AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?

Top comment by gtf21

Pebble smart-watches. I had them from the original kickstarter, and eventually had a Pebble Time Round which I loved. Whilst I now would never buy a smartwatch, I think that theirs were by far the best. Slimline, with a great UI, and nice functionality, and also not locked into either mobile ecosystem.

I'm not entirely sure what caused their death, but my personal view is that they tried to become too big, and I don't think the wearables market is really that valuable. They could have remained a small house which maintained a great product for a segment of the market that really appreciated it. I'm sure that's a simplistic view, and definitely ill-informed since I wasn't on the inside.

I still think they are far better than the Apple Watch or any of the Android Wear devices I've seen.

2. Tell HN: GitHub deleted anti-censorship activist repositories

Top comment by ValdikSS

No, Github DID NOT delete my account. My account is hidden from public (shadowban).

No, this is likely not because of GoodbyeDPI or Super UEFIinSecureBoot Disk.

Most probably it's because of someone has been spamming from my ISP's /24 IP range.

>His twitter account confirming that: twitter.com/ValdikSS

No, learn to read.

3. Ask HN: What are good resources for life advice?

Top comment by andai

I was going to suggest Dr. Peterson, but Ctrl+F revealed a veritable graveyard of downvoted comments about him already. That's too bad.

So I'll go with Steve Pavlina's [0] work instead.

Steve Pavlina's blog is a mix of solid personal development advice mixed with a journal of his self experimentation.

His most interesting work is on belief systems, and on deliberately installing new belief systems to improve your life.

An interesting note is that he has released most of his work into the public domain. I'm working on audio versions of his articles.

[0]: https://stevepavlina.com/

4. Ask HN: Best place to start learning about Markov Chains?

Top comment by dcwca

Just pick a random place to start, read some stuff, and then take a guess as to which direction to go in next, based on what's probably a good next thing to read. Then keep repeating the process over and over again.

5. Ask HN: Non-VC backed founders, any tips on growth?

Top comment by andrewljohnson

I've been building a company for the last 10 years. For the first 9, no VCs ever contacted us. In the last year, we've gotten pounded with requests, and have thus far declined to talk, but maybe will eventually.

So my tips:

1) If you are going to raise money, decide to do it and go at it hard. Talk to lots of investors, all at once. Until then, I wouldn't meet with any investors. Just thank them for their interest and tell them you'll contact them later if you decide to raise money.

2) To decide whether to raise, start with your goals. Decide what you want to achieve with the company, then analyze your company (business plan, spreadsheets), then choose whether to raise now, later, or maybe never.

What you want to achieve is isn't a simple sort of expected value (EV) question, for a profitable, boot-strapped company. You may prefer to take the option that maximizes the chance of a certain level of return for shareholders, over the option that maximizes the absolute EV. It depends what you want, what your risk tolerance is, what you think your business can achieve, and whether you think VC money helps you get there.

6. Ask HN: Mathematicians, what textbooks are best for learning these math topics?

Top comment by govg

I'm not really a mathematician, my experience comes from machine learning / statistics. Note that most math books tend to be known by the name of the author, as opposed to a fixed title.

Pure math :

1)Group Theory - Milne

5)Topology - Mukres

6)Measure Theory - Terrence Tao has a course, Robert Ash has a book on probability theory, and it is recommended that you study a bit of real analysis before you do this.

7) Differential Geometry and Statistics - Murray and Rice

9, 10 ) Non linear dynamics and chaos - Strogatz

11) Complex analysis - There exists a set of 4 books covering real, complex and functional analysis by Stein and Shakarchi, which should serve your purpose

Applied Math :

3) Probability - Grinstead and Snell, Durrett both have good books.

4) All of Statistics by Larry Wasserman for a more ML bent to it

5) Optimization by Boyd and Vanderberghe

7) There's no single topic called "Computer Science", but going with the theme of the topics you are looking at, Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson et. al, Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser should be good starting points.

Note that for a lot of these, you can find high quality material online (Both videos as well as course material). Just do a search for "Topic MIT OCW", replacing "Topic" with your choice.

7. Ask HN: How do you overcome Weltschmerz or fatalism about our future?

Top comment by douglaswlance

Step away from "news" and read Better Angels of our Nature by Stephen Pinker: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...

Not only is the world better than ever, it is getting better faster than ever, and it's accelerating.

The news is getting more negative as the world gets better. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2018.1...

This is happening because as subscription revenue dries up, the media is incentivized toward click-bait, and the human brain is biased toward negativity. As a hunter-gatherer, a negative incident can have much worse consequences than can a positive one, so we've evolved toward a negative bias for survival reasons.

8. Ask HN: How do you control your diet while working at a tech company?

Top comment by Cactus2018

Drink more water. Make a point of picking appropriate snacks. Eat more veggies and protein.

Skip 'carby' food (noodles, rice, bread, potatoes) (this will help you from feeling sleepy later).

> I constantly find myself failing to exercise restraint

at least you know :)

> what strategies do you use to practice moderation? And for those of you who have changed your behaviors, how did you do so?

We ate a lot of Tex-Mex, started ordering chicken soup instead of enchilada plates.

Skipped breakfast doughnuts. Skipped pie and cake.

Didn't add sugar or flavoring to coffee. Replaced all sugary drinks with water.

Did 'quantified self'; every morning weighed myself in the bathroom and sequentially wrote my weight on the mirror with a dry-erase marker.

9. Student Charged $14k on Stolen Google Cloud Credentials

Top comment by boulos

Sorry this happened to you! Feel free to send me your case number (email in profile), and I'll escalate it.

The Support personnel have hopefully been helping out, as all Billing Issues are covered regardless of support tier. I obviously don't know the ins and outs of payment instrument refunds / do debit cards mean that you actually do have to contact your bank, but I'm sure people in Support do.

10. Ask HN: If you had millions to invest, what sectors would you bet on?

Top comment by kk58

Basic framework here is to look at megatrends that will shape the global economy.

1. Urbanization

More than 60% of the world population will live in cities and existing cities will become bigger ceteris paribus. I could write a thesis on this but you need to think very broadly about this. A lot of unicorns are playing in this space think Uber, instacart, Zillow etc

2. Global Southern shift Basically demographic and economic centre of activity is shifting to global South. This is different from southern hemisphere. Pretty much any business focusing on consumption sector in these areas is a good bet. Think FMCG FMEG

3. Ultratrend - climate change Climate change will play havoc with so many layers of our economic systems. While most people think agriculture, you can also add transportation, manufacturing, renewable energy, reinsurance, fishing, textiles, pharmaceuticals

Any solution that is climate defensible is gold

4.Technology breakthrough

Here an IP defensible stack with a focus a sector or niche in above 4 areas would be a force multiplier.

Here I guess basic framework could be data + operational expertise + combo{ML, AI, serverless computing.. }

Chemical companies could be an interesting bet. There is a lot of work happening in using AI for molecule discovery, process discovery. Any company which cracks this will be the Google of "atoms"