Hacker News Reader

hbhakhraon Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers

The pay for outside working hours applies whether or not you are getting paged. That's 128 hours / 3 = 42.67 hours of extra pay during an on call week. The on call week also gives incentive to fix technical debt and build a more stable production system so you don't get paged.

hbhakhraon Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

We had the same experience as well. When lockdown started, we did a couple of Instacart orders and recommended it to people, until I found out about the stacked charges. If it was just a delivery fee + tip, I'm fine with that, even a transparent fixed percentage. The deception and realizing how much the per-item surcharge + delivery fee + tip was coming out to made me stop using them. Recently I've been using curb-side pickup from stores and its surprisingly convenient and no cost associated. The store workers even refused the cash tip I offered when they came to the car!

hbhakhraon I don't know how CPUs work so I simulated one in code

This reminds me of a time I pulled a near all nighter for a final. I came into the final on too little sleep and even though I knew the material, I couldn't think during the test. I took a 20 minute nap during the two hour final, woke up and aced the final.

hbhakhraon Flutter: Futures, Isolates, Event Loop

An async method can use await within it. A method can return a future but not be able to use the await keyword.

hbhakhraon Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

Risk of wasting time, upside of having fun and learning.

hbhakhraon Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

They just addressed this in today's announcement:

As for new Flutter features, Google today announced ‘Add to App,’ a new feature that makes it easier for developers to slowly add Flutter code to existing apps. In its early days, Flutter’s focus was squarely on building new apps from scratch, but as it has grown in popularity, developers now want to use it for parts of their existing applications as they modernize them.

hbhakhraon Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?

This looks awesome and obvious in hindsight, but as patio11 would say, you need to charge more. Especially on the higher end, let people that want to pay more, pay more.

hbhakhraon Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

Out of curiosity, which fund would that be?

hbhakhraon Show HN: Comp.fyi – Open compensation data by company and level

Great work on launching this and levels.fyi. How does comp.fyi ensure freshness of salary data?

I feel like sites like Glassdoor became a victim of their own success. It became the salary site for years, so naturally it accumulated data going back years. Last I checked, their salary numbers are significantly lower than current industry comp since it has been going up over the past few years and it seems like they don't drop old data from the averages.

hbhakhraon Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

I get that learning another new language sucks and JavaScript would've been nice instead but the Dart language choice actually enables some very nice features in terms of developer experience. I don't remember the details off the top of my head, but I believe stateful reload is one example of what possible because of Dart.

hbhakhraon Announcing Flutter beta 1: Build beautiful native apps

Disclaimer: I work for Google and write dart for my current project.

Simple reason is there is a lot of code written in dart that is making money so there is continued support for it.

hbhakhraon Vue.js vs. React: what happened in 2017

Good assessment. To summarize the argument, Vue.js is just as good and some would argue better than React for web development, but the React ecosystem really puts it over the top, especially React Native.

hbhakhraon Reddit: Explanation of Samsung hardware optimizations over stock Android

This was pretty surprising. I assumed Samsung just added bloat for the sake of branding, but it seems like much of what they do on top of Android is actually a big value add. Really made me rethink Samsung phones.

hbhakhraon Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted

Facebook Free February

hbhakhraon Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

Tangent: Any good resources to read up on typography? I feel like of all design related issues thats the one I have zero knowledge or insight on.

hbhakhraon Paul S. Otellini has died

Sounds like an interesting story. Have you written about it anywhere or would you care to elaborate here?

hbhakhraon Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

This article on their CSS engine was a great read. It's done by Lin Clark as a series of graphics, making it easy to follow.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en...

hbhakhraon Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

That should really be clarified on the pricing page because I think many people misunderstood that

hbhakhraon Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?

I'll add my own anecdote to this. I think the point about getting a better job is spot on. I was working a job for 2 years that wasn't challenging me at all and got to the point that it was almost rote. It was at those times that I felt the need to get intellectual fulfillment by coding outside of work. I was actually able to notice a very significant inverse correlation between the nature of my day job and how interesting it was to my "skill development" outside of work. If you are spending 40 hours a week on challenging technical problems, you should be getting all the skill development you need.

hbhakhraon Dilution

That would only happen when you have a line of investors waiting to invest and you can dictate the terms because of your high growth trajectory. In most cases though, it's not going to happen because of the standard numbers outlined in the article.

hbhakhraon Introducing Netflix Stethoscope

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

This explains some of what you are describing

hbhakhraon [dead]

I actually submitted it before reading and it after I read it I realized it was satire...

hbhakhraon Yarn – A new package manager for JavaScript

Just imagine two packages you depend on (a and b) that both have a shared dependency (x). Both start off depending on x version 1.0 but then later a is updated to 2.0 while b isn't. Now you have two packages depending on different versions of the same package and hence the need for duplication. You have a that needs x@2.0 and b that needs x@1.0, so both copies are kept.

hbhakhraon Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

The cheap bastard plan seems like it would be great for SEO, any stats you can share with us jasonkester on how well it worked out?

hbhakhraon Welcome Craig, Fred and Mark

Are these people the results of the job postings YC has had for hackers?

hbhakhraon JavaScript Speech Recognition

This was pretty mind blowing to me to see that speech recognition is built right into the browser now.

hbhakhraon Ask HN: How Did You Escape 9 to 5?

Do you have any more information on how you filtered business and what made the one bought stand out?

hbhakhraon Ask HN: 8 years working, now 3-4 months off to learn. Looking for advice

Good luck first of all. Sounds like you've done well for yourself thus far.

If you got the savings, I would say go for it and take the time to learn. I don't know how helpful the math for computer science course will be but understanding various algorithms is useful for general knowledge and especially for interviews. Once you know basic algorithms, start on cracking the coding interview, hackerrank etc.

Lastly, I would say the grass is always greener on the other side, so don't disregard all you have accomplished and all that you will continue to do. If you think you will enjoy a job at a top company, go for it, but don't do it because you think what you are doing is inadequate.

hbhakhraon Is There Any Room for the Not-Passionate Developer?

I've seen this exact cycle multiple times with my job. I got into programming because I enjoy it and find it fulfilling. When I hit boring times at my job, I seek that fulfillment with side projects.