AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

Top comment by locochef

The single best thing I did for professional development was see a therapist. In tech, our jobs are knowledge-based. You can't hammer a nail into a board while you're sitting on the couch with your child, but you can certainly think about software architecture. I've found that my job bleeds into my personal life, and vice versa, and I believe it is far more common than most people realize. Stress piles up and it affects not only your home life, but your work life.

Taking the time to talk to a professional and become introspective and conscious of my own mental health has provided me with more value than all the books and conferences and talks I've consumed put together.

2. I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

Top comment by PragmaticPulp

I understand why the Raspberry Pi uses SD cards (cost, simplicity, ease of use) but the entire line would be so much more useful with onboard eMMC storage.

SD cards are great for keeping cost down and getting started quickly by flashing OS images from a PC. However, enthusiasts spend so much time fiddling with external storage options and cobbling together messes of powered USB hubs, cables, external enclosures, and fiddling with kernel issues (USB attached SCSI) that a Raspberry Pi with built-in eMMC would be a breath of fresh air.

They could even keep costs down by adding a connector for an eMMC submodule, similar to what ODROID has done with their boards.

3. Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?

Top comment by st1x7

I work as a data scientist and have some perspective on this. There's no boat to miss, you'll probably be fine. Just keep a couple of things in mind

- The fundamental skills that you need are mathematics and software engineering. Depending on your background it might take years of additional studying.

- There is a big oversupply of people for the junior-mid level data science jobs. There are more people who want to get in the field than there are jobs. If you drastically switch careers, you'll take yourself out of a field where your skillset is incredibly rare and your competition is limited and put yourself in a place where everyone else wants the same job.

- The fact that you have a PhD is going to help you. Personally, I don't think that a PhD in a field other than mathematics/computer science is that relevant but employers tend to favor applicants with PhDs mostly because there are too many candidates for any given job and asking for a PhD is just a strong initial filter. There are also research jobs within data science for which a PhD requirement (in a relevant discipline) makes more sense but these are a small proportion of all the data science jobs.

- If you're already employed with your agriculture PhD, there must be a number of opportunities for you apply the techniques that you're currently learning wihout leaving the industry. That's probably the path that I would suggest - it would allow you to expand your skillset without taking big risks and you'll have more options in the future. Use the career capital that you already have and explore your options instead of making a sharp turn in your career direction that might leave you disappointed.

4. Ask HN: Why Isn't Open Source Voting Software Mandated?

Top comment by godelski

Everyone here is talking about paper ballots. Good, but this ignores OP's question. Most voting machines, even if they have paper trails, have some software in them. Just saying "paper ballots" doesn't address the issue.

To answer OP's question, I personally have no idea but think it should be. Much of our scientific work is open sourced (e.g. codes from national labs, NASA, etc). But I think a lot of people don't understand what open source is or means. They think you can't have open sourced software and still privately own it. We still honestly haven't figured out how to deal with this adequately in the law (there's a post on the front page about FB taking their OS project, and these posts happen at least once a month). People don't demand it because frankly people aren't very tech literate.

5. Ask HN: Have you picked any new skill from scratch, in your 40s or later?

Top comment by juanuys

Hey all, I've been a web developer all my life (first job in 2002), but started a masters in gamedev a few months ago (I've since turned 41), and enjoying it immensely.

My partner and I have kids (7 and 4), with no family nearby to "hand over" the kids to. We're pretty much on our own. Somehow, with less time we accomplish more.

I suppose it's not a drastic change from my day-to-day (like learning a musical instrument, a dance, or a language), but it's new to me, and something I want to do more of in the coming years.

The ways I incorporate it into family time are: designing pen&paper games and playing them with the kids; designing levels/characters, and drawing/doodling with the kids; coming up with narratives/stories and telling them to the kids.

I'm a gamer. When my wife and I first got together, we played a lot of games together (Resident Evil on the sofa, Scrabble/Carcassonne at the pub). She works in TV and one of her first jobs was with Gamepad [1] (we're still good friends with Violet and family). So, the games runs deep, and I would love to spend more of my time making them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamepad_(TV_series)

6. Ask HN: Is it time to quit tech industry?

Top comment by mmphosis

Maybe, but don't give up your day job. Financial health and personal health are both important.

I've been programming for 43 years (since I was kid) and worked as a programmer for about 20 years. In the last 17 years, I've seen the switch from exploration, creativity, open-ended thinking to this new thing called "tech." I am not a "tech." I guess I've quit tech, and won't become a "tech." I miss working as a programmer - I had pretty good jobs. Beware as workplaces in other industries can be much more toxic.

From what I gather, no one is hiring programmers: "the programming part is easy", "solo programmers need not apply", "scrum", buzzwords, horrible marketing, bad management, and worse. I have a day job not in "tech", and not as a programmer. On the side, I program for me. I read and post what's interesting to me on Hacker News and other programming sites.

7. Ask HN: What helps you improve your mood and keep your sanity?

Top comment by ollerac

I love this book called "Soowing Down to the Speed of Life". In one chaper the author talks about the incredible boon that comes from heading towards boredom instead of away from it. He decided to take a night to just do nothing.

At first, it was uncomfortable, but then his whole world slowed down. He started noticing things he hadn't noticed before: a particular color, a detail on a flower. It was like a different reality.

I use this idea of heading towards boredom to clear my own head. I find it incredibly helpful to sit in a dark room with no sounds and no goal for about 2 hours. After the initial discomfort (might last 20 minutes, might last an hour) my brain feels renewed and free. And the quality of my ideas goes way up.

I don't do it to be more productive though. I do it because it helps me get to a better, more attuned experience of reality. Closer to joy, peace, and acceptance, and further from always thinking about what's next.

8. Ask HN: Will Apple M1 mean better support for Raspberry Pi?

Top comment by pornel

I don't expect it to make a measurable difference. Android and iOS have already pushed ARM support and optimizations in programming languages and key libraries.

For macOS, the support revolves around Xcode. Cross-compilation support is Apple-specific and won't benefit Linux. CPU architecture is abstracted away in macOS as much as possible, so average developers won't think much about ARM support.

Where Apple wants developers to tune for M1 specifically, is their proprietary frameworks for ML acceleration and Metal, which don't benefit anyone but Apple.

At best there may be some halo effect from proving that ARM can be as fast as "real" desktop CPUs, and it's not just the low-end slow Qualcomm chips. That might legitimize running ARM on servers, but Pi is neither high-end desktop nor a server platform.

9. Ask HN: What is your best native song that is unknown due to language barrier?

Top comment by robotmay

I'm an English folk musician and it's perhaps surprising to many people, considering the prevalence of English and our modern music, that we as a country have lost a huge amount of our songs and music over the years. We have however re-entered a folk revival since the 70s and it has combined with the national pastime of peculiar hobbiests having documented a lot of really obscure things.

But anyway, my partner sings one of our oldest documented songs, which I would classify as fairly unknown outside of historical circles and in an older form of English that is quite tricky to decipher: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr2LRpx4Uyk

I learn quite a few tunes and songs from various countries and it's interesting as to which I find immediately feel familiar to me. Scandinavian, French, Belgian, Breton, Quebecois stuff etc is very popular in folk circles here in the UK and I both listen and play a lot of it. Though a lot of us might struggle to sing along you might be surprised at how far some traditional songs travel :D

10. Ask HN: How to get rid of impostor syndrome?

Top comment by rossdavidh

So, I am 53 years old, a white guy with two engineering degrees, who's been programming for a while now. I still get imposter syndrome, whenever I am on a new project where we're using a new technology. So don't get too hung up on the idea that you're going to get rid of it.

BUT, now that you know (intellectually) that it's a normal mental illusion, it can be disregarded. This doesn't make it stop happening, any more than knowing about the blind spot makes it stop being a blind spot. But, you know not to listen to it, like you know that something disappearing in your blind spot doesn't really mean it's not there.

In fact, I now use it as a metric of whether or not I'm learning enough new tech, or if I'm staying with what I'm comfortable in too much (which is a path towards obsolescence when you're a programmer). When I get feelings that I recognize as Imposter Syndrome, I know (intellectually) that it means I'm working on new knowledge, and that's a good thing. It doesn't make the feelings go away; learning more about the new thing will eventually help with that (temporarily). But intellectually I know I've worked on enough projects to not be an imposter, more or less by definition, and I know that the feelings of "I don't know what I'm doing maybe I'm not cut out for this" are normal, and not an accurate guide to whether or not I am able to do this. They are, of course, an indication that I need to keep working on learning whatever the new thing is.