AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Recruiters want people who do side projects, yet contracts forbid them?

Top comment by PragmaticPulp

> It's been frustrating me for a long time that most companies when hiring are looking for people who do lots of side projects and open source work,

This is a myth.

The number of candidates I interview who have side projects worth looking at or open source contributions is maybe 1-in-10 at most. Any company that requires candidates to have significant open source contributions is going to have a hard time hiring, because it’s not very common.

Really, the only time side projects are valuable is when someone needs to fill gaps in their resume. For example, if all of your prior experience was writing PHP backend code but you wanted to apply to a React front-end role, it could be helpful to have something like a React TODO app in your GitHub profile to show that you have some minimal experience with React and front-end work. You don’t need a massive open-source contribution that takes months and months of free time, just something small to show that you have some amount of experience that isn’t reflected in your resume.

The side project myth is getting out of control. Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile.

2. Ask HN: Anyone here built successful SaaS/startup just for money?

Top comment by wpietri

You are half-way through a change. Your old motivations have lost their appeal. But you don't understand the new ones yet. You'll need to. My suspicion here is that you are experiencing some sort of crisis that has made your thinking pretty short term. That's mostly a good crisis response, as it helps us get through a problem alive. But it has issues.

The problem with "make money" is that it's mostly a short-term, proximate motivation. As others suggest, you need to figure out what you want the money for. Starting a business is a long-term proposition, so you'll need to find your deeper motivations.

And note that motivation isn't a static thing; it's a thing you nourish over time. So whatever business you pick, it should feed your motivations. E.g., I know somebody who has run a bookstore for 20+ years. He could do things that make more money, but he loves interacting with customers and talking about books on a daily basis.

One exercise you could do is to write your own obituary. Start by going to Legacy.com. Read a few of the famous-people ones on the front page. Next search for your first name and read a number of those. Leave the good ones open in tabs. Then open up a blank document and start typing yours. Refer back to others as needed, borrowing freely. What in others' obituaries resonates for you? What do you want your life to have been?

3. Ask HN: Introduction to Analog Synthesizers (Simulation OK)

Top comment by hatsunearu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYk8r3QlNi8&list=PLOunECWxEL...

THis guy is my favorite professor from my school. He has posted online lectures because of COVID and decided to put it up on his youtube channel so people can watch.

back in the day this course had like 25 official seats but like 40 people would show up every day to "unofficially" audit the course.

4. Ask HN: Hacker News like forums for other niches?

Top comment by brudgers

I suspect statistically, the HN for X is HN.

A topic silo encourages people to behave in ways that might help them reach the top of the silo. Getting to the top is expedited by pushing other people down. Even worse, it is expedited by driving out expertise.

The dynamics of HN prevent that. Topics so broad that being way outside your domain is the normal state of encountering an HN topic for everyone. Nobody has a well informed opinion about most of the items on the front page...most people don't even care about more than a handful of them even when there is a single story dominating it.

Secondly, there is no way to get to the top of HN. While karma adds up, HN is a constellation not a heap. The center is YC itself with rings of founders in the closest orbit around its mass.

Karma itself only puts you in the Oort cloud.

5. Ask HN: Failed project you spent 15 hours/week for 5 years on?

Top comment by jabo

Context: I'm the other co-founder of Typesense, mentioned in the article you linked.

Kishore and I have worked together on about 12 different side projects over the course of 13 years, and we've tried to adopt this mindset of consistency, persistence and long timeframes for each.

A few of these projects got good traction, but most of them didn't do well (at least revenue-wise). But here's the thing: working on all these projects consistently over the years, has also helped us learn about things like how to pick a market, how to validate our hypotheses, how to choose technologies when building products, how to maintain codebases over a decade, how to stay nimble, etc.

I would say that the sum total of our collective learnings through all these projects, have helped us significantly in our Typesense journey.

So I would say, showing up everyday is not a magic bullet to making a project successful. Instead, it's a magic bullet to continuous learning and building up a wealth of experience, that might just come in handy when you're working on your next project, which then increases your odds of success.

6. Ask HN: Did you quit smoking cannabis? If so, why?

Top comment by geebee

I've done a little research (only a little) into cannabis and health, and not surprisingly (due to legal complications), it's difficult to get very specific answers when you drill down into specific use patterns.

For instance, I read a study that people who use cannabis 4 or more days a week experience certain harmful psychological and physical effects. I get it, and I haven't read the full study, only the mainstream press overview... but right off the bat, think about a study that describes people who "use" alcohol 4 days a week. This includes people who drink one beck's "ultra premium light" 2.3%ABV every day and people who drink a fifth of bourbon a day or worse. It wouldn't make any sense for the beck's drinker to infer much from this study.

The state of cannabis research seems very limited - again, there's a good reason for this. But what does it mean to "use" cannabis. There are CBD heavy strains that have ~3%THC, and strains that exceed 30%TCH. How much do you smoke?

Someone who takes, say, 3 drags of low THC weed twice a week is smoking the equivalent of less than cigarette every two weeks. And the psychoactive effect is likely very, very mild.

I'm also learning (post-legalization markets) that the scenario I described above is becoming quite common, so I don't think it's an edge case anymore, even if it isn't the norm.

Ultimately, unless someone describes the kind of cannabis and the frequency and dose, I can't get much out of these stories or even the more formal research.

7. Ask HN: Should I sell my house to fund my startup? Anyone with the same story?

Top comment by throwaway2a02

No, you should not. Chances of it working out are probably slim. You probably don't need funding, as many solo founders can attest. Hiring should be done once the business is already generating an income, and should be scaled based on that income.

What happens is that if you do sell your house, (assuming you'll pay rent) things will get a lot more stressful for yourself financially, and this will severely hinder your mental performance and chances of success.

An even better idea would be to get a regular job and bootstrap your business in your spare time, on weekends. Once it takes off, you can quit the job and focus full time in it. Successful startups coming from this kind of environments are way more common than those coming from YOLO, all-in approaches you are thinking of. And this is precisely because of the way the mammal nervous system works. The ability to do creative mental work is severely impacted when under a perceived threat (financial doom in this case).

8. Ask HN: What's the weirdest/best thing you've done with Emacs?

Top comment by zck

The weirdest thing I have done in Emacs is using it to generate WAVE files, with a visual interface. The music loops, so you can keep playing with it. I've given talks about the package at !!Con 2021 and EmacsConf 2020.

Info about this at https://zck.org/bangbangcon2021. Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeTDIrJeriI. Bonus: the presentation itself is done from within Emacs, in another library I wrote.

9. Ask HN: Collection of Pitch Decks?

Top comment by d4rkp4ttern

The “Storytelling” framework by Andy Raskin is very much worth internalizing. His article on the Zuora deck is very popular—

The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen | by Andy Raskin | Mission.org | Medium https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-e...

The NFX website has a lot of great articles on fundraising advice. This one is on Storytelling:

The 23 Rules of Storytelling For Fundraising https://www.nfx.com/post/23-rules-storytelling-fundraising/

10. Ask HN: How can I/we make the most of a hot job market?

Top comment by ericb

1. Use recruiters. Several. Recruiters signal a company is motivated, and willing to pay more than they need to to fill a position. Tell the recruiters "I'm looking for $xxx,xxx and up." Most recruiters don't like wasting their time, so most will feel out the pricing power first.

2. Do as much interviewing in a short time as you can stomach.

3. Try to get offers from multiple companies. Tell each company that you love them best, but you've got a better offer, and you've got mouth(s) to feed, can they do any better?

4. Take the best offer you can get out of the company you think you'll like working for the most.