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Issue #256 - February 4, 2024
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring?, Who wants to be hired? and Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?
Top comment by xrd
It definitely ruined a friendship of mine. His startup was making insane amounts of money. He offered me a position, then his business priorities changed and forced me into a poor role with no long term prospects. I struggled in that new role and he noticed that. He then terminated our agreement two months early.
There are reasons he's right about what he did and there are reasons I'm right about being upset about it but it definitely cost us our friendship.
I think back that if he had operated with integrity and honored his agreement to keep me on for two extra months it would have not been upsetting to leave then. As it was it left me scrambling with three small kids.
The lesson to me is that even if the startup is flush with cash, there will be issues. How the founder manages those issues matters.
I recall when I had my startup I did a bunch of business coaching and really had to take on a lot of uncomfortable things about myself. I'm grateful for that. I invited him many times to participate in that work and he never did. When the money is good you think you don't need it.
2. Ask HN: Best open source and/or free EDA tooling
Top comment by junon
Kicad. Went from zero to fully working, quite complex digital board with it.
A few tips:
Use ultra librarian for parts when possible. They're usually better.
Making your own footprints is a pain but necessary sometimes. FreeCAD is another OSS tool that also has its rough edges but is good enough. Use the sketcher tool and the datasheet to build up all the lines you'd need (including for cutouts, pads, silkscreen, etc), export as DXF, then import into KiCad's footprint editor. You can then switch layers for each line or use them to position pads such that they're fully accurate and you don't have to think too hard about offsets and whatever.
Find (or make!) a good part manager if you're populating your own boards. I wrote some simple REPL around sqlite in Node.js for working with parts, and have a cheapo barcode scanner from Amazon to work with mouser IDs and the like to "check out" parts as I populate. In hindsight, I wish I had written it in Python. I also use this tool to convert the BOM kicad exports into a more reasonable format for buying. I also subtract away the parts in the DB I already have so I don't keep buying extras of stuff. Just an idea.
3. Ask HN: What are some homeless shelter innovations?
Top comment by benrutter
I used to work in social housing
The biggest innovation in homeless is the "housing first" policy in Finland. No clever tricks or anything but homeless people are given social housing regardless of engagement with services, addition problems etc. (This is the exact opposite of how things normally work where someone has to engage well with services before being elligible for state housing).
The outcomes are basically as close to ending homelessness as you can get.
Link if people want to find out more: https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/eradicating...
4. Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
Top comment by ComputerGuru
Backing up to WARC, HTML, whatever is great for posterity but not much more than that.
Assuming you're a member of the organization and therefore licensed to use the content (but merely unable to access it): Purely hypothetically speaking, if an admin is this mia and obviously not on top of the job, the odds are probably high that they've neglected maintenance. Old PHP server running out-of-date PHP applications... not the most secure combo in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some magic strings you could send to the server to get it to regurgitate the contents of the database in a more developer-friendly, strongly-typed fashion which you could import to myBB or XenForo and continue chugging along..
5. Ask HN: Guide for Implementing Common Lisp
Top comment by Jach
This is a very approachable paper from 1990 on one way to do it with a C kernel bootstrapping to Common Lisp: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/kcl/paper... Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) is the ancestor of today's Embeddable Common Lisp (ECL).
SICL is probably the best modern version of CL written in CL from a design standpoint, even if it's not taking over SBCL's role anytime soon: https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL It uses some fancy bootstrapping to have the whole language available early, e.g. their definition of class 'symbol is:
(defclass symbol (t)
((%name :reader symbol-name)
(%package :reader symbol-package))
(:metaclass built-in-class))
(define-primitive-object
(symbol :lowtag other-pointer-lowtag
:widetag symbol-header-widetag
:alloc-trans %make-symbol
:type symbol)
...
(name :ref-trans symbol-name :init :arg)
(package :ref-trans symbol-package
:set-trans %set-symbol-package
:init :null)
...)
6. Ask HN: Any good Silicon Valley Photo coffee table books?
Top comment by marcuskaz
Not a book, and a bit self promotional, but I have a small photo series I worked on https://mkaz.com/silicon-valley/
Also, look for Silicon Valley '07 by Gabriele Basilico, it's a photo book - not a huge coffee table book but pretty good with about 80-100 photos from 2007
7. Ask HN: Are you using a GPT to prompt-engineer another GPT?
Top comment by chalsprhebaodu
I’ve commented it before, and surely it’s something I’m doing wrong, but I cannot believe system prompts or GPTs or any amount of instructing actually works for people to get ChatGPT to respond in a certain fashion with any consistency.
I have spent hours and hours and hours and hours trying to get ChatGPT to be a little less apologetic, long-winded, to stop reiterating, and to not interpret questions about its responses as challenges (i.e when I say “what does this line do?” ChatGPT responds “you’re right, there’s another way to do it…”).
Nothing and I mean NOTHING will get ChatGPT with GPT-4 to behave consistently. And it gets worse every day. It’s like a twisted version of a genie misinterpreting a wish. I don’t know if I’ve poisoned my ChatGPT or if I’m being A/B tested to death but every time I use ChatGPT I very seriously consider unsubscribing. The only reasons I don’t are 1) I had an insanely impressive experience with GPT-3, and 2) Google is similarly rapidly decreasing in usefulness.
8. Ask HN: Looking for a project to volunteer on? (February 2024)
Top comment by nhatcher
SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: IronCalc spreadsheet
IronCalc is a new open source spreadsheet engine written in Rust with bindings in Python and JavaScript. The engine can be compiled to wasm and runs in the browser.
Pitch:
https://www.ironcalc.com/
Playground:
https://playground.ironcalc.com/
Source Code:
https://github.com/ironcalc
IronCalc intends to be robust, light, fast, easy to use and Excel compatible.
Although IronCalc is already working there is still a long way to go. We want to build different skins like native apps, terminal applications. We need to incorporate all Excel functions. We want to add charts like maybe chartjs
The current skin is written in React/TypeScript.
If this peeks your interest send me an email hn@theuniverse.today
9. Ask HN: De-Googling my life: Alternatives to Google Sheets?
Top comment by CrypticShift
10. Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?
Top comment by DrAwdeOccarim
I work in biotech and at my company, specifically our CEO, for over a decade has constantly asked all of us, "How are you leveraging AI in your job?". So much so that we used to joke about it. Well, when ChatGPT arrived, something happened. Everyone at the company (now about 5000 people) were already primed, looking for how they could finally answer "Yes" to our obsessive CEO. We have a deep roster of professional software engineers, and one dev in particular hacked out an internal site that leveraged the OpenAI API and deployed it company wide. Last count, a majority of the company uses it daily. What my team specifically has found is that building custom GPTs and working out detailed, two-way prompts, has allowed us (and specifically my part-time employee) to deliver detailed technical reports commensurate to an FTE. The key is to force the output to "show it's work" and to expect to review similar to how you would work with a first year graduate student. If you do the math, this puts the company above it's FTE cost in terms of per employee output. That's the real ticket right now. It's not inventing the next drug, but it sure as hell is making me more productive without causing burn-out. It works really well also at meeting minutes, a huge source of time-waste for project managers who should be doing high-thought work instead of menial tasks.
So to answer your question: become reliant on it. This is the future of white-collar work. Local instances are catching up to the big ones. It's only going to get better!