Hacker News: grumpy_coder

New comment by grumpy_coder in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

grumpy_coder — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 03:33:00 +0000

The cuts include workers in senior director and vice president roles, as well as managers, product developers, product managers, program managers, software developers, site reliability developers, technical analysts, user experience developers and others.

They are in no-way laying off call center employees, they are laying off tens of thousands of the most highly paid US workers.

And yes the numbers of H1Bs granted in 2025 is relevant. You don't layoff 20% of your 100,000+ people workforce all of a sudden 'cos March went badly.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "High school student discovers 1.5M potential new astronomical objects"

grumpy_coder — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 23:07:57 +0000

The schools studied in that paper are free, or close to free. Not $50,000 per anum And I don't think OP was suggesting it's the quality of education that affects outcomes in attendees of expensive private high schools.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "Architecting large software projects [video]"

grumpy_coder — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:20:20 +0000

Yeah, I think the first mistake is thinking 'large software project' is specific enough to have any good advice at all.

Large software projects could include AAA console videogame, or banking mobile app, or embedded vehicle entertainment system, or airport baggage handling system, or hundreds of other totally different domains.

The only good advice I can think of is given a large software project try to hire someone (or a whole team) that have built something pretty similar before.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more"

grumpy_coder — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 20:08:52 +0000

A fine time to cancel Larabee properly and get serious about specialized GPU hardware five years earlier.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "The Death of the Middle-Class Musician"

grumpy_coder — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 16:33:37 +0000

The grocery bagger on a zero hour contract needs to be able to survive when not given 40 hours. Also the 5% unemployed people in a 'full employment' economy need to be able to survive when sacrificed to control inflation.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "The Death of the Middle-Class Musician"

grumpy_coder — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 16:29:57 +0000

Have you seen how much money we are shoveling into 'AI'

New comment by grumpy_coder in "The Who Cares Era"

grumpy_coder — Wed, 28 May 2025 15:46:09 +0000

Boeing has consistently underperformed the market massively since the MD merger. Making maybe 3% after inflation

New comment by grumpy_coder in "The Ingredients of a Productive Monorepo"

grumpy_coder — Wed, 28 May 2025 13:23:01 +0000

Monorepo very often means bazel for tooling (rbe and caching tests) and that means one WORKSPACE with common versions of libs.

Monorepo also means a team 'vetting' new thirdparty libs, and a team telling you your CI takes too long, and a team telling you to upgrade your lib within 23 minutes because theres a security issue in the korean language support...

New comment by grumpy_coder in "The state of binary compatibility on Linux and how to address it"

grumpy_coder — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 14:41:06 +0000

Related video about releasing games on linux, i.e. dlopen() all the things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMPCSqQ-34

New comment by grumpy_coder in "Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)"

grumpy_coder — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 14:49:05 +0000

in this context 'your boss' is usually a level or two above your direct manager on org chart Take it as the most senior person you can get regular face time with, this also needs to be gamed.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store"

grumpy_coder — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 18:23:08 +0000

More like the willfully blind engineers, disingenuously claim to believe that absurd bullshit. There's not a lot genuine left in that company.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "Should managers still code?"

grumpy_coder — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 17:00:18 +0000

Should managers exist?

We got along better before all these managers arrived, could ship huge projects with 100 people and one ceo. And the ceo wrote code and didn't do any of the nonsense most managers fill their days with.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "How the U.K. broke its own economy"

grumpy_coder — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 20:20:01 +0000

Then when you need to buy a house you have to leave.

Net migration to London from the rest of England and Wales is only positive for those aged 20 to 27

There's plenty of great experienced people outside London, but all the rich (business owners) are openly prejudice to everywhere else. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cwy57v07gn2o

New comment by grumpy_coder in "It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI"

grumpy_coder — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 16:17:22 +0000

Me too. At least i can be wrong in private that way.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "Do you want to be doing this when you're 50? (2012)"

grumpy_coder — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 18:44:27 +0000

This sounds far more real to me than the original post. All the technical issues in the world don't bother me unduly, it really is the managers who make you hate work.

Money wise these corps are a system of their own, they pay enough to make you not quit. The more they pay, generally the more they suck.

Just need to wait till my 401k doubles one more time, my kids finish college, and the house is paid off.... just 10 more years

New comment by grumpy_coder in "Don't "optimize" conditional moves in shaders with mix()+step()"

grumpy_coder — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 16:37:48 +0000

I believe the conclusion is correct in 2025, but the article in a way just perpetuates the 'misinformation', making it seem like finding if your code will compile to a dynamic branch or not is easier than it is.

The unfortunate truth with shaders is that they are compiled by the users machine at the point of use. So compiling it on just your machine isn't nearly good enough. NVIDIA pricing means large numbers of customers are running 10 year old hardware. Depending on target market you might even want the code to run on 10 year old integrated graphics.

Does 10 year old integrated graphics across the range of drivers people actually have running prefer conditional moves over more arithmetic ops.. probably, but I would want to keep both versions around and test on real user hardware if this shader was used a lot.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "Ask HN: Promoted, but Career Path Derailed"

grumpy_coder — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 22:09:43 +0000

"it will almost certainly double in value in 7 years" implies 10% is an almost certain long term return. It is not.

10 years is a common rule of thumb to double your investment, this is a good guess since after adjusting for inflation, the real return of S&P 500 is about 6.8%. Which is about 10.5 years to double your investment.

(give or take S&P 500 being one of the best returns you will find historically)

New comment by grumpy_coder in "Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases"

grumpy_coder — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 23:38:54 +0000

I see an over-reliance on automated tests recently. Often suggesting just passing the CI tests is enough to approve a change. In ancient code it's just as important to limit the blast radius of your changes, and have a good reason for making them. Not changing something is the ultimate way to prevent a regression.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "Insurers rely on doctors whose judgments have been criticized by courts"

grumpy_coder — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 20:52:15 +0000

It's also important to realize claim denial isn't the same for all customers. When I was classed as an executive at a large blue chip company, my claims were approved quickly and easily at the company specific hotline. With the same provider, making the same claims, they are now partially denied initially and it requires long phone calls to get them to admit they should be covered and often it just isn't worth the hassle.

New comment by grumpy_coder in "US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case"

grumpy_coder — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 19:01:01 +0000

That game already exists. Intel and Amd had an odd relationship for years when Intel needed Amd so they could claim that competition existed. Cross licensing instruction sets and the like.