AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Amazon delisted me – what do I do?

Top comment by ikeboy

You need professional help. It's unfortunate, but there's a very specific format you need to be responding in that's not intuitive unless you've written a bunch of these.

Check out any of the following (I've met both of them and can recommend them):

Ed Rosenberg, ASGTG

Chris McCabe, ecommerceChris

You'll pay somewhere in the $1-2k range for a listing reinstatement, they'll write a professional letter to Amazon in the format they want and hitting all the right points, and you'll be back in business.

Alternatively, you can sell wholesale to other sellers who will sell on Amazon, and not have to deal with this crap yourself.

2. Ask HN: How do I ask for a raise?

Top comment by mightybyte

In my experience, by far the best way to get a raise is to find a new job that you think you will like as much or more than your current job and take it. In addition to the monetary benefits, this will open the door to meeting new people and take on new responsibilities. I've never regretted doing this, and more than once that action gave my overall career trajectory a huge boost, even when I already thought I was happy (which was the case most of the time).

3. Ask HN: I will pay you $2000 and code the MVP for your side-project

Top comment by tptacek

This doesn't make much sense. A 20% royalty is an absurdly high price to pay for an idea, for which you'd do all the execution; meanwhile, if you expect them to do substantial work as a "co-founder", 20% is absurdly too low.

4. Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

Top comment by ggregoire

I've been doing frontend dev for 10 years and had to change my stack & way of working only 3 times:

- HTML templates (served by Symfony/ASP.NET/Rails/Django) + jQuery + dependencies manually downloaded/updated/deleted/added to the index.html

- ~2014: Angular SPA + Grunt + dependencies managed with Bower and added manually in the index.html

- ~2017: React SPA + Webpack/Babel + dependencies managed with NPM and added automatically in the index.html with Webpack.

The last one is by far the stack with which I'm the most productive and I encounter the less bugs. I feel like frontend dev is finally mature and enjoyable.

But anyway, jumping from one stack to another one was quite easy. A few days of learning.

-

I've been doing backend dev for 10 years too and had to change my stack & way of working as often, if not more.

Jumping from one (or several) languages/frameworks/databases/ORMs/web servers/containers/package managers/testing tools/and so on, usually take several weeks of learning.

Imo, the "frontend world is crazy/changes too fast" is way over exaggerated.

5. Ask HN: Do you like/use Reddit's redesign?

Top comment by makecheck

Not at ALL.

I’ve never seen a single site design repel me more quickly. I depend heavily on the simplicity and information-density of the old design (e.g. being able to pick from a dozen link titles that all fit on screen at once). I also depend on the pinch-to-zoom simplicity of focusing on exactly what I want, which only works well in the “normal” web pages of the old design. The new “design” breaks everything that made the old design convenient in these respects, and is almost impressively bad. It is so astoundingly different than what made Reddit work originally (i.e. its simplicity) that it quite honestly feels like someone tried their best to sabotage Reddit.

And all of this, I must say, is before I even mention the ridiculous spam-like additions they made. I think the new design finds no fewer than 3 places to shove something in my face like “USE APP / Better in app / HEY DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN APP!?!?!?”. Who is that for? Does anyone like this kind of crap? It virtually guarantees that I will never download the app.

Reddit’s days are numbered if it keeps this stuff up. I’m actually surprised that, historically, Digg died for much smaller redesign “sins”, and I think it was primarily because Reddit was an alternative. What’s the alternative?

6. Ask HN: Was GitHub Hacked or Me?

Top comment by otras

This came up recently in a different HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118740

The main gist is that GitHub doesn't require proof of ownership in order to set a custom domain.

This means that if your GitHub Pages configurations are incorrect for any reason (for example, that user switched from a Pro to a regular account and lost the ability to have a GH page on a private repo), another user can come along and claim your page (confidencetoexplore.com) as the custom domain for that repo.

My bet would be that this happened to you. As another user in that thread mentioned, report them: https://github.com/contact/report-abuse

7. Ask HN: Machine learning contractors, how much do you charge hourly?

Top comment by aspectmin

Okay. I’ll throw in. I live in the Pacific Northwest and have been in tech a long time, about the last 4/5 years with a heavy focus on data science and ML with a particular focus on cyber security (and robotics/IOT (think like datacenter energy system monitoring). Not a PhD. Pretty much self taught. Worked for one of the big tech companies for many years, which gave me a lot of cred to build on (and a great platform/environment to focus on learning).

When I bill hourly, it’s somewhere around the 200-250 USD range, but I much prefer to bid by the project. I also do a fair number of talks around machine learning/security, AI and the future of work, and consult with policy makers on the impact of tech (esp. AI) to jobs and rural workforces. The latter generates me significantly more revenue than the hourly billing.

As to the projects themselves, to use the adage, ML is probably less than 10% (maybe even 5%) of the actual projects. Most of the work is finding the data, cleaning, and doing things like figuring out how to get their IOT devices regularly reporting to the cloud or Messing with things like SNMP and monitoring infrastructure.

Hope that helps. Feel free to ping if questions.

8. Ask HN: Why Isn't Functional Programming Taking Over?

Top comment by unscaled

In some sense, it is, it's just happening every slowly.

Functional programming features are getting a foothold in mainstream languages. It's a drizzle, but the direction is clear.

Let's look at closures. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, if you were a mainstream developer using C, C++, Java or C# you were out of luck. But during the following decade all said languages (except C) added them, and nowadays closures are taken for granted in almost any new language being designed.

Functional list/stream processing APIs are the next feature being popularized, with such APIs being available in most mainstream languages nowadays (Go is a notable exception).

Other FP concepts like immutability, sum types, pattern matching and even type classes are finding their way into mainstream languages. Their adoption is far from universal but direction is clear. FP is becoming more widely adopted, just not necessarily FP languages.

9. Ask HN: What are the best open-access journals for non-academics to submit to?

Top comment by dijksterhuis

Publishing to arXiv [1][2] is your best bet in the short term.

- Free

- Lots of subject areas (not just computer sci.)

- People may cite your work

- People may offer feedback

You do need to get endorsed first though [4] (as another comment mentions).

However, if you want "proper" peer reviewed & published, you need to start looking around at conferences. They're usually easier to get something through, as they tend to expect much shorter papers.

There are industry led conferences (like RuhrSec [3] for Cyber Security) which might be a good route to start with.

But, really, there's no shortcut for getting into a "proper" journal / conference. You need to research, have funds, time and, sometimes, a bit of fame already.

[1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16832/why-uploa...

[2] https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1C

[3] https://www.ruhrsec.de/2019/

[4] https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement

10. Ask HN: What is the best laptop to run Linux in 2019?

Top comment by derekp7

Chromebooks with Crostini make for a good "second laptop". It is finally getting to the point where it is usable as my daily driver.

The main advantage is that in ChromeOS, things like Netflix and Hulu work at full resolution. And everything is touch optimized. Under Crostini, Linux apps are getting very well integrated.

Note, that there are still a few things that are in the works yet. I'm on the beta channel, and just got v74, which gives audio support to Linux apps. And 3d is still being worked out. (Audio in isn't in place yet though, for security reasons).

I also have a Thinkpad X1 Yoga, which so far has been 0 trouble with Linux (suspend/hibernate work as expected). The only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint scanner. Thinkpads in general are fairly well supported, partly because many Red Hat developers carry thinkpads from what I've heard.