AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Advice for finding an entry-level remote job?

Top comment by geocrasher

I am sorry about the position you're in. For the last several years I have been balancing taking care of my terminally ill wife who recently passed away, all while working remotely in the web hosting industry. It's hard to balance. Harder than you think. Setting boundaries will be vital to being successful in any WFH role.

Now that that's out of the way: You need to focus. You've described your abilities and that's fine, but you lack focus. Your qualifications are great, but your presentation is all over the place. You need a single one page resume that focuses on one aspect of your knowledge and experience, and lightly mentions the others. Make multiple resumes, each with a focus on one thing. Use the resume that's best for the job. I recently saw somebody who must have had 20 different resumes to match the jobs they were applying for. It worked.

Also, you might consider looking into the Web Hosting business. If your temperament is as you describe, and you like talking on the phone or live chat, most web hosts will overlook any technical gaps. Those can be taught. In fact that can lend to your focus! Focus on the fact that you know things that can't be taught: Customer Service, talking down angry customers, talented writing, friendly and always willing to find a solution under dire circumstances. Those are GOLD. Once those are on the table, the rest is negotiable. I'll email you a link to at least one that is hiring full remote entry level.

Additionally, you need to step up your confidence level. Let an employer know that your family is important to you and that you're dedicated to working hard so that you can support them- and leave it at that. They don't deserve the other details, and they aren't relevant.

I hope this helps.

2. Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

Top comment by aasasd

If you're asking about services too: Yandex Market. It's like Google Product Search that is actually successful and widely used for searching for specific products, or Amazon that doesn't swindle you left and right.

It's basically just a large catalog of products, filled by third-parties a-la Amazon now, only it didn't sell anything itself (until recently). Instead, it had detailed characteristics for a lot of products, with corresponding filters in the catalog; and good user reviews. Since Yandex is good at dealing with unstructured text, even poor data exports by vendors end up organized decently on the service. Since Yandex had millions of users on its other services, they all could leave reviews without much hassle. And since Yandex is primarily a search engine, it knows when a bogus review is spammed across the web.

Alas, it's only available in Russian since it works with Russian shops. Every time I need to look for a product on the English web, I lament that there's no service that is quite that solid. Amazon has filters, but search results usually look like simply a bit better Aliexpress. In regard to Google Product Search I don't even know anything particular—I tried to use it a couple times, and my general impression is that it... exists. Not much else.

3. Ask HN: Why are e-ink note-taking devices so expensive compared to iPads?

Top comment by throwaway4485we

Throaway to not get sued.

E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays to absolute silence. Any research project or startup that comes up with a better alternative technology gets bought out or buried by their lawyers ASAP.

E-ink don't make the display themselves, they make the e-ink film, filled with their patented pigment particles and sell it to display manufacturers who package the film in glass and a TFT layer and add a driver interface chip, all of which are proprietary AF and unless you're the size of Amazon, forget about getting any detailed datasheets about how to correctly drive their displays to get sharp images.

In my previous company we had to reverse engineer their waveforms in order to build usable products even though we were buying quite a lot of displays.

With so much control over the IP and the entire supply chain and due to the broken nature of the patent system, they're an absolute monopoly and have no incentive to lower prices or to bring any innovations to the market and are a textbook example of what happens to technology when there is zero competition.

So, when you see the high prices of e-paper gadgets, don't blame the manufacturers, as they're not price gouging, blame E-ink, as their displays make up the bulk of the BOM.

Tough, some of their tech is pretty dope. One day E-ink sent over a 32" 1440p prototype panel with 32 shades of B&W to show off. My God, was the picture gorgeous and sharp. I would have loved to have it as a PC monitor so I tried building an HDMI interface controller for it with an FPGA but failed due to a lack of time and documentation. Shame, although not a big loss as an estimated cost for that was near the five figure ballpark and the current consumption was astronomical, sometimes triggering the protection of the power supply on certain images.

4. Ask HN: What websites do you visit every day?

Top comment by sevensor

Every now and then (like right now) I visit today's HN, but usually I like to follow it 48-72 hours behind (using the _past_ link). After a couple of days, the dust has settled, and you don't have to check back to see how a conversation evolved. This also keeps me from wasting time trying to get karma.

I have a small list of blogs I follow.

* https://www.scottaaronson.com

* https://blog.plover.com

* https://blog.rongarret.info

* https://drewdevault.com

* https://thezvi.wordpress.com

* https://acoup.blog

Like a barbarian, I check them every day instead of using RSS or even paying attention to their update schedules. In aggregate, I get about one new post to read every day.

When I'm in the mood to know what's going on in the world, I check:

* https://text.npr.org

* https://lite.cnn.io

I also follow the alternative weekly for a reality check on what I read here on HN.

Edit: formatting

5. Ask HN: Is it crazy that software developers have to study for interviews?

Top comment by jeremymcanally

I decided a while ago that I wouldn't study for interviews, and it's served me well. I either know enough to get the job or I don't. Convoluted interviews where I fell on my face weren't necessarily always jobs I would have done badly at, but preparing a "tricky" interview like that with brain teasers and dumb algorithm questions was a strong enough negative signal to tell me I very likely wouldn't like working there much anyhow.

If I go into an interview without studying and fail legitimately on questions that relate to the job (and who hasn't done that?), then it's a good thing because I obviously wouldn't be able to handle the day-to-day work and therefore am a poor fit. :)

Really, to my mind, it's a win-win for everyone.

6. Ask HN: How do solo SaaS founders handle monitoring/PagerDuty?

Top comment by smoe

You can't get out of it completely, but you can reduce the risk of it actually occuring and, maybe more importantly, reduce the constant paranoia whether the system is ok or not.

What has helped me as the only technical founder, as freelancer or in very small teams in general:

- Choose boring technology. Especially when alone I prefer reliability and tons of state of the art on how to operate it, over shiny features

- Choose technolgy and infrastructure that you know. It is a whole lot easier to maintain a stable system with something that you have ample experience with.

- Keep system complexity roughly aligned with team size. E.g. when alone, it might not be the best idea to maintain 5 very different database systems altough on paper each is "the best tool for the job"

- I don't think you need any super advanced, well tought out archiecture, but if you are constantly fire fighting while at work, it might not even be good enough

- Setup basic automation so the system can recover iteselffrom the unavoidable but benign hickup every now and then.

- Don't deploy before going for lunch, coffee break, dinner, weekends, etc.

- While working, observe your systems behaviour over time, and especially the impact of changes on it. If you see a degradation, fix it or at least put it in the backlog. Otherwise it will bite you eventually out of nowhere.

- Have nice error pages and messaging that are shown to users when the system fails. In my experience in early stage companies, crashes suck, but aren't actually that bad after all and users are quite lenient as long as they see that the system is down instead of having the bad experience of it just not working correctly.

7. Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?

Top comment by lapcatsoftware

Daily news needs easy reliable filler material, and sports provide that.

Another commenter mentioned the stock market report. Again, easy reliable filler material. Despite the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has a tenuous effect at best for the vast majority of people, and despite the fact that it's not a great overall economic indicator, the news media report it because it's easy, and it changes daily.

Truly "newsworthy" stories are not guaranteed to happen every day. But the news media still need to fill space regardless. That's why they love things that reliably change on a daily basis. "Team A beat Team B" is such an easy story to write. It practically writes itself. Compare with true investigative reporting, which is extremely difficult, may take months or years, and may or may not have publishable results. How much investigative reporting can you do and still have a daily news report?

Why does the news media always cover elections as if they were horse races (and inevitably lament that in retrospect with crocodile tears for exactly 1 week after the election before forgetting and doing it again the same way the next election)? Because it's easy. You could say lazy. Candidate A is up in the polls this week, Candidate B is down. Such an easy story to write. You can keep taking polls, and keep publishing polls, and you've filled a bunch of news space cheaply.

Don't even get me started on how the "news" is now largely publishing tweets written by other people. The ultimate in journalistic laziness.

8. Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?

Top comment by tylerrobinson

Wow! A lot of fast replies here without much substance.

"A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills"."[0]

By this definition, no, it's not a dark pattern. It may be a pricing strategy that you don't like, but not a dark pattern. It's an invitation to start a full discussion with the vendor about what you're trying to achieve.

Usually, you'll see "Contact Us" on the pricing page for enterprise services. If you're an enterprise buyer, you usually have lots of people on your team who want different things. You might have special requirements for your industry. You probably need to sign a contract for special provisions or services.

Or maybe the vendor is in a new market and they're trying to learn about their customers with an MVP. How many times have you seen the recommendation here on HN to set up a landing page and add a button that says "Email me if you're interested"? Same idea.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

9. Ask HN: Boss ignoring me – what next?

Top comment by davismwfl

Let me give you one other potential where you not speaking up is a mistake.

Your boss knows you are a high performer and you are taking care of bugs and keeping it off his radar so s/he doesn't have to stress about it so he leaves you alone out of respect. He trusts you and knows you are capable and you don't need your hand held, hence your high ratings prior. He may not realize how much time has really passed because things you take up are just done and there isn't a concern and he's focused on other team members who are struggling or need more day to day help. It is possible you are reading into the situation what you fear rather then reality.

I'd suggest you call or send a quick email to your boss that isn't passive aggressive etc. But also do so to protect yourself so it is a fine line. I'd say something like, "Hey Boss, I've solved the last few defects x, y, and z and realized that we hadn't connected recently and wanted to take 5 minutes and just make sure I am doing the priorities you feel are most important." This way if he is building a case against you he'll have to respond in a way you know otherwise his case would become weaker. The fact you let it go on for months is already a weakness, but not beyond fixing. If you ignore, you will leave either by their action or your own and you'll be bitter which can poison your new job search, so do your part and then at least you feel good even if you leave as you'll know you did everything you could.

10. Logging into Gmail on Chrome links my Google Account to the browser

Top comment by tedivm

This isn't a bug, this is an explicit decision they made. It caused a bit of a stir at the time, but they went through with the change anyways.

Personally for me it was the last straw, and I've since moved to Firefox.