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Issue #216 - April 30, 2023
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
Top comment by dang
All: This thread has several pages of fabulous comments - to get at them, you need to click 'more' at the bottom of each page, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232&p=4
One of these years (maybe this year!) we won't need to paginate anymore and scrolling will be blissful again. In the meantime, sorry for the annoyance if you knew this; I just wanted to make sure everyone realizes how large and good this thread is.
2. Ask HN: Why is WebAuthn so slow to take off?
Top comment by rektide
Passkeys is a new FIDO standard that will let the private keystore be backed by the cloud. It was added to WebAuthn fairly recently. Having keys tied to specific physical devices was a terrible & frustratingly limited scheme that never had any hope. Now that there's something a little bit looser, there's some small hope WebAuthn starts to become interesting & viable. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/webauthn-conditional-ui/
Another huge challenge is that there are so very many ways for developers to use this tech. There are a truly humbling amount of scenarios & flows one can set-up. Many of the most direct paths continue to have the user already set up an account via regular email/password, so users still end up doing the same account management anyways. I'm missing the link to the wonderful wonderful guide I spent a couple commute rides reading, but it was one of the longest most technical pieces I've read in quite a while. "Introducing the WebAuthn API" is perhaps a reasonably ok substitute. https://medium.com/webauthnworks/introduction-to-webauthn-ap...
3. Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?
Top comment by suby
You say that Windows is a Kraken, but it's been on a downward slide in my mind. I don't think Nadella gets enough flak for what is happening to Windows and Microsoft's attitude towards respecting users / privacy in general.
Some examples that I've seen posted to HN over the past few months
* Microsoft Edge leaks browser history to Bing - https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-b...
* More ads in Windows 11 start menu - https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_sta...
* Absolute junk shoved into the Windows UI - https://thomasbandt.com/the-day-windows-died? https://birchtree.me/blog/the-windows-11-trash-party/ https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabl...
Windows is in a boiling frog situation. It's been slowly accumulating dark patterns and anti-features like mandatory online-only accounts, while at the same time losing quality of life features like the ability to move your taskbar or to not combine apps in the taskbar.
I should be using Windows today. I grew up on Windows, I learned to program on Windows, I had a very difficult and bumpy transition in getting off of Windows. But I had to leave their ecosystem because they have absolutely no respect for the user, and at this point I do not trust them. I want to reiterate that these are recent things, I'm not mad at them for what they did in the 90's here.
They aren't treating Windows as a serious tool for getting shit done, they're treating it as a data-mine and advertising opportunity.
4. Ask HN: How many websites, apps or notifications do you look at to “catch-up”?
Top comment by prepend
For me it’s:
-HN many times a day (probably too much to be healthy as it’s my default “I’ve got 60 seconds to spare”)
-Reddit used to be many times a day but since they turned off compact mode on mobile it’s maybe once a day using old.Reddit.com on my phone and really not like how I have to zoom to read stuff
-gmail as workflow for personal chores and work GitHub/GitLab, maybe 5 times a day
-discord once or twice a day to catch up with friends (this replaced old WhatsApp and Facebook messenger groups going back many years and there was a switch maybe 5 years when everyone stopped commenting on stuff publicly and moved to private rooms)
-I used to use reader and Feedly to bring everything into RSS but don’t have a replacement for it but have a lazy longing to recreate and test out different things. So I’m missing out on specific blogs and might check them every few weeks. I think this is a gap but things do come through to HN.
5. Ask HN: What's with the culture of suppression of dissenting views?
Top comment by rurp
I don't know, I read with `showdead` on and the vast majority of heavily downvoted comments are really bad. Lightly downvoted posts are more of a mixed bag, but honestly I think it's pretty fair overall. Nothing is perfect but this forum gets it right more often than any other popular one that I have spent a long time on.
6. Ask HN: How do I stop card testing attacks on my Stripe account?
Top comment by nibbleshifter
I thought the whole point of using Stripe was they handle thia shit for you.
7. Ask HN: Why do some electronics use 6.2 volts DC?
Top comment by tempest345
Around 6.3V was a standard voltage for vacuum tube heater pins (the part that emitted free electrons via thermal emission inside the tube to be available for the electrical fields to accelerate).
My guess would be that historically 6.3V supplies made forvacumee tubes where commonly available when transistor based electronics where created so it made sense to utilize them. Works quite nicely for the typical 5V circuits as a "rough" input voltage to be feed through a LDO regulator, for example. And so it just stuck.
8. Ask HN: An OS for people who hate changes?
Top comment by loxias
I've been using the same debian stable setup, mostly unchanged, for almost 20 years.
The most recent "new bullshit" I had to learn was figuring out EFI/GPT enough to boot onto a new thinkpad. If you prioritize stability and reliability over features, debian stable might be right for you as well. :) I'd avoid any whiz bang GUI layers. I have a simple window manager which runs xterms, which can then run firefox and emacs.
The next time I imagine being forced to make a change is to move to Wayland, but that's years away.
9. Ask HN: Is "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell still a recommended read?
Top comment by gjadi
I read it last year and I think it's still relevant.
I had planned to write on the topic. In his book, Steve McConnell advocates for PPP = Pseudocode Programming Process
Basically, he says you should outlines the structure of your code first, before writing your actual code.
IMHO this is even more relevant in the age of AI assisted programming. Pseudocode Programming Process is becoming Prompt Programming Process.
The process is the same, it's just the tooling around it that has evolved.
10. Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
Top comment by ranger207
The rule of thumb is that a filesystem needs about a decade or so[0] to iron out the bugs and become reliable enough for regular use by regular users. Btrfs is 14 years old which means it's old enough to start getting adopted, but changing the default filesystem in a distro is not a particularly quick process, since most people simply don't care about most of the advanced features. Plus since data loss is such a feared problem, any anecdotes about it will cause a massive hit to the filesystem's reputation, regardless of the anecdote's validity. Right now Fedora and OpenSUSE use btrfs by default, likely because they're upstreams of enterprise distros where users will use those advanced features, so Red Hat and SUSE want to make sure it's as solid as possible before potentially rolling it out to paying customers.
Personally, I'm a happy user of btrfs installed by default by Fedora and haven't had any problems with it, but I'm also not using any of the advanced features.
[0] Source: casual conversation and poorly remembered anecdotes