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Title: I work at a company that is not actively hiring, so imagine my surprise when I see 5+ job postings on my company's LinkedIn page.<p>It appears that LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings from other places on LinkedIn and other sites such as angel.co if the company name of the job posting matches your company name on LinkedIn.<p>After importing, the job postings will display your company logo, company description, profile pictures of your connections that already work there, etc, just like a real job posting. The "Apply" link redirects to the original job posting such as from angel.co.<p>The only reason I was able to tell these are not legitimate is because the descriptions of the posts clearly describe a different company.<p>So it seems to be a phishing opportunity is to create a profile on LinkedIn or angel.co with a company name that matches your target company. Write some job postings with descriptions that look like a job posting that the company would actually hire. And now those job postings will be reposted onto the official LinkedIn pages of the company, and applicants will be redirected to your phished webpage.
Upvote: | 378 |
Title: They say if you want to foster reading in your household then you should read a lot. Read fiction, non-fiction...always have a book in your hand.<p>Can you treat math the same way you approach reading? Reading can be seen as a casual hobby and activity, but math doesn't appear to have that same level of casual approach.<p>I have young children and would like to approach math the same way I do reading. How do you practice math at home to foster mathematics in children the same way you can with reading?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: The Machinery game engine seems terminated. From email:<p>Thanks so much for supporting The Machinery.<p>Unfortunately, we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer possible for us to continue in the current direction. Per Section 14 of the End User License Agreement, the development of The Machinery will cease, we will no longer offer GitHub access, all licenses are terminated as of 14 days after the date of this notice, and you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries. You will receive a full refund of your annual license payment through Gumroad.<p>We really appreciated you being a part of the Our Machinery Community. We hope we have been helpful in some way to your development needs.<p>-Our Machinery
Upvote: | 209 |
Title: I'm a pro bono attorney, and have been really interested in making the law easier to understand. I also see a ton of government resources online in varying degrees of usability. And for sure, there's no interoperability between them.<p>This is an international legal dictionary, an experiment in improving the situation: glossaries are scraped and parses from official sources: <a href="https://github.com/public-law/open-gov-crawlers" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/public-law/open-gov-crawlers</a>. The results are saved as datasets in well formed JSON with Dublin Core metadata: <a href="https://github.com/public-law/datasets" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/public-law/datasets</a><p>I add Library of Congress subject headings to the sources, to enable filtering (still to come).<p>The web app is basically an old-school mashup, which I've always liked.<p>Another experiment is using the Dale-Chall readability formula to improve the reader's experience. Here's an example of it at work:<p><a href="https://www.public.law/dictionary/entries/amicus-curiae" rel="nofollow">https://www.public.law/dictionary/entries/amicus-curiae</a><p>This is an experiment, using readability as a <i>relative</i> metric. I.e., not extracing an absolute grade-level score as its normaly used. Instead, using it to compare different definitions of the same phrase. My theory is, there's strong scientific validity for this use, even when applied to very short passages: All I simply want is to figure out, "Which is more readable? Passage A or B?" And then, my code sorts the definitions in order of readability to (theoretically) produce a newspaper-article-like effect: A reader can read the first couple of sentences to get an overview of the story.
Upvote: | 105 |
Title: So many blogs promote their newsletter, often before I even start reading their article. I run a content-based website, and many of my competitors push their newsletter.<p>What is the rationale behind it? I don't subscribe to a single newsletter myself, so I'm a bit puzzled about the benefits of running one.
Upvote: | 174 |
Title: If so, what did you replace it with?
Upvote: | 317 |
Title: Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA
when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is <i>not</i> an option,
include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn't a household name,
please explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about
something. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>,
<a href="https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don't miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32306917" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32306917</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32306919" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32306919</a>
Upvote: | 446 |
Title: Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:<p><pre><code> Location:
Remote:
Willing to relocate:
Technologies:
Résumé/CV:
Email:
</code></pre>
Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/" rel="nofollow">https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/</a> or <a href="https://hirehackernews.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hirehackernews.com/</a>.
Upvote: | 118 |
Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.<p>Bonsai (YC W16) (<a href="https://www.hellobonsai.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.hellobonsai.com</a>) offers freelance contracts, proposals, invoices, etc.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I’m Stefan, one of the founders of Polymath Robotics (<a href="https://www.polymathrobotics.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.polymathrobotics.com</a>) and formerly of Starsky Robotics (YC S16). My co-founder is Ilia Baranov, a career roboticist. We’re building general autonomy software for industrial vehicles.<p>We’ve just come out of stealth with a full autonomy stack freely available in sim online. Whether it’s a tractor on a farm or a 400t dump truck in a mine, we make it easy for you to make it driverless. Where before you would need an industrial vehicle, $25-150k in sensors + compute, and 6-18 months of building time, now you can start building applications that command autonomous robots right away.<p>See a demo here: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/852d54744d45452d926b9016f61f5e43" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/852d54744d45452d926b9016f61f5e43</a>.<p>Two big things are hard about automating industrial vehicles: first, robotics is deceptively hard. But also, industry is nitpicky. These two together are too much for most startups. That is, if you put all your energy into the first—the noble effort of getting the robots to actually work— the second will end up killing you. We learned this the hard way at Starsky, and what we’re currently working on at Polymath is a way out of this dilemma.<p>At Starsky, we were working on autonomous trucks. We knew that was a hard product to build, but I didn’t really have perspective until I went and hung out with SaaS companies afterward. My SaaS friends use horizontal services at every layer of the stack. Payments? Just plug in Stripe. Messaging? Twilio. Libraries and tools exist for everything. Your thing goes a lot faster when you can just buy the rest of the stack.<p>Contrast that with Starsky, where we were building our own robotics stack completely from scratch. That meant the autonomy itself (our actual product, and really complicated on its own), but also custom teleop, a drive-by-wire system, hardware abstraction layer, and fleet management system to orchestrate all the trucks via an API. Each of those things could be a company in itself! Imagine trying to debug a stack like that when something’s not working.<p>That’s sort of just how robotics is today. Like software in the 80s, everyone’s rebuilding the whole stack for each new project. So the tech gets super complex, brittle, and unadaptable. In fact, an open secret in the robotics world is that most demo videos you see are “cooked,” because the robots are so unreliable in the field.<p>I got to know many of the folks building industrial autonomy vehicles from 2016 onwards, and saw a depressing pattern. Brilliant, mission-driven engineers would get a start with a healthy seed round from investors who thought it was “just” an execution problem. After 18-30 months the teams would have a prototype that somewhat worked, but what they <i>wouldn’t</i> have yet was the commercial traction needed to justify more fundraising.<p>That brings us to the other half of the dilemma: industrial customers are nitpicky. When it comes to scaling an autonomous vehicle POC (proof of concept) with a large industrial company, they’re surprisingly unimpressed with autonomy. Sure - the first time they see a driverless vehicle their jaws drop and they ask about safety. But like everyone else, they quickly assume it “just works” and start asking whether it will integrate with their Oracle instance. Then they start nitpicking the specific way the tractor drives across the field / the luggage tow stops on the apron / the dump truck pulls up to the processor / etc etc.<p>In other words, after the initial POC, industrial autonomy stops being sexy-super-hard-technical and starts looking like Enterprise SaaS. Except by then the team has spent 2 years heads down making autonomy (the hard part!) actually work rather than talking to customers. As a result, they’re not up on the top 20 things customers care about and they don’t end up with product market fit. Few startups make it out of that pincer squeeze.<p>All this to say … what we’re building at Polymath is a shortcut to autonomy for industrial vehicles. We make it so you spend less time building / maintaining undifferentiated basics, and focus instead on the 5-10% of the application that’s hyper specific to your industry / vehicle / customer. Just like our friends in SaaS.<p>Since we’re <i>just</i> building the autonomy layer, we can focus on getting the tech reliable, stable, and scalable. Our users can build their own custom behaviors, or integrate with apps, or whatever it is that makes their robot actually useful, on top of the Polymath autonomy core.<p>The software can be installed on virtually any large outdoor vehicle, as long as it operates in a controlled environment. Focusing exclusively on closed environments is partially a cheat code. It lets us assume the vehicle can come to an immediate stop if there’s trouble, or be teleoperated by a human in dicey situations—all the constraints that mean we <i>don’t</i> have to be Waymo or Cruise.<p>Polymath autonomy includes localization, navigation, controls tuning, obstacle avoidance, and a safety layer. Importantly, we also built a hardware abstraction layer, which lets the whole thing work across different vehicles and sensors.
One thing we’re doing differently this time around is buying (rather than building) parts of our solution wherever possible. Again, part of that “make robotics more like software” thing. So we’re using Formant for teleop, Gazebo for sim, and for customers that need hardware installation, we have a partner called Sygnal that does awesome integration and retrofit work. (And, almost obviously, we’re built on top of ROS [Robot Operating System, the standard framework for building robots).<p>We also have our own demo vehicle, a tractor affectionately nicknamed ‘Farmonacci’, that we use to run unmanned testing daily. You can see a shiny demo video of it here: <a href="https://youtu.be/bP0mNG53bVw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/bP0mNG53bVw</a>
And now the part I’m most excited about… You can start building on top of Polymath autonomy today, for free, in sim, with a tool we built called Caladan (yes, the name is Dune-inspired).<p>Caladan is a set of simulated vehicles and environments where you can interact with Polymath’s autonomy via Rest API. That means you can build autonomous vehicle behaviors and applications in your preferred programming language, without having to touch ROS. So, even non-roboticists can build an autonomous vehicle application pretty easily. To my knowledge, we’re the first to build an autonomy product that’s this accessible, and especially something that you can use for free (it’s funny that roboticists, a group least interested in talking to sales people, is super forced to).<p>We built Caladan by bringing our autonomy code into a standardized Gazebo environment, with a Rest API that allows you to command it in any language (without needing to know anything about ROS).<p>The cool thing is, you can transfer the same code you write with Caladan to a real vehicle. We’ve tested it out with Farmonacci, and we’ll select people who are hacking on top of our simulated vehicles and give them testing time on Farmonacci as well. Part of the idea for Polymath is to take robotics off of ‘hard mode,’ and help teams build robots that are stable and reliable right from day one.<p>For now, it’s entirely free to use Caladan. Since each instance is a cloud-GPU, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask people to pay if they want consistent access (but there will always be a free version). We want to make our money automating your actual robots, and we’ll also charge if we have to do too much custom stuff for you in sim. But, of course, we have startup-friendly pricing if you talk to us.<p>So please, sign up for Caladan at polymathrobotics.com and mention that you came through HackerNews (we’ll prioritize spinning up your instance if you do). We can’t wait to see what you all build. We’ll be around in the thread and look forward to your comments, ideas, and feedback!
Upvote: | 172 |
Title: We're building an app that helps people manage their schedule, tasks and notes all in one place.<p>The goal is to create a workspace, where people can manage their various priorities, both personal and professional, see a single schedule combined of all their calendars and manage their days without switching between multiple apps.<p>At the moment we've implemented Google calendar synchronisation, basic tasks and notes. Also Emery has some things we really wanted to see in other apps – private notes for meetings, categories that can be used to group tasks/notes/meetings together, weekly productivity reports.<p>Happy to hear any feedback and answer any questions!
Upvote: | 261 |
Title: Heya HN! We've built a Raspberry PI CM4 based SSD NAS for home hosting. We built it as a part of KubeSail.com - which is a platform aimed at making self-hosting easy and at making the technical bits (tunneling, backups, updates, etc) as easy as possible.<p>You may have seen plans for this about 9 months ago on HN, but we're finally in full production! I'll be booking tickets to fly out and help assemble the 2nd batch in a few days - we're effectively a two person computer company, which is a lot of fun and a crazy amount of work. Our mission is to make home-hosting a website, an app, or just personal photos a reasonable alternative to SaaS products.
Upvote: | 277 |
Title: I'm searching for a commercial product that enables commenting on HTML elements on a product so it can be shared with an org. Think google comments connected to Inspect Element in chrome that can be shared with an organization.<p>I want to get away from creating tickets or sending emails highlighting UX concerns. This is cumbersome and not very transparent or collaborative.<p>Does a tool like this already exist?
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: How do you plan meals / food shopping?<p>I want to have a list of recipes which I rotate round every 4-6 weeks, which then creates a shopping list each week, minus any ingredients I still have in the fridge.<p>Does such a tool exist? All the meal planning apps are over complicated, focus on specific diets, and generally can’t seem to do this task.
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: I’m a sole developer building software integrations, and automations.<p>I find customer support very difficult: everything feels like a personal attack, and I can’t help but get defensive.<p>How do you, or your team, deal with the emotions of customer support?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Interviewed Erik van Eykelen of releasewise.com, a (then) 51-year-old programmer and founder who had some interesting things to say about growing older in tech.<p>"I'm 51 and I've been active in this industry since I was 14. I watched it grow from computers with 4k of memory to having a supercomputer in my pocket. I was learning in the age of Apple II and the Commodore PET. When I realized that I could create an explosion of data with just a few lines of code, I was hooked forever. It was such a magical thing. I found some other guys in my high school that were also into computers and we started meeting regularly on Fridays and Saturdays to... Well, to do some things that were, perhaps, not allowed. Since then, I've started three companies, and I don't think I could have found the same satisfaction in any other industry. I am mindful, these days, that I'm 51 because I know ageism is a thing in tech. There's a moment when you walk into a room and people think, 'Oh, he's a greybeard.' I don't have a beard, but you know what I mean. But when I start to talk about things and find solutions, that disappears. I can't change my age but I am in full control over what I do and what I read and how much time I carve out to write code. I can still see myself doing this when I'm 60, 70 years old. Even older. Because I want to keep doing meaningful things."
Upvote: | 395 |
Title: I have been using a 16 vcpu 32GB RAM 50Euro/month hetzner cloud instance as a remote development server for about 3 weeks now. Have not run anything else on the server, just a vscode server and my code.<p>This morning I received a notice that all my services with Hetzner have been locked with no explanation and no direction for contacting a human. Below is the full email I received.<p>What can I do?<p>---
Dear Mr ______<p>Unfortunately we have had to lock all services you have with us due to violations of our Terms and Conditions (https://www.hetzner.com/rechtliches/agb/) and/or System Policies (https://www.hetzner.com/rechtliches/system-policies/).<p>We will not be accepting any more orders from you, and your account will be cancelled to the next possible cancellation date, as per our Terms and Conditions.<p>This decision is final and cannot be appealed.<p>Kind regards<p>Your Hetzner Online Team
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: Hi HN, Michael and Warren here - cofounders of DeploySentinel (<a href="https://deploysentinel.com" rel="nofollow">https://deploysentinel.com</a>). We make end-to-end testing easier and more reliable.<p>At my last job, it dawned upon me how many production incidents and unhappy customers could have been avoided with more test automation - “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. However, it wasn’t clear that you can get prevention for just an ounce. Our teams ramped up on investment into testing, especially end-to-end tests (via spinning up a headless browser in CI and testing as an end user), but it quickly became clear that these were incredibly expensive to build and maintain, especially as test suite and application complexity grow. When we asked around other engineering teams from different companies, we consistently heard how time-intensive test maintenance was.<p>The worst part of end to end tests is when they fail occasionally in CI but never locally—a heisenbug in your test code, or what’s usually referred to as a flaky test. The conventional way to debug such an issue is to replay a video of your CI’s test browser, stepping between video frames to try to parse what could be happening under the hood. Otherwise, your CI is just a complete black box.<p>Anyone that finds this story familiar can probably attest to days spent trying to debug an issue like this, possibly losing some hair in the process, and “resolving” it in the end by just deleting the test and regaining their sanity. Some teams even try to put front-end monitoring tools for production into their CI process, only to realize they aren’t able to handle recording hundreds of test actions executed by a machine over just a few seconds.<p>After realizing how painful debugging these tests could be, we started putting together a debugger that can help developers pinpoint issues, more like how you debug issues locally. Teams have told us there’s a night and day difference between trying to debug test failures with just video, and having a tool that can finally tell them what’s happening in their CI browser, with the same information they’re used to having in their browser’s devtools.<p>We give you the ability to inspect DOM snapshots, network events, and console logs for any step taken in a Cypress test running in CI, to give more insight into why a particular test might be failing. It’s like Fullstory/LogRocket, but for CI failures instead of production bugs. (We’re starting with Cypress tests, with plans to extend further.)<p>Our tool integrates with Cypress via their plugin API, so we’re able to plug in and record tests in CI with just an NPM install and 2 lines of code. From there we’re able to hook into Cypress/Mocha events to capture everything happening within the test runner (ex. when a test is starting, when a command is fired, when an element is found, etc.) as well as open a debugger protocol port with the browser to listen for network and console events. While a test suite is running, the debugger is consistently collecting what’s happening during a test run, and uploads the information (minus user-configured censored events) after every test completes.<p>While this may sound similar to shoving a LogRocket/FullStory into your test suite, there’s actually quite a few differences. The most practical one is that those tools typically have a low rate limit that work well for human traffic interacting with web apps at human speeds, but break when dealing with parallelized test runner traffic interacting with web app at machine speeds. Other minor details revolve around us associating replays with test metadata as opposed to user metadata, having full access to all network requests/console messages emitted within a test at the browser level, and us indexing playback information based on test commands rather than timestamp (time is an unreliable concept in tests!).<p>Once a test fails, a Github PR comment is created and an engineer can immediately access our web app to start debugging their test failure. Alternatively, they can check our web dashboard as well. Instead of playing a video of the failure in slow motion to understand the issue, an engineer can step through the test command-by-command, inspect the DOM with their browser inspect element tool at any point, view what elements the test interacted with, if any console messages were emitted during the action, or take a look at every network request made along with HTTP error codes or browser network error messages.<p>Typically with this kind of information, engineers can quickly find out if they have a network-based race condition, a console warning emitted in their frontend, a server-side bug, or a test failure from an edge case triggered by randomly generated test data.<p>We dream of a world where applications have minimal bugs, happy customers, built with engineering teams that don’t see testing as an expensive chore! Although the first pain we’re addressing is tests that fail in CI, we’re working on a bunch of things beyond that, including the second biggest issue in testing: test runtime length.<p>We have a free trial available for you to try out with your own tests, along with a few live demos of what our debugger looks like on an example test. You can get started here: <a href="https://deploysentinel.com/" rel="nofollow">https://deploysentinel.com/</a><p>We’re looking forward to hearing everyone else’s experiences with end to end tests, and what you think of what we’re doing!
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: What creative uses have you found for the Raspberry Pi?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I have been getting very conscious of climate change and human impact on the earth and would like to more actively contribute. I am quite a good senior programmer working in finance. Im having enough of devoting my life to things that seems so meaningless in comparaison with the real problems of humanity. Yet i see little I can do. Any one of you made the switch? Where did you find the job. Was it remote? Is it really making an impact?
Upvote: | 298 |
Title: I've had a rough day yesterday. I'm a web dev, but read that as in "I learnt HTML in the 90s and worked on small projects maintaining websites". Hence the username. On my current job I'm working with a proprietary software, which uses VanillaJS to modify XML/JSON files to make the data useable for our company. I'm not the dumbest person on the planet, or so I believe, I understand what coding is, I understand the fundamentals.<p>Yesterday I spent 4 hours regexing out HTML data from not so well maintained data sources and screamed at my computer, because I was not able to find patterns. I know, please don't ask. This is not high level programming. We're talking .replace and .match, with the occaisonal if/else over hundreds of sets. My colleague calmed me down and took the time to help me. Bless him. This colleague has multiple projects within the company, because, to me, he is a modern web dev: Building scrapers from scratch with Node, uses multiple frameworks, you get the jist.<p>My path in this company should have been: Learning the code he writes, so I can help him maintaining the software and be on standby, if something breaks. This won't be happening in the forseeable future.<p>My problem: I do not understand his code. Or anyone elses. While I basically use if/else, he uses ternary operators. I write functions by hand, the uses arrow functions and symbols I can hardly understand. Multiple generations of Javascript foundation changes and yearly new crazes are lying between us. We do not have the time to code review his projects. Also, he should not be my teacher. But: I want to be able to help him and not be a burden.<p>I tried $learnToCode websites, YouTube tutorials, bought "Master Classes" from the usual suspects. But I'm literally drowning in the market of javascript. There is no clean line learning "This is the 2000s" to "Welcome to the year 2022" javascript.<p>For example, I do not get Typescript; I do not understand, how big projects can use Node, with it's thousands of dependencies, while nobody cares, that 20 to 100 of them are deprecated, or in short: I do not understand, how this whole eco system works. But I want to. Do you have any suggestions on how to unclutter this mess, which absolutely overwhelms me?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Seems like the quality of youtube suggestions & shorts have been spammed by bots & other people hacking the system. Why is Google not doing anything about this?
Upvote: | 208 |
Title: We are Jason and Alex and are very excited to be launching Adadot <a href="https://adadot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://adadot.com/</a> in this community. We have spent 15+ years in remote tech teams in unicorns, start-ups and scaleups.<p>Developers are increasingly under pressure to be more productive and ship faster. However, its difficult to improve what you cannot see or measure.<p>My role (Alex) was in operations and I was collaborating with Sales, Finance and other teams. All these teams had systems like Salesforce and SAP that helped them quantify what “good looks like”.<p>Meanwhile engineering (Jason’s background), was flying blind and spending up to two hours a day patching data together for their sprint meetings.<p>Some of the challenges that we faced in trying to solve this for ourselves were that:<p>Most of the data a developer can use for insight is fragmented and spread across multiple tools like Gitlab / Github / Jira / Slack / Calendar
Most of the insight is organised around tasks / projects. While this type of information is helpful to an extent, at the end of the day were people managing people
Typical developer metrics were one-dimensional. Developers who were great collaborators always seemed to score lower on classic productivity metrics but they add true value<p>Our goal is to help developers improve the way they work, collaborate, and feel through data.<p>Software in this space has traditionally focused on monitoring developers and their performance for the benefit of their manager. We took a different approach.<p>Adadot is developer-centric meaning that we focus on empowering each developer to improve their own working patterns with data that only admins in their company would have been previously able to access. Team managers can see aggregated data only. Any individual developer can sign up and use Adadot without having to be part of a team licence.<p>More importantly, the work of a developer is not just code and its our core belief that the current definitions around productivity are limited. Burnout is a very real problem. Great collaborators and people who lift their teams up are underserved by code-focused engineering productivity tools.<p>Right as we started building Adadot Github's SPACE <a href="https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3454124" rel="nofollow">https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3454124</a> productivity came about scientifically validating our thinking!<p>Finally, we figured that no developer on the planet wants to manually enter data. So we found a way to collect and process data automatically through integrations.<p>For now the output is dashboards and benchmarks centered around three core data themes:<p>Work: Classic data-driven engineering metrics, like deployment speed and failure rate. Identify blockers in real time<p>Collaboration: Understanding if the work is happening in silos, if the team are helping each other (eg. with code reviews, participating in Support channel) and if messages and meetings are becoming a distraction<p>Wellbeing: Helping you to uncover unhealthy working patterns and protect yourself and your team from burnout. Is there enough Focus time for deep code work and when? Surfacing upskilling and new languages that are being used<p>What this is not: A monitoring tool that will tell you (or your manager) who in your team has been lazy.<p>Results:
We are seeing teams improve velocity by up to 50% within the first 30 days. 70% also maintain the rate of improvement for at least 3 months meaning that they are able to increase their productivity sustainably.<p>Individual developers are using it to improve their collaboration visibility and gain promotions to managerial positions.<p>Check out:<p>Our demo: <a href="https://share.vidyard.com/watch/XEctQFzdQpMgpnjY4giFNV" rel="nofollow">https://share.vidyard.com/watch/XEctQFzdQpMgpnjY4giFNV</a><p>Public Roadmap: <a href="https://adadot.prodcamp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://adadot.prodcamp.com/</a><p>Knowledge base: <a href="https://adadothelp.document360.io/" rel="nofollow">https://adadothelp.document360.io/</a><p>Our Ask:
If you are a developer - we would love for you to try Adadot and give us your feedback. We have a free plan and also offer free trials at <a href="https://adadot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://adadot.com/</a>
Upvote: | 325 |
Title: Who do you talk to when you have architectural questions? Where do you get feedback on design options? When you want to discuss tradeoffs of those options who do you talk that over with?<p>I am one of two technical cofounders for a small software company. We have really good discussions about the design of our product. I am pretty good at searching. We are comfortable weighing alternatives and making a decision and living with the consequences. All that said, sometimes I want to discuss with other people some of the design challenges we face, or seek input on how people have approached the problem.<p>Are there fora that you enjoy for such discussion? It seems that it does not fit with the theme of most Q&A sites. Most IRC channels I know of are pretty focused on their own specific topic.
Upvote: | 177 |
Title: Been working in my startup for the last 7 years. It has no failed and I am turning 37 soon. I am interview now but my identity has been shattered. I don’t know how to build myself back up. Everyone tells me it’s not too late to start again but I am no longer young. I feel so miserable.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Hi Hacker News! We’re Dan, Jan, and Brent from iollo (<a href="https://www.iollo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.iollo.com/</a>). We’re developing an at-home metabolomics test that measures hundreds of “metabolites” in blood, which studies have shown can inform about health status, disease risk, dietary patterns, and physical activity. We will then provide evidence-based dietary, behavioral, and therapeutic treatments to help extend the number of years you’re disease-free (your “healthspan”).<p>Today’s healthcare system is reactive, meaning diseases are treated only after symptoms are present. By the time they are detected, they’re often already serious issues that require irreversible interventions, like taking lifelong medications and living with their side effects. Collectively, we end up spending trillions of dollars treating diseases reactively that can often be prevented with good health monitoring and management. Also, a lot of age-related diseases develop as a result of molecular imbalances that accumulate over years.<p>One scientific field where many of these molecules can be measured is called metabolomics. Having worked in this field for more than a decade, we know that the technology exists to detect potential signs of chronic conditions at the earliest stages, when they are most actionable. Dan has a PhD and did his postdoctoral research at Stanford in computational biology and metabolomics. His work covers healthspan extension, lifespan extension and machine learning-based tools for drug repurposing. Jan, who was Dan’s PhD thesis supervisor, is a professor of computational biomedicine and metabolomics at Cornell. He has published over 90 metabolomics-related papers, with a focus on age-related chronic diseases, such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease. Brent was the co-founder of Circle Medical, a primary care provider via video and in-person.<p>The “metabolome” is defined as the complete set of small molecules found in biological organisms with a size of <1,500 Dalton, also known as metabolites [1][2]. This comprises biochemical substances such as amino acids, nucleic acids, fatty acids, vitamins, and hormones, as well as external chemicals like drugs, environmental contaminants, food additives, toxins [3][4] and metabolites produced by the gut microbiome. As of 2022, over 200,000 metabolites have been identified in nature, 40,000 of which are in blood, and over 1,500,000 are expected to still be identified (what we call the dark metabolome) [5].<p>The same way that fasting glucose has a baseline, other metabolites in blood, like the ~600 that we measure, also have their own baseline and deviations from these baselines have implications for your overall health and aging [6]. Compared to genetic testing, which tells people what might happen to their health, metabolomics tells us exactly what is happening in a body right now. Recent studies have shown links between blood metabolites and the risk or presence of various systemic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease; see for example [7].<p>Here are a few examples of what the first generation of iollo reports will include:<p>(1) The food a person eats and what actually ends up in their blood are not always the same thing. This is related to the concept of “bioavailability”, which differs from person to person. For example, people with impaired sugar transporters in the gut will not experience the same spike of blood sugar as people with a normal receptor (side note: this is not always a good thing, since sugars that remain in the gut lead to IBD-like problems). Our technology measures various markers of food intake, for example of red meat and plant-based diets, that can show what actually ended up in your blood. This can help guide dietary recommendations and healthy lifestyles.<p>(2) Your personal rate of aging. Research has shown that there is a “biological age”, which might differ from a person’s actual, chronological age. People who are biologically older than their real age tend to develop more health-related issues and age-related problems compared to people who are biologically young. Our platform will provide the users with estimates of their biological age, as well as their personal rate of aging across repeated time points and potential recommendations to slow down this rate.<p>(3) Our technology measures so-called “polyamines”, a group of molecules that regular lab tests do not capture today. Polyamines have been shown to improve the immune system in aging individuals, and appear to have protective properties against various diseases. Moreover, recent studies have demonstrated that a long-term, polyamine-rich diet can increase blood levels of these molecules. Hence, polyamines provide an interesting angle of dietary interventions, and the success of this intervention can be monitored with our technology.<p>(4) We also find some interesting, unexpected metabolites in certain people. For example in one of our pilot studies, one of our participants had a high level of phthalic acid, which can be found in plastics and cosmetics and is a chemical known to disrupt hormones in the body.<p>The next generation of our technology is expected to provide additional information about mental health markers, metabolic disorders, inflammation and allergies, and many more.<p>How it works: We send you a blood collection device, the same one we use at Stanford for research studies. After an overnight fasting period, you stick this device to your arm and press a button. A vacuum forms and a lancet (virtually!) painlessly pricks the surface of the skin to collect a small amount (~80uL) of blood over a couple of minutes. The faint feeling is similar to when you attach the new generation of glucose monitors, if you’ve ever used one. The device contains a sponge designed to stabilize the biochemical molecules in blood at room temperature. You package the device with a prepaid return label, and it gets express-shipped directly to the metabolomics lab.<p>As soon as we receive your sample, we store it at -80°C. Samples are defrosted, centrifuged to collect the desired blood extracts, and the extract is then dried under liquid nitrogen. These blood extracts that contain metabolites are then subjected to two different mass-spectrometry analysis step: first through an ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass-spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS), and second through a flow injection analysis tandem mass-spectrometry (FIA-MS/MS) on the same instrument to specifically extract lipids. The measured mass-spectra from the machines are then analyzed using specialized software to obtain quantification values of all metabolites.<p>Here is a short video of our lab process: <a href="https://youtu.be/Jm3mCfHJjX8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Jm3mCfHJjX8</a><p>The resulting data is then securely sent over to us (we’re HIPAA compliant), and we perform statistical analysis and machine learning to generate an individualized report. Depending on the number of tests you do, the same procedure is repeated after a few weeks or months. This allows the user to build their own, individualized longitudinal metabolic monitoring.<p>We will associate metabolite profiles with wearables data, diet, supplement and medication intake, and potentially health conditions based on current research, and provide recommendations based on these.<p>This process also shows the difference between us and the infamous Theranos (a common question we get!) Instead of building our own machines that might end up not working, we rely on decades of research in the mass-spectrometry field and work with established metabolomics labs to ensure the quality of our measurements. Moreover, every bit of information that we communicate to the users will be heavily backed by scientific evidence which we disclose in the delivered reports.<p>One of the more exciting things we'll be able to do as our metabolomics database grows is to look for new signatures of age-related diseases at earlier and earlier stages. (Such analysis will only be done on de-identified data, only with consent, and only for our work towards extending healthspan.) One example of this is being able to detect early signatures of type 2 diabetes with metabolomics data, up to 12 years in advance, even when someone has a normal fasting glucose [8][9]! Once we’re able to detect these early disease signatures, it is much easier to find interventions to treat them and extend healthy lifespan, especially if they are still very early in development.<p>We are currently running an internal pilot and taking preorders: <a href="https://www.iollo.com/plans" rel="nofollow">https://www.iollo.com/plans</a>. We will be offering a beta version to users who’ve signed up in the coming months. Tests can be pre-ordered at $50, but we won’t charge the full subscription, which is around $212-$276 per test, until your first kit is shipped to you. If you decide to pre-order, we’ll additionally provide you with your entire metabolomics data so that you can run your own association experiments. Just type in the code HNLAUNCH with your pre-order so that we can send you your data. Right now we only ship in the US.<p>We believe we have a real chance to change the standard of care in health while developing more understanding of human health, physiology, and aging. We hope to expand metabolomics test access to users and patients, and give providers a new way to help treat age-related diseases. We really look forward to your questions and comments and feedback!<p>Thanks everyone! - Dan, Jan, and Brent.
Upvote: | 167 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re MutableAI (YC W22) (<a href="https://mutable.ai" rel="nofollow">https://mutable.ai</a>). Our mission is to reduce the time and cost to create high quality code using AI. We have worked at the full gamut of companies ranging from startups to big tech and have gotten the sense that many of the rote aspects of software development could be made easier, freeing up precious mental energy.<p>Devs love Copilot, but autocomplete is just one of many ways that AI should make programming easier. We’re taking a more comprehensive approach to developer tooling that bundles Copilot-like autocomplete with documentation, custom AI instruction, and some early refactoring capabilities (Python only) in one extension. We currently support Javascript/Typescript, Python, Go, and Rust, with more coming soon. Overview (w/ bg music) [1].<p>In addition to autocomplete, which can be triggered either automatically or manually, we can add documentation to all your methods in a Rust file, or you can ask the AI to insert missing imports in a Python file. In some cases we can get really sophisticated and ask it to program a game from scratch or update your REST interface to accommodate a new data payload.<p>We use a combination of AI (e.g. OpenAI codex) and AST transformation / metaprogramming techniques on the backend. We are also working on providing other backend solutions for varying needs, including on-prem deployments.<p>We soft launched our product with a small cohort of users and want to welcome more of you to our pilot beta. We hope you enjoy the product and look forward to learning from you.<p>We are currently in an extended free trial phase for early adopters and plan to keep a free tier for solo devs and open source contributors. We also offer a generous discount to startups. For enterprise please reach out to [email protected]<p>We want to thank our very earliest users and invite the HN community to try the product installing it via the VS Code marketplace [2]. We're looking forward to hearing your comments and feedback, or feature suggestions!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-gKEbgyzCg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-gKEbgyzCg</a><p>[2] <a href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mutable-ai.mutable-ai" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mutable-...</a>
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: I'm in the Bay Area. We don't order using apps often, but when we do we find that so much of the selection consists of mediocre looking Chinese, Indian, pizza and Mexican.<p>Using the current Android mobile app, you can't actually drill into and read reviews which makes assessing the actual quality of the restaurant difficult.<p>And I've found that restaurants will run their own "ghost kitchen" shadow restaurant out of their main (poorly rated) location. This delivery specific restaurant has good reviews on DD, but when you Google that restaurant name nothing comes up aside from listings on the app. And then the food arrives and it's terrible and you match up the physical address and realize it's a poorly rated Indian restaurant by a different name.<p>Or, you order from one of these weird ghost kitchen brands and the actual restaurant doesn't actually get your order (despite the app telling you they confirmed it) and your second driver finally tells you to cancel the order.<p>Is it asking too much to have a service that's transparent, functions well and have the end product taste good?
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: Like many people I've learned a number of skillsets throughout my life but only a few have given me so much value that I wish I started earlier.<p>Specifically, it took me about a year of daily meditation practice before I started seeing significant results (more energy, focus, patience, willpower, less stress/anxiety, etc).<p>Another one is learning to bike safely in a dense urban environment. It's something I do multiple times a week that brings joy, exercise and fresh air (yes my per mile risk of an accident is higher than other modes of transportation but I'm also balancing that with better fitness).<p>Are there others that I should be learning?
Upvote: | 99 |
Title: I use full disk encryption with LUKS to encrypt data at rest in Linux systems. Lately, ZFS has offered native encryption in Linux. I am thinking if new Linux systems should be encrypted with file system encryption (such as ZFS native encryption or ext4 with fscrypt) instead of full disk encryption (mostly LUKS).<p>I know some of the differences. For example, ZFS leaks some metadata, mostly dataset and snapshots names (which are useless in my case). LUKS encrypts everything, has a better KDF and multiple key slots, and is mature at this point. ZFS uses AES-GCM which is more complex but stronger than AES XTS.<p>Are there other reasons to use one versus the other? What do you choose?<p>Openzfs encryption is still rather new and I worry there might be bugs or pitfalls breaking confidentiality, or cause pool corruption.<p>Any feedback on the implementation quality of ZFS native encryption?
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Is there a HN post that made you money?
What HN posts do you suggest to help people make money?
Upvote: | 317 |
Title: I'd like to 'do my own thing' yet don't know how. I'd like the 'thing' to be entrepreneurial along the lines of: this was hard to do before and now it's easy vs this is brand new/revolutionary.<p>What's the best way to meet someone who has a problem that needs to be solved? Alternately how do you meet someone with a complimentary skill set that has similar goals? Any intermediate steps I should consider?
Upvote: | 115 |
Title: Hey everybody, it’s Sarup and Paul, founders of CodeCrafters (<a href="https://codecrafters.io" rel="nofollow">https://codecrafters.io</a>). We make interactive courses for software engineers, where you get to recreate popular developer tools from scratch. Build your own Redis, Git, Docker, and SQLite—in Go, Python, Rust, etc.<p>For example, if you did our Git course, you’d learn how Git internally stores file data by building an implementation of Git that can clone a GitHub repo. If you did our SQLite course, you’d end up with a SQLite implementation that can read a valid SQLite database file, and retrieve data by performing an index / full-table scan on it. The projects you’ll build are always end to end compatible with the official spec. Given the same input, your program would behave the same way the official one would.<p>We’re different in the developer education segment in 3 main ways:<p>First, we cater to people with programming experience. There are tons of introductory “learn to code” resources out there, but surprisingly little once you get past the basics. Good programmers want to get better and to develop in areas where they’re not strong yet, and that’s what we help with.<p>Second, the coursework involves writing actual code instead of consuming videos. You handle concurrency, develop statecharts, traverse B-trees, etc. While we test against a fixed spec, you’re welcome to try different approaches. E.g in our Redis course, you could implement handling concurrent clients either using threads, or using an event loop.<p>Third, instead of coding in the browser, you build these projects in your local dev environment. We create repositories for you to work out of, and you git push to run tests. The actual code can be written in your editor of choice (VSCode, JetBrains, Emacs, etc).<p>This last point in particular—our git-based workflow—is something customers repeatedly tell us they enjoy. We run our own git servers, and have server-side post commit hooks configured to run tests on every push. These post-commit hooks also send back logs to users, with colors to indicate pass/fail, errors, etc. Our feedback cycle for popular languages like Go, Python, JS often takes ~2.5sec (including pushing code, running tests, and streaming back results), faster than even regular GitHub pushes. We do this by executing code within firecracker VMs and caching aggressively wherever possible.<p>As open source contributors, we’ve always been interested in the internals of software we use day-to-day. When Paul became an Engineering Manager for a team of 12, he decided to conduct in-person “Build your own Redis” workshops as a way to engage his team and help build skills. He had a mini-curriculum, a physical leaderboard for scorekeeping, and a Slack channel for discussing solutions. Participants loved it and wanted more. With CodeCrafters, we’ve essentially built an expanded version of that workshop experience on a website—for engineers and teams that want to challenge themselves, dive deeper, and grow.<p>We’ve learned how much hunger there is for a skill-building path that’s structured, fun, and focused on cool, well-known projects with serious technical dimensions. Jumping straight into the deep end as an open-source contributor has always been an option, but it’s daunting, if not intimidating. It can take a long time to get oriented in a major codebase, and mentorship isn’t always available. There’s a need for an intermediate approach with lessons that build technical expertise, and that’s what we’re supplying.<p>So far, we’ve seen developers and teams use CodeCrafters to learn the internals of complex software, master programming languages, onboard devs in a new language, and even as a continuous team-bonding activity.<p>If you’re a developer, we’d love for you to try CodeCrafters. Most customers expense the subscription through their learning / professional development budgets. If you need help convincing your manager, feel free to email me — [email protected].<p>Paul and I are excited to continue helping software engineers become the best technical version of themselves. We'd love to hear your ideas, experiences, and suggestions. What new courses should we add? What other formats of learning have you found to be effective?
Upvote: | 403 |
Title: Im looking for a resources (ideally books) that can help juniors, devs and even seniors to improve their technical writing. To help them write better issue descriptions, announcements, documentations, user manuals and so on. How to communicate (in a written form) technical stuff to technical and non-technical people.
Upvote: | 161 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'm a full time game developer nine months into creating my city builder game. It's a lonely journey so I put together a very small group of other solo game developers.<p>We meet up every week (currently Tuesday nights, EST) to relate to the struggle, hang out, and rotate one person who presents for the night (they can teach or talk about anything game dev related, including their game). It's been a success and motivating for all involved.<p>I'm looking to add 1-2 people to the group who can commit to (preferably) weekly or bi-weekly meetups. I have a strong preference for other full time developers. Must be serious about finishing/releasing your game.<p>About the group:<p>We are late 20s - 30s and serious about releasing our respective games. We are pretty open and honest with each other, and will question each other/provide feedback freely.<p>Email is in profile
Upvote: | 173 |
Title: Amazon shopping is becoming increasingly pointless as one or more of the following are true:<p>- There are multiple products, sometimes dozens, which are actually the same product in the same or different colors, and often with a variety of nonsense manufactorer names. So there is the appearance of choice while actually the non-same items are difficult to find (needle in haystack)<p>- Products tend to be very low quality. If you take time to read the reviews, it's obvious that many of the high reviews are stuffed. The low score reviews usually tell the same story: a critical part breaks on first use, or a critical flaw renders the item completely unsuitable for the task it is intended for.<p>- Counterfeits... I don't even need to get into this, as it's a very well-known problem.<p>Unfortunately, the Walmart effect applies here too, because the low prices attract most shoppers, and the small players (and brick and mortar stores) can't compete and go out of business. If they try to compete, they typically just find the same garbage manufacturers who are selling on Amazon. It's a race to the bottom.<p>As consumers, we end up with items that are either useless on arrival (and not even worth returning), or they are far less than we would have hoped or wished for or been willing to pay for.<p>The great irony is, with the ability to import items from around the globe, and the significant number of online stores, it can still be impossible to find even a decent simple item (such as an extended reach car wash brush).<p>Even if you search more broadly than directly on Amazon, you see the same few items across most online retailers. And when you read reviews of the items on each retailer website, you see the same low score complaints... sometimes in such detail that you can be certain that it was the exact same product.<p>I see no solution to this. There is one country where most of this garbage comes from, but any special measures to penalize their exports will just result in shifting the manufacturing to another don't-care country which will pick up the slack.<p>Imagine the total cost of this situation, from materials consumption to trash piles (which is a short process for many of these products). It's an obscene waste.<p>/rant
Upvote: | 197 |
Title: Hey HN, I’m Brad, one of the creators of Superblocks and a YC alum, excited to share our internal tooling IDE.<p>As developers ourselves, we faced the problem of building tons of internal admin UIs, backends to connect siloed data, reporting jobs, and data pipelines. For UIs we would build one-off React components. For integrations, we would have to decipher vendor docs and implement auth. Finally, for reporting jobs we had to handle failures and observability – many hours of repetitive engineering effort.<p>So we built Superblocks, an internal tooling IDE to connect to any datasource (databases, APIs, data warehouses), drag and drop your common UI components (tables, charts, forms), spin up backend APIs and schedule cron jobs, all in one place.<p>Since developers we spoke to hated repeatedly handling permissions, hooking up observability, configuring security and managing CI/CD pipelines, we built Superblocks to integrate with popular dev tools like Datadog, Elastic, GitHub, GitLab, Okta and more. Use our cloud version, or run a self-hosted agent to ensure your data never leaves your VPC [1].<p>Superblocks is quite differentiated from other “low-code” tools out there:
* 100% built for developers: observability, debuggability, version control, extend with Python & JS
* A platform, not a point solution: An all-in-one builder for internal tools: app UIs, APIs and cron jobs
* Agent architecture: source-available, stateless and lightweight vs a legacy on-prem deployment
* Scalable pricing: Pay for apps by Creator and usage-based pricing for end users (based on day passes) so it’s affordable to have 100s or 1000s of end users. Workflows and Jobs are billed on the number of executions.<p>A quick 4 min demo on the website: <a href="https://cdn.superblocks.com/superblocks-demo-06132022.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.superblocks.com/superblocks-demo-06132022.mp4</a>
Developer docs: <a href="https://docs.superblocks.com" rel="nofollow">https://docs.superblocks.com</a>
To illustrate Superblocks in action, we built this startup funding explorer last night [2]<p>Would love to hear feedback!<p>[1] Agent <a href="https://github.com/superblocksteam/agent" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/superblocksteam/agent</a>
[2] Superblocks Startup Explorer App <a href="https://app.superblocks.com/applications/4aab03cd-3b18-4138-aa8b-ac7c7592574f/pages/bdf59690-18a5-42d5-9014-250f8318a8cc?environment=production" rel="nofollow">https://app.superblocks.com/applications/4aab03cd-3b18-4138-...</a>
Upvote: | 193 |
Title: For this palette, I used recent advances in color science, which made perceptual design more accessible, to choose a set of colors (mainly for syntax highlighting) that have uniform luminance for less visually uneven, fluidly readable code, but at the same time maximally distinguishable hue and chroma. The background colors are based on natural (sun-)light and shade for a more pleasing look than equally neutral greys.<p>For much more detailed info, including the construction, check out the repository.<p>There’s also already a (bare-bones) VSCode extension, linked in the repository, but it could admittedly use more informed distribution of colors over tokens, language specific highlighting and perhaps more opinionated use in UI elements.
Upvote: | 267 |
Title: My dad got really sick a few months ago. I was shocked but also panicked about the idea of him dying without me knowing him well. He was a great dad but didn't talk much.<p>Fortunately, he got better for a short time. I seized the opportunity to ask him as much as he could answer and film him. Of course, his memory wasn't perfect but I got the big picture.<p>Now that he passed away, I'm both devastated and glad that I got to know him more and kept a record so I can see his face and listen to his voice for more than the usual family video. I wish I had done it sooner though.<p>I've heard multiple people tell me they don't know their parents' or grandparents' life, or they've heard it but they've eventually forgotten so I thought I'd share. I hope this will help some of you.<p>Thank you blood donors<p>Thank you dad
Upvote: | 513 |
Title: I created this tool a few months ago to automate some of my tasks.
I use it to collect prices and files and to get notified when something changes on certain websites. The task runner uses Playwright.<p>I'm not sure if it can be useful to anybody else besides me :) Any feedback is welcome.
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: I’m bought in on the need for automation in SRE, now how do I do it? An SRE team I’m on is making a big push to automate, and I want to make sure we do this right. I also don’t need theoretical SRE books right now, I need some books or resources with case studies of things automated and ideally some code to boot. I’m looking mostly for the “HOW”, but I’m also interested in books to help think about “WHO/WHAT/WHERE/WHEN.” I’m _not_ interested in books that delve deeply into the WHY for either SRE or automation. I’m looking for resources practical applications, ideally with pitfalls to avoid, on how to build a world class DevOps organization and automate the right things on my team. I’m thinking API construction, design patterns to Use/Avoid, fully autonomous systems vs self-service tooling, and SLI construction and measurements. Sorry, this is a lot, but I might be helping to lead this team so I have a lot of questions on the implementation of this (not to mention how to steer office politics) and I’m feeling a bit out of my depth. Any advice on good resources to pursue is most appreciated!!!
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I will need to learn about writing safety-critical C/C++ code at my current job. Many resources[1-2] tell you what not to do, but few tell you what to do[3].<p>What are some excellent examples of open source code bases from which to learn?<p>1: https://www.misra.org.uk/
2: https://yurichev.com/mirrors/C/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf
3: https://nasa.github.io/fprime/UsersGuide/dev/code-style.html
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I love learning new things. Reading new books on unfamiliar subjects, practicing intensely for months to develop a new skill, talking with an expert and absorbing decades of wisdom as they share a lifetime of experience.<p>When I was younger I thought this was the normal mode. As time goes on I've realized not a lot of people I know enjoy learning this way.<p>Where can I go to find people with a deep love of learning, not for money or a credential but just for the pure joy of it.<p>Universities? Libraries?<p>Suggestions appreciated!
Upvote: | 81 |
Title: I am in intermediate level Python dev (mainly work with Django) but looking to level up. I learn by doing so any recommendations for hands on material to help learn more?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Rahul and Alex from Taro (<a href="https://jointaro.com" rel="nofollow">https://jointaro.com</a>, <a href="https://app.jointaro.com/demo" rel="nofollow">https://app.jointaro.com/demo</a>). We help software engineers get onboarded and promoted faster.<p>Career growth depends on having a good manager and support group, but finding someone who advocates for you is challenging. Especially in a post-pandemic world, where many of our working hours are spent in isolation, we’ve lost many of the hallway conversations + quick insights that are critical to success in large organizations.<p>Alex and I have spent our careers at companies like Meta, Pinterest, Robinhood, and Course Hero, eventually landing Staff+ IC and management positions. Despite spending more than a decade in tech, we still stumbled our way through our career: choosing a team, understanding how perf review actually works, and finding a career path. We’ve had our share of good and bad managers, and we’ve also personally mentored dozens of engineers. (Interesting stat: the average engineer at Meta gets a new manager every 1.2 years!) During the pandemic, we started giving free talks about SWE career growth, explaining what we wish we knew earlier. These livestreams routinely got 500+ concurrent viewers, and our community ballooned to 40K software engineers who were looking to understand promotion and influence as an engineer.<p>We spent weeks talking to 100s of engineers and discovered that their career bottleneck was not coding ability, but all the other _stuff_ that is essential for software engineering. For example, as a mid-level backend engineer, how does my path to senior get impacted if I switch to Android dev? A product manager added a last minute requirement on my project which may cause the deadline to slip – how do I handle the fallout? Engineers often neglect these topics (project selection, effective communication, perf review) which leads to career stagnation and frustration.<p>For many engineers, the current resources available online are overwhelmingly irrelevant: they’re about learning a new web framework, or Leetcoding to switch jobs. If you’re at an established, fast-moving tech company, these resources won’t help with career advancement. Instead, the highest leverage activity is to learn from peers + veterans in similar companies.<p>Taro is the product that emerged from our community: a Q&A database from real engineers, where content is tagged by company + level. We also adopted the "case study" model where an engineer or manager discusses a specific story of how they ramped up or landed a promotion-worthy project. This kind of info is difficult to come by unless you know the right people within the company. Taro allows you to get personalized help for your situation, while also learning from the questions + answers of others.<p>We make money by charging software engineers directly for full access to the Q&A database, plus the ability to ask their own questions. We currently have 100+ Taro Premium members from companies like Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon, along with thousands of free users. We designed Taro for full time engineers at fast-moving tech companies – it’s not a good fit for freelancers or students who are still exploring software engineering.<p>Checkout a quick demo of Taro: <a href="https://youtu.be/nMgUciFPJMs" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/nMgUciFPJMs</a><p>Feel free to browse through <a href="https://app.jointaro.com" rel="nofollow">https://app.jointaro.com</a>. We’d love to know what resources you’ve used for career growth. Thanks for your feedback!
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Tools like Eclipse's Java Browsing Perspective(https://querix.com/go/beginner/Content/05_workbench/01_ls/02_interface/01_perspectives/java_browsing.htm), Visual Studio's Object Browser make it easier to browse the codebase by components.<p>What are the ways you do it? Is there anything similar available for functional programming?
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Feeling very upset about a feature request.<p>The main reason is, the requester behaves like I am hired to customise the software for him. And I should keep working until he is satisfied.<p>Even if I don't like it, they keep saying this is very good feature, blabla...<p>What should I say? F... off?<p>For these kinds of people, they will never understand the manner of GitHub and do some PR.<p>And they won't pay at all...
Upvote: | 261 |
Title: Longevity was discussed a lot here. So, for the hackers and experts here:), how do you help your parents?
Was thinking to give them or suggest to take<p>Nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN): 1g per day (available but only from small firms in Europe)<p>Resveratrol: 1g per day (available)<p>Metformin: 800 mg (need a prescription)<p>Omega3 fat oil<p>Do you have better ideas?<p>PS: Got it from David Sinclar. Doctors don't seem to care much about that topic. Actually, started to think about it since, noticed a bit of mental decline and started asking myself what might help against it and in general. Also, might take that stuff for myself as well.
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: If you want to keep up with the latest news, podcasts, plus listen to Spotify music delivered in a new way, you should try out AudioOne FYI.<p>AudioOne FYI delivers a personalized radio experience of everything that matters to you, no one else. Just create an account and tell AudioOne what you like, it will deliver everything as an audio first experience.<p>Get up to 3 personal audio newsletters a day, with The latest news, subscribed and preferred podcasts and short topical audio clips.<p>Search for the latest news and podcast episodes powered by Google and other sources and listen, not read the results. You can also follow your search topics and they will be delivered in your own personal radio station. AudioDrops are going to change how you follow content that matters forever.<p>Soon you will be able to build your own custom radio stations and share them with others. Create a curated experience of music, news and podcasts that you and your audience can enjoy, always up to date. You will also be able to go live and host guests on your own dedicated radio station or broadcast in syndication.<p>Try it. Want the personal experience, create a free account.<p>More features to come. Will keep you up to date, here on Hacker News.<p>Thanks,<p>Tony
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Graphql is great, but is totally over hyped. This is probably more of a rant or a frustrated dev outburst.<p>but beginner to mid level developers are lead down the path of USE GRAPHQL especially on youtube... and this is just unfair and wrong.<p>The good:<p>- It makes working with describing the data you want easy<p>- It can save you bandwidth. Get what you ask for and no more<p>- It makes documentation for data consumers easy<p>- It can make subscription easier for you to use<p>- Can let you federate API calls<p>The bad<p>- It is actually a pain to use, depending on the backend you are using you'll have to manage<p>two or more type systems if there are no code first generates in your language<p>- It doesn't support map/tables/dictionaries. This is actually huge. I get that there might be<p>some pattern where you don't want to allow this but for the majority of situations working with json api's you'll end up with a {[key: string] : T} somewhere<p>- No clear path for Api versioning you'll end up with MyQueryV1.01 MyQueryV1.02 MyQueryV1.03<p>Don't use Graphql unless you're managing a solution/problem set that facebook intended graphql for<p>Invest your time in a simpler solution then running to GraphQL first<p>thanks for reading my ted talk<p>please any senior dev's drop your wise words so that any new dev's can avoid tarpits
Upvote: | 720 |
Title: And if they were, what impact would this have on video game design?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: How/where does one learn generative/algorithmic art? I see all these stunning creativity, but don’t know where to start. Any advice?
Upvote: | 208 |
Title: There is a bunch of editors with the traditional model of inserting text with the keyboard, arrows move the cursor around, you click around in menus/using hotkeys to perform actions (Visual Studio Code, Atom, Eclipse). Then there is the "modal" editors that have different modes where you can switch between for example "editing" or "movement" modes, and what your keyboard controls depends on the mode you're in (editors like Vim). Otherwise there is also very interactive and extensible editors, where eval basically lives within/together with the editor (Emacs, LightTable)<p>Otherwise, most editors fit in somewhere along those lines.<p>But what other editors is there out there that have something really different for editing/writing code? Things that come to mind is "editors" like Scratch where you aren't really "editing" code with your keyboard, but moving things around instead. Or, if I imagine I'd create a editor for programming controlled by a joystick, what kind of UI and UX would that editor have?
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: I live in SF but location flexible and considering making a move to NYC.<p>Biggest issue is obviously cost. I’m shocked even living in what is considered a high cost of living area by the rent prices I’m seeing in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. I’m seeing fairly basic 1 bedroom apartments being listed that are $5k+ not including utilities or brokers fees which can be as high as 15% of the annual rent, and most likely not rent stabilized meaning they can raise the rent however much they want after the lease ends.<p>Outside of rent the cost of entertainment and eating out is not surprisingly on the higher side relative to other cities though I would not say it’s as wildly expensive as the rent is.<p>The upside is that there’s an energy to the city that is lacking here, and you don’t need a car to get to most places within the city (though to be fair I don’t have a car in SF either).<p>For people who have recently considered moving or have been living there do you feel it’s worth it considering the rent/housing situation on top of everything else (food, groceries, entertainment, taxation, etc)?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Let's start with that my accent is clear enough and I don't have communication issues at work. I actually feel quite comfortable.<p>But I'd love to have a perfect west coast American accent when I speak english. Having learned a few other languages myself, it feels pretty good when you can surprise a native.<p>Anybody that went through that process of improving their accent with a tutor or on their own could share their learnings on it?
Upvote: | 120 |
Title: A few months ago I bought an Oculus Quest 2 with the vague idea that I'm going to set up a development environment inside it.<p>It is a bit heavier than I expected, and while I had some fun with Beat Saber, I have not used the thing for work.<p>I mostly do web development - Nuxt on the frontend, Rails on the backend. My standard development environment is Visual Studio Code.<p>I'm curious if anyone found a place for the Quest in their work processes.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Hello, HN! Figure is a little side project I’ve been working on. Someone described it as Bejeweled meets Wordle.<p>I built the puzzle interface and website in Next.js and React, which was a first for me and overall a great learning experience. The daily puzzle data is queued up in a PostgreSQL table. Another table stores anonymous solve stats. Once a day, a cron job hits a serverless API that promotes the next puzzle as “live” and prompts Next.js to update the prebaked static site with the new data. The game state is managed with Redux and your stats are persisted to localStorage. Framer Motion for animations. Styling is mostly Tailwind CSS. I use Figma for design and Logic Pro to make the sounds.<p>I get a lot of questions about how the puzzles are generated. It’s not super sexy. I generate random grids of tiles and then run them through a brute force solver (sounds rough but the puzzles don’t feel anything). Every few days, I play through puzzles that look promising based on the solution space and pick some good ones to go into the queue. The rest are sent back to the void (again, painless).<p>I’ve spent a little bit of time tinkering with a procedural generator, but so far the random ones are better. The downsides of the random approach are (1) the curation effort required, and (2) the high variability in puzzle difficulty. I have a feeling there’s a whole body of math and CS knowledge where Figure is an example of something that I don’t know the name for (imposter syndrome intensifies).<p>As for the future of Figure, I feel strongly about keeping it free of ads, login walls, in-app purchases, or anything else that infringes on enjoyment or privacy. I’d also like to make sure Figure is accessible to everyone. English isn’t exactly required to play, but translations for the UI and website would be nice. I’ve tried to build Figure to be friendly to people who have color vision deficiency and people who rely on screen readers and keyboard navigation, but I have no idea if it’s actually any fun in these cases.<p>Here are some miscellaneous thoughts…<p>1. It’s been surprisingly satisfying to build a web game with a modern frontend stack. I’ve noticed a lot of grumbling on HN over the years from OG web developers who yearn for the days of semantic HTML, a sprinkling of CSS, and vanilla JS. I was in that boat too and have grumbled plenty about the breakneck pace of frontend evolution. One of my goals with this project was to pick some popular frameworks and give them an honest try. I’m now a believer, but there’s still no way I can keep up with all the progress.<p>2. I found Tailwind awkward at first, but after a while I realized I was using Figma a lot less and just designing in code with utility classes, which is great for focus and flow. Having lived through the Web 2.0 standards revolution, it was hard to let go of some deeply rooted opinions about semantic purity, but overall I’m sold.<p>3. I really love side projects. At most jobs, you’re pushed toward specialization. Side projects allow you to build out a generalist skillset, which makes you better at your core job function and better at collaborating with others. It’s also liberating to explore and pivot around without time pressure. Figure started out as a 3D fidget toy in Unity where you fling projectiles at floating objects…<p>4. I made this game on my trusty 2013 MacBook Pro, which has been almost completely sufficient (ahem Docker ಠ_ಠ). I’ll probably get an M2 Air soon, but I’m reluctant to say goodbye to the best computer I’ve ever owned.<p>5. I’m very grateful for the people who build and maintain open source projects. It’s also delightful how many paid services offer generous free tiers to let developers play around: Figma, GitHub, Vercel, Supabase, and Pipedream, just to name a few that I’m currently using actively. If you work on FOSS and/or these excellent platforms, thank you.<p>Anyway, hope you like it. Happy to answer any questions.
Upvote: | 417 |
Title: Hi HN<p>I started this crowdsourced list to find small internet products made by solo developers (or tiny teams) that can be used as alternatives to BigTech/VC-funded startups.<p>E.g. you can use Tally (by two devs, $14K MRR) instead of Typeform ($190M funding, 600+ employees)<p>or Plausible (by two devs, $83K MRR) instead of Google Analytics.<p>I added a link to a form where you can send me suggestions to alternatives, happy to add to the site!<p>Thanks,
Rauno
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: Hey everybody,<p>So after about 8 years of various unsuccessful startup attempts I bit the bullet and got a job.<p>Classical 6 figures tech job in AI for bigtech. Fully remote chill work hours you know the deal.<p>I used to live for work pouring all my heart into an idea talking to customers iterating working day and night.<p>Now, I want to work to live travel and most importantly I want to meet as many interesting tech people as possible.<p>Now my question. Where should I go? Ideally, I want to be able to go back to Germany at least for 3 months a year the rest I am open for suggestions.<p>Should I move to a digital nomad place like Bali or Portugal? Or a tech hub like San Francisco or Austin?<p>Time zone wise Hong Kong would be ideal but I am mostly working on my own so it isn't a deal breaker.<p>Also wherever I am, should I go to conferences ? Meetups? Dm random people on Twitter and Hackernews? Otherwise, il just keep chatting up a bunch of people in co-working spaces.<p>I feel like nowadays there must be quite a few people in this situation. Would love to hear your thoughts.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Wanted to post a 2022 version of this <i>classic</i> HN question. Figured a Sunday would be a good day for this post.<p>What are some of the YouTube channels that you enjoy, particularly as an engineer/entrepreneur?
Upvote: | 127 |
Title: Blockchain & AI don't count, because they're being talked about plenty!
Upvote: | 495 |
Title: What is the best software to read arbitrary text aloud in a decently human sounding voice? I'd be happy with a CLI tool or a website I can just paste text into.<p>There are many articles I'd rather hear than read so I can rest my eyes. I've tried the builtin macOS say cmd, naturalreaders (dot) com and they both suck.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Every time I read about Lisp I hear about the _enlightment_ phase,
but what is it?<p>I checked Lisp and what stands out most for me is the syntax and
the powerful REPL but aside from that, why is it so praised
compared to modern languages? I don't see many projects
using it either aside from certain exceptions.<p>Apologies for my ignorance _in advance_
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: We have been working on Multy, an open-source[1] tool that enables developers to deploy and switch to any cloud - AWS, Azure and GCP for now.<p>We realized that, even when using Terraform, writing infrastructure code is very different for each cloud provider. This means changing clouds or deploying the same infrastructure in multiple clouds requires rewriting the same thing multiple times. And even though most core resources have the same functionality, developers need to learn a new provider and all its nuances when choosing a new cloud. This is why we built Multy.<p>Multy is currently available as a Terraform provider. You can write cloud-agnostic code and then just choose which cloud you want to deploy to. Multy will then call the cloud provider APIs on your behalf. For example, the following Terraform code deploys a virtual network in AWS and can be easily changed to deploy to Azure or GCP:<p>```
resource "multy_virtual_network" "vn" {<p><pre><code> cloud = "aws" // or azure, or gcp
name = "multy_vn"
cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16"
location = "eu_west_1"</code></pre>
}
```<p>Our goal is to expose any configuration that is common across all clouds, but there’s always specific features that are not available in all of them. For example, if you want a very specific AWS CPU for your Virtual Machine or use a region that is only available in GCP. To enable this, we implemented overrides [2] - a way to configure the underlying infrastructure for cloud-specific purposes. You can also mix other Terraform code that uses the cloud-specific providers with Multy. While this makes you somewhat locked in, having your 80% or 90% of your infrastructure cloud-agnostic is still very powerful.<p>You can see more complex examples in our documentation - <a href="https://docs.multy.dev/examples/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.multy.dev/examples/</a>.<p>We’re still in early days and looking for feedback from other developers on our approach. Let us know what you think!<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/multycloud/multy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/multycloud/multy</a><p>[2] <a href="https://docs.multy.dev/overrides" rel="nofollow">https://docs.multy.dev/overrides</a>
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I see and hear a lot of complaints around inheriting code bases that are less than stellar. If anyone has, I'd love to hear about cases where you inherited a "good" code base, whatever that may mean: awesome test coverage, good documentation, solid organization, consistent styling/formatting, abundant best practices, whatever!
Upvote: | 143 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Fabien and Naren, co-founders of Wolfia (<a href="https://www.wolfia.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolfia.com</a>). Wolfia lets you share a link to a mobile emulator running your app. Developers can get feedback instantly on a feature they just built by sharing a link to an interactive version of their app. We’re starting with Android but iOS is coming soon!<p>Mobile app development in 2022 is harder than it should be - you can't easily change a line of code, rebuild the app, and have someone on the other side of the world see the result in seconds. Instead of the rapid iterations that web app developers enjoy, mobile app developers are stuck with pushing builds every night and waiting a day for the team to see the new code. That's if they even have a nightly build setup. Most people also only have one phone, so they can never test the Android app if they have an iPhone and vice versa.<p>We've been developing mobile apps for over 10 years (at Facebook, Wealthfront, etc.). In that time, the tooling has dramatically improved, yet we still found ourselves having to go and install emulators on a PM's laptop and give them commands to copy and paste on the terminal because they didn't have an Android phone. Or we would have to procure test phones and wait for a build to be pushed. We’re building Wolfia to finally make this process seamless.<p>Wolfia lets developers send a link to an APK (an Android binary) that's running on an emulator accessible via the browser. You can then play with the app without the need for a physical device. This dramatically shortens the feedback loop and completely transforms the dev cycle: from days to hours or even minutes.<p>Product managers and designers can use it to check that a new feature is being built up to their specs. Developers can use it to check if the code is running correctly. Founders, user researchers and salespeople can use it for interactive demos of the product.<p>We host headless (without GUI) Android emulators with hardware acceleration running on AWS bare metal instances to get high performance. We use WebSockets to make a two-way connection between the browser and the emulator through ADB (Android Debug Bridge). The emulator's GUI is displayed on the browser via an H.264 video feed, and we relay the user's touch events back to the emulator. We use WSS to make this secure.<p>Try it for free at <a href="https://www.wolfia.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolfia.com</a>! (you can try a demo - we used Materialistic, an open source HN app - or sign up for free and upload your own app)<p>We would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and feedback!
Upvote: | 172 |
Title: I am getting the following message when performing searches:<p>Server Error
We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue.<p>Please try again later.
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: Parts of search and maps appear to be down.<p>Cloud [0] and Workspace [1] dashboards are green.<p>0: https://status.cloud.google.com/
1: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Hi HN! About a year ago I showed my side project Yare here (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27365961" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27365961</a>) and was overblown by the feedback and support. Since then a lot has changed and I'm excited to share the beta of 'Yare 2' (<a href="https://www.yare.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.yare.io/</a>).<p>The simple programming game has evolved into something a little more complex with the ability to not only control the units with code, but now practically anything is programmable. E.g. the players can build their own UI elements to play the game with (when you choose 'play with mouse and keyboard' on the homescreen, it showcases what is possible to create).<p>This is a passion project that I don't plan to anyhow excessively monetize and will be always free to play, but I'm worried that it's perhaps growing into a too chaotic/confusing game and losing its initial simplicity.
Upvote: | 129 |
Title: i can't log in to any of my banks without my phone. Most of the systems in my workplace also require phone app authentication. I can't do any of those things with just a PC or laptop. Smartphones being the smallest and portable are surely the most lost and stolen. If someone got a hold of my PC or laptop - they would be able to do some damage, but not even close to if they were able to access my phone. Everything everywhere nowadays requires some app.
Upvote: | 238 |
Title: HN has strong opinions against Electron so here are my requirements:<p>- I want to make a native looking GUI<p>- Cross platform (macOS, Windows, Linux)<p>- With a sane language (no C, C++ or Objective C)<p>- Ideally with a data flow looking like unidirectional data flow / Elm architecture<p>What options do I have?
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>As most of you (I think?), I cannot learn something without having a project, on the side, to implement what I’ve just learned.<p>Recode is the project that I've used to learn Go. It lets you create a development environment in your cloud provider account easily.<p>You can think of it as a desktop version of Gitpod / Coder / GitHub Codespaces less polished and with less features but 100% free, 100% open-source and 100% community-driven.<p>At the time of writing, it only works with Visual Studio Code and AWS.<p>In order to let you configure your development environments easily, I’ve chosen to use Docker with some Dockerfiles:<p><pre><code> - One for your user configuration.
- One for your project.
</code></pre>
The user configuration corresponds to the tools / settings that you use in all your projects like your timezone / locale, your preferred shell or your dotfiles.<p>The project configuration corresponds to the tools / settings that you use in a specific project like Go >= 1.18 and Node.js >= 14.<p>As you may have guessed, the project configuration inherits from the user one.<p>> Why Docker and not something like NixOS, for example?<p>I know that containers are not meant to be used as a VM like that, but, at the time of writing, Docker is still the most widely used tool among developers to configure their environment (even if it may certainly change in the future :-)).<p>> Given that my dev env will run in a container does it mean that it will be limited?<p>Mostly not.<p>Given the scope of this project (a private instance running in your own cloud provider account), Docker is mostly used for configuration purpose and not to "isolate" the VM from your environment.<p>As a result, your development environment container runs in privileged mode in the same network than the host.<p>----<p>I post this here, because, you know, even learning project could be useful to someone.<p>Still learning Go by the way, so I'm open to any suggestions to improve.
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: Ruben here, software engineer, long-time lurker of Hacker News and founder of Windmill. Windmill is a fully open-source self-hostable platform and runtime to build complex workflows, internal apps and integrations using any scripts in Python or Typescript-deno. I am back after having been revealed a bit too soon on HN and miraculously getting into YC (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31272793" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31272793</a>).<p>To build internal apps for ops, integrations between services that cannot talk to each other directly, or to run background jobs that run your business logic and analytics, the two main options today are no-code solutions and old-fashioned, roll-your-own scripting. Both have problems, and our goal with Windmill is to find a new sweet spot between the two. No-code solutions are productive <i>if</i> your problem matches the tool exactly - but it not, they are rigid, hard to extend and quickly become tech debt, annihilating their initial time advantage. Indeed, no-code is just code but made by an opinionated someone else and hidden as a blackbox with an UI.<p>The alternative is to do it the old-fashioned way, writing everything from scratch, both backend and frontend, perhaps deploying it on the latest flavor of serverless, and pray to never have to touch it again because that took way too much time and it has now became a burden that the ops and business team might poke you about regularly.<p>Furthermore, the landscape of SaaS is specialized tools for everything—alerting, data analytics, administration panels, support management, integration between services—when it feels like a few scripts would have been as good or even better and spared you the need of depending on one yet another tool. This could be even further facilitated if there was a way to import the right bunch of scripts from a fellow community of engineers, tweak it and deploy it like you can do in communities where automation can be shared as simple JSON files, for instance in the node-red or home assistant community.. That’s the idea of Windmill: to bring back the power of scripting in an easy way.<p>With Windmill, you write normal scripts, or reuse ones made by others, and we make them production-grade and composable. You shouldn’t have to worry about things like http requests or scheduling jobs. We abstract much of that away, making your scripts be both more focused and more composable. You end up doing things the right way but much quicker.<p>We reduce the complexity of workflows, integrations and internal apps by uniting them all under one banner. At the heart, they mostly have the same needs: workflows with a UI or a schedule. One tool that does it all out-of-the-box offers greater consistency and allows you to grow the complexity of your toolset at your own pace.<p>I have an academic background in compilers and industry experience in distributed systems. My compiler work made me wary of solving every problem with a domain-specific-language (DSL) or complex frameworks. We can just do more with the well-crafted existing languages like Python or Typescript. Rolling up your own DSL is nice in theory, you can make it very ergonomic and focused on the task at hand, but then you start adding features and either reinvent existing – albeit worse – programming language or decide to stop there. In the very large majority of cases, a well crafted library is vastly superior to any DSL. By being able to use any library of Python and Typescript, we stand on the shoulders of giants.<p>I have also observed that the best distributed systems are often the most simple as they are more predictable and have invariants that are easier to reason with and scale horizontally. This is why for Windmill, we rely solely on Postgres + our native workers + our http REST api layer. Later on, we plan to build adapters to host the workers on AWS lambda or Cloudflare workers, and the queue on Kafka if your needs are exceptionally high.<p>At the heart of what we have built is a queue implemented in Postgres and workers implemented in Rust that create a sandbox (using nsjail), fetch dependencies, and execute scripts. Every script can be triggered through its name with an HTTP POST by passing a JSON payload in which every field corresponds 1:1 to an argument of the script’s main parameters. Most primitive types in Python or Typescript have a natural corresponding type in JSON so the conversion is always what you would expect. We then execute the script inside a new sandbox and then store the results in the same Postgres DB at the end of the job execution.<p>The HTTP payload can be sent from your own frontend or you can use our automatically generated UI. Indeed, we do a simple, yet effective analysis of the parameters of your script, and from it, generate the jsonschema corresponding to your parameters. That schema is what enables us to convert any script into a no-code like module for flows, or a standalone internal app with its auto-generated UI. In the case of Python, we also look at the imports to deduce the Pypi dependencies without you having to declare them.<p>For flows, we defined an open spec for building them out of those scripts we call OpenFlow: <a href="https://docs.windmill.dev/docs/openflow" rel="nofollow">https://docs.windmill.dev/docs/openflow</a>. It is essentially a json format for describing a sequence of steps with for loops and soon branching. The most interesting bit here is that each input of each step can define its input as a javascript expression that refers to and transforms the output of any previous step. We make it fast by leveraging native v8 integration in Rust (thanks to the deno team) for executing those expressions. This makes this apparently linear sequence a flexible DAG in which one can express complex workflows.<p>Then on top of that we have an UI builder for flows that hides most of the complexity to give an experience that is similar to a low-code platform where every step is treated as a blackbox. The platform itself offers all the features that you would expect: a variable and object store for storing states, plain values and credentials; a cron scheduler, tight permissioning for the sensitive credentials, groups, a webeditor with smart assistant to edit the scripts directly in the platform etc. Finally, we made a hub (<a href="https://hub.windmill.dev" rel="nofollow">https://hub.windmill.dev</a>) to share flows and scripts with everyone. The goal is to grow over time an exhaustive library of pre-made modules and flows to tweak from so that you can focus on what is actually custom to you.<p>Windmill is open-source and self-hostable. You can think of it as a superset of both Pipedream and Airplane.dev. Compared to Temporal, the scripts themselves are agnostic of the flow in which they are embedded, which has the benefit of making it easier to build a hub of reusable modules. We are the only ones as far as we know to convert script parameters to UI automatically. We see ourselves as complementary to UI builder solutions like Retool or Tooljet as we do not want to focus too much on the auto-generated UI and could be used solely as the backend part of the two aforementioned tools.<p>We are now a team of 3 senior engineers and the product is progressing faster than ever with a public roadmap: <a href="https://github.com/orgs/windmill-labs/projects/2" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/orgs/windmill-labs/projects/2</a><p>We make money from commercial licenses, support and team plans on the hosted solution.<p>You can self-host it or try it <a href="https://app.windmill.dev" rel="nofollow">https://app.windmill.dev</a>, the free tier is generous (and the paid one is not enforced yet). Our landing page is: <a href="https://windmill.dev" rel="nofollow">https://windmill.dev</a>. We would appreciate your feedback and ideas and look forward to all your comments!
Upvote: | 212 |
Title: I'm a senior dev but I'm in a position where I happen to know a few junior devs through my gaming hobby, after talking with them it seems like they're having a hard time.<p>I know my company hasn't hired juniors for over the last year at least, and that seems to be the same at a lot of places. I've been talking with those juniors recently and most of them are having a hard time getting anything.<p>This is going to make the senior dev situation worse in a few years since there doesn't seem to be any pipeline to make new ones.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Currently searches aren't loading, and my standard web interface is intermittent.<p>Based in the UK ... anyone else having trouble?<p>(Edit: If you're happy to do so, it can be helpful for people to give a location, just to get a sense of whether it's connection based or data-centre based ... thanks)
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Have you listened to German Rap yet?<p>Why don't you upgrade to Spotify Duo?<p>You're a top fan of Chainsmokers (am I?). Listen to this random playlist that we added to your Library without your consent<p>Is this really the "Ad-free" listening experience I'm paying for? Or are these not ads?<p>Reference for all above: https://imgur.com/a/OA7UM6w
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: Last time this question was asked on HN was in 2017 (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15694118" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15694118</a>), a lot has changed in the last 5 years in the world of web scraping (legal landscape, antibot unblockers, data type specific APIs, etc), so I thought it may be a good idea to refresh this question and see what are the most popular tools used by the HN community these days.
Upvote: | 313 |
Title: I read a quote along the lines of "Next to height, the most unfair advantage someone can have is the ability to walk into a room without preparation and persuade the audience on just about any subject."<p>At face value, this sounds preposterous but there's merit to what the author is saying. Upon reflection, I've realized that this superpower is a lot harder than it seems and it requires:<p>- Ability to think clearly
- Ability to encode into brain what you want to say
- Deliver message<p>I'm finding it difficult to perform the first 2 steps. Has anyone found great resources and exercises to help with this?
Upvote: | 232 |
Title: Hi HN – I’m Emmanuel, founder of Sematic (<a href="https://sematic.dev" rel="nofollow">https://sematic.dev</a>). Sematic is an open-source framework to prototype and productionize end-to-end Machine Learning (ML) and Data Science (DS) pipelines in days instead of weeks or months. The idea is to do for ML development what Rails and Heroku did for web development.<p>I started my career searching for Supersymmetry and the Higgs boson on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, then moved to industry. I spent the last four years building ML infrastructure at Cruise. In both academia and industry, I witnessed researchers, data scientists, and ML engineers spending an absurd share of their time building makeshift tooling, stitching up infrastructure, and battling obscure systems, instead of focusing on their core area of expertise: extracting insights and predictions from data.<p>This was painfully apparent at Cruise where the ML Platform team needed to grow linearly with the number of users to support and models to ship to the car. What should have just taken a click (e.g. retraining a model when world conditions change – COVID parklets, road construction sites, deployment to new cities) often required weeks of painstaking work. Existing tools for prototyping and productionizing ML/DS models did not enable developers to become autonomous and tackle new projects instead of babysitting current ones.<p>For example, a widely adopted tool such as Kubeflow Pipelines requires users to learn an obscure Python API, package and deploy their code and dependencies by hand, and does not offer exhaustive tracking and visualization of artifacts beyond simple metadata.<p>In order to become autonomous, users needed a dead-simple way to iterate seamlessly between local and cloud environments (change code, validate locally, run at scale in the cloud, repeat) and visualize objects (metrics, plots, datasets, configs) in a UI. Strong guarantees around dependency packaging, traceability of artifact lineage, and reproducibility would have to be provided out-of-the-box.<p>Sematic lets ML/DS developers build and run pipelines of arbitrary complexity with nothing more than minimalistic Python APIs. Business logic, dynamic pipeline graphs, configurations, resource requirements, etc. — all with only Python. We are bringing the lovable aspects of Jupyter Notebooks (iterative development, visualizations) to the actual pipeline.<p>How it works: Sematic resolves dynamic nested graphs of pipeline steps (simple Python functions) and intercepts all inputs and outputs of each step to type-check, serialize, version, and track them. Individual steps are orchestrated as Kubernetes jobs according to required resources (e.g. GPU, high-memory), and all tracking and visualization information is surfaced in a modern UI. Build assets (user code, third-party dependencies, drivers, static libraries) are packaged and shipped to remote workers at runtime, which enables a fast and seamless iterative development experience.<p>Sematic lets you achieve results much faster by not wasting time on packaging dependencies, foraging for output artifacts to visualize, investigating obscure failures in black-box container jobs, bookkeeping configurations, writing complex YAML templates to run multiple experiments, etc.<p>It can run on a local machine or be deployed to leverage cloud resources (e.g. GPUs, high-memory instances, map/reduce clusters, etc.) with minimal external dependencies: Python, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes.<p>Sematic is open-source and free to use locally or self-hosted in your own cloud. We will provide a SaaS offering to enable access to cloud resources without the hassle of maintaining a cloud deployment.
To get started, simply run `$ pip install sematic; sematic start`. Check us out at <a href="https://sematic.dev" rel="nofollow">https://sematic.dev</a>, star our Github repo, and join our Discord for updates, feature requests, and bug reports.<p>We would love to hear from everyone about your experience building reliable end-to-end ML training pipelines, and anything else you’d like to share in the comments!
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: We’re Mike and Raymond – cofounders at Lumina. We’re excited to share what we’ve been working on, the Lumina Desk (<a href="https://getlumina.com/desk" rel="nofollow">https://getlumina.com/desk</a>).<p>Last January, we founded Lumina with the mission of building the next-generation workspace.<p>We started off by launching a product called the Lumina Webcam, essentially a modern webcam that uses software to make you look good.<p>Building hardware is hard, and it’s been no different for us. We ran an Indiegogo campaign in September that raised ~$700k, scrambled to figure out hardware production (encountering every obstacle you can imagine - customs, supplier issues, parts incompatibilities), and chewed through enough glass in order to start shipping in December. But between then and now, we’ve scaled up production and have gotten some great customer feedback.<p>Next: we’re building the desk. We set out to rethink this centuries-old product and figure out how to make it into a more useful, productivity enhancing tool.<p>To start, we’re viewing the desk as a digital device, not just a mechanical one. Your desk could be an extension of your digital workspace; a complement to your phone and computer.<p>So we’re designing the Lumina Desk to have an embedded display. The thought is: from your desk, you’ll be able to check your calendar, receive call and chat notifications, and more. Or you can install (or build your own) apps to further customize it.<p>Think of the browser tabs that you keep open to occasionally glance at – the ones with dashboards or calendars or news feeds. These can now be in your desk, playing a role similar to a paper calendar or newspaper, but now in a seamlessly digital format.<p>With a digital desk, it can also play an active role in your health. Like a way to schedule times to sit or stand, or sensors that detect ergonomic input, or an in-desk dashboard that shows you your health stats.<p>Finally, we surveyed all the desks on the market and were surprised that few of them had the core fundamentals people want. How many desks have enough cable storage to hide all your cables? Enough usb and 110v sockets to power your workstation? Enough wireless charging space to charge all your wireless devices? These features should be tablestakes for any professional desk.<p>We’re in the early days of the desk, and there’s still room to shape the development of the product. If you have ideas on how we make the ultimate workspace, reach out and let us know. If you might be interested in building apps, we’d love to talk to you about building our first few apps.<p>Thanks so much for reading this. There’s a ton of work to be done, and your early support means a lot to us.
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: I started a new job as a Software Engineering Manager at a remote startup ~6 months ago. My direct reports, peers, and manager are globally distributed and I am really struggling (perhaps failing) to develop strong relationships with anyone in the organization.<p>I've never had trouble establishing relationships in the past and have always had a few "allies" up and down the org by this point. Based on feedback in all-hands, etc. I don't think that my situation is unique in the org.<p>While this is disconcerting to me on its own, the part I struggle with the most is that I don't have anyone I feel comfortable talking to about the daily challenges that my team and I face.<p>I can lean on my extended network to a point, but what I would really like is a dedicator mentor that I could discuss specific problems with, above and beyond what I could reasonably ask of a friend. Has anyone had success establishing this type of relationship? If so, how? Alternatively, is anyone else facing this type of problem in a globally distributed company? How are you managing it?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: How does the current recession feel like to you compared to 2008?<p>Do you feel this is the beginning of the recession or are we in the middle/end of it?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I'm working on a huge hobby project, and it's getting discouraging because the results are taking longer than I expected.<p>When you have a vision, how do you work toward it for long spurts? Or is it more of a "micro-visions" approach? Not sure if I'm asking the right questions, so feel free to reframe them if I'm not being clear enough.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Hey HN, we are Mathias and Philip, co-founders of AccessOwl (<a href="https://www.accessowl.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.accessowl.io/</a>). AccessOwl automates your employees' access to SaaS products. We give you a simple way to provision and deprovision any SaaS tool, as well as to configure permission levels. See a demo here: <a href="https://www.accessowl.io/productdemo" rel="nofollow">https://www.accessowl.io/productdemo</a>.<p>Most of us use SaaS tools for work day-in and day-out. How do we get access to those tools? For the most part, through a colleague or IT admin who creates all accounts and sets permissions manually.<p>Here’s what it usually looks like for the unfortunate admin: (1) receive a request for a new tool via email, Slack, JIRA or face-to-face. Since you are busy with something else, you write a todo for later; (2) you log in to the tool and realize that the permission that was requested is way too high so you check in with the requestor’s manager; (3) you finally set up the account and document user, tool and permission in a Gsheet/Notion/Airtable.<p>This quickly becomes a 30m task for a simple access request! This is still the best practice for most people and it sadly also was for us. We were both founders before and experienced the same tedious process in different flavors at our own startups and other companies.<p>At some point we migrated to Okta and partially automated our provisioning and deprovisioning (permissioning, however, stayed painfully manual). Why only partially automated? Because Okta utilizes the SCIM API which was either not available in our tool stack or required an expensive upgrade to enterprise-subscription (thanks to the “sso tax”: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31175300" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31175300</a>). And yet, we still missed simple things such as approval steps, a straightforward way to request access, and access reviews.<p>We talked to hundreds of organizations and saw the same manual processes and self-built scripts everywhere. The pain often starts at growing companies with around 50 employees. At this stage the CTO usually gets fed up with manually (de)provisioning and documenting it in a Gsheet. Another widespread cause of headache are IT security certifications (e.g. SOC2, ISO27001,...), requiring to know which employee has access to what tool, regular access reviews, and timely offboardings.<p>It seemed crazy that in a world where SaaS has become the norm, there was no great way to manage something as seemingly “trivial”, but also as critical, as user accounts. The core issues are, as always, missing integrations. Despite SCIM being the standard for over a decade, not all applications are utilizing it. Worse, many vendors lock it up in their enterprise plan.<p>This brought us to our core design principle: AccessOwl has to work with every tool, no matter what integrations are available. We generalize all the available ways of integrations in a single, simple interface. We take care of all the grunt work needed to coax each SaaS tool into doing the right thing. Whether it’s calling public APIs or resorting to Plaid-style automations as a last resort. Our first iteration was a simple workflow in Slack (Request -> Approve -> Manual provision). It covered all access documentation and solved back-and-forth communication between stakeholders. Since then, we have been adding more and more integrations to SaaS tools to directly (de)provision without the use of SCIM APIs. Taking a similar approach to provisioning as “Plaid” did in banking. We’re already covering 100+ tools and counting.<p>So what does a typical workflow look like?!<p>Step 1: Request an access, onboarding or offboarding. For this we piggy-back on whatever messaging tool is used in your org (we are starting with Slack, Teams will follow). It’s as simple as clicking a button to get your request started (no more manual JIRA tickets!) and always gets forwarded to the right stakeholders.<p>Step 2: Provisioning and permissioning. In the most basic workflow the tool owner receives the approved request with all the information to manually provision the account. If and when you arrive at the point where manual provisioning becomes a pain, you can let us automate it for you. The requestor will automatically get process updates and the access will be audit-ready logged in the background.<p>Prices start at $2.5 per employee per month and we charge a fixed premium for the automation of (de)provisioning based on the total number of employees.<p>We are excited for the opportunity to share AccessOwl with you! We would be more than excited to hear your thoughts and feedback and your own experiences with SaaS access management!
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: HI HN!<p>TL:DR - When did poor communication etiquette become normalized in American corporate culture?<p>I re-entered the job market several months ago after not needing to touch my resume since 2008 (see last submission) and my experience has been nothing short of brutally sobering. My age (40s) and experience (20+ years in IT) was definitely helpful in keeping me resilient through the process, and I'm extremely fortunate to have landed a senior IT leadership role that I love.<p>BUT I have come away from this entire ordeal a touch jaded and syndical towards much corporate America and how people are treated within the job search process (almost all other job seekers I spoke to had very similar experiences) . These are several key takeaways from my job hunt that I wanted to get some feedback/input from the HN community on potentially why this is happening and why it seems to be so prevalent across so many companies today:<p>1. Of the 13 staff-level (not recruiters) virtual interviews I had where no job offer was given, 9 of them that moved onto second interviews, 4 to third, I only received follow-up "dear john" communication from 2 of them. Ironically these were both from first-round interview companies. Is it normal practice to ghost applicants at the staff-level interview process? In brutal self reflection I even recorded several of the interviews and shared them with friends in senior leadership positions to ask for coaching advice and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.<p>2. Communications, especially logistical planning for interviews, was at times borderline comical. This is not hyperbole when I say that more often than not I would need to write follow-up emails after an email communication would go unresponded to for over a week, sometimes longer, sometimes not at all.<p>3. I have, as of today, well over 30 ATL optimized applications still sitting in "applications purgatory" with many large fortune 500 companies. Most of these applications are from 3-4 months ago. The fact that these companies have no automated purge/rejection process seems bizarre to me.<p>Help me out HN. How does your company handle communication etiquette? Am I out of touch to be expecting email replies to relevant, time sensitive information within days, not weeks? Why is ghosting tolerated, or is it normal now and I'm just expecting too much from this new generation?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: I'm technically a new grad, I finished my CS BSc in 2020 but didn't start working then, and instead started another BSc. This year I was close to starting my masters and go into academia but likely won't because I just don't have the energy for it after going through a big breakup and a sort of "identity crisis". Currently I live in a big European capital (with a lot of tech jobs) that I love from the bottom of my heart, and I would like to stay here. But all the computer science jobs just seem so dull and pointless. It seems like you either work for a startup that will eventually be bought by a competitor and all the work that went into it is moot, for a big bank or corporate, or some small company building CRUD apps for other faceless corporations.<p>What am I missing? I get work is first and foremost an exchange of labour for money, and not supposed to be fun. But aren't there more options I missed so far? I enjoy web scraping a lot and have used it to solve a bunch of real world problems my (ex) girlfriend or I had. I could conceivably work as a freelancer and have done so in the past as a psychology student but I really want to work on something as part of a team. I recently came across the "developer relations" role, i.e. representing the company at conferences and online, recording demos, writing technical blog posts etc.. it seems perfect for me (I prefer working with people), but I would assume they are looking for people who have a few years of experience already so they know what they're talking about?<p>EDIT: plus some of the most insufferable people I've met in my life were in undergrad CS classes or colleagues in SWE gigs
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: I like the idea of Dependabot. A to that actively tracks down dependency updates can be useful. Where I work, we have a daily CI job that creates a PR for each new dependency and runs a build in both our UI (JavaScript) and API (Python) projects. If the build passes, "Happy Days", we can merge the PR, and the app is all the more secure and effective for it.<p>What I've noticed in practice however, is that occasionally, this process will allow an upgrade to a dependency that will pass the automated build and test step, but introduce the wildest runtime error into the application. Usually at the time when we aim to deliver something.<p>Dependency 'spam' is also a very real issue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929596 - the daily deluge of often insignificant updates is a trudge to deal with, especially when coupled with the risk of these sly runtime errors.<p>Dependabot is a great idea, but no-one appears to have anything bad, or practical, to say against it. But it does clearly have flaws.<p>I don't think I'd want to switch the bot off, but I would be interested in hearing how other people get on with the tool.<p>Thanks. :]
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I’ve just been ghosted by a company after finishing a 2kloc home assignment.<p>It took me about 6h to develop and iron out the edge cases.<p>My take away from this is that:<p>I will not do take home assignments for free if they take more than 1h of my time.
Upvote: | 267 |
Title: And what is that new project where C++ is the main language? And what other languages and tech stack are you using in that project?
Upvote: | 133 |
Title: Hey HN! We are Piero and Luis, co-founders at Pana (<a href="https://joinpana.com" rel="nofollow">https://joinpana.com</a>), a banking app that uses social trust to help people save money and access healthier and better financial products. We’re open to everyone, but are focusing on the 62M Latinos in the USA, a particularly under-served market that we know a lot about.<p>US Hispanics have largely been ignored by traditional banks [1], resulting in 5% of this population being unbanked and an additional 13% underbanked. This is mainly due to cultural differences and lack of trust, as well as in-person and Social Security Number requirements that exclude a significant number of people.<p>Why is this market under-served? In Latino communities, a lot of transactions take place within family and personal networks based on trust. But this trust network isn't connected to the standard banking system, and therefore they don't get access to the financial products they should, if their creditworthiness were evaluated properly.<p>In addition to remittances, Latinos commonly lend amongst each other. Lending circles are an example of trust and credit-worthiness currently outside the formal financial system, and are common among US Hispanics (e.g. [2]).<p>We’re working on a new “social banking” concept that is designed to be a better fit for the trust-based behaviors that are common and familiar to this community. Of course, everyone is welcome! But we believe that social banking is especially applicable to the US Latino market, so we’re focusing there for now.<p>It’s worth adding that a proper evaluation of trust-based payment behavior should help us lend to people who are currently being abused by predatory rates.<p>The inspiration for Pana came during my time as head of Scotiabank’s Caribbean & Central America Digital Factory, where I saw the power of building digital banking products for the Hispanic market. In stark contrast, I was surprised to learn on a trip to the US that without a Social Security Number I had to visit a traditional branch. After numerous signatures and hours of waiting, I was finally able to open the account—and then handed an ATM card instead of a debit card which would only allow me to do cash withdrawals and not the ability to make purchases. Adding insult to injury, I could never reach the bank officer again for support.<p>Because this was so surprising to me, I checked with friends and family, and all of them shared similar experiences. “Lack of trust,” “high fees,” and “cultural differences” were words I heard repeatedly.<p>It isn’t just end-customers who struggle with this system. Employers and sellers transacting with the 12M people living in the U.S. without a Social Security Number have to rely on cumbersome paper checks, cash or money order, and seriously, you have no idea how complicated it still is to perform basic transactions like sending money abroad.<p>Encountering this broken situation made me realize that a new startup would be best positioned to fix it. I had already, working with a team that’s knowledgeable about the Hispanic market, built digital banking solutions solving some of these issues—but only for big banks; smaller institutions tend to lack the scale, technology, and reach. However, the big banks are the ones who ignore this demographic in the first place because they have “bigger fish to fry”—a catch-22! The market, however, is easily large enough to support a new business, so we decided to build it ourselves.<p>With Pana, we’re applying the functionality and community-building aspects of familiar apps like WhatsApp to the banking space. Today, Whatsapp is widespread in the US Latino market -specially around informal peer-to-peer financial transactions-, proving that when one tool catches on, it will probably become the norm across this diaspora. We’re building on the social trust strongly embedded within the Latino culture to help achieve personal financial goals. Individuals can choose to share milestones and celebrate achievements with close friends or public groups of peers with similar needs. Within a group, payments and requests for payment among users can be made.<p>If this works, banking on social trust could potentially disrupt the $320B in yearly transactions through Alternative Financial Services (money orders, check cashers, payday loans, etc.), and who knows, maybe eventually the banking industry as a whole!<p>Latinos represent the fastest-growing diaspora in the USA with a 1.7T buying power and are often forgotten—in part, because we are not compelled to use existing banking products and therefore, no one can see how trustworthy many of us really are. We're now on a mission to remove these financial barriers.<p>We really hope you guys check out Pana and tell us any feedback you might have, and we look forward to your comments!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2021-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2020-banking-and-credit.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2021-economic-we...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/01/292580644/lending-circles-help-latinas-pay-bills-and-invest" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/01/292580644...</a>
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: If you try to look at reddit.com/r/nsfw and you’re not logged, you‘ll see now a log in button to see the content of the page. Until yesterday it was just a simple button with I’m over 18 text.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: I never seem to get picked for the new projects that involve new tech stacks and migration efforts. At my current company I am still maintaining an old codebase and Oracle database where some peers are working on migration to AWS and snowflake. Even at previous jobs I was always staffed on the unimportant legacy projects despite expressing interest in newer exciting projects . I do try to self learn and get certifications but somehow never get chosen to work on new exciting projects .
Am I a bad engineer or do I come across wrong to management ? My performance reviews go great. What can I do or change ?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: There is an odd gatekeeping duality on tech forums:<p>1. You're not a proper engineer if you can't write scalable, highly available software that scales to infinity. Real engineers write production-grade, robust, fault tolerant, scalable, highly available, observable mission-critical systems.<p>2. <i>No one</i> actually needs large distributed systems, you're not google, stop trying to build large scalable systems. One Server + backup is enough. Everything else is overkill, complexity, resume-driven engineering. I can handle 50k RPS with one beefy bare metal machine, written in Rust. Unless you have 10 million customers, which 99.9% of companies don't have.<p>I'm not sure how to feel about this.
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: I was thinking that the terminal emulator of my Debian installation is one of the most unknown yet widely used tools of my setup. I know my editor, window manager and shell better than my terminal emulator.<p>Currently I use urxvt on Debian. But I'm not sure why - it wasn't a conscious choice. I think it comes by default with i3 or something.<p>Anyway, Linux users, which terminal emulator would you suggest and why? (I'm on Debian in case that makes a difference.)
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: A look at a common issue I see beginner devs go through. Probably the thing that weeds the most people out of development.
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: I am reading more and more about startups which are focusing on investments in real estate [1].<p>Doesn't anyone feel uneasy about it, that more and more people are looking at real estate as a financial tool, not a basic human right to have a roof over one's head?<p>Aren't startups like this just adding oil to the fire which is the real estate market?<p>I do not understand how will someone expect for future generations to achieve their own personal freedom and living inside their own four walls.<p>[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/17/backed-by-forerunner-and-bezos-back-arrived-a-startup-that-lets-you-buy-into-single-family-rentals-for-as-little-as-100/
Upvote: | 488 |
Title: The standard 3 pin plug is required for grounding in India but Apple do not sell chargers with 3 pin by default or include it in any of their products. If you buy a macbook and use the default charger, you will feel a slight buzz on the top of the laptop. Your ports might also shock you.<p>This is quite unexpected given $200-400 laptops come with a decent grounded charger here.<p>Kids can get shocked while touching your laptop in charging state.<p>Picture with current testing device: <a href="https://ibb.co/YbqtgVX" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/YbqtgVX</a>
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I have to deliberately force myself to learn new things. It could be anything new for me. I find that as I age I have to stop myself from hardening in my ways. I have to constantly be on guard to not fall into my comfort zone. It was much easier to pick up new things when I was younger. What are your suggestions on how to make it easier to learn new things?<p>Edit: I’m 30
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: See title.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I've built a Cypress test runner that completes all tests (no matter how many you've got) in less than a minute. In contrast, based on my experience, a medium-size Cypress test suite takes about 15 minutes to complete.<p>The only catch is that individual tests have to be under 30 seconds.<p>The idea came out of frustration running Cypress in my previous company, where it was taking 10 minutes+ to run all Cypress tests while parallelizing across 30 VMs and costing us in excess of USD 2k/month.<p>In order to achieve this, I have effectively built a new Cypress test runner from the ground up. It understands Cypress syntax, but otherwise have nothing in common with how Cypress works. The way it achieves this performance is by splitting each spec into individual tests and starting all of the tests at once, i.e. if you have 10 specs with 5 tests each, this program will start 50 VMs to run your tests.<p>I have two companies trialing this at the moment and the feedback has been incredibly positive, saying that it is saving _hundreds_ of engineering hours.
I am trying to establish how to price this. The challenge is that this model is profitable at scale, but losing money if there is not high density of clients. This is because it costs me USD ~0.15 to run a VM for 1 hour and I need to spin up enough VMs to complete all tests, and I am charged in increments of an hour.<p>My thinking is to charge 2 cents per a test-minute, i.e. Using previous example of 10 specs with 5 tests each, it would cost USD 1 to run all tests once. If you run integration tests 100 times per day, that's USD 100/day.<p>This may sound much. However, if prior to using this you were waiting 15 minutes to run all tests, that is 14 minutes saved. If avg. engineer in your company is earning USD 60/hour, you are saving USD 14 by having engineers get immediate results rather than waiting for them. If positioned that way, it doesn't sound expensive.<p>I am currently targeting companies with 30-50 engineers (existing customers are series A and series B companies). At this size, they don't have crazy amount of tests, so I can deliver on the 1 minute promise, and they care a lot about moving fast.<p>What sounds reasonable?
Upvote: | 53 |
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