AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

Top comment by FriedPickles

I got annoyed that my MacBook case would slightly buzz when plugged in, so I worked with a factory to make these grounded Apple adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Grounded-Duckhead-Apple-Mac-Adapter/d...

They've been selling consistently to others annoyed by the problem or who want to ground their MacBook for other reasons.

2. Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?

Top comment by fhd2

I see the same in the consulting space - people who've barely ever talked to a prospect let alone had an actual customer (I happen to know from talking to folks like that) have a shiny website with pricing packages talking about "their team" and what not. Feels like pure hustle culture.

I started my business a year ago, and there is no "we". There's me and (at this point) enough clients for comfortable living. I went completely scrappy on my website (https://dahlke.tech). Felt rebellious in this day and age, but it doesn't seem to hurt.

I don't think that stuff matters in the beginning, clients see right through it from what I've heard. Some people get off on trying to look and feel like "a real company". I find there's joy in accepting that my company is not that, not yet, and putting all of my energy into getting there.

3. Ask HN: Does (or why does) anyone use MapReduce anymore?

Top comment by tjhunter

(2nd user & developer of spark here). It depends on what you ask.

MapReduce the framework is proprietary to Google, and some pipelines are still running inside google.

MapReduce as a concept is very much in use. Hadoop was inspired by MapReduce. Spark was originally built around the primitives of MapReduce, and you see still see that in the description of its operations (exchange, collect). However, spark and all the other modern frameworks realized that:

- users did not care mapping and reducing, they wanted higher level primitives (filtering, joins, ...)

- mapreduce was great for one-shot batch processing of data, but struggled to accomodate other very common use cases at scale (low latency, graph processing, streaming, distributed machine learning, ...). You can do it on top of mapreduce, but if you really start tuning for the specific case, you end up with something rather different. For example, kafka (scalable streaming engine) is inspired by the general principles of MR but the use cases and APIs are now quite different.

4. Ask HN: How to get into quantitative trading?

Top comment by lockdown22

Not sure if Options trading for Income / Theta harvesting counts as Quantitative trading, but I found success here.

Long story short: I created an option backtester (MesoSim) and started analyzing public domain trades.

I have a couple of listed in this blog: https://blog.deltaray.io/tags/strategies/

If you are interested I'd suggest taking a look at the Weekend Effect, it's relatively easy to understand.

Best luck to you getting back to trading!

5. Ask HN: How to deal with constant interruptions at work (with ADHD)

Top comment by g4zj

I'm autistic, and quickly become very frustrated by distracting sounds and unexpected or unproductive interruptions. Unfortunately, this is a "me" problem, and I've found that I'm the only one interested in solving it.

After years of carefully managing/challenging expectations of me, here's what my work situation looks like today.

- I work 100% remotely. If I go into the office, I will only be interrupted constantly, dragged into meetings, etc.

- My Teams status is set to "offline" at all times, with notifications disabled. No exceptions. I check Teams messages between tasks, before/after lunch, and at the end of the work day.

- Unproductive Teams messages, like impromptu requests for status updates, questions which have well-documented answers, or that I've answered directly on multiple recent occasions, are completely ignored.

- All work requests which are not submitted via official channels are ignored. The remainder are addressed only if they are submitted, or assigned, directly by my manager. I completely ignore all other work requests.

- I've created dozens of mail rules to filter out almost all of the noise in my inbox, including the company newsletter, timesheet reminders, office-specific messages (bagels in the lunch room!?!), etc.

I know I'm a pain in the ass, but at least my sanity is stable after years of overwhelming frustration while trying to effect even the slightest change in others.

6. Ask HN: Why is Bluetooth still so unreliable?

Top comment by zh3

One factor is Bluetooth is on the 2.4GHz band, and WiFi on that band is many times more powerful - so Bluetooth packets can only get through in the gaps between Wifi transmissions. Many of the Bluetooth devices around use Nordic Semi nrf5x chips, and we know that with those chips if there's a single wifi transmitting at one end of the frequency band and all the BT-type devices up at the other end there's still significant interference effects. Also the short wavelength (~10cm) means the RF bounces and refracts all over the place, often resulting in small dead spots where devices fail to communicate (and the dead spots move about as the environment changes,e.g people moving around).

As a result, getting anything through relies on lots of error handling and quite a lot of software is not the highest quality, shall we say? It's also not helped by lying user interfaces telling you a device is connected when snooping packets manifestly shows its not (looking at you, Apple).

Bluetooth can be pretty reliable - in RF-quiet environments. Low data rate stuff with error handlng/repeat transmissions often works by getting through during periods when there happen to be few interfering signals. Trying to use BT for relatively high rate date (e.g. audio) with lots of nearby wifi's is always going to be hit and miss.

7. Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

Top comment by nickd2001

"It’s obvious the game has changed" - it's obvious you haven't been in tech all that long. ;) that was a joke answer - no offence intended :) But seriously, I've heard "the game has changed" many, many, many times over the last few decades. Its true. The game is constantly changing. :) "what you all are focusing on to stay employed in tech". - Same answer as its always been. Be reliable, show up, get stories in the Done column. Be friendly, nice, help others when they're stuck, ask for help when you're stuck, do a mixture of work, some with new tech you wanna learn, some on old legacy stuff or things other people don't like so they're grateful you did so they didn't have to and want to hang onto you 'cos you know the codebase. Look after your boss :) People forget to do this. (not being a sycophant, just genuinely making their life easier and trying to be not too much of a PITA to manage). If a job ends up being stressful / non-fun, or you're locked into all old tech with no future, then ask for a change to the role, or move jobs internally or externally.

8. Ask HN: What happened to normal-sized smartphones?

Top comment by conesus

Apple still sells the iPhone SE 3. Rumor has it that the next iPhone SE will lose the home screen button but retain the same size. The camera isn't as powerful as the iPhone 13/14/15 lines but I find that it does fine in low light and takes the same exceptionally beautiful photos in good lighting. It has portrait mode as well.

It's not that much of a trade-off in terms of features or capability and it has the small size you'd expect.

9. Ask HN: Is Apple's R1 a Discrete GPU?

Top comment by CharlesW

The R1 is an SPU (Sensor Processing Unit) which works in concert with the M2's integrated GPU (the R1 being the innie, and the M2 being the outie). It is doing an enormous amount of image signal processing, which seems to explain the 256GB/s memory bandwidth.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/apple-r1-chip-apple-vision...: "The specialized chip was designed specifically for the challenging task of real-time sensor processing, taking the input from 12 cameras, five sensors (including a lidar sensor!) and six microphones. The company claims it can process the sensor data within 12 milliseconds — eight times faster than the blink of an eye — and says this will dramatically reduce the motion sickness plaguing many other AR/VR systems."

10. Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?

Top comment by jon-wood

At least in my experience, yes, it really is that dull. If you get senior enough it manages to be both very dull and very stressful.

I managed to stick out for about a year after the startup I’d been working for was acquired by a multinational. I’d been an early engineering hire at the startup, and by that point was a technical lead for one of the teams. On being acquired I got promoted to technical lead for the newly formed division, which in practice meant endless meetings about every aspect of what we were doing. I’m talking eight hours a day on Teams calls, and a couple of hours writing things up between them.

One thing I’ll never forget is that an early task I picked up was working out how to tell if someone had opted out of marketing communications. I naively went in thinking it couldn’t be that hard, just look them up in the system that tracked these things. When I left we still didn’t have a decent solution. I’d spent months on calls with everyone up to the Data Protection Officer, and the closest I ever got was something we thought might work. For all I know they’re still trying to work it out 18 months later.

In the end I hated that job so much I took a ~50% pay cut and left a five figure retention bonus on the table to get out. I’m now happily back in a startup writing code every day, solving interesting problems, and laughing whenever someone complains about how much process and documentation there is.