AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?

Top comment by 65

I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone. Remote work destroyed my mental health.

All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a single person in real life.

I don't think people understand the plight of the young office worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a girlfriend, friends, or a life in this city.

I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life. But no, I had a remote job.

I got a new job that's supposed to be 3 days a week in office. Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to go into the office. And here I am, again, in the torture of solitary confinement.

I've been thinking about getting a new career, going into the trades. Anything that would allow me to have consistent interaction with other people.

I've become anti-technology, anti-society. I'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.

2. Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

Top comment by INTPenis

I've just become completely lethargic lately. And there's some sort of mental block stopping me from working. It's kinda insane because I can work on other stuff, but as soon as there's a simple task for my employer my mind just wanders off.

And when I really try to focus I just go blank in my head. Can't explain shit.

I'm trying to slowly get back on the pony just because I'm ashamed of all the salary I've collected for what little work I've been able to do.

Haven't done therapy lately but one thing that comes to mind is how futile everything is. I know it's a cliché but I'm almost 40 so this isn't your regular teenage angst "nothing matters", I thought I was past that.

It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids, I haven't found purpose yet. But the thoughts that come to mind is that this could all end tomorrow and wtf are we working for when we could be living?

3. Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

Top comment by tonystubblebine

I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222

It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it:

1. Lost our way on recommendations. When I showed up the company was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true and it gets even more pronounced if you pay people to game your recommendation system. I think we were boosting articles that made people think we were a site for clickbait. The canonical example for HN is "Why NodeJS is dead" by a new programmer with zero experience or context. Readers noticed this, but worse, so did authors. And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. As of December, about 30% of our recommendations are generated by a new system that is picking much higher quality articles that have been vetted for substance over clickbait. This is getting a lot better, rapidly.

2. Got lost thinking about the creator economy, when we should have kept thinking about doers. Distribution was our winning value proposition (on top of simple free tools). We were built to find and boost individual articles and that meant that anyone with something great to say had a chance to get their story boosted, often by a lot. This is my original background in publishing: working at O'Reilly helping them publish programming books that were written by programmers. For a lot of topics, personal experience trumps everything. Not to knock creators, but by definition full time content creation gets in the way of having personal experiences that are worth writing about. We are partly through fixing this and #1.

Those are the two most obvious ones. But then there's a longer list. We competed with our platform publishers by starting our own in house publications. Those are shut down now. We started but didn't finish a number of redesigns and so the tools didn't get better for a couple of years. We're past that now and are putting out table stakes features again and some innovations too.

What I told our investors was that there was a huge pile of shit to dig out of, but that it would be worthwhile eventually. And I still believe both that there is a lot more to do and also that it'll be worthwhile.

4. Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

Top comment by jaxomlotus

Here's the flip side: I was hiring (at a stealth vc-funded startup).

I reached out to every designer and coder laid off from Twitter and Amazon (one of my investors sent me a spreadsheet that those laid off folks added their contact info to).

I didn't receive a single interested response to my reach outs. Now granted, I'm sure they were bombarded with lots of startup offers and being picky what company/stage they were responding to, or were still in grief mode and not ready to start looking, or maybe (probably!) my reach-out finesse was lacking.

But I'm just pointing out that their are definitely companies like mine who are hiring and it's not all doom and gloom for laid off folks.

I ended up hiring via ads on LinkedIn and job posts on eng message boards.

Being real for a minute: There is definitely a perspective among hiring companies that regular lay offs are sometimes packaged alongside bottom performers, but I think that is something they would just do diligence on during an interview process.

5. Ask HN: How do you deal with information and internet addiction?

Top comment by labrador

I handle it by collecting quotes that tell me to knock it off. I've since started to focus on just the things I really care about:

    The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.
    ― Aristotle
    
    Knowledge isn't free. You have to pay attention  
    ― Richard Feynman
    
    "Information is not truth"  
    ― Yuval Noah Harari  
    
    If I were the plaything of every thought, I would be a fool, not a wise man. 
    ― Rumi
    
    Dhamma is in your mind, not in the forest. You don't have to go and look anywhere else.
    ― Ajahn Chah
     
    Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world, 
    but in the process he loses his soul.
    ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn
    
    The wise man knows the Self,  
    And he plays the game of life.  
    But the fool lives in the world  
    Like a beast of burden.  
    ― Ashtavakra Gita (4―1)

    We must be true inside, true to ourselves, 
    before we can know a truth that is outside us.   
    ― Thomas Merton

    Saying yes frequently is an additive strategy. Saying no is a subtractive strategy. Keep saying no to a lot of things - the negative and unimportant ones - and once in awhile, you will be left with an idea which is so compelling that it would be a screaming no-brainer 'yes'.
    - unknown

6. Ask HN: Are you tired of reading ChatGPT headlines?

Top comment by Agingcoder

No - to many people chatgGPT is science fiction come true. And for older folks in our (technical) world, it is, too.

I understand it's 'just' a language model, but it doesn't matter - that's not how it's perceived, and it is actually rather impressive anyway.

What you're seeing is just a manifestation of a rather major (sociological) event, and while I understand that the amount of hype is a bit over the top, to a large extent it makes sense.

7. Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

Top comment by FrustratedMonky

Engineers are always building things that are incredible, then turning their back on it as ordinary once the problem is solved, “oh that’s so normal, it was just a little math, a little tweak, no big deal”.

AI has gone through a lot of stages of “only X can be done by a human”-> “X is done by AI” -> “oh, that’s just some engineering, that’s not really human” or “no longer in the category of mystical things we can’t explain that a human can do”.

LLM is just the latest iteration of, “wow it can do this amazing human only thing X (write a paper indistinguishable from a human)” -> “doh, it’s just some engineering (it’s just a fancy auto complete)”.

Just because AI is a bunch of linear algebra and statistics does not mean the brain isn’t doing something similar. You don’t like terminology, but how is re-enforcement “Learning”, not exactly the same as reading books to a toddler and pointing at a picture and having them repeat what it is?

Start digging into the human with the same engineering view, and suddenly it also just become a bunch of parts. Where is the human in the human once all the human parts are explained like an engineer would. What would be left? The human is computation also, unless you believe in souls or other worldly mysticism. So why not think eventually AI as computation can be equal to human.

Just because Github CoPilot can write bad code, isn't a knock on AI, it's real, a lot of humans write bad code.

8. Ask HN: What Happened to Elm?

Top comment by josephcsible

In version 0.19, the core team hardcoded a whitelist into the compiler of which projects are allowed to use native code (which happened to basically be the core team's pet projects). This basically crippled the language beyond usability for everyone else. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17842400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510267

As for a replacement, I'd look towards Haskell. At a language level, it looks really similar to Elm, and it's been having a lot of work done towards being more practical on the Web lately, e.g., GHC 9.6 getting a WASM backend merged.

9. Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

Top comment by digitalsushi

The red tape is garroting us.

My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing.

At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and allow it.

We have weaponized Agile and Scrum - loathsome coworkers will write stories to write stories. Upper management is pushing us to mark "out of office" one day a week, but to then work through it, due to superfluous meetings dragging the productivity down.

A 4000 dollar, maxed out macbook pro boots up directly into a load average of 20.00 and upwards, as antivirus software scrubs every interaction and files open and even at rest deep on the SSD disk. Teams videos run at 3 FPS and lag constantly, making one look like they dont understand the conversation.

All of this, to dabble in code, the thing we're passionate to do, to try and help these places exist.

I didn't fall out of love with coding. I love it deeply, but there's an abusive guardian at the front door with a shotgun, oblivious that I'm here to help

10. Ask HN: Is anyone successfully self-hosting Firefox Sync?

Top comment by wasmitnetzen

Yes, I'm running it with the mozilla/syncserver docker image[1], but still using the hosted identity service. The setup procedure is a bit fickle, the error handling on Firefox' side is quite bad, sometimes the first sync times out when you have a larger data set, and you need to manually enable each sync type to reduce the size. But once it's up and running, I don't really have any issues.

I do hope that syncstorage-rs will become usable eventually and hopefully improve performance.

Note: contrary to your post, cookies are not synced.

[1]: https://hub.docker.com/r/mozilla/syncserver