AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: The book that did it for you in math and/or CS?

Top comment by arush15june

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

I failed the interview for an internship I really wanted in my 2nd year of engineering; I did get a shit internship that summer, but being really shaken at my incompetence, I took up this book, and quite honestly, it changed everything!

It truly sparked an interest in systems for me. The book helped me build a strong foundation in systems; Processes, memory, filesystems, networks, concurrency, synchronization and more. After reading OSTEP, it felt like an epiphany, and I charted a path for the rest of 2 years of college around distributed systems, systems research, and virtualization.

And the best part is that all this knowledge is free! Kudos to Professor Remzi and his work!

2. Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

Top comment by dimitar

The Clojure programming language was a single person effort in the first years and all of the design and implementation was done by Rich Hickey in the first version (2 years of work, not counting previous experience).

He was burned out from the state of commercial programming around the time and funded a sabbatical with his pension savings to work on Clojure. He had at least 3 attempts to bridge Common Lisp and the JVM or CLR runtimes and he had formed strong opinions on the need for Clojure to be hosted.

He kept up doing 90% of the work with the next few versions and even today it he calls all the shots on its development, it not being a "bazaar" style open source project. Of course it being open source anyone is free to write their own patches and make forks, but generally contributions are more likely to be accepted by the community as libraries, not language changes.

The whole story has been submitted here a few times and is quite interesting: https://download.clojure.org/papers/clojure-hopl-iv-final.pd...

3. Ask HN: Is anyone else genuinely scared that this is the start of WW3?

Top comment by TameAntelope

I would argue that you're getting sucked into the news cycle a bit more than is probably healthy, if you're feeling real anxiety.

Maybe turn off the news for a few days to relax? It may seem like Very Important Things are happening right now, but honestly, as someone who does watch the news pretty obsessively, you can construe basically anything into being Very Important.

All of the most likely outcomes for what's happening in Ukraine are not impactful to you in any real way. The very unlikely outcomes are more impactful, but specifically the odds of a nuclear war is vanishingly small. Not zero, and meaningfully larger than a week ago, but still infinitesimally small.

Take a walk outside, pet your dog/cat, hug a loved one, watch a funny movie. That's what I do when I get really wrapped up in the news cycle. :)

We're all going to die in 40-60 years anyway, hardly any of this matters.

4. Ask HN: Why do my online accounts keep getting banned?

Top comment by jph

Fidelity is the one to focus on immediately because it's the most serious-- by far-- and they have walk-in locations where a real account rep can help you. The downtown SF location near Market & 2nd has excellent staff in my experience.

Fidelity might turn up something about identity theft, or credit reports, or red flags, or similar. If so, you can handle these. If not, then ask a private investigator for help; a good PI has research tools to find problems then help you fix them.

5. Ask HN: Should I give up and get a job?

Top comment by NikolaNovak

My very brief, hopefully not too harsh 2 cents:

The description of what you are building sounds like a deeply technical, profoundly specific thingie for deeply technical people (with unknown market, and unknown business proposition at best). The fact you have not started with or outlined the problem it solves, the business need, or who is the customer in non-technical terms feels like a massive red flag to my naive mind. Bluntly, at best it sounds like a "tinkering hobby" - NOTHING wrong with that, unless you need to pay the bills :).

I would suggest getting a job in a place / position where you can observe the business flow, verbiage, get some mentorship, and not only pay the bills, but set yourself up for long term success should you desire to build something of your own again. I have no idea what your technical prowess is, but it sounds like you may have spent your years building stuff rather than building business, and that's where your growth opportunity lies. To put it another way "Selling and marketing are not my skillset" is almost a token of pride for us techies, but it is empathically not a successful mindset for a potential business owner. If marketing and selling are of no interest to you, and you just want to do the technical part, than accept your own preferences and priorities and go work with/for somebody who does prioritize and excel at sales and marketing :)

(all this of course based on reading three paragraphs you've shared and therefore as likely completely misread and wrong as not :).

Best of luck!

P.S. For what it's worth: nothing prepares and nobody can explain to you the MASSIVE transformation and upheaval of your life that having children will be:). If money is in any way a stressor, to you or relationship, or if this brings you anxiety, that's another good reason to settle that down before kids come along :>

6. Ask HN: Books to read when you transform from SWE into SWE Management?

Top comment by strife25

Everyone recommends The Manager's Path, but I don't think it's a good book to explain HOW to become a manager. The book's goal is to explain the career path of a manager from tech lead to CTO.

My #1 recommendation these days is "Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager" by Jamies Stanier. This book explains how to approach the work a manager is involved in and what you can expect from the day to day. Planning, hard conversations, performance reviews etc.

Also, look for general management books. Leadership is something all humans do – software management is about managing creative people. Some other books I recommend are:

• Creativity, Inc by Ed Matmull • Crucial Conversation • Team of Teams

For email newsletters, I recommend Software Lead Weekly (https://softwareleadweekly.com/) and Better Allies (https://betterallies.com/more-content/).

Lastly, I also write a blog called Build the Stage (https://www.buildthestage.com) about managing SWEs. I've got posts about performance reviews, team meetings, how to give feedback, etc. It'll help you out.

7. Ask HN: What is the oldest, still supported OS?

Top comment by nix0n

Possibly Burroughs MCP[0] from 1961, currently Unisys ClearPath MCP.

Not to be confused with Encom MCP[1], which was defeated by Flynn and Tron in 1982.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP [1]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/

8. Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

Top comment by legitster

I'm not sure if I share the same assessment. I am amazed at how robust your typical Wikipedia page is despite the chaos that goes into writing it. Given that it's not possible to make a version of reality that everyone is happy with, I think Wikipedia comes pretty dang close.

9. Ask HN: Can you help me remove the marks for the airstrikes from Google Maps?

Top comment by playpause

I don’t know if this is true. But to everyone dismissing the idea that a military would ever use Google Maps to co-ordinate, you may have missed some news stories about what a shitshow the first few days of the Russian invasion has been. Major breakdown of their digital systems and lots of improvisation.

10. Ask HN: Should HN require/encourage job postings to have a salary range?

Top comment by PragmaticPulp

If these were extremely specific job postings (e.g. "We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer II with 2-3 years of experience") then it would make more sense.

But most of the "Who is hiring" posts aren't job postings. They're literally answering the question "Who is hiring" and inviting a wide range of people to apply.

Requiring salary ranges would significantly elevate the amount of work that goes into answering the "Who is hiring" question and therefore would reduce the number of postings significantly.

The smallest companies and startups would be the most negatively impacted. Big companies could probably kick it over to HR and legal and have them spend a week drafting up a post that complies with all of the various requirements in different states, but the average poster in that thread isn't going to want to touch a salary requirement posting for something that isn't a specific job ad.