Hacker News: 972811

New comment by 972811 in "So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?"

972811 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:58:07 +0000

your links don't disprove OP's main point at all. being forced to share data to the government is different than actively collecting data to sell to other third parties. these companies have tons of incentive to collect user data, but very little to sell it. i think that nuance is important to understand. if you think i'm wrong, try going to facebook or google and asking to buy some user data. you cannot.

New comment by 972811 in "Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got"

972811 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 01:14:20 +0000

It's all about risk/reward tradeoffs. Once you get past the junior->senior level, each promotion is hiring you for a completely different job. As an individual, there are only a few ways to get that job: 1. Trial run at your current company (could be wasting your time, but also you have domain knowledge and relationships to help) 2. Join a smaller company and hope it grows (could rapidly accelerate growth due to needs, but could also go very poorly if the company stagnates) 3. Try to lateral to another company with a promotion (pretty difficult in general)

It's not really that juicy for the corp. If they hire (promote) you without experience, they are hiring someone without experience for a position and then have to go and hire again to replace someone else. Vs. just hiring someone with experience

New comment by 972811 in "1910: The year the modern world lost its mind"

972811 — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 03:34:04 +0000

this can definitely happen, and in weird ways too. i thought my neighbor was playing bass super loud at night, and it was reverberating loud enough in my home so that I couldn't even hear a movie in my living room. when I knocked on his door, I was surprised to hear almost nothing and he had just been cooking dinner with low volume music. he shifted his subwoofer about 3 feet (it wasn't even against the wall) and it completely solved the problem

New comment by 972811 in "Guide to mechanical keyboards"

972811 — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 17:26:08 +0000

have you tried the logitech mx keys mini? it's really similar for me

New comment by 972811 in "'Bodies Like Greek Statues': Steroids Are Everywhere"

972811 — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 00:43:56 +0000

i'm not sure what you mean by "bread and butter" of the fitness industry. certainly most fitness "influences" are on some sort of performance enhancing drug, with many of them on anabolics which is the reason why they look muscular and lean. i'm not sure what fat burners you think are actually more dangerous than this stuff (clenbuterol? ephedrine?), but I don't agree

New comment by 972811 in "Why It Takes Forever to Get a Doctor's Appointment (2023)"

972811 — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 16:58:57 +0000

they contribute already, but it's more challenging than federal. many residents do not stick around in the state they train in, so states have less incentive to fund this

New comment by 972811 in "Why It Takes Forever to Get a Doctor's Appointment (2023)"

972811 — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 01:57:31 +0000

not really, but private funding is generally pretty controversial with weird incentives (e.g. a company may only fund for positions that will create demand for their products--like a skincare company only funding dermatologists) [1]

don't think many other entities besides the federal government have a ton of incentive to fund residency. and the federal government does have caps on residency slots

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2005/06/private-funding-for-res...

New comment by 972811 in "Britain is running out of babies"

972811 — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 01:22:12 +0000

china is on a similar path, maybe even worse. hard to make people have more children, even harder if you have a history of actively stopping people from having children

New comment by 972811 in "From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate"

972811 — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 23:57:08 +0000

your opinion of doctors is probably off. i'm married to a doctor (in the US) and i would say 4/5 doctors i meet spend most of their time talking and thinking about money. there are lots of reasons for this (some valid), but assume your doctor has money on the mind

New comment by 972811 in "Google's CEO faces employee questions about layoffs"

972811 — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 18:31:08 +0000

he has nothing to say. his strategy has been to keep riding the gravy train for years. now the growth is slowing and he can see the core search business will be under attack and there is no answer. he'll essentially coast for the next 5 years. play politician, take few risks, "streamline operations" and fire a bunch of people, then walk off into the sunset. what is their future? cloud is still very small and has really difficult competition, youtube has challenging competition and isn't super profitable, maps/search/mail/docs/drive all feel quite stale. what's next?

New comment by 972811 in "The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons"

972811 — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 18:05:37 +0000

yeah surprisingly that was ideal for me when I was single. i enjoy the actual physical act of cooking but hate the constant planning/prep/shopping. guaranteeing a few healthy dinners a week that I don't have to plan was pretty nice. unfortunately the meal quality dropped a good bit and the recipes get redundant after a while

i'd still recommend it to anyone who's never cooked before at all and wants to start

New comment by 972811 in "A Leaked Memo from Google CEO Sundar Pichai Comes Amidst Employee Discontent"

972811 — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 04:49:29 +0000

it reads like complete corporate garbage but I would assume these are created with

1. a rough organization-level investment prioritization

2. ask the leaders of those organizations to come up with vague mission statements

3. put them together and you get nonsense.

my guess would be the interpreted version is something like "Sundar says this is what we are focusing on"

1. Keeping up with recent AI advancements

2. Making youtube, search, gmail, and drive/docs/calendar better

3. Improving android and related devices

4. Expanding google cloud

5. I have no idea

6. Built a better employee experience

7. Improve devex and reduce operational costs

the only really interesting things I see are

1. AI is at the top

2. monetization is not mentioned

3. efficiency/cost savings are directly mentioned

would be a little concerned if I were a googler. basically AI + existing stuff + reducing costs / operational efficiency

(realizing I made alot of numbered lists here)

New comment by 972811 in "Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse"

972811 — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 01:26:55 +0000

if you can get a job, the jobs still pay well. but the availability is SIGNIFICANTLY decreased. so the stanford cs grad can probably get a 100K job straight out of college, while people lower down on the totem pole may be unemployed or taking very low paying jobs. similar to how law is structured

New comment by 972811 in "Netflix never used its $1M algorithm (2012)"

972811 — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 22:35:25 +0000

in my experience from the outside it's difficult to separate their rec algorithm quality vs. the quality of their inventory. you're making the assumption they have a ton of great stuff that they're just not showing you, but they may not.

New comment by 972811 in "Signs that it's time to leave a company"

972811 — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 22:25:48 +0000

i agree with all of what you said, but i think the main change is just that these companies aren't growing the same way they were pre-pandemic. everything feels resource constrained in a way it didn't in the mid-2010s and this makes everything inherently political and negative

edit: to give an example, you probably don't think at all about an exec's value when you see him once a quarter in an all-hands explaining the great growth and complimenting teams, your paycheck is high and growing, and your team has happy hours, lavish team all hands, and tons of autonomy. when the same exec is announcing layoffs, no growth, and reduced benefits, you start to look at the deal a little differently

New comment by 972811 in "I was addicted to my smartphone, so I switched to a flip phone for a month"

972811 — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 05:01:42 +0000

for a more expensive alternative to limit smartphone use, i bought an apple watch ultra, turned off notifs, and it cut down my phone screen time down by ~80% pretty much overnight. basically just keep my phone in another room for most of the day and night (watch works great as an alarm clock)

New comment by 972811 in "Delete or hide life-wasting apps"

972811 — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 01:12:09 +0000

this is really smart

New comment by 972811 in "OpenAI's misalignment and Microsoft's gain"

972811 — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 22:44:49 +0000

sure but what does "hard to do" entail in terms of timeline? in my experience nothing complex can launch in 3 months at a big corp. 6 months would be aggressive. a year seems the most likely. but where will competitors be in a year?

New comment by 972811 in "Ask HN: Am I unhireable?"

972811 — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 00:18:37 +0000

yeah. the SWE stats sound pretty normal for now. I have heard from friends that product is even worse.

I do wonder a bit whether OP is a little too wishy washy around position in interviews (e.g. coming off as not being sure whether he/she wants to be an engineer vs. product manager). the post even comes off that way a little

New comment by 972811 in "They can and will ruin everything you love"

972811 — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 19:16:58 +0000

i don't see anything being "ripped to shreds". seems mostly the same to me as a casual user. still a toxic place that is still the best for current events. maybe a little more toxic, but it's not like it was great before