AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Where can I find remote or quality oriented freelancing work?

Top comment by ArtofSaf

Here's something you can do:

1. Go to https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/PHP to see websites that use PHP

2. Focus on smaller to mid-size companies (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs)

3. (Optional) Search for each company on Linkedin and add managers with relevant roles (VIP of sales, project manager, marketing manager, etc.). The goal is to familiarize them with your name so they're more likely to open your email (step 5).

4. Find the email format of these companies with https://hunter.io/.

5. Reach out to the most senior person with a relevant role at each company with a personalized 1-on-1 email.

The key here is to review their website and business and share 2-3 ideas of what you can them build or fix (if there are any glaring issues or vulnerabilities). They may not necessarily use your ideas but the goal is stand out and help them understand how they can put your programming skills to use. Here's a template you can reference: https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer

There are a lot of businesses out there whose teams don't have the capacity to build everything so they would be keen to have a reliable freelance programmer help them bring some features or projects out of backlog.

2. Ask HN: How to keep yourself accountable?

Top comment by lallysingh

I think this is the wrong question. I think you should find better compassion for yourself. Understand why you didn't do something the way you wanted. That's useful learning about yourself, other hackers, and the software development process on general.

Are you doing work where you don't care about it's quality? Why do the work? Some part of you didn't care about the result, or didn't believe that the additional quality would actually pay off.

That's completely normal.

Understanding which one and why is honestly far more interesting than most personal software projects.

3. Ask HN: Are available domain names still important when naming a company?

Top comment by PatrolX

In general most people massively underestimate the importance of naming and treat it with indifference.

The cost of advertising is the long-term tax you pay for poor short-term decision making when naming your product or service.

What most people don't realize is that it's the "sound" of the name that's most important, not the way it looks on a logo or in a domain name.

The reason for this is the part of the brain's working memory called the phonological loop that gets excited by short repetitive rhyming sounds and rehearses them repeatedly, which is why you sometimes can't get a song or tune out of your head. This function results in repetitive and rhyming names being more readily committed to long-term memory, thus making good names not just memorable but unforgettable.

All the the best names are alliterative and rhyming, and I'd argue that Coca-Cola is the best name ever conceived so far.

"So does the available domain matter?"

Yes, but nowhere near as much as the name itself.

It's very possible to come up with original great sounding unique names that position you well in the marketplace, it just takes time and a lot of patience.

4. Remind HN: Put contact info in your profile if you'd like to be contacted

Top comment by whalesalad

Since posting this and leaving comments below, my inbox has become flooded with spam garbage.

Some of you are signing me up for mailing lists, gay porn websites, right-wing anime news? This is no coincidence.

Thank you all for taking time out of your day to “prove me wrong”, I hope you feel good about it.

5. Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

Top comment by metafunctor

Django, Python 3, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, uWSGI, nginx, Celery, RabbitMQ, Ubuntu, Ansible, Sentry.io, Gitlab, Hetzner, Cloudflare, Create React App.

Effects on success: I already knew this stack (no time lost learning new tech), can run with a very tight budget (suitable for starting a business on the side). And, obviously, this is a great stack that will scale far into the future if needed.

6. Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

Top comment by aguzzi94

Oh sweet sweet failures! I'll start. I recently started trying to quit drinking for good, since it slowly turned from a thing that made me all charismatic and happy and jumping around, to a bitter angry man. This change started when I got together with my current girlfriend, since every time we would go out and have a (probably more than one) drink, I would get jealous (I'm very jealous and insecure, working on it) for stupid silly things. Problem is the alcohol made my jealousy amplified by 100x (wish it would do the same with my startup revenue)and I would flip out for nothing. Two weeks ago I promised to my gf and to myself that I would have stopped with this behavior and that I would have drunk less. No need to say, that same night, I drank waay too much and flipped out because she just glanced at another guy and made her cry and leave me there all alone, drunk and stupid. She couldn't take it anymore. Fortunately, the day after we talked about it and I decided to quit drinking cold turkey (Allen Carr's book helped a lot in this- suggested if you're in the same boat). It has been 10 days and I haven't touched a drop of alcohol nor I intend to. Working on my insecurity/jealousy as well. Your turn!

7. Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

Top comment by latchkey

I picked Flutter and I'm really happy with it. The latest release of Flutter makes me even happier as there are some nice improvements. I'm using Material components because for me it is the bootstrap of UX these days and requires little thought to make a fairly clean UX. As a developer I can just drop in components as necessary.

  * Hot reload, on device, works and works well.
  * Really nice error messages (in latest release).
  * It is fast.
  * Dart is pretty nice once you get used to it.
  * Provider api for state management works great (basically, react context).

8. Ask HN: What are some architectural decisions that improved your codebase?

Top comment by ncmncm

Eliminate threads, queues, locks, buffer allocate & free, copying, system calls, synchronous logging, file ops, dynamic memory allocation.

Replace with huge-page mapped ring buffers, independent processes, kernel-bypass set-and-forget, buffer lap checks, file-mapped self-describing binary-formatted stats, direct-mode disk block writes, caller-provided memory.

9. Ask HN: Best ways to spend money towards climate efforts

Top comment by code_scrapping

I have the feeling that the answers below are going away from what the OP was trying to find out.

It's not about going vegan, starting a garden or using condoms. If a person is already exhausted personal efforts (to the extent one can with a given life condition), where can we help by directly investing.

Because I'm a working professional with solid income, maybe I don't have time/space to do the time-consuming activities proposed, but I do have excess funds that I can direct to the higher cause.

So - where should we invest our money, and not our time? Because we possible have the first, and not the later :(

10. Ask HN: Read any good books lately?

Top comment by ageitgey

The Count of Monti Cristo is a really fun book. It was published as a serial and was kind of like the Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones of 1850s Paris that everyone was talking about at the time. It's fun to read for both the revenge story itself and for the implicit look into the history of the French Revolution and what the life of a (dramatized) high roller was like back then.