AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What are you working on?

Top comment by jsomau

A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase.

The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying.

Here's what I'm planning next:

- Detecting the checkouts and extracting the checkout total generally across websites still needs refinement.

- Storing the purchases/savings locally in the extension storage to show you a graph of spending and saving.

- Showing a CO2 savings estimate.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumer...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-con...

2. Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

Top comment by kitcar

Congrats!

Just a heads up, as a semi-happy webflow customer: your customer service chat bot / the way you hide methods to contact customer service is very frustrating. The first time I ran into a technical issue I almost considered just cancelling my account and moving elsewhere because I couldn't figure out how to speak/chat with a human. There are many services I spend less money on monthly that have infinitely better customer service. Ultimately a friend provided me with your support email and I got a response there, but was shocked that wasn't listed anywhere on your website that I could easily find..

3. Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

Top comment by alkonaut

I got my higher education for free. I expect to save nothing for my children or their education. I expect to have to put aside very little for retirement.

The thing is, I just can’t find an argument why I should be able to get very rich doing my job. It’s a comfortable job. It pays a good salary. I got here by taking no risk at all. I wouldn’t want to switch jobs just to drive up my pay even if I could. I have other things to think about. I have worked 20 years in the same job and so have my colleagues. This is a cultural difference I feel.

4. Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago

Top comment by bobuk

More than 10 years ago, I've asked Aaron about the best way to tell him "thanks for your job". He said what he has a big wishlist on Amazon, so I've chosen a couple of books and bought them to him. Since then, once a year I have an event in my calendar: "check out what's new on Aaron's wishlist". Don't know why I decide to write it today but this is a link for this wishlist, just for inspiration. I think it will help you to understand more about Aaron and his personality

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/2A6HM9B19FOPW/

5. Tell HN: Dropbox now requires access to contacts for Google login

Top comment by Ensorceled

I left dropbox when they changed the full page upsell to "dropbox business" so that I couldn't easily figure out how to skip it and get on with my work.

I had a paid pro account at the time.

I actually had a conversation with a product manager; I checked the yes you can contact me when I cancelled my account. They simply refused to admit that an upsell was a advertisement and that disrupting my workflow on my paid, professional account for an ad was wrong.

The other interesting thing about that conversation, they could not understand how a sole proprietor would see no benefit from collaboration tools and kept making up bizarre scenarios where I could use them.

I actually asked them if they were a product manager or a salesperson at one point.

To Dropbox's credit, that product manager didn't try to retain me, they were genuinely trying to figure out why I had quit; they just couldn't grok the reason.

6. Ask HN: Do we need a Google Customers Union? Could it work?

Top comment by fergie

Are we talking about _customers_ or _users_? They are two different things, often with competing agendas.

Its great that some American Google workers have decided to unionise (in practice, a significant proportion of their EU staff will already be unionised), and they are right to point to ethical issues as the reason for doing so. In the medium term, we are going to see some sort of professional regulation in software engineering, if for no other reason than to ensure that Terminator and Black Mirror don't become a reality.

The situation with customers and users is different. They already have ultimate power over Google since they can simply go elsewhere. The best way that we can keep Google decent is by ensuring that competing services can emerge. Unionising customers/users would actually make them more invested in Google which would be self-defeating.

7. Ask HN: How do we know Signal or Telegram don't store our data on their servers?

Top comment by faitswulff

Signal’s claim to fame here is that they were subpoenaed in 2016 and could only supply account creation and last connection times:

> The American Civil Liberties Union announced Tuesday that Open Whisper Systems (OWS), the company behind popular encrypted messaging app Signal, was subpoenaed earlier this year by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia to hand over a slew of information—"subscriber name, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, method of payment"—on two of its users.

> ... “The only information responsive to the subpoena held by OWS is the time of account creation and the date of the last connection to Signal servers,” Kaufman continued, also pointing out that the company did in fact hand over this data.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/fbi-demands-sign...

8. Every day at the same time, my internet dies for 1 minute. How do I investigate?

Top comment by dvcrn

Not likely your issue but I had something similar that exactly every day my Wi-Fi would act up and my computer disconnect. It also happened to be the same time a nearby church starts ringing it's bells and my room happened to be very close to it. It also didn't happen on days the church didn't use the bells.

Still don't know what exactly caused this and I don't live there anymore but because I was the only one in my family with these problems, and only my room was facing the church, I want to believe the bells rang at a frequency that messed with my old routers Wi-Fi.

If someone could tell me if this Is possible, I could finally get some closure on this.

9. Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

Top comment by impendia

I'm a professor at a US university. The honest answer (at least at the university level) -- probably we don't.

From what I can tell, there's very little enthusiasm for online education, on the part of either professors or students. Pretty much everyone is eager to get back to normal, and I'm fairly confident that this is exactly what is going to happen.

For a dissenting perpsective, read Joshua Kim's columns at Inside Higher Ed:

https://www.insidehighered.com/users/joshua-kim

He is a big cheerleader for online education and for major changes to university education. Personally, I don't really buy his arguments -- but his posts are extremely well written and he does work full-time at a university, so you might find him more persuasive than I do.

If remote university education becomes widespread, then I expect innovations to largely come from outside the existing system. Universities are weird workplaces, and the incentive system does not really encourage large-scale innovation.

That said, it seems that startups like edX, Coursera, etc. have not really been successes. So I'm skeptical that big changes are coming soon.

10. Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?

Top comment by tbrock

I have the M1 MacBook Air and it’s best computer I’ve ever owned, hands down. Brought me back to Mac from my X1 carbon 6th gen running Linux (arch btw).

The machine itself?

     - Faster than blue blazes
     - Dead silent
     - Cold to the touch (even when cranking)
     - Has excellent screen and keyboard
     - No touchbar
     - Has bonkers battery life
     - Comes with tiny a/c adapter that charges it quickly