AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

Top comment by Rebles

At the beginning of the year, I decided it was time to find a new job after 10 years with my employer. I spent February doing interview prep and conducting interviews. Back then, the COVID-19 was mostly limited to China, markets and governments weren't terribly concerned about COVID-19.

I accept a job offer, put in my two weeks notice, and my last day at was last Friday. Hardly anyone was seriously concerned about COVID-19 when I gave notice. A week later, business travel was suspended and WFH policies implemented. My last day, schools were closing, and the economy tanked. This week, we're sheltering in place.

I gave myself 3 weeks in between the old and the new job, you know for relaxation and travel. Instead, I'm sequestered to my house for 3 weeks.

Everyday, the news got worse and worse and continues to get worse and worse. Now, I'm in between jobs, and am a little worried my new employer will revoke my job offer. To add insult to injury, one reason I didn't leave my previous job was job security. But in February, there wasn't any sign of an economic downturn. Everyone was enjoying the bull market.

2. Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

Top comment by knzhou

Their reasoning is that if the only things you can do are China-style lockdown or nothing, then the disease will just resume exponentially growing the second lockdown ends, so it's pointless to do it at all.

While that may be technically right (under some optimistic, unverified assumptions, e.g. no reinfection), it's a false dichotomy. Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea aren't under lockdown, they're stopping the spread by just having good testing and case tracking capacity, and good hygiene. And the longer things go on, the better they're getting at doing that. If things are getting out of hand, a temporary lockdown is effective (as it was in China), to get the numbers down while building up this kind of capacity. But lockdown doesn't have to last forever; China has already lifted restrictions in most cities.

The UK seems to be ignoring this, and I don't understand why. I suspect the real logic, as some government officials have outright said, is that a completely failed response would free up money for the NHS by killing off "bed blockers".

The social signalling around it is "prudent caution", in the sense that they are talking slowly and confidently while using big words. This gives some people the gut feeling that this must be the "rational" thing to do, but it's just window dressing. The plan is neither prudent nor cautious; it's recklessly endangering millions of lives. Experts in the UK are horrified; there's an hours-old petition against this with hundreds of academics already signed on [0]. The WHO has condemned it, and half the people I know studying abroad in the UK have fled the country over it.

0: http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia/UK_scientists_statement_on...

3. Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?

Top comment by lostintangent

I’m working on a tool that allows developers to record and playback interactive, guided walkthroughs of a codebase, directly from their editor. It’s called CodeTour, and it’s currently available as a VS Code extension: https://aka.ms/codetour.

I built it because I frequently find myself looking to onboard (or “reboard”) to a project, and not knowing exactly where to start. After speaking to a bunch of other developers, I didn’t seem to be alone, so it felt like this problem was deserving of some attention.

While documentation can help mitigate this problem, I wanted to explore ways that the codebase itself could become more explainable, without requiring unnecessary context switches. Almost like if every repo had a table of contents. To make it easier to produce these “code tours” I built a tour recorder, that tries to be as simple, and dare I say, fun to use as possible.

I’ve since found that this experience has value in a number of other use cases (e.g. simplifying PR reviews, doing feature hand offs, facilitating team brown bags, etc.), and I’m excited to keep getting feedback from folks as they try it out. It’s also fully OSS, so I’d love any and all contributions: https://github.com/vsls-contrib/codetour.

4. Ask HN: What happens next after a successful lockdown?

Top comment by adaisadais

I remember all of the statistical problems centered around virality that we would have to do in college. The problems always seemed so make-believe and dystopian.

Now my company is close to going out of business and I have just been laid off. Partly due to high-ranking officials not believing in the virality of nCov-19.

I can't get W.B. Yeats "The Second Coming" from 1919 out of my head:

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

5. Ask HN: Are there good self-hosted video conference tools?

Top comment by londons_explore

You need a lot of GPU time to run a decent video conferencing system.

That's because every video feed usually needs to be realtime, low-latency transcoded to match the receivers bandwidth requirements. If some people in the meeting are on 3G while others are on fast internet, you can't send the same data to all of them! You can't send the same to all of them if different client devices have different hardware video encoders/decoders. Start doing software decoding and you'll soon end up draining users batteries like Zoom!

In a 10 person meeting, thats 10 incoming video feeds, and 100 outgoing video feeds. Not many machines can encode 100 video feeds in realtime! Obviously you can skimp on quality a bit and bucket users (ie. we'll have a high, a mid, and a low res feed, and just pick which to send).

For all the above reasons, that tends to be why self-hosted video conferencing systems are kinda laggy and gobble battery and have poor client support.

Big companies offering hosted VC solutions tend to have dedicated video encoding chips, so they can cheaply make hundreds of video streams to send to every participant.

6. Ask HN: Are we overreacting to coronavirus?

Top comment by tossitfarther

Early last week, one of the hospitals near me (NYC) had zero confirmed cases but a couple of people who were exhibiting Covid-like symptoms bad enough they required hospitalization.

On Thursday of last week, this hospital had their first several confirmed positive cases. Keep in mind that in the early days of this, the criteria for testing in the US has been "you are already very sick and you require hospitalization for something with similar symptoms"

On Tuesday of this week, as tests became more available, that hospital had ~20 suspected and confirmed cases.

On Wednesday they were at 22 confirmed cases and 22 suspected cases where people are sick enough to require hospitalization but test results haven't come back yet.

Last week, the hospital was dealing with normal load and on standby should this become a problem. In the space of a little over a week, they now have a floor devoted to patients who are a) sick enough to require hospitalization and b) have tested positive and another floor devoted to patients who are a) sick enough to require hospitalization and b) are presumed to have this based on symptoms presented, pending test results.

It's just one facility, but I personally cannot look at a single hospital that had zero known cases last week, which now has two floors devoted to active cases this week and comfort myself with, "It's fine, this is just the flu."

7. Ask HN: Starting over after business failure

Top comment by legitster

Work a job as normal and boring as you can find. Boring is, boring. But boredom is a good way to build up energy for a future run at a startup.

Also, one thing you lose working in a startup for a long period of time is perspective on what "normal" problems are. Which is why so many startups look like they only target other startups. The best ideas come from working in an industry long enough to understand the specifics about a problem, how to solve it, and who would buy it.

8. Ask HN: How are you coping with all the (mostly bad) news around you?

Top comment by keiferski

Basically every other generation before you in history faced a much greater threat with far less resources, technology, and desire to cooperate. Cold War, WW2, WW1, American Civil War, Chinese Civil War, Napoleonic Wars, French Revolution, Black Death, Mongol Invasions, etc. since the beginning of time.

I personally find it comforting to know that no matter how bad this virus gets, it’s essentially nothing when placed within the context of human history.

9. Ask HN: What makes an online course amazing?

Top comment by ivan_ah

For me the biggest game-changer for online video lectures has been this Chrome plugin that allows for fine-grained control of video speed: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

If you have control over the courseware platform used for your course, make sure it uses a compatible video player based on html5 video and not some custom implementation (very rare).

In case video speed controls is not available on your courseware, you can pre-process videos to speed them up to 1.5x using this script (save as `fastervid.sh` and run on video lectures before uploading)

    #!/bin/bash
    if [ -z $1 ]; then
      echo "usage $0 input_video.mp4"
      exit -1
    fi

    echo "Converting $1 to 1.5x speed..."
    ffmpeg -i "$1"  -filter_complex "[0:v]setpts=0.6666666666666*PTS[v];[0:a]atempo=1.5[a]" -map "[v]" -map "[a]" "tmp-$1"

    echo "Delaying audio of $1 by 60ms"
    ffmpeg -i "tmp-$1" -itsoffset 0.06 -i "tmp-$1" -map "0:0" -map "1:1" -acodec copy -vcodec copy  "faster-$1"

    # cleanup temp file
    rm "tmp-$1"

10. Ask HN: Best way to increase typing speed?

Top comment by hoorayimhelping

Context here matters. Why are you trying to increase your typing speed?

Do you hunt and peck, and you want to type faster? Do you feel you "don't type very fast," compared to some kind of standard? Are you competing in typing competitions?

If you hunt and peck, your best course of action is to break your habit and learn to type on homerow keys.

If you feel you don't type fast enough using homerow keys, your best bet is just to type more. Perhaps think out a sentence, then test yourself for how fast you can type it versus just typing things off the cuff. I find that when I know what I want to type (e.g. I know a sentence I want to say), I can type blazingly fast, versus typing words as they come out of my brain, which is much slower.