skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you expect when modern UX is about engagement not having an efficient transaction.
SEEKING WORK | Remote Only | EU

Location: Europe

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: React, React Query, Redux, Javascript, Typescript, Material UI, .NET Core, C#, SQL, NodeJs, Chart.js; excited to learn and adapt to other technologies;

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AvAw0X41XXakVsTbHFXHB7S-YLS...

Email: ionutcpreda[at]gmail.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ionutcpreda/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Senior Full Stack Developer with 6+ years of experience across the entire SDLC identifying business problems and delivering software solutions for startups and up to large enterprises.

• Reducing development costs by +100% by understanding business goals and the precise user needs, thus delivering the most cost-efficient, qualitative solution.

• Prioritizing solving blocking production issues by refactoring code, thus reducing technical debt and doubling development productivity.

• Mentored software engineers, helping them grow from entry-level to developing independently while assuring the software was properly released to production.
Standard applications are optimized for discoverability, familiarity, ease of use and looks. Those are appropriate dimensions to optimize for in many cases, but not for heavily used apps.

Great games have amazing interfaces -- they let you do very complex tasks very quickly. They often take longer to learn than the standard GUI app, but so does the Costco text app, and it's a trade off worth making. Can that trickle down to the 8-hour-a-day type apps like the Costco screenshot?
> it's painfully ironic

It was successful in drawing in my attention initially
, but by focusing on that so much it leaves me thinking about how the article arguably isn’t describing a cargo cult. It ultimately comes across as slightly clunky sales copy for Palantir.
have u used or considered an eink display?
> Not if you're on the opposite end of a shitty job market attempting
to find any way to get a foot in. The market sucks, and cynicism is
growing among all parties.

What you say is interesting, because I am watching this "market"
carefully as an educator. The disconnection you speak of is real and
worrying.

Each day we read stories about layoffs and talented people desperately
seeking a job. Each day we read an equal number of stories about how
tech firms cannot hire anyone. We hear of "massive skills shortage".
In cybersecurity we have 50 jobs to fill for every candidate we can
train.

How is this mismatch possible? Someone, somewhere is lying.

In Little Britain we have Dafydd Thomas (Matt Lucas) the controversial
"Only gay in the village". The running joke is that his gaydar is so
broken (because he is so insular) that he misses every chance. Guys
are coming on to him all the time, but he can't see it [0].

That is "industry". It's so misunderstood, so delicate, and special,
and hard-done-to.

So called "industry", insofar as it's a collection of HR people with
completely made up job-descriptions based on a drunken game of
buzzword bingo, hasn't the first clue what it really wants.

Likewise we have universities that churn out tepid, conformist
graduates who nobody would ever want to employ. If they're lucky most
of them have been taught by adjuncts and temps using materials that
are 10 years out of date. If they're unlucky they were taught remotely
by some Microsoft product, and would certainly have learned more from
just picking up and reading the first chapter of any decent textbook.

I'm talking about the UK now, but I'm sure the same disconnect applies
to similar cultures.

A dating game in which both parties are motivated to lie, is just
round after round of disappointment.

I wish you luck. My advice is steer clear of any company big enough to
have an HR department.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/littlebritain/characters/daffyd...
> Australia is not third world country where "organized crime" runs rampant.

What do you mean? We have the meth wars in Melbourne back in the early 2000s between two literal organized crime syndicates, the St Kilda police station raid where the police were found to be hoarding guns and drugs in the ceiling. That's just off the top of my head. I haven't lived in Melbourne since 2008 but I imagine there's more that's happened since.
It's the Lucky Country, don't ya know? Abundance on an island.
https://archive.vn/pyn0E
Indeed, it adds up long-term and across people, so scales up horizontally too into many human-hours gone, evaporated into UI/X abyss.
You can feel that you've clicked a button (mouse, keyboard or whatever), but you can't feel that the camera has registered your pinch gesture.
Can you share more about how you got accurate measurements on this?

I've got some moderately interesting graphs from my fitness tracker, and I'm broadly aware that my sleep cycle is not the "usual" 90 minutes that the standard-issue human gets. But I've had a lot of trouble refining the data to a useful point, let alone building a routine around it.
Play here: https://flanets.io
There have been systematic studies of this. UI productivity for people that have had time to learn the software peaked in the mid 1980’s.

So, the industry traded being able to walk up and use a thing in the first 30 seconds for having it be painfully bad after the first 30 minutes.

People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”. That’s only true if you count users that bounce after 29 minutes the same as users that use the software more than once.
> Satya goes on to argue that AI has the potential to restore productivity growth.

And I would argue investment in infrastructure (I know, hand-wavy term) would do better.
Tourists expecting to form lasting connections with locals always made me laugh. How deep can these connections be if you're only staying for a month? Why would a local invest in a 'lasting' connection that's just for a month?
The relationship between playing musical instruments and cognitive trajectories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_(Brin_novel)

One of the minor themes is old people obsessively, aggressively filming everything in public.

Note how well "robots.txt" works: the problem is bad actors tend not to follow "social convention" rules like that. The people that do adhere to such rules are probably not going to be the worrisome agents, anyway.

Furthermore; the laws are already ahead of you: if a store's surveillance video is requested by a court, and it has blocked out the people wearing "don't see me" codes; ... who does the court hold has destroyed evidence? Store owner that turned the feature on? Vendor that enabled it? Person who wore a mask with the activating code?
I think Tech has nothing to do with it, it's just neoliberalism and financialization of the economy.

Basically the idea that your problems are your own, and the society (or government) has no responsibility to help people who are struggling for some reason.

This coupled with the ability to put debt burden onto people, one way or another, which enabled lot of rent seeking in the economy.
I'm an obese man and had severe sleep apnea. Last year I got a sleep study and started using a BiPAP machine from ResMed. The different was night and day (sorry). Huge improvements to my energy levels and ability to just function during the day.

One thing that was really interesting in this process was understanding the machine itself. Being used to crappy consumer electronics, I was amazed at how robust the build quality was and the engineering involved. Every little eventuality of medical accessibility problems, or things that could go wrong were accounted for in the design somewhere. It's incredibly simple to use, easy to clean, easy to get spare parts if needed. I guess that's the quality you get when your device costs upwards of $2,000.
In a former life I worked in a job where we used an interface like that. The learning curve was steep for the first couple weeks, but once you got used to it and developed muscle memory, it was soooo fast and just effortless.

They were in the process of replacing it with a web application when I left. Nobody I talked to could explain why.
Carry a powerful flashlight and blind everyone who might even think about looking your way.
> Specifically, what actually happens, in economic terms, to profit? Nothing good, it seems.

Uhh . . . first it pays the bills allowing the company to keep running, including your salary. Then the rest goes to shareholders, where it does things like power your 401(k) or if you're really old, your pension fund. Which then allows you to do nice things like retire someday.
I am all ears for suggestions on how to actually do that then.

What will the regulations be?

How do you get the government to want to implement such policies?

How do you enforce them?

How do you get around corporate lobbying against changes to their business operations?
> According to the historian Orderic Vitalis, William moaned on his deathbed, "I treated the native inhabitants of the kingdom with unreasonable severity, cruelly oppressed high and low, unjustly disinherited many, and caused the death of thousands by starvation and war, especially in Yorkshire....In mad fury I descended on the English of the north like a raging lion, and ordered that their homes and crops with all their equipment and furnishings should be burnt at once and their great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle slaughtered everywhere. So I chastised a great multitude of men and women with the lash of starvation and, alas! was the cruel murderer of many thousands, both young and old, of this fair people."

This is an interesting contrast with leaders like Genghis Khan, who seemed to think (or at least portray to others) that his actions were not only acceptable but noble and religiously desirable.

It'd be interesting to see a study of regret and non-regret among conquerors throughout the ages. Do we have other examples of this, or does William stand out among his contemporaries and predecessors?
Just get used to it. This is the future. Meta and Apple will eventually have a near real time point cloud of just about every public space imaginable. Once these things are slim enough to truly take off, there will be no going back.
Our society isnt really structured to do things that require many years of research so were either making things incrementally better or just going after low hanging fruit. We need different incentives than profit.
> So maybe the “cargo cult” is the ruthless pursuit of profit, as opposed to constant reinvestment in the firm.

It’s an old story, an individual or group of individuals becomes greedy and consumes enough resources to finally destabilize their society. A new society is born, people are afforded a new opportunity, for whatever reason a person or a small group of people gains an advantage, and then the cycle repeats. I think the question is how to shift incentives to break the cycle, while getting buy in from the stakeholders that are currently running it.

There’s been some ideas around potentially how to do this, one suggestion is changing quarterly reporting to annual reporting for public companies, but then this limits visibility into public companies even further and creates a new set of problems. Then there’s the idea of getting rid of public companies, but I’m not sure that would actually result in the outcome people imagine. Finally there’s talks about wealth tax, which could work but really is more of a stick than a carrot, and has been met with a lot of hostility. So we have what we have and hopefully someone figures it out before the cycle restarts.
So they only want high earning workers from developed countries, basically the kind of immigrants every other country wants but doesn't dare say it out loud. What's wrong with that? Their country, their rules.
But what even happens to profit? It disappears from the cycle. The value created is lost because it’s no longer used to improve the firm that created the value. It’s redistributed to various yacht companies and the like.

Additionally the profit incentive is in direct conflict with the productivity goal, as additional profit may not arise as a result of additional productivity, given the cost of pursuit.

And while yes, big tech firms may have pursued growth, correctly so, many existing firms did not, and I didn’t think we were limiting our discussion to the tech industry, and we can be sure those tech firms have since shifted gears.
Thanks for sharing. Appreciate it.
The answer is simple - money. Digital nomads typically don't take jobs from local residents, they on average have more and are willing to spend more money than the typical local resident, and additionally the country has no responsibility to provide social benefits to a digital nomad and thus they are low cost.

Additionally while digital nomads may sometimes be ignorant of local culture/tradition and that can be somewhat annoying, they typically don't cause problems when it comes to crime.

Now there are legitimate concerns with respect to housing with things like AirBNB's/under the table housing arrangements and causing the housing prices to increase, but while that is an issue to a local resident it is actually seen as a positive to the city itself when it comes to the economy.
Only if one knows Elixir which is tiny percentage of developers.
ESBuild already does a lot, and is already extendable via plugins https://github.com/esbuild/community-plugins. I think it's more that the maintainers of ESBuild want it to focus on doing the essentials well (which it does, IMO).
I'm a generalist. The most accurate description of my work is "webmaster". I built a website from the ground up and I understand the whole stack from Linux to the words on the page. I maintain nginx configs and care about accessibility. I write dockerfiles and comprehensive articles.

It's weird to be pigeonholed when I love wearing so many hats. It's probably why I found the corporate world so dreadful.
> Does it block ads? It doesn’t

Having recently tried to watch Youtube on iPad without an adblocker, I discovered Youtube advertising. It's insufferable. Ads appear every few minutes, and they're not like the TV ads of yore. They're exclusively get-rich-quick schemes with people explaining how they're able to earn $10,000 a month doing nothing -- all one has to do is go to that website and subscribe to a shady course.

Fortunately Brave still blocks ads successfully, even on an iPad. Without it, it would be unusable. I wonder who puts up with this.
I have almost never thought about the file size of a program (even for big games) on a daily use machine.

I am certainly not gonna be learning and switching to emac just to perform this task for unwrapping a .docx file
You're describing bandwagoning. Cargo cult is misattribution of cause, not follow the leader.
Your github profile and website are awesome! Good luck with the job search
Silicon
Hey Devs! Got 3 minutes to share your backend development experiences?

Participate in our quick survey, and we'll donate 3€ to Techfugees, an awesome NGO empowering refugees through tech.

Your insights will help us shape a free, open-source backend solution that truly meets your needs .
> well it's painfully ironic

How's it ironic?
There's a lot of gloom and doom around Japan, but I think there are a few counter-points.

1) Yes, the economy is stagnant. But it's interesting to think about it from the point of view that Japan disproves the idea that a growth economy is the only way. Here is a country that increases worker efficiency and has a really high standard of living, but doesn't do it in a hyper growth kind of way.

2) Yes, Japan is super, super xenophobic compared to other countries. This is contrasted with it being one of the top tourist destinations on earth. I think things like digital nomad visa could be a small step on the way to closing this dichotomy. It's clear that one of the easy levers Japan could pull to alleviate their economic issues would be to allow more immigration, and I think the world's facination with Japan and Japanese culture is such that they could pull it off.
Weird this only making news now when Wired was reporting it a week ago?

(and weirdly has multiple stories on it now)

Jan 26: https://www.wired.com/story/torswats-swatting-arrest/

Jan 31: https://www.wired.com/story/alan-filion-torswats-swatting-ar...
That's a clever argument, though I wonder if it would be defeated by some restrictions on the chromatic polynomial. In your example, the number of 3-colorings up to isomorphism is extremely large, because the colors of any brick and its cobrick can be switched, and the mortar condition implies the districts are 3-colorable.

Of course, the chromatic polynomial is #P-complete, so this may pose some difficulty.
I think the disclosure part used to be more important in the past when progress was slow, but today the twenty years given in return is an eternity to block other development for, as technology just keeps compounding on itself. FDM 3D printers which are arguably an indispensable tool for all kinds of research were blocked this way from 1988 to 2008. Maybe Stratasys would've hoarded the design and kept it secret until they could perfect it, maybe the processing power wasn't there yet... or maybe we could've had low cost 3D printers in the fucking 90s and actual flying cars or something by now with how much progress that would've enabled. But I digress...
https://archive.ph/MDASk
<meta>It's lame when there's one comment on a post, and it's being down-voted instead of replied to.</meta>

I agree that Ukraine has problems which it's inconvenient for MSM to focus on. That said I can only imagine what I'd do if I was in their shoes. It's war, they're the little guys, they've had a history of a fair amount of corruption, and they face an existential threat. It's not like it's something my country wouldn't do if they felt they had to.

It may not even have been state actors, kind-of like some theories about the Nord pipeline explosion.[1]

Heh, as far as Russia being less untrustworthy than they are presented to be? Let's just say they have a ton of work to do before I'd believe that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Nord_Stream_pipeline_sabo...
> but YouTube.com stinks — it’s a minefield of UI targets that are too small for eye-tracking’s precision [0]

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/the_vision_pro
Not sure about Thailand but key in Philippines is to go in the village/province where the locals are the primary consumers of housing. It helps if you know local families to keep you from getting ripped off.
Why Alphabet Might Come Back to Win This Round of AI
Not involved in the project, but it looks like it doesn't render the character until the cursor arrives at the location the character belongs at.
To put in perspective, you should compare numbers with mortality caused by cold weather, which is significantly bigger (about 8 times more).

It's 4 594 098 deaths by cold and 489 075 deaths by heat during years 2000-2019, source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
"Interop"??

The more honest name would be FixUpOp, surely.
That's true, but favouring two sides fairly evenly is at least better than favouring one side.

Both the problem and the solution are very US-centric, but it's still important work.
The real cult is the one where "productivity" is considered a measurable and worthwhile goal.

The official definitions make no sense. "The ratio between volume of inputs and outputs."

What does that even mean? More stuff? More clicks? More eyeballs? More sales? More disposable income? More wealth disparity? (That last one being the real meaning, IMO.)

The subtext seems to be that OP believes CEOs are visionaries and he'll repeat whatever they say uncritically. Which is a good example of a cargo cult attitude.

It turns out Nadella and the writer are dead wrong, even if you use the official economic definitions.

The writer didn't bother to check this. He believed a simplistic narrative that appealed to his preconceptions without bothering to check the ground truth.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Illustration-on-Real-GDP...
So China. If you're right it will be interesting to watch. Interesting to see how other countries respond.
I'll keep it short on why folks are probably downvoting you.

I'm super fit. Probably one of the worst sleep apnea scores. Others like me, this advice will just mislead them (possibly kill them, as sleep apnea does kill).

But for those it will work on, the machine will help! Sleep apnea is a killer of motivation to workout, it destroys the body's ability to recover (and messes with metabolism / mood). So it's a vicious cycle. The sleep apnea makes you gain weight, the weight makes the apnea worse, and so on and so on.

So use the machine, exercise if you can to try and reduce your score if you are overweight, but don't feel bad about needing help to break the cycle. And in the end, you still might need it, just like folks need glasses to see. It sucks that this can happen with something as fundamental as sleep, but I've come to accept it.
well the neuronal networks are able (when sized appropriately) to memorize the seen markov chains, and more, really.
Likely first-gen cell phone service (AMPS)[1]. Calls were entirely unencrypted analogue audio transmitted in bands formerly allocated to UHF television. Your VCR was likely a pre-83 model, which is when the frequencies were reallocated to AMPS[2].

[1]: https://www.telecomtrainer.com/amps-cellular/

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_television_freq...
We had some lightweight terminal POS when I worked at a grocery store as a teen. We were tracked on average items/minute we scanned. I was fast with those and could ring through a cart of produce quickly.

The stupid self-checkout things... clunky, inaccurate, awful touchscreen calibrations, flag needlessly for "help" automatically. Whoever wrote those systems should feel bad for what they produced. I can't imagine that in the long term, they've helped the store save money or save anyone time.

As a young kid, I learned to use an AS/400 system and got fast at it quickly. I did a ton of data entry for my father's company. It felt so accurate and fast in comparison to the UI garbage today.
Probably because you don't rent in Zurich/Geneva.
Text-driven interfaces can be amazing. I worked at an auto parts store right out of high school. Our terminals for looking up parts were entirely text-based, and once you knew the commands and make/model/category shortcuts you could easily issue commands at a faster than the terminal could render the results. It was so efficient and productive. I was in a parts store last month, and their catalog software was gui- and mouse-driven and just slow and un-ergonomic. Sure, you get images to accompany the parts list, but I'm not sure the tradeoff was worth it or even necessary. I want to believe fast, uncluttered CLIs can make a comeback.*

*That being said, I just realized I sound like the professor in my AutoCAD class who insisted that the way he learned AutoCAD (all keyboard commands) was better as we all happily clicked around.
I would be more concerned about the Meta Ray-Bans as they actually look like Sunglasses:

https://www.ray-ban.com/canada/en/rayban-meta-smart-glasses
DALL-E images downloading as WebP
It did trickle down to things like the costco screenshot, in the form of the CUA standard. Here’s a nice writeup of the history:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/
As others have mentioned, they work for a company in a different country what doesn't matter. They usually won't work while there.

It's not realistic to expect a one-man internet company to be anywhere for longer than a few days without 'working' in a way or another.
Or..

Experienced applicants do not bother to list git as it is an assumed skill in dev work these days.