AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?

Top comment by koeng

I’ve been working on a synthetic DNA assembly company. Basically, I figured out how to assemble DNA for people at a fraction of what it normally costs, so they give me a sequence, and then I make it in real life for them, then ship it to them.

Most of my customers have been AI protein designers, ironically. Turns out SOMEBODY has to wrangle atoms in the real biological world and that’s me!

After almost a year of work I finally smoothed out all the kinks in the process, so can now go from a design to synthetic DNA in a cell in about a week (not counting oligo pool synthesis time). I can do about 600,000bp per week, which is large enough to synthesize the smallest bacterial genome (each week), tho I only do about 1000bp fragments. I’m also completely bootstrapped and self funded, and only get help from my several opentrons robots

2. Ask HN: What things are happening in ML that we can't hear over the din of LLMs?

Top comment by lelag

Some exciting projects from the last months:

- 3d scene reconstruction from a few images: https://dust3r.europe.naverlabs.com/

- gaussian avatars: https://shenhanqian.github.io/gaussian-avatars

- relightable gaussian codec: https://shunsukesaito.github.io/rgca/

- track anything: https://co-tracker.github.io/ https://omnimotion.github.io/

- segment anything: https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything

- good human pose estimate models: (Yolov8, Google's mediapipe models)

- realistic TTS: https://huggingface.co/coqui/XTTS-v2, bark TTS (hit or miss)

- open great STT (mostly whisper based)

- machine translation (ex: seamlessm4t from meta)

It's crazy to see how much is coming out of Meta's R&D alone.

3. Ask HN: Who's getting their job applications rejected?

Top comment by buro9

I work at Grafana, and we be hiring, I posted on the Who's Hiring in January and that was a big mistake. I've posted before (probably 6 times a year as I miss the 1st sometimes) and had few to no responses, but in January I had over 50 responses in the first few hours, and it continued to elicit responses for the next week.

Employers are swamped right now, there are a lot of people seeking few positions. I've gone from giving personal replies and spending time on most applicants, from spending time sourcing, to just trying to keep up with the inbound applications.

It's obviously a very hard market right now, and I feel for those who are searching in this climate.

4. Ask HN: How common is developer burnout? Have you ever been burnt out?

Top comment by alsetmusic

I went from a FAANG to a twenty-ish person local business. I found out that what matters to me is not money or status. It’s a short commute, work that ends at the same time every day, liking my coworkers, and working directly with the people I help. Some mix of these might be right for you, assuming the bills are covered.

My job has less (no) global impact. What I did previously affected far more people. I told people what project I was on and they thought that was cool. But I don’t hate my life or job and I very much did before.

5. Ask HN: Tips to get started on my own server

Top comment by throwaway38375

Some tips:

1. Digital Ocean offer small VPS for $5 per month. That's a 50% saving right away!

2. Stick with Ubuntu in the beginning. It's not the best, but it's 100% good enough and has so much support and tutorials out there.

3. If you have a small VPS with not much RAM, definitely set up a swapfile. It gives you virtual RAM for doing RAM heavy things on a small VPS.

4. Use the virtual firewalls offered by your host rather than the server firewalls in the beginning. If you mess up a server firewall you may have to get your host to reset it for you. If you mess up a virtual firewall you can amend it through a web UI and get back to doing things quickly.

5. Learn to read man pages and log files. Between the two you can figure out how to do stuff, and then figure out why it isn't working correctly.

6. In terms of security, use a recent distro, use a firewall close everything you don't need, use SSH keys, and set up secure passwords for everything else, and you will avoid a lot of problems.

7. Keep an eye on resources, programs like top, uptime, free, df, and du will allow you to see what's using up CPU, RAM, or disk space.

8. Learn a relational database. MySQL or Postgres are good choices. This skill will keep you employed for years, almost every business uses a relational database in one way or another!

9. Have fun :)

6. Ask HN: Doom and Gloom but financial markets doing well?

Top comment by lifeisstillgood

It’s fairly simple. In 2020 countries across the globe shutdown, and to keep economies “safe” governments printed money and handed it out more or less to people who were in economic danger - waitresses who could not work, though furlough schemes and the like.

USA printed basically 10 trillion (yes with a T). UK about 1 trillion. Germany, France, Spain, South Africa Japan and so on. Maybe 25 trillion? No one seems to have counted.

Under MMT (modern monetary theory) this is fine as long as government takes away the printed token (money) later on in form of tax

But they have not. The money has flowed from waitresses to landlords, to supermarket owners and their landlords and to share owners of supermarkets - basically it went from the poor to the middle class and then to the ultra wealthy.

The ultra wealthy now have an extra 25 trillion dollars. So they “invest”.

Real estate goes to stupid prices (see cost of a 4 bed house in London).

Stock market hits new highs.

But the rest of us have sold our nice middle class homes in suburbs for stupid amounts and moved … somewhere with less amenities.

Or are renting in cities at high rates and food prices going sky high.

The simplest answer is governments only did half the job - the next job is a uber wealth tax - holding of over say 20 million, 30 million, just get taxed, forcing sale of assets and return of assets to the flowing economy and then governments can afford things like welfare and investment again.

We should stop privileging the privileged.

7. Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

Top comment by cjk2

Killer one that has shafted us is tying everything into popular deployment and CI tooling. Your product should be buildable, deployable and tested on a standalone workstation at any time. We have lost literally days fucking around with broken products which get their tentacles into that shit.

I'd use AWS + ECR + ECS personally. Stay away from kubernetes until you have a fairly large deployment as it requires huge administrative overhead to keep it up to date and well managed and a lot of knowledge overhead. Keep your containers entirely portable. Make sure you understand persistent storage and backups for any state.

Also stay the hell away from anything which is not portable between cloud vendors.

As for observability, carefully price up buy vs build because buy gets extremely expensive. Last thing you want is a $500k bill for logging one day.

And importantly every time you do something in any major public cloud, someone is making money out of you and it affects your bottom line. You need to develop an accounting mentality. Nothing is free. Build around that assumption. Favour simple, scalable architectures, not complex sprawling microservices.

8. Ask HN: How hard is it to find a job after trying to start your own thing

Top comment by codegeek

"irreparable damage to my career."

I am trying to help you with my comment but it is going to be straight. You sound like someone who wants to have the cake and eat it too. If you have the itch so bad, you need to do something about it at some point and there never will be a right time. Trust me on that. Yes, you can take calculated risks etc but overall, there will never be that perfect day.

"Irreparable damage" is too strong of a phrase. That tells me that your itch is not that bad and it is more of a nice thing to do because many others do it. Don't think of it that way. If you truly want to do your own thing, think of it this way. What if you never do it ? Will you be ok with it on your death bed ? If not, do something now. If it doesn't matter that much to you, you are most likely better off just working for someone else.

Having said all this, if you are not sure about how to start your own thing, the next best thing is to join a small company/startup where you learn and are very close to the bottom line. Lot of startups/small companies (under 50 employees) would love to hire failed entrepreneurs.

Source: I have been doing my own thing for almost a decade now after working jobs for a decade. If you are a failed entrepreneur, hit me up. Always open to chatting.

9. Ask HN: Anybody Using Htmx on the Job?

Top comment by recursivedoubts

yeah, i'm using it on a consulting job at

https://www.commspace.co.za/

they also use hyperscript

working out pretty well i guess, it gets a little crazy sometimes, htmx definitely isn't a silver bullet like some people say, but it works

also, I'm the creator of htmx and hyperscript

10. Ask HN: How do I improve my emotional intelligence?

Top comment by human_person

Do you know why it will make the other person sad or angry? What do you do when they get upset? What emotional state are you bringing to the conversation? Do you respect their emotions or just get annoyed with them for being ‘irrational’ or not understanding you? Have you noticed patterns in their responses to different types of deliveries? How often do you ask questions in one on one conversations? How often do you apologize when the other person gets upset?

I’m not sure you’ll be able to find a book that will tell you what to say word for word but you might be able to learn a lot from studying your own interactions. I’d encourage you to ask open ended questions when someone doesn’t react the way you expect them to.

I try to keep in mind that everyone is a rational actor based on their values and world view. If someone seems irrational it means that I’ve misunderstood their values or some aspect of their understanding of the world. Trying to figure out where the disconnect is can often be a better use of time than just repeating myself or rephrasing my thoughts.