AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?

Top comment by tetris11

[Borrowers: The Game]

You live as tiny mouse-sized humans existing with regular humans who should never know your presence as you occupy the walls and spaces in their home. Every day you must hunt for food, which involves collecting gear to traverse spaces (paperclip + string = grappling hook and rope, matchstick = torch, plastic bag = parachute) to reach places where food is stored (i.e. the kitchen - defended by the cruel cat, mousetraps - easy to find but deadly to use, others). There's also more than one of you with time, where you can find and recruit others from outside the house, mate to create a family base of increasing members (prompting you to expand more into the walls which will increase your chance of discovery by normal humans), and most importantly - coordinate scavenger hunts with your crew (think: one Borrower leads a climb and trails a rope down, allowing others to follow, where more people == more food for the base). Due to the high death rate, there are no main characters, just Borrowers.

[Extras]

- Riding or rearing mice? (they can lead you to the cheese and help dodge the cat)

- Stealing and riding a drone? (perhaps not such a rustic experience anymore)

- Turning your tiny wall cave into a thriving Borrower city complete with electricity and beer? (might require killing the humans)

2. Ask HN: Serious mathematics books that can replace a good teacher?

Top comment by motohagiography

Been mulling viability of hiring professors and TAs to give 10 day intensive math and physics lecture seminars backed by tutorials in beach settings. Sort of like taking the lectures of theoreticalminimum.com but on the road, where you can join a session with a small group of ~10 students in places like Barbados, BVI, Costa Rica, mostly outdoors. If the economics can work for for yoga, we can probably make them work for an amateur/programmer interest in math. No certifications, maybe just walk through some coursera and khan material as prep.

Want to teach geeky tourists calculus? If we made math tourism a thing, teachers in host countries could skill up pretty fast as well.

3. Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

Top comment by TameAntelope

You call it degradation, Reddit calls it "explosive growth".

The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users, users who could then be monetized.

The "useless answers" are wildly popular responses because people generally prefer to meme, not solve problems.

Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Why do people not behave how I want them to?" and that, my friend, is a question as old as time itself.

From the HN guidelines, but it also applies to Reddit:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob[0] illusion[1], as[2] old[3] as[4] the[5] hills[6].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633099

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852

4. Ask HN: What's your greatest enjoyment in life?

Top comment by srvmshr

I will be tad shameless & mundane: I don't enjoy working after 9-6. No great intellectual side hobbies to burn the midnight oil. For me, two things give a lot of bliss:

1. Watching a new interesting show or a re-run on Netflix, sipping a cup of coffee (or having a few drags of vape occasionally).

2. Going on a long aimless drive with country music, and stopping somewhere along the coastline to enjoy the view of sea or ships sailing at a distance.

I don't have kids or pets. Living in Japan. The horrors of everyday dealing with GCP/AWS & Japanese office regimen needs occasional quenching by solitude.

5. Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

Top comment by Hackbraten

Remember the early web, when people used to look at existing websites to learn how it was done?

“View Source” used to be a career-starter for a lot of people, but has become largely useless today due to transpilation, frameworks, and other abstraction layers.

I’d love to see a browser extension provide an “Explain Source” context menu item, which sends you to a pane in Developer Tools that shows:

- an estimation which frameworks the page is likely using (a little like the bar chart that GitHub shows for languages);

- a list of dependencies that the website is likely pulling in, with links to their respective homepage and GitHub page;

- their version number(s), if detectable;

- language(s) in which the website was likely written; and

- a small internal API so people can contribute recognition rules for more frameworks and libraries via pull request.

The target demographic would be students of all ages (starting at elementary school), and other people who’d love to learn about web development but don’t quite know where to start.

And who knows, bringing back that explorative, hands-on philosophy may well help a single person get into web development – maybe on the other side of the planet? – and I believe that’d already be worth the effort.

6. Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

Top comment by wayne-li2

If you want to work at positive impact companies, Khan Academy is one that comes up in my head.

But take it from me, someone who has volunteered for civic tech organizations and have participated in ground work for political campaigns. The most positive impact you could possibly make is money.

Political campaigns need thousands of volunteers. But someone who has no skills or education can volunteer. The supply pool is giant! But campaigns need millions of dollars in order to survive. It’s way harder to raise a dollar because in order to donate to campaigns the person usually needs to have discretionary income. And to move the needle financially for a campaign, you need to be fairly wealthy.

At the end of the day, maximizing your salary and donating, say 10k (2.8k direct + 7.2k via PAC) to a political candidate that you believe will make a way bigger positive impact than working for minimum wage or free for that candidate. Because your skills aren’t being used optimally. If you take a paycut from 300k to 60k, are you still comfortable making that donation?

Anyways, my personal mantra is to maximize income at impact neutral companies or positive adjacent. And then commit to donate a significant chunk of income to positive impact organizations. Don’t know if this helps or not.

7. Ask HN: How can I stop my inbox/wishlist/bookmarks/tabs/todos from growing?

Top comment by tene80i

Relax, be kind to yourself.

The finance analogy isn’t right, because debt is something you have to pay and these things, or at least most of them, don’t require you to do anything.

If you have too many emails to get through, yes, unsubscribe ruthlessly.

If your storage costs too much, yes, delete ruthlessly.

Now, accept that you will never make use of everything you’ve found. That doesn’t matter. That’s also true of libraries and the world in general.

So don’t worry about getting through them. You cannot.

Just remove anything that causes problems (incoming streams, expensive storage), and then enjoy your curated things at whatever pace you feel like.

You can’t finish it, ever. But that doesn’t mean it is a problem you need to solve. It means it’s a selection to taste from.

8. Ask HN: How worried are you about the upcoming recession?

Top comment by mikercampbell

I'm not sure how bad it will be, but I'm just tired. I'm tired of living through "once in a life time events" every decade or less.

I'm tired of the world insisting that every company must be growing in order to be valuable, and then when growth stagnates, people ditch it to cause massive losses.

Can we not just have moderate success? Can we create a system that doesn't self implode every so often? Can we create a system where making money at all costs (including the decimation of the planet, the wage-slave workforce, and the engorging and toppling of governments through cronyism) isn't the the default?

I have to remember that people are _generally_ good. I have faith in the next generation of leaders, thinkers, and doers. What will happen will happen, but I have hope that the youth who have seen wave after wave of "being at the brink" might be able to create a system where this isn't the norm.

That's a ramble, sorry. But it's just what I'm feeling. I have to ride this wave, take care of my partner and children, do what I can for others, and hope it ends soon.

9. Ask HN: Why XMPP failed and SMTP didn't?

Top comment by tetraca

XMPP was actually fairly successful. It was just embraced, extended, and extinguished by the major companies that provided services using it. Google, Facebook, and Atlassian all used XMPP for their chat clients. You could freely interact with all of their chat solutions using XMPP clients. XMPP support for each one of them went away one by one.

The environment outside of major providers was (it definitely is) kind of janky. If you can set up a server application it's not hard but it's not exactly easy to get started, or get people on it without handholding (from my own experience).

10. Ask HN: How do you sync your computer’s development configurations/environment?

Top comment by Apreche

Not just with development environments, but all computer configuration, I stick with the defaults as much as possible. Instead of changing the configuration of the computer, I change myself.

For example, let's say an app has a default keyboard shortcut I don't like. I won't change it. Instead, I'll just get used to it until it becomes muscle memory.

Now the default configurations are my preferred configurations. Of course, there are still a few things I change from the defaults. But since there are so few I can just configure them by hand, because how often am I setting up a new computer? Not very often. And there are so few config changes, it only takes a minute.

The only thing I have to actually sync is my vim config. It's a very small config, but it's still more than nothing. I just store it in a Git repository.