Hacker News: bigs

New comment by bigs in "How to negotiate your salary package"

bigs — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 22:09:24 +0000

It happened for me once by pure chance.

I was looking to leave a secondment I was on, and received an offer, right as the leader of the client I was seconded to said we’d like to take you on permanently and we’ve cleared it with your company, here’s the offer. I used that as leverage and left.

Otherwise, I agree, it’s a snowball chance in hell to coincide them.

New comment by bigs in "Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?"

bigs — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 11:14:37 +0000

My 8yo has an iPad with Osmo Awbie which he loves. You use physical tiles to program steps in a logic game like “move right 3”, “turn 90deg”…

They have a bunch of other programs too but for some reason I seem to only be able to find them on Amazon now.

He did want to create Roblox levels and Blender based characters and it was just too much to start with.

New comment by bigs in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

bigs — Thu, 15 May 2025 22:27:52 +0000

Hopefully after living a long and fulfilling life? Geez

New comment by bigs in "The role of developer skills in agentic coding"

bigs — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 02:23:49 +0000

The tortoise and the hare is an important point to raise - this is exactly how I feel.

But how long before AI is Good Enough that the point is irrelevant?

New comment by bigs in "Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)"

bigs — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 04:11:22 +0000

Maybe because others aren’t “disrupting” everyone else

New comment by bigs in "How to know when it's time to go"

bigs — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 09:34:14 +0000

I agree with this outcome. When you do raise issues nothing gets done about them and so if you continue down that path they will see the writing on the wall and plan your replacement.

“Everything is fine” until a key milestone is hit - it’s time to move on, or there’s an internal role you’d like to apply for.

New comment by bigs in "Choosing death penalty by firing squad because it's safer"

bigs — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 10:08:31 +0000

…does he think it’s “safer”?

New comment by bigs in "Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office"

bigs — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 23:55:40 +0000

This remote colleagues problem is my issue. I don’t mind coming back in (except the cost) but it is very irritating and pointless as I’m a project manager with dispersed teams all across the country (and some in other countries). I come into the office, say hi to a few people I know, get on Teams calls all day in an open plan office with less privacy than at home, then commute home again.

New comment by bigs in "HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls"

bigs — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 11:06:02 +0000

We as end users have no agency in the relationship with vendors.

New comment by bigs in "Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads"

bigs — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 03:12:17 +0000

This write up is fantastic

New comment by bigs in "Ask HN: Going from Data Engineer to Platform/Infra Engineer Advice"

bigs — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 03:45:38 +0000

Sorry I don’t have advice but as someone who started in infra before cloud, and has recently been involved in data (Fabric, PowerBI) programs, don’t take the steep learning curve of infra lightly.

You might think there was quite a lot of depth to learn in data.. wait till you see infra. Modern cloud environments also hide a lot of the technical stuff away so a basic course in understanding networking (TCP/IP, DNS, proxies, caching and so on) may be a good starting place.

New comment by bigs in "Couriers mystified by the algorithms that control their jobs"

bigs — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 20:49:38 +0000

Sounds pretty close to the dystopian predictions…….

New comment by bigs in "'Mainlined into UK's veins': Labour announces public rollout of AI"

bigs — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 03:03:27 +0000

Wasn’t NHS data anonymised, split into sets and sold a decade ago, then some corp bought multiple sets of the data and combined them easily, de-anonymising it?

New comment by bigs in "If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?"

bigs — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 22:38:01 +0000

Or you may find they write higher quality code - less bugs, more performant code, or so on.

New comment by bigs in "Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you"

bigs — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 07:15:27 +0000

Why should web browsers treat http like a bug? Many sites don’t need https.

New comment by bigs in "Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles"

bigs — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 07:12:57 +0000

In what dystopian world did they think this was what their customers want? Oh right I forgot the end user is not their customer.

New comment by bigs in "Show HN: Decentralized Email and Storage"

bigs — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 22:50:24 +0000

From the FAQ it appears to be similar to Protonmail - emails stored on their servers, however the key “decentralized” difference being that you locally hold the encryption key so any attack on the server can’t decrypt the emails as you hold the key (unlike Protonmail who holds them).

I don’t know the tech details of either product myself I’ve just re-iterated their FAQ entry.

New comment by bigs in "Settlement for Australian users impacted by Cambridge Analytica incident"

bigs — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 05:50:16 +0000

How do you know if a friend installed This is Your Digital Life?

New comment by bigs in "Sharing new research, models, and datasets from Meta FAIR"

bigs — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 22:59:37 +0000

Don’t you love the doublespeak of using “FAIR” as well!

New comment by bigs in "Parkinson's Law: It’s real, so use it"

bigs — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 23:25:39 +0000

I work in a large law firm and see similar outcomes, coming from a similar fast paced background.

I’ve drawn a different conclusion as to “why” though. Law firms are inherently risk averse. As such things do take time to dot the i’s, and that is more important than the time or financials.

I look at it through the project management lens of the three constraints: Quality, Time and Cost.

The law firm (and potentially your cloud provider) has prioritised Quality. Either Time or Cost take a hit.

High quality + quick = costly. High quality + low cost = a long time.