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Issue #305 - January 12, 2025
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring? and Who wants to be hired? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
Top comment by jll29
Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed.
I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT get back to the moon again", "Recall: Toyota hits the breaks", "Last fag: how big tobacco lost against a Minneapolis law firm" ;-) and the fact that the winner gets to write the history. For example, next month, Bill Gates new memoir "Source Code" will come out, the first of three planned autobiographical books, and I doubt he will share with us how he strongarmed PC manufacturers into shipping Windows pre-installed in order to get the OS monopoly and other important events.
2. Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
Top comment by y33t
Don't bother, if you're in a position to do so, help them find a first-class brain surgeon. Get them into Sloan Kettering, Mayo, Duke or OHSU or whoever. Help them look for clinical trials to get chemo past the blood-brain barrier (I've heard some promising things in this area, though I'm not sure if it's being tested on humans yet). If they have a family that's taking care of them, offer to help them. Even just a grocery trip a week or something would be a massive help (obviously this depends on how close you are to them but you get the picture). Hell, offer to just hang out with your friend for a few hours so the family can get out and decompress for a bit if they need to.
Don't let them fall into the false hope of "I might have 5-10 more years". The person I knew fell into that and did absolutely nothing they wanted to do before they died because they were in denial and kept holding onto the expectation that they'd get better.
If they have money, every cockroach will come out of the woodwork trying to get a piece. Watch out for them if you can.
I know someone who got scammed out of a very substantial amount by a real brain surgeon in America(!!!), who referred them to a guy that sold a bogus device which he claimed would "destroy the tumor" (no FCC sticker on it and the entire thing was controlled by a Raspberry Pi when I disassembled it). Brain surgeon had a bunch of FDA complaints against them too and performed it in one of the poorest cities in the country, across the street from a burnt out apartment building. The local pharmacy had a constant police presence because of armed robberies for the drugs. These details scream sketch to normal people, but normal people aren't going to be dying of brain cancer in the foreseeable future. Desperate people will do crazy things if they think it offers some hope.
3. Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?
Top comment by alyandon
The only data I care about on the phone already gets backed up by Google and is then exported regularly via Google Takeout. I don't live on my phone so I tend not to generate much of any value on it other than random pictures of things.
Prior to Google automatically backing up everything, I used Titanium Backup.
4. Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024?
Top comment by throwawaystress
Simon Willison’s blog: https://simonwillison.net/.
How the heck does he have time to post all that amazing stuff, AND be coding open-source, AND have some kind of day job?
My god, I wish I were that productive.
5. Ask HN: Politics Blog Cloudflare Subpoena
Top comment by maxk42
Hello. I was in practically the same situation: I hosted a political site via cloudflare that some people took exception to. In my case they took the example of clearly satirical cartoons (that were uploaded by users - not my own content)and claimed they promoted violence. Cloudflare immediately terminated my account without warning and refused to refund me for the remainder of the month. The harasser then went on to contact my host and after a campaign of reporting every cartoon over the course of several months the host decided it wasn't worth the headache anymore and dropped me also. This experience really soured me on the lack of defense of free speech in the US. I'm afraid I have nothing to offer but my sympathies. If you're reading this and hosting political content on Cloudflare please act accordingly.
6. Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools
Top comment by intersteel2
[plug] I've been working on cashtrac.me to do all the thinking for me. E.g. "here's a better way to order your earning/spending". Looking for people interested in participating in user studies or just folks interested in the problem. Its free for use ATM.
7. Ask HN: How can I learn to better command people's attention when speaking?
Top comment by 2024user
Try asking questions to engage responses. Let's say someone brings up Thailand in a conversation..
You might say: "Oh, I went to Chang Mai 2 years ago. I went with my buddy and we found this small waterfall while bike riding. It was pretty cool". Something like this is hard to respond to.
Or you might say: "Has anyone been to Chang Mai?" and then engage the conversation from there. You steered the conversation to your interest and now you can see who bites.
8. Ask HN: How to approach first days on a new job as a senior engineer?
Top comment by scarface_74
Context: I was an early strategic technical hire by a director/manager/CTO 3 times to help execute process changes and lead new initiatives healthcare SaaS companies between 2014-2020 and then started working in strategic cloud consulting since then where I am brought in to get developer, operations and the “business” to be better aligned and/or to lead new initiatives.
I’m currently a “staff software architect” at a 3rd party cloud consulting company.
What not to do:
1. Disrespect current processes. What you call “legacy code” was done for a reason, is generating revenue, solving real world problems, and the reason you have a job
2. Make any suggestions about improving processes before you have been their at least 90 days and understand why the current system is like it is.
3. Suggest rewriting something or introducing new to the company technology until you have worked there 90 days. Especially don’t start doing resume driven development.
What to do:
1. Set up a meeting with sales and ask them to “sale you the value proposition of the product as if you are the customer”. Ask questions as if you were a potential customs and raise objections to the product as if you were customer. Sales is usually very good at answering those questions.
2. Talk to your manager and ask what are their 90 day and 1 year plans for your team and make sure your work is aligned with the goals.
3. Get to know the pecking order. The org chart will not show you who has the most influence in your department.
4. Setup “getting to know you” 1-1’s. What are people working on? What do they want to be working on? What are their biggest pain points? What would they improve if they had a magic wand?
5. Pick up small stories, bugs to get familiar with the development process.
6. Learn about pre-wiring a meeting when you are trying to suggest changes. Do a POC, talk to the person who might have the biggest objection or has the most influence and work collaboratively to address their objectives. Keep doing that for more people on your team. It helps get more people on your side.
ADKAR change management model
https://www.prosci.com/methodology/adkar
9. Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2024
Top comment by wojciii
I had a Samsung laser printer which died after ~10 years.
I bought this instead of German Amazon.
https://www.lexmark.com/da_dk/printer/14204/Lexmark-B2236dw
It works without nasty binary only drivers, as it supports IPP Everywhere of similar protocol. I was surprised that it just worked on Ubuntu and MS Windows 11.
10. Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
Top comment by chevman
Been in BigCo land for 20 years now, and have seen the rise and fall of quite a few AI/ML/RPA etc fads.
Honestly the whole landscape seems broken and unproductive at this point.
Countless vendors, platforms, cloud environments, industry/technical jargon - all with different pricing models, SLAs, tooling, etc etc.
Getting anything usable is a challenge and most orgs spin in a never ending cycle of data integration/normalization work that produces little business value.
My advice to teams now is simplify, reduce, streamline - get to the kernel of what you think you need and protect it all costs. Most of the shiny new objects being pitched as silver bullets are just ways for other people to make money off your margin.