AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Startup failed after years of work – Can I even get a job now?

Top comment by tomhoward

You might be surprised how in-demand you turn out to be once you start applying for jobs.

With this: "I've been coding for a long time, shipping real products to real customers", you're already ahead of many job applicants. Plenty of startups or established companies are looking for people with that kind of experience.

Your self-esteem and self-belief has likely taken a hit as you've spent a long time feeling like a failure.

I know the feeling well; it happened to me, and it took quite a while to work my way out of it.

The best thing to do is to be kind to yourself and take it easy for a while. You're not a failure. The thing you worked on didn't work out but that's fine, there are plenty of super-talented, capable people whose companies didn't work out through no fault of their own.

Take it gently work-wise; perhaps try to find some small contracts with small teams that you can work on in part-time, remote engagements.

But if you get yourself on a path where you're delivering projects and getting positive feedback from the people you're working with, slowly but surely things will turn around and before you know it you could be in a very good place.

Good luck to you. Feel free to reach out if you want more personalised advice (email in profile).

2. Ask HN: How can I learn how to paint?

Top comment by kingkawn

I will tell you what I tell my students;

To learn to make art you spend time working with the materials. That is it.

When the urge arises to judge the quality of your work, it will be tempting to say this is good or this is bad.

Take that energy that you might put into assessing the aesthetic and put it back into the materials instead.

Persist and grow. Avoid aesthetic judgements, and instead produce work.

Inevitably as you deepen your experience you will begin to autonomously develop techniques and content that you find yourself returning to.

As you progress through this process your style will begin to take unique, identifiable shape.

Through this process you will become a true painter.

Many people mistake technical capacity at predefined aesthetics as painting, but I would argue that this produces uninteresting work.

Every identifiable style was born from people who chose to work outside of preexisting style.

Goodluck.

3. Ask HN: How do I 3x my performance?

Top comment by kstenerud

Don't aspire to be a high performer. It's a lie. People posture and virtue signal and Instagram how they want to be perceived, and the nerd crowd is no exception.

Want to know the secret to social and economic power housing? Contacts! You only get real power when other people contribute to it, whether you're an artist or a financeer or a scientist or whatever. You succeed when your network wants you to succeed. How many things you can do at once is irrelevant, and only puts you on par with the horse in Animal Farm.

But there's nothing that says you must play that game. Success in life is not how many shinies you get. It's about your deep connections. Nobody on their death bed wishes they'd gotten that Ferrari.

Get the money you need to do the things you want with the people you care about. How you get it is up to you, but it doesn't have to be the measure of your life.

Stop.

Enjoy where you are now, because you'll never be able to come back to it.

See the wonder that's right in front of you. Enjoy your youth while you still have it.

4. Ask HN: Has anyone successfully been able to completely quit using Google?

Top comment by blub

No, because one is still forced to use some of their products by others: captcha, mailing gmail addresses, ads and tracking even in iOS apps, tracking on most websites (which can usually be blocked). Youtube is unfortunate, because many obscure things are only available on it, but it's not an essential service.

FIY if you're in the US they're also buying access to your CC purchase info.

5. Ask HN: How to Get Good at Sales?

Top comment by slovette

This is one of those things that HN may not be great at overall. Most answers here are brainy: “read this book” or “follow these principles” type suggestions, but this is really something that isn’t solved by reading about it. Don’t get me wrong it helps to have an intellectual basis, but in reality you just need to be embarrassed and rejected a lot to get good at sales.

Sales isn’t about your product, it’s about the person your speaking with and picking up on queues and verbiages that help you cater the conversation to them.

There isn’t a magic algorithm here. Get out among people and learn how to hold an artificial conversation for longer than 1 minute with a complete stranger without making it feel artificial. Once you can do that and walk away feeing good about it, you can start to figure out how to convert that artificial-ness into something that’s hard to distinguish from comfortable conversation with someone you’ve known for 10 years. That’s sales. It’s being able to interact with people at a comfort level that enables them to feel relaxed and safe.

I push a lot of CS students to get jobs as servers at local restaurants and bars. The pure experience of interacting with a group of new strangers every 5-10 minutes is hugely beneficial to sales development. It’s also easy to practice selling stuff (convince a bud light drinker to try a local microbrew, or up sell the nachos to the nachos grande because it’s the freakin weekend and what’s life without a little adventure). The bonus is that you can obtain a huge amount of experience with very little commitment as serving can be a 4-6 hour /week deal if you need it to be.

In the end it’s not about sales. It’s all about how comfortable you are in your own skin and how comfortable you make them. That takes a bit of time and discomfort to achieve and a book won’t give you that by itself.

Go get experience.

6. Ask HN: What is the best setup to work remotely with GUI on Linux?

Top comment by hexadec

I recommend Parsec. I use it for gaming on remote Windows machines, but the Linux server works well too. I can access from my Chromebook or laptop with enough fidelity and good networking that allows me to do nearly anything.

I still suck at CounterStrike, but that is not the software's fault.

https://parsecgaming.com/

7. Ask HN: Which C++ style guide do you follow?

Top comment by tzhenghao

We follow Google's as good as we can. I think they have a stronger stance on some best practices which I personally don't agree with, but I also can't think of a better forcing function for less experienced C++ devs to write dangerous code and shoot themselves in the foot anyway.

8. Ask HN: Tricks to Avoid Eye Problems?

Top comment by geocrasher

Look away. Frequently. I work from home, spend 10-12 hours a day looking at screens. My office is set up so I can glance out a window easily. In fact it's in my peripheral vision, that's how close it is. I look out it frequently. I'm 42, just had glasses in the last 2-3 years. The trick is to let your eye focus on something far away on a regular basis. It's like getting up and walking around, but for your eyes. It makes a huuuge difference.

9. Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?

Top comment by hombre_fatal

I'm not sure how it's a perfect alternative. It seems worse on almost every dimension.

You're stuck between running this miner covertly (scummy) or asking for permission (who is going to click yes?).

How much of Coinhive's income comes from users who are unknowingly running the code? It seems like a move towards more user-hostility, not less.

The one time I saw an actual fit for the end user was an online game that would let you turn on the miner to win in-game coins. Who else can pull off an opt-in?

10. Ask HN: Annual Bonus Time, Team's Not Happy

Top comment by sameyolo

A lot of really poor advice so far in this thread. Unfortunately your personal best bet is probably to do nothing. If it really bugged you, find a new job silently because everyone is hiring.

The realistic answer is that you deliver the news to your team during your one on ones, explain the matter was not in your hands, and move on. If someone leaves over pay (which is reasonable) but you do not control pay, then it's not on you.

Don't be too hard on yourself.