Top all-time · #4484
Matt Welsh
Personal blog · mdwdotla.medium.comstartupsai
Matt Welsh's personal blog at mdwdotla.medium.com covers startups and ai. Since 2020, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matt Welsh's Medium posts on using Rust at a startup, Mozilla and Chrome team sizes, and leaving Google. One commenter says the Rust post explains things well.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-11-23
- Hey, let's fire all the devs and replace them with AI (2023)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-01-16
- /some-thoughts-on-running-successful-teams-at-google-c061249592053 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-09-11
- The end of classical Computer Science is coming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-05
- Mercator: An ESP32-based spherical persistence-of-vision display2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-11
What Hacker News says?
Being pushed/forced to implement top-down efforts, forced to comply with management's directives instead of being empowered to build things bottom-up https://sifted.eu/articles/deepmind-talent https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-researcher-quit-google-op... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2023-07-13/ex-goo... https://mdwdotla.medium.com/why-im-leaving-google-for-a-star...
Comment linking /why-im-leaving-google-for-a-startup-88be418236d8
on “The man who killed Google Search?”Submitted Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale as a story · 265 points
HN discussion> so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour I don't think that's correct. IIUC, Software Dev was 260M for Mozilla + Mozilla Corporation + Mozilla Foundation + MZLA Technologies Corp. + Mozilla Ventures + Mozilla.ai. With large increase of 40M from 2023 to 2022 so I'd bet a good chunk of that is going to Mozilla.ai knowing how the rest of the corporate world is acting right now. Like the Chrome Mobile tea…
Comment linking /some-thoughts-on-running-successful-teams-at-google-c06124959205
on “I tried Servo”Submitted Everything I wish I had known about raising a seed round as a story · 207 points
HN discussionI don’t buy it. Static languages have certainly become more ergonomic, but if the evidence was really so overwhelmingly clear, everybody would have switched by now. To wit, regarding your comment about Rust, I just read this article earlier today: https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautio...
Comment linking /using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454
on “Ruby concurrency is hard: how I became a Ruby on Rails contributor”Submitted The end of classical Computer Science is coming as a story · 37 points
HN discussion2019: >Chrome, with an emphasis on making the web great for the next billion users. The team consists of around 40 engineers, in addition to a number of PMs, test engineers, UX designers, researchers, and others. We built a lot of features in Chrome that are used by more than a billion people.) https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-success... "MY" Mozilla has 46 engineers ;) But if you think ludicrous…
Comment linking /some-thoughts-on-running-successful-teams-at-google-c06124959205
on “Firefox Is the Superior Browser”Submitted Hey, let's fire all the devs and replace them with AI (2023) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionRust is fantastic for writing robust, secure, high-performance software. Rust is definitely a much, much better C++ in almost every respect. No doubt there. However, for many problems, the sweet spot of a good-enough static type system and garbage collector - effectively a better Python - is a better fit. This article explains things well, IMHO: https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautio...
Comment linking /using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454
on “Fish (shell) porting to Rust from C++”Submitted Mercator: An ESP32-based spherical persistence-of-vision display as a story · 4 points
HN discussionEasier than C or C++ for sure. But how is Rust as easy as a GC'd language like Java or Go? They have strictly less constraints to deal with, and (in my experience) less superfluous refactoring sessions due to the overly conservative nature of the borrow checker. I like how Matt Welsh put it in https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautio... : > What really bites is when you need to change the type si…
Comment linking /using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454
on “Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages”Submitted Startups, Impact, and the Search for Meaning as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWouldn't recommend unless CPU-bound. https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautio...
Comment linking /using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454
on “Ask HN: Which full stack framework (NextJS, Remix, SvelteKit) would you use?”Submitted Why New Tech Products Fail as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMozilla claims over 700 of their 750 employees work on Firefox. It's a bit harder to find out the number of people working on Chrome. The founding director remarks that there were 40 engineers working on Chrome mobile in https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-success... . That's obviously just a slice of the whole team. Search results suggest a range of numbers between 23 and 500. There appears to be a…
Comment linking /some-thoughts-on-running-successful-teams-at-google-c06124959205
on “Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads”Submitted Mercator: A spherical persistence-of-vision display as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How LLMs and coding agents change the dynamics of adopting Rust as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hey, let's fire all the devs and replace them with AI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hey, let’s fire all the devs and replace them with AI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hey, let’s fire all the devs and replace them with AI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The End of Programming as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
