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Issue #155 - February 27, 2022

Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!

1. Ask HN: What is the most unique website you’ve come across on the internet?

Top comment by moh_maya

https://y-n10.com/

The website of the Nintendo founder's family office. It..is just beautifully designed, and a homage to the original game consoles and the entire art form of PC gaming when it started.

Earlier thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803201

2. Ask HN: Any scientifically proven techniques to boost concentration?

Top comment by jmalicki

Exercise (mostly I've seen more intense than walking, but cardio like running, cycling, rowing, etc. - I haven't come across much for resistance training like weightlifting) has been very well studied to improve cognitive ability, as well as mental health (depression/anxiety). Depending on what you mean by proven, it's not gravity, but it's pretty good evidence compared to just about anything in medicine (just look at the numerous citations testing various aspects/study designs/different populations).

Just a few studies (there are countless): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3951958/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20065132/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35153701/ https://ju.se/download/18.4662178a174aa5f82061c573/160103080...

3. Ask HN: Why is there no small Android phone?

Top comment by mg

I maintain this chart of small Android phones, maybe it helps:

https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/small_android_phone...

You can move the "RAM" slider to 3GB which will show the phones that have 3GB or more. And the screen slider to your desired size. A height of 140mm means the phone would have a display size of roughly 5 or 6 inches.

For the USA, it gives me 90 phones with 3GB and up to 6 inches.

4. Ask HN: Anyone here have good material for learning how to sketch from scratch?

Top comment by commieneko

Commercial artist for 45 years. Also a developer, FWIW, mostly graphics programming since the late 1970s.

_Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ is actually one of the best places to start. I know you said you tried it. But try it this way: Ignore all the theory and the stories the author tells. It’s mostly nonsense. But the exercises are actually very good. The trick is to not care about the result and about making progress. I know, that sounds crazy. But it’s true.

Just do it.

Go through reams of cheap paper. Happily throw most of the drawings away. Draw anything and everything. Fall in love with nothing. It’s like practicing scales for a musician. If you get a good drawing every now and then, then cool. If not, don’t worry about it.

It’s gonna take some time.

Be prepared to adjust your expectations as to what a good drawing is. It will change, drastically, over time. The way you draw will emerge rather than be something you develop or manage. Frustrating, I know. But the basics have to develop organically, like learning to talk.

Learning to draw is much more about learning to see than making marks. You think you can see things, but what you are really doing is recognizing things. Any normal adult has the motor skills to make a controlled mark. But we don’t know how to make a mark that the brain will read as something. If it was just a matter of reproducing something that’s in front of you, then tracing would work. But nearly all tracings suck as drawings.

Having said all that, start reading anything you can find on the subject. Be prepared to ignore most of it. You are finding your own path.

You can look through my history on ycombinator more discussion and to to see lists of books that are worth your time. But look on your own too. If you find anything new and different, please share.

As far as goals, they are great things to have. But expect them to change and evolve. Why shouldn’t they. As you get better, your tastes will change. Things you saw that seemed wonderful, may suddenly be full of flaws. Things you disdained may suddenly reveal their secret appeal.

It’s an adventure as well as a skill. And the learning never stops. I’m in my 60s and have been drawing seriously since my early teens.

I’m just getting started.

5. Ask HN: How much gas we could save in EU if we reduce our heating temp by 3°?

Top comment by a1371

23% ish.

It's not naive. Going to "pure" building science (I studied this in uni) the formula for the building heat loss is Q=U.A.dT where dT is the temperature difference between indoors and the outdoors.

If you assume that outdoors is 5°C on average in year, and indoors is 21°C, dT is 16. reducing the indoor temp to 18°C puts the dT at 13.

Since everything else stays the same, you'd expect a 23% decrease in heat loss (Q). And that much less energy need to be replenished.

In the real world buildings are more complicated than that. Also you may risk giving more people diseases and reduce cognitive abilities when things get cold. So perhaps also tell the public to dress warmer and drink more hot fluids.

6. Ask HN: How do you manage your companies knowledge base?

Top comment by bluGill

I have a strict rule, anytime someone asks me a question I respond by checking the documentation for that, and writing or fixing it as needed. Once I think the documentation is correct I tell them how to find it, and ask them to tell me where something doesn't make sense so I can fix it.

As an expert I often think things are obvious that are not. So it takes a few rounds to make useful documentation.

7. Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

Top comment by aerosmile

So many people offering explanations, and yet not a single one of them answers the OP's question. If you're upset that Intuit is engaging in lobbying (as you should be!), that might be an appropriate answer for a different question (eg: why doesn't the IRS just send us their own reports for us to approve?). Again, I am not defending Intuit's involvement in politics, but that's not the answer to the dark patterns question - let me try to answer that specific question:

For years, I kept experimenting with different approaches to filing my taxes. I started out with TurboTax, and being so painfully aware of their bad reputation, I kept trying out every alternative I could think of - including their biggest competitor TaxAct and three different tax firms. After all that work, I am back to using TurboTax. Obviously, it was not an easy decision given how hard I tried to avoid that path, and no, I didn't return to TurboTax because I got tricked by one of their dark patterns.

The simple answer for why the tax firms didn't work out is that the work they required in their onboarding equaled or exceeded the amount of work it would have taken me to do the whole thing in TurboTax myself. Mind you, this is just the onboarding piece - not including the emails and calls leading up to the onboarding and following the onboarding.

The least sophisticated firm just said: send us everything in a zip file. That sounded appealing until they started following up with a million questions. The medium-sophisticated firm (which was the most painful of all of them) asked me to use their web app which was essentially TurboTax except that the questions were incredibly confusing so that I had to look up a ton of stuff just to make sure I was submitting the right thing. The third firm used a better web app, but it was still the same thing - the onboarding was essentially the same as just using TurboTax.

The obvious added value with tax firms is that they might catch something that you would have done wrong without their assistance, but these days TurboTax does offer the same service as well (and no, I never received some valuable piece of advice that justified the additional time and effort of working with a tax firm).

TaxAct is not bad, and would be my close second preference. In fact, they actually cover more niche cases (eg: filing certain types of corporate taxes). Even so, their UI/UX is only almost as good as TurboTax but not quite. As unpopular as TurboTax might be in this community, I think we can take a moment and appreciate their PM+UI/UX team, who used some pretty delightful copy and super slick design to turn an awful task into a rather pleasant experience.

And that's the ultimate answer to the OP's question as I see it... most people who are aware of the dark patterns in TurboTax know that it is not the cheapest way to file, but it's certainly not the most expensive either - and if you're looking for the easiest-to-use and fastest method to get the tax report checked off your list, then it's hard to find a better solution (granted, partially because they are helping create the world we live in).

8. Ask HN: Am I the only one baffled by the long term usage of Twitter?

Top comment by a4isms

Ironically, this "Ask HN" post isn't much different than the kind of rant thread one sees on Twitter all the time, including the comments from people piling in to agree with the rant.

There's nothing particularly constructive, no suggestion for "fixing" the problems you articulate, it's a human being—you— talking about their perfectly valid feelings—that Twitter is a waste of focus.

If you can understand why you feel it's valuable to post this rant on HN and have a conversation in public with those who choose to reply to it, you can understand why people post rants on Twitter.

p.s. If HN was nothing except these Ask HN posts, it would be Twitter. What makes it HN is that this kind of post is infrequent.

p.p.s. I don't object to this post on HN or the value of having a conversation about what makes another social media site good/bad/meh.

9. Ask HN: What was better in the past in tech?