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Title: domains.fj<p>fiji.gov.fj<p>usp.ac.fj<p>etc.<p>http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/fj.html
Upvote: | 93 |
Title: It seems as though very frequently these days whenever I try to enlarge an image by zooming in within chrome (ctrl-+) images end up getting smaller. What is with this current anti-pattern? I see it all over the place including Whatsapp, google images, facebook's gallery view.<p>When I zoom in within my browser I would assume images would get bigger not smaller.<p>I believe this to be an issue within dynamic flex-based layouts and/or percentage based width on an image.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Lawrence, Chen and Dekel from Optery (<a href="https://www.optery.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.optery.com/</a>). Optery is opt out software that removes your home address, phone number, email, age, and other private info from the internet. Specifically, we find and delete your profiles on hundreds of data broker and people-search web sites.<p>Sites like Radaris, SocialCatfish, VoterRecords.com, Persopo, PeekYou, and WhitePages.com scrape the internet for the personal information of as many people as they can find, plus buy it in bulk from other sources. Then they post it online and sell it to anyone who wants to know about you. This is legal (though there are a lot of gray areas), but the net result is that a shocking amount of personal data is available about us online. Most of these sites will remove your data if you ask—but they don’t make it easy. Plus you have to ask each of them individually, and to do that, you have to know who they are in the first place.<p>We automate the opt-out process on these sites, first finding your exposed profiles, and then removing your information from both the public internet and the datasets they sell. Because there are hundreds of such sites, it’s impractical to manage all this on your own. Software, however, can manage it nicely. We’ve written that software.<p>This helps protect you from identity theft, phishing, hacking, spamming, doxing, and more. People search sites are used not only by identity thieves, but by phishers and hackers who craft convincing emails referencing non-obvious personal details as a way to build trust and trick you or those close to you into letting your guard down.<p>We arrived at this problem from two opposite directions. Two of us worked in the data broker industry in the past, but as we learned more about what this data actually gets used for, and the harms it can cause, we decided to leave. We had a lot of inside knowledge about how the industry worked and decided to use that knowledge to help people learn more about the problem and address it head on.<p>The other thing that happened was that I was a victim of identity theft. The thieves were able to open new accounts in my name by creating a fake ID and then piecing together information to bypass verification questions like “In which of the following cities have you never lived or used in your address?” or “Which of the following streets has a current or former association with you?” I found it was nearly impossible to remove myself from the Byzantine ecosystem of data brokers posting and selling his info online. Once the dust had cleared, we began discussing approaches to automating opt out and removal requests and Optery was born.<p>The problem is hard to solve for two reasons. First, there are so many data brokers, each with their own nuances and distinct processes for opt outs. So far we’ve built custom opt out processes for over 200 data brokers. Second, most U.S. citizens actually still have few legal rights to data privacy. Optery is only for U.S. residents for the time being, and this is one main reasons—the problem is at its worst here.<p>This is changing as new privacy laws are starting to get passed at the state level (e.g. in California, Nevada, and Virginia), but as of this writing the majority of U.S. citizens don’t even have a legal right to opt out of their personal information being posted and sold online, and in our experience, about 5% of data brokers simply do not comply with opt out requests. In these cases we file formal complaints to the FTC and state AG offices, and we recommend you do the same. They are slow to act on these complaints unfortunately, but at least the wheels are in motion, and we believe this issue will eventually get taken care of as more people become aware of the problem. In the meantime, we continue to send opt out requests regardless, and are able remove personal data from the other 95%.<p>One nuance of the opt-out process, which existing services tend not to handle correctly, is that you should avoid sending an opt out request to a data broker unless you are reasonably sure that the provider has your data in the first place. Otherwise you’re giving them information about you, when what you want is just the opposite! Some other services just take a long list of privacy@ email addresses for every data broker they can find, and then blast out generic opt out requests containing all of your identifying information, regardless of whether or not the data broker even has your information to begin with.<p>But the Achilles’ heel of these sites is that they rely heavily on the open web for marketing: SEO, affiliate programs, and paid search ads. Therefore they mostly support HTTP GET requests in standardized formats to reach individual people’s profiles, e.g. <a href="https://www.data-broker.com/person" rel="nofollow">https://www.data-broker.com/person</a>? firstName=george&lastName=orwell&city=new-york&state=NY.<p>We take advantage of this to find out which providers have you in their database first, before invoking the formal opt-out. These HTTP requests require less information than the formal opt-out processes do, plus are buried inside of the millions of other search requests that are happening through their open web marketing channels (e.g. paid search affiliate, SEO, etc). We’ve been able to find many more exposed profiles this way than the more old-fashioned approaches other services use such as manual searches and the bulk “spray and pray” emails. Also, it lets us provide our users with a dashboard full of these links they can use to discover and verify what’s out there on them. Many people prefer to submit opt out requests on their own, or are already working with a different removal service; in those cases, our dashboard can be used to double-check and verify that work. Visibility and transparency is rarely available to consumers in the world of personal data, so when we demo the product to people who care about their data privacy, it’s often a "wow" moment.<p>A common question we get is “And what about you? Why should I trust <i>you</i> to collect my data any more than these shady outfits?” To be clear, we do not sell data. We are not a data broker, and do not have any financial relationship or any affiliation with any data broker. If you are looking at an information removal service, research the company carefully. Many other services have deep ties into the data broker industry through affiliate partnerships, data sharing arrangements, and financial relationships. We do not. More on that here: <a href="https://www.optery.com/privacy-policy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.optery.com/privacy-policy/</a>. You can delete your account at any time and all information we hold about you will be destroyed.<p>Unfortunately, there is a catch-22 where in order to opt out of people-search sites, you must first tell them who you are (otherwise, how else would they know who to opt out!). To create an Optery account, we require only the minimum amount of information necessary for this, which is: First Name, Last Name, Year of Birth, Current City, and Current State. For most people, this is no more information than what is already publicly available online. We also offer users the option to give us more precise details (such as a full birth date rather than just birth year, past addresses, etc.) because this can increase the accuracy of locating profiles at data brokers and opt outs. This is entirely optional though. The only required info is the absolute minimum, without which there would be no point in creating an account, because we would not be able to find or remove you.<p>We have a freemium model. When someone creates an account, we send them a free Exposure Report with ~70 screen shots of where they’ve been found, which lets them see where their personal details are posted online and being exploited by data brokers. From there, they can decide if they’d like to use our free tools to submit opt out requests on their own self-service, or they can upgrade to a paid tier and we’ll remove the profiles for them.<p>We launched Optery as a Show HN last year (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27662114" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27662114</a>) and the feedback from the community was enormously helpful. We prioritized a bunch of features like adding MFA, expanding our list of data brokers, streamlining UX, and clarifying our privacy terms and practices, all based on feedback from our Show HN. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the current iteration!
Upvote: | 223 |
Title: A little background: Self-taught web developer, hired to work with both frontend and backend code. This is my first software development job.<p>My problem is, I'm slow to pick the technologies needed to start working on JIRA tickets. I'm working together with another junior developer (also self-taught, started same day with me) but I'm just stuck eating his dust. I decided to put egos aside and ask him for help and the only thing I got was generic advice, which I already do (read the docs, understand what you read, try building their tutorials/getting started section, read more code, trial and error).<p>Either I'm inherently slow and it's time to accept the natural limits of my brain or there's a better method that would work for me and I'm missing it.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Good morning everyone! My co-founder and I recently moved to the UK after working at Robinhood for over 5 years. We were stunned at the fees it was costing us to move money across borders with existing fintech solutions, so we decided to start Atlantic Money - the world’s first fixed fee (with no FX markup) money transfer product. For £3 you can transfer up to £1M. Let us know if you have any questions!
Upvote: | 182 |
Title: Hey HN! We are Ravi and Vijay from 8vdX! (<a href="https://www.8vdx.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.8vdx.com/</a>) We are building a founder-friendly venture debt marketplace for early stage startups. We also provide seed-extension debt to breakout companies to extend their runway to get to a better Series A raise. Our mission is to be the preferred debt partner for high growth startups and scale with them as they grow from seed stage to Series A and beyond.<p>Vijay and I were both working at Eight Capital, a high yield fund that I cofounded, when we gave a bridge loan to Kodo (a startup from YC W21) to support their high growth rate while they were getting their YC funding. Kodo is an Indian company and had to complete some standard processes for that to happen, but they needed money right away. Our loan allowed them to accelerate their growth and they ended up having an amazing Demo Day result.<p>We wondered, could this be repeated with other startups or was it a one and done investment? We looked at publicly available data and quickly came to the conclusion that we could indeed underwrite venture debt to seed to early stage startups. That was the genesis of the 8vdX venture debt marketplace.<p>We launched 3 months ago and have already provided venture debt to 16 startups. In good YC fashion, we’ve been focused on our batchmates to begin with :) But we believe this model can scale beyond the YC ecosystem and we’re very interested in that.<p>Why do we think this makes sense right now? Seed rounds today are the same size as Series A used to be a decade ago. But there are no existing players who provide venture debt to early stage startups. Last year, seed and early stage and Series A startups raised ~$100B from equity investors. Venture debt can be up to 25% of the balance sheet of these rapidly growing companies, making this a $25B annual opportunity in this underserved market.<p>Our loans are founder friendly. We do not force founders to open captive bank accounts, cash flow sweeps, take personal guarantees of the founders, or force the startup into bankruptcy if the startup is unable to repay. We have a simple and transparent application process to receive funds through the 8vdX digital platform.<p>Currently, startups can apply digitally for up to $150k of debt by visiting our startup portal at 8vdx.com, and upon approval, the funds are wired to their account on the same day. 8vdX has a capital-light business model as the venture debt to the startups are entirely funded by angels and institutional investors through the marketplace. We have a deep product pipeline which includes multi-currency venture debt that can be extended on day zero to international companies. We will be supporting local currency venture debt for startups in India, Australia, United Kingdom, Mexico and Indonesia for the YC S22 batch and our goal is to support even more countries in the future. We are also inviting platform partnerships from online investment apps to distribute the 8vdX venture debt offering to their clients.<p>Vijay and I look forward to hearing your ideas, questions and feedback. Thank you!
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: As per https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/r8wnnz/preorder_and_shipping_megathread_macbook_pro_late/<p>Seems any order outside the standard 14"/16" 16GB RAM is delayed for resellers - some dating back to November! Direct orders from apple.com seem to have gone uninterrupted.<p>Is apple sacrificing the resellers to maintain its M1Max/RAM stock for Mac Studio/new products?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Matt, Rachel, and Rob, the founders of Rownd (<a href="https://rownd.io/" rel="nofollow">https://rownd.io/</a>). We make it easy for developers to sign up users through a code snippet that adds account creation and authentication to any website or web app—like Stripe for accounts. We made a page for you to try it out: <a href="https://rownd.io/hacker-news" rel="nofollow">https://rownd.io/hacker-news</a>, and a video to walk you through the flow: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7fv17HSYrc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7fv17HSYrc</a>.<p>For example, one of our customers is a film festival. The festival requires everyone who buys a movie ticket to make a user account. That's a big drag on conversion rates and requires technical upkeep. We take care of all that for the festival and make account creation and maintenance less painful for their users, which leads to more ticket sales. Further, the day of the festival, they can text “tickets” to xxxxx (our short code) and we send a specialized magic link so they can log in quickly and see their itinerary and tickets.<p>Rownd works across all your websites and apps, so (for example) if a user has subscribed to your newsletter, that data automatically gets contributed to their account for your app. No one needs to re-enter their email address!<p>Turning a website visitor into a user is hard. Turning a waitlist member or a newsletter subscriber into a user is even harder. There is a huge gap between marketing pages (landing pages, blogs, docs) and actual products (web apps and mobile apps). The culprit is the traditional sign-up/login page. Sign-in pages add friction and lose users in your product funnel.<p>Your marketing pages should transition seamlessly to your actual product, but most sign-up flows act as a giant wall: stop, enter information that the company often already has from previous interactions, verify email/phone, remember your password (hopefully it’s in the password manager!), and finally, if you’re lucky…you’re in.<p>We eliminate this gap, stitching together user accounts from your startup’s CRM, mailing lists, and database, making authentication work seamlessly across your websites and apps. If a user verifies their email or phone number anywhere (including in marketing emails), we authenticate them everywhere. Visitors and subscribers become account-holding users.<p>We give you a code snippet for websites (which you add to your footer), and an SDK for web apps, to add authentication. Our “hub” (i.e., our standard sign-in and account management widget, specially designed to look and feel trustworthy) is then visible on your pages, and the account data is available to the browser/app through a simple API. Additionally, if you already have information about that user in other sources, such as CRM/marketing tools (Hubspot, Mailchimp, Airtable, etc), we integrate it into the onboarding/authentication process. The account data is available to your website or app through our browser API, so there is no need to build a backend for user management.<p>In more detail: We create an anonymous account around any visitor to your website. When a user comes to a site that has the Rownd Hub, a unique ID is created. Any form that is attached will fire that data to our Hub as well. The registration process can take place over several days if a visitor returns periodically. The data is stored in browser memory until they either press the "verify my account" button or click a button or link that is tagged as a Rownd authentication button (a bit like how Discord lets users view a server, but only comment once authenticated). If you link us to relevant data in your CRM, Airtable, or database, we make “claimable accounts” that are initialized from these data sources. Users claim their accounts and sign in with our passwordless authentication (via email or phone number today, but eventually perhaps crypto wallets too!). You can also use our “instant account links” in your own email and SMS campaigns to re-engage with users and bring them back to your app or website, fully authenticated when they arrive.<p>We are a team of former IBMers that have worked together for years tackling authentication, API management, and data protection. The predecessor to Rownd was a company helping startups comply with data privacy laws. We started to notice some pain around sign-up and onboarding for our own product and were frustrated that our funnel had so many holes in it. Then we realized that other companies were facing similar problems converting their site visitors to users. So, one day during a team discussion, we said “okay, let’s solve that problem!”<p>Since we’d already built a backend for secure data storage, the account layer was essentially there. We’ve therefore focused on building the layer that streamlines user authentication, connecting data directly to the user’s browser session as well as the custom backends that most products have. In the future, we aim to allow even more seamless, opt-in authentication across different websites as our network grows. We’ve got a ton of new features in mind from mobile app support to a broader array of SDKs to enabling “sign in with crypto.” We’re excited to make this crucial part of the internet easier, more scalable, and more distributed than ever before.<p>If you’re a developer, please let us know what you think! We’d love to hear your questions, feedback, ideas, and experiences around this space. You can also try Rownd for free at <a href="https://rownd.io/hacker-news" rel="nofollow">https://rownd.io/hacker-news</a>. We look forward to hearing how we might help developers accelerate building products, and companies speed up growing their user base.
Upvote: | 109 |
Title: After an invitation to apply for a job with a YC company yesterday (an email from the CEO offering to "have a conversation") I got a generic invite to take an online coding test in Javascript.<p>I've written JS and shipped numerous apps in it over the last 20 years and let me tell ya, if anyone worked for me and wrote code like I saw on those tests, I'd fire them.<p>My favorite was a sort question that had an obvious bug. Both sides of the sort had the same test (so no sorting would happen). But the question wasn't about that... it was about which input would tell you the code was wrong. This is most ridiculous way to diagnose or fix a bug that I've heard of.<p>Nobody who really works on software works on these kind of bugs. And this diagnostic technique of arbitrarily working backwards to force a multiple choice solution is probably the worst method of programming that I've ever come across. No wonder so many companies are hiring shitty programmers and writing garbage code.<p>Without an actual problem and an understanding of the problem domain, no programmer is going to write anything useful for you. Frankly, I'm frustrated by this method of interviewing and selecting candidates. It makes me not want to work at places that do this.<p>Anyone else have a similar experience? Also, hiring managers... Do you find these kind of tests useful? Why? How?
Upvote: | 147 |
Title: Tom from Tensil here - happy to answer questions!<p>We developed Tensil to bring custom ML accelerators to people who don't have the resources of companies like Google, Facebook and Tesla. Currently, we're focused on supporting convolutional neural network inference on edge FPGA (field programmable gate array) platforms, but we aim to support all model architectures on a wide variety of fabrics for both training and inference.<p>Tensil is different from other ML accelerators in that it is open source and really easy to use. For example, you can generate a custom accelerator with one command:<p><pre><code> $ tensil rtl --arch <my_architecture>
</code></pre>
You can compile your ML model targeting that accelerator like so:<p><pre><code> $ tensil compile --arch <my_architecture> --model <my_model>`
</code></pre>
Running your model on FPGA is as simple as doing the following:<p><pre><code> $ tcu.load_model(<compiled_model>)
$ outputs = tcu.run(inputs)
</code></pre>
The accelerator generator was developed in Chisel and we built our own parametrizable compiler to target it. The link in the post takes you to the documentation, and here's a link to the Github repository: <a href="https://github.com/tensil-ai/tensil/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tensil-ai/tensil/</a>
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I am overweight and just curious. My theory, though untested, is that getting an oxygen tank might speed up passive weight loss substantially. 84% of all weight that is lost is in the form of carbon dioxide, and I wonder if upping the amount of carbon dioxide exhaled would lead to more weight loss. Oxygen only makes up 21% of our air. I am making the assumption that the lungs can handle being 100% saturated.
Upvote: | 332 |
Title: With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a lot of people are thinking about supply chains, especially when those chains are rooted in a hostile foreign country.<p>What happens (to the US, EU, or whatever else you might have insight on) if TSMC is destroyed, say during a Chinese invasion of Taiwan? Are we facing a "1-year supply shortage while companies retool to US/EU fabs", or "nobody gets new electronics/cars for 5 years while whole chips are designed and fabbed, and their containing systems completely reworked"?<p>My current working hypothesis: the former case sounds inconvenient - the latter sounds like it would cause riots in at least some countries (most notably the US with our electronics addiction and high silicon-per-capita ratio).<p>However, I have very little experience with electronics design or semiconductor logistics. I know that there are a few silicon wizards floating around - any projections on the above?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Microsoft is due to start forcing every single account on Minecraft to a Microsoft if it isn't already, over the next 2 days, I have read.
I have learned that if you make a Microsoft account, their system auto-locks you out and forces you to provide them a phone number<p>I play with my family (it's something we've bonded together over a long time) and we take our privacy seriously, and don't give up our phone numbers to companies , frequently using burner apps or other methods to set up stuff.<p>However, Microsoft accounts don't accept VOIP numbers it seems, and their official guidance is to find someone near you if you don't have a phone, and use their phone to validate your account. This seems like a huge risk to someone else, with Microsoft now having their number (there's nothing that indicates they don't keep it.)
Also, if this is for spam prevention, then if you have a lot of kids, you would be in trouble due to multiple accounts sharing the same number unless you bought every kid a phone.<p>Apparently alternate email addresses used to be enough, to stop this but the system still automatically flags you. I don't know if TOTP 2 factor authentication works, but have read if you submit the reclaim-your-account form with lots of personal details, Microsoft considers this not-workable if you had setup MFA on your account and won't intervene.<p>An option with Microsoft accounts is to set up their own dedicated microsoft authentication app to get in passwordlessly (but that feature isn't going to be on the Minecraft launcher, likely) , but this isn't as clear cut over if it pulls your phone number and other details from your phone.<p>Does anyone know of a method my family could preserve their phone number privacy while continuing to play?<p>Is there a way to set up a Microsoft account with enough authentication that it doesn't auto-ban you a little bit later and force you to give them more info to keep the account?
I don't know if TOTP is enough, there's been mixed results per https://github.com/MultiMC/Launcher/issues/4093<p>I know some might wonder about third party clients or as some called them it seems ,hacked clients , but those don't support LAN/multiplayer it appears.<p>Note: the message Microsoft accounts tell you is that they detected suspicious activity, but for those who gave them the info then checked the suspicious activity log in the (new)account, nothing but their own logins are shown, indicating this might be more of a phone-number-obtaining thing. I have trouble believing the tens of millions of players on Minecraft are all able to give phone numbers, and this seems concerning from a privacy point of view.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Every few weeks or so there is a post on HN pleading with people to consider self hosting their own services. As enticing as that sounds, I'm sure I'm not the only one that has no idea how to secure said services. Spinning up a server is no problem, keeping it secure on the other hand is a feat I have no idea how to accomplish.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>Just wanted to show this little 2D game engine that I've been working on for some time (around 2 years on the editor part, longer on some of the components).<p>It's quite full featured but obviously this a project of such magnitude already that the work never really ends. That being said it's definitely already at a point where games can made and published. The editor runs natively on Windows and Linux using Qt5. The games can run on both Win and Linux as well as on WASM with WebGL.<p>Feature wise there's a bunch of the stuff you'd expect.<p>Audio, graphics, scripting, animation+entity+gameplay systems, physics and UI are all there. Scripting is through sol3 + Lua, physics with Box2D. Audio, graphics, UI and game play stuff is all done by me.<p>License is currently GPL.<p>Source code is on github <a href="https://github.com/ensisoft/gamestudio" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ensisoft/gamestudio</a><p>Some games are available on my site at
<a href="https://ensisoft.com/games.html" rel="nofollow">https://ensisoft.com/games.html</a>
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: Hi everyone,
I build some "online" converters as a side project in the last weeks.
The difference to existing conversion websites is, that my converters don't upload your files. Everything happens in your browser on your device (with the help of a lot of great Open Source Javascript libraries).
I think privacy is an essential feature for a service like this, so my converters also don't use google analytics or any other form of tracking (in fact they use no external resources at all).<p>I started this because I ended up with some .heic files from my iPhone and had to use ImageMagick every time I wanted to upload them somewhere. So now there is <a href="https://heic.to-jpg.com" rel="nofollow">https://heic.to-jpg.com</a> and I can just drag and drop .heic-files there to convert them to jpg.<p>Next I needed to send some stuff to my accountant, so I made pictures, but he wanted a pdf. So I made <a href="https://png.to-pdf.net" rel="nofollow">https://png.to-pdf.net</a> and I can drag and drop multiple png's and it will return a pdf with one image per page.<p>There are a lot of other converters that basically came free with the libraries I used, you can find them all in the sidebar (e.g. <a href="https://tiff.to-png.com" rel="nofollow">https://tiff.to-png.com</a>).<p>I hope some of you will find this usefull.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Dockerized is like npx for unix tools: Run popular cli tools without installation.<p>Example:<p><pre><code> dockerized npm init
dockerized python2 somescript.py
</code></pre>
Run an older version of a tool:<p><pre><code> NODE_VERSION=15.0 dockerized node
</code></pre>
Use cases:<p>- Maintaining multiple versions of an app<p>- Installing without polluting host machine<p>- Quickly run some commands you may not have installed<p>Features:<p>- intuitive use. Just the original command, but with 'dockerized' in front.<p>- dockerized apps can access the current directory and read/modify files, just like native apps.<p>- no need to know which docker image this package comes from.<p>- support for tools which don't have an official docker image.<p>- container cleaned up after use.<p>- ability to specify the version.<p>- version specification per directory (share exact versions with your team mates).<p>The inner workings are pretty simple, it's just a docker-compose file.<p>As expected with dockerization, there are limitations related to networking, and file persistence (outside current dir), but it can make life easy for simple scenarios.<p>Pull requests welcome!
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: Hi HN community, Anne-Sophie and Vincent here, the founders of Micro Meat. We’ve developed new techniques for producing cultivated meat.<p>Cultivated meat is just real meat based on animal cells, but instead of getting meat by growing animals, it is grown in bioreactors. This will soon be much better for our planet: less land, water and feed required for the animals, less environmental impact from cutting down forests for farmland and feed production, less antibiotics, and of course, far less harm to animals.<p>The basic process for cultivating meat is known, but there remain difficult problems in bringing it to mass production. I’ll describe the process, the problems, and our solution.<p>Cultivating meat is similar to brewing beer, but instead of growing yeast, we grow muscle cells (plus fat cells for deliciousness!). The process begins with a handful of stem cells that are isolated from an animal. Initially, the volume is tiny and the cells are handled very carefully. They are mixed with medium, which is a mixture of growth factors like insulin, along with amino acids, and other nutrients that they need to grow. Then they are proliferated (multiplied) to upwards of 10M cells per mL.<p>After proliferating, the overall volume gets above 250 mL and shear stresses start to become an issue, meaning the cells get damaged and break apart. Traditional bioreactors use large impellers for mixing the cells and medium, along with a sparger which adds gasses like CO2 and O2. The impeller, gas bubbles, baffles, and internal surfaces are all locations where cells encounter damaging shear stresses. That’s not a problem if you’re cultivating bacteria, yeast, or other microorganisms that have a high tolerance for this. But mammal, bird and fish cells are very <i>in</i>tolerant of such stresses, making it hard to cultivate meat. This is the first problem we address.<p>After the cells have proliferated from a very small volume to tens or hundreds of liters, they are still a mass of single, unorganized cells. In order to get delicious meat we need to make those individual cells merge and differentiate together to form actual muscle tissue that has the right texture. When cells differentiate, they change from being stem cells, into specialized cells and structures, for example, inside the cells myosin heavy chains develop along the actin cell-skeleton. These myosin-actin complexes are basically the motors of the muscle. For this, the cells get seeded onto constructs called scaffolds. A scaffold is like housing for the cells, a structure where cells can easily move into and grow. We usually try to make scaffolds that mimic the cells' natural environment in the animal's body so they feel as at home as possible.<p>Traditional methods pour the proliferated cells on top of the scaffold and hope that they “stick”. This is easy, but results in tissues that aren’t uniform—in some places the cells attach well, in other places not at all. Additionally, the scaffolds are not always edible—a major problem if you’re producing meat! Consistent cell distribution throughout the scaffold is the second problem we address, and edibility is the third.<p>The scaffolds are then reintroduced to reactors for another proliferation or differentiation, depending on the process. The cells are given time to mature, where they finalize their structure, orientation and internal make-up. At this point, you have muscle tissue, and the only thing left to add is components such as fat, which add to the taste and texture of the meat.<p>This process is immensely complex and the cost to produce it at scale is tremendous. To bring cultivated meat to the masses, the complexity and cost problems have to be solved. Many companies have spent years on R&D, but are still not able to produce at larger scales. We want to change that.<p>We asked ourselves, how could we protect these cells while they are in the harsh environment of the reactor, while also creating homogenous, high quality 3D scaffolds that are consistent throughout?<p>Our method addresses shear stress by shielding the cells within the scaffold. Because the cells are embedded <i>inside</i> the scaffold they don’t feel the damaging wall shear stresses inside a bioreactor, only the surface of the scaffold itself is exposed to them. Our scaffold composition is designed to maintain typical diffusion properties, so even though the cells are shielded and don’t touch the medium (which contains the nutrients) the nutrients still make it to the cells. As time goes on and the cells differentiate and mature, they now have a 3D construct where they can begin to develop into the texture of meat. This process enables cells to be seeded at nearly any rate, from only a few grams per minute to over thousands of kilograms per minute. This means our technology can be used from the research stage all the way through full production.<p>We don’t intend to sell meat ourselves. Our business aims at helping other companies to go to market faster, by eliminating the complexity associated with scaffold seeding. Our scaffolding technology easily integrates into any bioreactor train on the market. Users can purchase or lease the machine for around $250-$500, depending on their needs. Our scaffold bio-inks are universal for mammals, birds and fish, and can be purchased either as single orders or as a subscription, ranging from volumes of one liter up to thousands. Each liter of scaffold costs less than $2 and produces 2 to 5 kilograms of meat.<p>A word on our backgrounds: I (Anne-Sophie) am a biomedical and tissue engineer with a PhD from ETH Zurich and Masters from Imperial College London. I’ve been working on creating functional biological tissues in the lab most of my professional career. I love animals and have been a vegetarian since I was 8 years old. I also love our planet and decided to use my tissue engineering skills to help change our food system. And I love good food! so the idea of amazing new food products is highly appealing to me.<p>I (Vincent) am a space systems engineer. I’ve been building, testing, launching and analyzing the Delta IV, Atlas V, New Glenn and SLS rockets for the last 7 years. I’ve probably had my hands in almost every stage of launch system development, from napkin sketches to saying go for launch. Space has always been awe-inspiring to me, but the climate crisis needs direct attention in order to stop, reverse and survive the impacts of climate change. After researching the impact the livestock industry has on our planet, I knew I wanted to get involved to stop it.<p>If you’re interested in learning more or collaborating, you’re warmly welcome to reach out to us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the above, from cultivated meat in general to the details of the production process, and whatever else you’d like to ask or share!
Upvote: | 390 |
Title: Hi HN! I’m Adam from Kable (<a href="https://kable.io" rel="nofollow">https://kable.io</a>). We make it easy to build great API products.<p>Kable takes care of all of the things that pull you away from your core business – API keys and authentication, usage-metering and billing, invoicing your customers, dashboards for tracking key metrics, evolving pricing to optimize revenue, surfacing usage dashboards to your customers – so you can focus on what’s most important.<p>Every API developer has to deal with important but unsexy responsibilities like “How will I securely manage API keys?” “How am I going to track which customers are using which parts of my product?” “How am I going to monitor usage of my API, and how can I make that information available to customers?” “Billing is complicated, invoicing is time-consuming, when am I going to find time to automate that?” This is the stuff we take care of.<p>I led the billing team at Hulu for five years and got a full education in the complexities of billing, payments, and accounting. Before that, I led the security team at Appian for two years, and before that I worked at WePay (YC S09), a payments API company. On a slightly weirder note...I have an obsession with API-first companies. I am fascinated by the rise of the API economy. Twilio for messaging; Stripe for payments; Algolia for search; Segment for data; the list gets longer every year. I have always been fascinated by these companies, wanted to work with them, learn from them, and serve them.<p>I spoke to hundreds of people building API companies and two themes rang more loudly than anything else: “We are doing X for now but we really want to do Y...” and “We haven’t built Z yet because we just don’t have the time.” These statements were always about the same topics, too: billing, invoicing, authentication, monitoring, analytics. Why was every startup struggling with the same things? I decided the best way to serve this community – a community I love – was to build tools for it all. Kable provides all the infrastructure you’d build in-house if you had all the time you needed.<p>The truth is, tools already exist for most of these things. So why wasn’t there wider adoption among the startup community? The answer, I learned, is pretty simple: integrating with third parties can be complicated and time-consuming. The key insight for Kable, therefore, is: it has to be <i>trivial</i>.<p>Kable can be added to any application with just three lines of code: import, configure, execute. We don’t depend on you storing external keys, nor do we require weeks-long technical integration to get onboarded. You can sign up, add us to your API, configure pricing plans, set up invoicing, and visualize your customers' usage through our dashboard – all in about 15 minutes.<p>Many of our first customers are other startups in our YC batch. They have been able to bring their products to market faster by outsourcing things like authentication. Right from launch they have clear visibility into their customers’ usage patterns. They don’t need to manually invoice their customers, and not only that, but having built on our infrastructure, they’re ready to tune their pricing models to optimize revenue without ever writing a line of billing code. With all this, startups can move faster than was previously possible.<p>Our pricing is pay-as-you-go based on the volume of events we store and the revenue we help our customers generate. That means we get to dogfood our own software for usage-based billing!<p>We’d love for you to try it out. You can sign up at <a href="https://kable.io" rel="nofollow">https://kable.io</a> and begin using our test environment for free. We require a credit card on file before provisioning live API keys, but the product is fully accessible to new users.<p>It’s so exciting for me to share what we’ve been working on with the HN community. You are the developers we hope to serve, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you ever built an API? Ever struggled with pricing? Ever spent one too many hours setting up a dashboard? Ever thought to yourself “I wish I could just focus on my product?” We want to hear your stories. Kable was built for you, so please tell us what you think!
Upvote: | 193 |
Title: I know there have been threads like this in the past about sporadic difficulties, but from my own experience and complaints here and on twitter, I'm wondering if pinboard.in's paid archiving service is broken, and if there is any chance of a fix; and if not, what people have moved on to as an alternative.<p>For the last 4 months, my paid archiving account has almost completely stopped archiving bookmarks. I tried setting up another account as a trial, and that had the same problem. Worse, my wife made an account last summer, and the full text search of her bookmarks has never worked at all (it throws up an error message).<p>I've sent several emails to Maciej over the last few months without any replies (apart from one email cancelling the extra account I'd set up, so I know my emails are received).<p>This is a really frustrating experience! I've been really happy with Pinboard for many years, and paid up front for several years of archiving. There is also now a wonderful MacOS/iOS client ("Pins for Pinboard").<p>I feel bad posting a thread here, but it seems to be impossible to contact support, and I hope that there are still other Pinboard users (and perhaps even Maciej) here who might have more of an idea what's going on (e.g. whether this is affecting all accounts).<p>I would really love to be able to carry on using Pinboard, but I have no idea whether to expect it to ever start working again.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I came across a word in the Postgres source code that I'd never seen before: "frammish".<p><a href="https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend/storage/lmgr/lwlock.c" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend...</a> :<p>> Therefore, they offer both exclusive and shared lock modes (to support read/write and read-only access to a shared object). There are few other frammishes. User-level locking should be done with the full lock manager --- which depends on LWLocks to protect its shared state.<p>It sort of makes sense in context, as a "feature" or a "flourish". It also appears on the pg_hackers mailing list:<p>> There has been some talk of separating the power to create new users from the power of being superuser (although presumably only a superuser should be allowed to create new superusers). If the planned pg_role rewrite gets submitted before the 8.1 feature freeze, I might look at adding that frammish into it.<p>and here, from 19 years ago:<p>> And we get ragged on regularly for the non-SQL-standard features we've inherited from Berkeley Postgres (eg, the implicit-FROM frammish that was under discussion yesterday).<p>No amount of googling turns up a formal definition or usage outside of the Postgres community. "frammish.org" doesn't seem to be related.<p>Are Postgres developers starting to evolve their own dialect? Should we call an anthropologist?
Upvote: | 286 |
Title: Retina screens have been around for something like 8 years, but there’s seemingly only one non-Apple retina screen that exists.<p>Is there a technical reason for this? Or is it logistical? Surely there’s demand for it, not everyone is buying screens for gaming.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: What does History tell us is the empirically correct investment strategy in a period of forthcoming inflation? For max return? For safety?
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: I'm using Mermaid, Excalidraw and PlantUML diagrams to explain and document what I'm working on and they work great and are a lot better than screens of prose, but I've become aware that something is missing: motion.<p>Animation brings a whole lot more to explanations, making simple explanations of how request coalescing works easy to understand, token simulations [0] through to helping explain concepts like Fresnel lenses [1]. Embedding them into GitHub READMEs, tweets and documentation would be awesome.<p>Google do it to illustrate posts (e.g. <a href="https://blog.chromium.org/2021/03/a-safer-default-for-navigation-https.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.chromium.org/2021/03/a-safer-default-for-naviga...</a>).<p>I found Excalidraw Claymate [2] but the stop motion approach with no tweening support makes it painful to create animations where circles move from place to place. There's also Manim [3] but I think this is more for maths.<p>Adobe Flash used to be the go-to; what do you reach for when you want to illustrate a concept with an animated diagram?<p>0. <a href="https://github.com/bpmn-io/bpmn-js-token-simulation" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bpmn-io/bpmn-js-token-simulation</a><p>1. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30576688" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30576688</a><p>2. <a href="https://github.com/dai-shi/excalidraw-claymate" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dai-shi/excalidraw-claymate</a><p>3. <a href="https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim</a>
Upvote: | 142 |
Title: Hi, I'm Eric and I'm the founder and lead developer of Prepform.<p>A high-quality education helped me pursue my interests and achieve my goals. I started Prepform so students of all backgrounds have access to the same kind of education.<p>I grew up in Southern California, surrounded by dozens of SAT prep programs, and I swear I must have gone to all of them. Different programs followed different styles and techniques, but the strategy they shared was to create a study plan and review mistakes.<p>A study plan is
taking a diagnostic test,<p>setting a target score,<p>creating a study schedule,<p>identifying mistakes, and finally<p>reviewing those mistakes.<p>I wanted to take this structure and optimize it with machine learning, while accounting for elements of human learning and memory.
I'm a big fan of SuperMemo, a memorization technique developed by Piotr Wozniak, where you review material just as you're about to forget it. Cognitive psychology tells us human forgetting follows a pattern, but Piotr quantified this behavior to identify the precise moment forgetting happens.<p>The goal was to build on his research with AI and tailor it to not only test prep but to the individual student, and make it the engine of the study plan.<p>The result is Blended Prep, which guides students to internalize knowledge rather than memorize material, and gives them the best chance to ace their next exam.<p>I'm so excited to share this with the HN community, and would love to know what you think. You can try it out at <a href="https://prepform.com" rel="nofollow">https://prepform.com</a>. Thanks for reading.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Hi! This is Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the founders of Substack, with Sachin Monga, the head of product. Yesterday, we launched an iOS app for Substack, so you can read all your Substack subscriptions in one place, with no distractions.<p>Readers have been tweeting at us for years now to ask when we’d have an app. We’ve long wanted one too, and we suddenly got the manpower to be able to build a good one when we acquired Sachin’s company Cocoon (W19) last year.<p>Soon after starting Substack, we found it easiest to explain what we do as “We make it simple to start a paid newsletter.” Even then, a Substack was more than just an email newsletter: it was also a blog, and it could host embedded video and audio, and people could leave comments and participate in discussion threads. But the term “newsletter” was useful shorthand because everyone kind of got what that meant. All along, though, we’ve been quietly building the tools for what we call “personal media empires,” encompassing different media formats (natively) and community discussion (which we intend to make better and better).<p>By a similar token, right from the start we’ve been intending for the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing tools. We’re excited by the vision of Substack becoming a network, where writers and readers benefit from being part of a larger ecosystem. For writers, it means they can be discovered by readers who might not otherwise have found them. For readers, it means being able to connect directly with writers and other readers and to explore a universe of great work.<p>The app is a key part of the network vision. Nothing changes in terms of writers and readers being in control. The writers still own their mailing lists, content, and IP and can take it all with them anytime they want. Anyone who signs up to a Substack through the app still goes on to that mailing list. And readers still get to choose what appears in their “inbox,” with the power to subscribe and unsubscribe from whatever they want (you can also add any RSS feed into the app via reader.substack.com). But now we’ll have more and better ways to surface recommendations from writers and readers, to show people’s profiles, and to deliver notifications inside and outside of the app.<p>This is just a start for the Substack app. We want to keep improving it, so please give us feedback and ask us the hard questions. What do you think we’re doing wrong? What could be better? What could be great? What might we not have thought of?<p>We’re here for the next couple hours. Ask us anything.<p><a href="https://on.substack.com/p/substackapp" rel="nofollow">https://on.substack.com/p/substackapp</a>
Upvote: | 374 |
Title: There's been recent news and articles about both of the above platforms taking a less firm stance on free speech absolutism within the last year (such articles have hit front page on HN, I find it redundant to link them here). Personal politics aside, it feels like it'd be healthy to have a glut of platforms that have a variety of stances on free speech, and yet it's been quite hard to find one that sticks to its proposed principles.<p>Are there alternatives that some of you would recommend in this sense?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: My current company (not FAANG but a household name) just handed me a sub-inflation raise (5.5%) in spite of my "exceeds expectations" performance rating. New hires are getting 50% more equity than the total value of my unvested equity. The official line is that inflation is not a factor in assessing annual comp adjustments.<p>Does this match up to your experience elsewhere? I'm certain I could make more by switching jobs, but I wonder if I'm being screwed by more than the usual amount by staying.<p>I'm really effective in my current role. Past a certain level of seniority it's a big ordeal to change jobs, rebuild your network within a new company, rebuild reputation and social capital, etc. These network effects are a big part of your effectiveness as a staff+ engineer. I'd rather not move, but it seems I have to given the hundreds of thousands being left on the table.
Upvote: | 209 |
Title: Over the last weeks, the Ruble/USD ratio has declined by roughly 50%.<p>That means that some actors still buy Ruble for 50% of its old value. Who is that? What can they do with the Ruble they buy?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Hi there HN! My name is Jake Ruth, and together with Nick Puljic and Daniel Pronk we are building Stock Unlock (<a href="https://stockunlock.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stockunlock.com/</a>), a web app that provides investment education and analysis tools. It’s great to meet you all… and speaking of “meeting”, Nick and I only met Daniel in real life a couple weeks ago even though we have been working on this for over a year… but more to come on that later in the post :)<p>As retail investors we noticed that many retail products have some combo of the following shortcomings: high paywalls, tricky to navigate web design, oversimplification of investing principles, and misaligned incentives that push users to trade more—instead of giving them adequate education to manage a successful portfolio. They are very non noob friendly.<p>Further, I am personally very “triggered” by the lack of financial education myself and friends were not given growing up. I am fortunate to be a software engineer, but it really hurts me to see a lot of close friends, and even family get bit by the financial system since they are not educated by it. And it’s not our fault. Much of America and the world falls into this bucket, which was exasperated by a deflationary financial brokerage environment that led to trading apps which would allow anyone to trade stocks in minutes from their pocket (for free!). Honestly, that’s great. Access to markets is important. However, many people are following a similar story line, you get easy access to trading for low costs/free, you probably started in the bull market from the covid flash crash, made some money if you’re lucky, but have since fallen into the red/realized how clueless we all are for what investing actually is.<p>I remember so clearly a few years ago looking at a Yahoo Finance page and feeling overwhelmed by price ratios, reported financials, stock prices cross stocks, analysts, different news articles from the same publishers saying the opposite headlines… It honestly felt impossible to learn. Especially since my family/close friends aren’t into finance or investing.<p>Then one day, sitting on my bed in NYC hiding from COVID in 2020, I stumbled upon Daniel’s Youtube account. I do not follow celebs, I don’t know famous people, I don’t twitter, but there was something about Daniel and the investment education content he put out that immediately had me captivated and drawn to his account. He is well spoken and presents investing and financial analysis in a way that I actually could understand, and it blew my mind. I proceeded to feverishly ingest his Youtube content for months.<p>I began to notice a pattern in Daniel’s videos, he would sometimes use third party sites to show investment graphs, but he would often open an excel sheet with 3-5 stocks in it (columns), and then fill in rows for financial metrics. I will quote Daniel “I spend about 5-8 hours a week making these spreadsheets, it takes a lot of time but it’s worth it”. So I’m an engineer sitting here watching this and I think… I could definitely write a program to do this. And better yet, I could give it to Daniel as a thank you for all the great work he puts into Youtube.<p>So on a weekend I whip up this program to automate his spreadsheet creation and give it to Daniel… I mean I tried to, but Daniel didn’t answer my Youtube comment! GASP!!!! Ok… so, I found his instagram, but still no luck. I was honestly pretty pissed, like this dude is so smart how could he not recognize that I can save him 5-8 hours a week if he used my program to automate his spreadsheet creation.<p>Well, another 2 months go by. Every week I iterated on the program more, started ranting to my co-worker at the time Nick (we were at Oscar Health together), and kept pinging Daniel shamelessly across multiple social channels. FINALLY he answered me… we ended up hopping on a zoom call, which itself went for 2-3 hours, a beer was cracked… the rest is well, history!<p>I was able to pretty easily write a Python script to hit a financial data API (Alpha Vantage at the time), and Daniel, Nick, and myself all saw a vision for us to create a software platform that actually taught users how to invest, without oversimplifying the process, and at a price that didn’t break the bank.<p>The moment at which this turned from a side project to a company, was when I shared my program with Daniel Pronk’s investing discord community and people basically freaked out. “This is the best thing ever”, “can you make it generate _this_?”, “how can I pay you for this”... I basically took the classic “push back chair from desk” moment and knew it was time to take this full time. Thankfully, Nick was also on board! We had a founding team of 3, and at the time the project was called “Stonk Reporter” (I’m still a bit salty we didn’t keep this name). After a long 4 month beta/pilot with around 200 users from Daniel’s discord, we launched Stock Unlock on December 11th 2021. Jake and Nick met Daniel for the first time a couple weeks ago, until then it was a fully remote co-founder relationship!<p>Today we provide a modern/easy-to-use web app which has data visualization tools for financials, and contextual, inline education. Sites like Investopedia are good for term lookup, but the education isn't given at the time the investor needs it. Typically you get confused, search the internet, and land there—we show it to you in place. For users who already know the ropes, our graphing tools allow users to compare 70+ financial metrics across as many stocks as they want. These tools either don't exist or are part of extremely pricey programs like Bloomberg Terminal (no retail investor can afford that). We have existing investors using Stock Unlock who say they save 80-90% of their time on company analysis with our tools.<p>Our current business model is that we give everyone a 7 day free trial, no credit card/totally free to try the site. We ask for email, but you can give a fake email if you want and we don’t verify it/anything like that. After the 7 day free trial we are priced at $6.99 per month / $74.99 per year (USD, prices will vary for Euro/Canada).<p>We build the consumer web app layer and get our financial data from another startup called Finnhub. We are “serverless” using AWS for all our backend infrastructure. We use Cognito for user auth, Api Gateway & Lambda (Python) for the API, Dynamo & Postgres for data store, S3/CloudFront/Route 53 for static hosting. The frontend is all ReactJS with special help from Material UI for our designed components/us not needing to write tons of CSS (yay), and recharts for the lib to help draw pretty graphs. There are also a ton of fun technical challenges that we solve, currency conversion/alignment for the 122,000 global stocks we support has been hairy/filled with edge cases, also data staleness for prices/market caps is another area of complexity. Not to mention building around a 3rd party HTTPS/JSON api and caching those endpoints/storing some data internally is a fun juggle!<p>Your feedback/your stories about any of the above or this space in general would be amazing. I look forward to interacting with everyone in the comments, we embrace constructive feedback and feel fortunate knowing that you will hold us to your highest standards.<p>If you do decide to try our application, please let us know your thoughts! We launched with a pretty raw MVP and are adding features to the site weekly, with no end in sight. Cheers!
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: Hi HN - Here’s a question that I hope will generate some useful comments, suggestions and links.<p>Background for question: I normally run an internal DNS resolver with an upstream pool of 10-15 providers. These are normally a mix of Global Anycast servers (Quad9 etc) with some OpenNIC, YandexDNS etc thrown in towards the end to cover the ‘chilling effects’ blackholes.<p>Currently Yandex DNS is pinging a timeout (either due to black-holing or DDOS’ing depending on where I connect To/From).<p>My question to HN is this – Given my ‘Information Wants To Be Free’ viewpoint, are there any DNS equivalents of Switzerland (WWII, Neutral to all parties) providers?
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: I work for a tech company and we're trying to see if there is interest from senior engineers who want to work part time. Now that we're a remote first company, we want to know if there are engineers who are at a point in their career where they no longer want to work full time, but are still interested in working reduced hours or part time. Specifically, we're not so much looking for contractors/freelancers to work on specific projects, but for an experienced senior engineer (previously worked for different start ups, or at a larger top tech company) to join a team and essentially be a guru or advisor to the team.<p>What are peoples thoughts on this idea? Is this type of thing something that you've seen at other companies, or would be of interest to see at a company?
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: Hello HN! I'm Tom, co-founder at Tensil (<a href="https://www.tensil.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tensil.ai/</a>). We design free and open source machine learning accelerators that anyone can use.<p>A machine learning inference accelerator is a specialized chip that can run the operations used in ML models very quickly and efficiently. It can be either an ASIC or an FPGA, with ASIC giving better performance but FPGA being more flexible.<p>Custom accelerators offer dramatically better performance per watt than existing GPU and CPU options. Massive companies like Google and Facebook use them to make training and inference cheaper. However, everyone else has been left out: small and mid-sized companies, students and academics, hobbyists and tinkerers currently have no chance of getting custom ML hardware. We aim to change that, starting with ML inference on embedded and edge FPGA platforms. Our dream is that our accelerators help people make new applications possible that simply weren't feasible before.<p>We believe that advances in AI go hand in hand with advances in computing hardware. As a couple of software and ML engineers hoping to live in a world alongside intelligent machines, we wanted to know why those hardware advances were taking so long! We taught ourselves digital design and gradually realized that the next generation of hardware will need to be finely customized to enable state of the art ML models at the edge, that is, running on your devices and not in the cloud. In the CPU world, the RISC-V RocketChip implementation has proven the value of customizable compute hardware. The problem was that no-one was building that kind of capability for ML acceleration. We started Tensil to build customizable ML accelerators and see what kind of applications people can create with them.<p>Tensil is a set of tools for running ML models on custom accelerator architectures. It includes an RTL generator, a model compiler, and a set of drivers. It enables you to create a custom accelerator, compile an ML model targeted at it, and then deploy and run that compiled model. To see how to do this and get it running on an FPGA platform, check out our tutorial at <a href="https://www.tensil.ai/docs/tutorials/resnet20-ultra96v2/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tensil.ai/docs/tutorials/resnet20-ultra96v2/</a>.<p>We developed an accelerator generator in Chisel and then wrote a parameterizable graph compiler in Scala. (Fun fact: unlike in software, formal verification is actually a totally viable way to test digital circuits and we have made great use of this technique.) The accelerator generator takes in the desired architecture parameters and produces an instance of the accelerator which can be synthesized using standard EDA tools. The compiler implements ML models using the accelerator’s instruction set and can target any possible instance of the accelerator.<p>Currently, the accelerator architecture is based around a systolic array, similar to well-known ML ASICs. You can view the architecture spec in our documentation. The compiler performs a wide variety of tasks but is optimized for convolutional neural networks. There are also drivers for each supported platform, currently limited to FPGAs running bare-metal or with a host OS.<p>When you tell the driver to run your ML model, it sets up the input data and then streams the compiled model into the accelerator. The accelerator independently accesses host memory during execution. When the accelerator is done, the driver is notified and looks for the output in the pre-assigned area of host memory.<p>How are we different from other accelerator options? There are many ML ASICs out there but they are all locked into a single architecture, whereas we have customization at the core of our technology. This offers the potential for a better trade-off between performance/price/watts/accuracy. Compared with other FPGA options, Xilinx DPU is great but it’s closed source and can be difficult to work with if your model is in any way customized. By going open source, we aim to support the widest possible range of models. FINN is a very cool project but requires big changes to your model in order to work, and also typically requires large FPGAs which are unsuitable for edge deployments. We work out of the box with any model (no need to quantize), and on small edge FPGAs. For embedded systems, tflite/tfmicro are great for deploying very small ML models on extremely constrained edge devices, but they are limited in terms of the performance and accuracy that can be achieved. Our tools allow you to work with full size state of the art models at high accuracy and speed.<p>Currently we're focused on the edge and embedded ML inference use case. If you
run ML models using any of the major frameworks (TensorFlow/Keras, PyTorch, etc.) on small, embedded or edge devices then Tensil is a good fit for you right now. If you primarily run inference in the data center or need lots of training acceleration, reach out to us and we can walk you through our roadmap. For now we are focused on CNN inference on edge FPGA platforms, but our aim is to support all model architectures on a wide variety of fabrics for both training and inference.<p>The core technology will always be free and open source, but we plan to offer a “pro” version with extra enterprise features under a dual license arrangement, similar to Gitlab. We are also working on a cloud service for running our tools in a hosted setup, in which you’ll be able to run a search across all possible Tensil architectures to automatically find the best FPGA for your model.<p>If you're interested to learn more, check out our docs (<a href="https://www.tensil.ai/docs" rel="nofollow">https://www.tensil.ai/docs</a>), our Github repo (<a href="https://github.com/tensil-ai/tensil" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tensil-ai/tensil</a>) and join our Discord (<a href="https://discord.gg/TSw34H3PXr" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/TSw34H3PXr</a>). And feel free to reach out any time (email in profile).<p>We’re here to enable you to develop amazing new ML based applications, so we’d love to hear your experiences of working with ML compute hardware, whether it be CPU, GPU, or some other specialized platform. Have you had to make major changes to your ML models to get them to run on the available hardware? Are there any cool features or UX improvements that you wish hardware makers would add? Are there features that you’d like to add to your own applications but don’t know how you’d get them to work on an edge device? Looking forward to your comments!
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: I work currently as a "senior" swe and my duties cover a wide range of technologies and non-tech related stuff: Elixir, Go, nginx, mysql, Docker, debezium, Kafka, Terraform, Ansible, HTTP APIs, a bit of Angular, mentoring, hiring (tech interviews), product discovery, design docs drafts, etc., etc.<p>When it comes to hiring senior software engineers, my company and peers seems to put a lot of focus on the following topics:<p>- does the candidate know about performance, scalability, and high availability topics?<p>- does they know about infra topics like: K8s, monitoring, CI/CD<p>- does they know about GCP or AWS?<p>- are they available to be part of our on-call rotation schemes?<p>- can they mentor more junior engineers?<p>Not to mention of course the more classic requirements for senior software engineers like: actual working experience on the field, solid knowledge of the fundamentals of comp sci/soft. eng., good practices, problem solving skills, good communication skills, etc.<p>When I interview candidates, I try to focus on the second group of requirements. I want to see if the candidates are able to communicate effectively while working on a technical solution. I could care less about details like GCP, Ansible, the programming language they master the most, or whether they use K8s or not. These technologies can be learned, if required. My company, though, doesn't like my approach and they insist on me asking very specific tech questions.<p>What do you think? We currently are hiring "Go senior software engineers" (that's the actual job title in Linkedin), but I couldn't care less if you know Go or not when you come to work with me. I want to know if you are good at solving problems.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: Repo here: <a href="https://github.com/ariroffe/personal-website" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ariroffe/personal-website</a>
Upvote: | 425 |
Title: I am interested to know what ML platforms you use for personal/hobbyist projects... Do you rent GPU instances from the likes of Azure, GCP, AWS or do you use managed solutions like Paperspace Gradient, or Colab? why or not?<p>I am very much a beginner in the space of machine learning and have been overwhelmed by the choices available. Eventually I do want to simply want to build my own rig and just train models on that, but I don't have that kind of money right now, nor is it easy to find GPUs even if could afford them.<p>So I am basically stuck to cloud solutions for now, which is why I want to hear personal experiences of HN folks who have used any of the available ML platforms. Their benefits, short comings, which are more beginner friendly, cost effective, etc<p>I am also not opposed to configuring environments myself rather than using managed solutions (such as Gradient) if it is more cost effective to do so, or affords better reliability // better than average resource availability... because I read some complaints that Colab has poor GPU availability since shared among subscribers, and that the more you use it the less time is allocated to you... not sure how big of a problem it actually is though.<p>I am very motivated to delve into this space (it's been on my mind a while) and I want to do it right, which is why I am asking for personal experiences on this forum given that there is a very healthy mix of technology hobbyists as well as professionals on HN, of which the opinion of both is equally valuable to me for different reasons.<p>Also please feel free to include any unsolicited advice such as learning resources, anecdotes, etc,<p>Thanks for reading until the end.
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: Over the past two years there's been smaller regional outbreaks here and there, but they were quickly contained. This current outbreak started about a month ago with cases slowly starting to tick up. About two weeks ago it became clear to me that we would soon be entering lockdown as the omicron cases won't stop increasing, imported as well as local. Last Friday there were about a 1000 new daily cases nationally, higher than at the peak in 2020. Since there is no clear change in policy, and already a lot is being done, there is no reason to believe that infections won't keep increasing exponentially. Today, Sunday, daily new cases reached 2000-3000.<p>Schools, gym, parks, and most other public venues have closed. Education is being done online, and also adult education is shut down if it is offline.<p>WFH is pretty much non-existant in China, even after 2020, but from next week we'll work from home as will many offices.<p>When ordering on Meituan, some select goods are out of stock at some stores , like tomatoes, minced meat. Still, you can get it if you just search it from another store. My neighborhood seems perfectly normal and the supermarket has lots of stock though some beef is sold out. Several supermarkets on Meituan are closed but there's lots still open. I've got food for two months so no issues.<p>Still, I see this as a good thing because: (1) Hopefully WFH gains acceptance and becomes normalized (2) A new policy will emerge as it is already clear that you can't quarantine and hospitalize people for omicron when it is not dangerous. In fact what I'm worried about is having to be in quarantine hospital or hotel, that's it. There are officials talking about ending the 0-policy but no clear solution yet.<p>I expect this to last 3 months.<p>Edit: I'm in Shanghai. Types of lockdown vary between cities and even districts and sub-districts. Here, you may get to stay at home for two days if you're a second degree contact; but if you didn't wear a mask it'll be 14 days. If you're a first degree contact it's quarantine hotel for 14. If you're infected I believe you go to a hospital. In Shenzhen, some communities that are under lockdown are not able to order groceries but only get the type of hotel/airplane food you get in quarantine. So I definitely want to have proper food, which is why I'll WFH for a long time, so as to not come into first or something cond degree contact.
Upvote: | 314 |
Title: 1Password was silently removed from Russian App Store and Play Market.<p>Are there any good alternatives? Or do I have to use Kaspersy's password store?
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: In light of recent news, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg suggests the search engine will now filter results based on recent political events [1]. For those considering or aware of alternatives, what are they?<p>For me, DuckDuckGo was supposed to represent private (not selling user data), unbiased (i.e. apolitical), fast search results. Ideally a replacement would meet as many of these goals as possible. Some alternatives I'm aware of:<p>* Searx - <a href="https://searx.github.io/searx/" rel="nofollow">https://searx.github.io/searx/</a><p>* Brave search - <a href="https://search.brave.com/" rel="nofollow">https://search.brave.com/</a><p>Note this is not a discussion about the morality of DuckDuckGo's recent actions.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/duck-duck-go-reverses-course-will-demote-russian-propaganda-in-search-results-014336389.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.yahoo.com/duck-duck-go-reverses-course-will-dem...</a>
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I've never built a business before so I'm wondering if applying to accelerators is even feasible. I see all these people younger than me, or people in my age range working on their 2nd/4th+ company.<p>I'm self taught, didn't go to a prestigious school, and I only got into tech 5-6 years ago so I consider myself pretty good at application development but not exactly someone who understands the deep computing fundamentals, nor do I have connections to startup founders or such people. However, I know what I know pretty well and have been able to build some application experiences for my employer and side projects that I am quite proud of..
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: After our Samsung refrigerator of <7 years failed yesterday I recalled HN posters mentioning how criminally unreliable are modern refrigerators.<p>I've benefitted from many a great advices I saw on HN about appliances, so I am hoping the collective HN mind could have a suggestion about this indispensable household item.<p>I know one solution would be to get a vintage fridge, but I would really appreciate the energey-saving and the ice-making features of the modern ones.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: A few days ago I updated Firefox to be greeted with a full page ad for 'Turning Red.' I don't understand how they think this is acceptable.<p>Beside the moral issues, this undermines all the reason I would update altogether. Now every time there is a update I have to wonder if I will have Disney shit shoved down my throat?
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: That is, you become more interested in what your app does rather than the programming involved to get it to do that?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Paste the following into the console of any HN page - for annotated avatars on all HN comments. (self contained code)<p><pre><code> for(u of document.querySelectorAll('.hnuser'))for(u.prepend(c=document.createElement('canvas')),x=c.getContext('2d'),c.width=18,c.height=14,s=u.innerText,r=1,i=28+s.length;i--;i<28?r>>>29>X*X/3+Y/2&&x.fillRect(6+2*X,2*Y,2,2)&x.fillRect(6-2*X,2*Y,2,2):r+=s.charCodeAt(i-28,x.fillStyle='#'+(r>>8&0xFFFFFF).toString(16)))r^=r<<13,r^=r>>>17,r^=r<<5,X=i&3,Y=i>>2</code></pre>
Upvote: | 701 |
Title: I don't know if this is the right place for this but here are my stats. I'm a 32yo male, divorced with 2 kids whom I have little access to at the moment. My childhood friendships have withered, my divorce left me untrusting of women (at least for now). I work alone and don't have many opportunities to meet new people organically.<p>The thing is I don't even like hanging out with people most of the time but I get into this space where it feels like a biological necessity.<p>Does anyone have any tips on how to give myself attention? Or, in other words, how can I learn to be alone without feeling lonely? I feel like I need this lifeskill in order to proceed in my life.<p>I have a pattern of loneliness pushing me into making very foolish decisions.
Upvote: | 314 |
Title: With massive drops in productivity and increases in government spending the economy was hurting. Now with Russia attacking Ukraine oil prices are going to hurt the economy more.<p>I'm worrying about the future for me and my young family.<p>Do you have any advice for someone with dependents during this time?
Upvote: | 180 |
Title: The more I live the more it seems like we're living in a soulless dystopia:<p>- My local state TV channels feature 20 minutes of commercials for about 5 minutes of actual content
- YouTube shows more and more ads as time goes by
- Can't go in the street without being bombarded by ads wherever you look
- Whenever you Google something, the top results are SEO spam websites with jumping ads and auto-playing videos that quite literally feel like some form of digital cancer
- Services are starting to display ads <i>even</i> if you're a paying costumer -- e.g Samsung TVs<p>At which point enough is enough? They've stripped humanity out of these daily tasks so much that I can't imagine this is sustainable. What will be the last straw in this market?
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Hi HN! Maddie and Patrick here. We founded Living Carbon (<a href="https://www.livingcarbon.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.livingcarbon.com</a>), a biotech company developing trees that grow faster, capture more carbon, and produce more durable wood. Our mission is to help rebalance the planet's carbon cycle using the power of plants.<p>We released research results indicating that photosynthesis enhanced trees grow faster and capture more carbon compared to control seedlings [1, 2]. After multiple generations of vegetatively propagated tree seedlings studied in a controlled environment, our lead photosynthesis-enhanced poplar tree seedling showed a 53% increase in above ground biomass.<p>Data from our molecular, morphology, and physiology analyses indicate that our photosynthesis-enhancement design works as intended. We’re continuing to study these seedlings in field trials and pilot projects across the US.<p>Forest carbon drawdown is one of our greatest allies in the climate crisis, but the impact of forest carbon solutions has been constrained by land-use efficiency, suitability of land to support forest stands, the growth rate of trees, and the duration of carbon storage before it is released back into the atmosphere. There are many strategies to enhance carbon capture in plants, including nitrogen fixating microbes, resistance to disease and drought, salt tolerance, decomposition resistance, and photosynthesis enhancement. Our initial focus has been two-fold: (1) improve carbon capture in trees via more efficient photosynthesis, and (2) improve carbon storage through decay-resistant wood, which slows the release of carbon through decomposition resistance.<p>Our approach is to use an alternative metabolic bypass pathway that allows our seedlings to break down toxic byproducts of photosynthesis using less energy. Usually, waste products of photorespiration are exported from the chloroplast to multiple organelles for metabolic cycling. Our biotechnology enables the chloroplast to break down these waste products internally and turn them into energy-rich glucose and cellulose, thereby growing faster and capturing more CO₂ over time. This method can operate across many different species and doesn't require an intensive human re-engineering process.<p>This process is similar to the natural process that already exists in 15% of plants, called C4 carbon fixation, which have separately evolved special features to combat photorespiration and are more photosynthetically efficient and productive. Examples of C4 plants include corn, sorghum, and sugarcane. Our strategy achieves similar results to C4 carbon fixation in the remaining 85% of C3 plants, starting with trees.<p>To ensure this carbon is stored for longer, we are also developing a trait to naturally slow decay by increasing metal accumulation in plants. Our trees accumulate metals from the soil, making their wood less digestible to fungi and slowing the return of CO2 to the atmosphere. As a bonus, this makes our trees uniquely well suited to land with high heavy metal concentration. We’re targeting underutilized, abandoned mine land across the U.S.—areas where trees would otherwise not grow.<p>If we can increase the efficiency of photosynthesis by 30-40% and if we can also reduce the decomposition rate of wood, then we will have a biological method of active drawdown that avoids the conflicting incentives, high starting costs, and requirement for ongoing and intensive management seen in methods such as direct air capture.<p>Living Carbon got started when Maddie read a paper on improving photosynthesis in tobacco and thought that someone should try this in trees. After talking to the author of that paper and other experts in forest biotechnology, turns out it wasn't only possible but a very good idea.<p>We want to help ignite hope, in our current era of climate instability, that we can use the tools of biotechnology to empower our ecosystems and help plants do what they do best. We welcome your thoughts and discussion!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.16.480797v1" rel="nofollow">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.16.480797v1</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.livingcarbon.com/post/photosynthesis-enhanced-trees-grow-faster-and-capture-more-carbon" rel="nofollow">https://www.livingcarbon.com/post/photosynthesis-enhanced-tr...</a>
Upvote: | 424 |
Title: I'm with T-Mobile and I just received a phone call on my mobile phone from another number where everything except for the last 3 digits was exactly matching my own number. I found that suspicious, but I was curious enough to pick up the call. The other person greeted me with "We are very important this is Interpol!" in seriously broken English, so I suspected a spam call and hung up to try to call them back. That didn't work because the phone number they were calling me from does not actually exist. Like I immediately get the T-Mobile announcement informing me that this is an invalid number.<p>Now I am wondering:<p>- How can a spam caller call me with a source phone number that does not exist?<p>- Shouldn't my mobile phone network verify that the caller - which was also inside their network - is a valid subscriber? Otherwise, how can they bill someone for this call?<p>- How does this kind of scam call work technically?
Upvote: | 141 |
Title: Hey HN, I created Smort as I wanted to highlight an article and share it with a friend but couldn't find an easy way of doing it.<p>Smort lets you easily edit, annotate and share an article. To read any article, just prepend smort.io/ before a URL in a browser. (I recently found out that even 12ft.io/ uses the same technique). Smort is free to use and shareable links are valid for 7 days from creation. Permanent links will be supported soon.<p>I'm primarily a backend/ML engineer so had to learn all things frontend to build Smort. I started out developing in SvelteKit and loved it but later migrated to React & Nextjs due to better third party library support. I have lots of ideas on how to take Smort forward and would love for you all to use it. Please join our Discord to share your curated articles and feedback!<p>This is a walkthrough article detailing everything Smort can do at the moment - <a href="https://smort.io/demo-walkthrough" rel="nofollow">https://smort.io/demo-walkthrough</a>.<p>Smort's name was inspired by the memes [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=smort+meme&tbm=isch" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=smort+meme&tbm=isch</a>
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I've had some EU-based potential customers ask whether I could host their data separately on EU located servers.<p>I've been Googling around to get a definitive answer as to whether this is an absolute requirement or whether there is an easier way around it.<p>For reference, my current setup includes servers in US, a database on Google Cloud and a cloud-based ElasticSearch instance.<p>Any insight or experience with this would be greatly appreciated!
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I built a GitHub repository template which automates the process of configuring a new repository to take web page screenshots using GitHub Actions.<p>You can try this out at <a href="https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper-template" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper-template</a><p>Use the <a href="https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper-template/generate" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper-template/generate</a> interface to create a new repository using that template, and paste the URL that you want to take screenshots of in as the "description" field.<p>The new repository will then configure itself using GitHub Actions, take the screenshot and save it back to the repo!
Upvote: | 214 |
Title: Hi HN, I’m Forrest of Lifecast (<a href="https://www.lifecastvr.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.lifecastvr.com</a>), with my co-founder Mateusz. We make software to create 3D video for VR, robotics simulation, and virtual production. We convert any VR180 video or photo into our 6DOF VR video format, or into meshes compatible with Unreal Engine. Our 3D reconstruction is based on computer vision for dual fisheye lenses and deep learning.<p>VR video can be categorized as 3DOF (three degrees of freedom) or 6DOF (six degrees of freedom). 3DOF responds only to rotation, while 6DOF responds to both rotation and translation—meaning you get to move your head. VR games are 6DOF, but most VR videos are 3DOF. 3DOF can cause motion sickness and eye strain due to incorrect 3D rendering. 6DOF VR video fixes these problems for a more comfortable and immersive experience, but it is harder to make because it requires a 3D model of each frame of video.<p>There are some prototypes for 6DOF VR video systems in big tech, but they typically involve arrays of many cameras, so they are expensive, not very portable, and generate an impractical amount of data. Because of these challenges, 6DOF hasn't been widely adopted by VR video creators.<p>In 2015 I was working on ads at Facebook, but I was more excited about VR. I built 3D cameras out of legos and GoPros, showed some of this at a hackathon, and eventually they let me do that as my day job. I was the first engineer on Facebook's 3D VR camera team, which made Surround 360 (an open-source hardware/software 3D VR camera), and Manifold (a ball of 20+ cameras for 6DOF). After Facebook, I was a tech lead on Lyft's self-driving car project, and Google X's everyday robot project.<p>I started Lifecast because I wasn't satisfied with the progress on 6DOF VR video since I left Facebook. I learned new ideas from robotics which can improve VR video. The Oculus Quest 2 has just enough power to do something interesting with 6DOF. There have also been advances in computer vision and deep learning in the last few years that make it possible to do 6DOF better.<p>Our software makes it simple to create 6DOF VR video using any VR180 camera. It's a GUI for Mac or Windows, which takes VR180 video or photos as input, and produces Lifecast's 6DOF VR video format (more info: <a href="https://fbriggs.medium.com/6dof-vr-video-from-vr180-cameras-2e17805ef3bc" rel="nofollow">https://fbriggs.medium.com/6dof-vr-video-from-vr180-cameras-...</a>). VR180 video can be created with any VR180 camera; the Canon R5 is one of the best on the market right now. We make a video player for WebVR which runs on desktop, mobile or VR. Playing the videos on the Quest 2 doesn't require installing any software, just visiting a web page in the Oculus Browser.<p>In addition to our 6DOF format, the software can also output point clouds (.pcd) or triangle meshes (.obj) compatible with Unreal Engine. We are seeing interest in using this for virtual production (2D film-making in a game engine), and creating environments for robotics simulation.<p>This recent video review/tutorial does a nice job of explaining our tech: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4a-RnTLu-I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4a-RnTLu-I</a> (video by Hugh Hou, not us). For something more interactive, the thumbnails on <a href="https://lifecastvr.com" rel="nofollow">https://lifecastvr.com</a> are links to demos that run in browser/VR.<p>6DOF VR video is one piece of a larger puzzle. We envision a future where people wear AR glasses with 3D cameras, and use them to record and live-stream their experience. 3DOF is not sufficient for this because it causes motion sickness if the camera moves. We have prototypes which fix motion sickness in 3D POV VR video from wearable cameras. Watching the videos in VR feels like reliving a memory. Here's a demo: <a href="https://lifecastvr.com/trickshot.html" rel="nofollow">https://lifecastvr.com/trickshot.html</a><p>You can download a free trial from <a href="https://lifecastvr.com" rel="nofollow">https://lifecastvr.com</a> after entering your email address, but do not need to create a full account. The free trial is not limited in any way other than putting a watermark on the output.<p>We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences about VR video, virtual production and robotics!
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: HI Hacker News!<p>I’m very excited to show you this project I have been working on, MarkdownSite.com.<p>For folks who interact with the website, it is a web hosting platform where you can add your repository and have a website built from the `public/` directory. Files in `site/` with an `.md` extension are rendered from markdown to HTML, and the website is then available at a random subdomain.<p>For folks that set up their own instance, it can also become a framework for customized building. The entire project is open source and I tried my best to document and explain the structure of the machines and how they interact in various mermaid graphs in the readme files under the `devops/` folder.<p>There is still a lot of work to be done, I hope that you find this useful. It's been super fun to work on!
Upvote: | 217 |
Title: My Google account was hacked, I was messaged by someone on Facebook and they demanded I give them money or they would post my private photos. They started posting my pictures and even sent them to my family and friends, dad included! They then changed all my passwords, restore email, phone number ect to their own email and number, so I can't do anything. They wiped my phone and my son's tablet completely, all my banking is gone, everything is gone. I'm now stuck in a foreign country away from my baby with no way to get money or access my email for my travel documents. I'm really scared and don't know what to do. Google says they can't do anything to help me! They can't kick him off or disable my account, I just have to be harassed and blackmailed, and goodness knows what else. I'm a single mum and I'm in a different country to my baby, please can someone help me? I just want to get back.<p>Does anyone know how I can recover and secure my Google account? I've tried everything that I can find/Google have told me to do.
Upvote: | 291 |
Title: Our package registry ecosystem has a serious problem... and not just npm.<p>People are aware of this but maybe this will make them a bit more aware
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I am on the hunt for aesthetically pleasing tech architecture diagrams.<p>Can be any tech stack or process, doesn't matter if it's outdated.<p>Hope you folks know of some?<p>The stuff I'm finding on Google image search is so bland!
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I'm looking to make a move from Brisbane Australia (not from there) and have the privilege of being able to look for a job and move pretty much anywhere. Where should I live?<p>Wish list:<p>1) Very warm climate (Brisbane has this)<p>2) Decent tech scene (or in a near enough timezone to enables remote work for US or EU employers) (Brisbane barely has this)<p>3) ACTUALLY diverse and cultured (Brisbane has gotten a lot better in the past ten years, but falls well short here IMO)<p>4) Non-car centric with good public and alternative transport opportunities (Brisbane falls well short here too)<p>The ultimate city for me would have the huge population and excellent public transport of Tokyo, the diversity of NY, Miami, London and Paris, the climate of Singapore and the non-car centrism of Amsterdam.<p>Short list so far:<p>* Barcelona?<p>* Lisbon?<p>* Miami?<p>* Austin?<p>* Tel Aviv?<p>* ??? Any Latin American or African cities I'm missing? Maybe Fortaleza, Recife, Salvador Bahia, Lagos, Dakar ???<p>Cities like NY, Toronto are diverse and have lots of opportunities but are too cold. Also not that great on public and alternative transport.<p>Sydney, Melbourne and Vancouver are too cold in winter and not that diverse. Also not that great on public and alternative transport.<p>Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen are very non-car centric but too cold.<p>Yes, I'm too picky and probably asking for the impossible =) but would love to hear more suggestions
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hello!<p>"Vim Reference Guide" is intended as a concise learning resource for beginner to intermediate level Vim users. I hope this guide would make it much easier for you to discover Vim features and learning resources than my own blundering experience.<p>To celebrate the release, ebook version is free to download till 31-Mar-2022:<p>* <a href="https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/vim_reference_guide" rel="nofollow">https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/vim_reference_guide</a><p>* <a href="https://leanpub.com/vim_reference_guide" rel="nofollow">https://leanpub.com/vim_reference_guide</a><p>Some of my other ebooks and bundles are on sale and I'm currently creating short 1-3 minute videos to highlight Vim features. You can find these details in the above links.<p>Visit <a href="https://github.com/learnbyexample/vim_reference" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/learnbyexample/vim_reference</a> for markdown source and other details related to the book.<p>Hope you find these resources useful. Let me know your feedback.<p>Happy learning :)
Upvote: | 244 |
Title: Just curious, I see so much "pumping" around Rust, and as an engineer myself, I beg the question: why the hype here specifically?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: I’m traveling to an area of the world where the only communication medium I will have available to me is unlimited 140 character text messages. I’m wondering if it is possible to set up a computer that will allow me to fully interact with it via SMS. I’d like to be able to do things like check the news, read and reply to my emails, check on the status of my home and other servers. What is the state of the art in SMS based human computer interaction?
Upvote: | 93 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Jose and Marco from Method (<a href="https://methodfi.com" rel="nofollow">https://methodfi.com</a>). We are building a developer-first API that makes it easy for developers to embed debt repayment into their applications. We enable your business to push money to any type of consumer debt, like student loans, credit cards, and mortgages, on behalf of your users.<p>Making payments to consumer debt on behalf of individuals is an archaic process. In most instances it involves mailing physical checks. If APIs exist at all, they are brittle. Figuring out how to do this with reasonable UX is costly, time-consuming, and involves lengthy compliance processes.<p>Fintechs have innovated to help users manage savings and investments, but so far have done little with debt, which is actually many people’s biggest anxiety. Ballooning American consumer debt means there’s a great need in this space, but fintechs attempting to enter it run into this issue of how hard it is to offer payments. That’s the problem we solve. By using our API, any company can embed debt repayment into their platform with instant access across 10,000+ financial institutions, covering 95% of all consumer debt.<p>We ran into this while building our previous startup called GradJoy. It started as a side project to manage our student loans, then turned into a PFM (personal finance manager) that
connected all your student loans to one app and calculated the optimal way to get you out of debt. We got into YC S19 with this. Our next step was to connect with APIs and make payments on behalf of users. As Demo Day was nearing, integrating payments was taking longer than expected. We had assumed there would be an API solution, but we were unable to find one. We asked fellow founders in the lending space and told us we had to send physical checks to student loan servicers! Given our deadline we spun that up, but ran into constant issues with checks taking forever and getting lost in the mail. Managing payments was becoming our full-time job.<p>After Demo Day we worked to get integrated directly with the financial institutions to be able to make payments online. It took forever to jump through all the costly compliance hoops and work with slow-moving organizations. Once we finally rolled out electronic payments, we got a lot of interest from other YC founders who wanted to know how we did it. A lot of them asked if they could just use our internal payment APIs. Eventually we decided to pivot to Method Financial and focus on making it easy for developers to add debt repayment to their own apps and services.<p>Our solution is a developer-first API that handles account verification, money movement and transaction confirmation via direct integration into the banking network. To initiate a payment, developers just have to send a source account (where the money is coming from), a destination account (where the money is going), a transaction amount, and in some cases additional user verification (for compliance). That’s it!<p>On the back end we are connected to 10,000+ financial institutions because of our direct relationships with the banking core providers. This gives us access to networks of intra-bank payment rails. As soon as a payment is initiated from the customer side, we verify the end-user (KYC/AML), initiate money transfer and return confirmation in real time. Settlement usually completes on the same day. No more paper checks, no multiple integrations or screen-scraping, no transaction limits, far fewer returned payments, and best of all, we deal with the compliance headaches, including all the ongoing compliance maintenance that needs taking care of.<p>So far, companies are using us to do things like provide matching student loan payments as an employee benefit, do one-click balance transfers when switching credit cards, and allow cryptocurrency users to pay down debt or pay bills. We charge per API call, and there are monthly minimums similar to Plaid.<p>Our API is live and we have a self-serve dashboard with two environments: development mode (cannot move real money) and sandbox mode (move real money—up to 20 live payments for free). After a simple KYC verification, you can enable sandbox mode and move real money at <a href="https://dashboard.methodfi.com" rel="nofollow">https://dashboard.methodfi.com</a>.<p>We’d love for you to try out Method. You can get development and sandbox API keys in our dashboard – no credit card required.<p>Have you built a similar payment infrastructure before? Have ideas for other potential use cases? We’d love to hear your questions, experiences, ideas and feedback! We’ll be online today to answer any questions - we’re always excited to talk about fintech, payments, APIs, etc.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: This is a chrome extension I made. You visit tiktok.com and sign in, the extension retrieves MP4s and puts them in a folder.<p>My goal: the TikTok algorithm has helped me find wonderful things. I consider the list of my [Likes] to be a treasure collection, and want to make sure I don't lose them.<p>If you don't have time to try, here's a video walking through all the features: <a href="https://youtu.be/BoHOdRxHgP0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BoHOdRxHgP0</a><p>Is it free: Yes. (I did test a payment modal once, but users gave me 1-star ratings for it, so I removed it)
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Hello HN! We are Jill and Basel, founders of Vimmerse (<a href="https://vimmerse.net" rel="nofollow">https://vimmerse.net</a>) Vimmerse is a platform and SDKs for creating and playing 3D video. We make it easy for businesses, developers, and creators to provide 3D immersive experiences for their viewers using our content creation APIs and player SDKs.<p>We have been watching video in two dimensions for too long! Most 3D content people experience today is computer generated, such as VR games. Diverse use cases can benefit from real-world 3D video, such as music performances, training, family memories, and the metaverse. Why isn’t there more real-world 3D video? Because it has been difficult and expensive to create, stream, and playback real-world, camera-captured 3D video content.<p>I am an IEEE Fellow and inventor of over 200 patents. Basel has a PhD in electrical engineering with deep experience in VR/AR/3D video. While at Intel (as Chief Media Architect and Intel Fellow), I led an MPEG standards workgroup on 360/VR video. I found that 360/VR video’s limitation to 3 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) caused discomfort or even nausea in some viewers, because we experience the real world in 6 DoF (controlling both position + orientation), not in 3DoF (just orientation). I initiated an activity in MPEG to develop the MPEG Immersive Video (MIV) standard, which provides 6DoF. I became the lead editor of the MIV standard, and Basel was the lead editor of the test model.<p>While at Intel, we developed a MIV 3D video player for Intel GPUs and observed the greater engagement that 3D video provides to viewers. However there was no content available for the new MIV standard, and creation of 3D video content was a very difficult and expensive process. We realized that if 3D video were to become widely used, the creation and distribution processes needed to be simplified. We founded Vimmerse with a mission to greatly expand access to 3D video.<p>Businesses can build their own services using our APIs to upload captured content and prepare 3D video on our platform. Our platform is capture agnostic, meaning it can work with any video device suitable for 3D capture, such as iPhones or Microsoft Azure Kinect depth sensors. More than 60% of iPhone 12 and 13 models sold (Pro and Pro Max) have LiDAR depth sensors, which can be used for capturing 3D video content.<p>The Vimmerse platform prepares 3D content from the uploaded capture files. Our approach is built on top of industry standard video streaming protocols and codecs, so existing video streaming servers and hardware video decoders can be utilized. The content preparation platform creates two types of output bitstreams from the uploaded captures: bullet video and 3D video. Bullet video (named after the Matrix movie’s bullet effect) is a 2D video representation of the 3D video, following a predetermined navigation path selected by the content creator. 3D video gives viewers the ability to control navigation with 6 Degrees of Freedom (6DoF), where they can pan around or step into the scene. Bullet video may be streamed (HLS) or downloaded (MP4) for playback on any device. 3D video playback may be streamed (HLS) to the Vimmerse 3D video player.<p>Services may use the Vimmerse 3D video player app, or developers can use our player SDK inside their own apps. Viewers have the ability to control navigation using any viewer input method: device motion, mouse/keyboard, touch controls, head/gesture tracking. The player SDK renders views for the selected 6DoF position and orientation.<p>We haven’t published pricing yet, but our plan is to charge for our content preparation APIs based on usage (e.g. minutes of video processed and streamed) and player SDKs based on number of units.<p>The Vimmerse website <a href="https://vimmerse.net" rel="nofollow">https://vimmerse.net</a> provides a no code way to test out our platform or view featured content. We invite the community to upload their own test content. Instructions for preparing content are available at <a href="https://blog.vimmerse.net/freeport-platform-usage-instruction/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.vimmerse.net/freeport-platform-usage-instructio...</a>. Sign up for an account to upload content, or use the guest account (login: guest, password: Guest#123). The Vimmerse 3D player for Android is available in the Google Play Store at <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.vimmerse.player" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.vimmerse.p...</a>.<p>Please share your thoughts and experiences with 3D video, and your ideas for use cases that would benefit the most from 3D video. Are there any features we should add, or capture devices that you would like to have supported? Looking forward to getting your feedback.
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: Hey HN commmunity, Karthik here! Super stoked to announce the launch of Zipy today.<p>Launching the product that you've been so dearly working on for months is like sending your newborn to school for the first time. Excitement to nervousness, anxiety to thrill, all sorts of emotions hit you at the same time. But the entire team of Zipy is confidently looking forward to the feedback you guys have in store for the beautiful product we’ve built. In community we trust!<p>Over the past decade, from being a Web Development Intern to a UX Designer and a Product Manager, I have seen the struggles that both Frontend Dev and Product teams face in terms of understanding user behavior and debugging customer issues. Web technologies evolved significantly, but the debugging process still remained in the stone age. With Zipy, we are trying to change this.<p>Zipy is a product that is primarily of the developers, by the developers and for the developers, essentially built to scratch our own itch, and thus, we've carefully handcrafted various workflows specifically for engineering, product, and support teams. We have been extremely lucky to get support from a bunch of awesome early adopters and partners, who were instrumental in carving our product experience. Hope you all find Zipy very useful. Please give it a try and do share your feedback here: <a href="https://app.zipy.ai/sign-up" rel="nofollow">https://app.zipy.ai/sign-up</a><p>Check out our Website: <a href="https://zipy.ai" rel="nofollow">https://zipy.ai</a>
Quick 15 minute Live Demo: <a href="https://calendly.com/d/crv-vpv-p7c/quickzipydemo" rel="nofollow">https://calendly.com/d/crv-vpv-p7c/quickzipydemo</a>
Join our Discord Server: <a href="https://discord.com/invite/7595RKftFY" rel="nofollow">https://discord.com/invite/7595RKftFY</a><p>Benefits of using Zipy:
Install in a minute
VueJS, React, Angular, Ember, and any javascript web app support
▶ Replay customer sessions with errors in real-time
Dev tools with Stack Trace, Console Logs, and Network Request Response details
Search error sessions by customer name, URL, email ID, and more.
Easy Slack Integration and Alerting<p>Special Coupon for HN Community: 'ZIPYPH1MONTH' for a FREE 1 month access to our Startup Plan.<p>Looking forward to your feedback and support.<p>Fix what matters,
Karthik and Team Zipy.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: WebAssembly is commonly used as part of web applications, and minimizing its size is especially important.<p>As part of the latest release of Cheerp, our C++ to WebAssembly/JavaScript compiler, we have introduced a powerful new LLVM optimization that aggressively reduce WebAssembly output size at compile time.<p>We have named this optimization 'PartialExecuter', the key idea behind it being taking advantage of known function parameters to find inner code blocks that cannot ever be possibly executed.<p>Such blocks can then be completely removed from the compiled output, significantly reducing its size.<p>What makes this pass more powerful than typical Dead Code Elimination is the ability of reasoning over all the possible executions that the code can take, while being robust to memory stores and side-effects. Moreover, PartialExecuter can even reason over loads as far as they refer to read-only memory. This latter capability is especially useful to drop code from complex functions whose behavior depend on input strings (i.e. printf).<p>We think this work may be of interest for the HN community, and we welcome feedback and questions.<p>In-depth blog post: <a href="https://leaningtech.com/reducing-webassembly-size-by-exploring-all-executions-in-llvm/" rel="nofollow">https://leaningtech.com/reducing-webassembly-size-by-explori...</a>
Upvote: | 295 |
Title: Run `ssh devzat.hackclub.com` to try it out! The repo is here: https://github.com/quackduck/devzat (golang).
It has markdown and emoji support, DMs, channels, and it can show images too. You can send code, and it gets syntax highlighted (you can change the theme). You can ping people like so: @user and it sends them a \a, which should play an audible sound if the terminal allows it. There's inbuilt games and rainbow names and a lot of other small things I don't remember right now.<p>You might find the auth system interesting: it's based on a hash of ssh pubkey (bans use that and a hash of IP, so it isn't so easy to get around a ban)<p>Also an interesting issue: bots that go around trying to brute force ssh into random IPs with common usernames. My current solution is banning if rapid successive joins are detected.
Upvote: | 391 |
Title: I have a good team (two backends, one frontend, one devops, one PO / PM) that have been working together for 5 years. Due to changes in the company, we lose our jobs and we want to jointly develop projects for others. How to start without experience in acquiring customers? I don't know if it matters, but we work in Europe.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Mailchimp just locked my account and I can't even download my data and subscribers. I used it for a small tech blog.<p>I respect their opinion and do not support the war, but locking out data is just insane. I know there are a lot of independent Russian journalists and activists who use Mailchimp and now we have even less freedom of speech inside the country.<p>Thanks Mailchimp.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: https://twitter.com/libretube/status/1503967212570394627<p>LibreTube main devs(@rimthekid
) github account has been suspended by GitHub without any reasons.
All of his releases and comments are hidden by GitHub.
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: My biggest force-multiplier is my fish shell history, going on 7 years of command line history.<p>I want to do the same thing for my web browser. At first I looked at Memex but they disabled browser history search. You have to save or annotate an article first before it becomes searchable. My brain, naturally, does not know ahead of time what could be useful in the future.<p>Is there any product out there that creates a fully searchable full-text history forever with little fuss?<p>I'm using Firefox on Linux but could switch to another browser (but not OS) if needed.
Upvote: | 235 |
Title: Just wanted to share this because I think it's ridiculous.<p>I happen to have an email with one of the newer TLDs (like .pizza or .website). This somehow makes me unable to check out on the sony website.<p>See: https://imgur.com/a/gL0u6JY<p>Of course, the real error is swallowed by their frontend and all I can see is that an error has occurred. I have to dig into the network requests to find out the real reason why they don't want to take my money. Who comes up with this? Why is email validation still a problem in 2022?<p>How can a normal internet user figure this out? If I wasn't a web developer I would have given up.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Video with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky asking to retreat and surrender their weapons was published hours ago [1].
Although I must admit the quality of the video is mediocre, the voice of the president is a little unnatural and stagy, the color of the skin of the face doesn't match, though the facial expression is not bad.
Nevertheless, here we are, deepfake video created specifically for war!<p>(PS: I'm Ukrainian and just try to be sarcastic about the whole thing which is horrific, be careful and take care)
(PS2: considering our attitude towards the situation, we're not even taking this video serious)<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/_delanay/status/1504048298520371201" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/_delanay/status/1504048298520371201</a>
Upvote: | 399 |
Title: Hi HN! Maxime, Nicolas, and Vincent here, founders of Sarus (<a href="https://www.sarus.tech" rel="nofollow">https://www.sarus.tech</a>). Sarus is a privacy engineering software that lets data scientists work on data without the need to access it. It works like a proxy between the practitioner and the data. All queries and data processing jobs are executed on the original data with the privacy guarantees of differential privacy.<p>When data is sensitive, getting access can be a huge pain. It means going through a long manual validation process that includes designing, and implementing an appropriate data anonymization. It takes weeks to months and some data utility may be lost to the masking requirements.<p>Sarus makes all of it irrelevant by letting analysts work on data that is never accessed. Analysts only access outputs of their data jobs, and those can be protected with appropriate privacy measures.<p>With past lives in healthtech, finance, and marketing, we’ve experienced first-hand that data governance has taken a huge part in data operations. It’s a rightful objective to protect data but it should not have to hamstring all innovation. For most data science or analytics objectives, the analyst has no interest in the information of a given individual. They look for patterns that are valid across the dataset. Access to user-level information is just an unfortunate way to get there.<p>We decided to build Sarus so that data access is no longer a requirement.<p>The Sarus API proxies all queries, compiles them into a privacy-safe version, runs them on the original data (which never moves outside of our clients’ infrastructure) and outputs the protected results to the practitioner. The protection relies on differential privacy, a mathematical definition of privacy already used by leading tech companies.
Differential privacy works by adding calibrated randomness to outputs so that the information of any given individual cannot be inferred. One of its main benefits is that it does not make any assumption on what is sensitive in the data or what the recipient of the output may already know or do. This is the ideal candidate for replacing all manual data governance processes by something fully automated. Each query gets rewritten by Sarus in a way that implements its core principles.<p>For the core primitives of differential privacy, we leverage the latest research (Dwork & Roth 2014, Abadi 2016, Dong 2019, Koskela 2020 or Wilson 2019) and open source implementations (tensorflow-privacy, Google Differential Privacy, OpenDP, Smartnoise). Our key contribution is to bundle everything into an API that can be queried without seeing the data in the first place. It requires proper privacy accounting (we use PLD accounting as in Koskela 2020) but also setting all the technical parameters that are required by the framework (estimating range of input data, allocating privacy budget across computation steps…). We also optimize the privacy utility trade-off by memoizing previous queries as much as possible.<p>Wait, but the first thing data scientists do is to check out the data, how do I do that now? Not a problem, the API provides synthetic data samples with the same schema and statistical distribution by default. It effectively replaces the need to see any record, and data scientists can still do feature engineering, test and debug code with it. Of course, synthetic data is not something you would want to build insights or ML models on, you’d use the API to do that on the original data.<p>How it works: the app is deployed in the cloud infrastructure (any cloud vendor is compatible). The data admin lists relevant data sources from the UI or the API, and grants learning access to practitioners by applying a privacy policy among predefined templates. The synthetic data sample is automatically generated. From there, data scientists can run their analyses with their usual tools (pandas, numpy, TF, scikit-learn, Metabase, Redash, Tableau…), whether from a python SDK or a hiveSQL connector.<p>Curious? We have released a self-serve demo for you to try it out. It lets you make a dataset available from the Sarus proxy, set up access policies and then, as a data practitioner, use it for analytics and machine learning. It is limited to a handful of datasets but should give you a good understanding of Sarus. You can sign up at <a href="https://demo.sarus.tech/signup" rel="nofollow">https://demo.sarus.tech/signup</a> and begin using Sarus for free, no credit card required (tutorial on <a href="https://www.sarus.tech/post/we-just-released-an-open-demo-try-it-out" rel="nofollow">https://www.sarus.tech/post/we-just-released-an-open-demo-tr...</a>).<p>Our model is a software license to run on our clients’ cloud. Our pricing is on a per-dataset per-month basis and starts at $600/month.<p>Please let us know what you think! We look forward to hearing your questions, feedback, ideas, and experience!
Upvote: | 136 |
Title: I'm casually browsing for some engineer manager / principal engineering roles. I scheduled an interview with 3 different companies, and in all 3 cases nobody showed up for the interview.<p>In the first 2 cases, I emailed the recruiter about 5~10 minutes after the interview was supposed to start, to check if I had the right meeting link (I know I did, but wanted to frame it politely). After the meeting was supposed to end, I sent another email saying that unfortunately I was not able to reach them, but that I'm still interested and would like to reschedule. Again... crickets.<p>In the 3rd scenario I confirmed the proposed interview date/time, but never received the meeting invite. Only after the interview was supposed to take place, the recruiter proposed a new time.<p>The companies mentioned are Grafana (no reply at all, not even from the head of people who I reached out to after being ignored by the recruiter 3 times), Miro (the recruiter replied several days later with a very vague non-apologetic message, but never reacted to my proposal of rescheduling) and Microsoft.<p>Is this a normal experience or is something weird going on?<p>(and yes, I know shaming companies with their name is not nice, but ghosting candidates also isn't nice imho)
Upvote: | 144 |
Title: In short: horrible.<p>I know this won't be new to most of you, but I wanted to share an anecdote (and a rant!)<p>I have a friend who has brain cancer. I went to Amazon searching for books on the subject and I typed ‘brain cancer’ in the search (books) field. What did I find?<p><i>Amazon UK</i><p>As you scroll down page 1 of the search results, you find examples of “brain cancer notebook” or “brain cancer journal”. Empty notebooks with nothing to do with the subject.<p><i>Amazon US</i><p>Same search term. The search results were even worse. The “no content” ranked even higher on the first page of search page.<p>Here is a screenshot of the search results for Amazon UK and US: https://i.postimg.cc/JRDkSGRK/amazon-book-search.jpg<p>Try an Amazon book search for “Ukraine war” on Amazon UK and US and already the search results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks seizing the opportunity to profit from war (these blank notebooks are not donating to charities, they are simply seizing on keyword searches).<p>The reason so many of these "no content" notebooks pollute the books category is because of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service: a print-on-demand service. It has opened the flood gates to “low content” or “no content” journals and notebooks which allows "creators" publish hundreds of notebook titles. These are simply empty, lined or blank print-on-demand notebooks. Amazon includes these in book search results rather than confine these items to it’s own search category. You can find hundreds of YouTube videos on how to publish “no content” notebooks via KDP and how to game Amazon search results to rank higher.<p>I know Amazon simply doesn’t care, but I had to rant. I might be overreacting by the results I saw and I won’t be offended if you say so :-)
Upvote: | 146 |
Title: Hi HN! I’m Andrew Israel, an engineer and the founder of PropelAuth (<a href="https://www.propelauth.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.propelauth.com</a>). PropelAuth provides end-to-end managed user authentication and lets your users manage their own accounts and teams.<p>We have a special focus on B2B features that make it easy for an end user to sign up, create and manage their own organization in your product, invite their co-workers, and so on. This includes roles within the organization (RBAC). We provide frontend and backend libraries where organizations are a first class concept, and we host UIs on your domain to manage the rest.<p>We didn't start out with this focus. PropelAuth actually started out of a chess side project I was working on. As side projects go, I started by focusing on the core product and fun aspects of it. Things like user authentication felt like a distraction from the things I wanted to work on.<p>I’ve set up auth at different jobs and for friends' companies in the past, and I never felt like any tool nailed it. The experience I wanted was “all aspects of auth are taken care of for me, UIs included” and then to have minimal libraries to check if users were logged in or not. The MVP of PropelAuth was a set of basic UIs that we hosted on our customers domain, some admin tools, and a few frontend/backend libraries.<p>We were also dogfooding ourselves—and because we sell to businesses, we built out some B2B specific features: creating organizations, inviting coworkers, roles/RBAC, and the UIs for all that. When talking with early customers, those turned out to be the features that got the strongest reactions. B2B founders were looking for that, and existing auth tools didn’t have these features or didn’t have them in an easy to implement way. So that’s been our focus ever since.<p>The product today acts similarly to a self-contained auth microservice that you can configure. It has simple UIs like signup and login and then more advanced ones like security pages (with 2fa enrollment) and organization management (with roles support).<p>The frontend libraries request short lived tokens for your users that your backends can verify. It also exposes APIs to fetch user and organization information.<p>We have a free plan, and charge $0.02 per monthly active user for the next plan up.<p>We’d love to hear any feedback you have! If you want to try out the product, you can sign up on our website at <a href="https://www.propelauth.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.propelauth.com</a>. You can check out our docs at <a href="https://docs.propelauth.com/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.propelauth.com/</a> and there are guides at <a href="https://www.propelauth.com/blog-categories/guide" rel="nofollow">https://www.propelauth.com/blog-categories/guide</a>. Thanks!
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Hello everyone,
I am Computer Science student which enthusiast about programming, software development techniques, project management and system design. I always read a lot of blog posts, cool stuff or techniques. Though, i can not find the way how to practise them. Sometimes i find an idea that i
may accomplish. Afterwards next i'm thinking about the idea and i realize the idea is not fullfilled or not useful for humanity, community, at least for me. And i am here to discuss my issue. Every comment is welcome.<p>Note: This is my first post on HN so if i violated some rules by (or the way) posting this i am so sorry. And also sorry for that i am not fluent in english.
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: We built a marketplace called bringshopper.com where we bring shoppers to newly started businesses. We had a call with their sales team and as they suggested we used Stripe Standard Connect and direct charges. When we bring shoppers successfully we charged higher application fees to cover our costs and there was no upfront costs<p>We even built feature to cover negative balances of connected accounts by cutting their ad budget<p>And one day Stripe blocked our account, and disabled all our connected accounts and said they WILL NOT RELEASE OUR FUNDS AND WILL USE TO REFUND ALL CUSTOMERS. Now there are multiple things:
1) They didn't refund anyone as we are a platform account we have no charges under us to refund
2) They didn't release funds either<p>They TOOK OUR FUNDS, $159k to be exact
They can't refund customers of all connected accounts and use our funds as they advertise in stripe.com/connect/pricing that Stripe Standard Connect is not responsible for losses, disputes, refunds of connected accounts<p>There is no charges to be refunded or disputed and they simply took our funds<p>How is this even legal? Anyone had similar experience or anyone can help? Our company is struggling here due to this
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: TLDR: Product developers need tools designed for them to build ML models. We’d love for you to try a demo of Mage without needing to sign up: https://www.mage.ai/onboarding<p>My name is Tommy DANGerous (or Tommy Dang) and I’m the CEO and co-founder at Mage. I worked at Airbnb for over 5 years as a product developer building features for guests.<p>Mage is a web-based tool for building, training, and deploying ML models that make predictions based off your data.<p>Training and using ML models in production typically requires working knowledge of building data pipelines, algorithms, infrastructure for deployment and inference, and more. Because of this highly specialized skillset, mostly data scientists and ML engineers are the only ones able to build and use ML models. Existing ML tools cater to this audience.<p>Over my 5+ years at Airbnb, I helped build and launch the Airbnb Experiences product, created ML models before and after we had in-house tooling, and built a devtool platform called Omni. I worked with 100s of product developers across the company and saw that they knew how ML is being used and had ideas on how they would apply ML to their specific feature. However, they relied on data science resource to help them implement their ideas even though we had ML tools built in-house for data scientists.<p>Mage is a low-code tool that you can access via your web browser. You can build ML models through our user interface. How it works:<p>1. First, you add data by uploading a file or connecting to data source like Amplitude, AWS Redshift, S3, Snowflake, GCP BigQuery, etc. Once you add your data, we store it on AWS S3 for fast retrieval and transformations.
2. Next step is you are given suggestions on how to enhance your dataset. You can perform functions like filtering, aggregating, adding columns, etc. We provide a GUI for you to perform these transformations. Behind the scenes, we’re translating your input into code using the Pandas API.
3. Once you’re done preparing and cleaning your data, we’ll train your model by launching a few data pipelines in Airflow, use Spark to build your training data, and then run our proprietary ML pipeline to train your model.
4. Finally, when you’re ready to use the model, we’ll deploy your model to an online API endpoint that is running on AWS ECS. You can get your model’s predictions via a POST request.<p>Existing ML tools are designed and built for data scientists and ML engineers. Mage is designed and built for product developers by product developers. This means we designed our tool to be usable by someone with no ML experience and we provide guided suggestions throughout the process to help educate users and help them become an ML expert.<p>We’d love for you to try a demo of Mage without needing to sign up: https://www.mage.ai/onboarding. If you love it and want to use the entire set of features, you can sign up and use it for free (the best developers tools are free!). Thank you so much, your support is ultra appreciated!
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: How much money did you lose exercising? How much taxes did you pay in paper gains?
Upvote: | 216 |
Title: I often hear people complaining of high ink prices. Specifically purchasing a printer such that when the time comes to replace the ink, buying a new printer is the cheaper option.<p>Not to mention the whackamole game wherein more affordable, aftermarket ink cartridges are made incompatible.<p>Why isn’t there a printer that is open source, and whose compatible cartridges are affordable? No investment required in taking security measures to exclude cartridges of a different manufacturer
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>Arek here. We’re super excited to officially launch PSPDFKit API [1].<p>PSPDFKit API is a collection of HTTP APIs that enable you to convert, generate, and edit documents without running any service on your infrastructure.<p>What differentiates our API from others is that you can chain together multiple “actions” as part of a single API request. For example, you can convert, OCR, watermark, edit, and flatten a document — all in one call.<p>Available actions [2]:<p>- PDF Generator<p>- PDF Converter<p>- Image Converter<p>- OCR<p>- Watermark<p>- Merge<p>- Split<p>- Duplicate<p>- Delete<p>- Flatten<p>Our documentation includes sample code for JavaScript [3], Python [4], Java [5], C# [6], PHP [7], and the command line. We also have a Postman collection [8].<p>Let us know what you think or if you have any questions.<p>[1] <a href="https://pspdfkit.com/api/" rel="nofollow">https://pspdfkit.com/api/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/tools-and-api/" rel="nofollow">https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/tools-and-api/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/javascript/" rel="nofollow">https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/javascript/</a><p>[4] <a href="https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/python/" rel="nofollow">https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/python/</a><p>[5] <a href="https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/java/" rel="nofollow">https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/java/</a><p>[6] <a href="https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/csharp/" rel="nofollow">https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/csharp/</a><p>[7] <a href="https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/php/" rel="nofollow">https://pspdfkit.com/api/tools/php/</a><p>[8] <a href="https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/getting-started/postman-collection/" rel="nofollow">https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/getting-started/postm...</a>
Upvote: | 204 |
Title: Always been more interested in this sort of answer from the tech or scientific community, especially after reading previous threads on the 'ufo glare'
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I'm interested in some of the bigger tech companies and I'm wondering about their presence in the UK.<p>Do you work there? What has your experience been so far?<p>How competitive are they relative to the rest of the market in London?<p>How challenging is the interview process?<p>Culture/work-life balance?<p>Is the number of teams and the problems they work on limited because they're not in one of the primary US offices?
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: I've long been in the practice of "commit early, commit often". If one use case works I commit, if the unit tests pass I commit. The code may be a mess, the variables may have names like 'foo' and 'bar' but I commit to have a last known good state. If I start mass refactoring and break the unit tests, I can revert everything and start over.<p>I also push often because I'm forever aware disks can fail. I'm not leaving a day's worth of work on my local drive and hoping it's there the next morning.<p>I've become increasingly aware that my coworkers have nice clean commit histories. When I look at their PRs, there are 2-4 commits and each is a clean, completely functioning feature. No "fix misspellings and whitespace" comments.<p>What flow do you follow?
Upvote: | 199 |
Title: Hi HN, we are Sudip and Mark, founders of AirMyne (<a href="https://www.airmyne.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.airmyne.com</a>, but there’s nothing there yet). We’re building an industrial-scale process/plant to capture and remove CO2 from air, so it can be piped to nearby sequestration facilities and injected underground—a process that requires less energy and capital equipment than other leading solutions.<p>Companies spent over $1B on CO2 offsets last year, sourced primarily from landowners and project aggregators claiming to protect forested lands. Over the past few years, interest in more permanent forms of CO2 removal have led to the pilot-scale commercialization of novel bio-oil/biochar/biomass, direct air capture, mineralization, and ocean processes, but these are not yet available with sufficient capacity to meet demand. There is no silver bullet, but we believe removing CO2 from air with an industrial chemical process offers the most realistic and scalable path forward.<p>Capturing and sequestering CO2 from air is a huge engineering challenge. The dilute concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (~400ppm) means a system operating at 100% capture efficiency would still need to process 2500 tons of air to capture just 1 ton of CO2. Significant energy is then required to release CO2 from the capture medium. On top of that, compressing and injecting CO2 underground requires controlling for gas leakages, dry ice blockages, and the corrosive conditions created when concentrated CO2 comes in contact with trace water vapor.<p>Our approach goes back to the fundamentals of acid/base chemistry. CO2 acts as an acid and will bind to a base, whether in the liquid phase or on a solid surface. We have developed a process to bring air in contact with a base substrate that captures CO2 molecules while letting N2 and O2 molecules pass through. After energy is applied, CO2 is desorbed from the substrate for downstream treatment and compression. This reversible process allows for a single stage “air in, CO2 out” system where 1 ton of substrate could capture >1000 tons of CO2 over its useful lifetime.<p>In the lab, we have demonstrated this approach at a gram-level scale and believe the process offers favorable energy use, planned capex/opex costs, and process complexity compared to existing solutions. (We’d love to show you a video but can’t do that yet—the chemistry & physical embodiment of the system are areas where we’re developing core IP and that process still involves some secrecy at this stage.)<p>As we scale this process, we are initiating discussions with other companies who can help us inject captured CO2 deep underground so it can be sequestered for geologic time scales. Sequestration technologies have improved their compression and injection processes over the years, and an emerging regulatory landscape is starting to take shape to accelerate the deployment of CO2 injection wells and mineralization projects in the US, the EU, and around the world. We intend to colocate our CO2 capture near injection facilities to minimize transport logistics.<p>Sudip and I both come from industry. At Honeywell, Sudip invented and scaled the low-global-warming refrigerant 1234yf used in automotive air conditioning systems, as well as a variety of products used to make displays, computer chips, sensors, solar modules, and electrical components. I invented formulations at BASF now widely used in the manufacture of silicon carbide power electronics for EVs, solar inverters, and other high power electric devices. We bring a systems engineering perspective to the C02/climate problem—our focus is not only developing, but also derisking and scaling industrial systems/processes into a business case suitable for large industrial stakeholders.<p>Eliminating existing emissions is the most urgent and important challenge we face to keep the climate habitable, but removing CO2 from the atmosphere will likely be needed too. Tackling this problem head-on opens up other fascinating possibilities. By focusing on the “extreme user” case of removing dilute CO2 from air, we might develop unique innovations or insights applicable to the point-source capture of more concentrated CO2 streams such as industrial flue gases. And just as natural gas (methane) was a commercially useless molecule until oil companies started capturing it and finding a use case, we believe that if CO2 can be captured from air and made useful, it could become the feedstock for an industry of similar scope and scale.<p>We are thrilled to launch as a YC W22 company - we couldn’t ask for a more forward-looking community of folks open to buying, supporting, or otherwise engaging with climate solutions like ours. Grateful for your time and happy to take your questions! We are at [email protected] if you want to reach out.<p>p.s. dang took out all our footnotes but if you want references for any of the above, please ask!
Upvote: | 198 |
Title: Yesterday I made a Jokr order and was handed a swag bag. It had a rag thin bandana, a tote bag, and a plastic bag dog waste holder. The tote bag has a use, but the bandana was so thin it was a waste of fabric. The dog waste holder is another problem, but also uanessacry when I don't have a dog.<p>I think swag is great to get, when it has a use. I they probably made a lot of bandana's and plastic bag holders that were probably thrown away. I also know there are a ton of conferences where this is also happening. This is leading to so much waste that is not controllable, but companies continue to waste money in this area. They will also shift blame to consumers on recycling when the companies are constantly producing it.<p>Questions:<p>- Why do companies continue to waste money on useless swag?<p>- What can be done to have companies think about the waste they are producing from swag?<p>Edit 1: I'm not talking about t-shirts or sweatshirts
Upvote: | 118 |
Title: Hi, I've been developing an HTML5 MMORPG game where people can submit code to play a game, like collect items, destroy defense towers or kill monsters, etc.. I've been working on this for over 1.5 yrs (all my spare time) and now it's ready for preview, does anyone want to try it out? It's mostly opensource (and the rest will be opensource sooner or later)<p>Please access it with PC, it's an HTML5 game: <a href="https://bytelegend.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bytelegend.com/</a><p>I really want it to expand to more languages, but right now I've only finished Java part. I wonder if anyone can help me with other languages. Besides, I'm not a good game story designer, but I really really want it to be a game with a fantastic story. Any help will be appreciated.
Upvote: | 229 |
Title: Hello HN, I've been at my current company for the past 15 years. I've taken on different roles where I started as a software engineer, before being promoted to lead, and then to staff engineer. I know my current company by heart. I know how to get things done. I know who to talk to and how to talk to the right people. I know the processes of my company in and out.<p>I decided to get out of my comfort zone. Try something new, I told myself on and on for the past 3 years. And I finally did it. I'm changing jobs.<p>I'm going to a new company, where I'll be doing something slightly similar to my previous role, but in a totally new field. I don't know anyone there. The people seem extremely friendly and fun to work with. This is what I felt in the hiring process.<p>It feels like I forgot how I got good at this. Technically, I have no doubts to get things done. However, on the people level, I have no clue how to get started. How do I make "new friends" at work?<p>What do you usually do when you switch to a new company? How do you go from the "new clueless person at work" to "oh hey Mike, I'll need your help this afternoon"?
Upvote: | 242 |
Title: Hi HN, we are Ana and Maria, co-founders of Theneo, an AI tool that generates Stripe-like API docs (<a href="https://theneo.io/" rel="nofollow">https://theneo.io/</a>). Our ML models take care of tedious manual work in generating and publishing API docs, making them much easier to produce—less technically demanding for writers, and less writing-intensive for developers. Here's a demo video: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/792fc6008a914d068ff8b34994fbc467" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/792fc6008a914d068ff8b34994fbc467</a>.<p>I’ve been working with APIs for the past seven years, and the documentation process has been consistently the most painful. Nobody wants to have to do it, it’s filled with gruntwork and repetition, and takes a ton of time. Developers are not technical writers and documenting is never their priority, let alone making docs look nice. But for the reader—often the very same developers, when they’re consuming others’ work—it makes such a difference. How many times have you just looked at the API doc and decided “nope not going to integrate”? That was the case for me and my team many times. Developer communities often complain that even the most well-known companies’ public API docs are incomprehensible, and internal API docs are neglected even more.<p>The gruntwork and repetition are clues that there’s room for software to do a lot of this work, and particularly for ML models to help produce the content.<p>We want to allow anyone to create great docs without having a whole team of writers and designers, so we researched what makes Stripe, Square, and a few other API docs so great. First, it was definitely the content. Second, it was the user-friendly interface: layout, colors, scrolls, how easy it was to find information and give feedback. We talked to developers and technical writers to understand their pain points. Then we took all that research along with Maria’s experience as an ML Engineer at Microsoft, Deepmind, Google, and Facebook to come up with Theneo, a Technical Writer AI Assistant.<p>Theneo is like having a technical writer next to you. You upload your API collection (JSON, YAML, etc.). Our models automatically load and analyze API requests, methods, endpoints, request body, parameters, etc., then run some quality checks (e.g. for grammar errors) and give you content suggestions for the section names and descriptions.<p>API docs generated by Theneo are user-friendly, beautiful and interactive. we automatically generate all of your API requests in multiple languages and make it interactive for the reader. Here is an example: <a href="https://app.theneo.io/demo/theneo" rel="nofollow">https://app.theneo.io/demo/theneo</a><p>For internal API docs, we created several integrations that make it easy to create and maintain API documentation: Postman Integration - you can pull all of your collections and use them in Theneo; Github Actions - you can define how and when you want API docs to be updated automatically (<a href="https://github.com/marketplace/actions/theneo-api-documentation);" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/marketplace/actions/theneo-api-documentat...</a>
Visual Studio Code (coming soon) - by the end of this month you will be able to create and preview your API documentation right in your IDE. We do not use your private API docs for ML training.<p>You can see a quick overview of how our setup works here: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/792fc6008a914d068ff8b34994fbc467" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/792fc6008a914d068ff8b34994fbc467</a><p>We are coming up with a lot of new integrations and features to make it easy for developers to generate and maintain internal or public-facing API docs. We would love to hear from you, what you are currently using, what you love or don’t love about those solutions, what stops you from having high-quality docs for your APIs, and anything else you’d like to share!
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: I'm currently on 18.04 LTS. It "ain't broken", which is the most compelling case for "don't fix"<p>On the other hand, 4 years is a long time! What new features have you found valuable?<p>Also feel free to ask context questions, since at some level the answer is obviously "It depends". Here are some high level things:<p>- This is my daily personal computer. Google mail/calendar/etc<p>- Programming Python through VSCode for AWS<p>- No intensive gaming<p>- Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz × 8, and NVIDIA GEForce GTX GPU, on the theory that I will someday do neural network projects
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I probably have to enter 20-30 different 6 digit codes every day logging into various accounts. It's ridiculous. I can't believe it's come to this. It's about as annoying as the cookie bar.<p>Why does it have to be 6 digits? Especially if it expires in like 5 minutes? And why can't we have some sort of centralised solution to all this? The authenticator apps are probably worse than SMS in terms of the interface.<p>I am starting to think the amount of manpower wasted on this globally is way more than the fraud preventing in terms of economic cost.<p>Thanks for listing. Rant over.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Hi! I'm an Ubuntu user and I love exploring all kinds of apps around the internet, specially FOSS. I install new software and update their configs very often, but upgrading my OS and sharing my setup over the two laptops I use is yet not very straightforward to me.<p>Do you also have to handle that? How do you do it? Is there any good software available out there to make it easy?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I happen to like my indefinite license for 1password6 but Chrome has made a change in version 99 that renders the 1password plugin dead. Support says I need to upgrade to 7.<p>I've asked 1password legal to buy me out of my license as they may be in breach. They do have some language about breaking changes made by Apple - https://web.archive.org/web/20140902010520/https://agilebits.com/home/licenses. I haven't found the exact license but have requested it. We'll see. They did push this indefinite license thing and half a decade falls marginally short of indefinite.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: I know there are several attack vectors on public Wifi, but these days are they mostly mitigated?<p>- Man-in-the-middle attacks: thwarted by certificate authority checking by the browser and/or certificate pinning in mobile apps. Browser will not let you advance if the certificate is invalid.
- Replay attacks: OAuth tokens expire and good sites will use nonces.
- Packing sniffing on open networks: thwarted by TSL over http and encrypted traffic (unless you have a root certificate installed).
- DNS lookups are somewhat plaintext, but now started to be done over https. Even then, attackers would know what you're connected to, but not what you are saying.
- Port scanning/direct attacks: Firewalls by default lock down ports and well-patched machines prevent this
- Email (SMTP) and other protocols: are all encrypted as well to prevent snooping.<p>Is using public Wifi actually dangerous? If so, what's the attack vector?
Upvote: | 213 |
Title: Couldn't resist when I saw Tinder for the other day! Thanks <a href="https://twitter.com/DasSurma" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/DasSurma</a> for making the source code for Tinder for Bananas available!
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: I'm browsing with JS and cookies disabled for speed and safety. Lately, more and more simple and plain blogs require JS to show any text on website. Can we just agree on letting basic html do it's thing? Why insist on JS to be able to show simple text on webpage?<p>For example:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933</a><p>Go ahead, disable JS and try opening blog on this link. Won't happen...<p>This page is simple dark text on white background with some images sprinkled in. Why is JS required to show this?<p>I'm sure I'm not alone in this...
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: What are the technologies or methods you've used that greatly improve the development efficiency of your team?
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: What book (or books) changed your life? I'm looking for inspiration and would love to hear what and how you were impacted.
Upvote: | 393 |
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