AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Nitter officially declared "over" today – alternatives?

Top comment by rchaud

It's over.

It isn't just Twitter, it's every single website that's turned themselves into a login-walled "application".

Twitter's relative openness lasted a long time. It was open by default because it is a product built in 2006, when the idea of coralling people into walled gardens to show them ads didn't exist.

Apps built later take the concept of "walled garden" as a default feature. Slack , Discord, Snapchat, Tiktok, Telegram .... all largely closed off platforms. You can't see anything unless you're logged in.

2. Ask HN: What are the best articles on managing people?

Top comment by tmoravec

I’m reading some articles on managing people all the time (mostly from Software Lead Weekly newsletter). And recently, I’ve opened Armstrong’s Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice to read a few chapters on a problem I’m facing at work.

And WOW a proper book on the topic is SOOO much better than any random article that I find, be it from SWLW, HN, Reddit, or any other source. Articles and posts are easy to like when I already agree with their premise. But the depth of a proper book, from a real source of authority and not some random person online, looking at the problem from multiple points, that’s so much more insightful and useful.

So instead of hunting for best articles, I would 100% recommend getting Armstrong, or some textbook. Or at least High Output Management as other comment suggested, or some other well known and well regarded book. But Armstrong in particular can give you very deep understanding of most aspects of people management, plus it’s up-to-date.

3. Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

Top comment by PheonixPharts

> I'd love to know what are some of the hidden challenges to making a useful product with agents?

One thing that is still confusing to me, is that we've been building products with machine learning pretty heavily for a decade now and somehow abandoned all that we have learned about the process now that we're building "AI".

The biggest thing any ML practitioner realizes when they step out of a research setting is that for most tasks accuracy has to be very high for it be productizable.

You can do handwritten digit recognition with 90% accuracy? Sounds pretty good, but if you need to turn that into recognizing a 12 digit account number you now have a 70% chance of getting at least one digit incorrect. This means a product worthy digit classifier needs to be much higher accuracy.

Go look at some of the LLM benchmarks out there, even in these happy cases it's rare to see any LLM getting above 90%. Then consider you want to chain these calls together to create proper agent based workflows. Even with 90% accuracy in each task, chain 3 of these together and you're down to 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.73, 73% accuracy.

This is by far this biggest obstacle towards seeing more useful products built with agents. There are cases where lower accuracy results are acceptable, but most people don't even consider this before embarking on their journey to build an AI product/agent.

4. Ask HN: Alternatives to the Pomodoro technique?

Top comment by bun_terminator

Pomodoro always felt so strange to me. If I could just "start" things on command, I wouldn't need any of these special techniques in the first place. And if I do work, I absolutely don't want to stop, and certainly not because a clock tells me so. It's like the perfect antipattern to destroy any productivity in me. Not hating, just puzzled by it.

5. Ask HN: How do you come up with side project ideas in 2024?

Top comment by BigParm

If I lived ten lifetimes I would never run out of things to build. Each project suggests five new projects along the way.

It’s harder if you think about building for the masses. It’s easy if you think about building for yourself.

But yeah everyone gets creative block sometimes when you’re not on a roll already.

It’s actually crazy the breadth and depth of research that is out there. And in computers, it’s not like math where it’s proven to end here with this proof or whatever. People are just writing papers about something they made. There’s tons of room to get in there and do something new.

6. Ask HN: How do you organize software documentation at work?

Top comment by hiAndrewQuinn

99% of people on the Internet are lurkers, and only 1% actually contribute anything ever. By defaulting to action, you can quickly end up wielding a disproportionate amount of influence on the resulting culture of your org. So, not a methodology, but an algorithm I often follow:

If I need to do a thing, and I don't know how to do it, I search for the most obvious sequence of words I can thing that is vaguely like my problem in Confluence. I do this maybe 3 to 5 times.

If I find something, I open it in edit mode and start reading through it. The instant I hit upon anything not obvious to me, add whatever obvious thing is missing.

If I don't find anything in there, I create a page in the Diataxis format (usually a HOWTO) and write it myself. I use short sentences, plenty of screenshots, and plenty of code blocks, to make it as copy-and-paste friendly as possible.

I never ask just how basic this thing actually is - most of my most viewed articles in any organization turn out to be the most basic ones. "How to make a network drive in Windows." "How to set up your Git credentials." These are very often much more popular than "How to build a custom VM inmage with QEMU and Ansible." I take my own confusion as an existence proof that this is sufficiently obscure enough to confuse one generally competent but non-expert person, and take faith that most people in my org are not experts in most things.

I trust other people to be able to look at the timestamps and the history of the docs and to figure out whether what they're reading is too outdated to be useful. I pretend, despite evidence to the contrary, that other people will follow roughly the same algorithm as me, and read pages and make updates on the fly as they work. If they don't, well, that's them ceding their cultural power, which they probably don't want anyway (and that is entirely fair).

7. Ask HN: Are there any good reasons to use C++ over Rust for new projects today?

Top comment by deviantbit

I am a retiring engineer/entrepreneur. I made a lot of money with C++. It is hard for me to tell anyone not to use it.

I recently developed an oil and gas derivative tool in Rust. IMO Rust has a long way to go. It reminds me of OCaml. I spent 2 years developing a Compliance System on DEC/OSF1 in OCaml. We made the mistake of adopting that language too early. Also, the C++ community is a lot more tolerant. A big plus for C++.

8. Ask HN: 36 months of unemployment and depression. How to go back?

Top comment by boredemployee

Believe in me, I've been in your shoes before, it seems like an endless problem! But the cure starts with the basics that we often neglect:

1) Go out for some exercise (45min of moderate walking)

2) Get some sunlight

3) Check your Vitamin D levels

4) Drink about 2 liters of water

5) Eat healthily

6) After all this, start thinking about your employability again

Never forget that when one opportunity closes, others open up. The following metaphor might seem like quackery, but "instead of focusing on a sick tree, look at the entire forest around it"

9. Ask HN: Anyone left software to study non-STEM subjects?

Top comment by whorleater

I went and did a masters on Middle East studies, focusing on Shia rituals in Iraq. I moved to Baghdad (and south Iraq) for a year, wrote up my research here: http://malloc.dog/karbala/, http://malloc.dog/field/iraq/

My day job was writing cpp and elixir, although I kept my job and returned to it. I've been thinking about leaving software completely though.

10. Ask HN: What is your go-to stack for the web?

Top comment by assimpleaspossi

I ran a web dev business for 20 years. It includes two sites you probably have visited and bought things from. We used HTML for HTML. CSS for CSS and Javascript for Javascript.

Then we used a common and popular programming language to make them all work together.

It was compatible with everything. Worked everywhere. Interfaced with everything. And was as fast as hell.

No additional thinking or learning required.