AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: How to learn sales?

Top comment by skmurphy

You need to separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation, marketing is a broadcast. Marketing gets the phone to ring, sales takes the call and closes the deal.

For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.

For larger deals you "sell with your ears" as much as you talk.

I find Neil Rackham's "Spin Selling" very useful. Peter Cohan's "Great Demo" embeds a lot of discovery advice and suggests that a good demo is really a conversation driven by mutual curiosity about customer needs and software capabilities.

For B2B customer development interviews (those early market discovery conversations) I have a short book you may find helpful. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/01/30/40-tips-for-b2b-cus... (there is also a link at the bottom for a PDF version).

Two final books I would suggest, while not exactly sales books, are "The Innovator's DNA" by Clayton Christensen and "The Right It (Pretotype It)" by Alberto Savoia. They cover a number of techniques for finding the right problem to solve and determining if your solution is a good fit for customer needs. I mention them because it's not uncommon for a startup to have a product problem that manifests as a sales problem.

2. Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?

Top comment by dmerrick

I always think of this poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

    To laugh often and much; 
    to win the respect of the intelligent people 
    and the affection of children; 
    to earn the appreciation of honest critics 
    and endure the betrayal of false friends; 
    to appreciate beauty; 
    to find the best in others;  
    to leave the world a bit better 
    whether by a healthy child, a garden patch,
    or a redeemed social condition; 
    to know that one life has breathed easier  
    because you lived here. 
    This is to have succeeded.

3. Ask HN: Teaching kids how to think?

Top comment by ChicagoBoy11

I had the pleasure to spend a few years with an incredibly creative family, in all domains (family unit consisted of nobel prize winner, renowned academics, award winning authors, artists), and the one thing which always stood out to me was how they had such a deep culture of rewarding curiosity, thinking, and exploration.

I have no idea how conscious it was on the family's part, but it seemed like everyone in that family ALWAYS had a creative project that they were thinking about, talking about, and was celebrated by all in the family. It could be the dad talking about some data he was cleaning, or the younger kids about some new comic character they were developing, etc. It was clear that there was absolutely NO judgement as to what everyone's endeavor was, but that being a creative person and exploring and thinking was table stakes to being part of that family.

I don't know what the answer is, but I think if you manage to cultivate that kind of culture in your household, everything else will come easier, because above all, it seemed like they all had JOY in doing all of this. I could easily see how it could become a chore and even a burden, but somehow those parents really managed to lose sight of having everyone see thinking and exploring as primarily a fun thing to do, and it seems to have stuck.

4. Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use?

Top comment by hardmath123

NetNewsWire is wonderful! Brent Simmons is writing it for love (https://inessential.com/2015/06/30/love) and it really shows.

https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

Here is their "How to Support NNW" page. https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...

5. Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?

Top comment by chadcmulligan

Most jack of all trades jobs are at small companies in my experience, I've found most small places advertise themselves, not through agencies, so you can get a jack of all trades job there. They don't pay as well though, it's the trade off imho, interesting work that keeps you busy, or specialise and become a corporate consultant - lots of money but boring af.

Other alternatives:

- move into management

- found your own company - your jack of all trades skills will then be pressed

- you could also start a side project and put your energy into that, hopefully it will develop into your own company.

- write a book in something (edit: there's the international consultant route for this to I suppose, become a super specialist in one thing and run around talking about it)

- edit: Sales / evangelist etc

6. Ask HN: Best Recipe Search Engine?

Top comment by aSockPuppeteer

Tangentially related but use this website to cure the cancer of recipe websites.

https://plainoldrecipe.com/

7. Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry?

Top comment by phlipski

This is like asking, "How do I get into the medical industry?" It's overly broad. There are lots of different jobs in the chip industry.

1. Device engineer - want to build transistors? Grab a physics/chemistry masters and /or PHD. Go to work at a foundry house like TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SMIC or Global Foundries.

2. Analog circuit design - grab a masters in EE (w/ circuit design specialty).

3. Layout - the person who translates the analog circuit design into the physical drawing that ultimately gets turned into a photolithography maskset. You can get an associates degree (maybe not even that much) at a local community college - learn the cadence/mentor EDA tools.

4. Verification - learn verilog HDL and computer architecture. A bachelors degree at a good Electrical Engineering program will get your foot in the door.

5. CPU design/architects - masters/phd in computer architectures.

6. Software - lots of different jobs here. Firmware guys write low level boot-rom code. Some guys focus on linux drivers and kernel porting to company xyz's latest chip. Some software guys focus on specific IP blocks of a chip like maybe working around bugs in the latest GPU IP integrated into an SOC like that used on the Raspberry Pi.

7. Test engineers - the guys that write test patterns to test a chip after it has been fabricated and packaged. You could go software or hardware for these jobs. Bachelor degree needed.

8. Packaging engineer - the people that design the packages that the bare silicon gets mounted to. All kinds of folks in this field - physics, mechanical engineers, materials guys. This is a fairly broad field.

9. Hardware engineer - designs the pcb's that the chips get mounted too. Your "classic electrical engineering" job IMO. Bachelors in EE with a focus on electronics and circuit design.

In general you'll need a degree from a decent engineering college to get your foot in the door. Software generally doesn't have this barrier. Look for internships at chip companies.

8. Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2020)

Top comment by mjgs

SEEKING WORK, South East Asia (UTC+7), remote work OK, open to relocation for big projects

Willing to relocate: Yes, happy to relocate to same city as business or just to a more convenient timezone. I am British/Irish.

Technologies:

- Front-end: Javascript Revealing Module Pattern, JQuery, Bootstrap

- Back-end: NodeJS, ExpressJS, Eleventy, MongoDB, Mongoose, PassportJS, Mocha, Async, Joi, Webhooks, Message Queues, Nginx, Redis, Linux, Git, Bash

- Cloud: Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, Letsencrypt, Mailgun, Stripe, Serverless, GitHub Actions

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjgsmith, email me for my complete up to date CV

Email: markjgsmith@gmail.com

I'm a Senior Web Developer with 5 years experience building web based applications, APIs, and integrating cloud services, and with an 8 year background in building file data ingest pipelines for Fortune 500 companies in the Media and Entertainment industry across the EMEA region. 5 years experience working remotely. I'm looking for both full-time and/or contract work, and currently available for hire.

Website: https://markjgsmith.com - social medias, github, etc

9. Ask HN: What is an acceptable latency for a web load balancer?

Top comment by danpalmer

100ms for setting up an initial TLS connection is about what I'd expect. It depends on the key size, ciphers, etc, but up to 300ms is typical.

However, this should only be done at the beginning of the connection. After this the client will have a symmetric encryption key that is much faster to use. Their load balancer should be caching these sessions so that subsequent connections don't need to re-negotiate a session key.

If this 110ms is only on the first request, and a cache miss on the sessions, then I'd say that's probably something you should be expecting. If it's after the TLS session has been set up, or on a cache hit, that sounds bad. It also could be that their session cache isn't large enough and is forgetting sessions too soon, causing more TLS negotiation than may be necessary.

10. Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel to learn advanced programming?

Top comment by Jugurtha

Not a channel, but talks by David Beazley on Python topics are gems. High insight density. The presentation are often 60+ pages, and you can spend hours playing with each concept in every 'slide'. His talks are rabbit holes.

Raymond Hettinger tweets snippets of code that are delicious. His talks are really useful, too. Specifically, the one entitled 'Beyond PEP8' which focuses you on the impact you can have by zooming out of details and concentrate on good design.

This is something I've been using. I write code that uses a yet to be API, and ask myself and colleagues if it makes sense for them to use it.

For example, I'm writing a Python wrapper for MinIO's admin command line interfaces 'mc' and 'minio' which the Python client lacks. Put up the docs first at https://big-mama-tech.gitlab.io/bmc and asked colleagues and the MinIO folks if it's acceptable/useful before really going for parity.