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Issue #233 - August 27, 2023

Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!

1. Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?

Top comment by polonbike

Not completely what you are looking for, but still open source plans of house: Wikihouse https://www.wikihouse.cc/

Earthships are also said to be open source, but the plans are (definitely) not free https://earthshipbiotecture.com/

You can also check Open Source Home, by Studiolada (those are free, but the plans are in french) https://www.countryliving.com/remodeling-renovation/news/g46...

Open Source Ecology is now listing a house in their list of builds https://www.opensourceecology.org/extreme-build-of-the-seed-...

Open Building Institute is also promoting a configurable house https://www.openbuildinginstitute.org/

2. Ask HN: Where do I find good code to read?

Top comment by benrutter

There was a blog post from Peter Seibel recently called [Code Is Not Literature)](https://gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/) which pointed out that although everyone seems to agree reading code is great, very few tend to do it regularly.

I feel like I get a lot more out of messing with / hacking on code than I do from reading it. I'm sure people vary, but I've got loads more out of open source contributions to sometimes small projects, and not very much out of trying to do something like read the code for the Glasgow Haskel Compiler or something.

So for code to read, I think having an in is crucial, at least for me. So I'd say, find a cool, maybe small open source project, look at the issue tracker if it has one, and try to implement something. You'll only really know if it's good code (or why) after you start trying to change it.

3. Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

Top comment by nameless912

I once was interviewing for an internship at a quant firm in Chicago (I was in my Sophomore year I think at UIUC) and my interview went pretty well up to the point of my second-last interview of the day.

Then, I sat down with the VP of engineering, and he opened the interview with "so, what do you think it is we do here?" And I naturally stuttered through a canned answer about how they use arbitrage opportunities in the market to profit off of mis-priced securities, etc. Then he asked me, "but what benefit do we provide? Why is working here good for society?"

I blanked, and didn't answer for about 15 seconds. Then, I tried to start piecing together an answer until he stopped me, told me he had found my Facebook, and wasn't appreciative of my politics (I was moderately lefty in high school, significantly more so now; maybe this conversation is part of why). He had _printouts_ of some posts I had made criticizing George W. Bush, talking about why I thought we should be raising taxes on higher earners, supporting Obamacare, etc. He told me that he didn't think I had the "cojones to stomach the job" (direct quote), and told the recruiter not to bother with the last interview and that I had failed.

I _sobbed_ on the train home; I think it was the worst I had ever felt about an interview in my entire life, and yet looking back at it, I think this was the best possible outcome. Imagine if I had worked for this asshole.

I've worked for companies I don't personally agree with in the past; it's part of living in a society(TM). I am able to hold my nose to a certain extent to make an income for my family (heck, I am currently having to cross picket lines to come to work, which makes me feel icky). But I can't fathom what hell I would have been living under had I gotten and taken that job.

4. Ask HN: Undiscovered electronics/maker YouTube channels

Top comment by acegopher

5. Ask HN: How to monetize a website that is making views?

Top comment by tracerbulletx

If you really have a site with a lot of people who are visiting specifically because they're anxious about balding, balding treatments are one of the most stereotypically lucrative products. You should hold out for a hell of a lot more than 100 dollars and a resume piece. Prequalified anxious traffic is worth a huge amount and there are a lot of high margin anti balding products with money to throw around.

6. Ask HN: What's the Situation with YouTube-Dl?

Top comment by eska

Just get the standalone yt-dlp from github and occasionally update it with yt-dlp -U since Google constantly tries to interfere with the download mechanism.

7. Ask HN: How to contract for US companies as EU national

Top comment by rightbyte

I did contract work for an American company from the EU for 6 months.

I set up a one man company (with unlimited liability ...) and just sent invoices to the American company and they paid to my bank. Then I paid the taxes myself locally.

[Edit: My company was not based in the US.]

It is very doable if you got a lead.

8. Ask HN: SaaS operators, what is the cost:earnings ratio of your SaaS?

Top comment by xmonkee

Onboarding and risk management tools for financial firms. Monthly spend is about $1500, which is about 10% of revenue. I can probably spend some time and bring that spend down to $1000 with some work (but currently time is better spent getting revenue up)

Edit: I would like to add that with a combination of fly.io and digital ocean the actual server costs are way under $100. Most of the costs are paying for other Saas needed for the product (document analysis, emails etc) and tools (github, copilot, sentry, etc)

9. Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

Top comment by coldpie

In my opinion (others will disagree), the vast majority of CS concepts are not very useful for most software developers. I don't think you should feel bad about that. I consider my time & money getting a CS degree to be almost entirely wasted.

If you're at a large company, look around for open positions that look interesting on other teams and talk to those team leads about what skills they would want. Maybe they'd even be willing to have you on board as a "trainee." If you're genuinely good at self-teaching, you will be an asset even without the skills built in.

If there aren't positions available at your current employer, you'll have to try to decide what skills are in demand and pick one, and you'll have to spend your personal time on it. My approach has always been to build something with the tech I want to learn. Usually just toys (a music player to learn GTK; many garbage video games and websites to learn various languages & toolkits) but sometimes useful stuff, too (a blog post demonstrating reverse-engineering a video game; many little unixy tools to make my dayjob easier; porting a Linux video game controller driver to macOS). In my opinion, just doing exercises isn't a good way to learn or demonstrate your abilities to an employer. Projects you own & and can talk about are way more interesting.

Also, consider that you might just be burning out on tech. I know I'm getting there. Ten-plus years in an industry is a long time, not everyone's built to do the same kind of work for their whole life. I'm keeping my eyes open for something in another field that grabs me.

10. Ask HN: What does your self hosted stack look like?

Top comment by ckwalsh

At home I have a little Intel NUC running ubuntu hooked up to a 4 bay synology NAS.

I’m running several web apps, a git server, Plex, pihole, private CA, and keykloak, all on top of microk8s. It’s overkill, but I appreciated the opportunity to fiddle around and learn K8S without stress of external obligations.

I have two ingresses, one internal and one external facing. The external one is exposed via cloudflare and a micro vm (for multi level subdomains that cloudflare doesn’t support for free).

dyndns is handled by the router. It writes to a pseudorandom hostname, and cloudflare references it by CNAME.

It doesn’t get any significant amount of external traffic, but is good enough for family to use for the web apps + a yearly march madness pool (that can’t be hosted on yahoo/ESPN/etc due to a custom family rule set).