AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023?

Top comment by r_hoods_ghost

1. Deglobalization accelerates as the Bretton woods organisations become increasingly irrelevant and trade moves to being bloc and region based.

2. The web continues to fracture into separate Euro, Sino, Russo and Americano nets due to increasingly different views in privacy, surveillance, freedom of speech etc. SV companies are slow to pick up on this.

3. Tech layoffs in the Bay Area intensify. When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.

4. The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.

5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.

6. There is another crypto mini boom lasting at least a couple of months that sees Bitcoin double in price. This ends when it turns out that yet another exchange was being used as a personal piggy bank.

7. The UK continues its long, slow slide into economic ruin, driven by the general incompetence of its political class. (admittedly you could have made this prediction most years since 1945 and been right,but still)

2. Ask HN: What's a build vs. buy decision that you got wrong?

Top comment by nodoodles

> Have you bought something that you had to scrap and build yourself anyways?

Yes, but that hasn't meant it was a mistake -- 'buy-then-build' can be a great strategy. Often the 'then-build' never happens, but going into a decision with the mindset readiness for 'then-build', you can learn from existing products, hit their limits and understand what is the custom version of it you'll need in your context. Recent examples are on smaller scale, though - using a library that speeds work up early, hitting its limits, and replacing or extending with DIY that does less things but goes deeper for my use case.

> What are services/products that you built and wished you had bought?

The most annoying recurring version of this has been being just a little too early - building something, then discovering a few months or years later a public product that does the same, but better. At that stage, rebuilding to use has low ROI, and one ends up maintaining a legacy monster. There was a period when public offering of supporting backend infra was maturing, ie things like secrets/configuration management, logging, observability, monitoring, a/b tests, a bit earlier even basic web frameworks (ie building anything on PHP before Laravel came out meant you built your framework first; iirc worse than the frontend framework landscape in 2022).

3. Ask HN: What is your new year's resolution?

Top comment by kingkongjaffa

I feel, and I think it's a common thread for my generation, that we have grown weary of drinking from the information firehose. The internet has become like high fructose corn syrup for our brains. We're fat with it. So I want to consume less (low quality information) and create more.

I like the idea of "note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work"[1]

My resolution this year is to read more and to write more, and to write better. With the main purpose being to "think better".[2]

More than any other blog I go back to Andy Matuschak's. A close second is Buster Benson's[3].

[1] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes?stackedNotes...

[2] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z7kEFe6NfUSgtaDuUjST1oczKKzQ...

[3] https://buster.wiki/me/

4. Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

Top comment by hikingsimulator

One book stuck out to me this year: Blindsight by Peter Watts.

What happens when humankind on the verge of post-scarcity suffers its first alien contact -- truly alien contact. A team of engineered humans is sent to meet them.

What really stuck out to me is how the content of the book could be applied to a potential AGI -- an alien, intelligent entity that we can't really understand and still have to interact with. I can't go further without delving into spoilers. It's really good. But, also, very bleak.

5. Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

Top comment by johnklos

I run my own email.

I have my own physical servers, that I built and tested myself, that I'm colocating. They handle both incoming and outgoing, and I've been doing it for so long that there is no previous reputation for the IP addresses I use.

In spite of how vehemently some people, Reddit's /r/sysadmin, as an example, want you to NOT host your own and use issues like deliverability as reasons, it's really not hard at all. It's super simple to refute all the major points they make, because they're so painfully weak that anyone that believes them may actually not have the aptitude to do it, and therefore shouldn't be telling others to not do it.

1) The primary issue brought up is deliverability. If you don't have a static IP, or you don't have control over your reverse DNS PTR, or the reputation of your IP is poor, then pay a company to smarthost your outgoing mail through them. It's a few $ a month, and poof! Problem solved.

2) There is no problem 2! Incoming email is incredibly straightforward. Even if you're on a residential network that blocks incoming port 25, you can pay for a VPS or something like that on a public address and port forward to your mail server.

Why make a distinction between simply hosting your email with a VPS and doing this? Well, one of the primary reasons for people hosting their own email is being able to possess your own email - that is, your email isn't sitting unencrypted on a server that you don't control.

I've even run an email server in my car while driving across the country, just to show how easy it is. It uses tinc to forward a public address and had no issues with email in either direction :)

6. Ask HN: Why is the Wikipedia Foundation's begging tolerated?

Top comment by jkrauska

All the other top websites [1] either are selling my information (Meta) , exist to show me ads (Google), or I pay monthly for (Netflix).

Wikipedia runs one of the busiest websites in the world with a staff much smaller than any of those other sites. Like any company -- there's going to be priorities different than mine and waste.

But I'm ok being asked to chip in for what I get.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites

7. Ask HN: What is your favorite front end state management solution?

Top comment by wotamRobin

Principal eng working with 3 teams on a ~500k loc React site here. After lots of experimentation, we’re just using React contexts.

- Redux is cool but there’s so much decoupling that it gets hard to read the code. New hires would take too long to start, TS types got crazy, it was too much.

- XState is very good for state machines… but you barely ever need that level of control. Most of the time understanding it ends up being overhead. We’ve had maybe one good case for using it in about 10 years.

- React’s contexts are minimum overhead and work very well with “jump to definition” functionality and TS types. You can choose to use a reducer if you want, or skip it if it isn’t appropriate.

YMMV of course. This is just us.

8. Ask HN: Who else is working/on call over Christmas?

Top comment by atdrummond

Best of luck with the generator.

I'm on a hotline, volunteering, for people who might be feeling extra mental stress due to the holidays and might do something they regret. I decided not to risk the travel to see family with the storms and I figured I might as well try to help others who might be dealing with some of the same tough emotions that often plague me this time of year.

9. Ask HN: How to get better at writing?

Top comment by glitchc

Reading good writing is the first step towards improving your written output. Observe the techniques that resonate with you and incorporate them into your style. It will feel clunky at first, like any new exercise, but over time will become more fluid and seamless. Reading also builds a large vocabulary, which is essential to achieve fluid prose.

Read the best authors for the intended style, be it story-writing, critical analysis or business communication. It all depends on the style of writing you would like to master. It's theor techniques that you want to emulate and make your own.

Write to evoke an emotion. There must be a purpose to your writing. If to inform, guide the reader to an ah-ha moment. Your writing will be memorable if the reader feels something.

Cut fluff. Every word must have a purpose. Less is more.

Good writing is about refining your own voice. Write as you speak, speak as you write, and both will improve.

Ultimately, have fun with it. Experiment with different styles. Writing is an art, it requires creativity. This must be cultivated and grown. In time, over many poorly crafted drafts, a unique voice, all your own, will emerge.

Best of luck!

10. Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

Top comment by everythingabili

EXACTLY!

Back in the days when "small pieces loosely joined" was a thing, I thought Delicious was very, very cool. (I use Diigo (free) now which is the closest I could find to Delicious when it went bad). I needed something that isn't account dependent and works on web and mobile, so matter where I am browsing content I can save a reference to it. Hypothesis looks interesting but imo is more geared to textual annotation than tagging.

Bookmarks are so bad, that they don't even keep your most recent bookmark in a folder at the top.

But what we lost when we lost Delicious was so much potential. For example...

* people were exploring using tag clouds semanticly, to sort of translate how two different people categorised things (you say "cool", they say "hot" etc)

* I think NASA did collaborative tagging where you merely tag interesting things to keep an eye on with nextYear, fiveYears or TenYears then produced a Horizon Report of the overlaps.

* People were making news readers that found interesting items based on your tag cloud and items adjacent to those tagged in your cloud.

* A tag cloud was a quick "Contents page" for any blog out there... You could glance at one and see if this content was for you.

* They were emergent, as in, they evolved over time - so much better than most peoples' idea of categories, or how categories are used in the real world.

I think that despite all the potential in bookmarking/tagging people weren't ready to pay for it - and if you're the kind of person who squirrels lots of things away for later, in a sensible manner, you're going to find a way to do it somehow.

But bookmarks/tags etc could be so much more.