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Issue #229 - July 30, 2023
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
Top comment by rsynnott
It's not a good job market, but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.
It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them.
Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they'll have tools for this and if their tool can't extract your text they may not bother. Unless you're a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume.
Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you're coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.
Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine's dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.
2. Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?
Top comment by edent
"Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America.
It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers.
But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist.
Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libraries, and archives - none of them have a copy.
So it blows my mind that something so influential is, effectively, a myth.
3. Ask HN: Online activities to be made impossible by the UK Online Safety Bill
Top comment by KomoD
> you become a private service provider, and then have a host of responsibilities including annual audits of whether a significant proportion of your users are minors. If they are then you need to use a (commercial?) age verification tool and monitor everything assiduously. Difficult to see most people being able to satisfy those requirements.
And then I just block the UK instead, let's hope this just doesn't go through.
4. Ask HN: How do I train a custom LLM/ChatGPT on my own documents?
Top comment by gavinray
Do it yourself in ~20 lines of code with LlamaIndex.
You give it a directory containing documents and ask it to build an index and vector data embeddings over the documents
Then you can use this index with models like ChatGPT
Tutorial here shows the end to end process
https://gpt-index.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started/s...
5. Ask HN: Why do web sites not place the cursor for input?
Top comment by ttfkam
A lot (the majority?) of web developers know their framework and how to script things but don't know that HTML has been able to do things like this out of the box for over a decade. Even IE 10 supported it. So much simpler and more reliable than using JavaScript.
6. Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
Top comment by fgeahfeaha
Other people have mentioned ray-tracing in one weekend
Complimentary to that I would recommend TinyRenderer
https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki
This one is a CPU-based rasterizing renderer, it gives you a good understanding of what a GPU graphics pipeline does underneath.
In the graphics world the two common ways of rendering things are either rasterization or raytracing.
Raytracing is basically all the movie/VFX/CGI/offline renderers (although it is also being used for certain parts of real-time in recent years)
Raster is how most real-time renderers like the ones used for video games work.
If you're interested in graphics I'd highly recommend implementing a ray-tracer and a rasterizer from scratch at least once to get a good mental model of how they both work.
7. Ask HN: My country is undergoing a coup, which encryption software should I use?
Top comment by toast0
A lot of this depends on your threat model and how much of a target you think you are.
If you are worried about your safety, it's better to leave than figure out workarounds. And it's likely easier to get out before things get bad; consider going on an international vacation --- if things look fine, enjoy your trip and go back; if not, figure out what comes next from there.
If you aren't really worried about your safety, but just want to avoid getting hassled about communications and don't want to lose communications with the outside world... Definitely do encrypted messenger stuff. But also, try to set up alternate communications. Even though they're not hard to block, many government shutdowns don't block fixed line internet service, land line telephones, or international voice calling. If you can setup a dial-up internet account with an ISP in another country, you may be able to use that from your landline even if internet via domestic ISPs is all shut down. Of course, if the regime is interested, your telephone company would have records of the calls (at least destination and length) and that might get you put on a list.
But also note, if most of your contacts are local, and local communications are disrupted; having access to international communications doesn't help you communicate with your contacts, unless they've done the same thing and the more people who have set it up, the more likely it is to be noticed.
8. Ask HN: Which distro do you use? (2023)
Top comment by rvdginste
Debian at home and at work.
Been using Debian since Potato. Stable on servers. Testing or unstable on laptops and desktops: quite often a testing base with selected packages from unstable.
Debian just works, and is popular enough that it often has packages for third-party software. And it supports a lot of different architectures, I used it on i386, amd64, powerpc and armhf.
9. Ask HN: Is Slack having some trouble?
Top comment by ochronus
Yes. It's really a shame how useless their status page usually is - it's still all green at the moment.
10. Ask HN: Visiting SF on a Budget?
Top comment by kaycebasques
Muni (the bus, streetcar, and lightrail system) is great for getting around the city. Some routes are crowded and occasionally get some unpleasant people, but most of them are chill. Especially if you just avoid the commute hours. Tickets are valid for like 2-3 hours, no need to buy a ticket every time you get on. The 1 route is very fun, takes you through Chinatown and the hills. The 28 takes you from Fisherman's Wharf to the Golden Gate Bridge to Golden Gate Park.
Our ballpark is beautiful, catch a game there on a sunny day even if you don't care about baseball. Just go on a ticket site or the ticket window right before the game and you should be able to get in cheap.
Put up a "couch wanted" post on Craigslist. It's still active here.
Our meetup scene is still very active. Most events are free and sometimes even have free beer and pizza. I for sure have seen a few AI groups.
Check out https://noisebridge.net
Take the Caltrain down to Mountain view and make the pilgrimage to the computer history museum
The only neighborhoods where you should prepare yourself for SF looking like a dystopia is dead-center of the city, ironically right next to City Hall. You can visualize SF like an apple with a rotten core. No offense to the people living there, it's just a fact that it looks rough. All the neighborhoods on the outside are chill and pretty. It's only a small part of the core (Tenderloin, and the northern edge of SoMA near Tenderoin) where things look super rough. Even there, you'll be fine. I lived at Hyde & Ellis for a year. Treat people with respect and you'll be treated with respect.
Beware The Great Wall Of Fog in the west. You'll be at the Ferry Building and it's beautiful and sunny. And then you head to the ocean and you are practically swimming in fog.
You've got to ride a cable car once. Just pay the $8 and do it. Get on near the Ferry Building, then get off at the Fairmont and grab a beer at The Top Of The Mark (on a sunny day).
Find my email (or some other way to contact me) and I can buy you a beer
I have endless suggestions on where to go and what to see, just give me more pointers on what you like / don't like.
Welcome!