AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?

Top comment by slightwinder

Oh, that's a fascinating wild post.

> Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.

They did not acquire usenet, they acquired Dejanews, a big usenet-archive and gateway to the usenet. Usenet itself is made of decentraliced servers. Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies had one in the early days. Each with their own groups. There also were public groups, maintained by some hive-mind-org or something.

Anyway, Usenet still exists, it's not dead, technically. But there is also not much alive either. File sharing on commercial servers seems to be very popular now, and the discusion-groups are receiving more spam than actual worthy content.

> Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused,

50:50 I'd say. There were many tech-groups. But pretty fast there were also an equal amount of non-tech-groups. And in terms of hyper-focus I would say, reddit has far more focus today than usenet ever delivered. It's more about finding a sub and filling it.

> generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does.

I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform. Yes, usenet had more nerds and expert, more technical capable people. But usenet was also significant smaller, as was the whole internet at the time. You had some kind of natural selection, as internet generally, and usenet specifically only lured very specific people in. With special interests, from a special age and culture. Today it's different, you have anyone from anywhere making a space. I'd say those time are lost forever. At best you get some overhomogenized communities, like this hackernews here. But if you look at reddit, discord, or web-forums in general, you will still find hyper-focused spaces. Just not necessarily with the kind of people your chemistry matches with.

2. Ask HN: Tesla is making us move or quit. Would I get severance?

Top comment by ericmay

(I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Speak to a lawyer.)

One thing I don't think you should do is quit. That will absolve Tesla of all unemployment responsibilities, potentially severance, etc. If they want to fire you, make them do it. I think you should save this email (print a couple of copies too).

You do not need to "make a decision" - just tell them you're happy to come to the office but due to personal obligations you cannot do so until January 2023 and leave it at that. Continue to reiterate this to Tesla. Tesla likely wants you to "make a decision" (and is pressuring you) so that you voluntarily quit and they don't owe you anything. Continue to do your job during your normal work hours. Respond to emails and instant messages. If you lose access to a system, send an email and ask to have access restored so you can continue to work. Document these interactions.

-edit-

Continue to work, even if they appear to "ghost" you. If you lose all of your system access, send emails and call phone numbers and document each of these interactions. Depending on how far you take this and how far things go, you may be able to recoup wages.

For example: (Thursday, June 9th 2022 8:55 am, called my manager's phone and asked if they could assist in restoring access to my email account).

Also, check out the HN Who is Hiring thread :)

3. Ask HN: Is there a TV on the market without “Smart TV” features?

Top comment by MR4D

You want to buy a “monitor”, not a TV.

For instance there is this from LG [0] or this from Dell [1]. Just do a search for “large 4K monitor” and you’ll find more.

[0] - https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-43-ultrafine-4k-uhd-monitor-...

[1] - https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-55-4k-conference-r...

4. Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

Top comment by rgovostes

I got an M1 MacBook Pro from work last year, and expecting to pay the price for being an early adopter, I set up my previous Intel-based MBP nearby in case I ran into any problems or needed to run one of my existing virtual machines. (I do varied development projects ranging from compiling kernels to building web frontends.)

In reality I have hardly turned on the Intel MBP at all since I got it. At all.

Docker and VMware Fusion both have Apple Silicon support, and even in "tech preview" status they are both rock solid. Docker gets kudos for supporting emulated x86 containers, though I rarely use them.

I was able to easily rebuild almost all of my virtual machines; thanks to the Raspberry Pi, almost all of the packages I use were already available for arm64, though Ubuntu 16.04 was a little challenging to get running.

I also had to spend an afternoon updating my CI scripts to cross-compile my Docker containers, but this mostly involves switching to `docker buildx build`.

Rosetta is flawless, including for userland drivers for USB and Bluetooth devices, but virtually all of my apps were rebuilt native very quickly. (Curious to see what, if anything, is running under translation, I just discovered that WhatsApp, the #1 Social Networking app in the App Store, still ships Intel-only.)

5. Ask HN: Examples of good technical writing?

Top comment by wkschwartz

James Gleick‘s “Chaos”[0] (history of chaos theory) and “The Information”[1] (history of information theory) are so beautifully and artfully written you might forget they’re technical. As close as (history of) science writing comes to poetry.

A lot drier but top marks for clarity: “Linear Algebra Done Right” by Axler.[2] It got me through both undergraduate and PhD math degrees. When something was confusing in a lecture or another textbook, I could always return to Axler for the most direct path from ignorance to understanding.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/... [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1... [2]: https://linear.axler.net/

6. Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

Top comment by ravenstine

Yes. It even happens at medium sized companies.

One answer is to accept the way things are at BigCo and to just coast along in your role, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Another answer is to work at an early-stage startup or a small non-tech company where you can move fast. The tradeoff there is lack of job security and lesser pay.

Don't ever expect to move fast at BigCo. It's a BigCo for a reason. By moving fast, you could upset the cash cow, hence the friction placed in front of you. But this can work in your favor. Excellence will not be expected of you at BigCo, and if anyone complains about why nothing is getting done, you just repeat exactly why. As long as the company is making money and you haven't made any enemies, the chances of you getting fired are slim to none.

IMO, you have to look at the big picture. If you ignore the friction factor, is life at BigCo so bad? Are your hours reasonable? Do you like your coworkers? Good pay? Learning to let go your frustration with how you think the company should be run may be the most favorable choice. Remember, all jobs suck, more or less. A year after you change companies, you will find things to hate about that one as well.

7. Ask HN: What is the best jurisdiction for internationally distributed teams?

Top comment by troydavis

Based on your description, your goals are predictability and low or outsource-able overhead. For those goals, the US is the clear choice. By far the largest pool of investors and employees are comfortable with US entities as counterparties. Plenty of companies will incorporate, prepare tax returns, and handle other compliance items (unemployment insurance) for relatively small fees.

As far as states, if you don't care, Delaware is probably the most common. Nevada and Wyoming have no state corporate income taxes, so they are also popular. More on that: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2019/03/04/the-... . To incorporate, check out Firstbase (https://www.firstbase.io/) or Stripe Atlas.

8. Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

Top comment by muzani

Preparation. Anyone who has done public speaking knows that it's a lot of work to be a good speaker.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson says you have to be 10x more prepared than you need to be. He calls it his Batman utility belt. You anticipate every question you'll get and do your research.

One interviewer asked Neil whether it was worth the $3B mission to Saturn. He brought up that it's $3B over 12 years and that it's how much Americans spend on lip balm. He researched the reporters, anticipated 10 different questions, and prepared to answer a question on cost.

For example, a very common question to rehearse is "tell me about yourself" or "tell me about your biggest or latest major project." A big company might ask your experience with processes - CI/CD, how you work with a team, when you've let the team down. A smaller company might ask about what you think about their product.

Don't memorize a speech or answer though.

A more advanced trick I learned from public speaking class is to get a topic, draft bullet points in my head within 5 minutes, then speak from those points. An example I love is "Do you think a sewer system or waste disposal system is more essential to a city?"

If you answer immediately, you will "ummmm uhhh" a lot. Learn to take a breather and buy time.

9. Ask HN: What are some mentally healthy apps to have?

Top comment by NalNezumi

Not apps but things that have helped me:

* remove All notifications from non-message & Calendar apps.

* condition everyone around you that you might not reply messages in time. (crucial to make above work) and ofc you have to follow that too.

* (if you have the financial means) get another device without ANY distraction what so ever, ideally disconnected from the internet (except maybe syncing files) For me it is a e-ink (android) tablet.

>I’m looking for some apps that people use and get genuine value out of. Can I learn something while I’m bored on the couch?

For me it's not about finding some app that helps me with this; I already have a backlog (bookmarks, pdf, tutorials) of stuff I genuinely want to consume yet I end up always scouring for new content, even with the gigantic backlog.

There's rarely any lack of quantity in content these days, quality maybe, but that's the fallacy that lead us to look for more/newer content rather than consuming the ones we've already identified.

So having a dedicated device for "consuming backlog" and minimizing adding more stuff to it have been a good change.

10. Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

Top comment by jaylaal

For a small but complicated project I got thrown into a while ago, the only way for me to understand it was to print out all the source directly, vertically tape together the pages for a single file, and then lay them all out on a huge table. Then I took multicolored markers and started physically drawing out the call chains. I then I sers-toi the system, and also found an enraging bug: the system widely used the variables "blah_name" and "blah_id", including in many functions' parameters. Except, in one case, blah_id was passed in as blah_name and thenceforth became known as blah_name.

I don't know if an automated visualization system is possible, but you'll have to understand the whole thing before doing so. Pen and paper was the most expedient solution for me at the time.