AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Good tech talks on how analytics systems are implemented?

Top comment by kthejoker2

Speaking as an analytics architect ...

You'll be a lot better off spending your mental energy thinking about the outcomes you want to achieve (user engagement, upselling, growth, etc) and the types of analysis you'll need to understand what changes you need to make to produce those outcomes. Protip: this is actually really hard, and people underestimate it by orders of magnitude. A blog post by Roger Peng (with indirect commentary from John Tukey) ... https://simplystatistics.org/2019/04/17/tukey-design-thinkin...

One other immediate tip is to start thinking about correlating your telemetry with user surveys - again, strongly focusing on outcomes and the controllable aspects of those outcomes.

Don't let the data lead the discuisson; decide on the question you're asking, and the implications of all of the possible answers to that question (clearly yes, clearly no, mixed, etc) before you ask it.

Then engineer the lightest weight system possible to ingest, process, store, analyze, and visualize that data.

For me, that would just be:

1. Log data in whatever logging tool you like. Persist the raw stuff forever in a cheap data lake. 2. Batch at some fixed interval into a staging area of a relational DB. 3. Transform it with stored procedures for now (while you figure out what the right transforms are) into a flat fact table. 4. Visualize in Superset or PowerBI or even plain old Excel.

Once you've got the patterns of analysis at least fundamentally right you can consider stream processing (Flink or Kafka Streams are fine) to replace 2 and 3.

2. Ask HN: Should I find a job or try to build a profitable project?

Top comment by rubicon33

Similar boat to you. Had the exact same question in my life.

I decided for a totally different option, lets call it option #4:

#4 Take an "easy" programming job and use your spare time on nights/weekends to build a software business.

I chose this option because I wasn't willing to risk my savings. Plain and simple. I want to retire some day, and blowing 60k for a ~5% chance at making a profitable business wasn't worth it to me.

3. Ask HN: Old guys, what do you miss about development in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s?

Top comment by mkozlows

On reflection, the thing I miss about web dev in the '90s is the low user expectations.

Because I was going to say I missed the simplicity of it all -- your front end was just HTML, no CSS (which didn't exist yet) and only sometimes a smidgen of Javascript for like light form validation; your back end was just a Perl script with CGI.pm running behind Apache that rendered that HTML.

No React, no flexbox, no REST API, no microservices, no Docker, no Kubernetes... but the reason it didn't need any of those things is because it had a terrible UI, didn't do all that much, and only needed to support trivial numbers of users whose modems were probably the main bottleneck anyway.

Trying to make modern users happy with '90s era tech would be impossible and deeply painful.

But it was nice, just for a while, to have a world where people were thrilled that even a super-basic web application was a thing that existed.

4. Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

Top comment by biophysboy

This is a pipe dream of mine, but I would love a Wikipedia of null results: nullpedia! Nobody publishes null results bc they’re not exciting, but I think a lot of NSF money would be saved if “failed” experiments were aggregated somewhere in a searchable way.

There’s lot of questions. How to organize it? How to encourage participation? How to maximize usefulness while at the same time minimizing volunteer effort? How to encourage discussion (suggesting changes for a better exp design) rather than manipulation (stealing the seed of a bad experiment to publish at your better funded lab)?

I don’t know how to do it, but I think if done right people would really like it.

5. Plaid Deletes GitHub Issue Exposing Imitation of Bank Login UIs

Top comment by whockey

Hi all - co-founder of Plaid here. We're in the process of migrating this repository and replacing it with a dedicated iOS SDK repo, JS SDK, and (soon to be) Android SDK. However, I messed up the order of operations with this migration and can empathize with the reaction. I personally chatted with a lot of the commenters on the original issue before we did this and more than happy to engage/get feedback from anyone else over email/phone/in-person. Feel free to shoot me an email at william [at] plaid [dot] com if you want to chat/have any feedback.

6. Ask HN: Why are ISO standards so expensive?

Top comment by andrewaylett

I've been part of a team developing C++ compilers and run-time libraries. We used the final draft, which (at least for C++) is freely available. I suspect anyone relying on the final text (were it to differ from the last public draft) would be disappointed to discover that pretty much no-one uses it.

It doesn't seem to me to be a terrible trade-off to say that ad-hoc use via public drafts is fine, but if you need to use the actual spec for whatever reason then you're probably being paid to abide by the spec and it makes sense to charge for it.

Where I strenuously object to non-public specifications is where they're referenced in (and required by) legislation: if ignorance of the law is no excuse, the law had better be freely available.

7. Ask HN: Twitter account stolen by presumed vulnerability

Top comment by dsl

Did you have a phone number associated with your Twitter account? If so call your mobile provider and ask if any changes have been made recently, especially by store employees. If you have two factor set up they most likely removed it and reset your email address using phone verification and intercepted the text message.

For everyone else... go check your Google, Github, etc. accounts and make sure you do not have a phone number listed.

8. Ask HN: Do all VPNs suck?

Top comment by motohagiography

VPN providers trade a local threat actor who is probably ignoring you for a foreign one who is probably watching and analyzing everything. Best advice on this thread was doing a VPN back to your home router.

Typically, you'd use one for default internet browsing on public wifi, with the expectation that your endpoint ends up on the list of a foreign intelligence agency who ostensibly doesn't care about you or what you are interested in.

The other best advice used to be, "don't be a terrorist," but these days, it's more, "don't be a political actor," given whatever you type will be found and used as leverage if you achieve any prominence. I'd posit that security tech is sufficient for business, but not for politics.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat

9. Ask HN: More tech-oriented HN alternative?

Top comment by DoreenMichele

Lobsters is more tightly focused, but has a lot less traffic and submissions.

So depending on what one means by "an HN alternative," maybe that fits. Maybe not.

I bet some folks could also recommend some good Reddits if you list what type tech is your thing. Some Reddits are really good, I just try to stay off the main front page which tends to be all the drama for which Reddit is infamous.

---- Generic Lobsters invite info:

https://lobste.rs/about

The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you recognize from the site or request one in chat.

Chat info: https://lobste.rs/chat

10. Ask HN: How does everyone handle mobile browser testing?

Top comment by blueimp

For local automated testing of mobile browsers on both iOS and Android you probably want to have a look at https://appium.io/, which uses the Webdriver protocol.

If you want to run the same tests against both mobile and desktop browsers, I recommend https://webdriver.io/, which uses Appium for mobile testing.

If you're interested in a Docker setup as a boilerplate to test against all major browsers (both mobile and desktop) with best practices for e.g. test video recordings, you might also wanna take a look at this repo of mine: https://github.com/blueimp/wdio