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Title: I have noticed that trying to bill at higher rates has been becoming more difficult and if I don't work a full 8 hours it appears that I am slacking off. The vast majority of software engineers do not do 8 hours of actual work, even including meetings.<p>However, I sometimes notice other contractors billing a full 40-hour work week and clients not batting an eye.<p>Am I being too honest, and should I continue billing for the fifteen minutes I go off reading HN, having lunch, or any other short break?<p>Edit: I guess what I meant to say, is lowering my rate by around 25%, but also being less picky on what I should bill so that I can earn the same amount, acceptable?
Upvote: | 156 |
Title: Hi HN, I'm Davit, the CEO of Activeloop (<a href="https://activeloop.ai" rel="nofollow">https://activeloop.ai</a>). We've made a “data lake” (industry jargon for a large data store with lots of heterogeneous data) that’s optimized for deep learning. Keeping your data in an AI-optimized format means you can ship AI models faster, without having to build complex data infrastructure for image, audio, and video data (check out our GitHub here: <a href="https://github.com/activeloopai/deeplake" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/activeloopai/deeplake</a>).<p>Deep Lake stores complex data such as images, audio, videos, annotations/labels, and tabular data, in the form of tensors—a type of data structure used in linear algebra, which AI systems like to consume.<p>We then rapidly stream the data into three destinations: (a) a SQL-like language (Tensor Query Language) that you can use to query your data; (b) an in-browser engine that you can use to visualize your data; and (c) deep learning frameworks, letting you do AI magic on your data while fully utilizing your GPUs. Here’s a 10-minute demo: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxsofpSIw3k&t" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxsofpSIw3k&t</a>.<p>Back in 2016, I started my Ph.D. research in Deep Learning and witnessed the transition from GBs to TBs, then petabyte datasets. To run our models at scale, we needed to rethink how we handled data. One of the ways we optimized our workflows included streaming the data, while asynchronously running the computation on GPUs. This served as an inspiration for creating Activeloop.<p>When you want to use unstructured data for deep learning purposes, you’ll encounter the following options:<p>- Storing metadata (pointers to the unstructured data) in a regular database, and images in object storage. It is inefficient to query the metadata table and then fetch images from object storages for high-throughput workloads.<p>- Store images inside a database. This typically explodes the memory cost and will cost you money. For example, storing images in MongoDB and using them to train a model would cost 20x more than a Deep Lake setup [2].<p>- Extend Parquet or Arrow to store images. On the plus side, you can now use existing analytical tools such as Spark, Kafka, and even DuckDB. But even major self-driving car companies failed on this path.<p>- Build custom infrastructure aligned with your data in-house. Assuming you have the money and access to 10 solid data engineers with PhD-level knowledge, this still takes time (~2.5+ years), is difficult to extend beyond the initial vertical, will be hard to maintain, and will defocus your data scientists.<p>Whatever the case, you'll get slow iteration cycles, under-utilized GPUs, and lots of ML engineer busywork (thus high costs).<p>Your unstructured data already sits in a data lake such as S3 or a distributed file system (e.g., Lustre) and you probably don’t want to change this. Deep Lake keeps everything that a regular data lake makes great. It helps you version-control, run SQL queries, ingest billion-row data efficiently, and visualize terabyte-scale datasets in your browser or notebook. But there is one key difference from traditional data lakes: we store complex data, such as images, audio, videos, annotations/labels, and tabular data, in a tensorial form that is optimized for deep learning and GPU utilization.<p>Some stats/benchmarks since our launch:<p>- In a third-party benchmark by Yale University [3], Deep Lake provided the fastest data loader for PyTorch, especially when it comes to networked loading;<p>-Deep Lake handles scale and long distance: we trained a 1B parameter CLIP model on 16xA100 GPUs on the same machine on LAION-400M dataset, streaming the data from US-EAST (AWS) to US-CENTRAL (GCP) [4] [5];<p>- You can access datasets as large as 200M samples of image-text pairs) in seconds (as compared to the 100+ hours it takes via traditional methods) with one line of code. [6]<p>What's free and what's not: the data format, the Python dataloader, version control, and data lineage (a log of how the data came to its current state) with the Python API are open-source [7]. The query language, fast streaming, and visualization engines are built in C++ and are closed-source for the time being, but are accessible via a Python interface. Users can store up to 300GB of their data with us for free. Our growth plan is $995/month and includes an optimized query engine, the fast data loader, and features like analytics. If you're an academic, you can get this plan for free. Finally, we have an enterprise plan including role-based access control, security, integrations, and more than 10 TB of managed data [8].<p>Teams at Intel, Google, & MILA use Deep Lake. If you want to read more, we have an enterprise-y whitepaper at <a href="https://www.deeplake.ai/whitepaper" rel="nofollow">https://www.deeplake.ai/whitepaper</a>, an academic paper at <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10785" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10785</a>, and a launch blog post with deep dive into features at <a href="https://www.activeloop.ai/resources/introducing-deep-lake-the-data-lake-for-deep-learning/" rel="nofollow">https://www.activeloop.ai/resources/introducing-deep-lake-th...</a>.<p>I would love to hear your thoughts on this, especially anything about how you manage your deep learning data and what issues you run in with your infra. I look forward to all your comments. Thanks a lot!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.activeloop.ai/resources/introducing-deep-lake-the-data-lake-for-deep-learning" rel="nofollow">https://www.activeloop.ai/resources/introducing-deep-lake-th...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/AZtWSkA" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/AZtWSkA</a><p>[3] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13705" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13705</a><p>[4] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/POtHklM" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/POtHklM</a><p>[5] <a href="https://github.com/activeloopai/deeplake-laion-clip" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/activeloopai/deeplake-laion-clip</a><p>[6] <a href="https://datasets.activeloop.ai/docs/ml/datasets/coco-dataset/" rel="nofollow">https://datasets.activeloop.ai/docs/ml/datasets/coco-dataset...</a><p>[7] <a href="https://github.com/activeloopai/deeplake" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/activeloopai/deeplake</a><p>[8] <a href="https://app.activeloop.ai/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://app.activeloop.ai/pricing</a>
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: In almost all jobs I had there was a boss running the show with some badly designed & not updated excel sheet. What is your experience?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: If we looked at the German Job Market as if it were the stock market, we would say that it's crashing! On the following link you can see my pet project where I have been scrapping the major job offer portal in Germany for over one year. In the last two weeks it has lost 33% percent of all posted job offers and it keeps dropping as a rock :-(<p>Dashboard: <a href="https://jobmarketanalytics.com/#months=%2212%22&technology=%5B%22Java%22%2C%22Python%22%2C%22SQL%22%5D" rel="nofollow">https://jobmarketanalytics.com/#months=%2212%22&technology=%...</a><p>Source Code: <a href="https://github.com/petracarrion/job-market-analytics" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/petracarrion/job-market-analytics</a><p>Slide Deck: <a href="https://petra.carrion.io/job-market-analytics/slides/" rel="nofollow">https://petra.carrion.io/job-market-analytics/slides/</a><p>Important! If it is offline, please refer to this image: <a href="https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/ElMG6yee19KT.png?o=1" rel="nofollow">https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/ElMG6yee19KT.png?o=1</a>
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Open ended questions: where do you store and backup your personal data (S3, Google Drive, etc)? How do you run your backups? How do you manage encryption keys, etc? What considerations drove your solution?
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: The thought of returning to corporate working kind of disgusts me. daily meetings, middle management bs, politics, bureaucracy... im sure your familiar with the typical complaints.<p>Ive realized I don't seem to have any money generating skills, the only thing I seem actually be good at is making money for other people.<p>So im wondering if anyone has been able to use their coding skill to make a living that isn't working in a business.<p>Things ive tried and thought about(please correct anything that seems wrong!):<p>monetizing hobbies - I see why people don't recommend this, im not good enough anyway. to old to go pro at sports, not good enough or have credentials to teach.<p>coding tutoring and teaching - i tried this on codementor.io, there's more mentors then people needing help, its competitive and doesn't pay much when you consider how much extra work goes into it. I also don't have a CS degree so it doesn't seem like I can teach at a school. Maybe there are better ways to teach?<p>bug bounty chasing - I thought this would be easier then it really is. i guess its like a whole different skill set, interesting as a hobby but its going to take to long to get good. and its competitive<p>make a company or sell a thing software thing - I can code up my dream ideas with ease, what i don't know how to do is market anything or get users. seems to be another skill that will take months and maybe not even turn out to do anything<p>freelance - compared to just working rates seem low and its hard to find work from what ive seen<p>If you have cool ideas or something worked out for you, id be interested in hearing them! Otherwise I need to get working on a resume, id rather not!
Upvote: | 496 |
Title: Given that most of the new companies adopt modern frameworks like React, Angular, Vue which are quite stable across browsers unlike jQuery, Backbone days when the same code worked in Chrome but not Firefox for various reasons.<p>Just wanted to pick your brains on what do you think how relevant is cross-browser testing. Do we really need to test our code on 50ish Chrome versions, 25is Firefox versions and so on.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Am curious what peoples experiences from Montessori transitioning to other education systems was like and how they perceived the school worked or didn't for then? Have some children decisions and looking for outside opinions! Thanks!
Upvote: | 253 |
Title: Simple question with not so simple answers…<p>Watching Elon gaslight current and former Twitter employees in the public square, I couldn’t help but wonder if any engineers would actually work for this guy going forward and why?
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: I got sick of the old software development loop: <i>Change code -> Run tests -> wait -> wait some more -> look at failures.</i><p>I decided to build a tool that will enable you to: <i>Change code -> look at failures.</i><p>No wait time, no explicit test running.<p>Under the hood:<p><pre><code> - Runs the whole test suite and collects code coverage per test.
- For each auto file save, analyzes the changes on the tests.
- Runs changed tests in the background.
- Display results, the loop time from change to test results is approx 250ms.
</code></pre>
Instead of:
<i>code -> alt+tab -> arrow up -> rerun all the tests -> wait ... -> test results </i><p><i>code -> alt+tab -> test results!</i><p>Check it out!
<<a href="https://github.com/nabaz-io/nabaz" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nabaz-io/nabaz</a>>
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: My wife is pregnant and I need a job urgently... and like when I needed a job urgently in the past to pay student loans, I feel inclined to accept whatever offer I get.<p>But what I really wanted was work with C. But even searching for that is hard (often a company writes C/C++ and they mean only C++ and not C at all).<p>I tried in the past seeing if embedded would work but even entry positions require experience.<p>So no idea where to look for such jobs.<p>The vacancies list I found right now is just a long list of full stack, frontend, backend, sometimes java, the occasional SQL, nosql, and sometimes python or ruby. Not a single C job.<p>Where the C users are hiding? Is living programming in C even possible or it became a purely hobby language for people doing angular.js on their day jobs?
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: Michael and Yury here – we're building a no-code analytics platform for growth teams that automatically generates actionable data insights.<p>After working in the data space for many years, we realized there was still a huge gap in the marketing analytics market. Growth teams have so much marketing and advertising data, yet this siloed data is not actionable.<p>The existing BI and search-driven analytics solutions are designed for data-savvy people. In our experience (previously built an NLP company called FriendlyData), non-technical people just don't know what questions to ask.<p>So we decided to try a different approach: Narrative BI automatically generates a personalized feed of insights. You just need to connect your data sources (takes 2 min to set up), and you will get automated narratives, alerts, and reports in minutes.<p>We currently support UA, GA4, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads, but many more integrations will be added soon.<p>You can try it out for free and give feedback or roast it in the comments section. Just connect your data source, and you'll start getting narratives in 5 minutes.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I've been reflecting over the past 2 years of covid lockdowns, the shift to remote work. I love remote work, it has given me more flexibility and made it easier for me to be better at work and better at home.<p>However, it has taken a significant and largely unseen toll on my mental health.<p>I am not sure why, I'm still trying to figure it out, but I have made one key observation. And I'd welcome either confirmation or denial from this crowd if you've experienced the same.<p>For context, we have shifted largely to using Slack, video call, and email for communication. Slack is the biggest culprit in the whole mess. My biggest takeaway is that text is not lossless compression for communication. Or put another way, text doesn't capture the vocal inflection and nuances that communicating by voice does. And also, for some reason, I tend to interpret a written message in a much worse way than I do a message that is communicated verbally.<p>One message on its own is not a huge deal, but across the 100+ channels I belong to and the probably hundreds of messages that come my way in a day, it adds up to a lot of added psychological burden. I think email already had this drawback, but with slack because people are empowered to just fire away a message, less thought goes into it, the frequency goes up, and the psychological toll increases.<p>Does anyone feel the same?<p>Do you have any tips to deal with this?<p>Sometimes I think I'm a snowflake for thinking this way, and I've definitely had to learn to toughen up during this pandemic working a very stressful job at a FAANG. But it is one of the things I think has made the largest change, as far as a psychological toll goes.<p>Thanks for reading.
Upvote: | 124 |
Title: A few minutes ago I was calling my family, and had a 15-second video ad after they picked up. According to them, they saw the ad too.<p>Do you think this is a case of A/B Testing, or are the ads here to say?<p>Picture for reference: https://imgur.com/a/ddddPAm
Upvote: | 129 |
Title: Coming from WPF and Winform, I find web development to be unnecessarily complex, but I refuse to believe that’s true.<p>I just want to make a simple web app, no React, Angular or any of that. That can’t be too hard right? I’m sure in large scale, that stuff has its place, but I don’t need it. To me, the browser is the UI framework.<p>When I Google around to get started, I find obnoxious Medium articles. I don’t want to copy and paste instructions and throw something together without a clue what’s going on. Mozilla has good documentation, but I don’t know what’s a good source to actually get a web app running locally that I can eventually deploy online. Do I really need Node? Compared to WPF/Winform this is a mess, or so I hope not.<p>I want to make a simple app where users can create and fill out a form. ATC test plans, to be exact.
Upvote: | 185 |
Title: RESOLVED! Thanks for all of you who pointed me to my glaring mistake to subscribe to the WRONG (read: essentials) version which provides NO email. Changed to "Workspace Business Starter" (with in intermediate step, check comments if you are stuck like me).<p>My vanity domain (¨Lastname¨.net) had its email hosted on gmail, for over 10 years with a lot of success.<p>Util I was forced to buy Workspace. Since that moment the message "We are sorry, but you do not have access to Gmail" shows with NO way to enable it.<p>I made the mistake of having this domain registration done with an email on this domain and have lost the password for the domain registar (NetSol).<p>So now I can not change the MX records (password reset only works with registered email) and I have try every single possibility to contact google: to no avail.<p>EVERYTHING I own (user accounts and the like) are now unavailable since I lost access to my email.<p>Is there any google whisperer who can help or tell me where I could find help?<p>I am desperate...
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: Hello HN!<p>I've been working on a task manager (<a href="https://plocs.com" rel="nofollow">https://plocs.com</a>) that combines a todo list with project management.<p>Unlike most task managers, Plocs supports task dependencies and makes working with them easy.<p>Thanks to dependencies Plocs is better in two important ways:<p>1.) You can plan in a goal-oriented way. Start with your goal and then plan the steps you need to get there.
2.) You can tell very easily which tasks you can work on: the ones that don't depend on other tasks are shown in a list to the left of the screen.<p>Would love to get your feedback!<p>PS: If you click on "Start demo" you can try it in the browser without registering.<p>Thanks,
Christian Staudenmeyer
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: It seems there are a variety of solutions to prevent value from being transferred from artists/fans/venues to resellers. Why does it seem like there have been no significant attempts to implement an alternative?<p>The only YC company[1] I can find in this space seems to be DOA.<p>[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/the-ticket-fairy
Upvote: | 117 |
Title: Cartwright is a data profiler that identifies and categorizes spatial and temporal features. Cartwright uses deep learning, natural language processing, and a variety of heuristics to determine whether a column in a dataset contains spatial or temporal information and, if so, what is specifically contained.<p>Cartwright was built to automate complex data pipelines for heterogenous climate and geopolitical data that are generally oriented around geospatial and temporal features (think maps and time series). The challenge that Cartwright solves is automatically detecting those features so they can be parsed and normalized. This problem turns out to be quite tricky, but Cartwright makes it simple.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Sanket and Pranav, co-founders of Dots (<a href="https://dots.community" rel="nofollow">https://dots.community</a>). We help people manage large communities on Discord by automating common tasks like onboarding new members and providing insights on your most valuable members.<p>Companies are increasingly interacting with their customers through communities on Slack and Discord. This trend will continue, because building a strong community around your product is a moat, leading to better retention and revenue. However, while Slack and Discord are great communication tools, they aren’t designed for community teams to engage with thousands of members at a personal level. Moreover, community leaders don't have a good idea of who their members are. We solve these problems by letting them automate common tasks and by giving them visibility into what’s going on in their communities.<p>There’s a ton of repetitive manual work required to build a great community. Often, community leads spend hours kicking bots/toxic members or answering FAQs, ending in burnout. Specifically on Discord, mods of busy servers are patching together 10 bots or building custom bots to improve the UX of their server. This is confusing for community members too.<p>Dots is a no-code automation builder that helps mods build great experiences in their Discord servers. Specifically, the product consists of:<p>- <i>a no-code bot builder:</i> You can pick a trigger (e.g when a user joins a community, or when they click a button), and define various actions to fire off after (e.g. send a message, send a survey) You can think about it like Typeform for Discord on steroids;<p>- <i>member analytics:</i> Tag members into segments directly from Discord and identify key community members (or members about to churn)<p>Discord allows community leaders to build complex rules and member hierarchies. However, most mods lack the ability to code their own bots. A niche market of consultants and developers has cropped up to help customize communities, but our product lets the admins build what they need for themselves.<p>Here’s a quick 3 min demo on creating an automation flow: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/67334ccee36f417da62caa2ad8fdcbd8" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/67334ccee36f417da62caa2ad8fdcbd8</a><p>Communities like Chainlink, Splice, and the NBA use Dots to onboard and engage thousands of members in their servers. Here are some automation examples of what they use us for:<p>- <i>Welcome flows:</i> custom onboarding flows to ask questions to new members and show them around the community, as well as verify they’re not bots<p>- <i>Surveys:</i> send surveys to specific members within your Discord server<p>- <i>Support flow:</i> community-specific support chat bot directly in Discord which integrates with their existing support tooling<p>If you run a Discord, we would love love love your feedback! You can sign up at <a href="https://app.dots.community/signup" rel="nofollow">https://app.dots.community/signup</a> with no credit card required. Invite code is LAUNCHHN. We have a free tier and our paid pricing starts at $29 / month and up for more advanced features and very large communities.<p>Join our Discord to see a flow in action (or just hang out with other Discord mods): <a href="https://discord.gg/WJFTPtvGGw" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/WJFTPtvGGw</a>.<p>Thanks so much HN—we look forward to your comments and questions and any of your thoughts on software support for communities!
Upvote: | 112 |
Title: Hi everyone, based on the feedback on my prototype puzzle (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884467" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884467</a>) I have now built a daily puzzle site, with lots of animation and interactivity.<p>Hope you enjoy it!
Upvote: | 244 |
Title: Hacker News refuses to delete public comments or submissions even when users request that they do so. HN says it may consider deleting specific comments if a user emails them and explains why a specific comment or submissions should be removed.<p>Isn't this a clear violation of GDPR and CCPA?<p>HN will anonymize usernames, but that does not remove personally identifying links or data from comments and submissions.<p>Will this ever change? Will it ever be possible for a user to be completely deleted from HN (remove all comments and submissions)?
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Hello all!<p>We are selling standalone boring, mainly desktop (although it runs on beefier laptops as well) software. It's for Windows and written in boring technologies (C99 for the engine and C# for GUI).
We are considering various business models when it comes to selling it in the future as our current one causes a lot of problems. Some options and thoughts I have about them right now:<p>1)What I call a "classical model" which we tried so far: release 1.0 version, sell it for a fixed price. Continue to support it for a while with bugfixes/features. At some point move to developing 2.0 version, sell it again (giving discounts for current 1.0 customers).<p>Advantages: simple, the customers can use software they purchased forever<p>Disadvantages: at some point you need to start collecting features/development for the next version. This means you will not be shipping new things for a while and "sit" on developments in house. This creates numerous problems, the most severe are: I)you are releasing all the new things at once making the release period hell as all the bugs/suggestions/problems hit you at one point in time and II) you can't give customers what they want/need immediately even if they want to pay for it right now as you need a significant improvements for the next version. III) You don't get quick feedback from the customers (only from testers which will always be less complete) about the things you are working on. It may turn out you have spent a few months working on something people don't really want or they want it in a different way.<p>2)Pure subscription.<p>Advantages: I)Everyone is on the newest version all the time II)Everyone can cancel/renew at any point III)Incentives aligned: developers can ship new stuff immediately, no reason to sit on new developments<p>Disadvantages: you can't purchase software and "own it". I like the idea that software once purchased can be run in 3-5-10 years from now and it's not developers' business when/how you choose to run it.<p>3)Some mix of the above. For example one time purchase and then subscription for updates.<p>Potential problems:<p>I)Difficult to determine what happens to people who cancel subscription (do they get the latest version at the time - that's difficult to support, what they need to pay if they renew in a few months?)<p>II)What happens when someone want to jump from subscription to one-time payment + updates?<p>III)It's seems to be recipe for a situation where there are 100s of "current versions" people are running and that's very difficult to support. It would be nice if everyone is on a newest one (or some ancient one that doesn't need support anymore).<p>It seems like it's very difficult to choose a business model that let people "own" the software but which also keeps incentives for the developers to ship new developments regularly. I guess that can be worked around with frequent release schedule (so you don't sit on stuff for too long) but that's very difficult to accomplish in a small development team.<p>I also think in case of various subscription/subscription hybrid ideas it's very important to be very clear about the policy towards people who cancel/want to renew after some time.<p>Any advice/suggestions are much appreciated!
Upvote: | 112 |
Title: I feel like there is a lot more "news" about stuff outside whole hacker/cs space mostly economy/politics + some personal blog shilling past few months.<p>Or I just got into some sort of a buble and see only politics and economy for past few months, what are you think guys?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Hi HN!
This is my pet project, written from scratch because there is so much to discover and learn in the process. The focus is on simplicity and incremental updates.
Progress is slow because I do not have much spare time to work on this, but I would love to hear some feedback.
Regards
Upvote: | 279 |
Title: I know some of you can relate, when I have to interview I feel a terror come over me. It's immobilizing. A simple algorithm question becomes impossible because I don't have access to my prefrontal cortex, instead it's all fight or flight, sweaty hands, and panic.<p>I found with covid I can now do the onsite portion with a little wine in my mug and answer the questions with access to my whole brain, since it's all over zoom.<p>When I told this to a friend they said they use beta blockers.<p>Can anyone relate? There doesn't seem to be another way to get work in the tech industry. There is not much relief for those of us with anxiety.
Upvote: | 145 |
Title: I was constantly googling CLI commands so I built this small CLI tool with GPT3.
You can ask for shell commands right from the CLI.<p>You'd need to use your own API KEY for this but it's pretty simple, instructions are in the README
Not perfect but not bad either.
Upvote: | 159 |
Title: I've been using it for over 7 years, and while I've memorized a bunch of commands and have some idea of what the commit tree is, I'm perpetually bewildered by some of its messages or the behavior of some commands - and the only way I can fix major trainwrecks is by nuking a branch (when I'm lucky, the entire repository when not) and copy-pasting stuff until it's back to working state.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: A recent post on HN got me thinking about how to visualize box breathing, and this is the result. I hope you'll find it useful<p>It can easily be installed as an app (PWA) on mobile or desktop for offline/easy access. Instructions are at the bottom of the page.<p>Reference post:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33586383" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33586383</a><p>Source code:
<a href="https://github.com/lassebomh/box-breathing" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lassebomh/box-breathing</a><p>Happy breathing HN
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Hey there HN – I'm Mohamed, CEO here at Posterity.<p>I've seen a lot of threads lately discussing how stuff can be transferred safely to significant others and spouses. A key aspect of that transfer is often timing, and the ability to only disclose information if and when necessary.<p>This is basically what Automations are about; web-hooks triggered in the event something happens, and which can serve as a reliable signal because we verify every death manually.<p>Today, it's available via IFTTT (<a href="https://ifttt.com/posterity" rel="nofollow">https://ifttt.com/posterity</a>), and we'll be launching standard HTTP web-hooks very soon as a follow up.<p>Hope you find this useful.
Upvote: | 120 |
Title: This is something that's bothering me from time to time, so I'm interested in knowing if others are struggling with it as well.<p>It seems to me there are some people (my experience is with SWEs but probably not limited to that) that:<p>- don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question<p>- don't stay focused to the point of the discussion<p>- don't have some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech<p>- generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion<p>In such cases I find it hard to have technical discussions at the point where I'm frustrated thinking of all the pointlessly-spent energy required to have those discussions the first place.<p>Anyone else feeling like this at work? Why do you think this happens? Is it an intentional choice to communicate like this, is it lack of some skill (on theirs or on my part) or something else?<p>P.S. Apologies for this rant (that probably lacks clarity as well)<p>---<p>EDIT: Fixed title and some missing words (oh the irony).
Upvote: | 293 |
Title: Just got into this business and I have a few ideas from running a personal wiki to Bitwarden, Plex etc.
I'm curious what you folks are running so we can all share and explore more ideas.
Thanks!
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Hello everyone! I left my job to start General Task a little over a year ago, and have been building a better free task manager with a small team.<p>We aim to be the best place where one can find what’s next in their workday and we integrate with a number of different services to help do that. We’re still in the early stages of a beta, but so far you can:<p>- Create/edit tasks with due dates, priorities, and folders<p>- Drag tasks onto your calendar to block off time to do them (syncs with GCal)<p>- Sync with Linear (JIRA coming soon) to see tasks assigned to you<p>- Sync with Github to see your PRs<p>- Integrate with Slack to make tasks directly from Slack<p>What sets us apart?<p>We know there are tons of task managers out there. We believe ours is different because it is tailor-made for engineers, with integrations for Github PRs, Linear and Slack. We also support dragging tasks onto your calendar, which is usually only found in premium paid products, while our consumer product is free and always will be.<p>Our mission is to make knowledge workers more productive, and we believe the best way to do that is by focusing on software engineers and achieving mass adoption of a free consumer product before releasing a paid product for businesses.<p>Let us know what you think!<p>NOTE: We currently only support Google sign-in, sorry about that! We will be adding more login options soon. If you don't want to sign in with Google, you can see a quick 1 minute demo of our features here: <a href="https://youtu.be/NUOIH2On_Nw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/NUOIH2On_Nw</a>
Upvote: | 120 |
Title: Because I'm struggling to think of anything in recent years, and most of the things they do try to launch tend to flop, even if the initial idea is pretty good.<p>Meanwhile, all their successful products and services have been around a while now. Search was 1997, Blogger was 1999 (not initially by Google), Gmail was 2004, YouTube and Maps were both 2005, Google Docs was 2006 and both Android and Chrome were 2008. So where's the next big hit? Is one even possible with Google's attitude of "if it doesn't succeed in a few months, kill it"?<p>What is likely to be their next successful story out of the things they worked on recently?
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: I'll start. For me, I think the most impactful thing I've ever built was an internal application for a FX trading desk that eventually went on to handle billions in daily trades.<p>It didn't use any fancy frameworks, just plain old CRUD on Java.
Upvote: | 729 |
Title: Lately I've been getting frequent "Error HTTP 451: Unavailable for Legal Reasons" thrown by Cloudflare whilst using Piped (a YouTube alternate front end used by Nitter).<p>However these errors are generated... in error. The page links to a DMCA complaint which lists about a half dozen unrelated YouTube (and Piped) links, none of which are being accessed when the error is generated. In fact, viewing the video on YouTube plays back fine. There appears to be a glitch in Cloudflare's URL filtering. It's been happening so frequently that Piped is often unusable.
Upvote: | 206 |
Title: Can you share your recent experience with different search engines?<p>I've tried brave, duduckgo, kagi, start page, qwant, you, searX. Relevance of results is average. I want more organic results, to text made for content (blogs), not text made for clickbait (publishing sites). Add "reddit" to search words to get more organic results is also wired phenomenon.<p>I just feel that those search engines are more for advertising than searching relevant results. How you deal with that?<p>For example teclis.com is good for science and academic articles, are there any other search engines more relevant in different subjects?
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Life changing is open to your interpretation. It can be anything like changing majors to arriving at some serious realization. In short, it caused a tremendous mind shift that led you to take certain decisions that helped you in the long run.<p>Any reason for which you still remember that book or its contents. Also mention the reason.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Hi. I made Easylang to help beginners get started with programming. It is open source.<p><a href="https://github.com/chkas/easylang" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chkas/easylang</a><p>Why I think Easylang is for beginners better than Python.<p><a href="https://easylang.online/blog/easyl_pyth.html" rel="nofollow">https://easylang.online/blog/easyl_pyth.html</a><p>UPDATE: The posted link goes directly to the beginner tutorial. This is the start page of the IDE.<p><a href="https://easylang.online/ide/" rel="nofollow">https://easylang.online/ide/</a>
Upvote: | 167 |
Title: Hi,<p>Over the years, I have accumulated many “calculators” in various spreadsheets to make my personal life easier: tax simulations, startup equity, investment allocation, real estate, …<p>Clearly calculators online are a dime a dozen, yet I’ve never found the competition (top hits on Google) as accurate as mine, they all seem very wonky, slapped together quickly and missing important details.<p>What would be the path of least friction to produce a no-backend static website that can host these calculators? I believe that with the right intuitive UX and user-friendly features (i.e. persist the input in the URL query string, instant recomputation on input change, …) they could be valuable for someone.<p>For context, I’m a software engineer working in FAANG as a backend developer in distributed systems and Linux kernel for many years. I just really dislike dealing with anything frontend-related and I’m utterly incompetent in it, I find CSS to be the biggest monster in computer science (and I troubleshooted bugs in distributed consensus algorithms, ha!), so I’m ideally looking for a framework/template where I can mostly focus on my business logic functions/invariants and get as a result a few static assets to host.<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I needed a way to let users write JavaScript to create plugins for a site I'm building.<p>I couldn't find a solution I was happy with, so ended up building one that run's it in a web worker on a separate domain from your main site.<p>Hopefully I haven't missed anything. If so, please let me know!<p>My website has an interactive demo you can write code in the browser textarea, and see the output on the right.<p>Interactive Demo: <a href="https://workerbox.net/" rel="nofollow">https://workerbox.net/</a><p>Github: <a href="https://github.com/markwylde/workerbox" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/markwylde/workerbox</a>
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: Given the very interesting comments on the "Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?", I was wondering about something similar: Things you regret based on ethical implications, bad technical decisions you made convinced you were right but regret/cringe about later, failures on miscalculations on budgets that provoked a bad outcome in the company etc whatever.<p>Thanks in advance.
Upvote: | 502 |
Title: I am seeing more low quality comments in the last few months with baseless claims. Has any other hn readers been seeing this? Curious to know from long time (>3 years) hn readers.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Hey HNs:<p>This is Vincent from the ILLA team. I'm sure you guys see tons of "Open-source" and "Alternative to Retool" these days. I won't deny Retool is a great product, and so are many open-source competitors such as Appsmith, Budibase, Tooljet etc.<p>However, what makes ILLA so special? What advantages does ILLA have that allow users to choose ILLA instead of others?<p>Well, I would like to answer those questions to all folks at HN one by one.<p>First, we are similar to Retool, or Appsmith but we have many different our own features. We are a true open-source project all the folks here can check and review our Code here: <a href="https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder</a>. We believe as developers the basic ethic is to be honest, especially in "open-source" circumstances. You have to be honest with your team, users, and contributors in order to grow. Therefore, we welcome all the contributors from around the world to build ILLA together, this is a promising project and won't let you down. With your code, we can build the next DevTool together instead of just making some cash.<p>Ok, so maybe some folks here would say that I don't care about "Code Integrity", and there are many different options such as Appsmith, Budibase, and Tooljet. Why should I use ILLA here? Well, we believe the difference between animals and homo sapiens is that people know to use tools to improve their work efficiencies. Our whole team members are developer backgrounds and we know many itch issues we would like to solve for developers. So maybe our newest 1.3.3 version is not good enough, but just give us a little more time and I'm you will see the differences.<p>In the end, We are also "open-source" first. We are willing to collaborate with different open-source alternatives as much as we can. For example, we just partnered with PingCAP a few weeks ago. We will support many other open-source databases such as MindsDB, Supabase, etc soon. We can also support many other open-source alternatives, if you are interested, you can always find us in our Discord community.<p>Our Repo again: <a href="https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder</a>
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: I have some game projects that were released almost ~15 years ago (https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/asylumsquare/list/100010). Of course, from today's perspective, they have some issues (low 4:3 resolution, for example).<p>I made the games available for free on Steam because I thought they might still find some players who enjoy them, even if they are of course a bit old-fashioned here and there.<p>I'm now thinking about releasing the source code as open source. I'd really like to do that, because I think it might be interesting for some people. And if people create new ports or mods/improvements, that would be pretty awesome.<p>However, from today's perspective, the source code is not very well structured - so it's a bit embarrassing. I'm torn on whether to publish it or not, because it might reflect badly on me as a developer. How would you handle that?
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: This thread is from 2015
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9049208<p>I have bookmarked it and read it sometimes. Is there a 2022 version of the thread we want to create? Things surely have changed a lot since 2015.
Upvote: | 233 |
Title: On october 27th, when I first heard about Starlink for RV's, I immediately signed up at starlink.com and paid €480. I filled in my email and my phone number, but to date I have not received a confirmation of receipt from Starlink. The payment was a direct transfer.<p>I have gone through the (not great) starlink support pages, and one can apparently only contact starlink through an account that becomes available through the confirmation email. Naturally I have none. It also states that if that confirmation email wasn't confirmed, the order would be cancelled after 7 days (it hasn't). There was no email in my Spam folder.<p>Now it's been over 3 weeks. I am a customer but as far as starlink is concerned, I am not. They obviously did their utmost best to not need a helpdesk, having generous procedures in place for when things fail. There is no one to talk to, not even a silly bot. This is all great when it works, but when you fall on the side where things don't work as intended, as I do now, it doesn't exactly feel great. It feels like a scam, it's indistinguishable.<p>There is also a potential for a scam. If I somehow filled in a slightly wrong email address someone else could, in theory, have taken over my account, and could have redirected the shipment. The point is, I'll never know, and I was not made aware of such risk while signing up. Indeed the signup experience was strangely feed-forward, without an email-confirmation step. In the end it felt like I was supposed to dump €480 into a void, with nothing to show for, except a bank transfer. I was forced to rely on the reputation of the brand, only.<p>I think the above is a relevant data-point to many of you (non-scammers), because it represents an extreme case, even beyond Google, one where not only the non-fallability of software artifacts is presumed, but also the non-fallability of the organizational process that led to its 100% no-contact design.<p>That's sure to have some relevance to the community, but of course I just want someone to talk to and solve what could have been the smallest of issues. Any advice on how to proceed next is appreciated.<p>Edit:<p>- as commenters have mentioned, there is a reset option, by email or phone. AFAIK neither works.<p>- I'm pretty sure I filled in everything correctly, and at the correct site. Never had this kind of problem.
Upvote: | 160 |
Title: I know its kinda generic question, but what technical documentation you would point to as well written, concise, with good examples etc.. Something that really stands out.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I built this during Covid. When I released it, some of the parts went out of stock or skyrocketed in price, no longer making this an economic DIY project. Now that things are getting back to almost normal, I thought I'd share it here and request feedback. This is a very niche project for people who like the same things I do: saxophones, Rust, mechanical keyboards and the Raspberry Pi.
Upvote: | 526 |
Title: I designed and built a product and put together a kick ass engineering team of 4 people. My business partners handle sales and put the majority of the cash in, leaving me with stake of around 30%. Four weeks away from signing a multimillion contract, my co-founders issued a cash call, claiming I am subject to a compulsory share transfer clause. They give the company a premoney valuation of zero, and as a defaulting shareholder I should get 50‰ of fair value... Aka here's "140k leave now, and you have no choice about it". I managed to convince a lawyer to help, and she's willing to do it without charge - after going through the shareholders agreement it's pretty clear that their argument doesn't hold up. But... How to handle this situation? Especially going forward with regard to audits etc. as I no longer trust these guys at all
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: It is similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675112 but about being a team leader, operations manager, or project manager.<p>Currently, I am moving from being an individual contributor to a management position. And I constantly have this thought in the back of my mind that at some point I'll do something dumb and let down people that I am responsible for. It's illogical because through the last couple of years I have substituded the manager for weeks without any issues. But I understand that this is a normal reaction for anyone who is facing something new<p>So I thought that the HN community with all its experience has something to share on such topic<p>Thanks in advance
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Thanks!
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: My Stripe account suffered a card test, Stripe asked me to provide KYB materials including inventory documents and company documents, shipping information, but the account was still closed and Stripe is about to make a mandatory refund of all funds in the account (including the actual purchase price of the product).
I am seeking help, but Stripe support just tells me it is not working.
This could be a vulnerability of Stripe, if your competitor uses Stripe and you want to destroy the competitor's payment system, just test the stolen credit card like crazy and obviously your competitor's Stripe account will be closed.
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: No form of transport requires less energy than telecommuting. Why aren't there Zoom/MS Teams/Slack bill-boards on 101 and 880? Where is everyone's outrage at needlessly requiring people to move themselves into offices and the congestsion, waste, and environmental damage it causes?
Upvote: | 572 |
Title: Yachay is an open-source community that works with the most accurate text-to-geolocation models on the market right now
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I had this idea kicking around in my head for quite a while. Took an evening to make this, and a short morning to polish it a bit. So here it is!
Upvote: | 731 |
Title: List of scenes that I am particularly fond of:<p>- Minecrat computer engineering: Culminated with this playable 3d simplified minecraft clone (CPU+GPU) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BP7DhHTU-I<p>- Shader computing scene: More of a subculture of an already marvelous subculture, people are finding weird ways to compute with shader<p>https://blog.pimaker.at/texts/rvc1/ Risc V emulator in a shader
https://github.com/SCRN-VRC/SVM-Face-and-Object-Detection-Shader Object detection in a shader<p>- Cellular automata: people finding awesome patterns, some great project:<p>https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working-game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life
https://btm.qva.mybluehost.me/building-arbitrary-life-patterns-in-15-gliders/<p>- TAS/Speedrun:<p>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBK1sq1BQ2Q Insane game exploit which uses only player input in order to inject an elaborate rom hack with network functionality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9dTmzRAL_4 Another insane one which work by switching game (!!) during the run<p>- "Can it run Doom" Scene:<p>https://twitter.com/sylefeb/status/1258808333265514497 Run a doom map renderer on a FPGA. Not on a classic computer "emulated" by the fpga, the renderer is directly implemented in the fpga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6hnQ1RKhbo Yes doom can run doom<p>So what are your technical gem?
Upvote: | 295 |
Title: I mess around with writing sometimes and I was just gazing at some pics of a PDP-8 - so gorgeous, and clearly the real world inspiration for all the "panel of blinking lights" computers we watched in 70s-80s SF.<p>Got me wondering - we've had way too many shows now dealing with modern digital culture (hello Silicon Valley). There's been some attempts to tell stories from the early days of <i>micro</i>computers (Halt And Catch Fire for instance), and that makes sense, given that those are the machines that many GenX played with at home or at school.<p>But Hollywood's version of Silicon Valley - Silvercon Valley? - has yet to celebrate the Minicomputer and Mainframe eras in a real way. They have done a bit of deep diving into the 50s, but only in the form of standard issue Genius Porn where the computer operators who broke wartime codes were like Harry Potter characters or something, with modern social causes overlaid as a historical corrective of sorts, and I somewhat doubt that Turing is any happier for the fact that the world no longer cares that he was gay, but remains unable to grasp the awesome stuff he did do. He's not here for it.<p>Grim thoughts aside, these PDP-8s and the people who worked with them daily deserve a story, complete with looooots of pornographic shots of the machines themselves. Love stories that begin by someone bumping their true love's pile of punchcards into a game of '52 pickup that ends with lurid shots of stacks of cards being sucked into the reader.<p>Anyways, the best story would heroize someone real from the era. I know a lot of stories but cannot really find the one that really deserves someone having a go at making it into a script set in that gorgeous era of earthtoned data.<p>What do you think, HN?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hi HN! Tarek and Luana here, co-founders of Kalshi (<a href="https://kalshi.com/hn" rel="nofollow">https://kalshi.com/hn</a>), a financial exchange that allows you to trade on the outcome of events.<p>Everyone faces different risks: inflation, extreme weather, mortgage rates, Supreme Court decisions, student debt, and more. Our mission is to allow people and businesses to mitigate risks that relate to them.<p>We got into finance early during our time at MIT. Tarek worked at Goldman and Citadel, Luana worked at Bridgewater and Citadel. We noticed something common across all these places: a lot of trading stemmed from an opinion on a future event. For example, a lot of activity at Goldman at the time was focused on providing institutions with exposure to, or a hedge against, Brexit. To do this, we’d sell them complicated financial bundles (a bunch of swaps, options, etc.) at a high price… but these bundles were proxies: basically, a bunch of risk curves fitted together to approximate the binary/event exposure the customers were looking for. What you couldn’t do was just trade directly on the event itself, even though that would have been simpler and cheaper and was what people actually wanted. The option just didn’t exist.<p>Once we identified the problem, we noticed it everywhere. The more we thought about it, the more the idea of an exchange for people to trade directly on events seemed obvious. That was the inspiration for Kalshi’s event contracts.<p>We give people the ability to trade based on their opinions about a specific yes-or-no question. For example, if you have student debt and are worried about relief not passing, you can purchase a contract and get a payout even if it doesn’t pass. If you’re worried about the economic fallout of another lockdown, you can place a trade to hedge against it. If you’ve developed a model on inflation, you can profit from that….and maybe even offset your rising costs.<p>Our markets are phrased as simple yes/no questions. For example, “Will the Fed raise interest rates next month?”. Users place orders on either the Yes or the No side and choose a price to purchase the contract between 1c and 99c. When there is a Yes order and a No order on both sides where the prices sum to $1, a trade is formed. When the event happens or doesn’t happen, based on criteria clearly defined in our contracts up front, we give back that $1 to whoever was right. The way our markets are structured means these trades are fully collateralized—there’s no margin or leverage on our platform.<p>The price that a given event contract trades at is actually the market’s assessment of the probability that the event will happen. If something happens that should increase the probability, people will start paying more for Yes contracts, raising the price. This market determination of the likelihood of an event has made Kalshi the most accurate place for predicting where inflation will be next month: <a href="https://kalshi.com/forecasts/inflation" rel="nofollow">https://kalshi.com/forecasts/inflation</a>. People have been building forecasting dashboards on all sorts of things based on our data, including Bloomberg and news outlets.<p>Before Kalshi, markets that allowed you to trade on economically relevant events were illegal or unregulated. From day 1, we decided to take the harder path: build a fully regulated exchange with a deep commitment to compliance. We spent almost 3 years working with the CFTC to develop our exchange, contracts, market structure, surveillance, and compliance programs to provide a safe, secure and orderly market. This finally led to us getting federal approval to launch the first regulated exchange for this new asset class.<p>This path incurred the risk of launching later than anyone who opted to eschew regulatory approval. We chose the hard path because we want to develop this asset class in a way that is safe and responsible, which we see as the only way to build for the long term. We make money the way most exchanges do: we take a small fee on each transaction on our platform (none of the weird order flow or other stuff).<p>Our markets are liquid, have been around for over a year now, are fully regulated (as mentioned), and expanding. We’ve got over 70 markets live, many inspired by requests from our users. Here are some of the markets we’ve had so far: Will there be a Moon landing by 2025? [1] What will monthly inflation be? [2] Will there be a recession in 2023? [3] Will a new COVID variant of concern be identified? [4] We’d love to hear your suggestions for others!<p>You can access our platform through the web, iOS, Android, and our API - you can sign up at <a href="https://kalshi.com/hn" rel="nofollow">https://kalshi.com/hn</a> and place your first trade in minutes. We recently launched our mobile app after months of hard work, which you can download at <a href="https://kalshi.app.link/hn" rel="nofollow">https://kalshi.app.link/hn</a>.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas and look forward to a good discussion in the comments!<p>[1] <a href="https://kalshi.com/events/MOON-25/markets/MOON-25" rel="nofollow">https://kalshi.com/events/MOON-25/markets/MOON-25</a><p>[2] <a href="https://kalshi.com/events/CPI-22NOV/markets/CPI-22NOV-T0.2" rel="nofollow">https://kalshi.com/events/CPI-22NOV/markets/CPI-22NOV-T0.2</a><p>[3] <a href="https://kalshi.com/events/RECSSNBER-23/markets/RECSSNBER-23" rel="nofollow">https://kalshi.com/events/RECSSNBER-23/markets/RECSSNBER-23</a><p>[4] <a href="https://kalshi.com/events/COVVC-23MAR1/markets/COVVC-23MAR1" rel="nofollow">https://kalshi.com/events/COVVC-23MAR1/markets/COVVC-23MAR1</a>
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: I've been working in IT (software developer, architect, devops) for around 20 years now. I've dabbled in pretty much everything. I actually had a passion for it all - I enjoyed every second of what I did. The excitement of learning all that new technology and building something was amazing.<p>Fast forward to present day - I feel like I've lost that passion I had for technology. I don't feel like working in the industry anymore. Has anyone else gone through this?<p>I'm thinking of what else I can do with my life. I could focus on my current hobbies and start a business based on those. Not because of money, but because I'm looking for that excitement again.
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: I'm looking for technical blogs about software programming and software engineering. Mainly just for fun but also for educational purposes (broadening my knowledge horizon if you will). Maybe it's just me, but finding good content like that is somewhat difficult. Do you guys have any recommendations for blogs? At the moment I prefer blogs, but I'm also open for book suggestions. Have a nice day.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: If you're in California, you may have received a "California Middle Class Tax Refund" gift card, in the form of a VISA debit card. This is a "stimulus program" payment.<p>The debit card comes with fees. Lots of fees. About 3%, plus a $7 charge. Plus, by activating the card, you authorize My Banking Direct, a service of New York Community Bank, to use your financial info for marketing purposes.<p>But there's a way out. Hidden down in the fine print, in what looks like 8 point type, is "If you do not agree to all the Cardholder Agreement terms, you should cancel the card by calling customer service and request the funds be issued to you in the form of a paper check".<p>Now it gets interesting. There's a number to call, 1-800-240-0223. It leads to a phone message system, of course. First, there's press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish. Then a long spiel about the cards and payments, which you can't skip. Then you get a list of options, 1 through 8.<p>None of those options is customer service. Some try to trick you into activating the card, by typing in the number and your Social Security number, before they will tell you anything.<p>So how do you get a check? That's the trick. And here's the answer, from KCRA-TV.[1] "If you received a card, you can call 800-542-9332 and select option 9 to speak to an agent." This seems to lead to the same phone menu as the number on the notice. No Option 9 is listed. But if you press 9, you get sent to customer service.<p>Now, that's not the end. Now you get to talk to a voice recognition system, which asks what you want. It rejects "send check" and "cancel card". After two tries, it hangs up on you, and you have to start over.<p>But it does, it turns out, recognize "customer service". Which, finally, gets you to the hold queue for a human. The first human said her computer was down and she couldn't issue a check. On the next try, the human hung up when I asked for the company's business name and address. On the third try, the human actually did the transaction, or at least pretended to. I asked for a transaction ID, which was not offered, and was grudgingly given one. In 10 days to 2 weeks, I am supposed to get a check.<p>Now <i>that's</i> a dark pattern.<p>New York Community Bank has a rating of one star with the Better Business Bureau. They probably make at least $150 million off the fees from California alone.<p>[1] https://www.kcra.com/article/california-middle-class-tax-refund-debit-card-explainer/41860421
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: Node types being things like: companies, macro impacts (interest rates), value chain components (raw materials/trucking)
Edge types being things like: suppliers, buyers, competitors<p>What would be the ideal node types and edge relationships to model the business world in a way you can run simulations of events?<p>Has this already been done? Seems like it would be helpful.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I want to start my own company, but Im not sure how to pay my bills while looking for product-market-fit.<p>I have a well paying job now, and I am pretty sure I would throw my marriage into chaos if I told my wife I was leaving my job to pursue a start up. Shes not stupid, she knows start ups have like a 90% failure rate.<p>So the question is: how do I continue my current standard of living for my family while working on a startup?<p>Are all startups at my age generally side hustles that become profitable enough to quit my day job?<p>Does anyone here have experience with this?
Upvote: | 237 |
Title: I am moving to a new country and it will require travelling by plane with all of my possessions. That includes many laptops, Raspberry Pis, routers, hard drives, USB drives, and SD cards. I think that this may firstly look suspicious, and secondly I am concerned about something being implanted on any one of the devices or drives if they are ever out of my sight, or being "asked" if they can be viewed (i.e. being compelled to give in to plugging in the drives).<p>What would you do? Encrypt all the drives? Transfer almost two terabytes to encrypted cloud storage (which provider?)? What about the laptops (I have 4, one Android tablet, two iPads, a current and old phone)?<p>I could ship these in the post ahead of time. Though I don't think if it's any safer.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: A palindrome date, time and datetime (:
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: Small team down here in South New Zealand just launched CodeLink. In short its an IDE (VSCode/JetBrains) plugin that lets you share blocks of code that link directly to the code inside your IDE or repo. We use it all the time and think its pretty nifty tech that lets you understand someone’s code in context very quickly. we’re hoping to keep refining it to make it better and more useful.
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: I have a strong case of ADHD. Can't take medication that would help me due to other medical reasons. I'm also not a social person and now have developed strong anxiety after consistently failing for a decade (working on that with a psychologist/psychiatrist but it's been a year and so far no significant improvement).<p>I have long periods when I just can't focus on doing anything at all (2-10 weeks) followed by short periods of extreme focused activity (1-3 weeks).<p>I'm unable to hold a job. I'm "the best programmer they've ever seen" but only for the first month - then they start to hate me because I'm not working.<p>Programming is the only thing I can do - and the only thing that makes me enough money to survive. I was unable to finish high school, anything resembling academia sounds like absolute torture.<p>What to do? Please help me.
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: I am giving individual posts more weightage than a blog. You are free to mention the entire blog if you think everything there is worthwhile.<p>Mention some blog posts that you still remember for what it served to you.<p>One example may be this Mechanical Watch description: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: I just don't understand. The whole world knows that he stole billions of dollars and committed fraud. Not all the details may be 100% understood, but the evidence is strong enough that there is no doubt that he has committed a serious crime.<p>So, shouldn't he be arrested and in prison, or at least detained? Why isn't he? He still seems to be free and sending messages to employees. Is it because they can't extradite him from the Bahamas? What is going on?<p>This incident made me lose faith in the justice system and I need an explanation. I understand it doesn't happen the same day but it has been a week now and... nothing.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I had the concept in my head for some time and firstly just prototyped it using only HTML & CSS. Sent it to a few friends and they liked it so I made it into its own website and added few 'competitive' features like click counter and share button.
Upvote: | 633 |
Title: I built over the last two years a human-like neural network chess engine that tries to predict your rating from a single game. It automatically adapts to your play and tries to play like a human at your level would play, giving you a balanced game.<p>At the core I’m using an AlphaZero / Leela Chess Zero style neural network that I have trained on 1 billion human games from the lichess.org open database. Around this network I have built a chess engine in Rust with algorithms that use the outputs from the NN to produce human-like moves at a given rating from beginner to world champion, as well as predicting the level of the opponents play.<p>I want to develop this into kind of an AI coach that you can spar certain positions against and get feedback suited for your level. Happy for any suggestions!
Upvote: | 134 |
Title: Hey everyone!<p>In the last months I've been working on Unclutter, a modern reader mode browser extension. In contrast to all existing approaches, it unclutters articles by modifying their CSS instead of extracting the text content.<p>This results in a more visually pleasing result that reuses the original article style. The idea is to remove friction so you use the reader mode more often.
There are a few more features around saving articles automatically and taking highlights -- more details are on the website.<p>The extension has about 400 active weekly users right now, mostly from organic web store traffic. Monetisation has proven to be hard and for freemium there would need to be much higher numbers anyways.
Do you think I should keep working on the project?
Upvote: | 212 |
Title: Benthos Studio lets you plug and play various components to build a Data Streaming pipeline through a graphic interface.<p>It also allows you to mock inputs to emit dummy data and run the rest of the pipeline to inspect the output of each step.<p>The project is running <a href="https://www.benthos.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://www.benthos.dev/</a> under the hood.
Upvote: | 145 |
Title: I remember some such forums that were really popular and that provided a lot of value for some sub-communities. Nowadays, those needs seem to be mostly filled by Discord servers, Facebook groups and other walled-garden products. HN being a notable exception, but that seems to be running on its own stack.<p>My question is: is this just a matter of something going out of fashion (perhaps driven by monetization interests), or are there technical/UX/safety reasons why you'd recommend a different solution for a new community project in 2022?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: It’s been a tough year in tech, but I love this community and I’m curious.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: I have a favourite.<p>Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes.<p>I just love it for the writing and the way it teaches probability. I haven't encountered any book in probability that is like this book. Every other book I have encountered are just axiom listing behemoths. This book have strengthened my understanding of probability.<p>Does any book come to your mind along these lines? Books that stop being pedantic where needed to first convey the topic to the reader. Then they worry about rigor.
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Forget about billion dollar ideas, I am not even interested in working on million dollar ideas. There are multiple ideas or projects which are left because they don't have potential to scale. They are very specific to a niche set of customers or teams. Many people wanted to work on the solution but dropped off as they had bigger fishes to fry or knew the idea wouldn't scale. But the idea would scale up to a certain limit.<p>e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-isp-instead-of-paying-comcast-50k-expands-to-hundreds-of-homes/<p>I believe that every village needs to solve their own problem and and may be in a different way(based upon the resources they have) as the external help may not arrive. The solution also need not go to cities as it is very specific to the village. This man got a project working after passing the initial inertia. His company may not scale beyond a certain limit but I guess that's okay.<p>What do you think would be those kind of ideas?
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: Thinking to ask my doc to hook me with this to help with the obesity. Curious to hear experiences from HN crew who has tried it.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I’m really thankful for this anazing platform and the knowledge i have gained through HN.
Upvote: | 702 |
Title: I would love to learn more about FTS at a very low level and I'm looking for books to read more on that topic. Any good suggestions ?
Upvote: | 232 |
Title: Over my whole career I can see a pattern.<p>Typically, I work for an employer for around 3 to 5 years. At the start of each employment I make several successful leaps, often designing and building new systems (usually single handedly). I am rewarded with various pay rises, bonuses and promotions. Then around the halfway mark or later, things sour for a variety of different reasons. Typically, I will fall out with someone senior, like my line manager. It's normally over something mundane but definitely technical.<p>In each cycle I try resolving things in different ways but each time I fail; then I desperately try finding a new role with the knowledge that the whole process might repeat itself.<p>I can recall the various reasons the fallouts occured, e.g. frustrated by a boss's crony cancelling 3rd party supplier contracts (which I had to grovel to reinstate), having differing views about testing/automation (I am fond of both), how workloads should be spread more fairly, etc. There are many different reasons.<p>In the more recent cycles I just end up being entirely unproductive at the end.<p>Is it just me?
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: I wanted to see how difficult it would be to build a web app using a sub-$300 android smartphone. Decided to build a fun predictions website where you could bet virtual (not real) money on predictions made by others, and also make predictions of your own.<p>Building it turned out to be considerably easier and more fun than I anticipated.<p>Primary tools used were:<p># QuickEdit as the mobile code editor (Note: the free version of the QuickEdit app is riddled with ads, it shows an advert each time you close a tab, but it unfortunately had the best UI of the 3 or so Android code editors I tested. Ended up using NetGuard to block it from retrieving & displaying ads),<p># PHP for the Backend ( custom PHP microframework I've used and built on over the past few years ).<p># jQuery for the frontend js (<i>cringing</i>) - it appears I'm simply too lazy to learn React/Vue/et al. Every once in a while, I pick one of them to learn, but I always end up returning to jQuery - or time-permitting - amateur level vanilla JS.<p># Bootstrap for the CSS - Battle-tested. For a purely backend dev with minimal design skills, good ol' Bootstrap (and in a growing number of cases, Tailwind) is always a life saver.<p># Whole thing is hosted on 2 VMs (1 hosting the web app, and 1 hosting Redis & MySQL).<p># As to the site itself, it turned out to be pretty cool to play around with. Go there, view the predictions, bet on the predictions you believe will come true, or against the ones you think will not. You get $50,000 to bet with (not real money). No signup is required to bet, but a quick signup is required to make a prediction. Hope you guys like it, and please be ruthless in telling me of any bugs you've found.<p>So go on here => kudotap.com<p>And Have Fun!
Upvote: | 150 |
Title: Chatter Net is a modern decentralized semantic web built atop self-sovereign identity.<p>This is a very early prototype. Help, comments, criticisms are all needed to help the project move forward.
Upvote: | 141 |
Title: I operate multiple apps which were providing my entire livelihood, and I wake up one day to realize it's all gone.<p>Long story short, Google froze my Google Pay account which is used to pay for anything related to Google services, including GCP. This was done as they need to temporarily suspend me to 'verify' me. The GCP team couldn't help me since it was an issue with Google Pay. Not to mention their chat support is useless and doesn't have any power to look into cases.<p>Now I login to find out my Google Pay account is 'temporarily suspended' since I need to verify my account. I go ahead and add my drivers license and fill out their form, but while they verify details they suspend your ability to pay for any Google services.<p>So now I can't pay for GCP usage (firebase) and all my authentication, database, cloud functions, are all not usable since the service is suspended. Unlike Amazon who offers phone lines for resolving billing issues, Google does no such thing. I wish I chose AWS.<p>The end result is that I have apps I spent years of my life building and which currently feed me to only be rendered unusable because some AI at google thought my Google Pay needed additional verification.<p>My whole life has done a 180 in the past week. I feel like I'm a man with literally nothing to lose and I can't live with myself anymore. This hurts much more than losing a job for me.<p>Please stay far, far away from Google services of any kind. They are by far the worst of the big tech companies when it comes to developer support.
Upvote: | 476 |
Title: Linux is present in a big percent of the devices on the planet, from smart phones to servers to IoT devices to (...). It's fair enough to assume that bugs and/or regressions in it can (and will) affect big portions of these devices. This makes me wonder why aren't there any unit tests in the kernel (and the different drivers in it; especially file system related). Or maybe there are and I just haven't found them?
Upvote: | 240 |
Title: I wanted a way to quickly generate new Spotify playlists from my library based on some simple user inputs. There are probably a bunch of songs floating around in old playlists that you will never listen to again so the Spotify Playlist Recycling Plant is an attempt to resurrect these forgotten gems!<p>At the heart of this tool is a simple custom algorithm that uses Spotify's 5000+ unique genres to find similar artists. It works well for my purposes but everybody uses Spotify differently so I'd love some feedback :)<p>Built using React and the Spotify Web API.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Do you know any good black Friday deals for tech stuff?
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: Last week we at n8n ran into problems getting a new database from Azure. After contacting support, it turns out that we can’t add instances to our k8s cluster either. Azure has told they'll have more capacity in April 2023(!) — but we’ll have to stop accepting new users in ~35 days if we don't get any more. These problems seem only in the German region, but setting up in a new region would be complicated for us.<p>We never thought our startup would be threatened by the unreliability of a company like Microsoft, or that they wouldn’t proactively inform us about this.<p>Is anyone else experiencing these problems?
Upvote: | 651 |
Title: context: We are a SaaS for martial arts academies located in Europe. We are using Stripe for our payment integrations and all our academies have their own account connected to our platform using Stripe Connect (standard), since the last couple of days 2 accounts have been suspended due to "suspicious activity".<p>Stripe has implemented a new fraud detection system that is clearly flawed here. These customers are small gyms in local areas with accounts active for the last 11 months without no issues whatsoever, now all of a sudden they were both suspended (and payout blocked) due to suspicious activity. The suspicious activity is disputed payments, which for SEPA DD (the main payment method used) can simply be that the customer has no money in the bank account.<p>The Stripe response so far has been vague, to say the least. Has this happened to you?<p>I believe Stripe is a very good product and we have had no issue with them until now, but this situation is deteriorating trust very fast. Do they literally have the power of taking your funds hostage over a "suspicious" fraudulent activity that is clearly due to a bug in their automatic detection system?<p>Please let me know if you know someone that can help us here
Upvote: | 213 |
Title: Hi everyone, We have just released an open-source case management dashboard for manually approving/rejecting KYC requests (know your customer) with built-in OCR & face-matching functionalities.<p>Next steps:<p>- Enable KYB (business onboarding) documents and personas approval.
- Connected backend between our KYC flow and the case management dashboard.
- Releasing an open-source rule engine, to help automate decisions.<p>We’d love for you to try it out, give us feedback, and suggest features that would make it applicable to you.<p>And if the rest of the project is relevant or interesting to you, follow us here: <a href="https://github.com/ballerine-io/ballerine" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ballerine-io/ballerine</a> and we’ll update you once new things are available.<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I have been seeing a lot of shilling for mastodon lately, so I thought I would step in and shill Nostr for a bit.<p>https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr<p>Fun facts about Nostr:<p>* Nostr stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays". It is an odd acronym, but I like it.<p>* Nostr uses websockets and relays to build a really simple P2P network. We also steal a few ideas from bitcoin (ECDSA ids, schnorr-signed events).<p>* Relays are simply dumb data stores for events that clients publish and subscribe to.<p>* Clients don't trust relays to be honest, so all events are self-signed. Your pubkey is your userid.<p>* It is stupid simple to build a Nostr client. You can easily do it in less than 400 lines of JavaScript. And it runs in the browser.<p>(shameless self plug)
https://github.com/cmdruid/nostr-emitter<p>* Nostr is powerful enough to host chat apps very easily. Here is a rip of Telegram, running on Nostr:<p>https://anigma.io<p>* There's a lot of fun things you can do with Nostr. Check out all these cool projects!<p>https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr<p>* We are constantly discussing how to improve the protocol. Come join the conversation here:<p>https://t.me/nostr_protocol
https://anigma.io
https://damus.io
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips<p>Thank you for reading my nostr shill post. I did not create nostr, nor do I get any monies for promotion. I just think it's really cool and I have a lot of fun building stuff that punches though nats.<p>If you have any questions about nostr please feel free to ask.<p>Also, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I hope we're all feeling fat and sassy today. :-D
Upvote: | 248 |
Title: HN Summary is an open source bot which sumarizes top stories on Hacker News and publishes the summaries to a Telegram channel.<p>Whenever a new story appears on the Hacker News API /topstories.json endpoint, this bot summarizes it (currently using OpenAI GPT-3 text-davinci-002) and sends the story title, summary, and url to the hn_summary channel on Telegram.<p>The purpose of this project is to help build intuition on the capabilities of the current generation of large language models while making a broader swath of top Hacker News content more easily accessible. It could also serve as a platform for experimentation with other language model capabilites such as semantic search.<p>Join the HN Summary channel on Telegram to see the bot in action and enjoy the story summaries.<p><a href="https://t.me/hn_summary" rel="nofollow">https://t.me/hn_summary</a><p>There are a number of potential directions I am interested in exploring here, such as making the bot interactive to allow features like bookmarking urls, semantic search, and semantic filtering.<p>I am also thinking about interfaces other than telegram. I started with telegram since I had recently used it on another project and it seemed like the easiest way to start playing with it. What other interfaces would make sense here?
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: I came across this article by V.I. Arnold : https://www.uni-muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html which is rather old. But some of the points mentioned in the article can be related to problems in the classroom today also.<p>People have an idea that being abstract and talking in abstract terms creates some sort of elitism. But it hampers understanding and excitement at the nascent stages. Abstraction is required to tackle complexity. But that is not the all and be all of the domain.<p>It can be taught like other natural sciences starting with real life examples and building up. It is much more clearly written in the article.<p>I would very much love to hear about books or courses that teach mathematics in the way mentioned in the article.
Upvote: | 124 |
Title: Too much of my day looks like this:<p>I sit down in front of the computer to do some work. I think:<p>"Before I begin, let's check HN real quick if there is something interesting on the frontpage. Probably there is not, so I'll start my work in a minute."<p>Half an hour later, I realize I went down some interesting rabbit hole of information or joined a discussion.<p>Now I need a break from the computer. I stand up and do some other stuff.<p>20 minutes later, I come back to the computer to do some work. I think: "Before I begin, let's check HN real quick ..."<p>What is this problem called? Is it typical procrastination?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Any ideas?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do.<p>Here's Paul Graham:<p><a href="https://stylometry.net/user?username=pg" rel="nofollow">https://stylometry.net/user?username=pg</a><p>Here are some frequent HN commenters: (EDIT: Removed due to privacy concerns)
Upvote: | 676 |
Title: For those laid off, how is the job hunt going? I haven't been able to start yet, but likely this next week I'll start studying and getting ready.
Upvote: | 290 |
Title: For other HN'ers out there who have personal projects on Heroku and might've forgotten (like I did), this weekend is the last chance to get data out of Heroku (or upgrade to paid plans) before it deletes databases/Redis and shuts down free dynos on Monday.<p>> What products are impacted by the removal of free plans?<p>><p>> `free` dynos, `hobby-dev` Heroku Postgres, and `hobby-dev` Heroku Data for Redis plans.<p>><p>> What happens if I take no action on my free apps or databases or do not upgrade to a paid plan?<p>><p>> If you take no action by November 28, 2022:<p>><p>> - `free` dynos will be converted to `eco` dynos scaled down to 0. You must subscribe to the Eco dyno hours plan or upgrade to another paid plan before you can scale them up again. Any Scheduler jobs that used free dynos will fail until they are reconfigured to use another dyno type.<p>> - For non-Enterprise users, `hobby-dev` databases will be deleted in accordance with the Heroku Documentation starting November 28, 2022.<p>> - For Enterprise users, `hobby-dev` databases that belong to an Enterprise Account or Team will be converted to `mini`. There will be no immediate change in cost to your Heroku Enterprise invoices if an app is upgraded from a free tier resource to a paid tier resource. Any changes to Heroku Enterprise pricing would require a contract update to take effect. If you have any concerns about your contract pricing, contact your account executive.<p>> - `hobby-dev` databases that belong to personal accounts will be deleted, and `free dynos` will be converted to `eco` dynos scaled down to 0, even if that user also belongs to an Enterprise Team. These users must upgrade to paid resources before November 28, 2022.<p>ref: https://help.heroku.com/RSBRUH58/removal-of-heroku-free-product-plans-faq<p>I'm personally moving my projects to a self-hosted dokku cluster, but I've heard good things about fly and render too.
Upvote: | 326 |
Title: I have a personal domain with catch-all email enabled. Someone signed up for an Apple ID with a scrambled (random) username on that domain, and I got notified about it on my inbox.<p>This happens every few months and I have usually ignored them because my understanding is that Apple wouldn't allow usage of that Apple ID if the email address is not verified. Since this happens every few months, I decided to act on it this time: instead of clicking on "verify now" on the email I received, I worked through the password reset flow and managed to set a new password to the account.<p>However, attempting to delete the Apple ID account prompts for answers to security questions, which I don't have because I did not create the account in the first place.<p>There's a flow to reset security questions as well, but that prompts for an answer to the existing questions.<p>In chatting with an Apple support member, there's apparently a concept of "rescue email" which is different from the Apple ID and can be used to set new security question answers if the old ones are unknown. I don't get that option which indicates that the account doesn't have a rescue email set.<p>Since all of my available options are fruitless, I asked that the chat support member escalate my case to a higher-up and they offer to arrange of a phone support because supervisors seem to be available only on phone support. That's not ideal for me because I am a deaf person and I don't sign, and for the reason that I don't want my mobile number to be associated with this Apple ID that I didn't create.<p>At this point, I am curious to hear if anyone else has ever been in this situation and to understand how you've gotten out of it. I can't imagine that this is an isolated case.<p>Disabling catch-all on my domain isn't a solution because that'd just make me unaware of new accounts that are being created on my domain. Shouldn't Apple be hard-verifying the email address before allowing any type of usage?
Upvote: | 66 |
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