When I was a kid, my uncle was driving me to a piano lesson and his car ran out of gas at an exceptionally long red light. Some young lady picked us up, drove us to the nearest gas station to get a jerry can, and back to his car to get us back on our way.
Readit Newsdgunay commented on What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you? louplummer.lol/nice-stran... · Posted by u/speckx
dgunay commented on Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners thorsell.io/2025/12/07/es... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
Knowing nothing else about him, I like him based on this alone.
I've been in planning sessions where someone would confidently declare something would take half a day, was surprised when I suggested that it would take longer then that since they were basically saying "this'll be finished mid-afternoon today"...and was still working on it like 3 weeks later.
Besides the usual unknown unknowns, I've also seen this happen with tasks that involve a lot of coordination in the SDLC. Oh the PR went up at at 2pm PST? Coworkers in EST won't review it until tomorrow. Maybe some back and forth = another day until it clears review. Then QA happens. QA is heavily manual and takes a few hours, maybe with some false starts and handholding from engineering. Another day passes. Before you know it the ticket that took an hour of programming has taken a week to reach production.
It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation.
It's clear why people do it (more pay) but it sets up bad incentives for the companies. Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee, just to have them leave as soon as they can get a better offer?
Why didn't companies just grant raises more aggressively? Was the ease of poaching engineers not a clear market signal?
dgunay commented on Ask HN: What has been your experience with Agentic Coding? · Posted by u/grandimam
My experience is that you still have to care about some of the internal details, currently. The models are not always the best at maintaining a coherent concept for separation of concerns, a balance of automated testing, etc. Within 5k loc I had to step in and do direct refactors as the pure vibe coding approach had devolved into slop.
> I'm convinced that very few customers think face scanning is an improvement.
But it is. In fact, we were getting a much rawer deal before, as this was data the government already effectively had but we as travellers derived no convenience from it.
The last time I reentered the US though, it was just a quick face scan and I was on my way. I don't know if that was because of the government shutdown or if it's actually SOP now, but either way it was much faster than having a customs agent manually verify my papers.
This reminds me of my mental journey playing League of Legends for a really long time.
It's a 5v5 team game and very famous for its toxic community. What MOBA isn't? Anyway a regular experience as a LoL player is being in a steady state, or maybe even ahead of the other team, only to have your position trashed because one of your teammates keeps making repeated mistakes.
The first couple years I played, this would make me super mad. Exactly what the author felt in online games of Bughouse. Sometimes I would get mad at people I knew IRL, which I'm pretty ashamed of. Putting in a lot of effort and still losing feels bad. I never had this feeling when I would get absolutely crushed in 1v1 fighting games because ultimately I was fully responsible for every loss.
After a while though, I kind of stopped getting upset about losses in LoL. Maybe part of a broader mindset shift, or I just recognized that the only productive thing to do is try your best, do not self-identify as "someone who wins", and extract as much value from a loss as you can. In the long run, you win more and more games that way.
Eventually I stopped playing entirely, for other reasons, but that's also a valid approach. IME most people (including myself) who play games like this a lot and experience Bughouse Rage usually have an unhealthy amount of their self-worth wrapped up in the game.
dgunay commented on We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs lalitm.com/fixits-are-goo... · Posted by u/lalitmaganti
An ex-employer of mine had a regular cycle:
1. Build features at all costs
2. Eventually a high profile client has a major issue during an event, costing them a ton of goodwill
3. Leadership pauses everything and the company only works on bugfixes and tech debt for a week or two
dgunay commented on Ask HN: Working in a language that isn't your native one. How hard was it? · Posted by u/william-cooke
On the other side, one thing I have tried to be more mindful of, as a native English speaker often working with nearshore contractors, is speaking and writing more simply. Enunciating more, slowing down a bit, and using fewer idioms can go a long way towards making ESL coworkers more comfortable.
dgunay commented on Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable theverge.com/tech/823337/... · Posted by u/throwaway270925
I just tried installing Heroic Games on Arch, and the install process has left me less than impressed. It will be one vague error with a bunch of forums saying, "try this" and no "this is what that error means". I try to install that one and it has its own error, with the same forum experience. I'm not trying to install something which will allow me to install vulkan which will allow me to install heroic games...maybe.
I don't think an Epic games launcher is exactly obscure. Mind you, I'm completely commmitted to Linux and having the launcher is just in the "nice to have" category, but it hasn't gone well so far.
The experience using Heroic Games Launcher is a good bit less polished than Steam IME. I only really use it to play games that are occasionally given away on the Epic Games Store for free so I mostly treat it as a nice bonus if they actually work on Linux.
Language learning apps are the ultimate sand-pit for solo developers thinking they can offer some random unique feature that Duolingo (or "Anki but better") doesn't offer. Without realizing, they don't do it for a reason. Language learning has extremely low activation and retention. And it's super easy to find one or two early adopters that like your app for some reason to keep going.
And solo developers that get into language learning often are only strong in software development and lack in UX, design, product, or marketing.
You may start with a calm, "not Duolingo gamification" style app, but every language learning app starts with pure intentions until you're many months or years in, your numbers are low, you need to make money, and you need to move the needle.
My two cents, you don't have to heed it obviously.