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geekster777on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)

Location: Boston

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Javascript, Typescript, Python, Go

Email: nhilton777@gmail.com

Hello all, I'm a full stack engineer with 8 years of experience specializing in frontend data visualization and performance optimizations. I love product work, the journey to understanding customers, and the process of removing friction from their workflows.

geekster777on Ask HN: Who is quitting? (July 2026)

Honestly, I've been hand waving this somewhat. We'll be on my wife's insurance for the next several years at least, and live in an area where public schools are quite good (Massachusetts). My assumption is that each kid will add ~$15k in cost a year, though I could be underestimating this. I'm planning a few layers of buffer here. 1) My wife wants to keep working past 6 years from now and has no interest in FIRE (this is huge, but 6 years is a long time for her to change her mind). 2) Once kids are old enough for elementary school, I can go back to work. If my math is wrong, 7ish years of overspending shouldn't set back our FIRE too considerably. 3) Being a stay at home dad to start should seriously eliminate the expensive childcare costs. 4) My FIRE numbers don't include my 401k/IRAs, which I can dip from (with penalties) if necessary.

geekster777on Ask HN: Who is quitting? (July 2026)

I quit in May. I'm a bit worried though. The gig was good, people were great, but writing on the wall was that management expected devs to be so bullish on AI that no handwritten code would exist moving forward. Simultaneously, deadlines were getting aggressive and OKRs more optimistic now that everyone can be a 10x engineer with Claude. I probably could have ridden it for another year if I really wanted to coast, but ultimately I'm too burned out to do that sanely.

Financially, I'm in a place to (lean) FIRE, but my wife is 6 years away from FIRE. The plan is for me to be a stay at home dad (supplemented by the above FIRE income), while my wife who is also in tech continues to work and advance her career. In our soonest timeline, that leaves me 10 months to pursue hobbies and projects before an infant makes focus time more difficult. I've spent the last two months on my backlog of videogames, writing some music, hitting the gym, and exploring new hobbies (mahjong, climbing, and drawing). I'm hoping to focus my pursuits into quarters (Q3 being music and Q4 being video game development). Hopefully, this will cement habits enough that they'll continue as my life transitions.

But to circle back to my worries above. I'm planning on exiting the workforce for good if possible. If I enter it again, it will most likely be in 6-8 years (as kids enter school). This is a long time, and likely the industry will shift significantly in that time. I fear the cash cow that is software development will be less lucrative in that time, or that my skills will be too outdated. So while I desperately want the year off, another year of work would put us in a more secure financial position. And I'm most in my prime now, and therefore able to secure a high paying gig right now. It's /probably/ fine, but becomes an issue if we hit road blocks in the next few years (layoffs, injuries, economic disaster, etc). That's a lot of financial anxiety that I probably don't need to have, but it's still present. While the economy remains shaky, I don't necessarily feel confident that my purchasing power will keep parity over the next few years.

geekster777on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

Made a fun app that generates daily riddles. If you give an llm an answer then ask it for a riddle, it's pretty clever and fun to see what connections it draws: https://riddles.jpn.fyi/

I'm also currently working on an app that lets me hum a tune into my phone and generate guitar tabs. The audio processing is proving to be temperamental at pitch detection, but I'm planning on looking at some autotune libraries to see how they clean up audio for processing. Main problem I have is that I'll come up with a tune in my head, but by the time I sit down with a guitar and find my first target note, I've forgotten most of what I'd hummed.

geekster777on The locals don't know

I live in a tourist town (population 45k, with 2M visitors this past season). It's truly lovely. Our museums kick ass, the food and cocktails punch above their weight, and there are countless activities in the off season. Sure, I can get a cheaper burger or pay less rent just a few miles down the road, but instead I stay and benefit from tourists pushing the quality upwards. I often see folks focusing on the low-effort schlock shop, damning all tourists, before heading to one of the 8 local coffee shops (who could never survive on locals alone). The best thing a local can do is to openly give recommendations, helping to hold competition and quality to a high standard.

geekster777on Git cheat sheet [pdf]

Every cheat sheet like this highlights the surprisingly high learning curve of the git cli. It's an interface that really ships it's underlying data model rather than optimizing for common workflows. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I often feel like the target audience of git is the power user, leaving me uncertain anytime I need to perform an intermediate level action.

Lately I've been enjoying Graphite as a tool to interface with git. Commands are based around atomic actions I want to perform, despite often triggering multiple git commands under the hood. This has reduced my overall mental overhead, and removed many footguns.

geekster777on Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

On Windows, my most common use of the start menu is to tap the windows key and start typing out some math. The issue is that Windows isn't actually solving that math locally, but showing you the Bing search results for the expression. This has annoying latency, means you need an internet connection, and doesn't work for expressions that look like legitimate searches (ex 12345-2345 looks more like a zip code than math). I ended up building a lightweight desktop app with Rust/Sciter/JS that listened on Win+` and gave instant solutions. Was more of a fun exploration of the windows apis, but I easily use this app several times a week.

https://github.com/jpnickolas/Algebrisk

geekster777on Show HN: Graphite – Stacked Diffs on GitHub

Been playing with this as a beta user for a few months. I really like how the cli removes a ton of the footguns I've come to find with git. With Graphite I don't have to think too closely about navigating and reordering branches. It's removed a lot of my fears of "will this command clobber my workspace". The guard rails are up, but you can always drop into git if you need something specific.

geekster777on Flutter 3

Interesting, I've had the opposite experience. I'd love to develop in native with something like Flutter or React Native, but I find CSS to be much easier and more flexible to use. The base components always /seem/ flexible enough until I want to do something visually complicated like add an animation that blurs an image on hover. I know CSS is horrendous in consistency, but it's piecemeal development has led to it having every UI feature I could really want/need now that I've paid the price and met its learning curve.

geekster777on Ask HN: If you used to be socially awkward and shy, how did you improve?

Practice for sure. One thing I noticed with covid was just how out of practice I got. I felt vastly more critical of myself in social situations that would have been very normal pre covid (for example, being the first one to a social gathering and needing to make small talk with the host). Isolation really compounds awkwardness, since awkwardness (generally) leads to more isolation.

I think that social skills really are muscles that need to be developed and maintained. Have you ever tried brushing your teeth with the wrong hand? No amount of thinking and focus will get you the same fluidity as using your usual hand. Instead, you need to just suck for a while and practice until the muscles passively develop. Others have mentioned going to bars or the gym, but I'd also recommend joining a hiking group, a book club, or even attending a church that matches your beliefs. Basically, any sort of activity that has a somewhat consistent group of attendees and where the main focus of the event isn't talking. That way you can still feel successful even if you say very little, which can hopefully reduce the overanalyzing and self doubt that comes from awkwardness.

geekster777on Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

Man, I felt this hard and I'm surprised burnout isn't on the poll. For me, I have no real complaints about my team or work, and the ones I do have ping me more as a symptom of burnout - e.g. I'll get frustrated that the team likes to over engineer, when realistically it's to a small enough degree to never meaningfully impact maintenance costs. The work is chill, I work fewer than 8 hours a day and get pretty decent praise. But still I want to leave. I even get paid more than I will in most places, but it doesn't matter because I can't make myself feel anything but dread at working somewhere else. I just want to take 3-12 months to reset. Luckily, I have few enough obligations right now that I should be able to manage that. I just want to make it another 40 days (but who's counting) until yearly bonus and equity pay out.

geekster777on I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

I think lying is a reasonably fundamental part of human research, or at least obfuscation. You don't tell the participants what you're testing for, since you don't want the results to be biased, and often obfuscate what you're measuring.

I think the real ethical issue is actually that the email reads like it's coming from a lawyer. It's weirdly formal and cites that a response is legally required within 45 days. As other comments have mentioned, this has the real world consequence of heavy stress where most folks would (and should) lawyer up. This is the biggest ethical issue, since the study is costing its participants nontrivial money, and without consent.

geekster777on Ask HN: What mental models do you use everyday?

I consider mental models more to be good decisions made in bulk (though not necessarily the best decisions). Of course you'll break the model when it's convenient or when you know better, but when you're taking your day on autopilot it'll keep you moving towards your goals. Like in the runner example, the mental model of "put one foot in front of the other" may not help, but a "I run for an extra 90 seconds after I get tired" might keep you pushing to always improve. Maybe this is just a difference of definition of "mental model". I saw it being complained about elsewhere, but the thread seems to generally be defining it as "rules of thumb".

You do have a good point that folks tend to have a lot of difficulty breaking mental models they used as crutches while learning. In playing guitar, I've found folks who rely heavily on things like the box model or pentatonic scale who plateau and get "stuck" at a certain skill level because of it. So it raises the question - Is it better to use a model that provides quick wins and a notable plateau, or risk never getting traction but having an easier time at the high level? Of course that all depends on the specifics of each scenario, but my rule of thumb is to do the more fun thing and re-evaluate when my skills plateau.

geekster777on Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

I work at FB right now, and one of the more stressful things are the timelines for promotion. I think you have a year and a half to go from New Grad to E4, then 2 and a half years to go from E4 to E5. If you fall behind on those timelines, your performance reviews just start getting measured against E#+1 until you either get promoted or more likely fail. A lot of pressure is placed in those early levels to get promoted quickly and efficiently, with not a lot of opportunity to coast. As someone who's very ok with the compensation and responsibilities at E4, I don't really want to get promoted and it's exhausting. It means that "meeting expectations" isn't enough. I need to be exceeding expectations so I can prove I'm working at the next level. This often involves seeking out ambiguity for ambiguity's sake and making projects unnecessarily formal.

The other main "issue" is how incentives are structured, although this one seems to be working as intended. By focusing so heavily on personal performance and impact, Facebook can pretty reliably delegate project planning to their engineers in a bottom up fashion. Engineers will then adjust to ruthlessly prioritize only the most impactful work on the team. Velocity also gets highly prioritized. You don't have to assign many tasks, since engineers are afraid of the mythical "poor performance review". This leads many teams to feel chronically understaffed, and bad for choosing impact over polish on many projects. The flip side is that if your team is overstaffed, it's a struggle to find enough meaningful work to get more than a meets expectations (which may be too low depending on what level you are).

geekster777on Get started making music

I've struggled with the accuracy of statements like this as someone who writes a lot of music. Writing the melodies is always the easiest part (lyrics are the hardest). So how much is it brain wiring vs just practicing an order of magnitude or two more than most? I have thousands of hours spent improvising over random songs - just setting Spotify to shuffle and jamming to whatever pops up. It's fun for me, and something I generally do to procrastinate other work. I couldn't imagine someone practicing nearly as much if they didn't innately enjoy it. So it makes me wonder, is it fun because I'm good at it, or did I get good at it because I find it fun? I personally believe the latter, but it's hard to really tease apart the nature vs nurture in such a subjective art. It reminds me of comic artists trying to illustrate just how much art they have to produce to go from amateur to pro.

Note, I don't mean to imply I'm part of that small elite you mention. I'm no prodigy, it's just that I've had many musicians (in far less competitive circles) express a similar sentiment about my skills.

geekster777on No, we won’t have a video call for that

At the big companies I've been at, it's because no one (myself included) will read them. Sure, they'll read them at first, happy to get back the 25 minutes. Then new meetings will replace that time until it cascades into a series of low-signal notes that are infeasible to keep up with.

Similarly, I've seen so many folks in leadership that get the feedback of "the engineers on the floor have no idea who you are, what you do, or why this re-org matters". The solution? Publish a biweekly newsletter about what they and the rest of the org does - that cascades with every other level of middle management doing the same. All getting filtered into the same unread folder, leading to the same feedback as before.

geekster777on California sues Activision Blizzard over unequal pay, sexual harassment

I've thought often about this, but fundamentally no woman should feel obligated to fix this issue at a prospective company. You should be prioritizing yourself, your career, and your comfort. It's hard to ask someone to take on the uphill battle when there are so many other teams or companies that are safer bets.

Let's compare to something analogous like recruiting an executive or manager to take on to a dysfunctional org/team. We don't ask "well if the good managers don't join, how will it ever get better?". We create incentives to get these better people to join (or let the ship sink). But we intrinsically look at it as a burden worth compensating, and I'd expect companies with this level of bad PR to look at doing the same.

geekster777on Building a vision of life without work (2015)

This may be stated often, but it's still easy to get too caught up in the optimization game of FI. I appreciate every time someone reiterates the value in the journey, even when its expressed as a concern for FI.

geekster777on “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

I think of it more as I could work a few more years at my current high paying miserable job, or the same few years + 1 at a flexible (arguably less miserable) job.

For me at least, the goal has been to bank big cash early, then let the compounding do the heavy lifting towards the end. As I mentioned above, getting a 10% increase takes a lot more savings late in the game whereas the snowballing effect of compounding interest is stronger, so I'm coming out ahead just by staying afloat without dipping into my savings. I look at the work that appeals to digital nomads (pre-covid, this was work FAANG and other high paying jobs didn't widely offer), and it seems more valuable to spend some mobile years financing a nice adventure with the stability of a job that lets me work from home. It means a gradual transition to RE and that very little in my lifestyle should change once I pull the trigger. Personally I'm looking to reach FI /then/ transition to a remote/part time job as a way to reduce risk while offering some extra flexibility - everything I earn in that time should be gravy and it should allow me the freedom to travel and enjoy the experiences.

geekster777on “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

Sure, landing the same tech job may not be feasible. As I mentioned, the big nest egg should ease that blow. You can instead get a lower paying tech job you're plenty qualified for. You can also get a job doing something unrelated to tech, like Uber/gig work, secretary, waiter, creating on Etsy, or really anything. A disruption to early retirement isn't going to be so dramatic that you need to get your same 6 figure income as before in order to stay afloat. It's something where an extra $15k a year coupled with some cost cutting will get you through a recession with minimal damages (cost of living dependent of course, but I'm assuming a conservative ~$60k/yr expenses). Landing something more lucrative creates a noticeable surplus.

geekster777on “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

You do have the option of going back to work if shit hits the fan. Maybe it'll be harder to find a job, or to find one that pays as well as before, but that's pretty heavily tempered by the fat nest egg you have. It's a pretty big misconception that by "retiring" you're permanently cutting off all abilities to produce income ever again.

It's easy to see "oh if a wealth tax is introduced, you'll run out of money by 50" as if it's a huge hole in the plan, but if you're 30 that gives you 20 years of draw down time. A change in the market or legislation won't sneak up on you and suddenly drain you of all your cash - if it does, it's probably something affecting the entire population. You'll likely have a year or two of drawing down more cash than you should before you pivot your plans.

The most vulnerable time during FIRE is the first few years of early retirement (where a market crash could wreck you), but is simultaneously the point where you're still at your most employable (plenty of relevant contacts, skills that aren't out of date, and a relatively small gap on your resume).

geekster777on “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

May not be enough to pull the trigger, but definitely enough to transition down to a part time or remote web dev gig in a low cost of living area. Once you have such a net worth secured, you just have to keep from pulling from it for a few years while it compounds.

The big thing is that around 900k is when you get diminishing returns on savings vs market fluctuations. Bumping that amount by 10% would require saving $90k, which is a tall order. Or you could wait for a 10% market increase (it's up 14% this year). Not that the market is guaranteed to go up, or even by that much (we're in an unusually good market at the moment with inflated optimism). But at a certain point you hit a tradeoff where the market on average increases your wealth faster than savings off your salary will. At that point it makes sense to transition to a job that just covers your cost of living - one that you like more and offers more freedom.

geekster777on Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

Unrelated to your larger point, your financial goal is a good one. The FI/RE community is an odd one, but very welcoming and supportive overall. I'm currently on a similar path, and as I've started to near the end I've found that I needed non-financial goals to get me sanely through the journey. Planning for a life where you don't have to work is wonderful, but the reality is that it leads to a lot of free time - if you find the void hard to fill now it'll be miserable then.

I say this because you said that being without a life goal was so difficult that you attempted to take your own life. Just setting an (often achievable) financial goal is kicking that can down the road. It's something I fear for myself quite a bit, so I've been picking up lots of hobbies to plant the seeds for when I have an abundance of free time. For me, this is a combination of travel, camping, guitar, surfing, reading (hopefully one day writing), and most recently geocaching. Each hobby has its own set of goals that I hope can occupy me indefinitely.

geekster777on Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

From what I've seen, minority targeted scholarships tend to be created by minorities rather than the college itself. For example, the Women in Computing group will organize and fundraise for a scholarship towards their school. A successful black man may donate money back to the school with the stipulation that it goes towards helping other black kids like him. The school itself is happy to look progressive and point to all its targeted scholarships, but I'm curious how many of them are explicitly created by the school itself.

It changes the narrative around financial aid when you view it as communities putting in the work to ease the burdens of folks who are like them. Maybe it says something about how difficult it is to "make it" for them that they're disproportionately more willing to donate back to their community.

geekster777on On incels, dead bedrooms and the hard problems of loneliness

I'd rephrase this as "people despise weak men". I don't think women are unique in this conditioned view, and putting this in terms of Us vs Them doesn't quite get to the root of the problem.

The image of a damsel in distress is a common one that invites sympathy. Being seen as someone temporarily down on their luck who, with a quick pep talk, a removal of glasses, and a loosening of hair, will become the perfect date in your teen movie. Men do not benefit from this sympathy but nor do they suffer from its accompanied baggage and condescension.

I can't say that the solution is "just do for men what we do for women" since that sympathy has some real nasty undertones and connotations. Still, you really hit the crux of the problem with "people despise weak men". And I think we could grow a productive solution from there.

geekster777on Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python

I've been finding Signal Music Studio[1] to be doing a good job of conveying theory with minimal notation and practical examples. E.g. less labeling of things and more "here's what folks like to use this construct for". Not quite a book, and maybe not as comprehensive as you're hoping.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTR7Cy9Sv285kV3pohsMt...

geekster777on Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python

You may enjoy looking up micro-tones. Where western scales are made up of whole-tones and semi-tones, other cultures don't necessarily use the 12 semi-tone based scale system. Notably, Toxic by Britany Spears samples some Bollywood music, where the backing singing uses a bit of micro-tonality. You can often find different satisfying intervals, although they won't necessarily have the same cultural context/baggage associated with the sounds and therefore won't convey the same strong connotations that a diminished chord might.

geekster777on Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python

Something I wish was more clear in music theory is just how much overlap exists between the various concepts. I think it suffers from having so many names for everything, the learning curve seems much steeper than it really is. Even in this article, much time is spent on the duplicate names of notes and intervals. As a fairly proficient self-taught guitarist, this intimidating perception of theory delayed my learning of it for easily 5-8 years.

For example, you may spend a while learning the major scale, and what can be done with it. Then you learn the minor scale, and it seems like a totally separate scale that sounds completely different. And after that you learn that there are five other scales (modes) to learn about! (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Lochrian!). It can seem extremely overwhelming until you learn that they're all the same scale with different relative starting positions. Where major is [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], minor is [6,7,1,2,3,4,5], and the other modes are all the other permutations of starting positions.

My other gripe is that learning theory on piano puts a lot of bias on the notes themselves rather than the intervals. For example, the B major scale has 5 sharp notes (black keys) to remember whereas C major scale has none. These are pretty different shapes to remember. Learning these on guitar means taking the same exact shape and shifting it up a fret (so if you know one major scale, you know them all!). Not to say that guitar is the perfect instrument for learning this - folks will often learn scales as close to the 0th fret as possible, causing you to start on different strings and have slightly different patterns.

That being said, I wish there was a purely linear instrument (a piano with the black keys flattened?) for learning theory. The real magic comes from identifying the shapes and patterns, and how they're similar to each other. Like how major and mixolydian are identical except for one note, so it's very easy to modulate between them, or make a listener think they're in one mode when they're in another. Same with minor and phrygian. Being able to drop the baggage of "the second note of the B major scale is C# which is this black key here" and just focus on a floating set of intervals seems like it would make this all easier and less intimidating.

That all said, I still feel reasonably early in my theory journey. So maybe this is just my bias coming from guitar.

geekster777on Ask HN: Do you create music? let's hear it

https://soundcloud.com/jpnickolas

My quarantine hobby has been to get better at mixing and producing music. I mostly play guitar, so it's been a difficult process to get my vocals and lyrics anywhere near good (and something I'm still working on). I'm starting to hit a point where I can mix on autopilot (not that the mixing is great, just that it's no longer the bottleneck), so my next effort is to write drums that are more than just stock presets.

Huge shout out to http://songfight.org for being the catalyst that created any of those songs that have lyrics. They're a pretty small community that's been going on for 20 years, where every two weeks you're given a song title and 1 week to write a song that incorporates the title. The real beauty comes from the forums where people review each other's songs with a critical eye. Very wholesome community.

Note: please don't vote for me in this week's Songfight challenge - since the winner normally has somewhere between 10 and 20 votes, it's very clear when someone is calling on friends to flood the votes. It'll only lead to deep shame on my end, but I do encourage y'all to vote for any songs that you particularly like.

geekster777on On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. There seem to be two "problems" to solve for.

1. A permanent loss of wealth. When you've got more cash, you've got more to lose. People have more to gain from robbing/suing/hacking you. Being sued when you only have a year of savings is much different than being sued the day before retirement. The various life/house/health/car/umbrella insurances should hopefully put these worries at ease. Or at least that's what I've been telling myself. Being in the earlier part of my career, I've been looking more at life and disability insurance if fate messes me up before I've built up a nest egg.

2. A temporary loss of wealth (Plan for a rainy day. Then solve for an even rainier day). This one gets me good, since there's always another increasingly more obscure edge case I didn't plan for. Like you said, these always existed before, but there were just larger problems eclipsing them. I think it's important to remember that there can always be a rainier day to plan for, and that it becomes a slippery slope into the prepper lifestyle (not a bad thing if that's your jam!). I think what's been giving me a break from this anxiety is a flexibility of lifestyle. If there's some sort of crash, I don't need to diversify to the magical ratio that happens to survive that crash - I need to keep from drawing a significant amount of money until the markets recover. Maybe this means dropping cost of living (where a more lavish lifestyle will have more fat that can be trimmed in difficult times). Or, if I'm still lucky enough to be employable at that time, I can work to ease the burden. This doesn't blanket over "world has devolved into chaos" scenario, but having stock in oil or a collection of gold bars probably wouldn't help much in those cases either. You'd have to go full prepper :)