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speryon Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

I use your site often. Thank you for creating it, it's a great resource!

speryon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2022)

  Location: Germany, Berlin
  Remote: Hybrid/Remote
  Willing to relocate: Yes, to Berlin
  Technologies: Golang, Java, C#, Python, JS/TS, PostgreSQL, Cloud
  Résumé/CV:
  Email: the_spery@hotmail.com

speryon Ask HN: Did you deliberatively develop any new hobby in recent years?

Got into running and triathlon.

Started out 3 years ago with light running mostly on treadmill during the winter. Ran two half marathons and then one year later ran a full marathon. After that I spent three months preparing for half ironman distance triathlon. That was much fun, race as well.

Last year was most time intensive, I've spent about 6 hours running/swimming/biking a week, which is not that big of a jump as I use to go to gym for about 3-4 times a week.

Effort is interesting since I had to reduce the intensity to build up the endurance, so workouts we're not difficult at all.

I prefer it over other stuff since it makes me active and I enjoy the endurance workouts.

speryon Serbia surveillance law urgently withdrawn

Emergency is that if current regime loses the elections, they will all have to be persecuted for various law violations.

It's a fight for survival.

speryon The Animal Is Tired

I have such mixed feelings about the Demon cycle. I really like the characters and the first book is excellent. However it starts to be the same pattern for the later books and plot deteriorates rapidly as you near the end. Last two books ruined the series for me, I remember reading them during first lockdown last year and being super frustrated the way it ended.

speryon Serbian freelancers protest new taxation law that threatens push into poverty

You're right on most parts, I'm not as well informed as I thought I was, but I think you're going with assumption that all the freelance folk should have registered 'agencies' and worked with that. That wasn't an option for everyone.

Most of the freelancers I know only did occasional gigs (most were either students or designers) and having to pay for monthly tax wasn't really an option as they didn't make that much.

People with 'agencies' have no tax debts, so they aren't really the issue here.

speryon Serbian freelancers protest new taxation law that threatens push into poverty

What happened is that basically noone was paying any tax because the Tax Service did not have a way to classify internet workers. You can't pay taxes if you don't know how much you need to pay.

Bigger issue here is that they are forcing the people to play for the preceding 5 years, and taxes include both health insurance (which those people could not receive) and retirement fund (which those people are not eligible for those 5 years).

But Serbian government as a whole is deeply corrupt and this surprises noone.

speryon Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

That may apply to yoga class at 11am, but asking for a day off? Come on...

speryon Switching to Windows

I'm not saying windows users love installing services.

I meant, maybe your acquaintances aren't that tech savvy and don't understand the implications. My parents we're the same before I've taught them not to install stuff before consulting with either me or my brother.

speryon Switching to Windows

If your machine is low on RAM and you keep installing services to it, it will slow down. OS has nothing to do with it.

speryon Facebook Said to Consider Suing Apple over App Store Practices

You don't have Instagram? All their apps should be treated the same.

speryon Made-up difficulty of competitive games

I don't think that's the case. Or simply from my own perspective. I use to be pretty good at Starcraft2 (like top 0.01 percentile according to ladder, which had me playing vs grandmasters and pros often), but I was never any good at games like Dota2 (game in which I have more than double the hours of SC2).

I think the main difference is that in team games its much harder to figure out what you are doing wrong as you're not the sole contributor to the loss. If you lose in 1v1 in Starcraft, you can watch a replay and pretty easily find out when you lost and why. And with team games like MOBA's you have 10 variables, instead of just 2, so it's always combination of things that went wrong. Another big deal is that you have to master 1 race in RTS and you have a pool of 100 heroes to learn, each with unique mechanics.

speryon Dune Official Trailer

Why would they get offended by it?

speryon Ask HN: How do you switch off from work, particularly when working from home?

That's so true. It sucks a bit when you develop a lot of 'online' hobbies, like gaming, reading blogs, etc. But backpains will make even the most hardcore games into runners :)

speryon Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

You don't lose, you're still an engineer. Platform loses a user. And that's bad for everyone as explained in the essay.

speryon Show HN: Textdb.dev – simple data sharing for fun projects

Manually editing data has a bug. If you click cancel it will still update the value.

speryon Just some red flags. No big deal. Just ignore them

I may have answered with a bias. In all jobs I had, on the first day you're given a desk, PC and everything you need and you spend half of the day onboarding, other half usually setting up accounts for various stuff.

So from that point of view not having a desk for first few days I'd feel lost and like a visitor, not employee.

I have no experience working for tech giants and large shops (100+ people per location), so I may be blind to usual practices.

speryon Just some red flags. No big deal. Just ignore them

Not defending her but 'asking' for a desk sounds ridiculous. Should she also ask for a chair? Power outlet? Access to toilet?

speryon Just some red flags. No big deal. Just ignore them

I'm quite the opposite. I always try to give the honest feedback hoping it would be read. If company tries to use anonymity to track down people who give negative feedback and try to mistreat them, I'd rather not work there anyway. So its a win/win for me.

speryon Demo of an OpenAI language model applied to code generation [video]

Video should be there but their site is frustrating. Both for visibility and reliability.

speryon Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

They won't. They are very 'serious' about their API access. You won't get the chance to try it out without a full-blown company behind you.

I've tried to setup a dev account but I was stopped as I had no company homepage and privacy statement. Oh and they call it Garmin Health.

speryon PC games are fighting a new surge of cheaters and hackers

People playing with better than average HW is not such a big issue. It could mean a bit for the absolute top tier competitors, but that's under 0.01% player-base and for certain genres (FPS primarily). Cheating however affects anyone and is much more frustrating to play against than vs really good players. Being outplayed have its merits (you can learn something), but being killed by cheaters feels, well, cheated. It's just waste of time and energy.

speryon Ask HN: As a Facebook or Google engineer, do you consider your company evil?

I don't think its a lack of perspective. Any moves they make that makes us lose some of the freedom on the internet (and in real life now) will not be temporary. It will outlive the COVID19 crisis.

speryon The world after coronavirus

Waking up without an alarm clock doesn't imply lack of discipline. Unless I'm going out or going to bed very late I usually don't need an alarm. I'd just wake up at the same time every day.

speryon Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

Totally agree. I feel its too hard to strike a balance between the two.

speryon Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

As it should. Empty comments posted for the giggles of author (and maybe a few others) would just add too much spam. Look at what reddit grew into, you have templates of comments and meta comments everywhere, very low quality content.

speryon Ask HN: Courses/resources to improve my self-esteem and believe in myself more?

Don't want to post a shallow comment, but this 100%.

My life turned around just after 6 months of working out regularly. It's easy to improve self esteem when others see you in a much better light, and working out will make that happen. From physical transformation (no matter how small) to small dopamine highs you will get after putting in work.

speryon Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

If they contribute and the company grows, who cares if you're paying them for their 10% or 110%? But I'll read your comment as a half-joke so forget what I said :)

speryon My experience with toxic teams

Dancing Sign up button is really off-putting.