AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How is the SVB situation affecting your startup?

Top comment by Lightbody

Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about the financial system or banking inside baseball. This is just one founder's reaction to the whole mess.

We were reluctant to move our funds most of the day yesterday. Felt like a lot of dumb panic. We had emails from a few investors, most saying "stay calm" but one saying "move your money to this bank that I'm invested in!" ugh.

We decided near the end of the day to move at least half our funds (in a money market) out, but by then it was too late to initiate anything. Now we're finding this morning nobody at SVB is returning our calls. We are able to log into the online portal just fine. So not sure if/when we'll be able to to move anything.

Annoyingly, we're moving it because everyone else is moving it. I know it's a really dumb, self-fulling prophecy but at this point you don't want to be the last in line.

Note: I'm still not actually worried that our money will evaporate permanently. But I can definitely see a situation where it is inaccessible for several weeks, causing issues with payroll and operations. I expect worst case a large bank will swoop in last second and buy all the dumb investment vehicles/bonds for pennies on the dollar and then our access to cash will come back.

2. Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

Top comment by atonse

The best way I’ve found to become a better programmer is to continue to practice solving real world problems (and see how other programmers solved them too). It keeps you focused with your time instead of wasting time on silly things like your tab/space size, white spaces, TDD vs. test first development, and all those silly debates that do nothing to add value to end users.

It gives you practice in mapping real world problems to code, by breaking the problems down into discrete chunks that can be independently implemented. It also teaches you how to design your code in a way that it can adapt easily to those real world problems changing over time. It teaches you where to abstract things out, where to be driven by configuration etc. It has to be driven by a real goal, not a made up one.

The other big thing, focus on readability over cleverness every time. Your code should feel easy to read even by YOU 3 months later. 6 months later. I’ve lost count at the number of times I cursed at my past self for writing some code where I thought I was being clever, but didn’t understand later. Mostly did that my younger years and then learned not to do that.

3. Ask HN: How do you start over with 2FA after losing your phone?

Top comment by capableweb

Use your backup codes that you've downloaded and safe-kept somewhere (you did this right?). If not, I'm afraid you're out of luck.

There are two possible outcomes from contacting support for a service, asking to regain control over a 2FA-protected account, both which sucks, but on different levels.

1. You write them, proving who you are, and they tell you to get lost unless you have the 2FA proper codes, or backup codes. This sucks because you still didn't get access.

2. You write them, proving who you are, and they give you access to your account, so you can reset 2FA. This sucks because this means the service is not secure and you/others can be "hacked" because customer support can be exploited.

4. Ask HN: Is there anyone here making music?

Top comment by ZoomZoomZoom

Hey fellow hacker-musicians! Since this is a rare opportunity to see so many of you checking in, let me offer you my expertise as a sound engineer.

I'd be glad to check out your mixes and offer some suggestion or just chat about sound, production and music in general. Join the #mixing:matrix.org [1] room, write me an e-mail through my studio's form [2] or just ask here.

No obligations on your part, but I'd be happy if it led to me working with you on your music or other projects.

[1] https://matrix.to/#/#mixing:matrix.org

[2] https://thirdhemisphere.studio/

5. Ask HN: Why has functional programming become so popular oustide academia?

Top comment by xupybd

Because side effects cause bugs and make code harder to reason about.

The ways we avoid side effects can be inefficient. Tools such as immutable data types. In the past it wasn't really worth the performance trade off. Now days we're often running in environments where raw speed is not achieved on single core performance but over distributed systems. All of a sudden immutability seems to make more sense. Not only does it help with removing side effects but it also helps parallelize workflows.

I think that's why its happening now.

I've recently switched to using F# where I can and it's been a huge win. The bug count is way down, I can refactor with confidence, and My code is more readable.

The learning curve was hard. I still am not sure I truly understand what a Monad is but I can see the pattern and use it as a tool. It feels more constrained at first but it brings order to chaos.

6. Ask HN: What simple web apps do you wish existed? Seeking ideas for sample apps

Top comment by edmundsauto

An interface to preferentially compare and choose between 2 objects, using a Tinder like interface (swipe left/right mechanics). Every year I do a stack ranking of baseball players for my fantasy league. If I had this interface, I could easily setup an ELO comparison function to create my complete list out of a series of easier comparisons.

I have at times also wished I had this for just about any sort of data tagging. Give it an array of json objects, it displays the data and then lets you swipe super quickly through all the objects in the array, semi-randomly choosing which objects to compare. Would need to write the data out as well - that's the product.

This is probably worth a couple hundred bucks to me if anyone wants to build it and open source under a commercial-reuse allowed license. Every year I spend dozens of hours doing this and don't feel like I have done a great job of making the correct comparisons.

7. Ask HN: That happens to T-Bills when the Goverment locks up over debt ceiling?

Top comment by anonuser123456

Some large T-Bill backed money market funds are avoiding T-Bills with maturity around the debt ceiling date. This is because they need liquidity to ensure the 1-1 dollar parity.

What will likely happen is, T-Bills with those maturity dates will have a higher risk premium and trade at lower values. People like Warren Buffet will gobble them up because they are still zero risk if you are willing to hold them for a few extra months while the debt ceiling issue is worked out. If things get really bad, the fed could offer to buy them with a haircut to ensure markets have liquidity.

The T-Bill is the cornerstone of the global financial system. Even with a technical default, no one believes the government won't eventually pay. And if you believe they won't, you should be buying physical gold, guns & ammo + food stuffs because it would be Mad Max'ish were that to happen.

The real issue is, if the government is in technical default, the credit rating agencies will downgrade the UST bill. That will result in higher interest rates on ALL government debt as it eventually revolves through. That means less money for existing programs.

8. Ask HN: Are a lot of books just useless?

Top comment by dcchambers

I'm going to assume you're talking about nonfiction books, because this is highly subjective for novels/fiction.

Most books are terrible, and even most "good" books have large swaths of filler content. Very few books are packed with useful content from front to back cover.

I think this is largely due to pressures from publishers and the way books are traditionally published and sold.

A 50 page book that is jam-packed with goodies and has no filler won't sell nearly as well as a 300 page book that seems to be full of stuff from an expert in the field. A 300 page book looks a lot better on a shelf than a 50 page pamphlet. Most of us know in our brains that quality > quantity, but our hearts often tell us the opposite.

Some fixes already exist: Online content, blogs, developer docs, and self-published books.

Practically, I would say don't worry about skimming books or parts of books if they seem like they are mostly fluff or overly repetitive. Because they probably are.

9. Ask HN: What is the best postmortem you've seen?

Top comment by yodon

Edward Tufte's analysis of the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion[0] is by far the most informative post mortem I've seen. It directly impacted everything I've written since reading it.

If you hit the link, you'll see the page appears to be a wall of text, not a simple slide or two. As you read deeper into the report, you'll understand that's an intentional aspect of the report. (I'll also note this is the Columbia explosion, not the better known Challenger disaster O-ring post-mortem discussed by Richard Feynman in his autobiography[1], even though that's a great post mortem as well).

[0]https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

[1]https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/03933...

10. Ask HN: Taking 6-12 months off work?

Top comment by throwawaaarrgh

You're 28? Dude, go travel the world. Don't spend much money either. Some of the best times of my life were just hanging out with people I met traveling on the cheap.

I'd also suggest a little pet project while you travel. 6 months to a year is a long time, so it's relatively easy to spend an hour or two a week on something that you kinda wish you had picked up before but hadn't given yourself the time for.

About 2 months before your sabbatical ends, start putting feelers out there for another gig. Gives you a little bit more time to start re-adjusting