AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

Top comment by johnmorrison

In the online world, it seems like there are two big things happening right now:

- Neural networks / ML (eg GPT-2) Definitely nowhere near its potential for being applied to a wide variety of areas. Find a niche you like and apply there.

- Security / Privacy (eg Telegram) Rapidly growing demand pretty much everywhere. Bonus points if you can make your product great for standard users and at the same time hackable/customizable for people who want to do that. Capitalize on both legs of the pareto distribution.

That all being said, if you are ambitious and talented without an all-consuming passion for software, I highly recommend you find something you can work in hardware. Since the '70s or so most industries have been basically frozen, besides computer hardware/software. Yet in the meantime materials science and engineering design has advanced considerably, both of which form the basis for innovation in new technologies. This is why SpaceX was able to build components for 10-100x cheaper than the leading suppliers in the early 2000s.

I work at a startup in nuclear fission, particularly because this tech is at <1% of its potential right now. The same could be said for many other areas.

Here's some ideas you might find interesting, that I think could work in the next decade or so: - Supersonic air travel - Electric air travel - Nano/micro-scale metallurgy and materials for industry - Biological materials - Gut/microbiome - Genetic engineering - Nuclear fission / fusion - Carbon capture - Cross-laminated timber (CLT) for construction - Indoor farming / optimizing farming in general - Synthetic meat / meat alternatives

2. Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

Top comment by bekman

I run a popular Quiz website. I make around $6,000 per month from Google adsense. I work between 2-3 hours a week usually posting quiz links on my Pinterest page. My only expense is hosting which is around $20 per month (Digital Ocean). I have never advertised my website and it gets all the traffic from Pinterest Organically. Compare to my salary, I'm an IT Administrator in my day job and make $400 per month. I live in Ethiopia :) I thought this inspires my fellow HN. Good day.

3. Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

Top comment by mherrmann

I switched from MBP to a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. I compare the experience to living in a hotel vs. living at home [1]. In a hotel (=on Mac), everything is stylish and cared for, but you have very little freedom to change things. At home (=on Linux), you need to do the dishes yourself but there's no external agenda. It's simply yours.

I'm very happy with the switch. Though I'm on (Debian+) Xfce now instead of Ubuntu and would go for a ThinkPad instead of the XPS, because 1) I want a 14" screen 2) the XPS's fan is too loud, especially when Skyping 3) the XPS's camera is placed at the bottom of the screen instead of at the top, so people you have video calls with look up your nostrils.

[1]: https://fman.io/blog/home-and-hotel

4. Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

Top comment by masnick

I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/.

This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com.

I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question.

For notes I don't want to make public, I use OneNote. It's available on every platform, has a documented file format, and the sync works well. Of course, I have some more detailed notes on why I prefer this to other options: https://maxmasnick.com/kb/note-apps/.

[^1]: My whole website is built with https://gohugo.io. I use the GitHub Actions beta to automatically update the public site every time I commit to master. This means I can edit on a computer with a standard text editor, and also on iOS using https://workingcopyapp.com.

5. Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?

Top comment by reuven

I had a summer internship at HP while I was in college. (I graduated in 1992.) When I graduated, the assumption/expectation was that they would offer me a job. They hesitated, and a manager who was unusually nice to me explained that HP hires people who will stick around for many years -- and thus, they weighed every hire carefully.

He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a recession, everyone at HP -- all the way up and down the ladder -- worked 9 days out of 10, and took a 10% salary cut, in order to ensure that there wouldn't be any layoffs.

People spoke about the company, and how it treated employees, with great pride, and the way that they treated workers during hard times was one major reason for that.

If nothing else, I learned from these stories that the boss/owner should be paid last, after all of the employees receive their salaries. I've done that whenever I've had employees, and I credit that lesson not just to general business ethics, but to a sense that business is about much more than just profit.

It's hard to imagine a modern company taking such steps to avoid layoffs, but the story continues to inspire me nearly 30 years later.

6. Ask HN: Are there books for mathematics like Feynman's lectures on physics?

Top comment by nabla9

"Mathematics : Its Content, Methods and Meaning" by A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov ,M. A. Lavrent'ev. (3 Volumes)

This is a classic and exactly what you are seeking for. I think it was originally published in 1962.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/405880.Mathematics

https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning-V...

7. Ask HN: What are the most fundamental books on computer science?

Top comment by reacweb

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (), Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation (Hopcroft Ullman), don knuth's art of computer programming, Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools5 (Aho Sethi Ullman)

8. Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

Top comment by mattlondon

My favourite one that surprised me and continues to surprise people: kids that have grown up with smartphones and iPads from birth are computer illiterate.

People see their 5 year old using an iPad and the knee-jerk cliche thought/assumption us the classic "oh wow these kids just get technology!" (recall all the "I need my kid to program the VCR" type stuff from the 80s/90s - it is the same thing of older people assuming current children innately understand the current tech)

Yet while today's kids may know how to stab at a screen to get videos of Peppa pig to play, there are people starting to come through to their mid and late teens who don't know how to use a mouse and keyboard with any level of dexterity, or don't know what a "file" is or what folders/directories are etc because that is all hidden away on an iPad. As a result they struggle to do even the most basic tasks that we all take for granted... and they don't get taught because everyone thinks they already know it having grown up with an iPad in their pram.

I chuckle to my self sometimes when I see a toddler walk up to a TV or video advert and try touching it a few times, then walk away confused because what they thought was a touch screen isn't doing anything when they touch it.

Fascinating.

9. Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

Top comment by tomhoward

I've been working on a hardware data logger device and web software platform that monitors soil moisture and other environmental metrics that produce-growers care about – soil temperature and conductivity (which indicates salinity or fertiliser penetration), air/canopy temperature, rainfall, irrigation, humidity, solar radiation, etc.

We've been working on the product for about 4-5 years (as a side project while working on other things to pay the bills). Initially it was a smartphone-connected device using Bluetooth and manual data retrieval, but we've just reached production-ready stage of a newer version that uses the new LTE Cat-M1 cellular data protocol (which uses existing 4G cellular infrastructure but is optimised for lower power and longer range).

So we now have a whole lot of these devices sitting in crops (E.g., grapevines, wheat, fruit/vegetables, nuts, sugar cane), some of them over 20km from their nearest cell tower (you can extend the range further with high-gain antennas but we haven't had to do that yet), automatically uploading all this data and generating various data views (time series graphs and dashboards) to help growers make decisions about when/how much to irrigate etc.

It can also do reactive/proactive stuff like detect when temperature close to the surface drops to near 2°C overnight and send out frost warning alerts, and over time we intend to make the data platform powerful enough that it can do things like automate the switching on/off of irrigation pumps in response to soil moisture level trends.

I don't have a website to point to yet. I'm working on a demo site now.

But I'd be interested to hear from anyone who is working on tech like this or is interested to work on it or partner in some way (email address is in my profile).

Despite having worked in the space for nearly 5 years, I'm still not sure why this tech isn't more commonplace – i.e., why every professional grower isn't already using something like this. This kind of tech has been around for a long time, so we're not doing anything completely new, just doing it more affordably and hopefully making better use of modern tech.

From what I've been able to learn about the market, it seems that the big industrial-scale producers use this type of tech, though what they use is costly and sophisticated to install/maintain. But for many smaller growers, it's considered not important enough to make the investment, and they're happy doing things the way they and the previous generations have always done it.

But with water scarcity becoming an issue in many parts of the world it will become increasingly important for growers of all scales to use this kind of tech to avoid water wastage.

We've also had the opportunity to trial the equipment with growers in Far-North Queensland, inland from the Great Barrier Reef. The government and industry bodies in that region are interested to see how this kind of tech could be used to minimise over-watering leading to fertiliser run-off into the sea, which is a contributor to coral bleaching.

So, yeah, that's what I'm doing. Happy to hear from anyone interested to know more or work together.

10. Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?

Top comment by nikivi

I probably have the biggest personal public wiki at this point. Over 720 files and 13,000+ lines across all the files.

All files: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge/blob/master/SUMM...

The way I did it was by treating the wiki as extension of my brain and having a perfect workflow for editing it at a speed of thought. In my case it's Sublime Text + Alfred + some macros.

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow

In fact I recently started to use my wiki to host article drafts I am writing.

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/fragments

The best thing about having a wiki is the 'in progress' nature of it. Soon I plan to extend my Alfred workflow to access any link inside any of the files in seconds too.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind