AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: A way to adblock “we're using cookies” popups?

Top comment by gpas

If you are already using ublock origin go to settings > filters list > annoyances, turn on easylist-cookies.

2. Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn how electricity works?

Top comment by basjacobs

I highly recommend the All About Circuits textbook: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/

It starts from the very basics and builds up to quite complex circuits and their workings. It's an all-round great website, too.

3. Ask HN: Google won't remove my site URL from random business using it on Maps

Top comment by throwaway_jobs

It sounds like someone is impersonating you on Google’s services, you put Google on notice you are being impersonated (your Mark infringed) and as a result you are suffering (legal) damages and google’s official response acknowledges this and simultaneously says they have no duty to prohibit infringement of your mark on their services and they have no duty to provide accurate information to their end users/the public.

In other words in the old phone book days, imagine if you were to list your business in the phone book but next to your business was a competitors phone number so they get all your business...you put the phone book on notice and they just say sorry we have no duty to provide accurate information.

Many have said get a lawyer to send a letter...that’s a waste of time while you will continue to be damaged. Get a lawyer to file a small claims case for damages and injunction. A few benefits: 1) you could probably get a lawyer to do it on contingency (no out of pocket expenses for you, they would get a % of damages if and only if they win); 2) small claims cases can often fly under the radar of big companies and so maybe as soon as 20 days after filing you get a default judgment; 3) if the do respond a small claims case means 1 thing to them, their attorney’s fees will exceed your damages so they will probably look into it and resolve it; 4) if they want to fight it (which would be stupid if your claims are legit) small claims are extremely expedited, typically there is no formal discovery and it’s just a pretrial (where the parties will be encouraged to settle) and then a trial (possibly a mandatory mediation at pretrial or at the court on the day of the trial).

4. Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

Top comment by gringoDan

Remote work. 20 years of progress were consolidated into the last 3 months.

Previously, you saw people living in hubs like SF and NYC for the high salary and high prestige jobs. But when those jobs are available from anywhere, all of a sudden the "lifestyle cities" like Boulder, Boise, Chattanooga, etc. start to look a whole lot better. You no longer have to sacrifice the high-prestige career to live in a lower cost-of-living area with access to outdoors activities.

This is going to exacerbate the divide between the haves – who can bounce from city to city, chasing the best lifestyle at all times, enabled by their remote work – and the have-nots, who are tied to one physical location because of their jobs.

5. Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?

Top comment by hn_throwaway_99

First, note you're likely to get some survivorship bias in these responses - older people who left the industry are less likely to comment on HN.

That said, as a developer in their mid-40s, here's my take:

1. In general, mid-level engineering management jobs (which I consider Manager to Senior Director level) pay significantly more because they are shittier jobs. Sure, there is the rare soul that loves these kind of jobs, but I think most Directors would freely admit they liked their day-to-day a lot more when they were coding. I find that the type of folks who succeed in these roles have basically stopped caring about work so much and are much more invested in their family life. I.e. they don't "love" their job, but they do well at it because they want to make a nice living for their family.

2. I went the senior engineer -> architect -> director -> senior director route, and honestly I hated being a director/senior director. I don't mind so much managing people, and I really enjoy mentoring, but at the director/senior director level you're doing a ton of managing up, which I hate, and there are a ton of logistical responsibilities at this level that I find mind-numbingly boring.

3. So I switched companies and am now a "principal engineer", which I love and I think is my sweet spot. I don't have any official direct reports, but I do a lot of mentoring and general "team management". Given my history, the senior execs at my company appreciate some of my "management-level input", but they know I'm most effective if I'm not involved in tweaking job-level band discussions. To echo another commenter, I do just enough management-level stuff to keep me involved at a high level, but I spend the majority of my time writing code, doing code reviews, and working closely with product management to give engineering input re: new features.

6. Ask HN: What are your go to SaaS products for startups/MVPs?

Top comment by westurner

https://StackShare.io and https://FounderKit.com are great places to find reviews of SaaS services:

> mails,

https://founderkit.com/growth-marketing/email-marketing/revi...

https://stackshare.io/email-marketing

https://zapier.com/learn/email-marketing/

> text gateways,

https://founderkit.com/apis/sms/reviews

https://stackshare.io/voice-and-sms

> payments

https://founderkit.com/apis/credit-card-processing/reviews

https://stackshare.io/payment-services

Both have categories:

https://stackshare.io/categories

https://founderkit.com/reviews

7. Ask HN: Is there any work being done in speech-to-code with deep learning?

Top comment by daanzu

Windows Speech Recognition is far from the best, so perhaps your trouble could be partly caused by how you had to speak in order to be understood, rather than the command style? I used to use WSR to code by voice, and it was far more laborious than my current setup.

I develop kaldi-active-grammar [0]. The Kaldi engine is state of the art for command and control. Although I don't have the data and resources for training a model like Microsoft/Nuance/Google, being an open rather than closed system allows me to train models that are far more personalized than the large commercial/generic ones you are used to. For example, see the video of me using it [1], where I can speak in a relaxed manner without having to over enunciate and strain my voice.

Gathering the data for such training does take some time, but the results can be huge [2]. Performing the actual training is currently complicated; I am working on making it portable and more turnkey, but it's not ready yet. However, I am running test training for some people. Contact me if you want me to use you as a guinea pig.

[0] https://github.com/daanzu/kaldi-active-grammar

[1] https://youtu.be/Qk1mGbIJx3s

[2] https://github.com/daanzu/kaldi-active-grammar/blob/master/d...

8. Ask HN: How do you divide time between engaging with users and development?

Top comment by chrisbennet

I really value unfiltered end user input. No third party customer contact is going to tell you that use looked for "Export" under the "File" menu instead of where you had it the very first time they used the product. You have to watch over the users shoulder of have video.

I reserve my mornings for "thinky" time. It's when I have the most energy. I answer emails in the afternoon.

This may be controversial, but I try not to respond to email immediately. I believe when you do that, the client/customer will coming to expect a quick response leading a "conversation" instead of an asynchronous email. With an email question that gets answered say, once a day, the user will endeavor to phrase his questions more thoughtfully.

9. Ask HN: How do you read long PDFs?

Top comment by eigenvalue

Best I’ve found is to read PDFs on an iPad Pro using an app such as IAnnotate. Instead of scrolling, I display one page at a time in portrait orientation, and then you can swipe to flip the pages. Highlighting, underlining, and short notes are quick andeasy. You can keep all the documents in Dropbox for convenient synchronizing of notes.

10. Ask HN: How do you develop internal motivation?

Top comment by idoby

I find that internal motivation is mostly a myth, that is, the part where people expect to just have infinite drive out of nowhere.

The cooking analogy is good but here's an IMO better one - would you make a movie if you knew for certain nobody would ever watch it? I wouldn't.

You want to get a PhD - why? Is the PhD a mountain to climb or is it a pair of boots that will let you scale a mountain? Both answers are legit, but I think you do need to agree with yourself on one.

Motivation ex nihilo doesn't exist. Humans are goal-driven and averse to spending time on teleologically neutral things (enjoyment of the activity itself is, of course, a legit end on its own).