AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

Top comment by themanmaran

Marketing.

The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales.

No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/.

In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever way to 10x, or make it go viral. A big motivator was Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" post [1]. So we just sat down and talked to people.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

2. Ask HN: Why is Firefox losing marketshare and how would you save it?

Top comment by selfhoster11

They should focus on saving Firefox.

- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward

- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian

- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.

- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.

- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.

Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.

3. Ask HN: How to prepare as soon-to-be blind developer?

Top comment by miki123211

Blind person here, happy to answer any questions. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone born blind, so whatever ends up working well for me might not work as well for someone just losing their sight, though I tried to take that fact into account.

The most immediate suggestions that come to mind are:

1. Learn to use a screen reader. You don't need an expensive one. NVDA on Windows, Voice Over on the Mac and Orca on Linux are the way to go. NVDA is probably the least quirky and easiest to find resources for. I'd recommend against Orca, while it can be used, we all know how tricky Linux on the desktop can get, and throwing a screen reader into the mix doesn't help.

2. Forget about the mouse. Screen reader users use the keyboard exclusively. Try disabling the screen too, many sighted users who practice with a screen reader end up relying on what they can see, which makes things more difficult.

3. Accept that inaccessibility is a fact of life, and it has to be worked around. Not all tools are accessible, and some are more accessible than others. If you're looking for an accessible IDE, Vs Code is great and constantly improving. Emacspeak exists, but I don't actually know anyone who uses it, and I know quite a few blind people in tech. Some things that you're now doing through a GUI are best done via the command line, Git is a good example. Programming tools usually aren't the problem, it's everything else that causes issues. Slack and Zoom work great, for example, but many smaller collaboration tools don't.

4. Not all areas of programming are equally accessible. I can't imagine a blind dev working exclusively on the front end, where there's a lot of CSS involved, and where you have to look at Figma designs and debug issues solely based on screenshots. Backend stuff is much more accessible, same with lower-level systems programming. Dev Ops is very much a mixed bag.

I'm happy to answer any further questions either here or via email, my HN username at gmail dot com.

4. Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

Top comment by moreira

> lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login

I signed up to Quora with my Facebook account, back in the day. Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it.

I haven't used a social login since. In my case, it was fairly harmless, but it made me realise how dangerous social login is. Every time there's a signup, I look for "signup with email". It's the safer option. And if you can, use your own domain for email (Google's paid email offering supports this, as does Fastmail and countless other email providers). That way if your email provider decides to flip you off, you switch DNS records and you're up and running somewhere else, and everything keeps on running.

But: If you don't have a copy of emails then you lose all saved emails, so make sure you have a backup strategy in place.

5. Ask HN: Do you find working on large distributed systems exhausting?

Top comment by fxtentacle

Yes, I used to,

but No, I fixed it :)

Among other things, I am team lead for a private search engine whose partner-accessible API handles roughly 500 mio requests per month.

I used to feel powerless and stressed out by the complexity and the scale, because whenever stuff broke (and it always does at this scale), I had to start playing politics, asking for favors, or threatening people on the phone to get it fixed. Higher management would hold me accountable for the downtime even when the whole S3 AZ was offline and there was clearly nothing I could do except for hoping that we'll somehow reach one of their support engineers.

But over time, management's "stand on the shoulders of giants" brainwashing wore off so that they actually started to read all the "AWS outage XY" information that we forwarded to them. They started to actually believe us when we said "Nothing we can do, call Amazon!". And then, I found a struggling hosting company with almost compatible tooling and we purchased them. And I moved all of our systems off the public cloud and onto our private cloud hosting service.

Nowadays, people still hold me (at least emotionally) accountable for any issue or downtime, but I feel much better about it :) Because now it actually is withing my circle of power. I have root on all relevant servers, so if shit hits the fan, I can fix things or delegate to my team.

Your situation sounds like you will constantly take the blame for other people's fault. I would imagine that to be disheartening and extremely exhausting.

6. Ask HN: Why is MS Teams so slow, do devs test Teams on less powerful machines?

Top comment by hbn

At my company, the developers are all on fairly powerful MacBook Pros, and everyone else in the company has Windows laptops (I think generally Surface devices)

For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware!

Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying!

edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great

7. Ask HN: Why should I trust password managers?

Top comment by andrewaylett

Something I've not seen come up yet: a password manager that's integrated with your browser is a good defence against phishing.

Because it'll only offer passwords for sites that match the entry, defaulting (most often) to being the same domain, if you come across a phish then it won't offer the site at all. This is fairly similar to the "trust on first use" that SSH gives you, which some folk were wishing might have existed for SSL certificates the other day.

Unfortunately some sites require you to "log in with your ... credentials" rather than doing SSO. But you TOFU those, too, once you've verified they're legit.

Happy Bitwarden user here: the software is all Free, but I trust the company to run their servers securely more than I trust myself to, so I pay them to do so. Extra benefit: if I lose all my infrastructure, I haven't lost my passwords.

8. Ask HN: Easiest way to build a CRUD app?

Top comment by theptip

I would answer at the meta-level - pick the framework in the language you know best.

If you are already fluent in Python, use Django. PHP; Laravel? Etc. The benefit of using the “best” CRUD tool (if there even is one) is far less than the cost of learning a new language these days.

When Rails first came out, it was so much better than anything else that it was worth it to learn Ruby just to use that toolchain. Nowadays, the gap has closed for the simple use-case.

You can run Django/Rails & Postgres on Heroku with approximately zero infra burden. I still have a trivial app I last touched ten years ago and it’s still up and serving traffic.

9. Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?

Top comment by pvg

This has been addressed by dang before, one representative pastequote from a recent (ish) comment:

Yes, I think we'll continue to avoid the notification system, not just because of flamewars but also because (relatedly) it's not so compatible with curiosity. Push notifications seem to jack up the nervous system in a way that's good for engagement but not necessarily for users—we all experience this elsewhere on the internet, and on HN we're in the blessed position of not needing to juice the numbers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22937472

10. Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology

Top comment by civilized

Some lessons that will come with age.

1. There is no magic that will change human nature.

2. Rules that keep people from harming others are very important.

3. Don't expect to live a "special" or "great" or "revolutionary" life. Aspire to something extraordinary if you see an opportunity, but ordinary things like health, moderate wealth, and family are also good enough, and will have to be good enough for most people. And there is something very special in simply living a very good ordinary life.

4. Try not to be pushed into doing things that corrode the moral goodness within you. You will not regret spurning material rewards to live in accordance with your values, but you will regret the opposite.