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pacarvalho

105 karma · joined August 30, 2017

Engineering is my passion, work and hobby. If you want to talk about anything software, startups, solving engineering challenges or investments just send me an email at paulo@avantsoft.com.br!

Favorite tech stack: Ruby on Rails, React, Sentry, Amplitude & AWS. Favorite books: The Lean Startup, From 0 to 1 and The Hard Things About Hard Things. Hobbies: Rock climbing (especially bouldering) and DOTA.

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pacarvalho··on Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?
Kind of... Spent a while debugging an issue where the client was convinced he could not schedule new appointments in the system on the 29th.

It turned out he had set another setting incorrectly which was causing the appointment never to be valid.

But the rarity of the date let me wonder in the wrong direction for a while...

pacarvalho··on You Are Probably Not a Contractor
Makes sense. IMO contractors are supposed to be companies. Such as https://avantsoft.com.br that you hire for specific things and that can abstract the actual employee management, etc from the company that hires.
pacarvalho··on Gender-Based Pricing in Consumer Packaged Goods: A Pink Tax?
It seems the authors did not find evidence of a "pink tax":

"Finally, while our findings do NOT support the existence of a pink tax as conceived by regulators, a more expansive definition of the pink tax could include differences in markups across men’s and women’s products."

"...our finding that women’s personal care products are not systematically more expensive than substantially similar men’s products calls into question the role of government intervention to reduce the pink tax."

pacarvalho··on True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh [pdf]
What is the average cost from using other methods?
pacarvalho··on Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
0. Use GIT.

1. Add a staging environment.

2. Add a CICD.

3. Add tests. Start by easy ones (new features) to get team used to writing them. Then important flows. If your team doesn’t have the bandwidth hire a contractor. Ex: https://avantsoft.com.br

4. Choose a part of the code the warrants being the first to refactor. Balance easiness with importance.

5. Define a better structure/architecture for it.

6. Refactor.

7. Repeat from 4 as many times as needed.

Also, consider micro-services on new features… may be an alternative to full rewrite.

pacarvalho··on How Cloudflare Got Kiwi Farms Wrong
The big question to me is: At what level of the tech stack should moderation happen?

Should it be done by the ISP? By the IaaS? By the software provider? By developers?

Ideally, moderation would occur at just one level. That way, there are less avenues for abuse to occur. Leaving moderation rules vague may lead to some services that could be beneficial (whistleblowers, etc) to be easily taken down.

pacarvalho··on Large language models have a reasoning problem
Interesting study. Just reading outputs from GPT3 or other models makes it seem almost lifelike. Sometimes it is easy to forget it is just a well fit function with a lot of parameters.
pacarvalho··on Ask HN: Is unethical not to inform a user of a possibly forgotten subscription?
Slack has an interesting model where the license count charged to the company only includes active users which is a subset of those that are registered.
pacarvalho··on Productivity porn
It is quite tough. What are your thoughts on if it is worth it?
pacarvalho··on Productivity porn
"Productivity porn is anything that after having been consumed makes you feel like you were productive when in reality you didn’t actually do anything." - Interesting definition.
pacarvalho··on TikTok to overtake Facebook in influencer marketing spend this year
I am surprised this hasn't happened a long time ago. It has felt for a while that Facebook has been almost entirely cannibalized by Instagram.

Also wonder how much of that is due to Tiktok being more expensive to produce and thus having a higher average price per influencer?

pacarvalho··on Every single time I open your software, I'm asked to download an update
Are you a very avid adopter of products from early stage startups? Forced updates tend to be more common with small companies that can't devote resources to maintaining backwards compatibility.
pacarvalho··on 100k Issues Filled with Rust
Definitely a vanity metric ;)
pacarvalho··on Kubernetes reinvented virtual machines in a good sense
Agree. As someone that has had to migrate systems from K8s to Elastic Beanstalks or equivalent, there are definitely situations where K8s is overkill and simpler systems can work better.
pacarvalho··on 100k Issues Filled with Rust
I wonder how many others repos have over 100k issues. From a quick search it seems Linux does too.
pacarvalho··on Tips for having a high productivity remote company?
Is everyone an employee or are there contractors as well? Are there managers? how large is the team?

For smaller teams (sub 10 people), I find that having 1 daily informal standup and having the leaders make themselves readily available for answering questions is often sufficient. The key is often for leadership not to block development (so no long review cycles for PRs or long time deciding on details that subordinates need to accomplish their work).

pacarvalho··on Workstation
Why?
pacarvalho··on Ask HN: How to make money as a CS student?
I would recommend discussing anything related to compensation before starting at a company (definitely before signing contracts). So would recommend sooner rather than later.
pacarvalho··on Ask HN: How do I come back after burn-out?
I would recommend talking to a professional. There are psychologists and equivalent professionals that specialize on this and they may be able to provide you some guidance.

Not sure this helps but believe in yourself. The fact that you are even willing to talk about this already shows a level of self realization that few are able to achieve.

pacarvalho··on Russia Fines Google $360Mln over Ukraine Content
Was thinking the same. However, it says the fine was based on their revenue there? Does that mean they are still operating in Russia?
pacarvalho··on The U.S. Needs a Million Talents Program to Retain Technology Leadership
The article makes some good points.

Having lived in over 4 countries I can say the United States is by far the most bureaucratic when it comes to immigration. Processes are long, complex and expensive. Often requiring multiple rounds of paperwork or even quarterly submissions of additional documentation (such as with STEM OPT). It definitely discourages people like me (PhD in engineering + entrepreneur) from staying.

pacarvalho··on Ask HN: How to make money as a CS student?
Are you getting equity from them?
pacarvalho··on Ask HN: Can you buy your own airship / dirigible / zeppelin?
I assume you can buy anything if you have the budget for it. Or even build your own. Unsure what license you would need to fly one though...
pacarvalho··on Communication Exhaustion and Being Alone
Interesting. Do you believe these communication in electronic form are more or less exhausting then in person?
pacarvalho··on Ask HN: Non-money lovers, what do you hope to achieve for retirement?
Won't be there for a while yet. However, I want to be in a point in my career where I can move from doing to teaching. Bestow upon the next generation the lessons that I will have accumulated by then.
pacarvalho··on Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?
I usually go with GSuite.
pacarvalho··on Trust in newspapers and television news collapses to historic low
Even though the graphs do show some correlation between politics and media trust, I believe there may be other factors at play here. For instance, the need to make headlines ever more clickbait may also be eroding trust. Since the body of the article and the headline often don't agree.
pacarvalho··on Ask HN: Which has more jobs: Python or Java+Kotlin? For a Go dev
Out of curiosity: Why are you considering only these two? Why not Ruby, Elixir, Rust, etc?
pacarvalho··on Is DevOps Dead?
I wouldn't say that DevOps is dead. Just that some companies can survive without it. It is the type of thing that is good to have. Not absolutely required. You tend to miss it most when things go wrong lol
pacarvalho··on Pre-launch sign up for our new Web3 startup
What categories of freelancers are you targeting?
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