AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How do you deal with rude interviewers?

Top comment by revlolz

Unacceptable behavior for an interviewer. Ironically, that person did you a solid by showing you this wasn't the company you want to work at without already starting there and investing even more time with them. Imagine finding this out after you quit a current job, and low and behold, this guy is your new boss.

You are the candidate and hold equal power. In the thought process you had "I think I should terminate this interview." If it ever gets to a point you are uncomfortable due to rudeness, leave. Sure, in a big faang world you may never have interaction with that person, but them being on the panel has a chance they would be your boss, peer, or in your org some way.

Toxic people can ruin what would otherwise be good careers. Alternatively, this can also be a huge indicator a company tolerates and promotes this behavior. To me, while it's possible, that this was a once and rare thing that only this person has done... Screw betting my career on the least likely possibility.

2. Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

Top comment by armc

Here's 30 years of experience for you:

1. Few business problems can't be solved by more sales.

2. Cut expenses when the storm is approaching, not when you're soaking wet.

3. You can't eat assets or inventory. Don't get emotional about what you own, only about your cash balances.

4. Banks are your friend only when you don't need them. Corollary: One bank for borrowing, one for cash balance accounts.

5. 70 completed calls per week. Not emails, calls. You can do it, start now.

6. Don't be an asshole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule

7. Hire and retain "T-shaped" people. In difficult times those employees execute across multiple domains.

8. Client, vendor or employee drama is quicksand. You assist with a stick or a rope, you don't jump in with them.

9. Don't romanticize work & try to avoid romance getting in the way of work.

10. You're only as happy as your unhappiest child. Prioritize good parenting over work. Good parenting = SOS: Self awareness, objectivity, selflessness.

11. Get a prenup. No, really, do get one.

12. Pay yourself according to a financial model that prioritizes healthy business cash balances, and not your personal desires.

3. Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

Top comment by bombledmonk

In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v. Outlook desktop is one of the few places where this hotkey does not work.

Before I knew there was a native hotkey combo, I created a autohotkey script that would do that and had a mini-tutorial that showed how.

https://forum.digikey.com/t/add-a-digi-key-search-hotkey-eve...

4. Ask HN: Is it true that any community that grows big enough, gets ruined?

Top comment by jen729w

"Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.

Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...

5. Ask HN: Is DBA still a good job?

Top comment by forinti

I was a developer and turned into a DBA by necessity. When I was still just a dev, I couldn't get the support I needed from the DBAs, so now I try to be the person I needed help from before.

But, I now understand the problem. At my organisation we have only 2 DBAs, and we can't give all of our time to this task.

To be a DBA is an endless battle against the entropy some devs try to create. The data model should really always be validated by someone with more knowledge and experience. Also, some young devs come up with crazy ideas (for instance, we should not use foreign keys). Others want to load insane amounts of data to process in the database, instead of preprocessing, or using a staging database. There is a continuous stream of bad ideas being implemented.

And when a bad idea gets implemented, it is really hard to undo it and it tends to just create more chaos: you need materialised views to get around bad modelling, or weird views to compensate for duplicate data, etc.

So, yes, a DBA is a really important role. With regards to it being a good job, it depends if your company takes it seriously and puts you in the development process, otherwise you'll be in for a lot of stress.

6. Ask HN: Any other self taught devs terrified of interviewing these days?

Top comment by zw123456

I am an old timer, back in 1978 after getting my PhD, I interviewed with a bunch of companies. One was Bell Labs. I remember the recruiter, did not make me take a test on programming or anything. He just asked me to explain the most interesting project that I had worked on. I told him about a music synthesizer chip I had designed... after about 20 minutes of going on about it, I stopped and said sorry, I went on too long. He just said, nope, you are exactly the type of person we are looking for and hired me on the spot.

I think there is a piece missing now days, I could just be an old fart that does not know what I am talking about (probably), but it's the idea of finding someone with passion, even if they are not the slickest programmer in town.

7. Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

Top comment by akersten

Because the US endorses the concept of "essential patents," meaning you need to pay a licensing fee to be lawfully allowed to perform the math that transforms data into A/V content.

Never to mention the two blatant issues with this, being:

1) video codecs are the exemplary "we'll patent math and there's nothing you can do about it" scam, since that's literally all a video codec is

2) a process being "essential" to a particular outcome (i.e. no other way to do it) was the main motivation mathematics was explicitly excluded from patentability in the first place, so the idea of "essential patents" just underlines the absurdity of the entire system

Anyways, yearly reminder that software patents are a blight to innovation and a scourge on our industry, and no you won't change my mind.

8. Ask HN: Is Heroku Being Sunset?

Top comment by Beltalowda

I have no insider knowledge, but a look thought their changelog[1] is not exactly inspiring, especially if you consider that Heroku doesn't support things like HTTP2.[2] There are almost no real changes beyond updates to languages and the occasional (rare) minor change to the platform, which is not a sign of a healthy actively supported service.

[1]: https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog

[2]: https://help.heroku.com/JAOCNZ25/does-heroku-have-plans-to-s...

9. Ask HN: Why is Google Premium not a thing?

Top comment by fishtoaster

"Pay to have no ads" always seems great from a consumer perspective, but terrible from the ad buyer perspective. The people who would buy google premium are the people ad buyers most want to advertise to.

Widget Salesman: "I'd like to buy some ads for my widgets"

Google: "Cool. Some users won't see them."

Widget Salesman: "Which ones?"

Google: "Only the most-engaged ones with the most money."

Widget Salesman: "..."

10. Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

Top comment by sigmoid10

>Unfortunately I did not have a phone number associated with this account. My understanding is I would have been able to recover my account, If I had one.

It boggles my mind how people can have their entire life tied to this service and not connect a phone number, especially since google regularly warns you during login that this can happen if you don't add your number. They even ask to confirm every now and then in case your number changed and you forgot to update it. If you're worried about giving them your number for data privacy reasons, you should not have used their service for your whole life's activities anyway.