AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: PG's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' manual examples?

Top comment by kreutz

At Lugg (https://lugg.com) we did a few things that would not scale.

- My co-founder and I did all the Luggs ourselves in trucks we rented through GetAround for the first 4 months

- My co-founder and I's names, pictures, and phone numbers were hard coded into the app as the crew to fulfill the Lugg before we had crews or proper dispatching

- We launched without payments and would charge customers with a Square reader at the door

- Most mornings we would camp out in the IKEA parking lot in Emeryville, CA and approach their customers that were struggling to get their purchases in their cars and pitched them that we would deliver their items if they downloaded the app and made a request

- In the early days we didn't have operating ours and anyone could request a Lugg at anytime and my co-founder and I would hop in our rented truck and do it

A few months in we did a Lugg for someone that knew Sam Altman and made an intro to him for us. We met him for coffee, shortly after had a YC interview, and was later accepted in the S15 batch

2. Ask HN: Was any Starfighter postmortem ever published?

Top comment by itslennysfault

I have no relation to Starfighter, but I was part of a similar startup almost a decade ago, and learned a few things that are likely similar to what they faced.

We started with this dream of completely revolutionizing the way people hire in tech (with hopes of expanding to other fields).

First of all, we learned that for 99% of companies they don't have a screening problem, but they have a sourcing problem. Our original company was along the lines of HackerRank / LeetCode / etc, and created due to the founder's experience as a manager at Amazon where he'd get 1000s of resumes that needed to be screened and the process was eating up too much dev resource. A product that solves this problem is appealing to companies that get 1000s of resumes per posting, but basically useless to most companies who get very few candidates, and even less appealing to recruiters who care much more about top of the funnel than the screening process.

After that we pivoted to an event format. The idea being that we could attract 100s of applicants to do a challenge in realtime. This reduces cheating risk and allowed us to act as a means of sourcing candidates (instead of just a screening platform). The idea was 100s of candidates would enter and the companies we got to sign up would compete for the top applicants. It sorta worked. The platform was good, companies were interested, and we got some people placed.

HOWEVER, the profile of people that will do a multi-hour open ended challenge for the chance to maybe get hired by some companies largely leans toward entry-level people. We had some experienced people that did it because they were bored or just curious, but generally seasoned engineers aren't going to waste their time, and forget about "passive job seekers" which is what all recruiters want most of all.

Ultimately, the company ended due to a lot of personal issues between the founding team, but the product itself was good, and the market fit was decent, but far from perfect. I'm pretty sure if we would've kept it together we would've eventually became very similar to HackerRank just offering a platform where people can conduct the same crappy tech interviews we've been using forever.

3. Ask HN: How's your job search going in this current economy?

Top comment by geuis

Really, really, really bad. I'm a full stack engineer. I took part of the last 4 years "off" due to having savings and finally settling down to pursue my own SaaS attempt.

I've been back in the job market since the beginning of the year. I've probably sent out well over a hundred resumes (definitely over this number since I was keeping track until recently). I had a brief respite when I picked up a temp contract but that only lasted about a month.

I mostly get just rejections. I have over 15 years of experience. I literally know how to build out every part of a normal web/api stack.

I even have an active ongoing project I've run for 13 years and have scaled to support a couple million requests a day.

Nothing seems to matter.

I have maybe managed to get one actual call a week for the last year where I actually speak to someone from the company. And even then, it's been one "thanks for playing" response email after another.

I honestly don't know what to do. I've never had a problem at least getting interviews to the point where I'm at least in the consideration process.

I need help.

I revised my resume a few times and that hasn't helped. I've gotten more involved with LinkedIn and I get more noise but still low results.

I'm basically getting very desperate.

4. Ask HN: What happened to hackerspaces?

Top comment by mdasen

Real Estate. So many quirky things are viable when there's cheaper rent, cheap buying opportunities, or underutilized space. If I could buy space for $150/sq ft, I might have some extra cash, like the idea of investing in real estate, and like the idea of having a cool community hackerspace. If it's going to cost me $1,000/sq ft, I'm barely going to be able to afford the space I want to live in. If a group of us can rent at cheap prices we're saving money on our housing and paying for a shared second space doesn't cost that much.

Over the past 15 years or so, property prices have soared in so many cities. It really makes it hard to afford space for quirky things. There are certainly plenty of examples of ones that still exist and enough determination and you can still make things happen, but I think the rising cost of real estate is putting a damper on things like this.

5. Ask HN: Which DNS service do you use for your computer's network settings?

Top comment by samvimes

Devices -> Pi-Hole -> Unbound -> DnsCrypt

Some additional details:

- Outbound internet access over port 53 is blocked for everything on the network, other than the Pi-Hole/Unbound server

- IpTables rule in place to force all outbound traffic over port 53 to go thru the Pi-Hole. This prevents devices from circumventing the Pi-Hole filtering by hard-coding public DNS servers

- Cronjob that polls http://public-dns.info/nameservers-all.txt regularly, and updates an IpTables rule to block all outbound internet traffic over any port/protocol to servers in that list. This is my attempt to block things that try to circumvent DNS filtering by doing DNS over HTTPS

- Unbound makes it possible to bypass DnsCrypt for specific zones, as needed. It also is configured to prefetch records before expiration, which generally eliminates the latency introduced by DnsCrypt

---

This is overkill, but I tried to address privacy concerns as well as ad-blocking with this setup, and it's also been fun to tinker with

6. Ask HN: What's the best way to become an independent software developer?

Top comment by gregjor

If you need to get paid you aren’t “working for yourself” or controlling the project. Whomever pays for your work decides most of the parameters. That’s called freelancing or consulting.

You don’t “become” a freelancer or independent developer. That’s not an identity. You find customers who will pay you to deliver solutions to business problems. If you have a good reputation and track record and relationships with your customers they may trust you to make decisions about the project direction, tools and languages, schedule, etc.

Building a freelance practice takes considerable time and effort. I have some articles about that based on my experience (over 15 years freelancing) on my site typicalprogrammer.com.

7. Ask HN: What is your favorite FOSS WYSIWYG editor?

Top comment by kfogel

Please consider editing the original question's headline to specify "HTML" too :-).

Otherwise a reader might think (as I did) that you're asking a question the answer to which could be LibreOffice Writer or other things like that.

8. Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?

Top comment by Chiron1991

The core reason is (imo) that it's simply not possible to provide a Django admin equivalent in other frameworks because they lack the functionality to do so.

The basic dependencies for the Django admin are:

- authentication

- user permissions

- forms

- the ORM, to generate forms from model definitions and forward the admin's CRUD operations to the database

No other framework comes with all of these dependencies builtin. Yes, there are individual plugins to retrofit them, but then you would start building your extremely complex admin plugin on top of a lot of unaligned dependencies. Just one of them needs to go into a direction that doesn't align with your needs and your project is done. That's not a good base to start from. Django doesn't have this problem because the entire framework is built under one roof.

9. Ask HN: How to do transactional SMS as a bootstrapped or startup company?

Top comment by Animats

SMS has become a huge pain to send, because of spam. I ran into this with my steampunk telegraph office. We ran a telegraph office at steampunk conventions, where attendees could send in a message via SMS, and it was typed out on an antique teletype machine. A messenger at the con would then deliver a proper telegram in person.[1] I recruited some young actors to run the office, and it was a hit.

This used Twilio. Users sent an SMS to Twilio. Twilio then made an HTTP request to our server, which queued the message for the Teletype machine and replied to the sender with an SMS message. This is what Twilio calls inbound SMS - text comes in, reply goes back in the HTTP reply. You can't send unsolicited SMS via the inbound system. It's a unit transaction.

This now has to be registered as an "advertising campaign". There's an additional per-month fee, and a vetting process. You have to have an identifiable company. I could go through all that to comply, but steampunk is pretty much over and we stopped doing cons when COVID hit.

The spam industry effectively defines a "transactional message" as someone messaged in once, so now you can spam them forever. ("Now you can buy more of that thing you bought last year!") Regulation now works on that basis. So even services that are inherently one request/reply are regulated as "ad campaigns."

This is why we can't have nice things.

[1] https://vimeo.com/124065314

10. Ask HN: How is your startup doing?

Top comment by ilrwbwrkhv

I have a startup without VC funding. On track to make about $5 million profit this year.

Downturn has been great for me. Could hire some great folks for cheap and I am in a few industries where downturns help me.

VC is a scam in most cases apart from a select few like YC.