AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

Top comment by binwiederhier

I wrote a Dropbox-like file sync and share application called Syncany [1] as a side project back in 2014/2015. While it never made it out of alpha, it had gotten some traction, and looking back, I am still proud of the architecture and design (not so much of the code, hehe).

One day, a developer from this random company in Connecticut (I am German and lived in Germany at the time) reached out to me in my project's IRC channel, and asked if I wanted to interview. I did, and I got the job.

I moved to the UK, then to the US with my wife, and stayed with the company for 8 years. I got promoted from senior engineer to Sr. Principal Engineer and had an amazing time there. I now have a green card and live in CT with my 2 amazing children (with German and American citizenship).

I often think back about how much that project and that person who reached out to me changed my life. How different it would be if I hadn't worked on my side project, if it hadn't become semi-popular, or if he hadn't reached out. Butterfly effect at it's finest.

[1] https://www.syncany.org

Edit: Fun fact: Drew Houston (Dropbox CEO) emailed me at the time and wanted to hire me, but he didn't respond when I emailed him back. And even many years later when I applied at Dropbox they didn't want me, hehe.

2. Ask HN: Books you read in 2023 and recommend for 2024?

Top comment by cheyp

Fiction:

1) Betty Smith "A tree grows in Brooklyn". Maybe a bit too sentimental, but still very pleasant to read. Apparently this book was a WWII classic, but I never heard about it before.

2) Kazuo Ishiguro "An artist of the floating world". Maybe, not as strong as his other best two novels, but pretty interesting anyway.

3) Olga Tokarczuk "The Books of Jacob". An extremely long, but at the same time incredibly interesting book. It tells the complex story of a Jewish sect in Central Europe in the 18th century. It was a long read but it was definitely worth it.

3. Ask HN: Where do you live? What's good or bad about it?

Top comment by muzani

Malaysia, close to Kuala Lumpur.

Pros: Good food, strong English proficiency. Good diversity. Easy to get into the top 1% of tech. Very easy to set up a non-VC backed company, and you'll make sweet margins.

Lots of talent, roughly equivalent to Singapore. They have NUS and ivy league grads, but we have the population funnel. You can have all the smart conversations you have on HN all day and all night with someone out here. Plenty of tech events in KL, probably comparable to European capitals.

Cons: Middle income trap - retiring with a job is extremely difficult; most either end up doing a business, working in gov, or staying as a corporate slave long enough to get a VP position. High sin tax (alcohol, tobacco). Work discrimination is fully legal. Affirmative action is also a heated topic. Uptick in racism as we go through some political shifts, but it's still decent IMO. Very little VC funding here. VCs prefer Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, but VC-backed companies often set up engineering/R&D offices in Malaysia.

Mixed: There's good tolerance of LGBT+ here. Violence is uncommon. However, it's tolerance, not full acceptance. Don't force your views on others and you'll be fine. Everyone has very different religious and political views from their neighbors.

Stats say crime rate is comparable to Canada, but I think it's mostly the poorer areas. KL is mostly gentrified now; most of the people who would be delivering drugs are now delivering McDonald's.

4. Ask HN: How are you dealing with the job market anxiety?

Top comment by kemiller2002

I'll let you in on the secret to finding a job. It's not about your skills really (maybe some), it's about who you know. If you're relying on only your skill to carry you through to finding a job, you're going to have a rough time. It's about who you know. You're looking for a job? Go to meetups, code and coffees, free tech seminars by companies etc. That's your job now. Connect with people on LinkedIn. There are very very few people that are good enough that someone will just hire them on their skills alone. Will you find the "perfect" job that you never want to leave and retire from? In all honesty, probably not, but that doesn't mean it won't lead to the next great opportunity.

5. Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2023

Top comment by cehrlich

CO2 Monitor to let me know when I need to let some new air into my office. Mine is a TFA Dostmann 31.5009, but any model with an NDIR sensor should be fine, there are many choices around 70-150 EUR.

6. Ask HN: What other good forums are out there?

Top comment by pelagicAustral

I remember a point in time were there where actual communities, each one living in their own space, dedicated to any number of topics... Just around the time search results were not just ads... I suppose using the Discord search functionally, once you've created an account, can render some specific results... even then, that's more akin to a chat, that an actual community where topics matter....

Can we please go back to forums?

7. Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

Top comment by anovikov

Clouds are a scam and are designed for:

- fools who can't do simple math or read fine print ("have no idea how much 20 $2 per hour instances pumping data at 10 mbit/second add up in a month, and OMG that data is not free when i already pay for the instance?!". And besides they give me a whopping $100,000 credit - that will last eternity!")

- corporate tricksters ("if we don't invest into our hardware and buy AWS instead, our next quarter bottom line will look GREAT and i get a nice bonus, and by the time truth transpires, i will jump the boat to the next shop i do the same trick with")

- people with breaks in basic logic and total lack of foresight ("i can't afford buying all the hardware for my small pet startup, and will make do with just $200 a month in AWS, and i don't realise it will only work for as long as my startup is not successful and has no users - and when it's no longer the case, i will be vendor-locked with tech solutions based on AWS and petabytes of data which is $0.05 per GB to download, locked up there, and will bleed money for years").

They should be avoided at all costs except for development purposes, and if you don't know how to or can't afford to do something without clouds, you just don't know how to do it or can't afford it.

In Europe, none of my clients use clouds. They have dedicated setups with reputable providers that work a lot better than cloud-based ones and cost pennies. Also, i realise that my custom software development biz doesn't really work with EU clients, i barely make a profit with them and they get to be real pain. Probably suggests that educational level of Europe is a lot higher.

8. Ask HN: What are some excellent blogs, news boards, YouTube channels to follow?

Top comment by eszed

Matt Levine

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

He does interesting commentary on current business news, and deep dives on complicated financial matters. He's so freaking hilarious that stuff I'd expect would bore me becomes must-read stuff.

9. Ask HN: Why is it taken for granted that LLM models will keep improving?

Top comment by benlivengood

The scaling laws (the original Kaplan paper, Chinchilla, and OpenAI's very opaque scaling graphs for GPT-4) suggest indefinite improvement for the current style of transformers with additional pre-training data and parameters.

No one has hit a model/dataset size where the curves break down, and they're fairly smooth. Usually simple models that accurately predict performance work pretty well nearby existing performance, so I expect trillion or 10-trillion parameter models to be on the same curve.

What we haven't seen yet (that I'm aware of) is whether the specializations to existing models (LoRa, RLHF, different attention methods, etc.) follow similar scaling laws, since most of the efforts have been focused on achieving similar performance on smaller/sparser models and not investing the large amounts of money into huge experiments. It will be interesting to see what Deepmind Gemini reveals.

10. Ask HN: Why are SWE in the US more expensive than SWE in Europe?

Top comment by flappyeagle

The US engineer you mentioned does t want to work with people for whom cost is a concern. Those clients are annoying to work with.

When I did contract work this was my strategy.