AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Stock Android phone free of bloatware?

Top comment by Daegalus

The Pixel is the closest.

The reason you don't see long term support on Android is because of Qualcomm. Qualcomm wants manufacturers to build on new chips, so they deprecate older chips and stop support. Most manufacturers don't want to hire kernel and hardware devs.

Samsung can pull off longer support because of Exynos and they have a lot of inhouse expertise to extend support on old Qualcomm chips.

It's all money. They don't want you keeping a phone for 5 years.

Apple can do it because they lock you into their walled garden where they can double and triple dip on getting your money.

They also build their own chips.

2. Ask HN: Is GitHub down?

Top comment by edgyquant

Everytime github goes down, and my push/pull is rejected, I immediately assume they’ve discovered I’m incompetent and fired me. And I’m the head of engineering at my company.

3. Ask HN: How to navigate the world as a brain-damaged 17 year old?

Top comment by leashless

Tough road, kid, tough road. I had pretty serious brain damage when I was a child -- dyspraxia, dysgraphia, a bunch of other poorly-understood stuff -- and even today I'm still patchy. I've learned to have NT people handle the stuff I don't, like calendaring (I can't do time zones at all) and to be sensitive about tabulated data. I'm 51 now, and I've had a fairly successful career spanning a number of fields.

Two lessons from my experience.

1) the brain is incredibly plastic and over time figures out how to get things done

2) intense practice of very simple activities leads to very surprising and dramatic rewards -- video games with a strong hand-eye coordination component vastly improved my dyspraxia (at my age, we're talking Pac Man in arcades!) and then I moved on to tai chi. Deliberate practice of very simple things seems to be powerfully transformative for people struggling with neurological issues in general.

I don't know how much it helps, but strong odds there is a future. The year between A Levels and university to give yourself time to heal before you go straight into the next thing is a great idea. I also imagine there's a ton of emotional fall out from your attack and that also takes time to heal.

Shit hand of cards. You sound like you're doing a good job of coping. Keep on going it will improve over time.

4. Ask HN: What topics are good for a UI/UX Primer?

Top comment by charlysl

The best resources I know are these two video lectures [1][2] from MIT's 2018 6.170 course [3]. They consist of a set of heuristics that summarize the best of decades of UI/UX research, very well presented by Professor Daniel Jackson.

There is also the deeper MIT's 6.813 " User Interface Design & Implementation" [4]

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qblmdoZIJQ4rYGgCPLNusEn2yWi...

[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cvco6r8a6oV3Sy89RKdIfrZCrGi...

[3] https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa18/6.170/materials.html

[4] http://web.mit.edu/6.813/www/sp18/

5. Ask HN: How do you find high quality mobile games?

Top comment by barbariangrunge

The impossibility of finding good mobile games is why I develop desktop and console games. I have no idea how to get discovered in the soup of the mobile app stores and I don't want to build the kind of skinner's box it would take to compete alongside most of those games.

There are great mobile games out there, but I have no idea to find them except by accident.

It's so bad that something like 0.01% of mobile apps make back their investment costs[1]. This is, amazingly, far worse than the rate for indie games on desktop and consoles.

See: 80 days, Sorcery! (really, anything by Inkle), Universal Paperclips, VVVVVV (better on desktop though), and certain visual novels

[1] https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/9999-in-10000-mobile-apps-...

6. Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?

Top comment by Justsignedup

I do use adblockers, so much so that I basically only use android because of all the system-wide adblocking capabilities, including youtube ads.

I occasionally switch off adblockers to see what the rest of the world sees. Within seconds I am shocked every single time. Some sites I use are unusable without adblockers. The youtube experience is attrocious without adblockers. Amazon products are impossible to find without being flooded with sponsored products. Google results are ads until pages later.

Its like a whole other internet. I cannot imagine how small of a portion of the internet I'd need to use if I could not use adblockers.

7. Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

Top comment by p-e-w

Rust had Mozilla's backing, and later other behemoths like Amazon and Microsoft jumped onto the bandwagon.

Corporate support is absolutely essential for a new language to be taken seriously in the industry. If Go weren't associated with Google, people would have laughed that language out of the room long ago. Likewise, it's difficult to imagine TypeScript ever catching on if it didn't have Microsoft's might behind it (even though TypeScript is actually an excellent language).

Without the power of money, you are nothing.

8. Ask HN: How much do you work, what's your salary and how experienced are you?

Top comment by whynotkeithberg

155k, Linux/DevOps/SecOps. I work about 40 hours a week full remote.

However, I just found out I'm getting laid off in october as they're moving services overseas to cut costs. I work for the largest Clinical research org in the world & we were bought by them last year. I'm a bit surprised & the group that bought us was not known for tech. I think they're going to ruin a lot of their tech offerings because I've worked a lot with their Systems/Devops people over the last couple years and they are extremely unimpressive.

As for experience... I technically started at age 17 in the military doing tactical communications via satellite, networking, servers, radios etc. But been working in private sector for about 12-13 years after going to school for about 2 years upon getting out.

9. Ask HN: What are your favorite methodologies for organizing digital life

Top comment by mercurialsolo

I love culling things and losing things which have aggregated over the years. I have tried NAS'es, Disks and realize never ever come back to them.

Media - An auto-backup of photos, videos & music is what I like. Use google drive for cloud backup. Have a premium account to accommodate for all the space needed

Notes & Documents & Writings - Public ones - Already part of the internet space. The rest are really things which I can afford to lose. They are like a closet which I don't really mind cleaning out once in a bit and losing it.

Work - Tax filings & income documents are in a digital private locker. The rest of it like work related repositories, code and other stuff. Either open sourced or in private git repos.

Movies & Books - I used to collect things like movies, books and then realized that could just rent and buy them over so no more into hoarding the stuff here.

Best advice, I can give after trying multiple organizational systems is constant pruning and sharing out what you can in public domain.

10. Ask HN: Am I hurting my programming career by not exploring AI coding tools?

Top comment by stocktech

For reference, 14 yoe and currently in management.

Today, I don't think the tools are good enough to make a material difference. It may help a bad engineer tread water, but it won't take you from good to great. It may save you time writing basic boilerplate and individual functions, but I suspect 99% of engineers don't struggle with that. What's hard about our jobs is knowing how to orchestrate the whole thing and put structure around complexity. AI can't do that yet.

When I use it personally, it feels like a harder context switch trying to describe in english what I already know how to code. Then I still have to review the function to make sure it's accurate. It feels like a waste of time and an additional context switch.

Whenever the AI gets better, we'll have to use it to be productive I have no doubt. But the pool of engineers will change too - there will be a categories of engineers who can't debug the AI output and who still write crazy prompts.

Maybe I'm old, but I'll only be worried about AI when it can write and maintain a full app with no human intervention.