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brainfog

363 karma · joined January 27, 2015

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brainfog··on Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
I've tried a variety of tools over the years and always end up going back to a low tech approach: spreadsheets. I set up my credit cards to email me after every transaction, which I then manually copy over to my spreadsheet with additional category information. Pivot tables give me a breakdown by category / month.

The added friction of having to manually copy everything over is a nice incentive to buy less stuff.

brainfog··on Ask HN: How is your job search going?
If you're interviewing for staff level positions and above, you'll be discussing long term planning and some pretty tactical stuff where an NDA makes perfect sense. Might be a bit overkill for senior and below but meh.
brainfog··on Ask HN: How is your job search going?
I’m in Pittsburgh but didn't end up applying anywhere local. I was looking for remote-friendly positions to keep things flexible due to an upcoming move, which definitely limited my options. Out of the 50 or so companies I looked into, barely a third turned out to be remote friendly, with some only pretending to be (e.g. Meta seems to have gone out of their way to make remote suck for everyone involved by limiting it to staff+ on top of manager discretion).

I was definitely nervous about the time off being an issue. The usual stream of recruiter emails had pretty much dried up by the time I started looking for work, and I was fully expecting the search to take forever. It wasn’t an issue at all in the end - no one brought up the gap during interviews. I mentioned it in passing a few times when talking about why I left my previous job and mostly just got “dang that sounds like fun” from people. That being said, I have no idea if I would have gotten more responses to my initial inquiries without the gap on my resume.

brainfog··on Ask HN: How is your job search going?
I can't help but feel like I lucked into easy mode given the general consensus that everything sucks right now. Applied to 10 places (mix of FAANG and small startups) after taking a year off from work. Heard back from 5, somehow got offers from all 5 and am starting at one of them next month.

It took a fair bit of prep to get back into things - especially when it comes to system design interviews - but otherwise everything went fine. Really enjoyed how some companies are trying non-leetcode approaches lately like code review and debugging sessions.

brainfog··on Ask HN: Can you recommend a podcast player/manager for Android?
Another vote for Pocket Casts. The only thing I dislike about it is that the search feature can be janky at times, especially when it comes to non-English languages. No complaints other than that.
brainfog··on How Meta trains large language models at scale
Because it's completely irrelevant.
brainfog··on Location history data in Google Maps will soon be stored on user devices
I suppose this is a bit of a special case but the US and Canadian governments both require you to provide the full list of trips from the last ten years when applying for citizenship and permanent residency. Timeline is incredibly helpful there.
brainfog··on How does Shazam work? (2022)
> that would necessitate constant retraining

You wouldn't necessarily need to retrain that frequently. If your model outputs hashes / vectors that can be used for searching, you just need to run inference on your new data as it comes in.

brainfog··on Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
Judging from data on levels.fyi, definitely not the latter.
brainfog··on I will generate a voice summary of any YouTube video
https://youtu.be/ukZYP5Dy43E
brainfog··on Ask HW: did anybody try to put ChatGPT on a loop (talking to itself?)
Yes.
brainfog··on Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts
Where did all of these people even come from in the first place? Did the industry just have 50-100k at-least-somewhat-qualified people sloshing around doing nothing before they got picked up by FAANG?
brainfog··on Supply chain issues are killing synth companies
ok
brainfog··on Ask HN: What are the first things you do with a new Android phone?
- I look up the dates for when security updates will stop, and add a reminder to change phones before then.

- Turn off notifications for everything.

brainfog··on John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US
The amount of pedantry and over the top literalism in your comment gave me an aneurism.
brainfog··on `three = 1` in the Linux sourcecode (2014)
Yikes, that looks error prone.
brainfog··on On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots [pdf]
For context, the "apparent TOS violations" were him harassing the authors and a handful of other people.
brainfog··on Ask HN: Does Google look at !g queries to help improve search results?
That is probably less than a rounding error in terms of traffic.
brainfog··on Ask HN: How to Get into Google?
Google, the company that funded Steve King's election campaign, is left leaning?
brainfog··on Google disabled my husband's account
OP works at google, so at least one person at Google cares about it.
brainfog··on Google says its carbon footprint is now zero
They do to some extent, albeit not really in a measurable way. They could improve the battery usage of their apps, optimize power on Android, and make their services less addictive.
brainfog··on Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome
Pinging a bug five minutes after filing it is also an ...interesting... approach.
brainfog··on Ask HN: People with depression, have your depression increased lately (Covid)?
I'm in the same boat. I was already fraying at the edges before this all started, but this past month has been brutal.
brainfog··on The Unmarked Federal Agents Occupying Washington, D.C
Words don't have to be used literally. Everyone knew exactly what the original poster meant by democracy. Well-actually'ing on obvious things like this is just tiresome.
brainfog··on The Unmarked Federal Agents Occupying Washington, D.C
It may be patently true, but it added nothing to the discussion beyond "well, actually".
brainfog··on Ask HN: What type of restrictions does your employer have on side gigs?
Google owns everything by default but you can file a request with info about what you'd like to work on outside of work. If it's granted, you get to keep the rights. It doesn't matter whether you're planning on making money from it or not.

They're usually very reasonable about it, despite what you would expect from a company that covers so much ground.

brainfog··on Ask HN: Is okay keeping a private copy of your mailbox after leaving a company?
No.
brainfog··on Google’s robots.txt parser is now open source
Why would you expect that?
brainfog··on Ask HN: What are your rules-of-thumb for personal finance and saving?
> Side note: Its funny you cannot get real time updates/SMS when money is deducted from your bank/credit card account.

Most major credit card providers have email and sms notifications for transactions. It's pretty much instant.

brainfog··on Google Suppresses Memo Revealing Plans to Closely Track Search Users in China
I mean, he did go on record saying "I'm perpetuating gender stereotypes" by virtue of writing that memo.
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