AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

Top comment by jonhess

Command-e, put the selected text on the find clipboard.

Then command-e, command-g (find next) will search for the selected text without sacrificing the copy/paste clipboard.

Also, the find clipboard is shared between apps, so you can command-e in Safari, then command-g in Xcode.

2. Ask HN: Germans, how to work legally remote?

Top comment by ohthehugemanate

I did this for a few years. Here are your options:

Employment by the US company:

They're allowed to employ you and have you "stationed" in Germany. You pay no US tax, and DE tax on 100% of this income. For Sozialversicherung, Rentenversicherung etc it's just as if you were selbständig. Since you're allowed to give up all sorts of rights in DE conteact Law, the US based contract is probably fine.

Contractor for the US company: this is OK too. Since the company does not have a DE presence they can't run afoul of the Scheinselbständigkeit rules. You really should register as a Gewerbebetrieb, GmbH or English Limited company though, as that solves a lot of tax questions for you. In any case as a selbständiger in Germany You should expect to get audited in the first few years... And this makes it less likely they'll find things you have to pay.

I am not a Steuerberater... But I've been in a two selbständig household in Germany for 7 years. My income was from international tech contracts, just like yours. And I went through a Steuerprüfung, where they decided that since I dont have a degree in CS, I can't be selbständig in that field. Didn't matter that I have a long resume of big organizations, and a letter of reference from the CTO of one of the biggest companies in Germany. I had to form a Gewerbebetrieb and pay back taxes for it. It sucked.

Also, good luck on finding a Steuerberater who will help you optimize at all. Technically tax optimization is illegal, so most are very cautious even talking about it. 99% are just form fillers.

3. Ask HN: Is Google Secretly Undermining Firefox?

Top comment by raquo

Yes, gmail, calendar, youtube, etc. are slow and sometimes broken for weeks in various ways in FF.

Of course there likely won't ever be hard evidence that they are doing this deliberately. There are many ways for them to achieve this outcome without explicitly instructing their developers to degrade FF experience.

They can successfully bullshit most users that way, but for me this is just more reason to use FF more and Google less. I just hope there are enough other people with the same attitude for us to matter.

4. Ask HN: Why are non-technical managers paid more than engineers?

Top comment by Juliate

Senior engineer speaking. 20 years of experience in the software industry.

Management is knowing of to make people work together toward a common goal.

1. A managerial role is not _easy_ to hire for if you're looking for someone who has (for a start) correct skills & experience to manage a team (of engineers only, or of various backgrounds).

One of their roles is to help his team focus on what they want to/can do for everyone to succeed. That implies a lot of ingesting, structuring information and communicate it in all directions, all of the time. You need practice, and skills, to handle that without becoming completely numb.

2. Technical skills aren't everything. Far from that. When hiring, it's among the last items on my checklist. You want people to be motivated for the job, to be capable and willing to work in a team, to be willing to learn and spread what they learnt. What they know and can bring in total derives from that.

3. You get 1 manager for several members of a team. And a manager also coordinates with other managers & team members. Budget-wise, you can take and compare the manager compensation with any one team member's compensation but that does not make much sense.

4. Companies success being the result of (mostly) the technical excellence of their teams is the worst toxic professional myth I've encountered; it took me 5 years to see it and 10 more to accept it.

Purpose/strategy (know what you want) + design (know how to get there) + logistics (know who/what to ask for it) trumps most of the rest.

The bonus is if you also have the technical skills to do it but that's not a requirement.

Being an engineer is great, I love it. But it's far from being THE ultimate valuable role in a company.

5. Ask HN: What is the state-of-the-art environment for developing Erlang code?

Top comment by sntran

Contrary to others here, I would still suggest to stick with Erlang, but use Elixir's toolkit.

You can use `mix`, `exunit`, release, etc... from Elixir, and they can handle your Erlang codes fine. You also have better integration with editors like VSCode.

The reason for sticking with Erlang is that your project can be used in both Erlang and Elixir community. But if you write pure Elixir, it's pretty hard to use it in Erlang.

You can also write Elixir macro to wrap your Erlang code in an API. Not the other way around.

Project structure between Erlang and Elixir is similar anyway, so it should not be too difficult to have one single project for both Erlang and Elixir code.

6. Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News

Top comment by jdsully

The pay articles are often more timely and higher quality than the free news outlets. It seems only natural they’d get linked to from an aggregator geared to high quality discussion.

7. National Certificate in Kazakhstan Is Canceled

Top comment by pimterry

When you say:

> we got the free Internet, the government got an instrument for fighting digital weapons

I'm not sure what this means. What is the instrument the government now has for fighting digital weapons? Is it the ability to turn this HTTPS interception back on later?

If so, this doesn't sound like _great_ news. That would mean the government has stopped intercepting traffic for now, but it reserves the right & capability to do so again in future whenever it feels like it (I.e. whenever the internet next contains something Kazakhstan gov doesn't like).

8. Ask HN: What keyboard do you use?

Top comment by moh_maya

Has anyone tried Microsoft sculpt [1]? I use the 4000 series [2], and that's been amazing..

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/products/keyboar...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/products/keyboar...

9. Ask HN: What is your goto stack when building a MVP and why?

Top comment by legostormtroopr

Web app: Django+Postgres+Bootstrap locally done with Docker, deployed with Heroku.

With Django you get a lot straight out of the box, including: user management, admin dashboards. For an 1 or 2 person built MVP I wouldn't even bother with a JS frontend, just Django forms & Bootstrap templates and full HTTP/POST forms. It simplifies everything and removes a point of failure.

You can get a solid functional system working very, very quickly. Which you can deploy to Heroku for $0 while you iterate, which can be converted to production ready system for as under $50/month depending on what you need.

Desktop: Python+Qt - but thats old and probably bad advice in 2019.

10. Ask HN: Given that I am a Software Engineer, how could I help humanity the most?

Top comment by kleer001

Start by improving yourself. Are you the best you can be? Are the lives directly around you as good as they can be? Your immediate family? If you can't help your immediate family what makes you think you can help the world?

Not much is worse for the world than people who want to improve it that aren't perfect themselves.

Saw this recently, it seems like it might apply:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C. S. Lewis