AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?

Top comment by jordwest

I want to bring back old school distributed forum communities but modernise them in a way that respects attention and isn’t a notification factory.

Mastodon is a pretty inspirational project but the Twitter influence shows, I miss the long form writing that was encouraged before our attention spans were eroded.

Not at all close to solving it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. Would love to hear if there are others like me out there and what you imagine such a community to look like.

2. Ask HN: Why don’t you use Linux as your daily driver OS?

Top comment by captainmisery

I'm using Windows 10. In the past year I've tried: Manjaro, Fedora, Linux Mint and some others.

Why I'm not switching? Because every time I login there is something that needs a quick update or a quick fix.

After I've tried Fedora the last time, I turned on my PC and the resolution of my monitor switched to 800x600 from the 1920x1080. There was no way of setting it back to the correct resolution.

"Well, you know, you could just SUDO this, or SUDO that."

Yeah. I know. But I don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that. I want a operating system that just works.

I installed Windows 10, took 10 minutes, everything works great.

3. Ask HN: How to negotiate stock options?

Top comment by viksit

Having been on both sides here are my 2c. Pardon any brevity since i’m on mobile and in transit. Id advise reading up on these at this excellent guide (1).

Comp at startups are generally a sliding scale of cash to equity. A typical offer will ask you to slide it one way or another.

To judge stock, ask for,

- 409a valuation to know the current strike price of the shares

- total outstanding fully diluted shares to know the total shares available

- size of the employee option pool (eg, 10-15pct)

- possibility of an 83(b) election

- ISO vs NSO - what kind uf options are they?

- re ups, and anti dilution clauses?

- triggering events (eg what happens when the company gets bought?)

The more you know the better you judge the value. If folks are cagey in giving details, definitely push back and ask why.

Next, consider that the company’s progress is all that determines your shares net worth.

- how much do you believe in this team, space and product?

- and ask yourself - are you able to completely push this into a “lost cause financially” bucket in 5y? or do you need the cash? i’d advise being comfortable with the former :)

lastly, look at how much value you bring to the table to determine how much you get. if you’re engineer 1 with two non tech cofounders - you’d be worth much more than engineer 10. In that case, look at some of the blog posts online (esp by folks like Leo Polovets) on some ways to think about these numbers.

good luck!

(1) https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation

4. Ask HN: What type of personal NAS would you recommend?

Top comment by andy800

This advice makes me extremely unpopular in NAS forums, but I strongly recommend you never use any other RAID option than RAID-1. When a disk goes bad, you have a single mirror disk that you can directly and immediately connect to your computer and recover from. With any of the NAS proprietary RAIDs, or something like RAID-5, you'll need to somehow hook up 3 or 5 disks to your computer to have any chance of a recovery.

The NAS gurus always say "RAID is not a backup", and it is true you should have additional backups. But no backup solution is perfect, none get updated every day, especially if you plan on keeping the backup off-site. For most users, the NAS is the backup. All I'm saying is that when a disk fails on your NAS, you'll be in panic mode and will want the easiest, most direct path to data recovery, and there is no RAID option in this scenario preferable than RAID-1.

5. Ask HN: It seems like everyone is getting rich?

Top comment by hdjjhhvvhga

It is not true, you see it because people like to brag. But they prefer to hide their problems, sometimes very deep. The society discourages talking about these things unless you are close friends. Whereas positive aspects are amplified.

I give you an example. I have a couple of friends with two kids. They have an amazing FB/Instagram feed. You immediately see a wonderful model family living in a beautiful house, traveling together, enjoying every moment together, all smiling. It seems like they are always having fun in all possible places (it made my other friend who can't have kids a bit depressed).

One day I decided to visit their house and was a bit shocked. The kids were basically terrorizing the family. The father was half-alive but trying to smile all the time, sometimes unsuccessfully. The whole house was very cold because they spent too much on it and couldn't afford heating it adequately. But the most depressing was a bad smell from nearby chimneys of their neighbors. Apparently they couldn't do anything about. For me it was a living hell, I couldn't live in such a place for one day.

6. Ask HN: Do any discussion boards that aren't Facebook/Reddit still exist?

Top comment by malthaus

2 music / modular / synth communities that both underwent recent name changes to be more in line with current sensibilities:

https://gearspace.com (used to be: gearslutz)

https://modwiggler.com (used to be: muffwiggler)

7. Ask HN: Suspended by Google Domains

Top comment by DoItToMe81

There's nothing you can do. Google will not listen unless there's giant public outcry. I would recommend going with a more proven registrar and trying your hardest to inform your community of the new domain before it's too late.

8. Ask HN: Why does validating a user require 14000 files?

Top comment by jraph

Slightly out of topic, but beware when using Google to authenticate everywhere. The day Google decides to lock your account and they don't care about you, you are locked out of your digital life.

By the way, I go out of my way to avoid signing into services using third parties for this reason. I don't use a Google account neither so I would be locked out of any service requiring one.

Your service will be highly dependent on Google if you only allow signing with Google and if they have a failure, your service will be unusable. Allowing other providers would highly improve this.

9. Ask HN: What is the highest consulting rate that you have come across, in tech?

Top comment by eastbayjake

It wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't immediately point you to @patio11's authoritative post about why developers should indeed imagine such high rates: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

10. Ask HN: One Person, $1M Company

Top comment by Rd6n6

There are several solo indie game devs who passed that threshold. Jonathan blow (braid), Daisuke Amaya (cave story), Dean Dodrill (dust), Markus Persson (mine craft), Lucas Pope (papers please), etc

The average outcome for a serious indie game release is about 16k though https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A...

Wish me luck with my own when it finally releases (pre alpha atm) https://barbariangrunge.com