AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

Top comment by bravura

Okay I think I qualify. I'll bite.

LeCun's argument is this:

1) You can't learn an accurate world model just from text.

2) Multimodal learning (vision, language, etc) and interaction with the environment is crucial for true learning.

He and people like Hinton and Bengio have been saying for a while that there are tasks that mice can understand that an AI can't. And that even have mouse-level intelligence will be a breakthrough, but we cannot achieve that through language learning alone.

A simple example from "How Large Are Lions? Inducing Distributions over Quantitative Attributes" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01327) is this: Learning the size of objects using pure text analysis requires significant gymnastics, while vision demonstrates physical size more easily. To determine the size of a lion you'll need to read thousands of sentences about lions, or you could look at two or three pictures.

LeCun isn't saying that LLMs aren't useful. He's just concerned with bigger problems, like AGI, which he believes cannot be solved purely through linguistic analysis.

The energy minimization architecture is more about joint multimodal learning.

(Energy minimization is a very old idea. LeCun has been on about it for a while and it's less controversial these days. Back when everyone tried to have a probabilistic interpretation of neural models, it was expensive to compute the normalization term / partition function. Energy minimization basically said: Set up a sensible loss and minimize it.)

2. Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

Top comment by paxys

Having the right technical skills is only 50% of the requirement (and realistically even less than that). The harder battle is being a good salesman. Push yourself and your services at every opportunity. Send mass emails to friends and old collegues. Write daily puke-inducing posts on LinkedIn. Write blog posts and make toy Github projects with "looking for work" blurbs at the top of each one. Set a goal to post N times a day on X/Threads/LinkedIn/Reddit/wherever else you can think of, and hit those targets. Keep doing all of this for an extended period of time and the leads will start flowing in. Then you need to start putting even more effort into closing those leads and signing contracts.

3. Ask HN: Any jobs that don't force you to always be advancing career wise?

Top comment by pelagicAustral

Get the same job working for government. Work stability in government is unparalleled, and there is so much cruft and technical debt that you will literally spend up until your last breath fixing legacy code and trying to get people off ancient software systems.

You will stagnate, and nobody will give a shit. People will come and go next to you, but you will be stable through the ages, like a pillar in an ancient Roman temple... Seasons will leave behind memories, but the winds will not take you with them. You will prevail, no matter what. Maybe forgotten, maybe overlooked, but more certainly not underestimated.

4. Ask HN: Would you fund Mozilla to become independent of Google?

Top comment by DiabloD3

The only way I would donate to Mozilla is if the corporation is shuttered and the non-profit is disentangled from it.

Any donations you send to Mozilla today go to the corporation and are not spent on the browser. They are spent on things that have nothing to do with the core mission of the maintaining the browser.

Nobody is allowed to fund Mozilla to maintain the browser, which is the actual question you're asking.

5. Ask HN: How do you have effective 1:1s with your manager?

Top comment by Jemaclus

Manager here: first, I'll say that you're ahead of the rest of the class just by asking this question. Most people don't bother trying to get much out of the 1:1s with their bosses.

Here's the basic answer: the 1:1 is for you, not for me. If I'm doing my job well, I already know the status of your work. This is a chance for you to talk about anything that you want.

Some of my reports ask about technical things: how can we solve X better? Can we use Y algorithm? Why did we wind up going with Z tech instead of something else?

Some of my reports ask behavioral questions: how can I work better with Sue? I'm not confident in my presentation skills, can you help with that? I think I pissed off Bob, how can I recover?

Some ask for business discussions: how can we contribute better to the business? what are the most important priorities of the business? why are we focusing on a silly feature when there's so much tech debt to take care of?

And others talk about themselves: how can I get a promotion? How do I level up? What's my biggest weakness and how can I work on it?

Some people do all of the above, and some do none of the above. Some people have no interest in 1:1s, and it's just a quick status update and we bounce.

For that last group of people, I tend to try to poke and prod and try to get _something_ out of it, though.

I'll put it this way: the 1:1 for you, but it's also too valuable to skip just because you don't want it. We will have a 1:1 on a regular cadence, whether you like it or not. I don't want a meeting for the sake of having a meeting, but 1:1s are the single best way for managers to connect to team members. If you want to cancel all of the time because you have nothing to talk about, then that indicates a number of different possibilities, very few of which are good.

With that in mind, it's in your best interest to make 1:1s the best they can possibly be, which you are doing, so kudos to you.

Hope that helps.

6. Ask HN: How do you handle VAT / Sales Tax accounting as B2C SaaS?

Top comment by jwr

EU SaaS solo owner here (about 10 years so far). I gave up on B2C entirely. It's just too much hassle. My accountant starts screaming in horror whenever I mention VAT MOSS. Whenever I looked into the rules, I saw a snake pit with moving snakes.

Additionally, B2C has tight margins, so eating into those hurts a lot.

Whenever I looked at companies like Quaderno, they looked great, but when I actually tried to use them, it turned out that their solutions are far from perfect and often incomplete or simply incorrect (e.g. I would not comply with local laws in my country). This is a common theme: even B2B invoicing, which is far simpler, is not implemented correctly by companies that say they do "invoicing". For example, Stripe invoicing won't do JPK_FA or KSeF in Poland (SAF-T reporting), which pretty much makes it a no-go. Many service providers are also incapable of producing bi-lingual invoices.

I ended up using Braintree (don't make that mistake) and now I'm migrating to Stripe — but for payments only. I have my own subscriptions and invoicing, and I use a local (Polish) company that has an invoicing API to produce JPK_FA/KSeF data.

If I were to even look at B2C, I wouldn't even consider doing anything on my own. I would go with Paddle, carefully considering my margins.

I realize this is not the answer you were looking for but it's a real-life data point.

7. Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?

Top comment by worble

The rhetoric around Firefox is so exhausting. They change some wording while having made no actual technical changes to the browser and the internet is on fire for days calling them the devil incarnate, meanwhile Chrome gutted uBlock and other extensions a week ago and there was barely any noise about it.

What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?

8. Ask HN: What do you use to create diagrams?

Top comment by shagie

Mermaid - support in many markdown rendering pages. Embedding a ``` block in Markdown and having it versioned as text is the big win.

Graphviz - same basic reason as Mermaid, though no markdown support. Versioning text is a lot easier than versioning binaries.

Draw.io - if you've got to have a binary, this is it. In particular, it allows you to embed the drawing information in the image so that you can import a .png file into draw.io and get the drawing.

9. Ask HN: Should there be new RPN calculators to replace the TI-84?

Top comment by inejge

Calculators, especially scientific and graphing calculators, are a niche product these days, almost exclusively limited to education and exam-taking. There is no impetus for changing the approved models, given the mountains of materials adapted to their use (TI actively worked with various educational bodies to promote the use of graphing calculators and helped prepare the curricula using their own.)

Don't expect great changes in this area, although the impending death of the Dept. of Education might shake up things. Not for the better, I think.

10. Ask HN: How much traffic do you serve and with which database engine?

Top comment by jedberg

I think you might be asking the wrong questions. They key questions are Queries per second and the median response size of the query.

For example at reddit (15 years ago) we had 10x more vote traffic than comment traffic, but we only needed two databases to handle votes (technically only one the other was just for redundancy).

But we needed nine comments databases. Mainly because the median query response was so much bigger for comments.