AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

Top comment by jhoutromundo

On my last job, a new manager called me for a meeting on Friday 4PM. I spent the whole month on an extremely stressful project.

The meeting was about an app that integrates credit card payments, billets and bank account on a terminal that is going to be available to the general public.

The deadline? 11PM of the same day. Final version. From 0 to 100% in 6 hours.

I said that it was impossible. He said that I was incapable.

I remember coming back home with a feeling that I was incompetent, even with my 11 years of experience with JavaScript. I didn't sleep that night, trying to build it even with delay.

Saturday morning I had a burnout. I was afraid to lose my job because I sustain my family. I thought throwing myself from my apartment window. That was one of the worst days in my life.

I got fired on Monday morning.

Got another job on the same day. Almost twice the salary.I told them that I need a little time to cleanup my mind and they gave 2 weeks to recover from that situation.

I'm happy now.

2. Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

Top comment by zxcvbn4038

I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable, several runs required to make an end to end connection. It wasn’t custom programming, just taking full advantage of the browsers of the era’s inability to render the UI component for that. So I was building out a data center and needed Something like forty thousand cables run which translated into around one hundred and fifty thousand segments. I tried to give this info via a spreadsheet but they were steadfast that the web interface was the only way they could receive it. So I wrote a script to just post the data directly without going through the UI, ran it, and went home. Turns out all their web form did was e-mail the values to a half dozen people. The e-mail system was Lotus Notes (dates this) so each person got their own copy and there was a lot of overhead. The sudden influx of a million e-mail messages brought down Chase’s email system for two thirds of the country. They spent days clearing the mail queue and recovering - they had to fly in IBM techs with suitcases full of disk drives to add the storage needed. Everyone who received the wiring requests spent days deleting them with new ones arriving as quickly as they deleted the old ones. Then when things were finally normal again they asked me to resend them my spreadsheet.

3. Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

Top comment by peterwoerner

I have a PhD (in mech engineering) and work in industry.

My experience was that I basically had to pick up a new physics set and tool set every year as I jumped from algorithm development, to constitutive model development, machine learning, and quantum computing. In all cases they were tackling problems in different areas: new toolset to learn, new math to learn and new physics to learn. I thoroughly enjoy working on research problems, however I felt that there was a lot working on made up problems and forcing a square pegs into round holes so we could declare success to the funding agency when really it was a probably worse way to tackle the problem than industry standard.

Pros: I was forced to ride a learning curve with a new skill set and new area of expertise every year. I have learning to pick up skills very quickly.

I took a lot of cross discipline classes in physics, mechanical engineering, mathematics, scientific computing, chemical engineering, and materials engineering. I have a large amount of cross discipline knowledge.

I found the work fun and I basically had no boss which was nice.

The downside: I worked 60 hours a week for $20,000/year for 5 years. Lost wages ~ $500,000

The tools and skills I developed for my PhD only peripherally translate to the work I do in industry.

Advice: Get a job, the PhD will be waiting for you in 2 years if you decide you want it then. Plus it sounds like you are thinking about getting a PhD because looking for a job is hard.

4. Ask HN: What are your arguments in favor of end-to-end encryption?

Top comment by diffeomorphism

Politicians propose to forbid all buildings from having doors. After all "bad people/stuff etc." could lock the doors and hide behind them. Anyone arguing against that is obviously against safety.

Counterpoints:

- Do we currently have a big door problem?

- Wait, don't doors also serve an important function?

- Won't that make everybody much more insecure and basically do nothing against "bad stuff"?

- What if I put a wooden plank in front of the hole in my building? Wouldn't that be a "door"? Making doors illegal is not going to stop people from making "doors".

Now, people like to spin this analogy further and revise their proposal and say "Fine, keep your doors, but I get a spare key for every door made".

Problems with this:

- Yes, you and everyone in your office can grab the spare key and steal all my stuff (see TSA locks and basically any time in history that was tried).

- Remember the wooden plank above? That guy will not give you a spare key and can still hide "bad stuff".

- Fine, we will just use magical (blockchain) keys that nobody can steal and not make things insecure, but have an officer visit and inspect every room you have every 5 minutes. You have nothing to hide, do you?

5. Ask HN: Senior Positions Interview Prep Resources?

Top comment by JMTQp8lwXL

There are companies that will pay near FANG levels (maybe 10-15% haircut) without subjecting yourself to onerous completion of hundreds of LeetCode problems. There are other options, and we should be aware of them. You'll still need to prove you can code, but the questions we ask have practical application to our codebases: we use recursion and trees, for example, so we ask questions about those.

Other companies will treat you as more of a human, and less as a cog. In my current job, I asked to see production code when interviewing. I flipped over every stone I could, to know what I was getting into. I saw the good and the bad. FANGs? You must prove yourself to gatekeepers before even knowing if there are teams with personalities you will agree with. You have no guarantee there's something on the other side of the gatekeepers, that you're even remotely interested in.

Money is important, but for a small haircut you can have better WLB, less competitive peers (though still be growing in your career: you can challenge yourself, without being surrounded by hyper-competitive personality types), amazing culture, and a greater level of transparency.

6. Ask HN: Germany vs. Canada for Tech Jobs?

Top comment by omouse

>tech companies in Canada pay peanuts

This is because:

- Canadians are happy to accept whatever wages they are given (the "smart" Canadians move to the US to get higher salaries)

- immigrants to Canada are happy to accept whatever wages they are given

With those two factors, you're not going to make a lot of money in Toronto unless you're working a US company (Google, Amazon, and so on) and even then it'll be less than US counter-parts.

Berlin is a better choice because you can easily travel around Europe and there are more markets. It's also a faster flight back to India if you're visiting family.

>However, once a Canadian citizen, there is a possiblity to get transferred to a Silicon Valley arm of a US company from Canada (using the TN visa) and hence receive a higher compensation.

This is what I'm talking about. The employer will dangle this prize in front of you for as long as they can and will continue to hold off on promotions and keep your salary the same for as long as possible. This is why Canadian salaries remain low, because there will be another sucker that comes along and will also be offered the same "we'll give you a promotion in a few years!" or "we'll transfer you to the US soon! very very soon!" line and they'll accept it.

>How would you compare between the two countries for building a career in tech for an immigrant?

Is immigration required? Because if not, all you need is a good internet connection, a good computer, and knowledge lots and lots of knowledge to distinguish your skills from others and get the higher freelancing rates.

7. Ask HN: What happens after no-deal Brexit?

Top comment by davedx

I think if it even happens (several people I know still don't believe it will), it will in the long term lead to the dissolution of the Union. The position of Scotland is pretty clear here, and I can't see that the status quo will remain in Northern Ireland either. Personally as a British citizen I would not be disappointed to see a united Ireland in my lifetime - Brexit was a good chance to read up on all the history, and I do not believe NI should be ruled from London.

I don't think there will be quite as much chaos and doom as some people predict, but the ports situation will definitely be bad (if you listen to the transport professionals, hauling companies etc. who actually do cross between the UK and mainland Europe regularly). Certain medicines will be in very short supply. There's an endless list of things from mildly inconvenient to downright terrible (if you depend on one of the medicines to live, for example).

The economy is already tipping into recession. Leaving the UK's biggest trade union will make this worse. If the Tories somehow cling to power, expect more cuts. Maybe the NHS will be privatised to save money. The poor and disabled will be shat on even more than they already are.

The wealthy will as always find a way to do just fine. Tax evasion will continue and probably grow (exemption from new EU tax directives and policies).

More companies than have already left will move to the mainland.

More EU citizens will go back home (whether forcibly due to the draconian rules or out of choice). Priti Patel will smile sweetly as the talent exodus decimates entire sectors.

People will try and get on with their lives, but for many it will definitely get harder.

I hate Brexit.

8. Ask HN: Who has the best personal website/blog?

Top comment by soulchild37

I don't know which aspect for the "best" you mean, if you meant best on monetary gain by reading their articles, definitely https://kalzumeus.com (HN user patio11)

9. Ask HN: Who is building something that will change the world?

Top comment by ReD_CoDE

I'm in the Digital Built Environment industry, so I strongly believe that it's one of the less developed industries and has a lot of potentials.

Construction technologies are outdated

Facility management and Real Estate technologies too

Also, there are some hot topics like Digital Twin(s) and Smart Cities which everyone has her/his own understanding about them

So, we've chosen the Facility Management industry, with $1.5 trillion annually TAM globally and are planning for the first step have one million users in our B2B contract which will cause we become a unicorn with $3 billion value just with one contract

10. Ask HN: What Happened to GitHub's Atom?

Top comment by robotstate

I went from Sublime Text to Atom, then back to Sublime, as Atom was painfully slow in large projects. After a short break from the tech world, I came back to find that VS Code had taken over, and I couldn't be happier. It "just works" and offers a great experience out of the box.