AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

Top comment by NorwegianDude

You don't say where you are located, but unless you are in one of the few places where Dell doesn't offer on-site next business day support then XPS 13 is a great laptop.

Their support is amazing: "We're not sure what is causing it, but we'll send someone to replace the whole motherboard tomorrow." "OH, your currently halfway across the world on a island? No problem, we'll be there tomorrow"

I really don't understand how it's done. Clearly they must have parts distributed ahead of time.

I'm just amazed that it's included in the price considering the cost of sending a technician out to a customer. The fact that even here on HN a lot of people think Apple's support is good suggests that Dell might be able to save a ton of money by lowering their support level, so I don't really get why they offer it.

2. Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

Top comment by iaaan

Earlier this year, I interviewed this guy who gave me really strange vibes. He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. I google'd some specific, peculiar phrases I remembered him saying after the interview and found that the phrases came straight out of places like the Kubernetes documentation, word for word. He was googling my questions and then reading the documentation aloud to me.

His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."

Wait... Intellectsoft isn't the name of this company. Did these "Data Service Group" people steal Intellectsoft's website?

Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Over+the+past+decade%2C+o...

I'm still not really sure what was going on with that as we politely rejected him and never heard from him again.

If you look up the company on LinkedIn, it appears to be made up of hundreds of immigrant DevOps engineers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-service-group/

3. Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough

Top comment by jodrellblank

If that idea of your lifetime not being enough is stressing you out, Dr David Burns' work on cognitive behavioural therapy might help. Saying you want to be an expert in many things because you are interested in many things could be papering over some deeper anxiety-driven motivations around 'not being good enough' or 'not being worthy of respect' or 'needing to prove yourself to someone' or 'not wanting to be a nobody' or 'wanting to avoid the bullying you used to get' or etc. The Feeling Good podcast[1] is a good audio introduction and has many examples, his book Feeling Great is more of a self-help style written introduction.

The important question is not "what should I work on?" or "how should I decide and prioritise?", it is something more like "I have thought processes, they model imaginary futures and guide me away from predicted harm. Why do I have an imaginary future of not being enough of an expert and feel suffering in the present? Where did that thought come from and what is it doing for me, and do I want to keep it?".

You can go with the desire for expertise part, "why do I need to be an expert in many things?" - whose respect are you trying to earn? Whose criticism are you trying to avoid? Who are you trying to avoid being like? What emotional disaster is that trying to protect you from? Or the other side, "what is so bad if I am not an expert in many things on my deathbed?", what's imagined social or emotional harm is that warning me of?

[1] https://feelinggood.com/list-of-feeling-good-podcasts/

4. Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

Top comment by dmje

Everyone here is so incredibly focused on money as the primary motivator, which I guess given the thread question makes some sense. But I'd like to just put in a little word for money not being everything, and client type / work type actually being a really important part of the equation.

HN is a forum where increasingly I see posts every single day about the high level of misery in tech / how can I get out of this rat race / high levels of stress / undervalued / etc etc.

I charge £500 a day. It's not much compared to some of the rates on here, but I work with lovely, interesting clients in the non-profit sector. My clients love what they do and I do good work for them so they love what I do. I have long term, low stress, friendship-like relationships with my clients, not shouty / nasty / high stress ones. I've done this work for 12 years, and had to work with maybe a handful of assholes during that time.

FWIW I think there is a "lower budget bar" under which demands are insane for the money being offered, and we should all avoid this work unless we actively want to take a race to the bottom. But - I think there is undoubtedly a "higher budget bar" over which the stress level and expectation is made exceedingly high. This (I would imagine; I don't know, I've worked in non profits my whole life) is probably also equated with sector - if you're in a FinTech environment I would imagine you're looking at high budgets but also an insane number of highly pressured assholes shouting at you all the time.

What am I basically saying? I guess - yes, charge enough (and this is probably more than you think it should be) - but also, look at the bigger picture of your work / sector. Think about happiness, work-life balance, client motivations, etc - and use this to inform what you charge and how you charge for it. That'd be my advice.

5. Ask HN: Why hasn't the ACH system been more abused?

Top comment by wiredfool

The simplest explanation is: ACH is reversible. If the consumer notifies their bank of an unauthorized debit within 60 days, the money gets yanked from the originating bank and put back in your account.

The originating bank will then do the same to the merchant who debited your account, with feeling and 4 part harmony. If they do this too much (>1% unauthed, or >5% overall), then they get cut off. (Exact thresholds depend on the bank and their risk tolerance and what they've underwritten the merchant for. But those are about the highest numbers you'll see, though sometimes NSF returns can be higher. )

ACH never settles. There's no security as such. An ACH transaction happens overnight, on trust, and may come back (by agreement) 60days later, and longer in cases of extreme fraud. So any time you're seeing a 2-3 day hold on ACH, it's the bank doing risk management decisions, not something in the underlying transfer. (note, that may not be strictly true for some correspondent small banks in alaska or other odd time zones, where there really is a day+ delay on things)

The only thing that's keeping fraud under control is the banks doing underwriting on the merchants who can do debits. They're on the hook (ultimately) if there's fraud, so it's in their interests to keep it clean. They're also not likely to cut and run, because banking connections to the ACH network are not cheap/easy to come by.

(source, I've worked in this space for 18 years)

6. Ask HN: How do you get side gigs?

Top comment by loudouncodes

Networking and Marketing.

For 10 years I spoke at every conference, user group, etc. that I could find. I sustained a 9 person consulting company finding gigs through the network of other speakers and attendees that would come up and ask me questions. Every question can be rephrased as “I have a problem you can help me solve”, but you also have to qualify to make sure there is a company with a budget for solving that problem. That takes a little business development.

For conference attendees, you have to have some free giveaway to keep a connection… like a free 2 hour code review of your existing project, or “I’m willing to do this presentation for an in-house user group as a lunchtime thing if you’re interested”. Those little giveaways get you closer to the management and the confidence you know what you’re talking about.

7. Ask HN: Whatever happened to dedicated sound cards?

Top comment by speeder

The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules.

When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.

But a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio calculations that were then just starting to take off, people were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio processor, and you would have games where the audio was calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions...

After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.

Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.

Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current ones have way less features than the ones that they made during the sound card era.

EDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors, so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. All this died and in a sense also affected video development, some features that video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules.

As for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables.

8. Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

Top comment by Ken_At_EM

Share it all. Complete transparency. Show them the cash flow.

At your small size you will benefit from the additional trust and alignment this will bring. You may find yourself delighted in finding that many of your team can see and solve problems that you may have missed.

You can be super secretive to combat the BigCo mentality like Apple when you have the first class problem of being a BigCo.

9. Ask HN: Why don't we have 3 day weekends yet?

Top comment by sokoloff

In some places in Europe, after some period of employment, you can demand of your employer to let you work 80% of hours for 80% of pay. I have team members in Europe on this schedule and it works out well for everyone.

Based on that experience, I'd also be open to such an arrangement for employees based in geographies where that's not legally required, but is legally and practically permitted. My guess is that most people are working a 5-day workweek because they're most comfortable doing that, from both a "well, all of my friends are doing that anyway, so I wouldn't have anyone to hang out with" as well as from a "I'm working for my financial future and working only X hours per week is unlikely to give me the same career trajectory as working 25% more hours per week" perspective.

10. Ask HN: Why is the printer industry so scammy?

Top comment by acjohnson55

I used to work for Lexmark, back when they were in the inkjet business. They are perhaps most notable for starting and fueling the race to the bottom in printer price. The theory was that if you could lock the users in, the customer lifetime value would be made on selling profitably prices supplies (i.e. the ink cartridge).

There were a few big problems with this:

- People often could buy a new printer, with supplies included, for cheaper than a new set of cartridges.

- The primary focus of new printer development was on eliminating as much cost as possible.

- Refillers and remanufacturers compete with the official supplies.

The result was an almost completely customer-hostile industry. Printers became worse over the years. DRM and write-only memory were used to try to stop refilling and remanufacturing. Expiry of the ink was considered a good thing, as it would force customers to buy more ink even if they had low usage.

While I was there, Lexmark sometimes made losses by selling too many printers. About a decade ago, they left the inkjet industry, which they had played a major role in wrecking. Laser has come down in price to the point that it has largely supplanted inkjet for light-duty use. The manufacturers in the home/small office laser market haven't been quite as hostile.

Interestingly, we're seeing a similar dynamic play out in the venture-backed startup world of the past decade. What's old is new.

Companies eventually started marketing higher quality machines, targeted towards power users with broader needs. But the era of the bargain inkjet printers seems to be pretty much over. Also, it took an entire generation, but we're finally much further along towards the paperless office/society.