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Issue #194 - November 27, 2022
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Why isn't remote work advertised as a pro environment initiative?
Top comment by Someone1234
Because corporations are doing the majority of that pro-environmental advertising. I mean that both in terms of companies making changes (both real and greenwashing) and the News/Media corporations reporting on it.
Telecommuting could be absolutely massive for reduced emissions, could bring down urban house prices, improve inter-family relationships, and revitalized suburban neighborhoods (e.g. more walkable areas). Plus increase wealth to relatively poor rural areas.
Even some corporations are starting to realize that telecommuting isn't their enemy, but large ships move slowly, and recently we've been seeing a lot of "return to work" used as a way to conduct layoffs with lower negative PR/stock tanking. This isn't a byproduct but a goal of return-to-work (e.g. see Musk's text message conversation during Twitter-lawsuit discovery).
2. Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
Top comment by AlotOfReading
I built a lighting system for
I'm a lot more paranoid about privacy these days.
3. Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
Top comment by l-p
> We never thought our startup would be threatened by the unreliability of a company like Microsoft
You're new to Azure I guess.
I'm glad the outage I had yesterday was only the third major one this year, though the one in august made me lose days of traffic, months of back and forth with their support, and a good chunk of my sanity and patience in face of blatant documented lies and general incompetence.
One consumer-grade fiber link is enough to serve my company's traffic and with two months of what we pay MS for their barely working cloud I could buy enough hardware to host our product for a year of two of sustained growth.
4. Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
Top comment by LAC-Tech
- Systems that work offline. Partly for practical reasons due to my background working in Agtech companies, as well as logistics in developing countries. But also it's just technically and socially fascinating. How do you detect conflicts? How do you decide what one is? To what extent - if any - can it be resolved automatically? Revisions, event sourcing, CRDTs... there's no one size fits all industry solution and not enough people to take it seriously. (Friendly request - if it's been a problem for you in your industry, drop me a line. I sometimes think I should niche down in it, but wonder if it's too obscure).
- Frontend JS minimalism. Any stories about people ditching transpilers, build tools etc appeals to me immensely. My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it.
- Concatenative langauges. Less Forth and more Joy[0]. I just feel like there's something here, and the idea will not die until it catches on. The amount of concatenative language interpreters I've abandoned is a bit embarassing.
[0] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html
5. Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?
Top comment by earino
My very concrete feelings on this is that you probably don't.
Asking folks how to do this is a bit like asking billionaires how to get rich. It's a fun story but it's overfitting. The individual narrative that made a billionaire is unlikely to be available for you. If you ask some millionaires they may be more likely to give you some useful advice around sound investment strategies, living within your means, and identifying great opportunities.
You signed up for a bunch of responsibilities. You are always going to be your kids parent. You are only going to have this one opportunity to get this marriage and this family right. If you have a solid job that allows you to be there for them, take it and be amazing in this potentially incredibly rewarding role.
Then do an awesome startup when your kids are out of the house, you have a solid nest egg, and you can take risks again in your 50s.
6. Ask HN: Why the Linux Kernel doesn't have unit tests?
Top comment by sph
To add to all the excellent answers in this thread: unit tests are massively overrated.
It is good to know that your base64 encoding function is tested for all corner cases, but integration and behaviour tests for the external interface/API are more important than exercising an internal implementation detail.
What is the external interface of the kernel? What is its surface area? A kernel is so central and massive the only way to test its complete contract with the user (space) is... just to run stuff and see if it breaks.
TDD has some good ideas but for a while it had turned in a religion. While tests are great to have, a good and underrated integration testing system is just for someone to run your software. If no one complains, either no one is using it, or the software is doing its work. Do you really need tests for the read(2) syscall when Linux is running on a billion devices, and that syscall is called some 10^12 times per second globally?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ05e7EMOLM
7. Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)
Top comment by abadger9
I'm not laid off but actively looking to change after spending a couple of years at my current employer. Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews, 1-2 low ball offers, or radio silence. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for those laid-off, hopefully this storm passes soon.
EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).
8. Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?
Top comment by valdiorn
My startup ideas :)
I've been designing and building audio software and hardware components for musicians since I was a teenager. VST plugins to start, then moved on to digital guitar effects and now Eurorack synth modules. I've also built custom midi controllers, traditional guitar pedals, you name it, I've designed and built it.
I have absolutely no doubt that I could build a small, semi-successful company around these products, that would turn over 200-300k per year, with a nice profit margin. In fact, I've made quite detailed business models which make me very confident in that.
My problem, however, is that I am extremely well employed (like probably many other readers here :) and that just won't compete with my current paycheck; which also comes with job security, low stress, and vacation days (I'm on the UK). These ideas would also be very difficult or impossible to grow into million dollar+ annual sales, as they are targeted at very niche audiences.
So I've been stuck in this half-way place, where I have a bunch of products, mostly finished, even polished (and I work on this stuff because I LOVE doing it, that's the only reason), and every time I have to make a decision whether to open source it and give it away or try to monetise it. So far, it's all gone the open source way, but I have a couple of projects I'm holding back because I think I might be able to sell them to another company for a decent amount.
Thinking about all those meta/alphabet/twitter employees being let go these days, I wouldn't be surprised if we're about to see an explosion in cool, scrappy tech startups, from people who've been in my situation, and decided to use this as an opportunity to build their little dream startup - I hope so!
9. Ask HN: Again: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma
Top comment by DustinBrett
One brick at a time has been my philosophy for a while and it's worked well. Making a bucket list of life, then turning that into to do lists, then doing the things 1 by 1.
- Travel around the world solo for years
- Find a wife, get married & have kids
- Build my dream website (https://dustinbrett.com/)
- Get a job in Big Tech as a self taught developer
It's been 10 years since I started living this way and it's worked out so far. Before living this way I had no real plans, just hopes.
10. Ask HN: Any good black Friday deals?
Top comment by mellosouls
Generally I find Black Friday a bit overhyped, the "bargains" are best checked against price history with (say) CamelCamelCamel before you buy.
Not Black Friday, but in the UK and maybe other countries, Amazon Warehouse is currently doing a 20% off sale, so 20% off the price when you get to checkout.
I've had a few good "As New" things off there in the past, worth having a look.
There's also a 50% off books sale on the UK Warehouse, loads of tech books, though I don't know how many decent ones are left.
--
Specific Black Friday deals though: Quest Apps on sale:
https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/section/15301901340...