AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What are some available force multipliers that most people don't know?

Top comment by ahelwer

Eyerollingly boring advice, but quitting (and deleting!) reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and maybe even HN. Anything designed with the explicit goal of occupying your attention. Maybe you've noticed that you haven't managed to read a book in a year. There's a reason for that. And none of those sites can give you knowledge of the depth found in even a particularly crappily-written book.

People get all worried about losing their followers & social connections. The social fabric is very adaptable. It does not require public technological codification. You realistically only need fewer than five good friends to be happy; text them. I can guarantee your followers don't care about you at all. The ones who do will reach out to you in other ways.

Since the OP also listed a fallacy, one in the same vein is the endowment effect - where people value things more simply because they already possess them. Consider the example of you holding a stock priced at $200. Now consider an alternate universe where you didn't own that stock but had $200 cash (plus some extra for transaction costs). Would you buy the stock? If not, you should probably consider selling it. This same thought process can be applied to nearly anything in your life: job, significant other, city in which you live. It's good for keeping you out of traps.

2. Ask HN: Has anyone migrated off containerized infrastructure?

Top comment by freedomben

Disclaimer: I'm a container infrastructure consultant at Red Hat, so take all of this with a big grain of salt :-)

What you are complaining about isn't really containers (you could still pretty easily run stuff in a container and set it up/treat it like a "pet" rather than "cattle"), it's the CI/CD and immutable infrastructure best practices you are really sad about. Your complaints are totally valid: but there is another side to it.

Before adopting containers it wasn't unusual to SSH in and change a line of code on a broken server and restart. In fact that works fine while the company/team is really small. Unfortunately it becomes a disaster and huge liability when the team grows.

Additionally in regulated environments (think a bank or healthcare) one person with the ability to do that would be a huge threat. Protecting production data is paramount and if you can modify the code processing that data without a person/thing in your way then you are a massive threat to the data. I know you would never do something nefarious - neither would I. We just want to build things. But I promise you it's a matter of time until you hire somebody that does. And as a customer, I'd rather not trust my identity to be protected because "we trust Billy. He would never do that."

I pine for the old days - I really do. Things are insanely complex now and I don't like it. Unfortunately there are good reasons for the complexity.

3. G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

Top comment by rckoepke

>What does Google expect customers to do here?

https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access

To the OP ( 'HelloThur ), this is the answer to your most immediate question. I found it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120223

> Greetings. This is Alex Diacre here from G Suite Support. This has been flagged for my team and we’re looking into it. If any G Suite customer has trouble accessing their account they can always contact Google Cloud Support here: https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access (this is a special form to use when you cannot access any admin account)

4. Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

Top comment by jameslk

Web performance

This is an underappreciated field that lends to plenty of consulting. As the web becomes more complex, with heavy frontend code, third party services, and demanding amounts of images and videos, it's requiring a deeper understanding about networking and browsers to keep the web performant. Compounding the problem is the growing number of users who use mobile devices to browse the web, which have larger constraints on network and hardware than desktop users.

Additionally, web performance speaks to businesses because a "slow" website can impact your bottom line. There's lots of case studies about this: https://wpostats.com. For large companies with heavily-trafficked websites, this is critical as you're losing potential users/customers as a %.

Google has slowly been making it a bigger objective for websites to focus on SEO-wise, especially with their latest push around "web vitals." Therefore it's becoming a higher priority for marketing departments as well.

Web performance is not sexy and requires a lot of patience around analyzing websites to figure out why they're slow and coming up with specific optimizations for them. This is not like building websites. It's more like debugging. And it requires a pretty deep understanding of how websites load and run in browsers. Provided these things, I think that's partially why it's given so little attention and why so many websites perform terribly. If you're not deterred by these factors, there's a lot of businesses that could use this specialized expertise.

5. Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

Top comment by varjag

There is no plausible solution for multitude of reasons listed in other comments.

What I suggest, perhaps as last ditch effort, is look in the opposite direction: attacking the remaining Beltelecom and mobile layer2/3 connectivity in the country.

The only reason the limited networking is still up and running is not some residual generosity of the regime. It is because traditional PSTN and long range special comms services are all routed via IP trunking these days. Disrupting these will also disrupt operations level communication between KGB, police and presidential security units that are squashing the protests.

(Жыве Беларусь!)

6. Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

Top comment by minerjoe

I gave up using Federal Reserve Notes, on principal, and have dedicated my life to improving a small ranching community. By limiting my use of money to less than $100 a month (hopefully soon $0), I've had to build connections with human beings that would have not been possible otherwise.

It was really eye opening to realize that the universe wants to play and it will help me in the strangest ways.

I've set up a community computer lab entirely based on e-waste collected for free that has a print-shop, network, big screens, projectors, electronics lab, etc and organized a few hackathons to see what services we can offer to the community.

I'm spearheading reopening the local community center and are setting up a tool-library with donated tools. You'd be amazed how many people have workshops filled with tools they never use and will give to you if you ask nicely and with a purpose.

I've begun to map all the trees in town, set up a gleening team, and building out solar dehydrators. Gonna stock the local shop with dried fruit right next to the candy isle. Give the kids a choice.

I've got hundreds (soon thousands) of baby trees in my back yard and have been setting up a gene bank for grafting many varieties of fruit and nut trees. Grafted a couple hundred apple, pear, plum, and cherry trees this last spring. Propogating out all the materials we will need to turn this town into a veritable food forest. With patience you can create orchards without spending a single dollar.

We live in the most wasteful society that has ever existed. I'm exploring the hack of seeing how much of this "waste" can be turning into things that people would have had to spend dollars, which to me is adding fuel to the flame that is rapidly destroying everything of true value on this planet.

Mother Earth.

7. Ask HN: Newly Remote Workers – Where Are You Moving?

Top comment by jasonkester

For me, this is the number one reason that I work remote. Here was my thought process:

- Identify the thing you really want to do most in life.

- Find the place in the world where you can do that the best.

- Find a house there.

For me, as a rock climber, that meant moving to a little village near Fontainebleau, France, where they keep the best Bouldering in the world.

For you, it might mean finding the best concentration of snowboarding, a really good surf break that somehow has affordable houses near it (which probably means Puerto Rico, from my research), a cheapish southwestern Austin'y town with a good music scene, or if you're lucky in choosing your hobbies, a beautiful, unknown trout stream way up in the hills.

It could also turn out that the place you want to be is "The Road". There's something to be said for flying one-way to a strange corner of the world, and slowly making your way through it while working from the laptop (3G is ubiquitous nearly everywhere you'd expect it wouldn't exist). You might need to choose your spot carefully this year in particular, but this was what I did for 10 years or so before settling on that house.

The important thing is that it's actually somewhere you'd rather be spending your time, so make sure you really know what it is that you want out of life. Because if there's no reason to be near an office, it only makes sense to be near something better.

8. Ask HN: How does your organisation train programmers?

Top comment by vasco

Here's my usual playbook for onboarding engineers: Start by giving the person a high level overview of your systems and them let them go setup "company things" for the rest of the day. This gives the brain a rest from the technical stuff with menial work.

The next day, and throughout the first week, give them deeper dives into individual systems. Every time you do this start from the overview again, so they're reminded. Always keep it a conversation, go back to different parts when the engineer asks questions that show they haven't understood something you've gone over before. This is normal as you're unloading a lot of knowledge you've built over time. Make sure you keep focused on the mission of sharing knowledge and do not let yourself get lost into too many side chats about how your pet peeves are never prioritised to be fixed and how you hate technical debt - this is not the time.

Once they've setup their company emails and whatever your HR demands, start by giving them a simple task and leave them on their own with the expectation that they will reach out once blocked. Check if they're blocked yourself multiple times during the day. A new dev might be reluctant to reach out for fear of being perceived as too junior. Let them know this is not a concern, the concern is to ramp them up as soon as possible and questions are the best way to do it.

Remember to ask them about the pace, how they're feeling, what they're struggling with or if they're eager for more. Some people will prefer a few more days reading docs, others prefer to jump in to the work straight away. I've seen both approaches work and try to adjust myself to the way the person likes to work best.

Increasingly give them more complex tasks, have them pair with other engineers. Remember that not only you're onboarding them on the systems, you're onboarding them to the people. Make sure their work is throughly reviewed, take your time to explain why things are done in certain ways, take all oportunities to give further back context.

As time goes on, apply a similar playbook to give them extra duties, complex issues to solve, more permissions, etc.

PS: Grove's book is great, definitely recommend it

9. Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?

Top comment by Y_Y

Memory use isn't real though, especially with OSX and Chrome. It is just eating up what's available as an optimisation, not taking only what it needs.

Also, get Firefox.

10. Ask HN: Negotiating My Hourly Rate?

Top comment by obblekk

Here is the basic theory of negotiation and specific advise for your situation:

Theory: in a negotiation both parties are trying to get a deal that is better than the Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement (BATNA). So what you’re trying to do is say if this negotiation fails what am I going to do instead. Theoretically this is where your leverage always comes from because a good BATNA enables you to threaten to walk away.

Practical: in your post I understand what you want, but I don’t understand your BATNA. If your friend refuses, or worse let’s say he fires you right now, what would you do/make instead?

The easiest way to get a win-win is the following: 1) go find other gig offers - compare the price others are willing to pay you (recognizing there’s some risk the next client is not as friendly/easy to work with) 2) Let’s say you get 3 offers at $15,$16,$17. Show these offers openly to your friend and say “look I like working with you and want to continue but the market rate for my work is much higher than what I make right now”. This is actually a win-win because if you’ve done your research right, these are the same offers your friend would have to make to replace you. Now the conversation isn’t about what you want vs what he wants, but what each of you would do if you can’t get to an agreement.

3) Make your offer (say $18) and explain why it is higher/lower than the market avg (you can trust me, you know I do good work, etc).

4) Truly be willing to walk away if it doesn’t work. Not everyone is rational, not everyone will believe your alternative, not everyone wants a quick resolution. Unfortunately this is the hard part with friends, but if it doesn’t work you just must be willing to walk away (try to keep it isolated to your business partnership and not your personal friendship).

Notice, throughout, the premise is: here’s what my alternative is. Without this, you’re just hoping for him to take action out of kindness. It’s certainly possible, but it sounds like you are confident in your skills and value and ready to move past charity to career.

Good luck. Ask questions here if you have them. Let us know what happens.