AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

Top comment by jsolson

I think I can count the number of kernel changes I've submitted on one hand, but I work on core virtualization that involves a lot of pretending to be hardware and (these days) a lot of poking directly at hardware registers.

I would say James Mickens sums things up nicely in "The Night Watch[0]." For example, you mention debugging with logs and metrics -- this snippet came to mind:

     “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you checked the log files for
     errors?” I said, “Indeed, I would do that if I hadn’t broken every
     component that a logging system needs to log data. I have a
     network file system, and I have broken the network, and I have
     broken the file system, and my machines crash when I make
     eye contact with them. I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE
     DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS. My only logging
     option is to hire monks to transcribe the subjective experience
     of watching my machines die as I weep tears of blood.”

2. Ask HN: What is with the new URLs on facebook.com?

Top comment by groffee

Firefox recently started stripping out tracking URLs [0] and the most prevalent one is Facebook with it's ?fbclid= so it looks like they're encoding it straight into the URL now to bypass that, Medium does similar also.

[0] https://www.engadget.com/firefox-can-now-automatically-remov...

3. Ask HN: What do you code when learning a new language/framework?

Top comment by mikercampbell

Pokemon games!! All of the algebra is solved, and you can dig as deeply as you like in any direction you like.

Graphics? Check. And simple, top down, tilesheet or character maps work just fine.

Battles? Check. You can leverage anything from purely functional, object oriented, websocket, long polling, SQL, you name it. Whether you use 3 elemental types or flesh out everything from multiturn, semivulnerable, exp/leveling, it's all up to you.

Wanna just build an REST/GraphQL/gRPC API? Or a UI? PokeAPI is an opensource database of nearly all game data from moves, items, and species.

Pokemon is an endless, any-scope, extremely documented, opensource-rich field of exploration.

4. Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

Top comment by kradeelav

- We have the accumulated knowledge of the entire human history at our fingertips and can avoid a large chunk (not all, obviously) of the pitfalls that befell our ancestors. maladies that basic sanitation eradicates, old deadly diseases like leprosy, polio, being eaten by lions, mass starvation ... those are things that are not a Thing in developed countries, and a lot more developing countries than before. The amount of people being lifted out of critical poverty worldwide over the last 50 years is another wonderful example.

- obviously we have new pitfalls our ancestors didn't ... but when was this not true for the human species? there's always been adjustment periods to new social changes and technology. The printing press created one heck of an information upheaval that changed power structures of institutions and nations, and yet it's considered a net good now.

- On a more individual scale, the human brain for some has a tendency to always need to worry or be anxious about Something. The ancients were simply anxious about other things. This has been a thought that's helped me from negativity getting in the way of the potential positives I could accomplish.

- "if it bleeds, it leads" is one of the truest quips about the news I've heard and seen. Simply logging off of news and focusing on local connections will do wonders for the mindset. What you see on TV does not equate to reality.

And lastly, some may feel this quote is overly twee, but the older I get the more it rings true:

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. '" - Mr. Rogers

5. Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

Top comment by rossdavidh

So, one thing to keep in mind with all of this is that, if it was a small, fast-growing startup that got acquired, there was zero chance of it staying that way even if it did not get acquired. Being small and fast-growing for very long, is by definition impossible. In many cases, when a smaller company gets acquired by a big one, it's because they have hit the point where the founder of the smaller company realizes that their company's infrastructure and culture aren't going to work at a large scale, so they would rather offload the task of turning into a big company to somebody who already knows how to do that. But, even if they hadn't, they usually would have had to turn into something that looked a lot like the big company they got acquired by, anyway.

6. Ask HN: What is best way to do hands-on practice for system design?

Top comment by vishnugupta

You get hands on experience at a place

1. That has a functioning app

AND

2. Business is growing rapidly bringing more customers than the system can handle.

In other words you learn on the job by getting your hands burnt. I got lucky to have joined such a startup. Learnt a lot, from fixing DB queries, designing asynchronous order processor, using CDN etc. I worked on scaling up the full stack including stuff like connection pools.

So your best bet is to join such a startup. You will learn a lot by handling real user traffic. And also scaling isn’t homogeneous. For example, you make different trade offs scaling a search application Vs scaling a payment processor. So business use case and business domain does matter.

7. Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

Top comment by andyjohnson0

1. Bought a couple of personal domains and signed-up with Fastmail. Configured Fastmail to periodically pull emails from my legacy gmail account. I use the Fastmail webapp on desktop and their android app on phone/tablet.

2. Removed google analytics from my personal website/blog.

3. Uninstall Chrome on desktops and disable it on Android phone/tablet.

4. Use Firefox with Multi Account Containers add-on so that I am by default signed-out of google unless I need to do specific things, which are sandboxed in specific tabs.

5. Paid for Kagi search and set it as the default search provider on my desktops and devices.

6. Migrated a few legacy accounts from Google oauth sign-in to email/password.

Still to do:

a. Migrate my calendars from Google to Fastmail. For various reasons I need to be able to share calendars on Google and I haven't had time to sort this out.

b. Migrate off Google Photos. I take a lot of pics with my phone and google photos is just so convenient. I try to only keep six months of pictures on google and archive the rest to a machine that I own.

c. Google Movies/TV. I have a fair amount of bought content, mainly because its convenient to stream on a tablet. Not sure what the solution is there.

d. I still find google maps useful for a few things - particularly as a way to discover opening hours for businesses. My car has a built-in, non-android, GPS so I don't use google maps for driving.

e. I still have an android phone and tablet, and I'm sure they're still phoning home about me.

8. Ask HN: How would you bootstrap a telco?

Top comment by stevenjgarner

Having deployed extensive optical networks both aerially and underground throughout Iowa, my recommendation would be to locate a community that would value your contribution as a starting point. I would then deploy physical plant for specific customers overbuilding the fiber optics (e.g. if the customer wants 12 fibers, deploy 48 selling 12 and keeping 36 for your own future use).

In my experience VERY few people in the optical networking space understand how to engineer a municipal fiber optic network - they invest thousands of dollars per customer when it can be done with best practices for well under $1k per customer (let me just say that 802.1w RSTP is your friend). You need to combine all the different ISO networking layers into a SINGLE business model (ie. physical plant and Ethernet/VLAN circuits all by the SAME engineer not by different departments, otherwise things get unnecessarily over-engineered).

Even more important than the technical engineering is the financial engineering. Once you understand you will never produce more capital from selling customers than it will cost to provision those customers, you need to consider more advanced financial engineering models - the one that worked great for the cellular industry and several optical networks is commercial paper. Find a lawyer that REALLY understands commercial paper - then every contract signed by a customer actually IS cash and does not need to be converted to cash. It's one of the only ways I know of releasing capital invested into physical plant.

Good luck!

9. Ask HN: Is it possible to get an 18-year-old to spend less time on the computer?

Top comment by drooby

I was once this kid..

So from that perspective I can say… the internet and video games were very much filling a void in my life. It took spiraling into deep depression and thoughts of suicide to realize I needed to make the change myself. I suspect any degree of forceful action wont work sufficiently.

Find out what this kid wants out of life, actually get to know them, something my parents never really did. And this might mean asking to play video games with them.

Once you know what they want, what they truly want, you can help provide the tools and guidance for achieving those things outside of a television or computer screen.

Making the effort to actually connect with the person before suggesting an alternative lifestyle is key.

That being said, this person is a young adult and many people live happy lives spending lots of time in front of a screen.

10. Ask HN: How do you deal with managers/customers questioning your estimates?

Top comment by Arubis

- Call it a forecast, not an estimate.

- Supply confidence intervals. (“50% likely it’ll be done by date X, 90% likely by date Y.”) Estigator.com is great for helping construct and illustrate these.

- Demonstrate understanding of client/customer/manager priorities, frustrations, and necessary tradeoffs: show compassion and supply suggestions for where scope can be narrowed if needed.