AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

Top comment by SeanAnderson

https://ant.care/

https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

I'm making a digital ant farm. SimAnt + Tamagotchi that runs in real-time. Written in Rust/WASM/Bevy

The goal is to give people cute ants that do cute ant things 24/7, ask people to look after their ants and feed them once-per-day, and then deny the ability to provide ant care unless users engage in a breathwork/meditation exercise.

I would love help. I'm very much so in over my head. I have a billion things to add and the number one demotivator is not having people to tinker with, bounce ideas off of, and get hyped alongside. https://discord.gg/pg5Tu68cdW come say hi!

2. Ask HN: Has anyone gotten complete, permanent relief from tinnitus?

Top comment by upghost

I hope this comment reaches anyone suffering from tinnitus. My tinnitus is so bad that I’d … well good news is, I found a great way to manage my brain melting tinnitus.

Step 1: YouTube-dl this blessed sound: https://youtu.be/8indTo2ykPw?si=izyTOg4gYvnfsqZs (Plz tip the guy) (You should be able to tell just by listening to the sound that it immediately cuts out the tinnitus— if this sound print doesn’t work for you, there may be others that work better. But I have let other tinnitus sufferers wear my headphones and they all say it makes the tinnitus go away completely) 1a: (cut out the dialogue in the beginning with audacity) Step 2: buy a pair of these waterproof mp3 ONLY (it’s an appliance) bone conduction headphones: https://a.co/d/aqqhPm9 Step 3:put the mp3 you ripped on the headphones and remember what a normal life feels like

The only times I realize I have tinnitus is are right before I fall asleep, right when I wake up, and once a day for 20 minutes when I need to charge my headphones.

And I want to emphasize my tinnitus sounds like the screaming sun planet on Rick and Morty. It’s really bad. But thanks to this technique I only experience pain a few minutes per day. Good luck everyone.

3. Ask HN: Brother printers sending ink data to Amazon?

Top comment by orev

If you have the printer on your network, and any Amazon device on your network, the Amazon device could easily query the printer for ink levels. My Home Assistant does this and I never connected HA to the printer. It’s just part of the status information the printer seems to make available on the network.

It’s not surprising to me that Amazon would do this using one of their devices, as everyone seems to be grabbing as much data as they can. It’s probably described in the T&Cs somewhere (that they can scan your network and use data from it).

4. Ask HN: Is it just me or is mobile web browsing awful?

Top comment by bhawks

The web works better on Android.

At Google some PMs used to lament that Android users spend more time in the browser than in apps versus iPhone. In my experience using browsers on Android are much better than on iPhone and not everything really wants to be an app.

Id point the finger at Google actually allowing different web browser apps (Safari drives every browser on iPhone and lags in many areas) and just natural competition. (If ads really bothers you an ad blocker is an install away).

My only complaint really being cookie banners but they suck the fun out of desktop web too.

5. Ask HN: How do you tell if something has a keylogger implemented

Top comment by PeterisP

You may want to ask what does it mean for a game to have a keylogger?

A game is usually supposed to capture what buttons you press and, if it's an online game, send that over the internet, and so that would be perfectly fine as long as that's done while the game is running - so perhaps you're asking whether the game installs some malware that captures keystrokes outside of the game as well.

That would be generally detected by looking for various malware persistence mechanisms, seeing if there's something that's started on startup, possibly in a hidden way; or if there's some process that hides its activity. And if so, then you could check whether it was placed there by that game.

On the other hand, some of the anti-cheat mechanisms are so invasive that they effectively are far more capable than just a keylogger, and the game is quite open about placing them on your machine, e.g. requiring permissions to install it as a privileged driver.

6. Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

Top comment by ws66

It may be counter intuitive, but from my point of view, when you start managing individual contributors, YOU start working for them. Even though you are able to delegate work, a good part of your job is to clarify what needs to be done, how, etc... Especially that you are moving from solo to team based, you are also managing and clarifying requirements (stories or whatever) for your team. It's something you were possibly doing in your head previously, now you need to formalize it, because... communications! You help them do what they are good at, remove roadblocks, organize work between team members, plan work ahead of time, etc...

7. Ask HN: SaaS Founders, What 3 advice would you give your younger selves?

Top comment by spaceman_2020

Not a SaaS business, but an entrepreneur nonetheless. One thing I learned early is that having a co-founder with a serious b2b sales background, especially in a mid-tier company (big enough to bag F500 clients, small enough to work with small businesses) is a superpower.

My co founder was able to close deals I wouldn’t even know how to approach.

Don’t discount sales and marketing. Unless your tech is really revolutionary (chatGPT tier) or leagues ahead of the competitors (Figma), your biggest problem will be distribution and discovery, not tech.

8. Ask HN: For those trying to hire how hard is it to find people currently?

Top comment by linsomniac

A couple weeks ago we put a advert out on Indeed and also listed it here on HN. Initially we didn't have any further qualifications beyond the job post, which did indeed go into details on the job and requesting a cover letter.

After spending a couple days of 2-3 hours each on reviewing resumes that were "only ok", we started adding additional hoops for getting resumes in, and also tried to put in a gatekeeper to really urge applicants to write cover letters. After that the rate has dropped to bearable, but we still maybe get one out of 10 applications with a cover.

So, if you are applying to a job right now, I'd say that rather than optimizing your process for getting a lot of jobs applied for, spend some more time and apply for jobs that you're well suited for, and then make a cover letter that explains why.

I've been very lucky, I've not had to apply for many jobs. But when I have, I always wrote a specific cover letter AND customized my resume to the job advert.

But, yeah, we're having a hard time finding full-stack people that can hit the ground running with Java and Vue.

9. Ask HN: Best tools for self-authoring books in 2023?

Top comment by noelwelsh

Tooling is mostly unimportant. Writing the actual book should consume much more of your time. Unless you have very specific requirements around the output (e.g. one of my books has animations so I wanted something that made them easy to embed: https://www.creativescala.org/creative-scala/cycles/interpol...) spending time on tooling is yak shaving. Choose something using a tool chain you can live with and move on.

For selling books, try to do most of your sales via your own site. Gumroad is a good partner for selling PDFs. Lulu is pretty good for printed books. Amazon is a necessary evil due to their reach, but they will charge a much higher fee than doing it yourself and they are evil. If you don't self publish your royalty rate will be such that except for the few best selling books you won't make any significant money. It can be worth going with an established publisher if you want the prestige (and perhaps you can leverage that into $s) but in most cases I think self publishing is a better option.

Let me again emphasize writing the actual book is much more important than messing around with tools.

10. Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

Top comment by fafhnir

Dont't "organize" your life. Live it!

you dont't organize eating, sleeping, shtting, loving,... Did you ever forgot to eat or hug your beloved one and organize a birthday party for your wife / children / whoever?

so why do you want to "organize" the other aspects of your life?

The only things i need to push me forward in the important aspects of my life are values*.

The values are working like a compass and pushing me fully "from self" in the right directions.

If one value is punctuality then you will find a natural way to reach this value.

If the Value is your own and it is real, then you will find various ways to reach it.

So go and look out for the real important values in your life. If you need "lists" or "organisation tricks" to reach goals, then, maybe, these goals are not your own goals.

Find them and the rest will follow :)