myth2018

Bombardier sold the C-Series to Airbus. And, even if they had "given up" their design, Embraer would be in trouble to compete with Airbus anyway.

> I am a "viralata"

Really honestly, I could tell that before I finished your second paragraph. I see people around the world criticizing their own countries quite often, but afaik only Brazilians take the criticism to such a self-depreciative level.

Wrong. The deal was abandoned by Boeing, as an unfolding of the 737-MAX major fiasco.

And that merge wasn't Embraer "throwing the towel": Bombardier, Embraer's direct competitor, partnered up with Airbus, getting a critical competitive advantage. It was only natural for Embraer too seek a similar partnership.

The market is indeed not the same it was during the past 2 or 3 years. But these last years were abnormally good for IT professionals. Too much cheap money distorted the job market and, if you don't have much experience on how things used to be before that, you may find it difficult to adapt.

Suggestions:

- Try to expand to back-end and advertise yourself as a full-stack. I'd say that many companies are currently in "maintenance mode", putting their new projects in a wait list and focusing on maintaining their existing systems. A generalist developer, able to work on the entire stack, would be more valuable in such cases -- and that would also explain why UI designers are having such a hard time to find new jobs.

- Submit resumes to the "Who is hiring" lists here in HN

- I don't know if that's your case, but anyway. If you live outside US and EU, worked for companies from these regions in the past few years, and are trying to find a similar job now: it's gonna be harder than before. Those are precisely the countries where the cheap money caused the most severe distortions. Too many small companies with very little potential were full of cash and hired tons of developers from abroad. These days are over. Such jobs still exist, as they existed before the pandemics, but are harder to get and the competition is tougher. If that applies to you, I suggest you to start focusing on "traditional", on-site jobs in your country, and keep looking for better, remote jobs while you are employed and less preoccupied.

Indeed. And it lasted long enough for younger workers think that was normal.

There's indeed more than Ad blockers to this matter. Web scrapers became a major issue since they realized the great economical potential of LLMs and AI in general. Incumbents may wish to make it hard for competitors to run their own bots.

Similar experience here. Daydreaming happens more often as I spend extended periods alone, sometimes to a point I would also call "maladaptive". I'm looking for ways to deal with that. It often prevents me to make any meaningful advance on hobbies or any other activity for whose outcome there's nobody waiting -- hence, I have a number of unfinished stuff laying around and getting dust.

I agree with your thesis of under-stimulation. I wouldn't say I'm too reclusive, but social activities in general have been not particularly engaging, sometimes even a bit tiring.

Hi. Question: I'm an engineer living outside the US. If I were to establish a consultancy company in the US and offer my services through it, would that fulfill the legal and security concerns?

It may be my mileage.. But I frequently hear about the shortage of mainframe professionals and, some years ago, I seriously considered getting into it. However, after some attempts to find training on topics I typically see in job postings (CICS, JCL etc), I gave up after finding no courses also providing access to a mainframe "account" for practicing. Maybe I didn't search it properly. I've been advised to try an entry-level position in a company hiring juniors, since they usually provide the training during the first months. But, after over 20 years as an engineer, that felt bigger a step back than what I was willing to take.

I still feel interested though. I'm aware of the current state of chaos on mainframe development, but honestly, I don't think that the current web/mobile situation is much better and, besides, I personally hate them really bad.

These days I had big trouble to get a refund from an airline. I had their confirmation, via email, that the ticket would be reimbursed. But then, after some days, they alleged, absurdly, that I had flown the ticket and hence I wouldn't get the refund.

It turns out that they were mixing up that ticket with another one I bought, and I only managed to find that out after almost 1 month of trial and error talking with their staff, which pretty much resembled a chat-bot experience.

We put ourselves in a sort of quicksand. Technology's promises are tempting, but there are hidden costs. We didn't know that and now we're finding out what happens when complexity is not tamed. Lessons are being hopefully learned, but I'm afraid that what we currently see is just the beginning of the nightmare

> This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet

Not entirely false, I would say. I see more and more non-techies getting tired with their search results, instinctly expecting to see a variety of poorly-formatted, extremely poorly-written, ad-ridden sites.

I believe more and more people will wake as Google pushes the boundaries of good sense. This will lead to a decrease in qualified traffic, but that won't demotivate Google -- anyone who already ran ads targeting a niche public knows that Google will burn your monthly budget, and they won't hesitate to override your parameters to make that happen.

I'd say noise plays a major role. I've driven a noisy car for years and now that I'm driving a quiet one I frequently switch a bit too late when I'm distracted.

My experience with vim differs drastically and I believe the root of most problems you had stems from trying to turn vim into an IDE.

I won't argue at all. If you prefer IDEs, you go for it. But maybe vim and neovim aren't the best choices.

I use vim as a text editing tool, solely. My .vimrc contains ~ 20 lines. Use 2 popular plugins to help me finding and opening files, and one plugin to support editorconfigs (useful for sharing formatting rules with folks using vscode in the team). And I use makefiles or other scripts to call external tools (formatters, linters etc).

There's probably a billion of plugins which could increment my productivity, but honestly I don't care much.

> Having a co-founder who could actually build relationships, have good product vision, and most importantly SELL were crucial.

I agree with you. I made my attempt at founding a company without a co-founder possessing such "soft skills", and I believe failed primarily because of that.

However, I still see a risk for technical co-founders there: the ability to establish connections, sell and leverage a valuable network has to be made clear before a partnership can be established.

I shut down my company a few months before the peak of the startup frenzy in my country. Suddenly, lots of people wanted to leave their jobs, found a startup and "build a platform".

They were extremely passionate and optimistic about their ideas -- often something along the lines of "It's like <popular product> but focused on <nonsensical niche>"; ideas apparently inspired by some "how to build your startup" content farm article or social media influencers' BS.

But they brought essentially nothing to the table. No money, no useful expertise, no network they could leverage. Heck, some were not even willing to leave their jobs and dedicate themselves exclusively to the new company. They just had a ton of naive optimism and overconfidence.

And I've met a handful of young fellows swallowing the bait, lured by the dream of owning their very own company, picking their preferred tech-stack and doing things The Right Way.

Indeed. I understand how difficult it would be for a non-technical person to achieve that, but it could pay-off. I once worked with a sales guy, who owned a consulting business and planned to launch a SaaS. He coded a first version himself, using PHP, and began offering it free of charge as part of the courses he sold. His code was a complete mess, but the software he built significantly improved his chances to attract a technical person and establish a successful partnership, for both sides.

Hi. Would you mind to elaborate on which signs of ChatGPT you have detected? Not only out of curiosity: I've read that detectors are more prone to emit false-positives when analyzing text written by foreigners and, since that's my case, I'd like to learn how to avoid planting such signs into my own writings.

No UX-designed systems in sight, just users having a good experience.

Agreed. And, sadly, besides providing zero education, some code reviews even turn into spaces of abuse of political power when conducted by unprepared reviewers.

I've been unfortunate to work with one of those, some years ago. I decided to pretend I enjoyed the style as soon as I realized she suffered from a fragile sense of authority. In hindsight, that doesn't seem to have been a good decision.

It was clear she felt affronted by any deviations from the intended standard. But the feedback mostly comprised extremely vague, subjective, non-actionable ad hoc prescriptions. I carefully read through my reviews and the ones received by my colleagues, but was unable to devise any pattern. Ultimately I decided to simply code as fast as possible so that I could collect the feedback earlier and get rid of the damn thing.

That way I could kind of cope, but after some months I was really burned out and struggling to sustain any interest about my tasks.

> Telephone/internet customer service isn't a job that people should be doing, it's soul destroying.

That's true, but it's a different issue.

My gas company has already deployed a number of chatbots and automated phone responses. Now you simply just can't talk to a real person via phone.

These days they double-charged an invoice and I simply had no way to inform them about the problem they created. And this is not the sort of service you just move on to a competitor.

> Walkie-talky voice communication

In Brazil there's been a fairly sophisticated scheme based on that. It proceeded more or less as follows:

1) the "service provider" hired some highly specialized "candidates" who would enroll for the exam and take it

2) these fake-candidates would then quickly solve the questions, focusing only the few subject matters they were specialized in. One is usually not allowed to leave the exam room carrying the printed materials, unless they accept to wait for a specified amount of time (1 hour before the final time or so, IIRC). But these guys were able to memorize the answers and, then, simply left.

3) after leaving the room, the fake-candidates would meet a team in a car nearby. They had a radio transmitter there, and started to broadcast the answers.

4) the cheaters who hired the "service" would carry a radio receiver with a tiny earpiece implanted under their skins. They would then listen to the answers and write them down

I don't remember how did they find that out. I believe it happened when an exam proctor suspected about a candidate answering the questions too quickly.

Dude I can definitely relate

Notice that in this sub-topic we're talking more generally about causes for low-quality software -- laggy UIs being only one of the symptoms.

Figma contributes by enabling UI designers to easily author interfaces which look allegedly beautiful but are complex to build, test and maintain.

And the resources burned on building such esthetically pleasant piles of barely usable software could find better use on making it simpler, faster and more focused on user actual functional and non-functional requirements (much of them taking place on the server-side) instead of sugaring their eyes by throwing tons of code on their clients

> We need the supposed ‘smartest guys in the room’ to be less dumb

Indeed. Many don't quite understand technology, and investors are no exception.

There are smart ones, but those not necessarily make good investments -- they may simply look for good future exits and leave the bomb on the laps of the next suckers.

Brazilian here. Now and then we read these foreign articles with impressions about Brazil and feel a bit puzzled as to where and how they derive such conclusions from.

> But in recent decades, the traditional Brazilian diet has begun to change and fracture across class

What? The increase in fast-food consumption may have resulted from the increase of fast-food availability, but, in terms of habits and culture, it's quite the opposite: people are getting more and more aware of the importance of good nutrition for a healthy life. Legislation is going towards the same direction, restricting the offering of unhealthy foods at schools and mandating food industry to print standardized warnings on ultra-processed foods' packages, making it clear what sorts of potentially dangerous ingredients they contain.

Even crap-food chains like McDonalds have painted some of their stores in green and started to advertise some healthier options more ostensibly, just to make sure they don't miss any developing trend.

Other than that, regarding Outback's success, there's no big deal here. The pork ribs and the onion are good. Service is usually very good too, with polite employees and short waiting times. Some stores have longer queues, but that depends a lot on what time you go -- and some people even like to wait in lines, it's an opportunity to build up the hunger and chat with friends and family. It's expensive, but similar dishes are getting increasingly available in other, smaller restaurants, especially after some of the Outback recipes were leaked online 10 years ago.

And I'm not even sure what does it mean to be "the most popular chain" considering that there's a huge number of smaller restaurants which are extremely popular in their respective regions.

In summary, no big deal, the article even feels a like bit like advertising.

And don't forget the UX designers armed with their figmas and alikes. The tech-stack is only one among a number of organizational and cultural issues crippling the field.

Unfortunately I didn't bother to ask my friend for the specifics. But the need to hear attentively and wait for the end of the sentence had something to do with the verb describing what happened to the train. It could be either a minor, temporary problem quickly fixable, or a more severe incident which would require more time to work out. The difference would be determined by the verb prefix at the end and, by its turn, would determine our course of action.

> And no, I have no difficulties understanding this sentence.

This is what calls my attention most. During your language acquisition process, your brains may develop some specialized connections to handle such sentences. In Portuguese (and probably in most languages) it is possible to build such monstrosities -- and there are concrete examples which I won't recall now. However, one does that for literaly reasons, to sound overly sophisticated or intentionally difficult etc. It's definitely not a natural way to write, and it probably never happens spontaneously on spoken language. I can, very sporadically, grasp such long sentences in my language at the first pass, but it's always difficult and, even then, I usually reread just to make sure I really understood it.

Haha thanks for bringing this quote.

That reminds me of a german friend listening to an announcement in a train station. He raised his hand signing he couldn't be disturbed and seemed to hold his breath during that fairly long speech. And at the end he told me "this language is so messed up, I had to listen it all up to the end to figure out whether we should wait some more minutes or leave and take a bus".

My native language is Portuguese and I'm currently learning German. The separable verbs are quite a challenge for me, especially in longer sentences. I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in German there's this need to keep the content in the working memory for possible supplementary info, and only at the end you can figure the meaning. Until the sentence finishes, there's this tension, this suspense.

> the only good thing UML brought to software development

Interesting perspective, which differs from my own experience though. I found some value in class and package diagrams, which proved helpful in detecting problematic relationships between packages at a very early stage. Deployment diagrams have aided me in resource planning and communicating with deployment teams. On the other hand, I've personally never used sequence diagrams beyond academical assignments or simply satisfying my curiosity.

However I definitely agree that UML is extremely bloated. It introduced a myriad of problems so that they could sell solutions in the form of courses, books and certifications. Rational's acquisition by IBM certainly didn't help matters either. And the reference guide by Booch/Rumbaugh/Jacobson is severely painful to read.