AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How to deal with a serious mental health breakdown?

Top comment by bloudermilk

I'm very sorry to hear that your friend is experiencing this crisis and the distress it's causing you. I've been through similar episodes before, first with an immediate family member who experienced a months-long manic episode that was later diagnosed as manic bipolar disorder, then a close friend who experienced a drug-induced psychosis which evolved into long-term schizophrenia. I know how hard it is to watch someone you love behave erratically and how powerless it can feel to try and fail to help. Here's what I learned...

The most important thing you can do is take care of yourself. Your own physical and mental health are prerequisites to caring for anyone else and being a part of extreme psychological distress of someone you love takes a huge toll. Lean on whatever practices you already have to stay healthy and content. Remember that what you're witnessing is not your fault and not in your control.

The best way I've found to be supportive are to be present as much or little as I can without compromising my own being. Intervening, escalating, and trying to reason with people in this state seldom has the intended effect and often has the inverse effect. As much as you're able, accept your friend for who they are in this state, listen without judgement, and validate their experience without cosigning it. Stay in touch with their family and close friends and work together to seek medical intervention if they risk the well-being of themself or others.

I'm here if you want to talk about it on a call or over email. Same handle at gmail. Be well and keep reaching out for support.

2. Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

Top comment by craftyjon

KiCad EDA - https://kicad.org

KiCad is a popular open-source EDA tool used by engineers and designers across the globe. We're always open to contributions from experienced C++ developers, especially those who are also familiar with the world of electrical engineering / PCB design. Check out our developer landing page[1] to find the developers email list and contribution guides. We accept merge requests on GitLab[2] and try to keep a number of lower-scope issues tagged starter [3] for new developers to take on.

We're currently in our annual feature freeze as we focus on stabilizing features added in the past year and squashing bugs ahead of our planned 9.0 release at the end of January. Any help testing the nightly builds and surfacing bugs to fix is appreciated as well as actual bug-fixing!

[1] https://dev-docs.kicad.org/en/getting-started/index.html

[2] https://gitlab.com/kicad

[3] https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/?label_name[]=s...

3. Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

Top comment by paxys

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

4. Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever

Top comment by crazygringo

Just put it on your own domain and keep it there while you're alive. Renewing it is not that hard, especially with auto-renew on a credit card.

And make sure the Internet Archive indexes it. When people find old links that don't resolve anymore, IA is where they go.

Don't overthink this. Nothing lasts forever, but right now I'd say IA is the most likely repository to survive over the longest term, certainly in comparison to any for-profit company.

5. Ask HN: Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source?

Top comment by bruce511

I'm generally positive about BlueSky and pleased for their current successes.

But I fell like the really hard part is yet to come, and being open might make that part harder.

All online communities go through the same phases (or die along the way).

In the beginning it's populated by enthusiasts, tech adopters, people with good intentions. The problems are mostly technical and infrastructure.

Then it grows rapidly with mostly the same parameters.

Then it gets big enough so the trolls, spammers, bots, misogynist, racists, marketers, advertisers et al arrive. At this point the problems become social - moderation etc.

Failure to manage this stage well leads to, well, Twitter.

And it's by far the hardest part of the whole process. I hope BlueSky get this part right.

6. Ask HN: Do you feel burnout from being less hands on as you become more senior?

Top comment by srirangr

What you have mentioned are indeed the responsibilities of the "Head of Engineering" role.

Just when I learned how to build high quality, secure, and performant software I was pushed into the role of management. It took me some time to figure out where to draw the line between being an IC and being a manager. But when I realised that the success in the role dependent on the success of my team, I started investing my time in developing and growing the team to create a mindset of building high quality, secure, and performant software.

>> The whole company is doing so much more than I could do as an individual

This realisation is important that as a company grows, you will not be able to do all the things by yourself. You would need reliable, high agency people to take care of things exactly the way you would have. Train them. Build them into next generation leaders. Slowly start delegating more responsibility. Allow them to reach their best potential. These are soft skills and building soft skills takes decades, but they are worth investing time in. Focus on taking high quality decisions and help make sure they are getting delivered while meeting stakeholder expectations.

If you start enjoying the above aspects, you'll feel less burned out. You may not be in a position to build software, but you'll be in a position to build high performing teams and be an invaluable asset to the company.

If you still think IC work interests you more, you should ask your management to move back into the IC role and help them figure out the right person who can take up the people management, process improvement job.

I hope this helps! :)

7. Ask HN: How to check who the black bar is honoring?

Top comment by mtmail

I agree, that would be a good feature.

Thomas E. Kurtz has died https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42141761

8. Ask HN: I don't want higher salary, I need more freetime

Top comment by astroid

I am a Sr. Sys Admin, but I solved this with one simple trick: I requested 4 x 10 hour days, and I work about 32 actual hours.

I am meeting all my targets so it's fine.

Easy-peasy.

9. Ask HN: How has your experience been with a Snapdragon-based laptop?

Top comment by ActorNightly

Not technically a snapdragon laptop, but I use my S24 with Samsung Dex and Lapdock as my laptop. Its actually pretty good as far as usability. Hardware wise, the touchpad is pretty shit, but I use a Trackball mouse anyways and I can easily upgrade if a better version comes out since price is cheap.

There are some things that dont work, namely ML stuff with pytorch, but for everything else, Termux is pretty complete, and you can run Vscode or Jupyter Lab in the browser for dev.

10. Ask HN: What job search strategies work for you?

Top comment by ozim

You get actually denials so you get responses? I still have my job but I was sending CV out just to check and I basically did not even get a single reply besides automated "thanks, we received your application".

It is also not that my CV sucks because in 2020 and 2021 I was sending out my CV and was getting calls or replies the next day.