AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

Top comment by vivekd

This post caught my attention because recently I met a woman I really admire. She dropped out of her computer engineering class, took a vow of celibacy and poverty and became a missionary with a Catholic sect.

The reason I admire her isn't that. What caught my attention about her is that she has a sense of purpose. She has a purpose in life and has devoted her life to it.

I used to have one. My goal was to make the legal system cheaper and more accessible. And I devoted the last decade of my life to that. Now that's fallen apart and I'm a little lost and it hurts me alot.

I hope I'll find a purpose soon. That's what I'm passionate about right now, finding a new purpose or a new way to accomplish my past purpose.

2. Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go about hiring the first team

Top comment by louison11

Something obvious I didn't understand at first: the earlier stage you are, the smarter the people you need.

They need to be autonomous, flexible, but above all brilliant at what they do.

If you get "average" employees who just wants to follow the specs and receive their salary, they will most likely cost you more to manage than they will create value.

In early stages, you're probably still trying to answer complex questions - and you need people who have the capacity to think outside the box to do so...

As you grow, you can start tolerating people who "think less" and just do what they're asked. You'll have managers to manage them.

In other words, the type of people you need at this stage are the type who could be almost be startup founders themselves. ;-) My 2 cents.

3. Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

Top comment by ghshephard

OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two.

I've got a monitor dedicated 100% of the time to ChatGPT, and I interact with it non stop during the flow of technical scenarios and troubleshooting situations that flow into me - working in areas that I have the slimmest of backgrounds in, and shutting down, root causing, and remediating issues that have been blocking others.

I've essentially got 15-20 high-priced world-class consultants in every field that I chose to pull from, working at my beck and call, for $20 a month? I would pay $200/month in a heartbeat out of my own pocket, and I probably would ask the company to pay ~$2,000/month for my workflow.

I think if they never released another product, and they just managed to penetrate with their existing offering, they are easily a $100B+ company once they nail down how to monetize.

The difference between LLMs and Crypto is I can point to roughly 200-300 objective solutions over the last 9 months where ChatGPT resolved an issue and delivered clear value for me alone. And, over time, as you learn how to control for hallucinations, and manage your query patterns a bit more - the value has continued to increase.

That same multiple-times-a-day high value persistent experiences were never a part of my crypto experience.

4. Ask HN: Ways to make side income as a SWE?

Top comment by throwaway1492

In 2018 I was working low effort job at a insurance/finance type company that was having layoffs. So I started interviewing for a new job, and landed a remote job and took it. I didn't quit my old job. So I worked two jobs for about a year and went and got a third remote job (these were software dev jobs, w2). I did this through part of the pandemic. Working three jobs was doable when it was just me at home, but with the family home during lockdown it was too stressful so I quit two. I made A LOT of money during this time. But if I had it to do over, I'd focus on getting one high paying FAANG job instead.

Apparently this became common at some point, "over employment" is a thing now, with a subreddit and everything.

5. Ask HN: Top 10 Timeless Software Books That ChangedLife as Software Engineer?

Top comment by gwnywg

'A philosophy of software design' by John Ousterhout, great book which provides good understanding of what complexity in software means. Very concrete and short.

6. Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now?

Top comment by Backslasher

While interviewing post-FB to other companies as an SRE-type-engineer, it seemed to me that outside of FANN it's not common to give engineers a very wide scope. One company asked me whether I'd like to join the monitoring team or the container team, to which I replied "why can't I work in whatever team needs me the most, and switch whenever needed?". They didn't like that. After trying and failing to find a part-time position I like (can expand on it if interesting), I ended up joining as an architect to a "fixer-upper" company, where I have a lot of things I can improve and wide scope. The money isn't up to par with FB, but I feel I'm doing meaningful work and making the world better, which was missing from the last couple of months at FB.

7. Ask HN: Making a better world, how important is that to you?

Top comment by SeriousGamesKit

From an entrepreneurial lens, I was often tempted to think that computer science would be the best lever which could resolve some of the environmental issues close to home for me. As an example, I spent a long time trying to invent sampling tools which could help pinpoint the broken pipes which I imagined were contributing to the contamination of a major waterway near me.

While the solution was interesting, the background research revealed that not only was the river I was concerned about significantly less polluted than nearby ones, the source of the pollution was actually known- agricultural runoff from hundreds of farms. This would become a somewhat depressing theme- the problems were actually well understood, the solutions long available, but the actors with agency over the problem have chosen not to act. Through this lens, the sad revelation was that these issues which appeared to be technical were actually purely political.

It's kicked off a broader fascination with perverse incentives. I can recommend David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs' to speak to another aspect of this problem. In terms of the high-wire act of political influence around ecological decisions within major engineering projects, I'd suggest 'The making of an expert engineer'.

I do still think there's a significant amount for engineers to contribute. I'm often surprised to see and hear of solutions built by software engineers with little or no regard to operational cost, and I suspect the same is true of energy efficiency. Nowadays, I try to bias towards lightweight, shared cloud resources to deliver my projects. I think that Stripe's goal of shaving off some percentage points off the world of e-commerce to kickstart a market for atmospheric carbon removal is absolutely worth a go. And I'm still fascinated by engineering megaprojects for cleaner energy distribution, such as the Sun Cable.

8. Ask HN: Can you take more than 2 consecutive weeks of vacation?

Top comment by samsolomon

There's a lot of "it depends" here. As both a former founder and early startup employee these are the things that come to mind—

How far out did you discuss this with your employer? Were they aware of it when you joined? There's a pretty big difference if this is 6 months or two weeks away. Setting expectations go a long way here on both sides.

What is the size of the business? People are more critical the smaller the business is. The stakes are very different for a business with 10 vs 100 vs 1,000 employees.

Is the business cashflow positive—or near it? You said startup, so that makes me think they aren't cash flow positive. Three consecutive weeks is a lot to ask for a small business that isn't making money.

Essentially, the more stable the business is the less of an issue I'd expect it to be—given expectations were set in advance.

9. Ask HN: Should we plan for a life after HN?

Top comment by swatcoder

> some sort of mirror platform with the same profiles, same data and as much of the algorithm as possible

No offense, but you’ve just distilled the blindspot behind a lot of social startup ideas. Good communities are not a product of technology or data.

Technology and data facilitate different cost and scaling opportunities, but are just the bones upon which a community might be built.

This community is good because of excellent human involvement through dang (and others at YC) and through the luck of having the right, responsible users around so far. There’s no recreating it.

Sometimes, you just have to enjoy things while they exist and then let go of them once they don’t.

10. Ask HN: What's the most interesting (non-AI) advancement in tech in 2023?

Top comment by nicbou

After people discovered that you could fax the Berlin immigration office to bypass their queue of 10,000+ unanswered emails, they turned the fax machines off.

Germany is going digital against its will.