AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?

Top comment by kukkeliskuu

What you have encountered is actually one of the necessary steps to really become "a senior developer". And congratulations, you have already passed the biggest part of that hurdle: becoming aware of the issue.

There are things that are fragile, things that break when they encounter a shock. Such as porcelain, when transported. There are things that are non-fragile, things that do not break when they encounter a similar shock. Like a teddy bear, when transported. And there are things that are anti-fragile, things that improve when they are exposed to a shock, like the immune system. If you are not exposed to series of smaller shocks as a child, your immune system does not develop properly.

So you need to develop an anti-fragile attitude towards criticism, in order to become a better developer from the criticism. If you do not learn that, you will be stuck at the level you are at the moment. You can do this at the meta-level as well at the same time: become anti-fragile towards handling criticism in general, and becoming a better human being from it.

The key to hacking yourself is to increase your awareness of your emotional state. When you become aware that you are angry, the anger is losing the grip it has over you. When you are angry, you are sometimes doing things you would not have done if you were not angry. (Sometimes anger is healthy, it may also be a signal to us that our boundaries have been violated.)

2. Ask HN: How do you approach a problem you are not sure has a solution?

Top comment by gms7777

One thing that my grad advisor used to emphasize is “failing fast”. That is, for every problem of the form “Is it possible to do X?”, there is a dual problem of “Can you prove it’s not possible to do X?”

Before spending far too much time on the first question, it’s worth it to spend a little bit of time on the second: what’s the quickest way to show that this can’t possibly work? Often this takes the form of looking for statements such as “If X worked, then Y would work too”, and then you go test Y. Just because Y holds, doesn’t mean X does… but if it doesn’t, you know X doesn’t.

It can feel like a bit of a diversion in the moment (“why am I wasting my time with Y, when I really care about X?”) but it has saved me months, possibly years of going down rabbit holes in my career. Likewise, it definitely helps with that anxiety you mention, because it means I at least have some motivation that my idea isn’t completely crazy.

3. Ask HN: Has anyone switched from a professional job to a more manual one?

Top comment by liamtuohyff

Software engineer for 12 years then got depressed about the job. Got into firefighting because I want to go to heaven and figured that with the 1 day on 2 days off schedule I can continue software on the side anyway.

Turns out just because you are a good software engineer, it doesnt mean you will be a good firefighter, and I need to dedicate a huge amount of time learning the job because software is a creativity focued job and Fire/EMS is a memory based one, and i have a bad memory.

The sleep is terrible, im an introvert and have a hard time getting along with others at the firehouse, but will say without a doubt it was absolute best decision ive ever made in my life. You will never see the facial expressions behind a computer you see in this job.

Im doing creative data analytics for fire depts to see how to save more lives, and thinking about making the swap to law enforcement just because i think my past as a software engineer can save more lives there. One example of my analytics is posting cops in areas where statistically it isnt likely for fire/EMS to show up in time, if the cop gets on sceane sooner, they can begin patient care sooner, and unltimaly increase rosc rare. You gotta be the change you want to see in the world you know?

4. Ask HN: I have 176 logins/accounts. How many do you have?

Top comment by akira2501

If I need to login to your site less than once or twice a year, "Forgot my password" is my password manager. Personally, I feel that the utility of me working to keep and maintain that information in a database for high availability is essentially zero.

As a result, I store very few accounts overall and checking out as "guest" hasn't been a problem of any sort. There's like 10 critical things that I feel the need to store the password on and they all use a hardware key for 2fa anyways.

For the two accounts that I absolutely can't lose access to, I just used the "Correct Horse Battery Staple" method and came up with two very long and secure passwords that I have no trouble remembering.

5. Ask HN: Is anyone hosting their own Jitsi server?

Top comment by BjornW

Yes, I ran & still run a Jitsi instance and a website which would connect you to one of 12 participating Jitsi server at random applying to our guidelines in the EU.

My goal was offering a low-barrier open for all way to connect with loved ones. During the peak of the Covid pandemic for many people it was easier to connect with colleagues than family members or friends. So I contacted a few sysadmins and public organizations of whom I knew were running Jitsi and asked if it could be shared via our public website. A few agreed and a few dropped by and wanted to help out. After a few days a commercial hosting company decided to sponsor us with one VPS as well.

Our idea was to connect the servers and use the API to select a server with the lowest load. In the meantime we used a randomizer...we've never used the API after all, the randomizer worked well enough ;)

People told us they've used our free service for yoga classes, library book reading clubs, hackerspaces & celebrating birthdays with grandma.

Overall I'm still very proud what we've achieved in a few days with some servers, opensource software and bit of work.

Many thanks to @saghul, 8x8 and all other people contributing to Jitsi. Thank you!

6. Ask HN: Suggestions to host 10TB data with a monthly +100TB bandwidth

Top comment by chaxor

I always assumed having a raspberry pi with a couple HDs in raid1 with IPFS or torrent would be the best way to do this.

Giving another one of these raid1 rpis to a friend could make it reasonably available.

I am very interested to know if there are good tools around this though, such as a good way to serve a filesystem (nfs-like for example) via torrent/ipfs and if the directories could be password protected in different ways, like with an ACL. That would be the revolutionary tech to replace huggingface/dockerhub, or Dropbox, etc.

Anyone know of or are working on such tech?

7. Ask HN: What are your favorite sci-fi books?

Top comment by kcartlidge

Multiple re-reads:

- Saga of the Exiles by Julian May, which merges science fiction with folklore/fantasy in Pliocene Earth

- Hyperion by Dan Simmons, excellent SF with a feel of the Canterbury Tales about it

- Neuromancer by William Gibson, plus the follow-ups (all the Sprawl) are very good too

- The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, about the eco collapse of the US in the 1980s (10 years after it was written) and which William Gibson called a "brilliant novel"

And a couple of guilty pleasures:

- Venus Equilateral by George O Smith, 1940s stories based around a three mile long space station at the L4 point in space, a bit like Babylon 5 meets DS9 in the era of vacuum tubes

- Necrotech by KC Alexander, a brutal and obscene body-mod cyberpunk dystopia (the sequel of which, Nanoshock, has a superbly offensive opening sentence)

- Halcyon Drift by Brian Stableford, about a corporate dystopia and a pilot who hooks up his body to merge with his ship (a bit blase now but less so then, especially as I had read far less at the time)

- Bio of a Space Tyrant by Piers Anthony, a 6 book series following the rise of a refugee to becoming the Tyrant of Jupiter

8. Ask HN: How does archive.is bypass paywalls?

Top comment by RicoElectrico

Nice try, media company employee ;)

/jk

9. Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

Top comment by nologic01

Its likely a combination of many factors.

i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever.

ii) The fact that the past keeps growing. The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational.

iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.

10. Ask HN: What is an A.I. chip and how does it work?

Top comment by nologic01

It may help your digging and search if you have in mind what those chips really try to do: Accelerate numerical linear algebra calculations.

If you are familiar with linear algebra these specialized chips literally etch silicon so as to perform vector (and more general multi-array or tensor) computations faster than a general purpose CPU. They do that by loading and operating a whole set of numbers (a chunk of a vector or a matrix) simultaneously (whereas the CPU would operate mostly serially - one at a time).

The advantage is (in a nutshell) that you can get a significant speedup. How much depends on the problem and how big a chunk you can process simultaneously but it can be a significant factor.

There are disadvantages that people ignore in the current AI hype:

* The speedup in a one-off gain, the death of Moore's law is equally dead for "AI chips" and CPU's

* It is extremely specialized and fine-tuned software you need to develop and run and it only applies to the above linear algebra problems.

* In the past such specialized numerical algebra hardware was the domain of HPC (high performance computing). Many a supercomputer vendor went bankrupt in the past because the cost versus market size was not there.