Hacker News: roland35

New comment by roland35 in "Don't use your phone while you poop"

roland35 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:35:43 +0000

Uncle Johns Bathroom Reader was a popular series of books back in the 90s!

New comment by roland35 in "Did they ghost you?"

roland35 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:29:19 +0000

Those are some long turnaround times!

I actually had a positive, although a bit weird, experience with Microsoft. First, I got a response 3 months after I applied to schedule an interview! I figured it was due to the holidays. After the interview the recruiter called me personally and gave me the bad news that I didn’t get the job, but actually gave me specific feedback on where I did well and poorly on the interview. I was shocked! I think it’s the only time I’ve ever received non generic feedback.

I’ve heard a lot of bad experiences too, so unfortunately I think I was an exception!

New comment by roland35 in "Ask HN: Good fast IDE for reading and navigating code in multiple languages"

roland35 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 14:29:15 +0000

Neovim is where it's at. You can use lazyvim which has tons of languages you can select to add LSPs for.

New comment by roland35 in "The bottleneck might be the air in the room"

roland35 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:09:22 +0000

You could maybe, but water tended to collect on the surface (this was exhaled breath, so pretty humid).

Maybe if it was ambient air and not breath the humidity might not be as bad?

New comment by roland35 in "The bottleneck might be the air in the room"

roland35 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 13:08:42 +0000

I had a project miniaturizing nasa tech for detecting hypoxia with o2 and CO2 sensors. It used a phosphorescent dye that changed a delay flash (ie you blinked a light, the dye would absorbed and blink back after a delay) based on temp and o2.

CO2 was measured with infrared but water also absorbed it, so you need to heat things up enough to not have water. It can be small, but not watch small.

All and all interesting stuff!

New comment by roland35 in "AI sticker shock hits corporate America"

roland35 — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:37:53 +0000

Yes, I think in that way it is dumb. But in another way I think it could be justified as a way to try and blaze some new trails and see what's possible by having users not worry about cost in the beginning.

Sure most token burning ends up being a waste but some ideas pan out?

Not disagreeing but it's another way of looking at it IMO

New comment by roland35 in "The Eternal Sloptember"

roland35 — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:15:59 +0000

Its interesting, I think people sometimes think there is some binary existence of furniture sometimes! What's nice about todays modern economy is that there is a whole spectrum of tables I can purchase.

I can get a ultra cheap mdf Walmart table, a slightly less cheap Ikea table, maybe a midrange crate and barrel table, or a very expensive hard wood table from the local furniture store. Here in the Midwest we even have hand made Amish furniture available. So buy what you want!

New comment by roland35 in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

roland35 — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:16:52 +0000

I've found llms themselves get way more long winded in their responses once context starts to fill up. Fortunately it's not impolite to tell Claude to be more concise!

New comment by roland35 in "A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there"

roland35 — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:59:05 +0000

Like it or not it's true. I only worked at meta for two years before getting laid off myself but it seems to have greatly helped getting interviews.

I am much happier not working there though, getting laid off was a relief. Things changed a lot after the first layoffs and when the stock was around $90!

New comment by roland35 in "Reddit Starts Blocking Mobile Website, Pushing Users to App Instead"

roland35 — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:15:26 +0000

I found if you delete your cookies the overlay goes away. I use the mobile site and found that both desktop mode and old.reddit is pretty hard to read, so at least there is one workaround (for now!)

New comment by roland35 in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

roland35 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:03:23 +0000

This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.

Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.

New comment by roland35 in "It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)"

roland35 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:27:01 +0000

I had a side project going off and on for YEARS. I thought it was a great business idea with some interesting technical challenges.

I asked Claude and ChatGPT about it, and they both shot the idea down as a viable startup. It was a liberating feeling honestly! I have since focused my efforts on other projects and have been more successful with those.

New comment by roland35 in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

roland35 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:34:48 +0000

I don't think it's bad code that's necessarily the problem - it's bad architecture and systems which will bite you! Often bad code can be easily replaced if it's easy to refactor.

Of course, bad business can ruin it all. I wrote a beautiful and reliable distributed rust agent, but was later laid off due to the company doing poorly.

New comment by roland35 in "When legal sports betting surges, so do Americans' financial problems"

roland35 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:49:16 +0000

I am staying away from sports betting, but I have done fantasy football a few times. I was constantly on edge from it all, even when I was winning! Constantly thinking of who I needed to pick up, who to trade, which matchups were good, it was a time sink.

And I ended up losing to my 10 year old nephew for the championship game!

New comment by roland35 in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

roland35 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:07:51 +0000

That's true, but I think there is a gray area in between. As things scale up in one way or another, having high quality is important for both #1 and #2. Its hard to extend software that was designed poorly.

The question where experience comes in is when quality is and isnt worth the time. I can create all sorts of cool software I couldn't before because now I can quickly pump out "good enough" android apps or react front ends! (Not trying to denigrate front end devs, it's just a skill I dont have)

New comment by roland35 in "Trump Tells Aides He's Willing to End War Without Reopening Hormuz"

roland35 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:46:59 +0000

I would be shocked if he ever does that. Much more likely is just say something completely different and pretend that has always been the case

New comment by roland35 in "A Faster Alternative to Jq"

roland35 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:26:58 +0000

For better or worse, Claude is my intuitive interface to jq. I don't use it frequently, and before I would have to look up the commands every time, and slowly iterate it down to what I needed.

New comment by roland35 in "Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?"

roland35 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:09:17 +0000

Business majors typically. I remember seeing a small graffiti in my engineering lecture hall that said something along the lines of "limit gpa -> 0: major= business administration"

New comment by roland35 in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

roland35 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:47:26 +0000

A true prisoners dilemma!

New comment by roland35 in "2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March"

roland35 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:53:06 +0000

I am not huge fan of Meta but I wouldn't dismiss them quite so much. I think reels is probably doing pretty well, and despite being cringeworthy FB itself is still going very strong. There are a lot of behind the scenes AI work improving their ads.

There are absolutely a lot of high profile failures though, with the metaverse being #1 (along with the name change to boot!)