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Issue #188 - October 16, 2022
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring? and Who wants to be hired? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
Top comment by cassonmars
I used to put away a liter of vodka a night. I kept it up for years, accumulating a solid decade of heavy drinking. I was miserable. It was souring my relationship. The stress from work, personal life, and declining mental state of course made me feel even more compelled to drink. I was becoming a shell of my former self, and my dreams were becoming strictly that.
I had a confluence of events that changed my course:
1. I attended a tech conference where someone I personally knew who had went through rehab was hosting and speaking, and he was filled with a vivacity I hadn’t seen from him before.
2. My spouse gave me an ultimatum to quit or he’d be out the door. It wasn’t the first time he had said this, but I had a feeling it was probably going to be the last.
3. My progression in life was stalling. I couldn’t keep up commitments anymore, and I was starting to feel like I had already passed my peak.
So I quit. Cold Turkey. It was a dangerous, stupid thing to do, but I knew if I tried to taper off, I’d just slide back. The withdrawals were nightmarish, and I was lucky I didn’t die from it. But I pulled through, and then started to do some heavy soul searching for why I ever picked up the bottle — what was I escaping from? And I found those answers, and got to work — A real kind of personal work that most people will never have to put into themselves.
Since then, I have been a cofounder, jumped multiple levels in my career, and have been working towards several academic publications, on top of drastically improving my personal life. It’s been nearly five years since I put down the bottle. And every day I choose to never pick it up again.
2. Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?
Top comment by reissbaker
The Vim/Neovim ecosystem has gotten unbelievably better over the last 5-10 years. "Living in the terminal" for core development work is IMO better than pretty much anything else out there; my Neovim setup has a modern plugin manager; an IDE-like experience with fast autocompletion as I type, goto definition, and automated refactor support; and a side-drawer file browser navigable with Vim motions. It feels like an IDE, except that it launches in ~100ms and has ultra-low typing latency. Using it with tmux panes means I can have various drawers and panes with a series of full, incredibly fast terminals wherever I want, with long-running tasks like automated test watching/running while I edit code placed wherever I want around the editor panel. Not to mention the Cambrian explosion of "modern" terminal tooling getting built, like xplr [1], hyperfine [2], httpie [3], etc.
That being said, I think "living in the terminal" for general purpose computing, like browsing the web or talking to your coworkers, has been in a kind of frozen standstill while the rest of the world has moved on. I think it isn't worth trying to push non-dev work into the terminal currently.
1: https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr
2: https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine
3: https://github.com/httpie/httpie
3. Ask HN: Technical forums that are not dominated by pedantry?
Top comment by jkcorrea
Problem is all the pragmatic people you want answering your questions are too pragmatic to spend time reading and leaving comments on the internet
Never say never but I don't think it's very easy to build a broad and helpful community where the factors you listed aren't at play in people's motivations.
I find better help going into very specific communities for the technologies I'm having issues with. Discord servers are a great example
4. Ask HN: Firing an employee under a month before vest?
Top comment by SkyPuncher
IMO, it's not about this person. It's about the rest of the team and the message you want them to take away. Letting someone go right before they vest will likely create distrust on the rest of the team.
Typically, vesting cliffs are designed to give some breathing room for new hires. If they turn out to be terrible, you can part ways with them without impacting your cap table. If this person had long term performance issues, it's kind of shitty to wait until just before they vest.
I don't know what your company's situation is, but this likely doesn't have to be an "all vesting" or "no vesting" situation. By default, it sounds like you can terminate this employee and provide "no vesting". You can make it clear that you'll be offering them some/most/all of their anticipated vested stock despite you terminating their employment prior to the vesting cliff. This lets you terminate the relationship right now while saving face with the rest of the team.
5. Ask HN: Is Substack the new Medium?
Top comment by mudrockbestgirl
These things seem to come and go in cycles. In a few years Substack will probably end up just like Medium as they try to "cross the chasm" - Typical VC-funded company incentives. There is already a lot of low-quality spam on the platform.
You don't need $50-100M in funding and (soon) hundreds of employees to run a simple newsletter site. This only forces the company to over-engineer and push intrusive monetization to make meaningful investor returns. Just like Medium, Quora, etc. These were great simple products, until the pressure to justify their valuation and return money to investors ruined them.
6. Ask HN: Why do people come to HN for Stripe resolutions?
Top comment by globile
Stripe support is broken. I recall patio11 writing about how Stripe is all about putting in the correct "process".
Well, the process for support fails.
We handle a decent volume and have been a merchant for over 8 years. We can't even get an account manager to handle specific issues.
90% of requests are met with a subtle RTFM!
If you ask specific questions, these are avoided.
An open ticket is bounced from person to person. No two people seem to touch the same issue.
If you try specific chat support, and you ask technical questions, you'd expect some knowledge. Instead, most agents put you on hold and go over documentation, only to come back and say they've escalated this to a ticket.
Then the ticket comes back with more links to documentation, never answering the question.
The only way to make progress, answers and some human treatment is by jumping from connection to connection on Linkedin, trying to get an intro to someone inside.
Or of course, getting lucky with an HN post.
7. Ask HN: Are we all burned out?
Top comment by THENATHE
Too be honestly, I feel like society at large causes burnout.
I read a very complete account of my grandfathers early life (before he joined the military during WW2) and the kinda shit he did living of a farm is stuff of fairytales.
When someone in the 20 mile radius needed a barn built, LITERALLY EVERYONE came to help. When you were off work for the night, you would sit with your whole family and read the newspaper or play cards, or travel to your grandmas house 3 blocks away.
Now the whole world is split up. My nearest family is over 600 miles away. My friends would rather play video games on discord than go and play cards in person. Work is a 9-5 and then you forget about it.
It seems like there is no community anymore outside of online spaces, and that just isn’t the same. In my opinion, burnout is synonymous with lack of real world, in person community.
8. Ask HN: Offline resources during internet outages?
Top comment by biztos
If you're talking about a major extended outage, I would worry about having books to read, food to eat, other humans to interact with, music to listen to, and a way to exercise or at least move around outside. As a hacker you will also want some minimal low-powered computer to mess around with, because it will calm you down. Oh and a multi-band radio that also does short-wave and is crank-powered so you can keep up on the apocalypse!
Remember that if an Internet outage extends for long enough (days?) in most of Europe then parts of your society will start to fall apart and lots of people will be completely freaking out, especially in the cities. (If it's a part of Europe that had wars fairly recently, people will probably not freak out as much.)
Thus your goal is to stay physically and mentally healthy. As a thought exercise, imagine going a week with no Internet, no mobile phone, and a lot of chaos on the streets: stores and gas stations mostly closed, possibly looting, etc. How exactly would you get through that?
I guess that's the prepper version.
The "half-day internet outages and I want to keep working" version is just have lots of documentation downloaded, plenty of source code too, and don't forget to take breaks: restoring your ability to concentrate is itself a work task.
9. Ask HN: Has the Apple Silicon excessive disk read/write issue been fixed?
Top comment by tzs
Wow...looks like I don't do much disk I/O compared to most people here. I'm on a 2017 iMac that I use for both personal stuff and work. It seems like most people here can do in a few months what it took me 5 years to do.
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 39 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 2%
Data Units Read: 163,453,178 [83.6 TB]
Data Units Written: 96,776,875 [49.5 TB]
Host Read Commands: 4,760,816,278
Host Write Commands: 3,237,489,546
Controller Busy Time: 7,045
Power Cycles: 16,947
Power On Hours: 2,307
Unsafe Shutdowns: 109
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
I see everyone posting data for M1 Macs has an "Available Spare Threshold" of 99% whereas I've got 10%. What's the story there?
My understanding is that you want "Available Spare" to be as high as possible, and "Available Spare Threshold" is how low "Available Spare" can go before it is considering to be a failure, so the lower "Available Spare Threshold" the better.
10. Ask HN: Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/informational content?
Top comment by gregdoesit
Taking a step back, it's worth understanding why there's so much clickbait. Turns out that if the business model of a publication is selling ads, they're interested in reach. Generating reach is easier by having large quantities of shorter, and easier to produce stuff. This is true for videos, articles.
So if you're looking for more thoughtful things - which take time to produce - your options are:
1. Pay for publications that produce these. Ad-supported publications are unlikely to be able to budget for in-depth content. Just look at how eg BuzzFeed shut down their investigative reporting (which was unusually good). It just made no business sense to produce those articles when a meme piece or two would generate more ad revenue, while being 100x cheaper to produce.
In the tech world, publications that fall into the “paid and in-depth” category can be likes of The Information, IEEE, MIT Technology Review, and many newsletters, tech publications etc. Look for ones where ads is not their main business model.
2. Another source are people who do this for free... because they have a main job, and it's not a business for them to share their thoughts on things. These will typically be blogs, YouTube channels and other places. Based on your interests, you should be able to find plenty. Also, see this Hacker News thread about interesting blogs [1]. The only real downside is you won’t get these on a schedule, as it’s not a job for these folks.
3. Books and podcasts. Books are straightforward enough: they're meant to be deep, and reviews help do some justice on them. Podcasts are usually based on ad-based models, but most ads are less intrusive, and the format lends itself for thoughtful commentary. It's more time-consuming to listen to them over reading, of course.
I collect RSS feeds of both my paid publications, and thoughtful blogs using a reader (I use Feedly) and find this works pretty well.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302195