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harshalizee

928 karma · joined April 21, 2015

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harshalizee··on Show HN: I built a task system to handle the drudgery so I could focus on tasks
App monetization is wild these days. $9.99/month for a todo app with email that was generated with AI.

Meanwhile, an AI subscription starts at $20/month and you can vibe code your own version to suit your preferences and free forever.

harshalizee··on Microsoft Teams is a red flag
You would severely limit yourself if you're strict about your list without nuance. GitHub is pretty much bog standard in most companies unless you're working for the few using mercurial, etc.

I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case. We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, have access to all major LLM providers and primarily use Claude and antigravity.

There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.

On a personal note, it has been by far one of the best place I've worked at. The dotnet ecosystem is so well developed and rich, I expect to be paid a huge premium if I ever have to deal with Java again.

harshalizee··on AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities
Considering how the current ecosystem of ad-free paid subscriptions still have ads, it's not too much of a stretch that they will eventually double-dip with their models.
harshalizee··on Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program
how is a job with a salary of $750k "cheap labor" anywhere on earth?
harshalizee··on Cancel Your Subscription: a free browser game
Great job! That actually infuriated me. The most unrealistic part is that the entire site was very responsive. You need to add a ton of input lag, sluggishness, and spinners when loading a page. That will downright piss me off!
harshalizee··on Smart Ring Maker Oura, Backers Seek $2.2B in US IPO
Also, RIP to the Tile company. I haven't seen a company fade away that fast when Apple came out with Tag
harshalizee··on Jobs Without LeetCode
The vast majority of jobs on there says they do take home (ignoring the fact that it's not all dev jobs).

Take homes are somehow worse. It self selects for people who have ample time and no family obligations. I'd rather do leetcode

harshalizee··on Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout
Today, you're one of the lucky 10000![1]

For me personally, On shoes are probably the most comfortable pairs I've ever owned. Their waterproof sneakers are the only ones I've ever had that's actually fully waterproof. If you're looking for a decent pair of sneakers you should at least take a look at their Cloud line.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

harshalizee··on My last six months at Evernote
I would have probably still kept paying for Evernote if they just split the application into Evernote Classic (w/o any of the Collab, texting, bloat) and another with all the bells and bloat.

At the end, it was so bloated that there was a slight lag in the editor which made it infuriating to type on it. Switched and never looked back.

harshalizee··on Measuring the sloppiness of code
Yeah, enterprise code has that trope of being enterprise-y, verbose and bad. In my experience, that has always been the opposite. At the big corps/FAANGs I worked at, a single line of change can adversely impact millions of paying customers, so a lot of the verbosity and harnesses exists to dampen the failure modes. Most of the terribly written stuff has always been at startups, where devs fling nearly anything across the finish line, if it barely works the happy path.
harshalizee··on Meta tried to shrink engineering teams around AI
You also end up with a single point of failure. They leave, go on vacation, hit by a bus, etc. and they take every undocumented and tribal knowledge with them.
harshalizee··on Why getting your hands dirty is good for you
Mud/Clay baths are a real thing in fancy spas
harshalizee··on The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified
Your hypothesis straight up assumes that a) Americans have the best possible education required for the work (we don't; functional illiteracy has never been higher in the last few decades). And b) Americans are the most fluent in English (again see a.).

Even if the above assumptions are true the set of Americans who are qualified will be completely outnumbered by, say, even 2% of qualified people from a huge population like China/India/etc.

harshalizee··on The AI-Native SDLC Playbook
Oh wow! I thought you were likely nitpicking something slightly off center. Nope, the article is straight up truncated on the right with no recourse. This is on an iPhone in the Safari browser.
harshalizee··on YC founder asks desperate job seekers to tattoo themselves for an interview
The fantasy series, Farseer trilogy, and beyond (great read) has "Map-Faces". People subjugated to slavery, wearing their current owner's crest on their cheeks so everyone immediately knows who they belong to. Of course, when traded/sold to another, means yet another "map".

Seems like the valley is getting there and dropping all pretense pretty rapidly.

harshalizee··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
Why is it not fair use for the Chinese models if all they are doing is distilling these fair use models? According to the courts, AI model output is not copyrighted or eligible for copyright.
harshalizee··on Answering "why do you want to relocate?" during interviews
Then you shouldn't be asking those questions in the first place.

Why do you want a job?, Why do you want to relocate?, Why do you want to work here?, etc. are BS "no-op" questions that are not relevant to the skills that they are promoting.

If an interviewer asks these types of questions, they are literally showcasing that this part of the interview is a BS "Subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas" conversation. You will predictably get the "no-op" answers you asked for.

The interviewer always sets the tone of the meeting. You can't complain when they chose to play along. If you want a real conversation, you need to make it amply clear.

harshalizee··on Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com
By Reddit's own admission, that's literally 98% of users. Most of the incoming traffic never engage with the post in any way. This is true of most social sites. That's where the term 'lurker' comes from.
harshalizee··on Your Site, your rules: new AI traffic options for all customers
You mean like ISPs?
harshalizee··on Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M
Counter-conterpoint : For now.

A large part of this is due to bilateral agreements and free flow migration. This referendum directly affects that.

harshalizee··on Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M
It doesn't work as straightforward as that. To have a healthy immigration channel, especially if you want younger/educated/skilled/etc. the pipeline needs to be active and streamlined. Jobs, housing, a well-beaten path that is predictably navigable is incredibly important for a migrant, since they're taking a lot of risks moving there.

If this referendum blocks EU movement, it will choke the pipeline that's filling positions that takes in a high amount of immigrants like healthcare, agriculture, etc. Once it dies out, people may not be as willing to move if they're the one paving the path.

Historically, the US has been quite successful in this area. Migrants from Philippines dominate nursing, Mexico for agriculture and Chinese/Indians for Sotware/Medical.

The migration path has to be vastly superior to their current living for this to work, if they want the same immigration. Or else, it will be mostly people who are truly in a terrible situation who'd be willing to take a chance.

harshalizee··on SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P
Not really. The underlying rules for Nasdaq has changed.

The preexisting ruleset was used by investors to gauge their portfolio balance.

Now investors have to revaluate their portfolio based on the new ruleset as their fundamental risks have changed.

harshalizee··on How turkey hacked the hair-transplant industry
Do you have to take any medications/follow-ups forever to keep it in place or is a one and done kind of procedure?
harshalizee··on The AI zombification of universities
Assignments, sure. But if tests/exams are proctored in-person with pen and paper, the students may quickly pivot to traditional learning methods if they want to pass their courses.
harshalizee··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.

And then this person leaves, leaving no documentation or workflow. That's ok though, another ai agent will pick up right back and add slop on top of that until the codebase is a black box interacting with another black box.

Oh and this company handles other people's money? That's going to end well.

harshalizee··on Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan (2024)
The average life expectancy in the 1920s, even in India, was most definitely not 21-25 years. Various sources show the expectancy age as 51-57. This is because there wasn't enough data for this.
harshalizee··on The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind
Except now you also team up with people who are adept at sales, marketing, accounting, etc. now to form a cooperative instead of a corporation. Maybe workers can get back some of the rights and fruits of their labor.
harshalizee··on Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?
This is funny, because these exact same things were great filters to eliminate BS candidates. It's always the ones who talk a big game who tend to be the worst when the tire meets the road.

Some of the absolute best candidates were always the ones with a github that hadn't seen a commit in half a decade, nary a presentation or conference mentioned in their cv. This was true at two different FAANGs and a couple of other FAANG-adjacent companies.

harshalizee··on Datacenters are becoming a target in warfare
It's understandable. Big tech wanted to be part of the military industrial complex, now they get to experience the side effects that come with it.
harshalizee··on The bare minimum for syncing Git repos
Exactly! I was in university around that time. Our team project needed a non-public repo for us to sync to. Free/Personal Github at the time did not allow for private repos, so I just used my Dropbox folder as the "server". Worked well enough for a bunch of students to use that as a centralized repo.
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