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Title: I had transferred the domain from Namescheap to cloudflare because I had heard good things about them on here. Everything was working well (Mainly use this domain for my personal emails) and now nothing is working no warnings, nothing.<p>I contact cloudflare support and they transfer me over to their "Trust & Safety" team.<p>This is the response I get.<p>------<p>`
Hello,<p>Your account violated our terms of service specifically fraud. The suspension is permanent and we will not be making changes on our end.<p>Regards,
Cloudflare Trust & Safety
`<p>-----<p>What the heck is that supposed to even mean? Has anyone else had any way to deal with this sort of issue? Anyone from cf lurking here who can help me please? This is my personal domain and a lot of my other accounts are attached to this. Like what am I even supposed to do here ?
Upvote: | 335 |
Title: A recent post that has grained traction this afternoon is about a user who’s account was wrongfully terminated by Cloudflare due to false positives, and his inability to get in touch with support through normal channels. As per usual, the Cloudflare PR spin doctors(who monitor HN for any mention of the company name using a script) quickly turned up in the thread and had the users account restored before they got too much bad press for their mistake.<p>However, the worst part of this fiasco, was that this thread shed light on a far more terrifying issue regarding CloudFlare. The problem is that allegedly when they terminate your account you are unable to transfer-out your domain names. Allegedly, and perhaps far more insidiously, CloudFlare sets them to “pendingdelete” status. Meaning not only can you not transfer out your domain to another registrar, but the domain will expire after a short period of time and can therefore be sniped by an unscrupulous third party.<p>This post is a warning to the community: DO NOT transfer any domain name to CloudFlare that is valuable or important to you. Because at any time, your account can be terminated for no reason (“false positives”) and you will not be able to transfer your domain to another registrar. You will probably be unable to get them to reinstate your account so that you can transfer-out your domain through the normal support channels because they totally stonewall you("The suspension is permanent and we will not be making changes on our end."). You would either need take them to court to get your domain name(but by then your domain may already be permanently deleted/expired or sniped by a 3rd party) -OR- make a big stink on HN in order to summon someone with actual authority in the company who can remedy the situation.<p>Relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31573854
Upvote: | 272 |
Title: Hi! I made a React compatibility library for a Virtual DOM library (<a href="https://github.com/aidenybai/million" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aidenybai/million</a>).<p>The idea is to have much faster rendering (a compiler optimizes virtual DOM beforehand) while ensuring the same developer experience React provides.<p>This is very, VERY early stage, so be prepared for weird bugs / plugin incompatibility / etc. If you have any suggestions, I'd be more than happy if you replied in a comment with it!<p>You can spin up the demo here >> <a href="https://stackblitz.com/github/aidenybai/million-react-compat" rel="nofollow">https://stackblitz.com/github/aidenybai/million-react-compat</a>
Upvote: | 109 |
Title: Sometimes you might want to share a screenshot of the website you're on, without revealing the personal data that is visible at that time. With Obfuscate, you can make text unreadable without changing the structure of the web page.<p>Hit the extension button or press Alt+Shift+O to activate for the current page.<p>(Note that extensions can't modify the add-on website, so trying it on there won't work.)<p>Credit for the original idea: <a href="https://chaos.social/@maris/108379386421123630" rel="nofollow">https://chaos.social/@maris/108379386421123630</a>
Upvote: | 235 |
Title: I started working for a tech company immediately out of high school. The company was a startup that has seen notable growth.<p>I joined one year into the business and have been there for the last three years. I took on a lot of responsibility early on because I was excited and I learned a lot. I worked on tasks that had a direct impact on revenue.<p>Now I'm feeling burnt out and question whether I started on this path too early. I had really high expectations of myself and now I am wrestling with this feeling of guilt that I can't get motivated like I used to. I've tried doing the things with tech I love -- like working on my website -- but lose energy quickly.<p>I know I'm early in my career but I feel tired and unmotivated at work. Work seems like a never-ending treadmill of tasks, many of which are more bureaucratic now and don't interest me. What should I do?<p>Update: One thing that's worth noting is my job has changed in this time to something that doesn't interest me as much. The company has grown to 200+ people and I'm struggling to see how my skills apply to my role since my first role is now no longer relevant to our core business.
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: Arguable the goals of DevOps align partly with the goals of system administrators in former days: Provide reliable compute infrastructure for<p><pre><code> 1) internal users: mainly developers by providing CI/CD
2) external users: end users
</code></pre>
Nowadays we call people that do 1) DevOps and people that do 2) SREs (so one could argue that the role of sys admins just got more specialized).<p>The platform of choice is mostly Kubernetes these days, which promises among other things stuff like<p><pre><code> - load balancing
- self-healing
- rollbacks/rollouts
- config management
</code></pre>
Before the cloud days, this stuff has been implemented using a conglomerate of different software and shell scripts, issued at dedicated "pet" servers.<p>In particular, a main critic is "state" and the possibility to change that state by e.g. messing with config files via SSH, which makes running and maintaining these servers more error-prone.<p>However, my main question is:<p>"If this old way of doing things is so error-prone, and it's easier to use declarative solutions like Kubernetes, why does the solution seem to need sooo much work that the role of DevOps seems to dominate IT related job boards? Shouldn't Kubernetes <i>reduce</i> the workload and need <i>less</i> men power?"<p>Don't get me wrong, the old way does indeed look messy, I am just wondering why there is a need for so much dev ops nowadays ...<p>Thanks for your answers.
Upvote: | 437 |
Title: For those of you who have experience developing in C#, what are your thoughts on modern C# and .NET? If you have experience with ASP.NET Core, can you please provide some random thoughts about it? Did you or do you enjoy developing with C# or ASP.NET Core?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I think this might actually be a few questions:<p><pre><code> 1. Has anybody noticed their own cognitive decline? I'm 30 but am interested in experiences at all ages
2. Does anybody have a good way of testing their intellect or problem-solving periodically? This would at least help me keep track going forward
3. Has anybody found ways to improve their problem-solving skills? Or critical thinking?
</code></pre>
I feel like my ability to solve problems well - efficiently, cleverly, satisfactorily, completely - has reduced over time (past year, maybe multiple years? I'm not really sure.) For example, I'll find that a programming solution didn't account for things I should've considered or introduced a new bug; or a co-worker will suggest a different solution and it seems obviously better. I don't think this has always been the case; I used to be pretty school smart in subjects like math and comp sci. My theories:<p><pre><code> - Maybe my intellect has diminished from using alcohol and weed at an early age?
- Maybe that I've been feeling a bit burnt out
- Maybe I've gotten lazy and rely too much on, e.g., stackoverflow
- Maybe medicine I take for mental health?
- Insufficient sleep? I've been getting 6-7 recently but should probably be getting 7-9
- Maybe I've actually always been dumb and am only now realizing it!
</code></pre>
Any thoughts would be appreciated. If it's something I can change, that would be a huge relief.
Upvote: | 128 |
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: | 83 |
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://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=31582793" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582793</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582795" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582795</a><p>---<p>Edit: YC is hosting a job expo on June 6. If you might be interested in working at a YC-funded startup and would like to talk to founders who are hiring, check out <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584034" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584034</a> and <a href="https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-tech-expo-summer-2022" rel="nofollow">https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-tech-expo-summ...</a>.
Upvote: | 390 |
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: | 114 |
Title: From the 1st of July, Ring's basic plan will cost 40% more. Email:<p>---<p>We’re continuing to innovate for you, our neighbour.<p>More features are coming to Ring Protect Basic, at a new price.<p>Starting on the 1st July, 2022, we’re expanding the features available for Ring Protect Basic to improve your Ring experience and give you even more peace of mind.<p>With these features, the price of Protect Basic will change from £24.99/year per device to £34.99/year per device.<p>If you don’t want to renew your plan at the new price, you must cancel your subscription before any renewal set to occur on or after the 1st July, 2022. As a reminder, you can cancel by logging in to your account at Ring.com.<p>---<p>What will you get in return?<p>"Extended Video Storage:
You can store your Ring videos for up to 180 days. Video storage defaults to 30 days.<p>Bulk Video Downloads:
Download up to 50 videos at once when you log in to your Ring account on Ring.com.<p>Exclusive Discount:
Save 10% on select Ring products at Ring.com."
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Today we got an email that our entire global staff would be getting a long weekend, just because.<p>I also happened to see that tweet about Tesla staff and WFH.<p>My gut is telling me that a lot of companies will seek to leverage this economic downturn and layoffs to threaten staff into returning.<p>The dialogue until now has been fairly conciliatory, but we will start to see more come or go type of ultimatums...I am convinced.<p>What do you think?<p><a href="https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1531867103854317568#m" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1531867103854317568#m</a>
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: Since we have threads for who is hiring and who is looking for a job,
I thought it might be interesting to find out which companies are doing
mass firings and lay offs.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: Each of us have limits as to the things we're willing to put up with at a job. What's taking you near your threshold?
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: It seems like the stock markets (USA) growth is strongly correlated to inflation. The more money the government prints the more the stock market goes up. So the market doesn't actually represent value in a company but instead debt owed to somebody else.<p>What are the implications of this and is it a bad thing?<p>What would the market look like if we corrected for the money supply?<p>PS: I'm asking here because when asking at other places I was told to just not worry about it.
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: Happy to hear examples of a job you’re currently at or recently found that you find meaningful and satisfying. By itself, not because of compensation.<p>Please name a company or at least specific market niche + geo or product, to understand what exactly the company (or your team is producing).
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story.<p>More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort.<p>Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Industry/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...</a><p>I am still not sure if this was a good decision financially, but unlike in a corporate environment, I am so much happier working on a product that I can put my love into and see people enjoy it, see my direct impact, and be able to make big decisions (although this also adds a lot of stress).<p>I also quite enjoy the added SWE challenges. I had to write so many complex algorithms (path-finding, logistics, serialization, ...) and optimize things down to bits (shaders, compression of in-memory data, ...) that were rarely required by my corp job.<p>Anyhow, this is getting a little long, feel free to ask any questions, I will do my best to answer them.
Upvote: | 1157 |
Title: While there are fewer of them, there are quite a few fully open source, open content games out there, like Thrive, 0ad, Warzone2100, Endless Sky etc.<p>What is your favorite fully open source, open content game?<p>Edit: please vote on the comments people post too. Up if you like, down if you dislike, don't vote if you haven't played it or are neutral on it.
Upvote: | 378 |
Title: A month or so ago, I ported a Common Lisp implementation (npt) to WebAssembly to make a silly blog post, because I was bored and have a lot of time on my hands to waste with things like this (I don't have a job, and because I have next to no experience, these meaningless, silly projects tend to fill what time I do have).<p>This is significant as it's the first time Common Lisp in particular has ever been hosted on it; wasm has a few poor decisions in its design that make it less-than-conducive to being a target for Common Lisp, and a lot of the more interesting implementations require an implementation to already be on the platform for bootstrapping purposes.<p>My previous attempts using other implementations haven't gone so well, despite throwing a <i>lot</i> of time at it (as an example, I have a fork of Eclipse Common Lisp, a defunct implementation from the 1990s, sitting on my disk with a few hundred lines of changes that I finally got to successfully compile and run a handful of very basic expressions, but it blows up when you try and define anything). In comparison, I was pleasantly surprised by how little I had to do, even though I did end up scrapping <i>loads</i> of lines of my own changes to npt in the process as I got a handle on how to make it work acceptably.<p>The Emscripten toolchain and I don't get along, partially because I don't like inlining ECMAScript into my C and vice-versa, so it's little more than a neat little demo right now.<p>You can load slightly more complex programs into it by hijacking the "imp" ECMAScript function every few hundred milliseconds with strings containing <i>complete forms</i> (this is essentially a batch processor, so there's no interactivity that allows it to wait while you decide what the rest of a form should be). Only one at a time, though. It's not that fancy.<p>If you mess up at all, even just a little error, it will crash. This is by design; I disabled the debugger. It's a giant hack, and the hack I eventually decided on left it impossible to have a debugging experience, with the benefit of getting to use a closer-to-unmodified npt.<p>This could be more useful, if I spent more time on it, but it's more fun if it's just a demo. I hope you enjoy the toy I made for you.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batch_processing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batch_processing</a><p>If you don't know what forms are in the context of Common Lisp:<p><a href="http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_aba.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_aba...</a><p><a href="http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/26_glo_c.htm#compound_form" rel="nofollow">http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/26_glo...</a>
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Hi HN,
I'm a software dev with 10yrs XP. Mostly mobile and gaming.<p>I'm interested to take the leap and go fully into blockchain/solidity.<p>I'm looking for some bootcamps, or online learning platform that can guide me towards landing a position as a solidity developer.<p>I'm actually interested to know any experience from other developers that took a similar leap. What helped you get into so-called web3 development?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I'm 50. I started my career as a developer but my role over the past 15 years has morphed into a professional generalist in small (<10 people) financial firms. I have responsibility for all non-revenue activities (legal, accounting, audit, operations, regulatory, etc) so most of the team can focus on revenue.<p>I've decided to move to another country and that means I'll have to leave this job. As much as I have enjoyed it, I would like to go solo / entrepreneurial. Being a generalist with no specific skills, seems to be both an asset and a liability in such a transition<p>Has anyone made similar career changes with advice to share?<p>EDIT - <i>Great</i> responses so far. I'm particularly interested in hearing from anyone that went from generalist to a completely different direction/field. Not just contracting their generalism or specializing within one of their general fields. Thanks!
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: This has been asked previously here [1] but it has been over a year. The thread actually has suggestions to do this monthly to get insights into other industries but I guess that did not happen. Anyway I think it's been over a year and I think we should have a discussion about this.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638</a>
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I have been running imagetoexcel.com registered with Google Domain. The service is live since May 2019 with 1000 DAUs. I have auto-renewal turned on, so every year it renews for one year charging my credit card linked in the account. I lost my cards in February, so I had to block my cards with the bank. Apparently, in May, Google Services tried to take the payment and hit a bad response from the Payment. I received an email stating the same, so when I tried to add a new card(s) it threw an error `OR-HDT-09`. Understandably they had to verify me and asked me to submit my ID, which I did. Two weeks to date no response from the Google Pay services, even on the follow-up. Now the site is down.<p>As a precautionary step, I've transferred my 4 other domains to the porkbun, which was super easy. I just thought of informing fellow hacker news followers to keep them out in such a situation.
Upvote: | 150 |
Title: Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows. I am a FreeBSD "Ports" (packaging) committer.<p>I own a HP Spectre x360 14" which dual-boots Windows 11 and FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT. The Spectre is my personal laptop. I recently reinstalled Windows.<p>Laptops on Intel's TigerLake platform use something called VMD which supposedly helps with Intel's Optane SSD by taking over the NVMe. Some laptops like Lenovo ThinkPad models allow you to disable VMD, but my Spectre does not, so you need a second USB to sideload the drivers.<p>What else? There is no touchpad on the Windows installer. Linux and FreeBSD both have had TigerLake touchpad drivers for a while.<p>I remember working with a developer to build FreeBSD drivers for the VMD, and submitting a patch myself for TigerLake touchpad, and both are in FreeBSD 13.0 from over a year back.<p>Yet neither are in Windows 11's ISO, even the latest "Visual Studio" downloads, and on both Windows 11 Home and Enterprise.<p>The mainline Linux kernel has drivers for Apple M1 outside the GPU, something that needs many man-hours of reverse engineering. Windows 11 doesn't even have drivers long committed in the Linux and FreeBSD trees.<p>While I can install Windows 11 on an 8th Gen WhiskeyLake Spectre fine, touchpad and NVMe, it's a hassle on 11th Gen hardware even when the hardware isn't even super new, 12th Gen laptops are already out.<p>I guess the wrong person at Redmond got the note for the drivers :-). If someone reading this works at Windows, please add drivers for Intel's VMD and TigerLake/AlderLake touchpad.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: So it’s with deep professional and personal sadness that I must announce my plans to shut down 70 Million Resources, Inc., the parent company of 70 Million Jobs (the 1st national, for-profit employment platform for people with criminal records) and Commissary Club (the first mobile social network for this population).<p>When I launched 70MR in 2016, I was motivated to build a company that could short circuit the pernicious cycles of recidivism in this country--cycles that destroy lives, tear apart families and decimate communities. I sought to disrupt the sleepy reentry industry by applying technology, focusing on data, employing an aggressive, accountable team, and moving with some urgency. And for the first time, approaching the challenge as a national, for-profit venture.<p>This approach, which I named “RaaS,” (Reentry as a Service), turned out to be wildly effective, and by the beginning of 2020, we were delivering on our mission of driving “double bottom line returns”: build a big, successful business and do massive social good. With the help of Y Combinator and nearly 1,500 investors, I assembled a team and got to work.<p>We succeeded in facilitating employment for thousands of deserving men and women and became operationally profitable.<p>However, the pandemic had other plans for us. When it hit in force in March 2020, companies made wholesale terminations of nearly all our people, and continued their halt in hiring for two years.<p>Our revenue dropped like a rock to almost nothing. I immediately responded by paring our expenses to the bone and began letting team members go. There was no opportunity to raise additional funding, so I began injecting my own money into the company—money I barely have—just to keep the lights on.<p>When the economy and job market began storming back, we were inundated with inbound requests for our services. Our perseverance seemed to be paying off. Except now we were hit with a new gut punch: “The Great Resignation.” Now our workers were reticent to come back to work. And if they did accept a job, they’d often leave after only a few days.<p>It became obvious that we lacked the resources to weather this new storm while hoping and praying the world would normalize soon. (It still hasn’t.)<p>Our coffers are empty. We’ve incurred a relatively small amount of debt (that I personally guaranteed) that I hope to negotiate down. All employees have been paid what they were owed (except for me). I will explore sale of assets we hold.<p>On a personal note, I can’t tell you how grateful and humbled I’ve been that many would entrust their investment or business with me. For a person who’s done time in prison (me), it’s almost impossible to ask for someone’s trust. I have not yet forgiven myself for things I did which ultimately got me into trouble. But I will be eternally grateful to those that assisted me in my efforts to settle the score and win back my karma.<p>From the beginning I was blessed by an unbelievable team of smart, funny, passionate young people who shared my ambition to cause change. They stuck with me/us until the very end.<p>I’m most saddened by the millions of formerly incarcerated men and women who we won’t be able to help. These are some of the most sincere, honest, and heroic people I’ve ever met. It was my life’s honor to work with them.<p>I’m pretty sure I’ll continue my reentry work. Several prominent organizations have indicated their interests in me assuming a leadership role. I need to work, and I need to continue my work.<p>I’m so sorry for this outcome, despite the good we’ve done. I’m not sure we could have done anything differently or better, but ultimately, I take full responsibility. Needless to say, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out, here or at [email protected].<p>This has been the greatest experience of my life; it couldn’t have happened without my getting a second chance.<p>Richard
Upvote: | 1633 |
Title: Does she say, "My son created the color on the Start Button!" or, "My Daughter created the button that opens the Beast Limo's partition behind the driver!!!!" (The Beast is the US President's vehicle.)<p>Just what does she say? I imagine the answers can be humorous!<p>PS Take "Mom" to mean Mom, Nana, daughter, Son, or whatever seems appropriate for the comment!
Upvote: | 152 |
Title: This is a recurring question that pop up every couple of years, but it's always interesting to see what people use nowadays.<p>How do you track your personal finances? Excel sheet? Python script? Self-hosted dashboard?<p>Do you use open source software, did you code your own, or do you subscribe to a service?<p>I'm more interested in the basic spending tracking functions (auto importing from bank, auto tagging categories, etc) than having it track my investment portfolio.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Many popular programming languages today have one or two web frameworks that dominate usage in that language over other web frameworks for the same language.<p>- Python: Django, Flask<p>- Ruby: Ruby on Rails (RoR)<p>- PHP: Laravel<p>- JavaScript: ReactJS<p>I think it's nice to hear are about lesser-known web frameworks not often in the spotlight. If you are using a lesser-known or less popular web framework, what made you choose the framework? What do you like (or dislike) about the web framework you use?
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: My pandemic project was to find, restore and organize scattered and archived remnants of Palm/HP's mobile webOS platform to help keep these delightful little devices alive.
Upvote: | 439 |
Title: I am looking for a way to keep myself focus at work. I am very much multi-tasking and that is coming with the overhead that it has.<p>I wonder how the HN community deal with that and if Pomorodo technique is something you are using and recommending.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I worked on this applied Deep Reinforcement Learning course for the better part of 2021. I made a Datacamp course [0] before, and this served as my inspiration to make an applied Deep RL series.<p>Normally, Deep RL courses teach a lot of mathematically involved theory. You get the practical applications near the end (if at all).<p>I have tried to turn that on its head. In the top-down approach, you learn practical skills first, then go deeper later. This is much more fun.<p>This course (the first in a planned multi-part series) shows how to use the Deep Reinforcement Learning framework RLlib to solve OpenAI Gym environments. I provide a big-picture overview of RL and show how to use the tools to get the job done. This approach is similar to learning Deep Learning by building and training various deep networks using a high-level framework e.g. Keras.<p>In the next course in the series (open for pre-enrollment), we move on to solving real-world Deep RL problems using custom environments and various tricks that make the algorithms work better [1].<p>The main advantage of this sequence is that these practical skills can be picked up fast and used in real life immediately. The involved mathematical bits can be picked up later. RLlib is the industry standard, so you won't need to change tools as you progress.<p>This is the first time that I made a course on my own. I learned flip-chart drawing to illustrate the slides and notebooks. That was fun, considering how much I suck at drawing. I am using Teachable as the LMS, Latex (Beamer) for the slides, Sketchbook for illustrations, Blue Yeti for audio recording, OBS Studio for screencasting, and Filmora for video editing. The captions are first auto-generated on YouTube and then hand edited to fix errors and improve formatting. I do the majority of the production on Linux and then switch to Windows for video editing.<p>I released the course last month and the makers of RLlib got in touch to show their approval. That's the best thing to happen so far.<p>Please feel free to try it and ask any questions. I am around and will do my best to answer them.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.datacamp.com/courses/unit-testing-for-data-science-in-python" rel="nofollow">https://www.datacamp.com/courses/unit-testing-for-data-scien...</a>
[1] <a href="https://courses.dibya.online/p/realdeeprl" rel="nofollow">https://courses.dibya.online/p/realdeeprl</a>
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: Hey HN, we're excited to have people try out our framework! When we built out a Chrome extension earlier this year, we noticed that the config was too imperative. You had to constantly tell Chrome via the manifest.json file where your files were, what your permissions should be, etc.<p>So we thought it might be interesting to build a more declarative framework. When we built a proof of concept, we enjoyed working with it and decided to invest more time into making it usable and adding more features.<p>We're still pretty early in building it out, and there's a bunch more we want to add, but this feels like a good time to showcase it and hear what people think!
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: Warning: this whole post is a blatant plug for my Open Source project <a href="https://github.com/etiennesillon/ModelRunner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/etiennesillon/ModelRunner</a><p>There is lot of discussion around no code platforms and why developers don’t like them. My view is that they can be very useful to quickly get through the boring parts of a project, like creating master data management screens for example. So I’ve built my own version which interprets models at run time and, it turns out, understands natural language queries too!<p>Hi, my name is Etienne, I love coding and I’ve been doing it for a few decades now so I’d rather focus on code that keeps me interested. Unfortunately, I find that there is always a lot to code before I get to the interesting stuff. So, like every other half-decent programmer, I’ve always tried to automate as much as possible and build reusable libraries by adding levels of indirection and parameters.<p>I’ve been doing this for so long now that my code has become ‘hyper’ parameterised, so much so that I had to store all the parameters in configuration files. These evolved into complete models which are basically a mix between ER models and UML diagrams: they include Entities and Attributes but also support all UML relationships (plus Back References) as well as formulas in object notation like “Product.Name” and “Sum(OrderLines.Amount)”. I’ve even extended the idea to include workflow models to specify what happens when an object is created, updated or deleted or when a pre-requisite condition becomes true.<p>To simplify managing the models, I’ve written a graphical editor, starting with Eclipse GEF but since I like to reinvent the wheel, I moved to plain HTML5/JS. To make it even easier, I’ve added Google Speech Recognition so I can now design models by just talking to Chrome and when I’m done, I can deploy them with one click or by saying something like ‘please deploy the application’. This will create a schema for the data and the ‘meta’ application will be ready to offer standard, web based, data management screens.<p>At this stage you’re probably thinking “Great, you can design and deploy data driven apps with your voice, so what?”<p>Ok, let’s move on to something more interesting then, which is what the ‘meta’ app can do because it has access to all the information in the model at run time, like for example, the ability to manipulate the data using natural language queries.<p>This works because having access to the semantics in the model removes the current gap between Machine Learning based Natural Language Understanding systems, which are very flexible but mostly ignorant of the domain model and, on the other hand, old fashioned back end systems with very rigid APIs. You can find a more detailed discussion here: <a href="https://modeling-languages.com/modelrunner-open-source-no-code-nlu-voice-modeling-data-platform/" rel="nofollow">https://modeling-languages.com/modelrunner-open-source-no-co...</a>.<p>So I’ve also added Google Speech Recognition to the ‘meta’ application and I can now just speak to it and tell it to “create a city called Melbourne and set postcode to 3000 and set notes to the most liveable city in the world” or “get me a list of customers living in Sydney aged 40” which I think is pretty cool and almost justifies all the hours and late nights I’ve spent coding it!<p>I think this has pretty obvious applications like for example, being able to manage your data on the go by just talking to your phone instead of trying to use a GUI on a small screen.<p>So, I highly recommend the parameterised indirection approach but if you don’t have a lot of time to write your own code, you might want to have a look at mine, it’s all Open Source with an MIT license: <a href="https://github.com/etiennesillon/ModelRunner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/etiennesillon/ModelRunner</a>.<p>Or, if you just want to try it or watch a demo, just head to <a href="https://modelrunner.org" rel="nofollow">https://modelrunner.org</a>.<p>Now, it’s still very much a work in progress and I’ve spent more time on the core engine than on the UI so if you try to break it, you probably will! But, if you give it a try, please let me know how you went!<p>Thank you!
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Andrej Karpathy (director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla) on Twitter today:<p><pre><code> I am cautiously and slightly unnervingly looking forward to the gradual and inevitable unification of language, images/video and audio in foundation models... They will be endowed with agency over originally human APIs: screen+keyboard/mouse in the digital realm and humanoid bodies in the physical realm. And gradually they will swap us out.
</code></pre>
I work professionally in the machine learning field. Some of my colleagues and myself are realizing that we're pursuing goals that will reduce the value of human intelligence and creativity, commoditizing them.<p>Pandora's Box has been opened.<p>As a society we can reject this technology. Reject automated artwork like Dall-E 2, reject automated literature, and so on. Reject technologies that replace the human mind instead of assisting it.<p>For example, if we refuse to pay for self-driving taxis on moral grounds (the same way we might refuse to eat factory-farmed chickens) society can make these businesses unprofitable.<p>In your opinion, would a social movement organized around this idea find traction?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I am looking into video games which I can play myself or with my kids! Reason is: In real life, I don’t like guns, war or aggression. But when I play games, I often go for FPS or other, violent games.<p>I wondered why, but it turns out, I am more drawn to the story of these games than anything else.<p>So I wondered if there are more games which have a great gameplay and deep story to keep me engaged and are fun to play which don’t have gun or violence involved.
Upvote: | 267 |
Title: Interested in stories of (ex-) software engineers who started a different life and run now a farm (maybe just on the side).<p>Which place did you seek out and why?
Upvote: | 234 |
Title: When I'm trying to get familiar with a new codebase it often takes me a long time to build a proper mental model of the whole system. Even with my own projects, it's easy to lose track of all the components and their interactions since they're constantly changing, and making hand-drawn diagrams is time consuming.<p>So my questions are:<p>- Why isn't diagram generation automated as part of the build process (UML or otherwise)?<p>- Why aren't code visualization tools more popular? The options out there seem outdated<p>- Would you want to use these tools? What would be your ideal tool?<p>Edit: looks like this is a duplicate question
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31569646" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31569646</a><p>I can't delete it so feel free to discuss more
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: This question is inspired by: "How I would start my next startup in Germany without a GmbH (2020)" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31601638)<p>Say you want to set up a startup and the founders live in Germany, the US, Australia and Singapore. Your team will be fully remote from day one.<p>You are looking for a solution where<p>- the company is fully operational within days or weeks and can be set up without all founders having to come together in person<p>- day to day business can managed remotely (e.g. together with local tax advisor / lawyer)<p>- the jurisdiction has a solid good reputation<p>- the legal frameworks are understood and accepted by US / EU investors and VCs<p>- complying with all requirements around hiring employees is not too much of a burden<p>- official language of documents is English<p>- you have a good framework for rewarding employees with equity<p>Where would you incorporate and why?<p>I've looked into the US (obviously..), UK, Cayman (I know YC allows Cayman legal entities), Hong Kong, Cyprus etc. and see at lot of pros and cons for each option.<p>If you've gone through the process, can you share some insights and whether you'd do it again this way?
Upvote: | 192 |
Title: I feel like every time I search for something I expect the products to be either fake, filled with fake reviews, broken when I receive them, or from a no-name fake brand that popped up last week. It has become seemingly impossible to wade through the mess.<p>What's worse, there seems to be zero way to report these listings. I tried submitting a review warning other customers about the fake reviews for a fake product, but the review was not approved. In that particular instance, I was actively recommended a "wasp trap" by Amazon. Curious, I saw it was rated 4.8.<p>Turns out the positive reviews were all for... a pet cemetery headstone (complete with photos, to make the issue completely unambiguous). The listing itself was posted by a seller that had almost all negative reviews that were -- removed by Amazon! The reason? Amazon took responsibility, since it was fulfilled by Amazon. The problem: none of the negative reviews had anything to do with things like shipping time. They were all basically calling the product a scam.<p>This seems like a looming disaster for Amazon. It baffles me that there is no way for customers to at least report these issues. I've done most of my shopping for the last 15 years on Amazon, but I'm seriously considering stopping. Is anyone else in this boat?
Upvote: | 492 |
Title: This is something I've noticed over the last few months. I did previously have an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription but now I use Spotify and have set Spotify as the default for music and podcasts.<p>I will often ask my Alexa to play a song and it will say "This song is only available on Amazon Music Unlimited", which I know to be false because I'll have been listening to the song/s in question that day. For example, I asked for the song "Spud Infinity" by Big Thief yesterday.<p>I don't know whether this is because the device stores this database internally and is simply out of date, though I've noticed this on much older songs too. I'm sure there's a technical reason and not some conspiracy, though I do find it strange that during the ~3 years I've owned an Alexa it only started behaving like this recently.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: In 2019, I experienced eye soreness and back pain for a while because I was constantly working long hours in front of my 16 inch Macbook without any rest.<p>I decided to do something to change that. I’m not a fan of Apple Watch or smartbands. So the first thing I did was looking for some reminder software to remind me to take a break in the App Store, but none of them were smart enough for my needs. I wish the software could automatically tell if I was working, rather than requiring me to manually set an alarm. At the same time, when I go to the bathroom or drink coffee, it can automatically increase the time I can continue to work afterward.<p>So I created Eye Monitor. Eye Monitor is an automatic reminder tool. It judges whether you are using the computer through the use of the mouse and keyboard. (which means when a user is watching Youtube videos, Eye Monitor will consider it as not using computer. I haven't found a solution yet.) Whenever you use it continuously, your fatigue value will increase, and after a period of rest, your fatigue value will decrease automatically. When your fatigue value reaches the threshold you set, it will trigger a reminder (including the dock icon, status bar, notification, full-screen pop-up window, etc.).<p>After a year of iteration, Eye monitor now has a chart to show your usage of the day. And users now can customize the fatigue threshold, rest duration, reminder interval, reminder style, etc., and even customize the text of the notification (My customized notification text is “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) or upload your favorite picture as the wallpaper of the full-screen pop-up window.(Not so useful, but I like it.)<p>I like to set the reminder interval very small, like 1 minute, so that when I turn off the reminder, 1 minute later the reminder will reappear again and I will decide to take a break.<p>This software is like a bit of a nagging mom, taking the trouble to remind you to rest. I hope you will like it. Here is the App Store URL: [<a href="https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/eye-monitor/id1527031341?l=en&mt=12](https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/eye-monitor/id1527031341?l=en&mt=12)" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/eye-monitor/id1527031341?l=en&...</a>
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: I wonder if HN could share their favorite pieces of technical writing?<p>Preferably openly available content so that everyone can access (blogs etc.)<p>Focus is on "overall" score: tone, presentation, etc. as opposed to "very technically advanced" (although advanced examples fully welcome)<p>EDIT: awesome suggestions so far - should add that it doesn't have to be programming or even computer related... cookbooks count!
Upvote: | 298 |
Title: Dear HN, please stop using imgur to share images in the posts and comments.<p>-----<p>Why?<p>I'll admit that first and foremost I have selfish reasons for this. I often read HN on mobile. I also use Firefox on desktop and mobile, as should you[1]. When I tap on a seemingly direct i.imgur.com/yaddayadda.jpg link, I get the imgur UI loading animation, and it never loads. I have not found a way around this, other than using a Chrome based browser.<p>But my personal reasons aside, I want you to realize that imgur has become the exact kind of service its creator hated[2], and you probably hate too. One where you can't directly link to the image file, and the polar opposite of "no nonsense" image hosting.<p>Although the downhill started way before, I'll also note that imgur was bought by MediaLab in 2021[3]. If that doesn't ring any bells, have a listen to the episode 93 of Darknet Diaries[4]. If you don't have time for that, let me quote a comment[5] from the acquisition thread: "the general idea seems to buy declining brands for cheap and extract as much value as possible".<p>I wish I could give you an alternative as good as the original imgur, but as you probably know, it is very difficult to host a no nonsense image hosting service. For context see the imgur IAmA thread[6].<p>So instead I have some options that may fit at least the HN use case of occasionally sharing a screenshot or a photo.<p>[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/goodbye-edge/<p>[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/i/c07u7kr/<p>[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28674883<p>[4] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/<p>[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28677432<p>[6] https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i/<p>-----<p>What to use instead?<p>Option 1:<p>Abuse a popular unrelated service that you already have an account for.<p>For example Discord, Reddit, Twitter and GitHub all let you upload an image and link directly to it.<p>In Discord start a personal "Notebook" group and upload your images there.<p>In Reddit post images to "Your profile".<p>In Twitter just tweet it, or reply tweet it to yourself if you want it more hidden.<p>In GitHub drop images in a comment of your own gist for example.<p>This may not be your favorite option, but it is my favorite option as a reader of your comment or post, because the probability of the link just working and directly opening the image in the future is higher than most other services.<p>If you feel bad about abusing the service, you could throw some money at them. Discord has Nitro, Reddit has Gold, Twitter has Blue, GitHub has Team.<p>Option 2:<p>Take a look at actual imgur alternatives. I looked some up for you, but I can't personally vouch for any of them.<p>put.re - I was going to recommend put.re, but apparently they're showing exactly why we can't have nice things https://gitlab.com/putre/frontend/-/issues/16 You can request access, but I haven't tried.<p>upload.vaa.red - Can't tell what the retention time is, otherwise looks good.<p>imgbb.com - Says direct linking is a paid feature, but seems to work either way, for now.<p>cubeupload.com - They've had to remove anonymous uploads. See a pattern yet? Otherwise direct links seem to work, sometimes.<p>You can also take a look at ShareX image uploaders https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/tree/develop/ShareX.UploadersLib/ImageUploaders or custom uploaders https://github.com/ShareX/CustomUploaders<p>Option 3:<p>Host your own.<p>I am not an expert on this, or any of the previous things for that matter, but one combination I saw recommended was Backblaze + Cloudflare.<p>There are many many options here, and putting something like Cloudflare or any of its CDN competitors in front of whatever you feel like setting up will work fine and be cheap or even free.<p>Maybe comment your favorite set up.<p>-----<p>If you have better alternatives, or really any alternatives that work in 2022, please share.
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: There are numerous programming games available that claim to teach you how to code. However, I couldn't find any posts on HN that confirmed or denied their usefulness. Except this one, but it's from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13566247<p>1. Are there any good beginner programming games in widely used programming languages (like C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP)?<p>2. Are there any programming games that have helped you become a more advanced programmer (or a better programmer)?<p>I am interested in games that are not just fun, but also teach you programming useful in the real world (maybe not directly, since it's a game, but still).
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: We're a ~40 person startup, about to scale post-series A. We have been using Google Suite since the beginning in 2015, and honestly it's just terrible software and feels like it has had zero updates in 7 years. One of the biggest problems for me with Gsuite is that there is no real offline support (I know there is supposed to be, but it has never worked for me, plus the drive isn't available offline). I work a lot on trains crossing Europe, or sometimes on flights. I just want to have my files accessible.<p>I use LibreOffice personally, and I'm thinking about moving the team to it before we seriously grow.<p>Has anyone tried this in their companies? Was it successful? I'm especially interested in companies of a similar size (or larger) than ours, and those where not everyone is super technical / a software engineer.<p>My big concerns are support and training, I think there are companies who offer this which would make it a lot easier.<p>(Edit: to be clear, our CFO will probably continue to use Excel, as will some of the team who build very complicated modelling sheets as that is what they're used to, but I'm thinking for the rest of us who mostly need decent spreadsheets, and good word-processing and presentation tools).
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: Dear HN Community. We're Bjorn, Dustin, Stefan & Jens, the founders of WunderGraph.<p>More than two years ago, Jens started WunderGraph as a Side Project.
The initial idea was to solve the problem of integrating multiple disparate DataSources into a single, unified API Layer.
While solving this problem, Jens realized that his mental model of APIs was wrong.
Most API tools treat APIs as abstract things or just endpoints, in a very imperative way.
At some point, he realized that there's a better model to think about APIs:
APIs are dependencies and we should treat them in a declarative way!<p>And that's how the idea of the "Package Manager for APIs"[1] came to be:
WunderGraph is an API Developer toolkit which allows you to import and export APIs, just like npm packages.
This is possible because every WunderGraph project generates a static, conflict-free and versionable artifact.<p>It shouldn't take days to add a new 3rd party API to your API layer,
with WunderGraph, this is possible in seconds.<p>WunderGraph lets you define your API dependencies in a declarative way.
The whole "Graph" of API dependencies is represented as an unified GraphQL Schema.
Meta-data like API credentials, can be configured with our TypeScript SDK.
API Operations are defined as regular GraphQL Operations.
Custom middleware / business logic can be written using TypeScript.<p>Finally, WunderGraph generates a Gateway + Client(s).
Gateway and clients communicate via JSON-RPC.
We call this approach "Compile-time" GraphQL queries.
The client is 100% TypeSafe.
The Gateway handles Authentication, Authorization, Caching, Middleware, etc...<p>WunderGraph gives you the Developer Experience of working with a single, monolithic API layer,
although you're using many different internal and external Services and Databases behind the scenes.<p>WunderGraph Supports any OpenID Connect compliant IDP for Authentication,
S3 for file storage,
REST (OpenAPI), GraphQL & Apollo Federation for APIs
and PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, SQLServer, Planetscale and MongoDB for the data-layer.<p>Today, we're happy to announce that WunderGraph is finally Open Source!
Check out the Monorepo[2] on GitHub. If you like our ambitions, give us a star!
You can run WunderGraph locally and air-gapped, no strings attached.<p>There's also a more extensive release post on our blog[3].
Have a look at the examples[4], we're keen to hear your opinion!<p>[1]: <a href="https://hub.wundergraph.com/start" rel="nofollow">https://hub.wundergraph.com/start</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/wundergraph/wundergraph" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wundergraph/wundergraph</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://wundergraph.com/blog/wundergraph_the_next_generation_api_developer_platform_is_open_source" rel="nofollow">https://wundergraph.com/blog/wundergraph_the_next_generation...</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://github.com/wundergraph/wundergraph#getting-started" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wundergraph/wundergraph#getting-started</a>
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I am looking to discuss / talk to people who have burned out, whether or not you feel you've recovered.<p>I just got turned down for another job and I am at the end of my mental and emotional rope.<p>Tomorrow I have a second interview at a local retail store. I've been a web developer or software engineer for a decade but increasingly painful failures have ruined me as a person and I am lost and without purpose in life. I think I just need to give up on software, I no longer feel welcome or wanted.<p>I have read that burnout can take up to five years to be resolved, I'm about in year three at this point. It's kinda like a recession you can't see it coming but looking back its easier to see when it started and its root causes.<p>Even with resources (supportive wife, limited family, therapist) recovery is slow, difficult, confusing and not a straight path. I need a job and purpose before life can improve and I can find a daily existence that's not 90% stress. Until then every day is a catastrophe where I'm upset that I didn't solve "the problem" and all I can think about is fixing "everything" or I'll lose my wife, my house, my independence, my dignity...<p>If you are suffering from burnout I wish you luck in the eternal struggle for normalcy. I can't say it ever gets better, but try to be kind to yourself. Most of all be honest with yourself even if you can't be with others.<p>If this post in any way resonates with you feel free to respond or just yell into the void.
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: With all the news about the Apple M2 and the people excited to sunset their couple years old computers, I feel compelled to share my reality (and that of many others outside the HN bubble).<p>I'm a 27 years old software developer from Brazil. The computer in question was assembled in 2007 from parts that were mostly bought abroad (and then gifted to me) by a wealthier relative that was visiting. That's a key point: the currency exchange rates and the import taxes make electronics out of reach for the common folks.<p>That was an AMD2+ motherboard, 4GB of DDR2, a 5400 RPM rust spinner, and a Phenom X4 coupled with an ATI 4870.<p>Although the household was never in a dire situation financially, I had always been taught by example to fix things and keep using them for as long as possible. Even back in elementary school times I would troubleshoot computer issues myself and brush off dust from the components.<p>Yes, there have been hardware failures since 2007: two HDDs died (about 6 years lifespan for each), the 4870 died (but I extended its life for one more year with the bake-it-in-the-oven trick), one DIMM failure, a PSU blowout and a CPU cooler bracket mechanical failure.<p>All replacements that had to be purchased would cost me a significant amount of money. HDDs and PSUs were not that expensive, but GPUs were out of reach. When that DIMM died in 2018, I purchased an used and dusty DDR2 replacement kit off AliExpress.<p>After the pandemic hit and I got my first proper (remote) job in 2020, I splurged and replaced some components: a hand-me-down GPU from a wealthier friend (I had been using the onboard graphics since the 4870 died), an AMD3 motherboard, a Phenom II X4 and some DDR3, all used and from AliExpress.<p>The monitor, a 22" TFT panel from Samsung, is still kicking since 2007 with a couple of dead pixels. Same goes for the mouse, manufactured by an unknown Chinese brand, and a membrane keyboard that I completely disassembled and scrubbed clean under a running faucet.<p>Even with my career finally taking off (I'm due to complete undergraduate Computer Science this year) I don't see myself doing major upgrades/purchases any soon.<p>When was the last time you gave something extra life instead of throwing it away?
Upvote: | 407 |
Title: ...Not on purpose, probably. This started immediately after their WWDC service downtime.<p>"Dear Developer,<p>We identified one or more issues with a recent delivery for your app, "App" 1.0.0 (2). Please correct the following issues, then upload again.<p>ITMS-90338: Non-public API usage - The app references non-public selectors in App: authorizationCode, createRequest, estimatedProgress, identityToken, initWithFrame:configuration:, isMainFrame, isPassthrough, navigationType, onSuccess:, removeValuesForKeys:completion:, setNavigationDelegate:, setProcessPool:, setRequestedOperation:, setRequestedScopes:, targetFrame, userContentController, viewManager, websiteDataStore. If method names in your source code match the private Apple APIs listed above, altering your method names will help prevent this app from being flagged in future submissions. In addition, note that one or more of the above APIs may be located in a static library that was included with your app. If so, they must be removed. For further information, visit the Technical Support Information at http://developer.apple.com/support/technical/<p>Best regards,<p>The App Store Team"<p>https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/31507<p>https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/105471<p>https://github.com/ionic-team/capacitor/issues/5661<p>https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/127678
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: Hi HN, Quentin and JJ here! We are co-founders at Rootly (<a href="https://rootly.com/" rel="nofollow">https://rootly.com/</a>), an incident management platform built on Slack. Rootly helps automate manual admin work during incidents like the creation of Slack channels, Jira tickets, Zoom rooms & more. We also help you get data on your incidents and help automate postmortem creation.<p>We met at Instacart, where I was the first SRE and JJ was on the product side owning ~20% GMV on the enterprise and last-mile delivery business. As Instacart grew from processing hundreds to millions of orders, we had to scale our infrastructure, teams, and processes to keep up with this growth. Unsurprisingly, this led to our fair share of incidents (e.g. checkout issues, site outages, etc.) and a lot of restless nights while on-call.<p>This was further compounded by COVID-19 and the first wave of lockdowns. We surged in traffic by 500% overnight as everyone turned to online grocery. This highlighted our need for a better incident management process as it stressed every element of it. Our manual ways of working in Slack, PagerDuty, Datadog, simply weren’t enough. At first, we figured this was an Instacart-specific problem but luckily realized it wasn’t.<p>A few things here. Our process lacked consistency. Depending on who was responding and their incident experience it varied greatly. Most companies after they declare an incident rely on a buried-away runbook like on Confluence/Google Docs to try and follow a lengthy checklist of steps. This is hard to find, difficult to follow accurately, slow, and stress inducing. Especially after you’ve been woken up to a page at 3 am. We started working on how to automate this.<p>Fast forward to today, companies like Canva, Grammarly, Bolt, Faire, Productboard, OpenSea, Shell use Rootly for their incident response. We think of ourselves as part of the post-alerting workflow. Tools like PagerDuty, Datadog act like a smoke alarm to alert you to an incident, which hand off to Rootly so we can orchestrate the actual response.<p>We’ve learned a lot along the way. We realized the majority of our customers use the same 6 (Slack, PagerDuty, Jira, Zoom, Confluence, Google Docs, etc.) tools, follow roughly the same incident response process (create incident → collaborate → write postmortem), but their process varies dramatically. The challenge in changing these processes is hard.<p>Our focus in the early days was build a hyper opinionated product to help them follow what we believe are the best practices. Now our product direction is focused on configuration and flexibility, how can we plug Rootly into your already existing way of working and automate it. This has helped our larger enterprise customers be successful with their current processes being automated.<p>Our biggest competition is not PagerDuty/Opsgenie (in fact 98% of our customers use them) or other startups. Its internal tooling companies have built out of necessity, often because tools like Rootly didn’t exist yet. Stripe (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ8rvMhLyI4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ8rvMhLyI4</a>) and GitLab (<a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/incident-management/" rel="nofollow">https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure...</a>) are good examples of this.<p>Our journey is just getting started as we learn more each day. Would love to hear any feedback on our product or anything you find frustrating about incident response today.<p>Leaving you with a quick demo: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/313a8f81f0a046f284629afc3263ebff" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/313a8f81f0a046f284629afc3263ebff</a>
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: A few weeks ago we experienced an outage for a few hours, we got 500's from both NPM and Nuget private GitHub feeds. This essentially halted progress in our CI pipeline, so trunk progress ceased for a few hours. Downtime happens. What's alarming is that as an enterprise customer ($250/user/year) we only got a response 11 days later containing, essentially, these things:<p>* "Check again." If the turnaround on a support ticket is truly 11 days, we would have been facing a 22 day outage (as we'd expect yet another 11 days after responding "it's still happening").<p>* "You have no SLA."<p>* "If you want support, I can direct you to our sales team."<p>If, god forbid, Git access (or everything) had been down, we would have been scrambling to continue business, we wouldn't have had a number to call, and we likely would have had to pony up the cash.<p>I strongly recommend you take a good look you fall here: https://github.com/premium-support. Note that "< 8 hours" under "Enterprise" mean absolutely nothing, as they aren't guaranteed (per your contract). A more honest value in the column would be "N/A."<p>You have to get hold of sales to learn about premium support pricing, it isn't publicly disclosed. This is likely to prevent you from budgeting for premium support only in the event that you need it.<p>If your business continuity depends on GitHub Enterprise, and you don't have Premium support, you need to pay, plan, or change.
Upvote: | 193 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'm Alex, founder of Interval [0]. We’re bringing internal tools written like CLIs to the browser to make them more powerful, through a Node.js SDK which attaches them to a hosted dashboard without any frontend code. Large companies have full teams that work on internal dashboards and tooling. Interval brings that infrastructure to anyone.<p>In our previous project we had ~65 CLI scripts for tasks like provisioning user accounts, moderating content, and migrating data. These were quick to write and powerful. They also turned into an ongoing timesuck. Non-technical coworkers needed to bother an engineer every time to run one. Some of them were powerful enough to be footguns, and because we had to rewrite validation every time, we were always a bit scared of them.<p>We wanted to bring the power and speed of cranking out CLI scripts into the world of modern software development: testable, easy to expose to colleagues via a URL, and works with Everything Else by default. That’s why we made Interval.<p>We built:<p>- A Node.js + TypeScript SDK – this embeds in your backend codebase and provides APIs for defining tools + collecting input + displaying output. These APIs are simple awaitable functions that return parsed, validated, and soundly-typed user input. You put your Interval actions in source control, test them, run CI/etc exactly like you do for all your other backend code.<p>- A hosted UI, which handles I/O for the scripts in a less brittle way than command line arguments do, while also taking care of auth, permissions, and audit logs.<p>This lets you take your CLI commands out of an engineer’s terminal and share them with the whole company. Give support the ability to ban spammers but not drop the prod DB. Require two people for sensitive actions. Echo commands to a Slack channel. It’s a powerful set of primitives out of the box and lets you do anything else you want in the code you’re already writing, without making you have to spin up a second company just to support your internal tools.<p>Under the hood, your CLIs and the hosted dashboard talk through a 2-way message passing system. We felt this approach was the best of both worlds:<p>- UIs are hosted by Interval: We build, host, and maintain the part most people don't care about for internal tools.<p>- Backends are self-hosted: We can't see your business logic, secrets, etc.<p>We're in public beta today. I hope you like it and I'm happy to answer any questions/feedback in the comments.<p>[0]: <a href="https://interval.com" rel="nofollow">https://interval.com</a>
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: I am a software engineer who is self-taught, and after graduation I took local jobs for small web shops for dev work.<p>Here's a brief description of my timeline from beginning to present:<p>- 1.5 years contract-to-hire SWE (W2 never actually happened)<p>- 3 months full-time W2 work, followed by 6 months unemployed<p>- 10 years independent contract work (freelancing)<p>- 2.5 years of no work, and a lot of job searching<p>The last 5 years of independent contract work have been very sporadic. During this time I typically made under $10k every year. I don't really know how to "put myself out there" as a freelancer, and after 10 years of doing it, I just want to go back to W2 as a FT employee.<p>My tech job skills include, PHP, MySQL, vanilla JS and jQuery. I don't know testing, cloud, or CI/CD practices. Jobs involve building small scale websites- at first only WordPress and eCommerce sites but around year 5 become more much web app SaaS-focused.<p>I have spent a very long time without work because I don't really know how to fit myself into other places with such a skill set. I get interviews and then get rejected for not being good enough. But these are the skills I have the most experience in by far. I don't have any other job skills that come close. I don't have close friends and relatives who have a good pulse on the tech industry. I do have a Github portfolio- it's not very "hot" or "trendy" tech but just things I do them because I enjoy doing them.<p>What other good options do I have? It doesn't have to be highly relevant to work I've done in the past. Anyone have any ideas of what I can or should do?<p>A side note: I've been working remote since 2013 (may explain a lot about my how my career has went) and am pretty good with maintaining a schedule and discipline around WFH.
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: I'm in my 20s, and have been noticing that I have a bad memory. I don't forget anything major or concerning, but its obvious my memory is below average. It is starting to cause a bit of a problem at work.<p>I started to write a lot of things down, but the problem is that I can't always anticipate what I to need to remember later on. So what tools/methods do you use to help you overcome this?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I signed up for the trial of Google Workspace.<p>I entered my credit card information but my "Payments Account" required ID verification, so I submitted my ID.<p>I then cancelled my trial of Google Workspace, accidentally 1 day after the trial expiration.<p>I was not allowed to pay the outstanding balance of $1.16 at the time because my "Payments Account" had not been verified.<p>I closed my Google Workspace account so I wouldn't incur further charges and figured I'd just pay the invoice later.<p>2 weeks later they invoice me for the $1.16. However, I cannot pay without signing in to my cancelled Google Workspace account. I do not want to re-activate the account, though I try unsuccessfully with the instructions provided to me by support.<p>Support now tells me that after 20 days a deleted account cannot be recovered. I contact collections to pay the invoice but they "do not handle these types of accounts".<p>I am concerned this will effect my excellent credit.<p>I have tried multiple times to pay but support does not provide a means to do so.
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: Like many of us, I’m in a battle to minimize social media and related apps influence over my life. But I’m not at a point where I want to just toss my phone in the corner and forget about it either.<p>I’m looking for some apps that people use and get genuine value out of. Can I learn something while I’m bored on the couch? Keep up with some unbiased news while I’m using the toilet? Etc
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: Hello, I was hired as a remote full-stack engineer at Tesla during the pandemic. We were just told that remote employment agreements (mine was over email, not in my contract) are void, and we have to move to a Tesla office by August. This is essentially impossible for me until January 2023 (at which point I'd be happy to move). I need to make a decision by Friday. Do you think I would get severance if I tell them I refuse to relocate?<p>Edit: For context, Elon Musk sent company-wide emails last week about everyone having to go back to the office. A few days later, he announced layoffs. Many suspect the unexpected call for in-person work was a way to get people to quit and avoid paying severance for layoffs.
Upvote: | 259 |
Title: Hi, creator here.<p>This is a demo of our recent work presented at Oakland (IEEE S&P): <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/368" rel="nofollow">https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/368</a>. The server and client code are written in Rust and available here: <a href="https://github.com/menonsamir/spiral-rs">https://github.com/menonsamir/spiral-rs</a>. The general aim of our work is to show that homomorphic encryption is practical today for real-world applications. The server we use to serve this costs $35/month!<p>A quick overview: the client uses homomorphic encryption to encrypt the article number that they would like to retrieve. The server processes the query and produces an encrypted result containing the desired article, and sends this back to the client, who can decrypt and obtain the article. A malicious server is unable to determine which article the client retrieved. All search and autocomplete is down locally. The technical details are in the paper, but the high level summary is that the client creates a large one-hot vector of encrypted bits (0’s except for the index of the desired article, where they place a 1) and then the server computes something like a ‘homomorphic dot product’ between the query and the plaintext articles.<p>I’d like to caveat that this is an in-browser demo to show it is practical to use homomorphic encryption at this scale. As a real product, you’d probably want to distribute a signed client executable (or Electron app) since otherwise, a malicious server could simply deliver bad client JS on the fly.<p>Happy to answer any questions!
Upvote: | 331 |
Title: Coming from smaller companies and startups just got a job at #BigCo in the Bay.<p>The one thing I'm noticing is that it's miserable to work here because EVERYTHING has friction and takes days to get done and has to go through numerous teams and approvals just for the simplest stuff like a new VM or an SSL cert from their own in house CA.<p>I get great satisfaction at work out of accomplishing things and this is just rediculous to the point of making me dislike working.<p>To get anything done is emotionally exhausting.<p>Anyone else dealt with this?<p>Anyone have any type of jobs where friction is minimal?
Upvote: | 195 |
Title: I have noticed that at interviews, I struggle to build a proper narrative and talk coherently. I live in UK and English is not my first language which doesn't help. Most of the times the flow of my conversation is not fluent and it feels like I am putting up sentences one after the another and there is a ot of "mmmaa", "mmmaa" in my talking. Are there any practical resources to improve my conversation skills?
Upvote: | 228 |
Title: Pick a city completely at random. Click on the city name. Pull up the card to consume the full screen. Only then will three dots will show up in top right. In that menu you can download offline map without signing in. To manage your offline maps download a second region at random. While downloading you will notice the download in your Android notification drawer. Click on the download and cancel it. You can manage your other downloaded regions from here. There is no other way to access this menu unless you are signed in. However, with my method you don't need to sign in to the maps app ever. Thank you to whoever built the app without explicitly requiring Google Play services as well. I owe you a drink.
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Much as the title says, I really miss the Usenet days where I could contribute to a bulletin board-style forum on hyper-specific subjects.<p>If I remember my computing history correctly, Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. I'm not sure if this is dead yet.<p>Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does.<p>HN is topic-focused, rather than subject-focused.<p>Would be very interested to see if there's any Usenet-style project that's still alive.
Upvote: | 261 |
Title: Hey HN! Michael here—founder of Compose AI (<a href="https://www.compose.ai" rel="nofollow">https://www.compose.ai</a>) (also joined by my co-founder Wilson). Compose AI is a free Chrome extension that cuts your writing time by up to 40% with AI-powered autocompletion, rephrasing, and full-length email generation. It works across ~30 websites, so besides email, you can use it to do things like write Notion documents or chat on Slack (browser only (for now)).<p>I was in Mexico typing my 10th reply to a mundane email when it hit me: people shouldn’t be typing every letter of every word — especially not the same things over and over again. That got me thinking about building a tool that helps people type faster anywhere online and ultimately save them time—something that was easier said than done. It was quite challenging to balance the speed needed for real-time predictions with the model complexity needed for high quality predictions. Also, it was surprisingly challenging to integrate with a ton of different websites – I learned that there are many, many different ways to implement a “text box,” and experienced first hand, the joys of integrating with things like shadow dom and iframes.<p>I have been thinking about how to communicate with computers since I was in maybe 6th grade when I would literally dream about it. I remember I had a notebook in which I tried to analyze the linguistic structure of English to teach my computer English (not a great approach in retrospect). Later on, I worked in ML and AI at IARPA, Amazon, Disney, and BCG before starting an ML consulting firm. The trends in NLP finally caught up to my dream (LLM, distillation, fine-tuning, transformers, GPUs), so working on Compose AI seemed like the next logical step.<p>We are working to create a more holistic, AI-first writing solution. For now, our chrome extension has autocompletion, rephrasing (shorten, lengthen, change mood), and full email/reply generation functionalities. As you’re typing, the text is streamed to our backend servers, where we have relatively large transformers models that are tuned for specific scenarios.<p>If you need help with long-form content or the creative process, our web app (<a href="https://web.compose.ai" rel="nofollow">https://web.compose.ai</a>) can generate product descriptions, blog outlines, sales pitches and more. Note: our web app asks for credit card on sign-up but includes a free 7-day trial.<p>For our Chrome Extension, we make money using a freemium subscription model. Your data is end-to-end encrypted and encrypted at rest. We will never sell your data and will only use it to fulfill your completions or improve your results.<p>Here are a couple demo videos of the extension generating responses to a Hacker News email:<p><a href="https://www.loom.com/share/c36ec67b0a3a466aaa2ec5ee2399cb15" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/c36ec67b0a3a466aaa2ec5ee2399cb15</a><p><a href="https://www.loom.com/share/44cf0f5893094d1191143b9f6fe11a5d" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/44cf0f5893094d1191143b9f6fe11a5d</a><p>Thanks for reading! Would love to have some conversation with folks in the comments section below. Please share any feedback/ideas/experience!<p>Here are our open jobs: <a href="https://at.compose.ai/jointheteam" rel="nofollow">https://at.compose.ai/jointheteam</a><p>You can download Compose AI from the Chrome web store: <a href="https://at.compose.ai/download" rel="nofollow">https://at.compose.ai/download</a>
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Hey everyone! This is kinda my first post so hi. Not sure if HN is the correct place to ask this.
This is a bit personal, but throughout my life, I've been helping companies, big and small, my friend's startups, other people, even random people on algorithms, programming, maths etc.<p>I'm happy they come and ask me for help, but it feels like I'm a doormat. I'm now trying to run a startup, so it gets worse.<p>I don't mind helping my close friends though. I feel used when companies or people use my work and profit from it. The worse is when they advertise that they did it. I get 0 pay, and ironically I sometimes have to travel to THEM on my own expense? Yikes I feel so dumb.<p>My family have told me I'm stupid, so I'm trying to set boundaries. Some kind fellow startup founders also told me to be more aggressive.<p>The worst is when people can see me contribute to my hobby projects (open source), or I teach people for free, but that's because I like doing these things. The people then make me feel bad by constantly asking for help, especially for profit generation.<p>I'm still in my twenties, but I feel like this can't go on forever. Does anyone have any suggestions what I should do?<p>Like I don't wanna reject them, but if I can somewhow ask them to pay that would be great.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I guess a lot of people here already know this, and in general I don't expect a lifetime license to be actually 'lifetime', but I saw the worst example I've seen so far today.<p>Just over a year ago I bought an emojipicker for mac (getmumu.com) that claimed to have a 'lifetime license'. It's a neat little tool and I've used it daily. Now I got a new mac and I tried to transfer it over, only to find out that it's rebranded from "Mumu" to "Mumu X" and 5x'd in price.<p>After hunting through the website I found the tiny "get old version" in the footer. I entered my license key and was told it was already used. I wrote to the support email and was told that "Mumu" was discontinued and "Mumu X" was a new app that I'd have to buy it again.<p>> And note that “lifetime” means it would work on the lifetime of the app, not the lifetime of the customer.<p>Yeah, I understand it's "lifetime of the app" but adding an "X" to the name and a few minor features and then not letting me transfer my old app to a new machine leaves a really bad taste.<p>/rant.
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: Currently evaluating the tradeoffs between using my network (smaller pool, high trust), public boards (large pool, low trust), and recruiters (presumably medium on both scores).<p>There was a similar discussion on HN in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17791766
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here.<p>Three things in this post:<p>1- The interesting groups of HN posts<p>2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser<p>3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles.<p>Blog post about this whole process here: [1]<p>============<p>1- The interesting groups of HN posts<p>From the exploration, Ask HN proved the most interesting. These are the top four groups of topics I found insightful. Each group contains about 400 posts.<p>- Life experiences and advice threads [2]<p>- Technical and personal development [3]<p>- Software career insights, advice, and discussions [4]<p>- General content recommendations (blogs/podcasts) [5]<p>============<p>2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser<p>- Top 10,000 Hacker News articles of all time [6]<p>- Top 3,000 posts in Ask HN [7]<p>============<p>3- The data from this exploration<p>CSV file of top 3K Ask HN posts: [8]<p>The sentence embeddings of the titles of those posts: [9]<p>This is a colab notebook containing the code examples (including loading these two data files): [10]<p>============<p>If you've ever wanted to get into language models, this is a good place to start. Happy to answer any questions
Upvote: | 117 |
Title: This is about the Chinese version of Tiktok, Douyin. It's basically the same but exclusive to Mainland China. To summarize:<p>- It immidiately attempts to access the clipboard contents after opening<p>- It makes 140 DNS requests to atleast 5 different domains in the first three minutes <i>after closing</i> the app<p>- it makes an additional 50 DNS requests 5 minutes <i>after closing</i> the app<p>- it continuously makes tracking requests in the background after being closed<p>- It requests phone and location permissions immidiately after opening<p>Some of the domains it contacts after being closed:<p>- pstatp.com
- zijieapi.com
- bytecdn.cn
- snssdk.com
- amemv.com
- douyincdn.com<p>This is honestly even crazier than I expected. I've never seen an app contact this many subdomains even while being in the foreground. Instagram contacts around 5 for comparison, and only while running in the foreground.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I love the M1 chips. I use a 2021 MacBook both personally and professionally. My job is DevOps work.<p>But the migration to ARM is proving to be quite a pain point. Not being able to just do things as I would on x86-64 is damaging my productivity and creating a necessity for horrible workarounds.<p>As far as I know none of our pipelines yet do multi-arch Docker builds, so everything we have is heavily x86-64 oriented. VirtualBox is out of the picture because it doesn't support ARM. That means other tools that rely on it are also out of the picture, like Molecule. My colleague wrote a sort of wrapper script that uses Multipass instead but Multipass can't do x86-on-ARM emulation.<p>I've been using Lima to create virtual machines which works quite well because it can do multiple architectures. I haven't tested it on Linux though, and since it claims to be geared towards macOS that worries me. We are a company using a mix of MacBooks and Linux machines so we need a tool that will work for everyone.<p>The virtualisation situation on MacBooks in general isn't great. I think Apple introduced Virtualization.framework to try and improve things but the performance is actually worse than QEMU. You can try enabling it in the Docker Desktop experimental options and you'll notice it gets more sluggish. Then there's just other annoyances, like having to run a VM in the background for Docker all the time because 'real' Docker is not possible on macOS. Sometimes I'll have three or more VMs going and everything except my browser is paying that virtualisation penalty.<p>Ugh. Again, I love the performance and battery life, but the fragmentation this has created is a nightmare.<p>How is your experience so far? Any tips/tricks?
Upvote: | 223 |
Title: <a href="https://postimg.cc/6y3Z9yjY" rel="nofollow">https://postimg.cc/6y3Z9yjY</a><p>They had implemented that already a while ago, then reverted the behaviour, and now implemented it once again.<p>It seems as if it was not "enabled" for everyone yet, however.<p>They hid the permissions with each version better and better and apparently decided now, users don't need them at all.
Upvote: | 471 |
Title: I'm curious what tasks people automate. I often write short scripts to do simple things like summoning Kitty by Ctrl-Space in quake mode (macOS, using Hammerspoon), changing the external monitor's brightness, switching audio output device, etc. On iPhone, I've created some complex iOS Shortcuts. One of them is basically an app at this point. I've also made a number of Word VBA macros that have really helped me with tedious tasks.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I'm curious to hear the stories of who went through economic immigration and regretted it.<p>I know of some people who went back home. I used to not understand it. Having immigrated myself to North America, I see the point now.
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I've been using Bitwarden for about 4 years now and cannot understand how a Password Manager does not export attachments when backing up your data. I understand this was the case when the only export format was a CSV file, but now with JSON files I can't get my head around the fact that I almost missed crucial SSH keys had I not checked the output. A simple solution would be to b64 encode each file and add it into an array!<p>It's even mentioned on their Help page - https://bitwarden.com/help/export-your-data/ but I still think it's a bit unacceptable that there isn't even a warning in the GUI about this.<p>And yes, I know there are ways to manually export the files, but I shouldn't have to do that.
Upvote: | 233 |
Title: As it stands for me, I work 40 hours a week for $20 an hour… which is more than enough for me to be comfortable and then some. I get that that’s nowhere near the money most people on here make, but I am only 20 years old.<p>I have the advantage of being extremely flexible, I can make changes in all sorts of ways to optimize for a certain goal… usually it’s only my own discipline (or lack of) that stands in the way.<p>Lately I’ve learned that I have a taste for an expensive lifestyle and I want to explore that angle a bit more which is why I’ve been looking for ways to use the money I already have to invest and get a return on it.<p>With time on my side, I don’t mind making investments that won’t see returns until a few years down the line, I just have no clue where to start.<p>I don’t care about being filthy rich, I want a GTR not a Lamborghini.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: It's common for prospective employers to ask for some examples that prove our ability to code, whether through a sample assignment, an online programming test, whiteboarding, etc.<p>Sometimes a new job or contract will come with the discovery that the codebases on which we are asked to work are not what we were expecting, to put it lightly.<p>Such as,<p>* saturated with anti-patterns to the point that it's a massively negative impact on productivity<p>* excessively long compile / build times due to lack of maintenance and/or things just not being built well<p>* severely outdated tooling and versioning<p>etc.<p>While this can be a workable situation sometimes, an opportunity to contribute in a meaningful, positive way, in others it can be a tedious slog.<p>A developer can ask questions during the interview process about these things, which can sometimes illuminate these issues.<p>If an organization's developers are active in open source contributions, that can be a helpful signal as to the quality of a codebase.<p>And, it occurred to me that there's a big double standard in hiring around this. It seems like the software development process, generally speaking, is built on what is essentially a lack of trust in engineers - we can come in with over 10 years of verifiable experience, talk eloquently about that and our abilities, and still be met with these ridiculous and demeaning puzzles.<p>Why should we not be able to look at the code at a place we are thinking about working at? It's a CORE part of the job. To be blind to that doesn't feel right to me.<p>If/when I decide to look for a different position, I'm considering to ask employers if they would be willing to let me sign an NDA so that I can take a look at the code on which I'll be working. Or at least some portion of it.<p>I'm curious how this idea lands for people reading this post. I can envision a world where this is standard practice in hiring.<p>I'm curious to also hear reasons as to why this couldn't work in practice.<p>EDIT: changed non-intentional ultimatum-esque language
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Or is there at least one where Smart mode can be turned off verifiably AND it doesn’t keep enticing you to turn it on by withholding ease of use or some convenience feature until you just give up?
Upvote: | 390 |
Title: TL;DR I think the UK's National Health Service (NHS) should build [1] but I don't know how to persuade them, or even if I'm missing something and they shouldn't.<p>---<p>My mum was diagnosed with an aggressive, stage 3, breast cancer recently.<p>This isn't really about her case. In the UK, the NHS offer breast cancer screening every 3 years for women from the age of 50 until they turn 71. [2] Its stated purpose is to catch cancer early to reduce mortality. It's done via a fragmented set of regional IT systems that have evolved since the 80s with algorithms that are poorly understood by those using them let alone patients. And separate screening programmes for those with higher genetic risk, who've previously had breast cancer, trials looking at expanding the age range, etc.<p>Mum moved house a few years ago, told her local GP (primary care physician?) practice that she was due a mammogram and they assured her she was on the list. This is the only way women can check if they're on the list - phone the receptionist at the GP practice, then wait for a letter to arrive.<p>The letter didn't arrive, she wasn't on the list. She found a lump and was screened privately. The NHS programme missed an opportunity with her. It seems the GP practice didn't add her into one of the databases that feeds into another database that a software system then queries for who to invite.<p>Her case is seen as unique. But it seems it's not really just her. For instance, over a hundred women were missed by a screening programme for those at higher genetic risk in NHS Lothian. [4] An independent review [5] found 5_000 women were missed on the regular screening programme from 2009-18 not due to IT failure or policy error, i.e. due to user/administration errors - they're just ones they confirmed. That review took place because over 120_000 women were missed from their last scan - a significant number, yet everyone involved overlooked this. The blame falls partly with complexities around the way women are called forward, the assumption that the NHS knows what it's doing, the friction of having to phone and ask about it, etc. Over 120k scans missed even though they're there to reduce mortality, to save lives. And many more scans have been missed in the last year due to covid, perhaps making screening even more important now.<p>I'm aware that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Unsurprisingly on HN, software is my hammer of choice, so here we are.<p>It strikes me that if all, or initially even a subset of, the disparate databases pushed a link between the universal ID (NHS number) and the next screening date into a public facing web service [1] (there's already an OIDC provider [3]) then women could see their date due, reliably know if they were in the system, overdue a scan, save a few phone calls and <i>crucially</i>, if omitted, they would have something to point to, to flag up that they (and potentially others) had been missed <i>before</i> finding a lump, or potentially worse, not. We have something similar for car tax here [6] and no one dies if that's missed.<p>I can't be explicit about what I'm after posting here, I don't know, just appealing to the wisdom of the crowd. FWIW I've tried emailing NHS Digital and my Member for Parliament. Both replied with little more than cookie cutter responses which suggested they didn't grok the issue, probably my fault as much as theirs but I'm running out of ideas.<p>If you've read this far, thanks, really.<p>[1] https://i.imgur.com/iXNgWYC.png<p>[2] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/breast-screening-mammogram/when-youll-be-invited-and-who-should-go/<p>[3] https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/online-services/nhs-login/<p>[4] https://www.scotsman.com/health/hundreds-at-risk-of-breast-cancer-missed-screening-after-health-board-error-3537353<p>[5] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-breast-screening-review-report<p>[6] https://dvladigital.blog.gov.uk/2014/05/29/making-vehicle-information-clearer/
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: There are a ton of topics I learn/read on a daily basis. Some are out of my personal interest, some out of need (when interviewing).<p>I notice that after a while, without enough usage, these topics simply evaporate from my memory. I know the simple answer is to keep practicing.<p>I’m interested in knowing how different people do this. Looking for any tips, hacks, etc.
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: Hello all, the title really says it all. Hoping to find a linear algebra book that is friendly for visual learners.<p>EDIT: thank you all for the great responses!
Upvote: | 259 |
Title: Like many people, my wife and I use WhatsApp to keep in touch with various family and friends who prefer that platform. I actually use it more than she does—she basically just chats with close family and a few friends from highschool.<p>A few days ago, she opened the app to find the message,<p>> This account is not allowed to use WhatsApp
> Chats are still on this device.<p>This didn't make any sense, as she only uses it to chat with family and friends and certainly hadn't broken any terms. Found the option to appeal and submitted that. A day later, the app now says<p>> This account cannot use WhatsApp
> We've completed our review and found this account's activity goes against WhatsApp's terms of service<p>There's no way she's actually broken any terms, so it appears this is some kind of mistake, but given the speed of the "review", I doubt any human has actually looked at it. She's tried contacting them via their contact page, but given the review is already "complete", I'm not too hopeful.<p>Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam. Perhaps somehow all numbers in that group ended up associated with the spamming? Regardless, pretty frustrating situation since she has a couple of long-running chats with family and friend groups that she can no longer participate in. Always fun to be at the whims of the algorithm.<p>Posting in case there's anything to the connection between marking a message as spam and getting blocked (maybe it's safer to just mute spam messages instead), as well as on the off chance someone from Facebook ends up reading this and can help.
Upvote: | 205 |
Title: The definition of cool is, of course, at your discretion.
Upvote: | 450 |
Title: Somebody who really came from a poor or working-class background, who had poor parents. Was all of the work required to build a business (or brand, etc.) worth it, looking back? Was there some other path you could have taken that would have been more fun or fulfilling in some way, but might not have brought the wealth?<p>Would love to hear from experienced people who have been through it. Why is the entrepreneurial route worth it if you don't come from money, or why isn't it?
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: You can't go a day, without seeing worrying "news." From the Federal Reserve raising rates, making mortgages more "unaffordable" to this summer leading in the most decrease "mortgage applications" since 2006. <a href="https://www.mpamag.com/us/mortgage-industry/market-updates/mortgage-applications-decrease-in-latest-mba-weekly-survey/408097" rel="nofollow">https://www.mpamag.com/us/mortgage-industry/market-updates/m...</a><p>On the other hand, commercial real estate has their own problem, prime commercial space goes unleased, and majority of downtown cores are still empty, or heavily decreased occupancy.<p>I'm on the opinion of, if you need a house, buy a house - because you do need a place to live.<p>Yet, decreased supply, higher cost of loans and loan servicing seem to make it mirror 2006 - yet, mortgages are stronger than ever - but what about those covid mortgage forbearances?<p>What do all of you think?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Working in academy taught me one huge concept about editorial world. Some publishing houses that work exclusively for profit tend to focus more on the quantity than on the quality.<p>For some months by browsing HN, I've been amazed at how many open books written by normal people (self-published resources) that need to be discovered. So I was wondering: is there anywhere a list of "open" books? Let's give some authors some notoriety, if you found one, please comment below!<p>A books/resource to be defined as "open source" should have the following features:<p>- have a good quality content – it is a little bit hard to achieve, especially when you do not have money to hire editors;<p>- be free as PDF/HTML, but the author can still have donations, or can be paid for hardcopies;<p>- anyone can contribute to writing or editing! e.g. "source code"/content of the book is hosted in a Git instance;
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Books that are 500 pages or less.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Like an anarchist coding coop, or a democratic tech workplace, or anything like that?<p>I'm really curious about this. I recently worked with https://cng.ngo/ (their online presence is atrocious, ironically, I found out about them through local friends) for a month creating radio infrastructure for Poqomchi language speakers in Guatemala, and it was amazing.<p>I'm really curious what other peoples' experiences have been.
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: WWDC 2022 currently has 8.3M views and Google I/0 has 960K views. Both are developer conferences. Why does Apple get so much more engagement? Is it a failure on Google's leadership to put on a good show?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: <p><pre><code> #include <stdio.h>
static struct X {
void* operator new[](size_t) { return (char*)&1[""]; }
void operator delete[](void*) { }
X() : X((char*)this - "") { }
X(char i) {
printf(i%3?i%5?"%s%i\n":"%s\n":"Fizz%s\n",i%5?"":"Buzz",i);
}
} *x = new X[100]();
int main(){}</code></pre>
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Hi everyone! I'm the author of this project. I wrote it because I think that the math that makes characters move in games and movies is incredibly beautiful, and I wanted to give others a glimpse into it.<p>It's crazy to think that quaternions, an abstract mathematical tool discovered by William Rowan Hamilton in 1843, would be so perfectly suited to solve hard problems in the world of 3D character animation more than a hundred years later. The story of how he discovered quaternions is also beautiful. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:<p>"Hamilton was looking for ways of extending complex numbers (which can be viewed as points on a 2-dimensional Argand diagram) to higher spatial dimensions. In working with four dimensions, rather than three, he created quaternion algebra. According to Hamilton, on 16 October he was out walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin with his wife when the solution in the form of the equation<p>i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = −1<p>occurred to him; Hamilton then carved this equation using his penknife into the side of the nearby Broom Bridge (which Hamilton called Brougham Bridge)."<p>There's a plaque that commemorates that moment on Broom Bridge now.<p>If you have any questions about this project, I would love to answer them, but I recommend reading the README first, which should explain everything:<p><a href="https://github.com/diegomacario/Animation-Magic/blob/main/README.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/diegomacario/Animation-Magic/blob/main/RE...</a><p>Thank you!
Upvote: | 238 |
Title: Hi HN, Peter here, founder of Karate Labs (<a href="https://karatelabs.io" rel="nofollow">https://karatelabs.io</a>) joined by my co-founder Kapil. Karate is an open-source solution unifying API and UI test automation, including mock servers and performance testing (<a href="https://github.com/karatelabs/karate" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/karatelabs/karate</a>).<p>Back in 2016, I was part of the API platform team at Intuit. An issue had been slowing down the team: a particular test for a set of key services would randomly fail, and it was not clear if this was a problem with the test or if there was a genuine defect. The deeper I looked, the more the complexity around the test-suite freaked me out. It was using an in-house framework, which had evolved over years and the test depended on code in multiple files scattered across the workspace. It was clear that many programmers had attempted to fix it over the years. It was next to impossible to understand what the test was doing. There had to be a better way to express web-service functional tests, and I started thinking hard about it.<p>This gave birth to Karate, a scriptable framework combining API and UI test automation. It has seen world wide adoption as an open-source project, including 37 of the Fortune 500 companies (so far!). Companies that have written about how they use Karate include Walmart [1], Expedia [2], Adobe [3], Trivago [4], and Oktana [5].<p>Karate has its own Domain Specific Language, focused on writing tests with less code and in less time. This results in easy-to-read, maintainable tests, which are often simple enough for product owners to be able to contribute to. Karate also has powerful assertions (<a href="https://twitter.com/getkarate/status/1515657727913377798" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/getkarate/status/1515657727913377798</a> ), runs tests in parallel, and can reuse API tests as performance tests, which saves time compared to rewriting performance tests using a second tool. The UI automation space is crowded, but there are very few tools that do all three: API, UI and performance testing.<p>Last year, we decided to leave our day-jobs and work full-time on Karate. We incorporated Karate Labs as a for-profit company with an open-core business model in mind. In recent weeks, we've released our first two open-core products.<p>Karate Studio can import Postman collections, Swagger, OpenAPI, HAR and cURL. Once imported, you can preview an API sequence and edit it using an intuitive no-code interface. You can then export it as a ready-to-run Karate feature file that you can integrate into your existing CI/CD or DevOps pipeline. If you already have a set of Postman collections, you can migrate them to Karate and get the benefits of parallel execution, powerful assertions and performance testing. If team members prefer Postman for exploratory testing, they can use Studio to convert their draft collections into full-fledged API automation suites, complete with assertions for complex business logic, and then use them in regression test suites. Studio can also export back to Postman if needed. It is available for a 7-day free trial at <a href="https://studio.karatelabs.io" rel="nofollow">https://studio.karatelabs.io</a>, and you can see a demo video here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCgtnhektA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCgtnhektA</a>.<p>Our second new product is an IntelliJ plugin (<a href="https://www.karatelabs.io/intellij-plugin" rel="nofollow">https://www.karatelabs.io/intellij-plugin</a>) that integrates the auto-complete experience and syntax hints that developers love. Until now, Karate support in IntelliJ was via the built-in Cucumber and Gherkin support, which was very basic. Teams have wished for a better option that would take advantage of all the Karate capabilities such as embedded JSON, JS and data assertions. Now you can write, debug, and maintain Karate tests even faster than before. The plugin is available from the JetBrains Marketplace with a 30-day free trial: <a href="https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/19232-karate" rel="nofollow">https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/19232-karate</a>.<p>When it comes to "build vs buy", many teams tend to build test automation frameworks. The fact that maintenance of an in-house framework eventually becomes prohibitive in terms of effort and cost, tends to be overlooked. We are trying to increase awareness that choosing a mature open-source framework like Karate is the right move for any team wanting to improve developer velocity.<p>We thank the community, developers and enterprise users of Karate for having helped us achieve broad adoption and earn credibility in the test-automation domain. We look forward to your support, feedback and suggestions.<p>[1] <a href="https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/kafka-automation-using-karate-6a129cfdc210" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/kafka-automation-using-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://medium.com/expedia-group-tech/karate-5-reasons-why-you-should-try-it-87539e003840" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/expedia-group-tech/karate-5-reasons-why-y...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://adapt.to/2018/en/schedule/karate-the-black-belt-of-http-api-testing.html" rel="nofollow">https://adapt.to/2018/en/schedule/karate-the-black-belt-of-h...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://tech.trivago.com/post/2019-11-14-apitestautomationusingkarate/" rel="nofollow">https://tech.trivago.com/post/2019-11-14-apitestautomationus...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://oktana.com/api-testing-using-karate-framework/" rel="nofollow">https://oktana.com/api-testing-using-karate-framework/</a>
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: What are the signs that you're about to burn out?<p>I have talked about burn out a lot with folks I've worked with and trying to avoid it, but I feel like I might be on the cusp of it now and I'm trying to figure out how to recognize it?<p>What have you seen that was the precursor to it, what if anything did you or can you do to avoid it?<p>Right now I think I see a general lack of real energy, more stress from the recent economic impacts to our business, being more short tempered, getting sick more often (colds for instance).<p>Would love any advice or perspectives from the community.<p>Thanks!<p>EDIT:<p>When is it time to change jobs because of it?
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: Announcing `tuc`, a utility similar to coreutils `cut`, but more powerful.
It allows to split text or bytes into parts and reassemble them in any order.<p>I always found `cut` very practical for some tasks where `sed` or `awk` were overkill or awkward to use, but I also felt the need for more features.<p>Some key differences from `cut`:
- parts can be referenced by negative indexes
- delimiters can be any number of characters long, or match a regex
- can split text into lines, and reassemble them
Upvote: | 241 |
Title: The book may be on any topic. Relating to your profession or not. A book that had a significant impact on you or your life in any manner possible.<p>You can name multiple books though if that is the case with you.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I posted this a few months ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709273" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709273</a><p>I thought I hated programming and was ready to quit or even divorce my wife. I was not able to have a normal conversation with anyone. I was burned out but I thought I was having midlife crisis.<p>My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress.<p>My job was easy and I had a lot of control over my time, work location, etc. I didn't think it could be the job that was causing me feel depressed.<p>What I didn't realize while my work gave me freedom on work schedule, it didn't give me any real freedom to make important decisions. We were checkmark driven company. I was forced to do a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service.<p>After my post, I decided that I either move into management at my last company or get a new job. I worked longer hours and spent all my free time doing LeetCode.<p>LeetCode was hard and pointless. But I was motivated and was able to solve most easy and medium question in 30 mins. However, that was not good enough for FAANGs.<p>I applied to some smaller companies and got a few offers. I picked one really great Series D startup. I believe in their mission and I have freedom to make real decisions here. I got a decent bump in my salary but not really FAANG TC.<p>However, more importantly, work is 1000 times more exciting. I feel alive again. Wife and I are not fighting anymore. I work longer hours but have more energy at the end of day.<p>I just want to thank everyone that responded to my post and tell everyone that if you find your work or life unfulfilling, change your job now!
Upvote: | 564 |
Title: Made this using Power BI and the Crypto Watch API.
Started making this in November 2021, but never got around to publishing it, so that is the reason for the 'FOMO' in the title - probably a good thing if you 'missed out' on the crypto hype late last year. Now it serves as a way to see how much you 'saved' by not putting in money.<p>Hope someone finds it fun!
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: I (m, 23) will be graduating from a university in Kenya with a CS degree at the end of the year. However, I feel like I barely know anything. I hardly attended classes in my first and second year. I upped my grades in my third year and was even among the top in the class (anecdotally). To be honest, I’ve always felt like our CS course was inferior. For example, I did a Computer Graphics course, but we didn’t even implement line drawing algorithms. My favorite courses were compiler construction (we actually built a compiler) and distributed systems.<p>I started checking the sources of web pages in high school, and even learnt rudimentary JavaScript and PHP. After high school, I was hoping to join a good uni in the US. I got a relatively decent 1490 in my SATs then bungled up the rest of the application process. I hesitantly joined my current uni. I’ve been coding on and off since then. For school, I wrote introductory assembly, C, and C++: most of which I can’t recall now. Outside of school I learnt Node.JS, Python and Go. I haven’t built any large project: my biggest code base is probably my FYP React Native app or the Vue/Flask web app for my internship.<p>On paper, it appears I know quite a few technologies. But contrary to that, most of it has been surface level knowledge. To use a friend’s words, I’ve been turning buttons from red to green (doing CRUD). I don't know how databases work, I don't know what exactly ray tracing is, et al. I started applying for jobs last week. To my surprise (or not), I do not fit cleanly into the requirements of any of the junior listings. I can't solve the "easy" problems on LeetCode and my score for the AngelList Fullstack assessment [1] was 18/30. I rather objectively believe I have some gaps in my CS knowledge. I am even considering a boot camp—if one exists for people who already know what a variable is. My tentative plan is to get a part time job, and then spend 6 months reading books, learning tech I’ve always wanted to learn, and hacking on at least one build-your-own [2] type project.<p>So, how can one effectively fill gaps in their CS knowledge? It’s worth noting that I am overwhelmed, and even procrastinate when I don't have an overarching framework (like school). So it’s not as simple as just sitting alone and studying/coding. I am the "smart" kid who didn’t have to study throughout most of school, but who's "discovered" you have to sit long hours now to be competitive. Is my situation more common than I suppose? Should I suck it up, get a technical support role and build up from there?<p>[1] https://angel.co/assessments/full-stack-web
[2] https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x
Upvote: | 128 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Hahnbee and Han from Mintlify (<a href="https://www.mintlify.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mintlify.com/</a>). Mintlify lets software teams easily track and manage documentation. We’re open source and our Github is at <a href="https://github.com/mintlify/mintlify" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mintlify/mintlify</a>.<p>We worked at software companies in all stages ranging from startups to big tech, and they all had bad documentation, if it even existed at all. We decided to work on this problem and created a VS Code extension called Doc Writer which generated in-line documentation for codebases using Codex from OpenAI. Doc Writer helped people document their code more frequently and still continues to, but there were limitations. We were highly reliant on OpenAI, people didn’t want their proprietary code to be sent into the cloud, and the AI was satisfactory 80% of the time. But after digging deeper into the documentation problem space, we realized that Doc Writer only solved a small part of it.<p>We quickly learned that (1) the debate about writing documentation vs. having self-documenting code was highly controversial, and (2) entire teams hated writing documentation—not only developers.<p>We proceeded to interview dozens of startups and learned that the hardest part about documentation is maintaining it. Everybody was developing so quickly that it was difficult for documentation to stay up-to-date. Common problems we heard were that documentation was inconveniently decentralized over multiple platforms, people weren’t aware when important documents changed, and when code changes the related documentation wouldn’t be updated.<p>The goal of Mintlify is to increase visibility over documentation across your entire team so that you can easily maintain it. Mintlify allows you to centralize your documentation into one searchable place; set up integrations to receive alerts when documents change; implement a CI Check for documentation - connect documentation to code and receive alerts to update your documentation when the code changes.<p>Other solutions to the problem of documentation maintenance tend to create an editor (e.g. Notion, ReadMe, Archbee, Gitbook). We decided instead to work with teams’ existing documentation stack, because of our belief that maintenance of documentation is the real hard problem in this space. Our software is designed to help documentation owners ensure that content stays in good condition.<p>Here is our 2 min demo: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/892d08e178144cd89b109f9396e4db98" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/892d08e178144cd89b109f9396e4db98</a>, and you can also try it for yourself: <a href="https://www.mintlify.com/create" rel="nofollow">https://www.mintlify.com/create</a><p>Ultimately, we want to create a suite of automations that makes maintaining high quality documentation easy. We plan on adding documentation owners and integrations with task management platforms so that tickets can be instantly generated prompting people to update documentation. We believe there is a market for this because of our experience with our earlier Doc Writer product, and because companies like Glean, Gitbook, and Whatfix are all tackling this problem in their own way.<p>We thank the open source community, our community, and our users for having helped us shape the product to what it is now. We look forward to your feedback, questions, ideas, and suggestions!
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: I was reading this article on Cloudflare workers <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containers/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containe...</a> and seemed like isolates have significant advantage over serverless technology like lambda etc.<p>What are the downsides of v8? Is it poor security isolation?
Upvote: | 171 |
Title: Interested in learning more about what your experience was. Did you start as a software engineer and move to SE? Do you like it? Was the move $$$ motivated? What are your long term career goals?
Upvote: | 51 |
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