parpfish

The recent news about the massive layoff at Block doesn’t quite add up for me. The claim by the company was that AI made their devs so efficient that they could layoff 40% of them to make the company lean and still…

in the US, there doesn't seem to be much of a demand for "domestic labor". the idea of personal assistants or housekeepers is seen as something exclusively for the ultra-wealthy, but i'm not sure why. in particular, i'm…

I've always thought that it's unfortunate that employee equity can only be liquidated once you reach one of the 'big' exit events (i.e., exit or IPO) -- especially because this is tech and it can take YEARS to reach one…

I was just thinking about how new languages slowly build adoption and had the thought that LLM based coding may have basically frozen things in time so new languages (or language features) won’t be adopted. Without a…

Woke up this morning with a strange thought that I'm hoping the geniuses here at HN can poke some holes in. let's say that I take a quantum random number generator and use it to create a random-length sequence of random…

I just saw a job posting here where the description said: > "We spend 70-80 hours a week in the office and, more often than not, work nights and weekends." My first thought was "if they're expecting somebody to work 2x…

I've been doing retirement planning the last week. I'm 40 and I figure that I have at least ten years left before I could consider retiring so I've been thinking about what the next chunk of my career will look like.…

I've got a question for the data-science/stats side of HN that's proving difficult to google. We're all familiar seeing the results of polls reported along with a confidence interval of +/- a few percent. I'm curious if…

I was just thinking about an old Simpsons joke where Martin is excited to get the “systems analyst” job for career day. I remember hearing about that job title in school and it was always described as a really good job…

A few weeks ago I was doing some soldering and I started using a spool of insulated 22-gauge wire. Maybe it was the solder fumes, but I started thinking about what it actually took to create that spool of wire --…

I am fortunate enough to have the gmail address that is {given_name_initial}{surname}@gmail.com. However, I am not the only person in the world with this {given_name_initial} {surname}, which has resulted in me getting…

I've just saw Jack Diederich's "Stop Writing Classes" talk (2012) for the first time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0). This talk has shown up on HN a few times, but only elicited a big conversation in one…

I've seen a lot of debate whether the current large language models (ChatGPT, Bing/Sydney, etc) exhibit sentience. Given the history of the Turing test, I think it's inevitable for these discussions to happen whenever…

I've recently jumped back into the job market and have been applying to various data-science/data-engineering roles. Most interviews have some sort of take-home component, but it feels like these assignments have…

I was reading a thread on HN the other day that introduced me to the concept of the "Dead Sea Effect" in companies that can't retain talent. The simple summary of the effect is this: if your company is unappealing in…