AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: My boss doesn't think I'm doing good work, how to proceed?

Top comment by mushufasa

> Part of the reason it had taken so long is because I put a substantial amount of work into a part of the project that's no longer necessary due to changing requirements, which I don't think I could have forseen.

One of the things that I've experienced with new grad junior devs is that there's an adjustment needed to change from academic working to business working. In academia, usually the professor gives an assignment and you have to go off and figure it out, without bothering the professor, no matter what. In business, it's much better to 'bother the professor' regularly and check in affirmatively on whether the assignment has changed, or to tell the manager about challenges that arise to re-plan together. As a junior employee, you're not going to know the full business context of what makes sense, and checking in can save weeks of time that would otherwise be spent off on your own.

Not sure if that's the case here, but certainly something you could consider going forwards to prevent similar situations.

2. Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

Top comment by r_singh

I think the internet (and its tools) started off with the intention of making the lives of users easier as compared to the alternatives.

However, as the internet became mainstream and competitive, more successful players realized that they can employ dark patterns to increase their revenue by taking advantage of users (lock-in, difficulty unsubscribing, making cloud accounts mandatory, etc).

It's 2022 and I think all the companies everywhere feel like they have no choice but to learn from the best. The pricing tactics used by Apple, are now used by many other companies in different industries and even companies that were non-tech are now using tech with its dark patterns.

Who do I think is to blame? Investors of all kinds. They are making it harder for entrepreneurs who care about their customers to stay in business by throwing money and exploiting consumers weakness for deals/freebies. It's just the mindset of growth at all and any cost, that's what I'm seeing all around me on the internet and offline (by using the internet in some cases).

3. Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

Top comment by tyingq

>become worse lately thanks to all those StackOverflow and Github clones

A google search showing some of these leech type sites:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22code+that+protects+users+...

For me, "farath.com" is outranking stackoverflow.

4. Ask HN: How to continue to be gracious about the good fortune of rich friends?

Top comment by randycupertino

I worked in wealth management and LIVED the hedonistic treadmill firsthand.

Everyone was jealous of the next level up. I was making 300k and my high school hometown friends were like "holy cow, you're so lucky this is amazing, you have your own apartment" meanwhile I was annoyed I couldn't keep up financially with my trust fund boyfriend who had $3 million a year to piss away with random trips to Bermuda. My CFO was jealous of the Principal who could take netjets and didn't have to fly first class everywhere. The NetJets guy was jealous of the billionaire principal who had his own jet. That billionaire was jealous of the main money dude who had family money inherited from the crusades. They all fought with their wives over private school tuition and horses. Everyone drank, did tons of drugs, had dramatic affairs and fought like cats and dogs with their families.

I left finance and went into healthcare and realized I'm pretty damn happy living a simple life. I kept a $1500 belt I bought from Henry Bendels that's incredibly ugly as a reminder of dumb decisions and having too much money to piss away on stupid crap!

Read Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones Book by Greg Campbell. Reading that made me realize how our planet has finite resources and I just I wanted to cleave the my own consumption habits so stopped needless shopping for "fun" and started being a stubborn bastard about driving my 12 year old Hyundai into the ground. It's not much but it's my own private rebellion against the gaping maw of endless consumerism.

Worship your family, friends, love ones, health, music, doing things that make you feel alive, shared experiences and nature over shiny toys and stuff that just sits around collecting dust and looking pretty.

At the end of the day, we're all the same food for worms anyways no matter our net worth. Enjoy your friendships, realize they probably have their own internal struggles and problems they're dealing with and try to be there for them in whatever way you can!

5. Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

Top comment by jdavis703

First, I’m going to teach you to fish. Go to hCaptcha’s website, then scroll to the footer. Click around on the about links. It’ll reveal their business model. This trick also works for other businesses and NGOs.

Now, if we look at https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling we can tell they make money by labeling data sets for a fee. So as a guess, there’s someone out there that needs to improve computer vision detection of transportation vehicles. My guess is it’s a self driving car company, but who knows.

6. Ask HN: Why is there a chip shortage?

Top comment by TradingPlaces

1. During the pandemic, consumer durables went from ~10-11% of consumption to ~13%. 3 percentage points of consumption is about half a trillion dollars annually. Many of these durables come with cheap microcontrollers or even high end SoCs now. New vehicles have dozens of cheap microcontrollers. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Ktkq

2. If you look at that chart, you will see that the decade previous to the pandemic was the worst ever for durable goods demand. Supply chains had adjusted to that.

3. Supply chains had also all gone to a JIT model to keep inventories lower. This was a huge source of efficiencies, but made them vulnerable to a demand shock.

4. There are new sources of chip demand in EVs.

5. There are new sources of chip demand for very cheap ARM and RISC-V chips. High volume, low margin stuff that has been underinvested for manufacturing, like the entire auto chip chain.

6. 2019 was a down cycle, and companies were idling capacity.

7. When the pandemic hit, companies projected lower demand, and idled more capacity. This put them in a huge hole from which they still have not extricated themselves.

8. COVID outbreaks in Asian factories complicate things

9. Transportation bottlenecks complicate things

7. Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

Top comment by symkat

I made https://blogdb.org/ to collect blogs from around the Internet, it gets an RSS feed of the blogs. I posted a Show HN about it yesterday that didn't get much traction.

The code is all open source, at https://github.com/symkat/BlogDB/ and I wrote an article on my own blog about initially writing the software from design to deployment: https://modfoss.com/building-blogdb.html

8. Ask HN: Would you pass an interview for your current position?

Top comment by reacharavindh

I am still feel pissed about an interview for a job I think I'd have fit in superbly. It would have been fun, and productive. If not for the hackerrank quiz they threw in the front filled with irrelevant puzzles that needed solving under time pressure. I don't have time to spend or willingness to "train" on such puzzles for the purpose of getting a job. I am sure if I had a chance to talk to the team or the engineers, it would have been effective. This bitter experience only amplified my hate for such tests even more. The job I'm at currently, gave me a practical task(similar to the ones I would be doing on the job) and a few days to submit the results/notes of. It was so much more pleasant to walk into a tech interview with such work and have a nice chat about practical technical stuff instead of stupid puzzles.

9. Ask HN: What are you predictions for 2022?

Top comment by PedroBatista

It will be a tumultuous year, new covid variant will come out and governments will insist on the same playbook, a large part of the population will push back.

Money markets will go up and down surfing the good and bad news of Covid, but will cool off with the social cracks made by inflation and the timid “end of free” money. Bitcoin will go up but not reach 100k.

Tech’s gonna tech. Nothing profoundly new, the already big ones will continue to inflate and rake the money, sure they’ll get flak, fight a few big fines, make sure the right-to-repair plane lands of favorable ground. Their angst about the unknown future will increase but the bottom line will be great.

New hacks and leaks scandals, a roaring for a few weeks about it, nothing fundamental will change.

More “EVs surpassed ICE car sales” news, existing infrastructure will not be able to accommodate them and that will be mainstream news.

Shortages of things ( both legit and artificial) will continue and contribute to market instability and high prices.

When there’s instability among the people, the regimes tend to find a common enemy to save themselves. I fear the start of big wars in 2022, the west will pussy out because the cost is high and they aren’t willing to pay, the other parties know it. In the next years somebody’s gonna get too greedy and the cost will stop being too high.

Socially, people will realize things change but they mostly stay the same. They can change by refusing to not play the game, will they have the courage to live without the goodies they’ve learn to pursuit?

10. Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

Top comment by fatnoah

> Temporarily, I will re-program the system so that it does not forward text message content to my employees phone numbers.

I might be reading this wrong, but it sounds like you take inbound text messages to one number and then send outbound messages with the same content to employee phone numbers. Is that right? If so, that sounds like you're SENDING the spam messages in addition to receiving them. Regardless, it sounds like customer service needs to be improved, though.