AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

Top comment by bbotond

Yes. Before the update, when its avatar was still black, it solved pretty complex coding problems effortlessly and gave very nuanced, thoughtful answers to non-programming questions. Now it struggles with just changing two lines in a 10-line block of CSS and printing this modified 10-line block again. Some lines are missing, others are completely different for no reason. I'm sure scaling the model is hard, but they lobotomized it in the process.

The original GPT-4 felt like magic to me, I had this sense of awe while interacting with it. Now it is just a dumb stochastic parrot.

2. Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

Top comment by silisili

My neighborhood. When we moved in we sat out front every evening, and made small talk with every single person who walked by. Some were caught off guard, some kinda just waved and moved on, but most stopped to talk.

What's interesting is that people who had lived in that neighborhood nearly 20 years together had never talked, and met for the first time as both stopped to chat at nearly the same time.

Then we started with small gifts, usually food because my wife cooks exotic things for people to try. Now we get random gifts, usually food or fruits or some flower or plant.

Now we have little get togethers inviting each other, text to ask if need anything from the store, etc. And all it took was being willing to sit outside for a couple hours each night and say hi.

3. Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

Top comment by wokwokwok

There is literally no alternative.

You’re stuck with openai, and you’re stuck with whatever rules, limitations or changes they give you.

There are other models, but specifically if you’re actively using gpt-4 and find gpt-3.5 to be below the quality you require…

Too bad. You’re out of luck.

Wait for better open source models or wait patiently for someone to release a meaningful competitor, or wait for openai to release a better version.

That’s it. Right now, there’s no one else letting people have access to their models which are equivalent to gpt-4.

4. Ask HN: Who got hired from HN?

Top comment by nickfromseattle

I met the CEO of a startup a local Hacker News meetup.

I joined his company as employee #8 in a (non-technical) role I wasn't qualified for, in an industry I didn't know existed, leveraging a technology I knew nothing about. I didn't have any accomplishments but a few failed startups, but he thought the hustle I demonstrated was all I needed to be successful in the role he was hiring for.

Fortunately he was right.

1. We scaled to 200 employees in 4 years bootstrapped.

2. I got to work on problems you only get access to 15 - 20 years into your career

3. Very cross functional role working on sales, biz dev, product, legal, support.

4. Raised a few rounds and got acquired for a lot of $.

5. The company was acquired 6 years after I left, but I had 10 year options that had less than 6 months left before the expiration date.

The company experienced a lot of growing pains around year 3/4 that caused me to leave (along with some mistakes I made along the way), but I only look back at the experience with fondness.

Absolutely incredible experience.

5. Ask HN: What other news feeds do you read besides Hacker News?

Top comment by aendruk

Global:

- https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/ (1/day)

Local:

- https://publicola.com (20/month)

- https://washingtonstatewire.com (1/month)

- https://southseattleemerald.com/category/news/ (20/month)

- https://www.seattlebikeblog.com (20/month)

- https://seattletransitblog.com (10/month)

- https://wasmoke.blogspot.com (2/month)

- https://washingtonbeerblog.com (1/day)

Tech:

- https://weeklyosm.eu (1/week)

- https://this-week-in-rust.org (1/week)

- https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix (1/week)

- https://discourse.nixos.org/top (5/day)

Plus about 100 personal blogs (3/day) and update feeds of e.g. software releases, OSM activity in my neighborhood, etc. (6/day).

6. Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit?

Top comment by Gualdrapo

I feel like the HN hivemind likes to bash Reddit for some reason, but for me it has not been that bad. I've got small work gigs on there, discovered places where I've got to learn about stuff that I like, being updated about what's going on in the FOSS world, discover new music, etcetera.

Yes, some people in there would like to drag you into absurd and nonsensical arguments, but even in here where I do not participate that much have fell into that situation. I went into Reddit after 6 years of using Facebook which was much, much worse. Reddit made me ditch Facebook once and for all.

Not that I agree even in the slightiest about the changes they are about to make, but I'm yet to find an alternative where I could find all of the aforementioned but with a more sane support. I don't see how usenet can bring all of that all of a sudden, nor see myself using something like Mastodon and become a social media addict.

7. Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

Top comment by austhrow743

There will be local businesses with fairly aggressive marketing. Tons of billboards, on buses, local newspaper, etc. Should be easy to find because they're the ones advertising everywhere.

Call them up one by one and say "hey I run [project] that everyone has been using lately, would you be interested in having your business name listed as a sponsor? It'll be shown on 1/4 page loads which is currently 5000 times a day. $500/month".

You'll know in like an hour if there's any advertising potential.

8. Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

Top comment by mindondrugs

> this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like portugal/spain).

median salary for a developer in Spain is $30,000 a year[1], so 50-80k would easily place them in the upper 10% of the scale.

I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are.

[1] https://www.payscale.com/research/ES/Job=Software_Developer/...

9. Ask HN: What are some good resources for learning about low level disk/file IO?

Top comment by crabbone

There are some easy answers here:

* Bigger blocks = better performance. The bigger you can make it the faster you'll go. Your limiting factor is usually the desired resolution of the user (i.e. aggregation will inevitably result in under-utilized space).

* Disk, SSD and NFS don't all belong to the same category. Most modern products in storage are developed with the expectation that the media is SSD. Virtually nobody wants to enter the market of HDDs. The performance gap is just too big, and the existing products that still use HDDs rely on fast caching in something like flash memory anyways. NFS is a hopelessly backwards and outdated technology. It's the least common denominator, and that's why various storage products do support it, but if you want to go fast, forget about it. The tradeoff here usually is between writing your own client (usually, a kernel module) to do I/O efficiently, or spare users the need for installing a custom kernel module (often a security audit issue) and let them go slow...

* OS disk cache is somewhat of a misnomer. There are also two things that might get confused here. OS doesn't cache data written to disk -- the disk does. OS provides mechanism to talk to the disk and instruct it to flush the cache. There's also filesystem cache -- that's what OS does. It caches in the memory it manages the file contents of recently accessed files.

* I/O through mmap is a gimmick. Just one of the ways to abuse system API to do something it's not really intended to do. You can safely ignore it. If you are looking into making I/O more efficient, look into uring_io.

10. Ask HN: How to move from dev role to management/team lead role?

Top comment by akatechis

I've been working in this field for about 15 years, mostly full stack but focus on frontend. In the past couple of years I've been making this transition from individual contributor/senior developer to a team lead and manager role.

For me, what has worked CONSISTENTLY are 3 things:

1. Take initiative: I can't stress this enough. If you act like a team lead, people will recognize you. And if they don't, you should consider whether this is somewhere you want to be. An organization that doesn't help build its talent, is not one where you will accomplish your personal growth objectives.

2. Speak to your Manager: Assuming you are doing #1, make sure that your manager(s) are aware of your career goals. You need to get "buyin" from others in the organization that are able to carve out this kind of role for you. They will also have good advice for you. Not every manager/team lead role is the same, so YMMV in this regard. It may be that there's a bigger need for a people manager vs a technical manager.

3. Stay at a company for 3+ years: The number might be different, but in my experience this is the point, after which you have been around enough time to have been involved in many different projects. Not only will you know a lot of the tech stack and it's limitations, you will also understand MUCH of the business itself. You'll have positioned yourself at the intersection of the business and the technology, and become an indispensable part of the organization.

One of the companies I worked at was a personal finance startup, and over the years I learned so much about saving, spending, credit, loans, income and investing IN ADDITION TO the technology we were building and everything that was powering it, that I was asked to be a part of nearly every discussion.