Hacker News: jbirer

New comment by jbirer in "Show HN: Fractional jobs – part-time roles for engineers"

jbirer — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 23:31:22 +0000

There are simply no more jobs available for the massive population we have right now. Part time economy increases employment.

New comment by jbirer in "Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy"

jbirer — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:02:47 +0000

Paying 5 bucks to pirate seems to be missing the point of pirating for me IMO.

New comment by jbirer in "Starbucks in Korea asks customers to stop bringing in printers/desktop computers"

jbirer — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:54:30 +0000

I am more than happy to "take my coffee and fuck off". But I'll do it with a 50 cent instant coffee from a supermarket, not pay 10$ for it just to not be able to relax in a coffee shop.

New comment by jbirer in "Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy"

jbirer — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:44:03 +0000

My main issue is that they're now slowly testing the waters to see if they can make you watch ads while still paying for the subscription, and at that point, might as well take advantage of Romania's lack of law enforcement and hit the torrent websites.

New comment by jbirer in "Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian"

jbirer — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:41:57 +0000

I found myself on Arch Wiki for so many non-Arch issues that I decided that I'll just install Arch and use it.

New comment by jbirer in "I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it"

jbirer — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 21:03:18 +0000

Seems you were not chasing the launch enough. I've been guilty of that before, missing the development of a demo that was meant to be presented to big clients. You may wanna explore why you lacked commitment and drive for the development.

New comment by jbirer in "Open Source Society University – Path to a free self-taught education in CS"

jbirer — Mon, 26 May 2025 17:43:42 +0000

Shout out to Stanford that made it possible to start a CS education for free, for a Romanian kid who could not afford it (me). The free video course they have had up there since about 20 years was one of the foundations of my programming career now.

New comment by jbirer in "I Built My Own Audio Player"

jbirer — Fri, 23 May 2025 17:37:31 +0000

This is really cool, I love how you planned the entire development before with graphs.

When I was 16, I developed an mp3 player in C (I cheated and used mpg123 library). Audio players are a great way to learn about low level stuff and as a first project.

Keep developing things!

New comment by jbirer in "Realtek's $10 tiny 10GbE NIC will hit motherboards soon"

jbirer — Fri, 23 May 2025 17:34:22 +0000

Maybe the capacity is ever expanding, like the universe, so it always has room to spare.

New comment by jbirer in "Ask HN: How Do I Escape Homelessness After Rebuilding My Mental Health?"

jbirer — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 23:00:38 +0000

First of all, your situation is completely normal for the time period we live in. A few people I thought would never become homeless (web3 engineers who used to make 300K a month etc) are on the verge of it now. Pretty insane combination of a mental health and economic crisis we have going on.

>I’m willing to work. I know I can earn 3-4x more doing freelance tech, but I can’t do that from a car.

Why not? There are homeless people doing Amazon Turk from cafes in Hong Kong.

Second, you need to focus on fast money making sources. That's Lyft, shoveling snow, micro-tasks (I help people with Solana developer questions in the Raydium Discord for example, earning 100-200$ per small script), food stamps, church handouts, it does not matter. Cash quick. You need some quick money to ease up the stress so you can focus on the next big leap. You'll get to the big tech job, but until then, you need to focus on your current reality.

New comment by jbirer in "Show HN: We built Lovable for Mobile Apps (uses Flutter)"

jbirer — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 20:57:20 +0000

It's been some time that I worked with React Native, but I think you can use react-native-web to create web previews of the mobile app.

New comment by jbirer in "Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments""

jbirer — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 09:00:20 +0000

Bad e-mail management is not a responsibility on my part, and a disorganized client moving to another company is not really a threat either.

New comment by jbirer in "Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]"

jbirer — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 08:59:31 +0000

This is probably how people who never pay their debts think.

"It's ok if I am late with the bill, they will feel bad for me and never risk me reputation damage by airing out my debts".

But in the absence of a sense of responsibility or obligation, shame might be the only thing that might work to make them fulfill their obligations.

New comment by jbirer in "Surgery implants tooth material in eye as scaffolding for lens"

jbirer — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 08:51:54 +0000

As someone with Type 2 diabetes, I am eternally grateful for everyone who works on future eye surgery advancements. Especially for people who work in tech, it's nearly a death sentence.

New comment by jbirer in "Abusing C to implement JSON parsing with struct methods"

jbirer — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 08:46:32 +0000

This is giving me GObject and Gdk flashbacks. If anyone wants to traumatize themselves, compile GTK2 and work with the aforementioned.

That being said, it's still a very clever way to implement this.

New comment by jbirer in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

jbirer — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 08:43:54 +0000

As someone who agrees with cutting back some of the funding to Ukraine, this could've done in a much more professional and diplomatic manner. Arguing in front of televisions and interrupting Zelensky is just a bad look.

New comment by jbirer in "When AI promises speed but delivers debugging hell"

jbirer — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 13:41:50 +0000

Anyone who has ever worked with VCs or shareholders before knows that, if you tell them the reality and limitations of something, they will either fire you or ignore what you say. They have been desperate to remove the leverage programmers have due to their skill and replace us with AI that they don't have to pay salaries to. All we can do at this point is just take VC money promising them exactly what they want to hear, that they will be able to replace us with a NLP model. Sometimes you just can't save people but you can profit from their voluntary fall from the cliff?

New comment by jbirer in "Where is London's most central sheep?"

jbirer — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 13:19:32 +0000

In London, you are the sheep to be slaughtered with a knife.

New comment by jbirer in "Show HN: I built an active community of trans people online"

jbirer — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 13:17:05 +0000

Nothing wrong with NSFW content per se, but you cannot justify potentially exposing children to pornographic content as a "coping mechanism", it wouldn't be accepted by any court for sure.

New comment by jbirer in "Show HN: I built an active community of trans people online"

jbirer — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 13:12:58 +0000

I've been disappointed to not encounter the hot trans girl content the comments are complaining about.

How do you handle iOS testing? Do you have VPN blocking? What are some guerilla marketing tactics did you use? I am trying to grow a community in an unrelated topic and want to see what I could potentially do.

Cool project by the way!