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Issue #81 - September 20, 2020
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com
Top comment by dang
There's a detailed response here: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/godaddy-felons-io-unregistere...
currently discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523901.
2. Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?
Top comment by newscracker
Though there was hardly anything that I didn't already know, I liked the movie very much for its presentation that drove the point well to people who may not have understood how these platforms work, the privacy implications and the dangers therein. I've already recommended this movie to some more people.
As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much. Cambridge Analytica had so much news coverage during its time (along with public hearings by lawmakers and documentaries about it) and still did nothing material to the bottom line of these companies. They've actually grown bigger and become a lot richer since then.
1. Most people just wouldn't care enough to give up these platforms. While I've been enraged for a long time about these platforms, the big gap here is that there is no good answer to the question, "what are the better alternatives?" Don't tell me that Mastodon and Mastodon clones can be replacements for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook groups, Facebook events, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. Where are the nice(r) mobile apps (not just some website designed for desktops) for any replacements?
2. Governments will not regulate these platforms in meaningful ways that create fundamental changes. Regulatory capture is what's looming around, where the current biggies make the rules and ensure that nobody else can beat them.
I will keep pushing people to switch to better platforms (even if they seem deficient in comparison), but I'm sadly not very optimistic about big changes in the next decade or so.
3. Ask HN: What is a better approach to interviewing?
Top comment by gkoberger
I ask everyone to bring their own project to work on!
It could be adding a feature to a side project, starting something new, or contributing to open source. (Or, we have some stock ideas if people need inspiration.) Rather than asking them to solve a problem they had never heard of before or use a codebase they're not familiar with, I get so much more out of watching them work in their own environment.
I can ask them questions about why they're doing something, and they tend to have much more detailed answers because they've been thinking about it for weeks. They're solving a problem they care about in a codebase they know, which mimics how working with them will be a few months in.
We can talk about tradeoffs and design decision, and I get a real sense for how they think. Plus, I've found most people are so much more comfortable and excited.
(If you're interested, I wrote a blog post about all the ways I've designed how we interview, to give everyone the chance to show off the best version of themselves: https://blog.readme.com/designing-a-candidate-focused-interv... And of course, I'm hiring!)
4. Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
Top comment by viraptor
I'd like to give you a different view on the interview / question you mentioned. While it's certainly possible the interviewers are running the process badly (many are), pretend they have good intentions and answer to that. The tweet question is basically: can you think about performance.
Let's say you don't know anything about queues or distributed systems. You can say you never worked at that scale. You can also say what you think would be the number of followers (millions+), what would be the time needed for a write you a database (~millisecond each) and why that won't match 3 seconds, so you know how much time you have per follower. You can talk about the problems (disk persistence is slow, network is slow, keeping more in memory is better), that having many processes / machines working at the same time will likely be the way to go. You can try to pull the interviewer into discussion about it.
You don't need to know the answer (let's be honest, the interviewer didn't know it in details either) to actually talk about why the problem exists and what you understand about it.
5. Ask HN: What is it like to be old? What advice would you give to younger people?
Top comment by irvingprime
What's it like to be old?
My boss is younger than I am and is absolutely sure he knows more about my job than I do, even though I've been doing it since before he was born and he never did it at all.
People on TV keep trying to sell me stuff like Metamucil, some new kind of cane or similar silly gadget, or a scam investment, none of which I want.
My grandkids can't understand why I can't read things they're holding right in front of my face until I've spent twenty minutes finding, then cleaning, my glasses.
My wife has heard all of my jokes and all of my excuses. She now criticizes the former and laughs at the latter, instead of the other way around.
My friends sound like cranky old sticks-in-the-mud who wish they could turn back the clock to a time that wasn't nearly as wonderful as they claim to remember it was.
A trip to the supermarket now tires me out and instead of going out with (surviving) friends, I really look forward to taking a nap on the couch. Really.
The celebrities I recognize are senile and/or decrepit. The ones who are currently popular are appalling.
I don't have enough money to retire but dream of it every day (See the above comment about my boss).
Life is fantastic, except when it's not. Whichever it is now, pretty soon, it will be the other one.
My advice: Pay attention.
6. Ask HN: Where to meet non-technical cofounders?
Top comment by paulsutter
From Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html):
> The good news is, choosing problems is something that can be learned. I know that from experience. Hackers can learn to make things customers want. [6]
>This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view:
80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least one management person in the team at the start. The business person represents the "voice of the customer" and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on track.
7. Ask HN: Guild/Studio structure for Software Engineers?
Top comment by jaredandrews
I joined a mailing list recently that discusses tech coops: https://npogroups.org/lists/info/tech-coop Some interesting discussion.
I found a repo with a lot of information and companies here: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
It's really unclear to me how you would go about joining an existing studio like this. At least in North America, there are so few, I think the answer is to start one yourself.
8. Ask HN: Resources to encourage teen on becoming computer engineer?
Top comment by kqr
The single most supportive thing you could do for them is to hook them up with like-minded peers.
If they have friends the same age interested in the same thing, there's no limit for what they can accomplish, with or without the other material.
Not only because peers can help out in finding and recommending "teaching" material, but also because as humans we tend to want to do what our friends do.
I think these peers can be people they interact with only online, and not in person, but that is my own conjecture. The rest is supported by evidence.
9. Ask HN: Where do you draw the line between a co-founder and early employee?
Top comment by hwestiii
I will be that guy and say that all the discussion around who is allowed to self-designate as a ”founder” is fatuous and fetishistic. It’s an obvious attempt to amplify one’s importance beyond sense in order to provide some level of resume inflation and just dilutes the meaning of the word.
In my opinion “founder” is not a word someone should be unilaterally conferring upon themselves, but is more meaningfully applied only by others. Until you are making actual money, you are someone trying to start a business. When you actually make money, that is at least break even, perhaps you can consider yourself an “entrepreneur”. Leave the identification of “founders” to people like the Wall Street Journal if you wish for the word to retain any meaning at all.
10. Ask HN: Have you ever tried to live without a phone?
Top comment by LUmBULtERA
Many of us were old enough to have lived during a time where smartphones did not exist. My thoughts are... it is nice to have access to a great pocket-sized camera and communication device, though it is also nice to turn it off once in a while.