AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

Top comment by xena

https://xeiaso.net

Near 400 posts, writing about a lot of stuff. Here's some of my favorites over the years:

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/anything-message-queue - Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear - A weapon to surpass Metal Gear

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/%F0%9F%A5%BA - : the best sudo replacement

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/sleeping-the-technical-interview - Sleeping Through the Technical Interview

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/experimental-rilkef-2018-11-30 - I Put Words on this Webpage so You Have to Listen to Me Now

https://xeiaso.net/feeds to subscribe. Been considering an email list.

2. Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

Top comment by franckl

We are building the world's highest temperature heat pump. It can reach 1000℉, when other commercial heat pumps usually reach a maximum of 320 ℉.

It is a big deal because factories have to rely on polluting natural gas to produce their process heat.

We estimate that it represents 3% of the world’s annual CO2 emissions and a $10B+ annual market opportunity.

We are currently building a 5kW prototype at 480℉/250C to cook french fries for McCain (world's largest manufacturer of frozen potato products), our industrial partner for the first pilot.

If you would like to support our decarbonization efforts, feel free to email us on contact@airthium.com or to invest in our crowdfunding! https://wefunder.com/airthium

3. Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

Top comment by sensanaty

Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as far as I'm concerned.

Every "AI" related business idea I've seen prop up recently is people just hooking up a textbox to ChatGPT's API and pretending they're doing something novel or impressive, presumably to cash in on VC money ASAP. The Notion AI is an absolute fucking joke of epic proportions in its uselessness yet they keep pushing it in every newsletter

And a funny personal anecdote, a colleague of mine tried to use ChatGPT4 when answering a customer question (they work support). The customer instantly knew it was AI-generated and was quite pissed about it, so the support team has an unofficial rule to not do that any more.

4. Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

Top comment by mindfulmark

Realizing that external dependencies are regular codebases just like the one you're working on. That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them.

At that point, you lose the feeling that there are magic things out there that you will never understand and that for the most part everything is just regular old code that regular people wrote.

5. Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

Top comment by ggm

Be very careful about how you ask questions because some forms of question solicit "approval" answers. It's culturally informed, some cultures try very very hard NOT to have to deliver a negative.

Thats why some UX uses matched-pair questions which have two approaches to the issue at hand, boolean opposites, so you can see if they move sliders, weight or answer both the "correct" way to align the response.

Separately:

"If I made a new service x would you like it" is not the same as "if I said it would cost you $5 to use new service x would you use it" is not the same as "do you think new service x would be useful" is not the same as "do you think anyone else wants new service x"

It's very easy to mistake these for "the same"

I am personally very skeptical of NPS and satisfaction scores in small communities. They may work for google scale entities, I don't think they do for <100 users. Many people canonicalise the results of 4-5 respondants. In my experience, if your primary job is to assess if they qualify for X or Y, and you ask them how much they liked your service delivery in denying them X or Y, they will be profoundly negative about the service, which is really not helpful because you may have written a simple direct and fast web service to deliver the negative outcome. And of course, the reverse is equally true.

6. Ask HN: Stuck as a developer for 15 years. How to become a manager?

Top comment by paxys

You seem to have some misguided ideas about management that you first need to get rid of.

- Management isn't a "next step" for developers but an entirely different career path. You don't naturally progress into it, and no one owes it to you. It takes a whole new skill set and lots of deliberate work to make the switch.

- Like any other job title, "manager" isn't handed out based on seniority but skill. If you think it is "humiliating" to get managed by someone younger than you then you don't have the right mindset for the role to begin with.

From my experience these are both more true in tech than any other industry. Getting managed by someone younger than you, someone more junior than you, someone making less money than you etc. are all very common. If you can't get used to it then you are always going to have a bad time.

As for how to switch into it – it is very unlikely that anyone is going to hire you for a management position with zero experience. If you want to grow into it your best bet is to do so at your current company. First become a leader as an IC, someone who defines technical paths, does cross-team collaboration, clears up ambiguity and someone who junior teammates can generally look up to for guidance and inspiration. If you don't meet these requirements it's unlikely you will be able to succeed – both as a manager or as a staff+ engineer.

At first glance everything you have written (can't tolerate work, feel humiliated working with younger managers, stagnant in your job, no motivation, considering lying on your resume) comes across as massive red flags, and I'm not surprised that you aren't able to get ahead. My overall advice is to take some time for reflection and self improvement and then form a plan for yourself to get out of this rut.

7. Ask HN: Why aren't modern programming languages, like Rust, more legible?

Top comment by 3836293648

The problem isn't the syntax, it's the semantics. Matklad has a great post about this. You can try a bunch of different syntaxes, but rust doesn't get more readable with any of them. You need to remove information (and thereby change how the langauge works) for readability to improve.

And personal preference here, Rust is, with a few exceptions, actually one of the nicer languages to read once you add/remove all the extra information that rust requires.

8. Ask HN: Good Books on the History of Technology?

Top comment by eatonphil

Here are some histories of specific industries I've read recently and supremely enjoyed:

- The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

- The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production-- Toyota's Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry

- Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World

- Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (of all of these not the most amazing but still interesting)

- The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War

And then you can learn a lot by reading about the people who built the industries too. Here are a few I've been reading about recently that I recommend:

- Edison by Edmund Morris (Just read it backwards, you'll see.)

- Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

- The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts

- Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

I also got some interesting suggestions asking a similar question on Twitter a bit ago.

https://twitter.com/eatonphil/status/1668625835350454273

9. Ask HN: Best value computer science book?

Top comment by glimshe

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. If you can only buy one book about Computer Science in your life, that's the one to get. It's not dirt cheap (even used), but it's an incredible value nonetheless:

https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Pro...

10. Ask HN: Laid off –> solo founder. Do I look like I'm trying to hide something?

Top comment by K0balt

Nah, that won’t hurt anything unless one of your future employers requirements include low personal initiative and extremely high risk aversion.

I strongly recommend following your passions and interests above all other considerations. Just be sure to set your projects up for fast, clean failure if they aren’t viable, nothing wastes more time than failing to violently pivot when needed. Learn what you came to learn and if it isn’t financially sustainable, apply your new knowledge to the next project.

You won’t spend your sunset years wishing you had done less of the things you wanted to do. Regret is the real enemy, discomfort and struggle are stepping stones.

My$.02 as an oldster with 40+ years mostly self entertained in tech with a lot of failures and a few successes in the rearview. The only things I regret are some risks not taken, tbh.

If I have advice that I think missing could nuke your chances of success in life it would be:

Establish a point of retreat in an inexpensive place to live. A home of your own, somewhere in the world, where the cost of living is very low. It should be an economical and simple home with low maintenance requirements, in a place that brings you a sense of serenity. Being able to duck out and work on something without having to worry about significant costs has been critical to my freedom to choose my destiny. That and having a partner that is not adverse to adversity in the name of advancement, if you choose to have a life partner.

Best of fortune with your project!