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mathiaspoint

384 karma · joined July 2, 2025

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mathiaspoint··on Ask HN: Is your company still hiring junior engineers?
Do not expect to have a career in IT or software engineering in the US. If the market does improve they'll do their best to crush you with immigrants.
mathiaspoint··on Show HN: Amber – better Beeper, a modern all-in-one messenger
>Personal CRM

Interesting to hear I'm not the only one who's found the need to write something like this.

mathiaspoint··on OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
That is actually absurd. If they're insane enough to think the world is conspiring against them they wouldn't surrender that way.
mathiaspoint··on OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
Either people can manage themselves or they can't and the ones that can't probably need to be institutionalized for their and everyone else's safety.
mathiaspoint··on We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that
TOTP was definitely common decades ago. E-Trade for example supported it before KYC was mandated.
mathiaspoint··on Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
First of all I don't think you should be surprised that pay is the most interesting thing to potential employees? That is the entire reason they're tolerating you. If I just want to work on interesting things you would only get in the way.

Secondly, yeah, I'm not like that. I've got three or so side projects (I guess they're just projects now) I'm actively working on and have been building things with my teens. It doesn't matter anymore socially, like everything else in the US your counterpart just never shows up.

mathiaspoint··on Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
I think you're right that it did used to work that way but now all the juniors are competing with people like me who have done all of that and also have five years of professional experience at large companies.
mathiaspoint··on Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
Because that faith is what got people to accept "the brown people living next door." The idea that we could get along and just work harder is what let people give up tribalism. If that no longer works tribalism must come back.
mathiaspoint··on Apple pulls iPhone torrent app from AltStore PAL in Europe
It's proof that they're not complying with the DMA.
mathiaspoint··on Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
No that's close to the compliment of the male labor participation rate. 4-5% is only the people who have lost their jobs in the past six months and are actively looking for another one.
mathiaspoint··on Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
If your parents are paying for it that's still spending money on it.
mathiaspoint··on Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
It no longer scares me, it gives me a lot of hope and I think most people my age and younger feel similarly.
mathiaspoint··on Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it. If you do that's everyone telling that you don't belong there and you'll have a hard life if you ignore them.
mathiaspoint··on You don't want to hire "the best engineers"
Large corporations are probably the worst place actually. You get slotted into some random project treadmill (which will be completely different from whatever position you interviewed for) where most of the decisions are made by middle managers at least one or two levels above you. Going out of your way to solve problems will be ignored at best and my even result in a reprehend.

These places are for people who hate thinking but are good at pretending otherwise.

mathiaspoint··on You don't want to hire "the best engineers"
If you can't fill a role in this market that's definitely a you problem.
mathiaspoint··on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater
As someone who voted for it I'm entirely aware and don't think it's going far enough.

If you truly think there's a moral problem here you need to campaign for secession.

mathiaspoint··on Take something you don’t like and try to like it
You can go too far the other way. I only stopped liking jazz once I understood it.
mathiaspoint··on The day Return became Enter (2023)
The language runtime will insert/remove CR for you if you open the file in text mode on Windows. You'd be surprised how much stuff cygwin itself actually does for you. If your code isn't too Linux specific try building it under mingw instead and you can see what's actually going on.
mathiaspoint··on Nintendo Switch 2 Dock USB-C Compatibility
DP -> HDMI conversion hardware is pretty intense. I haven't owned a device that does this and doesn't at least get warm.
mathiaspoint··on MAGA declares war on the property tax
Not everyone needs to live in your particular neighborhood. The US native population is shrinking so baring immigration (which we absolutely do not need more of) housing prices should fall without any development.
mathiaspoint··on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now' [video]
The idea of a smartphone you control is a little absurd, the whole point of a smartphone is to sell access to you to other people, that's where all the money is.

There are plenty of devices you have full control over but they're not called phones for that reason.

mathiaspoint··on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
People too stupid to use computers safely should be kept away from computers for their own safety. Giving that kind of person any kind of computer would be immoral by definition. They shouldn't have phones at all, they're just going to fall for corporate approved scams from Meta, Applovin, and Indian call centers.
mathiaspoint··on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now' [video]
Outside of really niche stuff like the Pinephone there aren't. Because of things like this Android is increasingly incompatible with that use model and these days it's pretty safe to assume "phone" == "corporate administration you have no control over."
mathiaspoint··on Tell HN: My advice after I applied to 450 positions before getting hired
Yeah things definitely used to actually work to some degree. Something seems to have happened over the past 5-10 years and anything that requires any degree of administration is just unreliable at best and often just entirely unavailable.
mathiaspoint··on Tell HN: My advice after I applied to 450 positions before getting hired
Cold applying to large corporate employers is an almost complete waste of time so that's not a mistake.

I've had 3 jobs at large corporate employers in the past 8 years, the only way I'd ever apply to one is if I already knew someone and they wanted me hired. Everything is just way too disfunctional to waste time on otherwise.

mathiaspoint··on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
This hardly stops anything, app stores are full of malware, and the cost is very high.

It's like having an automated turret on your lawn because sometimes people bring bad snacks to your dinner parties.

mathiaspoint··on Ask HN: Best foundation model for CLM fine-tuning?
Why would you throw out the original embedding layer? That seems like a step backwards to me. It's likely it was partly trained on Yiddish and without it you're throwing out a lot of information in the rest of the model.
mathiaspoint··on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now' [video]
Yes I do. I don't really maintain a blog but I've been thinking about writing some articles on my personal site about how I have everything set up.
mathiaspoint··on Zuckerberg’s AI hires disrupt Meta with swift exits and threats to leave
It's a shame Grok quit publishing their weights. I really love huggingface's fully reproducible models.
mathiaspoint··on Tell HN: My advice after I applied to 450 positions before getting hired
I pretty much only apply via personal email these days. Nothing else seems serious.
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