AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

Top comment by jtwaleson

I'm creating an infinite canvas that has all your organization's code and documentation on it. If you zoom in, you can see the code, if you zoom out you see the big picture. By giving everything a place on the map, it becomes easier to figure out your way through the landscape and understand the systems. Different modes can you show you different things: code age, authorship (bus-factor, is the person still with the company etc), languages used, security issues. There's time-travel, think Gource for all software in your company, and maybe the most fun: a GeoGuessr for code. Select the repos for your team (or if you feel confident, of the entire org), you get a snippet and have to guess where it is. The plan is for LLMs + tree-sitter to analyze all the code and show relations to other systems, databases etc.

I had the idea 2 years ago, but starting building in earnest 2 months ago. Spending all my time on it now, minus 3 or 4 days per week of earning money. Currently looking for a GTM/sales-oriented cofounder in NL.

2. Ask HN: Former devs who can't get a job, what did you end up doing for work?

Top comment by mark_l_watson

I am in my mid-70s now and for the first time in my life I can’t find part time work. I have had three really good leads in the last four or five months but in each case there was no job unless I accepted a full time position. Sadly at my age, I don’t have the energy for full time work, so it is what it is. My wife is happy I am not working, and she literally would not accept it if I tried a full time gig, even just for a year or so.

One thing that I do is that I keep writing code in my favorite languages Common Lisp, Haskell, Racket, and Python (Python only for deep learning). I also still write.

3. Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

Top comment by Daril

For what it counts, I deleted my Amazon account today (and lost all my Kindle books in the process), I'll never buy anything from them again. I'll close my S3 storage account with a US company in the coming months : I'll switch to a German service. In the coming weeks, I'll also delete my GMail account (my devices are already deGoogled since many years). There a lot of European alternatives that respect our privacy, our values and principles.

4. Ask HN: Who are your favorite photography and generative coding artists?

Top comment by smusamashah

Frank Force for generative coding. He has made lots of clever and nice things. Includes game engine (https://github.com/KilledByAPixel/LittleJS), a procedural audio lib (https://github.com/KilledByAPixel/ZzFX) lots of stuff on dwitter.net (https://www.dwitter.net/u/KilledByAPixel/top)

Twitter: https://x.com/KilledByAPixel

portfolio in form of webdesktop: https://generative.3d2k.com/

Website: https://frankforce.com/

5. Ask HN: Recommend resources that helped your game dev journey?

Top comment by jowday

I commented on your other thread - but you should really clean up your information diet. From the vocabulary you use and the tone of your game and pitch deck, I can tell you’re someone that hangs on the words of tech industry ‘thought leaders’. You need to realize that most of the people in tech who have time to podcast, write substacks, or otherwise build a ‘personal brand’, aren’t actually making shit. They’re trying to inflate their profile so they can trade reputation for career advancement in any number of ways. It’s also not worth listening to most VCs. Most of them don’t have the time or technical ability to understand the areas they’re investing in and just chase trends. If they had the time and technical abilities, they’d be building companies instead of getting other people to do it for them. You’d be surprised to hear how many investors or personalities that are supposedly high profile are openly derided among actual founders.

The way to make something that’s fun is to try to make something that’s fun over and over again until you’ve got it down. It’s not by obsessively reading what investors or people who are essentially glorified influencers say.

6. Ask HN: A retrofitted C dialect?

Top comment by arnsholt

In 2014 John Regehr and colleagues suggested what he called Friendly C[0], in an attempt to salvage C from UB. About bit more than a year later, he concluded that the project wasn't really feasible because people couldn't agree on the details of what Friendly C should be.[1]

In the second post, there's an interesting comment towards the end:

> Luckily there’s an easy away forward, which is to skip the step where we try to get consensus. Rather, an influential group such as the Android team could create a friendly C dialect and use it to build the C code (or at least the security-sensitive C code) in their project. My guess is that if they did a good job choosing the dialect, others would start to use it, and at some point it becomes important enough that the broader compiler community can start to help figure out how to better optimize Friendly C without breaking its guarantees, and maybe eventually the thing even gets standardized. There’s precedent for organizations providing friendly semantics; Microsoft, for example, provides stronger-than-specified semantics for volatile variables by default on platforms other than ARM.

I would argue that this has happened, but not quite in the way he expected. Google (and others) has chosen a way forward, but rather than somehow fixing C they have chosen Rust. And from what I see happening in the tech space, I think that trend is going to continue: love it or hate it, the future is most likely going to be Rust encroaching on C, with C increasinly being relegated to the "legacy" status like COBOL and Fortran. In the words of Ambassador Kosh: "The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote."

0: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1180 1: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1287

7. Ask HN: If you work for Elon Musk, what keeps you motivated?

Top comment by exhaze

It would be great to hear from actual folks working for one of his companies rather than folks that presume that they can speak on behalf of those people, and, even worse, go so far as to liken them to "people in abusive relationships".

8. Ask HN: What fiction/non-fiction book should everyone read on the topic of CS?

Top comment by hiAndrewQuinn

Naming only ones I haven't seen mentioned in other comments:

- Networking for Systems Administrators, by Michael W. Lucas. Its explicit goal is to teach you just enough about networking, from the electron up, that you can talk to an actual network engineer and not make a fool out of yourself. It's a phenomenally high-ROI read if networking isn't your strong suit.

- The first 3 chapters of Mastering Regular Expressions. Regexes are up there with Vim keybindings in terms of sheer ubiquitous use no matter what stack you find yourself in. The rest of the book is excellent if you want to actually implement a regex engine.

- The Art of Unix Programming. Less technical. Gives you an idea of why exactly 'nix machines are like that, especially older commands. The 18 rules of design are worth committing to memory.

- The Linux Programming Interface. More technical. Pairs esp nicely with the above. Lots of practice C code one can run, plenty of short self-contained chapters.

- Not a book, but an online paper: https://how.complexsystems.fail . I see echoes of this everywhere I work, and it often helps me understand what kinds of "bad" things are secretly highly evolved resiliency measures.

- The Little Schemer. Just for the joy of solving problems.

Most of the others I can think of are too specialized to be of worth to everyone, but for what it's worth, William S. Vincent's Django for Beginners, APIs, and Professionals are a lovely triptych for anyone wanting to get into backend web dev.

9. Ask HN: How can I prepare my digital life for geopolitical disruptions?

Top comment by yeyeyeyeyeyeyee

I don't believe we are facing a military conflict soon, but it is clear that something fundamental has changed, and even if suddenly the US government does a 180, it's a whooole lot of toothpaste to put back in the tube.

Essentially, start freezing US dependencies out of your tech stack and take control:

- Run Linux on your machines

- Run GrapheneOS on your mobile

- Select services from this list: https://european-alternatives.eu/

- Keep local and off-line copies of your important data, and maintain frequent backups

- Block companies that comply willingly with unfair practices at your network edge (e.g. with a Pi-hole for DNS-based blocking, and you get ad blocking in addition)

10. Ask HN: Struggling to Understand DHTs – Any Good Resources?

Top comment by jeffadelic

Read the research paper about the Chord algorithm: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/chord:sigcomm01/chord_sigc..., then implement the algorithm on your own (paper contains pseudo code).

Or start here, generally read high level details about the algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer).