AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

Top comment by pelcg

The other day I found many TUI tools on a site called Terminal Trove:

https://terminaltrove.com/

And it also features a great list of them here that many might not have heard of.

https://terminaltrove.com/list/

For example trippy and nvtop look very nice for TUIs and other 'top' based tools they have listed there.

https://terminaltrove.com/categories/top/

https://terminaltrove.com/trippy/

https://terminaltrove.com/nvtop/

There's screenshots and install instructions that's also convenient.

2. Ask HN: What nonfiction books do you keep rereading?

Top comment by ghshephard

Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols 2nd Edition - Radia Perlman

Every 2-3 years, particularly in the periods when I'm not actively in network engineering, I re-read this book from start-finish - and it just completely centers my mindset with regards to pretty much every fundamental topic in Network Engineering. There almost didn't need to be a 2nd Edition - most of the major topics were covered in 1st edition - the only major difference is the use of lots of protocol examples. The core material itself is timeless.

Here is just one gem from Chapter 5 - "Hubs, Switches, Virtual Lans and Fast Ethernet"

"I originally resisted adopting the term switch. Unlike thing, switch sounds like a word you'd apply to a well-defined concept, so it makes people assume that there is a crisp definition that everyone else knows. I thought the world was already confusing enough with the terms bridge and router. Unfortunately, people coined the word switch assuming they were inventing a new concept, somehow different from a bridge or a router. And there were various independent product concepts named switch. As "switch" vendors expanded the capabilities of their products, the products wound up being functionally the same as bridges and routers, usually a hybrid or superset. One cynical (and ungrammatical) definition I use for switch is "a marketing term that means fast." Almost all products these days are some hybrid or superset of bridges and routers. So maybe it's right for the industry to settle on a new word, switch, as a more generic term for a box that moves data."

3. Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

Top comment by hiAndrewQuinn

This blog post on dating.

https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/models-a-summ...

Alright, it's not really a blog post about dating, per se. It's more of a blog post about becoming the kind of person who maxes out their dateability, no matter what their starting physical/mental/spiritual condition.

It's hard to explain what reading this post did to me. There are a few times in my life where I consciously decided to switch life trajectories radically and become someone entirely different. First age 8, when I vowed to become an idiot. After reading this was the second one, age 24, where I vowed to become a sexy idiot. I printed it out at the college library and reread it every day at breakfast - a strategy I highly recommend to my fellow nimrods. And, voila, age 25 when I, the jester, moved countries with no passport, no job lined up, and no plan, to go live with the woman who I would eventually call my wife.

Now I'm her sexy idiot. Progress!

4. Ask HN: How to do simple heartbeat monitoring?

Top comment by runjake

If you want super minimal, something like this might work?

  #!/bin/bash

  # Add this script to cron to run at whatever duration you desire.

  # URL to be checked
  URL="https://example.com/test.php"

  # Email for alerts
  EMAIL="root@example.com"

  # Perform the HTTP request and extract the status code with 10 second timeout.
  STATUS=$(curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}\n" --max-time 10 $URL)

  # Check if the status code is not 200
  if [ "$STATUS" -ne 200 ]; then
      # Send email alert
      echo "The URL $URL did not return a 200 status code. Status was $STATUS." | mail -s "URL Check Alert" $EMAIL

      # Instead of email, you could send a Slack/Teams/PagerDuty/Pushover/etc, etc alert, with something like:
      curl -X POST https://events.pagerduty.com/...
  fi

5. Ask HN: Seeking ideas for preschool/school projects

Top comment by A_D_E_P_T

What's fun, and very interesting for both children and adults, is going zero tech. In fact, go back to prehistory.

You start with the different properties of stones. If you have flint, obsidian, granite, quartzite, gypsum, and calcite in your region -- find them together. If not, buy them. Teach your kids about their different properties, and how they were used to make hand tools.

Then, the different properties of woods. Hard, soft, green, etc. Show them why ash and hickory (and especially negatively buoyant cornus mas, if you can get it,) make much better tools than pine. Make wooden spears and harden their points in a fire you make with stone tools.

Then integrate the two -- use stone tools to make other stone tools, and combine stone and wood into wooden-handled stone tools. Make bows and stone-tipped arrows, and use them. Go foraging with the children, and teach them how to cook vegetables, fish, and meat over an open fire. (Note: Beware mushrooms unless you really know what you're doing.)

In short order, the children will understand how men have lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Then they can advance into copper smelting, pottery, building carts and canoes, making nets from natural fibers, writing on clay tablets, and so forth...

I feel that, as with math where the optimal method is to start with Euclid and then progress through the ages, one ought to learn to be in the world by moving through man's stages of development. At 4-7, they're in their prime for traipsing around the woods and making stone tools.

6. Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

Top comment by jmacc93

Yes! Finally something relevant I can post to hacker news

I use this little script https://github.com/jmacc93/paste-to-tmux-script daily. Its for pasting your current clipboard item to a target tmux session, along with very simple dsl for controlling which tmux target to send to, opening the tmux target, killing tmux sessions, etc. It makes a vastly, vastly better and more productive repl for me. The workflow for using it looks like typically is like: use `@sw name_of_target`, `@open`, `name_of_executable`, then move my cursor to something I want to evaluate, use ctrl-c to copy the line, and ctrl-. to send it to tmux

I think I've changed stuff around since I last updated that repo, though, but the general idea and skeleton is there, if anyone wants to use it / hack on it. And I'm gonna do a rewrite of it soon, I think, so that instead of using a dsl (the `@...` forms above) it uses `!...` or some similar form to execute arbitrary shell commands

I'm hoping to (soon hopefully) integrate it with my https://github.com/jmacc93/noca notebook canvas program as well

7. Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

Top comment by rsync

KYC is already required at banks and they have the most complete - and global - view of all transaction flows.

Therefore we should insist that KYC be solely performed by banks - no other firms should be required to perform it.

Given the extraordinary privileges that banks enjoy, this would be a reasonable contribution to society - especially given that they are doing it anyway.

8. Ask HN: Are there any open source forks of nomad and consul?

Top comment by trilobyte

OpenBao is a fork of Vault. I'm not sure how well-supported the project is, but there is a decent amount of enthusiasm.

9. Ask HN: Good sources of math exercises for ~10-17 y/o?

Top comment by sinkwool

I remember when I was a kid, Kangaroo math puzzles were incredibly fun. I don't know if you can get your hands on some materials, but they were such a blast. https://mathkangaroo.org/mks/

I recommend getting some math olympiad books; at that level they're just like puzzles so should be fun.

https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/Olympiad_book...

Go for general problem books (non-topic-specific), and start with the easiest problems that they find fun.

I remember the following two books were interesting (though might be somewhat harder). You might find them on the internet archive or pdf's online.

Challenging Mathematical Problems With Elementary Solutions (Volume I, Combinatorial Analysis and Probability Theory) - A. M. Yaglom, I. M. Yaglom.

Challenging Mathematical Problems With Elementary Solutions (Volume II, Problem From Various Branches of Mathematics) - A. M. Yaglom, I. M. Yaglom.

Additionally, look into various olympiads:

American AMC 8 and AMC 10 from various years should be easiest:

https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_Problems_...

And when they feel adventurous, take a look at contests. Some countries (e.g. Romania, Russia) have contests for lower grades, though they are still quite difficult.

https://artofproblemsolving.com/community/c3754998_aops_year...

10. Ask HN: Why does everyone need to be an "Engineer" these days?

Top comment by foobarbaz33

Status and titles are important to many people. Bestowing a title is a free way for companies to satisfy that itch for their employee. "Engineer" is not a formal credential or legally protected title in the USA.

All sorts of jobs have rebranded.

    Janitor -> Janitorial Engineer
    Garbage Man -> Sanitation Engineer
    Cheater -> Rules interpretation Engineer
    Guard -> Correctional Officer
    Programmer -> Software Engineer