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Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2025) on Thursday January 02, 2025 @03:03PM (#42578209)
Location: Midwest, USA

Remote: Preferred

Willing to Locate: No

Technologies: 10 years of professional experience, working primarily in full-stack web development. I work daily in Python, FastAPI, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, MacOS, Docker, AWS (EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM), Git. I'm familiar (Use most months) with ElasticSearch, CloudSearch, Tailwind, Vue. As Hobbies, or smaller projects (used on at least one completed project over the past five years): Go, Zig, C, C++, Rust, Phoenix, NoSQL, MongoDB, (probably more, but these were the ones that came to mind.)

My day job has me performing two main functions:

- Building full stack web development systems. I generally lean more towards writing backend code, and documenting our infrastructure. UI is my weakest area. This role has me working in datasets with ~1 billion row tables, and search indexes with ~100 million documents. Since we're a small company (~8 developers), I have been a major part of the architecture of our systems over the past 8 years. We've got five separate core businesses that our dev team supports, and I've been a part of architecting and implementing all of them. I would prefer to focus more on backend development in a future role.

- Creating one-off scripts or processes to assist in business functions. These tend to involve quickly reverse engineering undocumented web APIs we have permission to use, and querying them for our customers. At their simplest, these are a mix of writing some SQL and a few HTTP requests. At their most complicated, they have involved designing and implementing a tree structure to accurately model the business domain, and then pulling data about these structures from relevant public APIs.

- Miscellaneous tasks as they come up, recently, I reduced the cost of a company's AWS CloudSearch spend by 80% (over 10k/month) by reviewing their codebase, doing some research, and improving what they were storing and how they were doing so. This required a one-line code change on the existing codebase, and writing a new, short (~500 line) indexer. Doing a deep dive into the single highest AWS line item was the impetus for the project, and frankly, it turned out far better than expected. Outside of work, I ran https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com, a website I built and maintain. It really will self-destruct, and it reaches ~100k users and handles ~13M requests each month. Building tools and infrastructure to manage its moderation and keep it a positive community has been a huge learning experience.

Email: [email protected]

Good luck with whatever you're working on!

Re:Valve New Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf] on Friday August 23, 2024 @12:51PM (#41330599)
Deadlock is quite different to Valorant in key ways. Rather than Valorsnt, which is essentially Counterstrike with hero powers. deadlock is Valorant plus Dota2. There are creeps and base management and extensive items.

I certainly think Deadlocks ui is unfinished, but the gameplay is certainly something that hasn't been done super well.

I don't love deadlock yet but haven't played it much. Plus, my opinion means nothing, I thought Artifact was a great game.

Re:Valve New Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf] on Friday August 23, 2024 @12:43PM (#41330518)
I very much agree. I just want to provide some evidence of one if your points:

> if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve.

In 2018, valve aquired Campo Santo. They were a 12 person company who made Firewatch and were working on a new game.

Since then, one of the founders worked on writing Half-Life Alyx. The rest have done little to nothing at valve despite being industry veterans who alwys seemed passionate about games. At least half of the employees at the time of the aquisition have left valve. Im too lazy and sick to look up everyone, but the people who wanted to make games left to good companies where they could work on games.

I personally am happy for the Campo Santo team that they hopefully did well financially in the acquisition, but I an sad that a team working on novel narrative games with high production values was disbanded with little to show for it.

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2024) on Monday April 01, 2024 @04:40PM (#39899024)
SEEKING WORK | Midwest, USA | Remote Preferred

With 9 years of professional experience, I specialize in full-stack web development, predominantly working with Python, FastAPI, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, MacOS, Docker, and AWS (EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM). I’m also proficient in ElasticSearch, CloudSearch, Tailwind, and Vue, and have experience with Go, Zig, C, C++, Rust, Phoenix, NoSQL, and MongoDB.

I excel in team environments and am passionate about delivering regular updates, fixes, and new features. My primary role involves:

• Full Stack Web Development: Specializing in backend development and infrastructure documentation, I’ve played a crucial role in architecting systems for five core business areas in a small company (~8 developers). Our projects often involve large datasets (up to ~1 billion rows) and search indexes (~100 million documents).

• Business Process Automation: I create scripts and processes to enhance business functions, from simple SQL queries and HTTP requests to designing complex tree structures for modeling business domains and integrating public APIs.

• Cost Optimization: As a side project, I significantly reduced a company’s AWS CloudSearch expenses by 80% (saving over $10k/month) through codebase analysis and optimization.

Outside of work, I maintained the now-self-destructed website thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com, which serves ~100k users and handles ~13M requests monthly. The project has been an invaluable experience in building community-focused tools and infrastructure.

As a mom, I appreciate a flexible schedule to balance my professional and personal responsibilities.

Contact: [email protected]

Wishing you success in your endeavors!

When you filter by election cycle it looks like they aren’t making any huge donations compared to their baseline. Maybe the baseline donations stop things like this, but I don’t think I’d jump to that being the clear reason.
Re:The Apple Vision Pro’s missing apps on Monday January 29, 2024 @10:46AM (#39177590)
I'm hoping there is a better selling point than a really good home theater for single people. When I was single, having a TV and couch was valuable so that even though they were 95% used alone, they could be shared with guests.

If I was into media enough to spend $3,500 to have a great experience, it would be a bummer if I couldn't watch a movie with someone else occasionally.

Re:Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards on Sunday January 28, 2024 @11:37AM (#39167290)
Are these separate decks or a single deck for your son? Do things come out of the deck(s)? What triggers that?
Re:550 of 700 Employees OpenAI tell the board to resign on Monday November 20, 2023 @09:03AM (#38348240)
Updated tweet by Swisher reads 505 employees. No less damning, but the title here should be updated. @Dang
Re:Behind the scenes: An Apple Event shot on iPhone on Tuesday October 31, 2023 @02:03PM (#38088883)
I think a lot use separate apps. I had a gimbal that I used to use with an old iPhone with buttons to move the gimbal and direct the phone, but also with buttons to start/stop recording, and do other things without touching the phone itself. This gimbal was in the $300-$500 range.
Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2023) on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:28PM (#37740458)
Location: Midwest, USA

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: Available upon request. I keep the work associated with my online accounts private.

Email: [email protected]

- 8 years of professional development experience as a full stack developer.

- Most familiar (use most days): Python, FastAPI, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, MacOS, Docker, AWS (EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM), Git

- Familiar (Use most months): ElasticSearch, CloudSearch, Tailwind, Vue

- Hobbies (Used on at least one completed project over the past five years): Go, Zig, C, C++, Rust, Phoenix, NoSQL, MongoDB, (probably more, but these were the ones that came to mind.)

My day job has me performing two main functions:

- Building full stack web development systems. I generally lean more towards writing backend code, and documenting our infrastructure. UI is my weakest area. This role has me working in datasets with ~1 billion row tables, and search indexes with ~100 million documents. Since we're a small company (~8 developers), I have been a major part of the architecture of our systems over the past 8 years. We've got five separate core businesses that our dev team supports, and I've been a part of architecting and implementing all of them. I would prefer to focus more on backend development in a future role.

- Creating one-off scripts or processes to assist in business functions. These tend to involve quickly reverse engineering undocumented web APIs we have permission to use, and querying them for our customers. At their simplest, these are a mix of writing some SQL and a few HTTP requests. At their most complicated, they have involved designing and implementing a tree structure to accurately model the business domain, and then pulling data about these structures from relevant public APIs.

- This month, I reduced the cost of a company's AWS CloudSearch spend by 80% (over 10k/month) by reviewing their codebase, doing some reasearch, and improving what they were storing and how they were doing so. This required a one-line code change on the existing codebase, and writing a new, short (~500 line) indexer. Doing a deep dive into the single highest AWS line item was the impetus for the project, and frankly, it turned out far better than expected.

Outside of work, I run https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com, a website I built and maintain. It really will self-destruct, and it reaches ~100k users and handles ~13M requests each month. Building tools and infrastructure to manage its moderation and keep it a positive community has been a huge learning experience.

Re:Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2023) on Friday September 01, 2023 @12:23PM (#37352858)
SEEKING WORK | Midwest, USA | Remote preferred

8 years of professional experience, working primarially in full-stack web development. I work daily in Python, FastAPI, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, MacOS, Docker, AWS (EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM), Git. I'm familiar (Use most months) with ElasticSearch, CloudSearch, Tailwind, Vue. As Hobbies, or smaller projects (used on at least one completed project over the past five years): Go, Zig, C, C++, Rust, Phoenix, NoSQL, MongoDB, (probably more, but these were the ones that came to mind.)

I work well with teams but thrive on independent work, and delivering consistent results. As a bit of a heads up, I'm fairly selective about freelance work at the moment.

My day job has me performing two main functions:

- Building full stack web development systems. I generally lean more towards writing backend code, and documenting our infrastructure. UI is my weakest area. This role has me working in datasets with ~1 billion row tables, and search indexes with ~100 million documents. Since we're a small company (~8 developers), I have been a major part of the architecture of our systems over the past 8 years. We've got five separate core businesses that our dev team supports, and I've been a part of architecting and implementing all of them. I would prefer to focus more on backend development in a future role.

- Creating one-off scripts or processes to assist in business functions. These tend to involve quickly reverse engineering undocumented web APIs we have permission to use, and querying them for our customers. At their simplest, these are a mix of writing some SQL and a few HTTP requests. At their most complicated, they have involved designing and implementing a tree structure to accurately model the business domain, and then pulling data about these structures from relevant public APIs.

- This month, I reduced the cost of a company's AWS CloudSearch spend by 80% (over 10k/month) by reviewing their codebase, doing some reasearch, and improving what they were storing and how they were doing so. This required a one-line code change on the existing codebase, and writing a new, short (~500 line) indexer. Doing a deep dive into the single highest AWS line item was the impetus for the project, and frankly, it turned out far better than expected.

Outside of work, I run https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com, a website I built and maintain. It really will self-destruct, and it reaches ~100k users and handles ~13M requests each month. Building tools and infrastructure to manage its moderation and keep it a positive community has been a huge learning experience.

Contact: [email protected]

Good luck with whatever you're working on!

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2023) on Friday September 01, 2023 @12:04PM (#37352547)
Location: Midwest, USA

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: Available upon request. I keep the work associated with my online accounts private.

Email: [email protected]

- 8 years of professional development experience as a full stack developer.

- Most familiar (use most days): Python, FastAPI, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, MacOS, Docker, AWS (EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM), Git

- Familiar (Use most months): ElasticSearch, CloudSearch, Tailwind, Vue

- Hobbies (Used on at least one completed project over the past five years): Go, Zig, C, C++, Rust, Phoenix, NoSQL, MongoDB, (probably more, but these were the ones that came to mind.)

My day job has me performing two main functions:

- Building full stack web development systems. I generally lean more towards writing backend code, and documenting our infrastructure. UI is my weakest area. This role has me working in datasets with ~1 billion row tables, and search indexes with ~100 million documents. Since we're a small company (~8 developers), I have been a major part of the architecture of our systems over the past 8 years. We've got five separate core businesses that our dev team supports, and I've been a part of architecting and implementing all of them. I would prefer to focus more on backend development in a future role.

- Creating one-off scripts or processes to assist in business functions. These tend to involve quickly reverse engineering undocumented web APIs we have permission to use, and querying them for our customers. At their simplest, these are a mix of writing some SQL and a few HTTP requests. At their most complicated, they have involved designing and implementing a tree structure to accurately model the business domain, and then pulling data about these structures from relevant public APIs.

- This month, I reduced the cost of a company's AWS CloudSearch spend by 80% (over 10k/month) by reviewing their codebase, doing some reasearch, and improving what they were storing and how they were doing so. This required a one-line code change on the existing codebase, and writing a new, short (~500 line) indexer. Doing a deep dive into the single highest AWS line item was the impetus for the project, and frankly, it turned out far better than expected.

Outside of work, I run https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com, a website I built and maintain. It really will self-destruct, and it reaches ~100k users and handles ~13M requests each month. Building tools and infrastructure to manage its moderation and keep it a positive community has been a huge learning experience.

Re:DevToys–A Swiss army knife for developers on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @10:25AM (#37308425)
This is incredible! Definitely worth the price for me. Thank you for mentioning it!
I don’t know the specifics, but a company I worked at definitely decided to get ‘serious about ads’ by hiring a director of marketing and seemingly giving him an unchecked budget.

About 2 years later, he left the company. Very few - if any - customers were generated, but there was a sizable Google Ads spend.

I think the business owners had quite good luck with hiring talented people and letting them get to work, fairly hands-off. The guy spoke well and could quote many marketing gurus. I never found what he said to be particularly useful for the company, but I assumed he was getting results since someone was keeping him around.

I believe many owners of successful businesses have blind spots and need people they can turn to fill them. Sometimes that goes poorly.

Right now I’m fixing a similar snafu where I’m halving a not-insignificant AWS monthly bill for a company due to an ‘expert’ doing something very expensive. Like, 2 weeks of work will cut many developers annual salaries worth of AWS spend a year. Sometimes you get bad advice and you’re growing & making enough money that you can ignore the seemingly huge inefficiencies.

> This makes as much sense as saying that a company spent $1.5 MM on five engineers for a year without a single line of code ever being written.

I mean, if you change this to ‘functional line of code’ or ‘usable line of code’ I have definitely seen that occur with one or two developers over my career.

I don’t think it’s the norm, but I do think it happens.

Re:Apple Vision Pro: Why Monitor Replacement Is Rediculous on Monday August 07, 2023 @03:00PM (#37039102)
Yup, He's also a person who's spent an hour talking (on Cortex) about how much he and CGPGrey enjoyed using the Meta Quest Pro for having work meetings together virtually. So he understands the comparisons fairly well.

His review probably made me more excited than anything else to give it a try.

Re:Patterns for Building LLM-Based Systems and Products on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:10AM (#36971141)
I’m happy to believe that the therapy was ineffective, but I don’t necessarily understand why going off topic is bad. In my experience, I had a lot of conversations with therapists that were ‘off topic.’

I’ve definitely talked poetry and writing with a therapist, and while I’ve never had my therapist provide code, we’ve definitely talked tech in great detail.

Maybe those therapists were intentionally making me comfortable by engaging with shared interests. And the LLM isn’t being intentional about it, but I’m not convinced that a therapist is ineffective if they fail to stay ‘on topic’ when directed off topic by their patient.

Not who you’re asking, but it can take almost no time, or decades. It has nothing to do with years.
It is very much supported. Top left, click on your name, 'Add account', and go from there. I think in the backend the accounts might be associated for security/abuse purposes, but Instagram actively wants you to be able to have more than one account.

I'd imagine it would be a lot harder to avoid being 'thirsty on main' without these features.

Just checked, and signed up with a random second account. They add the phone number from the previous account you were on by default, and mention copying your other non-public information over from the previous account you were signed in to.

Ask HN: How Do You Utilize Your Personal Knowledge Base?

I am always intrigued to read about how individuals construct, organize, maintain, and expand their personal knowledge bases. There's a wide range of tools at our disposal, including Obsidian, Notion, Markdown and plaintext, Zotero, Evernote, among others. Likewise, organizational structures are just as diverse - anyone here a fan of Zettelkasten?Despite a couple of serious attempts, committing...

( Read More... | 33 comments | 3 points | on HN )
I think the easiest solution is to create a second Instagram account. That’s what I did. Instagram supports having multiple accounts signed into the app at once, so it’s not much of a pain once you’ve set it up.

I had an issue where I opened threads before realizing I wanted to create a new Instagram account for it. I had to hard quit the threads app, create the new account on Instagram, sign in with it, then re-launch threads.

Re:Why engineers should focus on writing on Monday July 10, 2023 @08:27AM (#36665346)
I think you’re overlooking this:

> I won't say they are worse at coding, but more that I am more familiar with how dependencies work because I've already done the same thing when I was a junior. Also, knowing who to ask for help also helps a lot.

I might phrase this a bit differently, but I think it’s getting at my thoughts as well.

I work with developers who would destroy me in a race to implement various search algorithms, or whatever discrete metric of coding prowess you want.

What they struggle with is:

- Efficiently getting other teams to answer their blocking questions in a way that makes the other team happy to work with them. - Understanding the existing features of our fairly complex stack. - Judging when to ask for help, and who to go to about a particular problem. - Identifying dead ends quickly, and pivoting to alternative solutions at the first sign of trouble.

I end up in a lot of meetings, but I also occasionally (a couple times a year on average,) take a few weeks and implement a business goal that a team has been stuck at for months/years.

Re:Pocket: It gets worse the more you use it on Saturday July 08, 2023 @09:36PM (#36650616)
I’d love to hear a bit about how often you actually search, and some examples you’ve found valuable.

I have ambitions to do this occasionally, and I tracked things and took notes a lot for a while, but I never found myself using it.

Re:Langchain Is Pointless on Saturday July 08, 2023 @03:30PM (#36647897)
I had this exact same experience. I was happy to move to something good, but I couldn’t find a lot of benefit. Maybe I’m missing something, but the added complexity is not worth it to me for what it provides.
I enjoy going to plays in past because I can control where I’m looking. Often, I want to look at something minor in a scene, as I listen to it play out and watch the action from the periphery.

Ask HN: Where can I find the historical journey of various open standards?

I’ve delved into initial RFCs for a variety of open standards, finding particular joy in perusing originals like SMTP from 1982.However, I’m keen to gain a deeper understanding of the stages preceding the RFC publication. Are there resources documenting these early periods? I’m interested in the process of ideating solutions and understanding the technology’s state at that time. Taking SMTP as...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:Fastmail Is Down on Friday June 30, 2023 @11:06AM (#36536214)
I was happy to see it as a long time customer who checked my email in the last half hour successfully. If this becomes a problem for me, I’ll chime in. But Fastmail is one of the easiest decisions I’ve made, and is consistently reliable. I think HN commenters are basically the company’s target demo, and we’re very happy with the service.

If the service starts to regularly degrade, I’m sure you’ll see the comments swing the other way in the future, but unlike AWS outages which are poorly reported by AWS and seemingly a regular occurrence, FastMail having one outage isn’t worth canceling over. If someone has a clearly better provider that’s easy to switch to, I’m not opposed to hearing about it though.

Re:Fast Machines, Slow Machines on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @05:34PM (#36512922)
The strange thing for me is how much time we spent in the early 2000s discussing website responsiveness and quick loading times as ways to improve user engagement and productivity. Although I can't provide any statistics that I'm intimately familiar with, I recall reading numerous case studies where improvements in responsiveness resulted in significant productivity gains for end users. If I recall correctly, this wasn't just about dial-up connections and multi-second page loads. This belief was still prevalent even when discussing sub-second responsiveness.

Perhaps the direction of the case studies started to shift, and we stopped hearing about it. However, it seems to me more like we pushed hard to reach a certain level of speed in our computer usage, then became complacent, and have been regressing ever since.

Re:A Syntax for Self-Tracking (2020) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @12:51PM (#36495514)
I think I saw an example where you said you use it to answer questions like 'How many curls did I do with these weights last time' [1]. That was from a couple of years ago, and I'm assuming you are the commenter there. If that's correct, do you have a way to make this system portable? I feel like the place I'm most likely to need to answer such questions would typically only have my phone available.

I greatly appreciate the data you're collecting and the overall method of doing so. However, I'm curious to learn about the portability of this information, and how you access it when you're away from a computer with vim.

[1]: https://lobste.rs/s/ri5utx/syntax_for_self_tracking

Re:Using Git-annex for Data Archiving on Sunday June 18, 2023 @06:54PM (#36385379)
> saying "even 'talented' and 'experienced'" folks couldn't from Haskell isn't a slight against the language choice but rather the aforementioned folks.

I don’t think that pointing out that esoteric language choice can make ”the barrier to entry quite“ high for participating in development is controversial.

I try not to turn discussions about language choice into slights against people. People are different, and learn things differently. If you cannot empathize with casual contributors finding it more difficult, or not worth it, to contribute to unfamiliar languages in unfamiliar paradigms, I can’t help you.

For what it’s worth, I agree with your response to:

> I’m on board with functional programming and Haskell is very interesting, but I’ve still never understood the decision.

A person’s fun and enjoyment at development has to be a key component to engaging in an activity. That’s why I stopped engaging with Haskell - the community’s attitude and conversational tone frequently involved talking down to people. More than many other language communities I’ve experienced. It’s not all Haskell devs; probably not a majority. But it’s not fun to be insulted when trying to add a sentence of context to a comment.

It leads me to feel defensive in an unproductive way.

Re:Using Git-annex for Data Archiving on Sunday June 18, 2023 @07:11AM (#36379124)
I am really interested in Haskell, and I’ve written a good amount of it. I don’t blame someone for writing the software they want in any language they want.

> hah if you consider yourself "talented" or "experience" and can't contribute to a project you want to contribute to just because it's Haskell, you might have misevaluated yourself on those axes

But the way some members of the Haskell community talks down to people is so off-putting. It is the main reason I stopped using it.

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