Hacker News: ng12

New comment by ng12 in "What being ripped off taught me"

ng12 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:19:33 +0000

One thing I learned from consulting is if you position yourself as the "fix your mess" guy you have to be very defensive. Ask for more up-front, and bail at the first sign of underpayment.

Be pleasantly surprised when a poorly run project is being run by nice, honest people. Prep for the opposite.

New comment by ng12 in "How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform"

ng12 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:49:50 +0000

According to levels the pay band caps out around $250k and a principal title. It's good but probably not enough for most to put up with the culture long term.

New comment by ng12 in "Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill"

ng12 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 20:03:07 +0000

Outrage about what? I know people whose hobbies cab generally be summed up as "drinking alcohol". We already decided prohibition didn't work once.

New comment by ng12 in "Why I love OCaml (2023)"

ng12 — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 17:24:41 +0000

Yes but the context of the thread is OCaml being "almost there". Having to build this stuff in-house is pretty good evidence.

New comment by ng12 in "Why I love OCaml (2023)"

ng12 — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:51:45 +0000

Yes and they had to basically build their own version of the compiler to keep everything from falling over (https://oxcaml.org/).

New comment by ng12 in "The AI bubble is 17 times bigger than the dot-com bust"

ng12 — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 02:06:47 +0000

Short ETFs are usually leveraged and make for a really good way to lose money.

Realistically, timing is the issue. "This is a bubble" is worth ~nothing. "This is a bubble and it will pop in late December" is worth a lot if you're correct.

New comment by ng12 in "The AI bubble is 17 times bigger than the dot-com bust"

ng12 — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 19:44:02 +0000

Usually not, because shorting a broad chunk of market is very hard. "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

New comment by ng12 in "Leading computer science professor says 'everybody' is struggling to get jobs"

ng12 — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 13:56:46 +0000

I was going to agree with you until the implication that it's learning the nitty-gritty details that's important.

I can teach someone the details on the job. Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job.

However I've noticed that the fundamentals are so watered down, even at top-tier schools, that young devs like that are harder and harder to find.

New comment by ng12 in "Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs"

ng12 — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 19:22:57 +0000

Maybe it would be simpler to just impose a nominal tax on the total number of job openings a company creates throughout the year. Maybe as a % of the role's salary. You could even rebate it against employer payroll taxes so they get the money back when they actually hire someone.

New comment by ng12 in "OxCaml - a set of extensions to the OCaml programming language."

ng12 — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 23:47:00 +0000

Maybe Jane Street succeeds because of the people who are good at finance in spite of the people who like OCaml.

New comment by ng12 in "The Frontend Treadmill"

ng12 — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 12:55:39 +0000

Yeah, and I'm not anywhere near as distressed about it as this article implies I should be.

New comment by ng12 in "The Frontend Treadmill"

ng12 — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 12:51:07 +0000

> Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years.

I've been writing React professionally for over a decade at this point. I don't know what this guy's on about.

New comment by ng12 in "Apple Invites"

ng12 — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 23:21:57 +0000

I don't know but anecdotally living in a major city every social event I attend has a Partiful attached.

New comment by ng12 in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

ng12 — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 18:56:58 +0000

Huh? Lots of people are currently in jail for things they did on January 6th.

New comment by ng12 in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

ng12 — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 19:15:29 +0000

Honestly while Trump is a little slimy he's also kinda funny. Visit some conservative spaces sometimes, they're having fun while liberal ones are all doom-and-gloom.

It really does matter.

New comment by ng12 in "Python toolkit for quantitative finance"

ng12 — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 20:42:20 +0000

Unironically probably. The only place I've ever worked that used LoC as a performance indicator was a hedge fund.

New comment by ng12 in "Dr Pepper is now as popular as Pepsi. It's still shrouded in mystery"

ng12 — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 19:17:25 +0000

I mean... how do you describe what Coke tastes like? Most soda is kind of mysterious.

New comment by ng12 in "Microsoft employees spent years fighting the tech giant's oil ties"

ng12 — Thu, 09 May 2024 14:46:37 +0000

Safety, for one. Technology helps prevent spills.

New comment by ng12 in "Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets"

ng12 — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 13:46:36 +0000

> and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir)

Yeah, this always tickled me. Obviously smart people should just go work somewhere innocuous like Meta or ByteDance.

Also FWIW this is Palantir and Anduril's bread and butter. They get to vacuum up all the wrongthinkers.

New comment by ng12 in "Show HN: LangCSS – An AI Assistant for Tailwind"

ng12 — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:23:41 +0000

What? This isn't a syntax generator it's building full components.