AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Does your microwave interfere with Bluetooth? Mine does

Top comment by jcrawfordor

Bluetooth and WiFi both borrow their spectrum from microwave ovens. It's typical and expected that microwave ovens will cause some interference with other users of the 2.4GHz ISM band that are very nearby. Microwaves operate at very high power levels and are required to be shielded for human safety, but the permissible leakage power is relatively high compared to typical WiFi and Bluetooth devices---there's a simple reason why. From a legal perspective, Bluetooth is essentially pretending to be a microwave oven and making use of the permitted leakage power.

This is the cost of the historical regulatory situation that most of these unlicensed radio services use the ISM bands originally allocated for microwave heating. One of the advantages of newer WiFI standards, particularly WiFi 6E, is that they finally change this situation by using the U-NII bands allocated specifically for unlicensed short-range digital communications, rather than for microwave heating.

Mind that this is all in the context of US spectrum regulations, although other countries have largely harmonized their approach. I have a lengthier treatment of the topic here: https://computer.rip/2022-04-14-unlicensed-radio.html

2. Ask HN: Whats the modern day equivalent of 80s computer for kids to explore?

Top comment by rapjr9

A music synthesizer. It's a pathway to learning electronics, music, and the nature of sound. There are cheap kits, cheap synths, lots of kinds of synths, and there are much more complicated and expensive systems you can grow into. You can get software synths also, VCV Rack is a free though complex one:

https://vcvrack.com/

However I'd recommend an inexpensive hardware one with real knobs you can turn, like one of the Korg Volca series:

https://www.korg-volca.com/en/

Recording the sounds can lead into exploring all the concepts and gear involved in recording and mixing music. It's not mutually exclusive with doing other things also, you can play with both synths and computers and being involved with something artistic can add dimensions to and an escape from the nature of classwork/work.

Some other suggestions: gardening, high voltage electronics (with lots of supervision), electronics, photography, movie making, ham radio (gnu radio), show lighting systems (there's more than disco lights, robotics is involved), robotics, acoustic instruments (guitar, piano, flute, drums), sensors (you don't necessarily have to know electronics, get a data logger with built in sensors), weather monitoring/forecasting, hydraulic systems (with supervision), wood working, metal working, 3D printing, bird watching, painting, minibikes/small engines.

3. Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

Top comment by leonidasv

Kagi, a paid search engine.

I accepted paying for it after the trial because every other search engine just sucks or isn't customizable enough in comparison. Not to mention ads and tracking.

Kagi results are really, really great. I find it better than Google for technical queries and better than DuckDuckGo for localized queries. Unfortunately, it's not 100% SEO-trash proof, but I can permanently block those domains from results in one click - a refreshing experience. The AI quick answer is on par with Bing's (more accurate than Google's), but the best feature is the possibility of banning/re-ranking websites (such as those SEO-spam ones).

This feature is probably the one any family member will find useful: prioritising websites they like the most and blocking/down-ranking those they dislike. For example, I hate Pinterest and have banned it. My girlfriend, on the other hand, loves it and gave a better ranking. Guess that's what customisation is for...

The lenses are probably also family-worthy, since you can quickly create personalised results pages for good sources for homework research, safe online games for children, trustworthy news for your grandma, etc. But I've never used it extensively yet.

There's also some minor features (auto-login link for anonymous tabs, bangs, news, etc) that you pretty much expect from a search engine nowadays, too. IMO, the most complete and efficient search engine I've used so far.

4. Ask HN: Best books to understand semiconductor business?

Top comment by eigenvalue

Investment banks produce pretty decent industry “primers” as part of their equity research business (basically it’s a service to bank clients). Someone on twitter recently shared a Dropbox folder filled with recent primers, and I see at least 2 in there about semiconductors:

https://x.com/clarksquarecap/status/1703495357940822207?s=46

5. Ask HN: How are so many fake ads allowed on YouTube?

Top comment by kahnclusions

I don’t understand why these ads aren’t considered criminal fraud, why Google and its directors aren’t held criminally responsible for said fraud, and why all the income derived from such fraud is considered proceeds of crime and seized.

Oh, wait, I do understand. It’s because criminal law is only really meant for the little people who sold some marijuana and not the corporations facilitating massive worldwide fraud.

If I help personally defraud one person? Straight to jail. But Google helps defraud millions of people? Here please take some more taxpayer cash.

6. Ask HN: How do I code offline for a week?

Top comment by eszed

I don't know the circumstance of your tech exile, but I'd encourage you to take advantage of it to do something other than code! If you're going to be in nature, be in nature. If you're going to be with people, be with people. Those are the sorts of experiences you'll treasure, later in life, far more than a few more days of "productivity".

If none of that applies, and you still want to learn something to do with tech? Well, you know this won't be an ideal situation to engage directly with a system. How about zooming out a bit? Read some books. Some of Stallman's essays. Clifford Stoll. Or anything else more recent that you think is big-picture significant to your field. Your situation will be ideal for contemplation, which will in the long-term make you a better contributor to whatever projects you take on.

7. Ask HN: Has meetup.org been replaced by anything?

Top comment by solomonb

Oh Meetup. I miss you.

I first started using Meetup in the middle to late 2000s in the Bay area. It almost kick started my tech career after meeting a ton of people at a computer music event. I wasn't quite ready yet and made a detour through moving to LA, starting a pirate radio station and then becoming a carpenter in the art world for 5 years.

Meetup was there for me when I finally re-engaged with software engineering and computers. I would go to events almost weekly and met tons of interesting people who taught me about all sorts of subjects from 3d printing to category theory. I got to see the inside of many different startups and eat a ton of bad pizza.

All the way up to the pandemic i was a regular participant. I don't think I have been to a single event since the pandemic. I still live in the same place and do the same sort of work. I have a really hard time motivating myself to use the site and whenever I do, I find the schedule rather sparse. I have heard the same story from others many times.

Perhaps this is post-covid trauma? Or perhaps this is part of the price we pay for shifting so hard to remote work? Or perhaps this is the result of the shitty Meetup UX making it difficult to find groups I relate to? I don't know, but I suspect it is all of the above.

I miss the sense of IRL community provided by my local meetup groups.

8. Ask HN: Is GenAI heading for a crypto-esque bubble pop?

Top comment by joefourier

I wouldn’t compare GenAI to cryptocurrency because there’s no equivalent pyramid scheme mentality of “invest early in this asset and sell it later 100x” - it’s much closer to a traditional tech hype bubble. The average user isn’t roped in by the promise of buying and reselling a token, but by using and possibly paying for a product that can theoretically be useful to them on its own.

Like any tech bubble, you have crowds of investors pouncing on the “next big thing”, which will inevitably be overhyped and oversold, leading to the bubble popping when expectations outpace actual returns; but the core technology is still valid. The dotcom bubble popping didn’t mean the Internet was a fad, the video game crash of 1983 didn’t permanently doom the industry, the railway mania in the 1840s didn’t mean no one ever took a train after it crashed… any new and exciting development attracts grifters, but it eventually stabilises once people learn to separate the hype from the real applications of the tech. I remember when VR went through this - it was absolutely overhyped, but today there’s still a solid community around it even if it didn’t change the world.

With open source models and fine-tunes being uploaded on Huggingface, there’s no fraud, they’re perfectly free, and you can test them out and see for yourself that some work better than others even if benchmarks only tell part of the story. There’s absolutely a glut of thin veneers over APIs and models offering questionable benefits, but there’s also real value in having a solid UI on top of a basic model; we’ll see the ecosystem stabilise eventually.

9. Ask HN: Sales Tips for Solo Devs?

Top comment by l5870uoo9y

A few things I have learned over the years and in particular launching and growing my latest project[1]:

1) Track everything including errors. Know what users are using and what they aren't. Remove or rebuild less used features.

2) Find out who your users are and what they value. Ignore non-payers.

3) Economize, market, and document features. You not only need to develop and deploy features, but also to price them in appetising business model, market them on social media and SEO and describe/show how to use them.

4) Keep it super simple. You only get the users' attention for a few seconds, use them wisely. Nobody will read long documentation or use illogical/complex UI.

1: https://aihelperbot.com

Edit: Why not add some AI features for like pdf.ai? Would make your product more attractive and easier to sell.

10. Ask HN: How does Starlink work for IP address/ASN internationally?

Top comment by londons_explore

Starlink says on their FAQ page[1] for the roaming model that if you roam too far, your connection will be briefly interrupted while they assign you a new IP address.

I think that's because they want every user to have a reasonable experience with all the websites out there that do geoIP lookups. It also gives them flexibility in the future to not act as a worldwide internet backbone for their own users traffic by advertising each set of local IP's only at local POP's.

[1]: https://starlink-enterprise-guide.readme.io/docs/dhcp-config....