AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

Top comment by ljm

I submitted feedback over it but, aside from the over-reliance on rounded corners, and making pills and buttons hard to separate, the single worst change is that you can't see the latest commit status from the repo screen. Instead, you get the commit hash, and have to click a tiny ellipsis button to get the commit message and the status indicator.

When I'm browsing on github and not using git directly, the commit short-hash is the last thing I care about. You cannot see if your default branch has passed CI/status checks now. Those things should be first class citizens, that's why we put status badges all at the top of our readmes to make that info more visible with what we have.

It follows the trend of designing with lower information density. This trend IMO is not appropriate for developer tools.

2. Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

Top comment by jstanley

I made an automatic chess board that allows you to play with another person over the Internet (using lichess), but with a physical board. It has been described as "very lockdown chic".

Each chess piece has a magnet in the bottom. The board senses your moves by looking at where magnets disappear and appear, and it plays your opponent's moves by dragging them with an electromagnet underneath the board moved by a pair of stepper motors.

https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/autopatzer.html

3. Ask HN: How are you holding up?

Top comment by dang

Would you please stop the karma-farming spam schemes? You're wasting your time. We ban such accounts and the sites that they try to promote here, and karma doesn't help.

The comments in this thread are fine.

4. Ask HN: How to avoid over-engineering software design for future use cases?

Top comment by mabbo

> engineers go extreme in designing things/code for future cases which are not yet known

They're afraid.

Fear: If I don't plan for all these use cases, they will be impossible! I will look foolish for not anticipating them. So let's give into that fear and over-architect just to be safe. A bit of the 'condom' argument applies: better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

But the reality is that if your design doesn't match the future needs really well, you're going to have to refactor anyway. Hint: there will always be a future need you didn't anticipate! Software is a living organism that we shape and evolve over time. Shopify was a snowboard store, Youtube was a dating website, and Slack was a video game.

So my answer: relentlessly cut design features you don't need. Then relentlessly refactor your code when you discover you do need them. And don't be afraid of doing either of those things because it turns out they're both fun challenges. The best you can do is to try to ensure your design doesn't make it really hard to do anything you know or suspect you'll need in the future. Just don't start building what no one has asked for yet.

5. Ask HN: You cannot delete comments posts or your account on HN. Concerned?

Top comment by dang

> Today I found out after 11 years on this platform there is no way to delete anything you create and post

How did you "find that out"? It's not true. We take care of these requests for people every day.

> I have emailed HN@ycombinator.com and they don’t respond

We always respond. It may take a while though, because the inbox gets brutally piled up. It looks like you emailed 3 days ago. There are 32 ahead of you in the queue. I'm sorry, but there's not much I can do but answer emails in the order they were received. (The actual process is more complicated, but that's what it boils down to.)

6. Ask HN: How to develop a growth mindset?

Top comment by m12k

At one point I had a big realization that perfectionism was keeping me from ever going outside my comfort zone. This meant that for decades I had only really been growing in areas where I was naturally gifted and experienced (logic, math and similar) but failed to grow much in areas where I wasn't (e.g. emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills) because that way I never really had to fear failure, or challenge my self-image as 'someone who always succeeds'. I realized just how skewed that had made me - like a bodybuilder pumping iron with his strong arm, while the other arm hangs weakly by his side, atrophying. I realized how arrogant I had been to try to justify this neglect by thinking of the areas that I was bad at as less important than the ones I'm good at (they're not). And I realized how cowardly I had been to be so fearful of failure, how much it had hurt my mental health to tie up my self-worth with that self-image of someone that always succeeds. So I ate some humble pie, finally confronted my perfectionism, started focusing on strengthening my weak side, and adopted a new mantra: "If you never fail, you're not being ambitious enough". To this day, I still struggle to live up to this, but at least now I know what I'm up against, and what I'm trying to achieve - the clarity really helps.

7. Ask HN: What are the technical justifications for keeping .DS_Store?

Top comment by DiabloD3

I'm going to be honest: it should be deleted when seen, and OSX should have never begun this.

99% of the reason it exists is because the OS generated thumbnails. I see these in, for example, zips, that do not have images in them, and have that file.

You know what I've seen? People do `git add ` and then I find that directory in the repo. Why does git not automatically ignore that?! It's never the right option.

Anything* that pollutes directories should be absolutely verboten, its never what the user wants.

Edit: The worst part is, it makes them on network shares, and on filesystems that aren't HFS. The hell, Apple?!

8. Tell HN: YouTube fixed the dot after domain ad bypass

Top comment by rvz

I guess this is because there are Google employees that look at this site and have seen this issue reported here and on social media.

Chances were that one Google employee passed this issue on and the YouTube team was working on a fix. Unsurprising response here.

9. Ask HN: Should I buy Mac book Pro now or wait for ARM?

Top comment by gregoriol

Considering that the 1st generation of each Apple device is a beta version (first Apple Watch, first iPhone, first iPad, ... but also first Mac Book Pro with Core Duo CPUs) and are abandonned quite quickly, the best bet would be to at least wait for the 2nd generation, so at best 2022. A regular mac can last 6 good years nowadays, and more depending on your use-cases, so if you can wait until 2022 you better wait. Otherwise renew now! (I'll likely renew my 2014 MBP this year)

10. Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

Top comment by looping__lui

Honestly - don’t.

Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: - All the little tax issues for various countries/states - Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data - Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc.

For selling software, I user Fastspri and not having to deal with all those things made a huge difference. We still had our fair share of annoying problems, but if you start digging around what other “self-hosted” businesses have to deal with...

In a sense, we had a more complicated case as the product keys were generated upon purchase and sent immediately - hence there was no manual/physical interaction from our end with orders...

You can also put stuff on Amaz and use their infrastructure