HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

sometimes_all

289 karmajoined 4년 전

comments

sometimes_all
·15시간 전·discuss
What I am really impressed by is that experts and the army itself is open to criticism and commentary (I am sure there are limits, and censoring will be happening on the more important parts), but coming from a country where the government seems to think that any critique is "anti-national", such articles seem like a breath of fresh air.

A more open space means better ideas with potential edge get shared, which is better for everyone.
sometimes_all
·그저께·discuss
Interesting, I am not able to see it, and I have memory enabled.
sometimes_all
·3일 전·discuss
To quote Don Draper: "that's what the money is for".

By all means go work for big tech if you want to, it's a free country, but then you don't get to wash your hands off the bad things your company's doing by saying stuff like "the execs made us do it" or "the execs overruled us".

There's nothing unproductive in calling out denying responsibility/culpability. Some would say it's practically mandatory.
sometimes_all
·3일 전·discuss
> Employees are not in a position of strength

Employees that are paid multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars plus equity, and likely can jump ship to another company without a hitch are not in a position of strength?

Please. Meta is one of the few firms where employees genuinely had a chance to stop this from happening, with all the "engineers are first-class citizens" bit.

I'd rather people own up to their responsibilities than dodge around theoretical nonsense.
sometimes_all
·5일 전·discuss
> Only it was all a ruse to ensure people didn't jump ship too quickly and make the bleeding too heavy

You go when we tell you to go! Not before!
sometimes_all
·5일 전·discuss
Seems that they didn't add explicit options for resination/indifference, but there is at least one archetype you get at the end which does fit that mold:

  The Shrug
  patron saint: Matt Levine
  AI is a thing that exists and you regard it with detached amusement, like everything else. It's overhyped, sure, but so is most stuff. You'll use it when it's useful and ignore it when it isn't, and you find the discourse more interesting than the technology. You are unbothered.
sometimes_all
·6일 전·discuss
I figured out fairly early in my career that if a company/team really wants you, the recruiter is going to roll out the red carpet, irrespective of seniority. It's happened multiple times for me, and has led to the few successful offers I've had. But if they're ambivalent, or you're just there to fill in the statistics, then problems will pop up: lack of proper communication, no clear timelines, canned responses, ghosting, the list goes on.

So I look for markers: if I see a quick turnaround time for my emails, I know that I'm in the right interview loop. Else I spend as much time as the other party spends on me, ie not much.
sometimes_all
·17일 전·discuss
India has about a billion debit cards, but people mostly use them for ATM cash withdrawals, if that (banks used to give them by default during account opening, but have stopped this since UPI came into the picture). Only a single-digit percentage of people use credit cards, but they use them often and for relatively high-value transactions. The rewards game in the credit card space is slowly but surely reaching US levels, and they are associated more with stability and credit-worthiness since banks don't hand them out like candy, and India is, until recently, a debt-averse nation to revolve balances.

Mostly people use UPI, which is equivalent to debit cards given that amounts go directly from one bank to another. But UPI also supports some credit cards and lines, so there's that.
sometimes_all
·17일 전·discuss
I use LLMs for structured learning of old economics and philosophy books out of copyright. Is quite useful for me, given that I have no background in either of these areas.
sometimes_all
·19일 전·discuss
Reading the article, it seems that they didn't set out to do _only_ that, but it was one of the few things that worked.
sometimes_all
·24일 전·discuss
It is my opinion that while you do not judge people who have to choose between integrity and dinner, you can definitely judge people who made decisions and structured their life in such a way that they had that choice, and not only did they choose money, but did it in such a way that what other people would call riches was subsistence for them because of the lifestyle they led.

> There is a point where you have enough money

You forego the option of choosing when you end up chasing a goal or living a standard of living which requires you to continuously choose money every time. It takes a lot of thinking to come to what "enough" means. For some, enough is a few hundred thousand dollars max. For some, even a billion is not enough. You can definitely appreciate the former when they reach that goal and stay there, but it becomes difficult to appreciate the latter (and they are the focus of most of the criticism here), because you do need to sacrifice more than a bit of integrity in that case.
sometimes_all
·25일 전·discuss
I for one am happy that they were only able to ban Telegram (and by the looks of it, they weren't really successful because there are reports that the app continues to work). Nothing of much consequence happens due to this, and the government ends up looking like clowns, which they are.

As the internet becomes more critical for work and education, they're finding out that they cannot impose shutdowns for too long without hampering everyday life and commerce, which would make people angry.

The more the people in power get repeatedly shown up like this, the faster things will improve.
sometimes_all
·지난달·discuss
Funny, when I was in the US, my Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Mexican, French, British, and 99% of the American coworkers had absolutely zero issues with my Indian accent, except that one American guy who would ask me to keep repeating even though the rest of the room had already understood and processed what I said.

The problem likely lies deeper than just the accents; and by the way, the English requirement (including a verbal test) is already set in place for most of the workers. The regular halfway-decent ones will likely already have TOEFL scores hovering around at minimum the high 100s, and in the non-university hiring pipelines I have seen, the English/ESL tests seem to be common if you are not from an English-speaking country, so if you are seeing people where nobody can understand what they are saying, you need to take a better look at your employer's hiring practices.
sometimes_all
·지난달·discuss
Minor nit: Fastest ever recorded ball bowled was 100 mph. I believe you were thinking 150 kmph.

Also, if we're talking about street/amateur cricket, or even higher-level cricket a couple of levels removed from international, you are rarely going to have rockets hurled at you. Most will be 120 kmph tops.
sometimes_all
·지난달·discuss
The extreme steps some of the people took according to the article is really sad. But it makes me wonder what they were thinking?

I left the US a long time ago after only a few years of work because I felt it didn't make sense that it should take me decades to get the right to live stress-free in the country (or marry an American or somehow hack through for an O1 visa) even if I did everything right and more, but only two months to get a new job in case I lost my previous one, or pack up and leave. Why would I make a major financial/life decision that keeps me rooted to the US with this in mind? And this is not a recent happening; this imbalance has been going on for many years now, across different federal administrations.

Yes, you earn a lot more in the US, and the QoL is better. But the risk-reward ratio has been steadily declining for Indians, probably for decades, to the point where it's probably underwater. I can definitely empathize, but it's a bit difficult to back anyone who bought a house in such scenarios without at least a green card or a solid exit plan in mind.
sometimes_all
·지난달·discuss
That's nice, but used to what end, especially if you are not a Instagram/Facebook user, and have a decent ad-blocker set up?
sometimes_all
·지난달·discuss
The only reason I pay for M365 family is for the 1 TB per member storage. Excel is a bonus, and Word and Powerpoint are basically not needed any more.

If a better storage deal comes along, I'll happily cancel.
sometimes_all
·2개월 전·discuss
There used to be a time when it was just accepted that most of the good conferences/gatherings would be in the US, and it would either be important to go to, or be relatively straightforward to reach and attend (especially for Canadians), and nobody would think twice about it.

Now you have some very talented/consequential people just refusing to visit the country. Regardless of any qualms about the "content and logic", this should set off alarm bells for any American. Plus, this would've been a whine if he'd complained and had gone anyway. But he is not going, and has explained his decision. That makes it more of a statement.
sometimes_all
·2개월 전·discuss
Oh wow, you went from one place to some totally different place at the drop of a hat. Where did me "coming" to Western Europe come into the discussion about racial stereotyping about Indians? I'm not in Western Europe, and I don't plan to live there, not sure how you got that impression.

I think there's no reasoning with someone who only wants to deal in absolutes. Have a good day.
sometimes_all
·2개월 전·discuss
I'm sure you do. But your real life experience is not everyone else's real life experience, so there's no really need to make blanket statements about people.