AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

Top comment by kemiller2002

You need to see a therapist. Your problem is largely on your outlook on where you are in life. This is not meant to be a buck up or shut up comment, it's just that you can't improve your life until you change your outlook on things. You won't be able to move forward on things until you confront your feelings and accept your position to move out of it.

To answer your question, yes. My 30's were a mess with a divorce, a parent with dementia, a kid who had a unknown behavior problems they said was autism, and trying to keep my dad's business running all while maintaining a full time job. You can get better, but you need help doing it and have to actively accept you aren't all alone.

2. Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

Top comment by crazygringo

Not really, because I saw too many software companies go out of business because not enough people wound up upgrading to the next major version -- the ownership model of software can be awfully feast-or-famine for developers' income, it's a very tough/risky business model.

Generally speaking, I'm happy to pay a subscription because this way I get a steady stream of all the updates, and it's much more likely the company has a sustainable business model. And I don't have to agonize over whether paying for a major upgrade is worth it.

Not to mention that a yearly subscription is cheaper than buying outright, and I find that in some cases I no longer need the software, or now prefer to switch to a competitor. So I feel like in the end, a greater proportion of my money goes to the software companies who have actually continued to earn it.

By this point, the idea of "owning" software feels positively archaic to me, as strange as "owning" a music album.

3. Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

Top comment by dougdonohoe

Gotta say IntelliJ, which isn't just for Java. It's a great coding platform and I used it for Scala, Go, Python, Bash, Java, PHP, Perl, you name it. I know many people like to hate on IDEs, but IntelliJ (and/or its language-specific variants like PyCharm or GoLand) has great support for all the debuggers in the above languages. It has awesome search/replace. Being able to "drill down" in to code, including 3rd party libraries with barely any configuration is like magic. The git integration is phenomenal - I rarely get stumped doing anything in git and dealing with merge conflicts are a breeze.

4. Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

Top comment by johnmoberg

You should check out Modal! Does much more than just cronjobs, but super easy and cheap: https://modal.com/docs/guide/cron. They have an example with a simple web scraper as well: https://modal.com/docs/guide/web-scraper

From their pricing example:

> You schedule a job to run once an hour for 15 seconds. This job uses 50% of one CPU core and 256 MiB of memory. This job will cost $0.016/day for the CPU, and $0.001/day for the memory, adding up to $0.017/day, or $0.51/month.

5. Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?

Top comment by tayo42

I read "Crucial Conversations" this year. It feel like it has the potential to be life changing. Need more time to tell what impact it really has.

It introduced me to a new topic, which is analyzing social situations and apply problem solving skills to them. Something that never occurred to me for some reason. I now realize there are smart people working and having interesting thoughts and conclusions in this topic. So much more to explore. (Open to recomindations too!)

The book also seems to give more useful information about how to handle difficult social situations. I was pretty down on work and becoming cynical (still am though hah!) The advice I often get is stuff like be agreeable, don't rock the boat, dont say anything with passion ("corp speak"), to get ahead and get what you want. This feels bad to me. Often it appears in corporations the only people that are getting ahead are those types of yes people. I feel like this book gave me the tools to have differing opinions and express them successfully.

I also liked the book shows that a lot of these difficult conversations are actually in your control. Most people seem to have terrible communication skills I'm learning. Often I would write off a bad conversation as the other person just being an asshole or difficult or something. after reading this it seems like it is possible to handle a lot of these a lot better.

Disjointed thoughts off the top of my head, but I found the book pretty enlightening. Id recommend it if you struggle with expressing your opinions in emotional conversations.

6. Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

Top comment by jnky

I had a similar problem a while back where Google demanded a second authentication factor for an account that didn't have 2FA set. It asked for a previous password that the account must have had >10 years ago and I think the answer to a security question that I couldn't answer, because I always use cryptic responses to those and apparently didn't save this one way back when. My rationale was that I wouldn't need any of that, because I knew the account password so there would never be a need to go through account recovery.

Either way, I found a solution to that on one of those Google user support forums: I had to not try and log in to the account for approximately 40 days. After that, it'd let me log in with just the password again. This is apparently because Google keeps flagging the account of getting attacked and requiring a second authentication factor for some reason and the timer for that keeps getting reset after a failed challenge for one of the account recovery factors. After something between 30 and 40 days, I could log in to the account with just the password again.

7. Ask HN: What to do with a coffee plantation with about 8000 trees?

Top comment by Magi604

The reasonable answer here, unfortunately, is to sell it, for reasons that others in this thread have pointed it out.

The YOLO "hollywood movie"/NYT best seller answer, however, is to drop everything you're doing, go to Madagascar, spend some time trying and failing (with hijinx!) to grow the crop yourself. Your neighbors at first are distant and doubtful, but slowly you gain their respect. 15 years from today, tsingy brand coffee is a household name.

8. Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

Top comment by suprjami

https://www.learn-c.org/

If you have lots of time: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02383654

If you can't be bothered reading a whole book: https://matt.sh/howto-c

Exercises: https://www.codestepbystep.com/problem/list/c and https://exercism.org/tracks/c

Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM

Both r/cprogramming and r/C_programming are active, also full of lazy students trying to get people to do their homework. If you come by, describe your problem well with code. Say you're learning for yourself, not for school.

Together C & C++ is a good Discord if you prefer live chat: https://discord.gg/tccpp

9. Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

Top comment by PreInternet01

Yup. SCO OpenServer 5.0.something, for some partner's accounting department. Neither the OS nor the application software have been updated since the late 1990s, but if it works, it works, I guess... (to be honest: the application software is only used to run reports in response to requests from the legal department, but apparently still can't be shut down -- I ask once a year, next upcoming 'query date' in my agenda is March 2023).

This used to run on a Compaq Proliant server (huge noisy Intel 486 tower) until the end of the millennium or so, then was converted into a VM. First on VMware, then on Hyper-V, where it has been running comfortably on various hardware (Intel Dell PowerEdge, AMD SuperServer) since.

Access is the biggest issue, as the OS only supports telnet, and serial access. So ever since this has been converted to a VM, it runs on a dedicated VLAN (666, just to make sure nobody ever misunderstands the true evil underneath...), with an AD-authenticating-HTTPS-to-Telnet bridge (coded up in Visual Basic.NET using some long-long-deprecated libraries) connecting it to the outside world.

That VB.NET kludge was recently upgraded to .NET 6, in order to get TLS 1.2 support. This was surprisingly uneventful, and I'm pretty sure this abomination gets to live another decade or so.

Ah, yes, a career in IT... Always on the forefront of cutting-edge tech...

(Later edit to, like, actually answer the question: licensing costs are nonexistent: SCO is gone anyway, and we don't require any support/updates. Migrating to Linux might be an option, but is most likely going to be hugely painful, and the existing VM scenario Just Works for everyone involved. Security and such is not a real issue: only a handful of internal users have highly-restricted access via a proxy)

10. Ask HN: Can you recommend an “instant-switch” Monitor? Does one exist?

Top comment by atoav

HDMI Switching like that takes long because there is a EDID negotiation going on between the minitor and the input devices.

If you want to switch fast and often your best bet is getting an HDMI switcher that is basically always connected to the monitor and both sources and then toggles between the two. Beware of the supported resolutions and framerates.

A cheap hack would also be to connect your second source to the first using a HDMI Grabber (basically a HDMI-source-to-USB-webcam-converter) and open a fullscreen window displaying that. Then you could e.g. switch by switching virtual desktops.

Another post recommended rhe Blackmagic Atem, this should also work.