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Issue #173 - July 3, 2022
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring?, Who wants to be hired? and Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: GPT-3 reveals my full name – can I do anything?
Top comment by jmillikin
> I try to hide my real name whenever possible, out of an
> abundance of caution. You can still find it if you search
> carefully, but in today's hostile internet I see this kind
> of soft pseudonymity as my digital personal space, and expect
> to have it respected.
As a purely practical matter -- again, not going into whether this is how things should be, merely how they do be -- it is futile to want the internet as a whole to have a concept of privacy, or to respect the concept of a "digital personal space". If your phone number or other PII has ever been associated with your identity, that association will be in place indefinitely and is probably available on multiple data broker sites.
The best way to be anonymous on the internet is to be anonymous, which means posting without any name or identifier at all. If that isn't practical, then using a non-meaningful pseudonym and not posting anything personally identifiable is recommended.
2. Ask HN: What tone to use in code review suggestions?
Top comment by IncRnd
Review: a formal assessment or examination of something with the possibility or intention of instituting change if necessary.
None of your examples provide feedback as to why you want a change. That may be why you have been led to ask this question.
Consider:
* There is a potential overflow in this code. The library function xyz already does this and can log when the app is in debugging mode.
* This portion duplicates the same set of processes as over there. Refactor these into a single function, and we'll be good to go.
* While I don't have feedback yet on this function, it's too long for me to follow. It would be easier to read and for future maintenance if you refactor this part into a function.
* Since we're in closedown we can only take certain types of changes. If you refactor this into a separate function in the library, this change can be accepted.
* Or, I hate to be the process person, but the internal guidelines for this team call for all code to be structured the same way. Refactor this part into a separate function and I'll approve the PR.
There are lots of ways to provide feedback. I suggest stating the problem with the code and providing a solution. If that's the only possible solution to get past your review, state and don't ask. You can also give a carrot with "do this and I'll approve the merge."
How would you speak when sitting next to the person face-to-face? What tone do you want your boss to use when providing a performance review during a 1on1?
3. Ask HN: Can I see your cheatsheet?
Top comment by asicsp
I use my ebooks for reference:
* GNU grep and ripgrep (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnugrep_ripgrep/)
* GNU sed (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnused/)
* GNU awk (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnuawk/)
* Ruby one-liners cookbook (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_ruby_oneliners/)
* Perl one-liners cookbook (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_perl_oneliners/)
* Command line text processing with GNU Coreutils (https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli_text_processing_coreuti...)
* Command line text processing with Rust tools (https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli_text_processing_rust/) — work-in-progress
* Computing from the Command Line (https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli-computing/) — work-in-progress
4. Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?
Top comment by ElijahLynn
Social needs. Children need to learn how to be in relationship with others, it is the most fundamental need we have and is so important for the future of our planet.
If I were to homeschool, it isn't about the learning, that is easy, it is about providing an environment where children can learn to co-exist with others. That can still be done with homeschool, but it will need to be intentional with daily activities that involve being in relationship with others, in physical form.
5. Ask HN: What is your Kubernetes nightmare?
Top comment by ekidd
It's odd, but I actually really enjoy using Kubernetes in production.
We have a few rules:
1. Read a good intro book cover-to-cover before trying to understand it.
2. Pay a cloud vendor to supply a working, managed Kubernetes cluster.
3. Prefer fewer larger clusters with namespaces (and node pools if needed) to lots of tiny clusters.
3. Don't get clever with Kubernetes networking. In fact, touch it as little as possible and hope really hard it continues to work.
This is enough to handle 10-50 servers with occasional spikes above 300. It's not perfect, but then again, once you have that many machines, pretty much every solution requires some occasional care and feeding.
My personal Kubernetes nightmare is having to build a cluster from scratch on bare metal.
6. Ask HN: How is the remote vs in-person trend looking?
Top comment by ketzo
This doesn't quite answer your trend, but personal anecdote:
I recently switched jobs, and as part of my job interview process, I was pretty firm about only looking for companies that were working at least part of the week in the office. I just really thrive on in-person work.
Fast forward a few weeks... and I ended up taking a job with a startup that was fully remote. I loved their product, loved the founders, loved the team I had met; I figured I would make it work.
Two months in and I have hardly noticed that I'm not working in person. There's just such a huge difference when you're working at BigCo remotely and working at an eight-person startup. Particularly at my company, people just really give a shit and it shows. I feel genuinely connected to and engaged with my teammates. Makes remote work a lot better.
7. Ask HN: Europe to East Coast, does it make sense to move at 50?
Top comment by bshepard
Hello there, I live in Berlin now and used to live in the United States. My family is there, and I go back to the east coast of the US often. The degenerating and dystopian quality of the United States is difficult to overstate, but almost impossible to capture verbally.
Whatever one cause attributes to the systematic breakdown of the US, it is difficult to deny the realities of the decline -- massive alcohol and narcotic dependency issues, increase polarization of politics, censoriousness on all sides of the discussion, narrowness, a shortening of attention, a loss of standards. I could go on, but it's too depressing.
I came to Berlin first in 2006. Yes, it was very cheap then, but also very monocultural: now there are many more forms of life here, and they benefit from their coexistence. Stay here, make this moderately good place even better.
8. Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
Top comment by Alex3917
For your typical solo founder in their 30s, their odds of dying at any point over the next 10 years is something like 0.2%. And short of them dying, their business isn't going anywhere because keeping a SaaS startup online doesn't cost anything -- if you have the skills to do it yourself.
Whereas the odds of a venture backed startup shutting down at any point over the next ten years is something like 30%.
So from a risk perspective, it's literally over 100x more risky to use a software product made by a venture backed company than one from a solo founder.
On all of my sales calls, I tell people that I'm bootstrapped and that I'm going to charge them extra so that I can reduce the risk to their business by staying bootstrapped, and I have yet to run into anyone who doesn't seem satisfied by that pricing strategy.
9. Ask HN: Where and how do you find your early adoptors?
Top comment by daenz
I've been in your shoes many times. I worked for many months, solving a problem that I thought needed solving, and then sought users to pay for it. All of those attempts never resulted in success. My most current project though, I am doing things differently. I talked to people and listened to what they needed. I saw an opportunity in what they were asking for, so I started building, while letting them use it as soon as it was even a tiny bit functional. I only invested my time building when there was a positive signal that people would pay for it.
I know this probably isn't what you want to hear, and you've probably heard this advice before. I was like that too, and I ignored it. But it really does seem to work.
10. Ask HN: What tools are you a 10/10 on?
Top comment by zzo38computer
I use vim (text editor), curl (download from internet (many protocols) and can be piped; can also send), xclip (command-line clipboard access by pipes), dc (calculation), grep, 7z (supports many file formats), and the SQLite command shell. I also use less, bash, gcc, gdb, valgrind, dosbox, Ghostscript, and many others. I also wrote my own programs for some things; for example, I have my own set of programs for dealing with picture files (Farbfeld Utilities), but I also have ImageMagick in case of something that Farbfeld Utilities does not currently do; I have made programs for other things too. (Of course, I use many other programs too.) (Unfortunately, some of them use Unicode even though I do not want them to (others do not have that problem), and sometimes requires writing extra code to work around them (other times I am working only with ASCII and it is not a problem).)