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Issue #63 - May 17, 2020
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Top comment by dang
All: apologies for the interruption, but don't miss that there are multiple pages in this thread, with over 2000 posts by now. You have to click through the More links at the bottom to see them all. Later pages have all kinds of stuff that is just as interesting. It's kind of incredible.
(We intend to get rid of pagination once the next implementation of Arc is ready.)
2. Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
Top comment by bemmu
"Permutation City" by Greg Egan is mind-bending in a way similar to The Matrix, except taken up a few notches.
Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not continue then as well (the classic teleporter question). But it doesn't stop here.
What if you destroy it, but it just happens to continue somewhere else? Then it should continue there as well. So if you think that teleportation would not mean death, then you kind of have to accept that if anywhere in the universe at any time the same pattern exists when you die, then you can't really die because you'll just continue on from there instead.
Not sure I accept it, but it's certainly mind-bending to think about!
3. Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
Top comment by dang
Ok, you guys, this isn't the first time we've heard this request (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). I'm willing to do it (edit: not to change the default! just to add the option). It's just that any CSS issue that goes more than a quarter-inch deep is equally outside my expertise and my interest, so help would be welcome.
We can add CSS to https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css for prefers-color-scheme: dark, but that leaves open the question of specifically what CSS to put in there. Anyone who wants to make a suggestion is welcome to. Post it in this thread so others can comment, or email it to hn@ycombinator.com. I've roped Zain, YC's designer, into helping with this, and we'll come up with something.
p.s. If you're inclined to post "this is 2020, how come HN doesn't $thing", remember our motto: move slowly and preserve things: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... When I say slowly I mean slowly. This is also called alligator energy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442716
Top comment by loufe
Well this thread did not have the comments I expected. At least in my case I have a mom who gave us her all and continues to be a part of my life. I call her pretty frequently but I appreciate having a holiday as an excuse to remind her how much I love and care about her - and how lucky I am to have that. That's what this holiday means to me.
5. Ask HN: I've been promoted to Architect. What do I need to learn/do to excel?
Top comment by squeed
You have to learn to write, and get comfortable doing it.
When I was the (de-facto and later de-jure) architect, I was too reliant on in-person synchronous discussions. I neglected my e-mail and design-document skills.
The result: everything had to be synchronous. Chat was a wasteland. Decisions where one just had to Sit Down and Think wasted multiple people's time. I realized I was subconsciously avoiding writing long documents.
Part of the problem was - no kidding - I needed a new glasses prescription. But mostly I just needed to get used to the act of sitting down, drafting, and writing a design document. I also needed to encourage the team to have a bit of discipline and design before coding.
Later, as I transitioned out of a "move-fast-and-break-things" place to a large open-source project, my learned avoidance of writing definitely hurt me. I was not practiced at asynchronous design and development.
6. Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
Top comment by noad
This is a great question, I also want a way to search the internet but exclude all major media domains as well as any company over a certain size. So I just want to search through old blogs, SO, non-corporate social media, weird forums, etc.
There are so many cool things I remember reading on the web like 10-20 years ago that still exist that are so buried now on Google they might as well not exist. Nowadays searching any topic seems to always lead you to CNN and Microsoft and Facebook and other huge corporations. Search results are just becoming more sanitized and beige and meaningless every day.
7. Ask HN: What programming skills are required by HFT or Trading firms
Top comment by pjmlp
Basically Java, .NET and C++, with heavy focus on C++.
Being able to write allocation free algorithms, even on GC languages, lock free data structures and good knowledge of all multi-core programming paradigms and distributed computing.
Here are some talks that will give you a small overview into that world,
CppCon 2017: Carl Cook “When a Microsecond Is an Eternity: High Performance Trading Systems in C++”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM
Core C++ 2019 :: Nimrod Sapir :: High Frequency Trading and Ultra Low Latency development techniques
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0aU8S-hFQI
Open source Java HFT code from Chronicle Software, https://github.com/OpenHFT
"Writing and Testing High-Frequency Trading Engines", from Cliff Click
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iINk7x44MmM
However in these domains every ms counts, even how long cables are, so also expect Verilog, VHDL, and plenty of custom made algorithms running directly on hardware.
"A Low-Latency Library in FPGA Hardware for High-Frequency Trading"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXFcM1pGOIE
You can get an overview of the typical expectations here, https://www.efinancialcareers.com/
8. Ask HN: How to stop anxiety from too many choices?
Top comment by acituan
It doesn’t have to be the number of choices creating anxiety. Maybe an existing anxiety is pushing you towards seeing more choices to block yourself from committing on one, because you are too internally conflicted.
Motivation has an internal hierarchy, you do a thing in the name of a more core thing in the name of a more core thing. But this is not a tree, you also have different parts of you wanting different, conflicting things at the same time. So a lack of decisiveness on the outside might reflect an internal conflict inside.
If you side with one side of the conflict (starting with your semi pivot), the other side of the conflict might get stronger and more polarized. Same goes for medication, it will ease your decision making at the expense of silencing certain parts of yourself.
There are good suggestions about externalizing this conflict to journals, talking to a therapist etc. I would also suggest doing less things (not siding with any of the conflicting parts for a while) and to actually listen to yourself. What is this all about? What is the core motivating factor all these parts are organized around? In the grand scheme of your life, is a startup is nothing. What do you truly value and find meaningful? Don’t be eager to come up with an answer but instead listen to yourself for insight. That might be what your anxiety is telling you anyway; “stop doing things and listen to me”.
9. Ask HN: What is the point of “© 2020 CompanyName” in website footers?
Top comment by salamanderman
Marissa Mayer, in an early IO keynote, said she put the copyright note at the bottom, though arguably meaningless, to let people know the page was "done loading". She said that in initial user studies she did of the minimalist Google homepage (Sergey said it was that way because "I don't do HTML") people would just sit there doing nothing but watching the screen. When she asked what they were doing, they replied "I'm waiting for the rest of it". Websites loaded so slowly in '98, and ironically were also utterly covered in links and images and crap, that we were all accustomed to just sitting there until the pages fully appeared. So, while she didn't think the copyright necessarily meant anything from a legal perspective, it worked to tell people "there's nothing more to wait for, please proceed."
10. Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
Top comment by tensor
I have to admit, even I'm not sure what a "hacker mindset" is. As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side. Most importantly, how interpersonal skills matter and how emotions play out in a business setting.
Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Being able to tease apart correlation and causation, and being rigorous about what you accept as real knowledge vs mere opinion or anecdote. The business world, and the tech world, has a lot of "opinion" that masquerades as fact. E.g. "well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!"