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Issue #275 - June 16, 2024
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: What macOS apps/programs do you use daily and recommend?
Top comment by yen223
I highly recommend reading this list of built-in macOS terminal commands: https://ss64.com/mac/
Some commands I use often:
- `pbcopy` and `pbpaste` to copy and paste data via the clipboard
- `date -u` to give the date in UTC
- `networkQuality` is speedtest but built-in to macOS
- `caffeinate` prevents your computer from going to sleep (it's the same as the old
Caffeinate program, but built-in now)
- `open ...` to open a file, as if you double-clicked it in Finder
- `security` gives you command-line access to the Keychain.
2. Ask HN: Why is nobody manufacturing low tech electric cars in 2024?
Top comment by edent
Citroën Ami is about as low tech as you can get.
If you want something more car-shaped, the Renault Zoe has very few tech feature.
Similarly, Kia Soul has a reversing camera… and that's about it! No radar, lane assist, carplay or anything like that.
Cstomers only want 3 things. A comfortable ride, a safe journey, and $thing. The problem is, everyone's one more thing is different. I want DAB radio, you want cruise control, she wants lane assist, he wants automatic parking.
Creating a dozen different SKUs for all those things is complicated. Getting regulatory approval for every variation is expensive.
So most manufacturers sell only a few variations of their models.
3. Ask HN: Are you still using your Vision Pro?
Top comment by archagon
I bought it shortly after release, but returned it a month later:
* The sizing options are really confusing, and my measured fit (as determined by the app over a dozen runs) felt somewhat loose. Apple Store staff could not tell me what the numbers meant and could only size me through the app.
* There's not a lot of VR content available right now — just a few short (admittedly impressive) clips.
* I feel isolated when watching media, and it's also much harder to snack and get cozy.
* Gesture controls are (intrinsically) imprecise and frequently fire incorrectly — a serious regression from physical buttons or even touch input. Also, selection via gaze does not feel natural to me. I am itching for a physical Quest-like controller for selection and input.
* A Quest-like controller is also essential for gaming. You really can't do much with gesture controls, and a gamepad does not allow you to interact directly with the virtual world. In fact, most apps that I'd be interested in (painting, sculpting, etc.) would really benefit from physical controls. Drawing with gesture controls feels pretty bad.
* On that note, no Beat Saber, which is my killer app. And even if it did exist, I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable getting sweaty in a $4000 device.
* Mac display mirroring has latency, looks a bit grainy, and does not support 120Hz. Categorically worse than my existing physical displays.
* I want to use my third party mechanical keyboard, mouse, and headphones, but only Bluetooth accessories are really supported.
* It's not very portable. I'm not sure how I'd be able to take this anywhere in my carryon. (I don't usually check luggage.)
* I get a headache after a fairly short time of using the device. It's also stuffy.
* I can't build or run anything without approval by the Apple police. This does not feel like a general purpose computer and is unlikely to be the "future" of anything until the platform opens up, or is made to open up.
Oh well. Maybe I'll try again in a few years. In the meantime, I'll keep gaming on my Quest.
4. Ask HN: Is it just me, or does the job market for IT seem bad today?
Top comment by afpx
In the late 90s, early 00s I would submit 5 resumes, get interviews from 4, get offers from 3. The whole process would take a few hours - no studying, no projects, no indefinite rounds of interviews. I could actually talk to the hiring manager and get a sense for my odds of getting the job before putting the effort in.
Now it's like submit 1000 resumes, get interviews from 4, spend 20+ hours preparing and doing interviews, get ghosted at the end.
I have a friend who works for local government. They have an open GIS programmer position. I've done GIS programming for government (as a contractor), and it's not hard stuff. She says they received many 100s of resumes and are currently interviewing 30 people. They had so many people apply that they required each applicant to submit a very involved project beforehand just to weed people out. So, there are literally 30 people out there right now, putting in 20+ hours to complete a project just to get a job that pays probably $110k / year.
Top comment by dogman144
IMO it’s the reality of technology being a business, not a value-set, settling in.
1999-2020 was 20+ years.
That’s about the length of a long-term industry cycle.
It’s also 20 yrs of selling a narrative about tech that recruited ambitious, value-driven people who also wanted to make money.
Don’t want 18 hr days at Goldman or 10 years of medical school, but want the pay? Come work 8 at
And then if I was to get pretty negative: Then, ~2020 hits, the cracks in the ideology show, no way to hide the data revenue models behind every nice Change the World pitch, turns out tech also shredded social discourse and now looks like it might unemploy Mom and friends, and maybe undue democracy (who saw that coming haha), and so on. VCs always win and you’re tired of reading their same think piece blog posts, layoffs always win, a lot of places that seemed the polar opposite still became IBM accidentally. Work, don’t work, it’ll be several quarters before that catches up to you. If you’re really introspective - why did I make $200k+ in my pajamas during COVID while someone made $15/hr at Whole Foods getting exposed to a pandemic all day long? Pretty sure people in that position actually got very sick… but HelloFresh kept getting delivered so I didn’t realize.
The shine has worn off. That is all imo. Place that are both really changing the world, actually understand the second order effects and plan for those, and you can get hired at are few and far between. It’s still/just an industry where you can make a ton of money and keep your brain curious.
6. Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
Top comment by karaterobot
The ones that come to mind:
* If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. If you're only interviewing for a couple positions—people you will work with every single day—take the time to do it yourself.
* If they are a startup that says they are looking for people who are interested in solving exciting problems. For some people, this is going to be an enticement, but based on my experience, what I hear is "we're going to work you like a dog and pay you in equity, and at the end neither your work nor your equity will matter because we're definitely going to go out of business". I recognize this is a bias, but it's happened to me a couple times, and I'm in my 40s now and just not having it anymore. Plus, the problems are never that exciting, they're usually "how to sell a SaaS product that is basically a CRUD app, in a crowded marketplace with lots of competitors".
* If the interview is composed of like 10 rounds of 30 minute interviews, each with different groups in the company, that to me is an indicator that Conway's Law is at the helm of that organization: lots of groups that want input into everything, nobody empowered to make a decision on their own. Plus, it's just not a very good format. Give me a smaller number of hour long sessions where we can actually get into it, rather than racing through pro forma questions.
7. Ask HN: What skillsets/stacks will keep me employable over the next 5-10 years?
Top comment by misswaterfairy
- The ability and want to learn. I offer the following advice to every firefighter I teach: the day you think or believe you know everything, is the day you quit. (I'm a software dev. by trade with fifteen-odd years experience as an operational firefighter (and still am to this day)).
- Find a domain or two you have an interest (better yet, a passion) in, that isn't IT, and pair your IT skills to it. My day job is (more generally) emergency management, so I pair my geospatial analysis and programming skills to solve problems within the emergency management domain.
I don't think AI will completely take over, simply because of [1], though it will somewhat remove or reduce the need for 'generalists', where much of the workload is handled by AI, at the prompting of a software developer or engineer, much like how many farm hands were replaced by farming machines when they became a thing. That said, I think we're still half a century off AI truly replacing most software developers.
Humans will still be required to 'know what 'good' looks like' and ensure that whatever slop AI spits out actually fixes the problem. This is where domain-specific knowledge is incredibly valuable. See how you can apply your skills to make your interest or passion field better, using AI to your advantage, by exploiting your technical skills with domain-specific knowledge.
Most people think of firefighters as just that - putting out fires. That's only partly true though. We use a shiny, and fast, red toolbox on wheels to solve the problems of others, whether that be (actual) firefighting, rescue, first aid, replacing smoke alarm batteries, engaging with the community, even fixing things. Firefighters now days are closer to problem-solvers than they are firefighters. We just happen to respond to emergency calls too.
Be the problem solver in your domain. AI, in my opinion, won't be able to truly problem solve, or think outside the box, for many decades to come.
[1] https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...
8. Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
Top comment by kstenerud
I remember in 1999 thinking "Damn! The world's moved on to Java and I'm still writing in C! I won't last much longer..." Then I got a job writing C code for those wireless credit card doohickies (a nasty mess of Z80s with crazy paging schemes to access 2mb of memory, but I digress).
A few years later I actually started working in Java and Python, and then iPhone came along and I was right back in C land again!
Then in 2016 I got a job writing in Go, which lasted 2 years - aaaaand now I'm back to writing C (and C++) again - 25 years after my C-career crisis.
It's not like I'm actively seeking C jobs - I'm a polyglot and can handle pretty much anything. But again and again these C jobs just keep coming out of the woodwork... And I can command premium salary because there just aren't many skilled C developers anymore.
9. Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
Top comment by coffeefirst
https://affinity.serif.com is quite good. It's not the same, but I switched (95% personal use) when Adobe forced everyone onto subscriptions and it's been more than sufficient for that.
10. Ask HN: Was Sun Microsystems the last respectable tech company?
Top comment by smarks
Sun veteran here. There was undoubtedly a "cool" factor to Sun in the 1980s and 1990s which I and a bunch of other people bought into. It had burned off by the mid 2000s though after the dot-com bust and wave after wave of layoffs and canceled projects. Any "cool" was left at that point was only from nostalgia and inertia.
But I guess it depends on what you mean by "respectable" or "decent". It may be helpful to remember that a lot of people hated Sun in the 1980s and 1990s too. DEC (Digital) was a particular rival in those times. Spurred by the successes of NFS and the Sun/AT&T Unix deal, DEC created the OSF to counter Sun. Later on, there was something similar with IBM and Sun over Java. IBM eventually did license Java, but there was a lot of conflict.
I think in both cases the issues were mostly about licensing and business terms. Maybe this was nothing more than corporate rivalry and competition, but it kind of felt more personal than that.
At a Sun reunion a few years ago, Scott McNealy said of Sun, "We kicked butt, had fun, and we didn't cheat." The "kick butt and have fun" had been McNealy's slogan for a long time, but the "didn't cheat" was relatively new. I believe it to be true. I don't think Sun ever defrauded anybody. (It made mistakes, and plenty of them, but didn't defraud anybody.) In a world that has Enron and Theranos and FTX, maybe this is an outlier. But there are probably also many other companies that don't make that news that are making an honest buck and aren't cheating.