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Issue #313 - March 9, 2025
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring?, Who wants to be hired? and Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?
Top comment by yellowapple
I've pretty much settled on Zig at this point, if only for how dead-simple it is to cross-compile for other hardware platforms. The process of compiling working code for oddball platforms (in my case the Nintendo 64) was way easier than I expected it to be.
The only downside is the stdlib being as fast-moving of a target as it is. Right now I've had to put a pin on getting panic stack traces to work on my N64 code because apparently the upcoming release changes a bunch of stuff around panic/stacktrace handling (and it's already changed quite a bit over the years even before these new changes).
2. Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"?
Top comment by jasode
The solution for me to eliminate headaches when working at computer screens was getting an extra set of intermediate distance glasses specifically for computer work. The "computer screen distance" of 3 ft is in between book-reading distance of 1 feet and driving distance 20'+ feet. I also avoid progressive lenses or high-index lenses for computer work. I commented about how arrived at this solution previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15375221
Reading glasses work fine when the screen is very close to your face such as a laptop screen. However if it's a separate monitor that's ~30 inches away, reading glasses are slightly blurry which can lead to eyestrain and headaches.
https://www.warbyparker.com/learn/wp-content/uploads/2023/04...
Look into it if you suspect it's a contributor to headaches: https://www.google.com/search?q=computer+glasses+%22intermed...
3. Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?
Top comment by yatralalala
Hi, our company does this basically "as-a-service".
The options how to find it are basically limitless. Best source is probably Certificate Transparency project as others suggested. But it does not end there, some other things that we do are things like internet crawl, domain bruteforcing on wildcard dns, dangling vhosts identification, default certs on servers (connect to IP on 443 and get default cert) and many others.
Security by obscurity does not work. You can not rely on "people won't find it". Once it's online, everyone can find it. No matter how you hide it.
4. Ask HN: Are you a 40-year old software engineer without a job for > 1 year?
Top comment by irq-1
The best way to harness this is to offer what companies don't: unlimited time off, no return-to-office, health insurance and savings plans that don't kick-back to the company, flat(ter) management, no all-hands meetings...
5. Ask HN: Is Cursor deleting working code for you too or is it just me?
Top comment by tony
Keep files <1000 lines. If you can.
Keep chats <30 minutes, ideally 20-minute continuous segments.
Use a `notes/TODO.md` file to main a checklist of objectives between chats. You can have claude update it.
Commit to version control often, for code you supervised that _does_ look good. Squash later.
This glitch often begins to happen around the time you'd be seeing "Start a new chat for better results - New chat" on the bottom right.
If you don't supervise, you will get snagged, and if you miss it and continue, it'll continue writing code under the assumption the deletion was fine: potentially losing the very coverage you'd hope to have gained.
If it does happen, try to scroll up to the chat before it happened and "Restore checkpoint"
claude-3.7-sonnet-thinking, Cursor 1.96.2
6. Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025
Top comment by FlyingAvatar
You have two requirements that are at odds:
* Macbook is not an option
* Want to be able to mess around with some local LLMs.
Your choices for a Window laptop that can run a local LLM is either to get a large amount of system RAM and have it be abysmally slow, or to run a very tiny model on a discrete GPU which will (a) not be very good due to its small size and high quantization and (b) evaporate your battery life.
If you want to run local LLMs on a laptop and actually have them be useful, a Mac is currently the only real choice.
That said, with the money you save buying a Linux laptop instead, you can pay for a lot of tokens for whatever hosted LLM you want and it will be higher quality than what you could potentially run locally on a Mac.
7. Ask HN: How much employee resume verification is done in practice?
Top comment by PaulHoule
My Aunt Ruth(less) attempted to murder her mentally retarded sister with insulin and did time. Later on she applied for a job at a nursing home and failed to check the box about prior felony convictions. Got the job anyway. My father-in-law was in the hospital at the time and we were terrified when Ruth, who was visiting, changed his IV.
She tried to end a patient at the nursing home and was also busted for raiding the medicine cabinet. Obviously no check.
My son applied for a job at a small construction firm and they did call his references.
8. Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)?
Top comment by tikhonj
I worked on a 500+ page book[1] in Pandoc that included a bunch of code samples, math, a table of contents with working links and an index. (In hindsight, I wish we had thought about the index from the beginning rather than adding it after the fact.)
What worked well for me: Pandoc with a custom LaTeX template, and a decent amount of inline LaTeX to handle edge cases. We had a LaTeX theme to use from our publisher, but we also needed our own totally separate theme for the free version version of the book.
For one-off things like really long code lines, I found it best to manually figure out how to handle them. Sometimes there was a bit of TeX magic but, more often, I just rewrote or reorganized the code. I see the presentation and structure of code and math snippets as an integral part of how I'm communicating the underlying ideas, so manually changing things around to read better was fundamentally no different from going back and editing prose.
Unfortunately, this also means that the process was relatively hands-on. If you need something ≈completed automated, I expect Pandoc → LaTeX is going to fall a bit short. Edge cases need manual intervention, and it's easy for formatting errors to sneak in—the free version of our book has some formatting mistakes like code bleeding into the margin because I ran out of energy to fix all of them!
[1]: https://github.com/TikhonJelvis/RL-book
9. Ask HN: Replacement for Rackspace SMTP Hosting?
Top comment by selfhoster
I've been selfhosting my email for around 3 decades. Currently hosting for free thanks to Oracle Cloud's generous always free resources. Running Wireguard there, then it routes ports I've designated over Wireguard to my home machine.
10. Ask HN: A question about mentoring a junior developer
Top comment by RadiozRadioz
Think about it from their perspective.
Imagine you're new to a codebase, you're struggling to make it work. Unbeknownst to you, you're about to cause a production outage. Someone more senior at the company, the domain expert in the new thing you're using, notices you're struggling and decides to sit there, let you flounder and break production. It might not be a big outage, but you'd feel pretty bad and unsupported by your team.
You can see something bad about to happen, your instinct shouldn't be to do nothing to teach the person a lesson. You owe them the professional courtesy of offering a guiding hand.