AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

Top comment by dang

There are amazing projects in this thread. When any of you is ready to post yours as a Show HN, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll try to help. Read these first:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638

Some of you should consider applying to YC as well!

2. Ask HN: Recommended books and papers on distributed systems?

Top comment by hugofirth

I have many recommendations of different kinds:

## Blogs:

- http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/

- https://bartoszsypytkowski.com/

- https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/

- https://www.the-paper-trail.org/

- https://blog.acolyer.org/

- https://pathelland.substack.com/

## Other web resources

- https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ - set of resources from Amazon about building distributed systems

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_H... - lecture series from Cambridge

## Books

- https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1213/PrincComm/mfcn.pdf - A great book on the maths of networking (probability, queuing theory etc...)

3. Ask HN: What is the oldest image online in which the link is not broken?

Top comment by curlypaul924

As far as images that a modern browser can display, JPEG was created in 1992 and GIF in 1987, so there isn't going to be much prior to that. HTTP and Gopher date back to 1991, so the oldest image online that still resides at its original location would be on an FTP server.

Here's one of the oldest I can find, with timestamp 1988-07-06 00:00:

ftp://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/pictures/anime-manga/UruseiYatsura/Images/mendo.gif

or via http:

http://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/pictures...

This is the oldest one I can find on nic.funet.fi, from 1991:

ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/pics/comp/net/misc/dnesu.gif

They have mirrors of many of the old ftp servers of yore, so if there's an older image out there, that's the place to look:

http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/

Most of the other old FTP servers I remember (sunsite.unc.edu, ftp.simtel.net, ftp.uu.net) have long since shut down. The ftp server at ftp.sunet.se is one of the oldest still running. Perhaps someone else knows of an older one?

I tried to find a copy of lena.bmp/lena.tga/lena.pcx since those file formats pre-date GIF, but I came up empty.

4. Ask HN: Do you wake up with anxiety?

Top comment by Escapado

Used to have panic attacks and constant anxiety (without knowing what they are and what was wrong with me) every day for about 2 years triggered by a bad cannabis experience . Turned out I was predespositioned and it runs in my dads family. It started to mix with depression. 7 Years later I still sometimes get panic attacks and anxiety and dystonic thoughts, especially when my perceived stress is high (I work as a freelance SE). I have identified following long term factors that help bringing frequency and severity down significantly (talking about going from daily to maybe once every few months): - Exercise 4 times a week (preferably running) - Eat healthy (I cut sugar and eat according to an app 90% of the time) - Being outside every day and exposing myself to sunlight - Balancing alone time with social time according to my needs - Walk away from things that stress me out for no real benefit (that also means walking away from people) - Do not overpromise

Factors that help me coping when it hits anyway: - Breath slowly, deeply and on exhale remind myself that its only temporary - Put my feet on a cold floor - Smile and nod - Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (google it) - Walk outside

5. Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2021)

Top comment by scrapeJack

Location: Central European Time (CET)

Remote: YES

Willing to relocate: YES

Technologies: one stop shop for web scraping

Résumé/CV: http://scrapejack.com/

Email: contact '+' @ '+' scrapejack '+' . com

One stop shop for web scraping.

Everything from scraping, hosting, deployment, consulting, notifications, databases.

Crypto friendly(accept payments).

6. Ask HN: Am I experiencing burn-out or just getting too old

Top comment by mathattack

Burnout hits everyone differently. For me the biggest sign of burnout is Sunday night anxiety. I need new challenges (and recognition from those I respect) to get over it. Everyone is different though.

Specific to your case, don’t underestimate the impact of COVID. It’s natural to question things when you go through a life altering disease. And you’re supposed to be exhausted.

If you have a good boss with whom you have mutual respect, talk to them. Don’t wait for them to ask. If not, quietly look into your Employee Assistance Program. You don’t want to get stuck while you are getting over this.

You’ve put in 20+ good years into your career and got sucker punched by a disease. This is not your fault!!!

7. Ask HN: Non-US Fired after bipolar depression shared with HR. Can they fire me?

Top comment by tptacek

Your foreign status is perhaps less of a big issue than your contractor status. It may not be the case in every circuit but in at least some of them the precedent is that the ADA doesn't fully protect contractors. Part of the reason companies like to bring on contractors is that the "social contract" of contracting says that contractors can generally be dumped unceremoniously; that's part of the point.

Don't listen to people on this thread talking about "at-will employment", which (1) doesn't really apply to contractors and (2) doesn't apply to most discrimination cases, which are covered by separate laws (ADA, the Age Discrimination act, FMLA, etc).

Contractor status is one of those things you can often actually contest. Your employer referring to you as an "employee" is probably not dispositive, but there are a bunch of other tests (how much control you have over your work, etc) that an employment lawyer can walk you through.

Flip side of this: if your former employer is big and well-known, chances are they're well aware of the legal tripwires for contractors (everyone is after Microsoft infamously blew up over misclassification). Your actual contract, the one that actually got signed, probably spells out in great detail the fact that you are not a full-time employee entitled to benefits. So if it's a clueful company, it may be a steep hill to climb to argue that you were misclassified.

Terminating an employee with no previous disciplinary record right after a mental health crisis would be sketchy pretty much everywhere in the US, and most employers would be worried about legal repercussions. So it's possible that if you get a decent lawyer, you might be able to put together a nastygram that will get your former employer to cough up a settlement of some sort, rather than going to bat over your contractor status, which would be expensive for everyone.

Best of luck.

8. Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text-based web browsers?

Top comment by taviso

I don't know the answer to your question, but I see no reason I couldn't add hn support to nntpit, if there was interest.

https://github.com/taviso/nntpit

9. When did “disturb” became the default mode?

Top comment by hombre_fatal

Some of that just sounds like incompetent design, like how the designer didn't consider the UX of reverting to its previous DND schedule when your temporary DND mode turns off.

Though, perhaps you explained it poorly, what's wrong with it turning off DND mode when your 1hr DND timer expires? What else is the point of the timer?

Does that smartwatch not let you toggle DND off until you decide to toggle it back on? Is there no silent mode?

I keep my iPhone on silent-mode almost permanently. Maybe it's time to try any of the other brands with this elementary feature?

But to answer your question, people generally want to be disturbed by notifications. Just consider how many people don't keep their phone in silent mode. I don't think it's the ideal way to live, but people love running over to their phone to see if it's a new WhatsApp message that cause the ping. Certainly my girlfriend and roommates and all the people I hear day to day who have notification sounds turned on when there's a physical switch on the device to turn them off.

Still, a silent-mode switch already gives you your dream of "I want to opt-in to being disturbed". Apparently every smartwatch except your Xiaomi watch has it. Time to switch.

10. Ask HN: Why are monitors matte and laptops glossy and not the other way around?

Top comment by miahi

Glossy screens look better in ideal conditions. The matte screen diffuses the light (that's how matte works) a bit and reduces the contrast and it looks a bit blurry.

On phones, capacitive screens use a glass layer. Apple extended the glass layer to the laptops because it looked better (probably because matte screens looked worse than phones). Before them the screens were matte. Of course, everybody copied Apple and introduced glossy screens, because when looking at a glossy and a matte screen next to one another (in a shop) the glossy will win. And of course, everybody introduced glossy screens without the anti-reflection coating that Apple uses (cargo cult), so it made everything worse.

There was a time period when you had to really search for a non-glossy screen. Now it's a bit better, you can find them, but the touchscreen ones will always be glossy, and I did not yet see an OLED without glossy screen (could be because they are more fragile, although folding OLEDs do exist, so it's not clear).