soneca

I have a learning a bit more related to tech from this election. Centrally organized, cohesive, persistent online engagement wins elections.

It won for Bolsonaro whose campaign nailed it in 2018. It didn’t win in 2022 because he was completely bad in dealing with pandemics (mocking people dying and saying he had nothing to do with it being president).

Now, Lula’s campaign was absolutely dead during the whole time. Until it lost in the legislative by a mile and in the President run had a partial loss in the first round. Then the campaign lit up after the partial upset.

Janones, an energetic young guy elected to legislative with good online presence led the campaign. He achieved creating a WhatsApp group with 11 million people called “Lula’s army”. He would give the directions and the people would obey almost blindly.

The interwebs (basically WhatsApp + Instagram) got flooded with this top to bottom Lula’s campaign.

The first round results made Bolsonaro very favorite. Lula victory was a huge upset. I put the merit in this incessant social media campaign.

The thing is: “centrally planned cohesive campaign” looks a lot like a cult. The point of the campaign is not critical thought or argumentation, it is incessant messaging. Think fandoms.

Bolsonaro voters pejorative nickname from past campaigns was they were all “cattle”. Because that is how they behaved online. Ironically, what worked for Lula voters this year was they behaving like “cattle”. Just reposting and following this central orders on what to post, what to say, what to dress.

The thing is, it works. Cult-like fandoms work in elections. The right won a few elections like this in the world. In Brazil, the left just learned how to do it was well.

The more mindless posters a politician has following their campaign HQ orders, the more votes they have.

Thanks for putting the analysis here.

I would say that the analysis is still underestimating the US-only jobs. It is common to not say it in the HN post, but when you check that actual job post page, you see it is US-only.

Yes, but I see the same thing being in Latin America, similar time zone of the US.

Go check the “Who is hiring?” thread. About 90% of jobs at US companies that are remote, are “Remote (US)”.

This is much different from a few years ago.

I don’t know what happened, but my guess is that there are many more American software engineers looking for a job, so there is plenty to choose from within the US (which seems an easier hire in terms of bureaucracy and cultural similarity)

You don’t hate or regret using AI anymore as your HN history states?

Tangentially there was this recent post for a very hard juggling web game where everyone will likely suck:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48963122

Keep the phone still after throw and then move down when the sound is getting loud again (the sound is to mimic the parable I think)

I think you are right for movies and TV shows, but not for "comics, manga and graphic novels" and I'll add books as well. Since those are much cheaper and easier to produce than TV shows and movies, they can be created independently, without the need to optimize for earning tons of money. Indie literature and comics are very diverse in the storytelling.

But I acknowledged (and dread a bit) that the audiovisual storytelling is such a strong force that any discussion about storytelling, even when specifically talking about literature/comics storytelling, is dominated by audiovisual references. Any creative writing workshop/course that include sci fi and fantasy genres will inevitably mention Star Wars as example for whichever technique. The more literary ones will mention some Oscar winning movie, etc.

The World Cup already started. But there are no games played in Utah

I'm a product-minded fullstack software engineer with a strong eye for UX and design. I work confidently across the stack and thrive in fast-paced startup environments where quick, innovative problem-solving is key. I use AI heavily in my development workflow to ship faster, and I design and build AI-powered features as core parts of the products I work on.

Location: São Paulo, Brazil

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Javascript, Typescript, CSS, React, Vue, Ember, but also NodeJS, Postgres, MongoDB

Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/rodrigohgpontes

Email: [email protected]

A few side projects I have

Confabulistas - https://www.confabulistas.com.br/catalog

A catalog of Brazilian fiction writers with natural-language semantic search. Author biographies are chunked and embedded via OpenAI embeddings, stored in Postgres with pgvector, and queried by cosine similarity against the embedded user query, then LLM rerank. The site is in Portuguese, but the search accepts English queries, so it can be tested directly.

Parliant - https://www.parliant.ai

an AI-conducted conversational survey platform. I envisioned, designed, and built it end-to-end, leveraging AI-assisted coding and integrating advanced AI features.

Touchline Shouting - https://www.touchlineshouting.com

A web game built to explore AI as a moderation agent on systems with public conversation. You play as a coach typing instructions for your player. Repo can be made public for potential employers.

Well, practice to get better at writing (and, therefore, judging writing) yourself. It seems obvious. Your skills are not frozen in time and set in stone.

Oh, that is happening a lot to me and I wasn’t sure if it was only me!

A lot, I mean, about 80% of my ”não” (I speak Portuguese) are becoming just ”na”. And about 50% of my ”mais” are becoming ”mas”.

“o” and “i” are next to each other at the top row, so I wondered if the keyboard got smaller and my thumb automatic moviment became discalibrated.

But… I started to often see ”na” where it should be ”não” in other people’s texts.

Turns out it is a bigger issue it seems

They are 18+ at Angel Academy, right? I would say they are a lot older than 11, 14, and 15. One year I think is a lot of development in the teens. Doesn't seem a fair comparison

> "A spectrum would involve everyone having the same problem to different degrees;"

I learned the opposite, that the term spectrum is used when it is not same problem to different degrees. That's how the autism spectrum was explained to me, because the problem differs over the spectrum. In opposition to "level" or "gradient", which is intended to be something more linear over the same dimension.

I believe this redefinition of the term comes from how a "rainbow spectrum" is perceived, as different colors (and not as it is defined, as a linear degree of wavelength)

> "I suspect many job postings would become discussion battlegrounds"

I suspect they wouldn't. I suspect companies that ghost and post fake jobs wouldn't even reply. And companies that have real job posts would reply and have a chance to convince the job is real.

People already have to scroll a ton of job posts that are not for them (due to stack, location, seniority, whatever) and the [-] button is pretty efficient in hiding long discussions.

I am in favor of not making comments about suspicious posts off-topic. Votes and comments is the natural way that all disputes are handled in this forum.

The [-] button is a pretty good solution for long discussions in a job post.

Let seekers share their experience is a pretty useful signal, even if there is no way to know if the seeker is telling the truth. But downvotes are even more secretive and are allowed.

I was told that the main reason the “Who is hiring?” thread (and other job boards for startups) has much fewer remote positions that are global (the vast majority is Remote US now) is because of a legislation that reduces a fiscal incentive when hiring software engineers and the reduction is much more aggressive when the engineers are from outside the US.

Doesn’t it affect big tech companies? Only startups?

I would guess the opposite, with big companies being much more savvy and influenced by fiscal incentives.

I got an error when submitting the form, "Field data constraint violation", although I could not find which field was incorrect.

Got stuck in that one too because I mistranslated vegetables.

In my mind, they were all vegetables, since they are no animals or minerals. As it would be in Portuguese.

Edit: thinking about it, he wanted to make a joke about Mr Potato, but ended up creating a captcha for non-English native speakers. He could try selling that idea to ICE lol

I definitely did not see that coming. In my mind, foldable phones were the 3D TV of the phones.

Interesting development though. Nice to see something that is both cool looking and, apparently, useful getting traction.

I think the most interesting part is that, in AI, software does not have zero marginal cost anymore. You can’t build once and scale to billions just investing in infrastructure.

Still, companies like OpenAI and Twitter are doing just that. Thus losing money.

Will AI evolve to be again as regular software or will the business model of tech AI become closer to what traditional non-tech companies are?

How the WalMart of AI will look like?

Does SaaS with very high prices and very thin margins even work as a scalable business model?

This happened to me in the original site. I think it happens when the white and black balls collide at the exact same spot of the border.

But Asimov’s short stories weren’t a serialized novel from the start. They were individual short stories that he later combined with small changes to form novels. It’s different from what Dickens, Dumas, and Verne did.

Yes, definitely. I would love for xkcd to redraw the “compiling” one with ”My AI code agent is thinking of a solution”

https://xkcd.com/303/

The (1928) is part of the title of the article, not the usual HN practice of dating an article. The article itself seems to be very recent.

Another note is that the word “canibal” also exists in Portuguese and they conscientiously chose the (maybe neologism) “antropófago”. Which kind of means the same thing, but using Greek radicals. My translation to English would be ” Anthropophagy”, not cannibalism. The intention was to make clear the allegorical use of the term.

I’m a product-minded fullstack web developer with 8 years of experience and a strong eye for UX and design. I lean towards frontend work but handle backend challenges confidently. I thrive in fast-paced startup environments where quick and innovative problem-solving is key.

Location: São Paulo, Brazil

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Javascript, Typescript, CSS, React, Vue, Ember, but also NodeJS, Postgres, MongoDB

Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/rodrigohgpontes

Email: [email protected]