AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

Top comment by jasode

+ using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search.

+ Google Maps in 2004 and dragging the map interactively around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest's page reload and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm shift that let me explore a geography better than any book atlas. I gave away all my atlases

+ MS Window Media Player's ability to cleanly accelerate playback to 2x,3x,4x of audiobooks and tutorial videos for slow speakers. MS Windows 7 had this long before Youtube's player had a 2x playback option.

+ SQLite library : more than 10x improvement since I came from old school of writing custom formats for persisting data. No more dumping memory structs to disk or writing b-trees in C Language from scratch.

+ C++ STL in late 1990s. Instantly reduced need to write custom data structures like linked-lists or in-house string libraries for common tasks

+ VMware in 2000s : more than 10x productivity enhancement because I can play with malware in a virtual software sandbox instead of tediously re-imaging harddrives of air-gapped real physical machines

+ Google Chrome in 2008 : 10x quality-of-life since misbehaving websites crashing don't bring down all the other tabs in my browsing session like Firefox/Opera.

I probably have more than a hundred examples. Some software tech 10x improvements are more diffused. Reddit+HN websites are a much better use of my time than USENET newsgroups. Youtube with recordings of tech conference presentations I can watch at 2x+ is a better used of my time than physically traveling to the site.

2. Ask HN: How do I find energy to work on hobbies after the work day ends?

Top comment by xenopticon

Two things that worked well for me:

1. Work on your hobbies _before_ your actual work (or when you feel rested the most).

Don't spend all of your "prime time" in your job. In the morning, when I am rested and focused, I dedicate the first one or two hours of the day to work on my things. Of course this pushes my schedule and I finish work later, but at the end it feels like an accomplished day. There's no feeling of guilt because you "only worked on your job". This of course only applies if you have a flexible job.

2. You cannot do everything at once.

I had very similar goals as you in the beginning of the year. I was trying to write posts for my blog, learn my partner's language, study for the Terraform associate exam, and exercise daily. All combined with a moderately demanding job. We simply cannot have that many things in our buffer. Try to focus on what's more urgent or important for you. Do one or two things at a time.

3. 5 years of leetcode with no progress. I'm giving up

Top comment by dilippkumar

Personal anecdote:

The best coder I’ve come across in my career once told me he attempted to solve some leetcode and was stuck fairly early and gave up. I was surprised to hear that he even cared to try.

What made him a fantastic engineer was his meticulous work ethic, his track record of never having missed a deadline, him spending 40% of his time designing before he even wrote a single line of code, writing extremely human readable code, his obsession with unambiguous and simple APIs and his extensive unit testing.

He was humble, loved to crack jokes and was always fun to solve hard problems with.

None of that is captured by leetcode. This is probably my personal bias - but the only people who work hard at leetcode are people who want to prove something to the world. I’d rather work with people who like the profession and don’t feel compelled to prove anything.

4. Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

Top comment by knoebber

Dotfilehub: https://dotfilehub.com

I've always found various solutions that use git for sharing configuration files cumbersome. I set out to make my own simple version control system, and a lightweight web application where I can browse and edit them remotely. The main idea is that paths are aliased to simple names, so I can say `dotfile pull i3` and it will install https://dotfilehub.com/knoebber/i3 to ~/.config/i3/config

Overall the project is stable and I use it daily for all sorts of miscellaneous files.

5. Ask HN: How to build empathy?

Top comment by jtr1

I think cultivating curiosity about others is integral to building empathy, but it's a lifelong practice. I still find it very easy to project my own experiences onto others - an easy shortcut that drains my interest in them and makes listening hard. After all, if I feel I already know what's important to know about them, why listen?

Where I've found the most personal growth has been in continually re-learning the strangeness of other people's inner worlds. I try to imagine each person I meet inhabits an alternate universe, just as rich and nuanced as I feel my own is. So a healthy spirit of exploration and generosity helps, although it requires treating yourself the same.

A good shorthand I heard a long time ago from someone else on HN: when someone is expressing a problem to you, consider it your job to build a picture of their mental state that you can repeat back to them and have them recognize as their own. Good luck!

6. Ask HN: What is the most complex concept you understand?

Top comment by madsbuch

In my masters thesis I used following quote:

> On mathematical perception: “either you have no inkling of an idea or, once you have understood it, this very idea appears so embarrassingly obvious that you feel reluctant to say it aloud; moreover, once your mind switches from the state of darkness to the light, all memory of the dark state is erased and it becomes impossible to conceive the existence of another mind for which the idea appears nonobvious.”

7. Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

Top comment by eplanit

Google search over the past 5+ years: result quality getting worse overall; relevant results pushed further and further below ads/sponsored (now on page 2); privacy issues wider and deeper.

I recall being amazed at the seeming clairvoyance of their search results up to about 2014. It seems like when they reorganized under Alphabet, the division of responsibility became sharper. Alphabet to Google: you are an _Advertisement_ company. Your goal is to get as much info as possible on all people so to target and sell ads for maximum profit. The search engine, and other Google products, are to focus on that goal. The other innovation stuff may be done some by you, but we'll shift a lot to the other subsidiaries. I think the clarity and narrowing of purpose is wise, from a business perspective.

As a consumer, though, I've switched to DDG.

8. Ask HN: Why there are so many ads on YouTube?

Top comment by yrgulation

I would vouch they need money to pay for hosting and everything else, and as a free service perhaps ads are the only way. Not sure how one can expect youtube to host that amount of content for free perpetually.

I dislike ads, particularly dark patterns, and shocking I pay for youtube premium. An unpopular opinion but can someone please explain how can all this be hosted for free? Or why do some believe they should?

9. Work events, Zoom Lunches and other forced social activities are driving me nuts

Top comment by meristem

This may be a gap between intent and how the execution hits you. The theory (backed by research) is that creating connection can create psychological safety, and that improves team functioning. Given the physical isolation during the pandemic, many events have moved to Zoom, and often MORE events have been created to help with connection.

Which is where we come to execution. Finding activities and timing that generates connection is hard. For example, whatever your company is picking absolutely does not engender in you what they are hoping to engender.

The downside of being unhappy during 'irrelevant' activities or not joining them is that work is by and large a communal activity. The water cooler is still a good metaphor even when your work does not have any other them around.

Are there activities you and others enjoy that you could suggest? Even if just for your team and closest stakeholders.

Also: as someone else pointed out, mandatory should equate "during work time for which I am paid." The rest is optional.

10. Ask HN: How to think about crypto lending?

Top comment by rawtxapp

It's a way of accessing liquidity while holding on to your asset's appreciation and avoiding capital gains tax on it. If you're very long on your crypto holdings, but you still need money, that's ideal way of accessing it imo.

But many people confuse borrowing with lending, companies like blockfi offer you both. If you borrow to get yourself into leverage, you're running risk of liquidation. If you're simply lending it, you can make back 3-7% back interest in your crypto and blockfi and other places will provide that crypto as liquidity to institutions (presumably to short-sell).

You can also do it through DeFi protocols, MakerDAO is the most popular, you can see some stats at daistats.com (roughly 3B+$ in collateral and debt). It creates this weird cycle where if the price goes up, you can borrow against your increased collateral value to buy back even more which in turn increases the price further. I suspect there's some things slowing that dynamic at the moment, but it certainly plays some role.

And I should also add that this is a fairly common way for wealthy people to access liquidity while keeping their assets, I believe Larry Ellison is one of the famous example of this[1], but now it's democratized for anyone who has cryptocurrencies.

1: https://www.steubencourier.com/article/20140926/BUSINESS/309...