AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Are you a “lifer”? If so why?

Top comment by neilv

I suspect that a lot of people would be happy to be a "lifer" in the right situation. (Good company, good work, good colleagues, good respect, good TC.)

A barrier is that situation doesn't occur often. I think it could, but not many companies seem to be run that way. The stereotypical tech company, for example, seems to be driven by growth at all costs, and there's a kind of mercenary thinking by both company and employees, towards each other. Which is intertwined with the weird dynamic in which folk wisdom is that companies will pay more to hire someone than they will to retain.

Another barrier is that a worker opting out of this -- to go to a mythical modest little oasis company run by a CEO with a heart of gold who will live forever -- can be difficult, due to the large number of high-TC other workers in the field. In the US, if a worker is making relatively a lot less than others, they're at a disadvantage for housing, healthy living in various ways, opportunities for their children, etc.

So even lifer-inclined people will be motivated to play along with our current situation of chasing FAANGs, hierarchies of people all targeting promo criteria and metrics rather than company and team success, job-hopping whenever the right bump of TC and title comes along, rehearsing for fratbro interview rituals, etc. (Maybe with a bust cycle of a lot of VC exit schemes, we'll start to get better, but a lot of workers and companies have known nothing else, and there's a lot to unlearn.)

2. Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

Top comment by tolleydbg

This suggestion is humorous, but absolutely true: Potty Training In 3 Days.

Before having children, I thought I was fairly empathetic and introspective, but raising a child helped me realize how superficial those traits in myself were.

I'm being completely honest when I say this book made me a better leader and project manager - having a better understanding of the motivations of others, incentivizing those looking to you for guidance based on their own goals/desires, providing those with tools they need to succeed, and taking a macro view of a problem and allowing those under me to flourish and find creative ways to solve problems that take advantage of their strengths and idiosyncrasies.

I'm in no way suggesting that you infantilize those around you, just that teaching my toddler to shit opened my eyes to the way I approached problems, and Brandi Brucks' book helped me approach things differently with great success!

3. Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

Top comment by crazygringo

I see this claim in nearly every HN thread about the Economist -- that it's declined in quality.

And it baffles me because, having read it for 20+ years and gone back for research to read plenty of articles from further back... I just don't see it at all.

It's the same market-based, socially progressive, pragmatic international strongly opinionated journalism it's always been. Sometimes I think the way it characterizes something is missing part of the full picture, but it's always been that way. Journalists are fallible humans, they aren't gods, and it's not like there was some mythical past where they always got things right.

I can totally understand people not enjoying it as much as they grow older, simply because you come to mistrust journalism more in general, or shift in your ideological viewpoint so it becomes less agreeable. Readers change.

But I'm getting tired of this trope that it's the Economist that's been changing, that's been getting worse. It just doesn't make any sense. It's the same journalism it's always been. For every article you take issue with, I'm sure you'd find just as many from 20 or 30 years ago.

I suppose it's just part of a general narrative of declinism, how everything used to be so much better and the world is crumbling. But in this case, I just don't see it. You might not like the magazine anymore and that's fine, but I think there's a good chance it's you who has changed, not the magazine.

4. Ask HN: Do you look angry while you work?

Top comment by toomanyrichies

I've gotten this feedback from those around me for years. Even before I was a coder, when I was an ESL teacher in China, I had multiple students approach me (those I had made friends with, they were all 20-somethings and over) and ask me if I was OK, because I looked angry. I appreciated their concern but I didn't feel angry, so I had no clue what they were talking about. It was only later that I learned about the concept of a "resting ___ face", and that I might possess one.

This is a huge reason why I support WFH policies and personally take advantage of them. I don't personally feel the need to "fix" myself; doing so would involve putting on an artifice in order to placate people whose impression of me is founded on incorrect assumptions. It would make me feel like I was walking on eggshells, and it would take up precious mental bandwidth which would be better spent on the work problem at hand.

WFH means management of my facial expression is one less thing I have to worry about, since people can only see my Zoom avatar at best, and usually only see the section of the laptop screen that I'm sharing. Counter to what anti-WFH advocates say, it actually makes me more likely to form close bonds with my coworkers, since they're less likely to jump to conclusions about my demeanor and personality if they aren't privy to my facial expression.

5. Ask HN: Can we delete our accounts?

Top comment by ldjb

See the FAQ [0]:

"Can I delete my account?

We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. More here [1]."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799

6. Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

Top comment by ergonaught

Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There may not be great ways to filter this. GPT3/etc will exacerbate horrifically.

7. Ask HN: Indoor air quality sensors and other IoT that's local-first and not DIY?

Top comment by akoutmos

Hey there! My co-authors and I actually wrote a book on this topic earlier this year. It walks you though setting up a weather station with Elixir and Nerves using a Raspberry Pi and the following sensors:

- VEML6030 light sensor - BME680 environmental sensor - SGP30 air quality sensor

After you set up the hardware side of things, you put together a very simple Elixir Phoenix REST API and persist the sensor data into Postgres (with the TimescaleDB extension).

And to wrap up the book, you learn how to create Grafana dashboards to visualize all your time-series data.

Everything is meant to be set up on your LAN and everything can be run either natively or in Docker (there is a Docker compose file in the repo).

Hope that helps!

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/akoutmos/nerves_weather_station Book: https://pragprog.com/titles/passweather/build-a-weather-stat...

8. Ask HN: Why is there so little info on the web about IBM mainframe programming?

Top comment by alexwasserman

At companies I've worked at with mainframes the teams running them were typically very well tenured on both the systems and software running on them.

They weren't the types to go looking on StackOverflow or Youtube for answers.

They would also help train new joiners, and IBM offers good training too.

The kinds of systems running on mainframes don't lend themselves to copy/paste from StackOverflow type programming. It's a lot of credit-card and banking transactions where you want experienced people writing and helping on it.

Secondly, even if IBM is selling more than before, that's still an incredibly tiny fraction of the computing scene. Companies don't tend to have more than one (or possibly 2, with one for DR mainframes). So, that 80-90% of the Fortune 500 is really just 1000 mainframes total. Generously, if every Fortune 500 had a pair in each geography (roughly EU, Americas, Asia for big corps), that ends up being 6, so 3000 globally, in production. There are also some spread around academia, government labs, etc. But the numbers are dwarfed by standard x86 machines. eg. at one bank we had "the mainframe" which was actually one hot and one DR, and then 40k windows servers and 40k linux servers. Similarly, there were thousands of engineers in technology, but the mainframe team with single digits.

Given the wealth of information out there, even if there was "a lot" of information for some value of lots, it's dwarfed by the incredible amount of standard tech info.

9. Ask HN: Was I pwned? [resolved]

Top comment by wasipwned

False alarm. Really appreciate everyone helping me sanity check this. The randomized MAC is part of iOS' Wi-Fi privacy, and my phone is using Wi-Fi calling for AT&T. The randomized MAC and the fact that I thought I saw the traffic originating from my desktop (it wasn't, it was just multicast traffic) really threw me off.

10. Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

Top comment by kokanee

User and business priorities are aligned during the growth phase, when user acquisition is the most important thing for the business. Once there is a self-sustaining level of user activity and new signups, revenue per engagement becomes an increasingly important metric. At that point the user's priorities and those of the business are no longer aligned, and the company starts asking more of its users.

A third phase occurs when phase two is successful enough that competitors lose traction. If you can achieve a monopolistic position in your market, then you can stop asking for attention and money, and start demanding it. Pay up or else you don't get to stream music. Sit through more and longer ads with increasingly insipid UX and privacy issues, or else you don't get to stream videos.

My view is that the Internet is in a consolidation phase where a smaller number of companies are getting a larger share of traffic, resulting in monopolistic dynamics.