Ask HN: What's an interesting software development niche?
I am getting tired of web development after a couple decades. Anyone work in an interesting software development area that you'd recommend?
pcloadletter_
Re:Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
on Thursday January 02, 2025 @10:27PM (#42582040)
It's also just kind of cool and fun to hack together a personal website
Re:Babies and Young Children Learn to Understand Language
on Thursday June 20, 2024 @10:26PM (#40745569)
I gave up trying to read this after closing the 3rd popup
Re:Ask HN: Could AI be a dot com sized bubble?
on Thursday June 20, 2024 @11:32AM (#40739870)
I think it's an apt analogy. The Internet (and the web) was definitely good tech that is still used. Artificial Intelligence (or maybe more broadly, data science or _statistics_) is good tech that will still be used.
But chatbots in all the things? That will definitely collapse. I am interested to see what cream rises to the top out of all this and if we'll see an actual bubble burst like we did then.
Re:NPM and NodeJS should do more to make ES Modules easy to use
on Thursday June 20, 2024 @09:35AM (#40738628)
How are the deer in Nara?
Re:Tetris as Font
on Thursday June 20, 2024 @09:11AM (#40738398)
LOL, completed PhD at 20
Re:Nobody Knows What's Going On
on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @09:27PM (#40734007)
I've been thinking about this recently with internet comments on here, reddit, etc. There are very few topics on which I'd consider myself an expert, but whenever one comes up, the "top" comment (often something contrarian/snarky) is always significantly incorrect.
Ask HN: Tell me your stories of taking lower paid work to be happier
I'm on the cusp of going back to a job I really enjoyed that paid pretty well, but I was lured away by my current, high-paying job (for the money, prestige, etc.).I'm getting cold feet because of the money, but I'm fairly sure I'd like the day-to-day much better than my current job.So tell me -- what are your stories?
Ask HN: What do Engineering Managers do at your company?
I work at a Big Tech company and in my part of the org I can't help but feel like the EM role here adds more of an inefficiency than anything else.Our EM has 10 backend engineers under him. There are about five other teams, each of which is a fully frontend or fully backend team. We have biweekly sprint planning meetings where EMs assign out tickets to engineers on the team.The problem is that...
Re:Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest
on Sunday June 16, 2024 @01:46PM (#40698800)
Nothing you mentioned here disagrees with the title or the article
Re:Simple sabotage for software (2023)
on Sunday June 16, 2024 @10:11AM (#40697222)
I left Microsoft a year ago because the group I worked for checked pretty much every one of the items on this list. It was wildly unproductive.
Re:Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest
on Sunday June 16, 2024 @09:45AM (#40697026)
Some people here are confused. Kindness towards people doesn't preclude you from being assertive. It doesn't preclude you from being a shrewd negotiator. It doesn't preclude you from provide feedback to an employee who needs to improve performance. It doesn't preclude you from laying off an employee.
Re:Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest
on Sunday June 16, 2024 @09:12AM (#40696810)
Yes. A person's performance on the job does not change how I treat them as a human.
Re:Microsoft's Recall AI feature is now indefinitely delayed
on Friday June 14, 2024 @02:25PM (#40683471)
Or maybe they have to figure out how to actually make it work
Re:Microsoft's Recall AI feature is now indefinitely delayed
on Friday June 14, 2024 @02:23PM (#40683433)
But hey, at least Microsoft got to increase their stock price from the initial, hasty announcement, right?
Re:Developing an LLM: Building, Training, Finetuning (A 1h Video Expla...
on Friday June 14, 2024 @09:31AM (#40680758)
I find it can be nice to have an academic understanding of things you work with even if you don't have to develop it directly yourself.
Ask HN: Anyone else riding out a crummy job in this market?
My job is pretty terrible aside from the pay. What that means is, in this market, it's been basically impossible to land any job interviews for positions equal to or greater than my current pay (or honestly even close). Does anyone feel in the same boat and are just waiting it out?
Ask HN: Is it normal for companies to look for FE engineers who can design?
I am noticing a trend, perhaps a "do more with less" thing, where frontend job postings are starting to ask for frontend engineers who can also act as designers and even UX researchers. Is anyone else finding this? Is this a normal or correct expectation?
Re:Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing a...
on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @04:18PM (#40650999)
A bit of short-term thinking, though. Even if companies _right now_ can treat applicants like crap, they probably shouldn't. I'd rather have an applicant accept an offer because they want to, not because they have to. They'll care more about the work and are less likely to flee.
Re:Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing a...
on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @04:17PM (#40650979)
While it's not fair, what I've settled on is this: if they can't spend for in-house recruiting, they probably can't afford me. This is based on ~20 years of this consistently happening. Again, not fair, but I have limited time to do job searching and empirically 3rd party recruiters have always hit a dead end.
Re:Self-Serve Dashboards
on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @12:22PM (#40648150)
With all the hallucinating (or "bullshitting") going on, it's hard to imagine LLMs working well for query generation. But hey, we're _very_ early days for all of this.
Ask HN: What are some knowledge gaps you commonly see for web developers?
Re:All three game console makers have now abandoned X integration
on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @11:56AM (#40647840)
yeah, true. I didn't realize how much being on Twitter was bringing me down until a few months after I got rid of it.
Re:Ask HN: Do you think AI Agents are overhyped?
on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @11:55AM (#40647818)
I think perhaps their current usage isn't optimized yet. I'm not sold on people chatting with a model as the best UX. Maybe some abstraction on top of this interaction
Re:All three game console makers have now abandoned X integration
on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @11:51AM (#40647749)
We're running out of alternative explanations. At this point an RNG could make better business decisions on average.
Re:All three game console makers have now abandoned X integration
on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @11:34AM (#40647496)
I'm beginning to suspect that Musk's takeover of Twitter was a Bad Idea.
Re:Self-Serve Dashboards
on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @11:29AM (#40647399)
This reminds me of a time I was at a company using a BI tool for dashboarding. The numbers weren't making much sense to me, so I looked at the query building tool. I couldn't tell for the life of me if a part of the query was doing an inner join or left join. The business analyst who built the dashboard had no idea either.
It turned out that it was doing a left join when the intent was an inner join, and the data being shown was an order of magnitude higher than it should have been. This is when I lost all faith in these kinds of abstraction layers on top of SQL targeting people who don't actually know SQL.
Re:Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac
on Monday June 10, 2024 @03:07PM (#40637238)
My MSFT stock is looking good.