AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?

Top comment by afpx

This is cathartic. Thanks.

ACE 8. I was often hungry and cold. and sometimes homeless. I was poor in an area stricken with poverty (appalachia). I lived in a home that didn’t have half of an exterior wall, and we only had a kerosene heater. Often, there was no electric. We originally didn’t have plumbing except for an outhouse (luckily a federal program forced a corrupt contractor to tack on a shoddy bathroom to the house). No birthday or christmas presents.

School was terror. I had one outfit and shoes without bottoms. A gang of boys would wait outside for me everyday until evening. I’d hide in the woods until the path was clear. Teachers would assult me. The principal put me in the hospital. The police would harrass us. The police arrested my brother for skipping school, and he ended up in juvenile detention for a year.

Sexual abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse. It felt constant. My peers fared worse surprisingly. 20 friends dead before I was 24 (including two best friends and three girlfriends. Health problems, violence, suicide, drug overdoses, accidents.

I effectively moved out at 14. I exchanged sex with older women for room and board. I continued my schooling though.

I really lucked out honestly. Getting into the gifted program was by far the most important thing that could have happened to me. I somehow made it to undergrad. A friend turned me on to computer science when I was a junior. I spent my life savings on my first computer. I had terrible study skills and only graduated because I could derive stuff from first principles.

My first job had me in a cubicle with my face to the wall. Because of previous trauma, I involuntarily jump when people come behind me. So, the job was stressful. I fired up a spreadsheet and figured I could retire early if I kept increasing my wages and reducing my expenses.

I was never good at programming, but I was great at innovation and execution. I eventually got a role director of a consulting company in 2009, and I was making $150k. I felt like a badass. But, it’s been downhill from there. I have a problem with burning bridges.

I’m late 40s now. I ‘retired’ during the pandemic. I’ve really struggled since then. I have little direction and self-medicate most days. I’m suicidal most days, but I keep going because I feel I owe it to all the friends I’ve lost.

I doubt anyone will read this, but if you do, thanks for listening.

2. Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

Top comment by gorkish

From [1] The story of PING:

  ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder

3. Ask HN: My son might be blind – how to best support

Top comment by jesterswilde

I am blind, it was degenerative so it sounds different than what your kid has.

I have a few pieces of advice. This is more about my own upbringing, so don't take any of it as an accusation towards you.

1) Don't hide things about their condition or prospects. I grew up in a very loving home. However, my parents found out I was going blind when I was ~8, I didn't find out until I was 13. My mother wanted to protect me from 'being the blind kid'. But I was. Not knowing made everything so much harder and more confusing.

2) Don't rely too much on technology. Stick and dog are the best tools blind people have. Everything else, in my opinion, is a flash in the pan and won't have long term support. Not made by blind people and with minimal consulting for them. Like what a sighted person thinks a blind person needs after closing their eyes and walking around their house for a few minutes. (Screen readers are useful, I'm not talking about those.)

For a piece of tech I was excited for and is now dystopian: https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

3) Foster independence. The world is not made for us. It's also full of high speed metal deathtraps. The easiest thing to do is stay inside where I know where everything is. Even walking to the grocery store is a deeply uncomfortable endeavor. But I need to do it. I need to be able to live with that discomfort and not let it dissuade me from living the most human life I can.

The blind cane is very valuable. It took me too long to accept blindness as an identity, get over the shame, and start using it. I lost a lot of time to that.

Blindness sucks in every conceivable way. It affects every part of ones life. But I had a good childhood and I have a good life. All things considered, I'm extremely lucky for the circumstances of my birth because of the family I was born into. You can't take away the blindness but you can still give them a wonderful life.

4. Ask HN: Must-Read Books for Startups?

Top comment by sebastiennight

I was going to mention The Mom Test when I saw the title of your Ask HN, so I'll dive a bit deeper because it's IMHO the most important book I read when starting my current startup[0] and it's what took us to first sale before the MVP was even available.

> before investing in your idea, talk to potential customers to see if anyone wants it or not.

I would reframe this a bit, otherwise someone not familiar with the book will take from your quote the exact opposite lesson from the one taught in The Mom Test. I believe the main lesson from the book is:

- Don't talk to people about your ideas

- Ask people about their actual use cases and frustrations

- Figure out where they're struggling, investing effort and money. Let them talk

- Don't ask people about your idea and don't ask them if they want it or not. You're only trying to validate the problem.

Questions to ask:

    What's the hardest thing about [doing this thing]?
    Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem...
    Why was that hard?
    What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problem?
    What don't you love about the solutions you've tried?

5. Ask HN: What runs L4-related microkernels/hypervisors these days?

Top comment by hatsubai

You're correct that they're used a decent bit in the defense industry. I can't talk too much about it for obvious reasons, but it's an area where I would expect an uptick in their usage within the next decade in the defense field alone. Check out the DoD's modernization efforts regarding seL4 and L4Re. In-depth knowledge of these microkernels is going to be a skillset in very high demand as defense contractors are forced to adhere to the modernization efforts pushed forth by the DoD.

6. Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

Top comment by swatcoder

Consider that taking 5-10 graduate courses and writing a master's level thesis or project will generally take all of your free time and a bunch of your savings over the course of two or more years. (I sure hope you're not thinking to take on debt for this!)

And while you'll absolutely learn some things and find yourself excited about some ideas in those couple years, you will forget almost all of the stuff your learned within a few years of graduating because you won't be continuing to get your hands dirty and won't be building on the knowledge. Technical knowledge does not "stick" if you don't use it.

If you're a hungry learner and have the free time and money, you can go back to school for whatever you want. This sounds adjacent to your work, at least, so that's something. But remember that formal education is only the first and smallest step in learning a technical discipline, and it sounds like you want to continue PM'ing rather than transition to a technical IC, so you won't be continuing on the later steps.

If you're just trying to be the best technical PM you can be in your industry, there are almost certainly far more time/cost/stress-efficient ways to do so.

7. Ask HN: What currently is the best, nerd-friendly, rootable Android phone?

Top comment by neilv

When I tried CalyxOS years ago, it gave me the impression of generic Android with all possible "privacy" apps recommended.

I replaced it with GrapheneOS, which at the time seemed seemed to be developed much more seriously. (I haven't looked at recent CalyxOS.)

Choosing GrapheneOS determines the hardware: recent-generation Google Pixel.

For a more open platform, maybe take the Phosh stuff (or whatever it is now) that Purism developed for the Librem 5, and run it with PostmarketOS Linux with whatever is the current most mainline-kernel-and-drivers supported device. Or maybe the KDE Plasma mobile stuff has come along further.

I've been trying to get a good Linux handheld so long (including buying dozens of various devices, trying many approaches, doing many crazy builds, etc.), that I finally gave up. GrapheneOS works as a daily driver without violating me itself.

8. Ask HN: Is it wrong not wanting career progression beyond senior?

Top comment by trey-jones

My take might be a controversial take overall. Also note that I'm speaking as an American, in the "land of the free", which actually does apply in this case, I think:

First, if it's OK with you, then it's not wrong. Ignore the things society/advertisers tell you: "You need a boat! You need a nice car! You need a pool!" Do you want a boat? Do you want a nice car? Do you want a pool? You actually have complete control over these optional financial burdens.

OK, so if you've taken a step back and established what you actually want, (and this may change throughout your life), then you can set some goals around how to achieve that. People may judge you (fuck em, imo). You will get asked questions about what you do for a living all the time (probably), and maybe the status of a more prestigious role is important to you. It's all up to you (possibly with some input from loved ones if you value their opinions).

Personally, I'm kind of a minimalist. I have pretty much all the stuff that I want already. I actively fight against acquiring more stuff. If I had enough capital for my family to live off 10% per year, I would quit my job today, and offer my services for free to causes that I actually care about. Come to think of it, I guess that's one of my goals.

9. Ask HN: How to roll out an internal UI component library

Top comment by wolframhempel

A lot of good things have already been said, but having worked on similar initiatives within larger banks, here are some of my key takeaways:

- Treat it as a product. Build something that would be appealing to real world customers. Spent time on writing great documentation, making a website that demos the components and advertise them internally. Even if other teams will be forced to use what you build by company mandate, getting buy-in will make your life much easier.

- Write great documentation. Incorporate usage by other teams as code samples.

- Avoid becoming the bottleneck at all costs. If you ship components to other teams, these components won't do all the things the other teams need. This will create friction for the other team and make you a bottleneck in their development workflow. They won't put up with this for long and quickly start working around your library or ditch it alltogether. To avoid this, make sure you continuously allocate some parts of your team to make fast changes and remain responsive.

- Allow for others to contribute back. Teams won't just use your things - they'll extend it. Make sure you have a clear and structured way to incorporate their changes.

- Stay responsive. Embed your developers and designers within the teams using your library. Don't become "the UI team" that bestows the unworthy with an update at their leisure - get close to your "customers", share their wants and pains.

10. Ask HN: One-man SaaS, how do you attract customers?

Top comment by tjs8rj

Scrolling through here I get the sense that these answers are from people who’ve never actually done 0-1.

The truth is when you’re as tiny as you are you almost certainly won’t have any scalable channels. What you need to do is hand to hand combat to secure each customer. Focus on getting 1 paying customer first by any means necessary. Call them, email them, just get in touch and see if this solves a problem enough for them to pay for it.

What’s going to happen is the face to face of actually finding someone to use your product is going to teach you a ton about: the problem and how painful it is, how well your solution solves it, who your customer is, how much you can charge, and how to get to them.

After you’ve gotten 1 paid customer (by any means necessary), now try to get a second one (by any means necessary). Keep doing this.

After the first few you’ll start to notice a pattern in the ways you capture customers: the way you reach out, the medium you reached out with, the types of customers and triggers in their life that made them receptive, the messaging that convinced them to buy, etc

You’ll stumble upon the ways to scale your customer acquisition.

Focus on getting that first customer doing whatever it takes. Get a customer to pay you TODAY. Then repeat