AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?

Top comment by adrianmonk

Sometimes I have similar thoughts, and it makes me realize... there are a lot of humans.

Imagine we evolved on a planet with only enough land for 10,000 people. We would never have most of this stuff because people's work would not be specialized enough to get us there. One person would be responsible for so many different things that they wouldn't go into depth on each one. For example, maybe we'd have a library, but one person would be responsible for both printing the books and running the circulation desk. We would have technology (someone would have invented, say, a wood stove), but we wouldn't have anywhere near as much of it.

But instead, we have billions of people now, and it was at least 2000 years ago that we reached 100 million. When you have that many people, although most of them are still working on the basics (growing food, building housing, etc.), in absolute terms there can be millions of people working on specialized tasks.

It also makes me realize how prosperous we are as a species. Although we haven't eliminated poverty and hunger (and should and probably could), as a species, we are far from being on the edge of survival. We have enough resources that we have people working on niche stuff that will pay off in the future if ever. We have projects that require hundreds or thousands of person-years (in other words, equivalent to multiple lifetimes) of work, and the end result of the project is (say) yet another action movie or romcom.

Humans are smart and creative, but the reason we have what we do is lots and lots of people over a very long period of time with way more resources than what we need for subsistence. Which is pretty cool because any of those things could have not happened, but they all did.

2. Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

Top comment by rco8786

I have a very specific (and pretty easy) strategy for this when I join a new org. Technically you could do this at any time, but you generally have a "grace window" when you're new where people are happy to go out of their way to meet you and teach you.

First, meet 1 on 1 with every member of your immediate team. This of course serves as a "get to know you" meet, but your real goal is to get them to explain their work to you. Have them go into as much detail as time allows on whatever they're currently working on. Ask followup questions that start with "why" on everything. Have them show you their part(s) of the product, have them share as many docs as they're willing to (for you to read async later), etc.

Put aside whatever ego you may have, and just get into a beginner's/learning mindset. Ask all the stupid questions.

Then, at the end, ask them who else they're working with from other teams. Put those names on a list, and rinse and repeat with them. This way you'll start local to your role and work your way outward in the company. Eventually you'll find people that are doing nothing particularly relevant to you and you can decide to stop.

If it's a larger company, this is also where you establish your understanding of the org chart and who does what in it, and also makes you known to a ton of folks who may want or need to work with you in the future - which is invaluable in and of itself.

3. Ask HN: How did you get yourself out of a rut?

Top comment by cookiengineer

For me I had a little phase of not understanding the despair and hatred I received for forking Audacity at the time. I didn't understand why people would do that, and neither why they decide to have "fun" being a bully online and lying about things that never happened. When /pol/ and kiwifarms came at me, I wasn't sure how to deal with that, especially because most rumors supposedly happened when I was asleep, not even reacting to what was happening at the time.

So it kind of resulted in a phase that you are describing, where I kind of gave up on open source and gave up on doing the things that I loved to do before.

What I can recommend, heavily: shut off your phone, go outside for a couple weeks, no tech, no internet, nobody nagging or forcing you to do anything. And listen. To nature, to the environment, to what you think. Take with you a notebook and a pen, and write down your thoughts. Persist on not going online, and fight the addiction.

Social detox and meditation is much more efficient than one might think, if you have no predefined goal on what you want to do. If your goals are set by external influences, you won't be happy with it.

Best wishes, I understand how hard it can be sometimes. Don't lose your head in things you don't want to do.

4. Ask HN: If you've used GPT-4-Turbo and Claude Opus, which do you prefer?

Top comment by xianshou

Claude Opus. GPT-4 gives sensible answers to basic questions, but takes serious persuading to produce useful output on non-trivial work. Opus can be used as an integral part of an engineering workflow and only takes 2-3 tries to get from ill-formed query to working product.

This works particularly well when you copy the relevant excerpt from a project, dump it in, and say "Change X to Y, showing only the key modifications and where to put them". Typically it understands the aim and accomplishes the task in the way you intended, and it knows how to be concise yet precise.

5. Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?

Top comment by solardev

My Microsoft login is still a Hotmail account, and I still use my same eBay account from way back then too. There's also a forum I've been a part of since I was a kid, and I'm nearly 40 now.

My favorite account I used to have was username@ibm.net, back when they dabbled in consumer ISPs (unlimited dialup!). Sadly, they discontinued that service after a while.

I used to have really old Steam, Amazon, Slashdot, Facebook, and reddit accounts too, but deleted them all for various reasons.

6. Ask HN: How is the Spotify app so bad?

Top comment by onion2k

It's one of the most popular services in the world, but has one of the worst user experiences of all the apps I use.

This is really common. It's a sign that the value isn't derived from the software itself, but what the software enables you to do. It doesn't need to be good. People pay to access Spotify's library of music and podcasts, despite the UI.

When you run a startup having people hungry to use your MVP despite it's flaws is a classic signal that you're on to something valuable. I could list hundreds of shockingly bad apps that have awful user experiences that I've happily used over the last 40 years because they all did something I really wanted or needed to do. Almost every 'enterprise' app is a total mess from a UI perspective - but they make a fortune because the value that users get from them make it worth putting up with.

People think a beautiful UI is something that every app needs, but really every app just needs to do something useful. None of them need a good UI until there's a competitor with an equivalent service that has a better UI. Only then does the UI actually matter, because it becomes something users will use to choose which service they buy.

7. Ask HN: How should organize and back up 23 TiB of personal files?

Top comment by perihelions

You should look at Borg for the remote backup software. It does automatic deduplication; has the security posture you're asking for ("untrusted server")*; and is agnostic about which backup cloud provider you use it with. Of course it's FOSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_(backup_software)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642364 ("BorgBackup: Deduplicating Archiver", 103 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34152369 ("BorgBackup: Deduplicating archiver with compression and encryption", 177 comments)

*You definitely don't want your private filenames leaked to data brokers, like Backblaze's clients experienced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536019 ("Backblaze submitting names and sizes of files in B2 buckets to Facebook", 517 comments)

8. Ask HN: What's the best way to exit tech?

Top comment by iancmceachern

I'm currently working to do something akin to this. Would love any feedback.

I've spent my 20 year career designing hardware for many startups and large companies. Some pretty complex things like Kidney Dialysis machines, surgical robotics and artificial hearts.

As a architect, technical leader and having a seemingly "important" role in these things one is not really taken care of in the way one would expect. A lot like the conversation we've all been having about the gutting out of the engineering focused culture in much of our formerly engineering led industries.

I've been working to build a small, simple business that does product design, architecture, engineering services and also has the ability to do injection molding, 3d printing, machining, prototyping, etc all in house, all right here in The SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco.

I'm not trying to solve the most complex problems, be the biggest or fastest growing. I'm just trying to be stable, reputable and reliable, a "small giant".

9. Ask HN: Success stories from McKinsey (et al.)

Top comment by c_o_n_v_e_x

Perhaps one of my most favorite quotes I've read on hackernews:

"This was one of those big eye opening moments for me. Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling. You pay them a bunch of money to come run roughshod over your enemies by producing reams of analysis and Powerpoints, to fling the arrows of jargon, and lay siege to your enemies employees by endlessly trapping them in meetings and then they depart. Consultants are brought in to secure your flank, to provide air cover and to act as disposable pawns in interoffice combat.

They are not brought in to solve problems, to find solutions, or because of their incredibly acumen. It's because they have no loyalty or love but money."

- Kneebonian

10. Ask HN: How to get started with local language models?

Top comment by leopoldj

I wrote a series of blog post precisely for someone in your situation. I hope you find them useful.

Easiest way to run a local LLM these days is Ollama. You don't need PyTorch or even Python installed.

https://mobiarch.wordpress.com/2024/02/19/run-rag-locally-us...

Hugging Face can be confusing but in the end a very well designed framework.

https://mobiarch.wordpress.com/2024/03/02/start-using-mistra...