AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Why is everything changing too fast?

Top comment by ashildr

I’m your age and of similar profession with a known history of doing software development. Having been a nerd since very early age I come to the conclusion that

0) I am growing older and I may get more conservative 1) I used a lot of products that evolved to a local optimum but I see a lot of them being thrown back into a evolutionary state they already passed a decade ago. Maybe to eveolve better, but I have my doubts. 2) Everything is bloating now. Instead of a collection of good tools interacting I have now 3+ ways of opening an Excel-File someone shared in Teams. All of them are broken and Teams is broken, too.

I feel as if the excellent wrenches I have been using for 20+ years are growing tumors in the form of a can opener. All to please people who never used a wrench or a can opener before. And production of the original wrenches is cancelled. Over night.

Next time I need a wrench it may be made of felt, because fedoras are en vogue and the mad hatter has to sink venture capital into expanding his business.

(Funfact: In German you could make up the very valid and understandable, but still strange word “dosenöffnerförmige Tumore” )

2. Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

Top comment by ok_dad

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage.

Social media. I feel like if it weren't for these algorithms that prioritize "engagement" over facts and polite content, my country would be a bit less polarized. I think that social media will turn out to be like cigarettes and someday we will discover that it has an extremely bad outcome; at least how it's implemented today. I have come to enjoy HN a bit more lately, as I just don't engage with the trolls or the horrible people that have opinions I disagree with vehemently. The people I think are horrible, at least, because it's a personal opinion, and other's might view me as a horrible person. I have also learned that it's best not to judge someone by one or two views overall, here, and that helps. I wish more social media could be like HN and allow a diverse set of opinions, but ban the name-calling and such that really take things into a bad place.

Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. Perhaps it's the old man in me coming out, with a rosy view of yesteryear, but I think that the quality of things are just lower, in general. I do think that things "look nicer" and are more consistent, but at a lower level of quality. 20 years ago, I had only 5 or so choices for any given product, maybe a curtain rod for example (because I just bought some). Today I can go down to several stores and pick from hundreds of curtain rod designs that look really nice, but half of them break after a few years or less. I still have some shitty looking but sturdy curtain rods from 20 years ago, no joke. Electronics are worse in some ways, but faster and more complex, so maybe that complexity is the source of the decrease in perceived quality. I can say that computers are way faster now, and it's easier to do many things, but I have less freedom than I had with older computers for sure.

This is just about the end of my old man rant. Thanks for listening.

"The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt..."

3. Ask HN: Own .com for 7 years, a new company trademarked my name registered .NET

Top comment by bhartzer

You need to speak with a qualified domain name attorney, not just any attorney or solicitor.

As Director of a domain name protection company (and not an attorney) I can offer this:

If you registered the domain name before the other party files for a trademark, then there is no way you would have known that they would file for the mark. So, in most cases you probably don’t have to give up the domain name. It comes down to whether or. Or you registered the domain “in bad faith” or not. And again, how would you know they would start their business and get a trademark? You wouldn’t.

Are you in the same industry and compete with each other? If so, there might be an issue, but I’d your site offers different products and there would be no confusion between companies or websites, then there may not be an issue.

The best way to handle this is to get a domain name attorney to respond to their letter to you, essentially telling them to go away, and that you plan on keeping the domain name.

If you cannot afford an attorney, look for a company that offers domain name insurance or a domain name warranty, if you have an issue like this with your domain name, your legal fees to defend the domain are covered.

As you have described the situation here, you bought the domain before they filed for their trademark, and you’re not pretending to be them. So you should be able to keep the domain. They are just trying to “ strong arm” the domain away from you with a threatening letter. If they do sue you or file a udrp, defend yourself with the help of a good domain name attorney.

4. Ask HN: What Happened to Borland?

Top comment by stickac

This might provide some hints (or not): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg#At_Microsoft

"In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft. One of his first achievements was the J++ programming language and the Windows Foundation Classes; he also became a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow. Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the C# language. In 2012 Hejlsberg announced a new Microsoft project, TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript."

I can only speculate that lots of skilled Borland developers followed Hejlsberg and participated in creation of C# and later TypeScript.

5. Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals of CS

Top comment by nomemory

I had a good relantionship with Segdewick's books, before being turned off by Cormen a few times. They are less math focused, and overall have a beginner friendliness to them. They won't take you by the hand an explain things like you are 5, but nevertheless they are more easy to digest.

Also as a non-popular opinion in this current age, I recommend you to learn how to implement your algorithms in C, rather than an easier to grasp programming language. Even if you are probably not not going to program in C in your future career, understanding how memory management works will give you an edge later.

Also given C's loose style, you will also get some skills in organizing your code in a language that doesn't impose a lot of obvious constraints to the way you write your code. You will be able to build your own conventions, and evolve them once you get more skilled. Seeing what others are doing is also important.

Good luck!

PS: Don't fall into the macro trap, you will never get out. (inside joke).

6. Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

Top comment by ageitgey

YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate:

1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth.

2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates.

3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc.

4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money.

5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time.

6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform.

7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing.

And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc.

There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent.

It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.

7. Ask HN: How to be my own genetic disease researcher for my partner?

Top comment by nextos

If you truly think this is a rare disease, it's very likely that there's just one single causal mutation in your partner's genome. The easiest way to find that is to:

1. Search for variants in that genome where the allele frequency is close to 0 in a very large population e.g. https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/

2. Look into variant effects for those you prioritized in step 1 using https://www.ensembl.org/info/docs/tools/vep/index.html

Rare diseases are typically due to a coding mutation that alters the protein coding sequence in some significant way.

If you need help contact details are on my profile. I do this for a living at a university.

rsIDs are a minefield as they change often, there are synonyms and probably you won't have all loci properly annotated. Don't rely on that too much unless you really know what you are doing.

If it's not a rare disease, this gets quite more difficult. Also, depending on the whole genome sequencing platform you have used, many structural variants (e.g. deletions or insertions of large chunks of DNA) won't be easy to measure.

Other comments have suggested Promethease, which will give you a bit of help if it's not a rare disease (e.g. if it's an autoimmune one, it's good at imputing HLA and finding risk haplotypes).

My whole comment is a bit of an oversimplification, but I think these suggestions are a good starting point.

8. Ask HN: How are you taking care of you eyes?

Top comment by edmcnulty101

Women say they love mens eyes. So you have to work those out at the gym as well.

I do eyelid lifts and eye rolls. 3 sets of 20 6 days a week with a rest day on Sunday.

You can do these while on the treadmill and doing other excercise to increase efficiency.

You can also mix in some beta carotene into your protein shake to really maximize the eye pump.

9. Ask HN: Am I the only “unlucky” software engineer?

Top comment by defaultname

Often in situations like this -- where everything seems to be wrong with everyone else -- I remember that old Dysfunction Inc. post that had a tagline something along the lines of "The consistent feature of all of your dysfunctional relationships is you". It's a nod to the fact that often we need to stop and self-reflect instead of constantly enumerating the failures of everyone else.

I have limited insight into who you are, which is a post that was likely made in an irritated state and probably is a bit over the top, but various phrases in it are red flags. Having hired and managed for two decades, they sound irritatingly high maintenance.

Questioning why someone uses something is completely valid, for instance, and should never be met with resistance. Questioning in a derogatory or dismissive way (which if you're going to go on about "maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand" seems likely), on the other hand, is going to yield eye rolls and a complete lack of interest in humouring your question. Angling to be "smarter than thou" in a discussion or interview by trying to prove the existing team or group dumb in their choices will never, ever succeed.

We've all been there with the guy who sneeringly questions everything being done. It's incredibly boring.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, and it isn't personal. I'm just going on the limited bit posted.

10. Ask HN: Best self-starter resources to learn web design?

Top comment by code_biologist

Refactoring UI's videos and book are great:

https://www.youtube.com/c/SteveSchoger/videos

https://www.refactoringui.com/book