Hacker News: sharadov

New comment by sharadov in "Zen and the Art of Machine Learning Research"

sharadov — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:43:48 +0000

It's all about enjoying the journey.

New comment by sharadov in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

sharadov — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:43:06 +0000

I listened to a couple episodes and concur, the overt-criticality and smugness was off putting.

New comment by sharadov in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

sharadov — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:01:43 +0000

I think there are more nuggets of wisdom in great fiction than these self help books.

Maybe if someone put together a list of fiction books that correlate strongly with self-help categories, it would be immensely useful.

A great fiction book helps you vicariously experience a character's life while self-help is an instruction manual which sadly does not provide the same form of connection.

New comment by sharadov in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

sharadov — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:02:09 +0000

All the writers that I love to hate - hariri, gladwell! Will give it a listen

New comment by sharadov in "Doing nothing at work"

sharadov — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:11:36 +0000

More often true than not!

New comment by sharadov in "Doing nothing at work"

sharadov — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:10:10 +0000

Unfortunately this can work both ways - if it's a low politics environment yes, it will work to the engineer's advantage but in environments rife with politicking, people will be quick to swoop in and take credit and at the same time give 2 hoots about throwing you under the bus.

New comment by sharadov in "If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know"

sharadov — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:38:22 +0000

What is stopping the US government from stepping in and nationalizing these companies?

They've already talked about taking a stake - https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/us-officials-eye...

Trump took a 10% stake in Intel.

These models are getting very close to that line.

New comment by sharadov in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

sharadov — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:14:03 +0000

As someone who worked remote for 8 years I can see a few reasons

- Really hard to get juniors up to speed when they are remote, when I started out as a junior I sat around a bunch of senior folks, and inhaled in all the knowledge via the interactions we had all day.

- In my previous company, we hired a bunch of juniors who clearly were not self-motivated. There were few who were actively disengaged, would not even care to turn the camera on. They were a few boot-camp grads who though motivated, I could not for the life of me teach computer fundamentals. You can't learn a 4 yr degree's worth of stuff in 6 months at a bootcamp.

Yes Covid was great for us senior folks who did not need direction and were disciplined, but really bad for junior folk.

New comment by sharadov in "The worst job interview I ever had"

sharadov — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:33:05 +0000

Big red flag - definitely identity theft there!

New comment by sharadov in "The worst job interview I ever had"

sharadov — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:05:58 +0000

Sorry OP you had to go through this - not knowing your circumstances, but golden rule, once the interview starts getting invasive, please cut it short and move on.

Recently I had an interview for a contract position. First off, it was a zoom interview where the interviewer did not have his camera on.

He promptly asks me to share my screen - which I found odd, since I had no content to share with him.

Next - he tells me to go the top right screen of my mac and asks me to disable bluetooth.

I said am not going to do it, since I had my airpods connected and within the next second I also told him am not interested in proceeding with this BS interview.

There are boundaries of human decency, which you should never let anyone cross.

New comment by sharadov in "The Coming Layoffs and the Revenge of the Measurers"

sharadov — Mon, 25 May 2026 18:49:45 +0000

Plenty of competent engineers - who are clearly builders have also been let go. Enough with your trite analysis.

New comment by sharadov in "Coursera and Udemy are now one company"

sharadov — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:38:31 +0000

Coursera used to have good quality courseware, now I get better stuff via a simple search on youtube. Youtube killed these two companies, well Udemy was garbage from the get go.

New comment by sharadov in "Knitting bullshit"

sharadov — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:26:10 +0000

That's how characters are named in "Steal a Brainrot" , a Roblox game.

New comment by sharadov in "Knitting bullshit"

sharadov — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:27:18 +0000

I think AI is the final nail in the coffin of meaningless slop that started pervading our lives after covid.

I see people tiring of this brain rot, especially Gen Z, there are more offline events - music festivals, day time raves, running events, people are appreciating more things analog - LP records, cassettes, younger people getting turned off by social media.

New comment by sharadov in "Agents for financial services and insurance"

sharadov — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:46:29 +0000

Next couple weeks - financial and insurance services announce layoffs!

New comment by sharadov in "Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis"

sharadov — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:09:46 +0000

Agents are conniving yes men, and who usually loves yes men? Leadership! Most developers are rational and skeptical, hence the backlash from most in the community.

New comment by sharadov in "Men who stare at walls"

sharadov — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:32:47 +0000

Why not just take a quick stroll, if you are close to anything green - park, nature even better. Nature soothes like nothing else.

New comment by sharadov in "4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor"

sharadov — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:45:18 +0000

Mercor is the most scummy company out there, run by a bunch of sleazeball 20 somethings who are getting a lot of press as the youngest billionaires in the making.

Can't wait for them to crash and burn.

New comment by sharadov in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

sharadov — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:42:45 +0000

Not as easy as it sounds, most acquisitions are not integrated well. He was astute in determining they were going to be 100X what he paid( and he paid a lot by the standards of the day).

New comment by sharadov in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

sharadov — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:39:22 +0000

I plan to read it, I've no doubt he's a douchebag, but most hyper-successful CEOs are psychopaths.