AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs to travel the world, how did it go?

Top comment by keiferski

Absolutely worth it, however I'd offer a few short tips:

1. Try to stay in one place for a few months, minimum. If you can stay a year or two, do that. Jumping from city to city every week seems exciting at first, but it quickly makes everywhere feel the same.

2. To quote Lao Tzu, when your work is done, forget it. If you work remotely, actively disconnect at the end of the day. It's too easy to be constantly plugged into the English-speaking media world and ignore what's right in front of you.

3. Try to blend in and adopt local clothing, culture, foods, etc. Read books by local authors, watch local films. A bit obvious, maybe, but I've met many people who insisted on only eating Western food, reading Harry Potter, and watching Netflix while abroad. At that point, why even bother traveling?

2. Ask HN: Do you create music? let's hear it

Top comment by tripngroove

Recently released my debut album, "The Good Ship Cacophony" as Space Pirates Guild. Heavy guitars, synths, drum machines.

- https://open.spotify.com/album/6YS0IJarvrzMtZzYMiN51z?si=GAI...

- https://soundcloud.com/spacepiratesguild

- https://spacepiratesguild.bandcamp.com/

- https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-good-ship-cacophony/154...

- https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nC0XLATC5H8i...

3. Ask HN: Can you switch to a programming career despite nearing 40?

Top comment by matt_s

Outside of cult-like SV, you'll be fine.

There are tons of companies that need programmers to solve problems. If you have a base understanding already in a field, work towards programming things in that field. Having deep knowledge of a field can help you.

You didn't give much info about your background. If you can use an existing job to start doing programming, do it. If you are an office worker and use Excel for nearly anything, that can also likely be solved as a CRUD web application. Do it on your own time if your employer won't allow work time on it. Also look into automation of things you or co-workers do.

Generally speaking, I would say outside of careers requiring extreme amounts of education/certification (medical doctors, rocket scientists) you can generally switch careers from anything to anything. The advantage with programming is you can learn 100% of it online and you don't need a degree to enter the field.

4. Instagram is killing my start up

Top comment by PragmaticPulp

The tool you used appears to be a browser plug-in, meaning it operates by scraping the Instagram website from the client side. Instagram (and most sites) forbid scraping tools like this.

For future reference: Don’t use 3rd-party scraping tools on your social media accounts. They will generate thousands of API requests and trigger bot detection. You obviously didn’t intend for this to happen, but from the company’s perspective it’s equivalent to bot/scraper abuse.

5. PSA: macOS updates often modify your System Preferences to violate your Privacy

Top comment by userbinator

Those who use Windows, especially 10, are all-too-familiar with this sort of thing (and worse[1]). The "excuse" is usually something along the lines of "the configuration file has changed format so let's remove it and revert everything to defaults". (Why would it change format? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21174947 ) It's certainly taught me to treat updates as basically nearly equivalent to a new OS install --- you have to spend the time to look through everything and fix settings that were reverted, or disable whatever new horrible thing was introduced. The ultimate goal, of course, is to gradually bludgeon the "rebellious" users into docile sheeple to control and extract more profit from...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139

...then again, similar things have happened on the Apple side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229249

6. Ask HN: What happens when someone copies an NFT onto another blockhain?

Top comment by mattnewton

I could be missing something big but to me the principle of nft seems to be to find a greater fool who will buy it, and the crypto part helps sell it to the greater fool.

For an ownership right to be meaningful, it needs to have some legally recognized meaning by your centralized authority. If I have a peice of paper that says I own a house or a car or whatever, it’s only useful because I can show that in a court and the people with guns working for the state will give it to me instead of someone else with a fraudulent claim. And if you have that, then the distributed crypto part is redundant... It gets more complicated with art; especially like the jpeg that was just sold at an auction. What does it mean to own that digital image? What value/ rights does ownership give me? But, fundamentally the ownership being tabulated in a blockchain doesn’t do much a piece of official looking paper doesn’t do, except sound more exciting. I think of it is as notarizing a title to something, but in a new cool way associated with getting rich off Bitcoin.

7. Ask HN: Is startup PTSD real and possible?

Top comment by tlb

I had to shut down a company and lay off a dozen people, losing most of my savings and several years work. Friends have experienced much worse.

These might not compare to the worst horrors of war, but they rank among life's agonies with getting divorced, or losing a parent. They can cause something like PTSD. It can take months or years to be ready to try something big again, and some people never bounce back.

Most people who haven't experienced that kind of failure can't appreciate how much it hurts. So it's worth seeking out people who have gone through big failures to commiserate with. There are lots of them out there. Few will post details online, because it's sensitive stuff that involves other people. So you have to talk 1-on-1.

8. Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

Top comment by krapp

Godot tutorials[0..2]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjT5sLMD7Kw&list=PLkhDORpHGm... Card Game Tutorial

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAbG8Oi-SvQ&list=PL9FzW-m48f... Make an Action RPG in Godot

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRHN_WEulLc&t=6906s Godot 3D: Code architecture course in a single video

And a roguelike in C with SDL and Lua that really just exists to scratch my itch for "low level" development

Also getting thread folding working in Anarki.

Also a HN client in Godot/C#.

Why no, I'm probably not actually ever going to finish anything, thank you for noticing.

9. Ask HN: What's the coolest YouTube channel you've found in the past month?

Top comment by anotheryou

Contraption Collection (41.4K): guy engineering balisong/butterfly scissors. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC66lPJ8u2N1i2Bh_TMaWagg

David Bennett Piano (356K). Music theory (or selected phenomena ofi t at lesat) with examples. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz2iUx-Imr6HgDC3zAFpjOw

DarkAero, Inc (29.7K): Three brothers inventing an airplane. Carbon fiber, planned to sell as a kit so it all has to become production ready. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPUZCBNrduwUsw_MTW-sDxw

saVRee (74.4K). More engineering explained in detail. Sadly very very slow, speed up the vids :). https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCosExgfjj-DhMJXnQd2Y4gA

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Cheating a bit (know them for longer, but they have to be underhyped despite their size):

Subject Zero Science (193K): super well produced bleeding edge science explained. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRXRbi80k0_vcIfgpOSerTg

The Thought Emporium (746K): Bio hacking and DNA editing. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV5vCi3jPJdURZwAOO_FNfQ

10. Ask HN: Is Your Spacebar Working on YouTube?

Top comment by mtmail

Three users submitted that to HN in the last 15 minutes, seems to be tracked at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1697551