HN user

GFischer

4,852 karma

Programmer / IT from Montevideo, Uruguay (South America), currently working for the travel industry after 15 years at the insurance & financial sector.

You can contact me at xargef on Gmail (x..@gmail.com)

Posts38
Comments3,370
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news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Dealing with wrist pain / tendonitis as a developer

GFischer
6pts7
threatpost.com 6y ago

AWS Facial Recognition Platform Misidentified over 100 Politicians as Criminals

GFischer
7pts5
www.icann.org 6y ago

Proposed Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement

GFischer
3pts1
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Is Project Manager a Step Up from Senior Engineer

GFischer
7pts10
www.cnet.com 6y ago

Antisurveillance clothes foil cameras by making you look like a car

GFischer
11pts1
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Tips for getting remote work in the U.S. as a foreigner? (W8 or C2C)

GFischer
3pts2
gizmodo.com 7y ago

Reddit Is Down as the Summer of Outages Continues

GFischer
11pts3
www.theregister.co.uk 7y ago

Two in five 'AI startups' essentially have no AI, mega-survey of nearly 3k

GFischer
16pts2
www.caixinglobal.com 7y ago

AI Mistakes Bus-Side Ad for Famous CEO, Charges Her with Jaywalking

GFischer
4pts1
codegolf.stackexchange.com 7y ago

Build a Working Game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life

GFischer
1pts0
protosure.io 7y ago

Protosure – cloud-based, programming-free, policy issuance system

GFischer
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: Test uptime for your API / Service? Get notified of 3rd party downtime?

GFischer
1pts1
thenextweb.com 7y ago

Blackmailers threaten to leak users’ masturbation vids unless they pay Bitcoin

GFischer
1pts0
www.diffractionanalysis.com 8y ago

Leading French TV Group demonstrates the lack of value of its own content

GFischer
3pts0
www.marketwatch.com 8y ago

Intel CEO sold millions in stock after company was informed of vulnerability

GFischer
3pts1
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: What chatbot/AI/ML framework to use for a business project?

GFischer
3pts0
blogs.msdn.microsoft.com 8y ago

NET Introducing Support for Brotli Compression

GFischer
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Sabre lays off 15% of its workforce

GFischer
4pts3
medium.com 9y ago

Why I Only Watch Movies in Virtual Reality

GFischer
3pts2
techcrunch.com 9y ago

Uber sets self-driving battle at permission, not existence

GFischer
35pts44
www.yahoo.com 9y ago

BMW remotely locks car thief in stolen vehicle until cops arrive

GFischer
22pts12
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Apps or software to help with weight loss? What worked for you?

GFischer
2pts2
techcrunch.com 9y ago

Peter Thiel’s Big Gamble

GFischer
9pts1
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Adding a side project/startup to LinkedIn when employed full time

GFischer
3pts0
www.reuters.com 9y ago

NXP Semiconductors explores sale to Qualcomm: sources

GFischer
1pts1
www.flexport.com 9y ago

Rethinking Last-Mile Logistics: Deploying Swarms of Drones W/Self-Driving Trucks

GFischer
1pts0
www.facebook.com 10y ago

Overnight success? For John Hanke it’s taken him 20 years to create Pokémon Go

GFischer
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: YC Fellowship, was it succesful? Will it be repeated?

GFischer
3pts2
www.theverge.com 10y ago

Finding Fuboy: unmasking an internet troll

GFischer
9pts7
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Ask HN: Gmail Outage - how do you deal with it. Do you backup?

GFischer
6pts3

It makes 100% sense for a Mexican commute, or in other parts of South America.

I live in Uruguay and one of the best selling cars here is pretty similar, a friend has it and it's great for the daily commute:

https://bawauto.com/pony/

The best sellers are BYD models, which are a bit larger but still tiny by US standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Seagull

EVs have displaced ICE cars in Uruguay, and we usually are ahead of the trends, so I expect that to be the case in Europe and other places in coming years.

I wanted to buy a Tata Nano but unfortunately didn't make it to my country at an affordable price.

I think the demand was there, the supply wasn't.

My country, Uruguay, leads in EV adoption, and some small EVs are absolutely selling like hotcakes, a friend has the BAW Pony and I'd buy it if I had a place to charge it (there's issues with chargers inside condos due to fire risks).

170 km is plenty for city and suburban driving.

https://bawauto.com/pony/

Pretty cool... I dabbled into the idea of having a super simple tablet on a frame with a one-touch call function to family members - obviously with a camera and much different, but also revolving about the photo frame idea.

My father lived through the Uruguay dictatorship in the 1970s and avoids all social media whenever possible.

I was an infant at the beginning of democracy, so I haven't taken that much care.

Now, it seems he'll be vindicated once again, I do plan on visiting the USA and I'm hoping my social media won't be an obstacle (fortunately I don't think I have anything, but who knows, maybe I liked a meme or something).

I don't understand why socialists or communists don't tax the means of production accordingly, if they don't have money, take partial ownership (or complete ownership and turn it into a co-op or something).

Owners of capital and means of production have succesfully gamed the system and most of the tax burden falls on us middle class idiots that pay taxes on our work.

Meanwhile I had a terrible experience with DB (Deutsche Bahn) during the European summer two years ago, although it was partly out of their control (weather related delays and cancellations), I had to take awful detours, had paid for 1st class on ICE and ended up on regional trains up and down and lost one day of my holidays. No compensation whatsoever, although maybe I had to fill some online form for that.

But it gained way more traction in other parts of the world, it's the default messaging platform in South America for EVERYTHING.

I have never seen an iMessage.

Not everyone, I was given the option to go to the US legally (L1 visa) and passed on it, the person that chose to go instead regretted it and came back.

I am from Uruguay though, which is the best Latin American country, so YMMV, if I was from Venezuela I'd move to the US 100%.

It was one of the biggest considerations that made me decide against moving to the USA.

One of my coworkers took advantage of the L1 Visa (which I can still qualify for) and she ended up moving back to my home country Uruguay even though she made 50% higher salary in USA.

She did live some of the worst stuff in USA like Texas electricity failures, 20.000 dollar healthcare bills, etc.

I'm from Montevideo, I wouldn't call it "tropical" but yeah, compared to an US city it's absolutely a million times more walkable.

We do have humidity and heat and I don't enjoy it and I use A/C several months a year.

There's a big push for more cycling-centric and more cycling lanes, and the bus infrastructure is obviously a lot better than the US. I don't have a car by choice.

I haven't been to Houston but I have been to Dallas and it was an extremely frustrating experience and it feels like an awful soulless city to me.

I personally believe some sort of bonding period is great for remote people. I've worked in a kind of "worst of both worlds" setup where I went to an office 8-5 but I worked with a completely remote team (the office was basically a place for me to put on a headset and ignore everyone else).

But we met on a planned company trip (with the excuse of a Vegas trade show, we went and met one week early) and that helped immensely with bonding and team building.

If I manage a remote team, I'll push for a similar team bonding exercise whenever possible.

One of the pieces of software I was most proud about was a data entry system for a P&C insurance company, the old policy subscription terminal-based system allowed for about 200 policies/hour by user, then they "upgraded" to a GUI that slowed them to about 20/hour and I built a desktop application that allowed them to go back to 200 policies/hour but with stuff like auto-filling, geolocation, error correction so the data quality was much higher.

I worked with the end users a lot to make sure the UI matched the workflow, iterated over several versions and it definitely paid off.

They're gambling, because there are actually fines for those sorts of behaviors if they don't clear the unused bookings in a reasonable time or if ARC (the Airlines Reporting Corporation) or the distribution systems detect a fraudulent pattern.

I'm actually building an internal tool for such fines (called "debit memos") for a company with several thousand travel agents, and they're not uncommon at all.

I loved milk but it didn't counteract Italian genes, I'm 5 foot 6 which is fortunately normal in my country (Uruguay) but would be short-ish in the USA.

I heard a story about this happening at an Indian subsidiary of an American company, the person interviewed by the US manager was not the person that actually took the role ! It was discovered a few months in as the quality was not as expected (the person was actually a developer but not nearly as good as the one that was interviewed, he hired the interviewed person to pass the interview).