Hacker News: aksss

New comment by aksss in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

aksss — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:51:39 +0000

I remember these issues from earlier Surfaces. I was not impressed. Latest ones are pretty dope tho, IME.

New comment by aksss in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

aksss — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:42:40 +0000

If you have desirable skills, why does the business have all the power? If you don’t have desirable skills and yet remain employed, how could you expect otherwise?

New comment by aksss in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

aksss — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:40:16 +0000

Just being real here though, hiring flaky employees is enormously expensive. Every hiring manager / business owner would just as soon not waste their time on it. So there are these heuristics that have organically developed for how to spot good employees vs bad. Not having the stability, foresight, or courtesy to (be able to) give notice is merely an indicator of whether you have your shit together. Similar example: an HR director once told me early in my career that drug tests (back when those were a thing) are basically just IQ tests - the company doesn’t give a shit if you smoke pot, but if you can’t control yourself enough knowing you have a test coming up or you can’t figure out how to engineer a workaround, you’re probably dumber than the candidates we want.

The system is reasonable in the sense that it’s explainable and predictable on both sides. Social convention seems preferable to me in this context to binding contracts.

New comment by aksss in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

aksss — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:56:32 +0000

Globalization played (plays) a huge part in this timeline too. If I can outsource your job to a place that really does treat their employees as disposable, you should just be happy to be employed. And even if I don’t want to offshore, how does my product/service succeed or remain sustainable if my competitors are all offshoring (or indeed come from offshore)? I’m not defending this attitude just distilling and illustrating through extreme language what I see as a reality of global competition.

Post-WW2, America had a lock on global manufacturing and was like last man standing in a burned down world.

It was/is an illusion to think that could be a permanent state.

The pre-war employment situation in America looked nothing like post-war. Your race to the bottom narrative is probably better framed as reversion to a multi-polar world with bonus features of higher global prosperity and capability, lower barriers to access foreign markets (whether laborers or consumers), and mature logistics infrastructure. In short - more people than ever want YOUR job, and to live in YOUR house, and have YOUR safety net, such as it is, it’s not just some focus on quarterly reports.

New comment by aksss in "No Raise, No Promotion: 1 in 4 White-Collar Workers Are Stalling Out"

aksss — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:02:19 +0000

How would you characterize the functional differences between the good and the bad companies that allowed for a great implementation of unlimited PTO? For instance, is it more overlap in job responsibility, less silo’d single points of failure? Better project management? I mean, it seems to me it’s never “a good time” since most of us could work 24/7 if just based on demand.

New comment by aksss in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

aksss — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:52:15 +0000

It reminds me of the Dilbert joke about asking to be put on 4-10’s and the boss replies why would I do that when I already have you for 7-12’s? With unlimited PTO, if you can only take it when there’s no work to do.. well in my business the work is never done. Demand outstrips supply so completely and consistently, it would be an impossible hurdle. I’ve worked in jobs where even limited PTO was near impossible to take beyond the occasional one or two days. Banked PTO was basically considered your severance package. Seems hard to set expectations correctly with unlimited PTO plans.

New comment by aksss in "Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union"

aksss — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:29:51 +0000

Taxi companies in most cities were exploitive oligarchies - it was textbook regulatory capture. Often their workers weren't any better off in terms of lopsided deals. And the customer experience sucked sooo bad. The smells, the illegal "cash only" bait and switch, the runarounds. I remember. I was there, Gandalf. And I'll take Uber any day over going back to the old system.

New comment by aksss in "Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend"

aksss — Sun, 24 May 2026 20:16:52 +0000

A good habit to build is knowing when to abandon a session and start over rather than trying to correct. There’s room for correction but you can kind of smell when the whole discussion has become rotten and inefficient. Sometimes it’s just better to use the session as rubber ducking to learn how to correctly articulate what you’re after and start a new session with that clean and correctly articulated foundation.

New comment by aksss in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

aksss — Sun, 24 May 2026 04:35:03 +0000

I don’t think VS Code is remotely a replacement for VS/Rider. I use VS Code for a lot of things but for large and complex project sets the automation and features in VS are luxuries you really miss. It’s like going back to the Stone Age to use VS Code in those contexts. Trying to fill the voids in VS Code with extensions makes VS Code very brittle. VS Code has its lane but I think they are different tools suited to very different jobs.

New comment by aksss in "Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max"

aksss — Fri, 22 May 2026 01:46:13 +0000

Interesting, for my part I would never build a data center (or underpin critical infrastructure) with Ubiquiti but I have a lot of it at blind remote sites and it works well enough - WAN failover, and they've built out a fair bit of downstream failover as well - shadow gateways, RPS, etc. Has replaced a lot of Meraki subscriptions.

New comment by aksss in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"

aksss — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:20:05 +0000

"Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator’s account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois."

https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...

New comment by aksss in "Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired"

aksss — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:33:10 +0000

> a more balanced version:

Too complicated and subjective, stinks of more risk.

Also, I don't think it's dehumanizing it all (having been on the receiving end of it way back when during a layoff, and involved in the process more times than I care to count). It's standard practice for involuntary terms at all companies we work with, whether employee is IT or not. If a company is not doing this already, I'd encourage them to.

New comment by aksss in "US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants"

aksss — Tue, 05 May 2026 02:55:14 +0000

Which isn’t to say government is bad as an institution.. just to say that we regard it with an assumption of good faith at our collective peril - it’s track record counsels the opposite.

New comment by aksss in "US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants"

aksss — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:33:02 +0000

"Ostensibly" is the mistake in your formula. Current events are replete with examples to the contrary. It's not equivocating to recognize that governments are organizations of humans, subject to the same limitations - the larger they get, the harder they are to manage well; talent is incredibly important to success in mission; leadership is incredibly important to integrity, ethics, and strategy; lower oversight and mediocre control structures lead to abuse. You can see the challenges that government as an organization has there. And as to scale..? Son. At least you can "ostensibly" choose whether or not to interact with corporations unless they are colluding with... government.

New comment by aksss in "US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants"

aksss — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:30:38 +0000

corporate overlords? These are the state governments selling your data. The call is coming from inside the house. The sooner we realize that government is comprised of the same slithering slime of human greed and laziness, the more realistic discussions we can have.

New comment by aksss in "US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants"

aksss — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:26:57 +0000

Narrator: "But it did neither."

Honestly, we're better off with it than without it, speaking as someone with exposure to that industry's internals. That act drives a lot of good security practice within the organizations (mostly liability shifting, but still good). Specifically, the fear it instills of ruinous penalties from regulators drives good practice adoption, IME.

Further, multiple crappy patient portals across providers is a crummy experience, but it's an improvement over the world where providers held the data hostage and had zero interest in accommodating your requests for it, or even the idea that you owned it.

New comment by aksss in "Beijing Is Not Playing a Long Game"

aksss — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:46:39 +0000

You would prefer emotional and impassioned hyperbole? Arm waving and hand-wringing? Self-flagellation? Navel-gazing? Struggle sessions?

New comment by aksss in "Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down"

aksss — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:41:21 +0000

Classic Scorpion and the Frog tale, or the older Farmer and the Snake. https://read.gov/aesop/094.html

New comment by aksss in "BP profits more than double as Iran war sends oil prices higher"

aksss — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:03:09 +0000

$0.60 + 2.25%.

The excise tax is a fixed .60+ per gallon, going up July 1. The sales tax is 2.25%, and local sales tax some additional percentage.

New comment by aksss in "BP profits more than double as Iran war sends oil prices higher"

aksss — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:13:22 +0000

Good for California's budget as well.