AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?

Top comment by bobetomi

Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins.

He goes into so much detail about training to become an astronaut, his first spaceflight, training and planning for the Apollo missions, and talks about so many of the details and complexities of spaceflight that I had no idea about before.

For example, in the early space walks, they didn't consider how difficult it is to use simple tools in microgravity and without a surface to sit/stand on. The astronaut got completely exhausted just keeping himself still while turning a wrench, because when you turn the wrench, it pushes you and starts moving and spinning you, and when you try to correct it, you'll most likely overcorrect and then have to correct that, and then correct that overcorrection, etc.

And the level of planning and training for the off-nominal scenarios is crazy. They picked the top 30ish most likely failure scenarios and practiced the responses to them in simulators until they're muscle memory, and have detailed checklists for hundreds of other ones (which they also practice, just not as much). For example, when Neil and Buzz land on the moon, they'd be awake for about 10 hours, so they had to decide whether the plan was for them to open the hatch and walk on the moon right after landing, or get a night of sleep and do it "next morning". The problem with doing it immediately was that, if something went wrong, they'd have to abort and get back to the command module, but then they'd end up being awake for 20 hours while handling an emergency. On the other hand, they realized that they wouldn't be able to get sleep right after landing on the moon anyways.

His writing style is awesome: it's easy to read, explains technical details in a really easy to understand way, and quite funny.

2. Ask HN: Is anyone working at least 4 hours daily on an Apple Vision Pro?

Top comment by virgildotcodes

I feel like I would have been the ideal customer for it. I travel a lot and I'm a developer deep in the Apple ecosystem who is constantly wishing he had more screen real estate while bouncing between hotels and Airbnbs every few weeks.

I bought it and tried it for two weeks and ended up returning it. It's really cool, but even aside from the issues with 1.0 like not being able to just pull up individual app windows from my mac or multiple desktops -- it's just too impractical, it takes too much effort to get into this thing.

A phone, a tablet, a laptop, you can pick up, immediately use, put down, interact with the world around you, pick up again, zero friction, it's not restrictive, it's not an item of clothing, it doesn't take over your whole world and sensory system and thus alienate you from everyone and everything around you.

Not only is it that whole extra thing, but it needs to be plugged into a special battery pack, so you have another usb cable dangling onto this bulky pack which is daisy chained to your laptop or another charging port unless you want it to die in 2 hours. So you pull out your laptop, plug it into a charger, pull out your headset, plug it into its battery pack, plug that battery pack into your laptop, put on the headset, untangle yourself from the wires and figure out where to set the battery pack to be out of the way...

It's just so much faffing around. Plus it's fucking huge and takes up the majority of my backpack and I like to travel with a single carry on backpack.

A pair of Raybans with a usb c cable sticking out, maybe I could see that being legitimately usable without having to make a giant effort just to use it. It seems like a few companies are getting close to that, but I have yet to try those alternatives.

3. Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?

Top comment by washadjeffmad

We didn't have a huge library of books, but my parents had a full set of The World Book encyclopedias, a physician's desk reference, an illustrated home repair manual, and another full series of both Time Life "A Child's First Library of Knowledge" and "Knowledge Encyclopedia" for kids. These are what I spent the most time with.

We also had an excellent electronic dictionary with a few interesting games and a thorough etymology.

Living in the country, we were often in the car for extended periods and had catalogues of books on tape, mostly of the classics. Otherwise, we lived about half a mile, walking distance, from the town library and would go up on weekends.

On the computer, after CD-ROM drives became affordable, I particularly enjoyed interactive multimedia like Microsoft's Encarta, all of Knowledge Adventure titles, Explorapedia, and DK's "The Way Things Work". After Macromedia Shockwave, tons of eclectic titles about any given subject were being published, and we had discs ranging from the Civil War to Music Americana to I Love Lucy.

Remember, libraries can be anything. Don't limit yourself!

4. Ask HN: Anyone learned art (drawing, caricature etc.) as an adult?

Top comment by pclmulqdq

I have been learning classical singing (opera, oratorios, etc) with no previous voice training. I think I am fine, and I can get low-paying gigs, but nothing big. I also did the process of becoming an ok composer a while ago (a few public performances of my work, etc), and the same advice applies.

I do have significant musical training and experience. The prior music training does help, but it mostly just helps me figure out when something is wrong, not how to fix it.

I have three tips:

1. Find a teacher or group you click with. Music instruction is 1:1 because it doesn't scale well, but visual arts you can do with a studio. A teacher will really help since most forms of art are subjective enough that you may not know what you are doing well or poorly and that feedback is very valuable.

2. Do your art every day, even for 15-30 min. Inspiration starts with doing, not the other way around.

3. Try to be better than you were yesterday. Practice things you are bad at, and consciously do projects to improve yourself. There is no competition here except with yourself yesterday.

A final one:

IMO the notion of "talent" for the arts is just how people cope with the fact that the best and brightest in that field did more work than them. I had several friends who were "talented" pianists growing up, several of whom are concert artists now. All of them worked their asses off 5-6 hours a day to become "talented." It took me a while longer, but I eventually became a "talented" harpsichord player in my early 20s. Go at your own pace and don't give up and you will also eventually be "talented."

5. Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

Top comment by hakunin

Here’s my anecdote.

I built 3 production projects in elixir around 2015-2018, and it was a blast to learn and work with. Those were interesting projects that were a great fit for the stack. One was March Madness bracket game which required a huge throughput on day one, and another was a football game audience play calling each play from their phone as the team is playing live at the stadium. This one needed a lot of timing coordination and poor connection handling. I even put out an open source fast/customizable leaderboard on top of ETS.

However, I didn’t feel the need for this stack on most projects, and if I’m totally honest, I never got good at the novel way of building applications in it.

While it was very enjoyable, everything felt a little awkward. Even 3 years in I constantly felt that I’m not doing it right, and I’m fighting the language to do data transformations in a purely functional style. I never got used to writing Ecto queries, and always had to look up their syntax. Plus, there didn’t seem to be a good architecture story, just isolated praise of OTP. And Phoenix further fueled the confusion, making it hard to understand whether I’m supposed to reason about my app like a Rails app (just build controllers, models, and views) with no regard for processes, or I should orchestrate some creative supervision trees, that I can’t even tell how they would be arranged in a typical web app. Going back to Ruby on Rails was kind of back to super productive comfort zone after a bit, and I just continued staying there.

I’m still looking back at Elixir with nostalgia, wondering if I’m going to have a chance to go back to it and really make it an extension of my arms/brain like Ruby had become. And whether I can do all that amazing supervision-based architecting I keep theorizing in my mind. I loved Dave Thomas’s vision (and agreed with his controversial takes) and really wished I could get as good as Sasa Juric at really deeply reasoning in this framework. Maybe one day.

6. Ask HN: What is happening in tech unrelated to AI?

Top comment by MisterKent

In the web framework world, libraries are moving from a react component style of authoring to an older knockout based model. This means, instead of rendering an entire block of HTMl on each render pass, just a minimal subset will be rerendered, as the variable is bound to specific DOM elements. This effort started with Knockout, fell out of favor, and saw a resurgence with the success of SolidJS. Svelte has started moving in this direction. It's my opinion that React's compiler will eventually serve the same purpose to allow their giant user base to get the same benefits.

In the web performance space, there's some interesting stuff happening in origin trails around shared dictionary compression. It has been tried and failed before but the latest iteration/spec hopefully improved those shortfalls that made them unusable. Also, ZSTD compression has taken the crown from brotli.

Metas new AR glasses seem to be approaching the ideal hardware, IMO it's still searching for its killer app. Microsoft exited the AR space by killing hololens.

Startup space is dying right now, with very low VC risk tolerance / interest. Some funds have returned money to investors rather than risk it in investing.

7. Ask HN: What breakthrough helped you build and maintain better relationships?

Top comment by UniverseHacker

Doing hobbies that involve other people has helped me make a lot of friends- for a lot of men in particular, this is often really the only way to build friendships.

Learning how to be emotionally vulnerable is key to actually connecting with people. The book "Models" by Mark Manson is a pretty good primer on the importance of emotional vulnerability to connect with people. It is sort-of a dating advice book, but I've found it helpful for making regular friendships and connecting with my own family as well.

Another thing that is helpful is learning how to communicate assertively- which is the opposite of being emotionally manipulative. The book "When I say no I feel guilty" is particularly good introduction to assertive communication. A lot of people only learned emotionally manipulative communication, and will be avoided by almost anyone that sees that for what it is.

Counter-intuitively, not being desperate is critical. Be willing to judge if someone is worth your time, and be willing to disagree with people or say no, without letting the fear of being rejected control you. The same authenticity and vulnerability that will make people really connect with you, will also drive some people away, and that is totally fine. The goal is not to be friends with everyone, but to make good friends with people you are compatible with.

Therapy can often be helpful for developing all 3 of the above skills.

Lastly, take the initiative to make things happen. Invite someone to do activities several times before expecting them to reciprocate. People tend to be busy, shy, stressed, etc. - just because people don't reach out doesn't mean they don't like you.

8. Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

Top comment by Koshkin

First of all, I would make sure that it would not be swapping constantly when running on eight megabytes!

9. Ask HN: What type of Auth are you using on your side projects?

Top comment by grepfru_it

Keycloak or auth0. The app should support oauth2, if it does not it gets traefik-forward-auth (or whatever it’s called) to enforce mfa then you are in.

There are tons of open source projects to complete the self service experience, from sign up systems to self service password resets

10. Ask HN: Good Online Maths Communities?

Top comment by susam

The Libera IRC ##math community [1] has been around for over 29 years now! Originally based on the Freenode network, the community migrated to Libera in May 2021 following a controversial shift in Freenode's management.

This community played an instrumental role in my early days of beginning to study mathematics seriously. During its prime, weekly mathematics seminars [2] were organised by the members, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I still vividly remember the IRC user "TRWBW", who seemed to have an answer for every question, no matter how complex. TRWBW's ability to explain even the most challenging concepts with clarity and precision was very impressive. Sadly, he hasn't been seen in several years.

Although many of the original regulars have come and gone over the past three decades, the community continues to remain active. It still remains a good forum for discussing mathematics as well as asking and answering questions.

[1] https://web.libera.chat/##math

[2] https://freenode-math.fandom.com/wiki/Seminars#Past_Seminars