Hacker News: javajosh

New comment by javajosh in "What can I do differently to find employment?"

javajosh — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 15:45:53 +0000

I have 25 years of experience, including at prestigious places like Blizzard and JPL. However I've worked for a variety of startups, none of which succeeded.

How do you search for jobs?

javajosh — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 15:43:26 +0000

How do you search and apply for (especially senior or lead) jobs on today's internet?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636542

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

What can I do differently to find employment?

javajosh — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 15:28:32 +0000

I've been actively looking for a job for the last 18 months, and having no luck. I've applied for many roles, both directly and, occasionally, through recruiters. All of these roles were very close to my existing skillset (webapps with Java, React or Angular, microservices, k8s, distributed messaging, ETL, etc), but recieved no response.

I've signed up for various job boards (indeed, ziprecruiter, jobboutique, jobhire.ai, etc) and I only get misleading "X is interested in you!" spam email from them. I'm not sure where or how they get their data, but it seems very low quality. I've taken to only applying directly or, on occasion, through LinkedIn.

Not that long ago I would have 10 recruiters with offers in a week of showing availability on LinkedIn. Now this. I'm not averse to working harder to find a role, but now I can't even get an interview for a heads-down corporate job, let alone anything more interesting.

Any help or advice appreciated.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636341

Points: 7

# Comments: 12

New comment by javajosh in "Postgres Language Server: Initial Release"

javajosh — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 22:07:37 +0000

What are some of the most impactful/eye-opening lessons you learned from biome?

New comment by javajosh in "Body Doubling"

javajosh — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 22:00:10 +0000

They used to call this "peer pressure". Admittedly this is a narrower form of it where you harness the power of vanity and shame for purposes of good, not evil.

New comment by javajosh in "Show HN: Physical Pomodoro Timer with ESP32 and e-paper screen"

javajosh — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 21:54:28 +0000

That's a very unhelpful link if you want to buy or comparison shop. Online walmart sells over 300 different styles of countdown timer, including ones shaped like a tomato. Note that the Pomadoro Technique recommends a timer that ticks or makes some other unobtrusive sound to remind you that you are in focus mode, and to associate the sound with focus.

https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/countdown-timers

New comment by javajosh in "When the physicists need burner phones, that's when you know America's changed"

javajosh — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 21:41:16 +0000

Yes. I'd be curious to know how resistance movements deal with this problem in other regimes. How do (did?) Navalny or İmamoğlu supporters organize, for example? Is it simply Telegram & Signal? How does one spread a message to the public under such a regime, via pamphlets? Does it work to share "anonymously" on a foreign-hosted platform? Asking for a friend.

New comment by javajosh in "When the physicists need burner phones, that's when you know America's changed"

javajosh — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 20:10:25 +0000

I agree that anonymous speech is an important right in free societies. A novel attack on such a right in the Internet Age is to allow so much speech, anonymous or otherwise, ensure that most of it of is of very low quality, that thoughtful criticisms are ignored or, more accurately, overlooked. A related attack is to "flood the zone with shit", low-quality but emotionally resonant criticisms of speech, generated by hired humans and/or software. (Anecdotally most readers will see any coherent pushback as a signal about the OP's veracity.)

New comment by javajosh in "How much are LLMs boosting real-world programmer productivity?"

javajosh — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 22:10:52 +0000

Yeah, I've been disappointed in a lot of code generation within my field of expertise. However, if I need to whip up some bash scripts, AI works very well. But if I want those bash scripts to be actually good, AI just can't get there. It certainly cannot "think outside the box" and deliver anything close to novel or even elegant (although it may give some tactical help writing boilerplate lightly adapted to your codebase). The analogy I use is that LLM AIs are like a new car mechanic tool that can generate any nut, bolt or gasket, for free and instantly (just add electricity!). It's great addition to the toolset for a seasoned mechanic, distracting for a junior, and is not even in the same universe required to fix an entire car, let alone design one.

New comment by javajosh in "Sam Bankman-Fried thrown into solitary over Tucker Carlson interview: report"

javajosh — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 17:55:22 +0000

What better way to "own the libs" than to openly transgress against sacrosanct values? There is a certain power when you demonstrate that shame, consistency, or principle has no hold on you. To avoid the internal backstabbing this would entail, you also need to convince the audience that it's all a kind of kayfabe, make-believe, and that you really ARE principled and trustworthy with your people, or for some short period of time to achieve a goal. It's foolish, but the world is full of foolish people believing simply because it feels good. Reality has no place in this calculus. This is NOT a partisan problem.

New comment by javajosh in "Sam Bankman-Fried thrown into solitary over Tucker Carlson interview: report"

javajosh — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 17:49:28 +0000

Sidenote: Voidzilla did a 6 minute video about this interview [1]. Tucker focused on injustice, but not the billions SBF stole from people, but the fact that the people who took SBF's political contributions didn't get him off. The implications seem to be that Tucker values transactional justice rather than unbiased justice. This is a sea-change in American (and indeed Western) jurisprudence that is (to me) some combination of shocking and expected at this point.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BLzWTRmq2k

New comment by javajosh in "Trust in Firefox and Mozilla Is Gone – Let's Talk Alternatives"

javajosh — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 14:57:55 +0000

There are two big error modes that we need to look out for when reacting in anger. First is to not jump from the frying pan into the fire by adopting a browser that makes nice sounding claims but really has no way to back them up. Installing a blob from a random website is never a good idea, especially when it's a browser. Personally, I think Librewolf is worth the risk but time may proved me wrong. The second error is a bit more subtle in that we need to think more deeply about how to fund browser development such that protects user interest. Clearly there are very powerful and pervasive market forces that Will attempt to warp any browser project into selling user data. That's true for all ubiquitous platform software, but the browser is particularly vulnerable because it exists at a high level of abstraction and therefore high level of utility. So I will make a prediction that the next successful privacy focused browser is going to be something like Cursor, a fork of a well-known browser engine with built-in local AI in service of the user only. This project will have to be a loss leader for another money making entity that requires a truly secure and private platform.

New comment by javajosh in "Copilot for Everything: Training your AI replacement one keystroke at a time"

javajosh — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 19:18:56 +0000

That only captures your output, not your input. The best people to simulate in this world would be so-called terminally online people virtually all of whom's input is itself online. So for those who've read a lot of paper books or done a lot of traveling or had a lot of offline conversations or relationships, I think it would be difficult to truly simulate someone.

New comment by javajosh in "Rust Is Eating JavaScript (2023)"

javajosh — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 14:43:25 +0000

But the comment you're replying to doesn't say Java doesn't have any downsides. It just says that Java has a great story for doing shared types between client and server, which is true. It's also true that Java as a language has gotten a lot better over time. This is I think thanks to pressure from other languages written for the jvm like kotlin, And also developer feedback for those who work in other languages like JavaScript. Java is old and boring. Just like go is new and boring. Rust has plenty of downsides this idea that it's easy to use. Seems wrong to me. The borrow checker is famously difficult to work with despite being a central feature of the language. The really big upside to JavaScript is that it's the native language of browsers and so in a weird way. If you want to get closest to the metal so to speak, JavaScript is a better option for most deployed applications. It's interesting to note that the op's article mostly points to build tools that are written in rust rather than applications and I think that's telling.

New comment by javajosh in "The FAA’s Hiring Scandal"

javajosh — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 05:18:17 +0000

Complex philosophy has a way of devolving almost inevitably into a kind of "four legs good two legs bad" sort of way a la Animal Farm. In the same way dei seems to inevitably devolve into white people bad non-white people good. It doesn't really matter what it was originally. Philosophies that become popular will always devolve into some easy to understand but wrong version of itself. I personally believe this is the single biggest argument in favor of color blindness since it's relatively unambiguous.

New comment by javajosh in "Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'"

javajosh — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 21:37:53 +0000

Testimony is not evidence, and using the passive voice ("given explicit authorization", by whom? why does this matter?) is an explicit argument from authority. Physical evidence or nothing. There are no shortage of credulous people in the world happy to bask in the glow of attention.

Consider the counter-factual. If indeed there are aliens here, and have been here for decades, why not centuries? Why haven't previous generations found them, and not known their true origin? How curious that these artifacts only started appearing in the space age, when if they had appeared previously they would have been attributed to a religious origin (and not only not suppressed, but shared widely as evidence for God.)

Note: if aliens are here then FTL travel is not only possible but common, and easy, and this would undermine a great deal of verified physics. To get around this you'd need a conspiracy across all physics research (a la the SF novel "The Three Body Problem"). I'd also add that if going to other planets was like sailing a ship, then we could expect (lazy, sloppy) tourists to come around who don't "toe the line" when it comes to staying hidden.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and without it all such claims can be safely ignored (and indeed, can and should negatively impact the people making them).

New comment by javajosh in "Good Software Development Habits"

javajosh — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 23:33:50 +0000

>If a particular function doesn't fit anywhere, create a new module (or class or component) for it and you'll find a home for it later. It's better to create a new independent construct than to jam it into an existing module where you know deep down it doesn't make sense. Worst comes to worst, it lives as an independent module which isn't too bad anyway.

Innocuous and fine I guess but it points to (and then ignores) a deeper and interesting issue around how codebases grow, split, and merge over time. When the same thing happens at several levels of abstraction/zoom, take note. Refactoring to extract a method is similar to splitting a package is similar to splitting a monolith into microservices (and the reverse operations). The creation of a new package/module/whatever is an early signal of a "fault line" around which a future refactoring will occur (or, more often than not, a signal that the dev may not be familiar with where things go - but even in this case I tend to agree with the OP to just put it in a new place and let the code review fix it.)

New comment by javajosh in "Drinking water systems for 26M Americans face high cybersecurity risks"

javajosh — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 23:26:52 +0000

I think it is safe to say that few if anyone actually understands the common American voter and what they actually care about. Anecdotally, the prevalence of cyber-security plot points in action thriller movies/games/books indicates that there is at least some awareness of the threat.

New comment by javajosh in "Casio has released a ring in the form of its iconic watch"

javajosh — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 20:48:00 +0000

Actually, I think an abacus ring is a great idea or it could be multiple rings on the same finger where the main benefit is you could keep keep count of something. If you had three rows of small beads, you could theoretically keep track of up to a thousand things, all without a battery and with perfect accuracy. Additionally, you could keep track in a very low profile way if the beads were on the inside of the ring toward the palm of your hand and you manipulated them with your thumb. The beads would have to have a slight friction to them so they stay in place but are still easy to move. But in general I like the idea and it's at least as appealing as the op Casio watch ring.

New comment by javajosh in "Treating bullying as everyone's problem reduces incidence in primary schools"

javajosh — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 20:41:06 +0000

Love the book but I always thought this needed a little bit more explanation. It seems in our world people seek power for many reasons and only a small minority seek it simply to make people suffer. For example, people seek power to increase their own safety and pleasure. The suffering of others is incidental to their goals. In addition, since suffering is universal and requires no human actor to inflict. It seems rather like a huge waste of effort. I think it's better to read O'Brien's statement as something more specific to the world of 1984 and Big brother rather than something general that applies to all power seeking. We don't really learn that much about the workings of the inner party and the kind of propaganda that they are subjected to or subject each other to, and this might be evidence of what that looks like.