AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

Top comment by im_down_w_otp

For the last year or so I've noticed an increasing amount of my legitimate professional interactions going into my "Promotions" tab in Gmail. The effect of which has been, after discovering a few mishaps of this sort, to now regularly and meticulously go through a massive pile of "Promotions" just to make sure I haven't missed something legitimately urgent or important. Prior to Google's classification errors producing this particular anxiety I used to basically treat the "Promotions" tab as spam to never look at. Now I'm going through all of it with prejudice which means I'm waaaaaaay more aware of marketing drivel than I used to be. As such, I'm pretty sure this "error" is intentional on Google's part to produce exactly this outcome of drawing eyeballs to inbox advertising.

2. Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

Top comment by polote

Searching corporate wiki is pretty difficult, because contrary to something like Google, you can't use context of a search query to recommend content.

* First you have a few occurrence of the same search query in your search history (because only a few people searched similar words in the past)

* You can't either use synonyms of remove stop words to recommend better content (IT, can means "information technology, or the pronoun. THE can be an acronym, ...).

So basically the only thing you can do is search words. Confluence is worse than that because it tries to remove stop words and do things that break exact match search. But this is a difficult job. Ways to improve search: allow multi titles, index with tags, attributes, only do exact words match, allow users to suggest content for a specific search query, search autocompletion, searching in live during typing ... (many things that Confluence doesn't care about). You also have to respect rights when returning documents, each documents, can have rights from folder or document itself, inherited from team access or user access, so this is really computation intensive too, or pre-compute rights

(Working on a competitor [0] of Confluence and I have put plenty of hours of work on that specific issue, and I can tell you this is really hard)

[0] https://dokkument.com

3. Ask HN: How do I easily catalog a couple thousand physical books?

Top comment by kgodey

I have 3,476 books cataloged at the moment on https://www.librarything.com/. I bought one of their barcode scanners (https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat) to do my initial cataloging but you could also use the scan feature on their mobile app.

I prefer LibraryThing to Goodreads because LibraryThing focuses more on cataloging than social features. Their team also builds software for actual libraries. They source book data from almost 5,000 external sources so it's easy to map ISBN information with the correct edition and cover. You can also get your data out pretty easily, they offer exports in multiple formats.

EDIT: For most books, you can scan the barcode on the back to get the ISBN. Mass market paperbacks seem to usually have separate UPCs. The ISBN barcode is often located on the reverse side of the front cover, so you want to scan that one instead of the one on the back.

4. Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

Top comment by mdasen

I'd guess that it's a combination of things, but I think what sticks out to me is that a) they probably hit a plateau and felt like they needed to do something to break out of that (and didn't really have a good idea so they started "mixing things up"); and b) messaging seems like a product that everyone wants to solve, but doesn't necessarily offer amazing monetary returns.

I loved GChat. It was simple. I could use Pidgin or Adium or any number of third-party clients. It did what I needed. However, I'm guessing at some point, they were working on and maintaining a product that didn't really have the metrics that they were looking for. Growth probably slowed a lot once so many people were using it (so the honeymoon phase of "we'll figure out the money and strategy later" was over). Likewise, one of the great things about GChat was that it felt so un-monetized. There were no ads or anything. Compared to the alternatives of the day like AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc. it just felt like this easy, clean, simple messenger that worked without distractions.

When you're a company worth so many billions (now nearly two trillion), why are you putting engineering time into something that seems to have little growth and little money? Shouldn't you re-task those engineers to projects that might be the next big thing? I know that in a certain light companies can hire more people, but the hiring pool isn't infinite and you can only grow your staff so quickly without things becoming chaotic (you want enough veteran staff members around to mentor new people who don't know what is going on with the giant systems that are created in such a large company).

To me, messaging feels like a product that everyone wants to solve because it's cool, but people haven't really figured out hoe to monetize it well. I think Facebook wants messaging to reinforce its ecosystem and fend off rivals more than anything. Apple really likes iMessage because consumers seem to be really into iMessage and it seems to create a positive feedback loop to get people to buy iPhones (I'm an iPhone user and I don't get what's so great about iMessage, but people are really passionate about it). What does Google get out of messaging? What does Signal get out of it? Signal and Telegram have both been looking for business models and they've looked into cryptocurrency, but I'd argue that neither has really found a business model.

The messaging apps that seem to have found business models are the ones that aren't general chat/text replacements, but community chat systems like Discord and Slack. Microsoft's efforts with Teams and the new Google Hangouts Chat/Meet enterprise Slack clone show that Microsoft and Google see a Slack competitor as where the money is in messaging. It's easy to get a company to give you $5-25/mo per user when they're spending $5,000-50,000 per month on that user already (not just salary, but benefits, office space, equipment, etc).

I think the real problem is that there's little money to be made in the old Gmail/GChat messaging. So, in comes some project manager that wants to make their bones solving a potentially large market in messaging and they don't have any wonderful ideas, but they're hoping that if they move enough things around and rebrand enough things they can cherry-pick some metrics and show how genius they are and why they deserve a big promotion. You don't get recognition and promotions for keeping a ship steady in calm seas. Combine that with a product that doesn't seem to meet expectations for return on engineering investment and why should Google keep investing in this?

If we look at the companies that have succeeded, they're not general messaging apps and they're usually aimed at taking advantage of an enterprise play - with a generous enough free tier that home people can play with it. I think Google didn't want to continue offering a general purpose messenger that didn't have a path to profitable growth. They also didn't want to abandon messaging. So they kept shaking things up trying to find product market fit - profitable fit, not just something that free users enjoyed without something in it for Google.

5. Ask HN: What can I do to actively fight climate change?

Top comment by andrewljohnson

Ignore the crunchy comments saying don't eat meat, don't have kids, and don't drive. You have no impact as a consumer or influencer.

What you can do is:

* a) find someone working on climate change, and help write software for them part-time as a volunteer

* b) brainstorm an idea for a site/app, and build it yourself (and of course post it to HN)

* c) quit your job, join an organization focused on climate change, and do some work

* d) start researching more about climate change until you can make a better choice about a or b or c

If you can't commit a big chunk of time to it, then research good orgs focused on climate change, and donate money to them (or angel invest in them). That's the next best thing you can do.

6. Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

Top comment by PragmaticPulp

No, Facebook and Instagram are not monitoring conversations. Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being communicated with the servers.

Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth (if uploaded to the cloud). Enough that it would be immediately obvious if apps were trying to do this.

That is, if they even could. iOS limits what apps can even do in the background and shows an icon when the microphone is in use in the background. Again, it would be obvious if apps were listening.

But let’s assume that somehow they managed to avoid all of these pitfalls and they were listening to conversations, performing speech to text, and uploading your conversations. This would require communication with their servers, which isn’t difficult to extract through basic reverse engineering. Many security researchers reverse engineer these communications on a regular basis to look for bugs, some of which can be worth six figures in these companies’ bounty programs. If there was an API for uploading your secret conversations, it would be the holy grail discovery for a security researcher. Someone would have found it.

The myth persists because coincidences will happen in high numbers at scale. If hundreds of millions of people are spending hours on social media each week, some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance. Add in a general distrust for big tech companies right now and some subset of people will become convinced that their coincidences are evidence of a conspiracy.

7. Ask HN: What are some other general link aggregators aside from HN?

Top comment by petercooper

It's not like those you list as there's no voting, but I maintain https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ which is a river of links to posts on over 500 software engineering related blogs. There's an OPML file if you want to take the feeds into your own reader or you can submit feeds to add.

Oh, I also run https://rubyflow.com/ which is a MetaFilter-style linklog for the Ruby community, and somehow gets a fair few posts each day.

8. Ask HN: What're some great cities to live for $2k USD per month?

Top comment by ggm

Montevideo. Some options a bit limited there but good internet and handy access to B.A. along with a congenial climate.

For much of NZ/AU, this is too low for rent unless you can find a share house. Assuming you did, Melbourne, Brisbane, Wellington might work. That said, a LOT of money goes on rent.

Turkey and Greece aside, I don't think the core EU economies will work out. If you go to the more recent entrants on the fringe (Czech republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia) you'd be in budget.

Much of south-east Asia would be fine on this. Bangkok, Hanoi, Kuala-Lumpur, Chang Mai. Or Indonesia. You won't keep head above water in Beijing or Tokyo on this income, I can't speak for other cities in region.

Many economies now have digital nomad visa, its $2k class cost but then gives you rights to be there beyond 90 day tourist visa.

9. Ask HN: Where is the open source smart TV firmware?

Top comment by wolrah

There really isn't anything because there isn't much reason to do it beyond "because I can".

The SoCs used in smart TVs are mostly older ARM and MIPS chips with just enough power for what they need to do so it's not like a game console where it's an interesting development target.

Beyond that, by their nature TVs have inputs, so plugging in your own device that runs whatever you want is trivial, so there's no real need to get something running on that device specifically when you can shove a stick in a HDMI socket and make it do whatever.

If the telemetry and whatever are your main concern you can just not connect the TV to the internet in the first place.

10. Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

Top comment by SwSwinger

I was 27, living in the Southern USA with a MS from a State University, feeling very similar to you. I decided to push through my comfortable malaise and got offers at early Amazon AWS & Facebook back in 2009. It changed my life trajectory completely. I worked a little bit harder but got exponentially better payoff and interesting problems. Recommendations:

1. Getting into a more prestigious company is likely your next step. You only need to stay there 2-4 years but, since colleges are more corrupt, it's really the modern grad degree that proves your worth. FAANG or a reputable startup is your best option (LinkedIn Top 50 or Breakout List). The crazy hours you hear about are more self-imposed than you think, not mandatory.

2. If FAANG isn't calling you back, this means that you likely weren't even close on the interviews (Medium to Strong - No Hire). The interview algorithms are a heavily game-ified system and these companies expect you to study and game them so hard that answering the questions are second nature. I used to resent this, then I realized that it's actually a really good way to filter a large group of people with less class bias. If anyone can pass but they have to create their own 2-4 month gradual study plan to ace it, who is competent enough to pull that off? Often, in a larger org, you are encouraged to ignore your instincts and game-ify on arbitrary metrics to achieve larger-multistage company goals anyways. Adjusting my mindset this way helped me get the fortitude I needed to be better here.

3. Coding Competitions are another good way to get noticed by companies. The existing algo interviews started as NP-complete puzzles and Coding competitions and many people came to Facebook from that route (https://github.com/robertdimarco/puzzles/tree/master/faceboo...). Kaggle is the new equivalent for ML. It's a great time to get into ML via a non-traditional route and will likely turn into the existing algo interview frustration as it matures.