Hacker News: iamstupidsimple

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says"

iamstupidsimple — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:57:49 +0000

> £4800/yr is a shit ton of money? Things must be pretty rough over there!

For the average person in the UK, it definitely is.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Things my girlfriend and I have argued about"

iamstupidsimple — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 19:39:25 +0000

In the north of the UK, dinner=lunch and tea=dinner.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly"

iamstupidsimple — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 03:07:57 +0000

> However, tools, you can make a killing selling simple tools with sexy UX on Mac.

I've been thinking about doing something like this recently but I'm not a heavy mac user these days. Any tips on what people are looking for in small tools?

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and the open-source community"

iamstupidsimple — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 18:22:13 +0000

Somewhat relevant: Chet Faliszek (ex-Valve) is currently posting videos about how the flat hierarchy works:

https://www.tiktok.com/@chetfaliszek/video/72814172402960335...

https://www.tiktok.com/@chetfaliszek/video/72814409728508593...

https://www.tiktok.com/@chetfaliszek/video/72814159128240653...

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Improving code review time"

iamstupidsimple — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 23:35:22 +0000

These missing TotW's are usually about internal tools that aren't open source.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Why is Rosetta 2 fast?"

iamstupidsimple — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 16:53:27 +0000

And having execs who design the organizational structure around those goals is part of what makes good engineering :)

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Meta lays off 11,000 people"

iamstupidsimple — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 11:42:55 +0000

Crab bucket mentality. Those salaries are fine, what went wrong is Meta overhired. FAANG companies don't have enough work to go around as it is.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Steve Yegge Joins as Head of Engineering of Sourcegraph"

iamstupidsimple — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 17:45:54 +0000

> 1) How can you write this whole article without saying "Kythe"?

Well, it does discuss Grok (the closed source predecessor) extensively.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "C++20, How Hard Could It Be"

iamstupidsimple — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 12:17:04 +0000

@dang doesn't work, you're best off emailing hn@ycombinator.com

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Show HN: As your priorities change, your Google calendar gets rearranged by AI"

iamstupidsimple — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 11:28:28 +0000

Just personal opinion, but if this product is as valuable as you're suggesting, then definitely try selling at a higher price point! - Your target market can afford it.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Ubisoft about to take away games you bought"

iamstupidsimple — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 19:17:25 +0000

Valve is also a games developer, and they never pulled any of their old or failed games. You can still play Artifact or Ricochet multiplayer (if you really want).

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "The Birth and Death of the Office"

iamstupidsimple — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 13:22:36 +0000

Those are 'third places'. The workplace was always the second place.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Google's push to bring its 165,000 employees back to the office – Fortune"

iamstupidsimple — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 22:20:59 +0000

Sibling comment has a good point, this number includes everyone from software engineers to kitchen staff. Very few of my direct peers have left and the Google is growing still.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Google's push to bring its 165,000 employees back to the office – Fortune"

iamstupidsimple — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 18:07:48 +0000

I joined Google ~6 months before COVID. More than 60% the company was hired after my start date, so that 1/3 stat is probably higher.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]"

iamstupidsimple — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 12:06:33 +0000

A more generalised approach: structure emails in importance order, top down. So, actionable stuff at top, rationales further down, in descending importance etc...

This becomes more critical when talking to execs.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Democracy at Work Is Bad"

iamstupidsimple — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 21:48:36 +0000

Shackling accountability is no way to run a team.

That being said, there's value in ICs contributing to a roadmap, if they're trusted. Being a 'leaf node' and closer to customers can make people more in touch with problems and solutions a business could implement (at least, that's the theory). But in most organisations the customer and business problems are well-removed from engineers / designers leading to lower quality insights from those people; but in either scenario it always seems like management is out-of-touch.

I as an IC would personally be fine having a bit of 'skin in the game' if the risk:reward ratio was more favourable, but that does seem rare at modern corporates.

Ask HN: What 'deeper technical skills' make up a strong engineer?

iamstupidsimple — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 21:38:40 +0000

A lot of online software industry content is focused on junior engineers: algorithms and data structures, usage of SQL, etc... But I don't think we often discuss what really sets mid/senior engineers apart.

My list would probably look something like:

- ability to use a proper debugging stack (not just tests/printf, use of microbenchmarks for optimisation, systems tracing for services)

- optimisation of how their app interacts with the environment (kernel, network stack, cache lines)

- debugging beyond application level issues (e.g. ability to use core dumps, knowledge of how the JVM works)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31064726

Points: 47

# Comments: 21

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "I hope distributed is not the new default"

iamstupidsimple — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 13:26:51 +0000

I think it's a generational thing.

As a young person, work is basically the default way to meet people after moving to a large city. I have real friends outside work now but they all started as colleagues or friends of colleagues. I'd also prefer to work with people I can trust over anonymous colleagues any day.

I'm not saying it's the only way (it's probably not good or healthy) but this sentiment is super common among my peers. When we're older I suspect that will change.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?"

iamstupidsimple — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 15:01:10 +0000

Unfortunately that problem space is so large (every new line of fibre has how many stakeholders?) that a single individual or organisation might not be able to have any impact here. Which I think is the root of this question.

New comment by iamstupidsimple in "Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?"

iamstupidsimple — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 14:58:22 +0000

Even with high ping, application layer is probably the wrong place to solve this problem. We'll likely get email working as one of the first problems and be back to correspondence chess and the like. Even Civilization 5/6 works over email.