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Title: I'm thinking about introducing a low-code system to handle internal operational processes. I'm thinking things like viewing/handling dead-letter messages, manual intervention decision points, short lived operational tasks that haven't yet/won't be automated.<p>I'd expect the software engineering team to manage these apps, so the benefit I can see is the quick turnaround on the UI, rather than handing over to non-engineering users for development.<p>What are people's experiences with these tools? More specifically:<p>Can you do an effective SDLC with them? e.g. code on a staging environment, push to version control, promote to prod, rollback to old version<p>Have you actually saved time with them?<p>Did you avoid introducing unworkable complexity?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: A deGoogled device is excellent for the privacy and security of a user. Your data is worth a lot, and the hidden tactics used by big corporations are pretty shady.<p>By limiting the data you send to Google and other big companies, you ensure your Right to Privacy is in place. It takes time to embrace this life, but once you do, you will appreciate not having ads targeted to you or your devices constantly connecting to transmit data to servers.<p>*Benefits of deGoogling your devices*<p>1. Privacy for your devices.<p>2. De-Googled Operating Systems usually are open-source and can be actively checked for bugs and vulnerabilities.<p>3. De-Googled OS’ is based on stock Android.<p>4. There aren’t a bunch of trackers running in the background, and you can expect a much better battery life on your phone.<p>*The best alternative to Google Apps*<p>• Google Chrome<p>— Firefox - Safari<p>• Google Search<p>— Duckduckgo - Startpage - Neeva<p>• Google Chrome Passwords<p>— BitWarden - 1Password - KeePass<p>• Google Analytics<p>— Matomo - Fathom - Simple Analytics - GoatCounter - Counter.dev<p>• Google Mail<p>— ProtonMail - Fastmail - Zoho Mail<p>• Google Docs<p>— Beat Writer - Workflowy - Open Document Reader - Collabora<p>• Google sheets<p>— Airtable - Zoho - Coda<p>• YouTube<p>— Vimeo - PeerTube - Dailymotion - Newpipe<p>• Google Maps for Websites<p>— Leaflet - Mapbox - Nextzen<p>• Google Adwords<p>— BuySellAds<p>• Google Authenticator<p>— Authy - 1Password - AndOTP - Aegis<p>• Google Blogger<p>— WordPress - Medium - Squarespace<p>• Google DNS<p>— OpenDNS - NextDNS - Quad9<p>• Google Drive<p>— Internxt - Nextcloud - SyncThing<p>• Google Hangouts<p>— Telegram - Slack<p>• Google Images<p>— Unsplash - Pexels - Simple Gallery Pro<p>• Google Maps<p>— OpenStreetMap - Magic Earth<p>• Google Translate<p>— Deepl - WordReference - Lingva<p>• Google Maps<p>— Dark Sky - Weather Underground - OsmAnd<p>• Google Calendar<p>— Proton Calendar - Simple Calendar Pro - OpenTasks - DAVx5<p>• Google Keyboard<p>— OpenBoard - AnySoftKeyboard - Florisboard<p>• Google Keep<p>— Standard Notes - Joplin - Obsidian - Simple Notes Pro<p>• Google Podcast<p>— AntennaPod<p>• Ad-blocker<p>— Pi-hole<p>• Media<p>— Plex - Plexamp<p>• Netflix<p>— Sonar - Jellyfin<p>• Cloud<p>— NAS<p>• WeTransfer<p>— Internxt Send<p>These are the best alternatives that you can use if you would like to deGoogle your devices. Using Google on your device stores your location every time you turn it on. It stores your search history across all your devices in a separate database, meaning even if you were to delete said history on all your devices, Google would still have a record of it.<p>That’s the same for anything you’ve watched on YouTube, every app and extension you’ve used. How often you’ve used them. Where you were and who you interacted with. We would like you to understand that we want to give you back the power of protecting and controlling your data. Detaching from Google would be challenging, but to protect your data privacy, you have to be careful in using the internet and the apps that you use.<p>Update: We will continue to update the list with every comment and suggestions!
Upvote: | 118 |
Title: Hey there! Amogh here from eesel (<a href="https://eesel.app" rel="nofollow">https://eesel.app</a>). eesel filters your browser history to show the docs you need for work, right in your new tab. You can see recent docs, filter by app or search by title or content.<p>We're trying to solve a pretty universal problem. Everyone's work is spread across apps - there's a project brief in Google Docs, issues in Jira, a mockup in Figma, PRs in GitHub - and with this kind of sprawl, it can be a game of trial and error to find the links we need to do our job.
Trying keywords in the address bar only works if we remember the title and it's specific enough, search in apps can be slow and noisy, company "knowledge hubs" in Confluence or Google Drive are usually not up to date, and we ultimately just ping each other on Slack to find things.<p>I was struggling with this acutely as a PM at Intercom, and it felt ridiculous that I could search the web faster than my company's docs.<p>It was around this time that I also discovered an Effective Altruism blog post on Operations (<a href="https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/" rel="nofollow">https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/</a>) and how "maximising the productivity of others in the organisation" can have this multiplier effect for your own impact.<p>That's when it clicked - here's an "operations" problem that felt tractable for my skills and I could potentially multiply my impact by solving it. This is what gave the conviction to prototype something on the weekends, and things spun off from there.<p>Let's talk about the solution more. The magical thing about eesel is that we don't use APIs.<p>When it comes to "search across apps", integrating with different APIs is a pretty default way to approach things. That's how we started, but things felt uneasy - could we really build API integrations with _everything_? There's so much out there, and this list is pretty much always changing.<p>If we really did want a search across all work apps, we'd have to play catch up with old and new APIs. You could argue that these were just the schleps (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html</a>) we had to overcome, but it was amidst this we realised that uh, the browser exists.<p>We mostly work in the browser, and the great thing about it is that it's built on web standards. From HTTP and URLs to HTML and CSS, all apps in the browser follow the same predictable patterns: documents are accessed via URLs, content lives inside the HTML, there's a page title, there's a favicon, and so on.<p>It's not a perfect replacement for APIs, but it felt good enough. We didn't need to manually integrate with each app, and could instead rely on existing web standards. And that's what we did. eesel works with any app in the browser, including apps without APIs (like that internal company tool), or apps that don't exist yet (the new Product Hunt hit).<p>Not using APIs also meant that we could go an extra step with privacy - eesel works fully locally by default and you don't need to login to _anything_ (even eesel!). Simply install and it works.<p>We want to keep building on this approach and improve how we work in the browser. For instance, eesel uses keywords to automatically organise pages into Folders, and there's Commands to take actions (spoiler: you can customise a JavaScript to inject on a page, like this script that goes to a Notion backlog and clicks the "New" button - <a href="https://eesel.notion.site/Notion-New-page-f10c7398209544088a0d9fee5dd1051c" rel="nofollow">https://eesel.notion.site/Notion-New-page-f10c7398209544088a...</a>).<p>Alright, that's a lot of writing from us. We have a bunch of ideas, and would love to hear about where you think we should take this next.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Previously they had been autofilling links and replacing affiliate links with their code:<p>https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology<p>They stopped doing that but I found they appear to remove affiliate links altogether unless it comes from them.<p>Just to test I put NordVPN's affiliate link structure and viola it gets removed:<p><a href="https://go.nordvpn.net/aff_c">Test Affiliate Link</a>
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: Examples of tech/customer support forums that are useless:<p>- Apple (see [1])<p>- Microsoft (see [2])<p>- Google (see [3])<p>I often find better answers on SO, SU, and other stack websites. Hell, even independent blogs have better solutions. Why, then, can't these giant companies improve the quality of their forums?<p>[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1nwpum/why_are_the_official_apple_forums_so_unhelpful/<p>[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/g2nazh/has_anyone_ever_found_a_useful_answer_in_the/<p>[3]: https://support.google.com/groups/thread/126332371?hl=en
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I'm still trying to figure out, if it is possible to use Bitcoin in a trustless way. So that no matter which parts of your tech stack are faulty or malicious, you keep control over your funds.<p>The following is what I got so far. I never used Bitcoin. So correct me, if something is wrong please.<p>1: Create a seed phrase with dices<p>2: Write it down on paper or carve it into metal<p>3: Buy a hardware wallet with no internet connectivity.<p>4: Never connect that wallet to any other device.<p>5: Type the seed phrase into the hardware wallet<p>6: The hardware wallet will display an extended public key<p>7: Install a software wallet on a computer with internet access<p>8: Type the extended public key into the software wallet<p>9: To do transactions: Create a transaction in the software wallet<p>10: The software wallet will show a hash of the transaction<p>11: Type that hash into the hardware wallet<p>12: The hardware wallet will show a signature<p>13: Type that signature into the software wallet<p>That's it.<p>As I understand it, there still is trust involved in steps 3 and steps 6:<p>3: There is not an easy way to check if the hardware wallet really has no internet connectivity.<p>6: There is no way to check if the hardware wallet really uses the seed phrase to create the extended public key. It could create an extended public key that the vendor can predict. One could test it a few times with throw-away seed phrases, but one would never be 100% sure.
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I've noticed recently Facebook has started using URLs which seem to include encoded information.<p>For example, this URL to Vice:
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/VICE/posts/pfbid02XdVziPTwhmPU9XzBqkRvU5o7NPXUicAJgVy8kf1a1W51hU7EmgMmCigo9rZWxCjDl" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/VICE/posts/pfbid02XdVziPTwhmPU9XzBq...</a><p>It's a pretty URL with some kind of hash at the end beginning with "pfbid."<p>Whereas they used to look like basic sharded URLs:
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/random.username/posts/10208327509806082" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/random.username/posts/1020832750980...</a><p>Is this for more targeted tracking on posts and links being shared, a new sharding scheme, a combination of both, or something else entirely?<p>Appreciate any insights the community can provide.
Upvote: | 275 |
Title: Hi Guys,<p>I made a simple platform to buy/sell side projects. Current solutions are over complicated so I decided to make things simpler.
Let me know your what you think about this.<p><a href="https://secondfounder.com" rel="nofollow">https://secondfounder.com</a>
Upvote: | 169 |
Title: Last year, I wrote the book Everyday Data Science. It was #1 on HN! [1]<p>This year, I've been working with Jim Fisher on a new kind of interactive course. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure, except you'll learn Thompson sampling, differential equations, and Bayesian-optimal pricing.<p>After several months, the first two chapters are ready! Every word, button, and sound has been painstakingly crafted. Try out the first chapter to see what we mean! [2]<p>The course will be $99, but it’s $29 today, as a thanks for helping us build the next 8 chapters! Let us know what you think :-)<p>- Andrew Carr [3]<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26253281" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26253281</a>
[2]: <a href="https://tigyog.app/d/L:X07z8laLyz/r/when-life-gives-you-lemons" rel="nofollow">https://tigyog.app/d/L:X07z8laLyz/r/when-life-gives-you-lemo...</a>
[3]: <a href="https://twitter.com/andrew_n_carr" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/andrew_n_carr</a>
Upvote: | 153 |
Title: Hello,<p>This is a portfolio optimizer I made to help select portfolios for my clients. I'm a personal financial adviser. I generally put my clients in a mix of low-fee index funds and ETFs and I use this to set an appropriate allocation based on the client's risk tolerance.<p>I have been working on this as a side project to 1) improve the theoretical underpinnings of my investment recommendations and 2) improve my coding skills with frameworks like Vue and Torch. Here's the repository for the frontend: <a href="https://github.com/justinluther502/cashgraphfront" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/justinluther502/cashgraphfront</a>.<p>The frontend site is Vue 2 + Vuetify, and the backend is an AWS lambda function running the Torch optimizer. I am still working out kinks in the backend, particularly cold-start issues because the Lambda function has to load the entire Torch library (~2GB). This occasionally causes the AWS API Gateway to reach max timeout before the Lambda function finishes. Any tips on addressing this would be much appreciated. My first thought is maybe to pare down the Torch library used in the Lambda function because I am only using a small subset of the full library.<p>The optimizer function itself is designed to overcome several classic shortcomings in Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_portfolio_theory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_portfolio_theory</a>). Unlike textbook implementations of MPT, this optimizer can utilize non-normal returns distributions, risk metrics besides variance, and can allow the user to specify tail behavior, such as asset correlations behaving normally most of the time but converging to 1.0 in severe downturns. Most of these "fixes" happen during the generation of custom "flavors", or asset selection universes. I have 3 flavors pre-built and there is some information on how they are constructed in the flavor selection page.<p>Any feedback greatly appreciated!<p>Justin Luther [email protected] <a href="https://www.lutherwealth.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.lutherwealth.com</a>
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: Three years ago I posted a 'Change my mind' meme on Facebook dissing The Sopranos. Today FB says my post violated community standards and directs me to resources about self-harm and suicide.<p>Officially I can't advertise or go live for 30 days (don't do either anyways). Unofficially, my posts are no longer showing up in my own feed nor anyone else's. Were I actually at risk of self-harm, I struggle to imagine how socially isolating me is a proper response.<p>Warning and original post: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/2kzCEza.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/2kzCEza.png</a><p>Restrictions: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/VHCWfbt.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/VHCWfbt.png</a>
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Or, more generally, how to give children freedom and privacy, yet also be there to help them understand the lessons the world is about to teach them?<p>I have this preconceived notion that I don't want to violate my children's privacy. It's very tempting, of course, to passively monitor e.g. their spending or online habits, but I don't want to.<p>(As a concrete example, I know a some people get very detailed reports from the daycare about what their children have been up to. I'm not interested in that -- when I want to know what the daycare experience is like, I personally spend a day at the daycare.<p>This gives me much more nuance than a report ever would, but it also feels more respectful toward my child that they're allowed a part of their life outside of my supervision. But the reason I can do that is because there are other helpful adults at the daycare. That won't be the case everywhere, unfortunately.)<p>So I want them to have privacy, but I would also want to pick up on problems early -- either their own bad behaviour, or if they're victim's of someone else's bad behaviour.<p>Some more concrete questions in the same vein:<p>- What fraction of their online time should I sit with them?<p>- Do I play all video games with them or should they have some of "their own"?<p>- Do I give them the ability to do online purchases?<p>- Do I allow them to use up all of their money even as a mistake, or do I set up a limit?<p>- Do I limit their "screen time" (hate that term) or will that prevent them from interacting with their friends in the way they would want to?<p>This depends on maturity levels, of course, but I'm looking for generalisations. My children are 2 and 0.2 years old now, so this won't be relevant in a while but I like to be prepared and if you have thoughts regarding any maturity level, please share.<p>The reason I ask you HN folks is (a) that you are likely to understand my concern for privacy and personal integrity, and (b) that I've received very useful and thought-out child-related advice here before.<p>----<p>I'm also skipping a bunch of privilege-related questions like "who the hell can take a day off to spend it at the daycare?" Or, perhaps more importantly, "what determines how much time you spend online with your children may not be what's appropriate, but how much time you can spare for it?"<p>And yeah, both of those are problems for myself as well -- I'm interested in all creative solutions here, also that help work around such problems.
Upvote: | 220 |
Title: For those working in tech/software development teams - do you also find that there's a lot of tension between developers and designers?<p>They need to work together but it always seems like a challenge. From the tools they prefer (Figma vs. Github) to the pace/workflow to the language and communication.<p>What are the biggest pain points you've seen?<p>What are some great tips for bridging the gaps during a typical workflow?<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: Have you experienced people trying to always build / maintain monoethnic teams? How do you approach this problem and how do you even talk about it?<p>This is very specific to my EU/Singapore experience so I am not sure how big of a problem this is in the US/North America.<p>Even though the working language is english there's usually teams where one person decides to always hire people of his ethnicity or people that speak a specific language.<p>Meetings with such team is always awkward as they internally discuss the topic in their own language during the meeting. Also their hiring practices are essentially discriminatory.
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Hey HN! After lots of dogfooding, we are now releasing Algora.io to help developers share bounties & easily meet new collaborators.<p>The problem: early-stage founders always have more work than people, tight budgets and no time. Hiring full-time engineers is often not an option, yet most founders would welcome contributions from new collaborators. Meanwhile, most developers welcome flexible work. However, today, all of this is hard.<p>Our solution: we built a Git GUI where you can pay developers and start collaborating with new ones, in just a few clicks.<p>On Algora you can share, reward and earn bounties right inside your code repositories. Algora also recommends developers/bounties that match your tech stack and makes it simple to start working together.<p>We are excited to welcome you on Algora, answer your questions and further improve our product and documentation with your feedback!<p>Thank you<p>- Ioannis & Zaf
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: It feels like the majority of content is no longer organic or passion driven. It is now monetisation driven content.<p>It's similar to Google. It used to be index of useful organic information, created for practical reasons (regardless of Google). Now it is just an index of adverts and spam created for Google monetisation.<p>Even some famous tech review channels just seem like marketing/pr product shills to me now.<p>--<p>I searched for a software tutorial on Youtube and 90% of results are talking heads.
Upvote: | 173 |
Title: A little while back I remember seeing a user on a certain anonymous imageboard asking for an invite to a selective email host. Only after a few minutes did the guy realize the perplexity of the situation. How do you insure against a race condition in a public forum with no way to direct message?<p>Luckily, he nabbed the invite code, but it got me thinking about using PGP to provide a solution. This is meant to be a rough PoC and the UX is definitely not ready for the average Joe, but the functionality I'd like to think is there.<p>What catbox.moe is to dropbox is what I'd like this to eventually be to keybase. Btw, "this page uses NO SERVER" just means it's static. I'm not trying to fool anyone lol.<p>Edit: Source Code: <a href="https://codeberg.org/popcalc/pubKey" rel="nofollow">https://codeberg.org/popcalc/pubKey</a>
Upvote: | 131 |
Title: I love building and working - always have, always will. I've been programming for nearly 10 years, 5 of those professionally but the industry is literally destroying my soul and it has recently become crippling.<p>I've been in all kinds of jobs, from start-ups to massive corporate companies. I'm forever building my own side projects as I love it, as well as love the idea of making my own living but as you all know, side hustles don't make money over night.<p>I'm currently in a great job. By great job I mean, the money is really good, there's room to grow and the opportunities are endless... Yet I can't bare it. I can't bare the devs that go out of their way to work weekends without being asked, I can't bare the endless meetings, constant micromanagement, bringing the stress home to my family.<p>I don't know where or who to turn to. Can anyone relate?
Upvote: | 453 |
Title: Journaling is a great practice to learn more about yourself - if done daily.<p>I tried it multiple times and couldn't stick to it.<p>This project is how I finally fixed it for myself.<p>It works by eliminating my excuses.<p>There is only one question a day that I'll answer - no time spent on "finding the perfect topic".<p>I only need to go to the page - not find my notebook or create a new note/paragraph in another app.<p>I only left myself a relatively small input area, less than a page in a small notebook - that way the commitment doesn't feel too big.<p>I really enjoy the process and it has become something that I do early in the morning - a little bit of time for myself.<p>It's now public because I am sure it could work for you too.<p>Bonus: The data is all local, the input will be saved in the browser (IndexedDB) while I type, no login necessary - the full journal is accessible as a CSV (bottom right).<p><a href="https://dailyprompt.org" rel="nofollow">https://dailyprompt.org</a>
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: I'm curious if people here find blogging as a valuable activity from the following perspectives:
- Does the time spent writing feels worth it to you?
- Did it help to get noticed/ find jobs or other opportunities?
- Do you learn something new from it?<p>Personally, I tried writing in some blogging platforms (medium, dev.to etc), then moved to self hosted solution with Hugo but honestly it was too much maintenance. Writing up my thoughts in presentable state took too much time/effort. Right now, I simply save my notes to my personal Notion for future reference.
Upvote: | 324 |
Title: Thanks for checking out Babble! You might wonder why this app is even useful and why not just use Signal/PGP. This app's target audience is actually ordinary people in China or similar countries who are under severe government surveillance and censorship, where access to Signal and similar E2EE messaging software is blocked by nationwide firewalls, such as the Great Firewall of China (GFW).<p>Chinese people have been deprived of freedom of speech even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Li Wenliang, who was among the first to notice the spread of the virus and warned his colleagues about it in a <i>private</i> WeChat group, was admonished by the police for "spreading rumors"; his punishment was then aired on the national TV channel. After Wenliang passed away due to getting COVID-19 himself, discussions about it on China's public Internet were highly restricted; most discussions will be deleted upon being posted, which was done by some automatic keyword detection mechanism.<p>Things got even worse over the years and especially during the Shanghai lockdown in early 2022. Everything related to questioning the public health policy is banned. Many people posted articles about how bad Shanghai's economic and social situation is on their WeChat public accounts. None of these articles, not even their accounts, can survive for longer than a few hours. Even articles crying for help, because people were starving, got deleted.<p>A video called Voice from Shanghai Lockdown (<a href="https://youtu.be/38_thLXNHY8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/38_thLXNHY8</a>), which contains audio recordings of desperate Shanghai people during the lockdown, went viral on Chinese social media at the end of this April. Unsurprisingly, this video was immediately censored. People got angry and tried to spread this video as much as possible by re-posting it again and again, racing against the detection algorithm. But it was futile.<p>It's just like 1984, where the number of words available to say "legally" is decreasing. There are no tools available for people to speak out. Public social media and private messaging apps are all monitored by the government. Foreign tools such as Telegram, Signal, or anything similar are blocked by the GFW. PGP is too technical for normal people. The goal of Babble is to provide those people with a cryptographic and steganographic tool that's easy enough to use but secure enough against a censorship system. It's not perfect as of now, but we are making an effort to make it better.<p>Yes, Babble might get removed from the App Store in China if the Chinese government asks, but it's fundamentally different from Signal being blocked - there are a considerable number of people in China who has an overseas Apple ID so that they can download apps not on Chinese App Store, but to use Signal, you have to bypass GFW, which fewer people know how to. One of the real challenges for this project though, is how to get people aware of the situation, because our education is brainwashing and people are starting to take surveillance and censorship for granted. And it's very hard for the app to reach its intended audience because the surveillance system is designed to prevent them from accessing this kind of tool.
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: Not sure why this isn't more prominently highlighted, but this is a very culturally significant project and a custodian of a tremendous amount of Internet and WWW-oriented history. I would imagine HN would put this at the forefront of the discussions happening here.<p>I'm not affiliated, but I am a concerned netizen. All of us here have benefited from The IA. Please help raise awareness as to what is happening.<p>Read more here, and elsewhere - https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/14/cucd-j14.html<p>> In June 2020, four major publishers—John Wiley & Sons and three of the big five US publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House—filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, claiming the non-profit organization, “is engaged in willful mass copyright infringement.”<p>> The lawsuit stems from the corporate publishers response to an innovative temporary initiative launched by the Internet Archive during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic called the National Emergency Library. Given the impact of the public health emergency, the Internet Archive decided to ease its book lending restrictions and allow multiple people to check out the same digital copy of a book at once.<p>> Up to that point, the Internet Archive had established a practice of purchasing copies of printed books, digitizing them and lending them to borrowers one at a time. When it kicked-off the emergency lending program, the Internet Archive made it clear that this policy would be in effect until the end of the pandemic. Furthermore, the archive’s publishers said that this program was in response to library doors being closed to the public during the pandemic. Under conditions where the Internet Archive was the only means of access to titles for many people, the policy was justified and a creative response to COVID-19.
Upvote: | 746 |
Title: I'm looking for software that is powerful, understandable, hackable, extensible, reliable, future-proof (few breaking updates) and feature-rich.<p>The two tools I've found so far that come close to this are TiddlyWiki (notetaking) and Vim/Emacs (same text editor niche). TiddlyWiki loses some points on hackability because it's web technology and fairly sandboxed. Vim/Emacs are only for text, obviously. I think what these tools have in common is that they all have a strong core idea (Vim: modal, TiddlyWiki: a quine of tiddlers, Emacs: elisp) that provides insane feature breadth at relatively low cost to learnability.<p>Other software is usually on a spectrum of low feature count (most tools in the UNIX philosophy) to low understandability (IDEs, most other text editors, all OSes). Then a few rare ones are extremely powerful, but so old and poorly designed that I don't think they make the cut (e.g. Bash in my opinion).<p>Are there other tools similar to Vim, that maybe even cover other application areas? Doesn't have to be terminal-based. I'd love to hear your opinions!
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Given a two-car garage, what can a small team (2-3 people) manufacture that can be sold for some amount of profit? Imagine access to capital of 20-50k USD at maximum.<p>Interesting would be items whose manufacture could be automatized to some extent, but this is not necessary.<p>I am not particularly interested in the legality of this at the moment. But safety considerations could be important.
Upvote: | 352 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>as a Software-Developer, I'm looking for resources that could help to raise my understanding of UX design.<p>So a simple question:
What helped you increase your UX skills?
Upvote: | 254 |
Title: My Gay Flatmate helps the LGBT community to find a safe place to live.
It is a 2-sided platform. People can advirtise their spare room, and they can also create a profile to say they are looking for a room.<p>Happy to receive some feedback!
I am a solo founder (not by option)
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: I created this chrome extension for myself where I track my own behavior locally and recommend myself content from platforms I want content from (youtube/twitter/quora/etc) in a feed. I made it public just in case anyone else was interested.<p>I would rather have control over my own algorithm and own the data. Also, it gives me flexibility. Turns out I do like these feeds just not when I don't own it haha. Let me know what you think of my implementation?
Upvote: | 214 |
Title: So there are a lot of posts here about personal knowledge databases & note taking apps ... and methodologies. I wanted a way to keep track of info & just as importantly be able to easily see & edit that data from anywhere.<p>I wanted it to be robust, free, web-based, able to host code examples as actual files (e.g. style.css or script.js), and host images.<p>Turns out this is all available with Github & Gitlab.<p>Step 1: Create a Private Repo
Step 2: Hit the . key or use the editor URL pattern: https://github.dev/{{username}}/{{repo-name}}
Step 3: Start using ... you can add sub-directories with Markdown for notes ... you can add all the file types above.<p>For Gitlab just click "Web IDE" from your project's homepage.<p>(I made this URL: https://github.dev/{{username}}/{{repo-name}} my homepage, making it super easy to access.)<p>This is absolutely nothing new; but the epiphany I had a week or so ago about using a repo in this way seems to have really stuck (yes, a week is a short period of time but often a note app or approach sticks for a day or 2 for me).<p>I'm really curious if others do something like this & what other sorts of practices they might employ while doing this.
Upvote: | 215 |
Title: A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier).<p>But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system.<p>I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to write all the firmware from scratch and even designed my first PCB, resulting in a finished (though not very polished) handheld CHIP-8 console.<p>For those curious, the GitHub repo also has links to my dev blog about the project as well as a build guide.<p>Thanks for looking!
Upvote: | 128 |
Title: After five years wrestling with my side project, I'm finally optimistic I'll ship it.<p>How did I become optimistic? The short answer is money. The longer answer is indifference.<p>The Journey.<p>Since 2017 I've been working on a side project which I always intended to launch as a paid SaaS product. I matched every cliche about people bootstrapping their SaaS:<p>- The code isn't clean enough
- The UI isn't pixel perfect
- The export feature doesn't work correctly
- I need to completely refactor the entire app because I learned a new way to write a for loop...<p>On at least two occasions I became so stressed out I had to take a break from working on it.<p>On a side project!<p>Here's how I finally got some momentum.<p>Step 1: Hire a freelance developer<p>You need help. You need a new perspective. Most importantly, you need indifference.<p>Freelancers are hired to achieve a specific outcome. After achieving that outcome, they move on to the next project. They don't have time to refactor that same library three times. They force you to prioritize what's important to ship.<p>Step 2: Hire a UI/UX designer<p>Having a rough outline of what the app should look like gives you a target to work toward. Instead of becoming an expert with Figma, hire someone that can do it for you. You'll be shocked what value two weeks of a designer's time can bring.<p>Step 3: Hire a marketing agency<p>Digital marketing is a highly complex endeavor. If you think spending money on Google Ads or posting on Twitter is sufficient to bring your product to life, you'll be disappointed.<p>Yes this all costs money.<p>Yes you have to give up some control.<p>Yes you might miss some learning opportunities.<p>But if there's one lesson I learned after five years, it's all about shipping!
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I was frustrated with drawing apps where the eraser was E and the pen was P. Often, when I'm drawing, I want to quickly erase and then switch back to the pen. As one of my hands is on my mouse or tablet, I have to use my other hand to reach across the keyboard. I wanted a drawing app with customizable keybindings, so I made qboard a while back and have used it since.<p>I talk more about the design principles on the Github repo: <<a href="https://github.com/cjquines/qboard/#design-principles" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cjquines/qboard/#design-principles</a>>.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: To understand the meaning of an HTTP status code and list all codes belonging to a specific class from your terminal.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Ted and Thomas from Bend (<a href="https://bend.green/product" rel="nofollow">https://bend.green/product</a>). We help companies measure their carbon emissions by connecting to your corporate bank account (Brex, Mercury, or any other financial institution on Plaid) and then estimating the impact of each purchase.<p>Thomas and I found our way to this project via our background in fintech. Prior to Bend, I was a co-founder of Abacus (YC W14), a spend management company. At Abacus, we noticed that finance teams are increasingly paying attention to the climate impact of their purchase decisions, from travel policies, to cloud hosting, and beyond.<p>We believe this 'spend based' approach is the key to unlocking scalable carbon accounting. Today, most carbon accounting is manual, conducted once a year, and takes weeks or months to complete. It's like doing your taxes.<p>Fortunately, in the last couple years, we’ve started to reach a critical mass of good merchant data. It used to be that only a handful of companies tracked and disclosed their emissions. Today, 70%+ of Fortune 500 companies disclose their emissions in annual sustainability reports, and 1/3 of the entire global economy is now covered by a Science Based Target (and this coverage and quality is accelerating). The spend-based approach is fully automated and starts working the moment you connect your bank account.<p>That’s the good news. The bad news is that this emissions data is trapped in PDFs and blog posts, scattered across the internet. We aggregate and normalize this data by hand today, and plan to automate the process in the future.<p>Here’s how we measure the tCO2e (metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents) of your transactions: imagine that you get a $1,000 bill from Atlassian and want to know the carbon impact of that purchase. We know that for every $1,000 spent with Atlassian, there’s a 30.2 kg footprint — we multiply your bill total * (Atlassian’s annual emissions / Atlassian’s annual revenue) and return the tCO2e of that transaction.<p>Now imagine a similar calculation for each of the thousands of purchases your company makes every month / quarter / year. For merchants that don’t yet publish their emissions data, we fall back to category averages (e.g. for a Starbucks, we use the specific Starbucks carbon intensity factor, but for a mom-and-pop coffee shop that doesn’t disclose their greenhouse gas info, we use a generic benchmark ‘coffee shop’ factor).<p>To get a feel for the data we track, click on some of the corporate logos on <a href="https://bend.green/" rel="nofollow">https://bend.green/</a> — these aren’t customers; they’re examples of Bend’s merchant data. We have a climate scientist PhD on the team named Marion — we’d be happy to answer questions about our methodology!<p>Measuring and reducing your company’s emissions is of course good for the planet, but it also prepares your company for upcoming regulations and investor requirements. We help you create a 'climate profile' that you can use to close sales as the sustainable alternative to your competitors (you can share your info with prospects, customers, employees, investors, etc. — think of it like the climate equivalent of becoming SOC 2 compliant). And we just rolled out the ability to purchase carbon removal credits, powered by Patch, to offset some or all of your remaining emissions (optionally opt-in to automatic monthly purchasing).<p>Our pricing is $100 / month per company, and your company can try Bend for free for 14 days: <a href="https://app.bend.green/sign-up" rel="nofollow">https://app.bend.green/sign-up</a><p>Bonus points: if you’re building a fintech app, Bend data is also available via API (email us for API keys and docs). And if you work at a large / public company that already measures emissions, we encourage you to claim your company profile on Bend (for free!), and ask your vendors to track their emissions (after all, your vendors’ emissions become your emissions).<p>We’d love to hear your feedback and we’re excited to answer any questions!
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: I used Discord's new account switcher feature and, shortly after, I was locked out of both accounts for phone number verification.<p>Specifically, each account requires a separate phone number, and I am not banned for a ToS violation.<p>After trying several different methods (including <i>buying a second cell phone plan</i>) I have been unable to access my accounts. Over a few weeks with support, I've spent money and several hours on my end, to no avail.<p>From our conversation, I understand this triggered a false positive on their "suspicious activity detection system". They couldn't tell me what triggered it, and I have not broken the ToS (no unofficial client), and they cannot remove the hold, and paying for Discord Nitro does not let you keep access.<p>This is especially painful because it's cut me off from friends and certain developer communities. From what I see from posts on other social media, this is not an uncommon occurrence.<p>Has anyone else had these issues? If so, has anyone had luck getting this resolved?
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: The workplace policy has been in effect for many years, and was until recently an advertised perk of working for Slack. It allowed all employees access to free paid time off from 24th until the New Year (some employees like incident responders would take shifts, but even Customer Experience (their support team) ran skeleton shifts). Today they have announced this policy has ended as a result of the economy as well as making the workplace more equitable (as Salesforce employees could not access this benefit).
Upvote: | 300 |
Title: It was a small subscription, actually quite small, it was 10,72€ :), but they were the first ones I've ever done with a side project (or in the internet at all) so they feel quite special.<p>Just wanted to share that and thank Hacker News for keeping a guy motivated to try side-projects.<p>Very short summary: I develop a lot of integration tools for Microsoft 365 through their Graph API and this year Microsoft is going to disable all basic authentication connections to their sign in system (basic authentication are all protocols where you can't force MFA).<p>This affects a lot of users who configured their accounts on iOS a while back and are still using Exchange ActiveSync (even if you upgrade iPhone it imports the settings). So I made a Web App which will list all of your tenant devices still using legacy protocols and how to move them to modern authentication:<p>https://betterlicenses.com/audit_log<p>I also document on a blog post how this can be retrieved for free using existing Azure AD sign in logs, but it's not as easy to understand and my Web App will send you a daily notification whenever a new device is found using basic authentication.<p>Used Stripe to receive payments and the app has been running for a month and half. It's on a subscription bases only for 20 days because the first 2 weeks it was free and a lot of users were using it and my server costs exploded due to having to analyse a lot of log entries.<p>Update: I just wanted to say how nice this community is, really upbeat and encouragement comments :), thanks
Upvote: | 210 |
Title: Doing some market research on headcount management tools, and curious to know what tools you've tried, what has worked, or if this is still something done using spreadsheets?<p>I'm especially interested in connecting headcount planning with company objectives.
Thanks!
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I dislike going through interviews and all the rituals that involve working for a company full time.
I don't like to stick to one project for a long time, which is visible on my resume, and recruiters don't like that.<p>I've been thinking of a way to work around these traits, and what I have come up with is - work part time, on B2B, with invoices instead of employment contracts.
I'm hoping that with B2B it will be easier to find work, fast. It should be more flexible to employers.<p>But where do I find people to do work for?<p>Edit: I'm a full stack developer, mainly focused on Go and React.
Upvote: | 272 |
Title: This morning I woke up to find my channel suspended.
My channel has one video, a walk through how to use a command-line tool I built in python. I have no idea why this would trigger a suspension.
Has this ever happened to you?
Is a link to pypi.org considered a "Links to websites or apps that install malware" that violates YouTube's external links policy
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Maitham here, we’re building an API for at-home health data (<a href="https://tryvital.io" rel="nofollow">https://tryvital.io</a>). We allow developers to easily connect to hundreds of wearable devices and deliver at-home lab tests to their users, with a few lines of code.<p>Health data from wearables and labs sit in various data sources, each requiring a different integration. Most with bad documentation and some even needing a partnership. Data collected from these sources play a crucial role in health monitoring. Our goal is to enable developers to build applications on top of it.<p>Having previously worked as an engineer at a telehealth company, I saw firsthand how hard it is to build and maintain integrations with labs, wearables and medical devices. I personally became a health enthusiast trying to fix my own problems after having over ten surgeries, suffering from IBS, and sleep apnea.<p>We’ve built an API that gives you access to over 300 devices directly through our SDKs or our API. We also expose a plaid-like widget to connect devices. For our lab test API, we have partnered with independent labs in the US and have a physician network covering all 50 states, allowing any company to order at-home functional tests. Our docs can be found here (<a href="https://docs.tryvital.io" rel="nofollow">https://docs.tryvital.io</a>).<p>Our existing customers use our API to build apps to help allergy sufferers, wellness and fitness coaching, metabolic health support, and sleep optimisation. We have an API for individual developers and we charge based on the number of connected users and a platform fee for at-home lab tests. We open-source all our libraries and SDK’s, and hope by doing so we can both encourage more open data standards and alleviate privacy concerns.<p>One last thing! We know privacy is extremely important when it comes to health data, we anonymise all data by default and we use Evervault to encrypt the data, you can read more about it here <a href="https://docs.tryvital.io/welcome/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://docs.tryvital.io/welcome/privacy</a>. We also have an upcoming feature to set auto-expiry on data, that allows companies to set a period that the data stays stored for.
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: pg_jsonschema is a solution we're exploring to allow enforcing more structure on json and jsonb typed postgres columns.<p>We initially wrote the extension as an excuse to play with pgx, the rust framework for writing postgres extensions. That let us lean on existing rust libs for validation (jsonschema), so the extension's implementation is only 10 lines of code :)<p><a href="https://github.com/supabase/pg_jsonschema/blob/fb7ab09bf6050130e8d656f2999ec0f6a3fedc0d/src/lib.rs#L1-L13" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/supabase/pg_jsonschema/blob/fb7ab09bf6050...</a><p>happy to answer any questions!
Upvote: | 203 |
Title: We had a great discussion here on HN a few days ago about the question whether it is possible to use Bitcoin in a trustless way. So that you control your Bitcoin yourself and don't have to trust any privileged party to not take it from you:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32115693<p>Interestingly, there was a <i>lot</i> of speculation and misinformation. So even on Hacker News, this topic is still only vaguely understood.<p>But also some very good information came to light.<p>The biggest bomb that was dropped in the thread received little attention: The fact that signing a transaction is not deterministic. This means when a hardware wallet is asked to sign a transaction, it can internally do that multiple times and then chose from multiple valid signatures. This means that it can encode data into the signature. For example, it could choose between two signatures with certain properties (say one results in an even checksum of the bits of the signature and one results in an odd checksum) and thereby signalling one bit to the creator of the wallet.<p>Everytime it signals a bit of your seed phrase home, the security of your coins is cut in half.<p>Here is an article about the fact that elliptic curve signatures are not deterministic:<p>https://medium.com/@simonwarta/signature-determinism-for-blockchain-developers-dbd84865a93e<p>The way I understand it, the wallet can chose from a large number of possible signatures and thereby signal many bits to its creator. In every transaction.<p>I think a dicsussion about this should be started. The way I understand it, it makes it completely impossible to use Bitcoin in a trustless way. Even with an air gapped hardware wallet, you are always at the mercy of the wallet manufacturer and the delivery chain that gets the wallet to you. If it gets swapped out on the way to you, you are at the mercy of whoever swapped it out.
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: I've been working at this company for ~4 months, and I feel like an absolute outcast there. I work 3/5 days remotely, and I'm pretty happy when I work by myself—the job is fine. The problem comes with the two days I need to go to the office. I've anxiety the night before, and I feel depressed the day after.<p>My coworkers have a cliquey vibe, and I feel like the weird introvert who doesn't talk very much. I do talk with people I feel comfortable with, but with this team (I don't know why) I enter <i>quiet mode</i>, and I can't go out of there. It's weird because it's the first time at a job that I don't click with anybody. In previous experiences, I always have had 2 or 3 coworkers which whom I could get along with, make jokes, or share some kind of interest.<p>Here I don't have anybody to share a problem with. It makes me feel sad, and I'm falling into a depression. I know that we don't go to work to make friends, but I'm experiencing first-hand how difficult it is the lack of support at the workplace.<p>I thought that waiting some time would make things better, but they are going worse. I'm avoiding going to breakfast with them, to keep away from the weird silences, and I feel like I do them a favour (if I go with them I sit there without saying anything).<p>What should I do? I'm thinking of quitting, but I'm not sure if I'm being too drastic.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: At the start of this year, Colorado has changed to require every job posted to list a salary range. Other states are also beginning to follow suit.<p>I am currently job hunting. I started looking locally, everything lists salary ranges, perfect. I can know which positions to skip and which ones might be a good match right away. No need to waste time with 7 rounds of interviewing only to find out the salary is 50% of what I currently make.<p>Now I've begun widening my search to remote work, as the idea of commuting to an office in 2022 is completely insane to me.<p>Most jobs on nation-wide job boards do not post a salary range. I will not even click on those job postings. It's simply not worth it.<p>Further, after seeing so many positions listed _with_ salary ranges, when I see one without a salary range it makes me feel like you have something to hide and are trying to trick me.<p>So the next time your team starts discussing why you can't seem to hire, maybe ask if you are publicly posting salary ranges on these positions?
Upvote: | 1010 |
Title: I'm very interested in what types of interesting data structures are out there HN. Totally your preference.<p>I'll start: bloom filters. Lets you test if a value is definitely NOT in a list of pre-stored values (or POSSIBLY in a list - with adjustable probability that influences storage of the values.)<p>Good use-case: routing. Say you have a list of 1 million IPs that are black listed. A trivial algorithm would be to compare every element of the set with a given IP. The time complexity grows with the number of elements. Not so with a bloom filter! A bloom filter is one of the few data structures whose time complexity does not grow with the number of elements due to the 'keys' not needing to be stored ('search' and 'insert' is based on the number of hash functions.)<p>Bonus section: Golomb Coded Sets are similar to bloom filters but the storage space is much smaller. Worse performance though.
Upvote: | 2051 |
Title: This question pops up on HN occasionally, but I am posting it here again. These days, besides working as a data scientist, I am learning game theory and curious to know what you are learning besides your job.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I have a child with autism, who has developed a fascination with the bath and running the water. If we stop him he of course has a meltdown, so what I am looking for is a method for controlling the water easily from another point than the faucet. I guess a plumber can set me up something like that, but I also wanted to see if anyone had suggestions. Also was wondering if anyone had suggestions for setting up a recycled tub, that is to say the water can be set to run back after running out, so that it does not cost excessive amounts.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: I just started using a RSS reader and i am liking it. I would like to add diverse and good blogs to the list. Do you maintain a list of RSS links of the GOAT blogs? If you do can you please share?<p>I am mainly looking for blogs related to programming, tech, philosophy and finance.<p>This is my current list
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/rss" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/rss</a>
<a href="https://jvns.ca/atom.xml" rel="nofollow">https://jvns.ca/atom.xml</a>
<a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman" rel="nofollow">http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman</a>
<a href="https://www.joshwcomeau.com/rss.xml" rel="nofollow">https://www.joshwcomeau.com/rss.xml</a>
<a href="https://ciechanow.ski/atom.xml" rel="nofollow">https://ciechanow.ski/atom.xml</a><p>Thank you.
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: A few months ago, I released a small game called Fast Flood[0]. It's a mix of the Flood game and Wordle.<p>It did well on launch (>50k users played it in the first days) and has kept a group of ~300 loyal users that play the game every day, even though I didn't do anything to improve it for a long time[1]. These users spend an average of 6 minutes on the site and return every day or so.<p>The site has limited traffic today, but the users who visit are very engaged with the game, so I've started thinking about possible ways to get more people to play it. A week ago, I released an update that focused on fixing some existing bugs, a slight UI redesign, and, more importantly, tried to get people to share the game by adding a leaderboard[2]. Let me explain this last part.<p>Assuming that the game was engaging, my guess was that people shared games for three reasons:<p>1. Because the game dynamics require it (multiplayer-only games)<p>2. In-game or financial incentives (e.g., Play-to-earn, referrals programs, etc.)<p>3. Status (e.g., I feel good because I solved guessed today's Wordle quickly)<p>Given that doing 1 adds too much complexity, and I don't have the money for 2, I thought 3 could be a good option. I had two ideas. Either allow people to set up tournaments with friends where they could compete and compare results. Or a global leader board, where people could compete with everyone who played.<p>I chose the latter option and released these changes last week. It hasn't made much of a difference, making me wonder if my theory about why people share games is correct.<p>As a newcomer to game design, I hoped more experienced game developers/designers could provide insights about:<p>1. What makes users want to share games?<p>2. For daily puzzle games, have you seen any interesting approaches that make people more likely to share them?<p>Also, I have limited web dev experience. Please excuse me if my UI makes your eyes bleed :P<p>[0] <a href="https://fastflood.dylancastillo.co/" rel="nofollow">https://fastflood.dylancastillo.co/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/_dylancastillo/status/1510655616607522822" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/_dylancastillo/status/151065561660752282...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/_dylancastillo/status/1550135314521284610" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/_dylancastillo/status/155013531452128461...</a>
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: So long story short, I was in Bali just before COVID and decided to stick around...for 3 years. After freelancing as a designer/developer for nearly a decade I decided to look for a remote job - cuz why the fuck not everyone was hiring remote. I applied and got a job posted for 'hybrid' work - took 2 months to convince them I would do the work and come back in the summer (traditional finance company not used to remote ).<p>Over the past 3 months, I solo built an entire application from scratch that was presented to the Board 3 times which my boss says they're all ecstatic about. He mentioned the head of the project doesn't know I exist - thinks my boss made the entire thing. CEO, President, etc. all know about the project and are excited about 'my bosses project'. Basically the head of the project passed on sketches and screenshots of excel sheets which my boss would give me one sentence of what to build, no design. Usually, I don't give a fuck but it's different as a freelancer working directly with clients - definitely stings the ego thinking I was part of the company and having put in all the effort. Have I been freelancing so long I just forgot that's how office work hierarchy goes? Kinda makes me wanna say and go back to freelancing.<p>I'm moving back to NJ to be 'hybrid' beginning of August...Do I mention to the head of the project the first time I meet him that I built the entire app or just let my boss have his glory and mention I'm on the team that helped build it? Don't want bad blood with the boss as he's a nice guy and gives me freedom, but don't mind if I need to find another job as I'm not stoked on this company and I'm financially stable.<p>I guess more generally...do more people in remote companies also feel not being acknowledged for their work?
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: Hi.<p>I apologize in advance, but it looks like it's my turn for social media big tech support.<p>I had a situation where OVH abused a PayPal authorization to charge me 1200€ for a "private cloud" credit I never asked. OVH refuses to refund me changing the reason for it every time, but well, that's another topic.<p>I filed a PayPal dispute, I added exchanges with OVH as evidence, where they constantly insist on me having this "credit" still available for me to use, and my insisting on not wanting it for any purpose (the 12€ I added were enough for my test) and not having ordered it.<p>Finally, PayPal ruled in favor of OVH claiming that I "never provided documentation to prove this credit".<p>Not only I did (OVH messages), but nobody asked me for evidence at any point: I could have provided extra information/screenshots where it is shown. I am positive OVH was requested multiple times for documentation to support their claims, but that was never the case for me, not sure if that's normal.<p>Now I'm stuck with an absurd amount of credit on a cloud service I have no use for (and worse, it expires in a year), and apparently there's no UI option for me to contest this PayPal ruling. Phoning them I found no option to talk to a person.<p>Other than lawyering up and contacting consumer protection organisations, what else is there to do? Anyone at PayPal can give me a hint?<p>Thanks in advance.
Upvote: | 214 |
Title: This is inspired by [1].<p>Quite frankly, I don't know why filesystems <i>don't</i> provide these things.<p>I have read that Windows has a transactional API, but they've actually deprecated it! [2] They say it's because few programs use it.<p>I mean, sure, that might be true, but I bet it's <i>really</i> important for those programs that <i>do</i> use it.<p>Bonus question: why does Windows hide its equivalent of `openat()` in the NT API? [3] Rust code seems to claim its fundamental to the NT kernel [4], so why is it not exposed?<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32190032" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32190032</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/deprecation-of-txf" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/deprec...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winternl/nf-winternl-ntcreatefile" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winternl/...</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/1c63ec48b8cbf553d291a04957d86cfd191fcd78/library/std/src/sys/windows/fs.rs#L711-L715" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/1c63ec48b8cbf553d291a...</a>
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: This is my third ever GUI programming project -- I've only ever done any sort of programming in AutoIt as I'm entirely self-taught via their docs/tutorials. I've only just started learning about control flow and structuring of GUI apps really recently, so you might find that the data access patterns in my source code to be a mess as I wrote them before learning about those concepts.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Elixir, Nim, Crystal, Elm...<p>Currently I am a JS dev, and not enjoying it at all. I looked at Elixir and Crystal, like both. But I am open to learning anything that is unlike JS at this point. How is the job market like?
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: I'm curious how you go about developing a new feature.<p>This is specifically for solo devs.<p>As for me, sometimes I write down a brief overview, add some tasks to my todo list, and start coding right way.<p>Please share yours.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Google search used to be one of the wonders of the modern digital world, but (and I admit this is subjective) it feels like the quality of results has decreased drastically over the years. I just can't find stuff as easily as I used to. It still comes out on top for e.g. querying for technical information but for other things (image search) I don't even bother with it anymore. It also feels like certain kinds of queries are subject to malicious SEO practices where it becomes impossible to find results that aren't from the same group of tabloids/media outlets.<p>What happened? Did they let their golden goose starve to death? Or is this all in my head and Google is actually fine for everyone else?
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: What are some keywords (ie. "gnu", "word embeddings", "parenting", `${your_country}`) you track everyday and do you only use HN or HNAlgolia to watch them?<p>I found keyword tracking as useful as keeping a RSS list.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Suppose you have a diverse interest in CS, Philosophy, Physics. The purpose can be improving your knowledge in building systems etc.
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: When I was getting into web development I used a combination of Anki and git to help me quickly learn and retain skills. Figuring there might be demand for a product that uses the same strategy (without the requirement that you already know Anki and git), I created SkillPress.
No account is needed to start learning. I would greatly appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation.<p>I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So I did just that =).<p>I find hexagonal pipes a bit more difficult than the square variant because there's a larger variety of possible tile shapes. For an extra challenge I implemented wrap mode where the board can connect to itself (right to left and top to bottom), so there are no convenient outer walls to start from.<p>The site is made with Svelte Kit, its code is available on github at <<a href="https://github.com/gereleth/hexapipes" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gereleth/hexapipes</a>>.<p>Hope you enjoy playing =).
Upvote: | 537 |
Title: I couldn't help but notice that many young people don't want to spend months pulling their hair off to get a deeper understanding of what they do... they want to obtain value very quickly.<p>Paul Graham once tweeted that he was explaining to his son that he can't be Einstein and Messi, and his son said so I will be Messi. But no Messi if there is no Stadium, Stream, Cameras, etc...<p>The existence of a big number of people who can do complicated jobs is crucial for the modern world, and I think this whole thing will fall down if it continued with the current mode.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: As someone who is intellectually curious and has had great success finding articles on sites like Hacker News and blogs like kottke.org, I haven’t yet figured out where to find the most interesting content on YouTube. Let me know in the comments if you have found certain channels and creators to be particularly rewarding to follow, or if there are other ways you’ve found to consistently track down good content.
Upvote: | 759 |
Title: The demand for "natural light" in homes and offices is very high, and higher than the availability of actual daylight. And there seems to be a pretty feasible way to create a fake window (a light panel that mimics sunlight through a window), using LEDs and a fresnel lens. There's no shortage of videos around showing how to DIY such a thing, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDeEuzKXCH4<p>So, why can't I find many such products for sale? There are a couple of high-end companies like https://www.coelux.com/, but where's the mass market stuff? Is there an opportunity being overlooked here, or am I just missing something?
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: During my studies, I was surprised that even a variable swap might be optimized to work in place by using XOR. Since then, I got surprised at least a few times more. For example when I was working a lot with SQL and found some engine-specific optimizations.<p>What were the simplest, or the most clever neat tricks you faced in your career? I mean both things simple and elegant, but also some really dirty hacks it's hard to believe can work.
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: How is it?
What is your company’s business model and what is the sw/hw stack you use?
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: My wife (hotel management), our 6 month old son and myself (CS, software, hardware + business consulting) need to leave Berlin and Germany. Everything in Germany and especially Berlin eroded to a point, where we don’t want to stand it no more - meaningless to get into the details but quality of life, politics, social life, social net and tax situation just reached their 30 year low.<p>Our main goal is quality of life for all of us, so it should be a country w/o cold winters, possibly an island close to the equator. I’d appreciate, if I found a tech position, that allows us to buy / rent a quality house (which is close to impossible in Berlin even making 200k/year [due to neck breaking tax and cost of living]).<p>Getting along with English is a must. The same goes for the possibility of getting work visa. I also consider working remote for a EU / US company and just move to a nice place, but I’d love to hear your personal story, recommendations or ideas.
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I know - this is probably the thousandth time you have heard this complaint, but please hear me out.<p>I have been lurking and reading on HN since 2016 (I never actively commented til 2019), and the spirit of discussion was outstanding then (2016-2020). The amount of high quality posts and discussions about the technical and operational sides of technology and the tech industry was astounding! Yet, something seems to have changed with the culture on this site since 2020 - it feels as if the site has become a parody of itself, with “edgy” hot takes, cargo culting around supposedly conventional knowledge, and the insane amount of “stanning” of certain figures gossip and a handful of companies.<p>The increase in political content as well has been a massive change on this site as well, and as this is a discussion board it is fair game for everyone to have a say assuming civility. Yet this civility does not exist - discussions instead devolve into a passive aggressive form of brawling, with no actual insights coming out from other side.<p>Finally, as someone who is friends with a number of YC founders, there has been a recent trend among batchmates to start creating false traction/“demand Gen” for their products by astroturfing comments and submissions. And this is without explicitly saying it’s a marketing post.<p>Big picture, it almost appears as if HN has become what Reddit felt like in 2015-16, which pushed me to this site itself, and it is extremely depressing for me to see a discussion board that has helped propel my career start to lose it’s low noise to story ratio.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I'm a technical writer in his late 20's working remotely for a company based in New York. My background is in software development, but I took this job because at the time it was easier for me to find work as a technical writer than as a software engineer (and because I saw technical writing as close enough in spirit). I started the job this past fall.<p>In a nutshell, I'm dissatisfied with how my life is going. I can't galvanize myself to do anything. I'm on the clock right now, and here I am complaining about my life instead.<p>I don't give a damn about my employer, or the product it makes. I can't get interested in it. I can't get excited about the tedious parts of my work, and I can't even get excited about _automating and eliminating_ the tedious parts of my work.<p>And it's not just my day job. I'm ostensibly working on a game on the side, but I haven't touched it in months. I'm not even sure I want to continue it, as I've been working on it for years without being able to fulfill my goals for it. And this is coming from someone who got into computer science _because_ of video games.<p>Things that used to bring me joy...don't, any more. All I really look forward to these days is getting high and playing video games or watching Seinfeld reruns each weekend. And even that barely tickles my fancy these days! There's a game coming out this week that I <i>should</i> be excited for (because I love the series it's part of), yet I can't even galvanize myself to purchase it.<p>I can barely even open my IDE at work, as it greets me with dread where I once found joy and ambition.<p>Also, I have ADHD. This is probably relevant, but I haven't quite figured out how.<p>I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person here who's ever felt like this, so my question is this: *if you've ever been in this kind of rut, what was the nature of that rut and what did you do about it?*<p>Also, one thing I'd like to clarify: I'm not suicidal.
Upvote: | 185 |
Title: I'll give just one example. A few weeks ago I took my baby to the doctor for a routine exam, which includes weighing.<p>Scales are an ancient, pretty straightforward technology. If a skilled craftsman built a scale 300 years ago and it was well maintained over the centuries, I think its reasonable to expect it to still work adequately, and a minimally trained person would be able to operate it.<p>However, this electronic scale was so complicated and full of gadgetry (including bluetooth) that the hospital staff were unable to weigh my child and we had to go back home and reschedule.<p>I can think of a million other examples (Juicero...) but I'm more curious to hear of real-life examples like the one I shared.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Zipcar will charge your credit card for no reason and would rather have you dispute with the credit card company than refund you.<p>I encountered this and thought it was interesting. If my company had charged someone and found there was no trace of it in our system, I would be very concerned. But at Zipcar they seem to play it off as not a big deal. I wonder how much revenue they make from randomly charging people who don't notice.<p>https://imgur.com/a/ET3ckK9
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: PickCode is designed for use on desktop and tablet, and supports creating chatbots, visual designs, and 2D games. There is plenty of functionality missing - you can't add media to games for instance, but the current version shows off the foundation of what I'm aiming at.<p>I taught myself to code using MIT's App Inventor, so I have an enormous respect for block based languages like App Inventor, Scratch, Snap!, MakeCode, etc. PickCode is my attempt at adding options for students who want to learn more about programming without making the jump to text, or as an alternative to block coding for beginners coming to programming at an older age.<p>The visual language is meant to lower the barrier to entry to coding but the far more important aspect for me is giving students the ability to make things they're proud of as quickly as possible. A JS/Python API for controlling the chatbot and game engine are in the works.<p>As of now, there are sample programs to play with and an editor which saves your programs to local storage. Full user accounts, tutorials and administrator accounts for teachers to organize assignments are on their way soon. If you're interested in using PickCode in a classroom or want to discuss feedback, send me an email at [email protected]
Upvote: | 141 |
Title: My friend and I love the Notion UI, so we open-source a version we have been building.<p>- Block-based editor
- Drag to reorder blocks
- Basic Markdown-parsing including bold, italic, headings and divider
- Type '/' for command menu and shortcuts<p>Tiny fun detail: When you move between blocks with your arrow keys, your cursor will remain at roughly the same horizontal position (vs jumping to the start or end of a block).<p>Lotion is quite limited for now, and we would love any contributions (e.g. image blocks, video blocks, code blocks, etc.)
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: I just received an email from them with many stats about my writing over the last week. It's pretty scary to see how much tracking they are doing.
Do you trust Grammarly? Are there any good alternatives?
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: I applied for a SWE role with Gitlab. I received a standard rejection template post 48 hours. I wish if they have listed key reasons on why they rejected me. It could have helped me work on my weaknesses. I feel awful when rejections are void.
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I consider Web3/NFTs to be a scam and the only utility I see in cryptocurrency is the anonymous and decentralized transfer of value. However interestingly the coins that do this well like Monero are not seeing wide adoption.
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: Something that happened over a small span of time that totally changed the trajectory of your life?
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: Hi everyone,
I made Peerdiem (a portmanteau word between Peer and Per Diem, which means Per Day in latin).
The idea is very simple, a new painting or artwork to discover and discuss with your peers every day.<p>Content is currently only fetched from Chicago Art Institute Free API [1] but I'm planning to add more sources in the short future.<p>It was built with a couple of technologies I wanted to try for some time. Frontend is made with Preact and styled with Tailwindcss. Backend consists of an FastAPI app deployed in a Docker container.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.artic.edu/open-access/public-api" rel="nofollow">https://www.artic.edu/open-access/public-api</a>
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Hi HN! We're Aditya and Karan, the co-founders of Warrant (<a href="https://warrant.dev" rel="nofollow">https://warrant.dev</a>). Warrant provides APIs and infrastructure for authorization and access control.<p>Teams typically implement their earliest version of an access control system with a home-grown solution or an open source library. Many implement role-based access control, often with roles, attributes, and authorization logic hard coded and/or tightly coupled with their business logic.<p>As a product grows in usage and complexity, this is no longer enough. Teams find themselves constantly modifying their access control system as their product evolves, or building whole new systems to meet their ever-changing needs. Some teams move towards fine-grained, resource-based access control. Some require attribute based access control. Adjacent problems like multi-tenancy/data isolation, pricing tiers/entitlements, feature flagging, and audit logging come into the picture as well. The problems and the solutions are endless, and typically only large companies have the resources to build and maintain a system that does it all.<p>We’re software engineers who worked for years on access control systems at companies like Lyft, Yahoo, AppLovin, and Medallia. We often found ourselves spending time maintaining and iterating on these in-house systems to keep up with new product, infra, and security/compliance requirements.<p>Later, while building our own SaaS product, we had to implement access control yet again, and we realized three things: (1) Implementing access control is necessary but tangential to building core product features, so it should be standardized somehow. (2) Access control systems are difficult to maintain as a product evolves, and changing an authorization model or access rules often requires developer involvement. (3) While role based access control (RBAC) still has its place, modern applications require more powerful and customizable authorization models. For example, a data analytics product might want to express that “a specific user X can edit report Y” rather than “all admins can edit reports.” In the end, we built a service to manage and enforce access rules for our SaaS product. We quickly realized access control was a much more compelling problem to solve for engineering teams, and that service became the first version of Warrant.<p>Warrant is a fully managed access control service accessible via API/SDKs. As fans of Google’s approach to authorization and access control, we based Warrant on Google Zanzibar (<a href="https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/" rel="nofollow">https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/</a>). Users can define custom authorization models for their applications via flexible “object types” or use built-in models to quickly implement common authz scenarios like RBAC and Multitenancy. Our dashboard makes it easy for anyone from developers to product managers to manage an application’s authorization model and access rules.<p>We’re a centralized service, which raises two obvious issues: (1) the latency/reliability concerns of adding a network request to nearly all requests, and (2) the tedium/bloat of keeping data and access rules in sync via API/SDK calls. We’ve built solutions for both of these. Teams can start with our fully managed cloud offering—the simplest approach—and then move to these more specialized solutions as their needs evolve.<p>Teams with strict latency/availability requirements can run our Edge Agent (<a href="https://docs.warrant.dev/quickstart/edge-agent" rel="nofollow">https://docs.warrant.dev/quickstart/edge-agent</a>) on their own infrastructure to minimize the latency of access checks and improve reliability in the event that Warrant faces an outage. The Edge Agent services access checks from a local cache and connects to Warrant to receive updates in real-time.<p>Teams looking to avoid the overhead of integrating via API/SDKs can run our Sync Agent (<a href="https://docs.warrant.dev/concepts/sync" rel="nofollow">https://docs.warrant.dev/concepts/sync</a>) alongside their database to stream changes to their data directly to Warrant. With object types configured for syncing, Warrant Sync automatically keeps access rules up-to-date.<p>As developers, we’re focused on providing stellar developer experience, so we also created an easy way to perform client-side access checks: <a href="https://docs.warrant.dev/quickstart/creating-sessions" rel="nofollow">https://docs.warrant.dev/quickstart/creating-sessions</a>. Our client-side SDKs for React, Vuejs, and Nextjs provide components that make it easy to build dynamic UIs based on a user’s access rules.<p>We currently handle authorization in production for startups and indie developers alike. If you’d like to try us out, sign-up for an account at <a href="https://app.warrant.dev/signup" rel="nofollow">https://app.warrant.dev/signup</a> (free, no credit card required) to get an API key and refer to our docs at <a href="https://docs.warrant.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.warrant.dev/</a> to get started.<p>We appreciate your time and feedback HN! Let us know what you think in the comments!
Upvote: | 115 |
Title: I was searching for an issue on gitlab.com just now, and noticed I couldn't search any project's issue tracker without signing in: a banner says "You must sign in to search for specific terms." To reproduce, simply open <a href="https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/</a> in a private browsing session and try to search for any term.<p>I'm shocked by the user hostility. There's zero chance I'm going to move my open source projects to gitlab.com if users can't even search the issue tracker without creating a GitLab account and signing in. Truly baffling decision.<p>I was so shocked I dug deeper and tracked down the offending code and MRs that introduced them (appreciate the ability to do this, I'll give them that). This is controlled by a feature flag :disable_anonymous_search and manifests as <div class="js-issues-list" data-is-anonymous-search-disabled="true" ...> in rendered HTML. Relevant MRs from 10 months ago:<p>- <a href="https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/70223" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/70223</a><p>- <a href="https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/70249" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/70249</a><p>I don't see any justification given, but the former MR says "Related to #340716" which doesn't link to anywhere, and <a href="https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/340716" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/340716</a> is 404, so maybe something internal?<p>The feature flag also doesn't appear to be default-on for self-hosted instances.<p>Edit: Removed a potentially controversial aside since I don’t want to steer the conversation that way.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: From the post: "This was made with the help of a computer program [word2vec] that tries to express the meaning of any word by an adjective and a noun pair. Phrases like 'abstract astronomy' for 'space' and 'aquatic archipelagos' for 'islands' were generated by the program."
Upvote: | 133 |
Title: Background: I'm a sole founder of a startup with about 10 people.<p>I find it difficult to maintain an optimistic state-of-mind. I often slip into pessimism.<p>I have times where I feel very optimistic, I know I’m in the right mindset and ready to be productive, charismatic, effective etc.. Sometimes that can be in a social work situation, it could be while giving a talk, it could be while meeting someone new, or it could be feeling good about some new piece of work, and focussed to make progress with it. The feeling is optimistic, focussed, driven, confident and clear minded. Like I can dive into any tricky problem and solve it, or roll up my sleeves and get a certain piece of work done in a phenomenal way. That’s the best version of me, I’m happy in those moments, and I’d like to be like that at all times, from the moment I wake up.<p>However, I frequently am not in that state. I feel distracted, un-motivated, pessimistic. I ruminate, I feel stressed and frustrated with situations. Sometimes, I have a meeting coming up which I know it’s important to be optimistic and effective, to be in that state of mind. But sitting there, feeling pessimistic, it feels like it’d be impossible to switch to feeling optimistic. The meeting can go, and I end feeling unsatisfied with how I was - not warm, not projecting energy or focus, but actually un-focussed and potentially de-railing the conversation.<p>In other words, I spend most of my time in a pessimistic state of mind, and I can’t easily change that. Googling all of this, the most typical result is "burn out", which may be the case. I haven't taken a _really long_ break, but I have taken breaks, holidays, disconnected etc.. for up to 2 weeks. I feel refreshed, but quite quickly I'm back to the same place.<p>Advice for dealing with this?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hi all, I read a Bloomberg article today (<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-27/fed-raises-rates-by-75-basis-points-to-double-down-on-inflation?srnd=premium" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-27/fed-raise...</a>) stating the following:<p>"Powell also said the Fed will slow the pace of increases [to interest rates] at some point"<p>This is referencing a 3rd derivative (loan obligation = base, interest rate = 1st derivative, change in interest rate = 2nd derivative, pace of changes in interest rate = 3rd derivative).<p>I was wondering if hackernews had any other interesting examples of higher order derivatives that one might encounter in everyday life.
Upvote: | 231 |
Title: I'm currently in my mid 30s, and feel like I've forgetting how to do basic math. My day job is programming / web development, and I often feel like a fraud that I don't know (or remember) basic (and not so basic) math.<p>Does anyone have any recommendations on the best routes to go when re-learning math later in life? I'm a big fan of online courses—and am ideally looking for a platform that sets a solid foundation and progresses into more advanced math topics.<p>Maybe something like Khan Academy would be a good route to go? I want to look at all my options.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: After having failed with more than seven startups and finally achieved some success with my latest one Proxies API, here are a bunch of criteria I follow when picking a startup idea to bootstrap from the website<p>1. I am a bootstrapper, so I am interested in making recurring revenue and build an asset. So it has to be a SAAS idea. No consumer internet.<p>2. It has to have a competition. Again, I want to make money, not be a pioneer.<p>3. It need not be a multi-million dollar potential startup. I prefer it if it’s possible never exceeds a million dollars at its peak. It is because I don’t want to offer a platform, but a small subset of features that people find useful and the big guys find too small a market niche to address.<p>4. I prefer it if it does not need any design skills. With Proxies API, it is all about technology and how it works. I am in my element when I can run with just code and not have to pause for ‘prettifying stuff.’<p>5. I want a self-serve model. It is because I want to acquire customers by marketing rather than by sales. I have nothing against sales. I prefer this as I like to code, and I am a bit shy and introverted. I can write, in any case.<p>6. I want a field where I can write a lot about it. Just by looking at the area, I should be able to imagine what my first ten blog posts will be. If I can’t write, I can’t market. So I would slightly not touch it as I am not good at the rest of them.<p>7. The product should not be commoditized. It’s happening in almost any market after about five years. Social media tools are an example. They were selling at $100 pm a few years back now people are offering it free.<p>8. The technology should provide a moat against every amateur trying to start a company. That’s why there are a million to-do list apps. That’s practically the first thing they teach in any course.<p>9. I want to identify the primary keyword that drives traffic and search for that keyword on Google Trends. Google Trends should show the keyword gaining in popularity ideally, or at least it should be a flat line for the last five years. I will stay away from anything that is on its way out.
10. I want the users to get the AHA moment in one line or one image and not in multiple steps or after they “add 18 friends and two monkeys” rubbish. Just one look and the value prop is right there. With Proxies API, it was always this image and line. In essence, it immediately drove home this visceral power of using a single API call to solve an entire gamut of problem-related to scaling web crawling.
The author is the founder of Proxies API the rotating proxies service.
This article originally appeared here: https://www.proxiesapi.com/blog/My-Criteria-For-Picking-Startup-Ideas.php
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Hi HN, excited to share the project I have been working on for the past two years.
Marple was created by engineers for engineers. Marple helps them organize and analyze their sensor data in a more user-friendly way.<p>We’ve all been there: measurement data from an experiment or test needs to be analyzed but the only thing you have is a few data files flying around. You do not have a clue how to open or read the data. So what you do next is open your Python/Matlab/Jupyter Notebook/… and start coding in order to make some sense of the data. We didn’t like that process, so we started Marple to solve this issue.<p>Engineers tend to log data at frequencies from 1Hz to 10kHz and usually log hundreds of sensors at the same time. Data sets usually contain millions of data points. In order to make our web-based data visualization responsive, we had some technical challenges to tackle. We developed our own visualization engine based on PostgreSQL that is able to visualize millions of data points pretty much instantly. This allows us to create an interactive visualization environment which is perfect for data exploration, even for large data sets!<p>This is the second time we show Marple to HackerNews, but since then we made some big steps. We made a pivot to a cloud product and now offer a free version of Marple. Feel free to head over to our website and give it a go. Let us know what you think of it!
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>Roughly two years ago when the pandemic had people shifting to a WFH environment, I started a twice-weekly newsletter called Workspaces that gives readers a behind the scenes tour of their favorite entrepreneurs, designers, developers, etc. new desk setups.<p>Growth has remained consistent week to week, relying on the featured guests Twitter presence to help spread the word.<p>I have featured 175 workspaces to date (70+ more in the backlog) and have grown the newsletter to 7,000 subscribers while maintaining a >50% open rate.<p>I published the fist 117 editions of the newsletter without a sponsor. I had inbound requests but I was focused on growing the subscriber base as much as possible. With the new year, I shifted this focus slightly and began offering one sponsor slot per newsletter edition.<p>Since then, the newsletter has been sold out weekly and the price has risen from the initial $150 to $250, earning $2,000 per month from sponsorships.<p>I think it’s important to note that this was not an immediate cash cow… sending out 117 editions of a newsletter without receiving a dime can be draining. You have to truly enjoy the content you are putting out (I do!).<p>However, I think this shows that consistency rules and as long as you continue to show up, put out great content and iterate based on feedback you will continue to see your newsletter grow and ultimately the money will come.<p>Happy to answer any questions around newsletter growth, finding sponsors, etc!
Upvote: | 361 |
Title: We're building Parsnip to create a "tech tree" of cooking skills that allows anyone to level up on the building blocks of cooking knowledge while tracking their progress over time. It took us a few iterations to figure out the right product; here's the story of our latest pivot: [<a href="https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope" rel="nofollow">https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope</a>]<p>The goal is to create a personalized way to learn any recipe on the Internet, then use this as a springboard to help home cooks of all levels solve the problem of repeated meal planning in a 10x better way: [<a href="https://parsnip.substack.com/p/vision-part-one" rel="nofollow">https://parsnip.substack.com/p/vision-part-one</a>]<p>We believe that solving this problem at scale is good for people and for the planet [<a href="https://parsnip.substack.com/p/why-we-started-parsnip" rel="nofollow">https://parsnip.substack.com/p/why-we-started-parsnip</a>] and that now is the perfect time in history to do it: [<a href="https://parsnip.substack.com/p/why-now" rel="nofollow">https://parsnip.substack.com/p/why-now</a>].<p>Would love any suggestions, feedback, or advice; and happy to answer any questions!
Upvote: | 536 |
Title: our alerts just went crazy, and we're having issues even logging in to the AWS dashboard<p>possibly related: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32267154" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32267154</a>
Upvote: | 336 |
Title: Chunk co-founder here. We spent the last 2 weeks building this to scratch our own itch:<p>As developers, we often have problems that could be solved just by running a few lines of code.
Sometimes, running this code on your local machine is fine.
But other time, the code need to run automatically reacting to external events or to run continuously, which means, it needs to run on a server somewhere.<p>So now, you have to find a cloud provider, to package or build the code and finally to deploy it. All of that for what could be literally be 4 lines of code.<p>We couldn’t find an easier way to do this, so we built it.<p>Chunk is an all in one web editor (think of the codesandbox experience) that allows you to write, deploy and run a piece of code in the cloud from a variety of triggers: HTTP, WebHook, manual or scheduled (cron).<p>No setup, no build, no deploy. Chunk makes you go from idea to code running in the cloud in seconds.<p>Let me know what you guys think!
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: Hello HN! I'm building mvsqlite, a distributed variant of SQLite with MVCC transactions, that runs on FoundationDB. It is a drop-in replacement that just needs an `LD_PRELOAD` for existing applications using SQLite.<p>I made this because Blueboat (<a href="https://github.com/losfair/blueboat" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/losfair/blueboat</a>) needs a native SQL interface to persistent data. Apparently, just providing a transactional key-value store isn’t enough - it is more easy and efficient to build complex business logic on an SQL database, and it seems necessary to bring a self-hostable distributed SQL DB onto the platform. Since FoundationDB is Blueboat’s only stateful external dependency, I decided to build the SQL capabilities on top of it.<p>At its core, mvsqlite’s storage engine, mvstore, is a multi-version page store built on FoundationDB. It addresses the duration and size limits (5 secs, 10 MB) of FDB transactions, by handling multi-versioning itself. Pages are fully versioned, so they are always snapshot-readable in the future. An SQLite transaction fetches the read version during `BEGIN TRANSACTION`, and this version is used as the per-page range scan upper bound in future page read requests.<p>For writes, pages are first written to a content-addressed store keyed by the page's hash. At commit, hashes of each written page in the SQLite transaction is written to the page index in a single FDB transaction to preserve atomicity. With 8K pages and ~60B per key-value entry in the page index, each SQLite transaction can be as large as 1.3 GB (compared to FDB's native txn size limit of 10 MB).<p>mvsqlite is not yet "production-ready", since it hasn’t received enough testing, and I may still have a few changes to make to the on-disk format. But please ask here if you have any questions!
Upvote: | 150 |
Title: Hello HN!<p>I’m Jonathan from TensorDock. After 7 months in beta, we’re finally launching Core Cloud, our platform to deploy GPU virtual machines in as little as 45 seconds! <a href="https://www.tensordock.com/product-core" rel="nofollow">https://www.tensordock.com/product-core</a><p>Why?
Training machine learning workloads at large clouds can be extremely expensive. This left us wondering, “how did cloud ever become more expensive than on-prem?” I’ve seen too many ML startups buy their own hardware. Cheaper dedicated servers with NVIDIA GPUs are not too hard to find, but they lack the functionality and scalability of the big clouds.<p>We thought to ourselves, what if we built a platform that combines the functionality of the large clouds but made it priced somewhere between a dedicated server and the large clouds? That’s exactly what we’ve done.<p>Built to make engineers more productive. We have 3 machine learning images so you can start training ML models in 2 minutes, not 2 hours. We provide a REST API, so you can integrate directly your code with ours. And, there’s a community CLI you can use to manage your servers directly via command line<p>We provide a feature set only large clouds supersede. We have storage-only billing when the VM is stopped (for only $0.073/GB/month) so that you aren't paying for compute when you don't need it. We also provide the ability to edit virtual machines after they’re created to downsize costs. If you provision a NVIDIA A6000 and find out you’re only using 50% of it, stop the VM, modify it to a NVIDIA A5000, and you’ll be billed the lower hourly rate without needing to recreate your server and migrate data over! Our infrastructure is built on 3x-replicated NVMe-based network storage, 10 Gbps networking, and 3 locations (New York, Chicago, Las Vegas) with more coming soon!<p><pre><code> - CPU-only servers from $0.027/hour
- NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000s from $0.29/hour
- NVIDIA Tesla V100s from $0.52/hour
- and 8 other GPU types that let you truly right-size workloads so that you’re never paying for more than you actually need
</code></pre>
We're starting off with $1 in free credits! Yes, we sound cheap… but $1 is all you need to get started with us! That’s more than 3 hours of compute time on our cheapest configuration! Use code HACKERNEWS_1 on the billing page to redeem this free credit :)<p>TensorDock: <a href="https://www.tensordock.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tensordock.com/</a>
Product page: <a href="https://www.tensordock.com/product-core" rel="nofollow">https://www.tensordock.com/product-core</a>
API: <a href="https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/10732984/UVC3j7Kz" rel="nofollow">https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/10732984/UVC3j7Kz</a>
Community CLI: <a href="https://github.com/caguiclajmg/tensordock-cli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/caguiclajmg/tensordock-cli</a><p>Deploy a GPU: <a href="https://console.tensordock.com/deploy" rel="nofollow">https://console.tensordock.com/deploy</a><p>I'm here to answer your questions, so post them below! Or, email me directly at [email protected] :)
Upvote: | 147 |
Title: I never was much into notifications, and since it became possible, I have only ever allowed a selection of apps (IM, email, calendar) to send me notifications.<p>Since 2020 I disabled notifications completely on every device I own.<p>I'm not more focused, nor more productive, but, at least, they stopped popping up in the corner of the screen.<p>This included browser-based notifications, which not only are the most annoying kind, as they pop up virtually on every website, but I also have to regularly disable them on phones of friends and family, as they come and ask me to "remove the notifications virus"...<p>I can understand IM, email, calendar, even order tracking push notifications.
But do you really use ANY other notifications?<p>Do you use ANY notifications in places other than your phone?
Upvote: | 137 |
Title: So here we go, our rebranding is done. New logo, new domain, what could go wrong.<p>We provide a tool to convert design files between Figma, XD, Sketch, Figma, PDF and more and have recently rebranded it from "XD2Sketch" to "Magicul". We started out as a simple tool to allow users to import XD files in Sketch hence the name XD2Sketch but soon added more features. The name just didn't make sense anymore. Magicul initially seemed to be a great name, but turned out to be a bit of an interesting pick when translated to French.<p>We've sent out a newsletter to our customers to let them know about the changes and here's what one of our users replied:<p><i>Hey folks,<p>While I understand that you guys probably hope to operate primarily in English, I think it needs to be mentioned that your brand name "Magicul" in french, literally means "Magical ass"... but the real kicker is the .io of the domain, which literally means input & output...<p>So here goes the bad news... The entire french community is reading your brand name - literally - as: Magical ass (dot) in & out.<p>And then there's the logo itself... which is a hole with a hat.<p>Christ. You can't make this stuff up. This is ugh, umm, a brutally unfortunate brand?...lol<p>I'm in Quebec, Canada, where french is dominant and so I'm keenly aware of this - and so are my partners, colleagues and friends. We all had a good laugh.<p>Don't know what else to say...?<p>Bonne chance mes amis!<p>Have a good one,<p>- A fan of your work in Montreal.</i><p>You can checkout our website here: https://magicul.io<p>I just thought this was too hilarious to not share.
Upvote: | 153 |
Title: I built this tool that checks publicly available data against your phone number. I was surprised how one my numbers (which I text and sign up for services with) has a lot of information attached to it including my full name, all previous addresses, relatives, emails, and more.
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: I was just poking around on a Shopify store on my Firefox browser and saw Apple Pay button showed up, first thought it's a front-end bug on the website but tapped on it and the widget slid up and you can legibly make the purchase!<p>Tried on Chrome too and it worked there too!<p>Tried a few other website and can confirm it works everywhere Apple Pay is offered. is it a feature? bug?<p>Wanna try it yourself? you can check this Stripe test page
<a href="https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js/elements/payment-request-button?html-or-react=html" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js/elements/payment-request-b...</a><p>Haven't installed Beta 4 yet to see if it is still working.
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: My bank’s website has this maddening “security” feature which prevents me from copy/pasting things like account numbers and avoid fat finger errors.<p>I would love this block to go die in a server fire.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: What do you evaluate to decide for yourself whether, or not, a scientific paper or experiment is legit?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: There are thousands of courses teaching people programming - some of these have become big businesses (plural sight, educative etc). But most of these are aimed at beginners. Some intermediate at best.<p>Are there courses that take well architected, well written codebases and explain the design principles, coding principles etc of such codebases?
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: Hi HN!
Thanks for your attention to my post.<p>It was a big challenge to run most of Node.js packages in browser, fast moreover. Virtual File system, resolve import/export. I got cold many times, depressions, burned out, yet still alive and finished it.<p>Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of positive feedback.
There are 200,000 monthly unique users.<p>I work full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest - I am happy after many years of hard work.
Upvote: | 397 |
Title: Hi HN! I am Krishna Thota, founder of DevRaven. DevRaven is a monitoring platform for Developers.<p>DevRaven enables engineering teams or individual developers to setup active monitoring for their services/applications and get alerted when things don't work as expected<p>Today's launch makes available the following features:<p>API Monitoring - Monitor your HTTP end points and perform no-code or scripted assertions.<p>Synthetic Monitoring - Execute browser based end-to-end tests using Playwright framework. No setup required.<p>SSL Monitoring - Monitor SSL certificates for your end points and get alerted before they expire.<p>Web Page Monitoring - Run continuous Lighthouse audits on your web pages to ensure best performance, SEO.<p>Welcome any feedback, questions or suggestions.
Upvote: | 46 |
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