Hacker News: jaylaal

New comment by jaylaal in "Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got"

jaylaal — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:14:09 +0000

How's the boss going to know you can do secretarial stuff if he hired you as a plumber?

New comment by jaylaal in "Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got"

jaylaal — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 03:43:02 +0000

"Seriously, ref, I'm good enough to win. No need to play the game, you can just hand me the gold medal now!"

New comment by jaylaal in "I used to know how to write in Japanese"

jaylaal — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 16:11:50 +0000

Nice comparison. When I was living in China, I'd encounter someone who forgot how to write the characters for a word on a weekly basis. I think the difference is that with Latin alphabets you can still misspell something, and having gotten it down on paper, still rely on phonetics to convey your meaning.

New comment by jaylaal in "Ask HN: I'm an MIT senior and still unemployed – and so are most of my friends"

jaylaal — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 16:50:11 +0000

Also keep talking to people, since you never know when and where opportunities will come from.

This environment reminds me of the one I faced graduating into the 2001-2003 post-Dotcom Bust market.

New comment by jaylaal in "Ask HN: Is anybody building an alternative transformer?"

jaylaal — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 20:14:58 +0000

Robots in disguise.

New comment by jaylaal in "Traveling with kids is not what influencers portray it to be"

jaylaal — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 11:25:15 +0000

TL;DR: she thought kids would like grown-up stuff but was wrong.

"Giving my kids unadulterated fun allowed me to relax, at least as much as I could as a mom of three young ones.

I'm not the type of parent who wants to spend all my time off at an indoor water park with dozens of other screaming families, but I'm learning that we need to have age-appropriate fun. And that looks different from what I'd imagined (or what I saw on social media)."

New comment by jaylaal in "WuMgr: Windows Update but Not Automatic"

jaylaal — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 01:55:22 +0000

Was the development team hugely influenced by The Mythical Method Man Month?

New comment by jaylaal in "CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people"

jaylaal — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 16:11:04 +0000

Many people can't mentally context switch for game and aren't prepared for the behavior that is required of the game from those that can. It's an assault on their world view.

New comment by jaylaal in "Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?"

jaylaal — Tue, 31 May 2022 15:47:13 +0000

For a small but complicated project I got thrown into a while ago, the only way for me to understand it was to print out all the source directly, vertically tape together the pages for a single file, and then lay them all out on a huge table. Then I took multicolored markers and started physically drawing out the call chains. I then I sers-toi the system, and also found an enraging bug: the system widely used the variables "blah_name" and "blah_id", including in many functions' parameters. Except, in one case, blah_id was passed in as blah_name and thenceforth became known as blah_name.

I don't know if an automated visualization system is possible, but you'll have to understand the whole thing before doing so. Pen and paper was the most expedient solution for me at the time.

New comment by jaylaal in "Ask HN: How can I best assist my wife with a career transition?"

jaylaal — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 18:28:45 +0000

Beyond her own professional search, I'd suggest you making more time to be with the kids and handle household crap that she might be dealing with. Take things off her plate so she can recover from her previous situation and reflect and act on her future path. In my experience, this will be hard for you because you'll necessarily do less at work and have less time to improve yourself professionally and personally outside of work, but the payoff in stress reduction for your wife should be worth it in short- and medium-terms until she gets re-settled.

Background: Software engineer for over 15 years; twin 3 year-olds at home; wife is a teacher.

New comment by jaylaal in "Tell HN: I'm 18 years old today"

jaylaal — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 18:20:07 +0000

+1 on the health. At this point, you probably have a lot of time on your hands. Use some of that to learn how to be healthy. Exercise, food, cooking, etc.. are all deep rabbit holes to explore, so develop your baseline of knowledge and habits now so that you can fall back on them when life inevitably takes you away from them.

New comment by jaylaal in "More evidence that autism is linked to gut bacteria"

jaylaal — Fri, 31 May 2019 20:30:57 +0000

Why do you focus on the mice, when the article talks about two studies, one of which was longer term and done on humans? "Crucially, these changes in gut bacteria have translated into behavioural changes. Even 18 weeks after treatment started the children had begun showing reduced symptoms of autism. After two years, only three of them still rated as severe, while eight fell below the diagnostic cut-off point for asd altogether. These eight thus now count as neurotypical."