Top all-time · #1135
Laurie Voss
Personal blog · seldo.com · on HN as seldoprogrammingaiweb
Laurie Voss writes Seldo.com, a personal blog at seldo.com about programming, ai and web. Since 2008, 63 different Hacker News readers have linked it 85 times, most often “Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Personal website for Laurie Voss, aka @seldo
Most-linked posts?
- Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-09-13
- We are all product engineers now5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-09-14
- People suck at technical interviews (2014)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-08-27
- ORM is an anti-pattern4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2011-09-17
- ORM is an anti-pattern4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-06-15
- Do AI-enabled companies need fewer people?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-03-09
- Are We Making the Web Too Complicated?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-05-21
- HTTP Conversation Codes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-11-20
- What I've learned about writing AI apps so far2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-21
- What I've learned about data recently2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-23
What Hacker News says?
Yeah, the "generative" in "generative AI" gives a little bit of a false impression. I like Laurie Voss's take on this: https://seldo.com/posts/what-ive-learned-about-writing-ai-ap... > Is what you're doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it's probably going to be great at it. If you're asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will…
Comment linking /posts/what-ive-learned-about-writing-ai-apps-so-far
on “Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining”Submitted ORM is an anti-pattern as a story · 286 points
HN discussionhow to explain it to my young kids You should explain it to your kids, since one of your kids might be LGBT and it would be good for them to know that their parents will accept them. For more detail read "I want to expose your children to homoseuxality" http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/i_want_to_expose_your_chi...
Comment linking /weblog/2011/08/11/i_want_to_expose_your_children_to_homosexuality
on “Maddox - I hope SOPA passes”Submitted People suck at technical interviews (2014) as a story · 265 points
HN discussionSee also from a few years ago: http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern I agree with basically everything in this post, obviously :-)
Comment linking /weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern
on “What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL”Submitted ORM is an anti-pattern as a story · 232 points
HN discussionMendix http://www.mendix.com/ (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) is on a hiring spree. Looking for: - Software Development Manager - Devs (JS, C#, Java, Scala) - Cloud Engineers (*nix, Puppet, Python, DNS, HTTP, etc), - System Engineers (Hardware, Networking, etc) Mendix is a fast growing Agile PaaS (100%+ per year revenue growth for the last 7 years) with HQ in Boston and R&D in Rotterdam. We're not some startup that's h…
Comment linking /weblog/2012/08/30/software_developers_can_save_the_economy
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2013)”Submitted People suck at technical interviews as a story · 215 points
HN discussionShe makes a bunch of great points, but as someone who has worked on several projects with a properly implemented ORM, I find that I have to disagree with the post. It sounds like a lot of people who are Anti-ORM in the comments (here, and on her blog), are focusing on the saturation of relational databases, and touting that NoSQL style data stores are a better fit for certain problems. No argument here But in a rela…
Comment linking /weblog/2011/06/15/orm_is_an_antipattern
on “ORM is an anti-pattern”Submitted Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to as a story · 196 points
HN discussionI wrote a long, long blog post about why: http://seldo.com/weblog/2012/11/29/why_all_americans_should_... But the TLDR is: immigration brings skilled workers into the country, who produce more than they consume, raising GDP. So stopping the flow of immigrants causes GDP growth to slow.
Comment linking /weblog/2012/11/29/why_all_americans_should_be_in_favor_of_immigration_reform
on “Another awesome US immigration experience”Submitted Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as a story · 190 points
HN discussionI agree, Doctrine has performance problems. I did some microbenchmarks too. But you could try to optimize (or write your own custom) mapping code, or maybe you could load less entities or write a better ORM. Sometimes you have to use SQL queries too (when the result of a query cannot be mapped to entities). The "SQL and arrays" approach is much worse and doesn't scale. Without ORM and classes you will get undocument…
Comment linking /weblog/2011/06/15/orm_is_an_antipattern
on “PHP the Wrong Way”Submitted In defence of SQL as a story · 125 points
HN discussionDoctrine 2 also often spends 10x the time on post-processing the data from the database as it does actually making the database calls itself (it's not fixable without dropping to straight SQL out of the ORM). Its query language is atrocious and unnecessary. Their ideas of joins and internals are absolutely horrific. The boilerplate is 1/3 of my app. But even if it was the perfect piece of code (it's exactly the oppo…
Comment linking /weblog/2011/06/15/orm_is_an_antipattern
on “PHP the Wrong Way”Submitted PHP needs to die. What will replace it? as a story · 98 points
HN discussionCool story. A more marketing-oriented person being CEO is a better choice for a community-oriented organization, and should have been made by the board in the first place. This [1] puts it succinctly. "The mistake made was not made by Brendan Eich" and "The people who messed up here are the board of the Mozilla Corporation." This is Mozilla's board doing what they should have done all along, except that Brendan Eich…
Comment linking /weblog/2014/04/04/on_brendan_eich_equality_and_freedom
on “Mozilla Moving Forward”Submitted What I've learned about writing AI apps so far as a story · 94 points
HN discussionI know you don't know me, but if you ever meet anyone who does, you can ask them about my personal attitude towards censorship of any kind. The idea that I would stoop to censorship for something as petty as somebody voicing legitimate complaints about a technical screwup of mine is laughable. (Update: I remembered I wrote http://seldo.com/weblog/2013/09/04/why_i_am_a_web_developer a while ago, which should give som…
Comment linking /weblog/2013/09/04/why_i_am_a_web_developer
on “Npmjs.org moderated one of my comments regarding their outage today”Submitted What not to do when giving technical interviews (2014) as a story · 69 points
HN discussionPersonally, one of my favourite discussions is Laurie Voss' "ORM is an anti-pattern": http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern
Comment linking /weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern
on “Scaling PHP Book: I will teach you to scale PHP to millions of users”Submitted Google Knol is Evil as a story · 61 points
HN discussionThere's some serious miscommunication going on every time this discussion comes up. A lot of people seem to conflate all data abstractions with the term "ORM" (which has a very specific meaning), therefore assuming everyone who thinks ORMs are a bad idea are arguing against all forms of data abstraction. This is not the case. One of the better articles on this: http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern
Comment linking /weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern
on “OrmHate”Submitted ORM is an anti-pattern (2011) as a story · 58 points
HN discussionIf you found this article familiar, that's because the same article was posted here 3 days ago. Previous link: http://seldo.com/weblog/2014/08/26/you_suck_at_technical_int... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8232746
Comment linking /weblog/2014/08/26/you_suck_at_technical_interviews
on “This is why you never end up hiring good developers”Submitted Arrington is completely wrong about women in technology as a story · 54 points
HN discussionAlso see: http://seldo.com/weblog/2010/09/04/san_francisco_city_guide_...
Comment linking /weblog/2010/09/04/san_francisco_city_guide_map_for_the_prospective_resident
on “Ask HN: How expensive is living in Silicon Valley”Submitted HTTP Conversation Codes as a story · 50 points
HN discussion> .. but I now use an ORM. "ORM is an anti-pattern": http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern
Comment linking /weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern
on “Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghetti”Submitted Blue-collar knowledge workers will save the economy as a story · 46 points
HN discussion
