AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

Top comment by zanzibar735

This is extremely common. In their 30s, people get married, have kids, and move to the suburbs. Finding and keeping friends in your 30s is quite a challenge.

Some tips:

- move to a city - things are much much easier in a city as people are more transient, groups aren't as established, and new people arrive all the time

- it sounds like you have some friends - ask them if they have any friends in your area you should meet platonically

- the easiest way to make friends is an activity: you mentioned a hobby, but it can be anything - a running group, the gym, board games, etc. The more non-nerdy, the more likely you are to find non-nerdy people

- if you're like me, you struggle to make friends because it's not "easy" like it was in college. Friends in your 30s take work: reaching out, texting, scheduling, planning, etc.

- it sounds like you're not in therapy. So let me be the first to tell you that you're depressed (that "apathy" you're feeling is depression). Which is fine, it happens us all. But go to therapy because that's how you solve that. Just try it for a month, no pressure.

2. Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

Top comment by kraig911

I'm a front-end developer / artist / father. I'm trying to make a software application for families common in my situation. I have an 8 year old daughter who is very autistic and there is a huge lack in tools I feel that a family and kid can communicate with. To that end - I am trying to make a communication board tool. In my mind think of Trello board but there's not much in the way of words only symbols. Right now I have mockups and am evaluating whether to do this in unity 2d or Web/JS. Throw everything you know of UX and common UI frameworks out the window this is for kids the world keeps turning it's back on to enable them to participate.

3. Ask HN: How can I make a “kid's computer” today as good as an Apple II?

Top comment by billziss

I had a similar problem a few years ago. While I never found the perfect machine here is how I have been introducing my now 10 year old son to the world of computers:

- I bought him a Kano computer kit when he was about 7. The kit retailed for about $250 at the time and a kid could assemble it "like LEGO". It came with educational software that introduced him to programming languages, etc. (Unfortunately I do not think they make this kit anymore.) Verdict: MINOR SUCCESS.

- I tried to introduce him to Python (around 7.5) by following an online book about game programming. He did not show much interest. Verdict: FAILURE.

- I introduced him to MakeCode (arcade.makecode.com) around 8. He got absolutely hooked and it is still his favorite platform today. I bought him some cheap hardware (Meowbit) to put his programs on and he loves showing off his games to his friends and everyone else. Verdict: MAJOR SUCCESS.

- I introduced him to Godot when he was 9. He showed strong interest, built a few games in it and even understood enough of the Python like language that Godot has. He used this series of YouTube videos to learn about Godot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvPTSZl2WCc. Verdict: MEDIUM SUCCESS.

- We are currently building Ben Eater's 8-bit computer (eater.net/8bit) and he absolutely loves it. He is able to follow along with the videos and understand the material at a good level. He has named the computer "Terry". This project does require a lot of my own time. Verdict: MAJOR SUCCESS.

We have also tried other projects (e.g. Raspberry-pi with Raspbian, Arduino, Robotics kits, etc.) although nothing that he showed major interest at the time. I think you have to try with different things to see what will capture your child's imagination.

4. Ask HN: How do you explain the sloppiness of modern software?

Top comment by fredsted

I think companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft have realized that QA departments and software quality aren't worth it. People have gotten used to buggy software. At Apple, there's no Steve Jobs that cares about whether things actually work. Releasing new features to get media attention is more profitable than making sure the features actually work. We'll never see something like Snow Leopard again with its "no new features". Internally at these companies, there's also no reason for developers to care about quality. It's not rewarded by the managers.

Additionally, we as developers keep building software using more and more complicated tools that seem fancy and new to us, but are brittle and don't deliver good software in the end. We keep adding more and more layers of abstraction, both on the frontend and backend. Why? To put it on our CV. Things are moving so fast that we're afraid to get left behind. We're at a point where things just keep getting more and more complicated – actually keeping something alive (let alone building new features or making those features work) takes more and more man hours.

5. Ask HN: General Mood of the Community

Top comment by dusted

I've only been active since 2019, I wouldn't say the tone has changed much, maybe there are waves, maybe it's just the ebb and tide of who are active when, which is outside-influenced by peoples general lives. Sometimes several of the more negative people will happen to be in a more active period at the same time..

That said, I think the tone on HN is fairly good, people are not sugarcoating things, they're not veiling their views with courtesy, and they're generally presenting arguments for consideration, and if insults are made, they're usually insults of ideas, not people.

So maybe I'm just in the "negative asshole camp" but I think it's very refreshing to have conversations on HN, because my views are often challenged, and I am forced to reconsider and adjust, while at the same time, I feel that my own points are being considered, rather than automatically discarded as is often the case in mainstream social media, where discussions are not had to find understanding or truth, but to "win".

6. Ask HN: Where do you hang out virtually online?

Top comment by ydhddhtchgvbdc

Of all the places I've hung out online, IRC is still, by far, the very best. It had something to do with the simplicity of it. It had something to do with the organic policing, how channels and voices don't get overrun because it's impossible to understand a conversation after X number of participants (i.e. if too many people chatting, then people leave or silence themselves, like an auto-organic throttle). Of how unique voices and interesting people seemed to bubble to the top simply by the nature of the anonymity and the force of their personalities, of how punishment for bad behavior was carrot or stick and judgement rendered instantly /kick. There was something about the meritocracy of it all. And your name was only so good as your lastest contribution, because you knew that people would remember what you said. You had the power of anonymity, but it regulated itself because you cared about the people you were talking to, because you would develop relationships with them through that anonymity. Those who contributed the most were respected. You weren't competing with NeverEndingWaterfall™ of blah from Facebook, Insta, etc. Yeah, I miss IRC a lot. I know, it's still there, but the privacy and anonymity are all gone, so too the personalities.

7. Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

Top comment by mdasen

Google Takeout will export all your mail in mbox format which is easily handled by mail programs like Apple Mail and Thunderbird and should let you sync everything to a new service (if that service won't let you transfer it themselves).

I'm using iCloud+ from Apple. It's cheap at $1/mo for 50GB of space and lets me have my custom domains. $3/mo will get you family sharing and 200GB of space (if you want multiple accounts - I just have one account with multiple domains/email addresses). Apple's email hosting is 22 years old (pre-dating Gmail by 4 years) and seems like it won't be going anywhere anytime soon. They've recently expanded their email offerings with things like "Sign In with Apple" and "Hide my Email."

Zoho Mail will give you free hosting without IMAP or $1 for 5GB, $1.25 for 10GB, $3 for 30GB, $4 for 50GB, $6 for 100GB (billed annually).

Microsoft 365 will cost $5.83/mo for 1 person or $8.33 for a family of 6. Each account gets 1TB of storage (6TB for the family in total) and you get all the Microsoft Office apps. One issue is that the domain needs to be with Go Daddy which ups the price a little given their premium pricing on domains which is around an extra dollar per month.

FastMail is $5/mo for 30GB, $9 for 100GB.

There's no magic email provider that no one ever complains about - including Google where we've heard horror stories of getting locked out with no one to even contact. It also seems like no one wants to be hosting your mail for free with IMAP support anymore (and almost no one wants to host your domain email for free generally).

For me, migrating to iCloud+ was cheap and easy. I'm already on a Mac and iPhone. I set up some simple rules to filter my mail on my Mac and I'm enjoying the instant response of a native app. At $1/mo, there's no lock-in to annual billing and it basically costs nothing.

Microsoft 365 seems like a good deal if you're looking for a lot of storage and Microsoft Office apps. 1TB for $5.83/mo is basically the same price per GB as Dropbox, but you're also getting mail and the Office apps.

8. Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?

Top comment by bane

Something I've noticed among the "successful" youtube homesteaders is that they almost all invariably have property "in the city" that they rent out (generally unseen, usually unspoken, and always off camera) for significant passive income and treat homesteading like a virtuous hobby. Many of them also have side hustles like giving paid talks on homesteading, renting out "farm experiences", or offering classes on various farming skills etc.

Farmlife is hard as hell and successful farms find ways of leveraging what they grow into hired cheap labor and other efficiencies that takes much of the burden off of the owners. In the case of the popular homesteaders, they don't like to show this much as it takes away from the idyllic lifestyle they are literally making money pushing -- where tilling a field, cutting back brush, or fixing a field drain are 10 second activity clips.

If you want to farm, just go farm, but the homesteading trend in my opinion has smells of a kind of grassroots pyramid scheme where the only way to be successful at it is to bring other people into it.

9. Ask HN: Has anyone sold their employee stock on the secondary market?

Top comment by cgreerrun

I haven't personally, but I know people that have. The people that I know that sold shares used Equity Zen (https://equityzen.com/). The company I worked for has/had a "first right of refusal" option in the equity contracts, which basically means that when EquityZen offers you a deal, you have to bring the deal to your company and they can decide to buy your shares for the same price instead of letting you sell your shares to an outside party (which they might not want).

10. Ask HN: Alternate Email hosting to G Suite

Top comment by hkhanna

I second Fastmail for email & calendar.

The key vendor lockin that has made it hard for me to get away from Google Workspace (f/k/a GSuite) is Google Docs. Lots of people in my work and personal life share and collaborate on Google Docs. That's not easy to deal with unless your email address is on the Google platform.

I tried and desperately wanted to like Microsoft's equivalent Office 365 or whatever its called now. I quickly learned that to administer Microsoft's product requires a full time job. It's horrendously buggy, complex and not catered to SMBs.

Microsoft Office itself is pretty good and Word's collaboration features are approaching parity with Google's. But administering a domain in Microsoft world is just not worth the effort. Google Workspace's domain admin panel, on the other hand, seems to strike the right balance between features and complexity and more-or-less works as expected.

I am really trying to move my life away from Google, but as long as folks in my sphere use Google Docs, that is hard to do. If Google Docs doesn't concern you, I fully endorse Fastmail and have used it in my personal life since 2017.