AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

Top comment by busyant

Sorry, but everything listed here is rank amateur stuff when compared to Blackboard Learn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn).

First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere.

Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift.

Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to delete text that I am writing, half of the time, the delete key won't work (I'm exaggerating, but not joking). Formatting of text is quasi-random. Want red-colored text? That works about 90% of the time for me. The other 10% will give me gray text (This time, not exaggerating). If you are brave, you can edit your text as raw HTML, but, my God, you'd better bring the anti-hypertension pills, because the HTML will blast you with a tsunami of elements. Sometimes the elements (unnecessarily) surround individual characters, sometimes they surround _parts_ of words.

Third, it is nigh impossible to set useful defaults. Why can't the due dates for assignments be defaulted to the end of the day instead of the current hour and minute? Do you honestly think that I would ever want my assignment to be due at 4:33 PM?

Fourth, it tries to do too many things. I already have email. I don't need Blackboard's email functionality getting in the way.

I could go on (for a while), but it's time for those blood pressure meds.

2. Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?

Top comment by jawns

I hope this counts as weird enough ...

PROBLEM:

If time travelers from the future were to visit you, it would be difficult for them to quickly prove their authenticity.

SOLUTION:

Temporal passwords. At the start of each year, you devise a new password. You commit the password to memory, but you never write it down or divulge it to anyone until Dec. 31, when you submit it to the Temporal Password Registry, which publishes it and promotes its dissemination.

RESULT:

Prior to their visit, time travelers from the future can look up your temporal password in the registry for the year in which they plan to visit you. Their ability to communicate a password that you have not yet shared with anyone provides evidence that they are actually from the future.

PROMO:

https://temporal-password.pressbin.com/index.html

3. Tell HN: Google drops blogspot.in, breaking hundreds of thousands of permalinks

Top comment by chubs

This is one of the main reasons I tried garnering interest around a blogging app idea I had: If you blog with a third party service, eventually your blog will go away due to an acquihire, company shutdown, merger, or whatever happened in this instance (google forgot to renew a domain?). If you want to write seriously with a multi-decade perspective, you need to host it yourself, and I wanted to make that easy to manage for an average Joe. Unfortunately I haven't had any luck gathering interest! Technical people understand the idea but just roll their own using eg Jekyll; and Non-technical people don't get the idea, or dont seem to care.

The idea is here: http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/

Anyway if anyone has advice i'm all ears :)

4. Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

Top comment by colebowl

The best book on leadership I read was Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership[1]. He was a career US Navy SEAL and bring a lot of great leadership approaches from the SEALS and correlates them to the business world. His principles lead back to the idea of taking extreme ownership of everything related to your team and the "mission". I really liked his no nonsense approach.

The best lesson I learnt on leadership is to listen to and believe in your team. They are the experts, not you anymore. Your job now is to clear the path to their success. Different people need different things to succeed, it's your job to figure that out and try your best to provide it.

What I recommend: Figure out what kind of leader you want to be. Read as much as you can and talk to other leaders inside and outside of your company to see what works and doesn't work for them.

Finally, make sure your team has a crystal clear definition of what success is and the milestones to get there. Ensuring this understanding will help your team move in the same direction.

Good luck!

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23848190-extreme-ownersh...

5. Ask HN: Something like Khan Academy but full curriculum for grade schoolers?

Top comment by actfrench

I'm a teacher with 15 years of experience and an edtech entrepreneur. I've reviewed thousands of secular homeschool programs for accuracy and quality. We're working on developing unbiased reviews of all of our favorites, but here are a few great all-in-one programs to get you started. All mastery-based, all secular and aligned with state standards. In general, these also combine hands-on projects with online learning, involve little to no prep time and minimal parent involvement in learning, with some element of personalization.

Critical Thinking Co https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/criticalthinkingco

Oak Meadow https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/oakmeadow

Time4Learning https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/time4learning

Moving Beyond the Page https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/moving-beyond-the-page

It's usually good to supplement with a math program, if your child is gifted or has special needs. Here is a review I wrote on what I consider to be the best math programs out there for parents doing learning from home. https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/the-best-math-programs-...

And here are my 50 favorites:) https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/50favorites

I would also be happy to give free advice to you (or any family reading this) for your particular situation. Feel free to reach out to me via my website if you'd like more personalized recommendations and we can find a time to chat:) https://www.modulo.app/

6. Ask HN: What are some skills you have that are worth learning?

Top comment by oldsklgdfth

Learn how to take care of yourself first. That includes:

* learning to cook and prepare your own food.

* learn proper sleeping habits and make a routine that feels comfortable.

* learn to exercise - pick an activity and do it consistently with some goals in mind.

* learn to budget money and manage expenses.

* learn to groom yourself and maintain a regular cleanliness routine

* learn to entertain yourself alone - without the internet (ex. reading a book, telling a story, etc)

* learn how devices you own work and how to troubleshoot/repair them (ex. fridge, ac, oven, car)

The general theme I have is that "the things you own, end up owning you", if you are not accountable for them. Start with the things you can't get rid of like your body and then question everything else you introduce into your life to eliminate clutter.

Examples: - if you don't know how to prepare food your diet depends on what restaurants offer and you have little control over ingredients, portion size, calorie intake...

- if you pass out in front of the tv and wake up on the couch it is unlikely that you will feel motivated in the morning. Likely you will pick up McDonald's breakfast on the way to work cause you are running late.

- if you give up on exercising your body you will quickly feel powerless when you have to move something heavy.

7. Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?

Top comment by boulos

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but my advice isn’t to come to us).

Sorry to hear that. I’m sure it’s super stressful, and I hope you pull through. If you can, I’d suggest giving a little more information about your costs / workload to get more help. But, in case you only see yet another guess, mine is below.

If your growth has accelerated yielding massive cost, I assume that means you’re doing inference to serve your models. As suggested by others, there are a few great options if you haven’t already:

- Try spot instances: while you’ll get preempted, you do get a couple minutes to shut down (so for model serving, you just stop accepting requests, finish the ones you’re handling and exit). This is worth 60-90% of compute reduction.

- If you aren’t using the T4 instances, they’re probably the best price/performance for GPU inference. If you’re using a V100 by comparison that’s up to 5-10x more expensive.

- However, your models should be taking advantage of int8 if possible. This alone may let you pack more requests per part. (Another 2x+)

- You could try to do model pruning. This is perhaps the most delicate, but look at things like how people compress models for mobile. It has a similar-ish effect on trying to pack more weights into smaller GPUs, or alternatively you can do a lot simpler model (less weights and less connections also often means a lot less flops).

- But just as much: why do you need a GPU for your models? (Usually it’s to serve a large-ish / expensive model quickly enough). If you’re going to be out of business instead, try cpu inference again on spot instances (like the c5 series). Vectorized inference isn’t bad at all!

If instead this is all about training / the volume of your input data: sample it, change your batch sizes, just don’t re-train, whatever you’ve gotta do.

Remember, your users / customers won’t somehow be happier when you’re out of business in a month. Making all requests suddenly take 3x as long on a cpu or sometimes fail, is better than “always fail, we had to shut down the company”. They’ll understand!

8. Ask HN: Best ways to retain qualified employees?

Top comment by anw

I can tell you how to not retain employees, and do the opposite of that.

1.) Make goals unclear or constantly changing. Bonus points if you tie their bonus to hitting some kind of OKR even though that goal may be put on the back burner halfway into the quarter. Even more so if this includes their holiday bonus, and you have a minimum threshold of “accomplish 80% of your quarterly OKR and get 80% of your bonus. Get 79% or less accomplished and take home 0%”

2.) Make sure all managers are spineless and won’t fight for their employees. This includes managers from other teams piling work onto people who don’t report to them, but add “important to the company” work that has to be done and your own manager always going along with it.

3.) Make sure there’s a lot of good old boys club going on, especially if the “principle” engineer and the CTO go out to clubs every other night trying to wing man for each other. Also make sure there’s no accountability for these favorite engineers (or employees in general)

4.) Have a career framework that lets your employees know what they can do in order to get promoted or grow into another role (manager? senior level?). After a couple years of not promoting (most) people, then get acquired or change the entire structure so all of your employees are unsure if their work is actually going to help them get a promotion, or if that’s even an option anymore.

Finally, make sure feedback is treated like the plague. If somebody notices that the checkout page crashes every time someone uses PayPal, just ignore it. Somebody who isn’t the web dev has PR that fixes it? Let it live in limbo forever. Features require login but don’t tell customers until they get an auth error, and then have to refill out the form all over again? Not a problem. Why do you keep bringing up issues with the UX instead of rewriting our site in Angul...Reac....Vue.

9. Tell HN: Giving away my homebrew windmill

Top comment by Jaruzel

I'm going to be wonderfully pedantic here, in full HN tradition: What you have here sir, is a Wind Turbine. A 'Windmill' mills grain as part of the rotation. :D

10. Ask HN: Are YouTube ads getting worse?

Top comment by jasode

Yes, Youtube ads are getting more aggressive. Instead of just 1 ad per interruption (either pre-roll or mid-roll), it's multiple ads in succession. Instead of a few interruptions, it has increased to many interruptions. Unlike you, I don't get the yellow bars in the timeline that show where the ad spots are anymore.

Many Youtubers have made videos about the aggressive ad changes. Here's one example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_tkS4dvi8A

I don't know if any new definitive statistics are out but some Youtubers complain that they don't seem to be getting any additional money even though viewers are bombarded with more ads.