Hacker News: ptr

New comment by ptr in "Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief"

ptr — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 18:33:37 +0000

Apple software used to exhibit reasonable UX for “edge cases” just like the one you described. This was one of my main reasons for going Mac — they cared about the details. Sad to see that seems to be going away.

Trump signs proclamation adding $100K annual fee for H-1B visa applications

ptr — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 17:03:58 +0000

Article URL: https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d39699d0b2de3d90936f8076357254e

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45315119

Points: 8

# Comments: 13

Simple Sabotage for Software

ptr — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 06:25:37 +0000

Article URL: https://erikbern.com/2023/12/13/simple-sabotage-for-software.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38679787

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Spotify Will Cut Headcount by 17% to Confront Slower Growth

ptr — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 08:10:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-04/spotify-will-cut-headcount-by-17-to-confront-slower-growth

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514852

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by ptr in "Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected"

ptr — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 20:42:02 +0000

Yes — the Wikipedia article that I linked says so as well. But Polestar is headquartered in Sweden, and the cars are designed by Swedes in Sweden. It’s a Swedish brand.

New comment by ptr in "Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected"

ptr — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 23:19:28 +0000

Polestar is Swedish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polestar

New comment by ptr in "Apple Delays Work on Next Year's iPhone, Mac Software to Fix Bugs"

ptr — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 18:40:58 +0000

It’s not just you — something happened with me where I mentally checked out from the MacOS train after Lion. The versions from Mavericks and up are “those newfangled versions with their silly names”. And Mavericks is 10 years old! Maybe it was the RDF wearing off.

New comment by ptr in "Coroutines make robot code easy"

ptr — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 09:54:48 +0000

Coroutines are an abstraction though.

New comment by ptr in "Coroutines make robot code easy"

ptr — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 09:45:29 +0000

Something that coroutines made a big impact on for us was testing. Multi-step integration tests became a breeze. With state machines, each test would need its own FSM, and callbacks would make the flow hard to read.

New comment by ptr in "Growing from engineer to manager"

ptr — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 19:29:06 +0000

Great teams self-manage. Managers and management generally exist to ensure a baseline, but they can’t really do much more. In a strong team, everyone displays leadership properties, and they typically don’t listen to non-technical management.

New comment by ptr in "What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide"

ptr — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 19:23:11 +0000

As a software engineer (consultant/contractor), you can easily make 80k USD post tax in Sweden. That’s not too bad.

The Swedish Pandemic Approach: Now we know the results

ptr — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 07:39:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.larskarlsson.com/?p=12026

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35117746

Points: 29

# Comments: 21

The unspoken truth about managing geeks

ptr — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 05:33:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527153/opinion-the-unspoken-truth-about-managing-geeks.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34720146

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ptr in "There’s no such thing as affordable housing"

ptr — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 06:53:23 +0000

You don’t have to, most people buy their apartment. If you don’t have the money when you’re young, parents tend to help out with the down payment. The more you get from your parents, the closer to the city center you can live.

I can see why this doesn’t work for everyone, and I wonder what kind of social effects it will have.

New comment by ptr in "Names should be cute, not descriptive"

ptr — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 07:00:57 +0000

Since services are basically modules in monoliths, does that mean that we should have cute names for those as well?

New comment by ptr in "U.S. stock market returns – a history from the 1870s to 2022"

ptr — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 00:54:59 +0000

I’m not sure that’s it. Sure, Norway was invaded but it was a pretty “benign” invasion in comparison to what happened to others. Same with Denmark. Would be interesting to see their stock market returns.

New comment by ptr in "U.S. stock market returns – a history from the 1870s to 2022"

ptr — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 19:31:05 +0000

Nominal Swedish stock market return 1879-2012: 10.9% arithmetic mean, 9.0% geometric mean. Real return: 7.9%/6.1%. And Sweden isn’t really the world’s dominant superpower. https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/forskning/monetar...

New comment by ptr in "Shopify tells employees to just say no to meetings"

ptr — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 06:40:17 +0000

I’ve been on the stakeholder side in similar situations. Rather than saying that they were very busy and that it can take a while to get my task done, they strung me along (“we’ll take it up in next sprint planning”, “oh we missed your task, but it might be added to next sprint”, etc). Granted, this is an anecdote, but if a team can only plan a couple of weeks ahead, how should stakeholders be able to plan?

New comment by ptr in "Shopify tells employees to just say no to meetings"

ptr — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:46:06 +0000

Sprints are also detrimental to “soft values” in my experience:

* Engineers rushing to wrap up for the sprint (stress and decreased quality is bad for morale)

* Engineers getting monitored and measured on a task level since all tasks need to be estimated (micromanagement, lack of trust)

* Agility is decreased since everything needs to be planned (lack of autonomy)

Sprints tend to become “phony deadlines”, a key component in “Teamicide” (from “Peopleware”).

I’ve been trying to come up with benefits but I’m coming up short. Wish someone could tell me!

New comment by ptr in "Shopify tells employees to just say no to meetings"

ptr — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:01:13 +0000

The argument is usually that sprints just add overhead on top of picking the highest prio work from the backlog. Ie, sprints don’t have to be replaced with anything since there are no benefits.