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Issue #291 - October 6, 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: What are you working on (September 2024)?
Top comment by loufe
I learned how to weld (MIG) and built a giant mushroom to house a mannequin I dubbed "the mushroom man" over about 100 hours in the last 4 weeks. I covered the outside with thick foam panels cut to size, cementing them in place with copious amounts of spray foam. I shaved the outside to a nice shape with a sawzall and the inside I covered in chicken-fenced, then attached a painters tarp to that (so it could be painted on).
To fit on a trailer (the mushroom's cap is 11.5ft wide) the cap comes off the stem and the edges of the cap are two half-moons which have fixed mounting points where threaded rod sticks through some welded washers, and a nut is put on in place. I was too last minute to install the 200 WS2811 pixels and have them run some cool patterns, before the music festival I brought it to came time, but even just a lantern on top (another painters tarp covered the cap's metal-frame, and everything was spray painted) looked great.
Super fun project. Expensive, but I learned a lot, got to be creative, and I'm happy to try out new things and make the best of my before-children time. Also, it was such a joy seeing people croud around the mushroom (and site beside the mushroom man inside) at night during the festival.
2. Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?
Top comment by solardev
It kinda depends on which platform handles their bulk messages. For example, if they are messaging you through Twilio, replying with "STOP" will cause Twilio itself to opt you out of messages (https://help.twilio.com/articles/223134027-Twilio-support-fo...), and the sender can't disable that (https://help.twilio.com/articles/360034798533-Getting-Starte...). It's kinda like how Mailchimp handles unsubscriptions for recipients, no matter what the sender wants.
However, if they're using some other carrier or rolling their own VOIP setup, etc., or sending from a toll-free number instead of a shortcode, there's no guarantee that their particular platform will honor STOP. And there's no way for you, as a recipient, to know which is which.
Generally I will reply STOP if it's something I know I signed up for but no longer want. Things I never signed up for just get reported as spam and I don't reply.
3. Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring?
Top comment by gip
It is anecdotical, but I'm consulting with a startup in the Bay Area. We have 9 job openings listed on the website (and for some reason only 4 on LinkedIn). But in reality one position (senior dev) is really open, and the bar is sky high. By that I mean that the founders would hire the right person. But the other 8 positions are just there for signaling and nobody looks at the applications we get (and for one of these positions we got 1k+ applications last time I checked). For when I'm asked, the CEO told me to say that we are prioritizing finding the senior dev first (and the position has been open for 6 months).
I think the founders feel that it is the right posture to signal that the company is growing (external messaging) and that we are doing well (internal messaging).
4. Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands?
Top comment by dang
Related ongoing thread:
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729325 - Oct 2024 (33 comments)
5. Ask HN: Any good essays/books/advice about software sales?
Top comment by Terretta
Believe it or not, for "selling software":
Selling Microsoft - https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Microsoft-Secrets-Successful-...
The fundamentals of software sales haven't changed much since this. While B2C SaaS is different, the B2B platform world is still much as described in this book, and more importantly, the buyers are still the people who were buying when this book was published.
While selling today should have changed, many of the enterprise procurement processes that were being set up as this was published are still the same. That makes this an excellent foundation for understanding how to change it up.
That said, you said building an agency ... so do you mean selling software, or selling the ability to deliver solutions that a company can't get off the shelf?
That's quite different.
6. Ask HN: What is the best way to learn Erlang?
Top comment by cliffwarden
I always loved this one. https://learnyousomeerlang.com/
7. Ask HN: How to deal with AI generated sloppy code
Top comment by derefr
LLMs are always going to generate output (prose or code) in the same style as the training data. The Java training data corpus is both bloated/Enterprise-y, and mostly written by junior engineers or even students (because there are so many publicly-accessible Java school-project personal GitHub repos.)
If you're working on a Java project, consider prompting the AI to first write a "pseudocode solution" in a more concise/low boilerplate/"highly expressive" language — Ruby, for example — and then asking it to translate its own "pseudocode" into Java.
(Mind you, I'm not sure if you can modify the implicit system prompt used by automatic coding-assistance systems like Cursor. [Can you? Anyone know?] I'm more just thinking about how you'd do this if you were treating a ChatGPT-like chatbot as if it were StackOverflow — which is personally where I find most of the value in LLM-assisted coding.)
Alternately, consider prompting the AI to "act like a senior $lang engineer forced to write in Java for this project, who will attempt to retain their existing opinionated coding style they learned from decades of experience in $lang, in the Java code they write" — where $lang is either, once again, a more expressive language; or, more interestingly, a language with a community that skews away from junior engineers (i.e. a language that is rarely anyone's first programming language) and toward high-quality, well-engineered systems code rather than slop CRUD code. For example, Rust, or Erlang/Elixir.
(Funny enough, this is the exact same mental through-line that would lead a company to wanting to hire people with knowledge of these specific languages.)
8. Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
Top comment by Arch485
I've tried it, and I don't like it. There's too much confabulation to be useful as code completion, and any task more complicated than that results in logic errors most of the time.
Code completion was fine without LLMs, and solving problems myself usually ends up being quicker than trying to coerce an LLM into doing it correctly and then verifying that the output is actually correct.
The one time I used an LLM in my workflow to good success was using ChatGPT to automatically create an enum of every EU/EEA country and a switch statement over that enum. Those sort of "grunt work" tasks that don't require any thinking, but a lot of typing, seem to be where LLMs shine.
9. Ask HN: How to Improve Memory?
Top comment by eimrine
My the most fruitful approach is to wall myself off anything which wastes my cognitive ability. No smartphone except of regular calls, no websites with animations, no any books or articles which contains some words I consider as "bad". Less attention to dull people. Appreciate when your brain suddenly remembers for you something unexpected like the fact which was sitting here for tens of years without any use before you have remembered it successfully, any time I meet this I think deeply about how is it possible to remember anything for so long. Living without any mood disturbances is my top priority.
10. Ask HN: How close are we to replace animal models with software?
Top comment by poidos
Not even close. We don't yet have a computational model that accurately reproduces all the properties of water, the solvent where most life of interest occurs. And, if and when we have one, and are able to develop accurate models for the myriad proteins involved (an even worse problem,) and we're able to develop accurate models for all their interactions (O(huge)), and so forth, the computational cost to simulate systems that would be relevant at the scale of a whole organism would be... jaw-dropping.