AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?

Top comment by jbaiter

What worked for me was disabling HTTP3 support with the 'network.http.http3.enabled' key in about:config and then restarting Firefox. Seems like it's stuck in the 'SocketThread', repeatedly doing this:

  2022-01-13 08:20:53.075936 UTC - [Parent 4106991: Socket Thread]: V/nsHttp Http3Stream::OnReadSegment count=333 state=4 [this=7f6e295623a0]

2. Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

Top comment by del82

> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc).

Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0], making explicit what everyone understands, viz.:

"Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about 'proof of concept.'"

[0] https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/

3. Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?

Top comment by BlackLotus89

Gecko and servo are both not easily embeddable.

Servo isn't a finished rendering engine yet and the browser I saw that could exclusively use servo was not compliant enough and since mozilla fired the servo team there is no certain future for it anymore. Projects that tried to make servo embeddable are all dead and gone (see https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example for example)

So yeah last time I tried to use gecko I failed and didn't try again (years ago) nobody is willing to do the work and mozilla seems to focus more on other stuff...

4. Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

Top comment by Jugurtha

PostHog: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog if you want to deploy it yourself and https://posthog.com if you want the SaaS.

I was using Avodocs (https://www.avodocs.com) to produce a privacy policy for our MLOps platform, https://iko.ai, but they didn't have PostHog in the list for the "Analytics" section, and they assumed that doing analytics implied sending user data to a third party site or something.

I tweeted at them and they were lightning fast in reaching out and adding PostHog to the options of the the privacy policy template. It's really cool: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/144733750656389120...

5. Ask HN: What do you think of the Wordle guy not monetizing it?

Top comment by goddstream

What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized?

I don't like ads, on the internet or TV, and therefore refuse to inflict them on anyone who plays the little game apps that I release, otherwise I'd be a hypocrite.

Well done to Josh for having the humanity for just making a thing that people enjoy, and stopping there.

6. Ask HN: Career change for elderly UK ex-convict?

Top comment by bartread

I'm hiring software engineers now. I've enquired with our HR team as to whether your convictions are likely to disqualify you because I've never encountered this situation before.

I'm the CTO at Savanta: https://savanta.com/. My email is ${myfirstname}.${mylastname} (all lowercase) at the company's domain. My first name is Bart. If you're interested please drop me a line and, assuming there's a possibility of us hiring you, we can have a chat - either way I will certainly let you know.

Your age is not important and, in fact, may even be an advantage for many roles. I've worked with plenty of older people and value their experience.

As long as you're based in the UK your precise location is also unimportant as our software engineering roles can mostly be fully remote.

EDIT: I've heard back from our head of HR. We review all such situations on a case by case basis so you're not by default barred from employment with us. Money laundering might ring a few alarm bells if you were looking for a job in our finance team but does not pose any inherent issue with our technology team. Therefore, if you are interested in having a conversation, please do get in touch. Either way I wish you the best with finding a role!

7. Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

Top comment by DoubleGlazing

I have never got a job through LinkedIn, even though I get loads of contacts from recruiters - as many as 10 per week. The problem is that those contacts are poor quality. They are spammy as heck, basically mass emailing anyone who has a specific search phrase anywhere in their profile.

For the last year my profile bio has opened with the statement "Recruiters: Please tell me what your favourite colour is if you want me to respond to your message." Not one recruiter has actually done that. They literally do not even look at your profile.

8. Ask HN: I suck at math, where to start?

Top comment by upofadown

Chances are you actually suck at algebra. I went through this issue when I started electrical engineering as part of an overly elaborate midlife crisis. I got the book in the bookstore that was supposed to bring you up to high school level and just did all of the exercises. Then I did a whole lot of exercises for the introductory university math courses.

Basically it is something you have to grind at. Once you do enough problems all algebra will seem easy and you are done.

I am not sure that you actually need math for programming. Code is its own algebra.

9. Ask HN: Are We in a Bubble?

Top comment by abeppu

> yet we are in the middle of pandemic, millions get sick every day, inflation 30yr high

> is the economy is broken? should we be expecting a crash/crisis soon?

The question assumes that the real conditions on the ground are going to change the values we assign to stuff, but what if those are no longer meaningfully coupled?

Ford sold about 20% fewer vehicles at the end of 2021 than at the end of 2019, but its stock price is 2.5x what it was then. Ford is producing less actually useful stuff, but we pretend it's more valuable.

What if the economy is "broken" but not in a way which produces a "crash"? Prices are higher now, but many companies have improved margins; they're raising prices faster than their costs are increasing. Money is moving faster from the population at large to companies/investors. If the rich can keep getting richer by siphoning more out of everyone else, and the rich are the ones that own stock, real estate, invest in startups etc, then a lot of metrics can show those assets as increasing in value even if the median person's income or wealth are declining in real terms.

If the economies experienced by the rich and everyone else are decoupling, then I think the question is less "are we in a bubble" and more "will we enact reforms to decrease wealth and income inequality?" and at least in the US given structural political issues, I think the answer is "No."

10. Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

Top comment by jandrewrogers

Software quality has been increasing for as long as I've been in the business. However, the complexity, scale, and defect surface of software has been increasing at least as quickly. We've invested the systemic gains in quality to expand the capabilities of what software can reasonably do instead of polishing the software we wrote 20+ years ago.

This was the right choice in most cases. The software from a few decades ago was inferior in almost every way to the software we have now for solving the problems we need to solve today. Most software does not live long enough to be "high quality", or it lives so long that its original design assumptions become obsolete and therefore less useful.