AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Who is looking for a co-founder? (July 2021)

Top comment by tbird24

Clubs Poker | seeking CTO | Remote (I'm based in NYC)

Ruby on Rails | React | HTML5 Canvas (for the poker table) | Postgres | AWS (Lambda, Kinesis, Athena, SQS, etc.)

Clubs Poker (https://clubspoker.com) makes it dead simple to play poker with your friends for fun. We’re going to make poker look more like a social game (think Fortnite) and less like a casino. Sound interesting?

Clubs is currently hosting around 1,000 poker games/month and avg growth is 100% month over month. We recently closed a round of funding led by Village Global, along with other angel investors and professional poker players.

About me: Former poker player, PM for 10 years, now CEO at Clubs Poker.

To apply, email me at taylor [at] clubspoker.com, mentioning this post in HN & a description of why you think you'd be a good fit. You should have noteworthy full-stack experience under your belt already.

https://angel.co/company/clubs-poker/jobs/1457533-cto-lead-e...

2. Ask HN: 30 years old with no career

Top comment by poorjohnmacafee

Have you tried creating a business?

People forget this is the most opportunity-filled, complex economy in the history of humanity. The idea of "spend your career at corporations" is only about 100 years old as a result of the industrial rev. Forget it about it for a second. My grandfather launched a company in his youth and it was considered normal, he wasn't considered an "entrepreneur", he was just doing what many people did before today's career-at-corporations mentality became entrenched.

You already know quite a bit about a wide array of industries. Spend some months focusing on your past experiences and where there might be a place for you to break in offering a product or service.

3. Ask HN: How to stop download.cnet.com from hosting my app?

Top comment by textman

OP here. thanks for the suggested links which I will try. I hope I don]t offend any open source folks here but this is commercial software with a EULA that clearly states the software may not be redistributed without written permission so it is a license violation and has cost me some $. I found out from a potential customer that alerted me to this and said he thought my software being on sleazy download sites creates a bad image for me. I am a tiny, 1 person bootstrapped operation so I really don't want to go the DMCA route if I can avoid it.

4. Ask HN: How to get started with CB radio?

Top comment by LinuxBender

Permission:

If you are setting up a base station, your landlord or HOA may have restrictions on the antenna size. There are no permissions or license required in the U.S. from the FCC assuming you are using unmodified CB radios. Keep the antenna and coax cable away from other equipment if you can, to avoid interference that results in neighbors complaining about you.

Technical:

Look for ARRL sites that describe how to properly install and ground your antenna as well as different antenna types. The same knowledge for ham operators using the HF bands will apply to CB radio (26-27Mhz). HN is not a sufficient platform to give you all the steps you would need. You will need an antenna, SWR meter (standing wave ratio) to tune your antenna, coax cable, antenna mast, grounding connection (new or existing building ground). An all-around decent omni-directional antenna would be a 5/8's wave ground plane. 1/2 wave are more plentiful but less effective for what you are doing. The ARRL sites will give you information on how to do all of these things. You could also find a local ham radio club that will have people knowledgeable in this area. They may try to get you into HAM radio and that does require a license.

There are CB radio base station transmitters. The selection is smaller today than in the 70s/80s. You can find equipment on Amazon, just don't trust the positive reviews in my opinion. Try to find something that has both AM and SSB (LSB USB) should you some day want to talk to other countries using skip conditions.

You will find truckers and maybe some locals on channels 17 and 19. Channel 9 if for emergencies but may not have anyone responding. Happy to add more later, but I have to step away for a bit.

5. Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?

Top comment by PragmaticPulp

SMBs don’t hire any employees, including software engineers, unless that employee can generate more revenue than they cost to employ. The higher compensation of software engineers means that they won’t be hired for smaller tasks.

Generally, SMBs don’t hire software engineers at all unless they’re in the business of making and selling software. Smaller software engineering tasks are contracted out to vendors and custom software shops that may already have similar products that can be adapted to a customer’s needs rather than developed from the ground up. The high software engineer salaries force a sort of efficiency on the market.

Smaller startups that want to develop software might offer engineers some ownership of the company, or additional perks like remote work and shorter hours to attract them to jobs that don’t pay the highest software engineering salaries.

There are also many junior developers outside of big cities who have salaries more in line with the $60K range you listed. These are not talked about often on HN but they exist.

6. Ask HN: How aware are you about building decentralised software on blockchain?

Top comment by tombh

Generally I would say that for the average HN'er software is our life, it's not just a field in which exciting things happen (the internet, ML and blockchains etc) but also, indeed perhaps more so, a "boring", day-in day-out livelihood. Personally, I feel the trouble with the blockchain is that it has attracted a lot of "fair weather" supporters, people that have only become geeky due to the allure of money, not because of an inherent love of software.

Yes blockchains are indeed an exciting development and present a lot of potential, but "true" hackers are probably as excited by blockchains as they are by say Rust. The thing is that generally speaking we can have informed conversations about Rust, because those that understand the novelty of Rust have come to that understanding through a genuine interest in the technology, not because of how Rust can make them rich.

So yes, blockchains are indeed very interesting, but unfortunately the conversations around them are overwhelmingly distorted by the superficialities of what I would cynically describe as dilettantes. Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise :/

7. Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

Top comment by danpalmer

I think it's important to know about different data storage options and their trade-offs. Managing state is one of the hardest parts of backend development, particularly at scale, so an understanding of the trade-offs in databases/caches/blob-storage/queues, and when each is useful is important.

I'd pay close attention to speed and "correctness". What's the consistency model of a system? Can we lose data and if so how? What's the throughput? Latency?

These help choose good technology for backend systems, and helps answer questions like:

- Can we do this in-band while serving a user request?

- Can we do it 100 times to serve a request?

- If it completes successfully can we trust it or do we still need to handle failure?

- Can we trust it immediately or eventually?

There are lots of technologies and terms for all of this but I've specifically avoided them because the important bit is the mental model of how these things fit together and the things they allow/prevent.

8. Ask HN: Literature for mathematical optimization?

Top comment by tasseff

Here's an excerpt from a comment I previously made on Hacker News:

I'm a Ph.D. student in operations research (OR). My suggestion would be to first build a strong foundation in linear programming. This will introduce you to the notion of duality, which is heavily emphasized in many mathematical programming courses. Here's a good open-source book on linear programming written by Jon Lee, the current editor of Mathematical Programming A: https://github.com/jon77lee/JLee_LinearOptimizationBook

Then I'd suggest studying more general methods for continuous and convex optimization. The book I see mentioned a lot is Convex Optimization by Boyd and Vandenberghe, although we didn't use this in our coursework. Instead, we used a lot of the material presented here: http://mitmgmtfaculty.mit.edu/rfreund/educationalactivities/

If you read the above (or any other two books on linear programming and convex optimization), you'll probably have a better idea of what you want to study next and how you want to go about it. The next natural step would be to study combinatorial (i.e., integer or mixed-integer) optimization. (Jon Lee has another book on this subject; I've also heard good things about the Schrijver book.)

9. Ask HN: Is this the most quoted quote on HN?

Top comment by nwsm

I'd guess the paraphrase of Goodhart's law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

10. Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?

Top comment by _kush

I have made a few iOS apps (Cone[0] and Unwind[1]) which generate enough to pay my bills.

[0]: https://cone.app

[1]: https://unwind.to