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Title: My name is Amar Kumar and I’m the founder of KaiPod Learning (<a href="http://www.kaipodlearning.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.kaipodlearning.com</a>). We provide a physical place for middle- and high- school students who go to online school to work on their classes, to interact with other students, and to get support from teachers.<p>Over the last 15 years I have been a school teacher, a principal, and most recently the Chief Product Officer of Pearson Online Schools. I have come to understand the unfortunate link between residential property values and educational outcomes. There are tens of millions of parents in poor quality school districts who can’t afford to relocate or pay for a private school. Online learning can help solve this problem for many kids. With public online schools, you can live anywhere and have access to a high-quality education.<p>For millions of kids, online school is the best school they’ve ever had. They get to study at their own pace without feeling rushed or bored, work without distractions, and not fear bullying. However, they lack enough opportunities to interact with other kids or get real-time help from their teachers. In addition, parents of online students usually have to stay home with them and support them with academic work, something that not all parents are able to do.<p>At Pearson, my team supported 150,000 students who went to school completely online before the pandemic even started. In conversations with many families, I came to understand what brought them to our schools and what could make their experience better. The idea to run small-group learning pods as supplements to online school was the highest-impact idea we studied. It was popular with parents and students and we knew we could improve customer conversion, student outcomes, and school retention if we did it. However, Pearson is a curriculum company and I couldn’t get this off the ground. As the pandemic started and the floodgates opened for online schooling, I decided to quit my job and build a startup to solve the problem.<p>We provide a physical place for online students to meet every day, interact with other kids, and get support from instructors. We match them to a learning center within 20 minutes of their home with 8-10 other children of similar age. These students come to our center anywhere from two to five days a week. While they are at our centers, they are supported by a “learning coach”, a former teacher who loves working with kids (but not grading homework or creating lesson plans!). Our coaches interact closely with the online school teachers and create strategies on how to support each child. This team approach is highly effective at addressing the academic, social, and emotional needs of each child.<p>During the day, kids set goals for themselves; work on their online courses; take part in enrichment activities such as art, music, and coding; and have plenty of time for free play and independent learning. Our centers are open until 5:30pm every day so families with working parents do not have to worry about arranging for after-school childcare. At the end of the day, our students go home without any homework to do or tests to study for. All academic work happens on-site with the support of the coach. When the family gets home, they can truly spend time together rather than nagging kids about doing homework.<p>We have a video showcasing some of our students, parents, and teachers: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujx_TAUP7uw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujx_TAUP7uw</a><p>Getting feedback from parents is really critical and I would love to get your ideas on what makes for a great school experience for your children. And, if you have experienced some form of remote or online learning in the past (i.e, before or during COVID), I’d love to hear more about what you liked about it and what could have been better!<p>Thank you in advance!
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>Over the last year we've been building ente[1], a privacy-friendly, easy-to-use alternative to Google Photos. We've so far built Android[2][3], iOS[4], web[5] apps that encrypt your files and back them up in the background. You can access these across your devices, and share them with other ente users, end-to-end encrypted. You can also use our electron app[6] to maintain a local copy of your backed up files.<p>We've built a fault-tolerant data replication layer that replicates your data to two different storage providers in the EU. We will be providing additional replicas as an addon in the future.<p>We're relying on libsodium[7] for performing all cryptographic operations. Under the hood it uses XChaCha20 and XSalsa20 for encryption and Argon2 for key derivation.<p>We have documented our architecture[8] and open-sourced our clients[9].<p>We did a soft-launch on r/degoogle[10] sometime ago, and have since then ironed out issues and polished the product.<p>But we are far from where we want to be in terms of features (object and face detection, location clustering, image filters, ...) and user experience. We are hoping to use this post as an opportunity to collect feedback from fellow hackers.<p>If there's anything we can do better, please let us know, we would like to.<p>Best,<p>- Vishnu, Neeraj, Abhinav<p>[1]: <a href="https://ente.io" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://ente.io/apk" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/apk</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ente.photos" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ente.photos</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ente-photos/id1542026904" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ente-photos/id1542026904</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://web.ente.io" rel="nofollow">https://web.ente.io</a><p>[6]: <a href="https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/latest" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/latest</a><p>[7]: <a href="https://libsodium.gitbook.io" rel="nofollow">https://libsodium.gitbook.io</a><p>[8]: <a href="https://ente.io/architecture" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/architecture</a><p>[9]: <a href="https://github.com/ente-io" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ente-io</a><p>[10]: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_an_endtoend_encrypted_alternative_to/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...</a>
Upvote: | 1180 |
Title: It seems like everyone is getting rich these days: index funds , crypto, stock trading, collectibles, Wall street bets, tech jobs, fang jobs, home prices, prestigious jobs, etc.<p>How do you prevent becoming discouraged or distracted when there seems like so many opportunities calling and so many people doing better
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: We received a notice that our domain (registered with https://domains.google/) will be suspended in 72 hours due to a spam complaint. Truth is, out of 205,169 emails sent, only 15 of them were marked as spam.<p>There is no one at Google who would help. And now we have less than 42 hours to resolve this issue. Failing that, our website will be cut off from more than 500,000 community members worldwide.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I thought of using Sign in with Google instead of creating my own authentication for a new project I am building. I don't want my users to remember yet another password. I myself have been using Google to sign into many of the new services these days. So I went about implementing Google Identity SDK. Easy to setup. but when it comes to validating the Google ID token on the server side, it requires Google Client SDK.<p>The php SDK I am using has 14800 files totaling 37 MB!<p>I just want to validate a user.<p>I tried removing unnecessary services from composer.json. Still 14000+ files.<p>I just want to validate a user.<p>This just reinforces my general dislike of frameworks. Just so much of unnecessary fluff that your project if never going to use.<p>I just want to validate a user. It shouldn't require including 14000 files in my project.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: A group of agencies in Sweden have set up a project to find cloud providers who can provide an alternative to MS Teams/O365 following the Schrems2 decision [1]. Similar work is ongoing in other EU countries. Will more US software providers find partners in the EU to run cloud services in a way that doesn't involve risk of handing over customer data under FISA 702? There is definitely a huge need for compliant cloud solutions in the EU.<p>[1]: https://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.754943/swedish-gov-teams-alternative
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: After reading through https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28336318, I was curious how much people charge for their services. I found someone charging $350 per hour for webflow consulting, which was quite a surprise to me (never imagined such high rates were possible).<p>What are some examples of high/very high consulting rates that you know of? What is the area of expertise in such cases?<p>Edit : I am more curious about one man shops (or very small firms) and individuals/freelancers. I know big consulting companies charge ungodly amounts of money while paying a fraction of it to their employees.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: VeriSign's price increase goes in effect September 1, 2021. This increase likely will be passed on by your registrar.<p>Good time to remind everyone that VeriSign has a monopoly granted by ICANN to raise prices indefinitely with zero competition.
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: I'm considering trying to move towards working as a developer for a database product. I'd like to get some info on what the day-to-day tasks are like for a developer of something like MongoDB, FoundationDB, CockroachDB, NoSQL alternatives... any type of data store really.<p>Some things in particular I'm trying to figure out:
* As with all dev work, a large portion of work is bug hunting, but what kind of bugs do DBs usually have to deal with?<p>* Do developers spend a lot of time on optimization or is this mostly just a concern that's figured out during initial development?<p>* What educational prereqs are there? Do employers (strongly) prefer a Masters or even PhD?<p>* How is the job market for this kind of work? Obviously demand is going to be much lower that your standard webdev job, but how is the demand/supply imbalance?<p>* What employers hire these developers? Is it basically just FAANG and specialty companies a la Cockroach Labs?<p>Thanks to anyone who takes the time to respond!
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: For those of you who use macOS or Windows as your primary OS, what’s keeping you (application/feature/environment) from making the switch?
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: Now, after latest announcement (https://www.docker.com/blog/updating-product-subscriptions/), I've started to wonder is there any good alternative for Docker?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA
when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is <i>not</i> an option,
include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn't a household name,
please explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about
something. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://findwork.dev/?source=hn" rel="nofollow">https://findwork.dev/?source=hn</a>, <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>,
<a href="https://hnhired.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hnhired.com/</a>, <a href="https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don't miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380659" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380659</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380660" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380660</a>
Upvote: | 355 |
Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.<p>Bonsai (YC W16) (<a href="https://www.hellobonsai.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.hellobonsai.com</a>) offers freelance contracts, proposals, invoices, etc.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:<p><pre><code> Location:
Remote:
Willing to relocate:
Technologies:
Résumé/CV:
Email:
</code></pre>
Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/" rel="nofollow">https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/</a>.
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: Any methodologies? Public guides?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: As a consumer, aren't you terrified of Plaid account verification approach?<p>Some time ago I wanted to connect my bank account to my old Coinbase account, once I chose my bank I was prompted to enter my online banking username and password. They use the service called Plaid, that requires your bank credentials (and one time code if 2F is enabled) to verify your checking account. I was able to go with ACH deposit verification route as an alternative, but it is not default approach anymore.<p>This seems like a security and privacy nightmare.
First, sharing your username and password is against the most basic principle we tell the users. Don't share your password! Even a text message with the verification code says not to share it! I'd be surprised if this also does not violate terms of services for online banking.
Second, according to Plaid help pages they store credentials if bank does not provide an API. Ideally, banks themselves should not store unhashed passwords, let alone third party apps.
Third, it is a privacy nightmare. With such unlimited scope, they scrape everything, your entire financial history is available. And this all for what? To instantly verify a bank account? Their help pages and some comments from the founders state that they don't share/sell your info without explicit permission. They aren't now, but will they later? What if their monetization strategy changes? What if their new owner has a different view on privacy? Or I move to the state that has no CCPA analogue? Is it another service where I need to make sure to opt out of sharing and keep an eye on upcoming TS changes and wonder for how long they are going to keep my data?<p>I dug a little bit and discovered that Plaid is used by many in fintech: Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, Betterment, you name it. Maybe I was living under a rock for too long, but this password sharing practice did not use to be mainstream. I have or had accounts with some of them and I think deposit verification used to be the way few short years back.<p>I know the US banks don't have any shared scoped authorization mechanism similar to OAuth2/OpenID Connect and there is no easy way to instantly verify the account. ACH deposit can take a week. Though do you really need to fund your Coinbase, Robinhood or Betterment account immediately, is a week later too late? Isn't the whole spiel of Betterment and the likes that "time in market" > "time the market", so a week later would not matter for your retirement? Sure, this approach can be sensible in some narrow use case, when you indeed want them to have that unfettered access. But for the majority of consumers, I don't see how it is worthy of forming such a dangerous habit. However, I almost am certain, for fintech services there is a significant drop in conversion and uptick in abandonment rate, when they need a customer to come back in few days to finish their account funding. Again, seems to be not enough for the industry to be complacent about it.<p>Note: this is not a critique of Plaid or other services, their security practices maybe excellent, their code reviewed, tested, audited by 3rd parties, etc and there is a limited scope when it is sensible, I am shocked that this becomes mainstream.<p>UPDATE: I am well aware of Mint and that it has been around for a while. The goal of Mint is to
aggregate and manage your finances from one place. It may be that narrow use case, where it can be justified given the current state of things. You want to give it full ongoing access, because of the value it brings you. My beef is with it being normalized for the sake of few point conversion increase in the use case, when it does not benefit the customer and another alternative exists.
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I've read designing data intensive systems and it covered distributed systems a bit.<p>I don't find most textbooks to be an actually good intro outside of a course setting. For example, I own Andrew Tannenbaum's Distributed System book and a few others of his. But his writing style is too dense for me to make enough progress without giving up.<p>What other books (probably not textbooks) do you recommend on distributed systems?
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Obviously HN is one, but I'm sure there are other independent forums with compelling content that still exist. Where do you spend your time online?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: A start up is very keen to hire me and are planning on making an offer. I am not being grandiose in saying I would be a good catch for them (they know it and I know it).<p>My position at present is that I very much enjoy my current job, they are very good at rewarding me and give a good level of autonomy to run my engineering team that I acquired and grew myself. I don't have anything to lose here, only (potentially) gain.<p>However the start up is pretty exciting and I know I could achieve a lot there. I would really enjoy the challenge.<p>However, the real aspect that would make the difference for me is company stock, to the point that if they sell the company I won't have to worry about paying off the mortgage on my house and get a decent slice for retirement and my kids education.<p>Now to my question, I am don't know jack about working out what would be a good amount of stock to shoot for. How would I go about establishing this? I figure I need to work out what the company could be worth and then consider what a percentage of options would provide.<p>Anyone have any experience they could share?
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: It's 2021 and I am still using my home-built NAS (FreeNAS!), but I am increasingly interested in reducing energy consumption and maintenance time (mostly to improve compatibility with the family life, which leaves me less time to tinker with hardware).<p>So I humbly ask the hivemind:<p>- what are good solutions for storing personal backup on-site (other than a bunch of external hard drives)?<p>- What are some caveats that I should avoid?<p>- Can I trust the 'standard' companies (Synology, QNAP, Seagate, ...) to keep my data sufficiently safe?<p>Strong opinions, war stories, and all other suggestions are highly welcome!
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: Thanks for reaching out to us about the recent bill in Australia. We love that our customers care about their digital rights and want to find out more about how companies are looking after their information.<p>The police can't intercept, access or modify your messages without us receiving a warrant, and we take our duty of care seriously. Fastmail responds to well formed warrants only and challenges requests for access that are inappropriate, either in scope (not adequately targeted), or depth (asking for information that seems out of proportion to what's being investigated). We will continue to do so, for any legislation that applies to us both now and in the future.<p>The new bill still doesn't allow 'trawling' for suspicious data: they can't request access to a wide variety of accounts hoping they'll come across something of interest. They need to have a particular account under suspicion and something that gives them grounds for that suspicion, and the offence in question needs to be suitably severe to be worth the intrusion.<p>Where we are permitted under a warrant, we will notify the accountholder of the access request, and due to our existing measures to help customers stay aware of any hackers compromising their account, police can't also enter your account without leaving evidence you can see.<p>What this means for you: Fastmail remains a privacy-first provider. We will comply with our legislated duties, while taking care to ensure that we do not act unless compelled by law and that all legislated preconditions have been properly satisfied. Your data remains under your control and you can rest comfortably knowing that your account won't get caught up in a surveillance net.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I used to focus on tech related stuff way too much. Once I balanced my life more with things like disc golf, indoor skydiving, cooking, among other things, I felt much more complete in life. What hobbies do you do outside of tech (this includes things like gaming)?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: The more I learn about the company the more I like it. The one thing that surprises me is they seem fairly unique in the marketplace. Solid Linux-first hardware, with a encryption/anti-surveillance focus. Curious for people's thoughts here.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: From a privacy perspective, how much does not signing into a Google account help at device setup?<p>Thinking about picking up a 5a but CalyxOS isn’t ready for it yet.
Upvote: | 165 |
Title: If there were a general-purpose OLTP SQL database that was developed today, what features or design decisions would it pick that PostgreSQL and MySQL cannot adapt for historic reasons?<p>Or put another way, what are some cutting edge OLTP database techniques/features/architectures that PostgreSQL and MySQL would have a hard time supporting?
Upvote: | 338 |
Title: We're a couple of software engineers who believe that to build great software you need to write good tests, but we also sympathise when engineers say things like:<p>- "Writing tests was too time consuming on my tight schedule", or<p>- "Unit tests don't catch enough bugs, so they're useless", or<p>- "I've inherited a legacy code base without tests and have no idea where to start"<p>To tackle this we're building Symbolica (https://www.symbolica.dev), a symbolic code executor [1], that lets you run your code for all possible inputs. This means you can do things like:<p>- Assert properties about your code and check that they hold for every conceivable input.<p>- Check that two implementations of the same function/method/program are equivalent, which is really useful if you're refactoring a legacy codebase without tests.<p>- Find out if your code will hit any undefined behaviours, e.g. divide by zero or out of bounds array access.<p>We're still really early in the development of this product, but we're excited to have built a working prototype of the symbolic executor for C programs. We wanted to get some feedback from potential early adopters so we've put up a code playground (https://www.symbolica.dev/playground) where you can try out Symbolica on C programs in the browser for free. We'd love people to give it a go and give us their thoughts.<p>Our plan is to build this out into a hosted cloud service that you can integrate into your DevOps pipeline (e.g. GitHub actions) so that you can run these symbolic tests on every CI build.<p>Further down the line we plan to add support for other languages too. We've currently got proof of concept implementations for Lisp and Python and will be looking into C++, Rust and .NET after. Of course we're always willing to prioritise a particular language if there's strong demand.<p>If you're interested in what we're building then please either message us at [email protected] or join the alpha waiting list if you want to get first access to our full offering once we launch that.<p>For those curious about how the executor works the core part of it is open source on GitHub (https://github.com/SymbolicaDev/Symbolica)<p>[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic\_execution
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: There are a few resources that really changed how I approach my job for the better, but that largely don't seem to stick with anyone else.<p>This made me curious about what unpopular resources I might be missing out on.<p>Doesn't have to be a book -- any resource or technique is fine, it was just easier to say 'book' in the title.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I'm preparing a ≈20min talk about opportunities in software to give at a London school with students aged 14-18. I want to give insights into the software industry which are relevant to the decisions students will be making: which subjects to study or focus on at school, whether to go to uni, but more generally how to invest time well by learning valuable skills and discovering what their strengths are and what they might like to do in the future. As part of my preparation, I'd like to collect some real examples of journeys people make from their teens into professional software roles, but also how programming skills may have served you well as a hobby or in roles that aren't primarily about developing software. What's your story?<p>Some questions I'm interested in are:
How did you first get into programming? Were any books, blogs, forums, or people particularly helpful for your growth? What is it about coding that got you hooked?<p>What is your experience with university? Did you get a degree, was it worth it, do you think it helped you find work, what did you love/hate about uni?<p>How did you get your first paid work (family & friends, internship, freelance, full-time)?<p>What do you do now and what do you love/hate about your job?<p>------
I work back end in Golang at a fintech, but I got into programming when I was homeschooled with ROBLOX and making iOS games with cocos2d before doing an MEng in Computing at Imperial College London. I really like making things, intellectual work, and collaborating with other people. I like the pay, that I can find remote work or move country if I want, that I'm always learning, and I have enough time and energy to pursue various hobbies. Sometimes work is tedious and I don't like sitting at a desk for 8 hours, but overall I love my job and want to help others find their way into similar roles if it's right for them.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Among the mega high-traffic websites reddit seems to be the slowest and most unreliable. Many times it simply won't load, or log you out for no reason. Why do you think reddit never manages to improve its infrastructure?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: This is London specific.<p>What was your total compensation (TC) last year, including breakdown into salary, stock bonus (if any), cash bonus (if any), or anything else (benefits, pension etc)? What is your job title, company, industry, or sector?
The rules are that any auxiliary information is welcome but optional (if you are worried someone will recognise you don’t give out too much) but top level posts have to have a number on them. Also specify curency if not £
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: What are the best practices for ditching screen time outside work?<p>No Social Media of any type<p>No Streaming anything, no web surfing, no consuming any media that requires a screen (phone, tablet, monitor, TV)<p>What are the alternatives?<p>Out and about, preferably in nature (and not drinking at a bar)<p>Reading a book, the old fashion way with ink on paper). Kindle might be OK, so a tablet, or computing device for reading. How about AudioBooks?<p>Writing? Analog/digital.<p>Meditation? Hello Zen!<p>Gym?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: I had an interview yesterday with Twitter for a senior software engineer role. I applied for the position about three months ago and after multiple rounds of screening, yesterday was the final round of technical questions. There were three parts with two person asking me questions in each part:<p>1) system design question<p>2) coding exercise<p>3) behavioral questions<p>I got a call today saying that I have been rejected. But I was also surprised that HR person gave me a feedback which usually never happens. I was told the first round and third round went great and they were really "impressed" with my answers. However, the second round I "didn't listen to interviewer's feedbacks" and I am "not proficient" in selected language and lastly said I should "apply to other teams". I thanked the HR person for their time and said goodbye.<p>After a few hours I started to think about the HR's feedback. It really hit me hard.<p>Throughout the interview, one of the interviewers used "hands up" feature of Google meet but I didn't hear the sound that he raised his hands. The other interviewer asks me question directly without using "hands up" feature to gain my attention. I tell this interviewer that I do not hear the sound and I do not get a notification that someone raised their hand as I am working on the code so please just ask your question instead of doing that. But it causes a misunderstanding.<p>Also, during the second half of the coding part, other interviewer said: "oh, he will be working in your team". Suddenly, I see a major change of attitude of that interviewer who is also senior engineer. He has been quiet before this point but now he starts nitpicking on my coding style, asking me explain the code even though I explained my code multiple times already, asks hypothetical questions all after my code has passed all the tests. This is at 40 minutes mark. Then he leaves for 7-10 minutes and comes back. During that time, I work on improving the code with the other interviewer who was polite and understanding. When he comes back he starts asking me questions about edge cases.<p>The second item HR said was I am not proficient in the selected language (Java). But I have been teaching (and TA) Data Structures with Java during my PhD studies for 2 years so I am very sure that's a made up complaint.<p>I may be wrong but I feel he thought I am going to replace him or work closely with him and doesn't like my attitude. Overall, I heard a lot of good things about work culture at Twitter but I feel disappointed.<p>Sorry for talking too much, I wanted to share my experience.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: A few days ago we got an email from HN user thehodge (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thehodge" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thehodge</a>), aka Dom Hodgson, telling us that HN's SSL cert was about to expire—as indeed it was. All the renewal notices had been going to Scott's old YC email, which no longer works.<p>Dom runs <a href="https://littlewarden.com/" rel="nofollow">https://littlewarden.com/</a>, which monitors sites for upcoming issues and lets you know when you're about to publicly embarrass yourself. In a twist on eat-your-own-dog-food (eat someone else's dog food as a service?), he had set up alerts for HN in their system. Lo and behold, it delivered the goods, and that is why you're reading HN as usual today instead of certificate scoldings, and therefore also why my ass is in a saved state, which is how I like it.<p>I figure the least we can do is proclaim our thanks, so all hail Dom and Little Warden! Yes, I know most of you can do this in 3 lines of Python and a cron job, and yes yes, there are other alert services—but only one has personally helped you waste time unimpeded on the internet. That is all.
Upvote: | 1314 |
Title: I am curious about the overall architecture of Hacker News. After reading the recent thread about it’s expiring certificates, and the linked comments, I searched but couldn’t find an exact answer. So, what kind of hardware and software stack does HN run? Are there any CI/CD tools, analytics, et cetera?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Looking for a book/textbook that teaches you a programming language through systems (or vice versa). For example, a book that teaches modern C++ by showing you how to program a compiler; a book that teaches operating systems and the language of choice in the book is Rust; a book that teaches database internals through Golang; etc. Basically, looking for a fun project-based book that I can walk through and spend my free time working through.<p>Any recommendations?
Upvote: | 204 |
Title: Do you use techniques like spaced repetition?
Do you prefer to learn from books, articles or videos?<p>What's your process?
Upvote: | 274 |
Title: Who was it that left an impression on you and potentially influenced the way you work? What did they do, how did they work, what habits did they have to earn that distinction?<p>Don't necessarily mean technical work, anything that would cause you to think of them.
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: I have the idea of an app that is mostly about communicating with an API on the WEB. It feels a considerable overkill for an Electron App. The size of a hello world app in Electron is 100x the size of my backend!<p>On the business side, I understand that many people on HN prefer to ship that spend time on technologies discussions.<p>But if you have the time, and your goal is to do something maintainable, reasonably close the most to the Desktop, and well-integrated to the OS, what tech/stack will you use?<p>Windows/Linux GTK/MacOS
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: I'm curious to hear anecdotes from people about real-world usage of GraphQL. Did the added complexity get offset by the benefits? Are you glad or regretful that you made the jump? Did you encounter any little-discussed benefits or costs? What kind of services architecture do you have behind it that influenced how useful it was?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I’m puzzled.<p>A typed, compiled language easy to program.<p>Why did Pascal fade instead of growing?
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: The company I work in is experiencing significant growth, and adding new team members all the time. I'd love to hear from people who feel they have nailed their new team member onboarding (especially to technical teams). What makes it work? What did you try that didn't work?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Like the title says I am graduating with a CS degree soon. As I am in my final year, I am getting a bit worried that my resume is kind of uninteresting.<p>I've applied at probably 3-4 dozen places through my school's job board over the past month and have received zero responses. These are applications for entry level and internship positions. I'm worried my resume just doesn't standout. I only have a couple projects under my belt and no other professional experience.<p>How can I stand out to recruiters and employers? What can I do to improve my resume? I've worked with many different technologies but I'm afraid because I haven't bothered to work on mastering any of them that an employer wouldn't wanna take the risk on me being able to learn their stack.
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: I have started building an MVP by myself for a project that I've been exploring for a while . To make this project happen I picked up enough of NodeJS,React and GraphQL in order for me to be able to build it , but now I have just started to design it and I'm simply dreading CSS. Is there any way I could bypass this boring and annoying part of building the MVP? Thank you!
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: Asking this to read about some personal stories and/or advice. I read a lot about people transitioning from regular tech/programming jobs to maybe quants/finances etc., but rarely about arts (literature, music, sociology, history etc.).<p>I got into a CS curriculum right after finishing my high school on a whim; I'd always wanted to pursue a career in literature/writing/journalism from a younger age (but couldn't due to personal reasons). Now that I'm almost 27 and have been in the industry for ~5 years now, I'm wondering if I should decide on taking the plunge, or at least plan for it... since I do feel the friction in transitioning getting a bit higher as I spend more time in this field.
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: Looking for a book/textbook that teaches you a logic building skills through real-projects for fresher programmers.
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I've been a fan of the [redacted] podcast for years. Within the several weeks, the [redacted]-based host [redacted] has become increasingly manic, culminating in paranoid messages on his Twitter[1] and a 4 minute episode today threatening Mark Zuckerberg and accusing him of ruining his life. I don't know [redacted] personally, but it appears he his having a serious mental health crisis and may potentially harm himself or others. If anyone in [redacted] knows [redacted], can someone go check on him and get him help?<p>[1] [redacted]<p>[2] [redacted]
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: These days I only see videos about cracking the coding interview on YouTube; after a point it seems to get boring. Have you felt the same way? That is good content on software development isn't present?
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Recently I've been really curious how engineers take ad-hoc notes throughout their work days.<p>Personally I've been using Obsdian.md and creating a new file for each day that I work.<p>Anyone using a specific tool, or maybe even a physical notebook?<p>Follow up question is whether you ever reference your notes or go back and look through them again.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Hi, I live in the UK (England) and rent. My current lettings agent inspects the house every 90 days. When doing so, they do not just take photos of damage, they take photographs of every room from the doorway, in high resolution, with a "special app".<p>Edit extra information: I have a good relationship with them, and have asked them the obvious questions while also posting here. The agents that do it seem to just be doing what they are told, there doesn't seem to be malice. However it is invasive.<p>My curiosity is peaked every time, as I simply do not understand how this is legal under current data protection measures.<p>It's not mentioned in the contract, the contract only mentions damage photographs. They do not tell you which app, who creates it, where the photographs go, for how long, if they go to the cloud, or which cloud. Or even which country.<p>My thoughts are: If you gave me several years of photographs, of every room, every three months I could discern: Political choices. Gender. Age. Sexuality. Interests. Hobbies. Relationship status. Disability status. Approximate income. Field(s) of work. Illnesses. And then how those change over time.<p>Which is what makes me think "How is this legal?".<p>Edit extra: Also, are they not risking everything business wise? Giant fines? Rogue employees feeding criminals good targets? I just don't get the logic of it at all from a business perspective.<p>Thoughts? Thank you.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I still feel like it was a better communication tool compared to the smartphone touchscreens of today. Really miss the good old days.
Upvote: | 190 |
Title: I do not have any direct experience with this but would like to get a feel for the degree to which the anti-conservative narrative is true from people with first or second hand experience? Where is this heading?<p>Note: This is not an implication for or against my political beliefs.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Do you love tech but hate tech interviews with a burning passion?<p>It really rubs my fucking rhubarb the wrong way when I am in a technical interview and the interviewer starts asking me some random assed questions either technical or voodoo doodoo mumbo jumbo personality type questions.<p>I understand they have to ask something in a interview but its the questions in of themselves that they choose that has me hanging the phone up on their hot ear.<p>After years in the industry I have come to the conclusion I am actually no longer employable! I am crankier than bag of cats on their period!<p>Where can i get a job as a programmer where class A assholes can apply? I mean with all this diversity and inclusion woke culture surely they can include me in their inclusion diversity quota . Assholes need to eat too you knoe, and the garbage cans are slim pickings these days i'm only getting pure slope now with all the grabbing hands!
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Just curious and a bit frustrated about this. I had to buy a Windows laptop, and there is no one that is even close to be as good as the Macbook considering the touch pad. Why? I mean this has been the case for years.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Does anyone know of any short or long term neurological effects (positive/negative) of computer programming/engineering?
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: For a decade I have been advocating for the government of Los Alamos County in New Mexico to help with county wide broadband. The coincidence of my renewed effort, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a sympathetic County Council is yielding progress. At the direction of the County Council, the County staff has a job posting for a Broadband Manager. (See the posting at <a href="https://selfservice.losalamosnm.us/ess/employmentopportunities/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://selfservice.losalamosnm.us/ess/employmentopportuniti...</a>) The staff is posting the opening for a second time because the first time, only one applicant met even the minimum qualifications.<p>My questions for Hacker News are:<p>1. Does the posting look realistic?<p>2. Does it describe someone who could get a community broadband network built?<p>3. How can the County get qualified people to apply?<p>I've been pushing on this issue since 2011. I went so far as serving on the County Board of Public Utilities and becoming its Chair in 2015. Finding that the Board had no authority over the issue, I turned to political organizing and set up the website blabnow.blog. On that site, you can see what I think we need a Broadband Manager to do at <a href="https://www.blabnow.blog/los-alamos-broadband-manager-position/" rel="nofollow">https://www.blabnow.blog/los-alamos-broadband-manager-positi...</a><p>Beyond asking for thoughts on the Broadband Manager position, I would like to read general comments on:<p>4. How to get local governments to take responsibility for modern communication utility monopolies?
Upvote: | 171 |
Title: Hello everyone, I’m Hari, and I’m a serial Microstartup Maker. In the last 4 years, I made:<p>• <a href="https://visalist.io" rel="nofollow">https://visalist.io</a>, an all-in-one visa requirements website for travelers with 300K Monthly Active users<p>• <a href="https://anexplorer.co" rel="nofollow">https://anexplorer.co</a>, an all-one File manager for phones, watches, TV's and tablets on android with crossed 1M downloads recently<p>• <a href="https://acrypto.io" rel="nofollow">https://acrypto.io</a>, a cryptocurrency app to track and get real-time alerts with 200K downloads<p>• <a href="https://simpleops.io" rel="nofollow">https://simpleops.io</a>, performance, web vitals and API monitoring tool for websites with 2000 users<p>I started my indie maker journey to become financially independent and travel the world. I had a simple and small goal, build things I wanna use and make $100/day. It started slow, I had started building and improving while traveling, it took a while but I crossed $100, then I crossed $200/day. Then pandemic hit and I went back to $100/day, but after 6 months and building a new microstartup, it slowly picked pace and again crossed $200/day then I crossed $300/day, now I'm close to $400/day and my next goal is $500/day.<p>If the momentum keeps up, I will hit $150K this year.<p>AMA!<p>And if you wanna know the learning that I share, follow my journey on <a href="https://twitter.com/1HaKr" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/1HaKr</a>.
Upvote: | 167 |
Title: Looking for tips to live a healthier lifestyle. I am a software engineer that spends pretty much all day at my desk.<p>While I have normal weight, I have literally no stamina or endurance to exercise. I have tried both cardio and weights, but nothing ever seems to stick. I am battling burnout so that makes this even tougher<p>I mainly want become fit enough to run 5ks / half marathons by the end of this year and just feel healthy and fit in general for being able to do more outdoor stuff like hiking. (If it matters I gender identify as female.)<p>Also looking for tips on good diet plans or other tips for living a much healthier lifestyle.
Upvote: | 131 |
Title: I was playing around with fundamental constants and out popped 13.8 billion light years. What is going on?<p>the wavelength of an electron mass photon / (2pi)
*
the charge radius of a proton
/
the black hole radius of a proton
=
13.8 billion light years<p>((h / (m_e * c * 2pi)) * (h / (m_p * c * pi/2)) / (2G * m_p / c^2))
=
13.8 billion light years<p>https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28h+%2F+%28m_e+<i>+c+</i>+2pi%29%29+<i>+%28h+%2F+%28m_p+</i>+c+<i>+pi%2F2%29%29+%2F+%282G+</i>+m_p+%2F+c%5E2%29+to+light+years&assumption=%22UnitClash%22+-%3E+%7B%22G%22%2C+%7B%22GravitationalConstant%22%7D%7D&assumption=%22UnitClash%22+-%3E+%7B%22m_e%22%2C+%7B%22ElectronMass%22%7D%7D&assumption=%22UnitClash%22+-%3E+%7B%22c%22%2C+%7B%22SpeedOfLight%22%7D%7D&assumption=%22UnitClash%22+-%3E+%7B%22h%22%2C+%7B%22PlanckConstant%22%7D%7D
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: These things have been on the market for many years yet there doesn't seem to be any open firmware. I want to use content recognition capability to auto-mute commercials. I want to disable all telemetry so I can trust my own device. How would the difficulty of developing such a thing compare with projects like dd-wrt?
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: Everyone's heard the conspiracy that Facebook and Instagram record audio from your phone's microphone and use it to recommend you advertising...<p>Is there any evidence of this? or are there any groups monitoring the appstore binaries to tell if they actually sending voice data over the wire?
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: Nbb is a scripting environment that aims to make it easier to create ad-hoc scripts on Node.js using ClojureScript. It does not need a JVM for compilation: just use npm and you're good to go. Code is interpreted instead of compiled, which for scripting is usually ok. If your project outgrows the scripting phase, you can migrate to a proper ClojureScript compiler setup. Give it a try if you're curious about ClojureScript.<p><a href="https://github.com/borkdude/nbb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/borkdude/nbb</a>
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: Several years ago, from within Gmail, I could:<p>* Make a phone call<p>* Send an SMS<p>* Send a Google chat<p>* Start a video call with my parents<p>Now, all of this has been split up, and to start a video call, I have to start a video and <i>send an email</i> inviting someone. SMS has been split up into a separate web app that won't work without my phone being present.<p>How did it come to pass that they took an easy, integrated system and mangled it so badly? I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it mostly just worked, and was easy to use.
Upvote: | 166 |
Title: I've noticed a ton of crypto scams on YouTube recently, many of which are using the names of legitimate channels (like SpaceX), re-posting content from those channels and promoting scams – usually in the form of "send me [Elon Musk, Jeff Bezoz, etc] BTC, and I'll send you 2x back".<p>It seems reasonable to expect one or two of these to slip through the cracks now and then, but over the past few months, I've had YouTube "recommend" these to me, again and again, multiple times per day. I've often reported them as spam, only to have YouTube <i>recommend the exact same video to me a few minutes later</i>. I don't know anyone who would fall for the scams in the videos, but they've become so common now that it's getting <i>really</i> annoying.<p>You can't tell me that they're too difficult to distinguish from legitimate content. Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all (heck, I could write a couple of regular expressions that would do the trick and have 0 false positives), which leads me to wonder: why is YouTube promoting these videos? At this point, it feels like they must have some incentive <i>not</i> to shut them down, because it would require deliberate effort to have <i>any</i> form of spam control while also somehow letting these through.<p>Am I the only one noticing this?
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: The title says it all. To me, the most important component of a wiki is search. With that said, why is confluence wiki search basically unusable?<p>(by unusable, I mean I can never find the page I am looking for when I search. Basically, I have to maintain my own wiki of important links I may need to reference in the future)
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: I work as a software engineer at a big company and want to actively and directly in some way help fight climate change. Volunteering part time, maybe working full time on whatever it is if I can support myself. I feel like my skills could be useful but I’m not sure what problems specifically are important and relevant to my skillset.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I own a couple thousand books. I'd like to catalog them all. I have a child who is a broke college student, so I was thinking of paying them to do it over break.<p>What's the most efficient way to do this from an INTAKE standpoint? I need to get all the ISBNs into a database of some kind.<p>(The only other info I need is whether or not it's a hardcover or software -- that's something only the physical copy can tell me, everything else I should be able to get from the ISBN.)<p>I don't want my daughter to have to find and key all the ISBNs in. Can they be scanned in some way? Is the ISBN in the UPC code? Could I buy a cheap bar code scanner and just have her scan away?
Upvote: | 177 |
Title: I'm a single 31yo guy looking move somewhere new for 1-2 years. I'd like to have a studio/1br to myself, cook most meals, use public transit (no car), and have enough of a budget left for a decent social life. I'm pretty frugal by nature, but enjoy the odd creature comfort. Any recommendations for cities that would satisfy this lifestyle on $2k USD per month (net)? My budget isn't fixed, so can always go a bit higher, but would prefer to stay at/under $2k if possible. Thanks!<p>Some places I had in mind: Athens, Belgrade, Bucharest, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Mexico City. Anyone have experience with any of them?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Hi HN, we are Frank and Jay and we are working on a better way to deploy Next.js apps to AWS: https://serverless-stack.com/examples/how-to-create-a-nextjs-app-with-serverless.html<p>We are the founders of SST, an open source framework that makes it easy to build serverless apps on AWS: https://github.com/serverless-stack/serverless-stack<p>We found that many people in the community were looking for a better way to deploy Next.js apps to their own infrastructure and they were unhappy with the options. These were not easy to customize (Amplify Next.js) or would pass your code and credentials via a 3rd party service (Serverless Next.js component). So we decided to fix it.<p>There are a couple of things to note, specifically the AWS integration.<p>- Completely open source and free<p>- Deploys directly to your AWS account<p>- Import environment variables from your AWS services<p>- Easily manage permissions to your AWS resources<p>- Works with any CI service, supports PR/preview deployments<p>- Uses AWS CDK to define your infrastructure as code<p>We wrote about how to get started and compared the various deployment options: https://serverless-stack.com/examples/how-to-create-a-nextjs-app-with-serverless.html. You can also check out the docs: https://docs.serverless-stack.com/constructs/NextjsSite<p>We'd appreciate if you took it for a spin and gave us some feedback!
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I know of lobsters, reddit, and metafilter.
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: For the past weeks I've been receiving emails that are pretty obviously spam. Here's one I just got:<p>sender: Динасий Колпаков <[email protected]>
subject: Q7425 7235 F0 8741
(empty body)<p>They all have similar formats, with a .htm attached file with ridiculous names like "Elon secret invitation" or "how to get free bitcoin".<p>They are all look like 90's era spam. Yet not only aren't they caught in the spam filter, they arrive to my main inbox, they aren't even classified as promotions or anything.<p>I can also see a long CC list, since it's not hidden.<p>Are any of you also having a similar problem?
Upvote: | 575 |
Title: My background:<p>I'm a 25 year old Indian software developer working in India.<p>As for my education, I actually studied in the United States for my MS in Computer Science (from a large public university; not ivy league), and is one of the rare Indian students who actually returned to India immediately after I got my degree. I cannot pinpoint exactly why I returned; it was a combination of me being an introvert + I really felt like I didn't belong there. (Don't get me wrong here — all Americans (and non Americans, for that matter) I met in USA were wonderful nice kind people; it's just, I didn't belong there).<p>After returning back to India, I got a software engineering job which I would've gotten anyway even if I never went to America (I try not to think too much about this).<p>I have 2.5 years of work experience, and at work I do Laravel for the most part, with occasional Python and Go. If I may say so myself, I'm an expert in Laravel, great with python, and just a beginner in Go. I'm constantly learning and improving myself.<p>I work on a specific product (that our company sells to many other companies; basically what I'm saying is, this product is not something a specific client asked us to build — it is a web application we built and sell and make money from), ie., I'm NOT a consultant programmer or anything like that.<p>I've become good enough at my current job that it's no longer stressful.<p>I'm making decent money (decent enough for a single guy living in a tier-2 city in India), and I don't have much expenses. No loans or mortgages or crap like that.<p>My problem is that I don't know where to go to from here. Like, I'm in a good, comfortable place. I want to get to a better, even more comfortable place, and I don't know what to do.<p>I've considered applying to other jobs, but the work environment in most other places around here is hectic and is not worth with going to. And most other jobs here are those consultancy/outsourcing type jobs which I'm not keen on doing. Also, I doubt if any of those would be intellectually stimulating.<p>I tried my luck applying to FAANG companies, and well, I didn't get them. Unlike previous years, this year I didn't even get a callback after I applied (I used to get to the interview stages). Maybe they decided I might never improve lmao.<p>Perhaps I should move abroad? But where to? Going to USA is out of the question with the H1B lottery and associated crapshoot that I don't want to subject myself to. Plus, that's a country I choose to return from.<p>Or perhaps I should try to get away from my web developer job and get into something else?<p>Let's see. Consider machine learning. I'm good at math, yet I had an extremely difficult time in my artificial intelligence class; therefore I might end up being bad at ML, but who knows. Although there's plenty of ML jobs here, it's difficult to get those jobs if you're not already in ML. Hard to get my foot in the door.<p>I have more interest in type systems and programming language theory and things like that. While I'm not an expert, I know little of Haskell and Racket, and I think I'd enjoy doing more of those in a professional capacity. But then again, the job market for those kinds of things is next to nil here. A career at Jane Street interests me more than a career at Google, but I don't think I'm great enough for them to move me to one of their offices abroad (they don't have offices in India).<p>Should I learn ML/Data Science and get into that? Should I move abroad? Should I do anything else?<p>So, I'm asking for general career and life advise here. I don't have any active pressing problems, but my life is just meh. Borderline depressing.<p>Thanks for reading thus far, and sorry if I wasted your time.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: A new major release, with these significant changes:<p><pre><code> - cp has changed how it handles data
- enables CoW by default (through FICLONE ioctl),
- uses copy offload where available (through copy_file_range),
- detects holes differently (though SEEK_HOLE)
- This also applies to mv and install.
- utilities are more tuned to the hardware available
- wc uses avx2 instructions to count lines
- cksum uses pclmul instructions for --algorithm=crc
- Other digest tunings remain delegated to libcrypto
- More amalgamation of utilities
- cksum now supports the -a option to select any digest.
- This is the preferred interface, rather than sha*sum etc.
- This is similar to the amalgamation of encoding utilities
introduced in the basenc command in v8.31.
</code></pre>
Details at
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils-announce/2021-09/msg00000.html
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: I recently read a short piece about using Oracle’s always free as a VPN. What other cool projects have you run out of any cloud/hosting provider’s always free offerings? (Pour one out for Angelfire and Geocities)
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: I feel like for the past 2-3 years you can't really rely on Amaozn anymore. Reviews are mostly fake, many deliveries are either broken or counterfeit...
What happened?
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: I am an individual contributor in 40's. Have always been a top performer. A few months ago, I sensed that I am being pushed out. But I pretended that, I am unaware of it, since I wanted to focus my career. Now, this has started to impact my performance rating. I was under the impression, I was being targeted. Recently I realised that, its happening with a lot of other senior people too. Looks like they no longer value the senior people. This has really upset me, since I was very loyal to the team. I am not able to focus on anything.<p>I am thinking about the possible options. One option is to continue, (by doing the minimum required) till they lay me off. But I dont know if they can also resort to the informal layoff, by asking me to look for a job. The advantage in this option is that, this gives me the time to explore building something on my own. But it will definitely hurt my self respect. The other option is to start applying outside right away. But I have a lot of concerns. I know the market is hot for 2-10 years profile. Not sure about the senior level jobs. Even if I get selected for interviews, rejection will further demotivate me. I havent given interviews for a long time. I am very good at design, latest technologies etc. But I hate leetcode kind of interviews. The other problem is that, in a new company/job, I wont be able to focus on other things since the expectation will be high. I need to prove again. And eventually one will have the same problem no matter which company. One good thing in this option is that, I can prove a point.<p>Have you been in this situation?. How do we go about handling it?. Till now, I havent discussed it with my manager. Because, I fear, he might openly tell the truth. I would appreciate, if you someone could help me.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Whole language is an approach to, or attitude toward
learning that sees language as a whole entity, and writing, speaking,
reading, and listening should be integrated when learned.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: For context, I am a manager at a medium sized enterprise software company, I worked as an engineer for 10+ years and took over managing the team. We have 80+ engineers in the entire org. broken down into smaller teams of 5-10. My team specifically has about 15 engineers broken down into teams of 3-5.
We have a very challenging roadmap and often we end up delivering 20-30% of what's planned for the year. One thing that's often asked is how do we estimate, how do we predict when some feature will be done.
We are close to 20+ years into the usage of Agile methods, there is the school of thought who prefer to use time based estimates, some try story points and then there is the No Estimates movement.
I am trying to see what's considered as a best practice to start something for the team in 2021.
Upvote: | 127 |
Title: My work often involves starting with creating small prototypes that show a concept or solve a very specific problem. That prototype solves that problem, the client is happy and wants to extend it. The software grows from there, usually one feature at time. For these projects, the client usually doesn't know what comes next until they need it. This extension can sometimes be immediate, or could be years after the fact.<p>"Common wisdom" states that the prototype should be thrown away when the concept is proved and the funds come in, but for me there is never a point at which that makes sense. As I mentioned, it's one feature at a time.<p>I feel I do a <i>good</i> job at designing those prototypes in a decoupled, extensible way. I think about what direction the project could take, and try to put the right levels of abstraction in. Despite my best efforts, oftentimes I'm rewriting existing chunks of code to incorporate the new features because I chose a certain structure that no longer makes sense.<p>What I'm looking for is to improve this part of my programming. Are there any good resources on designing software that will grow/evolve over time? Software that never have a project plan for more than a few months or a few features?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>Over the last 15 months, two friends and I developed the music recording app we felt we wanted based on our own needs as musicians. It's called Tape It [1] and has just recently hit the Apple App Store [2].<p>We put a lot of effort into a good UX to help musicians really focus on playing their instrument instead of pretending to be a recording engineer. The app records in stereo on newer iPhones (although that's a premium feature; the free version only records in standard mono audio quality).<p>I would be really grateful for advice from this community on how to best approach marketing. We had a great TechCrunch article covering our launch [3], and we posted it on various music websites. Turns out advertising on Google or Apple Search is a dark art, though. We have some good ideas for developing a good social media presence, but they will take time.<p>Please hit us with feedback, opinions and advice that you think a young indie company like us can use at this point :). And of course, please go and try the app!<p>Best,<p>Thomas<p>[1] <a href="https://tape.it" rel="nofollow">https://tape.it</a><p>[2] <a href="https://get.tape.it" rel="nofollow">https://get.tape.it</a><p>[3] <a href="https://tcrn.ch/3nbODHD" rel="nofollow">https://tcrn.ch/3nbODHD</a>
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: I've realized that when I have a super productive day the next day or two after that I'm not as energetic and can't do as much. Is this something that other people face? If so is it because you exhaust yourself on your energetic day and need rest? or is it just random and some days you have a great night sleep and are well rested therefore you have a lot of energy?<p>I have nothing against incorporating rest in my schedule to be more productive, but I'm wondering if going all out and then resting and recharging is better or worse than limiting yourself on your energetic day to not exhaust yourself (kinda amortizing your energy). I'm also not sure if the amortization strategy has the same effect. Maybe I need to try it and see.
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: Searching for "Show HN" posts (using hn.algolia.com) reveals a sad story: Many of them are gone. I wonder what happens to Shown HNs, esp. the ones that are featured on HN, but then end up not existing anymore. Is it the server costs? Do they sell to other companies? Did the developer pass away and so did the link?
Upvote: | 284 |
Title: For the past couple of weeks, I've been suffering an absolute inability to be productive at work. I mean spending the whole day staring at the screen not writing a single line of code.<p>At first I thought it was a problem of attention, since I was being distracted by literally anything, from a text to street noise. But even removing all distractions and putting on some noise cancelling headphones won't do the trick. I just feel... unable to start.<p>It's a feeling that's really difficult to explain. Like the feeling that keeps you from jumping into a swimming pool when you're at the edge. I don't find work unpleasant, not the tasks that I have in front of me difficult, and I'm not particularly bored, or tense, or anything. I just can't do it.<p>Is this normal? Any of you have any idea about how to deal with this problem?
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: My name is Brian Fioca and I’m the founder of RescueTime (<a href="https://www.rescuetime.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.rescuetime.com</a>). We help people who work on computers understand their time, be more focused, and feel less overwhelmed. Although we got started back in W08, we’ve entirely rewritten our product to focus on wellness and balance in this new age of working from home, and it’s this new version I want to tell you about today.<p>In 2008, we set out to answer the question, "where did my time go?" Those were the years of Web 2.0, and applications like Mint and Google Analytics were our inspiration. We spent years perfecting the ability to help people understand where their time goes, but people often told us to help them work smarter, not harder. Over the years, we switched to fully remote work ourselves, and found it's more important to build good habits and set healthy boundaries than to measure where your time goes—we’ve seen how that can be counterproductive when it leads to lack of balance. So although we started in the productivity/quantified-self space, we no longer think in terms of maximizing productivity.<p>When most people started working remotely or from home, and with the world unlikely to revert to exactly the way it was before, we decided to rewrite RescueTime to reflect this new thinking. Unlike our original version, the new RescueTime is designed to be used every day. Instead of weekly reports we give you daily forecasts, progress meters, nudges, and report cards. Our goal is to solve the pain that knowledge workers have about feeling overwhelmed, distracted, and unable to set healthy boundaries while working from their computers.<p>There's no one-size-fits-all way to achieve work/life balance. We have over a decade of experience analyzing millions of (anonymous and aggregated) users' work habits and the use patterns of applications and websites for work purposes. This has given us a vast and unique historical knowledge engine backed by statistics which we rely on to identify individual needs and give useful, personalized help. You fill out a survey that asks you questions like, “are you a manager or an individual contributor?” and, “how many hours are in your target work day?” and we match your answers against historical data to give you a personalized “Focus Goal”, taking into consideration meetings and your work week schedule. We then help you navigate each day, alerting you when you're distracted, helping you protect focused work time, and letting you know when you can stop working for the day.<p>Some of this is counterintuitive. For example, our decade’s worth of data has taught us quite consistently that the average knowledge worker spends 2-3 hours a day in focused work activities on their computer. Most people believe that the average is a lot higher, and therefore assume it should be a lot higher for them, leading to stressful feelings of inadequacy. Our data even shows if you spend too much time on focused work without sufficient recharge time, you will burn yourself out. We also know that it's normal for knowledge workers to spend 2 hours per work day on personal tasks or away from their computer. It's just as important to have space to be able to think creatively as it is to have focused time.<p>While building our new version, we decided that if our product really could do what we said it could do, we as a company should be able to switch to a 4-day (32 hour) work week. We even designed our personalization flow to support this. Using the new RescueTime, we've continued to be able to accomplish the same (or more) amount of work as we had when we were working 5 days a week!<p>Unlike simple Pomodoro timers, website blockers, or time trackers, we combine technologies into a holistic solution that, more like a fitness or mindfulness app, guides you into setting good habits and boundaries for every work day. Unlike other productivity tools, we understand the habits of all types of knowledge workers and can provide contextual advice about how to make the best use of your time, instead of just letting you know that you've spent more or less in different areas. We’re less "Get Things Done" and more "Get to do More of What You Love."<p>RescueTime is a small application that runs in your Menu Bar or Task Tray that keeps an eye on the applications and websites you're using throughout the day. It knows when you're in work mode, what you consider focused work, meetings, and personal activities, and gives you advice on how to make the most out of your day. When it recognizes you're in a good zone for focused work, it lets you shield yourself from distractions (like social media or news). When you've hit your goal of focused work, it lets you know that you can probably stop working for the day. It's even smart enough to know that if you have a lot of meetings in a given day, your chances of meeting your focused work goal are lessened, and that's ok.<p>RescueTime is best for people who feel overwhelmed with their workload but want to be more efficient, value their free time and want to have more of it, struggle with staying focused and avoiding distractions, or struggle with separating work time from personal time. It’s especially good for knowledge workers who want to work less in their free time, especially remote workers. If that sounds like you, we’d love for you to give it a try — we have a free 2 week trial.<p>Here’s a quick walkthrough video if you want to see it in action: <a href="https://vimeo.com/606883007" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/606883007</a> and we’d love to hear from you about your thoughts on productivity and wellness in this new world of new ways most of us find ourselves working.
Upvote: | 207 |
Title: I have really not put much effort into my landing page because I have been working head down on the project.<p>I think I have lost a lot of potential opportunity to collect an email from interested people.<p>I know I should probably have: a headline, maybe a sub headline, a call to action, some features, some testimonials, and a second call to action at the bottom.<p>I am curious if there is one thing that would make a real difference on a landing page.<p>What is your best tip based on your own experience with landing pages?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: HN- you are the community that convinced me to get into startups. I wanted to come back and share what the experience of building a company has been like from inception to public listing. I'll be here for a couple hours to answer your questions. Ask me anything.
Upvote: | 416 |
Title: I am aged 11 and founder of <a href="https://sprout9.net/" rel="nofollow">https://sprout9.net/</a> a platform for students to find great tutors.<p>Please forgive me if I get this wrong and post it incorrectly.<p>I would like fellow hackers to give me some constructive feedback on my MVP please. Ideas and suggestions as how I can improve my version 1.0 and how I can get the word out so I can help many students as possible.<p>Thanks alot!
Azaan
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: I have used scrum and I dont see it really helps people build the right product. There is so much jargon and cruft around it; planning poker, story points, scrum master etc..<p>Software quality of what is built in the scrum way seems poor as it does local optimization and doesnt focus on long term.. seems like some thing that would work for consultancies the best?<p>Simple Kanban seems more effective, do you feel the same way? Am I doing scrum wrong? Is scrum built to ensure that program managers / product managers have something to do?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I just upgraded my 7 year old iPhone 6S to iOS 15 and discovered that Safari Extensions now lets you block YouTube ads if you use YouTube via safari. This is one of the things I used android as my media consumption device and glad to see iOS allowing it too.
I used “Adblock Pro” which I got for free from App Store (I am not affiliated with them). Other adblocker should work too.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA
when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is <i>not</i> an option,
include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn't a household name,
please explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about
something. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://findwork.dev/?source=hn" rel="nofollow">https://findwork.dev/?source=hn</a>, <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>,
<a href="https://hnhired.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hnhired.com/</a>, <a href="https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don't miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28719317" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28719317</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28719319" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28719319</a>
Upvote: | 375 |
Title: Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:<p><pre><code> Location:
Remote:
Willing to relocate:
Technologies:
Résumé/CV:
Email:
</code></pre>
Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/" rel="nofollow">https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/</a>.
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: I'm curious about this for myself and wondered what others here do.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Hi,<p>I've been recently exposed to some informational systems where all the domain data was modeled as one graph instead of a set of inter-related tables.<p>I worked with RDBs (primarily Postgres) for 5+ years and I cannot say that it ever felt wrong, but the more I think about modeling data as graphs, the more it makes me confused why it's not the default way.<p>Graphs seemed to be:
(1) Easier to scale (both storage-wise and complexity-wise).
(2) Closer to how we model the world in our minds, hence easier to reason about.
(3) Easier to query (felt more like GraphQL than SQL if it makes any sense).<p>The way I see it, there are two major ways to connect singular entities in a data model:
1. Lists (aka tables) that allow you to sort, filter, and aggregate within a set of entities of the same kind.
2. Relations (aka graph edges or foreign keys) to connect singular entities of different kinds.<p>... And I can imagine relational DBs being List-first Relation-second, and graph DBs being the opposite. But maybe that's too much of a simplification.<p>Anyway, looking back at different domains I worked with, it felt like I had spent much more time working with relations than with lists.<p>Another signal: I have an intern developer, and it took him 1 minute to understand the basics of how graphs work, but then I spent two hours explaining why we needed extra tables for many-to-many relations and how they worked.<p>Any thoughts? What am I missing? Are RDBs the default way mostly due to historical reasons?<p>Discussion on this topic that I could find: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541453
Upvote: | 233 |
Title: Hey, all.<p>Have you ever noticed people who you regarded as smart/intelligent, show themselves not to be that smart when they talk about something you know a lot about?<p>Say, you come to Hackernews/Reddit and usually see people on these sites as knowledgeable people. But when they talk about a topic you know very well, you realize they aren't that smart.<p>And, if this happens to the topics you know a lot about, what about the other topics you don't know much about? Are they wrong about those too?<p>So my question is: is there a name for this "effect", that you "lose trust" on someone you regarded as knowledgeable when they talked about something you know well?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Asking kind of for fun, kinds of for serious :)
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Is HN slow today, or is it just me
I loging in from Canada
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Hacker News (this site) seems to be going down today just like facebook. Is there a massive DDOS attack occurring or just a co-incidence?
Upvote: | 371 |
Title: If someone is a less able, cognitively impaired, or perhaps very young - It would be good to see what advice HN would give them for protecting their data from ransomware, theft, or disaster.
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed by the JavaScript ecosystem and 'needing' to keep up with the latest tools/frameworks/libraries? I have read a lot about new things like esbuild, Vite, Nuxt, and many more, but between my 3 kids and full-time job as a developer I have almost no time to learn them, and choosing 'what' to learn often feels overwhelming because of how many things are out there.<p>If I don't keep up I feel like I'll soon be irrelevant. Is it just me, or do other people feel this way as well?<p>I suffered some extreme burnout a few years ago so perhaps I just don't have the drive anymore.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: If people are struggling with mental health (myself included) - I just read about it everywhere - why a 4-day workweek don't get traction?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: I was contemplating Usegravity.app or Saaspegasus.com, I'm pretty open for the language, just want a solid foundation to go fast building my SaaS idea.
Upvote: | 110 |
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