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Issue #273 - June 2, 2024
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
Top comment by natpalmer1776
I would devote my time to building high quality, durable, and energy efficient 3bd 2ba homes in the rural areas surrounding major metropolitan areas, which I would then sell at material cost.
Buying my first home (mobile/manufactured) has been a combination of the best and worst thing I've ever done. The house cost nearly 3 times what my grandparents paid about ~30 years ago in the same neighborhood (on the same street!) while the construction and finish quality are sub-par at best, with a nearly endless list of things that are constantly in need of repair, multiple water intrusion issues, etc. To make matters worse, the housing market in the area I live has reached unreasonable levels, with my current home being 'valued' at 1.4x what I bought it for roughly 3 years ago.
Additionally, I keep seeing homes built that are on monolithic slabs and nearly everyone I know personally who is a homeowner is having issues with their home's foundation due to the high movement soil (clay) even in recently built homes. I would build homes that use pier and beam foundations with piles deep enough to resist soil movement, ensure site drainage was appropriate for each home, and generally put all the necessary care and work into ensuring that each home built would last for multiple generations.
I want to build homes that last and allow others to flourish without the litany of concerns I currently have to struggle with on-top of my day job.
2. Ask HN: I have many PDFs – what is the best local way to leverage AI for search?
Top comment by bastien2
You don't. You use a full-text indexer and normal search tools. A chatbot is only going to decrease the integrity of query results.
3. Ask HN: Can anyone recommend a Windows Systems programming book?
Top comment by deaddodo
The reason you're not getting a good answer is because the ultimate answer is to just use Microsoft's Documentation:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/get-started/s...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/
It covers near everything, is extremely exhaustive, and constantly updated. That being said, if you're more interested in how the Windows API is organized/works internally (why you have to give it handles/resources and what those mean, for instance), then Charles Petzold's series is generally considered the definitive resource:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JDMP71S/
4. Ask HN: What are your favourite websites that display a lot of data / tables?
Top comment by jamierumbelow
https://ourworldindata.org/
I reach for it several times per week. Never struggle finding what I want, nor getting it into the shape I want it.
5. Ask HN: How can we open-source a 7 year old SaaS codebase and build a community?
Top comment by from-nibly
Your other comments sound dispassionate about your product. It makes it sound like you are only interested in growing a company and not in solving problems for your customers. You said you arent interested in slowly growing a business that is currently making you money
This is completely at odds with growing an open source community. Its typically one of the slowest and most thankless jobs you can do in software. nix has been around for 10+ years and only recently are normies like me becoming interested in it.
Your product sounds like its niche, making it open source and getting other developers to contribute sounds like trying to grow a niche within a niche. Add F# and there might be like 5 people in the whole world who might care about your open source project.
Im sure your integration partners say they would like your project to be open source but they arent going to be doing ANY of the work.
I would sell your business as a turn key.
6. Ask HN: Why do games companies not release source code for old games?
Top comment by jccalhoun
As others have said, there are multiple reasons:
1) they may not even have it. The source code for lots of classic games have been lost. By some estimates at much as 90% of pre-2000 source code is gone. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/01/saving-video-gamings-...
2) the game may use code from other companies or libraries or something that they don't own.
3) it might even be unclear who actually owns the source code now.
4) it isn't worth the time to get things straightened out. Nightdive studios tried to rerelease No One Lives Forever and the companies that might possibly own the game hadn't digitized the contracts and either weren't interested in the hassle or wanted Nightdive to pay them to take the time to look and promised to refund them if they didn't. https://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-...
7. Ask HN: How to transcribe 1000s of handwritten notes
Top comment by throwaway211
Can you read them? Speech to text perhaps. That can also be done locally.
If a note's a minute, 1000 notes are around 16 hours of reading. Scale time needed depending on if it takes less or more than a minute to read. Add a note reference to the start of each recording, like a zettelkasten, so the scanned file, recording and text cross-reference.
If assessing other solutions, that's at least an upper bound on the cost of any other solution.
8. Ask HN: Is Stripe the new PayPal, cancelling user accounts without explanation?
Top comment by VoodooJuJu
It's unlikely you were cancelled arbitrarily and it's almost certainly the case that you're engaged in a high-risk or restricted activity.
>https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses ... nothing on this page applies to what I am doing.
I doubt it. Post the URL to your business website so we can see why it was cancelled by Stripe.
EDIT: I see you posted the link below, and as eli pointed out, it's probably due to soliciting donations. Per Stripe's restricted businesses link:
Crowdfunding, fundraising, and other donation-soliciting activities
9. Ask HN: What sites are similar to Hacker News?
Top comment by BMc2020
these are all broadly a) tech b) news c) aggregator:
https://bearblog.dev/discover/
https://paperlined.org/
https://lemmy.ml/c/technology
https://engineeringblogs.xyz/
https://jimmyr.com/
https://techurls.com/
https://interestingengineering.com/
https://researchbuzz.me/
https://www.techmeme.com/
https://robohub.org/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/
https://www.dailyrotation.com/
https://raddle.me/f/Tech
10. Ask HN: Why are all major operating systems monolithic?
Top comment by nullindividual
The NT kernel and XNU (macOS) are considered hybrid kernels. QNX, a microkernel, is absolutely everywhere (i.e., cars).
Performance of microkernels is or was a hotly debated topic back in the '90s; microkernels generally had lower performance than their monolithic counterparts. There was a famous argument comparing Linux (monolithic) to MINIX (micro) [0]. Wikipedia has simple explanations for the differences between hybrid, mono, and micro kernels that serve as a decent primer [1] and a visual that I find helpful [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(operating_system)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel#/media/File:OS-s...
