AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

Top comment by abeppu

Before the pandemic and surge of remote work, a lot of us complained not just about going to the office, but that the office itself was pretty crappy. The open plan creates an environment of high distraction, low privacy, and physical discomfort. Whether or not people wanted to listen to music or anything for hours at a time, they were pushed to do it just to drown out a constant background noise of words that are highly salient in your problem domain. You're probably constrained to the desk or chair set up that your office manager picked. The bottom line is you're spending a lot of time in an environment about which you may have zero input or control.

At home, I can work in silence if I want. If I want background noise, I can play music on a stereo or turn on the TV in the next room. When my back hurts, I can lie down on the sofa, or stretch and foam roll in a way which would be conspicuous in the office. I can be barefoot all day if I want. I can snack on the food that I like enough to buy, without broadcasting the pretention of bringing my own food to the micro kitchen. I can eat healthier lunches than the office catered food. Even without considering commuting, or the amount of time spent in synchronous interactions, just being able to control my own space is sooo much more comfortable. I injured my back this year, and taking care of it has been so much easier at home than it would have been in open plan hell.

A bunch of that stuff is nominally compatible with being "in the office" -- just give me a private office, with real walls, the ability to buy my own furniture, etc. But tech long ago decided that engineers get cubicles or open plan desks, that the way you know we're working is seeing that we're looking at screens rather than seeing our actual output, that a clean modern spaceship aesthetic is more important than workers being able to control or customize their workspace. Is it that we don't value the office, or that the office has been created by people who don't value us?

2. Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

Top comment by snowwrestler

When the iPhone launched, Apple talked a lot about how the typing system worked.

What I remember is that it sounded like pretty simple lookups. As you typed, the software compared your word to, essentially, a weighted dictionary to guess what you were going to type next.

If you typed “b” it was flummoxed. But if you typed “behav” it knew the next letter was almost certainly going to be “e” or “i” (for behavior). It may have been more complicated than that, but probably not much. It was 2007 and the phone CPU was not powerful.

One interesting thing I remember is that they said the phone enlarged the touch targets for highly predicted next letters. For example it would be easier to type an “e” than a “w” after you had typed “behav”, because the tap boundary expanded around the “e”. Cool stuff!

And if you did type behavw and hit space, it would autocorrect to behave.

At some point I recall Apple announcing that they had switched autocorrect to a full machine learning implementation. Rather than a simple deterministic look-up, it was trained on a huge corpus of text, and reads the whole chunk of what you’ve written so far to make predictions. Everyone does this now, it’s how they deliver the (incredibly annoying and stupid IMO) one-tap suggestions for email and text replies. “Thanks!” “Noted.” “I’ll get right on that.”

In my memory, that’s when typing got a lot more annoying on iPhones. The quality of suggestions went either down or weirdo or both. For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why??

3. Ask HN: Has anyone managed to find enjoyment in their work after burnout?

Top comment by highwaylights

This advice is going to be hated by a lot of people but.. care less.

You’re in an industry that values your skills and seems to always have demand. Whether or not that’s true in the future, it certainly is today, so the best thing you can do is put yourself first and worry less about work as a whole. Especially if it’s not your own company.

Spend more time on you, on activities with friends and family, on hobbies. If you don’t have particularly healthy hobbies, maybe start some. Getting away from your work more and more will make it all the more bearable.

These days work is close to the bottom of my list of concerns, which sounds really bad - BUT - I find I’m more productive than I’ve been in years because I’m not worrying if something takes longer than expected or is bigger than I realised. I can just enjoy the problem solving and shipping without the stress.

If you’re burned out this badly I’d suggest it’s your soul’s way of telling yourself “hey this isn’t working for me”. As someone who has been to some pretty messed up depths with the anxiety monster, I’d heed that voice. Life isn’t long enough to stay stuck in a rut like this for any amount of time at all.

4. Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

Top comment by luxurytent

A few posts here are suggesting that it's not too late. Perhaps so, but the way are describing yourself is worrisome, in a way that I think if you attempted to have kids (either biologically or through adoption), your stress levels would reach new heights that are unsustainable.

You are depressed, anxious, and have lost sight of what you want out of life. I don't know if kids are the bandage here. At the least, you need to figure out yourself before, or at least in parallel, to working on introducing young children into your family.

It's hard to offer specific advice on such a broad topic to a stranger. You've taken the right steps (therapy, counseling), but you have yet to find your inner peace. What do your social connections look like? Genuine social connection is usually highly correlated with happiness. Those connections can give you a sense of purpose (which is part of having kids) and a "place" in this growingly isolated world.

I'd start there, if you have not. Investing in people and in the relationships you have is absolutely critical to ones happiness. I'd be curious to hear more about how you see this part of your life.

5. Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

Top comment by yoda_sl

I came on board with the NeXT acquisition (or rather reverse acquisition as ex-NeXT often refer to)…

So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn’t have a badge to enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door to enter the campus, until some kind soul was letting him in (despite the policy only badged employees could enter or visitors with a printed tag). I saw it happening more than once while grabbing a coffee at the coffee booth in the IL1 building.

Later on, after he came back officially as CEO (or iCEO), I remember clearly during a lunch with co-workers (at Café Mac, seating outside) watching at a distance Steve & Jony walking inside the campus, then seating at a bench and Jony opening some carrying case/luggage, and let Steve pull the content out of it, so he could look at it in the sun: it looked like a piece of plastic… at the time, we had no clue what it was, except the color was orange. Many months later, Steve introduced the first iBook (which was the first Mac with Wifi): when I saw the orange color of the iBook I made the connection with what we saw back that day; Jony was most likely showing to Steve the first shell of the future iBook.

Steve otherwise at work was truly laser focus at a time on different projects: I was working on backend web services development with public facing web site, so usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible, which we obviously had to improve for the next presentation… stressful yes, but truly enjoyable. More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve.

Obviously I have a few more stories of that sort, since I spent close to 20 years at Apple (/NeXT).

It was quite something to get the hard work you did for months presented on stage by Steve… I still miss the excitement from it even if it is more than 15 years ago.

Edit: fixing a few typos

6. Ask HN: HNers with multiple sclerosis, can we get in touch?

Top comment by bennyelv

I’m a programmer with MS. Like you, diagnosed about 15 years ago, but still doing pretty well. I feel like I’m starting to notice the gradual decline more and more, despite not having had a serious clinical relapse for about 10 years (some minor ones).

Things you can try: Changing your drugs - maybe going for something drastic like HSCT.

Being patient and not panicking - if you’re currently having flare ups your symptoms will appear worse than they really are while there’s acute inflammation happening. Don’t forget that. If the flare ups get under control you’ll should see some recovery and improvement.

Not giving up - keep pushing yourself as hard as you can, make sure you’re training whatever’s left of your central nervous capacity. There’s probably still some left. Keep trying to do as much as you can and you’ll get access to it.

7. Ask HN: How to learn to sell?

Top comment by BlueTie

Hi there - one of the few pro sellers on HN here.

You're planning on prospecting into one of the most rejection-heavy domains out there with small physical business. These people get dozens of calls per day from companies they've never heard of - many of whom are trying to rip them off - and even the best ones (Groupon, Yelp, google ads, etc.) are basically just rent-seeking. Oh, and most have gatekeepers who don't care the slightest bit about your pitch.

Because of that I'd stay away from all this "smile and dial" advice. You'll have no chance. Go out there and hit the pavement and meet these people at their establishments at off hours. If you catch the owner in there at a good time - do your best to inform them of your products benefits and come up with a really good offer to get started (something that loses you money and time). Free Trial, free month of services, whatever makes sense based on the context of your business. The goal is NOT to make money or build a book of business at this point - it's to get a person happy with your software to sell to later.

If the owner is too busy or whatever - have some stuff printed out for them to read later that you can drop off. Ideally with a small gift (coffee, food, candy, etc.) and come back in a few weeks to see if you catch them at a better time (again with a gift, until they talk).

A solid entry level book would be Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount.

Good Luck.

*edit to fix book name

8. Ask HN: Have you ever heard of users demonstrating against software?

Top comment by soared

Old school RuneScape is an mmorpg where each game update goes to a vote, and if it doesn’t get 75% approval the updates are not worked on by devs and don’t get released. The community feels a strong ownership and connection over the game. So much so that when the development company (Jagex) makes a wrong decision, it’s common for users to “riot” in game. They go to a specific world, at a specific town, place down specific items, and chant.

While not rioting in real life, it feels familiar.

Wiki article about an example with a video. Occurred prior to the voting system, but still occurs even 15 years later https://runescape.wiki/w/Pay_to_PK_Riot

9. Ask HN: Is it possible to have a structured work day in software dev?

Top comment by Rygian

I work a strict 9am–6pm schedule from western Europe, and interact with both Asian and American colleagues. I simply decline all meetings that are outside of my work window, and it would probably be against the law for my management to expect me to do otherwise ("right to disconnect").

I do know, however, that some of my colleagues in Asian countries feel an non-official pressure to accept late-evening meetings so that European and American colleagues may participate.

10. Ask HN: What not-profit-seeking project are you tinkering with this week?

Top comment by binwiederhier

Have been working at ntfy.sh for about a year now, and it's a ton of fun: https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy

It's a a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, entirely without signup or cost. It's also open source if you want to run your own.

You can use it like this (more in the docs: https://ntfy.sh/docs/):

   curl -d "hi from HN" ntfy.sh/mytopic