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Issue #141 - November 21, 2021
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: I feel so shallow and dumb when I see what other smart people are doing
Top comment by foobarian
I have these kinds of feelings a lot. It is hard to feel useful in this day and age of a ubiquitous globally connected society because for anything you attempt to do you have instant access to the top 0.0001% of the Bell curve who you have no hope of ever beating.
I find comfort in that I am not alone, thinking of all the peasants and regular workers across history who didn't amount to much either, but still mostly fought on and had a good life. Plenty of examples in immediate family as well.
And lastly, I found that there is one thing that one can do that is absolutely unique that nobody can match anywhere in the world, and that is - as corny as this sounds - kids. It may be a touchy subject or not for everybody. But raising a human with the best possible effort you can muster is an accomplishment at least one person will remember and value 100000x more vs. any world champion in solving IOI problems or writing clever functional code :-)
2. Ask HN: Best cars without too much digitalization?
Top comment by kgermino
They don't sell them in the US anymore, but I drive a 2019 Honda Fit and it's great. Very versatile (holds four adults, 8ft lumber, 36" doors, etc). The base trim is very tech-lite: bluetooth radio but nothing fancier than that, physically controlled hvac and chair controls, traditional key, basic LTMS (no dedicated chips in the tires, just a calculation based on different angular velocity across the wheels), etc. It's about as tech-lite as a modern car can be.
If you want a new car, instead of a used one, I'd try that same pattern: low end, low trim. Honda almost certainly sells a Civic without too many digital gimmicks, other automakers probably have the same.
It's a dying breed though, complicated "driver assist" systems are becoming standard or even mandated :(.
3. Ask HN: What are some great engineering blogs?
Top comment by msadowski
Here are some that I've been following why working on my newsletter (https://weeklyrobotics.com/). These will be mostly robotics oriented, and some of them might be inactive:
* [Robots&Chisel](http://www.robotandchisel.com/blog/) - a blog by Michael Ferguson, he did a very nice series of posts on restoring a UBR-1 robot and implementing ROS-2 on it
* [Mike Isted](https://mikeisted.wordpress.com/) - at one point Mike was writing quite many blog posts on making drones, including some offboard control and autonomy
* [The Interrupt](https://interrupt.memfault.com/) - in-depth blog about embedded programming. Really like their monthly "What we've been reading..." series
* [Electron Dust](https://www.electrondust.com/) - inactive, but a really cool series of blog post on making a ball bouncing robot
* [Casey Handmer blog](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/) - some very in-depth articles related to space
* [Modicum of Fun](https://jpieper.com/) - a blog post of Josh Pieper, who makes mjbots open-source motor controller
Other:
* [Julia's Drawings](https://drawings.jvns.ca/) - neat presentation of various technical concepts in programming. Unfortunately it's not active anymore.
4. Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
Top comment by uejfiweun
- COVID will continue to be a thing. Some new variant will come along and force everyone to lock down again.
- The fed will have no choice but to keep interest rates low. This means we will have another year of rapidly rising asset prices.
- Supply chain issues will get worse throughout 2022, massively fueled by US-China tensions and COVID related shifts in demand. Major inflation like we haven't seen since the 1970s.
- Crypto will undergo a major crash in 2022. It follows predictable, cyclical patterns, and we are nearing the end of the classic boom/bust cycle. It is unclear whether this will cause the Tether situation to blow up.
- Mainly due to supply issues, we won't get a taste of any AR/VR metaverse type stuff next year. There will be a lot of hype-laden news articles about it, but nobody will actually live this future yet.
- Nothing will happen in China with Evergrande or any of these other companies. Nor will China invade Taiwan (yet).
- The "lie-flat" movement massively picks up. People don't realize how widespread this sentiment is in Gen Z, which doesn't need excessive consumerism to be happy, all they need is a computer. It is unclear what effects this will have on the economy.
5. Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
Top comment by claviska
I haven’t worked in academia for over 10 years, but back in the day Blackboard would either purchase or squash it’s competitors with litigation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANGEL_Learning
https://www.zdnet.com/article/blackboard-wins-e-learning-pat...
They even sued the government to prevent reexamination of their patents.
https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2008/12/01/da...
As an open source author who was once interested in producing an LMS, this was a major concern that forced me to explore other fields.
6. Ask HN: Looking for a book on algorithms and data structures
Top comment by ioli
The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skiena
Amazing book. Very readable. I highly recommend it. The book has a section call "War story" at the end of each chapter in which Skiena shares his real life experience of when the contents from that particular chapter came in handy for him.
Go through it. You won't regret
https://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skiena...
7. Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?
Top comment by navaneethpk
We are using Docusaurus (https://docusaurus.io/ ).
- it is easy to configure/customise
- looks really great out of the box
- solid documentation
- fast
8. Ask HN: Why there are no Android mini phones?
Top comment by mdasen
> there is clearly demand for smaller phones, shown by the iPhone mini
The iPhone mini might be a counter-example. The iPhone mini has sold poorly and it seems like Apple is unlikely to continue it when they redesign the form factor. They'll keep it around while they keep this form factor since they've already spent the money, but I doubt that we'll see an iPhone 15 mini (when they're likely to come out with a redesign based on their 3-year cadence).
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/09/iphone-12-mini-low-janu...
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/15/iphone-13-mini-expected...
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/05/iphone-12-mini-sales-la...
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/22/poor-iphone-12-mini-sal...
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/30/apple-ends-iphone-12-mi...
> it seems that phone makers who usually copy Apple on everything, just skip this idea at all
Making a smaller device is difficult. You still have to pack in the same guts, but you have less space to do it. This is particularly acute when it comes to battery.
Android phones often need 50-100% more battery to achieve similar battery life as the iPhone.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17004/apples-iphone-13-series...
Here we see an iPhone 13 Pro with 3095 mAh battery getting 16.62 hours of battery life. The Asus ROG Phone 5 gets 16 hours with a 6000 mAh battery. The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra gets 15.91 hours with a 5000 mAh battery.
Android phone manufacturers need space for large batteries. The iPhone mini's 2406 mAh battery is smaller than an iPhone Pro, but it's less than half what a lot of Android phones are coming with. Android phones seem to have standardized on 5000+ mAh and that's more than double an iPhone mini's battery.
Then there's also the heat/cooling situation. With a smaller space, it becomes harder to engineer.
And if they create this smaller phone which might be harder to make, would customers be willing to pay as much for it? I was kinda shocked that Apple offered the iPhone mini for $100 less than the regular iPhone.
When it comes down to it, the iPhone mini probably nets Apple 1-2% of its revenue. Is that enough to keep it around? Maybe. But Android manufacturers don't have Apple's margins and they don't have Apple's volume.
The reason there aren't Android mini phones is that customers don't buy mini phones. Even if they say that they'd like a mini phone, they aren't willing to buy it. Every woman I know says that mini phones would be the biggest seller. Apple has tried that and it's only 5%. I love my iPhone mini and I'll be really sad if Apple gets rid of it. I don't see why people want giant phones. At the same time, I understand the engineering challenges of smaller phones and acknowledge that while I think everyone should want a smaller phone, they don't.
9. Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
Top comment by bennyp101
4,5,15
15 year old does his own thing, not a lot can be done there, but he's not stupid with it.
Mainly just playing xbox with his friends, watching other people play games on youtube.
Younger ones have a Fire tablet each, 1 hour a day limit (unless they ask for more) - mostly seems to be learning games/lego cartoons. Browser disabled, can only use stuff in their age range. They aren't allowed to watch youTube unless one of us is in the room with them (Too often it just changes to some random advert/show that is very different to what they were watching ...)
I have a separate Pi-Hole for the kids vlan which blocks gambling/porn/mining stuff as well as adverts.
Every now and then we all sit and play xbox/PS4 together - Disney games/(Train|Farm) simulators etc
Edit: The youngest also like to sit with me if I'm playing a game on my PC, and I let them use the mouse/keyboard to try and get them used to the control of it.
(I'm thinking of setting them up a Pi that is 'theirs' to get the mouse/keyboard control going)
10. Ask HN: What is the fastest way to ramp up on DevOps, k8 and GCP?
Top comment by holografix
I would look at these topics and in this order:
1. Containerisation - can you build a hello world web app in any language then Dockerise it.
2. Now break it into two containers - one is the original hello world but now it calls an API on a 2nd container that responds with hello world in one of 10 different languages. Just hard code this the point is that it’s now 2 containers for your “app”.
3. Create a Docker repository in GCP’s Artefact Registry and upload your images. Now remove them from your local Docker registry and run them again but this time pulling them from your registry on GCP.
3. Use Cloudbuild to build them.
4. Spin up a local Kubernetes cluster such as Minikube.
5. Read docos about K8s deployments and service types. Special attention to ClusterService, NodePort, LoadBalancer.
6. Deploy the first version of your hello world. Maybe try to point your YAML to the local registry then the one on GCP you created.
7. Create a service to access your app.
8. Figure out how to turn in and access (via proxy) the kubernetes dashboard.
9. Now deploy the 2nd version of your app. Learn a bit more about K8s networking, pod horizontal scaling, pod resource claims, kill some pods, etc.
10. Learn Skaffold.
11. Create GKE cluster.
12. Deploy same app.
13. Learn about K8s Ingress.
14. Get familiar with GKEs console.
15. Use knowledge of Skaffold to understand and use the brand new Google Cloud Deploy.
Edit: autocorrect “fixed” several things