AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

Top comment by mabbo

Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid, but it's how we got here, imho.

First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager, so they also need to interview you too and have a say.

Second: Is it really fair to have just one or two developers evaluate you? When I first was an interviewer, I liked everybody! I would have hired them all. So getting multiple data points matters. Best to have at least a couple dev interviews.

Then there's the whole problem of needing to evaluate you on multiple dimensions. Can one interview really tell if you're good problem solving, coding, algorithms/data structures, and any specialization the role has? What about the soft skills aspect? We're going to need to have at least 3 or 4 interviews to cover all these aspects. These roles pay a huge sum of money, so there's a lot of worry that someone will be hired who doesn't really meet the bar, you know?

But now we have a bigger problem: if we're going to invest 4+ people to spend an hour of time with you each, we'd better have some data points that you're worth that investment. So maybe we need one or two initial interviews ahead of time to weed out any obviously unlikely candidates.

After that, it's every other company going "Oh shit, Amazon does 6 interviews? We should do that too!".

2. Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

Top comment by cl42

"Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott

I started my career in international development, and the book above provides a dozen case studies on states using scientific management, stats, etc. to try and control their growth/populations/economies and failing miserably.

It is a beautiful book in that it illustrates how difficult it is to actually manage a country and economy well, especially if you are trying to completely change it (i.e., "develop" it, solve poverty, etc.). It humbled me as a 22 year old "professional" wanting to fix the world.

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs is a close second to this theme of economic, technocratic development.

EDIT: I notice 22 upvotes. WOW! If you are a fan of this book or curious to hear more, please comment. Happy to elaborate. If you want a third book, The Evolution of Civilizations[1] is another fun one here. It tries to apply scientific principles and hypothesis testing to historical analysis!

[1] https://10millionsteps.com/review-evolution-of-civilizations

3. Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

Top comment by dmos62

- Writing as form of (or tool for) thinking; Leslie Lamport said (maybe quoting someone) that if you're thinking, but not writing, you only think that you're thinking;

- High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather it: you'll come out being more capable;

- Formal specification (maybe TLA+) when doing something unintuitive, like non-trivial concurrency; or, simpler put, think before you do;

- Functional programming, immutability, state machines, reactive programming: whatever you can do to make your systems more declarative and their state easier to reason about;

- I'm a geek for tools, and I know that not everyone is like me, but for me choosing the right stack for the job is a big deal, and when saying stack, I mean every tool I'll be using, from the programming languages, to deployment tech, to testing setup; a good tool can effortlessly solve a host of problems.

4. Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

Top comment by samwillis

Ultimately I think it’s because the internet is just too big! Google were only able to do it because they had the right algorithm early in the age of the internet. They were then able to grow with it to achieve the scale required. Starting from scratch now on a general internet search engine would be close to impossible without 10s, if not 100s, billions of investment. And you would need that to build the index before even beginning to be competitive. No one is making bets that big on search, especially when the online advertising industry (which is the only way to fund it currently) is in danger of massive regulation.

I think there is massive opportunity for domain specific search engines though, imagine a search engine specifically designed for software engineers and developers, or one for academic research (not just papers but all online scientific content, news and discussion), or one targeting the arts. I think it’s these verticals that could be incredible.

You then potentially move towards a building “meta” search engines (if your are older than about 35 you will remember these) that work out what you are searching for and uses a domain specific engine.

Edit:

Just to add to this, people who say that “decentralised” search engines are the only way to compete with Google are not completely wrong, it’s just that it’s not about protocols and distributed indexes. It’s about a community of smaller search engines working within specific domains and collaborating (commercially) on meta search engines, prompting people to search on each others engines if it would be better for that search.

We almost need an “Open Search Co-Op” which smaller search engines can join to share technology and refers users to each other.

5. Ask HN: How to move away from Google

Top comment by keraf

I moved away from Google a few years ago. I'm using the following alternatives:

- Email: ProtonMail

- Contacts, Calendar, Online storage: NextCloud hosted by Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share)

- Phone: LineageOS (Android)

-- App stores: F-Droid for most apps and Aurora store for the occasional non F-Droid apps (like the ProtonMail client)

-- Maps: MagicEarth (not open source but privacy friendly and very featureful)

-- Messaging: Telegram FOSS

-- Contact & Calendar sync: DAVx

- Notes: Joplin (syncs with NextCloud and available on F-Droid as well)

- Search: DuckDuckGo

ProntonMail (with own domain) and the hosted NextCloud instance aren't free, but privacy comes with a price and I'm happy to pay for it. So far I'm very happy with the transition.

6. Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

Top comment by perlgeek

One thing we see over and over again leading to social injustice is the externalization of costs.

Examples:

* burning fossil fuels externalizes the cost of dealing with climate change

* during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state

* plastic waste ending up in the ocean means somebody[tm] externalized the cost of not properly disposing of / recycling their waste

... and so on, once you think in these terms, you find that pattern nearly everywhere.

If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it.

I know, this is very abstract, and I don't even know what a software solution for that would look like, but if somebody comes up with a really good of tracking that, it could have a huge impact on society in the long run.

Try to think of a society where nobody could quietly externalize a cost, and we had an effective way of tracking who externalizes how much, and go after the big offenders in a very data-driven way. There could even be general laws that make certain externalizations illegal, in a much broader way than current regulations do.

7. Ask HN: Is Facebook Dying?

Top comment by betwixthewires

I think so. From what I gather from people who do use it, it's all about marketplace and business related groups. So it's basically Craigslist and yellowpages for cold calling at this point. These sorts of features simply don't work on their own, real use is what let's you get away with sticking ads in there, if all anyone ever sees are ads they change the channel.

Personally I think all the old guard of social media is dying, and doing their best to hide it. You smell the desperation in their decisions. YouTube, Instagram, twitter, Facebook, reddit, they all seem out of style and things like tiktok, discord and Snapchat seem to be where the hype is. Of course, they're dying at different rates, but they seem to have decided at some point that ux innovation was over, they were done iterating and began to focus on increasing profitability regardless whether decisions improve ux or not, meanwhile new companies began experimenting with different ux approaches and business models. I expect in a few decades it will be common wisdom that social media trends change fast and no social media company will expect to be able to rest on their size and buy up the competition forever.

8. Ask HN: Why aren't there any real alternatives to Electron?

Top comment by Otek

Electron is absolutely unbeatable when it comes to being cross-platform. Because its core is the same as Chromium, every time Chromium, the biggest browser engine without question, is updated to run better, more stable on every platform, and big companies pump millions of dollars into it, Electron gets it "for free". Very hard to compete with that. Additionally, writing Electron applications has a relatively low entry point because it resembles writing web pages to some extent.

9. Ask HN: What do you do when competition signs up for your service?

Top comment by pedalpete

I'd take this as a good sign, and even an opportunity to reach out to them.

I have a funny story (but too long to get into) where I met the founder of a start-up that was in "stealth mode" and not very good at it, who told me all about his company before he found out I worked for their biggest competitor (it wasn't malicious, he just dumped all this info out).

We ended up bringing both teams together for drinks after we landed and good talks about the industry ensued, but no secrets from either side were divulged.

One way to look at it is that you've just found a group of people who look at the world the same way you do. You have a lot in common. Yes, you are going to compete for customers, but that can be viewed the same as trying to score a point in sports. Each point doesn't equal winning the game, but you want to compete for each point.

This conversation came up at work this week as we have a somewhat well funded competitor, but they are also at the very early stages, similar to us. My co-founder asked if we should reach out to them.

I didn't feel the need at this point, but have no fear of doing that later in the future.

Imagine this. If you were both at a conference together, wouldn't it be nice to be able to say hello, know who each other are, and potentially respect each other rather than put your face in the clouds and pretend they don't exist?

So, let them check you out, you can check them out. Maybe even connect on linkedin if that's your thing.

If you don't take the initiative to be a host, how would you feel if you end up being treated as a guest?

10. Ask HN: Why do search engines not let you blacklist spam domains?

Top comment by rbinv

Google used to have that feature: https://www.ghacks.net/2011/03/10/google-adds-block-all-doma...

In my opinion, back then, they needed the data as a training set for spammy domain detection. Now that SERP spam is no longer a serious issue (in Google's eyes anyway), why bother. Google always knows what's best for you.