AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Gmail account security

Top comment by steelframe

Once upon a time I worked at Google.

I returned to Austin to visit old friends and took the opportunity to visit the Google office there. The Googlers sitting around me were primarily corporate sales.

They weren't getting any corporate sales calls at all as far as I could tell, but there was one extremely irate user who was locked out of their GMail account and was repeatedly calling them because they were the only human beings at Google the user was able to get in touch with, via something like "Press 3 for Corporate Sales." Of course these poor Google corporate sales people had absolutely no way to help this user even if they wanted to. Google literally did not have any GMail account phone support (at least at the time).

I could hear the poor guy screaming through their headsets about how he paid Google something for some service and was entitled to phone support and he demanded someone help him, but they just kept saying, "This is corporate sales. We do not offer consumer account support. If you want support, please visit the Google Support Forums at www dot..."

After they hung up on him 3 or 4 times, eventually a manager got on the phone and told him (between his screams), "Look, you're not getting any phone support because it doesn't exist. There's nowhere for us to transfer you. There's nobody who can call you back about this. Your only option is to search the forums for an answer to your problem. I am going to terminate this call now. Sir, I'm going to terminate this call. No, we can't help you. Nobody at Google can help you. I am terminating this call now. We asked you to stop calling this number. Do not call us again. "

I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." That experience underscored that notion for me.

2. Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?

Top comment by samwillis

> I feel like I'm encountering more and more sites and articles where I can't seem to find the date.

It seems to me that its become standard practice on marketing type blogs for corporate websites to remove the date from their posts. I think its because (from personal experience) the company will go though a burst of "blog productivity" create a load of content but then not touch it for years, they don't want that content to look out of date or their website to look stagnant.

Removing the date from their posts, or any other content, hides how old it is and therefore obscures how active they are at crating new content.

Most companies try to use their blogs to attract new customers, a new customer may visit their website once or twice and will never see the blog again, it's not important that they do. They don't want it to look stale.

As a counter example, an interesting thread from yesterday [0] was about how CloudFlare use their blog not as a marketing tool but for technical content and attracting employees. They very regulally use their blog, and so keep the date on it showing how fresh it is.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070422

3. Ask HN: Hacker claimed ownership and then deleted my Facebook Page of 50k users

Top comment by vertis

Sometimes company legal teams can be the most accessible way to draw attention to something like this, and I don't mean in a combative way. They're very risk conscious, they see a '10+ years of building a heavy metal community, gone like a puff of smoke' in terms of risks, both of bad publicity but also if you were to somehow litigate because of the damage to your business or project. Often they have an email address that is manned because they have to respond to legal requests of various types.

You can potentially request all your data (and data about the hack) and let them know why, maybe reach out asking how you can get law enforcement involved and who you should contact after you've made a police report. It's not a threat, but it get it on somebodies radar. If you express how devastated you are there is potential for them to help. They also have a lot more latitude than any kind of helpdesk (especially at the scale of Facebook, and the users/customers facebook has).

They're also well connected with-in an organization because they have to sign-off on all kinds of projects and risks.

I think `patio11` has amazing advice is a similar vein[1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1162561822248992768?lang=... (I think he has a longer version/reference, but I can't find it)

4. Ask HN: Who has moved from the U.S. to Europe?

Top comment by jzellis

I'm just outside London, moved here to marry my English wife from Vegas. I work part time doing basic IT for a US law firm due to health issues after heart surgery, and Yankee dollars are worth jack shit here - I'm not making serious tech industry money, but over here it's barely enough to survive on.

Housing is always smaller than you'd get in (at least the western) US for the same price, and I'd bet that's true pretty much everywhere in Europe. Speaking the same language is useful, but Covid has made it hard to make friends or do much.

Despite its reputation, I find that Europe is far more provincial than the US when it comes to food - a lot of stuff you think of as ubiquitous in the West will be "foreign" food and harder 48 to find. (And if you like tacos, stay on that side of the pond.)

Benefits: it's a lot quieter and generally less dangerous than the US. The NHS is absolutely amazing and you'll never want to deal with the American system ever again. People tend to be less aggressive.

From an entrepreneurial standpoint I'm sure it's much harder to get up and running, but I'm old enough to not care anymore. If I could work legally for a UK startup or tech firm doing basic dev I'd be happy enough and well-paid enough to never feel the urge to start my own ragged little thing again.

It is colder in most of Europe than the US, in my experience (not just living here but traveling extensively in my life). If you're a Cali kid, you will miss the sunlight, especially in the winter. It's like a fucking Joy Division video here from October through April. :-D

I think if my wife and I could afford to split our time between here and Vegas, we would. But that's just not in the cards right now.

But hey, at least they're not on the brink of civil war here and the curry is good.

5. Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

Top comment by lokar

A quick web search finds some answers. eg

https://www.spigglelaw.com/employment-blog/employers-affirma...

""" Title VII prohibits employers from making employment decisions because of an individual’s skin color, national origin, sex, religion, or race. Therefore, it is illegal to give an applicant an advantage solely because of the applicant’s race. However, this is not always the case.

Under United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, an employer may voluntarily implement its own affirmative action plan. However, this is permissible only if the purpose is to remediate past failures to hire minority employees in areas that contain few minorities.

Under Executive Order 11246, certain government contractors must have affirmative action policies to identify instances where they are not hiring qualified minorities. Contractors can take steps to fix any such hiring discrepancies.

Despite these two major exceptions, employers may not use affirmative action to hire more minority employees solely to increase the diversity of their workforce. As a result, the Fisher case only applies to schools, not employers.

"""

So, uh, it depends.

6. Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

Top comment by ollysb

It isn't about note taking, it's about supporting a brain that simply isn't capable of retaining the level of information that we have to deal with. The ultimate note taking device is actually an augmented human brain that has perfect recollection and organisation.

In the mean time the note taking apps help with:

Working memory - a page can hold far more information than I can retain in my working memory. Having a bunch of information helps me build a working model without having to retain all the information while I'm building. Spot patterns - by organising information it's easier to spot patterns.

Long term memory - your brain just isn't very good at retaining information long term. Maybe you have a company wide wiki but the act of building your own notes is enough to form some connections in your brain so that when you come back you have far greater familiarity and insight associated with the information.

7. Ask HN: How do you get out of a rut?

Top comment by oliwarner

> I've found myself sitting at my desk each evening

Wait, isn't that what daytime is for?

Get out. Play games. Read. Write. Ride a bike. Build something with your hands, with code, whatever. Hit the gym. Cook complicated dishes. Go to restaurants. Join a club and make some friends. Even sleep more.

You need to find what you like to do with your time, and truth is it's probably not what you want it to be. Picking up hobbies and mastering them is what drives a lot of people through life. If that interacts positively with $DAYJOB, that's great but it's rare.

---

Having read some of the other replies now, it's slightly disturbing how many of them draw to one of two conclusions: there's something chemically wrong with you, or you've made a massive mistake in life and you need to immediately change every decision you've made up to this point.

Sometimes life lulls. Unless there is something wrong —and yes professional assessment might help here— making massive and/or pharmacological changes to your life might be worse than just riding it out.

I'd personally just shoot for happy first. Treat this as burnout —as anybody working might call it— and take small corrective measures to improve you. If you need an extension to your studies, you can get an extension to your studies. Life isn't going to leave you behind.

8. Ask HN: Where are you going to find long-form content online these days?

Top comment by sharmi

A cautionary message from someone who used to think long form content equals quality and indepth coverage:

Long form content in magazines still used to have limited pages. So there needed to be a balance between information and prose. So even in long prose, the content was well edited, every sentence brought something important to the table.

Nowadays, on the web, an article could have infinite length without any limits. Less editing skills required and more importantly, the longer you stay on page, the better their metrics.

So the content tends to be way longer with more passages that do not really add anything to the central message. Most of them are approaching novellas in length.

At one point in time, this became such a big time sink for me, I wrote a firefox extension to warn me how long the page was and how long I spent on it. I am a moderately good reader and still some of these articles would typically take 45 mins to finish.

One heuristic I follow nowadays: Before reading, I think about what my purpose of this article is, what I hope to learn from this exercise: (It could just even be entertainment)

A few mins in, I see if this purpose is being fulfilled. If yes, I continue. If not, I just bail out.

9. Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

Top comment by lb1lf

I work for a small-ish engineering firm on a small rock off the Norwegian coast.

The local labour market for engineers, technicians and developers is pretty much empty - as in, everybody with the skills required and the desire to live here already does.

Recruiting more often than not means sniping, or, if we're lucky - that someone has recently found a partner with desirable skills and coaxed them into moving up here.

Anyway, we've found that word of mouth is the most effective way; we simply let friends and associates, former colleagues and whatnot know that we're looking for X.

This is a hundred times more effective than LinkedIn for vetting candidates - people are quite unlikely to uncritically recommend someone when they will be reminded of their sell-in for years if it is a dud. (Much unlike LinkedIn endorsements...)

It turns out with friends&associates, friends&associates' friends&associates &c, you can cast a quite wide net - and also, the sell-in works better both ways; the candidates who do show up for interviews already have been told ours is a good place to be and are, more often than not, a good cultural fit.

(And, before someone asks - 'cultural fit' means 'Happy to work in a rather unstructured madhouse where the unofficial motto is 'We've never done that before, so we're probably quite good at it!') - we've assembled a motley crew from just about every nook and cranny of the planet, from Sri Lanka via Belarus to Argentina and Japan and lots inbetween. Oh, and the occasional Norwegian. All making world-class subsea equipment on a small islet way out in the boonies.

10. Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?

Top comment by drclau

Worked for a bigtech well known name, large and extremely important project, literally the core of a service serving an enormous number of users, and feature flags were mandatory, no exceptions.

I can't imagine working without feature flags. Being able to enable new features in particular deployment rings (canary, dogfood, various production rings or regions), or per users / user groups, enabling gradually (percentage) and so on, is invaluable. I really can't overstate this.

Heck, we went as far as using feature flags for risky bugfixes even.

We had also internal tools to easily work with and track feature flags. A downside is that although normally you'd want to remove old feature flags that become obsolete, this hasn't been done very often.

What I suggested and we started doing was to tag the feature flags with the name of the author and the date at which they were added, and the same for the config updates, and usually ticket number and title for both case. This did help with tracking obsolescence, but obviously there was still a need to plan and do the actual work. Automating this process further was out of the question, due to the high risks involved.

Edit: added the last paragraph.