snicky

Not OP and I don't, but I know a few people who are very active on LI with their daily self-promotion posts only barely disguised as thoughtful remarks about the industry and this seems to be helping them to get into upper mgmt roles in companies most of us know here. It feels true even for people who weren't doing particularly great when I worked with them to put it politely.

    Senior Backend/Full Stack Engineer | Team Lead

    Location: Poland, Europe

    Remote: Yes (11 YoE working remotely, EST/PST timezones OK too)

    Willing to relocate: For the right opportunity

    Tech:
    * Backend - Ruby on Rails (15 YoE), SQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Heroku, AWS, K8s, Datadog
    * Frontend - Javascript (15 YoE), Typescript, React, Vue

    Skills:
    * designing and implementing web apps across the entire stack
    * high-traffic optimizations
    * security
    * payment processing architecture and financial integrations
    * leading remote teams
    * hiring

    Résumé/CV: https://cutt.ly/RrnaORcb

    Email: in the resume

    Available full or part time

I usually prefer to make a detailed plan for my trip, but I allow myself to break free from it anytime I find something more interesting to do. This way I'm more sure that I won't waste too much time or money staying in wrong places, choosing wrong means of transport and falling for some tourist traps or common scams.

It sounds weird indeed, but maybe some higher-ups decided this is a way to go in case people need to be isolated again or when it's necessary to hire some remote coworkers who shouldn't be left behind, etc.

I use this default context in ChatGPT and it works pretty well for me:

"Tell it like it is. Don't sugar-coat responses. Be concise. Short answers only. No bullet points. One paragraph max. No over-explaining."

I still don't quite get it given I have never worked high enough or in a big enough corp. What kind of mission a person earning $19k a day have to do at the destination to justify the cost? I imagine to earn this much their main responsibility is to lobby / influence someone important (at dinners, golfing and such). Otherwise, if there are no outsiders involved the whole thing could be just done online. If it's about lobbying though - does it have to be done immediately and 3-4 times a week?

Another example that comes to my mind is a highly skilled expert in repairing some important machinery, e.g. ship engines or factory lines.

People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held.

Well, no. It is a boomer talk, but in the 90s the web was so fragmented and unpolished that websites usually looked very different from each other. People were writing their own HTML (and CSS came later). "Home pages" were some form of an art. Not the highest one to be frank, but the ecosystem was quite interesting. People did visit those websites not only to get the information, but to enjoy those quirky forms.

Maybe he keeps more plates spinning ... in his side projects. Clearly, developers are expected to produce more results with LLMs and switch between contexts quickly. It shouldn't be surprising that everyone may be running their own thing(s) on the side now.

God, those self-indulging posts on LI are the worst. Sometimes it feels like half of the world's compute is wasted on that.

I played it years ago and sorry, it didn't rock my world even for 5 minutes. It's a very naive story with a jump-scare sort of ending that totally didn't work for me, because it was well expected. The story felt very underwhelming comparing to most books, movies or games even. IMHO a complete waste of time.

Cool, but unfortunately, it has the same same drawbacks as cash. If you get scammed, accidentally pay too much or lose your wallet you will never get it back. I sleep safer knowing that there is some protection in the banking system against losing money all of sudden.

IIRC BLIK asks you if you want to skip the verification next time you buy from the same merchant.

* take home assignments where they say "we recommend you to not spend more than x hours on this", but then, they expect a very sophisticated work and will reject you if you turn-in a "simple" implementation. Maybe they expect speed and quality?

I never finished a take-home assignment within the given time frame. Once I even spent a whole weekend working on a solution to something that was described as a 2h problem. I feel it's just a way for the companies to make it look like it's a small commitment and they are not wasting your time excessively. If you decide to spend 2 days instead of 2 hours then "it's on you" ... But if you don't you'll fail.

I'm in a similar age and career point and have similar feelings about my SE job atm. Can you share more about your transition to the researcher role? What field are you in, how did you get there, what problems did you encounter, etc.

I agree with you in general, but come on - learning is easier (unless you need to dive into highly specialized stuff), writing shorter chunks of code is faster, simple photo editing ("remove this and that from the background") doesn't need any skills now. Image generation isn't terribly too if you put some effort and don't stick with the same 3-4 drawing styles that all the cheapskate companies use.

GitHub Releases link is broken.

The dash in "off-grid" is missing.

A friend of mine owned a site once. At some point he couldn't figure out how to fix a frontend bug that appeared on IE only. In the end he was so pissed that instead of fixing the bug, he decided to stick a couple of additional Adsense banners <if IE>. His revenue went up drastically.

2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).

This is an interesting observation. Another one that I sometimes mention to my friends who didn't have an occasion to learn Chinese before is that in this language speaking, reading and writing are actually 3 separate components. You can read characters without knowing how to write them properly or even remembering them entirely. Lots of my Taiwanese acquaintances forget how to write certain characters, because nowadays most of the text they write is in bopomofo on their phones. Bopomofo represents sounds, so basically knowing how an expression sounds and being able to read the character (pick it from a set of given characters for the chosen sound) is enough to "write" it.

This reminds of a person I read about on HN years ago - a Russian guy who escaped from the USSR jumping off a cruise liner and swimming a couple of days to Philippines.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Ocean-Slava-Kurilov-S/dp/965555...

It could also explain why most of us can eat like pigs in all-you-can-eat buffets.

And it feels like half of the world's compute is wasted on those self-indulgent cringe posts now.

Semi-related opinion, but it really boggles me how people can be such a*holes to leave spam all over the internet and keep turning it into a cesspit. If a company does it in such an obvious way it has to be systematic, meaning that someone somewhere comes up with an idea, his manager gives an okay to proceed and then they chop it into tasks and other employees pick them up. There are multiple people involved. All of them know about what's happening and that it's unethical. And for what? I doubt most people running/working for the YC companies need money that badly. Are they going to buy a boat? A higher Tesla model? Invite their friends to Michelin-starred restaurants to show how successful they are?

Back in my days this was called "trolling".

    Senior Backend/Full Stack Engineer | Team Lead

    Location: Poland, Europe

    Remote: Yes (10 YoE working remotely, EST/PST timezones OK too)

    Willing to relocate: For the right opportunity

    Tech:
    * Backend - Ruby on Rails (14 YoE), SQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Heroku, AWS, K8s, Datadog
    * Frontend - Javascript (14 YoE), Typescript, React, Vue

    Skills:
    * designing and implementing web apps across the entire stack
    * high-traffic optimizations
    * security
    * payment processing architecture and financial integrations
    * leading remote teams
    * hiring

    Résumé/CV: https://cutt.ly/RrnaORcb

    Email: in the resume

    Available full or part time

I'm in the same boat regarding the CS education and the desire to learn C. I find the videos recorded by Antirez (the creator of Redis) that make up something you could call a C course quite interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjXBXBgfKyk&list=PLrEMgOSrS_... . He starts from the basics, but the pace is good and he quickly gets to nitty and gritty. The videos are in Italian, though the automated translations do the job. I think he releases one episode a week.

    Senior Backend/Full Stack Engineer | Team Lead

    Location: Poland, Europe

    Remote: Yes (10 YoE working remotely, EST/PST timezones OK too)

    Willing to relocate: For the right opportunity

    Tech:
    * Backend - Ruby on Rails (14 YoE), SQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Heroku, AWS, K8s, Datadog
    * Frontend - Javascript (14 YoE), Typescript, React, Vue

    Skills:
    * designing and implementing web apps across the entire stack
    * high-traffic optimizations
    * security
    * payment processing architecture and financial integrations
    * leading remote teams
    * hiring

    Résumé/CV: https://cutt.ly/RrnaORcb

    Email: in the resume

    Available full or part time

The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.

I subscribed to Netflix for a year or two when the platform became popular, but I quickly realized it resembles those old school rental shops too much. Yes, you could get some popular classics like The Godfather or Goodfellas, but apart from that you were stuck with another crime story or a comedy with Steve Martin or John Candy. Actually, my analogy may not be 100% fortunate, because I still have good memories about watching these comedies as a kid with my dad. Now I wouldn't have time and patience to go through movies of "that" quality. Anyhow, my point is that you were very unlikely to get there anything that wasn't already proved to be popular. Forget about anything more niche / arthouse. Netflix has produced plenty by itself, but how many of those movies are actually any good? I remember a handful of them: Marriage Story, Roma, Don't Look Up and a movie for kids called Okja.

Just here to say thank you to everyone arguing/explaining why ad blockers are not piracy using interesting arguments better than my own.

You will never walk alone.

For anyone interested in the issues with Indonesian economy, politics and development may I suggest a great book: Indonesia, Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani.

I had CMD-10 as a kid. It was fun when it worked, but it wasn't pairing well with most TV sets and video players. Though it's possible I just didn't know how to set it up properly.