AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: PostgreSQL or MySQL?

Top comment by nbouscal

The following isn’t the top reason I recommend Postgres, but is the reason I think least likely to be echoed in a dozen other comments:

Postgres has some of the best documentation of any software product I’ve ever used. If someone wants to learn about SQL or databases, I always have to restrain myself from recommending that they just read the Postgres manual front to back. It’s comprehensive, it’s well written, it’s easy to navigate, and almost every explanation comes with several clear examples. It’s hard to overstate how valuable a property that is for a product as central to your architecture as your primary transactional database.

2. Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?

Top comment by dpeterson

I opened a service ticket. My ec2 instances have somehow been running for over 950 hours in one month. I can go back and see my instances run for 744 hours (what i'd expect in a month) in previous months. Amazon invented more hours than actually exist in a month for billing purposes. Bezos is a genius! I should have thought of that!

3. Ask HN: Co-founder leaving a startup for free without equity?

Top comment by mch82

Before you start, create a plan to stop

My #1 rule for ventures, especially with friends, is to create an “ejection seat plan” at the beginning. The ejection seat is designed to save friendships and prevent teams from holding on to ideas too long.

Write down a list of milestones that must be achieved in 1, 2, 3, and then every 3 months up to 48 months. Agree that either partner can choose to eject without blame whenever the milestones aren’t met. Agree how much equity will be retained in the event of ejection. Follow the plan.

I credit five inspirations for the ejection seat plan. (1) Tim Ferris’ “dreamline” concept from 4HWW, (2) news stories about “golden parachutes”, (3) my friends who learned this with me the hard way because we didn’t do it, (4) the Stripe Atlas guide to founders equity, (5) my friend who helped me validate that it can work.

4. Ask HN: How do you handle/maintain local Python environments?

Top comment by orf

Not a fan of Conda, the cli is terrible, their unofficial builds are opaque and in my experience the very few packages that are not available on pypi are rarely worth installing (usually the worst kind of "research code"[1]).

Simply using pipenv and pyenv is enough for me (brew install pipenv pyenv). You don't ever have to think about this, or worry you're doing it wrong.

Every project has an isolated environment in any python version you want, installed on demand. You get a lockfile for reproducibility (but this can be skipped) and the scripts section of the pipfile is very useful for repetitive commands. It's super simple to configure the environment to become active when you move into a project directory.

It's not all roses, pipenv has some downsides which I hope the new release will fix.

When I need a temporary environment to mess around in, then I use virtualfish by running `vf tmp`: https://virtualfish.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

1. https://github.com/menpo/menpo/blob/master/setup.py#L17

5. Ask HN: How did you prepare for being a first-time parent?

Top comment by lastofus

Something that I wish was made clear to me beforehand is that there is a huge variance in children, even between siblings.

This means that what works well for some kids will fail terribly for others. Half of parenting is trying out a bunch of different things to find out what works well for your kids, and is also acceptable for you. This variance is also a big reason why there is no "one true way" of raising kids, and why you shouldn't take parenting authorities too seriously.

It's also helpful to know when comparing yourself and your kids to other couples with kids. The worst is parents of a single kid with an easy disposition. They can sometimes be judgy and wonder why you don't just do what they did, because clearly they are amazing parents, and you are failing hard.

6. Ask HN: Parents of HN, what are your best sources for evidence-based parenting?

Top comment by tlb

Beware the risk of looking for evidence-based parenting advice: it tends to focus on effects that are measurable and small. It's unethical to research parenting strategies with large effects. So you'll find lots of studies about what kind of music stimulates developing brains, but you won't find a recent, randomized controlled trial that says whether it's bad to constantly fight in front of the kids. (It is, I assert without evidence.)

So don't lose sight of the basics, like ensuring secure attachment.

7. Ask HN: Which email software do you use on Linux?

Top comment by cik

I keep trying them all - and I keep hating my answer. I've been trying to like Evolution since 2000, this year I've tried all the flavours of mutt/neomutt and combinations of things like offlineimap. I've tried KMail, Geary, Outlook in Wine.... It's just Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is the only thing that works. It's not awesome, but it can keep up with my 5 email accounts that get checked in parallel.

8. Ask HN: Cons of Being on a Remote/Distributed Team?

Top comment by kaikai

- 1:1 relationships between teammates are harder to build remotely. I've seen that countered with recurring pairing and online coffee/tea hangouts, and making time for 1:1 meetings whenever the team is together.

- communication issues escalate. The lack of small daily positive interactions make any friction-ful interactions more intense. Direct communication is my only strategy for fixing this. For example, "Hey, I don't like it when you post a ton of comments before I ask for review. I like to put up PRs before I'm 100% done so that people can see what I'm working on, but they're very much works-in-progress." rather than just stewing and being resentful of someone pointing out something I already knew and just hadn't gotten to yet.

- timezones suuuuuck. A couple hours is manageable, but working with an east coast / west coast / india team was a real problem. We have team quiet hours until noon ET / 9PT a couple days a week, so even though I'm 3 hours behind I don't feel behind when I show up for work.

- Everyone needs to be a strong and profuse written communicator. If folks aren't in the habit of proactively providing lots of context, people will get left behind and lose context for why decisions were made, and the product suffers. We're used to reading facial expressions and body language to actively gauge understanding in conversation, and it's harder to get that remotely.

9. Ask HN: Resources for Learning about Databases

Top comment by petepete

It gets recommended all the time in these kind of threads, but it's so good I don't care. Bill Karwin's SQL Antipatterns. You need a decent understanding of the basics to get the most from it, but there's some excellent information and examples of what to (and what not to) do.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sql-antipatterns/978168...

10. Ask HN: I am addicted to Porn. Help me quit

Top comment by hitsurume

The actor Terry Crews was also addicted to porn and he did some videos about quiting that you'll find online. Gist of it is figuring out your current habits and changing them. For example, he knew that he watched on Friday nights when the kids and wife were out for some activity, so he prevented himself from being home alone during that time and worked a system to control his addiction.