The best Hacker News stories from All from the past week
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It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming
Installing a payphone in my house
Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
Tell HN: I'm Afraid We're Shutting Down
So it’s with deep professional and personal sadness that I must announce my plans to shut down 70 Million Resources, Inc., the parent company of 70 Million Jobs (the 1st national, for-profit employment platform for people with criminal records) and Commissary Club (the first mobile social network for this population).<p>When I launched 70MR in 2016, I was motivated to build a company that could short circuit the pernicious cycles of recidivism in this country--cycles that destroy lives, tear apart families and decimate communities. I sought to disrupt the sleepy reentry industry by applying technology, focusing on data, employing an aggressive, accountable team, and moving with some urgency. And for the first time, approaching the challenge as a national, for-profit venture.<p>This approach, which I named “RaaS,” (Reentry as a Service), turned out to be wildly effective, and by the beginning of 2020, we were delivering on our mission of driving “double bottom line returns”: build a big, successful business and do massive social good. With the help of Y Combinator and nearly 1,500 investors, I assembled a team and got to work.<p>We succeeded in facilitating employment for thousands of deserving men and women and became operationally profitable.<p>However, the pandemic had other plans for us. When it hit in force in March 2020, companies made wholesale terminations of nearly all our people, and continued their halt in hiring for two years.<p>Our revenue dropped like a rock to almost nothing. I immediately responded by paring our expenses to the bone and began letting team members go. There was no opportunity to raise additional funding, so I began injecting my own money into the company—money I barely have—just to keep the lights on.<p>When the economy and job market began storming back, we were inundated with inbound requests for our services. Our perseverance seemed to be paying off. Except now we were hit with a new gut punch: “The Great Resignation.” Now our workers were reticent to come back to work. And if they did accept a job, they’d often leave after only a few days.<p>It became obvious that we lacked the resources to weather this new storm while hoping and praying the world would normalize soon. (It still hasn’t.)<p>Our coffers are empty. We’ve incurred a relatively small amount of debt (that I personally guaranteed) that I hope to negotiate down. All employees have been paid what they were owed (except for me). I will explore sale of assets we hold.<p>On a personal note, I can’t tell you how grateful and humbled I’ve been that many would entrust their investment or business with me. For a person who’s done time in prison (me), it’s almost impossible to ask for someone’s trust. I have not yet forgiven myself for things I did which ultimately got me into trouble. But I will be eternally grateful to those that assisted me in my efforts to settle the score and win back my karma.<p>From the beginning I was blessed by an unbelievable team of smart, funny, passionate young people who shared my ambition to cause change. They stuck with me/us until the very end.<p>I’m most saddened by the millions of formerly incarcerated men and women who we won’t be able to help. These are some of the most sincere, honest, and heroic people I’ve ever met. It was my life’s honor to work with them.<p>I’m pretty sure I’ll continue my reentry work. Several prominent organizations have indicated their interests in me assuming a leadership role. I need to work, and I need to continue my work.<p>I’m so sorry for this outcome, despite the good we’ve done. I’m not sure we could have done anything differently or better, but ultimately, I take full responsibility. Needless to say, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out, here or at Richard@70MillionJobs.com.<p>This has been the greatest experience of my life; it couldn’t have happened without my getting a second chance.<p>Richard
Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story.<p>More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort.<p>Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Industry/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...</a><p>I am still not sure if this was a good decision financially, but unlike in a corporate environment, I am so much happier working on a product that I can put my love into and see people enjoy it, see my direct impact, and be able to make big decisions (although this also adds a lot of stress).<p>I also quite enjoy the added SWE challenges. I had to write so many complex algorithms (path-finding, logistics, serialization, ...) and optimize things down to bits (shaders, compression of in-memory data, ...) that were rarely required by my corp job.<p>Anyhow, this is getting a little long, feel free to ask any questions, I will do my best to answer them.
Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
I've been programming on and off since the age of 16. Unfortunately, I have never been a rockstar programmer. I've always pieced code together from multiple sources to create programs but I've always failed to come up with a solution from scratch of my own and provide any value. I've always wondered how other smart people are able to come up with libraries, services and various solutions from scratch. I've devised countless ideas only to never execute them for various reasons or get started with them only to never fully complete them and see it all the way through.<p>I've already wasted my entire teens and 20s, current 28 years old, working as a software engineer (Full-Stack) at a startup for ~4 years. I've been feeling like a loser and not good enough for this career even though I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team. I've put in countless hours of work every day (70-90 hrs), being on-call almost 24/7, sometimes for straight 7 days for months despite only getting paid on a salary basis on 40 hr work weeks; being a loner helps with working long hours. My salary also hasn't increased much, and feel like I'm severely underpaid based on the # of years of experience but I struggle with evaluating my value in the market to determine my worth. I assumed working hard would pay off but that hasn't been the case at all; I truly believe I've been doing the opposite of "Work Smart, Not Hard". I've been trying to get back to learning DS and Algos so I can apply to places but I struggle with LeetCode, which is making me feel like even a bigger loser for not being able to solve problems.<p>I'm stuck in a rut, wanting to better my skills and earn a good amount of money but unable to concentrate, riddled with brain fog, and unsure of my future. My self-confidence and self-esteem are taking a hit. I am terrible at networking, so I don't have others to reach out to for tips and advice, hence I'm turning to HN. I apologize if this isn't the place for a post like this. How can I turn my directionless life around and find satisfaction with my career?
Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
I've been programming on and off since the age of 16. Unfortunately, I have never been a rockstar programmer. I've always pieced code together from multiple sources to create programs but I've always failed to come up with a solution from scratch of my own and provide any value. I've always wondered how other smart people are able to come up with libraries, services and various solutions from scratch. I've devised countless ideas only to never execute them for various reasons or get started with them only to never fully complete them and see it all the way through.<p>I've already wasted my entire teens and 20s, current 28 years old, working as a software engineer (Full-Stack) at a startup for ~4 years. I've been feeling like a loser and not good enough for this career even though I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team. I've put in countless hours of work every day (70-90 hrs), being on-call almost 24/7, sometimes for straight 7 days for months despite only getting paid on a salary basis on 40 hr work weeks; being a loner helps with working long hours. My salary also hasn't increased much, and feel like I'm severely underpaid based on the # of years of experience but I struggle with evaluating my value in the market to determine my worth. I assumed working hard would pay off but that hasn't been the case at all; I truly believe I've been doing the opposite of "Work Smart, Not Hard". I've been trying to get back to learning DS and Algos so I can apply to places but I struggle with LeetCode, which is making me feel like even a bigger loser for not being able to solve problems.<p>I'm stuck in a rut, wanting to better my skills and earn a good amount of money but unable to concentrate, riddled with brain fog, and unsure of my future. My self-confidence and self-esteem are taking a hit. I am terrible at networking, so I don't have others to reach out to for tips and advice, hence I'm turning to HN. I apologize if this isn't the place for a post like this. How can I turn my directionless life around and find satisfaction with my career?
So I took a corporation to arbitration
So I took a corporation to arbitration
Dragonflydb – A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached
Dragonflydb – A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached
My students cheated... a lot
My students cheated... a lot
Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits
Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits
Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession
I’ve been job hunting and I was going to get interviewed on Friday for a SWE role at a small startup and today I received an email from the PM canceling the interview and letting me know the company has decided to stop the recruitment process for all roles due to the markets situation. She also attached a tweet about a YC email to all their founders, here’s the link: <a href="https://twitter.com/refsrc/status/1527238287471292417" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/refsrc/status/1527238287471292417</a>. I checked the company webpage and in fact they have closed all the open positions, there were like 6.<p>From all the rejections I’ve got so far this is the first time the reason is markets turmoil / recession threat. To be honest is my first time job hunting since I graduated in 2019.<p>Screen shots: <a href="https://t.co/wSx5IR44nK" rel="nofollow">https://t.co/wSx5IR44nK</a><p>Will be this the situation for most tech companies or just start ups? I know the unprofitable over valuated ones will most likely get rekt first but I wanna know if during recessions recruiting slows down even for big profitable companies.<p>What companies or roles will be more resilient?<p>And how as a SWE / tech industry professional, specially the ones starting their careers like me, can prepare?<p>I hope some experienced people in the industry can give some hope and advice. Is demoralizing to find out I spent 4 years in school just to get into a really harsh job market. First pandemic, then recession? F...