AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What to do about ‘Good at programming Bad at Leetcode’

Top comment by karaterobot

At my old company, we never did take home assignments or whiteboard interviews. We just sat candidates down and pair programmed with them for a couple hours on whatever we were working on at the time. We paid them the same hourly rate we were making, (but didn't charge the clients for it).

If the candidate obviously didn't know what they were doing, we ended it early. Usually you knew within 15 minutes.

One candidate hated the interview process, and walked out. One candidate, likely a future business leader, argued vociferously for a higher hourly rate during the interview, and later with the founder.

But I would describe our success rate for finding good programmers who were easy to work with as "extremely high", and our rate for false positives as "I can't remember ever having one in about 4 years of working there".

The overhead for the engineering team to run these was not zero, and not everybody enjoyed doing it. But some people did, so we had them do it more often. I have no idea why this isn't a more common practice, I would recommend it to anybody.

2. Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?

Top comment by insickness

The best solution to getting past the anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle is to take small, manageable actions while accepting the feelings that go along with those actions.

Start with the smallest steps possible. Maybe that means opening the assignment and saving it to your computer. Then put it down and walk away. Come back in a little while and take another small step, such as reading over the assignment or making an outline of what you need to do to get it done. Often once you've done something you will often start to feel a lot different than if you've done nothing.

Keep track of how you're feeling. It's okay to feel more anxiety at first because you're doing something instead of nothing. Those feelings tend to subside over time as you take action, but the point is not to reduce your anxiety, the point is that you are making a commitment to do something in your life, to live your life, rather than to remain paralyzed in fear. Your goal is not to get rid of the anxiety but to live the kind of life you want to live.

This is the model for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. A great book on this is "Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Life."

3. Ask HN: 6-hour workdays more important than 4-day workweeks IMO

Top comment by dsr_

Can we agree that different people have different optimal working styles?

Some people get everything done first thing in the morning and are useless in the afternoons.

Some people can't get started until noon whatever their local time is.

Some people can commit to 10 or 12 hour days, and if so, it's not fair to ask them to work 5 days a week at that rate.

Some people work best in private offices, some at separated workstations, some at big collaborative tables, and some at home. Some do best standing, some walking, and some lying down -- all different from the ones who do best in a nice supportive chair or on a stool with no backrest. Some need an ergonomic keyboard, some need macros, some need a giant screen or 2 screens, or six. Some need screenreader software and some need speech-to-text.

The relevant questions:

* are they productive in some arrangement? I have seen a very very few people who seem to be always rearranging things and changing equipment and hours in a constant pursuit of distraction. The vast majority of people figure things out and settle into a steady state of productivity...

* is the nature of the work conducive to the desired arrangement? If the position requires customer or vendor contact or operations response, the coverage needs to be maintained (and handoffs need to occur smoothly).

* is the company culture amenable to alteration or accomodation? At one workplace, most of the people I worked with didn't come in until 11am and liked to schedule meetings at 6pm. I liked to leave around 5:30, having been there since 8 or so.

4. Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

Top comment by getoj

From Bill Watterson's commencement speech at Kenyon College in 1990. I was lucky to read this when I was graduating and it changed my whole career path. I am now very happy and very boring:

"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble."

5. Ask HN: Why are people in real life so different?

Top comment by civilized

On social media, thousands see your post but only a few react. They're the ones that found your post much more interesting than the average person who saw it.

In real life, only a few people hear what you say but they feel socially obligated to react in some way. So you get bland, polite reactions. They're the people that, if they'd seen your post on social media, wouldn't have replied at all.

In a nutshell: on social media, you broadcast to a huge potential audience, and your actual audience chooses you. In real life, your ideas only get to a small number of people who may not have chosen to listen to you. The interest levels of these two audiences are naturally very different.

6. Ask HN: Can you share websites that are pushing the utility of browsers forward?

Top comment by modeless

My site https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ uses WebGL, Web Workers, WASM, Service Workers, Notifications API, Geolocation API, probably some other web platform features I'm forgetting.

The use of workers and WASM is not obvious, but on page load it takes the current orbit parameters for every orbiting satellite that is potentially visible anywhere on Earth and calculates the future position of each satellite every few minutes for the next 5 days, and then checks each future position for visibility from your location (accounting for sun angle, earth occlusion, sky brightness etc), all client side before page load finishes. WASM allows me to use the canonical satellite propagation tools (SGP4, written in ancient C translated from Fortran) and workers let me use multiple cores and not block the UI too much.

7. Ask HN: Cloudflare broke my domain's DNSSEC making it unreachable since 4 days

Top comment by elithrar

(It sucks that I had to see this on HN)

Can you email me - silverlock at cloudflare - with your ticket ID and domain name so I can understand what broke?

8. Ask HN: Is there hope for micropayments?

Top comment by jzellis

Back in the dark ages, I was an early employee of Bitpass, a micropayments startup, and for Bitpass I co-founded what may have been the first completely indie online music store, Mperia (in the sense that artists could simply upload and sell their work directly, with no contracts or middlemen). It used Bitpass micropayments for record sales.

(We may have also been the first online music store to have Creative Commons licensing built in, as our launch coincided with CC's. I'll never forget at their launch party, when the nice, awkward teenage kid I thought was just some attendee's son got up and was introduced as one of CC's developers, Aaron Swartz.)

The thing that killed the momentum then is the same thing that still kills it - card transaction fees. Bitpass got around this by allowing you to buy Bitpass credits for like $3, which you could spend anywhere. It worked great for music, and Mperia was originally seen as a good gateway (and, frankly, loss leader) for getting people to adopt our system.

Alas, it never took off, and Bitpass's brilliant CEO and founder got sidelined by investors in favor of some ronin CEO from the ad world who bogged it down in awkward partnership deal negotiations until the money ran out. I'm still convinced, all these years later, that if they'd focused on the indie media angle, it could have taken off.

(I also wish that this band who played their first gigs ever at my coffeeshop open mic in Vegas called The Killers had put their record up pre-record label deal, as I asked them to. I think Brandon was down but their shitty manager told them not to, and later they sued him for being shady af, which I did warn them about.)

9. Ask HN: I found a pretty extreme data leak and I'm not sure what to do

Top comment by michaelt

> Now, I'm obviously documenting this insanity to write a blog post over the next couple of days,

Many countries have hacking laws that are exceptionally broad, written in the 1980s by legislators who had never even touched a computer. A law might, for example, ban "gaining unauthorized access to a computer system"

This means that if you accidentally find what looks like a security problem, and you look around a bit to make sure you're not raising a false alarm - you're already in violation of the law.

If your country has any such laws, to claim credit for your discovery would be to admit to a crime.

And while you might not have done anything you think of as hacking, put yourself in the mindset of the site operator. They might feel as if you've put a gun to their heads, or that scaring you into shutting up and deleting any data you've downloaded is them protecting their customers - they might go to the cops and give the cops a very different perspective.

If you want to alert the world to this breach, may I suggest downloading the breached data anonymously and e-mailing it anonymously to Troy Hunt of Have I Been Pwned?

10. Ask HN: How are you preparing for the recession?

Top comment by kradeelav

- aggressively trim unnecessary expenses like media subscriptions, the "extra coffee", immaterial luxury goods. you don't have to live like a monk, but all of us could easily trim our fun spending by 20-50%.

- have 6-12 months of emergency cash that can sustain you if your main source of income fails. something will always happen, whether it's an appliance or car that breaks down, or an unexpected medical expense. slush funds are good.

- 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. make stuff last the extra mile, if you can. stretching electronics and clothes .... fixing electronics (when realistic) instead of buying the new shiny thing ...

- don't sell stocks. if anything; if you're fortunate enough to truly have extra cash, buy that stock at rock-bottom prices you've been eyeballing for a while. buy low, sell high.

- if you have dependents, be extra conservative with your cash. you will need each other.

- this too, shall pass.