AskHN Digest

1. Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C

Top comment by rseacord

Many of your remaining questions have devolved into "When will I see my favorite feature xyz appear in the C Standard?" The answer in most cases is "that depends on how long it takes you to submit a proposal". Take a look at http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/wg14_document_log... for previous proposals and review the minutes to see which proposals have been adopted. In general, the committee is not going to adopt proposals for which there is insufficient existing practice or haven't been fully thought out. There are cases where people have come to a single meeting with a well-considered proposal that was adopted into the C Standard. I wrote about one such case here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/alignment-requirements-memory... Alternatively, you can approach someone on the committee and ask us to champion a proposal for you. It is likely that we'll agree or at least provide you with feedback on your proposal.

2. Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

Top comment by anonymousci

CircleCI.

Last week during covid crisis, all while announcing a $100m Series E round of financing, they let some employees go and did not offer any severance.

Disorganized management, and with some teams, passive-aggressive management style.

Would not recommend joining...

3. Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

Top comment by dceddia

The Z command line utility has saved me a ton of time. It remembers the directories you’ve visited and lets you jump to them with just a few characters. Almost like Chrome’s autocomplete for recently-visited directories (if you’re used to being able to type “g” to go to gmail or “n” for “news.ycombinator.com”...). For instance I can run “z B” and it’ll jump to my ~/Business directory (and “z ss” would do the same).

https://github.com/rupa/z

4. Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

Top comment by hackyhacky

As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech, obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues.

I tried to convince myself that these advantages made it worthwhile to sit alone in a dark room for >10 hours a day, but in the end I couldn't. I was spending more time wrestling with package managers, version conflicts, obtuse configuration files, pointless deadlines, egotistical colleagues, and almost zero time solving interesting problems on products that I care about. You might argue that I should have just found a better job, and I did, several times, but I found that no matter how much enthusiasm I had for a job at the beginning, eventually it got bogged down in software engineering detritus. I didn't much care for my colleagues: no offense to those present, but I just don't really like tech people, despite the fact that I obviously am one of them.

Through a series of coincidences, I found myself with an opportunity to teach programming at the university level. It was a lot of fun: I can talk about problems that interest with me with people who want to hear it. I operate with very little supervision. I still get to learn new technology, but fortunately I can ignore the rough edges and focus on the benefits. Meetings are minimal. The salary is adequate for my lifestyle. Best of all, I get to interact with real, live human beings. (Although at the moment, of course, we're doing everything via Zoom.) Fundamentally, the problems I'm solving are not technology problems, but human problems. At this stage in my life, this is more interesting.

I never imagined I'd end up a teacher, partly because I was a terrible student. Over the years, I had gone back and forth between industry and academia but now I think I'm in academia to stay: there's nothing I miss about slinging bits for a living.

Ironically, I'm helping my students enter a career that I left, but I let them make their own life decisions.

5. Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?

Top comment by matesz

Great write-up on that subject is in the first chapter of "Mythical Man-Month". Here is small excerpt.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder ''for Daddy's office."

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly re- moved from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

6. Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?

Top comment by DanielBMarkham

Making sense in what fashion, to what end? Investment opportunities? Proposed public policy changes? Where to look for a job?

To a large degree the economy is unknowable. That's why you can get two economists in a room and receive seven opinions. Don't get me wrong; there's good value there. It's just that economics is an odd mix of philosophy and math. On my more cranky days I call it astrology for people who know calculus.

If the economy were knowable to the degree that some economists claim to know it, they'd all be billionaires. So my advice is to scope down your question to something a bit more workable.

7. Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

Top comment by kabdib

Emacs user here, it's been my go-to editor for about 40 years.

I have a few customizations, not many. My .emacs file is 63 lines long, doesn't include any other files, and mostly just tweaks some key bindings and turns off features that I don't like. The only modes I use are built-in ones (e.g., C-mode, auto-wrapping text mode, etc.). I can't write elisp without a reference manual, and I think that's okay.

I suggest:

- not installing a bunch of random stuff until you're comfortable with the core experience or you simply have to adjust or disable something that bugs you

- just using Emacs, and not customizing the crap out of it, ditto

If you haven't gone through the Emacs tutorial, it's how I learned it (at 300 baud, uphill both ways and in the snow -- not kidding about the 300 baud thing, though).

8. Ask HN: How is your PPP loan application coming along?

Top comment by achenatx

Most big banks completely screwed their clients. You can read reddit/r/smallbusiness

1) The SBA was approving PPP submissions in like an hour (rubberstamping).

2) Any delay was 100% your bank. Many banks just didnt get to applications but didnt notify people. Some banks said people were approved (by the bank) but didnt submit those people to the SBA

3) There was a lot of time to submit to intermediaries like paypal. Paypal was turning applications around in 24 hours to funding. There were people that applied on 4/3 with a big bank that didnt get it and people that applied thursday night through paypal that got it

4) Big banks often added additional criteria which made it harder to complete the application. Some big banks were not using the correct calculations

5) Once you have an SBA loan number you are good and money is allocated. Banks have 10 days to disburse the funds

6) The SBA ran out of allocated funds, not all the money has been disbursed.

7) People submitted to multiple lenders and it was fine

Overall I think the program went pretty well and there was plenty of time for people to get applications in. There was obviously working of the system (hedge funds, large restaurant chains, etc) but if you look at the distribution of funds there were still many many small loans.

750K under $150K with an average of $51K

I spent the last 2 weeks doing nothing but reading reports, stats etc about the program to ensure I was able to get it for my team. Lots of people submitted with a big bank and just waited accepting no updates, now are complaining after it is over.

9. Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

Top comment by bartread

Microsoft Outlook, no question:

- It hangs all the time for a few seconds at a time,

- The search is moronic (how about you look on the server and on my computer at the same time instead of hanging for a while and then displaying that dumbass message offering the option to search on my computer instead when there's a problem with the connection?),

- Switching to the unread message view regularly results in a progress doofer that never disappears until you switch to a different view and switch back

- The message list font size gets corrupted by moving between Windows of different DPIs forcing you to switch to a different folder then switch back again to make everything readable

- It asks you whether you want to save changes just because you've clicked a link in a calendar appointment

- Got thousands of emails? It's slow, slow, SLOW, SLOW(!!!), SLOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!

- Too many modal dialogs

- It's clunky as hell when juggling calendar appointments, booking rooms, etc.

- When opening a meeting series it asks me whether I want to open the whole series or a single meeting every single time. Can I just have a modifier key for this, please, so that I can open whichever way I choose without being prompted?

- Inconsistent and unpredictable behaviour when it comes to inserting images as attachments versus inline in an email

- Losing messages in conversation view

- Difficult to follow conversations/find all messages if you don't use conversation view(!)

- Inconsistent behaviour around contact auto-completion: sometimes people end up in the auto-complete list, sometimes they don't

I could go on. I won't.

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

Top comment by andygcook

Plugging my brother's one-person business because he'll be too humble to post himself: https://nanagram.co

The product allows you to send pictures in the mail to your loved ones via SMS. It works great for getting fresh photos to your grandparents who might not be super savvy with a computer.

My brother started it a few years ago and makes enough now to keep it going. Probably is the classic definition of a lifestyle business, but I think that's a success even if it's unlikely to be a unicorn.

Also and more importantly, the product helps to bring hundreds of families closer together, which is especially important right now given our elders are cut off from contact.