AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)

Top comment by miloignis

Under $100:

1) A bidet! Got one in the pandemic when toilet paper was scarce and I wanted to be more efficient, but now I'll never go back. The Tushy ones are good.

2) A safety razor & accessories. I get a cheaper, closer, less irritating shave, and I get to customize every part of it. This can certainly be a rabbithole you spend a lot of money on, but you can get a solid customized starter kit for under $100 that will be totally solid, and from then on you're saving money over cartridges and gel unless you really want to splurge.

I'll second the electric toothbrush suggestion too, its great having my teeth fel clean and smooth.

2. Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were to go down tomorrow?

Top comment by runjake

I’m already doing this, but:

- All of Wikipedia English

- Download as many LLM models and the latest version of Ollama.app and all its dependencies.

- Make a list of my favorite music artists and torrent every album I can.

- Open my podcast app and download every starred episode (I have a ton of those that I listen to repeatedly).

- Torrent and libgen every tech book I value. Then, grab large collections of fiction EPUBs.

- Download every US Army field manual I can get my hands on, especially the Special Operations Medic manual, which is gold for civilian use in tough times.

- Download every radio frequency list I can for my area of the country.

- Download digital copies of The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emory, Where There Is No Doctor, and Where There Us No Dentist.

I already have paper versions of almost all of these but it’s handy to have easily-reproducible and far more portable digital copies.

3. Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

Top comment by cityofdelusion

The pieces did NOT exist in the 1970s. Fast microcontrollers, stepper motors, precision miniaturized manufacturing, reliable and cheap miniaturized DC electronics, and far far more technology was non-existent at any kind of affordable price point. Look at kitchen appliances or metal/wood shop machinery from this era, still heavily analog, mostly made from sheet steel, mostly non-computerized. The 80s would bring better microprocessors but even the simple Nintendo was an inflation adjusted $450. For comparison the first RepRaps used a full power PC as their host machine and their materials cost roughly $1000 in today USD and needed parts from a commercial stratasys machine.

Some of the greatest and most under appreciated technological achievements in the last 40 years have been in materials science and miniaturization.

4. Ask HN: How would you launch a privacy-first, Instagram-like social network?

Top comment by next_xibalba

> by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has. - Paul Graham [1]

I think this proposal points at an interesting issue that I see crop up often on sites like HN. It goes (I think) like this: 1) "I care deeply about what I perceive to be a problem." 2) Extrapolates onto some large critical mass of people, 3) That critical mass of people does not actually agree with the problem statement in any way, 4) Build a solution, never gets meaningful traction, misdiagnoses the root cause of the failure.

I'm not saying this to dump on this idea. Rather, I think it is a meaningful bias that all humans are vulnerable too. But I do think that filter bubbles amplify whatever this bias is to a powerful degree. If you are surrounded by people who are obsessed with privacy, it seems like everyone is inflamed by the economic model of social networks. But, outside the small filter bubble, most other people don't care at all or actually think its a great model.

Having said all of that, maybe a way to test whether you are experiencing this bias is to interview or collect information from as close to a random sample of social media users as possible. The more random the better. If you find yourself talking to people in SF/Seattle or people in the tech industry, that's a sure sign you have a bad sample. When you talk to them, don't ask leading questions that will bias them. Try to understand what their unbiased views on the problems (if any) are with social networks. Maybe you ask them what their best friend thinks so as to try to sidestep preference falsification. If you discover a consistent problem, maybe you're onto something. But then, you're still up against a world saturated with social networks, and convincing people to pay for something they get for free will be very, very hard. I think, ultimately, the only way you'll discover whether the problems you may have found are really important or not is if you can convince anyone to pay you. I suspect it will be a Sisyphean endeavor.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

5. Ask HN: My director got fired. His rival is taking his place. What to expect?

Top comment by codingdave

Change is hard, but to succeed in a political organization with political currents in the mix, you have to embrace it, so if you choose to stay, I recommend adopting a fresh perspective -- Your old job is over. This is a new job. Forget all past attachments to your old boss and walk into this new team with an open mind. Maybe the new boss is a decent leader, maybe not, but go in without any preconceived notions, do the work and see what happens.

Realize that even though it may be political, the leadership chose your new boss, so he is doing something they like. You are tanking your own role if you go in fighting. So go in and see what is going on that is working. There may be completely different measures of success vs. what you were striving for, which is why there is a discrepancy in how people view performance. Learn what the desired outcomes and expectations are, and why.

And if you spend some time in that mode of learning and acceptance and find they are all idiots, then leave. It is never too late to walk out. But give them a chance - there is a possibility that teams other than your own are different, but still decent teams.

6. Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

Top comment by rongenre

There's a couple uses cases (beyond the obvious) that I like with the chatbots

1. Brainstorming building something. Tell it what you're working on, add a paragraph or two of how you might build it, and ask it to give you pros and cons and ways to improve. Especially if it's mostly a well-trod design it can be helpful.

2. Treating it like a coach - tell it what you've done and need to get done, include any feedback you've had, and ask it for suggestions. This particularly helps when you're some kind of neurospicy and "regular human" responses sort of escape you.

7. Ask HN: What tools and practices have helped you work better as a developer?

Top comment by solardev

My Jetbrains IDE is bar none the biggest productivity boost for me. Even after VScode arrived (and got better, much better, over the years!), Jetbrains still has so many built-in features that I find it hard to code without, and I happily pay for my own subscription.

Aside from that, I think the thing that's helped me the most is simply over-commenting, everywhere and all the time. I leave a quick note for other devs (and myself) for every helper func, even if it looks trivial to me. And for anything complex, I try to leave detailed line-by-line comments that any junior dev can pick up. This not only helps others pick it up, it helps me myself a few weeks from now, and it also helps prevent runtime issues through what is basically as-you-go "rubber ducky" debugging, forcing me to verbalize my rationale for writing something a certain way.

And of course ChatGPT has been a moderately big help. It's not quite a replacement for another experienced dev, but it's certainly taken over 90% of my Stackoverflow and Google usage – if only for its much better natural language parsing abilities.

With these tools in place, the code mostly just writes itself if you can give me time to focus and not force me to join pointless meetings and scrum planning sessions. I can only be productive if I can sit down and focus without pointless rituals where my input isn't even needed or asked for.

8. Ask HN: Best Cyber Warfare Books?

Top comment by ahazred8ta

On a smaller scale: The Cyberthief and the Samurai (1996) is about Shimomura and Kevin Mitnick https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18163.The_Cyberthief_and...

The Cuckoo's Egg (1989) is about Clifford Stoll and a West German hacking for the KGB https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18154.The_Cuckoo_s_Egg

9. Ask HN: What's Going on with the US Economy?

Top comment by toomuchtodo

Money was cheap, it no longer is. This is reach for profit in a less favorable macro by cutting labor costs. US economy, by all metrics, is extremely healthy. The stock market isn't the economy.

https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/economy/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economy-posts-solid-gr...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/30/economy/us-economy-gdp-q3/ind...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/business/economy/economy-...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-economy-grew-at-a-so...

10. Ask HN: Proofpoint is blocking our emails. Any recourse?

Top comment by jfil

Email is probably the least concentrated and gate-kept space on the Internet. You'll be waiting for a very long time until these issues are on regulators' radar.

Proofpoint: * Does very aggressive "bot click" checks when they suspect your email is spam. They'll hit every link in every email, trying to check if the destination page is legit. They'll be rotating IPs and user agents for every hit and probably using the AWS IP range - of your web server blocks this behaviour, then that might be the reason why they penalize your emails. * They will block you based on the behaviour of other mailers that share the same sending IP. If you're not sending from a stable IP that's exclusively yours, then that could be the problem. Think about what other systems live/send email from that IP.

If you send me an email directly from your system (not forwarding an email) then I could take a quick look.