AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How did an adult ADHD diagnosis help you?

Top comment by matlin

Anyone reading this should be extremely skeptical of internet strangers recommending drugs that gave them "superpowers", changed their life, etc. Taking these drugs will make anyone feel more focused, motivated, etc because these drugs are strong stimulants that cause euphoria, focus, and bursts of energy.

Anecdotally, I've seen a huge uptick in posts of the format "how an ADHD diagnosis changed my life" on Reddit, TikTok, HN, etc. Talk to your doctor about your issues and concerns but don't forget the incentives of pharma companies to push these drugs on as many people as possible.

2. Ask HN: Have you found a good desk chair?

Top comment by tailspin2019

After years of crappy chairs, I finally invested in a Herman Miller Aeron at the start of lockdown.

Due to lockdown restrictions I took a risk and ordered one without trying it first (knowing I had the return policy to fall back on).

I was immediately disappointed with the comfort when it first arrived, and almost sent it back. But I stuck with it for a few more days and found that once I'd adjusted to the chair, I now find it the most comfortable thing I've ever sat in. I've since read that it's quite common to take a few days to adjust to a chair like this, where the ergonomics are very different (better) than cheaper chairs.

I used to get various aches and pains after sitting in my cheap office chairs for a few hours (even with breaks in between), now I find that there is almost no upper limit for how long I can comfortably work in this chair.

So yes it's f*king expensive, but I do highly recommend it. A year on, I think it was a very good investment.

BTW I highly recommend the Atlas Headrest for the Aeron - it looks 100% like a genuine original part and it really makes a big different to comfort (in my opinion). The only downside is the headrest alone costs about the same as what I used to spend on "upper-range" office chairs from Staples.

3. I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC startups. AMA

Top comment by manicksurya

Hey Peter,

I changed my employer last year while my spouses h4 visa was in process. Got to know last week that h4 visa was denied because it was referring to my old h1b which has become void due to switch.

Can you give some options to get uscisnprocess her visa soon. Is it possible to get other type of visas as we would like to start an online e commerce business.

4. Ask HN: How to get back in employment market after working on side projects?

Top comment by DarrenDev

Don't call them side projects. Call them apps, products and businesses. Each one used a particular tech stack, each one had a life-span of some kind: a start, a launch or a middle, users maybe, etc.

How would you explain all this work if you were hired by a small company to build them? You wouldn't hesitate to claim the years working on these interesting projects as valuable years and part of your career growth and progression.

We tend to downplay things we do or build ourselves, as if the very fact that another person (a boss) tells us to do something makes it immediately more valuable than if we choose to do that something ourselves.

It doesn't. The app you built because you chose to has just as much value as the app you built because someone paying you a monthly check told you to build it.

Wrap your 'side projects' inside a business and claim the credit for all that work.

5. Ask HN: What things that tech recruiters do, annoy you the most as an engineer?

Top comment by nindalf

There’s a lot of people in here complaining about various things recruiters do. Let me give a different perspective. For the first couple of years of my career, recruiters just ignored me. It was like I simply didn’t exist. I hadn’t studied computer science and didn’t work at a well known company. Meanwhile, my coworkers with CS degrees constantly complained about having to bat away recruiters offering them crazy money.

It’s different now. I worked at a well known company for a few years and get plenty of recruiter emails. Many of them are for positions I’m not interested in. Many of them use tactics I’d prefer they didn’t. But I don’t complain because the only thing worse than receiving these emails is not receiving them.

6. Tell HN: I curate HN stories which didn't reach the front page

Top comment by dang

Edit: ouch! - it was a moderator who added "Show HN" and that was totally our mistake. I'm so sorry for scolding you for something you didn't do!

Newsletters can't be Show HNs. Please read the rules—they mention this explicitly: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. I've replaced "Show HN" with "Tell HN" above.

Also, if you're getting these stories from HN then I would ask you to link to the HN submissions.

We totally support the goal of bringing attention to great stories that haven't gotten significant attention yet. Other people have worked on this problem (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392049), and in fact we spend a good deal of time doing the same thing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). But it's not good for community to sever the links to the source where you found them. In fact, at first glance it felt exploitative to me—a bit like kicking the ladder out from under you—but on reflection I'm sure that's not what you intended.

If you include the HN sources the way that polote has done here: https://hnblogs.substack.com/p/hn-blogs-24121, that would suffice.

p.s. It looks great and I'm going to subscribe!

7. Ask HN: What is your “sales stack”?

Top comment by rishabhkaul1

At Appsmith, we use: - Website and Blog hosted on Webflow

- ActiveCampaign for email automation and tagging of lists (typically one off emails like churn prevention or onboarding campaigns etc).

- Reply.io for engagement emails

- Segment for data pipes

- Mixpanel for product analytics, which feeds data back to ActiveCampaign for campaigns

- Integromat for some integrations.

- Canva for some basic images, templates etc.

- Google Analytics (for website traffic analysis, SEO etc)

- Asana + Slack for project management and alerts. Grammarly for well, grammar.

- Appsmith for dashboards and workflows. Ex. how we used Appsmith + Reply + ActiveCampaign to make a churn prevention engagement workflow https://blog.appsmith.com/connecting-mixpanel-replyio-and-ac...

We're now thinking of moving away from ActiveCampaign to Hubspot for marketing automation soon (90% off 1st year pricing for small startups)

We'll have to figure out a sales CRM sometime (Salesforce is sorta expensive, maybe Pipedrive?)

8. Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

Top comment by ratww

A SQL UPDATE where I changed everyone's password to the same value. The server had protection against updates without a WHERE, but of course it didn't protect against using the wrong clause. :)

It took 5 minutes to recover it all from a 2h old backup but there were people in the room who couldn't login and they instantly noticed my despair. Having 10 people watching me from behind made it look like an hour.

It was a fun day.

9. Ask HN: Why Poetry did not become a mainstream package manager for Python?

Top comment by spapas82

Because venv/pip/requirements is good enough for most cases. Most developers are introduced early to these tools and learn them good enough to work fine for them.

If there's no real problem with the existing tools, then people will not change their tested and trusted way of working for some fancy new tool, no matter what that new tool promises!

There's an old engineering proverb about that: if it works don't mess with it.

10. Ask HN: Can you think deeply in real time?

Top comment by thomascgalvin

I think a lot of my deep thoughts come subconsciously. My biggest leaps of insight happen when I've taken some time - hours, maybe days - away from a problem.

I've found this to be true of many pursuits: programming, writing fiction, even things like "where should the fridge go when we redo the kitchen?"

What you're talking about, good responses in the moment, isn't about deep thought, it's about being witty. They're different problems.

And I suspect that a lot of the people you think are being clever in the moment are actually repeating fragments of conversations that they've had with themselves in private. This isn't universally true, of course, but I do think it plays a part.