AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Difficulties with going back to school

Top comment by sircastor

I went back to school at 37, and got my degree at 40 (2020). I don’t regret it, though it was very tough. My classes were almost all online, and I transferred a “Associates in general studies” from a community college (obtained in 2008).

Here are my thoughts: 1) You don’t have to study your career path. You will almost certainly make more money in software than as an EE. I do electronics as a hobby, and I’m pretty happy with it. I worked full time while taking two classes a term. You already have a career in software. I’m here to tell you: you probably won’t be learning much you don’t already know. I didn’t. Why do you want to go to school to study ME/EE? If you want it, go for it. But if you’re just wanting to complete college, play to your strengths.

2) School is expensive. I cheated by going to a church college that subsidizes tuition. I have since stopped being a church-goer. I’m still proud of myself for getting my degree.

3) My wife is going back to school in mid-forties. It’s not too late.

4) You’re younger than you think. If you’re not too tied down, tear up your life. You’ve got lots in front of you. I had a wife and a newborn (still have both) and a full time job.

5) US university programs strongly bias toward kids coming out of high school. They are a quagmire of bureaucracy. Ask lots of questions about the program, find out what you can skip, what you don’t need, etc. I managed to get out of an internship requirement due to my 15 years in the industry.

Good luck, and I’m proud of you. Education is a worthy goal.

2. Ask HN: Is Washington Post correct in saying Signal is unsecure?

Top comment by crazygringo

Unsecure in terms of being vulnerable to state spying on cell phones. Not of network interception, but rather compromised phones where a foreign adversary can read all your phone's data.

From this perspective, all phones are insecure. Classified government stuff isn't ever supposed to be on commercial smartphones in the first place.

The kind of security Signal provides is sufficient for people who aren't active targets of foreign states.

3. Ask HN: Should I leave the company I co-founded?

Top comment by sroussey

If you are asking, then the answer is: likely.

There is a lot of nuance though, so I recommend finding a trustworthy third party to talk it out with.

All the questions and answers to discover the contours of your situation can easily be enough to identify you, which I assume you do not want at this stage.

Things to consider, but not answer here:

- the relationship with your cofounders: how many, how do votes work, etc. What did you decide in your founders agreement? Is the relationship antagonistic? Have you lost respect for them or they in you?

- relationship with your investors. Who has face time with them? What say or vote do they have? How are their interests aligned with yours vs your co-founder(s)?

- relationship with the employees. Who do they look up to and respect? Will they follow you on to your next thing?

- relationship with your customers. Do they know and interface with you or someone else?

- your skillset. Are you the technologist that invented something the the company was founded on? Do you generate all the sales? Have you created a great team that can now survive without you?

Take some time and try and live in the other side's perspective. You are moving in a different direction than they are. Do they find that painful? Will losing you be more or less painful than keeping you? Short term? Long term? What timing is at play (could be funding round, or something else)?

Best of luck!

4. Ask HN: How do you propose to rebuild industry in a post-apocalypse world?

Top comment by cratermoon

Tom Murphy over at Do The Math[1] argues that we would not be able to reboot modernity after an apocalypse. The short version of his argument is that we long ago mined/drilled/farmed/harvested the easy resources that can be gotten with pre-industrial technology. The raw materials we are extracting today require modern methods and materials. We can't bootstrap ourselves from human and animal muscle power back to industrial capacity because it is inadequate to the task.

We might have the theoretical knowledge to do it, but we'd be unable to build out the infrastructure.

And no, scavenging won't solve it because the energy and technology required to recover the raw materials again requires industrial processes and materials we won't have the ability to harness.

1 https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

5. Ask HN: Do programmers generally enjoy some amount of complexity?

Top comment by austin-cheney

This is the cross section of high intelligence and conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is the ability to perceive and abstract the world outside yourself and intelligence accounts of quantity of variables a person many consider simultaneously.

People who are both highly intelligent and have high conscientiousness are capable of perceiving many variables simultaneously and abstract them into refined simplified solutions. People with lower intelligence and high conscientiousness are still capable of perceiving these variables but will struggle more to put them together in a meaningful way necessary to achieve a polished result. It should be noted that conscientiousness is negatively correlated to intelligence at around -0.24 - 0.27, which is a big gap that explains why some lower intelligent people are unexpectedly more capable of high quality delivery than much higher intelligent peers.

People with low conscientiousness cannot refine complex qualities into simplified output. The cost is just too high irrespective of their intelligence. The result is sloppy output that just costs less to start over every time than to refine or extend. This will appear that these people tend to preference complexity, and in a manner of speaking that isn't completely wrong. It's not so much that they prefer complexity but that they are just incapable of expending the effort to build more meaningful systems.

6. Ask HN: Is anyone experiencing "AI brain rot?"

Top comment by tomgp

Perhaps not surprising given what we know about how e.g. satnav usage affects our navigational competence. Feels like outsourcing our reasoning and problem solving would have an analagous effect.

"Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0

7. Ask HN: can Wireless-CarPlay dongles steal your data?

Top comment by packtreefly

If the dongle acts as a wifi AP with a DHCP server, it could give the iPhone an ip address but no gateway upon connection. This will cause the iPhone to talk directly to the dongle via the WiFi interface, but talk to the rest of the internet via the cellular connection.

You can determine this by checking the WiFi network's properties after the connection is established. If there's no value in the "Router" field, that's how it works.

Once you load the firmware update page, JavaScript on the page instructs the browser to fetch the firmware payload from a server on the public Internet, then relays that data to the dongle's web server to execute the firmware update process.

As the other reply mentioned, this can be tricky, as CORS likes to prevent this kind of data transfer for security reasons, the right configuration on the web server will make it work.

It's a fairly clever setup.

If you want a low-tech way of confirming this design, try running the firmware update with a device that doesn't have two network connections, like a laptop, instead of a cell phone. If it doesn't work from such a device, the scenario I described above is probably how it works.

8. Ask HN: What's the ideal stack for a solo dev in 2025

Top comment by bvnierop

The ideal tech stack for a solo dev to use in 2025 is the one you are most comfortable with.

The ideal tech stack for a solo dev to use in 2025 is also the one that is most suitable to the problem that you are trying to solve.

Unless those two are wildly different from each other — such as one being Ruby and the other being Haskell — learning the same concepts that you already know in a new language takes a few weeks at best.

Personally I picked up Python for a couple of small LLM demos that I have given, but ironically the sample application is otherwise written in .NET (because I am most comfortable hacking GUI applications with .NET), with the Python parts being invoked as a subprocess.

9. Ask HN: Why don't hiring managers provide feedback?

Top comment by bell-cot

If I'm the HR VP, my choices look like this:

Forbid Feedback - this is a one-liner in our procedures manual. For internal Training, I might add a 3-minute "here's a real-world example, where well-intended feedback turned into a disaster" story to any 3+ hour training. That'll be a different case every time, to keep it fresh and drive home the point.

Allow Feedback - now I'm letting my front-line troops, who don't have much training for it, spend time wandering in legal minefields. The time is on my dime. Any additional training is on my dime. The liability (which could easily be $millions) is on my dime. And 99% of the (modest) upsides are for some declined candidate who we'll probably never see again.

10. Ask HN: Alternatives to Vector DB?

Top comment by romanhn

There's Postgres with pgvector extension.