evantbyrne

Everything I've used from Automattic has felt that way. If you ever want to torture an engineer, just make them change the layout of WooCommerce checkout.

Not everyone is looking to save a buck at anyone's expense. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking we're the same.

Some guy floated the idea of putting in a small datacenter in the nearby city and asked for public comment. The next town hall had a huge turnout and multiple people got kicked out for rushing the podium. Meanwhile, people are also protesting and suing to try and stop the nearby solar farm construction. What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition to clean energy? It almost feels like it is just an anti-progress movement in different clothes.

Philosophy of science went hard and was hands down the most valuable course in my education. It's very strange that they don't force everyone to take at least some philosophy in university. Can you imagine living in a world where the average person not only thought about what they believed, but were also equipped to ask themselves hard questions about the nature of belief itself?

Thank you. Was beginning to feel like I was taking crazy pills seeing people claim that 300ms is fast when 30ms has been the target TTFB for as long as I can remember. Maybe Linear takes more time on the backend for totally valid reasons and it needs some help from the frontend, but that's not generalizable, and every bit of JS comes with its own costs.

I would hope that when engineers speak of LLM determinism they just mean it as shorthand for close to 1 under expected conditions

The going rate for 1099 work tends to be higher than this to account for risk, unbillable work, and increased tax rate. Agencies that lend out their developers to clients charge 2-3x this. Remember that engineers can work remotely now which makes regional rates much fuzzier.

I was going to say it seems potentially useful, but engagement stats for this on Github and X seem unnatural and the anon crypto author makes it a hard no for me

Getting up to speed on the business logic was arguably the easiest part of my last job where the product was a liquid biopsy. Regardless of industry, you have to learn how to communicate with stakeholders and collect requirements. The existing software being a mess was a much more significant challenge. They also had similar issues on the data science side, where I would argue they did not lean into modern ML nearly enough and instead opted to do the familiar thing.

There are certain non-software industries that seem to have strong hiring preferences for workers who started in the industry over computer science chops, and a lot of those tend to use Java. For example, biotechs.

Totally. 8GB is probably enough for most users. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 32GB for a development machine in 2026 that's all

I used to be able to get by with just 8GB on a mac. But these days I have to run entire clusters locally

Culture flows from the top down

I experimented a lot with bootstrapping React projects this past fall, and Astro was by far the least painful to use. Notably, it was the least goofy of all of the React starter kits to use for server API development.

It never stopped being possible to order a bare bones F-150 with a 8ft bed. Might not have the tradeoffs that many people are looking for, but difficult to argue something like that has less utility than a mini truck that can't drive on the highway.

Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. It has become political (toward the left), sclerotic, and bitterly nostalgic. It's bad and no longer represents the future. I notice it every time I visit. It's sad.

An easy way to help with the negativity is to stop leaving bait comments

I would expect Windows to have better battery life than Linux, just because Linux is so much worse than MacOS on power consumption, but I also haven't run Windows on a laptop in over a decade so I really don't know.

It would be newsworthy if Linux laptops could compete with MacBooks on performance and quality. Maybe reconsider Windows if you feel the need to switch?

Ah yeah of course, there is a zero case as well. I was thinking you just restart as to not bias the result. That's an interesting alternative though

If you have a coin: Heads and tails represent bits. Flip a coin three times and add up the result to emulate a six-sided dice roll. e.g., heads, heads, tails = 3. If you get 7, then try again.

You might be right, and I think tech professionals should be expected to use industry terminology correctly.

How am I supposed to know what specific niche of AI the author is talking about when they don't elaborate? For all I know they woke up one day in 2023 and that was the first time they realized machine learning existed. Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some time, will continue to be, and even that much of that will be with LLMs.

Being broadly against AI is a strange stance. Should we all turn off swipe to type on our phones? Are we supposed to boycott cancer testing? Are we to forbid people with disabilities reading voicemail transcriptions or using text to speech? Make it make sense.

I wouldn't group it with Django. It's a very simple but also well-done CMS. It is not as capable as something like Wagtail, Payload, or Craft.

Congratulations, you just reinvented slavery.

But if you take the government out of the equation, and instead mandate contribution via project licenses, that might be worth a try.

Absolutely, but everyone makes time for Zoom meetings and finds a way to make it work, or people like me will hire someone else who can get it done.

So we are in agreement that work cannot be fully async.

There are clearly some forces at play that are changing how immigration works in the short-term. I think where we differ is mostly this: our anecdotal experiences are radically different (I would say competency is increasing not decreasing as a general trend) and I would never bet against the momentum of the US long-term, nor do I believe that quality tends to remain steady or increase with offshoring. Maybe things are different in your niche. I appreciate being given a view into a different perspective!

No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to capture the higher talent tier because their salary expectations are based on their domestic condition.

For 2x the salary young men have proven time and again they are willing to take the risk.

On top of that, the US immigration system is severely backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian nationals to become green card holders, and we as employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay the filing costs - not us.

A challenge for sure. This and what you go on to describe could certainly shift some junior labor from H1B to remote contract. I would expect that shift to have a mostly net zero impact on other American exployment.

> other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient and having major negative impacts on worker morale

Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure business continuity.

Every non-US team I've worked with and everyone I know that works with offshore still have meetings. It would be incredibly dysfunctional to not have any collaborative time.

Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline, but universities failed severely by watering down curricula in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which burnt a lot of employers disincentivizing them from hiring early career, and state and local jurisdictions in the US just don't give us the support or pipeline needed to build a competitive early career hiring pipeline.

Is that really what is happening? Because based on everything I can see, hiring standards are the highest they have ever been. As we get older, we have a bias towards underestimating the capabilities of younger generations, because we can see them making familiar mistakes in real-time.

I think you make some solid points, but there are major tradeoffs some of the data is not totally convincing. If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers to migrate to the US whenever possible. It's pretty easy for Canadians to cross the border. So one reason to hire American developers is for quality. The other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient, not to mention the major negative impacts on worker morale. So there can be reasons to hire out of country, but the tradeoffs are significant even when well executed.

London and Toronto give people healthcare. And I was in Michigan.

I was making $50/hour fresh out of college back in 2014. And I worked remotely. $45/hour today is not great given the cost of living.