AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

Top comment by Timpy

This is a weird tip I think I could only share with the hacker news crowd. Once I learned about gut bacteria I started thinking of my cravings as something external to me. Like instead of saying "I'm hungry and I'm in the mood for something sweet" I would realize "the hormone ghrelin is sending hunger signals to my brain and the gut bacteria in my body is asking for something that's not actually in my best interest." Being able to emotionally distance myself from my feelings let me make decisions that I knew were better for me.

Just remember that it gets easier, I think a lot of people struggling with addiction to unhealthy food try to resist temptation for a day and go through hell. They think "I can't live the rest of my life like this," but the thing they never make it far enough to learn is that it doesn't feel this hard all the time. Every night I go to bed resisting a sugar loaded soft drink I wake up stronger, and the sabotaging gut bacteria is one battle weaker than the healthy gut bacteria.

2. Ask HN: Is your company considering inflation in this year's comp review cycle?

Top comment by jh00ker

I'm a new manager, having been an SWE IC for 15 yrs. I just did comp planning for the first time. I was given such a small budget for my team, it's not even funny! The system is designed so that most of the staffing budget goes to new hires, not to reward existing employees. Even promotions are fairly small, compared to what you could get by leaving. It's a game of chicken between you and your company: how long are you willing to tolerate small annual raises while more money goes to new hires before you decide to become a new hire at a new company, yourself?

Now that I see it from the manager perspective, I pledge to stay sharp and become a job hopper ... as soon as I find the time to start interviewing. :^)

3. Ask HN: Why don't many video hosting companies adopt PeerTube or P2P?

Top comment by freefaler

I have some experience with large-scale CDN I've cofounded some years ago. The short answer is - the perceived benefits you'd receive doesn't match the decrease in quality of service. So the economics doesn't work. Content distribution is widely skewed towards 1% of content makes 90% of traffic nodes so the cases that p2p may work for very popular content but the long tail is not easily cached/served. Try to watch/download a torrent file with small number of seeders and you'll get the experience you will be providing for the end user. Also internet networking is tricky and connectivity in different parts of the world can differ widely. South America or Asia have almost none of the peering hubs infrastructure that is available in Europe. (I've cofounded a CDN company and have some knowledge of the market)

4. Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

Top comment by simonw

I keep coming back to the old Reid Hoffman quote: "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped".

A useful thing to remember is that you are the ONLY person that knows how beautiful the thing you were planning to build was going to be. What you've actually built is always going to be disappointing compared to the potential thing you had imagined.

No-one else has that context though. From someone else's perspective, you built a thing! If that thing is interesting or solves their problem, they couldn't care less what it would have been if it had matched your imagination of its full potential.

Most people never build or ship anything at all, so shipping itself is a big cause for celebration.

5. Ask HN: What concepts have you never truly understood?

Top comment by CornCobs

No one seems to be answering the second question, so I'll take a crack at it:

When something just isn't clicking in my brain I move on from it! Then some time later (not a fixed time) I happen across it and read through it again with a fresh mind.

This has happened too many times for it to be a coincidence, that the 2nd attempt ALWAYS makes things click very naturally. It has happened with probability concepts such as Bayesian networks or HMMs, optimization algorithms like EM, Monte Carlo sampling, bootstrap, functional programming concepts like monads, C++ move semantics; the list goes on.

Whenever you're stuck, just take a break! And not a 30 minute coffee break but still at the back of your mind kind of break - completely forget about it and come back in a few days, a few weeks or even a month or 2 later

6. Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?

Top comment by 0xbadcafebee

Somebody please make OkCupid for Jobs. Both employers and applicants fill out questions that the community curates (so they can be job-specific, industry-specific, etc). Both employers and employees get matches via algorithm rather than receiving 100 random resumes or 100 random job suggestions that have nothing to do with you.

Existing sites do this, but very poorly, because they only try to detect information out of a resume and detect keywords in a job listing. There is only so much data you can gleam from those sources and it's highly variable. You need to ask specific questions, like "Is Functional Programming the best form of programming?" or "Do you prefer asynchronous communication when dealing with coworkers?", or "Do you like being in an office?", or "Do you like working in finance?".

7. Ask HN: Why does the Ruble still hold 50% of its value?

Top comment by throwaway_434

Creating a throwaway as I have a controversial take on this (maybe even the minority opinion here):

In my opinion, Ruble will become stable in few months (once the dust has settled that is). The sanctions are only imposed by the West (many Asian countries abstained from voting in UNSC). Russia will use Chinese Unionpay in-lieu of Mastercard/Visa and might integrate with Chinese CIPS (alternative to SWIFT). Probably even Indian Rupay in the future. It also has its own homegrown Mir Payment System. The sanctions jolt is going to be temporary. Ultimately SWIFT is going to not be dominant anymore. This is some hard reality that the West has to come to terms with. If anything, these sanctions have fast-tracked establishment of a multi-polar World and rejig of alliances.

Don't forget that other countries, who supported sanctions against Russia (due to coercion or tight coupling with the Western World), are also watching what is unfolding. They are seeing the disparity between how NATO invaded Libya and none of the NATO countries faced any sanctions, while Russia invades Ukraine and faces massive sanctions. Libya hadn't threatened any NATO country nor had it invaded any non-NATO country. It was going through an internal civil war. Yet it was leveled and Gaddafi was dethroned, and lynched in public. So anyone who says NATO is a defensive alliance is just bullshitting.

They'll all have a rethink on what it means to be allied with the West and follow a "Rules based order" that only applies to countries excluding the West. It naturally follows that they will want to balance out their National interests and not place all their eggs in one basket.

One thing is for sure. These circumstances will only boost alternative forms of currency/payment systems. Imagine having the entire payment infrastructure controlled by handful of countries who can act with impunity. For whom, the so called "rules" don't apply but do apply for everyone else.

8. Ask HN: Do you pull and run code as part of code review?

Top comment by paradite

I'm a senior frontend engineer doing a lot of code reviews and my team loves my MR (PR) submission standard:

- Require the author to attach screenshots of the feature in a markdown table format showing the before and after comparison. This is enforced using a MR template.

- Require the author to attach screen recording for complex user interactions.

Overall effect is that it saves everyone's time.

- The author has to verify that the feature works anyway, so taking screenshots / recordings doesn't take much addtional efforts.

- The reviewer can focus on code itself instead of checking whether the code works.

- Easy for both parties to spot design and UX issues/regressions visually.

9. Ask HN: Neutral DNS servers?

Top comment by neilalexander

You could just run a recursive resolver yourself by using the root hints. You don't need to delegate your DNS queries onto a third-party resolver like Quad9.

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files

10. Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

Top comment by pengstrom

When I asked my current employer why they chose it, they simply responded that it attracts the "right" people. From a business perspective, any language is arbitrary. What matters is having clever people around to solve problems.