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Issue #299 - December 1, 2024
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: What are your most regretted tech purchases?
Top comment by merek
Pixel 7a phone. Purchased for work, intended for infrequent use. I created a new Google account since I didn't want the phone associated with my personal account.
After a couple of months of inactivity, I needed access again. The finger print didn't work (not accepted after a time of inactivity), and I cannot remember the PIN or Google account. I'm essentially locked out.
I can easily prove I'm the rightful owner with an invoice or bank statement, however neither the retailer nor Pixel will do anything, despite multiple conversations.
It raises the question of who owns the device: The person who purchased it, or the person who initially set it up? The Pixel is designed for the latter. I would argue it should be the former since transactions can be verified through intermediaries, whereas anyone could have set up the device, however I understand the complexities of Google verifying retailer receipts.
So I'm left with an unusable device, and I've run out of possible PINs to try.
Hopes for the future:
- On initial setup, a big ugly warning about being permanently locked out, and that I should ideally add recovery options to the new account, and be careful in choosing the PIN
- Requirement for retailers that stock Pixels to accept refunds in these situations, either through the kindness of Google's non-evil heart, or consumer law ("fit for purpose"?).
Any suggestions for what to do with a "bricked" phone would be welcome!
2. Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
Top comment by tikkun
It sounds like you want more broad stuff, not necessarily learning how to train models. More like learning to use them and how they work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195527 and
Hacker's Guide to LLMs by Jeremy from Fast.ai - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkrNMKz9pWU
State of GPT by Karpathy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZQun8Y4L2A
LLMs by 3b1b - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPZh9BOjkQs
Visualizing transformers by 3b1b - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJtZARuO3JY
How ChatGPT trained - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPRSBzXzavo
AI in a nutshell - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IK3DFHRFfw
How Carlini uses LLMs - https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/how-i-use-ai.html
For staying updated:
X/Twitter & Bluesky. Go and follow people that work at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI.
Podcasts: No Priors, Generally Intelligent, Dwarkesh Patel, Sequoia's "Training Data"
3. Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?
Top comment by bemmu
“Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke.
Refreshing and beautiful because it’s a totally new kind of world for a story to take place in, essentially survival in a world of procedurally generated endless architecture.
Most of the time there is just one or two characters among repetitive environments, which was relaxing as I get easily confused if there are 5+ characters to remember or extensive mental visualization required.
4. Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?
Top comment by valbaca
The special phrase you want is "chord"
A stenographer's keyboard is a special kind of chord keyboard for spoken English.
There are other kinds of chord keyboards, but look into those.
For example:
- https://www.charachorder.com/
- https://github.com/davidphilipbarr/Sweep
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515912
5. Ask HN: Platform for senior devs to learn other programming languages?
Top comment by fifilura
These days my main problem when learning is coming to terms with the development environment.
Python, how do I install and work with venvs? What is poetry and why is it better?
Scala, what is sbt and how do I make it work in Intellij?
Things I have learned under way, but still more of a headache than the actual language, since most ideas there are recognizable. And problems in the dev env can make you get stuck for several hours.
Docker helps a bit as an abstraction, but not all the way to the development environment.
6. Ask HN: Things to do on my phone
Top comment by hemmert
For me its about things to not do on my phone.
I disabled Safari (via parental settings), use an email account that auto-forwards everything to my main email, thus I can only send email from my phone, but not receive any (the inbox is always empty and I don't check my main email on it).
I only have apps that I use to input things into the phone (writing, taking photos) and I eliminiated everything that isn't designed to end at some point.
No Instagram or any of the likes, only WhatsApp, but muted so I have to proactively check it. I do use a news reader, which is subscribed to the RSS feeds of the sites I want to follow. No algorithmic curation of that content, and no ads (unless I open the sites that the RSS items link to).
Keeping one's sanity away from the side effects of tech these days is quite a technical job, somehow ;)
7. Ask HN: How do I search the web in the age of enshittified search engines?
Top comment by not_your_vase
If you know the below mentioned, then just ignore. Otherwise give it a try.
There is one thing, that many people either forgot, or never knew: how to create a search query. Nowadays most people put in a human question: "how to bake bread", "how to use a red toilet seat", "what happens to today around the corner".
However even to this day, search engines gives better results if instead this, you try to imagine the results, and search for text that you think appears on the correct result: "bread recipe", "toilet seat user manual", "concert Tuvalu 2024 november"
8. Ask HN: Recruiters, why do you repost jobs with 1000 applications a month later?
Top comment by gregjor
Companies and the recruiters who work for them post ghost jobs for various reasons. You can find plenty of writing and discussion about it on HN, Reddit, YouTube, even mainstream media. Look at the Wikipedia entry for "ghost job."
Not really a new practice, but having job postings and job searching online makes it more obvious. Running ads for jobs the employer may not fill has few downsides and doesn't cost much.
Digging through job postings and applying to them has turned into a numbers game, and an arms race of automation and now AI tools. I suggest a more effective job hunting strategy, because worrying about ghost job postings just wastes your time if you intend to find a job.
9. Ask HN: Which language for Advent of Code in 2024?
Top comment by middayc
I will this year try to be the "support team" for those that will try to do AoC in https://ryelang.org. At least one person said on X.com that he will use it, so we will see :)
10. Ask HN: How Do You Psychologically Manage Being Thrown Around as an IC?
Top comment by northwest65
> I just wasted a day investigating something for nothing
Nah not for nothing, they paid you. If they want to pay you for dumb shit, that's on them.
You'll have to find a way to let go of the frustration though, that's the real problem here. I just try not to get caught up in what the business is doing, it's just a job, and their goals will never ever ever align with my own, so no point sweating it.
I work at a small company now. When my boss does something stupid, I tell so and why. Sometimes I need to change tact because that's what the business demands, but sometimes he's like huh you're right (generally for technical reasons, although the cognitive cost of task switching is real) and we stay the course. Either way it's nice to have somebody listen at least.