AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What's the coolest website you know?

Top comment by kertoip_1

Obviously wikipedia.org. Nothing better has been invented in 20-some years. I honestly feel relief when I research some topic and it has Wikipedia page on it, so I don't need to dig through some sh**y blogposts

Edit: I mean: it's one of the very few websites that actually provides sources of information. It's insane it's that rare these days. And most important facts are just placed in visible and easy to spot place, no need to dig through author's life story, thanks for subscribers etc. before getting to the point.

2. Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

Top comment by gottebp

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1].

It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer.

It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough.

I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in.

Do other founders feel this way? I wish I understood it better.

[1] https://steadymouse.com

3. Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?

Top comment by johns

This deserves a top-level comment. John Britton's NY Tech Meetup demo of Twilio[0] in 2010 is legendary. The CEO had been doing it in small groups for a little while, but the whole dynamic of it changed in such a large venue. Epitome of "show, don't tell." Hard to overstate what an impact it had on the company at the time (I think we were about 25 employees).

[0]: https://avc.com/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product/

4. Ask HN: Best beginner friendly linear algebra book?

Top comment by isaacimagine

I enjoyed Linear Algebra Done Wrong [0], to be used in combination with a more traditional textbook, like Linear Algebra and its Applications [1] (which has some good diagrams). I've already seen it mentioned, but I'd like to add that 3b1b's Essence of Linear Algebra [2] videos are well made and make for a good supplementary resource early on.

[0]: https://www.math.brown.edu/streil/papers/LADW/LADW_2017-09-0...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-Its-Applications-5th/d... — PDFs exist.

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...

5. Ask HN: Is it still conceivable to remain an anonymous developer nowadays?

Top comment by mathrawka

If you prefer to use a pseudonym, why not just register an LLC? There are services out there that will register your company and be your registered agent in states that do not require your name ever made public (Wyoming for example). These services also provide a mailbox that would work for anything you need.

You can then get a business checking account (Mercury works well) with your newly registered business.

You can then create a business account on Apple and Google (and anywhere else).

All of the public facing information will be your company name. If you want more details or help, just ask here.

6. Ask HN: What news subscription is worth it?

Top comment by rootusrootus

I once subscribed to NYT. Canceling required a phone call, and the guy laughed out loud at me when I refused what amounted to a nearly free 6 month extension. Made me so mad, they'll never have me as a customer again.

I also decided I would never buy another subscription to a news site that also has advertising. In my perception, ads seem to be predictive of low quality journalism.

Most recently I've had an Economist subscription. I like them. They don't make canceling as easy as subscribing, and I do hold that against them, though they aren't as terrible as NYT.

But honestly, I let that subscription lapse and I don't buy any news right now. I actively avoid it, in fact. My sanity and happiness needed a break from the drip-drip-drip of negative stressful world events that I have exactly zero control over.

7. Ask HN: Pros and cons of V8 isolates?

Top comment by mrkurt

The downside of v8 isolates is: you have to reinvent a whole bunch of stuff to get good isolation (both security and of resources).

Here's an example. Under no circumstances should CloudFlare or anyone else be running multiple isolates in the same OS process. They need to be sandboxed in isolated processes. Chrome sandboxes them in isolated processes.

Process isolation is slightly heavier weight (though forking is wicked fast) but more secure. Processes give you the advantage of using cgroups to restrict resources, namespaces to limit network access, etc.

My understanding is that this is exactly what Deno Deploy does (https://deno.com/deploy).

Once you've forked a process, though, you're not far off from just running something like Firecracker. This is both true and intense bias on my part. I work on https://fly.io, we use Firecracker. We started with v8 and decided it was wrong. So obviously I would be saying this.

Firecracker has the benefit of hardware virtualization. It's pretty dang fast. The downside is, you need to run on bare metal to take advantage of it.

My guess is that this is all going to converge. v8 isolates will someday run in isolated processes that can take advantage of hardware virtualization. They already _should_ run in isolated processes that take advantage of OS level sandboxing.

At the same time, people using Firecracker (like us!) will be able to optimize away cold starts, keep memory usage small, etc.

The natural end state is to run your v8 isolates or wasm runtimes in a lightweight VM.

8. Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

Top comment by ChuckNorris89

1) Execs complaining that it's hard to find skilled workers nowadays, while doing their best to make the company an unattractive workplace and not bother retaining existing workers who are leaving (including me soon).

Guys, it's not rocket science, just ask your employees what's bothering them. If people are leaving by the numbers, then you have some serious issues that need to be fixed, otherwise the churn will never stop. You'll hire new people, they'll see it's a shit show, and leave as soon as their relocation bonus expires.

This brings me no joy either. I'd much rather stay on one place for long, rather than go through various interview hazing rituals every couple of years just to escape the madness and get a decent inflation adjustment.

2) Western governments quadrupling the amount of money in circulation in the last two years, EU governments ignoring sane energy independence policies for decades, then blaming all the rampant inflation and soaring energy and real estate prices solely on the war in Ukraine, and telling the working class to tighten their belts and turn down the heating, while the upper class has never seen better days as their assets appreciated to new heights.

And the voters who keep voting for the same parties, time and time again, despite the corruption scandals and evidence of gross incompetence across the board, passing policies that work against the people's intersts.

"Exhales"

9. Ask HN: In these uncertain times, how do you handle anxiousness

Top comment by rockbruno

>I feel like we are destroying our planet, destroying our economy, we make poor people poorer, stir political extremes, we alienate the younger generation with social medias, there is war in Europe, everything is about politics when it should be about science and people...

I think my opinion is unpopular, but it shouldn't be, and perhaps the fact that it's unpopular is part of the reason why so many people find themselves in this situation.

It sounds like you need to speak to a professional and go to therapy. You're putting too much pressure into things that are completely outside of your control, and part of living a healthy live is accepting that you cannot control the universe and learning how to detach yourself from these issues.

10. Ask HN: CS grad who barely knows any CS

Top comment by frogcoder

Most of newly graduates of any subject don't know much about real world jobs. You are just one of many, but you care to ask about this on HN, that's something.

And a warm welcome to this imposter syndrome help group, we are always afraid of missing out on some tech. Accept it, everyone is missing out on most of the tech.

When I was studying CS in college, I always wondered why the classes don't teach us about the hot Windows programming thing. All we did were tiny console C programs. I realized that very late, CS classes are meant to let you know about the fundamentals. You probably won't use these skills directly at work, but you will have ideas about how the languages and systems work internally. That pays in the long run.

Just go explore and make mistakes, you will be alright.