AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

Top comment by joezydeco

Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless.

I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day.

What you're asking for, for free, isn't possible.

2. Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

Top comment by SkipperCat

My question is why would you want to do that? You're just going to come against the same issues and problems that Reddit has, especially if you want to achieve anything close to Reddit's scale.

You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees.

You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot, but you'll probably never operate at the scale of Reddit. The killer feature of Reddit is that everyone goes to Reddit because Reddit is Reddit.

Maybe my pessimistic brain can't see the opportunity. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

3. Ask HN: How many of you have been laid off twice this year already?

Top comment by throwarayes

I’m starting to wonder what the upside of working at a big tech company really is.

Stability: no (who knows when the next layoffs will be)

Base Pay: maybe (probably higher on average)

Stock: maybe - but a complete crapshoot

Fulfilling work: maybe, but it could be disrupted by politics, maybe some side feature of a side feature, or you might just get laid off anyway

Frankly it’s hard to trust putting your energy into something new after being let go. At least at a small company market performance might be more closely tied to your performance, not random politics or idiotic decisions.

Seems you go to a large company to chill out, save up base pay, but not really give it your all as so much is out of your control.

Tech companies are shutting down their junior pipelines and turning their most senior talent into burned out careerists who don’t care. They’re managing to mediocrity, not growth. Which honestly maybe makes sense in a non 0 interest rate economy. I just wish they’d be honest about it

4. Ask HN: Lots of AWS credits expiring soon, ideas?

Top comment by bravura

Find a PhD student that needs GPUs for their research but isn’t in a first world institution. You could reach out to a few top professors and ask for a referral to someone promising.

Ie be a science benefactor

5. Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

Top comment by the__alchemist

Yep! C to B student in high school, granted, taking the tougher classes. Got better grades in college (Which I got into mainly because I scored well on the SAT and applied as a music major, then switched immediately after), and graduated with a (in hindsight) bullshit degree in applied science.

~5 years after college, I learned to code, and it's been a passion since. 7 years after college, I started a path I am still on to become proficient at math and science. I am still on that path. I"m 37, and am in a coffee shop reading a paper about interpretations of electron charge distribution. At home, I am coding general relativity and chemistry sims. I had no interested in this sort of thing while I was in school, and if I'd pursued them, I almost surely would have failed out.

I have a well-rounded math*+science+engineering background and knowledge base now, but it was almost entirely from self-study.

Good luck!

*Math in terms of the sort you'd need for science or engineering. I think the abstract stuff may be beyond me forever, in the way functional programming is. I think you need a certain level or type of intelligence for that.*

6. Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

Top comment by Animats

PayPal supposedly has a "refuse payment" button, but it works differently for "verified" and "unverified" accounts.

Now, if this was a bank to bank ACH transfer, the recipient could just refuse the credit. There's an error code for this situation: R10: “Customer Advises Originator is Not Known to Receiver and/or Originator is Not Authorized by Receiver to Debit Receiver’s Account”.[1] You can contact your bank and refuse an incoming ACH transaction, which will generate this.

This is different from sending money back. It says to the banking system that the transaction was rejected and did not complete. So you're not sending the unknown originator your money. You're refusing to take their money. This eliminates the possibility of a reversal from their end costing you money. It also marks the transaction as an error in the banks at both ends. This is useful, because many errors on an account are an alarm condition and will get the attention of some fraud department.

If you have to reverse a transaction, do it fast. There are time limits for the simple paths.

(A friend of mine runs a bank branch of a major bank. Much of her day is spent straightening out error situations like this.)

[1] "https://www.nacha.org/rules/differentiating-unauthorized-ret...

7. Ask HN: How much of unlimited PTO do you use?

Top comment by feoren

It's all bullshit. When my company switched to "flexible time off", they also instated an annual goal for number of hours billed, and surprise surprise: to hit the annual goal, you have to take basically ZERO time off. Previously we earned 2 to 4 weeks depending on seniority. Now it's zero. You cannot take time off and also hit your goal unless you work tons of overtime. It's all fucking bullshit and I'd be surprised if it's legal.

When in doubt, if some corporate executive wants to do it, 99% of the time it's to absolutely fuck you over as hard as possible. Corporate leadership at most companies in the U.S. are parasitic insects existing solely to suck the blood out of the company until their next spawning cycle when they sprout wings and fly off looking for another victim. Never doubt it.

8. Ask HN: How can a junior dev maximize their income?

Top comment by 101011

I know this question is situated around the tech, but the real answer is to leave every couple of years. There is always more money to be made, and the more experience you have the easier it is to get it.

I'm not saying this is what somebody should do, but if you're only indexing for income, then it's the only answer IMO.

9. Ask HN: Anyone else feel like their whole career will just be tech debt?

Top comment by devonbleak

There's definitely something to the "choose boring technology" approach. But to paraphrase Palahniuk "on a long enough timeline the survival rate for all technology is zero". Everything becomes tech debt.

If your solution makes it a decade that's a huge accomplishment - you got that abstraction fairly well nailed. Now think about all the systems you use that were written 10+ years ago and how clunky and painful they are and how you wonder why nobody upgrades this thing or replaces it with something more modern - that feels like tech debt, no?

Hanging your career on a single technology has risk - your bill rate is gonna plummet if the stack goes out of style and you don't move on, or as the market gets saturated with people that have enough skill with it. If the framework hangs on long enough your bill rate might go back up as companies get desperate to maintain the things built on it that they haven't managed to replace. It also has positives - you'll be very proficient with building things with it and likely know how to mitigate its limitations to get stuff done efficiently.

10. Ask HN: Advice on starting a YouTube channel?

Top comment by carom

Find a niche. People love free content. It wasn't that hard.

I was making computer security videos for people, real basics for programming, networking, web interactions, number bases, bit math - stuff that you need to learn as a base to get into hacking. Grew my channel pretty quickly to 1k subscribers just by sharing them to reddit. I deleted it because I got annoyed that I was making content for YT for free (the videos are still archived on Odysee). It really didn't seem that difficult to grow though when you're giving it away.

For pure dev things, cover different algorithms or data structures. Mobile, gaming, and web will have large audiences but already some established channels.

Other tips -

- Get a good mic, mic stand, shock mount.

- Downsize your screen to 720p when you record so it is large enough for the average laptop screen to read. It is absolutely ridiculous when someone is recording a tutorial on a 4k monitor and the text is microscopic.

- I was less concerned about video but repurposing a DSLR as a webcam is a good move. Pay attention to lighting and your background. Some people like full bright lights, color LEDs are a good vibe too.

- Practice speaking. Slow down.

- Learn to edit so you don't worry about redoing your whole video in a single take. I didn't like editing so I would redo 20 minute videos a few times until I got it right.