AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

Top comment by agentofoblivion

I don’t think many of these comments are realistic. I’m truth, these clauses are likely defensive, particularly for tech companies. There is an almost 100% chance that if you started a company and left your job, your company will not register your coming or going in the slightest. If you’re some famous person that ends up starting some billion dollar company, and it was in an area highly relevant to your job, you might have a problem. Or if you try to sue them to stop doing something you created while employed for them. But if you’re just a regular person that starts some business that’s moderately successful (already an unlikely scenario), everything is going to be fine. It will likely take you YEARS and YEARS of toiling in obscurity before you come even close to profitability, and that’s if you’re lucky. You think some big tech company is even going to remember you? Even if you build a multimillion dollar business, that’s a drop in the bucket for them, not to mention legal fees, difficulty of enforcing the dubious contract, and the bad PR of squashing a former employee’s business.

2. Ask HN: A Good Alternative for ReCaptcha?

Top comment by tpetry

For bots which are not specifically targeted at your page i simply add an invisible form element named url. Bots _LOVE_ to share their viagra urls. Any request which submitted an url is discarded.

This trick is simple stupid and should not work but somehow the simple spam bots have not improved.

This does not work for sophisticated bots (never met one) or the ones programmed specifically for your site (happens very rarely).

3. Ask HN: How do I make sure my non-technical parents are safe online?

Top comment by wittedhaddock

I work for a phone company, Community Phone, whose majority customers are seniors. We periodically check in with our customers over text message (helping make sure they achieve their goals, like using Uber, or whatever... which is our business: to enable an improvement in overall quality of life via phones, rather than phones in themselves). As a result, many of our customers FB message/call/email/text us as a sanity check any time they receive solicitation online. It's a service we happily provide, but it does require them to reach out to us, as opposed to us knowing when to intervene. Other than that, I will be monitoring this thread very closely for more general and automated solutions. Thanks very much for asking this question.

4. Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

Top comment by rossdavidh

This will sound odd, but hear me out: assuming that whichever way you choose, it will be wrong, which would you choose? If you quit this job to pursue your side project, and that doesn't pan out, will you forever regret having given up this job? Or, if you don't quit this job, will you forever hate your career because part of you is wondering what would have happened if you just "went for it"?

Figure out which mistake would be less crushing, and do that one. If it happens to actually work out, great. If not, at least you won't be spending the rest of your life regretting.

By the way, for reasons I won't speculate on, this method (assume failure, which would you pick) turns out to be a pretty good way of picking the option more likely to succeed, actually. But assume you won't succeed no matter what, and use that scenario to decide which way to go.

5. Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

Top comment by smacktoward

Let me answer your question with another question. How old are you?

Because I'm in my 40s, which means I was in my 20s during the 1990s. And from my perspective, it was not a notably simpler time back then than it is today. It was not some pastoral idyll, it was just a time a lot like now, except it was a little harder to get a hold of people.

But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they often talk about the '90s as some kind of dramatically simpler time. But that's not because of anything about the '90s; it's because they were children during the '90s, and people of all ages look back on their childhood as a simpler time. This is true even of people who grew up in objectively much more difficult times, like the 1930s and '40s. It's not that the world children grow up in isn't complicated, it's that they don't comprehend all the complications. You don't start to appreciate that stuff until you reach adulthood. So to everybody, childhood is like a lost paradise.

This is part of why nostalgia is such a seductive trap. It's so easy to look back on the past and think that it was something it wasn't. So if you try to make it your mission to restore that lost paradise, to restore something that never really existed in the first place, all you end up doing is chasing shadows.

6. Ask HN: How to initiate or respond to small talk (not the programming language)?

Top comment by munchbunny

Other posters have already given great tips for questions to ask, so I thought I'd add my overall approach. I assume that you're not specifically asking about small talk, but rather about how to hold conversations with strangers, such as in a party setting, maybe to kill time, maybe to get to know someone (your date?) better.

I am normally an introvert and I am somewhere between bad and okay at small talk because it bores the hell out of me, but I hold my own perfectly fine in conversational settings.

The key for me was to understand that small talk is like kindling, not firewood. It'll get a conversation started, but it's very hard to keep it going with just small talk. If you want an interesting and satisfying conversation that flows (relatively) naturally and where you really get to know someone better, you have to move past small talk quickly.

So I might start with mentions of the weather (common opener), or if they're parents, questions about their kids. However, I don't try to have a conversation about weather. I'm actually rapidly scanning for something substantial to work with. What do you do in bad weather? Good weather? Oh, you play pick-up soccer? Are you a soccer fan? Which club? Do you ever bet on games? Who do you play with? How did you meet them? Oh you're from North Carolina? Ok, can you tell me what the difference is between your barbecue and Texan barbecue? I've been told they're different, but I've never tried it.

That takes... maybe two minutes? And now we can have a conversation where this person spends the next five minutes telling me about how they do their briskets. When they finish, I either end the conversation so that it doesn't die a slow death, or I go back to prospecting for topics.

If the prospecting strategy isn't turning anything up but I get the sense that they're the touchy feely type, I sometimes try intentional vulnerability. "Hey, can I get your opinion on something? I'm trying to figure out what to get a friend for their birthday, but I'm bad at thinking of presents and I'm running out of time."

If I think they're the thoughtful type I might just go straight for something heavyweight like "so in your work, what keeps you up at night?"

If they're just not really responding, you shouldn't try to force it. There are people (and some really smart people) who might have to warm up to you first. If I were a better conversationalist, maybe that wouldn't be necessary, but I'm not, so sometimes the conversation just isn't going to go anywhere, and that's okay.

7. Ask HN: What are your other favorite communities other than Hacker News?

Top comment by jakebasile

I spend a lot of time on Reddit, though I know HN likes to hate on it. There are lots of subreddits that I enjoy participating in there and I can curate what I want to be part of. I have a multireddit specifically for memes and jokes, some for the different video games I play, and one big multireddit for guns and related stuff.

The website is moderately usable but an independent app called Apollo really makes it a pleasant experience on my iOS devices. Hoping for a macOS port sometime.

Edit to add some specific communities:

/r/GunDeals is one of my favorites, but is incredibly dangerous to my wallet.

/r/CCW is a great resource for concealed carriers.

I know it's childish, but the various meme subreddits can be hilarious at times. I like /r/historymemes /r/grimdank (warhammer memes) and /r/lotrmemes among others.

I also keep subscribed to /r/Clojure and others but I get most of my professional news from HN.

/r/DestinyTheGame and /r/DestinyLore are fun but the former can get a little salty when things in game are changed.

8. Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

Top comment by tictacttoe

I think what companies really want is smart generalists with advanced math, programming, and modeling skills coupled with domain knowledge. That skill set will always carry high value in technical companies.

The reason it carries value is the skills are difficult to acquire. I think the recent decline in interest reflects the rise of new data science candidates that are taking the path of least resistance to a career in data science. Rather than pursuing problem solving, people are pursuing "data science" which is a nebulous term in and of itself.

9. Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

Top comment by mtmail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Transit_Feed_Specifica... is the most used file format. Public transport companies used to submit their information to Google Maps and similar (the 'G' used to stand for 'Google'). You can find those searching for 'GTFS ' in various open data portals.

Alternatively OpenStreetMap is a huge global dataset. Buses are a small part of https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport It's easy to extract bus stops https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API (https://overpass-turbo.eu/) but you're probably interested in routes as well. It's a rabbit hole of complexity, e.g. a bus terminal is multiple bus stops, some buses skip stops based on time of day, weekday, season (school buses), some stops are just for drivers to take a break or refuel, direction of route matters.

The transport view on https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/21.3308/-157.8868&laye... is a pretty nice visualization. For specific questions on OSM tools there is https://help.openstreetmap.org/ and a mailing list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit

10. Ask HN: Resources on how Google/Facebook etc. approach software design?

Top comment by notacoward

The design process at Facebook is, to put it charitably, a bit minimal. "Move fast" is taken to mean start writing code immediately, then iterate on that to approach the desired outcome. Developers are rewarded for landing code in production each review period, even if that code provides little benefit, will need to be rewritten, and might even be buggy. In the rush, careful design and testing (which might delay landing in production and result in a bad review) get pretty short shrift. Some might say that there's risk or waste either way, and that velocity rules all. I'm not going to say they're wrong, but it makes "software design at Facebook" a bit of an oxymoron.