AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?

Top comment by nikivi

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

- Steve Jobs

And in similar vain:

Are you moving one step in 20 directions or 20 steps in one direction?

I collect a few of my favorite mottos/quotes here: https://nikitavoloboev.xyz/likes/#quotes

Most of these mottos and quotes are just pretty versions of my more generalized and practical rules I wrote for myself:

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/focusing/rules

2. Ask HN: I'm a terrible developer, what now?

Top comment by baron_harkonnen

> purely as a hobbyist

This is my first clue that you're not nearly a bad as you think. The biggest obstacle to becoming a good programmer is hating to program. Many people nowadays want to get into software because they can make money. There's nothing wrong with this, but if you really don't enjoy programming it's going to be more painful than it's worth. The fact that you like it is a good sign.

I saw in the comments that you've been doing this for a year or two. Programming takes a long time to get good at.

I recommend reading Peter Norvig's classic essay "Teach yourself programming in 10 years" https://norvig.com/21-days.html

It takes two years of programming to really break out of the beginner stage in my experience. I define this period as the period where you have to think much more about writing code than about the problem. The means that you really can't do much software development in the true sense because just getting programmings to run and run consistently take a lot of mental effort.

Years 3-5 are the intermediate stage where you can solve most common problems without having to think about programming too much, but programming itself is still a source of friction when it comes to completely projects. At this stage you begin to think more about how to structure larger and larger projects, learning some clever techniques, and understanding some of the more specialized techniques in your language of choice.

Expertise happens when you don't have to think about programming any more and are exclusively concerned with larger design problems. This is the point where you can reasonably write a program and, barring a few typos, will run on the first try.

Don't stress too much about being a great developer, just keep coding and you will improve.

3. Ask HN: We have the expertise but no clients. How to reach them?

Top comment by gwbrooks

B2B consultant here for 30 years weighing in with broad truths:

* If you are waiting on leads, you die. You create leads -- every day, as your top business priority -- by working to inform and educate people. You deliver value now (information, education) to capture value (a sale) later.

* This is going to mean talking to strangers. It's going to mean experimenting with ads, native advertising, figuring out which channels your buyers frequent, etc. The failure-to-success ratio will be high and that, as painful as it is, is fine. It's part of the process.

* As others have indicated: Don't assume you can just hire someone to do sales or marketing. If the founders don't fully understand the value proposition and the pain points of potential clients, it's very hard to succeed.

* You're new and that means you're likely small. You're also specialized. Consider throwing effort at partnering with larger players who have cracked the code, have a steady stream of clients but don't have your expertise. Subconsulting is profitable and a way to keep the doors open while you figure out how to hunt and kill your own work.

* Your rates have to be high enough to support you with 50%+ of your time unsold/unbooked. During that unsold/unbooked time? You are marketing. With the possible exception of sending out invoices, nothing else is as important.

4. Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

Top comment by kempbellt

I left.

The people were decent and the product fine, but my personal interest in the company went from "eh, sounds kind of interesting" to "why am I here...?" very quickly, and every day felt like an uphill battle to not rub my disinterest off on my coworkers.

Looking for inspiration is a mind trap that is best avoided. Inspiration comes when you are silent and you listen to yourself (and those around you). Keep an open mind. What you feel inspired to do may take you in a very different direction than you expect. Maybe the company doesn't need a new tech stack optimization, but would benefit greatly from a BBQ in the park - also no better time to get to know the people you work with better than when they are not sitting at a desk.

If you want to improve your company, listen. That's all there is to it. Listen to the needs of the people you work along side and then answer those needs. You are a part of a small tribe and that tribe values and benefits from active listeners and naturally inspired contributors.

Forceful inspiration typically has an opposite effect, so be mindful of your underlying drive.

5. Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

Top comment by haroldegibbons

My "aha" moment was realizing most of my ideas and most apps out there are complete garbage. Not needed. Damaging, even. 99.9% of all of it.

For example, most "cutting edge" web apps are better off as PHP monoliths. Facebook was a PHP file for a long time. But most apps in general should never make it past being shell scripts, which are better off staying as spreadsheets or better - text files which are better off as pieces of paper whenever possible. And all paper is better off left as thoughts whenever possible, and most thoughts should be forsaken.

6. Tell HN: My HN app is rejected by Apple for showing Covid-related submissions

Top comment by stcredzero

For the first rejection, they included a screenshot of the app's search functionality, searching for the term "Covid", which obviously contains HN submissions with "Covid" in the titles.

So basically, they were asking you to censor with regards to a specific topic?

For the second rejection, they included a screenshot of the app's main "Top Stories" view, which happened to have a COVID-19-related submission [3] as one of the top stories.

So they were asking you to censor/distort the top stories of the HN site?

We need to escalate these shenanigans in the tech media!

EDIT: Who in the independent media covers stuff like this? Snazzy Labs? Louis Rossman would likely rant about this, but his beat is more hardware.

7. Ask HN: Working part-time in tech?

Top comment by mbrundle

I’ve been working 4d/week for the last 5 years as a Data Scientist. I first proposed it during salary negotiations with a small startup, who were surprised by it but were willing to give it a go. It worked out really well, and once I had that under my belt, I was able to ask for the same arrangement at subsequent job interviews - I would make a point to raise this up front, and it proved a good way to filter out companies that likely wouldn’t have been a good work/life fit. (I look after three young kids outside of work; wife is a corporate lawyer who has to work 24/7, so my 4d/wk schedule is important in maintaining some semblance of balance for the kids).

Now I’m at a multinational (a publicly listed health data company) and the arrangement continues to work well, even though I now manage a team of 8 data scientists. I’ve had colleagues who’ve dropped from 5 to 3d/wk, the company seems very flexible around this type of arrangement. At the startups I felt that I had to squeeze in 5d of work in 4d at times, whereas here the workload has felt more commensurate with the hours I have available (and my manager often checks in to make sure this is the case).

Overall I love having an extra day to the weekend (I take the kids out to places in London on Fridays when it’s considerably less busy). My colleagues with similar arrangements used this to split their working weeks in half, and that worked well for them.

Happy to answer any questions.

8. Ask HN: Google Drive/Office 365 alternatives

Top comment by bartread

Seriously, just use Office 365. Otherwise you'll forever be dealing with a constant low grade stream of interoperability glitches.

Yes, file formats are usually interchangeable. No, that interchangeability is not perfect, especially once you get away from word processing and into spreadsheets and presentations.

The majority of people your partner has to work with outside of their charity will be using Office so these small issues will constantly cause friction and frustration.

Does your partner want to waste time on those issues or do they want to focus their energy on the good work of the charity?

And, since we're talking about a charity, O365 is probably available at a reduced price, or even free.

9. Ask HN: How can I prevent myself from being doxxed?

Top comment by ggggtez

1) Promptly stop saying anything interesting under your real name. Opt out of all social media except to post messages like "Congratulations on the baby!". This will prevent you from making any enemies who know your real name, and reduce the chances anyone will want to doxx you.

2) Start adopting new pseudonyms. Use a different one on every site, and a password keeper to help you stay logged in. If you happen to forget, don't worry. Treat every account as disposable. These are not "you". This is not "your brand". These are merely tools that allow to into a walled garden party wearing the mask of anonymity.

3) Do not mix your two online personas. Keep your politics, jokes, and personality in your pseudononymous accounts. Keep your boring safe opinions and pictures of dogs in your primary account. Don't talk about anything in your real life in your pseudonymous accounts, even the weather. Reserve that kind of discussion for in-person friends only. If you make a mistake, just delete the account and make a new one.

10. Ask HN: How are online communities established?

Top comment by nostrademons

Usually they splinter off an existing online community or fanbase of a prominent writer/net-celebrity. Hacker News was initially populated by refugees from Reddit. Imgur also got started off Reddit. Reddit's initial userbase largely came from readers of comp.lang.lisp and Paul Graham's essays (PG funded it, and posted announcements there when it launched, 3 weeks after it started). StackOverflow largely came from the readers of the blogs of its two founders, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. Github's users were recruited from people the founders met at meetups.

(I was an initial user of both Hacker News and Reddit, checking both out the first day they opened. Also was an admin at FictionAlley.org, which grew from 1881 to 100,000+ users while I was there. That one was largely founded by refugees from Fanfiction.net, along with the readers of two mailing lists devoted to prominent HP fanfiction authors, Cassandra Claire and AngieJ. Same pattern: refugees from an existing community, + followers of a local Internet celebrity.)