AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

Top comment by dang

They're already banned—HN has never allowed bots or generated responses. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either!

Edit: It's a bit hard to point to past explanations since the word "bots" appears in many contexts, but I did find these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33911426 (Dec 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571890 (Aug 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27558392 (June 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693590 (April 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22744611 (April 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427782 (Feb 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774797 (Dec 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325914 (March 2019)

We've already banned a few accounts that appear to be spamming the threads with generated comments, and I'm happy to keep doing that, even though there's a margin of error.

The best solution, though, is to raise the community bar for what counts as a good comment. Whatever ChatGPT (or similar) can generate, humans need to do better. If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter*. But that's a ways off.

Therefore, let's all stop writing lazy and over-conventional comments, and make our posts so thoughtful that the question "is this ChatGPT?" never comes up.

* Edit: I didn't mean that! I just mean it will be a different problem at that point.

2. Ask HN: If I get locked out of everything, please try to help me

Top comment by crooked-v

There was a post a while back around poor and homeless people encountering exactly this problem on a regular basis. Lots of people in the comments were incredibly dismissive and sometimes actively malign about it.

Edit: One suggestion from me would be to try and start the dead phone connected to power but with the battery physically removed (assuming it's removable). That might bypass whatever issue it's having and let it start up.

3. Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?

Top comment by nmjohn

Keep in mind many of the salary transparency laws have minimum employee counts before they come into effect, and iirc, the new york one requires an existing employee being located there before it comes into effect.

I'm firmly on the side of salary transparency, even if a company technically doesn't have to because of its size - but I suspect many of the YC companies in question here are small enough to not be affected by some of these laws.

4. Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

Top comment by santah

Same thing happened to me and my service (https://next-episode.net) almost 2 years ago.

I wrote a HN post about it as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26105890, but to spare you all the irrelevant details and digging in the comments for updates - here is what worked for me - you can block all their IPs, even though they may have A LOT and can change them on each call:

1) I prepared a fake URL that no legitimate user will ever visit (like website_proxying_mine.com/search?search=proxy_mirroring_hacker_tag)

2) I loaded that URL like 30 thousand times

3) from my logs, I extracted all IPs that searched for "proxy_mirroring_hacker_tag" (which, from memory, was something like 4 or 5k unique IPs)

4) I blocked all of them

After doing the above, the offending domains were showing errors for 2-3 days and then they switched to something else and left me alone.

I still go back and check them every few months or so ...

P.S. My advice is to remove their URL from your post here. This will not help with search engines picking up their domain and ranking it with your content ...

5. Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?

Top comment by zztop44

I don’t have ADHD but I get very distracted by Slack. Here’s what worked for me.

1. Slack app uninstalled on my phone. If I need it for something, I install it, use it, then delete again.

2. Slack app on my laptop fully closed by default.

3. Set times (about 5 a day) to check in and respond to notifications and scan channels. When I was a senior manager with lots of actually important messages these blocks were about half an hour each (for a total of about 2.5 hours a day). These days I can get away with less than 10 minutes.

4. Block these times in your calendar. At the start of the day, block out the rest of the time without meetings etc as Deep Work. People will understand you’re not easily contactable.

6. Tell your close team mates/manager that if they ever need you urgently they can contact via Signal/WhatsApp. If anyone needs you and really can’t wait a few hours then they’ll ask your manager and be able to get in touch. If you’re really worried about being uncontactable then put your phone number in your Slack bio.

Using that, I went from being totally addicted to Slack to being able to be a productive worker again. Of course your mileage may vary.

6. Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

Top comment by femto

I was located in Sydney Australia, trying to fix a literally showstopper bug in the signal processing of the bank of Land Mobile Radio base stations that were being used to coordinate the stage management for the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics. Less than 24 hours to go before the final dress rehearsal, and the production company was preparing to spend megabucks to pull all the radios out and replace them with a different manufacturer's, unless the bug was fixed in the next few hours.

I ended up hacking the radio firmware to bypass the signal processing and stream the raw received samples from London to Sydney. I hacked a radio in Sydney to feed the London samples into its signal processing, then streamed the resulting samples back to the transmitter in London. I now had an LMR base station running in real-time over the Internet, with the radio hardware in London and the signal processing in Sydney. I was able to attach a JTAG hardware debugger to the DSP in the radio running the signal processing and find the bug. From there we did a firmware release and uploaded new firmware into the radios in London. Our radios stayed in and handled the stage management for the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics.

Edit:

The customer must have been happy with the outcome, as they ended up using our radios for the Sochi Winter Olympics two years later.

7. Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

Top comment by ineptech

Fleeting idea that could be combined with that: a web-of-trust social network where you can only "friend" people in real life, by tapping phones.

When you do so, the app might say, "The person you just met claims to be Joe Schmoe, do you want to vouch for them?" If you approve them, they can message you and vice versa. A friend of Joe's can see you in his friend list, and try to message you, and you can accept it if you trust Joe, but they won't be a first-tier friend until you meet them. Your tweet-like posts can be seen by anyone, or your friends only, or people within N connections of you, as you prefer.

I think it could be implemented in a distributed way, with no central server, if some proportion of the users are willing to serve their traffic from a VPS rather than just their phone. If someone cheats (uses a fork of the app that lets them "friend" people they haven't met, create fake identities, lie about their friends graph, etc), it wouldn't affect you unless you trust them. Over enough time and with enough use, this might be good enough to figure out whether someone distant from you (e.g. someone you're about to make an Ebay purchase from) is using their real identity or not, as the "main" part of the overall friend graph that a real user with a lot of friends is connected to would be structurally distinguishable from the subnets created by cheaters.

(This is not a cherished idea I've been working on for years and am prepared to defend, just a random idea I thought I'd post in case it sparks an idea for someone, so be polite in ripping it to shreds pls)

8. Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

Top comment by sowbug

Parent of three ranging from tween to college age.

We have never had limits on anything. Screen time/content unrestricted. Probably dozens of times, maybe hundreds, we have had "the talk" about how there's a lot of weird shit in the world, internet included, and it's better to know about that stuff and how to deal with it than to create a temporary secure enclave at home where it doesn't exist.

We especially didn't want to pawn off our responsibility as parents onto their future 18-year-old college-bound selves to learn how to deal with excesses. Since the moment they could point, they've been given the opportunity to make mistakes with excess. They've fallen thousands of times, we've picked them up thousands of times, and now they're pretty good at not falling.

You can guess that I love CI/CD, stable trunk, etc., in my day job. My attitude as an engineer/parent is you'll never make bugs/threats go away. So make sure you and your team/family are experts at dealing with them while they're fresh and small.

9. Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

Top comment by jmduke

I run Buttondown (http://buttondown.email/) full-time now, but did so as a side project from 2017 to earlier this year.

My strategy was fairly simple: I wanted to create a better version of a tool (in this case, Tinyletter) that:

1. I already used whose quality I thought was extremely poor,

2. I did not think the creators were incentivized to make improvements;

3. I could think of a sub-niche that I was well-equipped to build because it reflected my own experience (support for Markdown, a REST API — basically developer-adjacent functionality.) [^1]

I think we are in general pretty awash in bad products; it is not particularly difficult to pay attention to what you use over the course of a week and see what could use some obvious improvements.

[^1]: People often think of 'niching down' as adding features, but I would argue it is often just as much about removing features. As companies grow, they must add more and more surface area to satisfy certain use cases. Side projects do not have this problem; they can be laser focused on one or two such use cases, and as such remove all the surface area that many users find to be detritus.

10. Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers?

Top comment by nickjj

If there's ever a time to ask such a question, it might be this thread.

Can I get some brutally honest feedback on a podcast I ran for 2 years (100+ episodes at once per week) at https://runninginproduction.com/? It's a podcast focused on chatting with developers around how they build and deploy their web apps. It mostly focuses on the "why", tech stack choices, libraries, workflows, lessons learned, production war stories, etc..

In my mind I thought it was a good idea but it got so little listeners that I had to abort recording new episodes due to burn out since there was no path forward to ever sustain it by outsourcing the burn out inducing parts. I still think it's a good idea but I wonder where I went wrong.

I tried everything I could think of. Guest variety from solo devs to bigger companies like Mux and Dropbox, audio editing to ensure the highest quality I could get for a remote guest<->host podcast with new guests having assorted mic qualities, removing a lot of "ums" and other fluff but not over editing things to make it unnatural, tags to quickly find tech stacks you care about and a ton of clickable timestamps with a summary of each show that's skimmable in seconds along with tons of reference links.

On paper it feels like I did everything I could to make things "good", but in practice after 100 episodes I had like 200-300 listens per episode which made it no longer viable to continue doing since each episode was about 6 hours of end to end time to put together (finding a guest, editing it, show notes, etc.).

I learned a ton from chatting with every guest and regret nothing but I overall see the podcast as a total failure since if it didn't gain any traction on it, it must be trash. I'd love to revive the show because chatting with someone new about what they enjoy working on was really fun.