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Issue #91 - November 29, 2020
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
Top comment by echelon
Dang helped promote my "Show HN" side project to the front page [1], and that in turn got it worldwide press coverage [2,3,4,5]. But beyond that, I'm super appreciative for keeping the community consistently amazing throughout the years.
I've seen heated discussions here. Dang always offers constructive guidance when discourse devolves or gets off topic. It's never preachy, and it usually leads to amicable results when I see it.
In years past I commented in frustration that HN was at risk of becoming like Reddit. Dang said not to do this and pointed out a community rule discouraging it. Looking back, I was completely wrong in that judgment. HN is one of the few places that really hasn't changed. There are brilliant people from all walks of life and at various intersections of our industry, all coming together to ask questions and share our perspective. There isn't anything else like it.
HN isn't without faults, but it's the best community on the Internet as far as I'm aware. Frequently informative, always entertaining. I learn more every day because of HN.
Dang,
https://imgur.com/a/w7SRSzF (warning: audio)
Thank you.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23968134
[2] https://gigazine.net/news/20200728-vocodes/
[3] https://hightech.fm/2020/07/28/ai-celebrity-voice
[4] https://hypebeast.kr/2020/7/vocodes-free-launching-text-to-s...
[5] https://www.larazon.es/tecnologia/20200803/zdj5mf47zfc6rmci5...
2. I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC startups. AMA
Top comment by asdf_snar
Hi Peter,
Thanks a lot for doing this. My partner is on a cap-exempt H1B (academia) and is a citizen of a European country. She has her work authorization, but the visa in her passport is expired, and to my understanding she needs that to re-enter the U.S. should she leave the country. As you know, visas are not being issued until at least Dec. 31st by presidential proclamation. After that, it seems consulates have a huge backlog of visas to issue, so assuming the proclamation is not extended, it seems the time-limiting step will be getting an appointment. It is our understanding that until then, she cannot leave the country without risking her employment, as she may be unable to return to the U.S. for six months or more (which violates the conditions of the H1B).
I have two questions:
1. Is our information correct? We have found conflicting information from "official" sources (universities, lawyers, ...)
2. I understand the desire to prevent abuse of the H1B system. Is there some way in which these travel restrictions on active H1B holders prevents abuse? We're both very frustrated, but the worst part of not being able to see family is that there seems to be no logical reason for it.
Thanks in advance.
3. Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?
Top comment by dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197967 is correct: it means it's the most recent post by that user.
This is one of those things that pops into your head and takes 2 minutes to deploy, so I just did it. It was late last night and I forgot to not turn it on for everyone. Then I thought it would be fun to see what sort of discussion I'd wake up to.
Not sure whether to keep it. Advantage: it's a concise way of displaying some surprisingly useful information—useful to mods, at least, but I think maybe also to readers.
Disadvantage: it's obscure. The inconsistency will drive some people nuts. We'll have "Ask HN: Why do some timestamps on HN have a full stop at the end?" threads for the rest of our lives. (No one reads the FAQ. The FAQ, you say? Why yes, at the bottom of every HN page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html...)
It also leaks when a user posted something later and deleted it. We could fix that, but as so often in software, it would make the thing way more complicated. So I'll probably just drop it.
Edit: dropping it.
4. Ask HN: What are some of your favorite journals or magazines?
Top comment by omosubi
Lapham's Quarterly - each issue (4x a year) looks at a different topic with a focus on history and showing various perspectives across times and cultures. each issue has writing from the ancients through this year.
Cabinet - I used to subscribe to this one but my subscription lapsed. it is kind of a hipster magazine and some of the stuff in there is obtuse garbage but every once in a while they hit it. this is a good example - http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/52/hodes.php
Harper's is usually pretty good though I've never subscribed.
If you live in a big city there are usually a couple really high quality newstands that carry 100s or 1000s of magazines - I love browsing those. recently I came away from one with an issue of Fantasic man, Reason mag, and Harpers. always worth a trip.
Another good place to view magazines is art school libraries. they usually have some more wacky ones like adbusters or BITCH and some of them are true visual feasts. of course they are more liberal so you won't find stuff like the american conservative or anything murdoch owned but every once in a while you will come across something really amazing.
5. Ask HN: How to effectively communicate results of my work to non-engineers?
Top comment by austincheney
Back a decade ago when I was doing cyber security work we would have to generate executive summaries of our reports. The only way for this to make any sense is to imagine the audience is an ADD 3 year old. Here were some of the factors that determined an executive summary:
* Very few words, and no jargon. Every statement is a meaningful fragment, like a subtitle.
* Colors, but not too many. Think of a pie chart.
* Numbers. Executives love numbers, but be careful. The numbers have to mean something that contains very few words and no jargon.
* Keep it short, because they don't care anyway. They are just concerned that something was wrong, something was done, and finally risk was reduced. All your words and fancy colors are quickly discarded so that a quick pass reassures them emotionally.
That is exactly how I would brief a business partner today unless I have full faith they are actively involved in the health of the product. It isn't that they are stupid, but that they don't care and you cannot make them care.
6. Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
Top comment by CaptArmchair
When confronted with this question:
> What is the best way to organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens?
Ask yourself this: Can you reformulate the question into questions that make more sense?
Who can/should organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens? What are relevant criteria to assert that a liberal democracy has been organized in "the best way"? Is it possible to agree on a fixed set of criteria? Is it possible to draw a model that matches reality? What game rules are you going to feed your model? Can you discern first principles that you're going to agree on and keep to build on top of?
The more questions and follow up questions you ask, the more concrete/tangible your answers will become.
Also, ask questions about yourself too. For instance, which biases can you identify with yourself? Are you able to avoid them?
In this case: how do you want to answer "best way"? If you are seeking an answer in absolute terms, then you may risk ending up in a logical tarpit discussing the existence of objective truth. Here you have a red flag: Is this question even a complete or answerable question?
So, it helps to question the question itself too. Maybe you need to bend the question before it can yield a worthwhile answer?
7. Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?
Top comment by keb_
These three are "classless" CSS frameworks:
https://newcss.net/
https://uglyduck.ca/typesafe-css/
https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/
8. Ask HN: How big are your tablespoons?
Top comment by r3dey3
Americans often have set of measuring spoons (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=measuring+spoons) that have 1 Tablespoon, 1 Teaspoon, 1/2 teaspoon, 1/4 teaspoon (some have 1/8 teaspoon too). As you found, a Tablespoon is an "exact" measurement and most don't use their actual eating utensils for cooking - though I'm sure at one point they were used.
Often I've found with watching cooking shows (and some of my own experience) when hosts say something like "add a ___ of blah" and then proceed to just pour it out of the container without exact measurement the reason they are giving a measurement is to give a rough approximate of how much but the exact amount doesn't really matter, though it never hurts to go towards the smaller for things like seasoning.
In terms of baking recipes (bread, cakes, cookies, etc) the exact amount matters more (chemistry or live things) but you can still be off by a bit and things will still work.
9. Ask HN: How are you performing email flows on your early stage product?
Top comment by ThePhysicist
Do you need an external provider for this? We have been sending our transactional mails directy via our own backend, and so far we haven't had any issues with that. If you don't send tens of thousands of identical mails per day you should be fine.
You can use a worker and scheduling framework like Celery and Celerybeat to e.g. periodically go through your users and generate mails. The advantage is that it's much easier to integrate this with your backend and tie the mails to actual user actions. Just make sure to record which mails you have sent already to a given user to avoid sending the same stuff more than once.
But maybe don't take my advice on this, we're a really privacy-focused startup so we try to keep most of our customers' data in-house for security and privacy reasons, I know that there are a lot of people that will recommend to rely on external services for this (and they might be right in many circumstances).
10. Ask HN: How do you stimulate your creativity on a day like today?
Top comment by gorgoiler
Constraint.
Limit your work in an artificial way. It will magnify and focus your thinking.
By way of a silly (and classic) illustration: try writing in a way that forbids inclusion of that common Roman glyph found prior to F and following D.
(And actually think about it! Don’t just opt for words you found in a book of synonyms!)