prompt
stringlengths 16
15.6k
| completion
stringlengths 4
6
|
|---|---|
Title: There are tons of articles on the internet about how to find a technology co-founder. I believe, there is another problem that also exists. If you have strong technology skills, but no business connections or experience, it's virtually impossible to be found as a technology co-founder, even if you've got a desire and ambitions.
Can anyone suggest an approach, what should one do in such situation?
Perhaps there is some matching service (read specialty social network), which helps to address this issue.
Upvote: | 124 |
Title: After 11 years of development career as an individual contributor in some large companies, and team lead for start-up teams, I recently landed in a team-lead position in a company filled with hot political issues, backstabbing, favouritism, tremendous timeline pressures for modernization with little business benefit, executive/director level leaders who have no knowledge of internal working of the system, all experienced folks leaving after change in said execs/director, eccentricity at some levels, and so on. It is such a classic case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon for me that threads like [1] and [2] resonate a great deal.<p>I do not want to turn away from this ecosystem for now mostly because I want to learn how to survive in such a political environment, and partly because if this modernization project gets delivered whenever it is, it will be a very good learning experience for me.<p>While official and unofficial mentorship is an option from inside the companies, I am not sure if I can cover softer issues like dealing with certain individuals in the mentorship session.<p>So, I wanted to ask you guys how can I find and approach an effective career coach or a mentor (potentially outside of my company). Any suggestions are more than welcome.<p>Thanks.<p>1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17511850
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17510670
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: There are quite a few different web frameworks for Go, as well as just the built in `net/http`. Has any one package emerged as more common or standard than others?<p>What are you currently using? Do you like it?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base? What are you trying to accomplish by saving content? What insights do you want to discover? What tasks do you want to achieve?
Upvote: | 136 |
Title: I've been using Evernote but I'm tired of the 2 device limit; suggestions for alternatives? Thanks!
Upvote: | 374 |
Title: I just used a low cost smartphone in India and honestly it was the worst I have ever used. I was wondering why is Google not making a language for low end mobiles that consume very less memory? We had glorious computer apps running in 512mb of RAM. Now all apps need a gig of memory to run without problems. Is this because of VM on Android? Is dart lang memory sensitive?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I did my B.Sc. from a fairly reputable university in Electric Engineering. Since I enjoyed programming during my studies I decided to go for it and accepted a full time job as developer ( mainly C / C++ ).<p>I really do like Linux, OpenSource projects, blogs like e.g. hackernews etc. To me it felt like a passion: So much cool stuff I can read about, all accessible only with a computer and an internet connection.
However, I recently decided to do my masters but currently have some serious doubts whether I should focus on software or just completely change my track. The problems I have are:<p>* Everyone can be a "software developer". Even thought I went through a really though and challenging university degree, which I finished distinctly above average, I have to go through whiteboard interviews. This won't change with additional job experience. For some reason, companies do highly mistrust my skills and degree.
Other jobs, equally well paid, do not require this.<p>* You have to know _a lot_. Programming languages, Tools, Operating Systems, Tests etc. On top of that, specific domain knowledge is required. Unfortunately, my brain forgets and if I work with different technologies, after 1 year I will not start at 0 but definitely neither at 100%.<p>* After all it's "just" software. Besides yourself, nobody really cares how you solved the problem. Sure, it's quite appealing to think through a complex system, tune it, develop it etc. but often it includes cumbersome work and decisions are made elsewhere.<p>So why should I stay in the software domain ?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I've been reading non-fiction almost exclusively, and now I'm looking to get into reading more fiction. Can you recommend something awesome?<p>I'd love to read something fun, lighthearted, and enjoyable (as opposed to gritty dystopias or super hardcore hard scifi). To relax, explore cool worlds and likable characters, and encounter some cool ideas. I'll be extra happy if it's available on audible.<p>Things I liked: Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, The Martian, Ready Player One, Mistborn.
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: A while back I came across an interesting problem that I've been thinking about off and on. Let's say I am thinking about taking a job working for a large company, but in some relatively dangerous part of world. I don't think I would take the job unless, among other things, I knew that the employer had kidnap and ransom insurance for its employees. However, some K&R policies prohibit the employer from telling the employee that the coverage exists. Is it possible for the employer to prove that they have the insurance without telling the prospective employee?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Like the title says,do you use any software or methodology to keep up with checklists?
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: I've been doing my dev work on Ubuntu 16.04 for years now and I love it. How are people who have updated to the latest version liking it? Would you recommend upgrading?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I'm the creator of Ekko - https://ekko.site/ - "Create your business website in seconds, using your Facebook page".<p>Me: I'm a full-time software consultant (https://benhowdle.im/), Ekko was intended as a side-project to generate passive income, not to be a fully fledged startup from day 1.<p>My aim was/is to make it incredibly simple for small businesses to create and keep their business website online and updated. The user connects their Facebook Page to my service, picks a theme and their new site is online. Every time they update their FB Page, the website (on my service) is instantly updated. This part is free, as you have a subdomain URL. To add a custom domain, it's a monthly fee.<p>I launched the SaaS in early 2017 and spent 3 months promoting/pushing it out to my networks online. This led to a lot of positive feedback, but almost zero paying customers (in fact, only 1 person ever paid, then subsequently cancelled their subscription due to budgetary reasons). Since then, I've occasionally tweeted about it, and gone through various phases of motivation to properly push/advertise/market it, but that side of it feels completely unnatural to me, I'm far more happier sitting behind the screen, building the product.<p>It gathers 1-2 sign ups a week, but zero conversions.<p>My specific question is, what the heck do I do with it?<p>In my opinion, it is my most complete piece of software that I've released. Everything works nicely, payment integrations with Stripe and GoCardless, domains through DNSimple, themes are just a set of React Components, so they'd be easy for people to build. It seems a real shame for it to be sat online, doing very little. I really don't want to abandon/take it down, because I spent a <i>lot</i> of time building it.<p>Should I try and sell it? Should I just give up? Am I missing something blatantly obvious? If anyone's got any advice, broad/specific/big/small, I'm all ears.<p>If you want to drop me an email, I'm at [email protected]
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: My name is Patrick Quade, and I’m the founder of Dinesafe (<a href="https://dinesafe.org" rel="nofollow">https://dinesafe.org</a>) and Iwaspoisoned.com (<a href="https://iwaspoisoned.com" rel="nofollow">https://iwaspoisoned.com</a>). We crowdsource food poisoning reports, and help detect and prevent outbreaks.<p>I launched Iwaspoisoned.com after experiencing a brutal bout of food poisoning from a deli in my hometown of Tribeca, NY. Out of concern for other consumers I called the deli to try and explain what happened and they hung up the phone. That inspired me to create a crowdsourcing platform to allow people to report. The idea was that if it was easy to discover if others were also sick after eating there, that would be useful information not just for other consumers but also for the deli owner.<p>Foodborne illness sickens 48 million consumers, and kills 3,000 every year in the US, according to US Center for Disease Control estimates. The financial burden is also significant. The total national cost of foodborne illness is estimated at $55 to $92 billion per year. and the impact on companies can also be significant, Chipotle lost $10 billion in market cap from its peak to its lowest point after it’s series of food safety missteps, and the founder and CEO was forced to step down.<p>We built a mobile responsive website with a simple form that allows consumers to report when they believe they have food poisoning. We moderate every report, with both a back end review, and front end/human review of each submission with the goal of eliminating malicious and inauthentic reports. We then geo analyze the data in real time, allowing us to pinpoint clusters of reporting associated with a single store, looking for multiple independent reports associated with the same store or location in the same time frame. We also store and analyze historial data. We developed an index and benchmarks that enable us to identify brands with negative and positive trends.<p>With our data, we predicted that Chipotle would have food safety issues ahead of their series of outbreaks, and we detected several of their outbreaks, and many others in real time.<p>Our business sells data intelligence to industry, focusing on enterprise clients in the restaurant industry. We offer daily alerts, intraday (outbreak) alerts, benchmarking, and secure messaging, plus an API service. We have also had interest in custom email branding/messaging, and "Dinesafe Certification" for those brands that rank consistently well in our analytics.<p>We now provide daily alerts to over 25,000 consumers, sending over a quarter million emails a month. We partner with and provide daily surveillance services to public health agencies in 6 countries. Within the US we partner with over 350 public health agencies, covering 90% of the US by population. We also provide services to the food Industry, primarily restaurants, but also producers, the grocery and convenience sectors and more. We have over a third of the top 50 restaurant chains in the US on our platform.<p>We are delighted to be on Hacker News, and look forward to hearing insights from the community. Thanks for your time.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Ambient noise generators like mynoise and noisli have been a great help in getting dev and documentation work done amidst noisy workplaces. What about you? Is there anyone out there who doesnt need noise cancellation headphones or ambient noise generators to get focus intensive work done?
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: This is something I've been thinking a bit about recently and would like to ask others how they deal with this. There are many popular trends that I believe are not suitable for every situation, ranging from cloud computing to open plan offices, DevOps and agile are other examples. What are some strategies that can be used to challenge these trends without appearing like a luddite?
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Hi all,<p>I am in an interesting situation. I thought I'd ask you all to see how you've handled similar situations.<p>A few months ago, I joined an 'AI' start-up. Most of my experience lined up well with the company vision, and I thought 'why not?'. They gave me what I was looking for in terms of salary and have funding to run for the next year.<p>The company is really just a consulting firm that deploys custom solutions for clients: this is totally fine by me, because it's really interesting and fun. But, the CEO is going to investors pitching the fact that we've built/are building some deep learning engine that can be applied to all problems. Investors are starting to do due-diligence on us, and I've repeatedly told him that there is no 'engine'; we're a consulting company. All problems we face are unique, and we provide a solution. There's no magic ML algorithm that works for all problems. This logic falls on deaf ears.<p>I feel that it's best to move on from here eventually - I may give it another few months to see what happens.<p>Any of you have any interesting takes/similar stories? I'd be curious to hear how you handled it.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: I'm flying in a few days to a developing country to lead a team of software developers. They are struggling with a project and the deadline is close. I accepted this contract because I like the country, the CEO and want to push myself to a first experience software lead.<p>One reason to bring me in is to implement good software development practices to the team. They are seriously lacking on this aspect: no test, a single staging dev server (no local dev env), no doc, inconsistent function and variable naming, the list goes on.<p>On the cultural aspect, the team is certainly stressed and I wouldn't be surprised if a few members will be defiant about seeing a Westerner joining the team that late in the project. Depending on how the CEO will introduce me to the team, I'm either the boss, am respected by default or another team member with no authority <i>at all</i> and can't rely on status to move things forward. Hierarchy is extremely important to this culture.<p>I can't just impose things: I need to sell good practices to the team so it becomes the natural next step to implement them.<p>It's going to be hard to implement a full software dev pipeline in such a small timeframe but I'd want them reach the point where:<p><pre><code> - the project is shipped
- they understand why naming is important
- they modularize their code
- they do stuff for a reason (no meaningless SO paste)
- refactoring becomes a reflex
</code></pre>
My solutions for this:<p><pre><code> - mandatory code reviews, especially my own code. It seems to me like a good way to show the team how you refactor code properly, will make me meet and talk closely to the devs and will, hopefully, inject a sense of collective code ownership.
- making it very clear from the very beginning that *I* will be the one to make efforts to make myself understood: I know that some of them have a below average English level and are not comfortable to speak to foreigners
</code></pre>
How would you handle this situation ? What first steps would you take ?
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: It's my understanding that many fields have practical, useful research results that never get brought to market. Most often, it's because researchers lack the time and interest to starting a business, or the researcher's university owns patents and entrepreneurs don't want to deal with the licensing process, or simply that no one outside the field is even aware of the practical applications of the research.<p>So I ask all you HN researchers: What results are you aware of that can solve problems and help people, but haven't yet been commercialized?
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: Hey HN folks,<p>A few months ago I received a manual action penalty from Google as they detected spam pages on our domain. The problem was that when people were searching on our site they are directed to a page with the following:<p>https://$domain/search?query=$QUERY<p>Some users (most likely bots) are generating huge spam searches on our search page and somehow Google is indexing these and there are no inbound links to these pages (at least I cannot find any).<p>To resolve this I did the following:<p>* On our search page I set the following header: X-Robots-Tag: noindex (based off of the documentation here https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag).<p>* Submitted URLs to be dropped from Google Index via Webmaster console<p>* Submitted 3 reconsideration requests to Google to avoid the penalties<p>In theory this should stop all search pages being indexed (as they all contain the noindex header) and it has helped drop the number of indexed pages marked as spam by 99% however we still have a significant number of urls marked as spam and so our site has a penalty from Google.<p>Has anyone had this issue before? How can I stop these pages becoming indexed when I have the noindex header set _and_ if you search the spam urls there are no inbound links to them?<p>Any help appreciated folks!
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: Hi — I’m Aidan YC (S18), the founder of Optic (<a href="https://useoptic.com" rel="nofollow">https://useoptic.com</a>). We’re building a smarter code generator that helps developers write and maintain the tedious parts of their codebase. Optic is fully open source (<a href="https://github.com/opticdev" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opticdev</a>) and all our code is MIT licensed.<p>A really simple use case that Optic enabled for some of our early users is keeping their backend and frontend in sync. Optic can read the endpoints in a backend and use that to generate the HTTP requests on the frontend. It even maintains that code over time so if the backend is updated, a pull request is generated to update the networking code. You can test that here: <a href="https://github.com/acunniffe/optic-networking-code-demo" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/acunniffe/optic-networking-code-demo</a>.<p>We have also had teams configure Optic to:<p><pre><code> - Write/Maintain standard tests for their React components
- Migrate to GraphQL by generating wrappers for each endpoint
- Generate/Maintain CRUD routes from models
- Wrap their Tensorflow models in APIs
</code></pre>
There’s a checkered history of optimism and failure around automated programming and many tools have promised to make developers' lives easier. In each generation of programmers there’s an acknowledgement that much of the code we write is routine, but none of the solutions have caught on. I failed once before when I founded Dropsource. While we built that product into one of the most popular tools for non-programmers to build mobile apps, we failed at our goal of building a tool we ourselves or other developers would use.<p>I left the company and went into research mode for around 18 months. A lot of the automated programming projects do their functional job well, but when it come time to integrating into a developer’s workflow they are littered with tradeoffs. Automation isn’t worth it if it means giving up control, rewriting lots of code, rebuilding your app visually, describing your project in some foreign dsl, or becoming tied to a vendor. Many of these projects haven’t caught on because the tradeoffs of using them have been too high.<p>When I started working on this problem again I was determined to get the developer experience right. For me this meant making Optic:<p><pre><code> - work with your existing code
- plug in to your favorite IDE
- useful throughout the lifetime of your project
</code></pre>
I knew that whatever product I ended up building would need to interface with source code so I started building an API for code that let you:<p>GET JSON objects describing different types of code. Powered by a regex like pattern matcher we wrote that walks AST Trees.<p>PUT new values of the same shape back to update the code. This was the hardest part by far. We ended up training decision trees on different programming languages using the raw code and the resulting AST tree as input. We use these models to regenerate code in the smallest sections possible so formatting and manual changes are preserved.<p>POST new code into the project. This was actually the easiest. A generator can be reformulated as a Parser + Mutator so we bootstrapped all the generation in Optic by combining the GET / PUT functionality.<p>This API was really powerful and it became the foundation of Optic. Generating code, doing transformations, syncing projects — all Optic’s major features are built on top of this API. It’s such a solid foundation (you get parsing, generating and the round-trip problem in a box) that I believe a lot of new meta-programming tools will be built on our platform. Our work is open source (<a href="https://github.com/opticdev" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opticdev</a>) and there will always be a free-forever version available. We plan to make money from some specialty features aimed at larger teams.<p>It’s still the early days but we hope to build Optic into a valuable open source resource that improves the workflow of developers and their teams. I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback, experiences and ideas for tasks we should automate. Thanks!
Upvote: | 183 |
Title: I've been seeing repeated mentions of early warning systems for a lot of diseases, but not too much technical development! I think I could hack something together that would be an interesting proof of concept and function as an effective early warning system, using my ML and Public Health background. Of course, I don't know who to directly sell to, its not like most businesses or consumers are interested in reducing disease burden, government folks seem interested though!
Upvote: | 170 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>We are Avishay, Michal and Or, founders of Anima App (<a href="https://www.animaapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.animaapp.com</a>).
We let designers create UIs in Sketch and then export HTML and CSS.<p>One the biggest pain points that we’ve experienced working in the software development industry, like so many before us, is the process of taking design to production. Designers today use tools like Sketch to design websites, web apps, or mobile apps, but these tools are limited and static. After experiencing the pain first-hand for over a decade, we resigned ourselves to try to make any kind of improvement we could.<p>We started by building our own fully-featured design studio software that allowed users to design iOS apps and export Swift code. But we quickly learned that although people were excited about it and tried it out, after about a week they went back to using Sketch. We realized that while writing algorithms for a layout engine is hard, getting adoption for your new product is harder!<p>Luckily one of our users pointed us in the right direction when they said that out of everything we’ve built, they were only really excited about our Auto-Layout engine. And so we decided to yank out our Auto-Layout solution and release it as a Sketch plugin. That was the turning point for us. Auto-Layout became very popular (100k users) and to this day is a main engine of growth for us.<p>In the past year and a half we shipped three products:<p><pre><code> • Auto-Layout - Responsive Design for Sketch[1]
• Launchpad - Export Sketch to HTML[2]
• Timeline - Interaction Design for Sketch[3]
</code></pre>
The team consists of Michal, our co-founder/designer and 2 technical founders, myself (Avishay) and Or (previously founded the Yo app).<p>Of course we are dogfooding our products and have built our websites using our own tools.<p>We’re sure that Hacker News readers will have a ton of experience in this space, and would love to hear about your experiences and ideas!<p>[1] <a href="https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/introducing-auto-layout-for-sketch-24e7b5d068f9" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/introducing-auto-layou...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://launchpad.animaapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://launchpad.animaapp.com</a><p>[3] <a href="https://timeline.animaapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://timeline.animaapp.com</a>
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: I have been on hackernews for months and to be sincere I have not really been a benovelent citizen when it came to going through the new submissions segment not until I started really submitting posts and found myself relying on people who actually went through the new submissions segment to either upvote my submitted links or to answer my pertinent(to me) Ask Hn: questions in the new submissions segment ,and I will like to know how much time the average hackernewsers spends being a benovelent citizen perusing the new submissions segment of hackernews.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I've been at my current job for one year. My work-iversary is coming up and we're meeting to talk about giving me a raise. How can I come up with what is a fair raise?
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: How do you use Kanban? How do you prioritise items on a Kanban board? What is the criteria for items to make it to the board? How do you release finished tickets? How does your Kanban process fit with the team's calendar in terms of frequency of releases, standups, meetings ... etc?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I'm a developer who's getting a bit sick of the high price of apple laptops. Their hardware used to be more reliable and I could justify the price for a great trackpad (the best I've ever used honestly), good battery life and OSX. I realize though I spend most of my time in chrome and the terminal and in theory I could be spending a lot less for something almost as good. (Maybe something with a better keyboard?)<p>It's been years since I've looked at the PC ecosystem and I frankly it scares me. I have no idea what's a marker of quality and what I can trust.<p>What are good linux laptops for 2018?
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: - Monthly, quarterly, yearly?
- notes, kanban, outlines?
- how do you visualize your progress?
Upvote: | 239 |
Title: I recently graduated and have been grinding for interview prep (leetcode and CTCI mostly), but I’m getting no where. Easy problems take me 2-5 hours. I experience PTSD like symptoms from the constant barrage of negative thoughts the difficulty and stress of doing these problems are causing me. I don’t have time to do anything else and no objectively measurable progress is being made. Even if I get a problem right, I gain little to no satisfaction at this point. I completely hate what I’ve gotten myself into.
I put all my eggs in the “being a programmer” basket and it’s clearly not for me. I do have a computer science undergraduate degree which I’m hoping I can use for something. Are there any career paths I can pivot to that are less cognitively demanding than software engineering where this degree would be an asset?
Upvote: | 294 |
Title: What are the best Best LEGO Mindstorms alternatives out there?
No upper age limit.
Upvote: | 141 |
Title: I remember having read a story about a programmer that encountered a weird error - his program was spitting out racial slurs in its output. The issue turned out to be a malicious version of the compiler, but somehow after removing it it got back to the system, and what should take only a few minutes turned into days and days of trying to find the culprit.<p>I've been searching long and hard but cannot seem to find it. I hope that what little I remember from it is enough and some kind soul will help me find the original article online... :)
Upvote: | 155 |
Title: The idea:
The idea is to create a news aggregator that geolocates the news, it analyses the news and displays an article on a street/city/region (location in general) if it is mentioned in that article. The website will later give you notifications about what is mentioned in the news nearby.
The current situation of the project:<p>For now I have a minimum viable product, I have the website up and running that shows how the news will be displayed on a map.<p>What I am asking:<p>It will be really very nice of you if you can give me feedback, any feedbacks even negative ones are really more than appreciated. I know there are many bugs, bad design, lack of content but the question I am asking you is would you use such a website/mobile app if it existed? Do you like the idea? Do you think it is worth it if I finish building such a website?<p>Here is the link to the website:<p><a href="http://www.toperudite.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.toperudite.com/</a><p>Here is the link to the newsmap:<p><a href="https://www.toperudite.com/pages/news/newsmap" rel="nofollow">https://www.toperudite.com/pages/news/newsmap</a><p>Please don't hesitate to fill the following survey (it takes less than 3 minutes)<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe9q_0roqwtipe4KLyRJ3lR1vVVHcYwuL6eRBr88G4qd-Z-qg/viewform?c=0&w=1" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe9q_0roqwtipe4KLyR...</a><p>Here is a link to a slack channel :
<a href="https://join.slack.com/t/toperuditebetatesters/shared_invite/enQtNDAyNjQzODgyMDE3LWVhNmZlOTNiYjBkMzJlYWJmNzRiYmExMjIyMmNiYWMxOGU4ZmVlZTNlZWJiZmRkODIwZmU1YTJhYWRmY2FkNTQ" rel="nofollow">https://join.slack.com/t/toperuditebetatesters/shared_invite...</a><p>Here is a quick youtube video
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrwvY049ipE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrwvY049ipE</a><p>Thank you very much for your time :)
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: For those of us without something to compare this stage of our life to, I was hoping to get some insight on how people handled/are handling their lives at around 25. At least for me, only being 2 years into my job I still feel like I'm thrown into a pit (a consequence of the job offer I took, I suppose, and complacency).<p>As for the second question, what advice would you give a 25 year old you?
Upvote: | 126 |
Title: How do you get your personal financial documents from paper form into your spreadsheets or accounting programs? There always seems to be backlog of receipts and bills on my desk. I'm thinking that there has to be a better way than typing all these in. Please recommend what works for you?
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: _or as a person in a CTO-like role_<p>Ah, the technical debt.<p>While the concept is sweet from the business perspective, the result of leveraging technical debt, most often, is a big mess.<p>The technical debt is accruing every week, after each iteration, sprint, what have you. Your developers are whining about it, and they want to do a significant rewrite or solve it with microservices altogether.<p>And you know this rewrite, like others in the past, will be a significant sink of time, and likely a catastrophe.<p>This is how I see it from my humble developer/team lead perspective. I’m really curious to know how people in CTO roles perceive it.<p>I agree that this is a useful quality lever that can get the whole company out of a bind, or could let business leverage a market opportunity before the competitors do.<p>What I’ve found is that people in various project-manager-like roles tend to overuse this lever. I believe this lever should be used only when there is a significant gain for the business, and the debt should be paid shortly after that.<p>What I’ve personally seen, and what I’ve been told by my fellow developers, is that it is common to use the technical debt lever just to:<p>- reach the “sprint commitment,”<p>- meet the artificial deadline,<p>- increase “developer’s productivity,”<p>- show manager’s power.<p>These don’t sound like critical high-value goals to reach, given the price of the Technical Debt.<p>That is my perspective. Now, what do you have to say?<p>As a CTO (or in a CTO-like role), what was your most consistent pain, frustration or problem with Technical Debt in your company in the last 2 years?<p>Have you ever had any?<p>Thank you for your time reading this and giving a thoughtful response. :)
Upvote: | 212 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>We’re Sean and Daniel, founders of OneGraph (<a href="https://www.onegraph.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.onegraph.com</a>). We're a single GraphQL endpoint that brings together all your SaaS APIs.<p>We make it easy to build integrations for your app into services like Salesforce, Stripe, GitHub, Clearbit, and Gmail. Since each service’s API is unique you usually have to read their documentation, implement their specific authentication, make very specific calls to their servers, etc.—it seems normal right now, but all of this adds up.<p>Both of us have done plenty of integrations into these services for different startups over the years, so we knew intimately how painful it can be, especially when you have to coordinate data from multiple services.<p>Then GraphQL came along, and we saw that it could be a query language for all of the APIs we wanted. We can express our data requirements—even between services—succinctly, and let a single execution engine figure out how to translate those requirements to specific API calls.<p>We’ve built a GraphQL service that does just that - it knows how to talk to each backend API we support to pull out exactly the data you need. Here’s an example of how it works:<p><pre><code> {
youTubeVideo(id: "YX40hbAHx3s") {
snippet {
title
uploadChannel {
snippet {
title
}
twitterLinks { # twitter accounts associated with the channel
twitter(first: 5) {
tweets {
text
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
</code></pre>
(You can see the full result of the query <a href="https://gist.github.com/sgrove/5f17d046e535763c3c85258054ed00fb" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/sgrove/5f17d046e535763c3c85258054ed0...</a>
or play with it yourself <a href="https://bit.ly/2NL89GA" rel="nofollow">https://bit.ly/2NL89GA</a>)<p>We charge based on the services you’re integrating with, whether you want white-label authentication for your users, and overall usage. Eventually we’ll offer an on-premise solution for bigger enterprises that need it.<p>We’d really appreciate your feedback on OneGraph. We have a lot we want to improve on, and would love to hear where you want us to go next.
Upvote: | 130 |
Title: Over the past few weeks I've been working on a small application to view trending repos on GitHub. I built the PWA[1] with React, Next.js and GraphQL .. but what's interesting is the application is only using React server side, meaning the client side javascript is only a few lines code adding some event listeners and registering a service worker for offline capability. This helped me achieve a perfect google chrome performance audit<p>I learned a ton working on it and would love to talk about it if anyone has any questions!<p>Application Link: <a href="https://trends.now.sh" rel="nofollow">https://trends.now.sh</a><p>Source code on Github: <a href="https://github.com/hanford/trends" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hanford/trends</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/</a>
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: I'm using Github, Dropbox and iCloud, but this makes me nervous about my data's privacy and longevity for a number of reasons. Among the three services, I have ~700GB of data.<p>But I got to thinking, aren't USB thumb sticks reliable and big enough nowadays to fit this much data? I could just buy two 512GB sticks and use rsync to backup to them a few times per week. This way I wouldn't have to lug around an awkward hard drive if I'm ever traveling.<p>What strategy do you use to keep your data safe and private for the long term? Do you have a portable solution, or do you recommend something else?
Upvote: | 160 |
Title: I have been scraping housing markets. LinkedIn paired with hunter.io for creating mailing lists of companies. Recently I started MITM and Burp to intercept Apps to get direct api access. I created a docker container using different tor endpoints for different ips. I even used ssh proxying to create my own ip network.<p>To bypass recaptcha I build a container with chrome + puppeteer with anticaptcha preinstalled and pre logged in.<p>Yet I wonder if it is still worth it. Kinda looking for a mentor or inspiration.<p>Been a long time HN reader and I wonder what you think? Why scraping is still worth it in 2018?
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: I would like to read about the initial proposals, email exchanges, discussions, about why any specific technology or protocol was built, who all were involved - designer, funders, contributors, etc.
History, timeline, discussions, proposals - accepted & rejected, ideas - accepted & rejected, philosophy, restrictions.
In general I would like to read about all the technologies, but want to start with the internet and the TCP stack (protocols).
Upvote: | 287 |
Title: Hello HN! We’re Jacob and Miguel, founders of RevenueCat (<a href="https://www.revenuecat.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.revenuecat.com</a>). We’re taking the pain out of building a business on in-app subscriptions.<p>Before starting RevenueCat, Miguel and I worked together at Elevate (<a href="https://www.elevateapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.elevateapp.com</a>), Apple’s 2014 App of the Year. Elevate is a brain training app that monetizes with in-app subscriptions. We found that while the subscription model was essential to the business being viable, implementing it was time consuming, complicated, and boring. We needed to see and react to customer level data on LTV, churn, and conversion and it just wasn’t possible without building our own, complex subscription tracking infrastructure.<p>RevenueCat is an Android, iOS, React Native, and Unity SDK that allows you to get up and running with subscriptions (with all the bells and whistles) in a couple of hours instead of weeks or months. We’ve found and cataloged the nuances and bugs of the platform in-app purchase APIs and wrapped around them to provide a stable and easy to implement API that is consistent on all platforms.<p>Right now we provide cross-platform status tracking, receipt validation, customer management, and charting for MRR, conversion rate, and more. Our plan is to become a full revenue management platform, so app makers can focus on making their app useful, and we’ll handle making sure it makes money. There are lots of standard monetization strategies (price testing, lifecycle offers, sales, churn prevention, etc.) that most app developers simply don’t have the time to implement and maintain. These things can make a huge difference to revenue (we saw it first hand).<p>We believe mobile software is undervalued and subscriptions can help. Right now, it’s too hard for developers to do them right. We want to fix that.<p>I’d love to hear your thoughts, fears, and desires! We’re working on adding more SDKs (Xamarin, Cordova, etc.) Sound off in the comments if there is one you’d like to see. Also, if you have an app that wants to try subscriptions or monetize them better reach out, we can help.
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: My friend in infosec was asked to review a app that is suppose to train people to identifying and eliminating bias in the workplace. It made me wonder if things like sexual harassment training, sensitivity training, inclusion training, and diversity training actually makes a difference in the workplace.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: I came across Perkeep[1] project today. I know some other self-hosted solutions like Rocket chat[2](Slack alternative), Redmine[3](Project management) etc. Curious what other self-hosted are there and which one you are using?<p>[1]: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep<p>[2]: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat<p>[3]: http://www.redmine.org/
Upvote: | 147 |
Title: Puzzles, games etc with the intention of teaching of some concept or topic. In any format (board games, digital games etc).<p>Any examples?
Upvote: | 391 |
Title: What/why?
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: How can someone with a product but no elite connections or degree raise a seed round ?
Upvote: | 157 |
Title: Reading this: https://www.quora.com/Is-software-development-really-a-dead-end-job-after-age-35-40<p>But it seems grey bias is deep rooted.
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: Books that are easy to read and beginner friendly.
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: My entire Microsoft account has been suspended, due to the violation of the Terms, by Microsoft, and without any further details. At the time of incident, I was not doing with the account or anything digital, and rather was cooking/eating dinner, when my computer received a notification about a problem with my Microsoft account.<p>I am not given any other options than to Contact Support about it, which I did yesterday and got an answer today that tells me nothing more than the very few that I know:<p>> Microsoft disabled access to the account due to a serious violation of the Microsoft Services Agreement https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement. As stated in the Microsoft Services Agreement, you will no longer be able to access any Services that require Microsoft account. For any subscriptions associated with the account, Microsoft will immediately cease charging the credit card on file for recurring charges. [...] Pursuant to our terms, we cannot reactivate your account, nor provide details as to why it was closed. This represents Microsoft’s final communication regarding this account.<p>I hope that I am not violating any other terms by sharing these messages. I do it out of frustration to know what exactly I might have done to deserve this, something more detailed than "you have violated our Terms as you eat your dinner", because without knowing which action of mine caused this, I either;<p>a) Will be unable to understand my mistake and not repeat it,<p>b) Will fear out of doing nearly everything and refrain from them, such as using a VPN on Amazon's AWS at Ohio, which I am sincerely suspicious of.<p>Microsoft's own way of justice is against the legal systems in all the modern countries, which always makes sure that the accused knows their faults, as one of their rights, and for the benefit of the accused not getting involved in such acts for a second time, for that they this time will know.
Upvote: | 311 |
Title: Doesn't have to be tech related.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: When I browse HN, I usually pick out a few articles I want to read from the front page, then email the links to myself to read later.<p>This method works out pretty well for me. I’m wondering if people have other strategies that work better?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I run a one-person company in the cloud / ops space and over the past year have gone from $0 to $200k in annual recurring revenue. I have not taken any funding. The major cloud providers (aws, google, azure) are starting to expand to my product space, however, and I'm increasing concerned with my long-term prospects.<p>I think it might make sense to pursue acquisition/aqui-hire, while my product and expertise can still add value to these cloud providers. I would really appreciate advice from the HN community on how to achieve the best possible outcome, including how to proactively pursue acquisition/aqui-hire at a large company. Thanks!
Upvote: | 222 |
Title: There’s an increasing interest in “dumbphones” these days, but it seems that options for a basic phone are fairly limited in the US market.<p>If you have switched, what did you switch to? If you’re looking to switch, what are you considering?
Upvote: | 175 |
Title: I often hear people saying they don't know what to build, so here's a desktop application idea that solves a real problem for people who create screencast style videos.<p>Rather than explain it, I've demonstrated the problem on video (~3min):<p>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUmGFiAZA0s<p>The TL;DR is when your desktop resolution > recording resolution you lose a lot of common Windows functionality and have to manually pixel align windows inside of recording tool constraints. I'm sure there's Windows APIs and methods to restrict windows operations to a customized rectangle, and that's the app you could potentially build.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I've done a bit of googling and haven't found any clear, non marketing explanations of this. When Intel and AMD start shipping 10nm CPUs, what is likely to improve? Will clock rates go up any? Will power use go down? Or will we simply be able to cram more cores onto a cpu? Can L1 cache size increase?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hi HN! We're Jono and Brendan, the founders of Toybox (YC S18). Toybox lets designers, marketers, and copywriters communicate changes to developers on any website, without having to write code. These changes get annotated as CSS edits so engineers can understand, reply, and implement the fixes (<a href="https://www.toyboxsystems.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.toyboxsystems.com</a>).<p>For years Jono and I have struggled to communicate changes with one another during the development cycle. As a UX designer and Jono as a full-stack engineer, we spend hours going back-and-forth, trying to make small but important tweaks to sites. This was by far the most frustrating part of our jobs, driving us to try to solve this age-old problem.<p>While learning about the development to design handoff, we’ve come across some common challenges teams face. First, not all companies have sophisticated or easy to deploy staging environments to quickly share works-in-progress. Second, some designers make tweaks using Chrome Inspector, but these changes don’t persist and are recorded nowhere near the relevant web page. Lastly, the majority of these conversations are happening in unofficial and unformalized spaces, making it easy to dismiss and disregard.<p>The first problem we attempted to solve was creating a way to share web pages without a staging environment. To do this, we built a chrome extension that collects and sends the rendered DOM of the current page to Toybox. People write HTML and CSS in creative ways, so making sure we accurately re-render the captured page within Toybox has consistently been a fun and difficult challenge (looking at you CSS in JS...).<p>We built Toybox in a way that doesn’t require prior front-end knowledge to use. We created an inspector that makes any page feel like Squarespace—a universal WYSIWYG of sorts. As you make tweaks, those edits get saved as CSS allowing a developer to contextually review where on the page a change was requested and the relevant code required to resolve that change. To see it in action, we made a demo of Hacker News here: <a href="https://app.toyboxsystems.com/share/Zodzjmzhpx3w" rel="nofollow">https://app.toyboxsystems.com/share/Zodzjmzhpx3w</a><p>We're excited about the possibilities of having a rendered web page within Toybox. We’re currently testing the concept of style and component linting. Instead of the rules being tabs vs. spaces :) we can lint for incorrect uses of color, accessibility, typography, button styles, and so forth by using design files or style guides as inputs. With the rise of component libraries and design systems, we’re excited to further automate these QA efforts and make this communication channel even smarter.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback and personal experiences when it comes to this phase of the development process. You can try Toybox for free here: <a href="https://www.toyboxsystems.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.toyboxsystems.com/</a><p>Thanks, Brendan & Jono
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: I'm in my early 40's and have traveled a lot during my 20's and 30's. I think I was always a little bit nervous about flying, but never enough to make me really anxious.<p>A few years ago, on a short flight to NYC, the plane went through a sudden turbulence. It was strong enough to send 2 flight attendants to the floor. It probably lasted 10-20 seconds and, during those seconds I thought we were going to crash because I had never experienced turbulence that strong.<p>Since then, I started to develop fear of flying. Even though I have flown since then, each time it has made me more anxious. Now I actively avoid flying.<p>After some introspection, I realized that I'm more afraid of the moments preceding the crash than actually dying. This fear got worse after I had a daughter because now I also picture how the last moments would be if she was by my side on a falling plane.<p>Rationally, I do know how infrequent plane crashes are, and how driving is more dangerous, but at the end I convince myself that the best way to not die on a plane crash is to not get on a plane. Since flying is not required for work, and I've already seen most of the world, it's not hard to convince myself that I don't need to get on a plane.<p>The last few times I've flown, I used a mental trick to help me get through it. I read that the odds of a plane crash is 1 in 1.2 million, so I used a random number generator to generate a number between 1 and 1.2 million, and then tried to guess what that number was. That gave me some relief but didn't completely stop the bad thoughts.<p>How do I overcome my fear of flying?
Upvote: | 170 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>We're Duncan, Austin, Jonathan, and Patrick, the founders of JITX (<a href="https://www.jitx.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.jitx.com</a>). Today, every circuit board is manually designed by skilled engineers. JITX is automating circuit board design with AI that designs optimized boards in hours instead of weeks.<p>This all started for us while we were still at UC Berkeley. Duncan and Austin were PhD students and constantly designing robots to test new ideas. We realized we had to start from scratch every time we started work on a new robot. All that work had to be thrown away, because you can’t reuse hardware designs like software. We wanted a way to design robots faster; we wanted a way to design better robots!<p>At the same time Patrick and Jonathan were building Chisel, an automated tool for digital logic design. The roboticists saw Chisel and got inspired. Patrick and Jonathan saw how people design circuit boards and were horrified. We hit it off and decided to solve the problem — we would make circuit board design more like software development: agile, flexible, reusable, fast.<p>Our core technology is inspired by the technology used for designing computer chips. The introduction of Hardware Description Languages (HDLs, e.g. Verilog) in the 80s, revolutionized chip design. Instead of manually drawing the shapes that make up the circuit, engineers would instead express the intended behaviour of their circuit using code, and then have algorithms automatically translate that code into the necessary copper shapes. This workflow is what makes possible the billion-transistor chips we see today. We bring the same workflow to PCB design.<p>Circuit board design is a multidisciplinary challenge, and we have to factor in electrical engineering (circuit design, RF design, signal and power integrity), mechanical engineering (thermal, vibration), and manufacturing (cost optimization, DFM/DFA/DFT). Unsurprisingly, almost every subproblem is computationally intractable, so we use clever representations and heuristics to arrive at good solutions. There are a million details to keep track of across all of those disciplines, and it’s high time we get computers to do the bookkeeping.<p>To give you an idea of our workflow, here’s a link to the first demo we ever recorded: <a href="https://youtu.be/ra0SWTrLzhs" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ra0SWTrLzhs</a>. It’s rough and out of date (new demo here: <a href="https://youtu.be/lYrY7iskgng" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/lYrY7iskgng</a>), but it helped us get into YC and shows the key ideas. Cliff notes: we describe circuit boards with a domain specific programming language, and then compile that language into hardware designs (and simulations, and schematics, and documentation, and manufacturing outputs). You describe what you care about at a high level, and then the system solves for everything you don’t specify.<p>For example, we request a board with BLE and a microphone, and the system selects matching key components from the library, solves for power supplies and component values, sources all the parts (thanks Octopart!), assigns pins, plans out placements, routes traces, and then exports a KiCAD project (board + schematic), and manufacturing outputs (BoM, Gerbers, etc.). If you care about the shape of the board, add it as a constraint; if you care about the position of a component, add it as a constraint; if you know which BLE chip you want, add it as a constraint. Design tools should be smart enough to solve for the million details you don’t care about, and optimize your design for what you do care about.<p>We started JITX to give everyone ready access to professional-quality boards, and today JITX runs as an electronics design contractor. You tell us what a circuit board needs to do, we use our tools to design the board, fab it, and get it back to you. We already do this faster than humans can, and our speed depends on the design. For product and proof-of-concept boards, JITX is on average 3x faster and also cheaper than human contractors. Test fixtures and connector-based boards are almost fully automated, and we have already hit 24-hour turnaround times on designs.<p>We’re not the first ones to think about better tools for circuit board design, but we are the first to use this approach. We know from experience that this is the way to go, and honestly we can't imagine a future where this tech doesn’t exist. We’re just racing to be the first ones to build it!<p>- Duncan, Austin, Jonathan, Patrick<p>PS: If you want to see the last robot we built before starting JITX, you can check out Salto here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dJmArHRn0U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dJmArHRn0U</a>.
Upvote: | 112 |
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.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Please state the job location and include the keywords
REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA when the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome.
When remote work is not 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 month, please. If it
isn't a household name, 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 submitters if you personally are interested
in the job—no recruiters or sales calls.<p>To search the thread, try kennytilton's WhoIsHiring browser at
https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/ or kristopolous' console script
at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519.
Upvote: | 448 |
Title: Hey all, we're James and William, founders of Federacy (YC S18). We're building a bug bounty platform for startups. (<a href="https://www.federacy.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.federacy.com</a>)<p>I was an early engineer at MoPub, responsible for security and infrastructure. By the time we were acquired by Twitter, we were 20+ engineers, but growing so fast that building software and systems securely was almost an impossible task. I found that there were never enough hands; I couldn’t peel engineers from revenue-driving features and it was really difficult to find contract or full-time security engineers.<p>William and I started Federacy to make it easier for startups to secure themselves. We think the key is to pair startups with extremely talented, outside security researchers to test their applications for vulnerabilities, review code, and help implement best practices—essentially serving as an outsourced CISO.<p>We saw that the best security minds we knew either weren't interested in a full-time role for a single company, weren’t able to work in the United States, or already had day jobs at the largest Internet companies. We thought that if we provided an efficient, no-bullshit way for them to do work that they enjoy, make a real difference in how startups secure themselves, and make money while honing their skills, we could unlock a huge amount of talent that wasn’t accessible previously.<p>We have a lot of respect for what HackerOne and BugCrowd have built, but they are focused on serving mostly enterprise companies with large engineering and security teams, who can afford their services. Their revenue comes largely from triaging the high volume of low-quality and automated/spam bug reports that come through their platforms. These services can be in the six figure range. It may be a good business, but that isn’t where our passion lies.<p>Startups can’t afford these services and the burden of triaging low-quality bug reports can completely overwhelm even the best dev teams, leaving them worse off than they started.<p>We think there is a better way:<p>• We hand-pair startups with a small team of pre-vetted researchers who are subject matter experts in your stack.<p>• Researchers test your infrastructure for vulnerabilities in an initial scan, and work closely with you to resolve issues and implement best practices.<p>• Your program can be private, where only you and the researchers you approve will have access to your program. You don’t have to provide source code and all initial testing is done with only the information and access your normal users have.<p>• We create your program for you and have you up and running in 5 minutes (or you can self-serve, if you prefer).<p>• We only charge for results (when a researcher finds a vulnerability).<p>We just started building a couple months ago and are looking for early feedback. Here’s an invite link we made for HN:<p><a href="https://www.federacy.com/signup?invitation_id=3b4d06c5-ac02-4b9b-b0b9-4bf1e72f7f7f" rel="nofollow">https://www.federacy.com/signup?invitation_id=3b4d06c5-ac02-...</a><p>We’ll be around all day to chat and are very happy to answer any questions as well as discuss how we built our product, security-related topics (systems automation, vulnerability reporting, coping with imposter syndrome, etc.), what it's like building a startup with family (we’re twin brothers), or anything in between.<p>Some specific questions we have:<p>If you’re familiar with other bug bounty platforms, are there any issues we can tackle early on that made the experience frustrating for you?<p>Would you consider contracting an outsourced CISO or a pentest with a security researcher that has reported vulnerabilities to you through your bug bounty program?
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Recently there was a fair amount of concerns about GDPR being a harbinger of doom for smaller companies and fears of user abusing GDPR requests or other companies using GDPR as a tool for taking down competitors.<p>Had anyone on HN had experience with people / companies / institutions abusing GDPR?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I'm a kind of person who likes to hack on projects to learn things. If I am learning a new language, I'll think of a problem that I want to solve. After reading some syntax I'll start hacking on a solution.<p>I have decided to learn distributed systems.<p>I think this weekend would be a good start to hack on things. I can continue later in the week I understand I won't pickup distributed systems over a weekend.<p>What resources do you recommend for one trying to learn distributed systems on their own?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Bad day and ranting a bit, sorry. Just reached a very strange WTF moment. I'll be submitting my notice at work on Tuesday (it's a holiday on Monday). I'm no rock star programmer, I just hit my tolerance limits for ignoring problems on the purely professional front.<p>Then, later today I went for a drink with a colleague, only to find he's a holocaust denier, Hitler was only trying to do the right thing etc. I found I couldn't mount any argument against his views - I had been indoctrinated etc, etc.<p>And then I come home and have a chat with my normally right-on room-mate, and somehow we get onto vaccinations, and she's considering not vaccinations her (future) kids on the basis her cousin hasn't vaccinated here and they're ok. And she is deeply suspicious of vaccinations in the face of decades of evidence supporting them. She left the room. I had tried to explain the basis of vaccinations, herd effect etc but just upset her (though calling her potentially negligent really did not help).<p>It's a day where no amount of attempts at explanations are sticking. On the professional front, oddly enough, I'm more accepting of that. But facts and history that I hold more dear are just getting eroded. Is there a way to convince and persuade without alienating people?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I am a current homeless web dev living in Portland, OR<p>I saw another post by a homeless dev in CO after doing some searches to see if there were others out there like me.<p>I got here due to medical issues that have finally come to being managed after 3 years.<p>I currently have zero cash, I am fairly new to Portland so I do not have friends and I have no family to lean on for support. I have 10 years of web dev experience, the last 3 years being very spotty; only a few contract jobs in and out.<p>I have a bed in a shelter for now.<p>I have tapped into the public health insurance so I can continue my medical visits.<p>I have food stamps.<p>I have a good laptop<p>I am often on a university campus using the library for charging and net.<p>My main problem is getting a job. This is where you come in HN community, please let me know what you all think or if you can relate.<p>My main languages are PHP and Python. I have extensive front end experience with Javascript as well.<p>No one is really looking for a PHP developer right now. And all the front end jobs want React/Redux experience or Angular. I have looked up and down on gigs and postings on Craigslist every single day.<p>Question: What do I do? All the recruiters think I am fit for a senior level position, but with 3 years of on and off programming I am a bit rusty and I am afraid if I apply and fail skills tests at too many places word will get around.<p>I really just want a relaxed junior level position, but those are hard to find. Everyone wants senior level guys in React and other frameworks I do not have. (Though I am currently teaching myself React and do know a good bit now.)<p>I just want to get my career back on track and get out of this shelter<p>Any advice for work, besides getting a min wage job. What do I do to get my web dev career back on track?<p>Thanks for any and all comments and my email is in my profile
Upvote: | 305 |
Title: I notice myself towards fellow human beings that I try to optimize simple everyday tasks. “They” mainly try to optimize certain events, by using Google Maps for the shortest route.<p>But I try to do this with numerous things, from filling up the dishwasher, to taking out the thrash, to (quite often to irritation to my SO), postponing things: to add things up and then to everything in one-efficient go.<p>Some of these moundaine tasks are “repeated” items with a reminder of a todo-app. Or by paying all bills every 2 weeks, instead of when they come in.<p>My wife (2 kids) cleans the house basically constantly. While when I’m alone, I just do it at the end of the day, cause it doesn’t matter to clean up multiple times the toys.<p>I buy things that don’t expire (like toothpaste) in bulk. While she buys them by one.<p>Do you guys/girls have similar instincts and events happening? It’s really not about non-chalance, but rather the strive to do things as efficiently as possible with as little effort as possible, while having the same good outcome.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: There was an article a while back about how cell service providers were selling extremely granular location data, and some of the programmers working on those systems immediately showed up on HN to comment on their moral dilemma. I suspect it's not an isolated case.
Upvote: | 432 |
Title: I remember being an extremely motivated and driven individual until 1-2 years ago. Then came a string of personal issues that turned my world upside down(including my realization that my father was a terrible abuser). Now that things are settled, I have a very strong urge to get up and chase my dreams again , however, I find this invisible force just not letting me do anything. I do not feel motivated at all.I wonder if anyone here has been in a similar state and how did he/she got out of it?<p>PS: I am a Coder
Upvote: | 137 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>What do you think is the most interesting emerging field in Computer Science? I'm interested in PHD areas, industry work, and movements in free software.
Upvote: | 381 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I'm Dhaivat and I've been working on JetLenses in the present YC batch. We offer the lowest prices on contact lenses online. On average, each of our customer saves $70 on each order in comparison to buying their contacts from a large online retailer.<p>It turns out that most of the cost of contacts is just advertising cost and fulfillment overhead.
We've built automation software for the fulfillment and prescription verification processes allowing us to cut overhead. We also use statistical models for ad optimization which allow us to cut our customer acquisition costs dramatically and deliver savings to our customers.<p>I have a technical background (I studied computer science and statistics, interned at Meteor (YC S11) and a quant hedge fund) and my Dad trained as an ophthalmologist. This was the perfect circumstance to realize that this is a large, fairly overlooked space within ecommerce where improved operations through software/data science can have a strong impact.<p>We're starting with contact lenses and we'll eventually apply our core tech to other prescription medical products with very similar cost structures. At the end of the day, we'd like to make these products cheaper and more easily accessible. Help us out by buying contacts from us or telling your contact-wearing friends about us!<p>If you wear contacts: We sell the same contacts as your doctor or other retailers, just for a lot less money. Check out our website at beta.jetlenses.com - order from us and save some dough while supporting our run-up to demo day! You can also check out our price comparison tool at <a href="https://beta.jetlenses.com/compare_prices" rel="nofollow">https://beta.jetlenses.com/compare_prices</a> - we're the cheapest
for most lenses but not all (yet!).<p>I would love to hear HN's thoughts about this! I'm particularly keen to learn about your experiences buying contact lenses (or even other medical products) and if what we're doing sounds exciting. You can also reach me at dhaivat AT jetlenses.com<p>Thanks!<p>Dhaivat<p>P.S. We currently only ship to addresses in the United States.
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: I'm trying to figure out the best way to start programming with a 5 year old. I guess it would be nice to have some visual language and output.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I have over 6 years of experience in iOS and I think i am pretty good programmer. I am looking for hourly rate of $200+ in Bay Area.
I get calls from companies that do placements but they don't go above $80 (even for Bay Area).<p>What can I do to get this rate?
Upvote: | 105 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>We’re Ranko and Shaoyi, co-founders of Numericcal (<a href="https://numericcal.com" rel="nofollow">https://numericcal.com</a>). We’re building developer tools to simplify building, optimizing and maintaining Machine Learning models for embedded, mobile and IoT applications.<p>This platform is the result of our own struggles while helping on two ML powered projects; one using Computer Vision and one Voice Recognition. In both cases running models in the cloud was too expensive and slow for a good user experience. Moreover, it was not clear whether the training data our Data Science team had, at the beginning of the project, was representative of the data to be encountered in production.<p>The solution for cost and speed was to run inference on some end-device. However, we did not know which device would be feasible, nor did we know what model the Data Science team would end up with.<p>We initially considered two options:<p>* Postpone working on ML related software tasks until the Data Science team figured out what they wanted to do. Unfortunately, this meant that we could not parallelize the development. Moreover, the Data Science team would not get any feedback on the model runtime performance until we integrated them towards the end.<p>* Make a bunch of assumptions about models that the Data Science team would use and implement something. This would allow us to work in parallel, but we would be running the risk of having integration issues if those assumptions turned out to be wrong.<p>We looked for tools online to solve this but we couldn’t find anything comprehensive. So we decided to build our own! We settled on a design that packages ML models into (very primitive) serializable objects, encapsulating all the information and supporting files to use the models. For example, an object detection model would package the DNN graph, shape of the input and output tensor, bounding box anchors, etc.<p>This gave us what we wanted. On the software side we could write against the “interface” of the package. During initial development, we simply packaged dummy DNN models that always returned the same value. Later, the Data Science team would simply drop in a new package and everything just worked. One more victory for abstraction!<p>Since then, we’ve added a number of features around the packaging system. We can now add models during compilation or remotely through a cloud service and a user-friendly GUI. Models are versioned and report basic performance metrics to the cloud so Data Science teams can get feedback and guide model exploration. Remote delivery also allows sending different models to devices with different compute capabilities. We also added the possibility of running models on different runtimes (TensorFlow Mobile, TensorFlow Lite, our own library, Caffe2 is coming soon). Finally, we wrapped the app side code into ReactiveX API to make working with multiple models asynchronously easier.<p>Today we’re releasing the Numericcal Cloud Tools and Android SDKs in Beta. You can read about the system in more detail at (overview.workspace.numericcal.com) and check out demos (<a href="https://github.com/numericcal/BetaDemoApp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/numericcal/BetaDemoApp</a>).<p>Machine Learning on mobile and IoT devices is yet to gain wide adoption. Making this transition will bring personalization of mobile apps and automation of business and industrial processes to a whole new level. We’re currently working on projects for automatic damage assessment on vehicles and preventative maintenance of mobile assets.<p>We hope these tools will add to the momentum by speeding up development iterations for other teams, as they did for us. In the long term, we plan to open source edge integration and packaging SDKs. We will also open up more of our cloud-hosted functionalities, such as automatic model benchmarking, deployment, model compression and runtime optimization as services.<p>We’re eager to hear comments, ideas and your experiences in building Edge applications with ML. Thanks for reading!
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: just wanted to share this useful tool with you. I have been looking at something like this for a very long time.<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/css-used/cdopjfddjlonogibjahpnmjpoangjfff?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/css-used/cdopjfddj...</a><p>what it does:
it analyses your html dom and looks for css classes. Then it extracts it all and combines it into 1 single css file.<p>I used 5 css framworks which was on 340kb kb. This tool made it 36kb!
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I know a lot of people who cover the camera on their laptop, but I don't know anyone who takes steps to disable the microphone, or who disables the camera/mic on their phones.<p>I understand that cameras on computers could capture lots of sensitive/embarrassing/incriminating information, but it seems like microphones would actually be worse in many cases. Also, since we carry our phones with us more than we carry our computers, the sensors on these devices are probably potential targets as well.<p>Do people block these other sensors and I just don't know about it? Or is it just too difficult from a practical perspective to block these sensors?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>We’re Chen-Chen and Antony from MAC’D, a fast-casual, build-your-own mac & cheese restaurant. Pick one of our six cheese sauces, a pasta base, add unlimited toppings like roasted broccoli and mushrooms, and top it off with anything from truffle oil to hot cheetos. We’re currently in San Francisco and Portland.<p>MAC’D was inspired by a mac & cheese restaurant called Homeroom, which Chen-Chen frequented while at Cal. Fast-casual has consistently been the fastest growing segment in the food and bev industry, so it made sense to apply that spin to an old-school comfort food like mac & cheese. It’s a social, nostalgic, late-night meal that’s both familiar in taste and unique in experience.<p>After graduating from Berkeley, Chen-Chen was a management consultant, but quickly realized that consulting wasn’t the career for him. Together with a part-time partner, he began drafting up ideas for a restaurant concept. The one that struck a chord was mac & cheese. After confirming high demand through several pop-ups in early 2017, Chen-Chen and his partner opened MAC’D’s first brick & mortar in SF’s Marina District. About 6 months in, Chen-Chen’s partner made a decision to pursue business school, and Chen-Chen ran the restaurant solo until opening up a second location. Antony was a friend of Chen-Chen’s and had been following MAC’D’s progress while a software engineer at AWS. He worked in restaurants throughout his life and after a brief stint as a chef in Milan, knew he wanted a career in the food industry. Chen-Chen had been pretty spread thin running two locations with eyes on a third, and good timing on both ends led to our partnership.<p>In a little over a year, we’ve successfully bootstrapped two locations in SF and have served over 75,000 meals. We’re profitable and have a validated concept in a city with among the highest costs in the US. We want to continue to grow and expand to other cities.<p>In Portland, we’re using low capital commissary kitchens to explore new food markets through catering and delivery. Commissaries give a low managerial overhead and remove front of house staffing / building costs. It’s a way of getting into new markets quickly and intelligently, with the goal of proving a market and getting our name out before investing in brick & mortar spaces.<p>We’ve identified roughly thirty cities across the US as potential locations for MAC’D. Our customers range from families looking for a predictable meal to more boisterous late night crowds. Our target markets are college towns, cities in the south and midwest, and ones with progressive food scenes, both in and outside the United States. We’re also ramping up on catering, so if you’re in SF and Portland, reach out! Our catering form is on www.getmacd.com. We’re also on instagram @getmacd.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Download:
<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oledify-pure-black-wallpapers/id1416984528?ls=1&mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oledify-pure-black-wallpaper...</a><p>OLEDify converts regular dark wallpapers into Pure Black wallpapers (#000000 - pixel is off). Since the pure black pixels are off, it helps reduce battery use on the newer phones with OLED and AMOLED screens. More research on this can be found here:<p><a href="https://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power-does-a-black-interface-really-save-on-amoled-displays.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power-does...</a><p>iPhone X is the first iPhone with OLED screen. Even if your iPhone doesn't have an OLED screen, I find pure black wallpapers looks super crisp and nice!<p>I built this app from feedback from the /r/AmoledBackgrounds sub:
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Amoledbackgrounds/comments/95mz1l/introducing_an_ios_amoled_app_oledify/?st=jkmu5i48&sh=a7cbf59d" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Amoledbackgrounds/comments/95mz1l/i...</a><p>Before (background is dark grey, not black):<p><a href="https://i.redd.it/w098c8sefpa11.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/w098c8sefpa11.jpg</a><p>After:<p><a href="https://w.oledify.com/946E9804-842D-4B8A-AA35-C8C54A1B25DD_pureblack_75point1_resolution_750x1334.png" rel="nofollow">https://w.oledify.com/946E9804-842D-4B8A-AA35-C8C54A1B25DD_p...</a><p>Demo:<p><a href="https://streamable.com/fhtgx" rel="nofollow">https://streamable.com/fhtgx</a><p><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/br5kdflkniwt9u0/AADkRawLrLR3isiEs5AMwjMua?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/sh/br5kdflkniwt9u0/AADkRawLrLR3isiEs...</a><p>- The app is 100% free to use and has no ads. I noticed a few people requested a donate/tipping on the AmoledBackgrounds subreddit post, so there is a Tip Jar option but it's not required to unlock any features. Only if you really really find the app useful and wanna buy me a beer, you can use the tip jar. If you don't want Apple to take 30% cut, I setup a paypal here:<p><a href="https://paypal.me/OLEDify" rel="nofollow">https://paypal.me/OLEDify</a><p>- The “Crop & Resize” tool in the app can be used to resize & fit wallpapers for your screen. This is useful when you have an image which doesn't perfectly fit your screen. You can create a new image of the suitable size for your screen size.<p>- The app also contains a "Post to Reddit" option which posts the edited wallpaper directly to the /r/AmoledBackgrounds sub.<p>- As you drag the sliders, the updates to the image happen in realtime on the GPU instead of CPU and are quite fast.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: This question came up in a meeting today and I thought I would ask the HN community for their insights. The company (could be any company but happens to be the one I'm currently working for) is in a position to open an office "anywhere" in the continental US. The projects this company takes on happen to involve embedded Linux systems and software defined radio systems, but lets not focus too much on the flavor of tech.<p>What cities in the US could be helped by having a company that was employing 30 - 50 technical workers (engineers) locate there? Are the cities already attractive to technical talent (already living out there) or willing to relocate there?<p>Everyone knows "Austin" or "Denver" or "Research Triangle Park" but how about other heartland cities?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: We're moving there next year for my wife's job. What's the startup scene in Paris like? How good does my French need to be? Are there any languages/platforms/etc. that are popular there more than in Silicon Valley/Fairfax County (the places I'm used to working)?
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: I'm a self-taught web developer with about 3 years experience, and I feel I have a pretty good grasp on the tools I need for my day-to-day job. But I never attended university and would like to get a deeper understanding of computer science. I've done a few moocs, and they are definitely very useful, but I'm wondering if there are any accelerated "bootcamps" that teach either computer science fundamentals, or maybe more advanced programming topics. The bootcamps I'm aware of focus on beginners.<p>Does anyone know if something like that exists?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: About a couple of years ago, I submitted a thread here called "Ask HN: I'm depressed, what should I do?" [0].<p>I was in a very dark place personally and professionally. I had turned to my family and friends without success, and posted here looking for a moral boost.<p>I would like to thank all the people that have responded with kindness.<p>I just wanted to say that your words helped, that I think about this thread often, and that your effort did actually help someone from a tough spot.<p>Update on my situation:<p>By the time that I got an offer I could live with, I had sent over 250 applications and done around 20 interviews.<p>I started with 33k€ a year (translates to a little less than 2000€ per month), now I'm at 38k€.<p>I rented a place downtown, and started working out (lost 18kg and counting), I'm going to run a marathon in 3 months!!!<p>Overall, I'm not exactly where I want to be, but -for once- I can see myself getting there.<p>I'm hopeful for the future, and I would like to thank the many people that helped me to get here.<p>Just to sum up, be kind when you can, it can change someone's life.<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134183" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134183</a>
Upvote: | 1370 |
Title: I recently read American Kingping by Nick Bilton and I thought it was really good. It’s about the founder of the Silk Road and how the FBI tracked him down.<p>Can you recommend any similiar novels?
Upvote: | 242 |
Title: Is there a way someone who is not a PhD can publish papers without being marginalized by the community?<p>Do you have any advice on how to write better quality articles?
Upvote: | 250 |
Title: Yes, I don't know where I want to go with this question, but don't you feel like pawns? Busting your heads with complicated problems just because it gives purpose to our lives while others benefit from it? How do you deal with this?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: I am from ECE background, been working in machine learning, and data analysis fields for couple of years, and have decent coding experience in Python and C/C++.<p>I am about to be interviewed by one of the big five (they reached out to me, I wasn't actively preparing for interviews).<p>Not being from a CS or software engineering background, I never took an algorithm and data structure course, and from what I know the coding test mainly involves those.<p>I know there are a ton of resources online for coding interview preparation, but I wanted to seek suggestions on an efficient/quick resource given that I have strong coding skills but not familiar with data structure/CS algorithm.
Upvote: | 170 |
Title: <a href="http://paperkast.com" rel="nofollow">http://paperkast.com</a><p>Hello everybody,<p>I just wanted to share a link aggregator website: paperkast.com. It's a article sharing and discussion hub.<p>It's opened recently. I think it was a need for the academia. I don't think there is an online community for paper discussion. Twitter is good for publication sharing but there is no central discussion around a paper. It's all over the place. Seperately, we know that the link aggregation style has a good reputation. It's a good stimulation for discussion.<p>What do you think of it?
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: I don't know any people from those companies. I am just curious.
Upvote: | 142 |
Title: (Not as in "going public".)<p>Why have we not seen a publicly-operated social network?<p>It strikes me that enabling people to connect with one another is fundamental to most governments as a public service. Cities and states make and fund roadways and public squares and parks. Social networks seem like an approximate digital parallel.<p>Given everything that's happened with Facebook and Twitter in the last months, why are there no examples of government-run social networks?<p>(Or, if there are, what are they? How do they work?)<p>edited the title for breadth<p>edit 2: thanks for sounding in! A lot of great answers. To be clear, I didn't mean to present this as a leading question. I was curious about the perceived reasons from HN's audience.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Hello HN!! I’m Agustin, founder of Fintual Inc, from YC’s S18 batch. We’re building an automated passive investment platform for Latin Americans (<a href="https://fintual.com" rel="nofollow">https://fintual.com</a>). I come from a computer science + business background so when we first started discussing this idea I didn’t have much experience on finance or investment other than what I had learned by playing around with Bitcoin. Since I graduated I knew I wanted to become an entrepreneur, but not having any work experience led me to pretty standard ideas like a music streaming website or a food ordering app. I realised rather late that I needed to join experienced partners to find better business insights and opportunities.<p>After many conversations with my current business partner Omar, who had been 8 years working for the largest wealth manager in LATAM, I was shocked to understand how Latin American people, including people around me, were unfairly paying enormous amounts of money to banks who offered very expensive and many times overly complex investment solutions to retail / uninformed long term investors. After investigating how Betterment, Wealthfront and passive investment strategies in general had been changing the landscape for Americans, we were motivated to do whatever it took to solve this problem in LATAM starting from our own country Chile which, despite being a tiny country, has more than 60 billion dollars allocated in Mutual Funds by itself.<p>We started by building a responsive website using AngularJS and Ruby on Rails as quickly as we could to get user feedback soon, we mostly copied the onboarding process directly from Betterment. At the beginning we thought automating every step of the investment process was the most important challenge, but now, after some experience and several conversations with YC partners, we have come to realize the real problem to solve is none other than distribution: how to reach millions of users in an economically viable way. Banks already have the clients, while we have to explain and convince people there’s a better way. At first we tried to find an incumbent to work with us, but after a year trying we decided to get our own license (the equivalent to a FINRA Series 6 license) which took a large part of the seed round and 8 months of work, but finally got it. We’ve been growing at a healthy 10% week over week since March now thanks mainly to word of mouth, but we know we need to have a better handle on this growth for the future.<p>I’m very excited to be at this point, I have been reading HN for 10 years now and I only dreamed about making a YC launch post. As I said, we need to find a more consistent approach on growth, If any of you has any new idea or has heard of approaches of how could we get more people to realize they’re overpaying (some even pay 7% annual fees!) and get them to know and trust our solution, that would be awesome, but anyway, I’m eager to read and respond to whatever this great community has to say.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: For example park.io was born out of a simple script that looked for available domains (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-automating-tasks-helped-me-grow-revenue-to-over-125k-mo-73da9c0b51)
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: Hello all, I made this burner acc on HN to try and ask people without showing exactly who I am.<p>So in short, I am going down the hill, I am starting to loose interest in almost anything but sitting and staring at the wall.<p>Now I am in this state in which nothing really interests me, I do not cook anymore, I do not go to the gym, hell if I leave my flat..<p>What is wrong with me?<p>I am a 26 year old, have been working in web dev since 19 trying to make a startup for the past 2-3 years, but I fail to see any progress. I just do not know how this life thing works!
I have ambitions, I do not want to remain in a 40-60k job (this is Europe) for the rest of my life, but through my work experience I was always seen as the young one and given no choice but to quit and get a new job in order to advance a bit further.<p>On the other side, I have made 3-4 projects, first solo and then with other people and all turned to ashes. I understand that the chances are incredibly low, but I cannot even find people that want to try and make something. It is literally insane, I have this feeling that I cannot find the people that I should be working with, either in a company or for a startup.<p>I used to work in 3 companies in Berlin and people were 9-5 and thats it. I had to keep on going to my bosses and ask for more work, more difficulty etc and when they all failed to deliver it, I quit.<p>I finally found out what I am actually good at. I consume a problem, find the solution, apply it and move on. If I dont do that constantly I get bored, but not like "oh this again?" I can handle this, but please! if you see the same thing over and over again let me automate it!<p>In my first work, I told them lets automate the provisioning and hibernation of our QA servers and save 2-3k per month. I got a no..<p>I could go on forever.. is this a normal thing?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: eno [1] - A modern plaintext language w/ libraries [2] for JavaScript, Python, Ruby & soon more!<p>We migrated a big relational research database to a file-based solution - requirements were:<p>- Super fast and easy editability for users<p>- Highest performance for parsing/validating >10K documents on every user change.<p>Our trials with YAML/TOML showed us that we wanted something both faster [3][4] and easier [4],
something <i>tailored</i> for file-based content management ... and after months of
research & development it's now publicly available (under MIT license) for everyone!<p>Last but not least I also want to mention eno's document introspection capabilities -
with a few lines of code you can build intelligent relational suggestion UIs as shown in [4] below.<p>[1] <a href="https://eno-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">https://eno-lang.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://eno-lang.org/libraries/" rel="nofollow">https://eno-lang.org/libraries/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/eno-lang/benchmarks/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/eno-lang/benchmarks/</a><p>[4] <a href="https://eno-lang.org/resources/introspection.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://eno-lang.org/resources/introspection.mp4</a><p>PS.
Your input for the Roadmap is highly welcome - what do you think should be in the next releases?
More languages? (If so, which? Currently in progress: Rust/PHP, Currently planned: Go/Java)
Additional IDE/editor support? (Currently supported: Atom/VSCode/Sublime)
Or something else entirely? :) Looking forward to your feedback!
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I’m Mitra Raman, the founder/CEO of The Buttermilk Company (<a href="https:///www.thebuttermilkco.com" rel="nofollow">https:///www.thebuttermilkco.com</a>). We help you make authentic, fresh Indian food in 5 minutes by just adding water to our products.<p>As an Indian-American in my 20s, I grew up eating my mom’s homemade Indian food everyday. When I moved away from home to attend Carnegie Mellon University, I was homesick for the first time and realized how hard it was to find anything that resembled my mom’s food. I either had to make it myself (finding the Indian grocery store + following my mom’s recipe took way too much time) or would settle for whatever generic dishes at the local Indian restaurant. The options were expensive, time-consuming, or tasted horrible.<p>Two years into my job as an Software Engineer at Amazon, I asked my mom to help me make her rasam. She gave me all the ingredients in a ziploc bag and told me to just add hot water! I asked my friends about how they coped with homesickness and realized that most parents were also figuring out their own ways of getting their kids’ favorites foods to them when they moved. That’s how the idea for Buttermilk started!<p>We crowdsource our recipes from real people (keeping our product truly authentic) and develop them into products that are super easy for our customers to make. If you’ve ever asked your mom to send a family recipe to you, you know how hard it is to get this right! Our team spends hours in the kitchen tweaking each recipe so we can prep and cook it just enough that the customer can complete the cooking with water. We have to be careful to not over-prep such that the taste and nutritional value erode over time.<p>We use fresh and non-GMO ingredients, make everything from scratch (seriously, even the garam masala), and deliver our perishable products in sustainable packaging. Our production is extremely detail-oriented and time-consuming because we are recreating recipes for one family into large-scale batches that need to maintain the quality of its original recipe. To improve efficiency, we have built software to track food production, predict incoming volume, and help our production and fulfillment teams communicate. We’re also exploring new shelf-life extension technologies (such as HPP) so our products can last a lot longer. Currently, they must be refrigerated for 5-7 days or frozen for up to 3 months -- if you don’t eat them before then, that is!<p>In terms of market size: there are over 4 million Indian immigrants in the U.S. This demographic, like all other ethnic groups, is poorly served by the existing food options when it comes to their cuisines. And of course there is the population of everyone who just likes Indian food and can’t find or make it! Though we are starting with Indian cuisine, we definitely don't plan to stop there. The market for ethnic foods in the U.S. is at least $5B. But in good startup style, we've started with the specific problem we ourselves had.<p>We’re super eager to hear your feedback, ideas, and experiences in this space or as it relates to our type of product.
Upvote: | 377 |
Title: Aretha Franklin just died and a story about her reached #1 on HN this morning before being removed (edit: looks like mods revived it and removed this post :D): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774698<p>When other celebrities die the post stays up. For example, this story about Anthony Bourdain's death wasn't taken down
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17264376<p>Aretha Franklin has had a much broader impact on culture (and I say that as a fan of them both) and if a post reaches #1 it's hard to make the case the story isn't relevant to the community.<p>Why the double standard?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Slack down at our office anyone else having issues. Looks like it's IRC fallback time...
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I will be delivering it as a PDF and thinking about printing a version in the future. What are the best software solutions for this?
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I'm a seasoned Python software developer. Recently I have found a new obsession with data processing, management, engineering etc ... I'd like to (eventually) branch off into that field but I find the lack of beginner friendly resources is slowing me down. All I can find is spark, hadoop related articles (I know these are prominent in the field, but I want to learn to walk before I run). So If any of you have pointers, websites, project ideas I can start to get a good grasp of all the fundamental concepts, I'd really appreciate it.<p>Thanks a lot in advance
Upvote: | 233 |
Title: If yes, what are you building, and what’s your opinion of async Python?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I work as a full time dev earning an OK salary (In UK terms). I find myself often struggling to buy any luxuries/pay off debt after my paycheck comes in.<p>I have lots of free time which I just spend doing side projects for fun. I need to turn this fun time into money time.<p>As a developer, what are some ways I could turn my time into money? Obviously I could try and sell some side projects, but I love open-sourcing everything I write.<p>Thanks
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: It seems this question hasn't been asked for some time, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
Upvote: | 227 |
Title: To comply with the new European legislation many websites put a GDPR / cookie consent notice in front of their websites. There are different implementations of this. While some are only implemented as modal covering the website or bar on the bottom of the screens (in both cases right next to the original content), other implementations redirect the user to a totally different (sub-)domain or even hijack the request and show the consent form instead of the requested content (on the same URL with a 200 status code).<p>The latter ones present a issue to my crawler. I cannot access the content of the page without accepting those notices.<p>Things I'm considering to bypass those notices:<p>* US IP address (easy to implement, but some websites also display those notices to US IP's)<p>* Heuristics to detect those notices and accept them programatically (takes some time to implement - while a couple of vendors (i.e. OneTrust) offer off-the-shelf solutions which are easy to identify and automate, there are also many custom made solutions, so the system would need understand the concept of a consent form and how to bypass it - some forms only require the press of the right button, others involve checkboxes/radio buttons). To collect test data one solution might be to visit a set of websites once with an US IP, once with an EU IP and/or with different user agents (browser or googlebot).<p>Do you have any ideas how to approach this problem? Or are you even utilizing some techniques already and are willing to share them?
Upvote: | 65 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.