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Issue #97 - January 10, 2021
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring? and Who wants to be hired? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Show me your half baked project
Top comment by basicallydan
Hi! I have a public Trello board [0] with a list of projects I'm working on, or ideas I have, which from time to time people comment on!
Currently I'm doing a version of Conway's Game of Life in Solidity for the Ethereum network. Spoiler: it's not going to be affordable to actually use it on the network!
0: https://trello.com/b/v4dV9CQS/1-dans-side-project-ideas
2. Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?
Top comment by itsmejeff
I’ve been pondering this a lot lately, as an engineering leader.
Masters in my organization have an extremely high ratio of value shipped to hours worked.
This means two things. They are able to discern and avoid work that does not provide value (this is often their greatest skill), and the best ones can direct a whole team away from large swaths of work that is not valuable. And they are able to build systems such that the cost of adding more value to the system remains constant as the system grows in complexity.
3. Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program
Top comment by markc
Didn't work:
- BASIC, Ruby, Python, Java setups + intros, tutorials.
- LEGO Mindstorms
- Scratch, Squeak
- Coding classes / camps
Worked:
A Texas Instruments programmable calculator. He read the manual, played with it a bit, then found out he could automate some of his homework. Then found out he could make simple games. Then fairly impressive games.
After that, he did a bunch of Minecraft programming and loved it.
Fast forward a decade and he smokes through Advent of Code without breaking a sweat, and is a co-founder and CTO.
I.e. all my efforts to pique interest didn't have any effect that I could see. He had to find his own way to it.
4. Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?
Top comment by dabreegster
Hi, I'm Dustin, and I've been working on abstreet.org for about ~2.5 years to fight car dependency in cities. Aiming to explore and advocate for short-term transportation changes like creating low-traffic neighborhoods and fleshing out bike and bus networks, and moonshot ideas like congestion charging zones in city centers, superblocks, and zoning changes. Targeting the general public, rather than planners who've already got tools they trust, for education, gathering feedback, and prompting citizen advocacy.
We've been growing an open source & academic community fairly well, but I want to hire more full-time engineers, and money's becoming a limiting factor. Looking for a partner on the business and PM side, so I can focus on the technical. The huge disclaimer is that I'm unwilling to compromise on the project being open source, so I have no idea how to squeeze a business model in here. I've also done a terrible job so far of actually getting public transit / cycling advocacy groups on board, so the need for a PM is pretty severe to make sure we're building the right thing.
Contact on github or HN.
5. Ask HN: How would you convince your friends and family to switch from WhatsApp?
Top comment by Abishek_Muthian
Steps, I've taken in order.
0. Removing myself from all active WhatsApp groups.
1. Setting the WhatsApp status to 'Message me on Signal or Email me' and not responding to non-important messages till they message on Signal or Email me.
2. When someone asks if we can continue our conversation on WhatsApp, politely informing them that I don't use WhatsApp and asking them to message on Signal.
3. Setting a Tasker auto reply for WhatsApp, informing the sender that I'm not available on WhatsApp and they have to message me on Signal or Email me.
3.a. Updated the reply message with 'My WhatsApp account will be deleted on Feb 8 for not accepting new T&C' and has set the status as such too.
4.Setting Signal as the default SMS client (Can invite people easily via SMS, perhaps added protection against SMS exploits).
6. Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
Top comment by thebigspacefuck
Every time I go looking for one of these open alternatives it’s filled with fringe conspiracy theorists, actual racists, etc. Example is LBRY. Bryan Lunduke says he’s switching off YouTube for LBRY, so I go there to check it out. Top trending video is some white supremacist thing why I shouldn’t forget my ancestry. Search for “how to repair furnace”, second result is video how Epstein is alive. Even Lunduke is taking the opportunity to start his red-pilled politics channel. I have similar story with Mastodon.
The fundamentals are there but the big challenge is no censorship actually makes these smaller platforms something that people don’t want to use.
7. Ask HN: Why aren't one-time sign in links more popular for authentication?
Top comment by starbugs
We have tried this for a while and the following reasons made us kill it:
1. Email delivery latency: depending on the service you use, the time it takes to deliver emails to the user can vary. Worst case I encountered was up to 20 minutes delay when there were issues with Mailgun.
2. Usability: you have to leave your current app and switch to your mail client. You may be on a device where you don't have a mail client installed at all, so you have to provide a password login option as well.
3. The sign in dialog gets more complicated and it's hard to explain to users how it works as it is not all that common. This also had effects on sign up/sign in dialog design which we found to have a negative impact on conversion rates.
8. Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?
Top comment by pickle-wizard
Thanks for asking this.
I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.
9. Slack Running Slow / Hanging?
Top comment by eunos
Same as me, yet the status page still saying OK.
HackerNews is starting to become the real status page.
It even spans multiple services! I remember I learned about Google and YouTube down also from HN.
10. Tell HN: Please update your DNS records when abandoning servers
Top comment by nickjj
Yep.
A few years ago I had a server on DigitalOcean and stopped using it. I forgot to remove the A record for it on a sub-domain connected to my main site and suddenly a sub-domain on my main site was serving ~400,000 pirated PDFs because the old server's IP address was in control by someone else.
I wrote about it here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-recycled-ip-address-caused-...
And it was discussed on HN back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17020944
Then another DNS related issue happened 6 months ago where someone thought I owned a domain they used to have: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/at-first-i-thought-someone-wa...
In this 2nd case someone else forgot to update an old domain redirect and I ended up being the recipient.