AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?

Top comment by Jakobeha

Material goods:

Ear plugs (silicone). Don't waste your money on noise-cancelling headphones, I have $200 ones and they don't compare to simple ear plugs. If you live in a moderately noisy area and you want peace and quiet, get them. They basically just make everything quiet. 24 from CVS = $10.

OpenMove by Aftershokz - Bone-conduction headphones. Perfect for running and just good for listening to music. They work, they're way easier to wear and more comfortable than earpods, I haven't had any issues since I got them about 8-months ago. Plus, you can wear them with earplugs for music + noise cancellation. $99

Cast iron skillet. This is more of a personal preference. I hate getting new kitchenware and then worrying about breaking it or getting it all stained. But these are super easy to clean and AFAIK practically never wear out. Also very cheap (iirc $15).

Software:

JetBrains tools. Basically the only software I can imagine spending $250 a year on, and it actually being worth it.

Patreon and Github sponsors. Not much (I think $15 a month total). It's sad how few sponsors a lot of these projects have. I'm not rich, but I can afford donating $5/month here and there. I really think the world would be a better place if more people donate to open source and content creators they like.

2. Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?

Top comment by dceddia

Last year I built Recut[0], a native Mac app that helps speed up video editing by automating the rough-cut process. It finds silence, gaps, and pauses and removes them, creating a cut list that you can import into editors like ScreenFlow, Final Cut, Premiere and Resolve. Here’s the Show HN [1] from a couple months ago.

I built it because I was making screencasts and cutting out silence + mistakes was 90% of my editing time. This makes it a ton faster. There were some command-line scripts to do a similar thing but I wanted something visual with a fast feedback loop, where I could quickly preview how it would sound and tweak the parameters in real time.

I didn’t know anything about video and had never built anything with Swift before so it’s been a fun way to learn a bunch of new stuff.

0: https://getrecut.com

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26317265

3. Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

Top comment by midrus

My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elixir.

We also found many times missing libraries, or found libraries which are incomplete, or unmaintained or just not well documented. Just compare the total amount of libraries in Hex, vs the total amount of libraries in rubygems. Somebody will say "but Elixir libraries are higher quality so we need less, etc,etc" as if there were not good developers in the ruby world and every elixir developer were a rockstar.

Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. There is a plugin but last time I tried it, it was even worse than the VSCode plugin.

Also, I've read some comments where people mention "we don't need redis", "we don't need workers" everything is so much easier. That was our thinking at first. But then you realize on deployments you will lose your cache, or your background jobs, etc. So you have to persist them either in mnesia or in the database. At that point you're just reinventing your crappy undocumented and untested version of delayed_job.

Most of what you get from elixir in terms of redundancy, high availability, etc you can have that anyway from kubernetes, heroku or any PaaS.... you will need more than 1 server anyway, so...

Liveview sounds amazing until you try to use it in the real world. The most minimum latency kills the experience.

In the end, we are back to Rails and much happier. Specially now we are using all the hotwire stuff. Not fancy, and not fashionable though.

4. Ask HN: Desperately need “sales for nerds” advice

Top comment by a13n

At your price point ($10-50 per sale, $10-500 lifetime value), it simply is not worthwhile to have anyone doing 1:1 sales. You should be acquiring customers via marketing.

There's a pretty famous book called Traction that introduces founders to marketing. It goes over 19 marketing channels, and after reading, you should have a good hunch about which 3-5 channels might work well for you.

Off the top of my head:

- Partner with climbing gyms. They all have a store that sells chalk and shoes and whatnot. Either sell them 50x of your product (this does require actual sales) or see if they have a model where they get a cut for every sale made.

- Influencer marketing. Reach out to people like Alex Honnold and ask if they'd be willing to try your product out for free and give you feedback. If they like it, ask if they'd be willing to help out by talking about it on social. Could eventually explore some kind of affiliate model where they get a 20-30% cut per sale they drive your way.

- Paid search ads. If anyone on the internet is searching for "climbing chalk" then they should end up on your site via paid ads.

- Retargeting ads. If anyone visits your website or puts something in their cart and doesn't buy, make sure you use Google Display and/or FB/Twitter retargeting ads. These will be the most profitable ads you ever pay for.

- SEO. This one is pretty hard because your site is relatively small/new, but if you write articles talking about why your chalk is better for the environment, you might get some traffic this way.

Some of this work does involve "sales", in that you're selling to gyms or recreational stores or influencers 1:1. BUT, just try to think about it from their perspective. You aren't "selling them on your product", you're "helping them make more money by promoting a cool environmentally friendly chalk brand".

5. Ask HN: How much do you contemplate per week?

Top comment by axaxs

If you mean just 'thinking on things', pretty much all the time. I realized when I was younger I never felt 'bored' like everyone else seems to. I'm perfectly content to just sit and stare at the sky thinking of god knows what. Even my wife sometimes comes in and asks what I'm doing when I'm seemingly just sitting on the couch staring at the wall at times. The downsides are that I have trouble sleeping unassisted, as I'll just lay in bed thinking til the sun comes up, and also have trouble staying focused on movies or even conversation, as my mind will be elsewhere.

If you mean work/product/big picture specific... probably a few hours a week.

6. Ask HN: I think I hate the software development industry? Am I crazy?

Top comment by megameter

1. First consider the possibility that this is a "life" thing and not just a "work" thing. Your username signals "I'm so depressed and fed up with it all", but what "it" really is can be harder to grasp than a current source of pain like your job.

2. You're also trying to sabotage change within yourself by saying "oh, but it'll take so long/be so expensive". You were not done the moment you left school. That's a common belief that is imposed upon young people, but carried to its conclusion, it's rather ugly and implies that you're either a huge success or eternally damned at age 30, and all events after that point are handwaved away in a Logan's Run fashion. 30 is more commonly a point where people in our society start to get a sense of their actual career path and shift from "consumers" of the current culture to "architects" of the next culture; what preceded that was mostly performative in the average case, a demonstrative adulting to "make the grade", and employment as a footsoldier for this or that ideology. You are cynical about this behavior already(hence your low opinion of the FAANG stereotype). It is therefore time to let go of youthful impulses and seek reflection.

3. This is the point where you should go study the extracurriculars you bypassed the first time because they weren't "practical". You can limit it to one a semester, night classes, online classes. You don't have to rush into a new degree. Through works of art, studied or improvised performance, sporting achievements, philosophising and general appreciation of the human condition, you can loosen the grip on things you have come to hate and start taking some new ones. The arts never have to become your profession, but they will let you see yourself better.

7. Ask HN: Those who have taken extended time off, any advice?

Top comment by amacneil

- "Try to take 3 months off maximum"

- "structure your time off"

- "Have goals and schedules"

- "Arrange ahead of time for a role to return to"

You are getting a very American perspective in this thread so far (possibly due to the time of day). I will counterbalance it.

Advice: You're overthinking it already. If you feel like a long break in between roles, take one. Book a one way ticket to a place you've always wanted to visit, and figure out your next steps once you get there. Many/most places in the world (including within the US) are very cheap to live if you don't need to live close to work.

Maybe you end up getting bored and returning to work in a few months, maybe you run out of money, maybe you love it and travel for a year or more, working hospitality jobs to get by. All of these are great outcomes, and you will learn something about yourself that would have been impossible to discover while heads down working full time employment.

COVID is a bit of hassle right now, but places are already opening up, and come summer you should have many more options.

8. GitHub Actions Down

Top comment by rvz

So now I am expecting a major GitHub Actions incident (worst case, the whole of GitHub) to go down every single month at least once. Last time this went down was last month. [0]

I now doubt if they can consistently manage more than a month without a major incident like this one.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26666843

9. Ask HN: How do I learn more about entrepreneurship/startups?

Top comment by bumbada

Stop reading books, stop getting courses and start doing things.

Some people have tendencies to never learn from other people, and they make the same mistakes other people have done again and again.

Other people, like you (it is obvious), go the other way, they want to know everything and not fail ever. The way they do it is procrastinating, never getting in the arena or over the stage until they are 100% prepared. And they are never "prepared", because failing hurts emotionally.

You are like a skier that tries to avoid falling down so much he just can't learn.

I created my own business when I was a kid, it is not that hard, offer things or services people need or want. Someone with a CS degree can figure it out.

You need to get out in the real world and fail. Then you can read books and ask for advice. Now you will be able to calibrate all the info that you get from books and people in real scenarios. Without real world experience, most info is worthless.

Spend the minimum amount of time reading, you should be experiencing life and writing down those experiences. Writing every day is much better than reading every day. One in active, the other passive and looks like work but it is not.

Minimize passive things and activities in you life, like TV, until most of your life is active.

This man was a serial entrepreneur: https://steveblank.com/

Start getting more aggressive, learn from this man: https://www.john-carlton.com/

You look too "soft",a "wussy", learn resourcefulness in films from people that go to war. You look too weak for making a company and need to get stronger.

You need to develop some habits that make you stronger, like making decisions fast, dealing and handling the consequences. Get used to risk every day, manage it, minimize it.

You learn those things while doing and trying. Accept failure in your life, accept rejection by other people, accept the pain and over time you will master it.

10. Ask HN: Where is a nice place to host which is not AWS / GCP types

Top comment by statico

Linode is great. Wonderful options, reliable, excellent tools. Been using them for almost a decade.

It's hard to beat Netlify and Vercel for static content. They make it easy and you'll be up and running in seconds.

I know you said Clojure, but it's worth mentioning: if you do choose to make a JavaScript/TypeScript backend, Vercel + Next.js's API routes is a great option. With that combination you'll have a GitHub integrated CI/CD build (if you need it) and serverless functions behind a custom domain with SSL in minutes.