AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

Top comment by endymi0n

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

— Ira Glass

2. Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

Top comment by AgentK20

Like many others have pointed out: Cost.

I'm the CTO of a moderately sized gaming community, Hypixel Minecraft, who operates about 700 rented dedicated machines to service 70k-100k concurrent players. We push about 4PB/mo in egress bandwidth, something along the lines of 32gbps 95th-percentile. The big cloud providers have repeatedly quoted us an order of magnitude more than our entire fleet's cost....JUST in bandwidth costs. Even if we bring our own ISPs and cross-connect to just use cloud's compute capacity, they still charge stupid high costs to egress to our carriers.

Even if bandwidth were completely free, at any timescale above 1-2 years purchasing your own hardware, LTO-ing, or even just renting will be cheaper.

Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic and you're unable to reasonably commit to year+ terms, or if your team is so small that you don't have the resources to manage infrastructure yourself, but at a team size of >10 your sysadmins running on bare metal will pay their own salaries in cloud savings.

3. Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

Top comment by jokab

Obs studio. I record myself while coding anything. I pretend to be a bigshot coding streaming sensation (even if its just for me). Its fun as well as very helpful in so many ways.

1. It helps me stay focus on the task at hand. One recording for each task 2. It lets me practice how to articulate stuffs. Its like blogging but ephemeral (because i wont upload this) 3. It helps me get motivated. Cant let my "thousands" of viewers down 4. It lets me review my blunders so i know how to watch out for them in the future 5. Its fun. I can let off some steam because i can curse all i want, my audience is 18+ and fine with some "sentence enhancers". I am Filipino but i record in English so i get that extra bonus practice.

4. Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

Top comment by lucideer

> I myself mostly use the following features from Keybase: Chat, KBFS, Git repositories and encrypting messages sent out-of-band via PGP in Keybase (and the various cryptographic tools [signing, validation etc])

While all these features are individually nice, I kinda started to worry about Keybase as a product when they started bolting on stuff like this.

I think the key (pun intended) to stable & ongoing success in this space is to focus on doing one thing well. Keybase was incepted as a service for signing & validation. There's currently https://keys.pub for that. I'd be interested to hear if there's others.

For chat, there's a lot of competitors to choose from. I like Riot.im.

For KBFS, Tresorit has been mentioned. I signed up, but haven't been super impressed with their clients yet. I'm not sure what better options are out there.

5. Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?

Top comment by adamcharnock

I'm hoping my reply is more helpful than it sounds at first glance... This is one of those questions where I read and then exclaim (rhetorically), "what's wrong with people?!"

Don't take this the wrong way, I often exclaim this. You are quite possibly in the majority and I'm the odd one.

To me it has always seemed inherently clear that the way to approach life is to do something if you enjoy it. If you stop enjoying it then do something else. I will naturally need a break from doing something after a while (hours, days, weeks), and so I'll put it down and pickup something else.

As a recent article on HN mentioned, "enthusiasm is worth 25 IQ points."

When it comes to self-guided activities such as this, there has never been a "should" or "best" for me. I just follow what I enjoy, perhaps guided secondarily by what may be useful. (Actually, I enjoy things that are useful, so perhaps that intertwines these concepts for me). I suspect I didn't thrive at university for this reason, while in the real world I know a number of people who would call me an overachiever.

PS. I have a few friends with some degree of ADHD. These friends may often feel overwhelmed by a large number of choices or tasks, to the point of inaction. I'm not saying this applies to you, but I just thought it was worth mentioning.

6. Ask HN: I work for AWS. How do I encourage change for Amazon warehouse workers?

Top comment by 0x262d

Honestly, you have pretty little real leverage. Warehouse workers are going to have to form a union and threaten to really shut down amazon's profits, in order to defeat these profit-motivated outrages. It's always been like this. People have to self-emancipate.

To aid this you can help promote support for unionizing and other related things. But that's fairly secondary. I think using your position as an employee to call out Amazon's abuses can be a good way to direct media attention but without worker power, attention on its own doesn't actually do anything. But Amazon firing its employees has given them a lot of bad press. If it happens to you it might be a good thing politically. That does suck though, if you can't afford it be careful.

Related to all of these topics I want to plug https://www.taxamazon.net/about, which doesn't solve the issue of warehouse conditions but does help address one other externality of Amazon's relentless drive for profits at the expense of all other issues. Raising consciousness around their tax-dodging helps people realize their worker relations are terrible and vice versa, and passing this ballot initiative will do a lot of good on its own.

Edit: do get plugged in to Tech Workers’ Coalition if you aren’t. I just wanted to be sober about the challenges and opposition warehouse workers face and the necessary strategy for victory.

7. Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

Top comment by redsymbol

All the time.

The old joke is about us looking at code we wrote six months ago, and being horrified at what we see. And I've had more than my share of that.

But what's ALSO happened, many times, is I look at old code I wrote... and I'm IMPRESSED. Just blown away by the beautiful elegance and power of the abstractions I came up with, the sheer intelligence of the approach, the insight and lucidity oozing from the code.

"Wow, I wrote THAT?!" Because I was deep in a coding trance when I wrote it. So deep "in the zone", that when I come out, it's not easy to recapture where I was. Not even the next day, and certainly not months later.

Interesting how it works!

8. Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

Top comment by rabidonrails

Founder of Phaxio here. Doing fax well is an annoying problem because the protocols are finicy and the carriers don't usually want to spend time troubleshooting issues.

Give our API a shot and shoot me a note for some extra credits as a h/t to a fellow HNer. (See profile for email.)

9. Ask HN: Any good FOSS alternative to Google's reCAPTCHA?

Top comment by simongr3dal

Cloudflare recently moved away from Google's reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha.

Announcement: https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch... Discussion on HN:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22812509

10. Ask HN: No formal software education – is there hope for me?

Top comment by hoorayimhelping

>Many places I apply to want people who have experience in software development or they want to hire a junior for some super low pay.

That's because you are a junior developer and you're only worth a junior engineer's pay. Sorry if that's harsh, I'm a bit blunt; but it's not a value judgement or a criticism, it's a statement of fact. Go work at a place that pays you a junior engineer's salary and learn the industry skills you need to earn a better salary.

>I've got lots of projects I've done in the last year.

That's really great, and it'll give you a leg up on the other junior programmers who are applying at places. But projects don't confer industry experience with a team, which is what places are looking for. It's a world of difference between "I've done projects on my own and I can complete them," and "I've worked with engineers, product managers, managers, designers, non technical people and together we have shipped software." All of the stuff you're doing is setting you apart from your competition, but realize your competition is for junior roles.

To answer the question:

>Is there hope for me?

Absolutely. You seem smart and driven and capable of communicating. In my 14 years of coding professionally, I've worked with people who studied communication, linguistics, a foreign language, creative writing, IT, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, music composition, etc. Some of the best engineers I've worked with had no formal training. It's totally doable. Being able to teach is a really good indicator of at understanding complex issues and being able to communicate them, all valuable skills for a software engineer.

Also, don't get discouraged during the pandemic. A lot of places are buckling down and if they do hire, it'll be an experienced person who normally wouldn't be on the market but is because of the virus. It's gonna be tough for junior engineers for a while until the economy spins back up.