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Title: Hi HN, I’m Omar the Founder and CEO of MutableAI (YC W22) (<a href="https://mutable.ai" rel="nofollow">https://mutable.ai</a>). We transform Jupyter notebook code into production-quality Python code using a combination of AI (OpenAI codex) and PL metaprogramming techniques.<p>I'm obsessed with clean code because I've written so much terrible code in the past. I went from being a theoretical physics PhD dropout -> data scientist -> software engineer at Google -> research engineer at DeepMind -> ML engineer at Apple. In that time I've grown to tremendously value code quality. Clean code is not only more maintainable but also more extensible as you can more readily add new features. It even enables you to think thoughts that you may have never considered before.<p>I want to reduce the cost of clean, production-quality code using AI, and am starting with a niche I'm intimately familiar with (Jupyter), because it's particularly prone to bad code. Jupyter notebooks are beloved by data scientists, but notorious for having spaghetti code that is low on readability, hard to maintain, and hard to move into a production codebase or even share with a colleague. That’s why a Kaggle Grandmaster shocked his audience and recommended that they do not use Jupyter notebooks [1].<p>MutableAI allows developers to get the best of both worlds: Jupyter’s easy prototyping and visualization, plus greatly improved quality with our AI product. We also offer a full featured AI autocomplete to help prototyping go faster. I think the quadrant of "easy to develop in" and "easy to create high quality code" has been almost empty, and AI can help fill this gap.<p>Right now there are two ways of manipulating programs: PL techniques for program analysis and transformation, and large scale transformers from OpenAI/DeepMind, which are trained on code treated as text (tokens) and don't look at the tree structure of code (ASTs). MutableAI combines OpenAI Codex / Copilot with traditional PL analysis (variable lifetimes, scopes, etc.) and statistical filters to identify AST transformations that, when successively applied, produce cleaner code.<p>We use OpenAI's Codex to document and type the code, and for AI autocomplete. We use PL techniques to refactor the code (e.g. extract methods), remove zombie code, and normalize formatting (e.g. remove weird spacing). We use statistical filters to detect opportunities for refactoring, for example when a large grouping of variable lifetimes are suddenly created and destroyed, which can be an opportunity to extract a function.<p>Some of the PL techniques are similar to traditional refactoring tools, but those tools don’t help you decide when and how to refactor. We use AI and stats to do that, as well as to generate names when the new code needs them.<p>A tool that reduces the time to productionize code can be compared to having an extra engineer on staff. If you take this seriously, that’s a pretty big market. Stripe Research claims that developer inefficiency is a $300B problem [2]. Just about every tech company would become more efficient through increased velocity, fewer errors, and the ability to tackle more complex problems. It may even become unthinkable to write software without this sort of tool, the same way most people don't write assembly and use a compiler.<p>You can try the product by visiting our website, <a href="https://mutable.ai" rel="nofollow">https://mutable.ai</a> and creating an account on the setup page <a href="https://mutable.ai/setup.html" rel="nofollow">https://mutable.ai/setup.html</a>. License keys are on the setup page once you’ve signed up (check your mailbox for an email verification link). I’ve bumped up the budget for free accounts temporarily for the day, I hope you enjoy the product !<p>In addition to inviting the HN community to try out the product, I’d love it if you would share any tips for reducing code complexity you’ve come across and of course to hear your ideas about this problem and tools to address it.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/tsGGpe-onZI?t=1067" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/tsGGpe-onZI?t=1067</a><p>[2] <a href="https://stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer-coefficient.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer-coefficient.p...</a>
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: It seems to me that NoSQL databases like MongoDB became obsolete. I can't think of a case where I would use NoSQL over Json(Bytes) types of Postgres and to some extent SQLite.<p>Could someone with the knowledge elaborate on the topic, please?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Given https://github.com/AzureAD/microsoft-authentication-library-for-dotnet/issues/3033<p>Fore query "cannot persist Microsoft authentication token cache securely!" (with quotes) Google returns single result, written in Chinese. Luckily I opened that Chinese result and spotted link to that issue.<p>duck.com does find the issue at hand.<p>I mean GitHub is no small site, but somehow I expected that Google will find my ANY public string on the internet.<p>Not that it doesn't find issues at all - but I stumbled upon this one that got left out.
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: In 2020, Magenta released DDSP [1], a machine learning algorithm / python library which made it possible to generate good sounding instrument synthesizers from about 6-10 minutes of data. While working with DDSP for a project, we realised how
it was actually quite hard to find 6-10 minute of clean recordings of monophonic instruments.<p>In this project, we have combined the DDSP architecture with a domain adaptation technique from speech synthesis [2]. This domain adaptation technique works by pre-training our model on many different recordings from the Solos dataset [3] first and then fine-tuning parts of the model to the new recording. This allows us to produce decent sounding instrument synthesisers from as little as 16 seconds of target audio instead of 6-10 minutes.<p>[1] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04643" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04643</a><p>[2] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06006" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06006</a><p>[3] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07931" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07931</a><p>We hope to publish a paper on the topic soon.
Upvote: | 185 |
Title: Reddit is now full of reports of people (and their channels) getting banned for supporting Ukraine or even just watching related live streams. Reddit is also censoring and removing these reports..<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t13wyv/im_banned_and_i_accept_that_but_russia/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t13wyv/im_banned_a...</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t13h44/so_youtube_apparently_blocks_your_account_if_you/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t13h44/so_youtube_...</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t147c3/defending_ukraine_autoban_from_youtube/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t147c3/defending_u...</a>
Upvote: | 1095 |
Title: Apologies if this is off-topic but the learning French thread got me wondering if anyone here is an artist in the downtime and has recommendations for learning materials when it comes to learning how to draw? I've tried Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and it doesn't do it for me. I've tried nma.art and that's like the closest I've come to what I'm after but currently suffer from paralysis analysis with too many or too few courses to choose from. Any suggestions? I'm hoping to be able to eventually draw people and landscapes, willing to pay hundreds of dollars potentially for the right course or instruction per month not really looking for like a udemy type thing.
Upvote: | 283 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Subomi and Emmanuel, founders of Convoy (<a href="https://getconvoy.io" rel="nofollow">https://getconvoy.io</a>). Convoy is an open-source webhooks service. We make it easy for developers to publish webhooks like Stripe and Twilio. Convoy is cloud-native so developers can deploy the container to wherever they host their applications.<p>Some time ago I built an API for local fintech companies alongside Emmanuel. While trying to sell this product, we were asked several times for webhooks. We didn't find a great tool that was easy to use, language-agnostic and cloud-native; something that could scale independently of our core service. We decided to build it ourselves.<p>Webhooks are the glue of the modern internet. They are used for asynchronous communication by API providers to notify apps/integrators about events that have occurred in their account. I like to say it as: if you make a payment on Shopify with Stripe’s checkout and Stripe fails to send a webhook event to Shopify’s servers about your payment, you won’t get a delivery of your package even though your card has been debited. This explains the importance of webhook events to many consumer apps.<p>Today, implementing a webhooks delivery system is a highly fragmented problem. Stripe's system is designed for security (with features like replay attacks, rolling secrets etc), Twilio for performance (with features like connection override), Pagerduty for flexibility (with features like payload filtering) and many more. We'd love to make these features available to everyone with Convoy. We're already helping a few companies solve problems they didn't know they had because of the visibility Convoy gives.<p>API providers need to push webhook events reliably. It’s a pain to build this from scratch. At first glance, it seems like good old HTTP POST, but with time it becomes more tricky as the requirements pile up: dealing with bad endpoints, pushing events to multiple endpoints as configured by your user, rate-limiting of customer endpoints, security of delivery, UX for managing retries. We take care of all that and give you one less infrastructure to worry about.<p>Convoy is open-source software that exposes a REST API. Developers push events to it using the REST API (we aim to support other means of ingesting data in the future for high volume environments – this is a feature Shopify provides today) then we sign the payload, publish the events, apply retries, etc. We also provide a management UI to manually retry events to user endpoints.<p>Convoy consists of 3 core components—in addition to the REST API, there is a job queue and a storage layer. The REST API server is used to create applications, endpoints and events. The job queue currently supports 2 backends: in-memory and Redis. The storage layer currently supports 2 backends: on-disk and MongoDB. All events pushed to Convoy are saved to storage and enqueued on the job queue for workers to deliver.<p>Most of our users use our product to push webhook events to their customers’ endpoints. Customers also use Convoy as a broker for inter-service communication.<p>We make money by providing a managed service. We've been running the managed service for a while now and charge $1/5k events, but those details are not on our website yet.<p>The repository is available at <a href="https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy</a> and a getting started doc exists here: <a href="https://getconvoy.io/docs/guide" rel="nofollow">https://getconvoy.io/docs/guide</a>. Anyone can download the binary or Docker image from here: <a href="https://getconvoy.io/download" rel="nofollow">https://getconvoy.io/download</a> and run it wherever they choose - AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.<p>We’d love you to try it out and hear your thoughts! We’d also love to hear about your experiences building custom webhook software and the challenges you’ve faced?
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: The gist of this question is, "how does one prep to keep technology operable?"<p>Imagine a disaster causes widespread collapse, where resources are no longer easily available, power and internet access is erratic or non-existent, and then things calm down enough to where the necessities of life are available and society tries to resume functioning.<p>Now, suppose you'd like to make computers work. What sort of things would you need?Power, obviously, or a way to charge batteries. What else?<p>What if you wanted to have communication with other people, or perhaps data communication? Would you want packet radio? HAM gear?<p>What if you want to repair equipment? I don't know if the computers in cars "break", for example [not that I imagine fuel being available]. I wonder about what sort of needs there might be to repurpose gear.<p>What if you need to keep an application running? Maybe you have a mesh network and people want a web app for some purpose. But, without documentation, it'd be incredibly tedious.<p>I can't help but think I've seen a linux distro designed for this scenario, where you have binaries, and all the code, and all the toolchains, and all the documentation.<p>The right answer might be "don't bother", but I'm still curious.
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: The Ukrainians have called on the "hacker underground" to defend against Russia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30462219<p>Everyone of us here has above average computer skills, but most of us don't have offensive or defensive cyber
warfare skills.<p>We have all seen how quickly war can break out.<p>What does one need to know to be of value to one's military, should the need ever arise?<p>What skills would they be looking for?<p>How can I acquire those skills?
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: I feel like I have to be in a very specific head space to write code. It’s like climbing a big hill but in my head. Sometimes it’s effortless and sometimes it’s a slog.<p>Are there any proven exercises or techniques I can adopt that are proven to boost my ability to focus and get in that clear headspace to write code?<p>Edit: adding some tips as I try to figure this out. Note: not scientifically proven (to my knowledge)<p>1. Music. which type depends on the individual.<p>2. Timing. Dead of night or early in the morning when the world is quiet. Not this isn’t a muscle you can flex at any time, you have to just capitalize on the right time.<p>3. Long shower<p>4. Caffeine<p>5. Get out of the office/house go somewhere else (like a cafe)<p>6. Take a walk<p>7. Have a beer<p>8. Write thoughts down in a notebook without any phones/laptop in sight and then jump to the laptop to implement<p>9. Meditate<p>10. Lift weights / exercise to work the demons out and quiet the mind
Upvote: | 288 |
Title: This post was on the front page a few days and really resonated with me [1]. I love HN, because there is nowhere else on the internet with the same concentration of intelligence, deep knowledge and mature perspective on things.<p>However like the author I’ve noticed myself becoming increasingly cynical about tech, and the world. This is a very bad attitude to have for any startup ambitions, where optimism (bordering on irrationality) is necessary to succeed. So I want to start reading other things more often.<p>What other communities are there that are more optimistic, but still have a similar level of intelligence, experience etc?<p>1. https://kg.dev/thoughts/i-love-you-hn-but-youre-toxic
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: It runs on the frontend in vanilla JS, it should work 9 times out 10.(false negatives near the border)<p>(Not that thoroughly tested but should be fine)
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Ask your friends at Google to explain this joke donation of Adwords credit:
https://www.androidcentral.com/google-response-ukraine-invasion<p>Ukraine needs real support not using this crisis to push your product!<p>If you want to make a statement switch off Google services in Russia. That is how revolutions are started!<p>Google makes less than %0.3 of their total revenue in Russia. Surely that is worth a sacrifice to end this unfair war and tell Russia they cannot invade their neighbors!
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: https://ibb.co/vQDWCcM<p>https://t.me/+VKWSAJJVAtsyZmE6<p>Locals in Ukraine are recruited to setup beacons / use (it?) emitters for missile targeting(?) by Russian army.<p>Has this tactic been used in any of the past wars?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Now that the dust has settled from the acquisition, has the culture held up? How's morale, work life balance, growth opportunity, etc.?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Hey HN! Esolang Park is an online visual debugger interface for esoteric programming languages, that I've been working on for the past few months. For every supported language, Esolang Park provides the powerful Monaco code editor, syntax checking, debugging functionality and a visualisation of the runtime state. The core is language-agnostic - a "language provider" only needs to implement the esolang's parser, interpreter and visualisation UI (and some other little stuff).<p>Apart from trying to boost DX for esolangs, the idea is for this to grow into a platform where people can discover and play around with a variety of esolangs without leaving the browser. That's quite far away though - the project is quite early in development and currently only has 5 languages (Befunge-93, Brainf*ck, Chef, Deadfish and Shakespeare). Some features like non-debugging execution mode (0ms interval) are missing too.<p>Currently the entire source code[0] (core + language providers) is written in TypeScript and React. Esolang code execution happens in a web worker. I'm planning to add support for WASM-based language providers for better performance, particularly for non-debugging execution. There's also a wiki[1] containing a description of the core design and a guide for implementing and contributing new language providers.<p>Looking to hear some feedback on the idea and current implementation - bug reports are welcome too!<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/nilaymaj/esolang-park" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nilaymaj/esolang-park</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/nilaymaj/esolang-park/wiki" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nilaymaj/esolang-park/wiki</a>
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: This question is related to the potential SWIFT block that might happen any time soon.<p>It sounds maybe naive but I was thinking that if we almost all turn down our heating system by ~3° Celsius (compared to our current settings) we could potentially save gas consumption that can be better used for other purposes. What do you think?
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: My niche language is Racket. I like it because I like Schemes more than Common Lisps and I think it is the most accessible Scheme. It improves on some of the issues I have with my main language, Python, mostly around creating an executable. If I'm being honest, I also get a dopamine hit from using a niche language, but maybe I'm not the only one who feels that way.
Upvote: | 150 |
Title: Do you credit any particular set of books for the advent of your expertise in math and/or computer science? The book that was of the right difficulty at the right time to ignite the intellectual curiousity that has made you go forward since.
Upvote: | 392 |
Title: Garry Kasparov - Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped
https://www.amazon.com/Winter-Coming-Vladimir-Enemies-Stopped-ebook/dp/B06XCCZJ7D
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Ideally, I'm looking at something similar to Russell's History of Philosophy but for science. I am studying the history of philosophy right now, and I'd like to complement the curriculum with some reading on the history of science.
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I see many side projects that don't charge their users and was wondering why that is.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Russia has invaded Ukraine, and four days on I feel powerless to both do anything (in a country that is neither of those two!) and to look away from the news and social media coverage of it. It's an abhorrent waste of human life.<p>News and reports today of Russian ICBMs and other nuclear forces being placed on high alert (and moved further towards the west of the country) [1] frankly scares me. While some observers think that this is "overplaying" his hand [2] I know that all of this is deeply concerning. The world does _not_ need another cuban missile crisis; it also does _not_ need to vanish in a pile of radioactive smoke.<p>I live in Europe. My father sent me a message to essentially ask if I'd had a thought about where my nearest "shelter" would be -- and I had. My partner's family have too. It feels awful, but I can't concentrate effectively -- I'm glued to the news and I need to put it down, convince myself that the world won't end tomorrow, and get back to work.<p>Am I the only person affected similarly by events? How else have you been coping with it all?<p>[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin-puts-russia-nuclear-deterrence-forces-on-high-alert-ukraine<p>[2] https://www.veteranstoday.com/2022/02/25/is-putin-overplaying-his-hand-by-moving-icbms-into-western-russia/
Upvote: | 159 |
Title: Hello HackerNews!<p>I started my SWE career in 2016. I'm in a team which develops an enterprise SaaS-Application. Now I got the opportunity to transform into a leader role which focuses on DevOps, Tests, QA, Documentation and related topics.<p>So far, we set goals and start to introduce the team (around 5 people) into that topic.<p>My question is - are there any good books, articles, podcasts, ... which can help me in this "challenge"? I already got some basic (practical) knowledge in leading people and managing a product.<p>Stay safe!
Upvote: | 314 |
Title: A Google search for "Moscow Exchange" list this as this official URL:<p>https://www.moex.com/en/<p>That URL just times out.<p>Anyone know what's going on?<p>Is this a DNS attack?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Thank you HackerNews for providing the `noprocast` flag! I was meddling with my account settings and I noticed the flag. I activated it and then HN said me to go to work. I really am grateful this feature exists within HN.<p>Thanks for wonderful feature!
Upvote: | 130 |
Title: What are some single person creation that have stood the test of time. The creation, at present, may be under the umbrella of some big corp. But the entire core of it was developed and maintained by a single person. Like Minecraft.<p>And I am not talking about only tech project creations. Anything extraordinary that comes to your mind?
Upvote: | 220 |
Title: Since Russia started the invasion of Ukraine, I feel sad and baffled while being glued to news sources covering the war, mostly on Twitter.<p>How do you keep your focus on working during these times?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: A few days ago I saw this tweet from PG: <a href="https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1496549841912094733" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1496549841912094733</a>
...and guessed it shouldn't be too hard to make a chrome extension to do this (I had never made a chrome extension before)<p>So I took a stab at it - took me a bit over a day to make it, and it was fun to put together.<p>I responded to his tweet with the link to the extension but I'm not sure if he would've seen it.<p>edit: Looks like I missed the approval notification for the listing of this extension on the chrome store: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/trab-tweet-reporter-and-b/bahkpblcfiffamfljnfjeablplgnjnkg?hl=en-US" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/trab-tweet-reporte...</a>
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Paul and Taylor, and we’re launching Drifting in Space (<a href="https://driftingin.space" rel="nofollow">https://driftingin.space</a>). We build server software for performance-intensive browser-based applications. We make it easy to give every user of your app a dedicated server-side process, which starts when they open your application and stops when they close the tab.<p>Many high-end web apps give every user a dedicated connection to a server-side process. That is how they get the low latency that you need for ambitious products like full-fledged video editing tools and IDEs. This is hard for smaller teams to recreate, because it takes a significant ongoing engineering investment. That’s where we come in—we make this architecture available to everyone, so you can focus on your app instead of its infrastructure. You can think of it like Heroku, except that each of your users gets their own server instance.<p>I realized that something like this was needed while working on data-intensive tools at a hedge fund. I noticed that almost all new application software, whether it was built in-house or third-party SaaS, was delivered as a browser application rather than native. Although browsers are more powerful than ever, I knew from experience that industrial-scale data-heavy apps posed problems, because neither the browser or a traditional stateless server architecture could provide the compute resources needed for low-latency interaction with large datasets. I began talking about this with my friend Taylor, who had encountered similar limitations while working on data analysis and visualization tools at Datadog and Uber. We decided to team up and build a company around solving it.<p>We have two products, an open source package and a managed platform. Spawner, the open source part, provides an API for web apps to spawn a session-lived process. It manages the process’s lifecycle, exposing it over HTTPS, tracking inbound connections, and shutting it down when it becomes idle (i.e. when the user closes their tab). It’s open source (MIT) and available at <a href="https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner</a>.<p>Jamsocket is our managed platform, which uses Spawner internally. It provides the same API, but frees you from having to deal with any cluster or network configuration to ship code. From an app developer’s point of view, using it is similar to using platforms like Netlify or Render. You stay in the web stack and never have to touch Kubernetes.<p>Here's an example. Imagine you make an application for investigating fraud in a large transaction database. Users want to interactively filter, aggregate, and visualize gigabytes of transactions as a graph. Instead of sending all of the data down to the browser and doing the work there, you would put your code in a container and upload it to our platform. Then, whenever a fraud analyst opens your application, you hit an API we provide to spin up a dedicated backend for that analyst. Your browser code then opens a WebSocket connection directly to that backend, which it uses to stream data as the analyst applies filters or zooms/pans the visualization.<p>We're different from most managed platforms because we give each user a dedicated process. That said, there are a few other services that do run long-lived processes for each user. Architecturally, we're most similar to Agones. Agones is targeted at games where the client can speak UDP to an arbitrary IP; we target applications that want to connect directly from browsers to a hostname over HTTPS. In the Erlang world, the OTP stack provides similar functionality, but you have to embrace Erlang/Elixir to get the benefits of it; we are entirely language-agnostic. Cloudflare Durable Objects support a form of long-lived processes, but are focused on use cases around program state synchronization rather than arbitrary high-compute/memory use cases.<p>We have a usage-based billing model, similar to Heroku. We charge you for the compute you use and take a cut. Usage billing scales to zero, so it’s approachable for weekend experiments. We have not solidified a price plan yet, but we’re aiming to provide an instance capable of running VS Code (as an example) for about 10 cents an hour, fractionally metered. High-memory and high-CPU backends will cost more, and heavy users will get volume discounts. Our target customers are desktop-like SaaS apps and internal data tools.<p>As mentioned, our core API is open source and available at <a href="https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner</a>. The managed platform is in beta and we’re currently onboarding users from a waitlist, to make sure that we have the server capacity to scale. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to sign up for it here: <a href="https://driftingin.space" rel="nofollow">https://driftingin.space</a>.<p>Have you built a similar infrastructure for your application? We’re interested in hearing the approaches people have already taken to this problem and what the pain points are.
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: Hey HN, I know reading books isn’t everyone’s thing, but it’s certainly been mine for as long as I can remember.<p>Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting.<p>So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph.<p>We also felt like it was important for Booqsi to be independent of Amazon; we care about supporting local bookstores, so every book in Booqsi links you to Bookshop.org to purchase that book (not Amazon).<p>Here are some of my favorite features launched as part of beta:<p>- A book-focused social feed (finally!)<p>- Beautifully-rendered custom bookshelves to show off to your friends<p>- Streamlined book recommendations to friends<p>- Easily track reading goals and books you've read<p>And many more...<p>It's completely free and easy to use, and we would love your feedback as you explore the platform.
Upvote: | 478 |
Title: Just received this email:<p>Dear XXXX,<p>Unfortunately, due to the Russian regime's war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine, we will no longer be providing services to users registered in Russia. While we sympathize that this war may not affect your own views or opinion on the matter, the fact is, your authoritarian government is committing human rights abuses and engaging in war crimes so this is a policy decision we have made and will stand by.<p>If you hold any top-level domains with us, we ask that you transfer them to another provider by March 6, 2022.<p>Additionally, and with immediate effect, you will no longer be able to use Namecheap Hosting, EasyWP, and Private Email with a domain provided by another registrar in zones .ru, .xn--p1ai (рф), .by, .xn--90ais (бел), and .su. All websites will resolve to 403 Forbidden, however, you can contact us to assist you with your transfer to another provider.<p>Customer Support,
Namecheap
Upvote: | 1735 |
Title: I recently discovered that TSOS, an old Univac OS that I used (and loved!) in the mid 1970's and first released in 1968 by RCA, is still supported (although the name has changed) as Fujitsu's BS2000 OS. Unix was released a year after that (1969). Is there something that beats these?
Upvote: | 180 |
Title: Every Russian citizen and every Russian company that is currently relying on businesses in the West such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and so on for hosting, communications, connectivity and other services should expect those services to be cut off at some point in the near future, and plan accordingly. This also goes for stuff deeply integrated into services in your home country that you have come to rely on, which may stop to function.<p>Regardless, you won't be able to pay for any of these services at the next billing period so they will be terminated one way or another.<p><i>Back up your stuff, move your service while you can or you risk losing everything</i>, this is <i>not</i> a drill.<p>Understand that the level at which this is currently playing out means that it could very well happen that governments will sanction businesses in the West that continue to work with and do business with Russian entities, businesses or individuals.<p>Some may decide to do this unilaterally for reasons all their own, some may give you warnings, some won't. Contrary to how these things normally play out the speed with which sanctions are being enacted and their severity should not be underestimated. Effectively threatening the world with nuclear annihilation has put the pressure on in a way that I have never seen before, leading to a degree of unity that is unique and which will speed up the process of ordering and implementing these sanctions to unprecedented levels.<p>Use the time while you have it.<p>If you are a private individual from a Western country get out while you can, even if that means a detour via Dubai or China. This could very well get ugly and you don't want to get caught in a country where lots of people are being made to believe that you and/or your country of origin are the cause for their hardship. Waiting it out is a risk you probably can not afford. Some Western governments have already ordered their citizens out of Russia.<p>I hope sincerely that all of this will be behind us soon and in a way that minimizes bloodshed on both sides, but I <i>especially</i> wish that for the defenders, who had no agency at all.
Upvote: | 727 |
Title: Product Hunt was once a curated collection of interesting new products, shared to a small newsletter list of enthusiasts.<p>Today, it has become a pyramid scheme of paid upvotes, shill accounts, and rampant spam. And nobody is talking about it.<p>Have a look at Today's #2Product of the Day with 500+ upvotes. They are ALL sock puppet accounts, and most comments and upvotes within a short period of time.<p>The comments are all obvious astro-turfing, with names like "AccountHolder2". Most of the other top products of the day have the same problem. See for yourself here:<p>https://www.producthunt.com/posts/teyuto-2<p>Something is deeply rotten with Product Hunt. There are maybe 2 or 3 posts in the top products of the day that aren't full of utter garbage comments from fake accounts.<p>I shared a link to this before and it was marked as Dead. I'm assuming because the system thought it was promoting someone's Product Hunt launch rather than pointing out a huge failing in one of the most important communities online.<p>Most upvotes are commercially driven. It seems like something that could be fixed with reasonable moderation.
Upvote: | 153 |
Title: As part of my startup's remit, I do a lot of work with clients' SWIFT payments. I feel like the media has done a very poor job explaining what SWIFT is and how exactly it works.<p>SWIFT exists not for the purpose of providing the rail(s) upon which money moves but to be the messaging system which coordinates said transfers. When sending funds (typically done via a document called a MT103, which is a text file with specific formatting requirements) one informs the recipient institution by sending a SWIFT message. When it is time for the banks to actually move the funds (which often times occurs significantly after the funds are made available to the client in question) this will be coordinated through a payment system. In most cases in Europe, this is TARGET2. However, as Russia is not a member of the Eurozone, many of their impacted payments will likely be on the STEP2 payment network, which is the only European-wide clearing house. (However, these days, it isn't uncommon for banks to work together to use multiple clearing houses across multiple jurisdictions to most efficiently move funds.)<p>From what I understand from banks and clients we work with who have a significant Eastern European nexus, Russia was already experiencing problems with the payment systems before the formal SWIFT bans were announced and that the effective shutdown of central bank settlements for Russia has served to bring international payments coordination for RU based institutions to a crawl.<p>Happy to add clarification where it could be useful.
Upvote: | 244 |
Title: I am a fourth year student in Eastern Europe, studying Math and Economics. This is the final year, and I have 3-4 months till graduation. At the same time, I've been working full time as a Data Scientist at a big telecom company for the last several months. And I think it's not for me<p>The project here is interesting, but I realize that I do not like any of the "real" DS tasks, e.g. anything that involves actually building a model from the statistical standpoint. Now, I write a lot of SQL: the company has hundreds of billions of calling records, so you have to really think about the queries you write, and even if they are quite optimized I still sit here for a long time waiting for the response. And even that is more exciting than any of the statistical tasks I face<p>Little background: I started coding when I was 16, back then I built an iOS app using Swift to help me learn English vocabulary. After that, I've been coding as a hobby on the side during my studies. I liked mathematics and statistics as a freshman, and during my second year found out about Data Science. Given my background, I thought it would be a perfect fit for me. I built a few pet-projects using ML during my third year, and started applying. They impressed one of the employers (big bank), so these projects basically landed me my first internship, which led me to the current job<p>The thing I like the most is actually building stuff with my hands, and I think SWE is a better fit here. I guess this is the reason I never liked Kaggle. Also, most of my internship I spent building a simple web interface for the existing model (mostly back, like connecting to DB, transforming data, deploying to Linux, etc), which was 100% SWE task and I liked it. So there were hints along the way...<p>How would you recommend me to switch to SWE the fastest way possible?<p>I'm quite depressed now because I've put enormous effort into switching to DS: I applied to 80 job postings before I got my first internship, and I feel this is for nothing now. Also, my university and faculty considered to be really difficult, so studying DS on the side was brutal.<p>Besides, I live in Russia and want to relocate (for obv reasons), and feel like it's easier with SWE skills (especially given that I know English and in the process of receiving EU passport). This puts an enormous time pressure on me given how the things are playing out now...<p>I would appreciate any opinion/advice!
Upvote: | 146 |
Title: The Russia - Ukraine War, Covid 19, the previous couple of elections. I'm wondering how you personally deal with possible deliberate misinformation on the internet. Lately I've begun to doubt every source of information that could possibly be shared because of financial, political, or misplaced altruistic motivations. So I've been ignoring as much as possible.<p>What is your approach to gathering and filtering information? Current events or otherwise.
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Hi HN, Jeff Epstein & Will Stevenson here – we’re the founders of <a href="https://Onboard.io" rel="nofollow">https://Onboard.io</a> (YC W22). We make software for companies looking to manage, automate and streamline their customer onboarding and implementation at scale.<p>In the B2B world, many things usually need to be configured or approved before customers can actually use their new software. It’s critical that this process go well—lack of momentum right after a purchase is a primary cause of customer churn. We experienced this at a previous company (Ambassador: acq in 2018) and ended up cobbling together several systems, none of which specialized in onboarding, to give our customers a better experience. Although it was far from optimal, it reduced churn by over 50%.<p>Later, Will did consulting work with SaaS companies and saw what a mess customer onboarding was at otherwise high-functioning startups. When he witnessed a startup doing $100M in revenue using spreadsheets to manage onboarding, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We decided to build a better way.<p>Most likely, your sales team promised the client they can get onboarded in record time, but the reality is that it will take much longer.<p>Current approaches are lacking in 4 major areas: (1) Lack of automation slows everything down and makes things inconsistent across teams; (2) buyers lack visibility & collaboration into what needs to be accomplished and when; (3) reminders and updates are often manual emails, wasting time while siloed in email outside the view of critical stakeholders; (4) there isn't an easy way to manage onboarding teams, clients and process for scale.<p>Most companies run all this using templates, which are rigid and hard to scale. When a new customer signs up, an onboarding specialist selects the closest template, then they read about this customer’s requirements and customize the template for them. Templates need to be kept in sync manually because the same tasks are duplicated between them. Often teams download them directly and forget to use the latest version. Worse, templates lead to an awful customer experience because there’s no way to coordinate and manage the process.<p>Various products solve some of this, but you have to cobble them together. Our company is built specifically to solve this problem.<p>Onboard automatically creates custom launch plans by enabling companies to have a single Task Repository, where each task is tagged to a specific customer attribute, plan choice, or use case. We connect these tasks to data learned in the sales process (can pull directly from your CRM) to automatically create a launch plan based on what you need to start using your new software. We provide visibility to the client with link access to view tasks, assignments and quick discussions (via stream) outside of email and in one place for all stakeholders to see. As the plan proceeds and tasks are completed, we send notifications to appropriate parties. Instead of emailing Excel files, there’s a transparent collaborative process.<p>We’re a SaaS and there is pricing on 2 vectors: platform fee and then per-user (internal users only; external users, i.e. users at your customers, are free).<p>We would love to hear about your (or your company) facing these challenges as a buyer implementing new software OR as a seller (how your company manages clients being onboarded on your software or service business).<p>We have a 14-day trial and if you are interested in trying out the product, feel free to sign up (cc required) or email us at [email protected] and we’ll see what we can do ;)
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Excited to share the project I've been working on for the past 7 months!<p>We've seen nearly weekly attacks against the open source software supply chain. I saw the seeds of this trend start in the mid 2015s as an open source maintainer and I've watched it only get worse over the years. I finally decided to try to solve this problem.<p>Socket is taking an entirely new approach to one of the hardest problems in security in a stagnant part of the industry that has historically been obsessed with just reporting on known vulnerabilities. Unlike other scanning tools, Socket actually analyzes the package code to characterize the package's behavior. This way, Socket can detect when packages use security-relevant platform capabilities, such as the network, filesystem, or shell.<p>You can search for any npm package and see issues that've we've flagged for each package. We look for 70 issues (full list here: <a href="https://socket.dev/npm/issue" rel="nofollow">https://socket.dev/npm/issue</a>) and we put those into a Package Health score. See these examples:<p><a href="https://socket.dev/npm/package/left-pad" rel="nofollow">https://socket.dev/npm/package/left-pad</a><p><a href="https://socket.dev/npm/package/lodash" rel="nofollow">https://socket.dev/npm/package/lodash</a><p>Socket looks for indicators present in all of the recent npm supply chain attacks. We're proactively auditing every package on npm to flag these issues.<p>Separately, we have a GitHub app that you can install. It detects typosquat attacks and leaves a comment on your pull request to let you know you might have installed the wrong package. We're currently working to enable it to leave comments for more of the package issues that we can detect, but we want to get the UX really good on that first, so we've released it and labeled it "beta".<p>Happy to answer questions.
Upvote: | 133 |
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> or <a href="https://hirehackernews.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hirehackernews.com/</a>.
Upvote: | 101 |
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://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=30515748" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515748</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515749" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515749</a>
Upvote: | 327 |
Title: Hi HN, Graham and Jeremy here - we are building GrowthBook, an open-source platform for feature flagging and A/B testing. The repo is here: <a href="https://github.com/growthbook/growthbook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/growthbook/growthbook</a> and our home page is <a href="https://www.growthbook.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.growthbook.io</a>. We did a Show HN 6 months ago (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28088882" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28088882</a>, which helped us get into YC) and have since added feature flagging.<p>Developers often launch a feature without understanding the impact it has on their users and business. This is a big deal, because only 1/3 of product launches actually improve the desired metrics. Of the rest, 1/3 have no effect, and the last 1/3 actually hurt [1]. The best way to measure this is to use feature flags and controlled experiments (A/B tests).<p>Jeremy and I worked together for 10 years at an ed-tech startup as CTO and software architect. We spent far too long just building and launching features without really knowing how they impacted our users and if they were adding value to the company. We had product analytics, but there was too much noise in the data to draw real conclusions. We knew the “right” way to do this was to build feature flags and run controlled experiments, but that was daunting for our small team.<p>We looked into 3rd party tools, but it bothered us that they didn't use our existing data warehouse and metric definitions, and we really didn't like the idea of adding an API call in the critical rendering path of our application. We also didn’t want to send our data to 3rd parties, didn’t feel good about vendor lock-in, plus the vendors were expensive. So, we did what any engineers would do—build it ourselves. After all, how hard could it be?<p>After a couple painful years, we hacked something together that (mostly) worked and used it to help grow revenue 10x. We started talking to other teams and realized just how many larger companies spend years building these feature flagging and experimentation platforms in-house because, like us, they couldn’t find any tools that met their needs. So we took everything we learned and built the tool we wish had existed back when we started.<p>GrowthBook is an open source platform for feature flagging and A/B experimentation. Our SDKs are built to be fast and cache-friendly. We take data privacy seriously and don’t use cookies or deal with PII. We sit on top of your company’s existing data warehouse and metrics so you can maintain a single source of truth. We’re open source (MIT), so you can either self-host the platform (with Docker containers), or use our managed cloud offering.<p>In GrowthBook, feature flags are added and controlled within the UI. Engineers or PMs can add targeting rules (e.g.”beta users get feature X, everyone else does not”), do gradual rollouts, and run A/B tests on the features. The current state of features are stored in a JSON file and exposed via an API or kept in-sync with a cache/database using webhooks. Engineers install our SDK and pass in the JSON file. Then they can do feature checks throughout their code (e.g. `if feature.on { ... } else { ... }`).<p>For A/B test analysis, a data analyst or engineer connects GrowthBook to their data warehouse, then they write a few SQL queries that tell GrowthBook how to query their experiment assignment and metric conversion data. After that initial setup, GrowthBook is able to pull experiment results, run it through our Bayesian stats engine, and display results. Users can slice and dice the data by custom dimensions and/or export results to a Jupyter notebook for further analysis.<p>We’re used by over 60 companies in production. We have self-hosted and cloud versions (see our pricing here: <a href="https://www.growthbook.io/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.growthbook.io/pricing</a>), and both are self-serve and simple to set up. We currently have SDKs for Javascript/Typescript, React, PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, and Android with more in the works (C#, Java, Swift, and Elixir). We support all the major SQL data warehouses as well as Mixpanel and Google Analytics.<p>You can give it a spin at <a href="https://github.com/growthbook/growthbook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/growthbook/growthbook</a>. Let us know what you think! We would especially love feedback from anyone who has built platforms like this in the past.<p>[1] <a href="https://exp-platform.com/Documents/ExPThinkWeek2009Public.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://exp-platform.com/Documents/ExPThinkWeek2009Public.pd...</a>
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: My usage of HN is guided by my desire to keep up with relevant news whilst minimising procrastination.<p>I typically only read HN’s front page headlines (on occasion perusing page 2 when time allows, such as when I’m on a comfort break).<p>Headlines that pique my interest lure me in to the HN users’ comments, where I often learn something.<p>I seldom read the linked articles. But when I do, it’s usually because the comments demanded it of me.<p>I find this allows me to strike just the right balance between learning and efficiency.<p>In my case, being an employer and a dad leaves me little time for exploratory rabbit holes of knowledge!<p>So thank you, commenters, for giving us of your time, and your wisdom.<p>And to the lurkers, thank you for your votes!
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: PyTermGUI is a highly modular framework offering most of the features one would expect from a GUI library, such as a mature and open Widget API, animations, mouse support and other goodies, right inside the terminal!<p>The markup language is another great feature of the library, and is used by practically all elements of it. It is based on Rich's implementation, but uses a more concise and easier to humanly parse syntax, while being over 10 times faster at parsing due to a long list of optimizations.<p>There is a full Window Manager API included as well, allowing the user to move, resize and otherwise manipulate windows and inner contents using either their mouse of keyboard.<p>All of the "guts" of the library are also exposed and usable from the outside within the `ansi_interface` submodule.<p>Thank you for your time, and I hope the library may be of some use!
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: In the spirit of some states now requiring salary ranges for job postings I think it would be good if HN followed that trend.<p>I often read the “Who is hiring?” posts but I have no idea if the jobs are even remotely within my range. I think it would save everybody a lot of time if a range was posted.
Upvote: | 220 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I made many small web games in the past with Unity or Phaser. But this time I wanted to make something completely on my own. So I coded a basic game framework in plain JavaScript, and used it to make Almost Pong.<p>This was a really fun project that taught me a lot about JavaScript, and I plan to make more minimalist games with this framework. Interesting fact: Almost Pong doesn't load any assets, all sprites and sounds are generated with code.<p>Happy to answer questions, and please let me know if you have any feedback on the game. Thanks!
Upvote: | 1135 |
Title: The recent dramatic policy shift in Russia has brought out two Citizens' Initiatives in the Finnish government's net portal. Both are about NATO membership in the country which is traditionally militarily non-aligned.<p>First initiative (open Feb 21) proposes a NATO membership referendum, the other (open Feb 28) proposes that parliament should go ahead to membership procedures without referendum, because of expected Russian harrasment and influence on the referendum procedures.<p>The government portal for initiatives has been very slow today. The authentication to sign any of the initiatives is done either by a person ID smartcard, or bank-based identification. Most people use the bank authentication (in most cases 2FA using mobile phone) because they don't bother with smart card readers.<p>The first of the initiatives has already passed the threshold (50 000) which automatically brings it to the table in Parliament. The other initiative has collected 35 000 signatures in 30 hours, meaning it will also pass the threshold tomorrow, despite many people not being able to sign it due to bank connections failing under DDoS.<p>YLE (state broadcaster) news about the attack: <a href="https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12338542" rel="nofollow">https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12338542</a><p>Initiative 1 (referendum): <a href="https://www.kansalaisaloite.fi/fi/aloite/9866" rel="nofollow">https://www.kansalaisaloite.fi/fi/aloite/9866</a>
Initiative 2 (parliament direct decision): <a href="https://www.kansalaisaloite.fi/fi/aloite/9997" rel="nofollow">https://www.kansalaisaloite.fi/fi/aloite/9997</a>
Upvote: | 213 |
Title: I took a look at the monthly “AskHN: Who wants to be hired?”[1] thread, and noticed that not a single comment had a reply from someone who’s looking to hire.<p>That would appear to show that nobody is actually getting hired from these threads, unless some other means of communication is being used.<p>Has anyone actually been hired by a company as a result of these threads?<p>If so, did you do something to stand out, or how did the process work for you?<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515748
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: Noticed since a couple of days ago that my Gmail and Google Workspace emails weren't loading on Chrome while they continue to work on Firefox.<p>And then I realised today that when I turn off uBlock origin on Chrome, then my emails start loading again on Gmail.<p>Is this happening to others? Is Google actively trying to kill all adblockers in Chrome this way?
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: My hometown, which I left on the 14th, so far has been safe.<p>But it's about to change. Today I stumbled upon information about supposed marks for the airstrikes on Google Maps.<p>I tried cheking information myself and found it very believable. Replicate as follows:<p>1. Search for Dnipro on Google Maps<p>2. Enter фермерське господарство (means farm on Ukrainian, but there are no farms there) in search<p>3. Do not press enter and look for auto-complete: Those are supposed targets.<p>Those marks are unusual: you can’t even report them. I never seen anything like this.<p>Video demonstration here:<p>https://youtu.be/OHGsFCfuB_k<p>This may save lives, including people I know. That’s why I need your help.<p>Important Edit: I have to clarify that in my opinion these are more probably marks for saboteurs to make real-world marks on the specified locations.<p>Examples here: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/russia-invades-ukraine-secret-symbols-seen-in-ukraine-point-to-escalation-of-violence/ZRZPD5W7WRAWD3U32C4PHB273I/
Upvote: | 248 |
Title: I've been trying for months to bring more traffic to my personal project's website. I've tried multiple combinations for months, researched and paid people to look at the ads and suggest what I can do.<p>Here's the problem: I only have a small budget I can afford and that is 15€ per day, per platform.<p>1. With Facebook, they say they sent more than double the clicks Analytics tells me they sent and the clicks that do pass through have an almost 100% bounce rate with average time spent on page of 0 seconds. For example, they say they sent 300 clicks in a week, but I only see 120-130 in Analytics.<p>2. With the same ad, on Reddit Ads, I see in Analytics 90-95% of the clicks they said they sent and the bounce rate is about 82%, with more than 3 minutes average sessions.<p>With both platforms I run an ad and then a retargeting ad. Until now, this was the only strategy that had relative success.<p>All the people that consulted on the ads said that with 15€ per day, Facebook gives 0 results, which I already saw and I find disappointing. The only explanation I can find is that on Facebook I only get bot clicks.<p>Are there any other platforms that are more suitable for my budget?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: What are some coping skills you use or can recommend to tackle or just mitigate the impending doom that's hanging over our heads? I've noticed I'm becoming more scared, demotivated and depressed as the Ukraine conflict marches on and irrational people make nuclear threats.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Dear HN: An angel investor who came through an inbound intro signed a YC-standard template SAFE on favorable valuation with us where the expectation was the funds would be wired quickly. But after that the investor is stalling/deferring the wire by a couple of weeks, even as we go to raise at higher valuation from others.<p>What are our options as a startup at this point if we don't want to work with this investor ? The investor has a fully signed SAFE (after doing due diligence), but just hasn't sent the funds.<p>We have revoked that investor's access to even see our wire details at this point because we don't want to work with this investor if it can be avoided. So if this 'investor' is never able to actually send the funds in a far out future, what happens to that signed SAFE ? How does it get revoked or expire in the absence of funds being transferred ?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I do not want to minimize the seriousness of what is happening in the Ukraine. I would just like to know what the difference is between these two actions.
The Iraq War(v2) resulted in hundreds of thousands Iraqi deaths (some estimate over a million). Given that we know that the USA reasoning for going to war with Iraq was based on misleading evidence, we could (and should) consider that each one of those Iraqi deaths to be unnescessary.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Hi HN! I’m Troy, the founder of Courier (<a href="https://www.courier.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.courier.com</a>). Courier replaces all the extra work developers have had to do to add different notification channels—email, browser, mobile, SMS, chat, etc.—to their product.<p>I'm an engineer and have been in engineering leadership for a long time. I kept seeing my teams spending hundreds or thousands of hours building notification infrastructure on top of messaging APIs to solve for common use cases, and it really just felt like a missing abstraction layer to me.<p>At one point we were building a chat feature for our product and just wanted the ability to let Bob @mention Alice and have it get intelligently pushed either in-app, via mobile push, or email—something Slack does well. As we dug into it we discovered how expensive it is to roll-your-own. Companies like Airbnb have dozens of engineers that work only on this part of their infrastructure! We realized it was going to take way more work than we could justify, so I went to Twilio, AWS, et al asking if I could buy a solution and learned that that just didn't exist. Somebody needed to create it.<p>Most product companies rebuild the same notification infrastructure on top of services like Twilio, Postmark, APNS/Firebase, etc. Those pipes are great, but there is significant complexity in scheduling notifications, templating, retrying, and so on. Courier gives developers higher-level abstractions that make it fast to develop robust notifications, and much cheaper to maintain moving forward.<p>Courier has been heavily inspired by a now-famous article by Slack’s engineering team about how they decide when (and how) to send a notification to a user using a complicated state-chart [0], as well as a post by LinkedIn’s engineering team on their own notification infrastructure [1]. We make all of that possible for teams and products of any size. Our YC pitch was "Segment for notifications."<p>Our customers plug in their existing messaging providers for the channels they want to notify customers on (e.g. Postmark or SendGrid for email, Twilio or MessageBird for SMS, etc.) They then call the Courier API which is able to correctly respect users' preferences, route a message to the “best” channel for a user, schedule messages to send seconds or months later, synchronize state across email and app inboxes, have a consistent template design experience for engineers and non-engineers on their team, ensure robust delivery at scale, and more.<p>A core focus for us from day one has been templating, something I think most developers have been frustrated by. We of course let you use your existing template code, but we also give you the ability to use our cross-channel JSON specification [2] or have both developers and non-technical teammates build templates for any channel using our drag and drop editor. In the latter cases, we use an abstract syntax tree under the hood to then render your message to the right format for each channel/provider combination – e.g. HTML for email and BlockKit for Slack.<p>Courier is free to sign up for and send up to 10,000 notifications each month – no credit card required. We offer usage-based pricing if you need to remove our “Powered by Courier” branding or send a higher volume of messages.<p>Our team’s mission is to make software-to-human communication delightful, for both developers and for the users they are notifying – so we’d love to hear your experience from either side. Have you had to build internal notification micro-services? Is there anything really cool you wish would’ve been easier, or wish you saw more products offering? Are there apps or services that you wish were more delightful today?<p>[0]: <a href="https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint/" rel="nofollow">https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2018/03/air-traffic-controller--member-first-notifications-at-linkedin" rel="nofollow">https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2018/03/air-traffic-co...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.courier.com/docs/elemental/" rel="nofollow">https://www.courier.com/docs/elemental/</a>
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: Hello Hacker News! Mark, Jay and I are the cofounders of Evry Health (<a href="https://evryhealth.com" rel="nofollow">https://evryhealth.com</a>). We are a full-stack health insurance company that reduces premiums by up to 20% for companies while improving the health and wellness of their employees.<p>People and media constantly talk about the problems in our healthcare system: prices are too high; premiums are rising faster than household income; health outcomes are lower than the rest of the developed world; mental health coverage is inadequate; and the lack of transparency and accessibility creates confusion for us all. All these are real problems, but they’re symptoms rather than root causes.<p>We believe the root cause is that the U.S. system is rife with misaligned incentives. For example, the fee-for-service structure incentivizes overuse and volume-based billing, rather than health. Thirty-five cents of every dollar spent goes to clinical waste, unnecessary services, administrative bloat, or fraud. (We could give footnotes, but doubt anyone needs convincing.)<p>We’re building Evry to realign incentives for mutual benefit. Our primary plan is an EPO (Exclusive Provider Organization), which is like an HMO, except you don’t have to choose a primary care physician and you don’t need a referral to see a specialist. We have no deductibles, almost no copays, and benefits that exceed the best plans from legacy insurers.
We pay most doctors and hospitals based on patient outcomes, not fee-for-service. Telehealth is available for free 24/7. Members receive a customized care plan that provides additional resources and offers cash incentives on a debit card. All this is to remove barriers to care and improve the health of each member at no additional cost.<p>On top of that, we reduce premiums by up to 20% for employers. We can do this because we are a software company that owns an insurance carrier. We automate roughly half the tasks involved with claims, care coordination, underwriting and back-office operations.
We aggregate data from disparate sources (claims, clinical, pharma, lab, and wellness data) to make superior decisions and aid patients. Our technology helps members identify and treat conditions earlier and more effectively. We also have a much better user experience—a single portal to access telehealth, care concierge, claims data, wellness plan, doctor lookup, rewards card, etc.<p>The industry is still fundamentally basing prices on 1960s approaches to accounting (ChargeMaster pricing). 1980s tech and accounting "advanced" the dialog to Diagnostic Resource Group pricing. But insurers and hospitals alike are saddled with this decades old technology and pricing that obscures transparency, adds cost, and isn't tied to patient outcomes. There are software businesses that focus on translating ChargeMaster to DRG to the more recent idea of Reference-based pricing. That is not the way to use technology to improve health care! We’re going much deeper.<p>The caveat is that so far, we only provide coverage to businesses with 100+ employees in Texas. We launched in our first market of Dallas Fort-Worth. That’s our beachhead, and we’re working on expanding into new states and markets (It takes a long time to get something like Evry off the ground—there are large barriers to entry). Since half of Americans get health coverage through their employer, we’re focused on companies to maximize impact.<p>We've built insurance, healthcare and fintech companies before. I founded the insurer that invented per-mile auto insurance ("Drive Less, Pay Less") and reduced premiums up to 50%. Mark (CFO) is a healthcare actuary with 30 years’ experience ranging from Aetna to Managing Director in Big 4 consulting. Jay (COO) is a fintech veteran who started in healthcare working with large hospital systems. What inspired us to start Evry was that we lost friends and family to the terrible dysfunction in the healthcare system. We felt we had the skill sets needed to do something about the problems, and ultimately decided we had to.<p>There is a lack of innovation in this space, and many things being tried—shifts to direct contracting, direct primary care, self-funded programs for individuals and SMBs—do not address the root problems. They are temporary price-oriented solutions. These are a form of moving the ball between cups—prices are better because coverage is impaired in hidden ways that the average person doesn’t discover until it’s too late.<p>There’s also a strong debate, of course, about governmental reforms to U.S. health care. Many support Medicare For All (MFA) for good reasons. However, MFA on its own may not be enough to address clinical variation and some of the other root problems in the system. In any case, in the absence of government action, we believe private sector innovation can address some of our shared problems. We’d be happy to discuss this, and the details of what we’re doing, in the comments below. We’d also like to hear about your own ideas!
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: Hello HN.<p>I am excited to share with you my new book, Bulletproof TLS and PKI. I've worked in this space since the very early days (think SSLv2), always frustrated with the fact that the field is vast but the documentation poor. That first led me to create SSL Labs (which ended up being very popular) and then the first edition of my book (in 2014), where I aimed to cover everything a curious person needed to know about SSL/TLS and PKI. Most importantly, it's a very practical book that you can use to just learn what you need at that moment. The second edition (just out) adds coverage of TLS 1.3. I publish two chapters as a separate (and free) OpenSSL Cookbook. There's another free sample chapter as well.<p>The best part of Bulletproof TLS and PKI is that it's a living book. There's nothing worse than obsolete documentation! Because none of the traditional publishers were interested in that sort of thing, we did everything ourselves. The manuscript is in DocBook, I write using OxygenXML, my copyeditor uses it as well, and there's a nightly build process that generates everything. We can even show exact differences across versions, for example you can see that here: <a href="https://blog.ivanristic.com/2022/02/bulletproof-tls-and-pki-is-out.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.ivanristic.com/2022/02/bulletproof-tls-and-pki-...</a><p>I hope you'll enjoy the book.
Upvote: | 134 |
Title: I was fascinated by this [0] and this video [1]. After many struggles, I finally built this app that traces images using circles similar to what these videos had shown.<p>The most challenging part (to me) is to find a way to convert images to vector lines. I had tried Potrace, but its output is not suitable for my use case: too many small elements share the same border. Potrace's goal is to represent the original image faithfully using vector lines. But I want to trace the image edges.<p>After searching and trying some Potrace alternatives in vain, I finally found my keyword. Surprisingly (to me), it lies at the end of the wiki page of the very topic [2]. Then I found a paper [3] that has nice pseudocode and a C implementation. I rewrote the pseudocode in Rust because I wanted to experiment with rustwasm. Honestly, I didn't care much about the math behind it.<p>From then, I could continue to finish the app and show it to the world.<p>This app is also my chance to learn about rustwasm and WebGL.<p>FYI: this app is offline-only; your images never leave your browser<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qgreAUpPwM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qgreAUpPwM</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_detection#Subpixel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_detection#Subpixel</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2017/216/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2017/216/</a>
Upvote: | 93 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I’m Syrus, from the Wasmer team. We just released the new version of WAPM that is an order of magnitude better than the previous one (that we also announced here in HN two years ago! [0]), enabling an incredible experience for using and publishing WebAssembly packages.<p>The tech stack that we are using includes:<p>* Python and Django (for the backend) with Graphene (for the open GraphQL API [1]) and Django Channels with websockets over GraphQL [2] for subscriptions<p>* Next.js [3] with React-Relay [4] and Tailwind.css [5] for the frontend<p>* WebAssembly and Wasmer [6] (for the online shell)<p>Vercel for serving the frontend and GCP for serving the backend.<p>Please let me know if you have any questions, I’d be very happy to answer them!
Upvote: | 186 |
Title: With all the talk about escalation amid the Russia-Ukraine crisis, I have been reading about this and am wondering about the odds of this occurring.<p>The main counterargument I see to this happening goes like: any world leader calling for nuclear armageddon will not be obeyed/will be assassinated because they cannot convince the entire chain of command to commit suicide. This seems flaky to me. One other thought I had is that perhaps that we are not capable of nuclear armageddon, because this has not been tested end-to-end, although ICBMs and nukes have been tested quite extensively.<p>What does HN think? Could it happen? And why do we assume that the tech is sufficiently advanced to e.g. take out every major city at the push of a button?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I have been a Cloud Security Consultant for over 13 years and all that experience I put into building ARGOS Cloud Security.<p>Probably the most common thing I've seen was teams spending loads of time manually investigating alerts from security products. Detecting security issues is not what it’s ever been about, but about the investigation of these detected issues. If you don’t have time to investigate everything, then what’s the point?<p>Organizations spend time and money on security consultants to help them investigate their environments, but these are often only point-in-time engagements, where, once done, nothing "reusable" is left behind. The cloud environment might be in slightly better shape, but maybe only for a short period, before the next contractor must come in to start the process all over again.<p>I, and many others I've worked with, always believed that the most difficult part of cloud security is distinguishing security issues from "just best practice violations". Using an "everything must be compliant" approach never really works and usually means things just don't get done. If everything is red, what do you do?<p>So, people spend immense amounts of time trying to figure out what cloud misconfigurations are actual security issues, what else is put at risk because of something that is misconfigured, and how it can be fixed. All that information is important to eventually prioritize and fix issues.<p>ARGOS investigates the things it finds, that's what it does. It's not about "finding more", it's about understanding what misconfiguration is exposing a cloud system to the internet and what else in your cloud environment is that misconfiguration indirectly putting at risk.<p>One awesome side-effect of this is that we even draw something like an architecture diagram of the environment "around the misconfigured resource". This specifically is something I know most past customers of mine lacked. Architecture diagrams were hard to come by, and never up to date.<p>It's easy to try out if you have access to a cloud environment like Azure or AWS, GCP is in a very early version right now. 20 minutes or less even is all it takes to get everything going, including a one-click Slack integration. First results should be in your dashboard minutes later and are continuously and automatically updated.<p>Really looking forward to people's feedback.
Thanks all!
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Comparing my pre-pandemic (in-person) and current remote working situations, I believe that I would be more productive and creative if I meet regularly in person with my coworkers. Doesn't have to be 5 days a week - in fact, a mix of remote and in-person enable important, focused work. Though remote seems to work well for a lot of people, I can't help but miss in-person interactions and the spark that they bring.<p>I'm looking at positions at startups and wish there was a filter for (current or eventual) in-person collaboration. I suspect that this may be the case for others who are on the hunt, so I hope that this thread can be generally helpful.<p>Which companies are hiring specifically for in-person roles? How many days a week are in person? (SF Bay Area roles would be particularly appreciated!)
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers.<p>tl;dr<p>$ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url <a href="https://dontbeevil.rip/search" rel="nofollow">https://dontbeevil.rip/search</a> --data-urlencode "<p>$ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug'<p>DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions.<p>It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN, StackOverflow, programmer Reddit, and a few others. Page content comes mostly from the Common Crawl project.<p>The limited, but awesome, features in this first release are:<p>- Expressions! Experience the power of Elasticsearch’s Simple Query Strings.<p>- REST API. Just change 'text/plain' to `application/json` in the above alias.<p>- CLI. Just use curl in the terminal. Simple as.<p>HackerNews, StackOverflow, Arxiv abstracts, 2M Github repos, and programmer Reddit (up to 2020) are being indexed right now. There's much more to come in the next few months.<p>I'd love to hear your questions, comments and suggestions in the comments below.
Upvote: | 269 |
Title: I recently found the peertube and its technology is very nice. You could deliver video using p2p torrent like streaming if there are more than 1 user watching it. For me it looks like the hosting provider gets a huge savings in terms of bandwidth. But I don't see many companies making use of this technology.<p>I think Bitchute is using p2p to deliver videos, or is it, really?
Upvote: | 179 |
Title: I've created an app with the goal to: Crowdsource creation of Ukraine/Russia peace agreement.<p><a href="https://peaceagreement.org/" rel="nofollow">https://peaceagreement.org/</a><p>How did it come about? - I'm worried about the rapidly escalatory nature of Ukraine/Russia conflict. Western countries are taking many measures to stop the war, but all measures seem to be alike - they all escalate and deepen the divide between the nuclear armed military powers. Meanwhile, innocent people in Ukraine are suffering now, innocent people in Russia are going to suffer soon due to sanctions and I cannot see how adding more suffering to the World is good and is bringing us closer to peace. I wondered if an unconventional approach to trying to resolve the conflict could be of any benefit...<p>You can see a mock example of a peace agreement here:<p><a href="https://peaceagreement.org/perfect-emblematic-fulfilling-clever-world" rel="nofollow">https://peaceagreement.org/perfect-emblematic-fulfilling-cle...</a><p>I've committed $1000 to the best reasoned peace agreement anyone comes up with. If you have geopolitical understanding of the situation and can construct an objective and convincing agreement, please create a new one by pressing "Create new agreement button" in the landing page. The app has just been launched and not many agreement proposals have been submitted yet, so the competition for $1000 is not fierce currently.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Hi HN, My name is Sachin - I’m the founder of Requestly (<a href="https://requestly.io" rel="nofollow">https://requestly.io</a>) and I’m very happy to be here and get feedback from you all. Requestly is software that lets you intercept network requests, modify, and debug them. We’re available as a browser extension as well as a desktop app and Requestly is useful whether you are a web developer, backend developer, or mobile developer.<p>When developers work with APIs on their local machine, current experience is very broken. Requestly saves you time by letting you test your APIs faster without deployment on staging. Requestly also lets you simulate different failover and edge case scenarios which are hard to simulate without code changes.<p>Back in 2014, I was working on Adobe Target and I had a customer issue where the delivered campaign was showing FOUC (Flash of Unstyled Content) on the customer’s website and It was intermittent. It was so hard to debug with the minified production version of the script, I built a tool to perform a simple redirect of production JS to my locally running JS. I was then able to do logging and gradually pinpoint the exact issue and where I could optimize. My team and I debugged a lot of customer issues using this tool, which eventually became Requestly.<p>I just loved working on Requestly so I kept maintaining the project over weekends and supporting users. It started to gain traction organically and today it serves more than 40K monthly active users.
In a later job at Blinkit (10min delivery platform in India), I saw how mobile app debugging is hard, and similar problems exist in backend development. I did a bit of both there and decided to work on Requestly full time to solve these problems.<p>You might have used solutions like Charles Proxy earlier! Charles is good and I am myself a huge fan, but when it comes to modification capabilities—setting up redirects or mocking API responses—it requires a lot of work. Collaboration is missing, data extraction and offline history are missing. It’d be fair to say that we are building a better alternative to Charles Proxy. We are also simplifying mobile app debugging by building a native SDK that anyone can connect to our Web.<p>Many users also confuse us with Postman. I’d clarify this as Postman is an API development platform, while Requestly is an API debugging and testing platform. For example - as a frontend engineer at Uber, I’d like to test how my app would react if the driver allocation API doesn’t respond on time - will there be an automatic retry, or does the app crash?<p>Requestly intercepts your local network traffic and provides capabilities like Mocking API Response, Simulate HTTP(s) Status Codes, Switching API endpoints, Redirect Production Traffic (or selective API) to stage/local environment, Inject scripts on web pages, and much more.
Requestly is available as a browser extension on Chromium and Firefox, as well as a desktop app on MacOS, Windows, and Linux systems. You can download it at <a href="https://requestly.io/downloads" rel="nofollow">https://requestly.io/downloads</a>
We have a freemium model. The free plan has almost every feature but is limited to 3 modification rules. Our pricing is at <a href="https://app.requestly.io/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://app.requestly.io/pricing</a>.<p>We are now building an open-source Android SDK that lets developers view their API traffic (and analytics events) on the web. This is in testing and planning to roll out very soon. This can be used by non-developers as well. Folks like product managers or digital marketers will be able to validate the analytics instrumentation easily.
As a matter of fact, tools like Requestly are needed not only in development environments but also in production environments to debug distributed transactions. We are not there yet but we have plans to solve that problem too. One foot at a time :)<p>I’d love to hear your thoughts on the product experience. What specific challenges do you face while developing and testing your code changes? Do you ever have to make changes in your codebase to simulate a scenario? I’d like to discuss & brainstorm potential use-cases that can be solved with Requestly. I’ll do my best to answer in the comments.
Upvote: | 190 |
Title: Hi HN. I am at my wit's end so I'm asking here. In the last few years, nearly half of all my online accounts for a variety of different services have been either restricted or banned for no reason. I have no idea what I could possibly be doing "wrong" here so I'm asking HN for help.<p>* Lyft. Got a generic error when requesting a ride, which told me to contact support. I contacted support and they said my account was suspended due to violation of ToS with fradulent activity. I asked exactly what they think I did to violate ToS and they would not tell me. I've taken hundreds of 5-star rides, never comitted any fraud, I don't drive for Lyft or even know anyone who does. To this day I still don't know what I did "wrong."<p>* Instagram. Signed up for an account a couple years ago. Followed some celebrities and friends. A week later when I try to login, it errors saying my account has been suspended with no reason and recourse for recovery. I made another account. Banned again after a couple of days. Now, whenever I try to make a new account, the SMS verification never passes. It is like they have blacklisted my IP address.<p>* Letgo. It's like Craiglist. I moved within San Francisco a few years ago and signed up for an account to get rid of some furniture that I would not be taking with me. Within a few days I couldn't login and support told me my account was banned due to fradulent activity. All I did was create a listing for a couch with some pictures! I hadn't even gotten responses to the post.<p>* Google. I tried logging in to an old account associated with some domains in Webmaster Tools. That's all I use this account for and I haven't logged in in years. I enter in the right password and am greeted with "You’re trying to sign in on a device Google doesn’t recognize, and we don’t have enough information to verify that it’s you. For your protection, you can’t sign in here right now. Try again from a device or location where you’ve signed in before.". What am I supposed to do here? Last I used this account has at an old address (different IP) and on a computer that has since been retired (motherboard swapped out, OS reinstalled).<p>* Twitter. I created an account several years ago. After a week when I logged in it said my account was restricted and asked me to enter a phone number for SMS verification. I complied, and even after entering the correct code, it errored saying it cannot verify my identity. Haven't used Twitter since.<p>* Fidelity. This morning I tried to log in to my investment account and it says my account has been blocked "for security reasons" with no other information or explanation. It says I have to call Fidelity. Over the phone they asked me to supply a ton of documents over fax for identity verification and a record of all the devices I've ever used to sign into Fidelity. They won't even tell me why my account was blocked in the first place.<p>This is endlessly frustrating. There must be <i>something</i> unique about either me or my devices. I have a regular residental ISP in San Francisco, I'm not using Tor or VPNs, I use a vanilla Mac with Firefox. I use an adblocker (uBlock) but so does everyone else. I have a bog-standard Samsung phone running bog-standard unmodified Android.<p>Does HN know why my accounts keep getting banned? Especially for those who work on identity/trust and safety teams in Silicon Valley who have inside knowledge of how this works.
Upvote: | 265 |
Title: I'm pretty discouraged, I'm 37 and I've tried numerous attempts over the last 20 years to start a software business as a solo founder and none have worked. I've been working part-time to cover the bills while I work on creating the software I hoped to turn into business. My wife and I plan to start a family in the next two years, and I need to start getting serious here for my family's future. The industry is really hot right now, and I can make great money if I just get a full-time job.<p>I'm building a programmable PostgreSQL proxy in Rust. The idea is to make it easy to consume the replication stream so it can do query caching with automatic invalidation, and so that people can build custom partitioning, caching, or real-time features on top of PostgreSQL. The proxy part is implemented, but there's still a lot of work to add the replication and caching features, and to test and polish everything to production standards - databases are serious business. The project is on github here: https://github.com/riverdb/riverdb<p>I don't even know if this is something people would want or pay for if I completed it. And then there's the task of marketing/selling it, which is way outside of my skillset.
Should I just give up (grow up?) and get a job? Is it worth pressing on here? I'm not consuming my savings, but neither am I making financial progress, and I'm not getting any younger.
Upvote: | 191 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Eli and Luke from Slai (<a href="https://www.slai.io/hn/62203ae9ee716300083c879b" rel="nofollow">https://www.slai.io/hn/62203ae9ee716300083c879b</a>). Slai is a fast ML prototyping platform designed for software engineers. We make it easy to develop and train ML models, then deploy them as production-ready applications with a single link.<p>ML applications are increasingly built by software engineers rather than data scientists, but getting ML into a product is still a pain. You have to set up local environments, manage servers, build CI/CD pipelines, self-host open-source tools. Many engineers just want to leverage ML for their products without doing any of that. Slai takes care of all of it, so you can focus on your own work.<p>Slai is opinionated: we are specifically for software developers who want to build models into products. We cover the entire ML lifecycle, all the way from initial exploration and prototyping to deploying your model as a REST API. Our sandboxes contain all the code, dataset, dependencies, and application logic needed for your model to run.<p>We needed this product ourselves. A year ago, Luke was working as a robotics engineer, working on a computationally intensive problem on a robot arm (force vector estimation). He started writing an algorithm, but realized a neural network could solve the problem faster and more accurately. Many people had solved this before, so it wasn’t difficult to find an example neural net and get the model trained. You’d think that would be the hard part—but actually the hard part was getting the model available via a REST API. It didn’t seem sensible to write a Flask app and spin up an EC2 instance just to serve up this little ML microservice. The whole thing was unnecessarily cumbersome.<p>After researching various MLOps tools, we started to notice a pattern—most are designed for data scientists doing experimentation, rather than software engineers who want to solve a specific problem using ML. We set out to build an ML tool that is designed for developers and organized around SWE best practices. That means leaving notebooks entirely behind, even though they're still the preferred form factor for data exploration and analysis. We've made the bet that a normal IDE with some "Jupyter-lite" functionality (e.g. splitting code into cells that can be run independently) is a fair trade-off for software engineers who want easy and fast product development.<p>Our browser-based IDE uses a project structure with five components: (1) a training section, for model training scripts, (2) a handler, for pre- and post-processing logic for the model and API schema, (3) a test file, for writing unit tests, (4) dependencies, which are interactively installed Python libraries, and (5) datasets used for model training. By modularizing the project in this way, we ensure that ML apps are functional end-to-end (if we didn't do this, you can imagine a scenario where a data scientist hands off a model to a software engineer for deployment, who's then forced to understand how to create an API around the model, and how to parse a funky ML tensor output into a JSON field). Models can be trained on CPUs or GPUs, and deployed to our fully-managed backend for invoking via a REST API.<p>Each browser-based IDE instance (“sandbox”) contains all the source code, libraries, and data needed for an ML application. When a user lands on a sandbox, we remotely spin up a Docker container and execute all runtime actions in the remote environment. When a model is deployed, we ship that container onto our inference cluster, where it’s available to call via a REST API.<p>Customers have so far used Slai to categorize bills and invoices for a fintech app; recognize gestures from MYO armband movement data; detect anomalies in electrocardiograms; and recommend content in a news feed based on previous content a user has liked/saved.<p>If you’d like to try it, here are three projects you can play with:<p><i>Convert any image into stylized art</i> - <a href="https://www.slai.io/hn/62203ae9ee716300083c879b" rel="nofollow">https://www.slai.io/hn/62203ae9ee716300083c879b</a><p><i>Predict Peyton Manning’s Wikipedia page views</i> - <a href="https://www.slai.io/hn/6215708345d19a0008be3f25" rel="nofollow">https://www.slai.io/hn/6215708345d19a0008be3f25</a><p><i>Predict how happy people are likely to be in a given country</i> - <a href="https://www.slai.io/hn/621e9bb3eda93f00081875fc" rel="nofollow">https://www.slai.io/hn/621e9bb3eda93f00081875fc</a><p>We don’t have great documentation yet, but here’s what to do: (1) Click “train” to train the model; (2) Click the test tube icon to try out the model - this is where you enter sentences for GPT-2 to complete, or images to transform, etc; (3) Click “test model” to run unit tests; (4) Click “package” to, er, package the model; (5) Deploy, by clicking the rocket ship icon and selecting your packaged model. “Deploy” means everything in the sandbox gets turned into a REST endpoint, for users to consume in their own apps. You can do the first 3 steps without signup and then there’s a signup dialog before step 4.<p>We make money by charging subscriptions to our tool. We also charge per compute hour for model training and inference, but (currently) that's just the wholesale cloud cost—we don't make any margin there.<p>Our intention with Slai is to allow people to build small, useful applications with ML. Do you have any ideas for an ML-powered microservice? We’d love to hear about apps you’d like to create. You can create models from scratch, or use pretrained models, so you can be really creative. Thoughts, comments, feedback welcome!
Upvote: | 130 |
Title: There are many options for IP security cameras and multi-camera setups. Ubiquiti, Foscam, Nest, Ring, and all of the things. But they all involve running untrusted internet connected devices on a local network. I want to improve my physical security with these devices without providing nodes to some future DDoS botnet or whatever else these poorly secured IoT devices will get repurposed for. I also don't want my system to be useless if the internet goes down or if BigCompany decides to change their terms or drop service for their APIs or whatever else.<p>Wondering if anyone has had success in setting up a self-hosted (maybe open source) camera system for their site? And if so, any advice? recommendations? sources for information that you found useful?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: I want to buy a new keyboard because the one that I use is bad. Do you have any recommendations?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Hello hn.<p>I believe that situation on Russian IT market is not being represented 100% clear right now in Europe and US.<p>Yesterday I had to emergently evacuate my family from Moscow on a flight to Dubai, leaving behind my apartment, car and my whole life. Every single one of the people I know in IT considers doing the same, or is already in the process (I have 12+ years of networking in this industry, this is fully subjective, but should be representative evnough - I talked to more than 50 people I know directly). Out of my close friends 50% have either already left, or purchasing tickets as you read that.<p>Every single person I know has either full blown panic attacks, averages 2hr of sleep per night, or has extreme anxiety. Four close friends whom I met through IT are hiding from bombs in Kiev and Sumy. Every single one is shocked by decisions made by authoritative Russian government with no care for peoples lives, either in Ukraine or in Russia itself. As you read this, laws are being arranged to set criminal charges even for things like acknowledging the war.<p>My whole investment portfolio got frozen in the St. Pete stock exchange for indefinite period and little hope to get them back. On February 27 I was lucky to quickly get a $10k loan in rubles and purchase already expensive dollars to mitigate the risks, right before inflation skyrocketed to %20+. Most people are not that lucky, and banks have tightened any loans. My salary has already devalued by 50% after one week of war.<p>If anyone can provide any help, Russian IT community needs it. Please reach in comments below by providing your contacts and type of help you can offer, I will do my best to connect you with Russian-speaking communities on Telegram: three of them are communities of developers with 10k+ people in each of them.<p>_Any_ help with remote work or relocation offers to UAE, Georgia, Turkey, Serbia would be immense.<p>You can also reach me directly on [email protected]<p>Hacker news, this is a crisis of extreme proportions. Please, we need your help.
Upvote: | 220 |
Title: Hi HN, I am Konstantina from Kaedim (https://www.kaedim.com). Kaedim is using ML to transform 2D art, sketches or photos into 3D content. We make it easy to integrate 3D User Generated Content in game or metaverses, with our API.<p>Creating digital 3D objects is getting increasingly difficult and expensive. There is a very limited supply of people who are good 3D artists, and the cost of training one is very big. It usually involves years of learning difficult 3D software. However, more and more of the digital experiences around us are turning into 3D.<p>I needed this product myself. The idea for Kaedim was born from a personal frustration when, 2 years ago, I was working on a project for re-creating a cathedral in 3D software for my university degree. Before being hands-on, the concept seemed straightforward to me, “the same way you draw on a piece of paper, you can also draw in 3D, how hard can it be?”. The reality shocked me. Having completely underestimated the task I found myself needing hours to model each 3D object (chairs, tables, walls) using really complicated and steep learning curve 3D software.<p>Every time I wanted to model something new I had to start from a cube and do all the necessary operations on it to achieve the desired shape. Over and over again. Moreover, there were many times when I would bin my creations and start from scratch for better luck. The reality with 3D modelling software is that it’s almost always easier to start from scratch than to try and fix a modelled object.<p>After my personal experience of the problem, I started thinking about game devs. “Game developers have this problem at scale, they need to build whole 3D worlds with millions of objects. How do they do it?”. So we started talking to them. Only to discover, there is no secret. 3D asset production is a big bottleneck for them too. There is a very limited supply of people who are really good 3D artists, and the cost of training one is very big. It usually involves years of training on difficult 3D software.<p>Our solution is an ML algorithm that creates 3D models out of 2D images. We are constantly training on more and more data points to improve the accuracy and we have added a Quality Control step to always guarantee a standard level of quality. We then use the QC results to train our algorithms further.<p>Artists and game devs have used Kaedim so far to quickly prototype, create and iterate their 3D art, in a cost effective way. However, talking to a lot of game developers, we realised something <i>key</i>. For the same reason games like Minecraft and Roblox are very popular, more and more people want the opportunity to customise and contribute 3D content inside their favourite games/metaverses.<p>This is why we created the Kaedim API. Within your app, enable your players to upload their 2D inspiration and easily create their own 3D content for customising and populating the game.<p>Kaedim API Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k976GJWQrKw<p>Documentation: https://app.archbee.io/public/m370vHO-M7WGXJQLRlIte/AU-DhH6mX0e1sb_FRXH3i#lk-useful-links<p>For signup and more information about onboardings get in touch with us here<p>Discord Server: https://discord.gg/4wN8NSUr<p>Thanks a lot for reading this! We are adding more and more features over time and would love to hear your feedback and ideas on what you’d like to see from the API.<p>If you have any cool app ideas that can be built by using Kaedim, drop them in the comments!
Upvote: | 150 |
Title: This is a question for our legal friends here on HN. Imagine this scenario: I have an open source project on Github with an MIT license. I've cargo-culted the<p><pre><code> Copyright (C) 2022 My Name
</code></pre>
line from every MIT-licensed project I've ever seen.<p>A random contributor forks my repository and sends me a pull-request. They haven't altered the license file in any way.<p>So, Question 1: are their contributions automatically licensed under the same MIT license as the original repository? (Note that their fork, which I'm being asked to merge, contains the identical license file.)<p>Question 2: have they (almost certainly inadvertently) assigned copyright over their changes to me? (They're asking me to merge changes from a repository which contains a copyright declaration in my name.)<p>Question 3: if one, why not the other?<p>Disclaimer -- personally I hate even having to think about these kinds of questions, which is why I try to make most of my open-source code available under the Unlicense [1]. I've recently discovered the Zero-Clause BSD licence [2] which may be a better alternative as it avoids the potentially problematic concept of a 'public domain' -- I'd love to hear an informed legal analysis of their differences.<p>[1]: https://unlicense.org<p>[2]: https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Our company is exploring creating a meetup in my town and previously relied on Meetup.com to make it happen.<p>But I do wonder if Discord for community and event planning + self-hosted website for member growth / publicity is the way to go in 2022?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: After stack overflow closes their jobs section, which site would you consider a replacement, both as employee and/or employer?
Upvote: | 167 |
Title: I made this game for my children to play, as they are heavily into Wordle, and I thought they'd also like something maths based!<p>Every puzzle is solvable and has at least one solution (usually more).<p>There is a kids mode in the settings, plus a hard mode for extra difficulty.
Upvote: | 189 |
Title: Hey HN!
We’re Maayan and Or, and we are building Elementary (<a href="https://github.com/elementary-data/elementary" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elementary-data/elementary</a>), an open-source framework that continuously monitors your data and sends alerts when anomalies are detected.<p>Elementary can alert you, for example, when a table in Snowflake hasn't been updated as expected or when a revenue column has too many nulls. It also monitors operations in the data stack, and provides for analyzing both impact and root cause. For example, it can alert you when your dbt runs or tests fail, including the impacted dependencies. A data lineage graph visualizes the data flow and can be used to find the source of invalid data.<p>We have both been working in the data space for over a decade, Maayan in analytics and Or in data engineering. Despite working at very different companies with different data stacks and use cases, we had the same reliability problems. Data is incomplete and inconsistent, and the abundance of technologies creates more complexity and inconsistency. Data reliability issues cause distrust, delays, and bad decisions. It's hard to achieve high data reliability, detect issues fast, understand impact and resolve quickly.<p>We also found that we had built similar solutions, and as we talked to other developers, we learned that most data teams have their own version of the same thing. They usually don’t go for a commercial observability solution unless they have major incidents and technical debt. Until that point, they prefer to build for themselves, for two reasons: to avoid the overhead of procurement and security compliance; and to customize to their own stack, data sources, business logic, etc, and have all the metadata and metrics in their stack to support additional use cases.<p>We decided to build an open-source alternative—one that can be implemented easily, hosted yourself, and customized. This solves the compliance and the data ownership problem. It also solves the build-your-own problem, because teams can deploy an extensive solution early on, instead of waiting till later when there are major problems.<p>Elementary stores all the logs, metadata, and metrics it collects and generates in the data warehouse, so users can easily add their own detections and logic to it. Additionally, the solution is dbt native, which means it provides a dbt package that can be easily installed in a dbt environment as well as configured directly from a dbt project. Since it's part of the existing workflow and environment, it makes it convenient for data engineers, analytics engineers, and data analysts to enhance and contribute.<p>Open source eliminates the need to pay for getting started or to grant access to a third party. A managed service and additional enterprise features will be available in the cloud in the future. Critically, though, the user's metadata will continue to reside in their environment, under their control, and they will still have full customization available.<p>Currently Elementary supports Snowflake, BigQuery and dbt. It collects metadata such as schemas, query logs and dbt artifacts. It generates and monitors data quality metrics, sends Slack alerts, and visualizes the data lineage.
If this is your data stack, we’d love you to give it a try!<p>We would love to hear your feedback, experiences and ideas from trying to solve data observability in your organizations.
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: Hi HN, I am David Ortega, a bioengineer and founder at Phase Biolabs (<a href="https://www.phasebiolabs.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.phasebiolabs.com</a>). We’re building technology that uses fermentation to turn CO2 emissions into carbon-neutral chemicals—specifically into sustainable, cost-competitive solvents for the pharma, cosmetics, and paint industries.<p>We’ve built a lab-scale prototype that is a 1.5L bioreactor with a microorganism inside that 'eats' carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas, converting them into chemicals as it grows. Here's a demo video I just made for HN: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUIT3RUeUPE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUIT3RUeUPE</a>. We are currently making ethanol in the lab but unfortunately CO2-based ethanol cannot be legally sold as a beverage, so industrial solvents it is :)<p>You can do two things with carbon: you can capture it, or you can use it. Both are hard, but the latter is harder, mainly because carbon dioxide is so small.<p>Capturing CO2 is usually done by attaching it to something else, usually another molecule, which is how we can extract it from a dilute gas stream or 'pull it' out of the air. But the CO2 molecule is only temporarily transformed.<p>Using CO2 is a different ball game, usually referred to as CCU (carbon capture and utilization). For this you need to permanently convert the molecular structure itself, and since you are working with extremely tiny pieces of matter, you need extremely precise machinery.<p>The challenge with converting CO2 is doing it efficiently. It needs to happen with as little energy as possible and to be as precise as possible. If you want to convert CO2 into X, but you also produce Y, and Z, that is a problem which will show up in the cost. Our solution is bio-based CCU, but there are also electrochemical and thermochemical technologies, each with advantages and disadvantages. And there are other bio-based approaches, such as making trees more efficient (e.g. Living Carbon W20). All are valid strategies.<p>In biology, CCU is known as carbon fixation. During my PhD I was engineering microbes to convert wastes into renewable chemicals and fuels, so I began to study biochemical carbon pathways, which led me to carbon fixation. I began to realize how important carbon fixation is at a macro level (carbon cycle) and how the process works, but also that it is extremely inefficient and can be optimized. For example, the trees in your garden don’t grow very fast. This is due to photosynthesis being 2-4% efficient. I’ve always wanted to start a startup and that has always been in the back of my mind, so I did things that I enjoyed that could also help towards reaching that goal, which led me to this.<p>Advances in synthetic biology mean we can do things that weren't possible 20-30 years ago. The amount of tinkering that we can do has substantially increased (and costs have dropped), and our understanding has grown due to a rise in data and analytics. We can borrow strategies that have worked in the past in other fields and apply them in new ways.<p>Since biological carbon fixation is precise, but very inefficient, our approach is to take that precision and enhance it using synthetic biology into a process that is efficient, scalable, and productive enough for industrial application. We're using microorganisms that can naturally fix carbon, and transforming them into mini factories. Our microorganisms are 7x more energy efficient than naturally occurring plants or algae and in theory can produce almost any molecule found in nature directly from CO2.<p>Carbon fixation is catalysed by a carbon fixation (biochemical) pathway, which is simply a set of enzymes that catalyse a sequence of steps/reactions. The enzymes attach electrons and hydrogen ions onto the CO2 molecule, while removing the oxygen, one step at a time. This process can be called reverse combustion, but whereas combustion is uncontrolled and explosive (literally), carbon fixation is highly controlled. It’s a stepwise progression from a single CO2 molecule, adding hydrogen/electrons one at a time and eventually carbon (going from 1C -> 2C, then 3C etc.) to get to your target product. Enzymes are the perfect molecular machines for this as precision is their speciality.<p>Our plan is to initially sell our technology to CO2 emitters so that they can reduce emissions and make money by converting a problem/cost (emissions) into new revenue. The technology scales to the size of the emitter. The cost is very different for a company that emits 50,000 tons per year vs 500,000 tons per year. We have some early estimates based on some economic modelling we’ve done.<p>We are at an early stage and have a long way to go but we have big ambitions for using CCU technology to decarbonise heavy industry, make sustainable chemicals and transition towards a circular economy.<p>Fermentation processes are well understood, easily scalable and easy to operate. We think gas fermentation can be easily deployed around the world to convert/recycle CO2 into sustainable products and Phase is aiming to use it to recycle emissions on the gigaton scale by 2040.<p>I hope this short summary provides new or renewed interest in the age-old process of fermentation, something that has been with us for millennia (my family has been making homemade wine for many years). I'd love to discuss any of these topics with you!
Upvote: | 191 |
Title: DM me / @DotDotJames on Twitter
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: www outline.com is offline/unreachable since about 10 days. It is/was(?) a very useful service to make some webpages more readable and (in some case) avoid the paywall. I also used it a lot of time to extract the "reader view" of some article to send it via email. But since 7-10 the website is down but domain looks okay. I'm also using a recursive DNS resolver so it's not blocked via DNS from my ISP.<p>Someone know what's going on? I haven't found other info.<p>Thanks
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: Hi, not sure whether this is a good topic to discuss here or not but I keep seeing issues with Wikipedia which are getting worse with time, with regards to neutrality and editorialisation.<p>While Wikipedia's model seems far better than an individual publishing house's encyclopedia one where they can draw editors from millions of people throughout the world and are not bound by ads or sales to keep them afloat, in terms of editing it hasn't been working well.<p>Not every editor has equal power on Wikipedia. The more you have stayed on the site and the more time you spend on the site, you tend to have more say on what gets inside the articles. I have seen talk pages where the same three editors who seem to be part of the same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any alternative opinion or tone to come in the article. A behaviour very similar to Reddit where some subreddit moderators can sustain echo chambers by moderating anything not falling in line. In Wikipedia's case this often even leads to some sources getting picked over the other specially when it comes to media or books.<p>Is it possible to break the grasp of "editors" or is every user curated platform doomed to reach this state?
Upvote: | 198 |
Title: If I search for 'cnn' in Google i get an ad that points to the Washington Post with the title "CNN Breaking News".<p>See picture: https://imgur.com/a/d6Mbk7i<p>How is this not considered false advertising? According to a quick google search in the US the federal Lanham Act allows civil lawsuits for false advertising that “misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin” of goods or services. 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a).
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Searching for "Russia Today" or "Sputnik News" doesn't return their URLs, but does return other related links. Seems to be related to a gov request: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/26927483#.<p>It's not a court order, so Google voluntarily decided to implement this.<p>Mildly interesting; I don't think anyone is surprised.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Creator here. I was looking for something as simple as Backblaze Personal [1] but privacy focused and open source. This is my attempt to build that.<p>Uses PyQt6 [2] for the GUI and Pyinstaller [3] for creating the platform specific binaries. The backup engine under the hood is Restic [4]. The server code is written in Laravel [5]. All the code is on GitHub [6].<p>I actually really like Backblaze (even use B2 for this offering behind the scenes) so this isn't meant to throw shade their way. Just wanted a private open source alternative. Something like Bitwarden but for backups.<p>[1] <a href="https://backblaze.com" rel="nofollow">https://backblaze.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://pypi.org/project/PyQt6" rel="nofollow">https://pypi.org/project/PyQt6</a><p>[3] <a href="https://pyinstaller.readthedocs.io/en/stable" rel="nofollow">https://pyinstaller.readthedocs.io/en/stable</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/restic" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/restic</a><p>[5] <a href="https://laravel.com" rel="nofollow">https://laravel.com</a><p>[6] <a href="https://github.com/blobbackup/blobbackup" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blobbackup/blobbackup</a>
Upvote: | 236 |
Title: I've been having a debate about whether code should be checked out and run locally (or on a staging environment) as part of code review. Personally, I find it easier to review a change after I've run it locally, but perhaps that's because I'm not very good at reading code.<p>I'm interested to hear what other people think. Do you run code as part of code review?
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications? Does it offer any actual practical benefits over other languages?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: Alex here speaking from the Russian IT community (40k+ people). Please read our message.<p>Switching off Visa and Mastercard transactions abroad will lock thousands of IT specialists within the regime. These people are now trying to flee the country.<p>We wrote about the situation here:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30552091" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30552091</a><p>Over the past two days we had 300+ resumes submitted[0], connecting these people with more than 30 organizations from Europe, US, Canada, India, Turkey, UAE and other countries to help them urgently relocate. Many of those looking for reloc are Ukrainian people by nationality who happen to live in Russia.<p>Lot of these people rely on scarce savings which they still have on their bank cards, as many were fired from their jobs over the past week. Getting cash is practically impossible right now, even in Moscow.<p>These people won’t be able to purchase tickets to get out. Those who already flew away won’t be able to finance themselves, as many still rely on Russian sources of income and try to work remotely while looking for another job.<p>Me and other community admins practically beg you, from all of our IT communities, to reconsider the decision, or give us more time.<p>Signed,<p>[email protected] (admin of 36k members IT community)
[email protected] (admin of 1k member IT community)
@zzzybkin (admin of 7k member IT community)
[email protected] (admin of 1.3k member IT community)
[email protected] (admin of 3k member IT community)<p>0 - all resumes to date are published here <a href="https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAE3nUawZ4YX6AtDCFg" rel="nofollow">https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAE3nUawZ4YX6AtDCFg</a><p><i>You can help by posting in the comments type of help, or relaying above information and our contacts to your local recruiters and hiring managers.</i>
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: I've seen some posts here about preparing for a nuclear attack, but I don't think I'm prepared mentally for war of any kind.<p>I grew up in the UK during the 90s so I've obviously had a very sheltered life. The two most difficult things I've ever gone through is losing a job and having my heart broken. If nuclear war happened, assuming I survived I'm not sure I'd be able to cope with the real suffering that would follow. I'm also not sure how I'd cope if I was drafted into a more conventional war. The idea of being cold, dump, tried and hungry for weeks on end seems unbearable to me. I also have no idea how I'd cope without seeing my partner for what could be months not knowing if she's safe, or even still alive.<p>I'm terrified that the world I was raised for will not be my future. I am scared and I've not been able to focus on anything else since this conflict started. I don't know how to mentally prepare myself for what might come and I'm not the kind of person who can just switch off and distract themselves at times like this.<p>Is there anything I can do to better prepare myself mentally for what might come?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Is there a specific topic, concept, etc.. that no matter how many times you try to wrap your head around, you can't ever seem to get it? If you were in this situation, what would you do?
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: There’s been a lot of discussion about the bimodal distribution in entering pay (specifically at the “senior” level). Blind and Levels.fyi have plenty of data on $300k+ FAANG pay packages. There’s plenty of hiring going on outside the hotspots at the $120-160k level. But are there non-FAANG jobs (ie sane hiring process, small teams) that pay senio engineers $200-300k? If so, where are they?
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: According to this video shared by Zelensky Facebook page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HucqNfL1oYA (YouTube link for those who don’t use FB).<p>Surely the documents in the video and his phone aren’t decisive for the war, but since a text inside an image can be easily deblurred using -lots of- ML tools available, it isn’t a bit unsafe to share video like this?<p>Maybe for a video is different but, if deblurring an image is not trouble for me, I don’t think it’s a hard trouble for the Russian IT guys to deblur a video.<p>Someone should alert the Zelensky’s social staff it, or I’m missing something?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: How does one go from an idea to a sellable product?<p>I have various ideas, not especially "high tech" more assembling of off the shelf components to create novel products that I think may be useful (I have a need for these myself). So I could build a prototype myself (despite being a software person). After that what? How do you find out about manufacturing costs and options? Marketing is another side, but I have an idea about that.<p>Are there any good guides out there?
Upvote: | 115 |
Title: I hear a lot from the Western/Ukrainian perspective about this war but I'm curious what the Russian Hacker News community thinks.<p>What is your perspective on what's happening? What are you seeing and hearing from your family and friends in Russia?<p>My deepest sympathy goes out to everyone affected by this tragedy. <3
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: A new calculator software cannot really bring attention (<a href="https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/" rel="nofollow">https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/</a>)<p>However, I wrote a full article explaining why I had to build something "new" that does not behave like usual desktop calculator softwares :<p><<a href="https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html" rel="nofollow">https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html</a>><p>TL;DR
All "small" calculator softwares I know share the same design flaws. And the GUI is not the only stumbling block in their poor efficiency. Handling correctly numerical approximations - expected or not - is crucial to trust the results. It is usually not done in lightweight tools. It should. So I prove that if I could do it, OS manufacturers could as well.
Upvote: | 286 |
Title: I am Struggling with this from a long time and it has made my life hell.
Would like to know what strategies you used to overcome it?
Upvote: | 144 |
Title: Throwaway for obvious reasons.<p>I’ll try to be as concise as possible. Some details have been changed to protect myself.<p>I used to operate a website that hotlinked to an asset from $company’s S3 bucket. When $company was made aware of my doing from the FBI, the FBI asked them to calculate the loss amount. They did this by looking at IPs that hit the bucket over a span of 1 month, and the IPs that logged into $company’s service. The number of IPs that they didn’t recognize (about 25,000), multiplied by some multiplier, came out to about $6MM.<p>The problem: I know how many people I had on my website that hit that asset. It was in the hundreds, not the thousands, definitely not tens of thousands. I know this because my site required a subscription and I know how many subscribers I had. There were (and still are!) hundreds of sites that hotlink to $company’s S3 bucket today, causing them loss, that are free and easily accessible. I can show this.<p>When I told my lawyer that this couldn’t possibly have been calculated correctly, he said that I’m pretty SOL in arguing this loss amount. He’s not technical so I don’t know if he really understands. Regardless, I’m in the process of discharging him because he’s failed me multiple times in this case so far.<p>This reeks of all sorts of wrong. $company is an organization known to probably 95% of HNers, they’re a technical organization, and they could not have possibly made the calculation in good faith.<p>If anyone has any advice, I’d appreciate it. I’ll be checking this thread closely, but I can also be reached by email at hotlinking@protonmail[.]com.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Throwaway account because my employer reads HN.<p>I'm a DevOps engineer and I have been working at my current company (a startup) for less than a year. For context without giving too much information, we make enterprise software that makes certain jobs a lot easier through automation. Our customers use our app basically as their full time job, many tabs open for hours at a time. Our customers are people who used our trial, then begged their bosses to sign up for a yearly plan with us, which costs 5 figures.<p>I feel guilty when our customers have repeated bugginess in our app. For example they might spend an hour working on a task and then suddenly our code runs into an exception and their data is not saved properly. These issues are rare from a numerical standpoint, we track exceptions and we have a low percentage of errors, but it can still be a serious negative user experience. We have even had a customer recently complain about a bug, which we fixed in a few hours, but the next week they had to complain about the bug again because it was back. We have also had complaints that they were pulled into a meeting with their CEO or VP or whatever and they needed the app and it wasn't working properly and it was really embarassing. One customer has requested access to our API because they want to write a script to make frequent backups of their data because they are nervous about our data integrity. I feel like we owe it to our customers who had advocated for our app to their bosses and made a significant financial investment to have an experience that is as polished of an experience as possible, since it would make them look really bad if our app is a buggy mess.<p>This is my second job out of school. At my first job, I'd search Twitter and see people complaining about our app being buggy and I would feel bad, but less strongly than I do here. That is because we had a QA team triple the size of the DevOps team that triaged bugs. Whenever we had an incident, I figured if it got through a whole QA team then it must have been a tough one to prevent. Nevertheless, I did have at least some bad feelings about the complaints.<p>I have casually asked my boss how they feel about all the random bugs in our product. They feel that as a startup of our size, our number 1 priority is making sure we have enough features. Our prospective customers tell us things like "we can't sign up until you support X number of features," and my boss and the founder believe that our number 1 indication of success is the downward trend of X. I understand what they mean (it doesn't matter how bug-free your code is if you run out of funding and go out of business) but I still feel guilty. My boss also is correct when they say that these issues happen less than 1% of the time. I don't feel like I have buy-in to make any changes to this process. Alerts are ignored, and some people don't even have PagerDuty set up, their alerts go nowhere.<p>I wouldn't call myself a perfectionist, I write bugs all the time. But when I see the bug I feel a responsibility to triage it and fix it.<p>I think about people who work at big companies and all the complaints people have about them, like becoming demonitized on Youtube for no reason or getting their app banned from the App Store for no reason. Those things would make me feel really bad working at those companies, especially if there was no way I could address them. But after doing some thinking, I realize the majority of the employees there probably don't feel this way. So it's probably an issue with myself that needs fixing, right?
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Hi HN, I’m Gary from Litebulb (<a href="https://litebulb.io" rel="nofollow">https://litebulb.io</a>). We automate technical onsite interviews for remote teams. When I say “automate”, I should add “as much as possible”. Our software doesn’t decide who you should hire! But we set up dev environments for interviews, ask questions on real codebases, track candidates, run tests to verify correctness, and analyze the code submitted. On the roadmap are things like scheduling, tracking timing, and customizing questions.<p>I've been a software engineer at 11 companies and have gone through well over a hundred interviewing funnels. Tech interviews suck. Engineers grind LeetCode for months just so they can write the optimal quicksort solution in 15 minutes, but on the job you just import it from some library like you're supposed to. My friends and I memorized half of HackerRank just to stack up job offers, but none of these recruiting teams actually knew whether or not we were good fits for the roles. In some cases we weren't.<p>After I went to the other side of the interviewing table, it got worse. It takes days to create a good interview, and engineers hate running repetitive, multi-hour interviews for people they likely won't ever see again. They get pulled away from dev work to do interviews, then have to sync up with the rest of the team to decide what everyone thinks and come to an often arbitrary decision. At some point, HR comes back to eng and asks them to fix or upgrade a 2 year old interview question, and nobody wants to or has the time. Having talked with hundreds of hiring managers, VPs of eng, heads of HR, and CTOs, I know how common this problem is. Common enough to warrant starting a startup, hence Litebulb.<p>We don’t do LeetCode—our interviews are like regular dev work. Candidates get access to an existing codebase on Github complete with a DB, server, and client. Environments are Dockerized, and every interview's setup is boiled down to a single "make" command (DB init, migration, seed, server, client, tunnelling, etc), so a candidate can get started on coding within minutes of accepting the invite. Candidates code on Codespaces (browser-based VSCode IDE), but can choose to set up locally, though we don't guarantee there won't be package versioning conflicts or environment problems. Candidates are given a set of specs and Figma mockups (if it's a frontend/fullstack interview) and asked to build out a real feature on top of this existing codebase. When candidates submit their solution, it's in the form of a Github pull request. The experience is meant to feel the same as building a feature on the job. Right now, we support a few popular stacks: Node + Express, React, GraphQL, Golang, Ruby on Rails, Python/Django and Flask, and Bootstrap, and we’re growing support by popular demand.<p>We then take that PR, run a bunch of automated analysis on it, and produce a report for the employer. Of course there’s a limit to what an automated analysis can reveal, but standardized metrics are useful. Metrics we collect include linter output, integration testing, visual regression testing, performance (using load testing), cyclomatic/halstead complexity, identifier naming convention testing, event logs, edge case handling, code coverage. And of course all our interview projects come with automated tests that run automatically to verify the correctness of the candidate’s code (as much as unit and integration tests can do, at least—we’re not into formal verification at this stage!)<p>Right now, Litebulb compiles the report, but we're building a way for employers to do it themselves using the data collected. Litebulb is still early, so we're still manually verifying all results (24 hour turnaround policy).<p>There are a lot of interview service providers and automated screening platforms, but they tend to either not be automated (i.e. you still need engineers to do the interviews) or are early-funnel, meaning they test for basic programming or brainteasers, but not regular dev work. Litebulb is different because we're late-funnel <i>and</i> automated. We can get the depth of a service like Karat but at the scale and price point of a tool like HackerRank. Longer term, we're hoping to become something like Webflow for interviews.<p>Here's a Loom demo: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/bdca5f77379140ecb69f7c1917663ae5" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/bdca5f77379140ecb69f7c1917663ae5</a>, it's a bit informal but gets the idea across. There’s a trial mode too, for which you can sign up here: <a href="https://litebulb.typeform.com/to/J7mQ5KZI" rel="nofollow">https://litebulb.typeform.com/to/J7mQ5KZI</a>. Be warned that it’s still unpolished—we're probably going to still be in beta for another 3 months at least. That said, the product is usable and people have been paying and getting substantial value out of it, which is why we thought an HN launch might be a good idea.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback, your interview experiences or ideas for building better tech interviews. If you have thoughts, want to try out Litebulb, or just want to chat, you can always reach me directly at [email protected]. Thanks everyone!
Upvote: | 139 |
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