AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

Top comment by rococode

Video walks on Youtube. If you haven't heard of them before, they're simple first-person videos where the filmer walks around some area with a stabilized video camera - no talking, just walking. I've really missed traveling and watching video walks while exercising has been a great way to satisfy that travel craving a bit and also trick my brain into experiencing some semblance of normalcy (not sure I could remember what a crowded street feels like otherwise haha).

I'm partial to Japan so my favorite channel has been Rambalac [1], and I recently also started watching another channel with the very creative name JAPAN 4K [2]. There are tons of other channels and places too, for example I recently watched a few in Lisbon [3] and Seoul [4] and Copenhagen [5]. They're very relaxing and fun to watch and going from place to place with no cuts captures the usual tourist experience quite well. If you like traveling you can probably find some that are interesting to you!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Rambalac/videos

[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/keikaikeikaikeikai/videos

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXlFDpaQ1ec

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqj7l0Xk0Ho

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl69sN5PtgM

2. Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?

Top comment by zck

I use https://nearlyfreespeech.net for my static site.

It isn't free -- it is pretty cheap -- but it has a lot going for it. It requires no custom tooling -- I upload via rsync. This makes it trivial to migrate to a new provider if necessary.

I develop my site locally, then rsync it up. I have a custom domain pointed at the site, and also a custom .htaccess, so I have a good amount of control over the site. I do things like serve html without the .html filetype in the url; e.g. https://zck.org/emacsconf2020 is stored on the server as emacsconf2020.html . (I do this so Emacs recognizes the files as html, but keeps the urls clean).

It's a nice tool if you want to get a little involved in your setup, without getting wrapped up in proprietary tooling. It does charge for what you use, so it's not a great site if you are going to host Blu-ray images that get downloaded from everyone on HN.

3. Ask HN: Digital Nomads: What's Your Setup?

Top comment by a3n

Semi truck driver. I have a laptop, and a phone. I use the phone's hotspot.

"Being on the internet" is not part of my job, and many nights I don't bother to take the laptop out of its bag.

I never use wifi because I'm paranoid.

While driving I listen to podcasts or streaming. I never predownload anything.

I don't know if I ever get throttled. Sometimes, even in this day and age, I'm out of cell range, and my podcasts pause.

I might watch a movie on the phone once a week or so.

Which is not at all helpful to you, except possibly to observe: the less you need, the better it is.

Your lifestyle and work may just be five or ten years ahead of it being worthwhile for businesses to provide what you need.

4. Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

Top comment by piinbinary

I wish I had tools that were just a little smarter at working with code. There are some things that I find I have to manually track down in a large codebase, but the things I do could be automated. I'm thinking of operations like the following:

* Tell me where in package (or module) X it calls functions that can eventually reach function Y in package Z (that is, there is a possible stack trace starting in X that leads to Y.

* Recursively expand the tree of callers of this function.

* Show me where the value passed to this function are created.

* List what packages have functions that can get called when I call function X.

* Given two functions A and B, what functions can result in calls to both? (This is sort-of the greatest common denominator of possible stacks leading to A and B)

(It seems like this must surely exist, but I have yet to find it)

I also want better tools for tracing what a system does when running. For example:

* Say I have a test over some deterministic code, and I make a small change to that code. I'd like to be able to run that test before and after, and get a diff of where the computation was the same vs. where it was different.

* When debugging, I'd like to be able to ask questions about the history, like what set this field on this model to the current value? (With debuggers I've used, you have to know these questions in advance and set up things to watch - you can't ask those questions after the fact)

* List all packages that had a line of code run while running this test.

edit: formatting

5. Ask HN: Why do companies ask employees to set goals?

Top comment by josephmosby

Engineering manager here. I have recently set goals for people.

The best-case scenario is to align personal career growth goals (e.g., senior engineer wants to be a staff engineer, or engineer wants a big raise) with company objectives. Company objectives are typically realized on a longer-term time horizon, which could be several years long. Goals, in their best-case scenario, should be a contract between company and employee that says "if you change and grow in this way to help me, I'll help you back."

Ideally, a good manager should use their experience and vantage point in the business to help their team members set good goals that both align with the company's long-term growth plans and their employee's personal growth plans.

Where these things go sideways: * an manager-type has set goals for a team that are tied to their assigned goals from their manager, and they are hoping by setting goals with their employees to shift responsibility onto them. (example: if manager's boss wants the team to be proficient in Rust by end of year, that should be something that I as manager just assign out as tasks and give you time to do) * manager and employee don't effectively communicate on employee's growth plans, so the goals are lopsided. (example: employee is trying to spend more time with one-year-old daughter this year. Their personal goal is "leave office at 4:30PM every day." Manager ignoring this goal is bad.) * manager is not very good at handling differences between growth plans and fails to communicate those issues to employee. (example: employee wants to get better at a legacy language that is on its way out at the company, and employee also wants to get promoted. These two goals may be in conflict.)

Goals should be a way for employee and manager to align employee's personal desires with company's objectives. For many reasons - most due to questionable managers - this is often lost.

6. Ask HN: How do I improve boring README page?

Top comment by TeMPOraL

Put yourself in the shoes of your users. What does a random user visiting your repo want to know? In my case:

- What problem does the software solve, and - roughly - how?

- How does it look? If it has any visual component, even if it's a CLI interface that's meant for human consumption, screenshots are mandatory. Screenshots + videos/ASCIInemas preferable.

- If there are alternatives you know of, mention them - be honest about when an alternative is a better fit than your project.

- What platforms does it work on? What are the requirements?

- How do I install it? In exact steps, for most common workflows. If that gets too long, link to a separate page containing these detailed instructions.

- How do I run it? Examples of common use cases, with exact invocations/procedures to perform.

- Any relevant remarks that could prevent me from installing or using the software.

- Links to further docs, project webpage, communities, etc.

When I evaluate a project - even briefly, skimming the repo README - these are all the points I'm on the lookout for - they're all helpful for deciding whether to look closer at the project, and possibly install and use it.

7. Ask HN: Who Are the Investors on HN?

Top comment by lpolovets

I'm an engineer turned VC, and I read HN on most days.

Eng career: one of the first 10 engineers at LinkedIn and Factual, and one of the first 10k engineers at Google.

Investing: I'm a partner at Susa Ventures. We're a $90m seed fund and we've backed companies like Robinhood, Flexport, and Fast at seed stage.

- $1m-$1.5m checks, generally when companies are raising $2m-$5m. - the 4 areas where we're most active are enterprise SaaS, fintech, logistics/supply chain, and healthcare IT. - we can invest pre-launch or pre-product, but prefer for there to be an MVP and idealy a few early pilots/contracts/users. - we like companies that have the potential to build strong moats in the long run (network effects, proprietary data, etc.)

Easiest ways to reach me: @lpolovets on Twitter or leo at susaventures.com

I've gotten more and more bandwidth constrained as our fund has grown, but I do my best to reply to emails/DMs where I'm a fit or could be helpful. If you mention HN, I'll prioritize your email. :)

8. Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

Top comment by tdeck

I'm a Xoogler. I joined in late 2016 and quit January 2021. In my opinion, the company didn't change much in absolute terms while I was there. It became more secretive, but overall the experience was similar in 2017 and 2020. It was generally good given the alternatives - no major complaints that don't apply to other software companies. Good work-life balance and good compensation. Many great people under-leveled (but generally no underpaid).

Was it cool? That depends on what you value and who you're trying to impress. I didn't think the work I did was very fulfilling. At Google many problems are already solved, and the ones that remain often seem like small incremental improvements. There's a ton of uninteresting work, just like anywhere else. The difference is that when something is interesting, there are a lot of very qualified Googlers who will flock to it because they're not really needed on what they're doing. So you rarely get opportunities to own something much bigger than you're qualified for. At a smaller company those things can drop in your lap.

A lot of coolness is about perception, and I can definitely say that recruiters think it's cool. When I was at Google I would get a couple of LinkedIn messages each day. The effect still seems to linger.

9. Ask HN: Literature on crisis response?

Top comment by cjbprime

The obvious choice is aviation -- there are thousands of commercial accident reports, many of which lead to process improvements for everyone else afterwards, and general aviation emergencies every day. YouTube especially is full of ATC audio combined with radar visuals and commentary for emergencies.

For tech, Dan Liu maintains a list of tech company incident public post-mortems: https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems

10. Ask HN: Do you read books regularly? Fiction or nonfiction?

Top comment by tomduncalf

I pretty much only read fiction. I've never really got in to reading much non-fiction, though I'd like to try to get into it more. I get my technical content during the day from the internet so don't really feel the need to read technical books, though I'll make the odd exception.

I usually read for about 30-60 minutes a day before bed, I find it helps me switch off and sleep well. I've recently been working my way through some classics which have been reissued, properly typeset etc., by Amazon on Kindle for free: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=18660703011. The best one I've read so far is Count of Monte Cristo - it's long but it's one of those books where you get really engrossed in its world and you're really sad when it is over!