AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How to negotiate continuing to work remotely?

Top comment by pfp

Don't negotiate. Dictate.

I'm not joking either. I tried negotiating this (pre-covid), only to get a "final offer" of a measly couple of remote days etc. Being on the spectrum, I took their word at face value, found another job that does 100% remote, and put in my resignation. Surprisingly that "absolutely final" position wasn't that final anymore, and they'd've rather had me remote than not at all. Had the new job not been a lot better substance-wise, the whole exercise would have been total waste of time.

Of course you'll want to dictate from a position where you can follow your ultimatum if need be.

The nearing end of Covid is where people like us can - indeed must - make a stand against the returning suffocating madness of boring commutes, noisy open plan offices, incessant context switches; against sacrificing one's creativity, flow and personal space to placate the emotional instincts and biases of the excessively social who rarely do the heavy lifting in our sector.

Stay determined and keep up the good work.

2. Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

Top comment by impostervt

Publish books on Amazon. I've published 4 and make about $3k in profit per month, after paying for ads on amazon.

Don't write them yourself, that's a lot of work.

Instead, do key word research about what books sell in non-fiction categories (fiction is a whole different ballgame). Look for keywords that 1) auto complete in the amazon search bar, and 2) have less than 4,000 matching books, and 3) have an average Amazon BSR of less than 150k.

The above isn't easy, nor is it particularly difficult.

Once you've found a good keyword, create an outline on the subject. You'll have to do a bit of research here, but this can be done in a few hours to a few days. The more time you spend here, the better your result will be.

Then, hire a ghostwriter to produce a 30k-ish word long book. This will run you around $1000, and produce a book long enough to turn into a 3+ hour audiobook on Audible (audiobooks over 3hrs get significantly better royalties than less than 3 hours).

Get a cover made. This will run from $50ish on fiverr to several hundred on 99designs or upwork. Don't cheap out, good covers are important.

Publish on amazon. Run ads.

There's obviously more too it than this. If interested, look up the Mikkelsen twins or Dane McBeth on youtube.

3. Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

Top comment by quanto

Best: It was a lesson I got as a fresh grad. I was losing sleep over stress from work. "This is just a job," an older colleague told me. In reality, he really did his job -- he was always on time, his code was impeccable, and he used cool logic to solve any problem. And yet, he was never too emotionally attached to work. He always welcomed criticism of his work. He had the demeanor of a cool-headed hitman finishing his job. At the same time, he was a warm human being to his colleagues, including me.

Worst: A conversation with this boss-colleague of mine would go like this:

Me: There was an urgent bug yesterday, and I fixed it.

Him: That bug was within my major commit last month. Did you fix the bug because you think I am incompetent and can't fix the bug myself?

Me: Oh, no, it was an urgent bug ticket submitted to our team, so I went ahead and fixed it.

Him: So you are saying I am useless to the team.

Me: No-no, I don't think you are useless. Quite to the contrary. You were busy doing another ticket yesterday. You know what, maybe you are right, and I should have waited and reconsidered before I fixed the bug.

Him: Oh yeah? You are being passive-aggressive now. Your behavior is very toxic and is disruptive to our team dynamics.

Me: I am sorry you see it that way. Could you tell me what I could have done differe...

Him: I am downgrading your performance review, and you would be getting a lower discretionary bonus this year.

This ended up costing me a five-figure bonus deduction.

Since then, after rising through ranks, I too became a team manager. Thanks to this lesson, I know how not to treat my team members.

4. Ask HN: What do you think will come after Kubernetes?

Top comment by fredsted

As businesses start to realize microservices aren't really worth it due to the complexity and cost it entails, they will start reverting back to hosting monoliths on VMs or services like Heroku/Netlify/Laravel Forge/Beanstalk, and they'll find out they can save a lot of money on compute and man hours by doing this.

For more simple workflows, e.g. a single API endpoint, there's serverless and other SaaS services out there which will let you build off from that, and lets you save a huge amount of time and money compared to building it traditionally with a Web framework.

Now that we've had a few years of experience with how people are actually using the platform , I could see a simplified version of Kubernetes taking hold for businesses still running complex sets of services, something that's easy to install, actually comes with batteries included and is secure by default.

5. Ask HN: Would you rather work 4 days per week for 80% salary?

Top comment by taurath

In software, there's quite a few other questions to answer first.

Will you be on call?

Whats the culture around "off-hours" contact?

How often if ever does crunch happen? Will the company pay more after 32 hours?

What percent of my time is expected to be in meetings vs getting things done, and how much do you expect to be done?

I have worked at places with all fridays off during the summer. We did all our releases on time even though summer was usually the biggest time. 4 days really doesn't seem to make much of a difference at all. Fridays are so often either no meeting days or at least not important ones. Overall, I absolutely have taken a paycut for legitimate work life balance increases, and I prefer to work with others who would as well.

6. Tell HN: Don't put your status page on the same domain as your app

Top comment by neilv

Some startup could do the `.status` Internet domain name TLD, plus offer an optional SaaS there.

(The SaaS could provide numerous different ways to push status to your branded `.status` domain page, plus optional watchdog/heartbeat. And the implementation could be be resilient against even a major cloud provider outage.)

Using dotStatus could be the no-brainer go-to for companies that know they should have an independent status page, or are required to have it, and don't want to spend a lot of engineering resources doing it right.

7. Ask HN: How can I improve my intelligence?

Top comment by coldtea

1) Exercize

2) Healthy diet (low weight, appropriate vitamins preferably from foods, etc.)

3) Sleep well - 6.30 hours seem to be the sweet spot, some need a little more (the recent "8 hours or bust" is mostly bogus pseudo-science, which even if peddled by an actual scientist, is not backed up properly, since the data show otherwise).

- All three of the above boost congnitive skills, alertness, memory, etc, more than anything else. If you have some medical issues affecting the above (e.g. some condition), seek help, and treat them as well. E.g. you might need pills to focus. But take care of the above big 3 as a priority.

4) Read a lot. Mostly books.

On fields outside technical/science (where newer is better), try to read a healthy chunk of old ones too.

On scientific fields, read newer stuff, but also some of the classics (e.g. for IT, something like "The Mythical Man-Month").

For the fields you're interested in, don't go for summaries and lazy recaps, go to the sources. Cliff Notes helps you repeat the same talking points as anybody else. Reading the original material helps you form your own perspective (and, if the material is art, it's also a totally deeper experience). Shed the common tech/nerd prejudice that History, Literature, or Philosophy "don't matter".

5) Talk to people. All kinds of people. You don't only learn and get insights from Feynman or Buffet types, but also from a retired pilot, a plumber, a cook, a single mother of two, whatever. Some wont be insights about technical developments or scientific techniques, but will nonetheless be insights into human society, feelings, how the other half lives, and so on.

6) Don't try to master everything. Focus on 1-2 things, and try to get a general knowledge of others. Get personal experience with things you care about, not just theoritical.

7) Stress less. Excess stress (over things one should not stress about, rather than actual heavy problems of the moment) can kill cognitive ability.

8) Don't trust random eight point lists from random idiots on the internet. They could be right, but how would you know?

8. Ask HN: Why Google cookies are exempted when blocking third-party cookies?

Top comment by Animats

Because Google doesn't want you to do that.[1]

Use Firefox. The Web works just fine with all Google tracking blocked.

[1] https://fossbytes.com/chrome-doesnt-delete-google-cookies/

9. Hacker Accessed AWS for $50k+ – AWS Ignoring Me

Top comment by scrollaway

AWS support doesn't generally suck or behave the way you're describing without good reason, so I feel we're missing part of the story here. What are you leaving out?

Anyway, it's important to frame what happened correctly: the security of someone on your team was sloppy, and most likely a bot was able to get an access key or access to one of your accounts, spin up crypto miners on EC2s and now you're responsible for the bill. If it hadn't been that, it'd have been ransomware, you probably got lucky.

Now, to see if your situation can be improved: Put up some dollars and get business support. Make a clear and polite case, from the beginning. Ask for a refund but you don't have grounds to demand it; if they issue one, it's a gesture of good will. They probably will issue one if you haven't had to ask for that before, but it reflects badly on everybody that cryptominers weren't caught for two months.

And before you create that ticket, make some billing alerts so you can show AWS support that this won't happen again.

10. Ask HN: Digital nomads, where's the best place in the world to work from?

Top comment by istorical

I spent a good year trying to develop a website to answer this question and collect responses from people who'd done just this to try to aggregate their qualitative and quantitative experiences, before ultimately realizing this is something where you can sort of point out some of the obvious trade-offs but the value system and preferences of the individuals vary so much that unfortunately the only way to really determine it is for the person in question to go live there. And so I stopped working on the site and just got a one way ticket and spent a year remote working.

Before realizing that for me at that stage in my life the best place for me ironically was the country where I started, just in a bigger city with a good metro system.

If you wanna determine this you'd be best off constructing a matrix of priority systems (weather, cost of living, language, broad cultural region a la northern european, southern european/latin, east asian, latin american, etc), nature in the area, etc) and make a tool for an individual to rank their priorities in terms of categories/factors, then rank the options _within_ each of those categories/factors, and then try to score the results for them. But even then, people often don't know what they want or care about until they've experienced a variety of places.