Hacker News Reader

emestifson Wrangling 2000 Git Repos at Reddit

Probably better that op posted the unshitified link

emestifson H.R.1332 – Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act

Still in the "Introduced" stage. Given the amount of lobbying in the US, and isn't the US senate Republican controlled(?), and lack of bipartisan cooperation, seems impossible for this to go anywhere.

emestifson Reddit's long, rocky road to an IPO

so it goes

emestifson We Choose Profit at 37signals

There's situations where it makes sense to raise $X million. And then there's situations where it makes sense to take nothing, bootstrap and become self sufficient.

How do you compete against YouTube, Big Banks, Twitter if you generate $1 in "FU money" profit? A VC approach may make sense if that's your goal.

But if you're creating a REST API client, selling it B2B, why are you raising $250 million at a $5 billion valuation [1], when you can just start selling it through organic dev network effects and growth?

Context matters.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702610

emestifson Reddit's long, rocky road to an IPO

There's a significant non-zero probability Reddit will break that loop themselves once they become beholden to big shareholders combined with their questionable internal decision making.

emestifson Software on gas pump with "demo mode" enabled allowed "free" gas for 5 months

> Double-swiping the rewards card led to free gas for months — and a felony theft charge

The software worked as intended. What's the felony?

emestifson Ask HN: Future Socioeconomic Impacts of automation

> Or is there [or is there not a] no smooth road after all the bumps of the transition?

That's the trillion dollar question

emestifson Ask HN: Future Socioeconomic Impacts of automation

The closest to a large scale test was Covid stimulus across multiple countries, which at face value didn't yield great results and had some short term (<5 year) negative economic implications. But that was an emergency measure and done without planning ahead of time, so comparison may not be totally one-to-one with a "proper" U/BI system.

emestifson AI Poses Extinction-Level Risk, State-Funded Report Says

    Yes, the planet got destroyed.
    But for a beautiful moment in time 
    we created a lot of value for shareholders

emestifson Ask HN: Which skills are least likely to be replaced by AI?

OP was asking about least likely

emestifson The unwritten rules of negotiating with Meta

You quite delusional about a number of things. It's not even worth pointing them out.

emestifson The horror of being a Meta content moderator

What makes HN different from FB? Is it just the scale? You see stupid stuff posted here. You even see things get flagged fairly quickly. Crowdsourced moderation. But I can't imagine that would work for FB. Is it that there's literally no bar when it comes to who can post what on FB? Whereas on HN there's a bar, and often the bar is dictated by the nature of the post itself (popular topic vs some niche where only a small subset will comment anything).

StackOverflow and all the other Overflow sites also crowdsourcing moderation, but there you get you question getting flagged because you didn't look hard enough or your question is too similar to one asked 8 years ago.

There's also tons of niche forums where maybe a few dozen or a few hundred people visit and participate. They likely get some spam, but never really the type of stuff you see (in my case hear about) on FB.

Another extreme example maybe 4chan. Some boards of course are filled with stupid people, but others are quite tame. Such as stark difference on just one site.

emestifson Riot Games laying off 11%

> startups having trouble closing rounds

Game startups or tech startup in general? I can understand tech startups still feeling the effects of limited venture capital, I'm less familiar with gaming startups and their funding dynamics.

Also, can you share more details about the games industry? There's no much that has made it to the front page of HN regarding how hard the games industry in particular was hit by layoffs, so I don't have a sense of numbers.

emestifson Post-Serverless Era Trends

> I don't think that's the way most people are going anyway

Unfortunately some are. And not only that, but also full steam ahead on a 100% locked-in, read _all_ the AWS (serverless)services, AWS-only stack. I speak from unfortunate experience.

emestifson Discord is laying off 17 percent of employees

You're not alone. Many are seeing the same thing.

emestifson Incompetent Middle Management Killed Google

https://medium.com/membership - you pay medium, medium pay author some tiny subset of that.

emestifson Discord is laying off 17 percent of employees

Consider the holidays in December as well. It's possible some layoffs were finalized but not enacted until after.

emestifson Incompetent Middle Management Killed Google

enshitification intensifies. Sorry I know this is a low quality comment. But I think it fits with the irony of everything.

emestifson GM buys out nearly half of its Buick dealers, who opt to not sell EVs

Gotta love the comment section, anyone can write anything they feel like, regardless of...well anything.

emestifson Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

Firefox paradox strikes again. User brings up an unrelated thing, even if valid, to lessen something positive.

You seen this pattern again and again in Firefox news threads.

emestifson Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

You got downvoted and now you're original comment is greyed out. Now you're mocking people and calling them "sensitive".

The fact news about Firefox gets upvoted clearly indicates it is newsworthy. You don't get to decide. The users of HN and their votes do.

emestifson Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

No, people go after the devs too. I was specific about distinguishing Firefox and Mozilla in my post. Firefox in too often caught in the political/flame crossfire.

emestifson Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

Thank you and everyone else working on the Firefox browser and adjacent projects for your hard work. Don't let the noise of the internet lessen what you and the team have done and continue to do.

emestifson Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

The Firefox paradox:

People b***h about Firefox's (lack of) market share, Mozilla doing stupid things (fair criticism), Firefox not having X (extension support on Mobile, moving from legacy extensions to standard manifest format)

Then people will still bring up this baggage even when something good happens, will refuse to move away from the browser monoculture/monopoly, s**t on Firefox devs

FFS, something good happened. No other browser has this. Yet people will find a way to lessen it. For what? What benefit?

emestifson Canadian wildfires fueled by climate change, study shows

Just a heads up for anyone thinking of replying, this is a just bait, no point in trying to use reason, it will be ineffective, you're just wasting your time replying.

emestifson Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

A number to a text-to-speech system with Bard on the other end of course

emestifson Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings

Now only if it were that easy to get a phone number to speak to a human at Google

emestifson [dead]

Lighrun, which appears to be an otherwise legitimate-looking SaaS company selling developer tooling, is engaging in the terrible practice of scraping and rehosting Github and Stackoverflow questions and discussions for what I can only assume to game their SEO numbers.

More examples https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Flightru...

emestifson Ask HN: Senior title on resume with just 2-3yr experience

Yes, there's a similar system here (Junior, Engineer, Senior, Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, Principal Staff, etc...among other variations of Manager, Engineering Manager, etc).

Thanks for the response.

My only concern is if I put senior and I apply for a 2-3yr experience position, I feel the "senior" title on resume is going to automatically increase the scrutiny I'll see during interviews and screens. Which is fine, but a bit misleading to them and misrepresentation of what I'm able to bring to them due to how they may interpret "Senior" at their company.