AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What are you working on?

Top comment by yjhoney

I'm writing a book that teaches people coding using JavaScript, the book that takes you from 0 (no coding background) to getting a job as a JS engineer.

2 years I ago, I had a hypothesis to see if anybody could learn coding if they tried. To test that, I reached out to random people with no coding background, most of them from underprivileged backgrounds. I figured they have fewer opportunities and are more likely to stay through the entire program. 17 of them stayed.

As of today, 14 of them have gotten full time jobs (which was a high win for them, going from minimum wage to 130k+ per year). The remaining 3 of them are starting interview prep right now. I'm going for a 100% success rate.

Everybody learns at a different pace. The slowest student took 2 years and the fastest around 6 months (I actively made them stay around to help out the slower students for as long as I could).

I'm putting together a curriculum of all the pain points people face when learning how to code and come up with a comprehensive book. It will be free to all. The current rough draft is here: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f...

To test the effectiveness of the book, I've just recruited a new student (my dad), who spent the last 30 years doing manual labor and barely knows any English. So far, so good.

2. Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

Top comment by jader201

I started the "Who wants to be hired?" threads over 5 years ago [1] after dang giving his blessing on it [2], and was super excited that it led to the job [3] that I still happily hold today.

I really wish these threads were more active -- and received more upvotes -- relative to the "Who's hiring" threads, as it seems like the signal to noise is so much better, and also seems like the success rate would be quite a bit higher.

I'm not sure if a) people aren't aware of the threads, or b) people don't have confidence in their success rate.

But as someone whose career -- and as a result, life -- got a big boost from it, I highly recommend anyone considering a move to try posting there. Seems like it could only help!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685170

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682189

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7833251

3. Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?

Top comment by doomlaser

Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, keeps a cool reading list with tons of books, color coded by the impact they had on him. He's clearly a voracious reader on a wide range of topics. I happened to find it yesterday and found tons of books and authors to add to my Amazon wishlists: https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf

If you're interested in games / startup stories, I have to recommend Masters of Doom, about the early days of id. It's thrilling and exciting to read: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult... - It's also in the news that USA has ordered a pilot for a TV adaptation. Here's hoping it's good!

4. Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

Top comment by ajross

Unpopular answer: pure fashion.

There's nothing wrong with object methods (that's 100% pure syntax vs. a function call) and an implicit "this" scope for symbols (which is just a limited form of dynamic scope[1]). They don't make code hard to understand. OO can be abused to produce bad designs, of course, but that's not an indictment of its syntax.

Non-syntactic aspects are maybe a more involved discussion. For an example, I personally think traditional OO lends itself very nicely to runtime polymorphism. And this is something that more modern languages have really struggled with (take a random new hacker and try to explain to them virtual functions vs. trait objects). Now... polymorphism can be horribly abused. But, it's still useful, and IMHO the current trends are throwing it out with the bathwater.

[1] Something that itself has long since fallen out of fashion but which has real uses. Being able to reference the "current" value of a symbol (in the sense of "the current thing we are working on") is very useful.

5. Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder

Top comment by yoz-y

I feel that even if everybody who cared went on strike, the difference in daily visitors would probably be in the error margin.

I think most people who really care have already left the centralised social media or scaled it down to the point that a non-strike day is an exception.

I do not disagree with the message, but I seriously doubt that this will have any effect.

6. Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

Top comment by obarthelemy

- Widgets on the actual home screen, no swiping required. Every app has widgets (except Skype !), so you can have whichever info you need most right there

- true browser, true addons. Unlike iOS, Android doesn't limit 3rd-party browsers to reskins of the OS' Web engine, but allows desktop-like from-the-ground-up browsers. You can get Firefow and put uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger on it.

- sideloading w/o rooting. Exiting the Walled Garden (not recommended) doesn't require compromising the whole security setup by rooting, flasing a new ROM.... just activate Sideloading from the developer menu, and live only semi-dangerously. Reins in Google's censorship.

- Regular File management, incl. internal Flash, SD card, Network, and Cloud. On of the first apps I install is Asus's File Manager so I can easily move stuff around my LAN etc.. Also makes it easy to use different apps for similar content: I've got my podcasts, audio books, and music in different folders and a separate app for each.

- Plenty of storage: if you get a phone with an SD slot, you can have oodles of storage for dirt cheap, which is very handy if you wander out of cities.

- much more choice about everything: all apps including Phone, Keyboard, Mail, Browser, Text, Homepage (Launcher), Maps,... can be defaulted to any 3rd-party app. This makes for a steeper learning curve (I prefer HERE MAps over Google Maps and Waze; Nova Launcher; Google Messages ...) Only Notifications and Settings are hard-linked to the core OS.

- You get a choice of hardware. You can spend $500+ if you want to or need really good pics, but the $150 Redmi Note 7 or Realme 3 Pro are fine phones. The Note even have FM Radio, an IR blaster... no NFC though.

7. Ask HN: What are some fun projects to try out on a spare Linux file server?

Top comment by whalesalad

Check these out:

- reddit.com/r/homelab

- reddit.com/r/homeserver

I'd say the content on /r/homelab is about 33/33/33 distributed between

1. Masturbatory massive rigs at your home that consume thousands of watts of power but look cool and its fun to say you have a 10-node vSAN cluster next to your dehumidifier.

2. People who like to pirate content like its their job - setting up Plex and all the newsgroup/torrent apps to auto-pirate shows and movies. For a 13 year old, that can be cool. For an adult who clearly has the cash to spend on non-essential items and in a world where time is money: I do not get it.

3. People with an old PC running Kubuntu for a remote dev / FTP environment who want to do more cool shit with their gear!

So as long as you enter the homelab reddit knowing this, you will have a better experience there.

I definitely second Pihole. I might suggest experimenting with virtualization: so you can turn that single computer into 5 or 6. Tools like Proxmox or even just installing KVM and managing it with (https://virt-manager.org/). You could Also look into running your own installation of Gitlab (although due to the footprint of the install, I might suggest keeping that isolated to a virtual machine)

8. Ask HN: Who Here Is Working to Fix the Environment?

Top comment by jacknews

Our family has recently changed to a flexitarian menu, cutting beef almost entirely, with many meals being vegetarian, and others substituting some of the meat with potatoes, tofu, green jackfruit, mushrooms, etc. Far from a hardship, we've been delighted by the much more varied new menu.

We've also bought some land that had been tropical forest, but was recently cleared for plantation purposes, and we've bio-chared it with waste charcoal scraps from the prevalent nearby charcoal kilns (about 3 tons of carbon sequestered, for the 0.3ha), and replanted it with a sort-of permaculture mix of various flowering fruit trees (we'll add some beehives in a couple of years), and longer-term restorative hardwoods.

We also bought another 5ha, waiting the same treatment, and we've encouraged others to do the same. 2 takers so far, for another 3ha. Biochar is recommended as 1-5kg/m2 so 1ha means sequestering 10tons of carbon

Assuming the science works (and it seems from online sources that it does - we'll see), I think this kind of biochar carbon sequestration could be quite a big help, and it's a very low-tech solution, which also improves yields, so doubly effective for forest.

Of course this is perhaps less-good than if the forest had just been left intact, but what to do?

9. Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

Top comment by patmcc

Here's the problem: go ahead and ask a bunch of different people what they want/expect their shuffle/random button to do and you'll get a bunch of different answers.

1. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, with replacement (same song twice in a row is possible).

2. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, without replacement (each song is removed from the list once played).

3. I want it to "seem" random (don't play too many songs by the same artist in a row).

4. I want it to be random, but predictable (same "random" ordering if I start the playlist again).

5. I want it to play my favourite songs more often than my lower-rated songs.

6. I want it to play my less-commonly played songs more often than the stuff I listen to all the time.

So: what exactly do you want when you say random?

10. Ask HN: Best office chair for home office work?

Top comment by ken

The best chair I ever used was a kneeling chair. It encourages proper posture in a way that no other chair I've seen does.

Beware, there's a huge spectrum of quality for this (or any other) type of chair. Kneeling chairs were also some of the worst chairs I've ever sat on. "Kneeling" is one feature which chair designers can use to make a great chair, but it's not a magic feature that makes any chair design great.