AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

Top comment by TradingPlaces

Kagi. Never have I been so happy to send someone $10 every month. When you become the customer, not the product, it’s amazing what can happen.

2. Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

Top comment by jimmyl02

Bard is actually pretty good when it responds from my experience. I definitely prefer the way it outputs results much more compared to chatgpt and it does provide sources / a UI linking to relevant material quite often. It is also searching the web for the latest info which is definitely felt in it's output. However, it often says "I can't help with that" even for relatively simple queries which makes it a little annoying to use.

In my opinion, it seems like Bard is more a test-bed for chat based search UI. I've also gotten AI generated results in the main Google search which is what I presume will be the main rollout. If executed well, it'll probably change the landscape in terms of AI assisted search.

3. Ask HN: I'm a SWE without a CS degree. Will online certs help me get into FAANG?

Top comment by jwestbury

You don't need a CS degree and you don't need certs once you've established yourself.

I've been in SRE or SRE-adjacent roles at Amazon, Microsoft, Dropbox, and now a quant hedge fund (the first three in the US, the last in London). My only degree is in English lit.

Your hardest step is getting into your first job with good name recognition in the tech industry. For this, your best bet isn't certs, it's networking -- find someone who can refer you, which will get you past the automated resume screening and get your resume in front of a hiring manager, at which point your degree and certs don't matter.

4. Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

Top comment by movedx

> I'm keeping things simple, so I've got mostly Go services, pg + caching, and a svelte webapp. I deployed my Go services on a low-ish end bare metal provider, and for now it is fine. Deployments are triggered via scripts, and so far so good. Is it sexy, using all the latest and greatest tech? No, its just simple shell scripts. But it works?

Don't change a thing. This is perfect.

> Am I wrong to think that I could probably scale like crazy and avoid AWS completely with my stack? Why should I pay hundreds/thousands per month plus a premium for bandwidth? I'm also enjoying staying sane avoiding IAM.

You're not wrong at all. Check out the hardware stack for Stack Overflow as of 2016: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

Don't over think it. Focus on the software and its features. Focus on getting users and ramping up your MRR.

Good luck.

5. Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?

Top comment by biofox

A previous time this was asked on HN, someone linked to these, which I quite like:

https://sciurls.com/

https://mathurls.com/

https://techurls.com/

https://finurls.com/

https://physurls.com/

https://devurls.com/

https://hwurls.com/

https://tuxurls.com/

6. Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?

Top comment by zadokshi

No code has its role, there are many simple things it can make easier. For most non trivial systems, no code will get you 80%-90% to a solution and the last 20% of your solution will be extremely difficult, complex, or impossible to deliver in any maintainable way.

Developers are hostile to these types of solutions specifically because once you go past basic CRUD your no code solutions make everything so much harder and complicated compared to if you had of just used JavaScript in the first place.

I’m fully expecting some no code sales people here to disagree. They always do. Those same sales people will try to blame the programmers for getting in the way of saving money or being stuck in their old ways. Have a good long proper conversation with your programmers that you trust and try to understand their resistance better.

7. Ask HN: Where Are All the Jobs At?

Top comment by jondwillis

Tech job market is fucked because rates aren’t zero and money isn’t free for the first time in like 15 years.

Middle class continued to be crushed, everyone noticed that tech was the only way to have a shot at upper middle class, and rushed for the same doors.

The “extras” that weren’t making the cut got let go last year and even harder this year.

The only way to win is to stop playing the game. Make your own company. Get a loan from the SBA. Fuck the disgusting wanna live forever VC extractions class. Get out of the rat race. Stop rewarding the cancerous leeches that are dismantling everything else so they can go do cocaine in Mykonos. Stop playing their game.

8. Ask HN: Who is using the D language and likes/doesn't like it? Why?

Top comment by sirwhinesalot

I haven't used it in awhile. I was quite positive on it during the D1 days when it was basically C#/Java but AoT. (I don't think Go even existed at that time).

The mess that were the competing stdlibs and the transition to D2 made me lose interest. I've looked at it again from time to time and it just feels too... big. It does too much.

I can get what I wanted from the D1 days with C# AoT now (it also has too many features but they have more obvious use cases and it has a much larger ecosystem).

I really don't see much use in a C++ but saner and with a GC. I'm sure someone has that use case, but not me particularly. And for the "statically typed high-level language with a GC" Java, C# and Go can do it with massively larger ecosystems backing them up.

There might be a future in the BetterC D subset or if they find a way to go after the Rust market with a more C++-like language but even for that I'm a lot more bullish on Herb Sutter's cppfront.

I honestly don't know what they can do to get a breakthrough. Walter Bright is appropriately named and there's a lot to like in D, it's just lacking a direction and an audience IMO.

9. Ask HN: How do I stop overthinking personal project management?

Top comment by latexr

> Do you have any suggestions?

You do:

> experience has shown that I am at my most productive with a structureless .md file and pen&paper setup.

Seems like you already know what works for you. Do that!

But since you’re asking, I’ll give another shout out to pen and paper. The thing I like about it is that it becomes physically overwhelming. That is key. When you dump information into a digital system you can avoid it and leave it to linger and grow indefinitely, but a bunch of papers strewn around your desk are harder to ignore. They begin to pile up and make working harder, at some point forcing you to deal with them. This means grabbing what’s around and starting to cross out what is not important after all (or was already done), and reorganising remaining tasks into new pieces of paper. The physicality of the process forces the cleanup step.

At one point I moved from separate pieces of paper to a notebook, but the principle remains: the filled pages to the left are the equivalent of the scattered pieces of paper. As that side of the notebook grows, I flip back to cross out tasks and rip the pages where everything is done. That step is important because otherwise I wouldn’t have an intuitive sense of how many tasks are left behind.

10. Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?

Top comment by jeffreyrogers

People are answering this wrong and focused too much on the site needing to have the same functionality as HN. The spirit of the question is where do other professionals (musicians, doctors, real estate developers, lawyers, etc.) congregate online. I don't know the answer for most of those but here are two examples

- SDN for aspiring doctors and med students https://forums.studentdoctor.net/forums/

- Wall Street Oasis for people in finance https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum

Not really the same spirit, but Marginal Revolution (https://marginalrevolution.com/) also has its own community around it and is one of the most influential blogs in the world. Also has an active comment section with an interesting cast of characters.