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Issue #323 - May 18, 2025
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
Top comment by rwieruch
Not sure if my "products" compare to yours, but I’ve seen some success with a few of them over the years, maybe there are some takeaways (or pitfalls to avoid) for you:
CloudCamping (PMS): 250+ Businesses, 2023
- Positioned as more modern, more accessible, and more affordable than the competition
- Limited competition due to the complexity of the product
- Personally visited campgrounds to demo the product
- Sent physical postcards (old school!) to campgrounds with product updates and announcements
- Due to limited competition, it is now ranking very high in the German marked on SEO
The Road to React & The Road to Next: 1000+ Users, 2024
- Gave away The Road to React for free in exchange for an email, grew the mailing list this way
- Benefited from early timing (luck!), it was the first book on the topic
- Initial version wasn’t polished, but I kept iterating and improving it each year
- In 2025, released the paid course The Road to Next to my audience, now over 1,000 students enrolled
SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as “Schlenker mit Turnbeutel”)
- Active from 2010–2015 as a hobby, grew to 10,000+ followers (a lot for the time)
- SoundCloud allowed 1,000 direct messages per track
- Carefully selected 1,000 high-engagement listeners in my music niche and personally messaged them to check out new tracks
So yeah, a mix of timing/luck, outreach that does not scale, being better than the competition I'd say.
2. Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
Top comment by danpalmer
Zed. They've upped their game in the AI integration and so far it's the best one I've seen (external from work). Cursor and VSCode+Copilot always felt slow and janky, Zed is much less janky feels like pretty mature software, and I can just plug in my Gemini API key and use that for free/cheap instead of paying for the editor's own integration.
3. Ask HN: What will tech employment look like in 10 years?
Top comment by omarhaneef
I know you’re trying to see where the puck is headed but I think there is a lot of work between where we are and where LLMs replace 4 Junior devs.
The workflows we have are not quite right for it. Coding has always been 10% coding and 90% debugging but I think the rate at which we generate the 10% will grow exponentially.
This means that the debugging has to grow. We will generate errors at an unprecedented rate.
LLMs trained on previous errors and methods won’t catch them. They’ll be more complicated and spread out over the code.
We need new tools to visualize the code and track errors. I think what it means to be a programmer will change. More testing, thinking and less klocs.
4. Ask HN: How do you store the knowledge gained in a day?
Top comment by parliament32
You don't, because information hoarding is only slightly less bad than real-life hoarding.
Be honest with yourself: other than the occasional search, when is the last time you referred to notes you took X years ago? And for the search-cases, how outdated was that information? Is the sequence of commands you painstakingly saved a decade ago for how to rebuild an array in megaraid really relevant anymore? Could you not have just, ya know, just googled it next time you needed it? Is your written-out explanation for how heat pumps work from that time you were re-doing your home heating system really useful.. when you can just have a conversation with Gemini about it now?
Less is more.
Top comment by Mandatum
Whichever Salesforce employee has their bonus tied to this being declared an incident and not an outage; fuck you.
This has affected critical, operational processes which YOUR sales and marketing teams use in Case Studies[0][1][2] and documentation[3][4].
[0] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/customer-stories/react-veterans...
[1] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/customer-stories/veterans-affai...
[2] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/customer-stories/mta-new-york-c...
[3] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/blog/productivity/why-every-bus...
[4] https://slack.com/intl/en-au/blog/productivity/standard-oper...?
6. Ask HN: Facing unemployment – what now?
Top comment by nico
I can relate, been in a very similar situation
Some recommendations: take care of yourself, it might feel like a chore, but it’s important. Personally, exercising regularly (15-45 min mon-fri) helped me get out of a very long rut
Also, pace yourself, but keep going, try to apply to 1-2 jobs every day to keep consistency
If/when you are out of a job, try to keep a project going that makes you feel productive, even if you are not making money, feeling like you got something done makes a huge difference
Edit: use ChatGPT voice mode on your phone to prepare for interviews, it’s pretty good at role playing, coaching and encouraging
A bit of a plug: I built this command line tool that uses AI to help you find jobs and track applications - https://github.com/nicobrenner/commandjobs
Feel free to use it, and would me more than happy if you want to contribute or collaborate on it
Finally, a lot of people go through what you are going through, especially people in the spectrum. Try to stay connected to friends, family, loved ones, or even join a group related to one of your interests
Good luck and contact me via GitHub if you want to talk in more detail about anything
7. Ask HN: How are you cleaning and transforming data before imports/uploads?
Top comment by PaulHoule
"Scripts" in Python, Java and other conventional programming languages (e.g. whatever it is you already use)
Not Bash, not Excel, not any special-purpose tool because the motto of those is "you can't get there from here". Maybe you can get 80% of the way there, which is really seductive, but that last 20% is like going to the moon. Specifically, real programming languages have the tools to format dates correctly with a few lines of code you can wrap into a function, fake programming languages don't. Mapping codes is straightforward, etc.
8. Ask HN: What is the worst communications tool you've ever used?
Top comment by throwaway519
Teams.
Chat is not chat. Office Communicator and Skype for Business were chat apps. Teams is not. Not on desktop and doubly not on mobile.
Collaborative sites. SharePoint was a collaborative workspace. Teams' schizophrenic frankenstein of uninteroperable 'apps' from 'Lists' unaware of members of a Team to 3rd party *ware that has regressed in function, collaboration and interoperability from SharePoint so much a two decade old install of Joomla does a better job, is not.
9. Ask HN: Email Provider for Main Account?
Top comment by svennek
I have my own domain (that I share with relatives), and use mailbox.org for hosting it.
I chose them after a rather lengthy search.
Reasons for choosing them(pros)
- multiple "payment accounts" can share the same domain (securely), which was my primary reason for choosing them.
I.e. I cannot access my brother's mail in any way, even if we share the same domain, because he is his own admin.
- you can pay extra for more space (i.e. additional storage on a per gigabyte basis)
- extra "domains" and "aliases" for the mailboxes are possible and free (for a given number dependent on your subscription level)
- German company (i.e. EU company, which I care a lot about).
- They seem like an old-fashioned unix company that respect privacy, so my risk of being data harvested or used for ai training seems miniscule
- They seem to be financially stable and (if I remember correctly) around 40 employees which is a reasonable size
- They have a full online office suit (which I do not use)
Reasons not to (cons)
- you pay per mailbox, not per domain
- their business plans starts to expensive for my taste (so my business domain is at another hoster) as the business is basically revenueless currently. Shouldn't be a problem, if the business is "real".
I want to stress, that I am only a customer, no partner or affiliate or receive any benefit of writing this.
10. Ask HN: Not sure about the future of tech
Top comment by GianFabien
Business has always been about maximizing profits for the investors. Technology might change, but the profit focus remains.
Regardless of the industry, the workers are a fungible resource to business.
If you don't want to be an easily replaceable cog in the machine, then you need to develop domain expertise which allows you to solve high value problems. You then might become a gold-plated cog in the machine.