AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

Top comment by bxparks

A Fujitsu S1500 ScanSnap, dual-sided, document scanner (now discontinued, replacement might be the iX1600). Completely changed how I manage my personal documents (e.g. financial, invoices, receipts, product manuals, medical info, business docs, recreation and hobby stuff, etc). Anything remotely important, I scan to PDF, which triggers automatic OCR that is reasonably accurate, then I upload the PDF to Google Drive, which is organized into a hierarchy of folders.

Google Drive's internal search is not good enough when there are 100s of documents with similar titles, so I try to maintain a consistent naming convention "{yyyy-mm-dd} {summary of document}". Electronic documents (e.g. bank and credit card statements) are downloaded as PDF and uploaded to the same Google Drive folder hierarchy.

The originals go into a set of 12 file folders labeled "Jan" to "Dec". The folders become a ring buffer. Every month, I empty out the upcoming month, by shredding the originals from 12 months ago. I got rid of a 4-drawer filing cabinet by incrementally scanning the original paper documents over several weeks.

(Edit: fix typo)

2. Ask HN: My friend made it big. How to handle?

Top comment by ackbar03

Hahahaha I faced this exact problem as well, very good friend of mine since high school, one of the blockbuster ipos last year. Guys a billionaire

Not sure if my advice will change anything or even help but this is sort of how I handled it

1. Recognize that it's only natural to feel that way. It's not that your not happy for him and want him to fail, but your more concerned with your own progress given where he is at life. I think that might stop you feeling like your a shit person for feeling bad

2. Your problem is you feel like your wasting your time so do something about it. If you do come to the conclusion that there's not much to be done, you'll probably feel better as well. Personally I spent a lot of time reflecting on what I was doing and quit my job for my own startup. Although it wasn't a complete failure, I'm definitely financially worse off than if I had stuck to my job, but all feelings of jealousy I previously had to my friends who struck it rich doing startups were gone, since you appreciate the opportunity cost they had to give up had they chosen to go for some high paying job like banking.

3. Ask HN: What are you using to replace shared iCloud Photos albums?

Top comment by hdjjhhvvhga

Personally I don't trust anything that I don't self-host. With Hetzner I chose full-metal instead of VPS. I pay €40 for 4 TB (2x4 TB mirrored to be precise) shared among a large number of services, including Minecraft servers for kids. The load is very low and the maintenance is a pleasure. Plus I love tinkering with and learning new things, so this part of mine is fully satisfied. I learned with Hetzner that every 3 years or so a hard drive dies but they replace it within half an hour so I just let the RAID rebuild itself and that's all.

4. Ask HN: Is domain squatting still profitable? Is there a solution?

Top comment by suby

I had a personal website where the URL was literally my full legal name. The domain would be of no interest to anyone other than me. I let it lapse around 2019 because I didn't want to pay for renewal, and figured I'd be fine leaving the site offline.

Immediately upon letting it lapse it's bought by someone who I believe lives in Russia. They took my website, rehosted an old version found on archive.org, and then put advertisements on the site. It was not rehosted well, half of the links were broken. I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to embed malware on there too.

I emailed the hosting company (DigitalFyre) with a DMCA request to get it taken down. Their support assured me they'd take it down but they never did.

After a year of it being up the domain expired and I bought it back just to prevent someone else from doing the same. I figured it wouldn't be profitable for them so I made the decision to wait them out early on.

I'm thinking the entire process is automated, where they'll buy up expired domains, rehost archived versions, and hope for either the previous owner to purchase it back or for ad revenue to make it worthwhile.

Absolute scum of the earth.

5. Ask HN: Is anyone working on an open hardware 3G/4G dongle?

Top comment by cookiengineer

Might be only a bit related, but osmocomBB [1] is a quite complete project that implemented an open baseband library.

It can be installed on a lot of old dumbphones and allows to create a base station and mobile station. Might help you to understand the inner workings of the network protocol quirks.

Back then it was known to be _the_ project to easily build an IMSI catcher, so its scene got a lot of redteamers using it.

There is also an ongoing effort to reverse engineer the usb modem of the pinephone, but afaik it's still a lot of work. [2]

[1] https://osmocom.org/projects/baseband

[2] https://github.com/Biktorgj/pinephone_modem_sdk

6. Ask HN: Inconsistent expression calculation between programming languages

Top comment by psyklic

This is solely due to differences in the / and % operators:

  # int/int -> int
  POSTGRESQL = 8291561284461.33301440
  SQUILU = 8291561284461.3
  JAVA = 8.291561284461331E12
  D = 8.29156e+12

  # int/int -> float
  LUA = 11665910614443
  PYTHON3 = 11665910614443.387

  # int/int -> float, UNIQUE: pos%neg -> neg
  JAVSCRIPT = 8036090802426.098
  MYSQL = 8036090802312.071      # single-precision FLOAT

  # int/int -> int, UNIQUE: negint/posint -> negint (the floor)
  PYTHON2 = 1.1107636287e+13
  RUBY = 11107636286950.146

  # int/int -> int, UNIQUE: negfloat%posint -> negint (the ceil)
  SQLITE = 8290383058308.3

  # int/int -> float, UNIQUE: negfloat%posint -> negint (the ceil)
  PHP = 8035491468054

7. Ask HN: Senior Software Engineer to Engineering Manager

Top comment by motohagiography

My experience with going back and forth between manager and IC a few times over my career (I prefer to be what I call a radical-IC, usually a specialist consultant), it's important to understand how different the competencies are.

First, a manager is not a super-engineer. Rarely are super-engineers good managers, and rarely are exceptional managers really good engineers.

Second, we need to separate management from leadership, and this razor does it really well: leadership scales effort, management extracts value.

Super-engineers have some natural leadership because they can scale their brains by adding others with clear explanations, mentoring, and leveraging others. However, this also is why you can have great team leadership on products that go nowhere because there is no one managing to figure out how to extract the value from the amazing technical feats your scaled and well-led team is accomplishing.

Teams with lots of management but little leadership feel like optimizing to get blood from a stone, because micromanagement is the antithesis of scaling effort, as it's about micro-optimizing extracting value on a linear, monotonic basis without any scale. But that's just the anti-pattern. Great management is when you have customers who are happy and interested in what you are doing because you've managed to extract value from your team and made them that way. You've given customers the thing that empowers them in their own organizations because you understand the factors that go into your product, and how to balance them so that what comes out is valuable to others.

Third, to transition to management, find a role to do pure management in a domain that isn't your top skill, where you can focus on the aggregate value instead of getting sucked into solving the problems themselves. This is counter-intuitive, but most important things are, so if you are a good programmer, don't start with managing developers. Do ops or better, a customer success/support team. Product is cool and interesting, but it's still an IC role, management means extracting value from teams. The path to CTO means managing teams and departments, so find something unsexy (like customer support) and take that on.

Alternatively, join a small company or startup and take over one of their teams, or get a 6-12mo contracting gig as a project manager with resource accountability. Long comment, and YMMV, but consider these dynamics on your quest.

8. Ask HN: Do you use Purism, PinePhone, or Fairphone?

Top comment by linmob

I have two PinePhones and a Librem 5. I mostly use my 3GB/32GB postmarketOS CE PinePhone, running Arch Linux ARM, as I do blog [0] and try to maintain an app list [1] and testing new features or apps on Arch is just way easier, than on Debian (PureOS, Mobian) or on postmarketOS. The PinePhone is slow, but works mostly fine, so does the Librem 5, which is a tad faster spec wise, but generally feels more smooth.

Sadly, on both devices, the battery life is not what it should be. On the PinePhone, active use trashes the battery (no surprise if you have knowledge of ARM SoCs), but it lasts pretty long if you don't use it too much. With the Librem 5, active use is better, but as long as Purism don't implement a standby mode, 8-11 hours is all you get until you need to find an electrical outlet.

P.S.: I also have the Gigaset hardware that the Volla Phone is derived from, and run Ubuntu Touch on it. It's fine, but it does not run a mainline kernel, so it's a different kind of Linux phone and does not really compare 1:1 to Librem 5 and PinePhone.

[0] https://linmob.net [1] https://linmobapps.frama.io

9. Ask HN: It's 2021 and QuickTime still doesn't export MP4. What is going on?

Top comment by rchaud

Handbrake for MacOS is far better than anything Apple could come up with in-house. It's free as well. Converts anything into anything.

I first heard of Handbrake 15 years ago when a friend told me he borrowed DVDs from the college library and burned them to his HDD using it. I started using it myself only in 2021 to compress videos for web projects. A 2MB MP4 video I've managed to compress to 200KB without much visual degradation on mobile.

https://handbrake.fr/

10. Ask HN: What do you intend to do about Apple's invasion of your privacy?

Top comment by kevinventullo

Nothing. I think it is naive in the first place to think your data was ever safe on a closed platform. If the federal government or anyone else with influence over Apple is a serious part of your threat model, you probably shouldn’t be using a phone at all.

Did you ever read Three-Body Problem? I lead my digital life as if I am being watched and tracked all the time.