AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Where are all the old Show HNs?

Top comment by gnicholas

When I was working as a full-time lawyer, one of my colleagues told me to join HN and consider posting my side project there. I literally posted my Show HN [1] from my desk at the law firm, before going to lunch one day. My post made it to the front page, I took a screenshot, and then went off to lunch — figuring that was as good as it would get.

While I was gone, my post entered the top 3 and then hit the top spot. It stayed there for most of the rest of the day, and into the wee hours of the morning.

I happened to have been invited to a VC mixer that afternoon, and I remember everyone was super impressed that some random lawyer had posted a Show HN that was literally-at-that-moment the top post on HN. Some guy from Samsung introduced me to his boss' boss and said they should license it (the first of many leads I failed to convert on!) I left my legal job a while later to work on BeeLine full-time, and it's been 7 years since then.

We didn't go the traditional VC route, partly because we didn't have huge capital needs. Instead, I've mostly bootstrapped the thing, and we now have customers like Blackboard and Stanford (and a couple partnerships with HN/YCers, too! [2] [3]). There have been times where I considered going back to my legal career, but I would have kept BeeLine running in the background if so. I'm super appreciative to the community here, since it was what prompted me to make the transition to this very rewarding path!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

2: https://insightbrowser.com/

3: https://www.programaudioseries.com/

2. Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

Top comment by nzmsv

The below is a joke, but sadly it is representative of most teams I have worked on.

If it's like anything that most managers do, you have the team come up with estimates, have some meetings to see if you missed anything, discover that you did, then create a schedule, remembering to add slack time for unforeseen interruptions due to people getting sick, customer issues, etc.

Then you see that the schedule is too long. Slowly but surely browbeat the team into saying "yes" to the question "do you think this can be done faster" on every task. Do this some more when someone from sales asks if something can be delivered in a particular quarter.

Get very stressed out when the real project deliverable dates align much more closely with the original estimate than the unrealistic one. Micromanage your people and stress them out. Keep freaking out as you miss every deadline in the "pipe dream" plan.

Deliver the project with a mild slip compared to the original plan (because you missed something major in the original planning as it is impossible to foresee everything). Use the twice-too-short plan as your metric though. Still, the product is awesome, so give your people a pat on the back.

Hold a "lessons learned" presentation swearing to never do this again. Speak at length about how critical good estimation is. Go on to repeat the very same exercise for your next project.

Just had an idea: maybe keep the version of the timeline from before you haggle down the dates and keep checking which one matches reality better? You don't have to tell the developers that you are doing it if you believe us programmers need some flogging to keep us coding.

3. Ask HN: Why is Node.js hated so much?

Top comment by ufmace

Probably the worst thing is that the standard library with Node Javascript is tiny. Therefore, you have to pull in a pile of NPM packages to do pretty much anything. The package ecosystem is rather messy for the same reason - there's a mountain of tiny packages doing a few little things because somebody needed to do just a few things and didn't want to pull in some massive library that does a ton of stuff including the thing they need to do. Which then leads to a lot of bigger and more useful packages having huge dependency trees of tons of little packages, all at poorly-managed versions that usually can't be shared with any other big packages. So a program that needs, say, 3 major packages to do something useful might end up with thousands of dependencies taking up hundreds of megabytes, often with 3+ copies of the same package at different versions.

For example, I have a little webapp that I built with create-react-app with typescript and redux. Very convenient overall admittedly. It's not very big, maybe 1k lines of code total, and 3 fairly minor packages added to do various things. The node_modules folder has over a thousand items in it, and takes up 350MB. The yarn.lock file alone is half a megabyte. Ahem, what the hell? At least the built artifacts are pretty small.

This might be seen as just a problem with create-react-app. But in my experience so far, pretty much everything in the Node world does this. Seriously, has anyone managed to do something useful in the Node world without ending up with a thousand packages?

4. Ask HN: Do you donate money to open source?

Top comment by buro9

I operate a tithe and give approx 10% of what I earn to causes I believe in. These are not all charities, and some include one-off donations to OSS projects.

I typically choose privacy and security related projects, individuals, and causes, these can be big projects like Signal, or regular donations for things like https://www.openrightsgroup.org/ , or random donations to smaller projects (that are sometimes individuals and mostly OSS but it being OSS isn't the core criteria).

I also include small charities that do things like refurbish old company laptops by servicing and installing Ubuntu and then providing them to schools and causes that cannot afford them.

It's mostly stable with a little scatter gun, I keep track in my monthly budget and just hover around that 10% mark. When I sold shares, I did extend the tithe to that too.

Edit: I am not religious but did learn of tithes when I was young and it seemed like a good thing that some religions do and I figured that if I started when young I'd never notice it. Mostly I don't notice it (though when I was saving for a mortgage I did stop and think I would've achieved it a lot sooner were I to not have the tithe - I stopped for a few months when I moved but slowly restored it).

5. Ask HN: What cool stuff do you run free-tier?

Top comment by cldellow

Sketchviz [1] runs almost entirely in free tiers from Cloudflare and AWS:

- Cloudflare to avoid big bandwidth bills from AWS for the wasm-compiled graphviz that is on every page

- AWS Lambda's 1M free requests and 400,000 GB-seconds for expressjs (web serving) and graphviz (rendering hostable .png images)

- API Gateway's 1M free requests for routing HTTP -> AWS Lambda (for the app) or S3 (for hosted PNGs)

- S3's 20K GET requests/mo (for hosted PNGs)

The only one I exceed is S3, but it's dirt cheap.

[1]: https://sketchviz.com/new

6. Ask HN: What is going wrong at Amazon?

Top comment by version_five

They matured, dominated the market, got lazy and comfortable, and basically took over the role of incumbent.

This is top of mind for me as my amazon use has declined from a peak a few years ago (with a dead cat bounce during covid) and I'm now actively avoiding them. As you say, for items you are not already familiar with, they are completely untrustworthy, and for stuff I know about and want to buy, a) they are unreliable for availability, b) they put so much effort into trying to trick me into signing up for prime or subscriptions, or for paying shipping when I qualify for free shipping, that I feel like I'm trading with a criminal. I can get better treatment literally anywhere else.

For better or worse, they changed the face of commerce, now they are an entitled dinosaur that I'll be happy to see pushed to the side.

7. Ask HN: Do you also alternate between super productive and slow days?

Top comment by ynac

As a workflow consultant, that's one of the clues to help someone find their groove. Good and Bad days can happen for various reasons. Finding patterns is key to managing your life well.

One exercise we use is to first track your days and rank them just on productivity, which is just the measure of what was planned and what got done - we worry about volume and type of work later on.

Rank the day on a scale of -3 to +3. Once we have enough of these we see either an internal or an external driver.

Crossing that ranking with a daily work journal (Ben Franklin style is fine), you'll start to see all kinds of things. By far the biggest influencer for better production I run into is day of week.

The day of the week we have the most control over is our most productive day. The exception to that is when people are "burning out" on their work and when they do have more control, they coast / float / rest / runaway / crash.

Once we find the better days, it's usually easier to repeat those conditions than it is to eliminate the poor days.

And just so this doesn't sound like a campaign to turn everyone into a 7-day-a-week work monster, I'm convinced over and over by watching people trim their days and weeks, increase their "people" time, and carry a notebook with them ALL the time, that less labor, more life results in more work and more love of that work.

When you have a great day or two of productivity, and then skid to a halt, ask yourself more questions about the work ahead. Get big picture and drop more questions, puzzles, problems on your subconscious. Chances are a few days from then you'll have all the answers and you'll have another blow out day! Tightening that cycle up is the goal, but take what you get and enjoy the ride.

Happy to give you a free workflow tune-up. Takes about a month, and it's usually fun.

8. Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?

Top comment by crossroadsguy

K&R. It was the best programming book I read. I have not read many other programming books to be honest. I couldn't finish most rather.

It's been years since I even touched C and at this point I am not going back, I know; but as an Android dev I wish I could find a non-lengthy book like K&R that would expose me to Kotlin like I was exposed to C, while helping unlearn a lot of Java.

9. Ask HN: Have you ever spend days unable to do *any* work?

Top comment by throwaway737383

I've experienced this at almost every job I've ever had. Best case I can get two years of productivity and then suddenly I can't even start, no matter what I do. Nothing works. Not site blockers, not isolation, not pomodoro, nothing. It's as though I'm physically unable to begin. It's not just difficult, it's impossible.

I was told this is strongly suggestive of ADHD, which sounded preposterous to me, but after the third health care professional (none of whom knew each other or shared records) asked if I'd been screened for it, sure enough... I have ADHD.

Now I'd love to tell you that everything is fine now that I'm diagnosed and under treatment (a few years now), but it isn't. Maybe my meds aren't the right ones, maybe I haven't learned the right skills yet, maybe this industry is just plain fucking boring and I should accept that and move on. I don't know. I don't have the answer yet.

So, sorry I can't be more helpful, but maybe there's some comfort in knowing that this is a thing and it's not just you.

10. Ask HN: Best tip for landing pages?

Top comment by davidivadavid

It tends to be easier to give advice based on concrete elements than abstractly.

Other than that, I compiled a list of tips a while back that should help you get a better intuition of what you need beyond the mechanics (sure, you need a headline, but what makes it good?):

http://yourlandingpagesucks.com/startup-landing-page-teardow...

If I tried to boil it down to the basics, it's mostly about trying to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer with very little time to waste:

* What's in it for me? => Value proposition / claims

* Prove it => Proof