AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: My country may be in the midst of a coup – how should I get prepared?

Top comment by slim

Hey Ahmed I live in Tunisia too. You seem to be young enough to not remember how it was to live under the dictatorship 10 years ago. I'm a political activist from the Pirate Party, and I've been arrested twice under the dictatorship and I'm not as worried as you are. Send me an email if you want to chat. I'm slim@pirate.tn

2. Ask HN: Does anyone use keyboard/mouse extra buttons for coding?

Top comment by ashtonkem

My mouse (Logitech G604) has six side buttons, three extra top bottoms, and has the following programmed on it:

- copy

- paste

- enter

- forward

- back

- Zoom mic toggle[0]

- OSX screen left/right (activated by pushing the mouse wheel left or right).

- Volume up/down (on top of the mouse)

Screen left/right is the most important things I do with the mouse aside from the normal pointing and clicking. For the side buttons, copy, paste, and enter are the overwhelming winners. These alone probably reduce the back and forth between keyboard and mouse by half. I regularly forget that the other three are there.

In retrospect, the correct answer is to select whatever key combinations you end up alternating back and forth between your keyboard and mouse to enter and program it into your mouse. This will reduce switching, which is faster and reduces strain.

My keyboard (Ergodox EZ) has a “hyper” button on it, which is the combination of every modifier key on my keyboard. This lets me program shortcuts like ctrl+alt+shift+command+o, which is pretty easy to reach and guaranteed to have no collisions. I currently only use this for o (optimize imports) and i (indent document) in IntelliJ. It’s a neat trick, but the mouse stuff above has so far been more important to me.

Then again I’m also a manager now, so take that last bit with a grain of salt. I might do more keyboard wizardry if I was a full time engineer still.

0 - This was really useful right up until I built a custom zoom control box with toggle switches (with covers!) for my lights, camera, and mic. Now it’s unused, but I haven’t found anything I do commonly enough to justify putting in this spot. I need to make a post showing this off one of these days.

3. Ask HN: Do you have a process or a framework to learn specific skills quickly?

Top comment by aronowb14

I built a process for myself when self teaching coding that generalizes pretty well (have used for it for coding, basketball, 3D art, and most recently cooking).

Revolves around Dr. Strange quote: “mastery comes from theory and practice”.

I start by finding books/resources for absolute beginners. Examples: (Salt fat acid heat [cooking] blenderguru [3d art] Murachs intro to Java [coding].

Next I go through the entire resource cover to cover, and as I learn I add interesting projects to an ongoing list. I find the more I learn, the more interesting the subject gets and the more I want to learn.

The key to getting this cover to cover completion to work though is habit building. I force myself to do the activity every day for at least ten minutes. It sucks in the beginning, but after 2-3 days it becomes super duper easy and I find myself working for hours over that ten minutes.

Once I finish the intro resource: I find the next resource that suits my level… rinse and repeat after that :).

Other stuff that helps/optimizes the process:

Focus on meta learning. Figure out what works for you as you learn. Reflect often.

Surround yourself with experts on the topic if you can.

4. Ask HN: How did you establish and maintain relationships with your first users?

Top comment by snide

I'm going to give a fun alternative example.

I used to run some popular publishing websites around entertainment: gaming, movies, tech...etc.

I talked to our first users entirely through our message boards, which had PM systems built in. The regulars were there almost every day and I got to know them fairly well. We'd talk daily and I used the message board to show off new designs I was working on. Eventually they started their own fan podcast (this was 2008 or so mind you) and I'd show up as a guest to support their love of the websites. They'd be surprised I'd show up. Me? I was surprised they went to so much trouble to support my site.

Eventually we just hired a bunch of these early users at interns. One we hired permanently, and others we helped get jobs within the gaming industry. I don't see them that often in person anymore (I've since moved) but I'm happy to see them with their own thriving careers and consider a couple of them friends.

I sometimes wonder if the move away from message boards and towards larger communities like Reddit and Twitter would have allowed for this kind of clubhouse atmosphere. It's one of the bits of the old Internet I occasionally miss.

5. Ask HN: Why is YouTube adding “&pp=sAQA” to video URLs?

Top comment by cesarb

It's fairly annoying for other reasons than just shell quoting. For instance, I use the browser history to know whether I've already watched some video; this extra parameter makes all these video links appear to be unvisited to the browser (since back when I visited them, that useless extra parameter didn't exist).

6. Ask HN: How do you chill your mind after work?

Top comment by babycake

Don't work as hard as you're doing at work. You're giving your employer all your creative and mental energy. This is the source of why you feel drained. If you don't fix this, it will eventually lead to burnout down the road (it could take a few years). All the other solutions are just hacks and workarounds while working 200% at your job. Those won't address the core of your problem.

Focus on your GF and personal experiences, your work will never treat you as humanely as life. You only live once, enjoy it!

7. Ask HN: What is your favourite stocks/options trading platform?

Top comment by tedyoung

I like TD Ameritrade (now owned by Schwab, but still has their own web site) for its generally good execution (as far as I can tell), but mostly because it still has the best mobile (iPad) app that I use for the majority of my stock and options trading. Note that there are two apps: TD Ameritrade and thinkorswim (aka TOS). TOS is the one you want, and their desktop TOS app is also really good, but I actually find the iPad app to be more than sufficient for most of my trading.

They continue to work and improve it (which I'm relieved about, because Schwab's mobile app is awful, Webull is worse, and I don't know how anyone uses RobinHood for options trading, it's so hard to do cancel/replace orders with them, which I do constantly).

8. Ask HN: Why didn't the early web support more client side languages?

Top comment by softwaredoug

Flash and Java applets were a big thing, these ARE client side languages. But to work well the vendor had to install a runtime on your PC. Back in the day JavaScript/HTML was too slow and inconsistent for intensive client side work. So people that wanted into intense client side apps used these runtimes.

Cross platform support across many vendors has always been hard. Look at cross platform libraries in C. Different compilers, OS, and std library implementations. Python or Ruby on the other hand have one “vendor” that works to make the runtime consistent on different platforms.

So for something like Python or Ruby to work well, it’d need to either be:

1. A central vendor driving development, who would need to manage and install a runtime on your computer

Or

2. All browser vendors have to buy into a single spec and make a very consistent implementation across their browsers.

Or

3. Compile to JavaScript (or web asm etc)

For (2) browser vendors already invest heavily in JavaScript and have a hard time keeping up! For (1) I’m not sure why any language vendor cares to try to compete with JavaScript seriously. The browser is quite different environment than the CLI or Desktop that it’d be a significant investment without clear upside.

We do see (3) with Typescript and Coffeescript. These create some debugging friction. Also as JavaScript gets marginally better the appeal of these other languages can feel more niche, and many people just use the common denominator.

9. Ask HN: DNS Outage?

Top comment by pgl

https://edgedns.status.akamai.com/

We are aware of an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service.

We are actively investigating the issue. If you have questions or are experiencing impact due to this issue, please contact Akamai Technical Support. In the interest of time, we are providing you the most current information available, which is subject to changes, corrections, and updates.

Jul 22, 16:09 UTC

10. Ask HN: How did you validate your webapp product/market fit?

Top comment by leesalminen

I co-founded a niche SMB B2B SaaS product. Both my cofounder and I had day jobs. We worked nights/weekends to get to MVP and had 1 free beta customer use it during the day. After getting good feedback from the 1 customer we went to a trade show and got our first couple paying customers. I convinced my cofounder to leave his day job and I would use my salary to pay his bills until we got a few more customers so I could quit my day job. During that period we found an angel investor (a big potential customer who liked the MVP but wanted to see more features). I transitioned to full-time as soon as the check cleared. It worked! Though, luck and timing were the major factors involved for us. Good luck to you!