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Title: Hi HN, I’m Arsalan, founder of Livedocs (<a href="https://livedocs.com" rel="nofollow">https://livedocs.com</a>). Livedocs is a no-code analytics tool that lets you build simple reports with live data from tools like Segment, Stripe, and Google Analytics, without writing code. Here’s a video of how it works: <a href="https://cln.sh/6NKYiG" rel="nofollow">https://cln.sh/6NKYiG</a>.<p>Working on early stage teams in the past, I got tired of tracking and reporting even simple metrics. My team would resort to either esoteric hacks, VBA scripts, or simply nagging data guys for metrics—even simple ones. Tracking metrics from multiple tools is a pain in the neck.<p>That’s when I realized most teams rely heavily on software that already offer some sort of embedded analytics on their dashboards. All they needed was a way to compose data from these dashboards into a single place.<p>Livedocs lets non-technical users track common metrics like retention, MRR, etc by connecting directly to tools via OAuth. IMO, until teams or projects hit a certain size or success, writing SQL queries or hopping between different dashboards to track simple metrics is overkill. So we let these users build live reports and documents using pre-built blocks that connect to their tools directly.<p>For example, solopreneurs, super-early stage startups, and small businesses use us to keep track of metrics like MRR, churn, web traffic, and product analytics like retention, activation, etc., from Stripe, Google Analytics, and Segment. See here for what that looks like: <a href="https://livedocs.com/doc/1e2e4001-ed5a-44ad-8d13-806deafdde95" rel="nofollow">https://livedocs.com/doc/1e2e4001-ed5a-44ad-8d13-806deafdde9...</a>.<p>To pick another example: side projects! I have so many side projects, each with their own Google Analytics, Stripe, and sometimes Twitter account that I lose track of how each is performing. Now I just set up a quick report on Livedocs for each—like this: <a href="https://livedocs.com/doc/46a38473-e525-4482-aa46-4da4a77cf180" rel="nofollow">https://livedocs.com/doc/46a38473-e525-4482-aa46-4da4a77cf18...</a>.<p>We call these “live documents” because they are like a document with live variables, graphs, etc. The closest comparison would be a dashboard, but way more flexible—e.g. as editable as a document.<p>I also wanted these documents to be easy to replicate for other projects and quick sharing, so I built a templates feature into Livedocs. Commonly used templates are listed here: <a href="https://livedocs.com/templates" rel="nofollow">https://livedocs.com/templates</a>. You can easily clone one and connect it to your own data sources to get started, so please feel free to try it out.<p>We charge $30/month and offer a free 14 day trial (without a card).<p>I’m keen to hear your feedback!
Upvote: | 129 |
Title: There is a neat tool for Flutter development called Monarch.<p>Due to the bug if you run 'monarch upgrade' it deletes all files in HOME :(
https://github.com/Dropsource/monarch/issues/38
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: I use https://svbtle.com as a blogging platform about once a month. The past couple of days it has returned a 503 [1]. Nothing came up on Twitter or Google about them having an outage. I don't know how to figure out what's going on. I've never considered backing any of my content up because of the svbtle Promise [2]. I'm hoping it comes back up so I can at least backup/migrate my content.<p>[1] https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/svbtle.com<p>[2] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LXB7R6sD2i4J:https://svbtle.com/promise+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: With the way real estate and inflation is like, in Vancouver BC in particular, have you increased your salary dramatically in the last two years or tried and failed? Are you working remotely for a U.S company or elsewhere and is that working out for you? It's tough to get a sense of where the local market is at. Also, what do you do and how much experience do you bring/what do you call youself?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: There is no back story here, but just curious of you who actually started off as an engineer and decided to switch early, mid or late career. What are you up to now? Why did you switch? How are you liking it?
Upvote: | 228 |
Title: I’m building a robot that can track nerf darts and shoot them out of the air.<p>I’ve worked on other projects in robotics and object tracking (perception for self driving cars), but this has a whole different set of challenges.<p>Nerf rival rounds travel at over 100 feet per second and shooting them out of the air requires aiming systems that are precise to less than half the width of a human hair and timing precision of 600 times faster than the blink of an eye.<p>This is the first part of the series of me building the project (and my first video!) so I’d love to hear what you think!
Upvote: | 175 |
Title: In the realm of distributed computing, it seems like there are folks that believe very strongly in the actor pattern. However, they generally seem to be pretty niche? That said, this perspective could be entirely due to my bubble, and so I was curious to hear from folks that are using them in production, and how well they’ve worked out in practice.<p>Or, if you’ve evaluated using them in production, but decided against it, I’d love to hear about that as well!
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Hi folks!<p>As the title says, I want to practice coding a GUI framework, probably in C++.<p>I read about a retained and an immediate modes, have a rough understanding how event loop works, and overall my goal is to practice architecture and optimization (especially cache-friendliness), and less so graphics and typography rendering, though I understand it's unavoidable to implement a rendering pipeline (I plan to start off with AGG or Skia graphics libraries).<p>The dummy app itself will be less about forms but more about data representation, e.g. an audio editor or a node-based system, where data should be updated and visualized in real time, and everything should feel responsive.<p>Could you please give some research directions? Maybe case studies, best practices, some interesting software, maybe to read more in detail about related architectures, etc.? Or maybe personal stories? I'm struggling to find related info which would not be focused on some framework, etc.
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: A few days ago, someone I follow asked the community for help maintaining his side-project, 512kb.club. This got me thinking.<p>There are loads of maintainers out there feeling burnt out, but they can't abandon their project since people are depending on the project to be maintained.<p>In an effort to combat this, I built a website that lists projects looking for new maintainers. It's still quite empty and has some rough edges. Any feedback is very welcome!
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I've decided to open source the project I've been working on called Hyperspace. Hyperspace is a suite of software implementing a wireless mesh network for IoT devices. My main requirements are listed on my repo but I'll copy them here.<p>1. The mesh shall enable nodes to route packets amongst themselves.
2. The mesh shall allow nodes with limited power to participate in routing packets.
3. The mesh shall be IPv6 based.
4. The mesh shall be local. I.E. not require connection to a remote server.
5. The mesh should provide 3D location to nodes in the network.<p>Nodes use the Decawave DW1000 UWB radio to transmit and receive data, and to measure distances to other nodes. Location can be determined with enough distance measurements (see the documentation for more details). The implementation is pretty primitive at the moment. The border router server and the iOS app are super basic and have very little in terms of actual functionality, but the core ideas are there.<p>I'm not happy with the state of smart home devices. I don't like it when a manufacturer shuts down a key server and bricks a bunch of devices. I don't like it when devices don't interoperate. Therefore, I've decided to open source this project in the hopes that it gains traction and that we can work on creating better IoT devices together.
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: I learned this late in life, but I came to realize that for anything you buy from a small business or from someone on commission, you can negotiate.<p>After reading about it on Reddit, I‘ve shown up to hotels and gotten 40% off initial price.<p>At Guitar Center, you can negotiate the price of guitars.<p>I’ve seen people negotiate a round of shots in NYC.<p>The world exists out there at a discount if you’re willing to ask for it.
Upvote: | 196 |
Title: I've been using MATE+Compiz on Archlinux since 2015 because I was used to it and it had a lot of GUI features that I didn't find elsewhere. At around the same time, I did give Gnome 3 a spin and found a lot of clunky behavior and bugs. Fast forward to yesterday when I was considering buying a new laptop to replace my ThinkPad x250 which is starting to show its age, I thought I give Gnome on Wayland another try.<p>OMG! It is nothing like I remember it. To put it succinctly, it's MacOS interface for linux. It's smooth, performant, beautiful and functional. I can do everything I used to have on Compiz, here on Gnome and it's built-in. I haven't actually needed any Gnome Extensions so far.<p>Well done Wayland, Gnome, GTK and every other project involved in making what's essentially the best Linux Desktop experience I've ever had.<p>As for getting a new laptop, that idea went out the window fast. My machine feels like new and I can attest to a significant performance boost of GUI apps as the result of switching to Gnome.
Upvote: | 390 |
Title: This is a really big decision that has been weighing a lot on my mind recently, and I would appreciate any candid advice that you may have.<p>Here’s the skinny:<p>I applied to two schools: MIT, and a bigger-but-less-prestigious school we'll call Z. Growing up, I always wanted to go to Z: my parents met there, my extended family lives in the area, and I have friends and cousins there. But MIT has also always been a dream (and I have friends there too). My original plan was to go to Z for my undergrad, then go to another school like MIT for grad school. I applied to MIT for the sake of completeness, and honestly didn't expect to get in. For that reason, it’s pretty easy to see how getting into MIT has thrown a big wrench in my plans.<p>To make matters worse, MIT hasn’t offered me any financial aid. My parents have saved enough money to help me pay for some of the tuition costs of Z (which I’m immensely grateful for). But other than that, it is clear that I’m fully responsible for paying for the rest of college on my own. (To contextualize how expensive MIT is: the college savings I have now are barely enough to cover one semester at MIT.)<p>On top of that, Z has offered me what essentially amounts to a full-ride scholarship. If I went to Z, I could realistically finish my undergrad in two to three years (from the college credit I’ve accumulated in high school) without going into debt. If I went to MIT, I’d be paying sticker price for a full 4-year degree: even with well-paying internships/work-study, I’d still be close to $180k in debt. (I realize that to some in the tech industry $180k may seem like nothing, but for an 18-year-old right out of high school, it may as well be like asking a dolphin to swim to the moon.)<p>After my undergrad, I want to pursue a Master’s/PhD in Machine Learning or Symbolic Reasoning. The problem with getting into MIT <i>now</i> is that I feel like I have a proverbial ‘foot in the door’: MIT has a lot of undergrad programs that feed directly into their graduate programs, which are top-notch for these areas of research. If I decided to go to Z, I’d have no guarantee that I’d be accepted to MIT’s (or a similar school’s) graduate program, even though I was accepted to their undergraduate program previously. (Of course, I have no guarantee that I’d get into grad school at MIT even coming out of MIT’s undergraduate program, but the chances are <i>significantly</i> higher.)<p>Additionally, just because I have no financial aid from MIT <i>now</i> doesn’t mean that I won’t have financial aid in the future. My siblings will be starting college in a couple of years; there are a lot of changing factors to consider.<p>Regardless of whichever path I take, I want to work for a larger tech company to gain experience before I bootstrap a sustainable startup (I mean, that's the dream, isn't it?). I would like to weave together some of the disparate threads I’ve started with my open source work to pursue an idea I think could have a really long-term impact on the way we communicate and collaborate.<p>So here’s my question: Although I know they’re both really good paths, how would you weigh this choice? I’d love to hear about your experience with college (especially if you went to MIT), your career path, and any advice you’d have for someone in my situation. Thank you!
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: A colleague told me the best way to level up coding skills is to read excellent code.<p>Do you have favorite repos that highlight this?<p>I have an irrational fear of unknown codebases since it feels most of the code is either boilerplate or tied to some framework.<p>Do you have tips and tricks you use to read codebases?
Upvote: | 234 |
Title: Hi Folks,<p>I'm trying to get back into macOS application development. I used to know the basics of Objective-C and Cocoa stuff back on the early days of Mac OS X with big cat names. At the time, I got a lot of value from the Cocoa Programming book from Big Nerd Ranch.<p>These days, it seems that every book about programming for Apple platforms is focused on iOS. Don't get me wrong, I love my iPad, but I'd rather develop desktop apps.<p>It appears to me that the documentation site has been neglected, and that the search engine algorithms favour returning videos and quick tutorials over books. Anyway, I'm having a hard time figuring out a good recent book about developing desktop apps for macOS. I don't care if it is Swift or Objective-C, I like both.<p>Can someone here point me in a good direction?<p>Thanks.
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: <a href="https://developer.apple.com" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com</a> doesn't work
App Store doesn't work
iMessage doesn't work.
Not just me - coworkers also struggling.<p>Any idea what's going on?
Upvote: | 253 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Dane and Geoff, the founders of Spoken (<a href="https://www.spoken.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.spoken.io/</a>). We make it easy to find the lowest price for any furniture item across all big stores.<p>Buying physical things on the internet is hard. You have to quality-check a product without touching it, double-check dimensions for where the thing will go, and evaluate a seller's credibility, often with little data. But buying furniture online is a special case of hard, because the market is deliberately deceptive.<p>Furniture sellers actively prevent consumers from easily finding the same item at other stores, or under other names, because this allows them to charge more. The sellers get to name the products and they name them in confusing ways to facilitate price discriminaton. For example, this table at Wayfair (<a href="https://www.wayfair.com/furniture/pdp/williston-forge-veronica-dining-table-w001977704.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.wayfair.com/furniture/pdp/williston-forge-veroni...</a>) can also be found at Appliances Connection under a different name for roughly half the price (<a href="https://www.appliancesconnection.com/modway-eei2034brn.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.appliancesconnection.com/modway-eei2034brn.html</a>). With most online shopping, the products you want have unambiguous names—if you want, say, a TV, you can simply search “Samsung 55 inch” and see what both Best Buy and Walmart are charging. But with furniture, sellers work actively to disrupt an accurate product graph and keep the market inefficient.<p>The net result is that buying furniture feels icky, noisy, and predatorial. It is much like buying a used car from a used-car salesperson might have felt before Carmax. This is reflected in how much consumers hate the industry: across 14 of the biggest furniture retailers the average NPS is -11, compared with 37 for e-commerce as a whole.<p>At the same time, people are buying furniture online more than ever. It is a $50B online market per year (roughly 1/3 Amazon, 1/3 Wayfair, and 1/3 everyone else) but it’s nowhere possible to do a simple apples-to-apples search for like items. Even on Wayfair, you can find the same exact item with different names and prices.<p>There’s no reason why furniture shopping online shouldn’t have the same advantages over going to a physical store that, say, shopping for a TV online does. It just needs to become possible to search across the entire catalog of furniture inventory.<p>We encountered this problem when Dane moved to New York and went through the labor of buying and assembling an apartment's worth of furniture, only to discover that one of his pieces of furniture was listed at another store but called something completely different and sold for 50% less. We discovered this behavior was pervasive among furniture sellers. We devised a solution for a small set of items. Our findings generated excitement in several threads on Reddit (here’s one: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeDecorating/comments/s1oz0p/urban_outfitters_home_dont_overpay/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeDecorating/comments/s1oz0p/urba...</a>). Many users told similar stories of frustration and confusion without a good solution and there was a lot of energy in these reactions—it turns out that the feeling of being taken advantage of is universally infuriating.<p>At the time, we were working on a tool to enable service professionals to grow their businesses. We did not find an acute enough pain for our then-users. When we started getting all these positive responses to exposing exploitative discrepancies in the furniture market, we realized we had hit on something people really care about, so we decided to build Spoken.<p>We crawl, scrape, and map product data and metadata across 1,000+ furniture stores to connect the exact same product across the internet. The mapping uses both algorithmic and human-driven scoring to evaluate exact product matches. It can be tricky, but it’s doable, to determine which products are the same—in a world of information abundance, there are many crumb trails. Often photos are the same. We can’t give away all the details here. But we do also augment brute human pattern-matching with our own tooling.<p>We aggregate all retailers’ inventory equally and surface transparent results—without ads, business-preference, or leaving out competitors. This means connecting Amazon, Google, Wayfair, and the long tail of hundreds of regional furniture stores.<p>Some shopping comparison extensions and applications do in fact show users some places that they can buy items—including some furniture items—more cheaply. However, their business models involve partnering with sellers, whom they give special treatment and won’t undercut. So they will only ever offer partial, not full information. We’ve decided not to do this, as we believe that the most efficient marketplace has a good chance to win in the end.<p>Our site is live, and free to use (<a href="https://www.spoken.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.spoken.io/</a>). Our next step will be to allow users to purchase directly on our site across multiple stores to consolidate check out flows and avoid marketing pop-ups and emails. We will charge a fee and offer users an option to offset the environmental effect of their purchase. The stores will fulfill the orders.<p>We’re eager to hear your feedback and your experiences with the furniture market!
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: My 2yo son was struck and killed by a garbage truck next to a children's playground in the SF bay area less than 2 years ago. The driver who has fled violated multiple traffic rules which directly caused my son's horrible death. We have evidence that the company's unimaginable level of negligence allowed this to happen and now they want us to sign an agreement forbidding us to disclose the details.<p>I'm writing this in great pain as I was not able to talk about it for a long time. My entire family were devastated. My mom passed away unable to accept the loss. My wife suffers PTSD. I stopped working so that I can go to the cemetery to stay with my son everyday. It's been almost two years.<p>They see our weakness not strong enough to go through litigation as it tortures us. They offered to settle through mediation with a laughable amount of money which I can earn in less than 4 years. And they want me to shut up so that they may do whatever they want to continue killing children in our neighborhood.<p>My family want to settle and avoid the additional suffering. I feel so weak. I want to protect them as much as possible but know in my heart I need to fight. I would never forgive me if one day another child gets killed and I could have avoided the tragedy if I choose to fight.<p>I need help.<p>What would you do if you were me?
Upvote: | 626 |
Title: This morning, I received a marketing email from Cloudflare (through one of our mailing groups), being militant about these kinds of emails, I immediately go to unsubscribe.<p>Dark pattern one: You must login to manage your marketing preferences. There's no security related emails here, so this is completely unnecessary.<p>Dark pattern two: "...confirm your email address to save your communication preferences.". I've no idea how we have a several-year old account without a confirmed email, but it should not have to confirm an email to remove old marketing preferences - or if cloudflare is so careful about this, why did it end up opted-in ion the first place?<p>Dark pattern two-point-five is that the email somehow became unverified - something it seems is only necessary to adjust marketing emails.<p>Okay, so I hit the "Resend verification email" link and check my inbox, nothing just yet. I wait a little longer. It's odd that I immediately got a security email about the login from a new IP, but I've not received this verification email yet.<p>10 minutes later, and I've still not got anything. I know these things <i>can</i> take longer, but I don't have the patience, especially since Cloudflare are clearly trying to make this hard.<p>Going to the preferences page, I hit that verify link again - still nothing. Okay, F12, I switch to the network inspector and click the link <i>again</i>.<p>To my surprise: Absolutely nothing. There's no network requests being initiated by this link. Maybe it's websockets, or maybe there's a script that failed to load? The UI does respond when I hit the link, but nothing else. I opened up the element inspector to find a click handler:<p><pre><code> function () {
return a.setState({
toast: 'verificationResent'
})
}
</code></pre>
That is certainly less than I was expecting. If that's just a react setState... this link is literally doing nothing other changing the UI when I press it. Perhaps some silly frontend developer reads that `toast` state elsewhere to trigger the real behaviour? Nope the only other reference to verificationResent is a ternary statement in the render function.<p>Dark pattern three: Just break unsubscribe. The cynic in me says this was intentional. Hanlon's razor tells me perhaps it is just a mistake, in which case dark pattern three is the overengineering of the unsubscribe function so you can get as much dropoff as possible and it's most convenient if it just breaks.<p>So wtf Cloudflare?<p>Oh, and to supplement dark pattern two: The verification check is only on the frontend. In the end, I was able to use the debugger to skip the verified check and edit & submit my email preferences anyway.
Upvote: | 450 |
Title: I'm looking to contribute to open source projects but just could not find the time since coding without pay is so foreign to me. I could not just approach my employer and ask if I could help code this open source project. What is your motivation for doing such things, thanks to all the open source maintainers!
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Ben, Gaurav and Ali from Reality Defender (<a href="https://www.realitydefender.ai" rel="nofollow">https://www.realitydefender.ai</a>). We help companies, governments, and journalists determine if media is real or fake, focusing on audio, video and image manipulation. Our API and web app provide real-time scanning, risk scoring, and PDF report cards.<p>Recent advancements in machine learning make it possible to create images, videos and audio of real people saying and doing things they never said or did. The recent spread of this technology has enabled anyone to create highly realistic deepfakes. Although some deepfakes are detectable to the eye by experienced observers who look closely, many people either don’t have experience or are not always looking closely—and of course the technology is only continuing to improve. This marks a leap in the ability of bad actors to distort reality, jeopardizing financial transactions, personal and brand reputations, public opinion, and even national security.<p>We are a team with PhD and Master degrees from Harvard, NYU and UCLA in data science. Between us, we have decades of experience at Goldman Sachs, Google, CIA, FDIC, Dept of Defense and Harvard University Applied Research at the intersection of machine learning and cybersecurity. But our current work began with a rather unlikely project: we tried to duplicate Deepak Chopra. We were working with him to build a realistic deepfake that would allow users to have a real-time conversation with “Digital Deepak” from their iPhones. Creating the Deepak deepfake was surprisingly simple and the result was so alarmingly realistic that we immediately began looking for models that could help users tell a synthetic version from the real thing.<p>We did not find a reliable solution. Frustrated that we’d already spent a week on something we thought would take our coffee break, we doubled down and set out to build our own model that could detect manipulated media.<p>After investigating, we learned why a consistently accurate solution didn’t exist. Companies (including Facebook and Microsoft) were trying to build their own silver-bullet, single-model detection methods—or, as we call it, "one model to rule them all." In our view, this approach will not work because adversaries and the underlying technologies are constantly evolving. For this same reason there will never be a single model to solve anti-virus, malware, etc.<p>We believe that any serious solution to this problem requires a “multi-model'' approach that integrates the best deepfake detection algorithms into an aggregate "model of models." So we trained an ensemble of deep-learning detection models, each of which focuses on its own feature, and then combined the scores.<p>We challenged ourselves to build a scalable solution that integrates the best of our deepfake detection models with models from our collaborators (Microsoft, UC Berkeley, Harvard). We began with a web app proof of concept, and quickly received hundreds of requests for access from governments, companies, and researchers.<p>Our first users turned to our platform for some deepfake scenarios ranging from bad to outright scary: Russian disinformation directed at Ukraine and the West; audio mimicking a bank executive requesting a wire transfer; video of Malaysia’s government leadership behaving scandalously; pornography where participants make themselves appear younger; dating profiles with AI-generated pro pics. All of these, needless to say, are completely fake!<p>As with computer viruses, deepfakes will continue evolving to circumvent current security measures. New deepfake detection techniques must be as iterative as the generation methods. Our solution not only accepts that, but embraces it. We quickly onboard, test, and tune third party models for integration into our model stack, where they can then be accessed via our web app and API. Our mission has attracted dozens of researchers who contribute their work for testing and tuning, and we’ve come up with an interesting business model for working together: when their models meet our baseline scores, we provide a revenue share for as long as they continue to perform on our platform. (If you’re interested in participating, we’d love to hear from you!)<p>We have continued to scale our web app and launched an API that we are rolling out to pilot customers. Currently the most popular use cases are: KYC onboarding fraud detection and voice fraud detection (ie. banks, marketplaces); and user-generated deepfake content moderation (ie. social media, dating platforms, news and government organizations).<p>We are currently testing a monthly subscription to scan a minimum of 250 media assets per month. We offer a 30 day pilot that converts into a monthly subscription. If you’d like to give it a try, go to www.realitydefender.ai, click “Request Trial Access” and mention HN in the comments field.<p>We’re here to answer your questions and hear your ideas, and would love to discuss any interesting use cases. We’d also be thrilled to collaborate with anyone who wants to integrate our API or who is working, or would like to work, in this space. We look forward to your comments and conversation!
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: Hi HN, we are Deepak and Sama, co-founders of BoxyHQ (<a href="https://boxyhq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://boxyhq.com/</a>). BoxyHQ provides an open-source platform for developers to quickly integrate enterprise features into their software solutions. These include SAML Single Sign-On (SSO), Audit logs, with more to come :)<p>Every B2B startup faces a common challenge when it comes to selling into the Enterprise; they need to allocate time and resources to support all the requirements to make their offering enterprise-grade. Supporting these requirements is a significant undertaking for the engineering team, especially since they already have their hands full with the core product. We experienced this problem ourselves and that is why we built BoxyHQ, a platform to integrate enterprise features in any SaaS app with just a few lines of code.<p>The main difference with Auth0 and WorkOS is that BoxyHQ is being built on an open source ethos. Our focus is to be a developer-first security platform, putting developers at the centre of our holistic approach and help them close the gap between compliance and security.<p>Please let me know if you have any questions, you can also reach out to me at [email protected]
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: In other words, who runs operations at a scale where distributed systems are absolutely necessary, without using any sort of container runtime or container orchestration tool?<p>If so, what does their technology stack look like? Are you aware of any good blog posts?<p>edit : While I do appreciate all the replies, I'd like to know if there are any organizations out there who operate at web scale without relying on the specific practice of shipping software with heaps of dependencies. Whether that be in a container or in a single-use VM. Thank you in advance and sorry for the confusion.
Upvote: | 601 |
Title: Hello HN! We’re Helio Sleep (<a href="https://www.heliosleep.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.heliosleep.com</a>). We help treat sleep apnea at home using sleep tests, best-in-class treatment devices, and board-certified physicians. We prescribe and deliver medical equipment, so that patients can get care affordably and easily from their homes.<p>An estimated 30M Americans suffer from sleep apnea. Getting diagnosis, treatment devices, and ongoing support can be difficult, and is getting harder, because fewer physicians are practicing sleep medicine. There is a serious "conversion funnel" problem. 50% of patients give up before making it to a sleep specialist; of those that get to a sleep specialist, 50% don't get a sleep study; and of those that do get care, more than a third fail to continue within 6 months. As a result, 24M Americans are currently untreated, leaving them tired and also at risk for serious health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.<p>Clearly, a lot more support is needed. That's our intention with Helio Sleep. We coordinate the care journey by connecting patients directly with sleep specialists, following up to make sure they have access to treatment, and coaching them to help them stay with it.<p>We encountered this problem repeatedly with family and friends who were having difficulties getting diagnosed and treated for sleep problems. Because of our backgrounds in digital health, we knew we could assemble a process to do something about it. We had previously worked at digital health companies including Medallion, Truepill, Counsyl, and Q Bio, building tools for patient education, telemedicine networks, pharmacy fulfillment, and automated reporting. We knew a lot about the difficulties of delivering and supporting prescription medical devices for at-home care.<p>One of the biggest challenges for such a solution is the complexity of the healthcare system. There are regulatory barriers to operating a provider network and a licensed durable medical equipment supplier. We also need to coordinate with payers and manufacturers. We’re building tools to coordinate all of these steps and provide a seamless experience.<p>Sleep apnea lies at the intersection of medical and dental treatment in the US, so due to US billing structures, patients typically aren't presented with all treatment options. There is a need for a sleep apnea 'portal' where everything relevant is addressed, and nothing major falls through the cracks.<p>At Helio Sleep, patients can self-refer or be referred through their medical or dental provider. They are evaluated for sleep apnea through a protocol-driven provider consult and a home sleep test. They then select from a range of evidence-driven therapies to treat their sleep apnea, and also their snoring if that’s needed. To help patients adhere to their treatments, we follow up with them, closely monitoring efficacy and adjusting care as required.<p>We went live at the end of February, offering consultations with licensed providers, home sleep tests interpreted by board-certified sleep physicians, and treatment devices including oral appliances and sleep positioners from industry-leading manufacturers, and we look forward to adding other treatment options including CPAP. We make money in an old-fashioned way by charging for diagnostic and treatment devices and for provider consults. We currently accept cash payment, and we’ll be adding insurance coverage. Getting medical care in the US is expensive, and we’re committed to finding ways to extend access to as many people as possible.<p>We’re excited to share what we’re working on and look forward to your thoughts! If you have or suspect you have sleep apnea, we’d be really interested to hear about any experiences that you’ve had in getting care. If you’re curious about your risk, one of the most widely used sleep apneas screeners is the STOP-BANG questionnaire. You can find a version of it here: <a href="https://www.heliosleep.com/quiz" rel="nofollow">https://www.heliosleep.com/quiz</a>. And if you’re a healthcare professional, we’d be interested to hear about your experience with delivering care for patients. If anyone would prefer to reach out directly, we can be reached by email at [email protected]. We look forward to your comments!
Upvote: | 158 |
Title: I forgot the password to my account and I have been trying to reset the password. To reset the password, Google keeps sending a verification code to the same email of the account that I'm trying to reset the password for.<p>I really do not get the point, I do not have the account logged in on any of my devices. I have tried all the previously used devices to reset the password from. It still keeps sending the code to the same email.<p>It's an account I use for AdSense and I have unpaid revenue in there. I have literally tried 5 different devices that I have used the account on, I can verify the phone number but then it keeps asking me to verify a code that's sent on the same email.<p>Now that I'm trying potential passwords, it asks me to solve a captcha everytime and I've tried so many times that it says I've entered the captcha wrong even though it's correct. We're 3 people literally looking at that and solving it and it's done that 10s of times.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Everytime I hear the soundtrack of Ben Hur from Miklós Rózsa I'm already thrilled. Same for soundtracks of Ennio Morricone. I wonder if these soundtracks only work if you saw the movies or if it's also special if you never saw the movies. On the other hand the movies for sure wouldn't be so emotionally intriguing without exceptional soundtracks. What are your thoughts?
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Recently i visited a car dealer to buy a vehicle and almost got mocked because we couldn't agree on a price (i was asking for x discount, while they only can do y and z the difference between x , y is a penny charge for the dealer). Now i went straight to carvana and bought a car (at y price, no negotiations crap) , so my question is how do you navigate the negotiation rabbit hole?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: New update, but posted on top of the old public post. Now indicates Okta recognizes a breach officially and has started notified affected organizations.<p><a href="https://www.okta.com/blog/2022/03/updated-okta-statement-on-lapsus/" rel="nofollow">https://www.okta.com/blog/2022/03/updated-okta-statement-on-...</a>
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: Thank you HN and particularly YCombinator, admins and its founders. I found YCombinator at the age of 18-19 when I was going through my own way, I started my Bachelors university studies 4 years before I graduated from school, Computer Science has been my curiosity field ever since and YCombinator has had always fresh news, interesting content and startups (I found about it at the time through Daniel Gross who's at my age). I gave up on people on other forums such SOF, FB, LinkedIn and reddit, I've come across your forums for the first time just now and they are such sane, it's so pleasant to read your content. I'd not known about any place to be able to talk to any place with other people like me besides traveling to US to YCombinator startup combinator, and I like my job and now when I found this forum it feel such a warm place (I found it while looking for information about dbus) and it feels like I finally can talk to people who are just like me and write posts and post comments like THIS without being threatened. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!! Mr. Graham, founders, admins you rock!!!! <3 ^_^ :)
Upvote: | 377 |
Title: If you do not own a house, please try not to live in a basement. I have rented a basement for 10 years. I never get to see what's happening outside, the weather, the traffic, the people, the nature etc.<p>If you are young, learn from my mistake. If you are not at the stage where you can buy a house, take different steps.<p>Avoid basement. It leaves a severe mental scar on you for lifetime.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Hey, HN! You probably know that the ordering of products on Amazon, posts in FB, and search results in Google is personalized for each visitor, as it directly affects conversion, click rate and engagement. But not everyone can afford to hire an army of PhDs to squeeze every penny out of the ranking, and not everyone agrees on the current (im)balance between privacy and profits.<p>So we built Metarank, an open-source and privacy-focused personalization engine. It can rerank in real-time any type of content, using only the data you allow, and optimize metrics you define.<p>We made a lot of proprietary DIY services for personalization in e-commerce in our past careers and heard so many complaints from other companies also struggling to implement personalization. It’s often considered "too risky" to spend 6+ months on an in-house moonshot project to reinvent the wheel without an experienced team and no existing open-source tools. Like other people in the industry, we were tired of building everything from the bottom up each time we approached personalization - it should be easy not only for Amazon to do such magical ML tricks, but for everyone else.<p>A small demo of the tool with personalized recommendations: <a href="https://demo.metarank.ai" rel="nofollow">https://demo.metarank.ai</a><p>A blog post on how this demo was made: <a href="https://medium.com/metarank/personalizing-recommendations-with-metarank-f2644112536b" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/metarank/personalizing-recommendations-wi...</a><p>The project itself: <a href="https://github.com/metarank/metarank" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/metarank/metarank</a>
Upvote: | 284 |
Title: Inflation out of control, cost of living crisis, energy crisis, house prices are in a bubble(?), war in Europe that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.<p>I read an article* that speaks of a Bretton Woods 3 like event, and Biden himself mentioned the beginning of a "new world order" (again).<p>I feel like the stock market has stopped reacting to real world fundamentals in any sense and just seems to continue its upwards march forever. Every correction being instantly bought up by all the free money washing around.<p>What is your opinion?<p>*https://plus2.credit-suisse.com/content/dam/credit-suisse-research/SearchPDF?DocumentID=1191091&DocumentType=NR%20Publication&documentClick=true&AuthRequired=true&tagFormat=PDF
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Hi HN! We are Banks Hunter and Max Justicz, founders of Charge Robotics. We make robots to automate the most labor-intensive parts of solar construction.<p>We just got back from our first demo on a 150MW solar construction site, where we showed off our initial prototype: an autonomous forklift that unloads pallets of solar modules from a truck and stages them around the site. It’s a huge milestone for us, and we felt like now would be a good time to share what we’re working on more publicly. You can see a couple videos of our robot in action here:<p>Staging modules on the site: <a href="https://youtu.be/Fwf4v8upuoI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Fwf4v8upuoI</a><p>Performing a two-pallet sliding and unloading operation in our warehouse: <a href="https://youtu.be/EOJiyMXpVeQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/EOJiyMXpVeQ</a><p>As solar modules have become commoditized and prices have plummeted, solar has become the cheapest form of power generation in many regions. Demand has skyrocketed, and now the primary barrier to getting it installed is labor logistics and bandwidth. Every solar construction company we've talked to is drowning in demand and turning down projects because they don't have the capacity to build them. 1/5th of all the solar that exists in the US was installed last year!<p>We're engineers who have been friends since living together at MIT where we studied robotics and CS. We always wanted to start a company together. We zeroed in on solar after seeing compelling statistics about its cost effectiveness and projected growth – and because we shared a motivation to do something about climate change. We actually started out writing software to predict optimal locations for solar sites (searching land for sale and scoring by price, amount of sunlight, proximity to existing substations) when we decided to learn more about what comes next.<p>Utility-scale solar farms (2MW+) are mechanically quite simple. They feature a steel racking system held to the ground by vertical posts ("piles"), and overwhelmingly (90%+) feature a single motorized axis to track the sun over the course of the day. Modules are then fastened to this axis with brackets.<p>We're using a two-part robotic system to build this racking structure. First, a portable robotic factory placed on-site assembles sections of racking hardware and solar modules. This factory fits inside a shipping container. Robotic arms pick up solar modules from a stack and fasten them to a long metal tube (the "torque tube"). Second, autonomous delivery vehicles distribute these assembled sections into the field and fasten them in place onto target destination piles.<p>This is a hard technical problem, but not research-level hard. We think of it as the "homework version" of self-driving cars, as we're operating in a semi-structured environment (flattened dirt field) with drastically fewer edge cases. Manual construction today breaks about 0.1%-0.5% of modules during installation, which is an easier bar for us to target than the stringent performance requirements of the AV world.<p>We're operating in a risk-averse industry, though, which makes deploying new technology more challenging. One industry-standard term we've become very familiar with is "bankability". It's difficult for projects to secure funding from lenders if they aren't using parts that have already spent years out in the field.<p>We've seen surprisingly little penetration of technology into this space in general. Projects are largely tracked with sticky notes in a "command room", material delivery schedules are highly volatile and often not known until days in advance, and there's no live monitoring of construction progress, making current status opaque. We actually had a site we visited outright lose a forklift – we were surprised that all vehicles aren't GPS tagged and monitored, especially given they're operating on multi-thousand acre sites.<p>Our system is the first to handle the full mechanical installation of existing solar components (remember bankability). We've tweaked the order of construction operations slightly to be more robot-friendly, as the more precise operations involved in fastening modules to steel tubes happen in a more controlled factory environment.<p>For our mobile robots, we’re building on top of existing vehicles (called telehandlers, or reach lifts) which are already ubiquitous on these sites due to their enormous tires and broad capabilities. They're able to unload shipping containers due to their extending boom, as well as move materials around the site. On our prototype vehicle, we did some significant up-front reverse engineering including mapping out CAN messages sans documentation. The steering and brake were directly hydraulically actuated (no drive-by-wire), so we added motors to both in order to control them with our software stack. The most unique sensor we contributed was an optical mouse sensor mounted onto the boom joint, telling us the extension distance.<p>The backbone of our robotic sensing is a robust vision system. We're using stereo cameras for SLAM and object detection. Fortunately, solar construction sites already have detailed engineering drawings including GPS coordinates of each vertical post in the ground, so we have a detailed map of the site to localize ourselves on.<p>Watching the existing process for large-scale solar installation in real time evokes the sense of watching paint dry or grass grow, only it involves hundreds of workers. After witnessing the physically grueling and inefficient process of workers manually installing thousands of solar modules, we realized there had to be a better way of building solar, and that increased automation was the way forward.<p>Our goal is to transition the world to renewable energy as quickly as possible. We’re excited to share what we’re working on with HN - please let us know what you think in the comments and we’ll be around to respond!<p>P.S. We’re hiring! If you want to work on cool robots with a positive climate impact, please reach out: <a href="https://chargerobotics.com/careers.html" rel="nofollow">https://chargerobotics.com/careers.html</a>
Upvote: | 169 |
Title: I'm approaching my 30s, and I thought I could draw on the wisdom and experience of the HN community, particularly those of you who are 40+ years old.<p>Thanks.
Upvote: | 159 |
Title: Maybe I'm neurotic, maybe I just need to vent, but increasingly I find myself beginning to consume prepper videos on YouTube and have seriously started making plans to shore up a 3 month food and water supply etc.<p>Curious if it's just people as neurotic/anxious as I am, or is there a more widespread trend towards it going on anyone is noticing?<p>Russia-Ukraine has been my hyperfocus for a long time now and I've been deep diving on international trade relationships, supply-chains, agriculture, and historical analogs to what is going on at the moment and I'm growing increasingly concerned by the day. It has tipped over into having a 3 month supply being the sensible position, at least for me anyway.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Ironically it looks like his content has been taken down from YouTube AND archive.org <a href="https://archive.org/details/SurveillanceCameraMan18" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/SurveillanceCameraMan18</a>
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Over the past few weeks I've been in five separate instances where I needed a company to help me something, and I could not reach a human. Instead, I had to open tickets that went nowhere, reply to tickets via email, be told conflicting things by different people via email... It's so frustrating, and I'm sure there are others who experience this.<p>Part of me thinks (perhaps naively) if I had the ability to speak with a real person over the phone, we could sort this out instead of constant emails or creating tickets that go into a black hole. As more companies outsource, automate, or severely cut their customer service department, there needs to be some kind of pressure to stop these frustrating experiences from happening. Voting with our dollars doesn't work when these companies are so integrated with our lives.
Upvote: | 418 |
Title: If you were building a new real time chat app like discord or slack in 2022, what would your tech stack look like?<p>I’m in this situation right now and am exploring options that will help me avoid reinventing the wheel.<p>My plan was to just build it from scratch using socket.io.<p>While looking at options like using matrix or using a third party tool like pusher, I thought to check here to see what others have done.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: If Java had a modern UI toolkit to create & run apps natively on the desktop and in the browser, could it rescue Java Client development?<p>I've been working on SnapKit for several years (+) to rescue my apps from obscurity by deploying in the browser and it's gone reasonably well, so I'm wondering whether it could be more:<p>GitHub:
https://github.com/reportmill/SnapKit<p>Demos:
https://www.reportmill.com/snaptea/<p>jeff
Upvote: | 120 |
Title: I know it's been discussed ad nauseam over the years but USB-C has been driving me crazy:<p>- Not knowing the capabilities of any port or device. Reminds me of the Plug and Play days: "well let's plug it in and see what happens".<p>- Power delivery? Passthrough? Good luck finding the magical combination of supported devices, wattage, etc. Even when I thought I found the right one my laptop would occasionally end up in some weird state between discharging and charging - taking power but not acknowledging it in software and slowly discharging but not as much without power...<p>- Display Port alt-mode. Where do I even start... Some cables mostly work but running two 4k displays reliably at 60Hz seems to be near impossible. Occasionally a display drops completely and there's some sort of strange reboot/shut down/kill power to everything combination I haven't quite figured out yet. They randomly drop from 60Hz to 30Hz or don't initialize at 60Hz. Then some cables don't support DPMS, DDC, who knows what else.<p>It seems that with high speed (10gbit or so from what I recall) via USB A, extremely capable HDMI, and dedicated charging ports prior to USB-C that was the epitome of connectivity, function, and reliability.<p>Initially I attributed all of this to the inevitable quirks of any new technology but after several years it seems as though these issues (and more) may never get sorted out.<p>What am I missing?
Upvote: | 93 |
Title: Hey HN, I'm really proud to share with you my new open source project: Kestra <a href="https://github.com/kestra-io/kestra" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kestra-io/kestra</a><p>I created a few years ago a successful open source AKHQ project: <a href="https://github.com/tchiotludo/akhq" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tchiotludo/akhq</a> (renamed from KafkaHQ) which has been adopted by big companies like Best Buy, Pipedrive, BMW, Decathlon and many more. 2300 stars, 120 contributors, 10M docker downloads, much more than I expected.<p>Now let's talk about Kestra, an infinitely scalable orchestration and scheduling platform for creating, running, scheduling and monitoring millions of complex pipelines.<p>I started the project 30 months ago and I'm even more proud of this project that required a lot of investment and time to build the future of data pipelines (I hope). The result is now ready to be presented and I hope to get some feedback from you, HN community.<p>To have a fully scalable solution, we choose Kafka as our database (of course, I love Kafka if you didn't know) as well as ElasticSearch, Micronaut, ... and can be deployed on Kubernetes, VM or on premise.<p>You may think there are many alternatives in this area, but we decided to take a different road by using a descriptive approach (low code) to build your pipelines allowing to edit directly from the web interface and deploy to production with terraform directly. We paid a lot of attention to the scalability and performance part which allows us to have already a big production at a big French retailer: Leroy Merlin<p>Since Kestra core is plugin based, many are available from the core team, but you can create one easily.<p>More information:
- on the official website: <a href="https://kestra.io/" rel="nofollow">https://kestra.io/</a>
- on the medium post: <a href="https://medium.com/@kestra-io/introducing-kestra-infinitely-scalable-open-source-orchestration-and-scheduling-platform-8e4d47193616" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@kestra-io/introducing-kestra-infinitely-...</a>
- check out the project: <a href="https://github.com/kestra-io/kestra" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kestra-io/kestra</a><p>Your comments are more than welcome, thank you!
Upvote: | 142 |
Title: I was wonder why aren't devs making desktop apps any more, especially since everyone is buying laptops and desktops again? With all the tooling out there for cross platform, a native experience, and better privacy/security than a webapp.<p>For example, Here are just two frameworks/tool kits that are easy to use and to build desktop apps with.<p>React Native for Windows and MacOS: <a href="https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/" rel="nofollow">https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/</a><p>Avalonia UI:
<a href="http://avaloniaui.net/" rel="nofollow">http://avaloniaui.net/</a><p>Also, If they do use frameworks like the ones mentioned above they will still only release the app for mobile and then rebuild the code for a webapp which is slower and does not have the functionality.<p>John
Upvote: | 264 |
Title: Hi HN community, we are Haakon, Hans Arne and Kris, co-founders of Carbon Crusher (<a href="https://www.carboncrusher.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.carboncrusher.io</a>). We are developing and scaling a technology and process that refurbishes roads in a carbon negative way.<p>Roads with cracks and bumps are often a result of unstable ground beneath the road surface. There are currently many ways of repairing such roads, all which are polluting. You can exchange all of the road, or mill up and reclaim parts of the road and bind it together with a substance with “glue-like” properties such as bitumen, or you could add new asphalt, concrete or gravel on top of the cracks and bumps, then you’ll likely get the same cracks and bumps a year later, since this doesn’t stabilize the soil beneath.<p>Our method is an enhanced, new way of full depth reclamation, with two main advantages:
1) Our proprietary built Crusher can chew and crush pretty much everything including stone and mountain surfaces, meaning we do not have to extract, transport and add any new masses and can re-use all of the road, even in rugged terrain like mountainside Norway.
2) Our binder. It’s based on lignin, a waste product from the paper industry, constituting around 1/3 of the volumes from trees. The majority of lignin is burnt, we make use of it as a binder in our roads instead, binding the carbon absorbed by the trees from the air. Our binder has no negative impact on vegetation, animals, humans or equipment. It is actually so harmless that our test-pilot Hans Arne often takes a sip of it to prove it to our customers and competitors! But it does not taste very good..<p>Here you see a video of our Crusher crushing large rocks (thrown in by Hans Arne): <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O1uWT5PARDWWHshac128hhv1tRkytIyX/view?usp=drivesdk" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O1uWT5PARDWWHshac128hhv1tRk...</a><p>In combination, this results in approximately 20% lower cost compared to traditional methods, roads that on average last longer between each time they need repairs, and a reduction of Co2 equivalents from ~7-10kg positive to 5kg negative pr m2, or approximately 1 tonne net negative per 60 feet we refurbish, of a 2 lane road.<p>We are innovating to improve efficiency and the carbon effect of both the Crusher and the binder. For the Crusher we are working on making it smarter in addition to being powerful, with more and smarter sensor tech and from being dragged behind a tractor towards being autonomous, which could increase efficiency by 40-50%. For the binder we are experimenting with new combinations to store more CO2, adding to the lignin base we use now. We are looking at a range of new biological additions such as other types of refined lignin, other carbon negative materials and potentially programmable carbon negative molecules that can mimic the favorable binding properties, and we aim for a 5x increase in carbon capture efficiency within a few years.<p>We’re three climate vikings from Norway with big hearts, bound together from earlier tech adventures. Kris dropped out of college at age 19 to found his first software company, and met his hardware match Hans on another project 10 years ago. Kris invested when Haakon co-founded Katapult and started scaling sustainability and tech companies 6 years ago, and early last year we all excitedly decided to join forces to build Carbon Crusher. The very first road though, refurbished with our method, was made 14 years back in Hans Arnes hometown, “Heart Valley” in Norway. Being able today to drive, touch it and see how good it still is, is a nice unique competitive edge for us and that our recent customers appreciate. Even if volumes have been limited so far it’s good to also have actual recent happy customers (municipalities, cities, counties and a few industrial companies) as ambassadors, as the road business is very conservative; we have sometimes struggled with being nicknamed “the tree glue folks”….<p>To scale our impact faster, we are working on changing from one off tender projects where we do the full refurbishment service for our customers, public or private road owners, towards a crushing as a service model with longer term contracts, licensing of tech to contractors and less people and hardware involved from our side.<p>On the product expansion side, we are currently most excited about developing software using satellite imagery that can monitor road health and identify repair needs for road owners effectively and give instant quotes and Co2 savings potential, we call it “SkyRoads”. Further, we are working on new complementary road tech that can enhance and add to the carbon potential from our solution. This includes sustainable top layers and capturing and dissemination of energy captured by the roads.<p>We want to re-invent the way we think about the 44 million miles of roads covering our planet, directly emitting over 400 million tonnes CO2 every year in building and maintenance, indirectly more through heat reflection. Our goal would be to 5x the carbon reduction potential of our current solution, using roads as a platform for a host of technologies on carbon reduction. On an annual basis, that could be 2 Gt each year. It’s a very conservative industry with limited innovation, especially on the climate side, and we believe someone needs to make those stretched targets.<p>All this inspires us; to make our planet’s roads, which is often overlooked in climate discussion, a part of the solution. It will require hardware, biotech and software innovation, and that excites us. If we succeed, our direct and indirect carbon impact will contribute in a meaningful way to our shared climate challenges.<p>We are super excited to launch this and be part of the YC community. Hopefully this post gave you some new interest in sustainable road tech. Please do reach out with any questions and we'll try our best to answer! You are also more than welcome to reach us also by email any time on [email protected]. Thanks!
Upvote: | 187 |
Title: A while back my wife called their main customer service number and got a gift card scamming operation. On their site they have this number 1 833-888-0776 listed for online customer service https://imgur.com/56WctZu. If you call it you either get the normal TJ Maxx welcome message and number tree but sometimes you hear a message like "please wait because the number may have changed" and then either a message about a gift card or press 1 for English and then it forwards to a credit scam call center. I called some of their technical staff last night and this morning but it is still happening as of me writing this post so I figure I need to post it publicly as well to get some publicity since this is really not ok.<p>It seems probable that someone managed to put a number in the load balancing of their system and is shunting off a subset of calls out to another call center.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Today I missed my online exam because I was 12hours late. Being European and engineer I was used to 24hours notation. “12:00 AM” was interpreted as 12:00 noon in my head. In retrospect i’m disappointed Pearsonvue (in this case) does not write these times in universal format or even better, attach an ics file upon schedule confirmation.<p>My question to you is: did you run into this kind of mistakes also? How do we solve this more universally?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: See title - I think a collection of failure stories would be a useful learning resource.<p>Edit: I’m thinking primarily about technical decisions, though of course these are made in a wider context (eg choosing tech that’s impossible to hire for).
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Yesterday I had a conversation with my dad (61), in which he asked me whether it made sense to start programming professionally at his age. It is kind of a crazy idea, but I promised him I would ask my "hacker friends" about it, so here I am ;)<p>A bit more context, in case you are interested: he has worked as an executive at multiple companies in the past decades (CEO, CCO, CFO). As he grows older, he has noticed it becomes increasingly difficult to find work, even though he would love to continue working for the years to come. I think he feels inspired by seeing me thrive as a contractor, with access to a global marketplace and seemingly endless working opportunities.<p>He learned to program when he was a student, probably Pascal or Basic, but as far as I know he has never needed to use that skill in his professional life (though I assume his excel-fu is excellent, because that is the preferred "programming language" in a business environment).<p>I have no idea what to advise him, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Maybe I will even send him the link to this page so he can read along!
Upvote: | 177 |
Title: At my current company they recently got rid of our QA resources. They were contractors and reassigned to do assist in other projects. However, the company now believes developers don't need QA since they can do their own testing. Devs should write code, do all their unit, int, system testings, run their code reviews, save testing artifacts, and work with key stakeholders across the company to close requirements gaps etc. We're basically the entire sdlc minus devops.<p>This is great for small features, but it gives me pause for mid or large features. Are we the only ones doing this?
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: I use a Google home almost exclusively to add things to my shopping list. It seemed Google was aware of this, as over the last few months they made little improvements, like images for the items and automatic sorting. Well today Google updated its list app, and removed almost all of its features, including the ability to even manually sort. Thanks Google.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Hey there, we’re Abbas, Evan, Adela, Krystyn, and Ken from Azuki (<a href="https://www.azuki.co/" rel="nofollow">https://www.azuki.co/</a>). We’re a subscription service for reading digital manga (Japanese comics) on Web, iOS, and Android. With Azuki you can easily read official translations of the latest chapters or dive into our back catalog of hit manga and hidden gems.<p>We’re in a golden age of manga. More and more series are getting translated and released in English, but publishers still can’t keep up with fan demand. Print shortages due to Covid and the long production pipeline of print books mean that lots of series take months or years to get official releases in English. And believe it or not, print sales still dwarf ebook sales for English manga!<p>We are huge manga fans and wanted a way to easily access lots of new manga without filling up our bookshelves, paying for thousands of individual ebooks, or resorting to piracy. That last one is important, since manga piracy is still rampant, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible to support creators by reading official releases. Most of us worked together at Crunchyroll (the anime streaming service) where we learned a lot about how to grow a subscription product and an associated fan community. Evan also worked for many years as an anime/manga journalist and podcaster, and Adela had experience in manga localization.<p>All that led to Azuki. For a single subscription fee ($4.99/month), we offer unlimited access to high-quality official translations of new chapters from more than 20 ongoing series including EDENS ZERO, The Seven Deadly Sins: Four Knights of the Apocalypse, and The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting. Most new chapters are available in English at the same time as they go on sale in Japan! The subscription also includes a huge back catalog, with hit series like Attack on Titan and Fairy Tail, and acclaimed indie manga like Pop Life and Children of Mu-Town.<p>All of this is available to read in our apps on Web, iOS, and Android, with series progress and reading lists shared across the apps. Fans love us compared to other manga reader options because of the easy access to the latest chapters (no need to buy individual ebooks for each one), our diverse catalog featuring series from six different publishers, and our dedication to presenting manga pages in the highest possible quality.<p>By the way, there are over 150 currently running manga magazines in Japan, with each usually releasing either weekly or monthly. Each magazine serializes anywhere from five to over 30 series on a chapter-by-chapter basis. That‘s a huge amount of comics, and only a fraction of it makes its way to English-speaking markets right now. We need more!<p>The most popular and visible genres of manga are action and fantasy adventure (things like EDENS ZERO and Four Knights of the Apocalypse), but there are a lot of fans looking for other genres, especially romance (A Sign of Affection) and comedy (Grand Blue Dreaming). We were a little surprised by how popular some of those series ended up being!<p>Our customers primarily use us to read new manga chapters released simultaneously with Japan, known as “simulpubs” in the manga industry. But we also offer community features to let fans talk about their favorites, in comment threads and in our official Discord. It’s been really cool meeting these fans and watching a community grow up around the service.<p>In terms of our business model, we charge a monthly subscription. We pay out royalties to publishers based on how much each user reads of each series, and keep the remainder to pay for our operations.<p>We’d love for you to give Azuki a try! Most series have the first few chapters available for free (with ads), and there’s a 30-day free trial so you can try our Premium membership before you pay anything. We seriously appreciate any feedback you have about the service and how we can improve, and we look forward to talking manga in the comments. Thank you!
Upvote: | 198 |
Title: Basic account setup and payment integration (Stripe); ideally with accounts having multiple roles and members etc. Any language, but ideally Java or Python/Django etc.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I have to use Discord and Element on a regular basis (which both use Electron). They both use an unreasonable amount of RAM, and I feel this even more as my laptop is quite old and has 4GB of RAM.<p>I keep looking for alternatives to Electron, which wouldn't require such heavy resources to run, but my searches always seem to come up short. There are a number of solutions that are either dead or are not ready for production yet, such as React NodeGUI[0], Proton Native[1] or react-native-desktop-qt[2].<p>There's react-native-windows, but I'm not running Windows, and even if that did gain Linux compatibility it seems that they're quite focused on Microsoft-owned platforms.<p>Is "just stick Chromium into all your apps" seriously the best we can do as an industry? It's resource-inefficient to high heaven, not to mention that it's slow and doesn't integrate with the native platform styles at all. As a JavaScript developer, I'm quite surprised this is the best there is for cross-platform JavaScript development.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/nodegui/react-nodegui" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nodegui/react-nodegui</a>
[1]: <a href="https://proton-native.js.org/" rel="nofollow">https://proton-native.js.org/</a>
[2]: <a href="https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop-qt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop-qt</a>
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: I'm founder of robusta.dev which automates day 2 operations and monitoring on kubernetes. In recent months we've seen a close competitor sign up for our SaaS service (using email addresses and names that clearly identify who they are) and experiment with the platform. This is a similar sized startup in the exact same market as us, competing over the exact same customers.<p>Is there anything we should or even can do about this? Or is this form of competitive research simply unavoidable?<p>We also have an open source offering which obviously everyone can try and even reuse. We're ok with that, of course
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: eBPF is an amazing technology that allows safely running user-supplied functions at pretty much arbitrary probe points in a kernel/user space context. Much has been written about how amazing this feature is for kernel observability. But as someone who writes user space code, what I find even more amazing is the support for tracing arbitrary user space programs, with no code changes and low overhead.<p>However, doing in-depth analysis can get complicated and time-consuming. My goal with wachy was to make this debugging significantly easier/faster to use, by displaying traces in a TUI next to the source code and allowing for interactive drilldown analysis. If you get a chance, check out the start of the demo video since (AFAIK) it's quite unique and gives a much clearer idea than I can provide with just text.
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: Hi OSS Developers,
I hope that you can help me understand the state of OSS Monetization better. I’m interested if and how you monetize - or try to monetize - your projects.<p>To get a better picture of the current state of OSS monetization I’ve set-up a quick survey to evaluate different monetization approaches and what OSS developers would require to work full- or part-time on their OSS projects.<p>The survey with 16 questions will take about 5 minutes and is aimed at OSS developers / maintainers:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegX_yKiGtXamKrVfg_1ioVWZ3Xdvtc3usZYn7p20dysHiaGQ/viewform<p>Best regards,
Joerg<p>PS: if you want to get the Survey Results you can join an email list at: https://mailchi.mp/8e59bb1c13db/state-of-oss-monetization
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Hi! My name is Rob and I’m working with my cofounder Kareem on Koko (<a href="https://www.kokocares.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.kokocares.org</a>). We’re a nonprofit that provides free digital mental health services to millions of people struggling online — particularly adolescents.<p>Today, we are launching our Online Suicide Prevention Kit (<a href="https://www.kokocares.org/suicide-prevention-toolkit" rel="nofollow">https://www.kokocares.org/suicide-prevention-toolkit</a>). The goal is to help social networks and online communities better support at-risk individuals on their platforms.<p>Many social platforms have built-in lists of keywords that detect mental health-related search terms (e.g., “self-harm” or “depression”). There is already an established practice to suppress content or surface disclaimers for such searches. Search “suicide” on most platforms and you’ll at least get shown a 1-800 number.<p>But there are a few problems with this. The keyword lists always have glaring omissions. Millions of young adults can still easily find dangerous content, such as tips on how to self-harm or kill themselves. And while some platforms redirect users to “emotional support” pages, the resources provided are often underwhelming and lack evidence-base. The most common approach is to provide an overwhelming list of crisis lines (which isn’t particularly helpful to someone who may already be overwhelmed themselves).<p>Here’s our solution: We have a privacy-first native library designed for social networks, streaming services, online communities, forums, etc. It catches common search terms like “kill myself”, “depressed” or “thinspiration”, as well as a huge long-tail of slang terms and evasive language (e.g., “sewerslide” or “an0rex1a”).<p>The library is written in Rust and matches in under a microsecond. It has language bindings to Python, Go, and Ruby, and all other major runtimes are coming soon. Our keywords are sourced from over 12k known crisis posts and are hand-curated by social and clinical psychologists on our team. We also use text generators like GPT-3 to expand these lists with other keywords beyond our user-generated corpus. The terms are updated regularly based on new patterns that emerge on our support platform, as well as co-listed terms on large social platforms.<p>We also provide evidence-based mental health interventions and resources, to help supplement what online platforms might already provide (though, frankly, many do essentially nothing). Our interventions can be accessed online, for free, without having to download an app. We provide users with online peer support, self-guided mini courses, crisis triage, etc. We have published seven reviewed papers on these interventions and we have two more in prep now. In a randomized controlled trial with Harvard, our services increased the conversion rate to crisis lines by 23%.*<p>This combination —search detection + evidence-based online interventions — enables us to reach users where they are, right at the moment they are reaching out for help. Instead of showing a user an ad or, at worst, harmful content, we can display resources that are actually helpful. We have seen young people search for “proanorexia” content, then click our banner, then engage with our courses, and then show marked improvement in body image perception and a greater motivation to get help offline.<p>Our library collects no data and our interventions are anonymous (we do not collect emails, usernames, IP addresses, phone numbers, etc).<p>Online platforms are heavily (and rightly) criticized for contributing to the youth mental health crisis. But what’s missing from the discussion is how these platforms are uniquely positioned to do something about it. Everyday, millions of people are crying out for help and the most anyone does is throw up a 1-800 number or offer suggestions to “go take a walk” or “reach out to a friend.”<p>Fortunately, we have partnered with a few large social networks that are eager to take the next step. We are now helping over 12,000 people a month with this approach. For users who complete our online interventions, we see significant improvements across clinical outcomes, including hopelessness, body image perception, and self-hatred.<p>This definitely won’t help everyone and nothing can replace direct human-to-human connection. Some at-risk users need far more than we can ever give them with our approach. But it does help some people in profound ways, and that inspires us to keep going.<p>Koko is something I started while I was a graduate student at MIT. I was severely depressed at the time, so I hacked together various technologies to manage my own mental health, as a way to fill the gaps between sessions with my therapist. That was almost ten years ago. I now have a kid of my own and I can see him struggle emotionally, just as I did.<p>Suicide rates for young people have increased dramatically over the past decade.* Since 2019, the rate of suspected suicides for girls aged 12-17 has increased by over 50% [3].* There is nothing more terrifying to me than the thought of a young person dying by suicide. If we can help avert at least one tragedy, it’ll be worth it.<p>We need your support. If you work at a large platform, or even if you just have a small Discord server or subreddit, you can help us by trying out our kit:<p><a href="https://www.kokocares.org/suicide-prevention-toolkit" rel="nofollow">https://www.kokocares.org/suicide-prevention-toolkit</a><p>And please donate! If you care about this issue, please support us: <a href="https://every.org/kokocares" rel="nofollow">https://every.org/kokocares</a><p>If you work at a large social network, or even if you just have a small online community (a Discord server, a subreddit), we think our resources could be helpful. But we’re curious if there are other opportunities we haven’t considered. We would love your feedback on what we’re building, and any technical ideas that might help improve it.<p>* Happy to provide references in the comments - just ask
Upvote: | 184 |
Title: Recently, I cannot help but notice how shy and socially awkward I might be at times, which is quite frustrating.<p>To be fair to myself, I am not awful in social situations in that depending on the context I can be seemingly confident and calm, especially when I am among people I know and the context is familiar.<p>When it comes to new people and places, everything changes dramatically. My voice changes, my posture changes, everything changes. I can start being awkward in all possible senses.<p>The discomfort gets to the point where I blush and this physical state of vulnerability and self-doubt of course makes things even worse :)<p>I understand that all of that relates to self-esteem and phychology in general therefore my question.<p>It's common to advise hitting on the gym, which I just started doing last week. Funnily, the gym is the place where I last noticed my awkward behavior :)<p>If you have managed to deal with that and improve in that regard, what is your success story?
Upvote: | 520 |
Title: In all of my infrastructure, the provider hosting my domain (nameserver) is the most critical part. If I lose the account/access to whatever provider is hosting my domains everything crumbles. It's a single point of failure.<p>What are best practices to make this as secure as possible?
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: Why do we need to search source-code?<p><pre><code> 1. Quickly learn the domain and context of the application
2. After adding a feature, we should aware if we broke anything (assume you work with code that doesn't have test-case), it helps even to search testcases
3. Find similar code and ensure you are improving quality of the overall similar code (not just fixing current bug)
4. Understand how application behaves when there are production issues.
</code></pre>
Most often I deal with large inherited code-base in my career, often we need to search similar code or usage of certain variable or a function/class/module. When it is statically typed language to certain extent IDE/compiler helps. But we have to deal with different languages and sometime developers copy/paste for various reason. Searching/grepping code and its usage seems to be very useful for various reasons.<p>You as a developer, what are all the ways you search source-code before working/fixing feature or bug? Do you use any CLI tools other than grep. I have used OpenGrok, But few times it is not maintained by me or other developers.<p>Below is my steps.<p><pre><code> 1. Read the relevant code, and know certain domain keyword, variable names (inclusive class/method/function)
2. Use the bitbucket/GitHub/git search
3. Use the grep
4. Use the git-grep
</code></pre>
Still few times, I end up missing.<p>Seems like this is (Especially CLI based search) very valuable skill to have. Do you have any tips/tools for other developers?
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: Despite all the posts about the declining quality of Google, we haven't seen any serious competitors arise over the last years. DDG is at about 2% market share, which is great but still very low.<p>Apart from Google's monopoly and the big technical challenges, what would a competitor need to defy Google?
Upvote: | 204 |
Title: If you were to choose one book (or maybe more than one :P) to lure a curious person to your field of study, which will you choose?<p>For example: How to Design Programs for Computer Science.<p>Note: It has to be inviting for someone that knows nothing about the field but becomes hooked after reading it. Not some epitome which is revered by experts only.
Upvote: | 569 |
Title: I've not been following its development. I do not hear about anymore. I guess the hype has died out. Is it still popular? Is it still gaining users? What went wrong? Have more viable competitors risen?
Upvote: | 155 |
Title: I've been using Fastmail since 2007, so I haven't touched the DNS of several of my domains in years. All of my email has been getting flagged as spam by GMail recently, and it's likely because I never added DKIM/SPF records to my older domains. I know there are a bunch of old Fastmail users here so figured I'd do a quick PSA
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: What is 'positive impact', you ask. Well, I'm eager to hear your ideas but I'm thinking software that tackles the big challenges: energy usage, preventing armed conflicts, reducing poverty, STEM training, improving access to sustainable environments, implementing AI, et cetera.<p>I would argue Wikipedia continues to be a very important software project (albeit with an emphasis on the database on content than the wiki software itself), and Linux as this specific piece of software serves as a platform for many other applications and services.<p>What do you see?
Upvote: | 177 |
Title: Hey HN! I’m Shaun, and I started the Narratives Project (https://www.narrativesproject.com/), a non-profit that presents divisive news events as contrasting narratives to show why people disagree. Our goal is to lower people’s distress about the news and animosity towards those they disagree with.<p>Our current news media system incites instead of informs. On-the-ground reporting has been replaced by armchair journalism, most people are locked in viewpoint silos that are occasionally penetrated by the worst of the other side, and the entire system is in an escalating panic about Those Bad People Over There.<p>People of different political persuasions look at the same event and immediately come to different conclusions, and often become agitated with those on the other side. When asked why others disagree, they usually give one of four answers: they're stupid, ignorant, brainwashed, or evil. Or all of the above!<p>It's probably not helpful to think that half the country is stupid, and it's a recipe for catastrophe to think that half the country is evil. So we're trying to work on the better answer, which is that people come to different conclusions because they have different priors and experiences. That may be obvious, but it’s difficult to remember in the moment, when we're confronted with someone on the other side of an intense topic.<p>We produce short, substantive analyses that present the perspectives on either side of an issue, and illustrate the underlying reasons for how people come to those conclusions. We identify what either side is focusing on, how they're interpreting new information, and how they're reasoning.<p>When we summarize the narratives, we describe them as though we believe them. In this way, we center diversity of perspectives as default. Presenting conflicts this way nudges the reader away from mind-reading bad intentions into their political opponents.<p>We like to imagine a person on their lunch break, who only has a few minutes to investigate a news event that everyone is talking about. They scroll through Twitter, read the opinions of people they agree with, and then open up our content to get a quick overview of the whole discourse. Most likely they go back to work still entrenched in their opinion, but hopefully also with an understanding of why people disagree with them (and it's not that they're evil).<p>Or imagine a mainstream conservative aunt who watches Fox News, and her progressive niece who watches left-leaning Twitch streamers. They have difficulty discussing news, not just because they disagree, but because they don't have any way of talking between their worldviews. They just end up sending each other links to partisan articles, which is not a great way to have a conversation. Instead of this, the niece sends her aunt our content about the topic, which helps them both feel acknowledged and talk productively about the disagreement (values, experiences, priors, etc.). They still disagree, but they don't think each other are crazy or stupid, and they’re no longer on a track that was pointing toward hating each other.<p>We believe that when news consumers can at least minimally understand those they disagree with, it helps to alleviate distress, understand their own position and feel acknowledged, and is a key step towards the humanization of their apparent enemy.<p>Here's two examples of recent posts:<p>https://www.narrativesproject.com/news/why-cant-we-agree-on-the-nonexistence-of-biolabs-in-ukraine/<p>https://www.narrativesproject.com/news/perspectives-on-ketanji-brown-jacksons-supreme-court-confirmation-hearings-days-2-4/<p>And here's a recent Instagram version:<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/Cbh6kxhArKa/<p>There are other organizations and products out there that share our concern, such as AllSides, The Flip Side, Braver Angels, Ground News, etc. We’re different in two ways.<p>First, news aggregators offer people news from both the right and the left to see where others are coming from. But there are too many divisive stories and too few hours in the day for this to be practical for the average person. Also, I think that watching oppositional news often just confirms people’s beliefs that the other side is awful.<p>More deeply, other organizations rely primarily on partisan media articles to build their understanding of the discourse. They assume that narratives are the product of top-down influence. We think narrative emerges from the interactions of individual agents sharing information, which is then picked up by the media and propagated. So we rely primarily on a social media listening tool (Meltwater) that gives us access to the full firehose of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. Our understanding of the discourse comes from looking directly at online conversations, and aggregating the different perspectives and positions.<p>We've learned a lot this year, but one of the biggest things we've figured out (through user testing) is that our design is not yet intuitive. Once users get what we're doing, they see value in it and want to share it, but there's a gap before that point, which we need to bridge.<p>So at the moment, our biggest questions are: How can we design our product to be accessible, obvious, and useful to the average media consumer? And how can we best compete within the incentives of our unhealthy media ecosystem?
And that's why I'm showing this to you. What do you think? Does it make sense? Are there considerations I'm missing? Is there a different format that we should experiment with? I would love to hear your thoughts!
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: Hi HN, we're Angie and Jed, and we're building Andi (<a href="https://andisearch.com" rel="nofollow">https://andisearch.com</a>), a new type of search engine with an AI assistant that answers complex questions, and gives you tools to fight spam and ad tech.<p>There has been a lot of discussion on HN recently about how Google search is dying. If you do a Google search in a category like finance or health, the results are overwhelmed with spam, clickbait and ads. That's what we're working to fix.<p>For us, the problem is personal. I'm a programmer who also trained and worked as a journalist and built a media SaaS startup. I watched first-hand as the media industry not-so-slowly starved, my startup failed, and my friends lost jobs and businesses. Google took all the revenue as media turned to trash, and ad tech, clickbait and content marketing took over the Internet, and made using the web awful.<p>With Andi, we already apply spam blacklists server-side and we're adding tools to blacklist and report spam locally. Andi's free from ads and tracking. And it protects your privacy more than other search engines, because searches don't pass through browser history (they're encrypted POST requests). It's free and anonymous, and there are no usage limits. You don't need to register, or install an extension or app.<p>Andi is not just another copy of Google. The UX is radically different, like messaging with a smart friend who answers questions and sends you useful links. It shows results in a cleaner, more visual way (or you can change view to a simple list). You can preview content from the web safely using a proxied Reader View with no ads or clutter.<p>Our AI assistant uses a conversational interface to answer complex questions, explain topics, and find key information. We call these "deep answers". It is a significant break-through, as you'll see if you try it out for yourself. Try something factual and current, like "How many Ukrainian refugees will the US accept, and what humanitarian aid will it provide?", "What were the demands of the cybercriminals who breached Nvidia?", or "Why is elon musk considering creating a new social media platform?"<p>We're doing much more here than GPT-based text generation. You've probably seen examples from GPT writing assistants that look impressive but make no sense. Large language models on their own generate plausible-sounding text that is often plain wrong or dangerous. That's because they predict the next word in a sequence based on training data. They have no understanding of factual correctness, or moral right or wrong. They're like human linguistic intuitive perception.<p>Our approach works more like humans do, combining large language models (both commercial and open source gpt-based models) with reasoning (directed logic and classifiers) and common sense (heuristics). We answer many questions using APIs or knowledge graphs, or quoting extracted text. When the question is appropriate for complex question answering, we use the new approach. It works by finding the best sources, and extracting the content with the relevant facts. We then combine GPT-based models with the results to compose a conversational answer that is also factually correct, presented alongside the full search results.<p>The way Andi searches is also different. We use classifiers and NLP to understand question intent, entities and topics, and predict the best sources for an answer. Then we query APIs and vertical searches directly, and retrieve content in real-time, before ranking and filtering the results. The content you see in search results is retrieved directly from each site in real-time.<p>When we can't find good results, we fall back as an agent to legacy web search (Google, Bing and others - about 50% of the time now). Andi does best with natural language queries. We've trained classifiers for content quality and spam detection, and blacklist and downrank known bad sources and copycat sites (for non-political content). You can disable these.<p>The stack is a serverless application hosted on AWS, using Lambda and Kubernetes, with inference moving to Sagemaker to improve speed. We use PyTorch, SpaCy, GPT-based models (GPT-2, GPT-J/NeoX and commercial providers) and HuggingFace, BERT-style transformers, plus AWS Lex for some initial intent routing. Classifiers are trained on custom-labeled public search data and content examples. We have a database of 30k+ top sites. We're building some custom vertical searches. Services are written in Python and Node. The front end is a Progressive Web App written in React.<p>Some fun features to try include recent events ("Why was the James Webb telescope launched from French Guiana?"), direct navigation ("go hn google search dying" and allow pop-ups), or question answering ("what is the gdp per capita of china vs new zealand"). You can also "Change View" on results between a visual feed, grid of cards, or simple list, or even like Hacker News or early Google. Also try View in Reader for a proxied ad-free way to read articles, including many behind paywalls like the NYT or Economist.<p>Andi is a fairly stable alpha and still experimental (it sometimes misunderstands or gets things wrong). We plan to have a freemium model with some paid features and API use. We're a small team with two full-time founders and some help from friends. We've been live for a few weeks, and we're iterating fast based on feedback. We'd love to hear what you think about search and how to fix it, and answer any questions you have about what we're making.
Upvote: | 352 |
Title: For far to long ingredient parsers been unavailable to the public. Either due to obsene complexity:<p><a href="https://github.com/nytimes/ingredient-phrase-tagger" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nytimes/ingredient-phrase-tagger</a><p>Or because of the dreaded paywall:<p><a href="https://github.com/mtlynch/zestful-client" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mtlynch/zestful-client</a><p>Wait no longer, I introduce PyIng. An easy to use python package for changing this "2 ounces of spicy melon" into this {name: melon, unit: ounces, qty: 2.0}.<p><a href="https://github.com/whitew1994WW/PyIng" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/whitew1994WW/PyIng</a>
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Hi HN! founder of nat.app here.<p>I've seen so many people building personal CRMs over the past years. Somehow, they all seemed to fail and die a year or two in.<p>The main reason for this in my opinion is that the personal CRM business is a bad business. People <i>sort of</i> want this and will tweet about in from time to time, but only very few people are willing to pay and put in the effort (aka. reaching back out to people), to make it work.<p>Those very few people are our market and because it's a small market, there is no way to sustain such a business unless you're bootstrapped and working on this part time (which we are).<p>Our approach is very specific: We focus on Google users (which is why there is only a Google login) who communicate mainly through email and put every IRL meeting in their calendar.<p>For those people, we are able to capture 80% of their social interactions with Google's APIs. Which means that our <i>if-else rules</i> are accurately able to identify contacts our customers are losing touch with.<p>nat.app then acts as a safety net and displays those contacts to our customers.<p>This product really has been a labor of love over the past 3 years and I'm very happy to be sharing it with you today.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: My co-worker and I were debugging a SQL issue; having not seen SQL in two years, I embarrassed myself by confusing union vs. join. After this episode, I tried refreshing my SQL memory, but there are few websites that animate SQL for you. Most of them just have a series of images to help you visualize. There are a few tools that are quite good and robust (especially for large/complex use cases) but require installation and are too complex for my simple purpose.<p>So, just created a small tool to help visualise SQL. Most of the animations are just my understanding of how SQL works. Would love to know what you think? Do you also visualise some of the queries like that in your head? Any feedback would be gold. Btw you can also edit queries and see different results (but its a bit limited).<p>Have fun ;)
Upvote: | 259 |
Title: Over the years I've found writing on HackerNews, Reddit and other online sites has given me an outlet to get creative and engage with folks in a way that will shift discourse towards something I'm more interested in.<p>I regularly lie and pretend I know about topics and areas I have zero experience in. I began noticing I received more upvotes and engagement when I pandered to views or opinions that are either the direct opposite of what the original content suggests (through cherry-picked exceptions), or I'll find a tangentially related view that's either current and popular, or supports a topic or viewpoint I'd like to know more about - often pandered with some popular topic.<p>Often this results in a thread about stuff that I actually want to read about, or someone <i>actually</i> knowledgeable on the subject will correct me - and call me out, but will receive far less approval (and often be flamed for criticizing me). On the plus side, I get to learn from someone really knowledgeable about how something works! (EDIT: Later I'll often go back and reply to the person saying they are correct, I was wrong - and thank them for their reply.)<p>Here's one of the worst examples (which I regret) because it perpetuates a view about a place I've never been, I've never stepped foot in the continent of Africa - it's one of the few times I wish I could go back and "correct the record": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309170" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309170</a><p>I know nothing about IP law - >200+ upvotes: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035901" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035901</a><p>I know nothing about, and have never been through Australia's ACCC courts - almost 200 upvotes: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26787289" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26787289</a><p>I've never hosted any copyrighted media, ever: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=16955522" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=16955522</a><p>I know nothing about tax havens, I've never even submitted my own taxes: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=16809428" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=16809428</a><p>Does anyone else do this?
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Hello,<p>I used Java a very long time ago, like 1.6, and I'm wondering what using Java at work in ~web backend looks like today.<p>What elements of your stack would you consider most important? Do most projects lean heavily on Spring Boot or something else? Which IDE? Pointers to refreshers or concise introductions you might give a new hire would be handy too.
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: Whenever I'm searching for anything even mildly off the beaten path, it's not uncommon for the top results to be SEO stuffed spam websites, or maybe even real websites that I can't access (like paywalls or requiring adblocker exceptions to proceed). Usually pages from the same domains are top-ranked for other related searches too.<p>As a user I'd love to be able to tell my search engine to "Never show me results from this domains" (similar to blocking an account on Twitter) – but as far as I can tell there is no way to do this in either Google or DuckDuckGo search.<p>This seems like such low-hanging fruit to me that I'm wondering if other people have ever wanted this, and if there's actually a reason not to do it.
Upvote: | 199 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>Blog discovery is a problem [0] due to the decentralized nature of online writing. Everyone writes on their own site or platform, and there’s no central place that brings everything together. Google results prioritize large media publications over blogs, so we need something else.<p>Blog Surf is an attempt to organize all of the great online writing done by individuals. I launched this project last year as a directory of personal blogs [1], but have now rebuilt it from scratch into a full-text search engine for blog posts.<p>You can search for blog posts, and filter by publish date and reading time. Blogs are manually reviewed before being added.<p>Posts are sorted by MarketRank [2], which is a measure of popularity across various online communities. Most projects that have attempted to organize blogs lack any way to measure the quality of a post, reducing their utility. With MarketRank, you can expect the top results for any query to be something you’d want to read.<p>The mental model for searching Blog Surf is “I want to see the best essays on X”<p>There’s also a directory so you can browse blogs by category, if you want a throwback to the Yahoo days.<p>If you’re a blogger yourself, you can check out the rankings page to see how your blog compares to others.<p>If you want to play around with things, we have a search API, and the full post dataset is also available for download.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591880" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591880</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506126" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506126</a><p>[2] <a href="https://dkb.io/post/market-rank" rel="nofollow">https://dkb.io/post/market-rank</a>
Upvote: | 389 |
Title: I have some side projects that I'd like to sell as commercial applications. These don't really provide any "ongoing service", so I'd feel bad with asking for a subscription fee, meaning ideally a small flat fee per license should suffice.<p>How does one achieve this in a sane, reasonable way in 2022? I don't want to ship an annoying "activator" program like something from Autodesk or Adobe, which goes against the idea of my simpler applications.<p>On the other side of the spectrum I feel like I could just provide a link to a zip on an S3 on the payment confirmation email, but that is easily shareable and looks unprofessional.<p>Is there something that can be done with encryption/activation keys that would not require the program to phone home to validate itself every time its launched?<p>How do you people earn money from your desktop applications?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: So, someone built Blog Surf[0] and I spent my morning weaving through various blogs (since it has a directory), and first thing that caught my eye was that for every 5 blogs I checked, only 1 had comments open on article pages.<p>If I look at posts like this one[1] and this one also[2] - these are extremely detailed articles (very interesting too), but no comments? I am not pointing my finger towards the authors, either.<p>It's just weird that commenting is being pushed either to Twitter or email.<p>What do you think about this?<p>I fully understand that blog comments can be a pain in the butt to moderate when the average Joe just starts leaving "Thanks!" with a link to their website. But, it's perfectly normal to remove the ability for anyone to link back to their website.<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://wattenberger.com/blog/css-cascade" rel="nofollow">https://wattenberger.com/blog/css-cascade</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/understanding-layout-algorithms/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/understanding-layout-algorit...</a>
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: I recently realized that certain kinds of knowledge allow one to be significantly more productive when solving a large class of problems.<p>For example,<p>* Regular expressions for simple text processing.<p>* Parser combinators for parsing.<p>* Parser generators (esp. packrat variety) for parsing.<p>* The concept of fuzzing and property testing for testing code.<p>* Calculus for solving all sorts of problems.<p>* MCMC for solving a huge class of probability problems.<p>* Search algorithms for solving a variety of problems (e.g. all NP-hard problems, sudoku, HTNs, scheduling, planning).<p>* Gradient descent for solving a variety of optimization problems.<p>* Vector Space embedding as a conceptual tool for a variety of complex AI problems.<p>* Effect composition (Haskell's IO or Scala's ZIO) as an incredibly powerful paradigm for concurrency and parallelism.<p>What are some examples of 10x multipliers that come to your mind? Fundamental ideas without which you would be drastically less productive.
Upvote: | 413 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'm so happy to finally show you all this release after years of hard work. I posted the first version of EnvKey to HN back in 2017 (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15330757" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15330757</a>), then went through YC in W18 (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569534" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16569534</a>).<p>EnvKey is an end-to-end encrypted configuration and secrets manager. It protects your organization's API keys, encryption keys, credentials, and other secrets, and makes it easy to run servers, scripts, tests, and everything else with the latest config. It also helps you avoid duplication in your configuration, react to environment updates in real-time, resolve conflicts smoothly, and a lot more.<p>You get an intuitive, spreadsheet-like UI for managing environments, along with a developer-friendly CLI that does almost anything the UI can. Running any program in any language with the latest environment variables is as simple as:<p><pre><code> envkey-source -- any-shell-command
</code></pre>
You can use the `es` alias to type less:<p><pre><code> es -- any-shell-command
</code></pre>
You can automatically reload a process whenever there's a change using the -w flag:<p><pre><code> es -w -- ./start-server
</code></pre>
To avoid downtime on reloads, add the --rolling flag to reload gradually across all connected processes:<p><pre><code> es -w --rolling -- ./start-server
</code></pre>
You can run custom logic when there's a change instead of restarting:<p><pre><code> es -r ./reload-env.sh -- ./start-server
</code></pre>
Or run something <i>only</i> when there's a change:<p><pre><code> es -r ./env-change-hook.sh
</code></pre>
You can pass command line arguments from EnvKey variables (just wrap your command in single quotes):<p><pre><code> es 'curl https://$HOST_URL'
</code></pre>
You can export your environment to the current shell:<p><pre><code> eval "$(es)"
</code></pre>
Or auto-load the latest environment in any EnvKey-enabled directory (like direnv):<p><pre><code> echo $'\n\neval "$(es --hook bash)"\n' >> ~/.bash_profile
</code></pre>
EnvKey is now open source under the MIT license and can be self-hosted. Our Cloud and Enterprise Self-Hosted products also include commercially licensed server-side extensions for auto-scaling, highly available infrastructure and advanced user management. Cloud is free for up to 20 user devices and 40 server keys.<p>EnvKey's client-side end-to-end encryption is built with the NaCl crypto library. Whether you use EnvKey Cloud or host EnvKey yourself, no configuration or secrets are ever sent to the host running EnvKey in plaintext. Public keys are verified by a web of trust. Invitations are verified out-of-band. Secrets are never accessed through a web browser. More details on security and encryption can be found here: <a href="https://docs-v2.envkey.com/docs/security" rel="nofollow">https://docs-v2.envkey.com/docs/security</a><p>Let me know what you think! Thanks!
Upvote: | 225 |
Title: I want to use Google Cloud for a project, but I keep seeing articles on HN reporting cases where Google has terminated a customer with no recourse or investigation. Taken together, the articles allege the following:<p>1. Google may directly ban your business account without stating a reason, leaving you helpless and bewildered[0][1][2].<p>2. Google will ban all accounts it believes are associated with an account it is banning, implying that anyone who is associated with your business can get it banned by doing things on their own[3], whether that means breaking Google's TOS or being unlucky (see point 1).<p>3. Competitors can shut your business down by organizing click fraud that appears to benefit you[4], and there's nothing you can do to stop it.<p>Because I actually <i>like</i> GCP, I am willing to consider the other side too. Arguments counter to the obvious implications of the above are,<p>1. Amazon and Microsoft have an incentive to cast doubt on Google's reliability as a provider, and maybe Jeffrey Bezos is making all of these HN posts from his yacht. More realistically, I know that I am not getting an unbiased sample by only reading the stories that get a lot of upvotes.<p>2. These injustices may be so rare that they don't factor in to anyone's risk analysis, but rather strike like meteors. Nobody wears a bike helmet for them, although they have hit people in the head before.<p>3. Someone who got banned for cause would naturally want to try getting themselves un-banned by waging a Twitter campaign, but this raises the question of why it only happens with Google.<p>I know that a lot of posters here have performed a serious risk analysis in the course of their own jobs. I have read comment threads decrying the individual incidents, but never one looking at it from the perspective of what a business should actually choose. Hopefully, that is what we can do here.<p>[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25899814<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30823872<p>[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390833<p>[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065<p>[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26965146
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: I am asking specifically from the Software Engineering / Development field fo work, but it can likely be applied to a great many other fields.<p>I would like to know how others go about finding peers to discuss the more abstract or theoretical aspects of their craft/trade/field to a degree that a "9-to-5er" would typically just not care about.<p>In my work life I find it difficult to engage others in discussions about computer science theories, or even obtain advice about perceived best practices. Those who have the knowledge and experience seem too burnt out with the industry to care, and those without are usually in the industry for the status & pay.<p>So how / where do you find people who care?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: A big chunk of my personal software suite comes from Google, mostly Gmail, Gdrive and Android.<p>I want to eventually move away, especially gmail and drive.<p>What are the alternatives that can be used with expectation that they will remain active for at least a decade ?
Upvote: | 254 |
Title: I've been learning about computer architecture [1] and I've become comfortable with my understanding of how a processor communicates with main memory - be it directly, with the presence of caches or even virtual memory - and I/O peripherals.<p>But something that seems weirdly absent from the courses I took and what I have found online is how the CPU communicates with other processing units, such as GPUs - not only that, but an in-depth description of interconnecting different systems with buses (by in-depth I mean an RTL example/description).<p>I understand that as you add more hardware to a machine, complexity increases and software must intervene - so a generalistic answer won't exist and the answer will depend on the implementation being talked about. That's fine by me.<p>What I'm looking for is a description of how a CPU tells a GPU to start executing a program. Through what means do they communicate - a bus? How does such a communication instance look like?<p>I'd love get pointers to resources such as books and lectures that are more hands-on/implementation aware.<p>[1] Just so that my background knowledge is clear: I've concluded NAND2TETRIS, watched and concluded Berkeley's 2020 CS61C and have read a good chunk of H&P (both Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach and Computer Organization and Design: RISC-V edition), and now am moving on to Onur Mutlu's lectures on advanced computer architecture.
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: I'm not talking about Meta the company, but rather thier Facebook property. I've been on for about 13 years. My newsfeed lately is a graveyard only populated by ads and some groups I belong to. The only friends left are narcissists or people selling something. I'm not motivated to post anything because I get much less engagement in the form of likes or comments than I used to. Just curious if this is just me or everyone knows it's dying.
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: Google blocked our payment profile for Riders App (<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whitescape.ride_allinone" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whitescape...</a>).<p>After 2 months of providing all of the required docs and getting auto-declines, I've talked to their support and they just answered (quote):<p>"I have consulted our specialist about your account. Our specialist team has determined that this profile must stay suspended due to violations of our Terms of Service. We’re unable to discuss the specific circumstances of this or any suspensions.<p>Our Google Payments Terms of Service states that Google Payments Corp. reserves the right to change, suspend, or discontinue any aspect of the Services at any time, including availability of the Services, or any Service feature, without notice or liability."<p>The app has nearly 25k of positive ratings and currently one of the most popular apps for action sport participants.<p>I frankly don't have any idea what to do, that's super sad.
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: I just discovered that Adobe took down the PDF 1.7 specification from their site. It's used to be hosted at [1] and I can't find a replacement. Of course this doesn't mean that the specification can't be acquired freely from elsewhere [2, 3], but it's unfortunate if the authoritative source is down. Hopefully it is a mistake though and it will be back up.<p>[1] http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf<p>[2] https://christianhaider.de/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=pdf:pdf32000_2008.pdf<p>[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20220309040754if_/https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: Hey, I'm the co-founder of Magma and coded huge chunks of the product. My other co-founder Radek coded the collaborative drawing engine in Typescript with parts in Web Assembly and also using WebGL - that's why it has a native app feel. If you have an iPad or a Wacom tablet we support pressure sensitivity (enable Windows Ink if you have issues).<p>We prepared 10 drawings that you can join. Beware that there is a 30 users (drawing at once) limit on each. You can easily create your own drawing and share the url with others to join.<p><a href="https://magm.ai/k36k" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/k36k</a><p><a href="https://magm.ai/exp-1" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/exp-1</a><p><a href="https://magm.ai/exp-2" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/exp-2</a><p><a href="https://magm.ai/exp-3" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/exp-3</a><p><a href="https://magm.ai/exp-4" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/exp-4</a><p><a href="https://magm.ai/exp-5" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/exp-5</a><p><a href="https://magm.ai/exp-6" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/exp-6</a><p><a href="https://magm.ai/exp-7" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/exp-7</a><p><a href="https://magm.ai/exp-8" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/exp-8</a><p><a href="https://magm.ai/exp-9" rel="nofollow">https://magm.ai/exp-9</a><p>How is it good for game dev?:
- Brainstorming on art
- Concept art
- Storyboarding
- Character development<p>Some trivia:
- There are 16 tools already like paint, select, bucket fill, including advanced tools like custom shapes
- We have multiple brushes to choose from. More in the Pro version. We will let you upload your own in the future.
- You can export to Photoshop and continue working there with some more advanced post-processing
- You can draw with a mouse, touch or stylus (preferred) - iPad, Wacom and other tablet vendors
- We are building a team space called "Artspaces" with project & team management. Currently teams can use an on-premise version of Magma (dockerized).<p>More technical:
- We are one of the first commercial projects to use Deepkit - a revolutionary high performance Typescript framework <a href="https://deepkit.io/framework" rel="nofollow">https://deepkit.io/framework</a>
- It works on Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari - but Google Chrome is preferred
- We use all the cool web tech like Canvas with WebGL acceleration and a software fallback. Websockets for communication
- 99% is built in Typescript - 1% is Webassembly and C for some optimizations. Node.JS on the backend.<p>Happy to take questions :)
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: After reading the thread "Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random" (1) I was wondering why PCs don't have a bunch of sensors available to draw entropy from.<p>Is this assumption correct, that adding a magnetometer, accelerometer, simple GPS, etc to a motherboard would improve its entropy gathering? Or is there a mathematical/cryptographical rule that makes the addition of such sensors useless?<p>Do smartphones have better entropy gathering abilities? It seems like phones would be able to seed a RNG based on input from a variety of sensors that would all be very different between even phones in the same room. Looking at a GPS Android app like Satstat (2) it feels like there's a huge amount of variability to draw from.<p>If such sensors would add better entropy, would it really cost that much to add them to PC motherboards?<p>----<p>(1) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848973" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848973</a><p>(2) <a href="https://mvglasow.gitlab.io/satstat/" rel="nofollow">https://mvglasow.gitlab.io/satstat/</a> & <a href="https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.satstat/" rel="nofollow">https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.satsta...</a>
Upvote: | 127 |
Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.<p>Bonsai (YC W16) (<a href="https://www.hellobonsai.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.hellobonsai.com</a>) offers freelance contracts, proposals, invoices, etc.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:<p><pre><code> Location:
Remote:
Willing to relocate:
Technologies:
Résumé/CV:
Email:
</code></pre>
Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/" rel="nofollow">https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/</a> or <a href="https://hirehackernews.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hirehackernews.com/</a>.
Upvote: | 81 |
Title: Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA
when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is <i>not</i> an option,
include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn't a household name,
please explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about
something. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>, <a href="https://hnhired.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hnhired.com/</a>,
<a href="https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don't miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878759" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878759</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878760" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878760</a>
Upvote: | 264 |
Title: After having cycled through various CLI-based todo apps, I started to realise that I actually don’t need a tool at all for managing my todos. Most of the time, my use cases are quite simple, like viewing my todo items, checking them off, or adding a new one.<p>Rather than having to memorise CLI commands for these interactions (which I’m not super good at), I figured that it’s easier for me to use my text editor directly, and have an editor plugin help me with the visual structure and some convenience functionality. So, kind-of similar to Emacs Org Mode, but without having to use Emacs. I personally use Sublime Text, and even though I enjoy it a lot, I don’t like being bound to specific tools.<p>I think the best basis for staying independent is to have a data format that’s properly specified and meaningful on its own. This puts the data first, and it allows the tools to be built on top and shared (or interchanged) more easily.<p>This is what [x]it! is about, which is a plain-text file format for todos and check lists. I’m curious for thoughts and feedback. There is obviously not much tooling support (yet), but feel free to create something if the idea resonates with you.<p>Website with demo: <a href="https://xit.jotaen.net" rel="nofollow">https://xit.jotaen.net</a><p>File specification: <a href="https://github.com/jotaen/xit/blob/main/Specification.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jotaen/xit/blob/main/Specification.md</a>
Upvote: | 452 |
Title: I'm looking to learn more about video encoding, compression, decoding, transcoding, ffmpeg, codecs, etc.<p>This is outside of my typical work, but I'm starting a new job in this realm shortly and I'm very interested in learning more about it for fun. Anyone have good books or resources for this? Thanks.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'm on my 3rd consecutive job that I hate. I'm a manager, though I've remained very technical and actively coding. I've liked all the teams I hired, and always had really good feedback from them and well above average survey ratings. I want to feel happy about work again.<p>Despite spending more and more time carefully picking a job, it always feels like I'm either deceived, or missed some stuff I should have caught earlier.<p>I can't get out of bed, am tired all the time. Sometimes on the brink of tears. I'm at a spot where it's very obvious to me that I'm depressed, it's impacting my family life. I'm losing my time, and should look elsewhere. But I've had 4 different jobs over the past 6y, and I'd love to settle somewhere. When stuff is f-ed up 3 times in a row, it's time to look at yourself in the mirror ; either I have the wrong expectations, not enough patience, or I don't know how to find a job that is right for me. I think it's a combination of all three.<p>What really f-ed me up is a brief, recent period of feeling love towards my job when I had hope to change the scope towards something more useful, that reminded me how it can feel.<p>If you love the job you're in, how did you find it? What are the concessions you made? What are the red flags (or the right signs) to tell you a job is the right one? Did you manage to reform a shitty job in something at least tenable?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: This thread is similar to the monthly "Who is hiring?" and "Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?" threads.<p>But this one is for people who don't want to work for money and are not looking for people who want to work for money. But for people who want to work together on cool projects.<p>For free to make the world better or to start a startup.<p>If you do, please post your project or your skills!<p>(Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30162767 )
Upvote: | 115 |
Title: In my free time, I've slowly been putting together a proper professional's ultranotebook. For me, that's a screen under 10 inches, a keyboard that doesn't suck, connectivity, insane battery life.<p>At the moment, I've frankensteined a machine with the following specs:<p>Display: 7.8 inch eInk display, 300 PPI. 5 finger touchscreen.<p>CPU: 2 (2.2 GHz Kryo 660 Gold – Cortex-A78) + 6 (1.7 GHz Kryo 660 Silver – Cortex-A55)<p>GPU: Adreno 619<p>RAM: 4 GB LDDR4X but ideally min. 16 GB<p>Connectivity: 5G/LTE, BT 5.2<p>Battery: 137.7 mAh, hit 144 hours on 115mAh set-up on intensive drain cycle in browser, no optimization for battery implemented OS-side yet. Just long enough so you also can rest on the 7th day.<p>Typing: 60% keyboard with Cherry switches, low-profile<p>OS: ChromeOS/Android/Linux all work. I'd like to port OpenBSD once I can sort some driver issues.<p>I am confident, even with current supplier issues, this could be sold at under $1000 easily. My ideal price-point would be $699 but the likely one is $849/$899 based on comps for the parts and quotes I've received.<p>Is this something anyone other than me is interested in? Or am I just crazy?
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: edit: I love this community! Thank you so much for all the insight. For those who complained, I'm sorry if this post comes across as complainy or redundant, I respect the HN hive-mind and was genuinely curious about everyone's thoughts on the matter.<p>Hello fellow travelers, I'll do my best to keep this brief(ish).<p>I've been in IT professionally since Y2K, data entry->QA->SysAdmin->PM->consultant->founder->sold and with the money took some years off, bought some property and a fixer upper and went to school and got a BSBA degree (never graduated from high school but wanted to show my kids the importance of a degree). I missed working and creating things with people so decided to reenter the job market in the PM space. So now that my hat is in the ring I have been told by recruiters what I need to "expect" in this "new market."<p>I was told "5 to 7 interviews is normal". What? I genuinely feel like I'm having a 'Blast from the Past' moment in this whole thing (good 90s romcom kids, look it up).<p>When did a hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of the organization to do their job? Am I just out of touch? How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive? Am i missing something? HN, please help!
Upvote: | 711 |
Title: Solar Witch is a little webpage and server which receives and displays messages, so I suppose it's a tiny message board. It's coded in very dubious Arduino C.<p>It's not a 24/7 website. Depending on the state of the battery, the server itself might run all night, but all the messages it receives during the day are deleted at sunset, and the messaging function itself is only active between sunrise and sunset. This is for two reasons:<p>1. Less usage of Solar Witch during the night conserves battery power.<p>2. I like the idea of websites which _aren't_ constantly available. Websites which have to sleep too. Websites living on servers which aren't somewhere in the cloud, but which are bound to a particular location, giving you a sense of where in the world they actually live.<p>Solar Witch is very much inspired by the solar-powered version of Low Tech Magazine (<a href="https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/" rel="nofollow">https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/</a>) and the not-always-online chatroom Gossips Cafe (<a href="https://gossips.cafe/" rel="nofollow">https://gossips.cafe/</a>), but at a far, far smaller scale.<p>PSA: Solar Witch is a teensy hand-written C server running on a teensy microcontroller attached to a teensy solar panel which can only handle one HTTP request at a time and may have buffer overrun issues due to my ineptitude with C. If it's gone down, please don't be surprised, and rest assured I'll hit the reset button soon! Solar Witch encourages patience.
Upvote: | 229 |
Title: I need to document quite many different binary formats and would like to present them with a figure visualizing the different fields, their length and names.<p>Similar to how internet protocols are presented in RFC documents, but rather not in text mode. Preferably in some vector format, like SVG, to make it easy to embed these figures in different kind of documents.<p>Up to now I have mainly used Microsoft Visio or even Excel for this. This is very tedious and ineffective. I think there must exist a tool for this where you just define the protocol (e.g. using Kaitai Struct syntax or something simlar) and then generate the protocol figure.<p>So far I have only found tools for generating such figures in text format.<p>Any suggestions?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Over the years I've been writing notes, documents, articles mainly for myself. But as I get older and further in my career I'm realizing there's probably value in sharing these with other folks...but I don't know the best avenue for doing this anymore. And selfishly wouldn't mind building up a bit of an audience for myself in the process.<p>Are personal blogs dead? Medium? Substack? Something else entirely?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: I'm a director in a structure with thirty people and my job has nothing to do with dev. I've been developing large apps in my day job but today I'm looking to develop a simple web app connected to a few data sources like Airtable. I'm amazed of the complexity of today environments and what you need to learn to have something up and running. I've used MERN, RoR and other things but there's so much hidden complexity and that it's difficult to use for small projects (just getting to an env that works is a pain). What would you recommend ?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: A recent post[0] went around about OpenBB. I starred their GitHub[1] repository because I was interested and now I've just received an email[2] thanking me for signing up for their newsletter.<p>Look, I hate to call the project out but I'm tired of people scraping GitHub for emails and blasting out marketing spam. And I'm confident they scraped my email from GitHub because that's the only place '[email protected]' is used.<p>[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30854451<p>[1]: https://github.com/OpenBB-finance/OpenBBTerminal<p>[2]:<p><pre><code> Hi,
We, as OpenBB, would like to personally thank you for signing up to our newsletter.
We are on a mission to make investment research effective, powerful and accessible to everyone.
The team would love to hear what you think of our OpenBB Terminal and if there is anything we can do to improve it.
Feel free to e-mail us at [email protected] or reach us through our Discord to get involved with the community.</code></pre>
Upvote: | 190 |
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