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Issue #191 - November 6, 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: What was being a software developer like about 30 years ago?
Top comment by fd111
It was great. Full stop.
A sense of mastery and adventure permeated everything I did. Over the decades those feelings slowly faded, never to be recaptured. Now I understand nothing about anything. :-)
Starting in 1986 I worked on bespoke firmware (burned into EPROMs) that ran on bespoke embedded hardware.
Some systems were written entirely in assembly language (8085, 6805) and other systems were written mostly in C (68HC11, 68000). Self taught and written entirely by one person (me).
In retrospect, perhaps the best part about it was that even the biggest systems were sufficiently unsophisticated that a single person could wrap their head around all of the hardware and all of the software.
Bugs in production were exceedingly rare. The relative simplicity of the systems was a huge factor, to be sure, but knowing that a bug meant burning new EPROMs made you think twice or thrice before you declared something "done".
Schedules were no less stringent than today; there was constant pressure to finish a product that would make or break the company's revenue for the next quarter, or so the company president/CEO repeatedly told me. :-) Nonetheless, this dinosaur would gladly trade today's "modern" development practices for those good ol' days(tm).
2. Ask HN: Have you set up a procedure to disclose your passwords in case of death?
Top comment by NamTaf
No.
Things that really matter (banks, etc.) have well-established next-of-kin processes. You can cause problems if you subvert them, as there's processes to go through to prove who might have claim to the estate and if necessary divide it between multiple parties. Similarly, subscriptions will just bounce once you inform the banks of the death and they freeze further transactions as part of said process. In my experience, your next of kin don't want to be dealing with cancelling a bunch of subscriptions when they're already planning your funeral, informing loved ones, etc. - there's already heaps of shit you have to consider and it's a very stressful, emotional time.
Giving over passwords implies that you expect someone to log in and do something with them, so it's not really important for them to have it for these reasons.
Secondly, I doubt any of my next of kin care about e.g. my Steam library or my Reddit account. As I've gotten older, I've realised that people don't really want to inherit the overwhelming majority of your stuff (they have their own stuff). If you think someone really does want something in particular, you can have that conversation with them specifically, but that's going to be very few and far between.
3. Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?
Top comment by _whiteCaps_
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device
send(to, from, count)
register short *to, *from;
register count;
{
register n = (count + 7) / 8;
switch (count % 8) {
case 0: do { *to = *from++;
case 7: *to = *from++;
case 6: *to = *from++;
case 5: *to = *from++;
case 4: *to = *from++;
case 3: *to = *from++;
case 2: *to = *from++;
case 1: *to = *from++;
} while (--n > 0);
}
}4. Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter
Top comment by matt_s
I think you're jumping into the technical bits right away without thinking through requirements/features. Maybe we (the royal 'we' as in all of humanity) shouldn't have a public town square? When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard you are also including all marginalized voices. The MarginalizedVoice super object has EqualRightsForSquirrels as well as HatefulRacistUncle child objects. There are very valid points, that people don't like to hear, about how the concept of someone/group choosing what MarginalizedVoice gets heard and what doesn't isn't fair. If the basis of a platform is "public town square" you're going to have to deal with all MarginalizedVoices.
Content moderation (incl comments) doesn't scale so don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisements. If the thought of not having an ad-driven platform leads you to "users won't pay for it" then maybe think of a platform users would pay for or some other way to have it be sustainable.
5. Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
Top comment by remarkEon
The vast majority of commenters here fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is, or rather what it has become.
It's not a "social network" anymore. I mean, it is in the technical sense - you and I can both sign up for an account. But what it is today is an elite coordination mechanism, and Twitter became this because it was the first of it's kind and some sort of momentum or technological inertia put us where we're at. Journalists, politicians, business people, elites more generally etc. all use this thing to coordinate what they think about basically everything.
So you're really asking "how do I create another semi-public elite coordination system that could step in if Twitter falls apart".
6. Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?
Top comment by olkyts
I live in Ukraine. From 2015 till 2022 I didn’t read or watched news and no social media or blogs or analytics. Then war started. Now I follow news everyday, because I have to take care of my family’s security. I follow analytics of battlefields progress so if I see warning signs I would have to take decisions to move my family further to the western part.
I follow news on volunteers who help military so I can take action and donate help.
I follow politics, because corruption is still an issue and during war it’s like enemy inside.
I follow local authorities media so that I get info on local issues, warnings or even when humanitarian aid is available, so I can notify my neighbors-refugees from southern part to go get mattresses and pillows or diapers (thanks unicef).
I follow economic news so I can take action on my still little assets.
Seems too much. I have to dose and follow rules I set for myself. Some days I go off. Some are more filled with information.
People in Belgium watched news and decided to host my wife with infant during attack on Kyiv. Some journalists investigated that one judge had russian passport and citizenship. It created tensions and people pushed to president to solve the issue. Drop in an ocean and no guarantees of results, but it’s better than nothing.
I don’t praise media, but in my specific circumstances I need it.
7. Ask HN: Carrier “lost” my number in a port request
Top comment by shrubble
First I would use unlec.com to determine where it is currently allocated. The SPID/OCN tells you who has it. SPID = Service Provider ID; OCN = Operating Company Name.
Then look at the LNP history, which is the history of who and when the number was assigned/re-assigned over the years.
Tell both companies that you will be involving the FCC and try to reach the "porting group" who will be able to fix this. Porting problems happen all the time, even with 99% of ports (that might be an optimistic number) happening in a nearly-automatic fashion. (EDIT: I mean the porting group at each company, not the FCC).
8. Ask HN: How to deal with burnout and its consequences?
Top comment by TrueGeek
> I'm not well off like most people on here, I can survive 4-6 months with no salary
Be careful of comparing yourself to what people post online. It's easy to read social media and think everyone else is waking up at 5am, drinking their keto coffee, and making millions with their startup while working as a digital nomad.
Even on a tech heavy site like HN I would classify someone with 6 months of savings as very well off.
9. Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing
Top comment by gunapologist99
As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away.
One take-away from this is the old "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", and another is that they're automatically filtering out lower-value or price-sensitive customers.
However, an obvious counterpoint is that Atlassian built a multi-billion-dollar business around up-front pricing, and even seem to still offer that up-front pricing today.
As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k, generally annually, (usually for a fully-loaded site license on the high end), but there are definitely exceptions above and below. Certainly there are companies in some industries (WorkDay, Oracle, SalesForce, etc) that are known for being extremely expensive, and there are certainly many companies that would like to get into an upper tier but just aren't quite there yet, and smaller startups (esp non-VC funded) are often on the low end.
Top comment by ergonaught
"It isn't affecting me so it doesn't exist" is a fairly elementary mistake, yeah?