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Issue #278 - July 7, 2024
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring? and Who wants to be hired? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
Top comment by rowofpixels
I built a hydroponic garden as a covid hobby. I wrote software to maintain the garden, water it on schedule, apply ph changes to the water, turn lights on / off, humidify, as well as monitor statistics (temperature, humidity, water temperature, water ph, water conductivity).
Rough guess would be that I spent 50 hours actually working on the software.
There's a handful of raspberry pis involved. I wrote everything in elixir and used https://nerves-project.org. The dashboard is written with phoenix live view. One of the raspberry pis is the "brain" and basically runs the dashboard and controls devices. The devices are all in an elixir cluster. I also run timescale db for some basic history of metrics.
Once I start a grow I don't use it that much actively, but it passively runs all the time. I check in every few days or week to make sure nutrients are looking good.
I've grown strawberries, lettuce, jalapenos, and cayenne peppers.
2. Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
Top comment by Yawrehto
Wait, has no one mentioned LibreOffice yet? 200 million active users (!) seems like it's successful enough. Admittedly, it hasn't really challenged Microsoft Office yet, but it's growing, and also it's hard to look at something with 200 million active users and say 'that's a failure'. Definitely an alternative though.
There's also uBlock Origin, but I don't know if it's the largest adblocker yet. It should be, though. I think it is a serious competitor, even in terms of market share, to many major for-profit adblockers.
3. Ask HN: Has anyone successfully pivoted from web dev to AI/ML development?
Top comment by simonw
Do you want to train models from scratch, or do you want to build cool things on top of AI models?
If the former, I suggest digging into things like the excellent Fast AI course: https://course.fast.ai/
If the latter, the (relatively new) keyword you are looking for is likely "AI Engineer" - https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer
There's an argument that deep knowledge of how to train models isn't actually that useful when working with generative AI (LLMs etc) - knowing how to train or fine-tune a new model is less useful that developing knowledge of the other weird things you have to figure out about prompting, evals and using these models to build production-quality apps.
4. Ask HN: Vision Pro owners, are you still using it?
Top comment by dagmx
Yes using it regularly multiple times a week.
I watch tons of media on it. My background was in film production and I firmly believe this is the best current way to watch films at home , as long as you don’t mind doing so alone.
The only better experience visually is a laser projector with active shutter glasses. I literally exclaimed out loud when I saw some of my shots on here for the first time. Depth for stereo movies adds so much, but you lose so much vibrancy and light with passive glasses. This solves both issues. I get why James Cameron said it was a religious experience. For fellow film makers, this is the highest quality way that I’ve experienced my own work.
It also is probably the only place at home to experience these movies at that quality. Nobody else has 4k 3D HDR with HFR. Nobody.
So as a previous film buff, it’s worth it alone for me for that.
However I also use it for work regularly. I join industry meetings with it, I multitask regularly. I spend more time on the couch working off my laptop with this as my screen now.
The passthrough and eyesight features have been surprisingly great for being with my family. While people think it’s sad that I’m doing my own thing in the headset, the reality is that we all do our own hobbies in the evening after work. I can now spend that time with my partner and interact with them while they do their thing.
I think it’ll take a while for Apple and the app developers to really get into the swing of things, but it’s been a huge, positive change for me.
5. Ask HN: Who Wants a Penpal?
Top comment by givemeethekeys
Man, I miss this aspect about ICQ (and the internet from the late 90's). Everyone I met online was awesome and from some far away cool place. And if they were anywhere near you - like, let's say, half a day's worth of driving near you - then they were totally down to meet in person!
6. Ask HN: How do you find a "boring" tech job?
Top comment by pipes
Financial services. Been in this for a few years now and the pension, benefits etc are just way better than anything I've seen at my level in the uk. Great for having kids, 6 months paid parental leave. Sensible people. Older developers. Also the domain knowledge is directly transferable to my own life (understanding financial instruments). I doubt I'll leave this sector now.
7. Ask HN: How to find a new job when I'm not good at networking?
Top comment by pling87
Fellow introvert here. I don't have as many years in industry under my belt as you, but I have been through several job transitions and am enjoying the job I'm at right now.
Every single one of my jobs came not from networking, but just cold applying to positions. If networking feels inauthentic to you, I would say just to forget about it and work at getting good at your craft. If you can demonstrate you have the skills and a company has a need for that skillset, they will hire and networking skills will be irrelevant.
Also, if you're not having much success at applying for a type of position, it may be that the timing is just not right, e.g. a company has a superabundance of web developers, but what they are really in need of is embedded software developers. In a lot of cases, it's not about you, but about what the company's needs are.
At one point in time, I applied to a company and failed to get in, but later on, I tried again, got the position, and it was a great opportunity. Was I that much better? Not really, just a timing thing.
So don't give up and keep moving forward with practicing your skills and applying. The more you prepare and try, the better the odds of success.
8. Ask HN: What book bit, stung and shook you deeply?
Top comment by kelseyfrog
Capital Vol 1. Mostly because it demonstrates two things:
1. How small ideas can have big consequences - each section is a logical consequence of the former, and
2. How multidisciplinarism is greater than the sum of its parts. One can be an ok historian, sociologist, or political theorist, but combined can find connections outside of the narrow scope of any single domain.
The accounts of working conditions, especially of children, will never leave me.
9. Ask HN: Why did GeoCities have that crazy design aesthetic?
Top comment by shams93
I was on the pre-ipo (and post ipo) design team. So its partly my fault lmfao.
10. Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
Top comment by subharmonicon
In the 90’s when I was at Microsoft it was common for people to ask brain teasers and algorithm questions and expect people to be able to reason through the problems even if they walked in not knowing the particular algorithm or data structures involved. The interview was graded more on your thought process and ability to make forward progress with hints and less on getting to a correct answer in 25 minutes.
People were super harsh about attention to detail, e.g. you had to write code that would compile on the whiteboard and you would get penalized to some degree for making mistakes, especially if there were enough to make it clear that you hadn’t really been using the language you claimed to be proficient in.