Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#101

Post by esperent » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:53 AM UTC

soulofmischief wrote: post #52

esperent wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lodash-es doesn’t ESM lodash/fp Most of my career has been JS and TS and I have no idea what this means.

I'm guessing you're only a few years into your web career, so I'll provide some background. lodash is a popular library that fills in many blanks that pre-2015 JavaScript had. It still provides value in modern JavaScript, but it's no longer as important as it used to be. JavaScript is actually based on a standard called ECMAScript. ActionScript shares this standard, as an example. In 2015, we got ECMAScript 5, which…

Nope, I'm about 15 years in and (unfortunately) deeply familiar with all of that as I lived and worked through it.

As someone else pointed out below, it was the use of ESM as a verb that threw me off.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#102

Post by sherlock_h » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:53 AM UTC

q-base wrote: post #82

I have started exploring Seneca/stoicism again. Prompted partly by a recent submission here, partly by personal reasons. Instead of consuming other peoples interpretation of stoicism I decided to go as close to the source as feasible for me. I have read Letters from a stoic a number of times before and my copy is filled with highlights, but this time I think I will try to limit myself to one or two letters a day and…

Thank you for sharing. The choices piece hit home for me. Forwarded this to friends.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#103

Post by InfinityByTen » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:54 AM UTC

Not strictly today. But I discovered that there exists a special class of algorithms that are designed with the use case of streaming data to your program. I just used one to get a uniformly distributed sample from a 10Gb log file.

I knew this was something coding interviews delved into: "if it doesn't fit in memory", but until like yesterday I never went down the rabbit hole. I have to say it was a nifty trick.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#104

Post by Fazebooking » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:54 AM UTC

willvarfar wrote: post #46

I had a great euphoric epiphany feeling today. Doesn't come along too often, will celebrate with a nice glass of wine :) Am doing data engineering for some big data (yeah, big enough) and thinking about efficiency of data enrichment. There's this classic trilemma with data enrichment where you can have good write efficiency, good read efficiency and/or good storage cost, pick two. E.g. you have a 1TB table and you wa…

Sounds off to me tbh.

Were your table is stored shouldn't matter that much if you have proper indezes which you need and if you change anything, your db is rebuilding the indezes anyway

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#105

Post by nicbou » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:55 AM UTC

geuis wrote: post #71

Screws weren't standardized until ww2. And even then, they really haven't been. Related video for those curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKNB04slCUA&t=3s

The channel Machine Thinking has many videos about screws, and about the early days of machines and precision.

In Europe we have standard screws. Building with only M5 screws is a joy.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#106

Post by endymion-light » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:57 AM UTC

I've been working on a litle raspberry pi pico project with kafka. As someone that used to have an Arduino uno, it made me genuinely shocked at how small controllers have gotten and they're massive capabilities

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#107

Post by omnicognate » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 8:58 AM UTC

I learned that the large tree near where I live in London that has visibly grown in the last year is a Coast Redwood (a.k.a. California Redwood, a.k.a. Sequoia) and that there are half a million of them in the UK.

Loving this post.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#108

Post by q-base » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

sherlock_h wrote: post #102

q-base wrote: post #82

I have started exploring Seneca/stoicism again. Prompted partly by a recent submission here, partly by personal reasons. Instead of consuming other peoples interpretation of stoicism I decided to go as close to the source as feasible for me. I have read Letters from a stoic a number of times before and my copy is filled with highlights, but this time I think I will try to limit myself to one or two letters a day and…

Thank you for sharing. The choices piece hit home for me. Forwarded this to friends.

Thank you very much.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#109

Post by dandelionv1bes » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 9:03 AM UTC

I’ve been slowing crunching through Math for Deep Learning, so spent a fair amount of time looking at Hessian matrices + second order optimisation. I’ve been slowly reading this book for a year, so stopping to do most of the math by hand each time. One chapter to go!

Then I was sick all last week, so ended up down a rabbit hole about the current card collecting bubble (right word?). Super interesting.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#110

Post by mitjam » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 9:07 AM UTC

I'm exploring adding a firewall to my home network to detect if apps are using my network as residential proxy.

My daughter likes to install random games on iOS that have been advertised to her on other apps, and I wonder if some of those work as residential proxy behind the scenes.