Community wisdom from Ask HN. Get answers to technical questions, career advice, product recommendations, and more from experienced developers and founders.
Total questions
20
Answered
0%
Avg score
4
Mood
curious
Latest questions
I work mainly in energy market communications and systems that facilitate energy trading, balancing and such. Currently most parties there take minutes to process messages and I think there could be a lot to learn from financial systems engineering. Any good resources you can recommend?
Hi HN,<p>I hope you're doing well. I'm reaching out to ask if anyone has a PC or laptop they're no longer using and would be willing to donate. I'm trying to get started with freelance work, but unfortunately, I can't afford to buy a computer at the moment, which is making it really hard to take on projects.<p>If you have an old device you no longer need and are willing to donate it, I d be incredibly grateful. I'm happy to cover shipping costs if needed. Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this. Any help would mean a lot.
How did Newton, lacking the stimulants that fueled the productivity of so many later great minds—from caffeine-driven mathematicians to nicotine-powered physicists—maintain the relentless intensity required to reshape mathematics and physics?
I am doing a PhD in R1 public uni on Computer Engineering in the USA. PhD is something I really wanted to do because it allows me to dive deep into stuff. Turns out what I thought initially was not the whole story.<p>I am nearing the end of second year of my PhD. My advisor is in HPC but doesn't do hot research and I want to do efficient hardware AI research (faster kernels, ML systems etc). But whenever I read papers and see the authors and what they have accomplished and the team behind them and the prestigious schools/labs doing them while I am deep in some cuBLAS function hoping to optimize register tiling to be a nanosecond faster, I feel like a failure. I don't know what problems to work on. I wonder if what I want to do even requires a PhD.<p>I question if I will ever be able to do anything publishable as the labs in MIT/Stanford, their cohort of brilliant minds basically alone? There's so much out there that I don't know. The more I think I know the more stuffs keep popping up. I thought I had finally understood LLMs to their nitty gritty details but then there's even more new variants of attentions popping up. I am not sure if I will be able to read everything needed to be able to research. I want to be able to get a job in the US after my PhD(home is terrifying) and I am an international so quiting is not an option.<p>I am looking for any advice or if you were in a similar boat anything would be helpful. Thank you.
I don't think just posting it on HN would work. (It's a ploy like digging a hole beside their path,then hindering their travel to "nudge" them to step off it where they might not recognize the hazard.)
Many developers spend a lot of time "sharpening the axe" for the alleged excuse of increased productivity. At what point this actually causes the opposite effect?<p>I'm proposing this question since I've come the realization that your tools aren't as important as the internet people make it believe, at the cost of countless wasted hours.<p>Sure, I may be faster than average at editing code and I can customize any aspect of my programming environment, but what if the time spent learning this knowledge was invested in actually useful knowledge.
Twitter is full of rants against GenAI.<p>Every AI CEO selling the disparition of developers in 6 months. But I don't see any developer complaining about LLM steeling our job, or that LLM are infringing copyright and are bad for humanity.<p>I can't possibly make a fundamental difference between GenAI and vibe coding, they are the same thing.
They didn’t kill me but they wounded me. The edge I carried all my life? Now it feels cheap. I still think. I still write. But they do it faster, cleaner. There’s still a spark in me, creativity isn’t theirs yet. But even that I feel it slipping through my fingers.<p>They’ll kill (figuratively) almost all of us. Maybe they already have, and people just haven’t realized it. LLMs are «zombifying» us.<p>Sorry to depress your Sunday. Thoughts?
Are you lost? What do you think is your guiding light? Social, career, philosophical, lets hear it.
I am a 24yo trying to figure out what kind of work makes me happy. I am currently a software engineer.<p>I love when people appreciate what I have built - and this cycle of "work -> appreciation" has been shortest in software engineering. Other fileds rarely feel the same (eg research, hardware, etc.)<p>With the tiktokification of software engineering with AI - this cycle has never been shorter - though I do agree making production grade software still requires meaningful amount of efforts and us as programmers have always been writing toy software just for the fun of it.<p>But lately, I have been deeply interested in pursuing psychiatry research and have been thinking of doing it full time by going for a masters degree. All things aside, I am not sure how would I get over this extremly short feedback cycle of delight that software has made possible and if there's any advice on how should I think about this transition.
So I was trying to book a reservation on hotels.com for some last minute travel and instead of the hotels.com web page, I got a "Sorry, we can't find that page right now. Seriously, I went to https://www.hotels.com/ and got a 200 w/ the "we can't find that page" message.<p>I looked around online and the only support number goes to reps in the Philippines with the script for what to do when someone wants to change their booking. I tried to explain to them that I was wanting to report a web problem and they kept asking what booking I wanted to change. I don't blame them... they're paid to read of a particular script.<p>And the last couple of hours it pretty intermittent via Firefox, less intermittent on Chrome. Worse on desktop than mobile.<p>So if anyone knows anyone over at expedia, can you tell them that they may want to back out the last change they made to their reverse proxy.
Hello everyone,<p>I’d love to hear about:<p>1. Tools you pay for that feel overpriced or frustrating (especially if you’d replace them immediately if something better existed), and<p>2. Anything that routinely costs you time, money, or attention (and how much money and time it costs you).<p>I’m most interested in problems that are painful enough that you’d gladly pay to fix them.<p>If you’re open to sharing, it'd be nice to know:<p>1. the exact problem 2. how you solve it now 3. the approximate budget or cost<p>Thank you. The more concrete and specific, the better.