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riknox

577 karma · joined December 18, 2018

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riknox··on Show HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app
To be fair the author of this did found two massively successful businesses so I imagine he does understand tackling a business problem.
riknox··on Cities need more trees
That applies outside of Scotland as far as I'm aware, whereas in Scotland there is a right to roam on all land as long as you're not disturbing housing/farm activities etc.
riknox··on I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train
That's not far off the same cost as to get to Glasgow from London, looking for tomorrow it's between £55 and £70. Significantly longer though for yourself, the train here is around 4 hours 45 mins (give or take). It's also generally close to on time, and we have delay repay for anything over 15 minutes.
riknox··on Purple Llama: Towards open trust and safety in generative AI
I meant more it's interesting that they're not a member or signed up to something led by big players in AI and operating for AI safety. You'd think that one of, if not the largest, AI company would be a part of this. Equally though those other companies aren't listed as members, as the sibling comment says.
riknox··on Purple Llama: Towards open trust and safety in generative AI
I assume it's deliberate that they've not mentioned OpenAI as one of the members when the other big players in AI are specifically called out. Hard to tell what this achieves but it at least looks good that a group of these companies are looking at this sort of thing going forward.
riknox··on Modules, not microservices
I think that's a reasonable heuristic, but I'd also say you have to take into account the human readability aspect of it. It sometimes does make sense IMO to split solely for that, if it allows you to "reduce" a complicated/confusing operation to a string name, leading to it being easier to understand at a glance.
riknox··on Tell HN: Royal Mail Data Leak
Interesting how many people go straight to the cache - seems like we've all been there when we're accidentally overwriting keys with the wrong data!

Experience is the best teacher I guess, although we all seem to be doomed to make the same mistakes.

riknox··on Glasgow council four-day week on full pay moves closer after study agreed
The title for this article is misleading. It only says they've agreed to a study to investigate it. There's a world of difference between that and actually approving a 4-day week for all.
riknox··on The worst part of working from home is now haunting reopened offices
Got to justify the absolutely massive campus they've built by the Clyde somehow. In my experience, there's been quite the PR push recently on how amazing this new campus is (I'm not a Barclays employee).
riknox··on Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)
I've not seen Storm being used anywhere sane for a few years at least now, and from a glance at job postings it looks unlikely. Spark, Kafka Streams etc. are definitely used in a modern data platform from my experience.

I think we're seeing a big shift with Hadoop-like workloads being moved onto cloud providers, so BigQuery, Amazon EMR etc.

riknox··on Misidentifying talent
Not just this, but the prevalence of strokes gained being the key metric to focus on for players has opened up a new understanding of what it takes to score well and win tournaments.
riknox··on Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again
AWS Console runs in us-east-1 so that points to at least that region having issues IIRC. I am also having Slack issues in EU.
riknox··on Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
I disagree with that. If you go into somewhere as a senior for example, it is not unheard of that a year later you can make a lateral move for 20%+ payrises. I've seen it happen many times in my career (obvious caveat that anecdote != data).
riknox··on Massachusetts couple suing eBay after employees harassed and stalked them
I think Wenig was also pushed out somewhat in relation to his opinion on the sale of eBay Classifieds - the rumour at the time was that he was very much against it while activist investors where trying to push it through.
riknox··on Stripe Identity
Not the OP but I had to do this when opening a bank account in Germany.
riknox··on Amazon reverses course, expands work-from-home options
I think a lot of the skills you learn around how you interact with people in a professional setting, developing a sense of when to ask someone for help vs. work through a problem yourself, and how to develop software professionally. I've found that we have a lot more work taken down a wrong path because it's not as easy to check in on someone remotely without it coming across as micromanagement of more junior developers. I appreciate that a fair portion of that "blame" lays with the more senior members, but I've at least found that some things that would easily be resolved face to face, or with the kind of coffee break chat you get in person, have festered on longer than they necessarily should have.
riknox··on Amazon reverses course, expands work-from-home options
I've started a new job remotely this year with quite a few junior engineers in the team, and I'm definitely finding it's much harder to mentor and make sure that they're taking the right paths while solving a problem than it was in the office. Flexibility is undoubtedly a good thing, however like you I think there is an element of paying your dues that is perhaps missing in the current environment.
riknox··on Building Self-Managed Teams: A Case Study from Riot Games
That's interestingly the opposite of what I've experienced in the UK. I suppose it depends on what type of company you work for, but in my experience those that realise they are a tech company and truly value technology make ample opportunities for their developers to move forward. My current workplace has both managers (and senior/execs) who have come from a tech career and very high level ICs.
riknox··on Two UK Broadband ISPs Trial New Internet Snooping System
I'm not sure if this is referring to the privacy laws or the internet itself, but the internet connectivity in Germany is dreadful in my experience. Capacity is at its limits, to the point that some flats don't have access to the internet.
riknox··on B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers
It's not exclusively, but you find a lot of "indie hackers" come up with business opportunities based on following/reading/speak to other indie hackers and then market to other indie hackers and so the cycle continues
riknox··on FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
Not sure of the future of Gumtree in Australia, but they also have a large tech company behind them (at least until next year). eBay Classifieds Group
riknox··on How much I made as a good Engineer at Facebook
I don't think it's true that the pay isn't drastically different. I was in the pipeline with Apple recently, and the pay for a sr. eng position was 80k. This is comparable to other companies where I interviewed. Of course, without receiving a solid offer I didn't hear about the RSU side, but I think your experience moving internally is totally different to starting a role with FAANG within EU.
riknox··on How much I made as a good Engineer at Facebook
That's the unfortunate reality of working in Europe I think, especially in a lower cost of living country. I've just moved from Germany to the UK, and my salary has increased in gross terms (and an associated significant increase in net), but I lose many of the German provisions/safety nets that the high taxes pay for over there.
riknox··on Amazon’s cloud Macs cost $25.99 a day. 77 days of usage would buy you your own
I thought the point is with the new announcement/EULA terms that a day was the minimum amount of time you could rent from Amazon for. I could have misunderstood of course.
riknox··on The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off
You can always address that, like VAT (and other commentators have said), by allowing refunding of tax on purchase (for example) for business purposes.