AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?

Top comment by alangibson

This is almost exactly my life, shifted by a decade.

The problem is that by 35 you can't get by on novelty anymore because you've seen some version of everything there is to see.

The worst thing you can do is pine for the good old days. They aren't coming back. And they weren't that good anyway. Your best times are ahead if you can successfully adjust.

What worked for me was putting down roots. I resisted it mightily at first because I wanted to stay mentally 25 forever. Now I see that getting married and having a couple of kids was the right thing to do. It forced me to become more flexible, more deliberate, more focused and have more stamina to do hard things

I'm a loner by nature, so I can't imagine where I'd be if I hadn't settled down. I just know it wouldn't be as good.

Once you've got those roots down, life will lead you to what you should do next. Maybe being a full time parent, maybe learning to sail, maybe more successful entrepreneurship. Who knows...

EDIT: I don't mean to imply that everyone needs a family. What's important is to start living for others to some degree. Hedonism has famously bad diminishing returns.

Some people choose to do lots of volunteering or switch careers to social work. There's lots of options.

2. Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

Top comment by Charlieholtz

I built a satirical social network called shlinkedin. It started as a way for me to learn elixir and make fun of thought leadership with my roommate, and has gradually gotten bigger. It’s all open source and a ton of fun to work on. Everyone is an alter ego (think Beff Jezos or Office Spider), and it’s hilarious to see how much people commit to the characters they create. And I can’t say enough good things about working with elixir / phoenix liveview. Definitely a steep learning curve for me (I’d never used a functional language before), but payoff is huge.

https://www.shlinkedin.com

3. Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?

Top comment by nickjj

A 2560x1440 monitor running at its 1:1 native resolution. The screen real estate improvement over 1080p is substantial. You get so much more vertical space and you can easily fit 4 side by side code windows at 80 chars. At 24" or 25" the PPI is also quite nice for reading text.

I wrote up a very big monitor selection guide at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo..., I try to keep it up to date by supplying alternatives to the ones I've purchased. Some of the monitors I recommended were $330 when I bought them but are now $500-700, although sometimes they come back in stock at $350ish.

I made the switch around 5-6 years ago and still think it was one of the biggest upgrades for general quality of life improvements when using a computer.

The only reason I haven't gone 4k is because using one at 100% scaling at 27" or less isn't really feasible due to how small the text is and using a 36" one to be able to comfortably view it at 100% scaling feels too big for using it in a normal desk environment. Personally I'd rather have the flexibility of 2x 24-25" 2560x1440 monitors, plus 120hz / 144hz 2560x1440 monitors are very abundant if you're into games (although you can make a strong case that 120hz+ is very noticeable and useful for general usage too).

4. Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?

Top comment by biren34

Okay at the risk of being offensive, all the comments before mine are made by overly intellectual fools.

I'm not usually so insulting--but as a father of two, if my 3 year old and 1.5 year old could only read one book, it would have to be "Oh, the places you'll go" by Dr. Suess.

Sorry to stomp on Das Kapital and its ilk, but if you get only one book, I can't imagine a better first message to convey than the endless possibilities inherent in each of us.

The world is your oyster! Even if you're old and have wasted most of what you were given. Especially today, in some of the most amazing times that have ever existed (even if you didn't draw the long straw). Today is SO much better than most of history.

5. Ask HN: How to raise funds for rare disease research?

Top comment by biols

I work at a medium-sized pharmaceutical company as a computational biologist. Diseases like KS sometimes come up as potential repurposing targets (or novel drug targets), but we get a LOT of pushback from finance / leadership because we're unlikely to turn a profit working on ultra-rare indications.

It is a deeply frustrating position to be in, wanting to work on these rare diseases and help this rarified patient population and not being able to, even though me and my colleagues are poised to do so. I often get maligned for being a scientist in pharma; laypeople often assert that I "don't want to treat cancer / rare genetic disease / etc; because then I'd be out of business." I can assure those reading that all of us DESPERATELY would like to work in these indications, and often times it's tragically finance that dictates whether we are able to or not. The system feels broken.

6. Ask HN: Great Blogs by Programmers

Top comment by asicsp

Bruce Dawson: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

+1 for Julia Evans already mentioned in another comment, who also has a favorite blogs post that may help you further: https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/04/09/some-of-my-favorite-blogs/

https://blogsurf.io/ has a huge directory, you could search by tags/topics and see if something interests you

Specifically for Python, I have a list of blogs here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/py_resources/miscellaneous....

Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski (more of a tech blog explaining things visually, interactively, etc)

7. Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

Top comment by riidom

Discord. I basically don't use it, avery few months I'd say, but I still hate it, because it drains all the good Q&A's from the internet and puts it into its chatlogs, with a mediocre search ontop.

Discord for gaming ramblings and chitchat may be okay, but I hate when software projects misuse it as a support channel.

Give me some forum instead, I know many ppl here on HN dislike discourse, I don't get it though, for me it's a great way to do a forum in a modern way. Can't perceive any UX issues with it (I do know the arguments, I just think they are not true, or much less of a hassle than claimed).

Maybe we need something like discord, but it should have a way to group a question and the following conversation including asking back and answers, and send that to a website where it appears like a forum thread. Basically just select it with mouse, right-click, pick some option, select some keywords for taxonomy and good to go. Should be 5 seconds of work after the person with the problem is satisfied. Yea that is something I would not hate I guess.

8. Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?

Top comment by ohazi

I don't work in the cryptocurrency space, but I've been following it since close to the beginning, and my personal conclusion is that yes, the vast majority of what gets peddled today is a scam, and we desperately need to find a way to nuke it all from orbit.

Reposting one of my earlier comments [0]:

Like many people back then, I also found the whole proof-of-work / blockchain concept to be interesting from a theoretical computer science / distributed systems perspective.

But these days, I can't help but think that we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first. Humans are the AGI, and we're going to happily use more and more energy to play this stupid game for as long as it looks like there's a profit to be made, even if the global outcome is to our own detriment.

If we want this mess to go away, we need to find a way to change the incentives globally.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120880

9. Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies

Top comment by jacek

I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult in my thirties and I have been taking medication for the last two years. I am also in EU.

I would recommend two things (YMMV). First, use ADHD to your advantage. People with ADHD have tendency to be inquisitive, but easily bored. Because of this I have become a jack of all trades. Although I have my specialty (ML), employers really appreciate that I also able to do Linux administration, create a web app and write a paper.

The second thing would be going freelance. I've done that last year, and it has been a blessing so far. I learned many new skills in new industries. Meeting new people and learning from them has been a valuable experience. The projects can be short enough not to get bored there. As a solid full-stack engineer you can earn better money, and have longer breaks in between.

10. Ask HN: What are some good tech magazines?

Top comment by ChuckMcM

My current subscription list includes;

Wired -- has slipped a bit, I worry they have lost the will to cover cutting edge.

Smithsonian -- a wide variety of topics, some tech, some archeologh etc.

Smithsonian Air & Space -- (now quarterly :-() which has good space technology as well as interesting stories of both military and civilian aircraft.

Science News -- which culls from a lot of journals and finds interesting papers to highlight (I will often follow up on an article by writing to the researchers for copies of their papers)

Popular Science, Popular Mechanics -- These have become remarkably similar in their content focus, that said they keep me up to date on a lot of commercial gizmos that I might otherwise miss in the noise.

QST (part of the ARRL membership) -- Which is all about Amateur Radio and so it hits a lot of interesting topics as I continue to explore software defined radios both in theory and in practice.

I use Scansnap scanner and paper guillotine to save articles that I find either particularly interesting, or I am curious if they will go anywhere. There are many interesting "over night" revolutions that appear years earlier as some sort of "wouldn't it be cool if ..." article. Indexing them is a pain, my indexing foo is weak :-).