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Issue #137 - October 17, 2021
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
Top comment by hiisukun
1. S3 Standby/suspend support.
If your laptop supports that, you can close the lid and it will power ~everything except the RAM down (sometimes a USB port still charges). In 'new' laptops, including almost everything Tiger lake and Intel, S3 is being phased out for Microsoft's "Modern Standby", known as S0ix (or sometimes InstantGo). This is much more like a mobile phone, where it stays on but attempts to use as little battery as possible.
So, peripherals might shut down, but you might still be able to get critical Windows Updates or receive an important notification -- all while your laptop is unplugged, lid closed, in your bag overnight. This is pretty bad for heat, battery, and often not what you might expect. My new laptop uses about 15% battery overnight, just doing nothing.
In the future, perhaps this mode will work as well as S3 used to for battery life, but finding your laptop fans on while it's closed inside your bag and getting really hot is not fun. This applies to lots of laptops currently.
2. A good screen. Brightness that goes high enough to be seen outside (400, or more) - and it'll usually auto turn down the rest of the time to save battery. Hard to go wrong on a Mac, but really variable screen quality across other brands and models. You'll spend a lot of time looking at the screen.
2. Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?
Top comment by malwrar
Not a solo founder, but I do a lot of ops professionally. Unless you have a specific reason, I say it’s best to avoid complicated tooling until later.
k8s, ci, etc are all really useful and solve a lot of hard problems, but god are they a bitch to set up and then monitor, fix when something weird happens, secure from nasty people outside, patch when some update becomes necessary, resist the urge to “improve”, etc. This doesn’t include the time it takes to work these tools into your project, like k8s for example really requires you grok its model of how stuff it runs is supposed to look. There’s a reason entire companies exist that simply offer managed versions of these services!
If you’re using fewer than like 10 boxes and don’t work with many people, you can get away with spooky arcane oldhat sysadmin deploy techniques (scp release to prod hosts, run deploy script, service or cron to keep running) and honestly it’s pretty fun to just run a command and poof you’re deployed. Then you can just wait until it starts making sense to use fancier tooling (more load, more sites/DCs, more services, more people/teams, etc). Monitoring is always good to start with, for other stuff a good litmus test is that price points for hosted k8s & ops stuff will start to make sense, you’ll be paying in time in any case. Who knows, maybe when that happens something new will pop up that makes even more sense. Until then, reducing the amount of stuff you need to worry about is always a good strategy.
3. Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
Top comment by arcanist_union
The race for breakeven fusion is heating up, and it's exciting to see. That old adage about reaching breakeven being 'always 30 years in the future' is actually, finally looking more like 5-10 years. Relevant projects, all tokamaks: The largest ever fusion reactor so far which is being built now -- ITER in France, then there's MIT/Commonwealth Fusion's SPARC (they just demoed a type 2 superconductor magnet that developed 20T in its rather large borehole), China's EAST reactor and its recent 200+ million degree temperature and confinement time records, and the venerable JET reactor in the UK, which still holds the Q record of ~0.67 with D+T and they are prepping for another tritium run. These projects are some of the leaders in the field, amongst many others.
The stellarators are also fascinating projects though even more geometrically complex than tokamaks are. The Moebius strip-like twist allows them to impart stability to a ring of plasma in ways that tokamaks can't. The Wendelstein X7 in Germany and the Large Helical Device in Japan are the largest and most recent examples. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab has a novel stellarator design called NCSX, which interestingly uses coils and arrays of permanent magnets.
The advent of type 2 superconductors at scale will contribute greatly to this speed-up to acheive breakeven with tokamaks and stellarators. The much smaller and newer design MIT SPARC (which will use the more recently developed type 2 superconductors) might even beat ITER(which uses type 1 superconductors) to Q=1+!
4. Ask HN: A US programmer makes 3 times that of a EU programmer. Why?
Top comment by mmmmmbop
It all comes down to U.S. tech companies being much more successful, mainly because of the scale of the U.S. market. Any U.S. startup can immediately address a market of $21T (GDP) without any regulatory overhead or language considerations. This causes engineers to be insanely productive in terms of economic productivity. In comparison, Germany, the largest country in the EU, has a GDP of only $3.8T. It's much harder to scale across the entire EU, and even then, the entire EU market is still smaller at $15T.
The second question is, why do international companies like FAANG underpay their European employees compared to their American peers? The reason for that is the prevailing market wage. Any company will pay as little they can while still getting the caliber of talent they need. Given the lower economic productivity of engineers working in local tech companies, the prevailing market wages are lower, so FAANG don't need to pay as much to get the top talent.
5. Ask HN: What's the Point of Life?
Top comment by thinkingkong
There is no point.
It's up to you to decide what it is that matters to you but if you're looking for some universal direction then that will just lead to frustration.
If you're lucky and you have the resources then you're in a position to choose which I understand can feel overwhelming. I would just encourage you to consider the possibility that you've been given a gift and you should cherish it.
6. Ask HN: How do you memorize things you read?
Top comment by reciprocity
One of the most successful methods I've found for me is to rewrite the material. I haven't seen anyone suggest this yet.
By rewriting the material, you are recoding it. You are forcing yourself to think about the information differently: what you are doing is explaining it to yourself. This to me is far more effective than something like highlighting, because in rewriting that material, you are also clarifying your understanding.
7. Ask HN: How do you get a job as a software engineer if you've been cancelled?
Top comment by elil17
Talk to a lawyer before assuming you can’t sue. Police won’t do anything for you but in any common law country a lawyer can. You can sue the platforms hosting the images (it’s a hard fight but people have won it before) and you can serve subpoenas forcing platforms who are hosting the images to say who uploaded them (e.g. their IP address). If your income has been high before there’ll be a lot of money on the line and you won’t have trouble finding a lawyer to do it on contingency (you don’t pay anything unless you win).
Another option is to bury your name in search results. Create online personas for a bunch of other people with your name. Write a bunch of blog articles using your name. Get all the bad press on page 3+ of Google results.
You could apply for a job with a government - they often have rules preventing them from considering certain information in their hiring processes.
You could also just apply to companies which espouse the values the defamer said you articulated. Depending on your race/gender/any other factors this could land you somewhere you’ll be treated poorly, but a job is a job and someone on one extreme or the other of the political spectrum won’t care how horrible a thing you supposedly said. Of course, that means committing to this option, as the employer will taint your resume and limit future opportunities.
Top comment by kleer001
Senior Visual effects artist here. Hi! 20+ years in the industry, worked on movies from Final Fantasy The Spirits Withing to Disney's Enchanted and a whole mess of forgettable cinema and TV shows.
My axe is SideFx's Houdini. I've been in love with it since I first set eyes on it in 1998, but didn't use it in work until 2010. Until then I was using Maya. Yuck. It's now off my resume and I've left studios that made me use it. It makes my hands clench up in pain.
I've also used Shake and Nuke, After Effects, Photoshop, etc... But Houdini is really my jam. And it keeps getting better all the time. Best damn customer support in the industry, bar none!
Any questions?
My opinion on Blender is: Sure, if it fits your needs. It seems kinda quirky, but the community looks good.
9. Ask HN: Is Anyone Here a Professional Baker?
Top comment by JackMorgan
I ran a bread baking business for a year in suburban TX, and I can safely say that it doesn't matter how good you are: profit margins are really low in certain areas. People were extremely cost sensitive. Also they often didn't even like "fancy" bread, and would complain about anything different from just regular sliced grocery store foam.
I got pretty good, and was able to have some "subscriptions" back before that was a thing, delivering it to people at work, but in the end I was barely able to cover the costs once I'd factored in running the oven. I then moved to the northeast , where people care about bread a little more, but again are usually quite sensitive to convenience and price. The groceries here have average bakeries in store, and produce cheap reliable bread.
As for cake baking, that's a whole different ballgame. I've had a friend who tried that and she had a very hard time. People typically were extremely price sensitive, and were very hard to please. It reminded me of the tattoo business: a few rockstars charging 10k for art that gets thousands of upvotes on social media, then a mass of people doing $100 specials for customers who are never quite happy. Kind of a bummer, so my friend gave up after a year and doubled down on programming as a career. She now keeps baking firmly in the "hobby" realm, since while she loves it, she knows it's extremely hard to make a living doing it.
10. Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?
Top comment by 1_player
There's none, to be quite honest.
Chrome is spyware, Edge is spyware, Brave has too many crypto sponsor for my liking, Firefox is going off a cliff, Vivaldi is the definition of bloat.
The web browser ecosystem is frankly appalling, and it's so complicated it's impossible for new competitors to appear and improve the status quo. We just have to put up with it, and I am furious Mozilla, one of the shining beacons on that landscape, now is sitting idle redesigning the UI just to justify their existence.
I use Edge, with custom scripts to turn off as much phoning home as possible, and it's still bad.