AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

Top comment by zmmmmm

Teams doesn't have to be good to succeed. It just has to exist. It's not even very important how good it is. Given it exists, IT will make everyone use it on Microsoft's behalf regardless of how bad it is.

Or another way to look at it is that the real customers for Teams are IT departments. It makes their lives easier because they don't have to do anything and it meets all the compliance requirements they are supposed to enforce.

Which in turn reflects that the real customers of IT are regulators and auditors. Nobody with decision making power actually cares whether any of the software in use in enterprises works well or not.

2. Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

Top comment by codingdave

First off, no, a full rewrite is not only not necessary, but probably the worst possible approach. Do a piece at a time. You will eventually have re-written all the code, but do not ever fall into the trap of a "full re-write". It doesn't work.

But before you re-write once line of code - get some testing in place. Or, a lot of testing. If you have end-to-end tests that run through every feature that is currently used by your customer base, then you have a baseline to safely make changes. You can delete code as long as the tests pass. You can change code as long as the tests pass.

Once you are at that point, start picking off pieces to modernize and improve.

Also, respect the team. Maybe they aren't doing what you would, but they are keeping this beast alive, and probably have invaluable knowledge of how to do so. Don't come in pushing for change... come in embracing that this beast of a codebase makes 20 million a year. So talk about how the team can improve it, and modernize their skills at the same time.

Because if you walk in, saying, "This all sucks, and so do you, lets throw it out", do you really have to wonder why you are hitting resistance?

3. Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?

Top comment by dan-robertson

I think you partly may just be biased by happening to notice ads more if they fit the topic you sent to your wife or being lenient in deciding if ads meet the categorization. And if you dwell on an ad because it seems to match, you may get more similar ads.

Here is how I think you could design a more robust (but less fun) experiment:

- Come up with a bunch of topics, write them down on slips of paper, put the paper into a hat

- Each Monday, draw three topics from the hat, send some WhatsApp messages about the first, Messenger messages about the second, and don’t discuss the third. Don’t put the topics back in the hat.

- If you see any ads relating to one of the topics, screenshot them and save screenshots to eg your computer with a bit of the topic

- Separately, record which topic went to which platform

- After doing this for a while, go through the screenshots and (each of you and your wife or ideally other people) give a rating for how well the ad matches the topic. To avoid bias, you shouldn’t know which app saw the topic.

- Now work out average ratings / the distribution across the three products (WhatsApp vs Messenger vs none) and compare

4. Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

Top comment by jameshush

Pro tip: you're not a generalist. A big chunk of specializing is how you package/market yourself.

I consider myself a "full stack employee". I've done backend, frontend, hosted live events, some sales, marketing, a dash of HR, pretty much everything.

Do I write that on my LinkedIn? Heck no. A year or so ago I looked at all the experience I had, saw I had a through-line story of how I've worked on video projects over the past 7ish years, and decided "I'm the frontend WebRTC guy." I identified the spots of knowledge I needed to read up on to be confident (just a few gaps here and there) interviewed at a job, and within 10 minutes into the interview my future (now current) boss said "You're the perfect fit!". Because I was. I'm the frontend WebRTC guy with some sales/marketing experience, and they needed a frontend WebRTC guy with some sales/marketing experience.

Before that, I was the Frontend DevOps guy. Before that, I was the Backbone.js guy. And before that, I was the Sharepoint guy (shhhhh don't tell anyone!)

If you're interested in AI, just go poke around and find something in AI. Don't sweat it. We all got plenty of time, and like you said, as long as we can center divs and set up click tracking on a Wordpress site we'll always be able to put food on the table! :)

5. Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?

Top comment by vfc1

Don't overthink it. You can validate the idea using SEO tools, check if the competitors have traffic and do some detective work to see if they are viable companies.

Check the SEO space, and see how many people are running ads on the main search terms, how hard is it to rank for the the main keywords. Check if forums exists, and discount coupons for similar products in marketplaces, check for similar products on product hunt and all the other product websites like Appsumo, Capterra, etc.

Look for blogs, Youtube channels, Facebook groups, subreddits. Join the communities and post there, ask questions. Interact one on one with at least 15 or 20 people and ask them about their needs.

You can do all this in a couple of weeks in the evening, without even writing a single line of code, and validate your idea.

Regarding the legal part, unless you are directly competing with your employer, they couldn't care less.

And even then, a lot of companies are created by people that learned the industry by working for other companies.

Your boss does not care about your side project, as long as you get the job done. But for you to feel better, don't put your name on it until you have quit your job, it's the internet you can still be anonymous.

No company is going to waste their time and expensive legal resources gratuitously suing you for a side project, unless it's something blatant that directly impacts their bottom line.

I wouldn't tell your boss about your side-project either. He will likely just see it as a sign of lack of dedication, that your priorities are elsewhere, and a tell sign that you will leave soon anyway.

So if they are on the fence on keeping you, that might trigger a decision.

6. Ask HN: What do you think when companies ask for gritty people?

Top comment by simonebrunozzi

Just to name names: “Flexport is hiring smart, gritty People who get stuff done” - [0] (Flexport is a YC company [1], and therefore they get to list job offers on Hacker News from time to time)

Honestly, I can think of two things.

1) They're bad, looking for smart people to grind them down with 70-80 hour workweeks, with no end in sight, with the illusion of small stock grants that will be diluted a few more times before IPO.

2) They just needed a short title for the job posting (HN limits titles to 80 characters), and they tried to summarize the fact that they look for people who are motivated, willing to work hard. But it doesn't say much about their attitude, their desire to exploit workers, vs simply trying to find good hires to add value to the company.

I don't know if it's #1 or #2, or a #3 that I can't think of right now.

A wise prospect employee will do the homework to understand what's the company culture, what's the cap table situation, etc. There are plenty of resources to get a better sense of whether it's a good idea to work for a company or not.

[0]: https://www.flexport.com/company/careers/

[1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flexport

7. Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?

Top comment by pchm

Taleb's Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game).

Opens your eyes to a wide array of fallacies that govern our daily life (unknown unknowns, "experts" explaining past events as obvious in retrospect, the news, predictions, survivorship bias, confirmation bias, iatrogenics and a lot, lot more) — almost to a fault, i.e. if you take it too far, you'll see these fallacies everywhere and things like stories of success/failure, biographies (or history in general) etc. will no longer make the same impression.

8. Ask HN: Why Adobe still can’t figure out Flash on WASM?

Top comment by apignotti

From the point of view of Adobe, Flash is a legacy technology. Simply put, there is not enough business to be made with it at Adobe's scale.

It is safe to assume that the Flash team has either left the company or moved to other roles in the meantime. The Flash codebase is gigantic, evolved over decades and probably includes IP with non-obvious licensing restriction (RTMP is an example that pops to mind). Porting to Wasm such a big codebase would require assembling a new team and figuring out some legal aspects. Both these things are expensive.

At the same time, FOSS efforts to replace Flash can at best achieve partial support for SWF content in the wild. The API surface is just too massive and poorly documented. I speak from personal experience here, having founded the Lightspark project when I was younger and with a lot of time on my hands.

Our opinion (at LeaningTech) is that Wasm can solve the Flash preservation problem by virtualizing the original, unmodified Flash x86 plugin. We wrote at length about our approach here: https://medium.com/p/eb6838b7e36f

The resulting product (CheerpX for Flash, https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/) is available to companies that needs to use Flash (and particularly, Flex) business applications.

Since the SWF effectively runs using the original Flash plugin the accuracy is optimal. On the hand, licensing the plugin itself is required, which means that the solution is not viable for end-users. As much as we'd like this to be different, it's unfortunately outside of our control.

Full disclosure: I am founder and CTO of Leaning Technologies, and lead developer of CheerpX

9. Ask HN: Does Hacker News still do in person meet ups?

Top comment by mtmail

A new London one was planned for September 8th but cancelled due to the venue becoming unavailabel (day of Queen's death). https://www.meetup.com/london-hacker-news-meetup/events/2881... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32660447 . If I recall 180 people signed up.

10. Ask HN: Do you still buy physical tech books like “Learn Rust” or “Learn Go”?

Top comment by NikolaNovak

Yes.

I read fiction as ebooks (basically exclusively since days of palm pilot and Treo, then kindle and phone and tablets), but far prefer physical books when learning a new topic including tech. Few reasons but I think it's at least partially because:

1. It's easier to mark or hold with my finger e.g. A table or reference or definition page, then return or glance at it as I progress next few pages of that topic. I find it hard to go back and forth in ebook,triply so on e-ink with slow refresh.

2. I cannot explain this but with ebook I don't get a sense of progression or framework relationship. I think with physical book my brain "maps" knowledge to something that's at beginning middle or end of book. And or it's keenly aware that this topot took two pagds thjs topic took 7 pages. Layout of tables and content and lists is firmer. Not sure how to explain it but I find that physical progression through the book solidifies it in my brain.

(I don't do much note taking or highlighting but I suppose it's good to have as an easy physical option. While I type all my work notes and my todos are electronic, I don't do really do electronic book annotation for whatever reason.)

Overall, it's at the point where existence of really good physical book may influence whether I dig into an optional technical / learning topic or not.