AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How to learn marketing and sales as a solo entrepreneur?

Top comment by bitbasher

I built and run a saas product solo (> $500k/year). Honestly, I have never found any advice useful. I've been to saas founder meetups (like microconf), I've read the books, etc.

Any advice I give may not apply to you and your business. My business is b2b and it's a platform for certain kinds of professionals as well as an API that powers many well known businesses.

I've only had success through two general strategies:

1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc). Leverage your network to find more customers.

2. The "Long Game" (SEO, word of mouth, etc). This is where I get most of my customers.

I'd say focus on the long game from day one (blog posts, good marketing pages, etc). Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it.

2. Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

Top comment by scrumper

I have a couple ideas for you from my own experience.

There's about a bajillion C/D+ stage 100-500 person software companies in any B2B vertical you could mention who would fight hard for your type of experience. Not necessarily SaaS click-and-drool tools for corporate drones, but unique and opinionated products that have some significant engineering innovation inside. Those companies have essentially no ability to attract talent organically, anyone interested in FANG would turn up their noses, and their number one problem is quality people. In many cases the CEO/CTO leadership is incredibly strong and smart; the colleagues are happy, motivated, intelligent, and disciplined; and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged. They're vital to their customers but under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast. It can be very rewarding and compensation is decent. The tradeoff is the big exit is vanishingly unlikely.

Second idea is go into consulting/professional services. Not Accenture or anything horrible like that, but dozens of boutique/smaller firms with decently inspiring leadership and a very high standard of colleague. Work is variable in interest and environment, pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.

3. Ask HN: What's Your Morning Routine?

Top comment by uncomplexity_

I'm 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water activated gel cleanser. Then a honey almond body scrub. And on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub. Then apply an herb mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion.

4. Ask HN: Does the Framework laptop stand the test of time?

Top comment by cdata

I used a Framework 13" as my daily driver for 3 years. I still have it, and now I also have a Framework 16", which has been my daily driver for the last six months.

The user serviceability and upgrade stories are real. The hardware isn't as svelte as Apple's, but mine has traveled all over the world and has yet to have any major issues. The one hardware failure I had was that the USB-C half of the charging cable on my 13" eventually broke after a few years of abuse, but that used to happen to me with Apple charging cables, too.

Framework has an active initiative to do outreach to different Linux distro communities and give them free hardware to help shore up compatibility. And, on that note, I haven't run into any Linux hardware compatibility issues (not with Pop!_OS, or more recently NixOS).

Speaking for myself, they have a loyal customer for as long as they continue to make this kind of hardware.

5. Ask HN: Share your "LLM screwed us over" stories?

Top comment by starchild3001

Guys, it's a major 21st century skill to learn how to use LLMs. In fact, it's probably the biggest skill anyone can develop today. So please be a responsible driver, learn how to use LLMs.

Here's one way to get the most mileage out of them:

1) Track the best and brightest LLMs via leaderboards (e.g. https://lmarena.ai/, https://livebench.ai/#/ ...). Don't use any s**t LLMs.

2) Make it a habit to feed in whole documents and ask questions about them vs asking them to retrieve from memory.

3) Ask the same question to the top ~3 LLMs in parallel (e.g. top of line Gemini, OpenAI and Claude models)

4) Do comparisons between results. Pick best. Iterate on the the prompt, question and inputs as required.

5) Validate any key factual information via Google or another search engine before accepting it as a fact.

I'm literally paying for all three top AIs. It's been working great for my compute and information needs. Even if one hallucinates, it's rare that all three hallucinate the same thing at the same time. The quality has been fantastic, and intelligence multiplication is supreme.

6. Ask HN: Real name vs. anonymous username – which do you use online and why?

Top comment by whoknowsidont

I used to alternate. I would typically use my real name on comments or posts (even in IRC) when I wanted people to know that what I was saying was something that I was willing to put my IRL credibility and reputation on (i.e., I wasn't hiding behind a keyboard).

I also like the freedom to post my thoughts free of that reputational damage and see how people react, and ideally to understand why my thoughts and perspective might be wrong (and I know there's a certain implication there in modern times, and no, I've never done or said anything outright hurtful to people).

Then one time in 2016 I got "dox'd" for making a comment on Bruce Scheiner's facebook page during the 2016 election. The post merely stated that Bruce was allowed to comment on political topics (a previous commentor had said he should just stick to security topics).

I was then harassed at my workplace, with said commenter (presumably) claiming I was being racist and homophobic (I'm gay) via email.

Since then I've never used my real name.

7. Ask HN: How is your job search going?

Top comment by DhawalModi

Absolutely horrible! I am about to complete my MS EECS degree and have been applying to SWE or MLE roles. Even with my previous ~3 years of Backend Dev experience I am not able to get past resume screening. I just get auto rejected all the time.

Doesn't help the fact that I have been in the US for a little bit more than a year and half, so building a network is pretty hard. Attended a hackathon, won 2nd prize with my team and tried to leverage something from there but no luck at all.

Makes me feel that I might be missing something but no idea what's wrong with my profile. (I don't need sponsorship too).

8. Ask HN: How are you using LLMs for traversing decompiler output?

Top comment by JosephRedfern

These guys are building foundational models for this purpose: https://reveng.ai/. The results are quite compelling, and they have plugins for your favourite reverse engineering tools.

9. Ask HN: Why isn't Alex Krizhevsky as famous as Ilya Sutskever or G.Hinton?

Top comment by spamizbad

He and his company aren’t trying to raise money so it’s less important he becomes famous.

10. Ask HN: Is there an anti-EU sentiment from big tech?

Top comment by A_D_E_P_T

So I take it your question is: Is Anti-EU sentiment justified or unjustified?

I think that it's both wholly justified and almost entirely grassroots/bottom-up. A thriving tech/industrial ecosystem -- even a functional military-industrial ecosystem -- is basically incompatible with Europe's regulatory and taxation structures.

Much has been written recently about how Norway and Italy tax unrealized gains to such an extent that running a SV-style startup is basically illegal. See, e.g.: https://x.com/aledeniz/status/1842872753499607407

Labor regulations result in very high costs of failure, so that what would be profitable in California would be unprofitable in Germany: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/wh...

As Boss Zvi put it, "Welcome to being a CEO in the EU with over 40m in revenue, now please report these 649 environmental and social indicators." https://x.com/jo3hill/status/1866450203743576478

And I could go on all day. Depending on the business you're in, it can be smart to incorporate in the Caiman Islands and work out of Europe on a satellite office basis, but you definitely want to limit your exposure to EU rules.

I'd only note that the EU is not a monolith, local regulations and tax laws can differ wildly, and some countries -- like Ireland and certain Baltic companies chasing investment -- are much more business friendly than others. (With Italy, Germany, and Norway in the "you'd have to be a masochist to start a business here" tier.)