AskHN Digest

1. Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

Top comment by dang

All: this thread has more than one page of comments. If you click the More link at the bottom you'll get to the others. I post this reminder because confusion appeared (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23306062). We hope to go back to single-page threads as soon as some performance improvements are ready. Previous explanations are at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

2. Ask HN: If you could work remote where would you live?

Top comment by larrykubin

I may be the only person left who loves San Francisco. Just got back from biking from my house through Golden Gate Park past the De Young and Cal Academy to Cliff House and down Ocean Beach. There was sunshine and people were outside. In different circumstances, there are people dancing on roller skates, learning tango, and skateboarding. Near our house there is a great Russian Bakery, tons of Chinese restaurants on Clement, Green Apple Books, Irish Bars.

Walk North and you are in the Presidio and see the Golden Gate Bridge. Walk West and you are at the Legion of Honor or Lands End and watching the sun set over the Ocean. Walk East and I can hit up a hip hop or funk night at the Boom Boom Room or go to the Fillmore. You can dance at Madrone Art Bar or see an indie rock show at the Independent on Divisadero. Walk a few blocks South and you are in the Panhandle walking by some beautiful Victorians, then stop and catch some jazz at Club Deluxe. Walk a little more and go up Corona Heights or Tank Hill and you have breathtaking panoramic views of the city. Or head down to some of the pubs in the Lower Haight. And that's just within a 2 mile radius. For some reason, everyone focuses on the Tenderloin and SoMa though. The city has major problems, but there is also so much to enjoy.

I have made many interesting and creative friends here who are from all over the world. I get to work on mobile games, but there are many other opportunities around. Among my coworkers are digital artists and painters, musicians, engineers, hip hop dancers, drag show performers, people who party all night in the Castro, a muay Thai boxer, mixologists, and more interests than I can list.

I lived in Seattle, Portland, and Austin over the previous 2 decades -- all great places -- but still find myself happier in SF.

3. Ask HN: Any job boards and age-friendly companies for older developers?

Top comment by travisgriggs

My experience is anecdotal and second hand. I've seen it twice now.

It began with a friend who was in the job market as a 50+. More on the hardware side. This guy has some cool experience. He gets lots of interviews, they go well, but no offers.

As his frustration grows, he grows desperate to try something different. He dyes some color back into his hair, gets some tinted glasses, and lets his daughter take him shopping for some more hip interview clothes.

A month later and he's in bidding wars for who to hire him. He said the difference was night and day. He was now pointing out his age in interviews "are you sure I'm not too old?" and the interviewers were like "no way man."

I wondered how one off this was. A year or so later, knew another guy who was having this same struggle. We shared the story with him. He raised his eyebrows, hesitated for a week or two, the colored his hair, got his niece to take him shopping. And pretty much same thing.

Obviously, this is a small sample set. But the lesson I took from this (and haven't had a chance to prove for myself yet) is that it's not your age that will limit you, but your apparent age. If you are old, but look like a younger/fresher version of yourself, you do well. If you appear "old", you struggle.

Best of luck.

4. Ask HN: Has anybody shipped a web app at scale with 1 DB per account?

Top comment by sky_rw

My startup currently does just this 'at scale', which is for us ~150 b2b customers with a total database footprint of ~500 GB. We are using Rails and the Apartment gem to do mutli-tenancy via unique databases per account with a single master database holding some top-level tables.

This architecture decisions is one of my biggest regrets, and we are currently in the process of rebuilding into a single database model.

FWIW, this process has worked well for what it was originally intended to do. Data-security has a nice db level stopgap and we can keep customer data nicely isolated. It's nice for extracting all data from a single customer if we have extended debugging work or unique data modeling work. It saves a lot of application layer logic and code. I'm sure for the most part it makes the system slightly faster.

However as we have grown this has become a huge headache. It is blocking major feature refactors and improvements. It restricts our data flexibility a lot. Operationally there are some killers. Data migrations take a long time, and if they fail you are left with multiple databases in different states and no clear sense of where the break occurred.

Lastly, if you use the Apartment gem, you are at the mercy of a poorly supported library that has deep ties into ActiveRecord. The company behind it abandoned this approach as described here: https://influitive.io/our-multi-tenancy-journey-with-postgre...

Happy to expand on this if anybody is interested. It's currently a cause of major frustration in my life.

5. Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

Top comment by arvidkahl

The best products happen at the intersection of an existing niche you are some level of expert in already and a technology that has not yet been adopted in that niche.

I've found one approach work very well with my mentees:

- Figure out which "special interest groups" you are part of beyond software engineering. That can be "aquarium owner", "coffee lover", "morning person", "diligent grandson" — the less technical, the better.

- Among these "niches", find the ones that could benefit from a transfer of technology, like (spitballing here) "teachers who work from home" (education niche) + "automated submission and pre-grading of homework" could work (digital document collection and rule-based checking logic), or "aquarium owner" + "nitrate cycle tracking IoT device" (hardware-enabled analytics) + "optimal light scheduling" (machine-learning-supported recommendation engine).

Do that for all the groups you're part of, and you will find lots of ideas that aren't just "scratch-your-own-itch". They are 'scratch-an-itch-you-understand-and-know-how-to-remedy'.

6. Ask HN: Do you still use MongoDB?

Top comment by josephg

No. Every time I've used mongodb we've ended up regretting it for one reason or another. And migrating to a different database after launch is a huge hassle.

I've done a couple projects where we kicked off with postgres using JSONB columns for early iteration. Then we gradually migrated to normal SQL columns as the product matured and our design decisions crystallized. That gave us basically all the benefits of mongodb but with a very smooth journey toward classical database semantics as we locked down features and scaled.

7. Ask HN: How do you brand yourself as a freelancer?

Top comment by brudgers

I know personal branding is an important part of the job to get customers

It pales in comparison to sales. Everything pales in comparison to sales. Including competence. Including doing the work.

What content about you do you emphasize to find leads?

To a first approximation, finding leads consists of finding leads. Not making content. It means pounding the pavement. Making cold calls. Making warm calls to people you know to ask for leads.

Don't get me wrong, I love avoiding sales as much as anyone. I've built websites and used Linkedin and blogged to avoid selling. I joined the local Chamber of Commerce and Rotary to sit in a room eating instead of going out selling.

Selling is really hard because it is mostly rejection. It is even harder when starting out because good clients already have consultants. It is even harder when starting out because you have no idea what sells. And crazy ideas about what might...like consultant CTO who also handles hiring and builds the product. There probably is someone who might buy that. You are unlikely to find that person because there are not enough days in the world for you to meet them and close the sale.

Even worse, if you meet someone who thinks they might buy that thing, they are probably a bad client. In the best case bad because they have no experience working with people like you. In the average case, bad because they do have experience working with people like you...new desperate freelancers.

Sell something that sells. Sell what other people sell because that is what sells. Every snowflake is different. Being different, being niche, pitching a snowflake...these are all excuses to avoid selling. Selling into a niche works when you've found the niche is organically through experience.

Good luck.

8. Ask HN: Examples of great ‘productized consulting’ landing pages?

Top comment by rstocker99

One of my friends does a productized (fixed price) roadmapping session (1) as part of a larger "build your MPV" service. My understanding is that it works out really well for him and his clients. They get to try him out with a fix priced engagement. The output leads naturally to the next step in a larger engagement. If for whatever reason it doesn't workout the client has useful documentation they can take to someone else.

(1) https://www.reemer.com/consulting/build-mvp

9. Ask HN: OCR framework for extracting formatted text?

Top comment by ryanfox

I built an application for exactly this. It's called A Personal Search Engine, APSE for short.[0]

It OCRs screenshots and stores the text in a search index, so you can query by keyword, date, boolean operators, the whole shebang.

It's all local. It is really useful for me - yesterday it saved me after Firefox wigged out and lost all my tabs. It's in a great place to try out, and I am actively developing it.

[0] https://apse.io

10. Ask HN: I'd like to learn vocals, any suggestion on how I can do this?

Top comment by MrGando

I've been playing Piano for ~28 years, almost went professional (Jazz) but ended up doing engineering. My advice would be to find a teacher, if you know nothing about it you need a teacher that corrects you so that you don't develop bad habits. Once you're no longer a novice, you can start learning other things on your own.

When looking for a teacher, I wouldn't try to find "the best" or "most virtuoso" around, but what works for you. Try several teachers, get some sessions with 2-3 and find which one is the one that motivates you the most, and understands you the most. A teacher is like a coach and a partner in an adventure... the most important thing is that they can make you progress and keep you motivated.

Good luck :)