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Issue #328 - June 22, 2025

Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!

1. Ask HN: How to Deal with a Bad Manager?

Top comment by ednite

I'll give this a shot, speaking from experience.

I’ve worked as a consultant with small and large organizations for most of my career, and I’ve seen this exact situation play out more times than I can count.

If I could go back, I’d tell my younger self not to stick around under bad leadership or in an unhealthy environment. It’s rarely worth it. Even if you care deeply about the mission, a toxic manager will slowly drain your motivation and confidence. I stayed in a few of those situations too long, thinking I had to tough it out. I didn’t, and neither do you.

The projects I’m most proud of were with teams I genuinely enjoyed working and growing with. That’s not a coincidence.

Start quietly looking. The right environment can bring out the best in you in ways this one won’t.

I really hope it works out for you.

2. Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?

Top comment by codingdave

Step back a few more steps. Maybe the web has run its course, and we need to engage with each other in other ways. Even aside from the obvious IRL options, maybe voice and real-time interaction should gain traction again. Maybe we need completely new inventions to help us share content and thoughts. Maybe the web can go the way of gopher and become the subject of future story-telling: "Man, remember back when that was how we interacted? Crazy, right?"

We should move forward, not sideways.

3. Ask HN: What newspaper are you paying for these days?

Top comment by wenc

Right now, I only have subscriptions to the NYTimes (US) and FT (international). But mostly I find out interesting stuff from https://marginalrevolution.com/ (which usually have links to FT, Bloomberg, WP, WSJ, etc.)

I was once a New Yorker subscriber, but I no longer have patience for long form writing.

I also once had subscriptions to the Montreal Gazette and Globe and Mail, which were pretty good for local and domestic news respectively (but only if you're Canadian). I also once subscribed to the Walrus when Jonathan Kay was editor, but it was too boring (it's Canadian, I'm Canadian, but I don't relate to anything they write about -- but I think they've gotten more interesting since).

The Economist -- I'm torn. A lot of the writing sounds smart, but many of the articles are written by young Oxbridge PPE grads who can turn a phrase but don't have a lot of real world experience. The Economist seems to be read by people who want to seem smart, who want to hold an elite-certified opinion, but don't seem to want to to do the work to actually go deep on topics and would rather outsource their opinion formation to the Economist.

I also once had a subscription to Foreign Affairs. Excellent long-form articles that I no longer have any patience for. You do get the occasional long form article that is so relevant and engaging that you're forced to read it to the end, but these are few and far between.

I've gone back to reading books.

4. Ask HN: Do you think there's censorship on HN?

Top comment by mtmail

> if anyone else is surprised by the lack of coverage on the front page with regards to the recent wars

HN user for 10(?) years. It's not surprising at all to me. It's off-topic here. Plenty of other websites cover the stories, TV covers it. I come here to escape the 24/7 news cycle. Celebrity deaths hardly make the frontpage, if the inventor of an operating system dies you'll top spot and 2000 comments. It's not that users don't care, it's more the expectation that people get their news from multiple sources (websites, aggregator, forums) and not every forum needs to cover all topics.

5. Ask HN: You have $35,000 how do you invest it?

Top comment by nodirvaliev

I’d probably use the money to build a small physical asset that serves a community — something like a coffee stand, a laundromat, or even a village solar charging station. Something low-maintenance, low-tech, and useful.

But honestly… I’m currently helping build a classroom in rural Tajikistan, where kids walk 5 km to school every day. Not exactly a revenue-generating asset — unless you count hope, literacy, and the occasional "thank you" as ROI.

So yeah, maybe not the most lucrative investment, but probably one of the most fulfilling

6. Ask HN: Tips for hiring? It has been difficult

Top comment by WeissBlau



    What have people been doing?
I work at a public HPC center and we cannot compete with industry so we cannot afford to hire anyone with experience nor can we afford to hire anyone with an amazing academic track record. So we hire juniors with 0 YOE and a sketchy CV and we give them 6 months where their main goal is to learn the craft. And it honestly works amazing well. I don't know why industry is so focused on hiring only seniors because there's lots of good talent out there that could be had for much cheaper.

When we interview we don't try to assess how much technical knowledge the candidate has, but rather, of the things which they have gained experience in (and they are allowed to dictate this), how much can they confidently relay to us. From this we can estimate how much talent the candidate has. We get some interviewees with seemingly strong CVs e.g. particle physics PhD who does Kaggle in their free time, but then they are not able to explain in detail anything they have done. We also get some interviewees who have seemingly mediocre CVs e.g. bad grades, didn't publish their thesis and bare github, but they turn out amazing.

I guess my point is, experience is not talent, and some good talent does not sell themselves well and for the rest you get inundated with mediocre talent who know how to sell themselves.

7. Ask HN: What Happened to the Apple Vision Pro?

Top comment by solardev

It's a clunky, heavy, $3500 nerd-alert flight helmet with a googly-eyes-of-doom projector up front. It has like four apps and two uses cases, one of which is "luxury paperweight". They're still trying to find the other one.

To buy (and keep) one, you have to be rich enough that a couple months' rent is nothing, self-confident (or socially oblivious) enough that you don't mind looking like a Star Wars droid knock-off, and masochistic enough to want to take your neck to the gym every time you want to watch a movie. Not a very big target audience...

It's too heavy and limited to be a useful personal screen. It's useless for gaming. It's too expensive to be an occasional-use-only device. It's a solution to a problem nobody had, and it solves none of the problems people do have. Sure, it had a lot of fancy tech, and maybe made sense as a laboratory prototype, but not a consumer device. You can do more with the $300 Facebook goggles for 10% of the price, or get one of the pricier but slimmer AR glasses (Xreal, etc.)

8. Ask HN: Is There a MacBook Equivalent?

Top comment by scoodah

If I were buying a non Mac laptop today it’d likely be a Framework. Their laptops don’t feel as premium, imo, but the fact you can repair nearly every single thing on the laptop yourself makes up for a lot of it. I don’t think they’re very directly comparable to a MacBook, they’re two products with fairly different ideologies behind them. Other than that I’ve been largely unimpressed by non-Apple laptop offerings.

9. Ask HN: Is it still a good idea to learn Perl for a young developer?

Top comment by brtastic

Yes. Perl will give you incredible power and you will have a lot of fun in the process.

First and foremost, it is great for writing scripts. It is much more civilized and faster than bash. If your script does anything more than calling a couple programs, writing it in Perl is a good idea. It has almost instant startup time, unless you use some heavy modules.

Secondly, its one-liners are very capable and can efficiently solve problems you would normally solve by a mixture of bash, sed and awk. Once you learn regexes it can mung text more efficiently than any other tool.

Lastly, if you wish so, it can scale up so that you can write full-blown applications in it. It is good for all kinds of backend tasks with the help of CPAN modules. As a bonus, any application you write should last you for a very long time, since both the interpreter developers and the community in general take preserving backward compatibility seriously.

Please note that a bit older technologies like Perl don't generate as much noise to get excited about. There is no new language feature, library or framework announced every month. Instead you can start investing early into your future by writing personal programs in it that will likely last you a lifetime and will not require constant tweaking as the ecosystem changes. Perl interpreter is not a "moving target", and many established CPAN libraries aren't either. It's a solid platform to develop stable, useful software.

10. Ask HN: What is the latest on treatment of Metastatic Breast Cancer?

Top comment by pella

Not a doctor, but gut microbiome modulation (e.g. fecal microbiota transplantation) is one of the most talked-about adjuncts for (metastatic breast) cancer right now.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2022&q=fecal+micro...

--- example:

"Understanding the relationship between breast cancer, immune checkpoint inhibitors, and gut microbiota: a narrative review"

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11557166/ ( Transl Breast Cancer Res. 2024 Oct 21)

  """
  Conclusions
  The composition of gut microbiota could help predict 
  the chance of response to immunotherapy, 
  and modulating gut microbiota has the potential 
  to enhance the  efficacy of chemo-immunotherapy 
  in breast cancer. 
  However, the available data relating to breast cancer 
  are limited. 
  Larger prospective studies are required 
  to further elucidate their role 
  as a biomarker and treatment.
  """