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Title: Hi HN! I’m Snigdha, founder of The Juggernaut (<a href="https://www.thejuggernaut.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.thejuggernaut.com</a>), a subscription publication for the South Asian diaspora. We charge <$5/month for original stories on South Asia and its people. I’d love your feedback — new subscribers get a free week trial :)<p>I’m Indian-American and grew up in New York. Being Indian wasn't cool growing up. Western media mostly focused on South Asia's poverty (Slumdog Millionaire) or stereotypes (Apu, taxi drivers). That started to change as I grew older. I saw more South Asians in the news — from those in spelling bees, which I used to participate in, to presidential candidate Kamala Harris, to tech CEOs like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella. I realized I didn’t know what was going on in the region or with South Asians nationally, let alone in my own city. My mom would forward me news on WhatsApp and I couldn’t talk to her about it meaningfully. I also found that journalism was becoming targeted: The Athletic for Sports, The Infatuation for food, Blavity for black millennials. And I noticed that as China grew, publications started China sections and readers loved Bill Bishop’s Sinocism, a newsletter with sharp China analysis. But there was no national, inclusive, well-reported publication for South Asians, the fastest growing demographic in the US and the largest diaspora in the world.<p>So, every weekend, I’d write a email newsletter (<a href="https://www.inkmango.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.inkmango.com</a>) linking to the best articles on South Asia(ns) with my thoughts on a pressing issue, from the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit to South Asian representation in Crazy Rich Asians. The newsletter grew to the thousands. After doing this for a few months, I realized linking to other publications wasn't enough. I was craving coverage I wasn't seeing. That’s why I decided to figure out what it would take to start a new publication with our own reported stories. We called it The Juggernaut.<p>We are starting with one new story a weekday. Our stories have included profiles on South Asian founders, an interview with comedian Hari Kondabolu, an essay on the erasure of Freddie Mercury's brownness, and an exploration of the rise of the Subtle Curry Traits Facebook group.<p>Media is difficult. People like free content. We launched behind a paywall because it allows us to pay journalists well and quickly, and invest in better journalism. And paid doesn’t mean exorbitant. I’d love to know — what publications do you read and why? What makes you want to pay for something? What pitfalls should we watch out for? Happy to answer any questions/comments; you can also email me at [email protected].
Upvote: | 81 |
Title: I've been thinking a lot about different machine learning techniques applied to video game artificial intelligence. I'm wondering if any video game devs would like to share their experience about what parts of making a game AI are challenging, things that are difficult to get right, time consuming, or tedious.<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: Shout-outs to everyone who contributes high-quality submissions/comments.
Despite the large userbase HN has today, it's still one of the most informative communities I've come across. Also thanks to the mods for their effort in keeping it this!<p>I'd only wish something like HN would exist for every interest/discipline (So many of mine don't have valuable online communities)
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I tried to use Finder's tags but failed to keep things organized everytime. Are you using a specific app? Do you have some "tips" to keep a setup clean?
Upvote: | 174 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'm Tony, one of the cofounders of Cosmic JS (YC W19) (<a href="https://cosmicjs.com" rel="nofollow">https://cosmicjs.com</a>). Cosmic JS is a drop-in replacement for WordPress that can power content for any website or app. We provide a web dashboard to create content and API tools and resources (REST and GraphQL) to integrate content into any new or existing project. Commonly referred to as a "Headless CMS", this eliminates the need to build and maintain your own CMS infrastructure. For a monthly fee, you use our CMS infrastructure and can focus on what really matters: building great products and user experiences.<p>My cofounder Carson and I met at a digital agency where we built and managed WordPress websites. We noticed that lots of development time was spent building and maintaining the CMS itself, sucking time away from core application development. Plus we encountered the same CMS problems over and over: automatic updates caused sites to crash, a client would decide to install a bunch of plugins that caused the site to crash, comment spam was a never-ending battle. We began looking for a better way to manage content.<p>This was 2014 and API services were becoming more popular (Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid etc were gaining traction in offloading non-core dev tasks), and it made sense that using an API could be a viable way to deal with content as well. So Cosmic JS was created to be the solution that we wanted to use: one click to add a new project, unlimited projects with a single login, a simple web dashboard to create content, and API tools and resources to integrate content into any new or existing website or app. No CMS infrastructure needed.<p>After much beta testing, we eventually released to the public in 2016. We're now powering production websites and apps for hundreds of teams around the world across various use-cases.<p>We know the market for a solution to this problem is big because WordPress, as of this posting, powers 30% of the web. That’s 75,000,000 websites (source: <a href="https://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/wordpress/stats/" rel="nofollow">https://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/wordpress/stats/</a>). Plus the need for dynamic content extends beyond websites. Mobile, IOT and other emerging tech are increasingly requiring dynamic, easily integrated content.<p>This is a hard problem to solve because a CMS has to satisfy the needs of both developers and content creators. We're different than other headless CMS providers because lots of effort has been made to make the CMS admin dashboard and content integration process as easy as possible for both the developer and content creator. We’ve been told “it doesn’t get much simpler”. We’re also very committed to education and community. We're the only headless CMS that comes with a community of developers built-in providing hundreds of apps, extensions, and integrations to learn best practices and teach others. You can get up and running with a variety of use-cases in just a few clicks. And we have a free plan that rewards contributors with a free personal Bucket forever.<p>Check out some of the apps built with Cosmic JS: <a href="https://cosmicjs.com/apps" rel="nofollow">https://cosmicjs.com/apps</a>.<p>We're excited to be participating in Y Combinator for the W19 batch to help more teams avoid the pain of CMS infrastructure management so they can focus on building great products.<p>We'd love to hear your feedback and learn more about your personal experiences building content-powered websites and apps!
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: Hello HN!<p>We’re Jorge, Kevin and Sean and we’re building GoLinks (<a href="https://www.golinks.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.golinks.io</a>).<p>GoLinks is a platform that allows you to easily manage and share links by letting teams create a short link for any internal URL within a company. These links are easy to remember and share, so you don't have to bookmark or copy and paste them in emails.<p>Each day we use and share hundreds of links to get our jobs done, without considering how long it takes to access and share these resources. It’s one reason why many of us leave tabs open in our browser: we don’t want to spend the 5 to 10 steps to navigate back to that important page. With GoLinks, you’ll be able to deep-link directly into any application with just a simple keyword entered into your address bar. This allows links to be conversational. For example, one employee can create the keyword “go/review” to point to the annual review page in Workday. Later in a meeting, that employee can mention, “Remember to visit go/review to fill out your annual reviews!” Now anyone in that meeting can remember and access the link “go/review”, without digging through their email or Slack.<p>Golink systems are commonly used in many big tech companies such as Google, Linkedin, Twitter and Airbnb, built by internal tools engineers in those companies. These systems have become an integral part of the way tech companies share internal links.<p>When we started our careers in tech, we would often visit each other for lunch at these tech companies and we began to notice the same go/links everywhere. In the hallways, cafes, break rooms, posters. fliers and TVs, there would be these keywords prefixed with “go/” that allowed employees to quickly access information on their devices. The employee could enter a shortened URL like go/food into their mobile browser, or desktop, and could access the lunch menu for that day. An easy and simple concept, but an extremely powerful method for internal communication.<p>Although these systems are ubiquitous in large tech companies, we noticed there was nothing on the market that catered to startups, midsize, or non-tech companies. Companies usually don’t have the time or the resources to build sophisticated internal tools, so we set out to create GoLinks as a Service.<p>The challenge was building an internal tool for companies that may not have any internal infrastructure. For example, large tech companies have infrastructure so when you connect to the company Wifi or access the VPN, you can access the internal company network. This allows users to access the “go” domain on the network, which resolves the deep link redirection. For smaller and midsize companies, employees might be 100% remote or working in a coworking space, or maybe the company never got around to setting up an intranet. We had to build a product that did not rely on assuming internal infrastructure.<p>We were able to replicate the functionality of an internal network, and the simplicity of a short-link redirect system, by creating browser extensions for each of the popular browsers. The extension would proxy the “go” domain to our server and we authenticate and redirect the user to the correct location. Now coworkers can be on any network and any wifi, and as long as they authenticate in their current browser, we can find their company’s internal links.<p>We are startup-friendly—anyone under 10 users can get started completely free—but our main initial focus is on enterprise clients.<p>If you’ve ever used our GoLinks or any company's golink system, let us know how it’s changed your daily workflow. Thanks for reading. We appreciate your ideas and feedback!
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: I'm currently a lab technician with a background in microbiology and would love to get into software development; however, I lack experience and I feel I'm too old to ever get a job in the field. I'd appreciate any tip!
Upvote: | 194 |
Title: Hello, HN!<p>We're Rohit, Edul, Prince, Alankar and Snehil. We’re building Mudrex (<a href="https://mudrex.com" rel="nofollow">https://mudrex.com</a>).<p>Mudrex helps traders automate their trading without having to code and spend a lot of time and money building infrastructure. Though we have started with cryptocurrency trading first, our goal is to help anyone who wants to get into automated trading or investing across any asset class.<p>We had been trading cryptocurrencies for some time and were not able to track trading opportunities across 1000s of currency pairs for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. We thought of automating our trades, but faced challenges like being unable to access historical data, building a testing framework to test strategies on historical or live data, and maintaining connections and orders on multiple exchanges. Also, since it was all coded we were not able to quickly iterate on trading ideas, since for simplest changes we had to dig into code and deploy new strategies to retest them. That also made it hard to have a log of all the trades, strategy changes, back-tests, papers to compare things at one place.<p>After talking to hundreds of traders, we found out almost all active traders were facing the same problems, so we decided to build Mudrex. At Mudrex traders can quickly build any kind of trading strategies using 150+ indicators, 50+ candlestick patterns, price or volume action. They can test their trading strategies on historical and live data to optimise and automate their trading by connecting their order using exchange API keys.<p>Cryptocurrencies are just a start for us and we have been growing very quickly since the launch and getting feedback from more and more people every day. There are millions of traders out there, trading manually across different asset classes just because they don't have capital and resources to build an automated trading infrastructure from scratch. We want to solve all of their problems so they can focus on building trading strategies instead of spending too much time on infrastructure issues. One of our users defined our goal as "democratising algorithmic trading and investing" and we are working hard every day to get closer to that.<p>For the next 2 months the platform is free to use but we will charge a $0-$100 monthly subscription fee depending on usage with a free tier available.<p>Next on our roadmap are things like a code editor (where traders can build custom indicators using minimum coding), a marketplace between traders and investors, and integrating equities and forex.<p>We dream of reducing the gap around financial opportunities between the wealthiest and the rest. We just got started and are going to face many technical/design/operational challenges, but with the help of our users' feedback and support we feel we can achieve it. Looking forward to hear feedback from the HN community to keep going in the right direction!
Upvote: | 157 |
Title: Options shamelessly copy-pasted from https://clang.llvm.org/<p>LLVM A style complying with the LLVM coding standards<p>Google A style complying with Google’s C++ style guide<p>Chromium A style complying with Chromium’s style guide<p>Mozilla A style complying with Mozilla’s style guide<p>WebKit A style complying with WebKit’s style guide
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I am a technical manager and currently in a leadership role. My manager who is an executive, keeps telling me“ don’t talk like an engineer, talk like a leader” when I go to him for any people or operational
Issues. I always see from an engineer lens and possibly missing leader or executive perspective. How do I develop or change the way I talk as a leader. Did any one face this issue in the transition. Any pointers can be of great help.
Upvote: | 511 |
Title: In Sam Altman's recent blog post, "How To Be Successful", he talks about "Getting good at sales":<p><i>Self-belief alone is not sufficient—you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.</i><p><i>All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc...</i><p>http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful<p>Other parts of the post resonated with me, and this one does too, as something I want to work towards as I build my company.<p>Looking online, all advice on "sales" is centered around actual sales scenarios, rather than what Sam is referring to. I was wondering if anyone came across any books etc. or had good advice on where to start with "getting good at sales".
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: I have a friend in federal prison (he developed a drug addiction and got arrested for theft). Not a bad person or anything, just had some problems. Anyways, he's always been interested in my job (software engineering) and has wanted to learn. I told him I'd send him some books to learn engineering, especially since he has a lot more free time to read now. I sent an introductory book on programming and it was not allowed to be given to him because it the prison said it posed a threat to order and security. I believe this is because they have access to a computer in the library where they can send some very basic messages, and they're afraid they'll figure out how to "hack" this computer.<p>Considering that software engineering is the perfect job for an antisocial person, I feel this is a huge mistake by the prison system. If someone has the aptitude for software engineering, this should be encouraged as a path to reintegration with society.<p>I was wondering what other people's thoughts were on this, do you think an introduction to Ruby On Rails, PHP or JQuery is dangerous to teach an inmate? Should this policy be changed?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: My current job involve working in decade old product, how can I get a practical experience in developing a highly scalable and distributed applications.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>This is Tom from ampUp (<a href="https://ampup.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ampup.io/</a>). We're building a
reservable electric car charging network out of shared private and
home chargers.<p>As a Nissan Leaf driver without a home charger, charging has been
almost a daily headache for me. For many commutes and trips I have to
ask myself, should I drive my Leaf, use Uber, take public transit,
walk really far, or just not go? This is due to the walk-in-only model
of the public charger, which results in unpredictable availability.
Worse, public charging is growing at a slower rate than EV adoption,
and the range estimators on EVs are no better than a 10-day weather
forecast.<p>I used the Plugshare app and it helped some, particularly the couch
surfing style of charging where I arrange a 2 hour slot with some home
charger hosts. When it worked well, it took out the unpredictability
and therefore anxiety. However, it doesn’t always work well. Many
times hosts won’t respond to text/calls to make the booking, and a
couple times I forgot to bring cash/check to pay for the electricity
as the host indicated.<p>My first attempt at this problem was building a webapp that worked as
an addon to Plugshare where hosts can create a calendar for their
charger, and set an hourly price where drivers can pay via credit
card. Once that’s set up, the host would paste the unique url to their
charger’s calendar in the description section of their Plugshare
listing. Long story short, this added as much inconvenience as
benefit, and drivers still ended up calling the host.<p>Given enough interests from hosts and based on experiences of a few
drivers including myself, I decided to make a second attempt and just
build a better app that focuses on the hosting and reservation flows.<p>After about 2 months of hustling and grinding, we
released ampUp (<a href="https://ampup.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ampup.io/</a>), where users can host multiple
chargers at flexible schedules and adjustable prices. Since the hosts
set up sharing calendar for their chargers, the other users can make
reservations with instantaneous confirmation. We use Stripe to enable
peer to peer payment with credit card rather than cash/check. We know
EV owners are willing to pay for charging and it’s important for hosts
to be able to make a meaningful amount if we want to scale this to
match our vision where one day there will always be a reservable
charger near where the user is or will be. From our analysis, with a
competitive (to public charger) pricing of $3/hr, hosts can expect to
make $190-$270/month in profit with just 3 rented hours per day.<p>For ampUp, our business model is to charge a flat 1 dollar to the
driver per reservation. If we use the $3/hr example from earlier, a 3
hour session will cost a total of $10 to add about 60 miles from a
residential level 2 charger. This "fuel" cost is on par with the most
fuel-efficient gas car which is the Mitsubishi Mirage. These numbers
are based on Bay Area electricity and gas costs.<p>ampUp already has thousands of hosts, but many of them are listings we
collected from all over the internet. The difference in the user
experience with those hosts is that we have to confirm the reservation
with them, as opposed to our own. This is a temporary limitation in
the "do things that don't scale" spirit. Our goal is to instantly confirm
reservations like Airbnb.<p>We sincerely invite the HN community’s feedback on our idea and on the
app and everything else in this space. You can reach me directly at
[email protected] or for [email protected]. You can download the app at the top
of <a href="https://ampup.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ampup.io/</a>. We hope ampUp will help more people to drive
their electric vehicles as effortlessly as driving a gas car!
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Generally, I'm not doing everything I want to do in my life, and I'm wondering how other people manage to do all the things.<p>After a conversation here with another HN user[0], I'd like to ask high-performers how it is they do what they do.<p>First, what do I mean by "high-performer": someone who is doing what seems like two or more full-time tasks during their everyday life. In the case of [0] the user in question is a dad, full time at school, and has a full time job.<p>Second, by "how you do what you do" I mean: when it comes down to the <i>point of action</i> how do you move into an action? When does the choice happen? Did you offload that to a list a week prior? How do you handle feeling overwhelmed? Do you even have a sense of overwhelm when moving in to an arbitatrary task? Do you feel exhausted or mentally non-functional with any frequency? What does your sleep, food, and exercise routine look like? Do you meditate?<p>I just want to know if I'm lacking something fundamental: something physical (chemical imbalance? gut microbiome?), some lack of character development (do I lack "grit"? am I undisciplined?), or something else entirely.<p>In the case of the conversation in [0], the user has some external motivation; having faced death by cancer, he now wants to live his best life possible. Is this something I can apply to myself? I ponder death on a regular basis (2 to 4 nights a week, not in a sense of suicide, but considering my own mortality), and that doesn't seem to have the same sort of effect.<p>[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19357028
Upvote: | 112 |
Title: And if so, how?
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: A web platform I've written to make it easy for people to share goespatial time series data and display it on animated heatmaps. There's also a social media component that allows you to write comments, follow, share and like data sets that you want to engage with. You can also download the CSV data and embed animations into your own websites. People uploading datasets can also choose to make money by accepting donations.<p>Please check out the home page for more details:
<a href="https://mapipedia.com" rel="nofollow">https://mapipedia.com</a><p>Here are some samples of things created with the platform (press the play button to start the animations!)<p>1. USA Formation (states and flags):
<a href="https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/united_states_of_america_formation.html" rel="nofollow">https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/united_states_of_america_fo...</a><p>2. Average Life Expectancy:
<a href="http://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/average_life_expectancy_by_country_since_1800.html" rel="nofollow">http://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/average_life_expectancy_by_c...</a><p>3. Growth of The Salvation Army:
<a href="https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/growth_of_the_salvation_army_worldwide_since_1865.html" rel="nofollow">https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/growth_of_the_salvation_arm...</a><p>4. Aids Related Deaths:
<a href="https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/aids_related_deaths_worldwide.html" rel="nofollow">https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/aids_related_deaths_worldwi...</a><p>5. Prevalence of overweight children under 5:
<a href="https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/prevalence_of_overweight_children_under_5.html" rel="nofollow">https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/prevalence_of_overweight_ch...</a><p>6. Population Growth:
<a href="https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/global_population_growth_since_1800.html" rel="nofollow">https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/global_population_growth_si...</a><p>Thanks for taking the time to check it out. This is the first time I've actually told anyone about this platform. I've been very close to it for a long time so it will be good to get feedback from others. All feedback is appreciated!<p>Cheers
David
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>We're Ethan, Jullian, and Will. We're the founders of Latchel (<a href="https://latchel.com/" rel="nofollow">https://latchel.com/</a>). We handle 24/7 maintenance for residential property managers and landlords across the US.<p>Ethan was Director of Product at One Planet Ops, the creator of websites like contractors.com, homegain.com, and many other lead gen marketplaces. Jullian is a self-taught developer and designer who has built mobile and web apps, most recently at picmonic.com. Will comes from Amazon, where he helped design and deploy the last mile delivery operations for Amazon Fresh, Prime Now, and Amazon Logistics across the US and the world.<p>Will started the company when his family needed help running the family rental properties. His grandfather managed the properties full time all the way into his mid 90s! Sadly, his age caught up with him and he could no longer take care of the family business after getting diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The disease progressed quickly and unfortunately the family did not have a succession plan in place (advice to anyone with a family business: plan the succession early, you don't want to spend energy worrying about the family business when you want to focus on taking care of a parent's medical or end of life care). Will helped his father with the properties as much as he could while working full time at Amazon but was quickly overwhelmed by the maintenance dispatching and follow-up. He saw that the overall process was very similar to the logistics and delivery problems he was solving at Amazon. After looking for solutions online and calling Ethan to see if he knew of any solutions they couldn't find any. Ultimately, we teamed up to build what we couldn't find on the market: a service to handle rental maintenance problems and ensure work orders don't slip through the cracks.<p>Maintenance coordination is a difficult problem to solve because it is fundamentally a communications problem that isn't easily solved by software. First, most contractors are third party and take jobs infrequently from a property manager, so they're extremely unwilling to adopt a new process for reporting that work is complete or for getting paid. Second, tenants also interact with their managers rarely, so mobile applications (and even online portals) have low adoption rates among renters. Lastly, property managers face an agency problem: ultimately it isn't their properties, it is their clients who own the property. The property manager is responsible for its care and maintenance and wants to be able to have all of the details of what happened and to know why certain decisions were made in case something went wrong.<p>We sell monthly subscription services to property managers to take all of their maintenance calls. We have two paid subscriptions: 24/7 Emergency and a premium option where we handle both emergencies and non-emergencies. We also have a free software tier that gives property managers an online web portal for tenant maintenance request submission. This online submission tries to detect emergency scenarios and our software automatically calls the property manager in case of emergency. In addition to the monthly subscription services we also take a 10% referral fee from contractors we source for the jobs (we cover the credit card processing fees).<p>The HN community is full of people working on simplifying the oftentimes ugly interface between the real world and idealized technology systems. We'd love to hear your questions, thoughts, and concerns about this problem space.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Hi HN! We are Yuriy and Oleg, founders of Axdraft (<a href="https://business.axdraft.com/en/business" rel="nofollow">https://business.axdraft.com/en/business</a>). Axdraft offers free legal documents for startups.<p>We have built Axdraft, because we believe that sometimes founders don’t need 20-page ironclad contract, 2 weeks of negotiations and detailed explanation of all risks. On early stages you just want to have a good, balanced agreement fast to move the deal forward while it's hot. The biggest difficulty here is that lawyers push us to perceive contracts as unique and, therefore, not possible to automate. Usually, by saying unique, they mean that there are 20-50 possible variations of a clause in the contract.<p>We are a team of brothers, who combine legal and tech expertise, Yuriy was a lawyer for almost 8 years at one of top law firms in Europe and when he started noticing that even the most complex legal transactions have many patterns, he reached out to his brother Oleg, who at that time was Senior Software Engineer at Booking.com in Amsterdam.<p>We teamed up to try to figure out and automate most common variations and allow any young startup, as ourselves to draft a document, which they need now. We spoke to about 100 founders and came up with a list of top-6 contracts startups use, including: (1) NDA; (2) Pilot agreement; (3) Services agreement; (4) SaaS agreement; (5) SAFE; and (6) Employee onboarding. We are already working on Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Founders Agreement and LoI, which are top-4 documents requested by users. We will be more than happy to add other documents upon your request.<p>Our main differences compared to Clerky, LegalZoom, RocketLawyer and similar solutions are:<p>1. we focus on startups, which makes the content more tailored;
2. we offer documents for free, because I see little value in the legal document itself. The main value of a lawyer, in our view, is in counseling, sharing the liability and providing you assurances;
3. we offer plain English description of the implications for each choice you are offered when drafting a document;
4. to use Axdraft you don’t have to register, because we want to create flawless and super-fast experience for founders to create legal documents;
5. we are happy to customize documents of registered users with their logos, company details and some custom language upon request.<p>We intend to monetize Axdraft by giving an option for startups to submit any document drafted with Axdraft or a document they received from third party for approval or review by a lawyer for a small fixed fee, which would still be much more affordable than engaging a law firm.<p>Currently, we offer founder to founder review, which is not a legal review at all, but more a business advice from a fellow founder, who is eager to share his experience with similar contracts.<p>We estimate the market for this product to be less than 1 bln USD at the moment, but we expect it to grow as the number of startups founded each year increases and as we expand into a larger 7 bln USD market of small businesses (under 20 employees) in the US.<p>We are really excited to hear your feedback about Axdraft. Please try it out at <a href="https://business.axdraft.com" rel="nofollow">https://business.axdraft.com</a> (registration is not required) and let us know what you think.
Upvote: | 172 |
Title: I'm looking to de-google myself and these are two services that impress me.<p>>Fastmail offers 25 GB storage, full mobile sync with push: mail, contacts and calendars and your own domain name at $5/month<p>>Protonmail offers 5 GB storage, up to 1000 messages per day, send encrypted messages to external recipients, own domain and email aliases for 4€/Month<p>These are the comparable plans - price wise, but I'm honestly unsure which one to try. Any personal comments are appreciated. If you use either, I'd love some feedback if you may.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: My name is Nelly Cheboi. I am the co-founder of <a href="https://techlitafrica.org" rel="nofollow">https://techlitafrica.org</a>, an organization that fosters a more technologically literate Africa by building computer labs in African schools.<p>I was raised in Mogotio, Kenya, in abject poverty. At nine years old, I collected wild vegetables on my way from school to cook for my younger sister. The only way I knew out was by studying. So I studied. I studied hard. And I ended with a full-ride scholarship to Augustana College, IL.<p>I was majoring in Chemistry before I discovered computer science my junior year of college. I loved it. With only three semesters left, I decided to get a degree in it. I also built a school with the aim of fostering digital literacy. I doubled down on my work-study program, got some donations from friends and four months later I launched Zawadi Preparatory (www.zawadiprep.tech). We admitted 30 kids at its launch in January 2016. Barely 3 years later, we are at 150 kids.<p>In summer 2018, we built a computer lab at Zawadi Prep. We collected computer donations, bundled it with elementary OS along with open source education software. There is no broadband internet, so we downloaded terabytes of content for our local server including Wikipedia and Stack Overflow. We showed the villagers how to make a Rails app at our free after school program.<p>I cannot think of a better success story than the one of my seven-year-old niece, Michelle. My friend came over to the lab. Michelle asked, "do you want to see our content?" They were like, "sure." She then opened up a computer, navigated to `192.168.0.2` and said, "look, we have all these." I teared up a little bit. I did not teach any of that.<p>Our goal for 2019 is to build 10 more computer labs in 10 different Kenyan schools. I always wanted to end poverty. To me, teaching digital literacy is the best way I know how. We now have over one hundred donated workstations. To meet our goal, we need a few hundred more.
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: Hiya,
Just wondering if anyone has any advice/anecdotes about learning how to paint?<p>I saw a thread a while ago about working with stained glass that got a lot of interest, and thought maybe the folk here might know a thing or two about this as well.<p>I have really gotten into looking at the works of impressionists ( https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/m03xj1 ) like Monet and Edward Hopper's early work, and would love to try my hand at it. If anything it would be to get more of an appreciation for the art, and as an emotional outlet after writing code every day.<p>I am pretty independent and would like to do as much as I can myself before going to a course and wasting someones time trying to understand things I could learn on my own, and have a better foundation for learning.<p>Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Upvote: | 238 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I’m Hyun, one of the co-founders of Superb AI (<a href="https://www.superb-ai.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.superb-ai.com</a>) in the YC W19 batch. We use AI to semi-automatically collect and label training data for tech companies, and help them implement machine-learning based features faster.<p>Almost all the magical AI features that we see are actually built using training data powered by humans. Companies build software tools and farm out to a bunch of people to click and type things repeatedly to label the raw data. That's how training data is made, and that’s a very large portion of what an AI is, up to this point. It has worked well up to now, but the process is not very fast and often prone to error. Moreover, the size of training datasets has increased exponentially over the past few years, as it almost guarantees a higher AI performance. AI engineers are now handling datasets as large as tens of millions of images, and thus there is a great need for a better way to build training data.<p>We started out as a team of five — Hyun (myself, CEO), Jungkwon (CTO), Jonghyuk and Moonsu (AI Engineers), and Hyundong (Operations), and after about a year, we are now a team of thirteen members. We have backgrounds in robotics, computer vision, data mining, and algorithmic programming, and we all worked together at a corporate AI research lab for around two years. While working on various projects from self-driving to StarCraft game AI, we experienced first-hand how building the training data was one of the biggest hurdles for developing new AI-based products and changing people’s lives. We initially tried to solve this problem from an academic perspective and published a research paper on using coarsely labeled training data for machine learning [0]. Soon, we decided to work on a more practical and widely applicable solution to this problem and that’s why we started this company.<p>So how do we use AI to solve this problem? There are largely two approaches we take. The first is, we try to automate as many pieces of the data building pipeline as possible using AI. To do so, we split the process into many smaller steps. If we take an image-labeling task, for example, putting bounding box labels around each object can be split into 1) scanning the image to find the type and location of each object, 2) drawing bounding boxes around each, 3) refining and validating all annotations. Some of these smaller task chunks can be completely automated using AI. For others, we build AI tools that can assist humans. And for really difficult ones, we do have human workers to do it manually. It’s a tricky problem because we need to understand what kind of tasks AI can do better than humans and vice versa, and carefully choose which tasks to automate.<p>Secondly, we try to improve our AI components throughout a given data building project using a human-in-the-loop AI approach. The key is that we bootstrap and feed portions of the training data we make back into our AI so that we can fine-tune them on the fly over the duration of a project. For example, we may start a project with a baseline AI (“version 1”), and for every 20% of a particular training dataset we make, we iterate and keep fine-tuning our AI so that by the end of the project we will have AI “version 5" that is specifically trained for the project. So as our AI components improve, human contribution gets smaller and smaller over time, and in the end, we will need very minimal human intervention. Ultimately, we want to make it like how humans learn. We see others do something for a few times, and we quickly learn how to do it ourselves. As our technology improves, our AI will be able to learn from only a few examples of human demonstration.<p>We found out that using AI in these two approaches not only makes the process faster but also more accurate. One of the reasons there is an accuracy problem with existing manual labeling services is that humans have to do too much. They spend hours and hours doing the same clicking repeatedly. But by us making it almost painless for humans to figure out what to do, they not only get through more data but they are not as exhausted or cognitively loaded.<p>Our current customers, including LG Electronics, are from industries ranging from autonomous vehicles and consumer to physical security and manufacturing. A large majority of tech companies have a shortage of AI experts and need to develop machine-learning based features with a very limited number of them. As a result, these companies do not have enough resources to build their own automated data building pipeline and often rely on outsourced manual labor. We can deliver training data much faster and better than these vendors that extensively rely on manual labor.<p>We are extremely grateful to have the chance to introduce ourselves to the HN community and hear your feedback. And we're happy to answer any of your questions. Thank you!<p>[0] <a href="http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/kim17a.html" rel="nofollow">http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/kim17a.html</a>
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: We're Peter and Harry, and we're building Travelchime (<a href="https://travelchime.com" rel="nofollow">https://travelchime.com</a>).<p>Travelchime is like Google Docs for planning vacation travel with your friends' recommendations. It lets you add places and attractions you're looking to visit to a doc, export them to Google Maps, and collaborate with your friends who've been there or are going there with you.<p>We used to plan our trips using Google Docs and Sheets, but it was a pain. We'd write the documents, then had to add the same places to a map for when we're on the trip. We also often sent these out to friends who asked -- there's nobody whose recommendations you trust more than your friends -- but it's hard to find which friends have these docs.<p>We built Travelchime to solve this. With Travelchime, you can:<p>1. Add all the museums, restaurants, and places you're staying/want to visit to a doc on Travelchime, and see them on a map with their opening times, links to Yelp, and more<p>2. Share the doc with friends on the trip or ask others for recommendations: multiple people can edit/suggest at the same time, just like Google Docs [1]<p>3. Export the places to Google Maps for when you're on the go<p>4. (Optional) Read some itineraries from around the web to get inspired! We use basic machine learning [2] to parse itineraries for the places they mention to help get you started<p>5. Once you’ve gone on the trip, you can share the full itinerary with notes to inspire your friends<p>We haven’t monetized, but will eventually link out to hotels that work well with your itinerary and get affiliate commissions there.<p>We've gotten a ton of support from Hacker News in the past: when Yale shut down our courses website, Hacker News rallied and got the attention on it to save it (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261</a>), and past HN launches (e.g., for WrapAPI: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11423070" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11423070</a>) got us our first paying customers. We love the direct feedback we get, so if you're planning a trip soon, give it a shot and let us know what you think either here or by email at [email protected]!<p>[1] To enable real-time editing, we use Quill (<a href="https://quilljs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://quilljs.com/</a>) and ShareDB (<a href="https://github.com/share/sharedb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/share/sharedb</a>), both amazing projects. We had also tried Draft.js, Slate, so if you want to chat text editing hit us up!<p>[2] A combination of Google's Entity Recognition API, Google Maps' APIs, and human checkers<p>[3] For those curious: we <3 React and have an all-Javascript stack with Node.js and MySQL on the back-end
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: As a software engineer, I have the need to stay many hours in front of a screen.<p>I work 8 hours a day in an office with a computer. At home I usually spend about 3 hours a day at the computer (social network, programming, side projects, HN, ...).<p>I usually have slightly red eyes. Lately the problem has gotten worse. I began to have some pains in the right eye and difficulty focusing on the computer screen.<p>Because of that, I'm currently at home on vacation. I have a scheduled appointment with a vision specialist next week.<p>This is the first time I have complications with vision. I'm 26 years old, so far I've never had any problems or need glasses.<p>Someone has some tips to avoid eye problems?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I quit college to work on my startup. After 7 years of work, it's almost game over (will be shutting down in a few weeks).<p>I haven't worked for anyone in years and I don't have a degree, but I've been coding for a long time, shipping real products to real customers... How do you think I should prepare for the job market? I'm 31 if it matters at all.
Upvote: | 302 |
Title: I really like that website, as well as his latest blog post.<p>Do you know of anything similar, perhaps written by someone else?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I’m Benjamin, one of the co-founders of NALA (<a href="https://www.nala.money" rel="nofollow">https://www.nala.money</a>), an application that simplifies the process of making mobile payments for our users in Africa. My co-founder Sam and I first met back in 2016 while I was working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (focusing on financial services in Africa), and he was earning his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Washington (researching mobile money security in Sub-Saharan Africa).<p>As you may know, the way that mobile payments are made in many developing markets is quite different from how they're made in the rest of the world. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, people make payments using mobile money, an electronic wallet service that is typically tied to a user's cell phone carrier and sim card. Using a 39-46 digit sequence of short codes (i.e. dialing a code such as <i>150</i>30, waiting for a screen to pop-up, dialing another code and waiting for that screen, repeat, etc.) that are received by the user's cell phone carrier, a user can request to send money to a friend, pay a bill, or purchase airtime all without being connected to the internet and accessible via smartphone and basic feature phone alike. (M-Pesa, which you may have heard of, is just one of the many such mobile money services offered in Sub-Saharan Africa).<p>While mobile money has undoubtedly transformed the way that millions of people transact, the process of executing a mobile money payment is time-consuming, arduous, and prone to error, resulting in a less than ideal transactor experience. After moving back to my home country of Tanzania in 2017 and conducting 700+ on-the-ground interviews, Sam and I founded NALA, the first internet-free mobile money smartphone application. NALA interfaces with existing mobile money providers (M-Pesa, Airtel, tiGO etc.), and provides users with a simple Venmo-like payment experience. To deliver this capability, NALA has built a USSD automator tool to send requests over existing USSD channels.<p>Our product serves as a central platform where users can initialize payments for all of their mobile money accounts (having multiple sim cards and mobile money accounts is extremely common in Sub-Saharan Africa as inter-network transaction fees are lower than out-of-network fees), and for the first time ever, access their transaction histories through our rich transaction tool. While we will make a percentage cut for every bill payment and airtime top-up that is conducted on our platform, we are primarily focused on growing our active user-base.<p>As Sub-Saharan Africa mobile money usage proliferates ($860+ million in daily transaction values and close to 400 million mobile money accounts), smartphone penetration approaches 40%, and the fastest growing middle class of any continent comes into its own, we believe there is massive potential to transform and shape the African payment space. Building a product that thoughtfully addresses our users' financial challenges is what excites and energizes us. The pernicious transaction fees that mobile money users are subject to is an area of particular interest and focus.<p>We would love to hear about HN's ideas and experiences in this space, as well as answer any questions you might have!
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Many docs and tutorials are from 10+ years ago. Have you had any luck loading the data dumps (not the API) locally in order to play around with them? if yes, I'd very much appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hi HN community,<p>We’re Patrick, Kenan, and Sid, the founders of Point (<a href="https://trypointbank.com" rel="nofollow">https://trypointbank.com</a>), a consumer digital bank focused on rewards. After being fed up with the poor customer experience and tactics of traditional banks, we did some digging into why we put up with our own subpar banks. We've discovered that the way most people end up with their current bank is by default (ex: parents set it up for them), rather than by choice. The complete opposite was the case for credit cards; credit cards were actually chosen based on their qualities.<p>We began to wonder why a solution that combined the rewards and benefits of a credit card, with the simplicity of a bank account didn’t exist. After extensive research and testing of various existing products, we determined that everything came up short for our personal needs. That was the problem.<p>Whether it was simply the lack of a clean mobile user experience, or rewards that were relevant, nothing managed to fit the bill. Since banks are a fundamental part of our everyday modern lives, we shouldn’t have to settle for a less-than-stellar experience just because that’s the current standard. That’s when we realized, we don’t have to settle. This was an exciting enough realization for us all to quit our day jobs as product managers, designers, and engineers. We decided we needed to create a revolutionary bank.<p>In order to solve this problem, we created a new-and-improved debit card. We are focusing our efforts on debit because it is currently the most popular payment method. Although debit is the preferred method, in the real world, there is little incentive to use one over the perks offered by credit cards. This unfortunately leads the majority of the dissatisfied group to settle for credit cards, with their offer of limited perks that typically come hand-in-hand with unavoidable debt.<p>Our business model is sustainable because we are partnered with a smaller regional bank and don’t have the hefty over head of a branch network. The reason we don’t see larger banks offering debit cards with rewards is because of the "Durbin Act”; a federal mandate which slashed interchange margins of banks with more than $10 billion in deposits. This was done in order to protect consumers and merchants from increasing and predatory prices that banks were trying to instill.<p>If successful in our mission we hope to keep the up and comers out of un-necessary credit cards and raise the standards of user experience for banks. There is no reason why dealing with your bank should be as dreadful as the DMV.<p>We look forward to hearing your thoughts on what we are building and are open to any and all suggestions. Feel free to drop us a line at [email protected] and check out our waitlist on our landing page.
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: Hello, HN! We're Michael and Liana, co-founders of Bottomless (<a href="https://bottomless.com" rel="nofollow">https://bottomless.com</a>)<p>Bottomless automatically re-stocks coffee using a smart scale. Users leave their coffee on the scale, then we detect the perfect time to trigger re-orders. We ship the scale for free when customers buy their first bag.<p>We met in college, and bonded over talking about businesses we could build together. You could say we've kept in touch since then: we're now married. Bottomless was born out of our frustration managing our household stock levels. We always seemed to be running out of one thing or another.<p>When we thought about it, we realized that restocking was a universal problem.<p>But if this was such a big problem, why was there no great solution? Subscriptions should be a solution, but they don’t work well for items that aren’t used on a set schedule. It seemed that if we could capture data on usage and stock levels in a passive way, we could solve the problem. Thus, Bottomless, the concept, was born.<p>The market for stuff people repeatedly buy is enormous. (We'll leave an exact estimate up to the reader's imagination.) We decided that to start we'd establish a beachhead with a single market. We landed on selling premium coffee because it's cheap to ship and has good margins. It also is much better shipped straight from the roaster than bought at the grocery store.<p>In the beginning, we built the simplest thing possible to test if the concept would work. We hacked together a scale prototype, made five of them and got them into the hands of friends. We bought coffee from roaster websites with our customers’ addresses to bootstrap supply.<p>The goal was to test if people would leave their coffee on a scale, and if we could reorder at the right time. It turns out they would and we could!<p>Since then, it's been a matter of making larger batches of scales. We bought a few 3D printers and acquired quite a few burned fingers from soldering.<p>We've benefited from a few technological tailwinds. For one, smartphone supply chain has driven down the cost of components quite a bit. We've been able to build hardware that works for this business model out of super cheap WiFi modules and LiPos. Also, the level of open source software for ML is quite powerful and well-documented.<p>We're aware that we are just scratching the surface of re-ordering hardware. We'd be interested to hear ideas that the community might have about this space!
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: I'm a manager of a team in a large company. Annual raises came out. I had a pool to divy up, which I did, and then my recommendations were ignored by higher management. The pool went else where, and my team got scraps.<p>This team is quite good, they really kicked ass last year. A lot of overtime on a very high profile project. Feedback I got was they expected more, and I did to.<p>So question; how to handle this? Worst case is I lose some people. Well maybe that's not worst case, maybe worst case it they disengage.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Vince and Jun, the founders of Nabis (<a href="https://www.getnabis.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.getnabis.com</a>). We are building a software and infrastructure solution to ship legal cannabis products for brands to licensed dispensaries throughout California.<p>About two years ago when the legalization of recreational cannabis was pending in CA, we were excited as consumers to be able to try out a variety of products without having to get a medical card. While we knew that many more brands were coming to market, we discovered that there was a lack of supply chain infrastructure to support the growing demand. We started out driving our own personal vehicles across the state to help a friend ship his products just to learn more about how the supply chain was set up. We learned that brands were still predominantly self-distributing, since you can’t just Fedex cannabis products due to compliance restrictions. Apart from shipping, the lack of secure warehousing space, a ubiquitous cash-based payment system, and vague new regulatory language all created massive friction to building a sound and cost-effective supply chain for cannabis products.<p>Once we started shipping more orders than we could deliver ourselves, we hired a team and built out a web portal that automates the most tedious parts of our operations, especially with regards to compliance and paperwork for shipping, storing, and testing cannabis products. We wanted to help scale the growing cannabis industry that was about to legalize, and convert more of the illicit black market into the legal market.<p>When recreational legalization commenced in January 2018, we applied for our distribution license since that would allow us to continue building our business as the logistics backbone for the industry. We thought distribution was the best place to start as it sits right at the center of the supply chain as the final checkpoint before products are sold into the retail market. By scaling out distribution, we help drive down the costs for everyone in the industry due to the economies of scale that we can achieve by owning one set of infrastructure for multiple brands, rather than having each brand build out its own delivery and warehousing solution.<p>Today, Nabis tracks and delivers over 1,000 SKUs for nearly 40 of the largest brands to 90% of retail dispensaries in California. The data that we track gives us insights into the cannabis market as it continues to grow rapidly, providing data-driven metrics of what brands and product categories will perform best in the market. We want to continue to support as many products that consumers love by ensuring reliable shipping and logistics of products to retailers. By expanding our infrastructure and portfolio of brands, we’re hoping to achieve our ultimate goal of scaling cannabis access to the masses and become the widest distributor of cannabis products.<p>Thanks for reading and hope that you continue to support the legal cannabis market! We’re looking to build a community of technologists to grow a data-driven supply chain for the cannabis industry, so we’d love to talk to you if you’re interested in working with us. Also, if you're well-versed in logistics and working in regulatory landscapes, we'd love to hear from you. And we're very curious for feedback in general! Looking forward to comments, and you can also email us at [email protected].
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: I've submitted a fair amount of job applications that often request for a GitHub profile.
I'm however convinced most don't look at it or only take a cursory glance at it.<p>What do recruiters look out for?
Upvote: | 235 |
Title: I don’t want to stop following the news for fear of not knowing what’s going on, but I’m finding that reading the daily news leads my thoughts into a dark place of dwelling on all the miseries I’m powerless to fix.<p>How do you do it?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I was looking for ideas on how to build a simple network analyzer to test antennas, filters etc. so I typed "network analyzer schematic" (without quotes) on Google Images and it apparently returned some results I was expecting, but clicking on a lot of results from the first page opened some subscription only websites with suspicious names nagging me to create an account to see the actual images, some of which I'm 100% sure I already have seen on their original authors websites.
Those websites are clearly made by the same entity, and to me it appears they're essentially hijacking Google Images results for their profit.
Here are some of those results; many more on the 1st page. I had a hard time finding something that returned an actual loadable image or an article without asking for subscription.
Note that they all return URLs containing "spectrum analyzer schematic" although I searched for "network analyzer schematic".<p>http://yyrfm.microdeo.de/spectrum_analyser_circuit_diagram.php<p>https://4.twizer.co/rf-spectrum-analyzer-schematic.html<p>http://5.6.gvapor.nl/rf_spectrum_analyzer_schematic.php<p>http://18.10.ulrich-temme.de/spectrum_analyzer_schematic_symbols.php<p>http://4.3.beckman-vitamin-d.de/vcr_tuner_based_rf_spectrum_analyzer_schematic.php<p>http://18.10.ulrich-temme.de/spectrum_analyzer_schematic_symbols.php<p>http://2.4.wohnungzumieten.de/gbppr_1_ghz_spectrum_analyzer_second_local_oscillator_schematic.php<p>http://5.6.gvapor.nl/rf_spectrum_analyzer_schematic.php<p>http://13.1.starpartybus.com/lm3915_spectrum_analyzer_schematic.php<p>Edit: it appears those pages are being slowly buried by legit results, but some of them still surface although much deeper.<p>Examples:<p>http://3.17.tierarztpraxis-ruffy.de/pna_x_block_diagram.php<p>http://10.10.artatec-automobile.de/block_diagram_power_antenna_wire.php<p>http://9.20.wohnungzumieten.de/logic_probe_with_sound_circuit_schematic.php<p>7.12.gvapor.nl/dds_function_generator_mcu_schematic.php<p>Note that I searched for the same exact phrase as above.
Upvote: | 173 |
Title: I am currently working for a startup and am one of 3 developers. Most of my work revolves around building the API in Node + Express as well as some small projects with MongoDB. The other developers don't really assist me since they have their own projects to work on, and, honestly, they have less experience and knowledge than I do.<p>So my question is: What is the best way for me to go about learning best practices in API development, or using MongoDB, or even just being a better software developer in general?
Upvote: | 440 |
Title: Due to privacy and time management concerns, I have decided to take the jump and get rid of my smart phone. Unsurprisingly, there are very few of resources online about which dumb phones are the best. Those of you who use a non-smart phones, which model is it and how do you like it?
Upvote: | 221 |
Title: Do any SaaS companies use "Request Demo" or "Contact Sales" to offer different prices to different customers for the exact same product?
e.g. "If customer is a startup I sell ONE license at $50 but if it's enterprise I'll sell ONE at $5,000 just because I know they can afford it..."
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I have been programming for 13 years now, which kinda makes me an old timer. I have mostly done web backends (little frontend) and DevOps, but nothing FAANG level.<p>I am starting to get saturated with building regular apps and doing DevOps (some of them quite cool and challenging). So I picked up Rust to get into low level systems programming. It's chugging along, but I am yet to make something cool with Rust.<p>I also try very hard to have an exponential personal growth. It's not been very successful so far. I do keep learning but not at a speed I consider meaningful.<p>This made me think, should I go ahead and pursue a Masters degree in Computer Science? Specifically in my interest subject of Distributed Computing. Is it too late for me to pursue it? Is it even meaningful given my info above? Has anyone had success with learning something Masters level without external motivation?<p>EDIT: I already have a Bachelor of Engineering Degree (non US)
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Dear HN,
Writing this post has been difficult for me. It has been months of procrastination before I’ve been able to put “pen to paper” on this.<p>tl;dr. I am suffering from what appears to be extreme burnout from programming/working at a startup. Half a year of “time off” has done little to repair me. I seek advice on how to get my life back on track and move forward.<p>I cut out of a ton of details in order to make this post as short as possible. Even so, it is a bit lengthy. It is about 4,000 characters, which is over the HN limit of 2,000. I have the full text pasted here. https://pastebin.com/0kx5jfrK It is a short read. Definitely under five minutes. Thank you for reading it.<p>Let me preemptively respond to some possible suggestions: 1) Exercise. I’ve been exercising daily and eating healthy for years now (well before X). That’s not my issue. 2) Travel. I have been traveling more with my time off, both international and domestic. While I enjoy it, it doesn’t seem to have changed much my outlook on my day-to-day life. 3) Therapy. I went to a therapist for a year or two while I was working at X. I don’t know how much it helped, if at all. It has been about a year since I’ve been back.<p>Thank you, HN.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I'm Gabe, the creator of Songcraft (<a href="https://songcraft.io/home" rel="nofollow">https://songcraft.io/home</a>). I recently dove headfirst into songwriting, and I quickly grew frustrated with my process. I found songwriting difficult enough without having to wrangle a mess of different tools, and there's no great solution to build chord sheets and tabs (unless you love pure text input).<p>So, I built Songcraft - an online songwriting platform and tab builder. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to jump from chords to lyrics to melodies. I added a chord progression generator and chord recommendation engine to ensure the ideas keep flowing. The integrated tuner, rhyming dictionary, metronome, and audio recorder allow you to stay focused without distraction.<p>A few months ago I shared the beta on Hacker News and got some incredibly helpful feedback and some amazing beta users. Since then, I've revamped the product and made a ton of improvements and additions. Today is launch day, and I wouldn't be here without Hacker News!<p>I'd love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you may have. Drop a line here or at [email protected].
Upvote: | 152 |
Title: I'm developer and after a year on a MacBook pro I'm still missing things like i3wm. Also, touchbar of MBP is just a nuisance. On the other hand I like screen, weight and battery life of MBP, best of all laptops I've ever had, but I still want to go back home to linux.<p>I'm currently considering
1) Dell XPS 15 (but the previous one I've had had only 2-3 hours of battery life)
2) Huawei Matebook X Pro, but I prefer 15" screen to 14"
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Hi everyone!<p><pre><code> I've been working as a freelancer practically my whole life. Although I'm not a very finances-oriented person, I do like to keep track of my spending and income, do some basic forecasting, budgeting, to also plan my time and activities.
One thing I've noticed is that most apps are really not oriented for people who, like me, dont have very fixed/stable sources of income. One month I'm doing something, next month I have very little work, next month I may be working on 3 different projects, with different wages.
I miss a simple way to track this, and to somehow allow me to plan my future, minimizing working hours and maximizing life (4hr work week anyone? ;)) But so far I haven't been able to find a finance management app that responds to the needs of freelancers like me.
Being in IT and software dev, I'm begin to think I should probably scratch my own itch and develop something that really suits my needs. So I'd like to ask you two things
</code></pre>
1 - Is there any app I'm not aware of, that you guys might use and that suits these needs?<p>2 - If you are somehow like me, would you give 5min of your time so that I could get more feedback from other freelancers about what would be useful for them, and other tips and strategies you might use for yourself for your own finances?<p>thanks so much!
Upvote: | 211 |
Title: The UK parliament petitions website is currently experiencing intermittent outages in response to the support of a petition to cancel Brexit, responding to many requests with "502: Bad Gateway".<p>The petition is the largest of its kind to date, with over 600,000 signees in 24 hours.<p>Petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: About 2.5 months ago I left my executive position at a promising blockchain startup. As I am nearing the end of my 90 day period for option exercising, i've come to know that the company sent out prior notice to all employees a few days ago, as it is struggling to raise money. All 3 founders are at work trying to raise capital in the upcoming month before money runs out and they are also planing on continuing to do so after all employees leave.
On one hand, I am very hesitant to exercise because of the current status. On the other hand, the company has a remarkable product (which they might decide to sell) and the industry is still very much in it's diapers, meaning there is tons of true potential.<p>i have a lot of faith in the founders but the recent news really threw me off. Would love to hear your thoughts!<p>More information:
-Company size: 15 employees
-Exercise price: $20 (679 options/2.3% of the company)
-Company raised from several VC's and also via ICO.
-I still hold company's digital currency.
-Status: recently launched product (fully functional) after 1.5 years of development with very few customers but high growth rate.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I recently put in my notice at work with nothing lined up. Do any of you operate full time as a consultant? I'd love to hear about how you got started and what resources, pitfalls, experiences you came across along the way.
Upvote: | 499 |
Title: Hello,<p>Although you don’t need to take any action, we wanted to let you know that the following third-party apps will no longer be able to access some data in your Google Account, including your Gmail content. This change will go into effect starting March 31, 2019.<p>IFTTT<p>We are making this change as part of ongoing efforts to make sure your data is protected and private. These apps haven’t yet complied with our updated data privacy requirements announced on October 8, 2018<p>You can always view, manage and remove apps you’ve given access to your account by visiting your Google Account.<p>Thanks,
The Google Accounts team
Upvote: | 231 |
Title: A few years ago, there was a lot of talk about Isomorphic rendering of JavaScript, but seems to have died down recently.<p>Are any products still using it? What happened?
Upvote: | 117 |
Title: Is there a bot/crawler akin to Google's Webmaster Tools that will test, score, and identify accessibility issues on a website?<p>If not, what are some best practices people use to maintain accessibility? Does anyone write tests for this functionality? Would love to learn more, top resources, checklists people use, etc.
Upvote: | 237 |
Title: They nearly charge 5% of the transaction on an average. Sometimes it's more than the wire transfer charges. There has been always this promise of low cost international transactions but no one seems to dethrone Paypal (or is it just my bias? ).<p>Extra: What goes into building a international payments service like Paypal?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Of late, except for few headline-friendly fields (colliders, quantum computing, gravitational waves and astrophysics in general), I don't get to see/relate with a lot of activities in Physics. Also I have noticed a growing trend of physicists becoming data scientists post phD. Although I understand the money factor, are there any other reasons for this as well?
Upvote: | 456 |
Title: There's often talk in the news about China wanting to poach Silicon Valley talent to build up their own tech scene. There's also talk of founders who moved to Shenzhen to be closer to hardware development for rapid prototyping.<p>However, I've struggled to find individual examples of experiences. Has anyone done this, or know someone who has and blogs/tweets about it? I'm curious how this looks in reality.
Upvote: | 191 |
Title: I’m interviewing right now at a lot of startups and am looking for better ways to ask “so, where is this thing headed?”<p>What do you always make sure to ask?
Upvote: | 241 |
Title: Specifically asking for Indian folks who came to US, worked for a while and went back (due to VISA issues or otherwise). How has been your experience back in the homeland in terms of money and life?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I'm a big fan of small, often indie, utility apps. Some apps I really dig:<p>- Monodraw: https://monodraw.helftone.com/<p>- Postgres.app: https://postgresapp.com/<p>- Lungo: https://sindresorhus.com/lungo<p>- Duet: https://www.duetdisplay.com/<p>- Magnet: http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/<p>What do you like?
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: Someone recently joined our team as a junior dev. Their work is good, but I noticed that when they're learning something new they generally watch a video. Often it seems to me to find out how to do something that is effectively a couple of lines of code. I asked them about it and they said they remember things better when they visually see the effect it has.<p>Also there are times when I ask a specific question like "What does such and such a library function return?" and they'll say "two strings" but don't know if it's a list or a tuple, of if it ever returns None, or whether it raises an Error etc. So at that point I'll open up the library documentation and read it with them. But they will never on their own initiative open the docs. They do read SO and tutorials.<p>I'm struggling a bit to collaborate with them because I have a strong bias towards reading (docs or books) to understand and they seem to have the exact opposite. They seem almost sad when I send them a link to raw information.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Say you're learning something that is totally new to you and totally out of your comfort zone (Something like learning Chinese when the only language you can speak is English and you're a westerner, learning archery when you have been a couch potato for years etc).<p>What would be your learning methods? Do you have any tips/hacks etc that works for you? Lets assume you are learning on your own, from books/videos etc, and not learning from a teacher
Upvote: | 259 |
Title: I'm looking for a new one and since HN is supercritical towards everything I'd love to have some tips! Thanks
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Also, how many years of experience do you have? What are your credentials? Where do you live?
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: My wife is looking for work in data science, on a contract basis in the $50-100/hr range. She has a PhD in biology with a data-analysis approach and has worked in the industry for two years. Are there good sites to look for work that aren’t polluted with spam?
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: My company sells product publicly claiming it to use AI. The product contains no AI at all. The statements they make about the product and how it uses AI are 100% false.<p>What should I do?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Premise 1: Investors/Incubators over-estimate their ability to pick good ideas/startups.<p>Premise 2: Software by a lone developer is not pragmatically different from software by a big A-team. It’s the market fit and marketing / sales that makes or breaks the project.<p>Premise 3: Most freelancers will not build and/or follow-through with their ideas, because they are not sure it will sell.<p>Premise 4: HackerNews has a decent number of people who know how the world works, and how a little glue would make it better.<p>Based on these premises I present The Proposition 2.0 (following version 1.0 [1]):<p>I’ll pay you $500 for your “real-life problem that needs a software fix” idea and market validation / research. I will build the MVP and give you another $1500 to bring us our first paying customer(s). We split the resulting product 80-20 as co-founders.<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5037694 [2] https://www.simonnouwens.com/hn
Upvote: | 211 |
Title: It would be great to know how early you joined (Employee number X) or similar context.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I'd like to get to know more about hard-tech fields like genetics, robotics, BCIs, nanotech, AI, synthetic biology, energy, space, etc. Basically everything that will shape the future in a significant way, even stuff like 3D printing and VR.<p>My goal is to develop the basic understanding, so I could find startup ideas by figuring out how to apply my own expertise to these fields. Also to be able to better predict where these technologies are going, maybe even be able to more intelligently invest in startups.<p>Of course learning about each of these fields takes decades, so I'm looking for something accessible to a layman.<p>Can you share some good resources that will help me out?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: What do you think is the best approach?<p>-I'm a shy person regarding this question, I have a friend that his method is "I have another offer, can you matched? or I'll leave" and got a raise 3/4 times.
Upvote: | 202 |
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 company. 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 if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: Try <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>,
<a href="https://hnhired.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hnhired.com/</a>, <a href="https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don't miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19543938" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19543938</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19543939" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19543939</a>
Upvote: | 400 |
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: | 156 |
Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: I've been working on frontend dev for several years now, in the pre and post framework era. React and the other frameworks and ES6 in general, has meant a ton of change to the very basics of how we work.<p>The way I do basic things has changed fundamentally in the last 4-5 years. Some of that is because I'm no longer a "beginner", but much is because things have just changed a ton.<p>People who know the JS / frontend ecosystem AND backend stuff as well:<p>Is this rate of change unique to JS, or is it everywhere?
Is Rails very, very different now than 4-5 years ago? Django?<p>I use PHP a bit and I've seen that change a bit, but it feels like mostly for the better, with namespaces in particular. Otherwise, I don't feel like PHP has had near the amt of change that JS has had.<p>tl;dr: is it crazy everywhere or just with JS/frontend?
Upvote: | 131 |
Title: I have recently been enlightened by LISP, specifically Clojure, and I'm not sure if I can go back to OOP.<p>After experiencing the joy of programming once again, I wonder why FP isn't widely adopted?<p>I understand in startupland that Django and Rails are simple to learn and prototype, but why aren't big companies and others using FP as a main language more often?<p>What are your thoughts?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I'm at my wits end with big tech platforms. I run a popular photography product company (which was a Kickstarter project in 2014) [0] which gets a lot of love for its ability to help photographers take interesting images.<p>But I'm continually running into walls with BigTechCos. I'm just coming off the end of having had my Instagram account deleted by Facebook because a graffiti artist and his trolls were able to flag my IG account and left me unable to appeal[1]. 20k followers, 4 years of work gone. My entire customer base is primarily on IG and they are shocked to find that I'm not; so I feel the pain every day and the fact that I'm no longer advertising on FB because of it is a loss-loss in my opinion. Can not explain how upsetting it is for me.<p>To add insult to injury Amazon randomly delisted my product. I randomly received an email that they removed me [2]. I checked the listing and saw that a customer had left a bad review. I went to contact that customer [3] and saw that the seller in that instance wasn't me, it was Adorama, a retailer who sells the product I created. I figured this was the sale that got my account flagged, so I responded trying to explain that I sell an OEM product so I wouldn't sell anything used/broken[4]. They then respond that my response is not sufficient[5]. I then decide to give them what they want, contact my manufacturer, come up with a plan [6]. Pretty long, with evidence, a spreadsheet, and even more detailed notes at the end of the email.<p>Today they've just gotten back to me saying they refuse to reinstate it and that I'm shit out of luck [7]. I am livid at this point. What else did they want? And if they weren't going to reinstate me in the first place, why not just say that? According to my account dashboard my account is in perfect 'health'[8] and there is absolutely no indication that there is anything wrong. I feel like I am being trolled.<p>It feels so perverse because I live in Seattle so I am always rooting for Amazon. Now, after having finally taken the leap and quit my job and started a company that's beginning to do well, the companies that I've always applauded are totally screwing up my business and leaving me stranded with no options. Not even a customer support number. I don't typically get stressed but the helplessness in the hands of these companies has been keeping me up at night. I <i>feel</i> the stress.<p>Does anyone have any ideas of what I could do? I live in Seattle so are there any offices or people I could try reasoning with in person? And also if anyone can tell me what I did wrong. If anyone has any information that could be useful I would seriously appreciate it because this is quite literally my livelihood and my entire life.<p>Thank you for reading. Also sorry for the rant; I am not usually so forthcoming; the entire situation though, is just so dis-empowering.<p>Edit: here is also the product listing in question [9]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.getfractals.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.getfractals.com</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19166053" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19166053</a><p>[2] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/aQLThvj" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/aQLThvj</a><p>[3] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/xm8dAoI" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/xm8dAoI</a><p>[4] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/8biKZlT" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/8biKZlT</a><p>[5] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/ZSVz7vn" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/ZSVz7vn</a><p>[6] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/IZgOfuA" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/IZgOfuA</a><p>[7] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/j81rJyk" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/j81rJyk</a><p>[8] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/dP11fCc" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/dP11fCc</a><p>[9] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OHD49R6?ref=myi_title_dp" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OHD49R6?ref=myi_title_dp</a>
Upvote: | 495 |
Title: I'm a non-academic and I would like to submit an article for peer review and publishing. I prefer that there's zero or minimal cost, although I understand the scope of review and editing will be lower.<p>What are the best open access journals out there? Are there any that have particularly bad reputations to avoid? Thanks.
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: This can be blogs, books, or YouTube. I'm working on upping my C skills and have started to reimplement some tools like wc, cat, etc. I'm wondering if there are good walkthroughs out there for some of the more complex tools like sort, xargs, etc.<p>Any further advice on C for the 20 teens is also welcome.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hello, HN.<p>I’m Thomas Eiden, founder of Atomic Alchemy.<p>Atomic Alchemy will manufacture nuclear medicine and the radioactive materials used to make it, using several compact nuclear reactors.<p>These will be the first privately-owned nuclear reactors for nuclear medicine production. They are merely higher-powered versions of previously-licensed reactor designs that currently reside at universities. These reactor designs are passively safe and cannot melt down. With improvements in modeling and simulation that have occurred in the last few years, it is quicker and cheaper than ever to license and construct such a facility. But to be clear—we won’t be manufacturing reactors—we’ll be a chemical/drug manufacturer in the same way that Delta Airlines doesn’t manufacture planes or airports, but is a transportation company.<p>Before starting Atomic Alchemy, I was the lead reactor core designer at the Advanced Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. My main job each operating cycle was to arrange the reactor core in such a way to allow the United States Nuclear Navy to run successful material experiments for their next generation submarines and aircraft carriers. I’ve always been interested in production and efficiency, and the issues currently plaguing nuclear medicine production have been of great interest to me all the way back to when I operated a reactor in college.<p>Nuclear medicine is used in a wide variety of diagnostic imaging procedures and cancer treatments. The most common procedure is the radiocardiogram to diagnose cardiological issues, and brachytherapy for cancer treatment.<p>Unbeknownst to many, there is a critical shortage of nuclear medicine worldwide--right now. The main failure in the supply chain is the fact that the entire world’s feedstock for nuclear medicine primarily comes from six government-run reactors, most of which are over 45 years old and will be retired in the next 10 years. Additionally, these government-run reactors are scientific research reactors and are not set up to efficiently produce these materials.<p>I have a design for a manufacturing facility that combines the entire supply chain, from irradiation, to chemical purification, to medicine production. This will allow Atomic Alchemy to fill the void as more aging reactors are shut down and allow those that remain to focus on their true purpose—science.<p>Currently, the reactors, chemical purification, and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities are all in separate facilities, sometimes oceans apart. By shrinking the entire supply chain into a single facility, manufacturing costs can be slashed by up to 50%, as regulatory, shipping, and myriad other costs associated with the radioactive material decaying in transit, is reduced.<p>The market for radioactive feedstock alone is well over a one billion dollar market worldwide, and is constrained by the current supply. As the standard of living abroad continues to improve, developing markets will demand even more nuclear medicine.<p>Looking forward to your feedback and questions.
Upvote: | 99 |
Title: <a href="http://confidencetoexplore.com/" rel="nofollow">http://confidencetoexplore.com/</a><p>That's my page. My other github pages are working fine, but that one redirects to a crazy screen with a lighting strike gif, an email address, and something about "muslim cybersecurity".<p>I changed the A records to put up a parking lot page and that worked, so I think it's something around github. As soon as I add the A records and CNAME records back to point to github, the hacked page goes back up.<p>How do I fix this?
Upvote: | 168 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>I would like to 3D print my skeleton to observe bone structure/features.<p>1. What kind of medical scanning would be appropriate for this case? Where can I get such a scan and pay (out of pocket) for it? Are there any dangers, and if serious, is it worth the fun of replicating your own skeleton?<p>2. What kind of medical scanning hardware would best suit my need? Does it support exporting imaging data for later 3D printing?<p>3. What's the best 3D printer (or printing service company) and material to print the imaging data from the scanning?<p>Thanks for your assistance!
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: It is touted to be better, but I don't see the appeal and it's slower. I also notice that old reddit randomly logs me out or "forgets" to use the classic design.
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: I want to preface this question by saying that I know that those of us who work at tech companies where lots of free food is always readily available are very privileged (and perhaps spoiled...) in having that particular material need satisfied. Also, forgive me if this question has been asked before.<p>That said, I’ve been working in tech for a while now and every workplace I’ve been a part of has had basically unlimited junky snack food and provided buffet-style breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. I constantly find myself failing to exercise restraint when eating in the office. This happens both through snacking and during meals. Furthermore, most of my meals are with my team, and I often find it extremely difficult to be disciplined about what I eat when the group decides what to eat together.<p>In contrast, during times in my life when I’ve had to cook every meal for myself, I found it extremely easy to control how many calories I ingested - these times are the only times I’ve been successful in losing weight.<p>Looking at the eating habits of my colleagues at various companies, I don’t think I’m the only one who has experienced this problem, where the high-availability of food and social nature of meals are a constant temptation. I love working where I do, so I don’t see this environment changing.<p>For those of you who are able to eat healthy, well-portioned diets (and perhaps even lose weight) while being surrounded by temptation at work, what strategies do you use to practice moderation? And for those of you who have changed your behaviors, how did you do so?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Hi,<p>The beta program of my new startup, Maildown, is now complete and is now accepting paying customers:
<a href="https://www.maildown.app" rel="nofollow">https://www.maildown.app</a><p>As well as a lot of stability enhancements, we've added a new help system, a new CLI (<a href="https://github.com/chris104957/mailer-cli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chris104957/mailer-cli</a>) and a REST API.<p>Maildown lets you create transactional and marketing email campaigns using Markdown syntax, so you can generate and send your email content far more quickly than with traditional WYSIWYG editors.<p>Thanks for looking,
Chris
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: I've often heard the claim that the startup graveyard is full of great products that didn't succeed (e.g. because the startup wasn't good enough on marketing, or because they didn't solve a big enough problem).<p>What are some examples of this?<p>If there are examples of truly great products that eventually died, I'd like to study them more in-depth.
Upvote: | 278 |
Title: I know Microsoft had a project going for this that is almost certainly scrapped now because Chakra went the way of the dodo but between Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla there is some pretty good backing behind JavaScript projects. I've never used TTD before personally but it seems like a game changer. Is this just a really hard feature to make or is it incredibly resource intensive? Is it actually not that helpful for developers? Am I missing something or is this just something that'll happen when it happens? It seems like you could make a pretty good integration with a browser that would make this valuable.
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Hi,<p>In 2017, I made a Google Cloud Account to use Google Maps API for a Computer Science student group project and put my debit card in. I naively put a $5 account notification in, thinking it was a cap. This project was defunct after 2017 and I should have just closed the Cloud account.<p>All was fine up until January 2019 when the Google Cloud Credentials were somehow stolen and over the course of two days on Google Maps API, racked up enough API calls to generate over $14k invoice. I disabled the Google Cloud Account a day after I noticed an email from Google Cloud. Google Cloud did try to use debit card to deduct from checking account, but I don't leave thousands sitting around in it, so charge was declined.<p>I talked to Google Cloud Billing and they have not been helpful, telling me to contact my bank. Today, I got a scary email from a collections agency demanding I login to my Google Cloud account and pay the bill! Worst part is, this API used to be free, until Google started charging exorbitant amounts for it.<p>I know I did not make these API calls -- if you looked at the call volume history, there was nothing for well over a year, until those two days in 2019, it started going crazy (and the project is not running on any server or being used in any way). I suspect a group member might have accidentally leaked the credentials.<p>I know AWS has waived costs[1] like this in the past, but Google is not known for customer support. I should have been more proactive in setting up a cap.<p>Appreciate any advice or Google contacts to talk to an actual human. Should I see if Google is willing to actually verify this was unauthorized usage or just lower the bill? I'll eat a few thousand just to make this go away.<p>To say GCP has left a sour taste in my mouth is an understatement!<p>Thanks for reading.<p>[1] https://dev.to/juanmanuelramallo/i-was-billed-for-14k-usd-on-amazon-web-services-17fn
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: So I have just decide to self-learn mathematics up to undergraduate level, and after researching I decided that learning these topics will do the trick for learning to the undergraduate level, but sadly I don't know the best resources(textbooks) to use for easily self-learning them.<p>Pure Mathematics<p>1).Group Theory(rubics cube,e.t.c)<p>2).Order Theory<p>3).Combinatorics(trees,graphs,e.t.c)<p>4).Fractal Geometry<p>5).Topology(cup = donut)<p>6).Measure Theory<p>7).Differential Geometry<p>8).Vector Calculus<p>9).Dynamical Systems(Fliud flow,ecosysytems,Control Theory)<p>10).Chaos Theory(Butterfly effect)<p>11).Complex Analysis(Functions with complex numbers)<p>Applied Mathematics<p>1). Numerical Analysis<p>2). Game Theory<p>3). Probability<p>4). Statistics<p>5). Optimization<p>6). Cryptography<p>7). Computer Science<p>Foundations<p>1).Mathematical Logic<p>2).Set Theory<p>3).Category Theory<p>4).Godel Incompleteness Theorems<p>P.s: I have a diploma in Marine Engineering and so I am not a total noob to math in general.
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: My first post didn't get as much attention as I'd like so I wanted to up the ante.<p>I lost trust in online budgeting services keeping my information safe, so I took this opportunity into my own hands and am writing free, open-source budgeting software with Electron. All of the information is stored locally on the file system, encrypted at-rest. I'm writing this software to use it myself, and want to share it with others because I feel everyone deserves tools to manage their finances.<p>The problem I am having is spreading the word, so I'd like to do something that's unheard of - pay you! Yes, pay you. I'd like to pay you a $15 amazon gift card to use my software (or at least test it). All you have to do is download the mac/win application at my github repo below, and after you've used it or tested it, send me (zachary) a slack message of your email and I can send the gift card over! The link to the slack is on the github page. (I don't have infinite money, but I hope to give away $100-$200 at the very least).<p>https://github.com/reZach/my-budget<p>Thanks all - I appreciate you!
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Natural language processing seems very popular today but is it actually any good and useful?
When was your last encounter with a good product taking advantage of this technology?
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: A progressive reading list or process to follow would be awesome
Upvote: | 237 |
Title: I‘m currently having a hard time motivating myself to do anything, really. How do the people of HN overcome the sensation of Weltschmerz, which translates to the feeling that the world is hopeless and lost. While yes, I am not denying that there are positive things happening every day, they all seem vastly unremarkable and small compared to all the horror that is happening every day. Famine, murder, terrorism, climate change, radicalism, fake news it’s all just too much for me currently. How do you motivate yourself to go to work every day, (presumably) coding for some hyper capitalistic company, that somehow feeds the whole downward spiral?
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Github just deleted ValdikSS [1] account and all of his repositories.<p>Including GoodbyeDPI, bypassing some DPI-based censorship, and Super-UEFIinSecureBoot-Disk, allowing to boot things when secure boot is enabled. The interesting thing is that he recently published some work [2] breaking UEFI secure boot (not on github, but on zeronet), basically undermining Microsoft, current owner of Github and big pusher of UEFI.<p>His twitter account confirming that: twitter.com/ValdikSS<p>[1] https://github.com/ValdikSS<p>[2] https://habr.com/en/post/446238/
Upvote: | 293 |
Title: I am involved in two bootstrapped startups (group of buddies saved up and some work remote from my house) and it is getting to the point where we do not really need the money or investments as we have some earnings keeping us afloat. One of the apps is enterprise, has shown market fit, and has some great clients. We have been approached already with VC offers, but I am just so hesitant to let someone else in. Sometimes (read: lots and lots and lots of times) something that started as a noble pursuit ends up being corrupted by all of the cooks in the kitchen. Any guidance to those that have been similar situations? Thanks.
Upvote: | 183 |
Title: Hey guys: I’m starting to realize that a sizable chunk of my work is actually quite repetitive. For instance, I’d have to log into GCloud console every once in a while to check if I still have enough credits… Do you guys have these repetitive tasks at work? I’m thinking of using coding up some automation scripts and I’d love to see where else people might use it on!<p>PS: what kind of jobs do you guys do? I’m a software engineer at a small startup
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: What are other good resources to read from?
Any source that are as good as PG essays on how to think in life?<p>Sources can be videos, audios, recordings, essays, blogs, etc. Anything.
Upvote: | 271 |
Title: HTTPS://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYdDp4mHDRY
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: Trapped by your current circumstances? Have you ever wondered if this is as far as you are going to get in life? Professionally?
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: I am on a weight loss journey and lately i see a lot of diet trends happening like intermittent fasting, keto, carnivore etc. I tried some of those but found that nothing restrictive like that would work for me long term. What i mean by that is that i cannot be healthy for me to avoid fruit if i am doing the keto diet or just eat meat and nothing else.<p>I am trying to be more healthy and changing what i eat is part of that so i am wondering what has worked for you guys? Exercise is also important but i've been told that i cannot do weightlifting since i have neck hernia.
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: What tools/services do you use your remote team? What does the process look like? Do the employees invoice you first and you make the payment?
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: I'm curious to know what kind of tools, scripts, automation, libraries, etc. you all have built to help boost the productivity of your team(s).
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: We are living in an incredibly time with respect to programming languages; the choices and diversity available are amazing. But it's often difficult to get up and running.<p>What's your recipe to get from a fresh OS install to the minimum viable development environment to do "real" work (not just a helloworld program) in your favorite language?<p>(include as much or as little detail as you want)
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Apart from full disk encryption and a password manager:<p>Do you use antivirus? Which antivirus?<p>Do you use two-factor SSH?<p>Do you use IDS?<p>What else do you recommend?
Upvote: | 137 |
Title: What are some good learning resources on audio processing, detection and anomaly detection using machine learning or deep learning? I am interested in machine predictive maintenance using audio anomaly detection
Upvote: | 252 |
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