AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Any felons successfully found IT work post-release?

Top comment by nope00

Nov’22 is very recent, and won’t be your experience forever. It’s been a little over 20 years for me. Now, I get background checked every year. It doesn’t show.

Initially I worked in food service and on phpfreelancer. I spun that into consistent consulting work until a client offered a full time position (less than 15 people, no background checks).

As the years rolled by, I kept moving around. Eventually I tried at a large company(around 8 years ago) and nothing showed on the background check.

I do NOT recommend being upfront, unless there are no formal procedures in place and being honest actually helps. We are talking about your ability to feed and shelter yourself, so give up on the “honesty” thing. I have -never- been able to provide for myself after having been “honest”. [edit: after reading felonintexas let me update this. If someone point blank asks, tell them. Don’t volunteer this information. There is nothing to be gained]

Also, you are now an edge case. That means most advice doesn’t apply. This is both exciting and horribly anxiety driving at the same time. You will have to become comfortable blazing your own path and doing things others say is not possible.

Seriously, good luck. It is possible. It is amazing what you can do that everyone else thinks can’t be done.

2. Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?

Top comment by myself248

TeleMate - I might still have the original floppies somewhere. I still miss how easy this thing made file transfers; there's simply nothing like it in the modern era.

Commander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit -- we played the hell out of these and it was only right to register them. Additional levels, whoah!

PKZip 2.04g -- back when software could just be "finished".

mIRC -- I sunk way too many hours of my life into mIRC scripts....

ACDSee 3.x -- Another "there's just nothing like it especially on linux", the fastest JPEG viewer ever to exist. I could crank up my key repeat rate, hold PgDn, and it would blast images into VRAM as fast as the keyboard asked for. Used 4DOS-style Descript.ion files and, to this day, I have a mindboggling amount of photo descriptions trapped in these files. No modern equivalent makes it so easy to tag things right in the filesystem without sucking them into some walled-garden database.

3. Ask HN: What has quantum computing achieved so far?

Top comment by bramathon

Quantum computers have not yet achieved any practical application. What they have achieved is performing highly specialized tasks like random circuit sampling or quantum simulation which would be too difficult for even the largest classical computers. While these tasks are highly tailored to the machines and effectively useless in the real world, they are exciting as they are demonstration that these devices can perform computations beyond classical. Turning this computing power towards practical use-cases is more challenging, but something we are likely to see in the next few years. The first applications will likely be ones like quantum chemistry where the problem is inherently quantum mechanical and thus maps more naturally to a quantum computer, or quantum-enhanced classical algorithms which lean heavily on classical solvers combined with quantum. The most important quantum algorithms require error-corrected qubits, which are some ways away but current devices are starting to demonstrate this at a small scale.

4. Ask HN: What software/tech blogs/magazines should I be reading in 2024?

Top comment by nomilk

Slightly contrarian perspective: I'm trying to read less temporal (things that matter now) and more fundamental (stuff that mattered 1+ year ago and will still matter in 1+ year, with even wider intervals for non-tech content).

This does result in missing ~important things occasionally (e.g. I still don't know what happened with SamA at OpenAI, and yes, I am curious), but that's a small price to pay for greater intellectual sanctity and an increased attention budget to distribute across important tasks or funnel into something hyper focussed.

5. Ask HN: Has the tech recession affected you?

Top comment by spamizbad

I’m a hiring manager. My company did a round of contractor layoffs in 2023 and made a smaller number of FTE hires backfills.

My advice is to hang in there. Often we have 3 strong candidates per open position. The people we reject aren’t getting rejected because they aren’t a good fit or lack skills - it’s just that someone else was a little better. If I had the budget I’d hire all the great people I have the privilege of interviewing.

For what it’s worth I think the industry is starting to run a little too lean. Teams are getting pushed to their limit, there’s no “slack” left for additional output. Contrary to the buzz you see on sites like HN, in the real world AI coding tools are completely underwhelming. The pendulum is losing momentum and I suspect orgs will realize they either need to grow their headcount or downsize their product offerings - meanwhile they’re letting certain products languish because they don’t have the headcount to work on it. And risk appetite for entering new markets is waaay down. The business culture is becoming more conservative (not politically/culturally, but rather in terms of its approach to operations and product development)

This means more opportunities for entrepreneurs and new companies soon. “What if big tech company X just copies you?” — oh you think they’re going to get budget to do that? You think they’re going to hire 50 devs to just copy your random startup? In THIS market? With THIS amount of Wall street scrutiny against quixotic projects? Hah! If you see a gap build it and fill it. The big dogs are all tied up in meetings with finance trying to save their datadog subscription from the chopping block - they won’t notice you until it’s too late.

6. Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

Top comment by textfiles

Happy to take them.

7. Ask HN: What skill do you want to develop or improve in 2024?

Top comment by nothingeasy

1) Networking: While I don't plan to do much home networking, knowing fundamentals would be helpful to my day to day. So I'm going to go through Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach (https://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/index.php) and augment it with CS 144 (https://www.scs.stanford.edu/10au-cs144/).

2) SQL: As another user mentioned, while I am primarily a FE, there are times when I need to work on the backend and having a shaky understanding of SQL can be a major stumbling block. I might start a bookclub in my city or at work just to ensure I'm consistent with learning.

3) C++/Rust: Will probably do a basic project and may hire a code mentor to do some code reviews/guidance.

8. Ask HN: What are the "boring" businesses for hackers these days?

Top comment by madamelic

The problem with "boring" businesses as you have described is they are also low-barrier.

Passive income businesses or businesses where an average 16 year old can put in $1 and get $1.25 out are liable to get 'disrupted' by someone who is willing to put in $1 to $1.15 out or someone savvy who can put in $0.90 to get $1.25 out. Terrible market and it's exactly why you see them on YouTube selling courses on how to do it or even just saying their entire business plan because it's that brain-dead.

They are just bad businesses because they have no defensibility or IP generated. Yes, you don't have to work to earn necessarily but you are still hitched quite heavily to being hands-on.

My opinion is a good "boring" business is something that passes unremarkably at Thanksgiving and will never be on magazine covers, also good competition to prove the market is strong enough to have another entrant

If you can tell someone what the business is and they go "So anyway"... fantastic business. You don't want any venture-backed companies whose business plan starts and ends at a snow shovel and a pile of money. You will lose unless your plan is the same and you either have a bigger pile of money or your competitor is much worse. The ideal space is likely an established market with sleepy / stagnant competitors so you can carve off a few percent by addressing what the market is not and having a few million+ a year in revenue.

9. Ask HN: What are the YouTube channel worth to follow in 2024?

Top comment by s-macke

Here is my list of my favorite channels:

The best channel about AI

- AI Explained: https://www.youtube.com/@aiexplained-official

Papers and news about AI and computer graphics

- Two Minute Papers: https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers

Awesome channel about science.

- Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium

Very good and long interviews

- Lex Fridman: https://www.youtube.com/@lexfridman

The rest of the list is also for fun and science

- Mentour Pilot: https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot

- Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/@TomScottGo

- Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/@kurzgesagt

- Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder

10. Ask HN: What are ethical companies like Patagonia and some digital counterparts?

Top comment by mtmail

Have a look at B-corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification) I see Patagonia is in the list, too. https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/ has a filter by industry, for example raidboxes.io for Wordpress hosting.