Hacker News: bsoles

New comment by bsoles in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

bsoles — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:51:12 +0000

> 35 points for open source contributions

> 30 for personal projects

These are insane weights for scoring a software engineer's resume.

New comment by bsoles in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

bsoles — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:51:50 +0000

I can clearly identify this kind of developers at work by their mindless enthusiasm for AI. Development is just another job before they can move into "management" and make all-knowing statements all day long.

New comment by bsoles in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

bsoles — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:48:12 +0000

It is why I feel dirty after AI generates a piece of clever code: I know I am stealing somebody's IP without attribution. And the AI companies benefit from this, not the real people behind the training data.

New comment by bsoles in "How Terry Tao became an evangelist for AI in math"

bsoles — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:05:35 +0000

As much as I like Terrence Tao, I think he is entering the crackpot phase of his career. Much like Roger Penrose and many mathematicians and physicists before him.

New comment by bsoles in "I stopped tracking my time. Now I can't focus"

bsoles — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:52:55 +0000

Tangentially related, but after the mindless push in my company for more AI use at any cost, every morning I drive to work thinking to myself if today should be my last day at my job.

One reason I am not giving my two-week notice is that I don't like "difficult conversations" with my manager.

New comment by bsoles in "Real wages start to shrink in developed countries"

bsoles — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:11:30 +0000

My "strong" performance rating got me a raise less than the inflation rate this year in the US. I guess I am not using enough tokens to justify a bigger raise.

New comment by bsoles in "What it takes to transpose a matrix"

bsoles — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:08:06 +0000

MATLAB

New comment by bsoles in "What it takes to transpose a matrix"

bsoles — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:06:50 +0000

The theory of (basic) linear algebra is pretty easy. The practice of proper linear algebra is very difficult. People spend entire careers on things like error propagation in matrix operations. There are entire books on inverting matrices using a litany of approaches using things like QR décomposition, SVD, etc. I think it is fascinating...

New comment by bsoles in "Childhood Computing"

bsoles — Sun, 24 May 2026 14:04:49 +0000

I had fun times around 1985 with zx81, ZX spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. Creating "games" with sprites and all... Even writing for loops with print statements were fun.

New comment by bsoles in "Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links"

bsoles — Sun, 24 May 2026 13:56:22 +0000

My employer's domain starts with "m". Bunch of people recently fell victim for a fishing email whose domain started with "rn". In Outlook 's font the two look almost identical.

New comment by bsoles in "AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills"

bsoles — Sat, 23 May 2026 11:04:41 +0000

It is called Gell-mann amnesia.

New comment by bsoles in "Cleve Moler has died"

bsoles — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:40:26 +0000

> Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py.

Literally every major brand car runs code built with MATLAB and Simulink. Same goes for every modern aircraft, space vehicle, etc. Far from being outdated.

New comment by bsoles in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

bsoles — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:24:10 +0000

My company is one. They just made "AI use" a mandatory performance goal for next year's reviews. I am thinking about retiring at this point...

New comment by bsoles in "Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS"

bsoles — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:16:01 +0000

> Not sure if it helps, but if we get our first blind user I will gladly make some admends to make it more usable for them.

I have heard "we don't have blind customers" argument many times before. Apart from ethical issues that this raises, ADA requirements, technically, don't care if you have blind users or not. Accessibility is still required...

New comment by bsoles in "I hate soldering"

bsoles — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:54:37 +0000

The cheapest Hakko iron (888?) works just fine for me, even for surface mount components.

New comment by bsoles in "I hate soldering"

bsoles — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:53:18 +0000

Once I have developed a technique for soldering surface mount components, using lots of flux, soldering became a joy event for me.

The cheapest Hakko iron (888?) and a flat fine tip works great. I have a stereo microscope but I only use it for checking defects afterwards. A 10x magnifier works just fine.

New comment by bsoles in "Think Linear Algebra (2023)"

bsoles — Sun, 10 May 2026 15:29:12 +0000

And eigenvectors in the first lesson!

New comment by bsoles in "Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM"

bsoles — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:21:40 +0000

I have never been able to stream video from a raspberry pi zero's official camera. What tools/software were you using?

New comment by bsoles in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

bsoles — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:28:17 +0000

> gparted wasn't to blame. I was.

I don't know about gparted, but I always felt that "rm -i" should have been the default. The safe option should always be the default and you can optionally make it unsafe. Same goes with "mv -i".

New comment by bsoles in "Agent Skills"

bsoles — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:17:42 +0000

Agent skills are ways of turning over our means of (software) production to our employers, while making ourselves obsolete at the same time. In the recent past, a (software) professional had to be continuously employed by their employer to maintain access to their professional skills. By transferring our skills into AI agent skills, we are basically giving away that privilege. In the near future, our employers might feel they don't need our skills anymore because it has already been captured by the AI agents. Somebody with a better grasp of economic history should be able to explain this using the analogy of what happened during industrial revolution and how the workers got screwed over.