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Title: This entire graph would have to represent every entity in the building, including the control nodes. It's an IoT graph, where a node may represent the light switch, connected to a particular desk(also a node). This graph should also show directions from one entity to another.
For now, I have a photoshop pipeline which generates a simplified graph from a color coded image, using NetworkX. This is a temporary replacement for when the actual BIM comes along. But the graph remains.
Are there any libraries out there that would help me or should I just roll my own system?
I'm not sure I would like to add Neo4J to the stack. Storing everything to Postgres seems to work fine. It's the in memory representation that I have problems with.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: I am missing some tooling for years.<p>My main idea is that as a programmer what I do is constantly reducing the set of all programs to a particular program which satisfies the specification. (At least that is what I think I should do to get a flexible codebase where adding/removing quasi orthogonal constraints is easy: that is where declarative/logic programming, Prolog, rules / inferring assistants come to my mind.)<p>When thinking, reasoning about timing, concurrency, async, correctness happens
1. Step by step, gradually
2. using nothing but logic.<p>We have some tools: eg. type systems to express interdependence (constraints) and they are also useful in that "step by step" gradual manner: it warns me if I misstep, but there is much more information I could get from a "dev assistant".<p>When I am thinking I (have to) enumerate all the possible cases for a given scenario, but I can't really reuse the existing logic statements I have (or ever had!) in my mind, because usually the code is not written in logic and neither the environment processes it to give me insights.<p>Eg. I would like to make logic statements on the ordering of method calls (or basically just events) to make sure it won't conflict with another ordering (there must be at least one ordering which satisfies for all).<p>I would like to toggle on and off my logic constraints to have the currently relevant ones only (to help me to develop other parts of the system), save the sets as "views" and combine them to see if there is any conflict between their related logic statements (and if so I could see what and I could fix it).<p>I'd need higher order logic (eg. existential operator) to make statements about my "desired" program: to help/assist my future self not to forget about that "constraint".<p>Are you aware of such an IDE/tool/project?<p>Agda, Coq, etc might do something similar I just did not realize.<p>I would really appreciate your help, I'm totally obsessed with that.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I am trying to find a mentor that might help me ramp up in C++ on an open source project like Google Chrome. I am happy to pay for the mentorship.<p>I would also be open to collaborating with peers that are in my position and want to contribute to an open source project.<p>I have 3 years of experience in C++ but haven't touched C++ for 5 years.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: I notice that when browsing Reddit day-to-day I am <i>constantly</i> getting either "Sorry, we couldn't load posts for this page" on a subreddit page or "Cannot load comments" on a thread page. This isn't just happening occasionally, it's been happening daily over the course of weeks.<p>There's been a lot of hate for the "new" Reddit design but outside of the actual usability of the site, there seems to be some huge problems from a technical perspective.<p>I've tried multiple browsers, internet connections,VPN enabled/disabled and it's always the same. I now just use https://old.reddit.com, but I'd be interested to hear if other people have the same experience?<p>It boggles my mind that a redesign could be implemented so poorly on such a popular site.
Upvote: | 262 |
Title: I, like probably most of the people here, want to someday build a product and sell it. But, until I can come up with an idea I believe in I would like to invest in other people's ideas. I'm a well paid independent consultant and have $100-150K yearly profits that can be used for investments.<p>My problem is getting in touch with startups to invest in. Investing through AngelList, but I unfortunately do not (yet?) meet the requirements to become an accredited investor.<p>Is $100-150K yearly enough to get started? Do I have the "buy in" necessary to join a fund?<p>Any real life advice on how to get started would be greatly appreciated. I'm based in western Europe btw.
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: I think everyone feels envious of a high-flying peer once in a while. Or at least, I definitely do.<p>When someone younger than me, in my field, is making more money / getting more acclaim / winning praise from people I respect, it makes me seethe. Sometimes I even waste my time looking for a way to invalidate them, to put an asterisk* on their success, so I can feel better about myself.<p>Does this happen to anyone else? What do you do about it?
Upvote: | 314 |
Title: My short list of the skills that have helped me the most in my career as a software engineer is not sorted. But the ability to quickly learn things is easily on that list. With technology constantly and rapidly changing, small improvements in the speed at which I learn things can have a big and cumulative impact on my productivity. But we rarely discuss personal learning strategies. What are your personal strategies? Please consider mentioning even what you consider to be dead obvious. It might not be to others.
Upvote: | 190 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>We’re Guillaume and Lewis, founders of Dataform, and we're excited (and nervous) to be posting this on HN.<p>Dataform is a platform for data analysts to manage data workflows in cloud data warehouses such as Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift or Snowflake. With our open source framework and our web app, analysts can develop and schedule reliable pipelines to turn raw data into reliable datasets they need for analytics.<p>Before starting Dataform, we managed engineering teams in AdSense and led product analytics for publisher ads. We heavily relied on data (and data pipelines!) to generate insights, drive better decisions and build better products. Companies like Google invest a lot to build internal data tools for analysts to manage data and build data pipelines. In 5 minutes I could define a new dataset in SQL that would be updated every day and then use it in my reports.<p>Most businesses today are centralising their raw data into cloud data warehouses but lack the tools to manage it efficiently. Pipelines run manually or via custom scripts that break often. Or the company decides to invest engineering resources to set up, maintain and debug a framework like Airflow. But that’s just for scheduling and the technical bar is often too high for analysts to contribute.<p>We saw a need for a self-service solution for data teams to manage data efficiently, so that analysts can own the entire workflow from raw data to analytics. We built Dataform with two core principles in mind:<p>1. Bring engineering best practices to data management.
In Dataform, you build data pipelines in SQL, and our open source framework lets you seamlessly define dependencies, build incremental tables and reuse code across scripts. You can write tests against your raw and transformed data to ensure data quality across your analytics. Lastly, our development environment also facilitates the adoption of best practices, where analysts can develop with version control, code review or sandboxed environments.<p>2. Let data teams focus on data, not infrastructure.
We want to bring a better, faster and cheaper alternative to what businesses have to build and maintain in-house today. Our web app comes with a collaborative SQL editor, where teams develop and push their changes to GitHub. You can then orchestrate your data pipelines without having to maintain any infrastructure.<p>Here's is a short video demo where we develop two new datasets, push the code to GitHub and schedule their execution, in under 5 minutes.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axDKf0_FhYU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axDKf0_FhYU</a><p>You can sign up at <a href="https://dataform.co" rel="nofollow">https://dataform.co</a>. If you're curious how it works - here are the docs: <a href="https://docs.dataform.co" rel="nofollow">https://docs.dataform.co</a> and the link to our open framework: <a href="https://github.com/dataform-co/dataform" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dataform-co/dataform</a><p>We would love to hear your feedback and answer any questions you might have!<p>Lewis and Guillaume
Upvote: | 110 |
Title: I'm considering going back to school, but upon further thought, the first major roadblock is that I seem to have forgotten most high school math and probably even some easier stuff! I'm sort of concerned about my ability to relearn 4 years of mathematics in a year or two and was wondering if anyone had and books / tips / etc. to make it easier
Upvote: | 137 |
Title: Hey all - I went on a meditation retreat for the first time in 2016 and have been to several since.<p>Since then, I've met a lot of friends through the process, but was curious what the overlap between the general tech community and the meditation community was.<p>Have you been on a retreat? If so how was it and would you go again. If not and you are interested in one - what has prevented you thus far?
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: I work in an office environment (large Bay Area corporate enterprise software co) where people are constantly cutting each other off in conversations and technical discussions. For people that are a more soft-spoken, it is almost impossible to get a word in - nevermind getting a full thought-process in. This has negative implications on work discussions as the loudest people who are usually dominating the conversations, from my observation, are usually not the brightest.<p>I am not someone who tolerates getting cut-off easily but it is frustrating and it takes a lot of energy for me to drive the conversation back on track and say what I want to say. This is something that I never had to deal in previous work environments prior to moving to the Bay Area so I'm inclined to think it's something specific to this area. Recently, I have moved to a team in my company where it is almost damn near impossible to have my thoughts heard and in some cases, I just shut myself off from discussions to save my energy. It's starting to affect my work life and my daily mood because in a lot of cases I just don't have the energy to reject and explain why we shouldn't be doing X, Y, or Z.<p>Is this a common thing in workplaces? I would be interested in hearing if people have been in this situation and how they've dealt with it if so.
Upvote: | 329 |
Title: I'm sitting for 10+ hours a day, what should I be sitting in ?
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>We're Mimi, Ben, and Landon, founders of Wren (<a href="https://projectwren.com" rel="nofollow">https://projectwren.com</a>). Wren lets you offset your carbon footprint by funding projects that prevent or sequester greenhouse gas emissions. It works by calculating your carbon footprint and then funding a project of your choice through a monthly subscription. Some of the projects we have right now involve planting forests in East Africa, providing more efficient cookstoves to Ugandan refugees, and preventing deforestation in the Amazon.<p>We met in college, and worked together on numerous side projects and class projects. After a while we decided to try finding a meaningful project that we could work on after graduation. At the time, we didn't know much about the science or emerging technologies for mitigating climate change, but we saw carbon offsets and asked ourselves "why isn't everyone doing this?" Then we got to work on Wren.<p>Carbon offsets have been around for a while, and with some googling, research, and phone calls anyone can find reliable and transparent projects. Our goal is to make it as easy and enjoyable as possible to offset your footprint. We only work with projects that have good evidence suggesting they're long lasting and reliable. We also only work with projects that wouldn't happen without support from Wren users. In addition to climate benefits, we prefer projects with strong social impact. Projects listed on Wren reduce lung cancer risk for refugees, provide millions of dollars of economic benefit to subsistence farmers, and protect biodiversity.<p>We see climate change as the most important problem we can work on. Despite growing evidence of the damage it will cause, governments are not taking necessary action. Wren is a way for an individual to have impact today.<p>Most in this space are nonprofits but we are a business. We take a 20% fee on each subscription. This allows us to hire talented engineers, invest in marketing, and raise capital. This way we can build tools that make our projects more transparent and reliable—daily satellite images of forest projects, data visualizations of tree trunk diameters, and other ways we can build more trust for these projects.<p>I've seen a lot of posts on HN recently about climate change and potential solutions so I'm looking forward to a good discussion :)
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: For anyone considering subscribing to Pluralsight, be aware that they will not inform you of their auto-renewal policy, and will charge you once your subscription is up for annual renewal without warning. In my case, this auto-renewal has cost me $300.<p>This is a serious dark-pattern and I'm surprised companies still employ it. It's so short-sighted. I emailed their support and they offer a "promotional" $50 refund as a token.<p>Are there any other companies that do this? In contrast, Egghead.io (which in a similar space) sends an email in advance warning you of the renewal as well as how to cancel it.
Upvote: | 172 |
Title: Periodically we see topics on freelancing and consulting, and usually a few people comment that they are successful and happy as solo (or self-owned firm) consulting. And often, those people stress that a good percentage of their time is spent networking and marketing to keep business flowing in.<p>Can anyone in this situation recommend modern, high quality resources where one can learn the networking and marketing skills to use to build a successful solo tech/dev consulting business?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: What do you like about it's killer features?<p>How interchangeable with Postgres was it?<p>How is performance?
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: PostgreSQL was awarded the second lifetime Achievement Award last night at OSCON. Come by the booth and check it out!
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: - Is it still relevant?<p>- How is the adoption of GraphQL compared to REST APIs?<p>- What popular services are providing a GraphQL endpoint?<p>- When would you use It aside from the cases you want to optimize the access to your service (mobile)?<p>- Are you using in your projects? What work, and what doesn't work?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: What you care about as a programmer is what your code does, right? Basically whatever the compiler has after lexical analysis (except for comments maybe).<p>So why do we bother with all that coding style stuff if we could make an IDE that edits the program itself instead of text? (I get that text is a universal format, but that doesn't mean we have to edit it directly.)<p>Instead of editing text you could choose to "declare a function", "rename this identifier" or "call function x with y and z arguments" and then save it with some coding style.<p>Is there such an IDE? I know what I'm describing is pretty much visual programming, but I mean for "text" languages.
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: The same question was asked a year ago with so many amazing answers, experience, and deep advice. Asking the same question again after almost a year.<p>Previous entry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17316120
Upvote: | 181 |
Title: I casually visit jobs/freelancing sites once in a while. I don't see as much demand for Lucene/Solr/ES skills for website / text / document search or other kinds of information retrieval, as I used to about 4-5 years ago.<p>ES seems to be the most popular but only in its ELK avatar for devops dashboards.<p>What technologies are you people using for text or document or website search nowadays?
Upvote: | 275 |
Title: I was wondering how different workplaces track user actions/events from a backend perspective. Popular options include segment, mparticle but they seem to be quite expensive for small/medium level enterprises
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: For instance the Images tab is quite degraded and different in Firefox (Can't swipe picture), I also noticed that some widget apps like soccer matches are degraded. try typing "Barcelona matches" in both browsers and notice how degraded the matches widget is in Firefox compared to chrome (For instance the matches are clickable in Chrome but not in Firefox). There are other examples that I can't remember right now, I am sure of it.<p>I also noticed that AMP isn't available in Firefox, though I am not a fan of AMP, I still find it weird that it's not available, considering Google's motives behind AMP, which is to improve user experience, allegedly.<p>Isn't this a bit anti competitive and alarming?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Here are mine:<p>1. create aliases for everything in ~/.bashrc to speed things up<p>2. window stacking / multi-tasking in iTerm with cmd + (shift) + d<p>3. turn on vi(m) syntax highlighting by adding :syntax on to ~/.vimrc<p>4. use jq to format and colorize json files / streams with the pipe | operator (so useful!)<p>5. Generate a custom command prompt at http://bashrcgenerator.com/ (just for fun)<p>I really like this topic, so made a video going into more detail on mine, if anyone's interested
https://youtu.be/okGN2RXFw_U
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: So I am primarily into Rust with a bit of Haskell and Purescript and I am trying to get some side work that will hopefully blossom into full time freelancing. The problem I am encountering, looking on sites like upwork, all the demand seems to be for Ruby or Javascript programmers.<p>Do you guys have any advice on how I can get some work with more niche languages?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Be <i>very</i> careful with the live-restore feature of docker. Running 'docker volume prune' just removed <i>all</i> my named volumes, which were used by running containers.<p>See <a href="https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/38883" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/38883</a>
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: Yes of course who cares about the strikes in prison. They are a bunch of criminals. But what about basic human rights. Why so much injustice. Better hang us, If we don't deserve to live please kill us rather not kill us by serving bad food. Or torturing us. This what an inmate told to us.<p>[https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/28/pris-a28.html Article]<p>2018 prison strike sill one of the biggest strikes in prison so far in the States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_U.S._prison_strike<p>But did we learn anything?<p>My brother is in Denver correctional facility. in the same facility, they have been doing regular hunger strike for about a month. But no seems to care. Do we care?<p>Can we do something about it!
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: For the past several years I've been putting in a lot of time into learning and sharing people skills (without the bullshit).<p>I'm interested in skills from dealing with your own emotions, through communication with close co-workers to high-stakes negotiating.<p>I'm curious: what are some people skills that you wish you had learned earlier in your career or that you wish your co-workers had easier access to?<p>Also: what are your favorite books and/or other resources that helped you?
Upvote: | 539 |
Title: It's surprisingly hard to find a solution for these simple requirements:<p>I want to create AI generated to use as soundtracks on videos - so there must be no question about royalties or copyright<p>I want to be able to specify how long the music should go for.<p>I want to be able to save the music.<p>It would be great if I could have some control over the pace/style of the music but I'm not a musician so lots of options would be detrimental. I don't want to compose music - I want it made for me.<p>I'm happy to pay, but the prices must be clear and up front and not require me to email the company to "make an enquiry".<p>I've done a fair bit of searching but not found anything to make AI music that meets these needs. It's strange given there is so much interest in AI I would have thought there would be plenty of good products available to buy.<p>Ideally I'd like to make music such as ambient music, similar to Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, Phillip Glass, but it would be great just be able to explore a range of types of music to find what I want.<p>Can anyone recommend any good AI music generators?
Upvote: | 205 |
Title: Just received this email from Robinhood (https://robinhood.com/):<p>"When you set a password for your Robinhood account, we use an industry-standard process that prevents anyone at our company from reading it. On Monday night, we discovered that some user credentials were stored in a readable format within our internal systems. We wanted to let you know that your Robinhood password may have been included.<p>We resolved this issue, and after thorough review, found no evidence that this information was accessed by anyone outside of our response team. Out of an abundance of caution, we still recommend that you change your Robinhood password.<p>We take matters like this seriously. Earning and maintaining your trust is our top priority, and we’re committed to protecting your information. Let us know if you have any questions–we’re here to help.<p>Sincerely,<p>The Robinhood Team"<p>If you've used Robinhood in the past, it's a good idea to check your emails!
Upvote: | 383 |
Title: My company just went through a transaction that increased my net worth by >$5M.<p>When this happened to you - what did you do? How did you handle it? What did you buy and what kind of financial planning/investments did you make?
Upvote: | 248 |
Title: I run the bot @BitmexRekt that posts liquidations (when traders lose everything) on the Bitmex exchange.<p>It's mildly popular on Twitter with 45k+ followers, and even got mentioned on Nouriel vs Arthur Hayes debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlZukhN_C6c (~2:50 minute mark).<p>Yesterday the bot was permabanned by Twitter, and Twitter is accusing me of "impersonation" which is obvious to anyone that has seen the profile that it is clearly not impersonating anyone. However Twitter is sticking to their guns and insists that the bot, which has been running for more than 3 years, is an impersonator.<p>Is there no way of getting a real person from Twitter to review this?<p>I wrote a bit more in detail here: https://github.com/LittleLightLittleFire/REKT/issues/7
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: What prevented Plan 9 from Bell Labs from becoming a widely-used operating system? Does it have a major flaw?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: As a technical person who’s likely on the spectrum and who’s very poor in the verbal communication skills department: I recently started a position to lead a small development team.<p>This is my first foray into managing; after many, many years of development.<p>I have little in common with my charges—I don’t really expect to be chummy with people at work—but it’s 100% my goal to help my underlings succeed in their careers.<p>Any targeted advice?<p>There was a former topic that highlights the end goal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230133<p>But do I account for poor verbal skills?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: As per title. I would like to test some ideas online but I don’t have a registered company. How can I accept payments on a website as an individual with something similar to stripe or more complex e-commerce solutions like Shopify?<p>I would like to avoid crypto if possible<p>Is PayPal.me viable? Or is there something I’m not aware of?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Based on the current content, it seems the domain has become another how-to tech blog using Wordpress. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)<p>Has this "passing of the torch" of whytheluckystiff.net been covered before on HN?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/27/joke-on-roman-souvenir-bloomberg-building-site-city-of-london
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: I have seen many discussions about how to invest but they seem targetted at the USA market. The main assumption is that one can expect to have a 6-7% return by investing in good ETFs. I have researched a little bit and I don't see how that can be achieved investing in the European bonds/stocks. At the moment the safest bet seems to park money in monetary/government bonds that however don't return more than 1.5% on average. Can somebody provide some suggestion references about good investment strategies with a low risk profile in an european context?
Upvote: | 81 |
Title: Hi HNers, I've built a lot of software in Python and Ruby over the years and recently, I've become interested in Lisp but am unsure which Lisp/Scheme variant to learn for building production grade software.<p>Ideally, I would like to learn the most modern one i.e. robust package management, tooling, ecosystem, etc. Really the main requirement is that I would like to be able to build production ready software with a Lisp that I can use at and for my company.<p>I've looked into Clojure and like a lot about it, but don't want to have to dig into the Java world. Is there any alternative out there? Any suggestions are appreciated :)
Upvote: | 168 |
Title: Will better tooling (think WebFlow or Google’s AI as a service) and more accessible training lead to:<p>- more devs -> lower wages for employees and;<p>- more startups -> higher funding requirements<p>for new entrepreneurs?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I'm considering a career change, but the job market for software development has me confused.<p>On the one hand, it's very common to hear about some supposed shortage of programmers. Yet on the other, few companies seem to have more than a couple openings at any point in time. And it seems every CS uni student or bootcamp grad complains about having to send out 300+ applications in hopes of landing 2-3 interviews.<p>WTF? That's easily an order of magnitude worse odds than when I applied to medical schools. How can it be that hard to land a job if the market is supposedly desperate for talent?<p>Or is it only _experienced_ coders that are in demand? Are employers just lamenting how the majority of applicants have barely any experience and little depth of knowledge?<p>If that's the case, encouraging people to go into the field on the pretense of a "hot job market" seems disingenuous. I don't want to spend years of my life and who knows how much money learning a new skillset only to discover I've joined an ocean of low-skilled coders who won't have any serious job prospects for 5+ more years. :/
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I am rather fond of the concepts described in "Clean Code" by Robert Martin but it seems that in real life, a really high-quality codebase is hard to come by.<p>While I am asking myself this question, the only one that popups to my mind would be Laravel: https://github.com/laravel/laravel (PHP)<p>One could think that a codebase as popular as React (https://github.com/facebook/react) would be a perfect example of "clean code" but with a glance, I personally don't find it very expressive.<p>This may all be very subjective but I would love to see examples of codebases that member of this community have enjoyed working with
Upvote: | 392 |
Title: Curious to hear stories of people who automated their 9 to 5 jobs
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: Hi HN! I'm Jason, one of the co-founders of FeaturePeek (<a href="https://featurepeek.com" rel="nofollow">https://featurepeek.com</a>).<p>FeaturePeek lets front-end developers get UI/UX feedback from their team earlier in the release cycle. For every pull request, we spin up a dedicated feature environment with tools like commenting, screenshotting, and bug filing overlaid on top.<p>Our vision is to fill the void in product development that occurs after developer handoff. Great tools exist for design prototyping (Sketch), design feedback (InVision), developer handoff (Zeplin)... but then there's a cliff, an empty gap, where teams use ad-hoc methods of iteration before shipping. We want to build a tool that shortens feedback loops between cross-functional teams so that the end of the release cycle is sane and stress-free.<p>If you're familiar with automatic feature environments for pull requests — like what Heroku or Netlify offer — it's like that, but 1) we're platform agnostic, 2) we support Dockerized builds in addition to pure static assets, and 3) we overlay a suite of tools on top of each environment to help your team communicate more effectively.<p>My co-founder Eric and I wished that this existed at our last startup. While developing a web-based SaaS product, we found that our teammates would wait until the day before the release to leave implementation feedback on new features. The feedback ranged anywhere from CSS nits to the dreadful "This isn't what I meant", in which case we had to decide whether to scramble together a fix or to delay the release. It was tempting to fault the procrastinating reviewers, but it happened so often that we realized it was instead a flaw in the review process. We knew there had to be a better way.<p>Eric has led Build & Integration teams at Apple and has experience in release management. My background is in front-end engineering and developer experience. So it was natural for us to think in terms of developer tools for release processes, and we decided to work on this together.<p>There are a few products that exist for gathering website feedback and filing bugs, but they all rely on using a browser extension in a dev/staging environment. This method is inferior because 1) Getting everyone on your team to install a browser extension on every browser is a pain; 2) Code has already been reviewed and merged, which is way too late to start the feedback process. Waiting on code review before conducting feature review is an unnecessary speed bump; and 3) Dev/staging environments can be an integration war zone, especially for larger teams. Another developer's feature could break something in yours, so this environment is not suitable for conducting feature review. QA should still happen on the release as a whole, but the UI/UX review of individual features should occur in isolation.<p>Here's how it works: After your pull request builds in CI, call our one-liner to ping our services. We use the credentials present in your CI environment to pull your image from your container registry. If you build static content, we download your built assets and add them to an nginx image for you. When the environment is up, a deployment link posts in the pull request, and your team is notified via Slack. We use Kubernetes and Helm to manage and namespace each environment, which spin up and shut down based on VCS webhooks. Our team collaboration features sit on top of your app in a parent frame, so you don't need to install any run-time dependencies to take advantage of them.<p>All new teams get a two-week free trial — but you can use the coupon code HN2019 to get an additional 50% off your first three months.<p>We'd love to hear your feedback, and answer any questions you may have :-)
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: Quick background, no degree, been working in the field professionally for a few years now and I'm bored out of my mind.<p>I don't want be stuck writing code to automate business processes for the rest of my life, nor does developing b2b or b2c consumer apps sound very interesting to me. The typical stuff I hear recommended to people like myself is to go the PM route or do something like devops, neither of which sound interesting to me.<p>There are certainly fields / problems that interest me (low level embedded type stuff, low latency programming, etc.), but they tend to not be accessible to someone with my educational background (let alone professional). And while I've considered school, it's a financial impossibility. On top of that, I fear I'm not smart enough to do a lot of the stuff and feel like a proverbial "code monkey".<p>At this point I'm wondering if I should just leave tech, but the lost earning potential tells me that would be financial suicide (where else can you make that much money with nothing but a HS diploma),but I'm just not sure, and feel I may be overreacting or not seeing some option, I know other people have been in similar situations, and I'm curious if anyone could lend me some advice.
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: Curious which cities people like
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>My name is Jaclyn Ling and I'm the co-founder/CEO of Hatchways (<a href="https://hatchways.io" rel="nofollow">https://hatchways.io</a>). We make it easier to get your first job.<p>More specifically, we help talented engineers who may not shine in traditional recruitment processes (resume + multiple interview processes) get opportunities to prove themselves on the job. We do this by using a practical skill-based assessment as a proxy for the resume, and then matching them to startups for paid internships, as a way to reduce full-time interview processes.<p>As a new grad without relevant work experience, or as a career shifter without a relevant degree, getting a first job is very painful. You spend months preparing for interviews that don’t reflect the job, you send hundreds of resumes out that go unanswered, and when you actually get interviews, getting through five rounds successfully is like a lottery.<p>I’ve been interested in this problem for a long time because of my own early struggles trying to get a job. I graduated from a foreign university (Canada), had a subpar GPA, and I don’t perform well in high-pressured style interviews. Somehow, I networked my way into getting interviews at all my “dream” companies. But I got rejected at every one of them and to this day, I’ve never gotten a job I’ve interviewed for. It deeply affected my confidence.<p>However, since then I was fortunate enough to start and exit a startup. We built a fashion app that made personal outfit recommendations based on your likes, which eventually evolved into a chatbot that provided recommendations to hundreds of thousands of teens. We got acquired, and when I was working for the company that acquired us, I finally realized that the interviews I'd failed at hadn’t reflected my ability to do well on the job.<p>Mainstream hiring processes are biased towards those who went to great schools, had high GPAs, are native-English speaking, have worked at brand name companies, are extroverts and great networkers, etc. But there are so many talented people who don't fit that profile. We're excited to work on ways of hiring that give them a better chance.<p>Our practical skill-based assessments simulate tasks they’d actually be doing on the job (e.g. project-based work). Engineers on our end review the job seeker’s code to pick up signals that are important for on-the-job such as: ability to follow a spec, code quality and how quickly the task is completed. An employer pays 90% of the cost only when a full-time hire is made, so ensuring that candidates have job-ready skills is crucial for us. We've found that it works to give people the opportunity to prove themselves on the job: 80% of our internships have resulted in full-time employment immediately after.<p>So far, we have helped talented engineers get software jobs who would have otherwise been overlooked: baristas and Uber drivers turned engineers, candidates with no local experience (from Turkey, India, Russia, Ethiopia, Brazil etc.), and those with non-CS degrees (linguistics, philosophy, economics, MBA’s, dentistry, mechanical engineering etc.)<p>I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas about how we can improve this system and how we can best help talented people who shine once they get a chance to prove themselves. We would love to hear your personal experiences in this space too. Thank you!
Upvote: | 267 |
Title: What is your favourite (video or written) tutorial for beginners – in any technology?<p>Mine is Django Girls Tutorial (https://tutorial.djangogirls.org/en/) because it does not assume any prior knowledge and has a good balance between the big picture and small details.
Upvote: | 480 |
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: | 139 |
Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.
Upvote: | 87 |
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://findwork.dev/?source=hn" rel="nofollow">https://findwork.dev/?source=hn</a>, <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=20584309" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20584309</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20584310" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20584310</a>
Upvote: | 370 |
Title: Hey HN community!<p>We're Bernat, Tim, and Rajiv, founders of Tandem (<a href="https://tandem.chat" rel="nofollow">https://tandem.chat</a>).<p>Tandem is a desktop app designed to give distributed teams the immediacy and flow of in-person communication. You can see who's online this second and talk/video/screenshare in one click.<p>What's unique about us is you can see what app your colleagues are working in (e.g. VS Code, Google Docs, Figma), which gives you a surprisingly clear sense of whether you can interrupt them or not. In fact, we've found it makes you feel like you're sitting around a table, without being overly invasive.<p>We started building Tandem when two of us had kids and started working from home more. We tried a bunch of different tools - Zoom, Discord, Slack, Hangouts, etc. - but hated the friction in all of them.<p>We felt slower, less collaborative, and more alone when we worked remotely. We built a one-click calling prototype, added video and screenshare, and this eventually became Tandem.<p>Some details on how instant calls work:
- You can click on someone and talk immediately, but they will be on mute until they accept.
- All calls start as voice, but can be upgraded to video and screenshare.
- Customizable rooms are a nice way to invite teammates to talk when they're free.<p>Some details on app presence:
- Your teammates will be able to see which work app you're currently in (only for a select set of integrated apps) - this gives everyone a sense of being together, and helps you know when a teammate is interruptible.
- You can go into Focus Mode if you don't want to be bothered, in which case your app will not be shown.<p>Pricing: 14 day free trial, then $10 / active user / month<p>We are doing a beta program where, if you can hop on a short feedback call every-other week, we extend the free trial indefinitely! This has helped us stay in touch with the people using it, and constantly improve.<p>We are constantly improving the app, so tell us what you think. With your help, we can make remote work more collaborative and social!<p>-Bernat, Rajiv, and Tim
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>We’re Katia and Phelim, cofounders of Prolific (<a href="https://www.prolific.co" rel="nofollow">https://www.prolific.co</a>). We help psychological and behavioral researchers quickly find participants they can trust.<p>We built Prolific because Katia had a hard time finding participants for her psychology studies during her PhD. She briefly used Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), but didn’t like the user experience and couldn’t get the data she wanted (UK participants). The fundamental problem we’re hoping to help with is better access to psychological and behavioral data. This is challenging in many ways: You have to balance the growth of a multi-sided platform, achieve high data quality, align incentives for all stakeholders (researchers, participants, ourselves, society), diversify the participant pool, to name some. We’re first-time founders and we’ve been bootstrapping our startup for the past 5 years during our PhDs.<p>Researchers build their surveys using Google Forms, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or another tool; all you need is a survey URL to get started. We verify and monitor participants so you can get data fast (most surveys are completed in <2 hours). Studies range from one-to-one interviews to surveys of thousands of people and you can retarget participants anonymously for follow up studies. You only pay for data you approve. Our business model is to charge a % service charge (typically around 25-35%) on top of rewards researchers pay the participants.<p>We have 70,000+ survey takers in Europe and North America (for distributions of demographic variables see <a href="https://www.prolific.co/demographics" rel="nofollow">https://www.prolific.co/demographics</a>) and 100s of demographic filters (try our audience checker via <a href="https://app.prolific.co/audience-checker" rel="nofollow">https://app.prolific.co/audience-checker</a>). This means we can find many target demographics for you. For example, you can filter for Democrats vs. Republicans, old vs. young people, students vs. professionals, different ethnicities, people with health problems, Brexit voters, and even collect nationally representative samples!<p>Anyone can sign up as a participant and start earning a little extra cash.<p>It's possible to do research using existing platforms like MTurk. Actually, over 50% of behavioral research is now run online, mostly on MTurk. But there are problems with the quality of data you get from existing platforms, and worse, problems with how the people who participate get treated [1]. Our approach addresses these issues. We think the key differences are:
It’s data you can trust: We mandate a minimum hourly reward of $6.50, and often rewards are even higher than that. As a result, participants feel respected and treated like valuable contributors, providing high quality data. We comply with data protection regulation and have a range of technical and behavioral checks in place to ensure high quality data [2].
Demographic prescreening is flexible and free: You can easily invite participants for follow-up studies at no extra cost. You can get niche or even nationally representative samples on-demand.
Prolific is built by researchers for researchers. We try to distribute studies as evenly as possible across our participant pool through rate limiting, so have less of a problem with “professional survey takers” than MTurk.<p>Our bigger vision is to build tech infrastructure that empowers behavioral research on the internet. The market opportunity is significant because any individuals, businesses, and governments would benefit from better access to rigorous behavioral data when making decisions. For example, what could we do to best curb climate change? What’s the best way to change unhealthy habits? How can we reduce hate crime and political polarization? The stakes are high, and behavioral research can help us find better answers to these kinds of questions.<p>Moreover, although we built Prolific primarily to help academics, we've noticed that businesses have been using the platform for things like market research and idea validation. This is a new market for us that we're excited to explore. We’d love to hear about any ideas, experiences, and feedback you might have. Thank you!<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719197" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719197</a><p>[2] <a href="https://blog.prolific.co/bots-and-data-quality-on-crowdsourcing-platforms/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.prolific.co/bots-and-data-quality-on-crowdsourc...</a>
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I've been fiddling with a idea sometime and I want to turn it into a product. I first want to build a MVP. I can't make a decision stack I am going to use. I find it difficult to make the difference between taking too much and too little account of an untenable and scalable 'future'.<p>Do you consider SQL for your data layer or settle for NoSQL solution, or maybe for something like firebase? How do you think serverless functions can contribute to a MVP?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: All ideas welcome
Upvote: | 486 |
Title: This has been the standard at every software company I've worked at so far.<p>There are 2 open positions: Software Engineer, and Project Manager.<p>The Project Manager position is filled in 2-4 weeks. This person is offered more compensation than the engineers they're managing. Often their skillset appears (to engineers at least) to consist only of the most basic skills required to function in an office environment. The emerging pattern is that the winning candidate is chosen based mostly on their physical presentation, and their ability to "win conversations."<p>The Software Engineer position is filled in 3 months if we're lucky, and then stays open in perpetuity, because the need for engineers outpaces the company's ability to hire them. We screen thousands of resumes trying to find somebody who's even worth interviewing. We hire a recruiting agency, throw money at Greenhouse, conduct on-site rounds with a 90% fail rate, and pay mid-5-figure finder fees to Triplebyte and Hired.<p>The Software Engineer has a skillset that is beyond the comprehension of most people, and is so large and varied that some part of it is even beyond the comprehension of their peers and vice-versa. There's often a lifetime of work behind the development of that skillset, since they were in their teens or even earlier, most of it above and beyond any standard educational curriculum.<p>Software companies would seem to be one of the most (if not the most) extreme examples of supervisors being more replaceable than their direct reports in hiring.<p>So why are software companies so willing to offer more pay for a managerial role that is easy to hire for, and so unwilling to offer more pay for a technical role that is one of the hardest to hire for? Why does it seem like market forces just don't apply here?
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Hey there,<p>being a freelancer in Germany is possible and well-known if you have multiple clients throughout the year and follow some rules.<p>However, being a remote worker and employee of a US corp/startup seems to be a grey zone to me because German law requires to work maximum 80% of your time for one client only.<p>How do you solve that problem? Is there even a legal way to do that?<p>I also thought about incorporating a GmbH which then creates invoices to the US company. Nevertheless, this would introduce additional costs and probably risks (e. g. when you are no longer an employee of the US corp).<p>I asked some tax consultants. Nobody of them really understood what I want to do and additionally, the bigger problem seems to be the German Rentenversicherung and not only the Finanzamt.<p>More info: I want to stay in Germany and am a German citizen. I want to be for a significant time at the company (3y+).
Upvote: | 109 |
Title: Hi HN, we're Jacob and Jordan, the founders of Compound (<a href="https://withcompound.com/equity" rel="nofollow">https://withcompound.com/equity</a>). We help employees understand their equity compensation.<p>We started Compound after seeing way too many of our friends get screwed over by startup equity.<p>You hear the story often: wide-eyed engineer accepts an offer and 100,000 options from an exciting startup. Woohoo! Suddenly you must make what may turn out to be the most important financial decision of your life, whether you know it yet or not: should you exercise your options?<p>The answer to this question depends upon many nuanced factors. Does the company allow for early exercising? If not, how long should you wait to exercise your options? When will you owe taxes? What is the Alternative Minimum Tax? How long is the exercise window if you cease employment? Will you ever qualify for the QSBS tax exemption? Will this be a qualifying disposition? Does your...wait...could you have negotiated for more equity? Do you really believe in the company? Should you even be working at an early-stage startup that you do not believe in?<p>Equity is really confusing. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, your equity is a crucial part of your compensation and is worth being scrutinized as such. Many people miss out on significant upside because they fail to familiarize themselves with key terms before it is too late.<p>There are 300-page books written on options but _nothing_ is personalized. Large financial institutions won’t talk to you unless you have millions of dollars in liquid assets. To make things worse, most companies do a terrible job of helping their candidates and employees understand the value of their equity. What does 100,000 options even mean? HR teams are frequently asked about equity-and tax-related matters from their employees and are forbidden from sharing useful, true things.<p>Jacob and I got really interested in these problems during our final year of university. We read books, consumed the entire tax code, and talked with dozens of experts. We became the de facto equity resource in our circles and helped hundreds of people with everything from negotiating offers to exercising options. This led to the start of Compound.<p>Over the years, there have been many proposals to fix equity compensation. There is no obvious simple answer. What is clear is that today’s system will eventually break. We are hoping Compound plays a role in the solution.<p>Compound is entirely focused on helping you—the employee—understand and manage your equity. We provide forecasting tools that show you how much your equity is worth, display tax implications (AMT exposure, capital gains), and model exit scenarios. We help you understand the value of your equity to make more informed exercise decisions. For the HN community, we are offering free informational consultations at (<a href="https://withcompound.com/?ref=hn" rel="nofollow">https://withcompound.com/?ref=hn</a>)<p>We also encourage companies to adopt more employee-friendly equity procedures and policies. We build tools, like fair offer-letter templates and internal equity dashboards, to promote transparency within companies. If your team is interested, please send me an email to [email protected].<p>In the future, Compound will earn revenue by offering financial products. We are still hammering out these details—our mission is to help employees maximize their upsides by democratizing access to financial services currently reserved for the super-rich (tax planning, advisory, bespoke investment offerings, concierge services, etc.).<p>We will be releasing more guides around this topic in the near future and would really appreciate your feedback and requests. Eager to hear about HN users’ experiences, ideas, and know there is a ton of expertise among the community to learn from. Happy to answer any questions in the comments or via email [email protected]. Thanks!
Upvote: | 140 |
Title: Ones that most people don't know about, that you actually regularly use. Thank you!<p>Edit: "Not a shortcut exactly..." tips are most welcome too.
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: Hey HN! We’re Eric, Peter, and Abhi, founders of Lang (<a href="https://www.langapi.co" rel="nofollow">https://www.langapi.co</a>). We help developers quickly translate their apps into foreign languages by combining internationalization SDKs with a command-line interface that integrates directly with human translators.<p>Previously, we all worked on building internationalization and localization tooling for companies. In our experience, companies don’t think about translation until too late, and the tech debt builds up very fast. It’s a nightmare to receive a task that says “translate app into Spanish.” Choosing the right open-source framework, refactoring the entire codebase, and integrating with human translators is a massive effort. As engineers, we wanted to work on features - not putting every string in our codebase into a translations.json file. In our months of internationalization work, we couldn’t find a good all-in-one toolkit. So we built Lang.<p>Like other internationalization libraries, Lang gives you a tr() function. Wrap your strings with tr(), and we’ll show your users translations that correspond to their language settings at run-time. But how do you actually get the translations? Open-source frameworks like Polyglot.js stop here, but Lang doesn’t. Run “push,” and our command-line tool will parse your code files, find tr() calls, collect newly added strings, and send them to human translators for you. For JavaScript, we use Babel to construct an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of your code, and traverse the tree to find tr()’d strings. For a developer, this makes it simple to add/remove/update strings: just run “push” in your terminal. You can track the status of your translations on our dashboard, and when they’re done just run “pull.” We’ll generate a translation file for you, and connect it with our tr() function. You own the file - Lang doesn’t make any network requests for translations at run-time, and your translations always load, even if our service is down.<p>This works for static strings in the code, but what about dynamic content in the backend or database? We expose a function called liveTr(), which takes a string argument. The first time liveTr() sees an untranslated string, it will make a request to Lang to translate it and return the string in its original language. But the next time, it will fetch the translation on-demand. We’ve shipped liveTr() with built-in caching functionality to reduce the number of network requests. We also have self-hosted solutions for users with high uptime requirements. This is a common in-house feature companies build for internationalization, and we want to make it available to all devs.<p>Lang currently supports JavaScript and Typescript apps (React, React Native, Vue etc.) with closed betas for Django, Android, and iOS. Give us a try at <a href="https://www.langapi.co/signup" rel="nofollow">https://www.langapi.co/signup</a> - machine translations are free, so you can see your app in another language in minutes. If you use human translations, we charge $99 / month for our tooling, and 6-8 cents per word translated. A lot of our work is inspired by open-source, and we want to give back - if you’re building an open-source project or non-profit, ping us at [email protected]. We’ll drop the monthly fee :)<p>The HN community builds amazing products, and we’re sure there are plenty of people here who have translated their apps - we’d love to hear your experiences in this area and your feedback on how we can improve!
Upvote: | 128 |
Title: Over the past two weeks, residents of Nur-Sultan, capital of Kazakhstan, have faced problems with access to the Internet. Officials explained that it was happening because of the new security system's testing. It was said to be a part of «Cyber shield of Kazakhstan» which allows to increase the country's defense capability and counteract information wars. According to previously received statistics, the authorities managed to inspect a third of all traffic in the Nur-Sultan city.<p>TSARKA assumed the role of a moderator in this situation and it seems that we managed to reach the top management of the country and convey our arguments. From our point of view, the optimal solution has been reached in the course of negotiations with the participants of the process.<p>A few hours ago we were officially informed that the tests were completed, all the tasks set during the pilot were successfully solved. Those who have established the National Certificate may delete it since it will no longer be needed. The need for its installation may arise in cases of strengthening the digital border of Kazakhstan within the framework of special regulations.<p>We don’t know how you guys are, but we breathed a sigh of relief when we heard about this news. Everyone got their own: we got the free Internet, the government got an instrument for fighting digital weapons.<p>P.S. We are especially proud of our role in the process. It was difficult not to fall into a negative point and maintain neutrality, but now we are satisfied with ourselves.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: And by serious, I mean with lots of users, lets say min 100K active and more complex then to do list, lets say e-invoicing service.<p>The performance of such potential app is what interests me the most, given that Rust is as fast as C/C++ and it doesn't have garbage collector.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Ahoy HN! We’re Greg and Vikrum, co-founders of Gold Fig.<p>Gold Fig is a tool that automatically creates a shared log of configuration changes to the SaaS tools you use. Modern applications are built atop a menagerie of these tools. Services like Stripe, SendGrid, Zapier, Segment, Twilio, Sentry, Travis, GSuite, domain registrars, CDNs, or even internal dashboards can directly affect your production and corporate environments, yet their configuration is not tracked with anything near the same fidelity as source code.<p>Mistakes occur when people make config changes without proper context. Depending on which service was impacted this can result in outage, loss of revenue, or reputational harm. It’s usually the thing that broke in a subtle way for some extended period of time that bites the worst. Moreover, when an incident does occur, the respondent often also has limited context about changes made, leading to longer resolution times and possibly even further misconfiguration as previous configuration was lost. As an example, we've personally experienced this pain when managing the CDNs fronting core services. We had to synchronize changes across our Fastly configurations, DNS records, and origin servers, with no single source of truth to guide us. Any mistake could result in downtime.<p>Some teams attempt to address this lack of context by putting one person in charge of doing all of the configuration for a service provider, leading to development bottlenecks. Other teams attempt to manually track these updates in a text file, email threads, or in their team chat. With Gold Fig, we want teams to be able to confidently share the management of their SaaS tools. Team members should have access to the full context behind all of the configurations they manage, and should be able to easily keep themselves up to date as they evolve. Gold Fig lives alongside automation tools like Terraform and Cloudformation, allowing you to plug the gaps that those tools can’t cover.<p>Our initial product is a browser extension that automatically launches on settings pages of SaaS tools. When you make a change on these sites, the extension gives you the opportunity to also provide a commit message, similar to how you would with a code check-in. Now you have a record of some button clicks that impacted your environment. The change has a permanent URL so you can look it up later if you forgot what you did, use it to help you move settings from staging to prod, or have others review the changes that were made. Now that Gold Fig has captured what changed, when, and why, you’ll never get stuck in a situation where only one person knows exactly how something was configured. A byproduct of Gold Fig is that you now have a foothold into being able to undo these types of changes. We envision Gold Fig being part of all devops team’s way of surfacing and tracking changes. In the future we’ll be able to empower teams to do pull-request like approvals, show context before a change is about to occur, and provide more awareness to those responding production incidents.<p>Our extension is able to capture payloads while being generally agnostic of the site itself. We’ll capture changes even if we haven’t seen the site before or if something has changed from the previous time we encountered it. For common sites like AWS or GCP we capture additional rich context like the product being impacted, the region/zone, and project name. We also aim to work on sites we don’t have access to like internal dashboards teams have built to manage customers, environments, or settings.<p>We’d love to hear your experience with settings pages and SaaS configs. We’ll be here listening to your feedback, answering your questions, and happy to field any feature requests for Gold Fig you may have. You can give it a whirl here: <a href="https://app.goldfiglabs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://app.goldfiglabs.com/</a> Thank you!<p>Greg & Vikrum - [email protected]
Upvote: | 127 |
Title: Can you give us an idea of what percentage of content on HN you typically consume in a day? Is it 100%, 50%?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I was big into Erlang in 2014, but haven't touched it since. I used to write code in Emacs and compile it there as well.<p>If I want to get started again (on either Windows or Ubuntu) what would be the base I'd need to get developing again?
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: My book titled "Python re(gex)?" is free to download through this weekend [1][2]<p>The book covers both 're' and 'regex' modules, has plenty of examples and chapters also have cheatsheets and exercises.<p>Code snippets, exercises, sample chapters, etc are available on GitHub repo [3]<p>I used pandoc+xelatex [4] to generate the pdf.<p>[1] https://gumroad.com/l/py_regex<p>[2] https://leanpub.com/py_regex<p>[3] https://github.com/learnbyexample/py_regular_expressions<p>[4] https://learnbyexample.github.io/tutorial/ebook-generation/customizing-pandoc/
Upvote: | 193 |
Title: Hey HN, I'm Evan. We make Quirk, an open-source Cognitive Behavioral Therapy app. (<a href="https://github.com/flaque/quirk" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/flaque/quirk</a>)<p>If you've never seen a cognitive-behavioral therapist before, it's easiest to understand by analogy with physical therapy. Like a physical therapist, a cognitive-therapist gives you goals and exercises to do, only they're mental rather than physical. Similarly, Quirk gives you exercises where you record and challenge negative thoughts.<p>I work on Quirk with my brother, Koby, a former founder and marketer in both consumer products and the mortgage industry. He's really good at simplifying, branding, and explaining complicated topics to the average consumer. Personally, I'm just an engineer who used to work on Segment's developer platform.<p>Quirk started as a command line tool (<a href="https://github.com/flaque/freak" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/flaque/freak</a>) that I used to track my panic attacks. I've had severe attacks for as long as I can remember, some lasting several hours. I always used to down-play them, saying "they're a once-in-a-blue-moon thing." But that wasn't really true and they started happening more and more. At a certain point they got so bad that I felt hopeless; I always assumed at some point in my life they'd just stop. But they didn't. So I picked up a book on depression, which turned out to be the CBT bible, "Feeling Good" by David Burns. I started working through the exercises and saw a dramatic drop in panic attacks. (<a href="https://i.imgur.com/P29BSRC.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/P29BSRC.jpg</a>)<p>I started turning the CLI into a little app so I could use it wherever. But since I was having so few panic attacks and was constantly recording thoughts all the time, the project became a CBT app. And the more thoughts I recorded, the better I felt; I went from having multiple attacks a week to having two in a six month period.<p>I gave Quirk to folks with a "this-software-will-probably-break-if-you-look-at-it-funny" guarantee and open sourced it. But after a bit, it became pretty hard to ignore how many folks were relying on it. That was surprising; it's small and it doesn't really do much from a technical perspective. Its main claim-to-fame is that it works pretty well. Everyday we wake up to folks writing in saying that "for the first time in 30 years I feel peaceful," or that they're "happier, healthier and feel so much better about everything," or that they feel like Quirk is "their secret weapon.” We’re recommended by quite a few therapists but we’re also used by folks who aren’t currently seeing one and had never planned to before trying Quirk.<p>That's fantastic, but that's not really surprising: CBT has 40 years of evidence saying that it works really well, even in "bibliotherapy" where someone isn't necessarily seeing a therapist. Quirk doesn't do every part of CBT, but it does the most general, applicable-to-everyone part. So what Quirk is really doing is fixing CBT's branding and consistency problems. Most people don't know what CBT is, or if they do, they don't realize just how effective it is and how much evidence is behind it. And when they "try" it, they often don't really do it consistently enough to see the value. Quirk's current feature set is just the thought-recording exercise with some cute illustrations, evidence building to prove to you that it works, and some silly skinner-box tricks to remind you to use it.<p>A lot of companies solve these massive technical or structural problems. We make a little toy app that helps you feel better.
But given just how approachable we could make CBT, we think we can help around 100 million people world-wide in the future. We're translated into 14 languages (kinda, it's a bit broken right now) and have quite an amazing and supportive community.<p>We charge a small subscription for Quirk, currently $4, though the price might change as we figure stuff out. Unlike a lot of other apps, we're quite privacy conscious; we store your thoughts only on the device and don't have any email or phone collection.<p>We want your feedback, questions, and ideas. If you're comfortable sharing, we really want to hear about your experiences. But mainly, we want you to know that CBT exists and that this is really something that could help you if you haven't been doing so hot lately.
Upvote: | 196 |
Title: You see an interesting article headline with a lot of upvotes on the front page, and you proceed to click on it only to be greeted with a pay wall on getting to the web address, why are these sort of articles allowed to get to the front page in the first place?
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: We're Matt and Nathan, founders of Together (<a href="https://togetherplatform.com" rel="nofollow">https://togetherplatform.com</a>). We make an app that manages employee-employee mentoring programs, and that ultimately improves employee career development and company culture.<p>Matt and I met while we were working at the Boston Consulting Group, an unusual workplace that gets a number of things really right. They rank Top 5 on Glassdoor every year for best places to work. The best thing there is the culture of 'non-evaluative' mentoring. It was common to grab a coffee on a weekly basis with a senior colleague outside your team, talk through what strengths you want to develop, and that conversation would somehow eventually translate into a project together where you worked specifically on those areas. It's the reason why we felt our 'personal growth rate' really took off - someone was always aware of your goals.<p>That got us thinking about whether the experience could be replicable at other companies too, and that's why we started Together.<p>We learned that a lot of companies have tried to run mentoring programs but the experience for employees wasn't great. Examples: Someone picked your match for you, and it wasn't a good fit; your match left the company and no one on the HR team even knew; you had a few sessions but had no clue what to talk about / no sense of progress against any goals; as an HR person, you had no visibility into whether the program was working or not<p>Through Together, any employee can voluntarily sign up to be part of their company's mentoring program. You can sign up to be a mentor, mentee or both - we've even had VPs enjoy the experience as a mentee. Once you fill out your mentoring profile, the magic is in the learning experience that is personalized just for you:<p>As a mentee, you get a curated list of the top 5 people at your company who signed up and can help you reach your goals. You can be part of one or multiple programs at the same time that focus on different career checkpoints, such as "new manager" or "internship" tracks. With that comes special agendas and content to work through with your mentor/mentee
You can track progress to your goals and look back through your personal session history with mentees/mentors - and if things aren't going as planned, an admin might even proactively reach out to you and see if they can tweak who you're working with<p>Many companies run mentoring programs today, but they largely fall flat. That's why companies like Disney Studios ask us to help them relaunch in a new and more impactful way.<p>What has been your mentoring experience at work? I'd love to hear about what worked and what didn't! What would you have liked to have? We'd love ideas for how an app like ours could support the mentoring experience for everyone involved. If you’re interested in launching Together at your workplace, [let us know!](<a href="https://www.togetherplatform.com/join-list" rel="nofollow">https://www.togetherplatform.com/join-list</a>).
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: I have noticed recently, after switching to Firefox, that a lot of Googles stuff doesn't work with Firefox. Most resent example is downloading attachments in Gmail. In FF clicking the download attachment button cause the Google servers to basically not respond for at least a few minutes before it would finally allow me to grab the file.<p>It strikes me that instead of the old motto of "Don't Be Evil" Google is now implementing the new motto of "Be Evil All The Time". Very disappointing.
Upvote: | 106 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>Every couple of years I find myself facing the same old tired routine: migrating my stuff off some laptop or desktop to a new one, usually combined with an OS upgrade. Is there anything like the kind of luxuries we now consider normal on the server side (IaaS; Terraform; maybe Ansible) that can be used to manage your PC and that would make re-imaging it as easy as it is on the server side?
Upvote: | 198 |
Title: Namely, why do opinions tend to completely trump evidence for technical decisions? E.g. choosing new trending frameworks, a language that _wasnt_ used on a previous project that failed, choosing a cloud provider based on gut-feeling etc. etc.<p>Is this because it's so easy to get started with new tech? I'd be interested to know what people's experiences are like.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Previously I told HN about the beta for TimeSnapper on Mac and many of you signed up and contributed feedback and suggestions during the beta, or responded with helpful comments in that thread[1].<p>TimeSnapper is now available in the Mac App Store, here:<p>https://apps.apple.com/us/app/timesnapper/id1456327684?mt=12<p>Thank you very much to the 'Show HN' readers who helped us get here today.<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19698363
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: There are lots of deep learning books on the market. The vast majority of them are presenting practical examples using some Python (or whatever) deep learning framework. Such books don't interest me at all. If I wanted to learn some particular framework, I would just look up the documentation for that framework.<p>I'm looking for two types of books:<p>1. A technical, math-heavy introduction to neural networks and deep learning, with little or no actual code (except possibly some pseudocode). The often recommended book by Goodfellow et al resembles what I'm looking for, but unfortunately, it completely lacks exercises.<p>2. An entertaining pop science like book which takes a more philosophical and cross disciplinary look at neural networks as well as their inspirations and applications. I haven't been able to find a single book like this, but surely it has to exist?<p>Recommendations, anyone?
Upvote: | 275 |
Title: Hi everyone, I just found out that I'm gonna be a dad. If is something I always wanted but my income is unpredictable. Sometimes I make 50k sometimes nothing. It never bothered me untill now. So I'm freaking out. What do you guys did when you have to have consistent I'm income.
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I’m Eric, the co-founder of Embrace (<a href="https://embrace.io" rel="nofollow">https://embrace.io</a>).<p>Embrace is a debugging and performance monitoring platform that gives developers the information and context they need to monitor and solve errors, crashes, and performance issues. Think of it as what you wish Crashlytics had evolved into combined with the session replay capability of Fullstory.<p>Before Embrace, I co-founded the mobile gaming company Scopely, where we made six top-grossing mobile games including Yahtzee, Walking Dead, and Star Trek. The pain I felt while developing those games sparked the idea for Embrace. Customers and I would find bugs that were impossible to reproduce by the development and QA teams, and the analytics and logging tools we had in place just weren’t enough to solve them.<p>We had crashes under control, so we cared more about startup freezes, failed purchases, and out-of-memory app closes. Without reproducing the issue, we couldn’t tell if the error was caused by a fundamental code issue, something with my device settings, a network problem, or just a very unfortunate combination of all of the above. The solution seemed simple: I wanted to look up my session and see all the user interactions, networking and logging together to find out what caused my issue.<p>After talking with my friends at other mobile app companies, I knew I wasn’t alone. Things worked well in development, but we saw unexpected errors in production and we never had enough information to solve them. I wanted more than just a stack trace to help developers fix the problem, so my co-founder Fredric—who has now built three mobile analytics companies—and I started Embrace.<p>We've talked with many mobile developers and companies and we saw many common problems with apps, such as slow app starts resulting from too many blocking network calls on startup, and we have built the features into our platform to help solve these problems. We also saw processes that were more cumbersome than they needed to be. Often when developers had to fix an issue they would try to combine data from backend logs, different monitoring tools, and feedback from bug reporters to try to build a picture of what was going wrong, but in the end it still wasn’t enough. There was always that one log message that they realized they should have added and they had to wait another release cycle figuring out a fix for the issue.<p>You can add Embrace’s SDK to your app to start collecting the info I had been missing when building apps. We intercept network calls, track views, monitor CPU usage, capture crashes, and automatically collect many more metrics to provide developers with the context that they have told us helps them solve problems. Add logs and breadcrumbs that you define, and we are able to get you as close to replaying user sessions as possible without capturing video. You’ll be to see able to see the network calls before a failed purchase or whether or not the device was in low-power mode when it crashed.<p>We are fortunate to have 40+ customers already, including Wish, OkCupid, AllTrails, and Home Depot. We helped solve the 2nd largest, long-standing crash for Wish by providing their developers with context they were lacking. Developers for a subscription revenue app were able to identify that a critical network call did not occur as expected when users took a certain path through their app. The most recent customer I visited solved two bugs using info from our tool the day after they integrated.<p>We look forward to answering any questions you have and hearing what challenges you face with your mobile apps. We are free to use in development, so any feedback you have on the service would be much appreciated!
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>We are Bastien, Guillaume and Alex, founders of Lazy Lantern (<a href="https://www.lazylantern.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.lazylantern.com</a>). We work on detecting what really matters as it happens in your website or app.<p>As software engineers in various companies, we repeatedly got overwhelmed by the amount of product analytics we had to keep track of. What specific metrics are you supposed to monitor when you have dozens or hundreds of them, each metric having contextual information about the user, device type, location, language, etc.? This can represent thousands to millions of useful sub-metrics. Despite spending significant time monitoring analytics dashboards on Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Grafana and more, we had to keep track of so many metrics and user segments that impactful events regularly went unnoticed. We often missed technical incidents, but also business opportunities such as not knowing that a feature really moved the needle or that there was sudden adoption for a specific user group.<p>We started Lazy Lantern to build an automated way of analyzing any number of metrics in real-time. The goal is to provide a good picture of impactful events as they happen, both in the case of negative anomalies (outages, bugs, crashes) and positive anomalies (virality, marketing, growth). In practice, we automatically detect abnormal patterns for each metric, in particular temporary spikes/drops, level changes, trend changes and seasonality changes. In case of anomaly, we surface the user segments that are most affected and we group correlated anomalies together to give you a better picture of what parts of the product are impacted.<p>On the implementation side, there were a couple of requirements for an effective anomaly detection algorithm. It has to be:<p>- Autonomous: avoiding manual configuration to be able to scale to arbitrarily high numbers of metrics<p>- Unsupervised: being able to detect anomalies for all types of businesses without knowing beforehand what a typical anomaly for each business looks like<p>- Dynamic: accommodating all kinds of seasonalities and trends, which excludes using static thresholds<p>- Fast: deciding whether a data point is indicative of an incident in minimal time<p>To fulfill these requirements, we first tried the Holt-Winters seasonal models, but finally got the best results with a procedure based upon Facebook’s Prophet forecasting model. To provide a better sense of each anomaly’s severity as well as what areas of the product are affected, we integrated two additional functionalities:<p>- Anomaly severity scoring based on the number of impacted users, deviation from prediction and anomaly duration<p>- Anomaly grouping using a reproduction of VARCLUS, which groups metrics by clusters based on their partial correlations<p>For this initial launch, we are targeting Segment customers, which makes enabling our product a breeze. If people find it useful, we will provide wider support. Pricing is based on the number of metrics you want to track. If you email us at [email protected] mentioning this post, we’ll extend the free trial to 3 months. If you are interested, sign up in one minute on our website at www.lazylantern.com.<p>We’d love to know if you think this product might be useful to you or if there is a better way to approach the problem. Thank you!
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Is it still Freenode / IRC?<p>Why do I ask?<p>I remember 15 years ago, say 2004, technical sites weren't commercial. Except Experts Exchange ofcourse.<p>Nowadays I can't trust opinions of people because I fear they are selling me something. Framework authors are only building frameworks on the side, their real business is building a hosted service for whatever they are building.<p>Nothing wrong with that.<p>I just miss a simpler time. And want a slice of that again.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Hi Hacker News, we're Jamie and Adam, cofounders of Boost Biomes (<a href="http://boostbiomes.com/" rel="nofollow">http://boostbiomes.com/</a>). Boost is developing spray treatments for fruits and crops to prevent mold, mildew and fungi. Packagers can use our products to extend shelf-life for fruits, and farmers can increase yield of crops. The active ingredients are live microbes.<p>I (Jamie) have been in biotech for over a dozen years. A decade ago, I was at a biofuels company working to grow algae, and fungi ruined our crop. At the time I realized that if we could control the ecosystem, we could prevent these kinds of agricultural disasters. In the meantime, Adam, as a professor at Berkeley National Lab and UC-Berkeley over the last two decades, had been developing a technology platform to understand microbial ecology. When Adam and I met a few years ago, we realized that his technology could address these kinds of challenges. No longer interested in algae as a crop, we saw the opportunity in high-value crops. These include strawberries in the field, apples post-harvest and cannabis as an exploding opportunity.<p>We're clearly not the first ones to think about microbial products for ag. What sets our approach apart is the technology that Adam developed. Using his approach, we are able to determine what we call an interaction map - the complete set of interactions between microbes from a given environment. The interaction map generates leads for us, including groups of microbes that work together as 'consortia'. Our current lead product candidates are in fact consortia.<p>Our first product is a soil amendment being sold into the cannabis market. There's a real excitement of the opportunities for the market to expand, and it's an industry full of early-adopters. We're looking longer term, though, as our products will address food production and waste. Fungi destroy enough food to feed 600M people every year—this represents 60% of the people going hungry every year! This is the kind of impact we're after with our tech and with the company.<p>We look forward to discussing the opportunity and technology!
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: Danny Cohen died yesterday morning, August 12th,
peacefully at home. Danny was major figure in the development of Internet protocols, particularly those related to packet audio and video. He was a member of the Internet Hall of Fame (<a href="https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/danny-cohen" rel="nofollow">https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/danny-cohen</a>).
Upvote: | 432 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>We're Lance, Lance, and Dallin (Yes...2 founders named Lance :)). We are the founders of Shift Health (<a href="https://shifthealth.io" rel="nofollow">https://shifthealth.io</a>). We help patients understand what they will owe pre-visit and provide flexibility to pay overtime.<p>Purchasing health care is unlike anything else you buy in our society today. You wouldn’t expect to walk into a grocery store, take home a loaf of bread not knowing the price and then receive a surprise bill 3 months later. So why is this the standard experience for buying health care services? The surprising thing is that the standard experience for doctors offices is not much better. Antiquated billing processes compounded with the fact that patients are responsible for more and more of the bill out of pocket is creating a scenario where doctors offices are only collecting 40% to 60% of the patient out-of-pocket responsibility. We partner with doctors offices to tell patients what their expected out-of-pocket price is before they see their doctor and provide flexibility to pay overtime. Our mission is to make healthcare costs understandable and affordable for all.<p>We all met working on a marketing venture together that we have since exited. While working on our marketing company we carved out time each Friday to discuss big problems that we had the right talents to solve. Those Super Duper Friday’s (as we called them) were really valuable for us. Lance R. (Rodela) has worked in healthcare tech for most of his career (Medicity, Aetna, SolutionReach), and he cued us into the trend of High Deductible Health Plans (HDHP’s). These plans are being rapidly adopted and are having adverse impacts for patients and healthcare organizations. Patients owe more and more out of pocket (up 12% just last year), and healthcare organizations are ill equipped to collect effectively from patients. We set out to validate the problem, and everyone else we talked to agreed that medical billing is almost never a positive experience. So we set off to fix it.<p>Even with Rodela’s background we didn’t realize how hard this was going to be in the beginning. Healthcare has been very resistant to disruption to date. Antiquated legacy systems abound, political lobbyists hover over everything and administrative staff have to be extra cautious not to find themselves on the wrong side of countless regulations and legislation. In short...it’s gnarly. Not sure if it was insanity or inspiration that drove us forward, but onward we went. First, we went out and talked to clinical leaders near us. It did not take us very long to find an excited pilot partner to innovate with us. We did a lot of discovery work with their billing, front office, and operations teams to understand their workflow and requirements. Next we spoke with dozens of patients to better understand their needs, pain points, and challenges. Once we had a firm grasp, we presented mockups and prototypes to the clinic and to their patients to refine an MVP. Finally, we set to work constructing our solution.<p>As we neared completion on the MVP the next hurdle (prior to even getting launched) appeared. We needed to integrate with the practice’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system. Fortunately, our partner had a strong relationship with their EMR provider, which saved us months of what would have otherwise been frustrating back and forth. Whew… we made it, right? Yup! Well, we made it to stage one at least. We launched the pilot and saw excellent feedback from both sides. Patients would text us saying “I love love love this” and our pilot partner saw patient collections grow by 30%.<p>We are not stopping there though. To build the best estimations we needed to build into insurance networks and more, and that is what we are pioneering today. There is still a lot of tech to build (calling all health tech pros hungry to work on something big!), but we are excited to announce that today we are able to text obstetrics patients 48 hours before their appointment how much their care will cost them out of pocket with 95% accuracy.<p>Healthcare payments have been a giant mess for a long time, but all of this is approaching a massive tipping point for change with 3 important market forces:<p>1. Financial Forces: Due to the rapid adoption of HDHP’s, patients are financially responsible for more of their bill. Doctors offices are ill-equipped for this paradigm shift and are collecting less (40%-60% of patient balances are written off). Patients want to know their costs ahead of time, and we have proven that doctors will collect more when they communicate ahead of time and provide flexible payment options.<p>2. Social Forces: Healthcare costs and spending has been catapulted to the center of the upcoming presidential debates, and an executive order requiring price transparency in the United States was signed in June 2019.<p>3. Technological Forces: Platforms are emerging providing more health data access than ever before.<p>I've recently seen some posts on HN about the executive order and price transparency (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20275097" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20275097</a>) so we’re looking forward to a really good discussion.<p>Please reach out with your ideas, help, and connections!
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: Hi Hacker News Community,<p>My name is Jerry, and I’m one co-founders for Lofty AI (<a href="https://www.lofty.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.lofty.ai/</a>). We use
machine learning to help identify homes where values are likely to
appreciate, and we help home buyers buy them. People can partner up with us to buy a recommended property. If they do, we are willing to cover any potential losses on the property. In exchange, the buyer agrees to share some of the future profit on the home with us. The agreement lasts 3 years.<p>Before starting this company, my co-founder and I had tried to invest in homes. However, we quickly got tired of realtors telling us to make offers based on very little data. We wanted to figure out a way to buy affordable homes that had the highest growth potential via a data driven approach. We realized there was a wealth of new alternative data out there, which could be used to predict both neighborhood growth and individual property growth. This alternative data we envisioned ranged from the growth in the number of postings on social media about a specific dog breed, to the number of restaurants in an area serving a specific type of trendy food, to the average wait time for ride sharing apps, and the average maximum temperature an area can experience.<p>Our tech involves running clustering to identify trends and keywords from text based data (e.g.: social media photo tags, business reviews) that are associated with different categories of neighborhoods (for example: rich/suburban/static, middle-class/urban/growing). We then take these insights and feed them into a larger model with historical home prices, house level features, and an array of other numeric features (e.g. ride sharing wait times, new businesses) that predicts future home price on both an individual property and neighborhood level. With this trained model we can then predict future home prices based on these alternative data sources (as well a few traditional data sources). As we ingest more data going forward we are constantly retraining and reoptimizing our models. Along with successful backtesting we have been tracking our predictions to validate our models in production and have found that properties we had identified 12 months ago have beaten the market in appreciation by an average of 14 points (yay!).<p>Most young working professionals want to live in or near large metropolitan cities for the lifestyle and better jobs market. This has contributed to extremely high home prices for places like the bay area and many young professionals end up paying rent that is on par with a mortgage payment. However, instead of building equity in their own future through an investment, they are simply making their landlords richer.<p>We want to change this by giving people another option. They can now invest in a home and their capital can be protected should the investment flop. The trade off is that these homes tend to be located in areas not “currently” deemed to be a desirable neighborhood. In essence, we want to help inexperienced home buyers make smarter decisions, and we are willing to risk our own capital for that.
In the event of a downturn in the market we are hedging our exposure by buying deep out of the money options that track the real estate market. These hedges are also attached to each individual contract so even if we were to go out of business before the maturation of the agreement or before a downturn in the market your downside protection would still be alive and well! As a result, anything that’s above a 20% decline across the portfolio will be covered by the hedging instruments, so we only need to be able to guarantee the range between 0 to -20% using our own capital. To make sure we can abide by the guarantee, we know exactly how many contracts we can enter into, and we will not go above that threshold until we obtain more funding.<p>Sign up with us to receive a list of recommended properties that our models think will appreciate over the next 3 years. Make an offer on the property you like the most using any method you’d like. If you don’t have an agent you work with, we can recommend you one along with helping you get a mortgage. After you make an offer on a home, you enter into a contract with us. We agree to cover losses over the next 3 years and in exchange, you share some of the future upside with us.<p>Let us know if you have any questions or insights, and I’ll be happy to respond! Feel free to directly reach out to me at [email protected] as well. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions!
Upvote: | 81 |
Title: I see like 2-3 posts a day about Lisp. What's so good about it?
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I’m Kevin, founder of Dex (<a href="https://getdex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://getdex.com/</a>). Dex is a personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch with people you might otherwise forget.<p>I started working on Dex because I felt like I was falling out-of-touch with people I cared about. I wanted to be aware of “how long it had been” and more proactive about maintaining my relationships.<p>Looking to solve this problem, I tried data tools like Airtable, Notion, and Google Sheets. It was easy to setup a sheet to track relationships, but I eventually found these tools difficult to keep up with. I’d end up procrastinating on updating my records and would rarely find the time to revisit them.<p>Dex is a personal CRM that aims to be simple, intuitive, and accessible. To get started, users sign up for a web application that connects with their Google contacts and calendar (and optionally Facebook and LinkedIn data). With this information, Dex suggests people to contact every day. Over time, these suggestions become better as users customize how frequently they’d like to reach out.<p>Dex includes the functionality you might include from a CRM: logging notes, setting reminders, and organizing contacts. A feature which makes Dex unique is a Chrome extension, which allows you to view relationship history and add people without leaving social networking sites like LinkedIn, Messenger, Twitter, and Facebook.<p>Most people realize the value and fulfillment that come from maintaining relationships, but occasionally still fall out of touch due to forgetfulness. Dex helps these people with a system of regular reminders to keep in touch. I’ve noticed many people already have their own ‘system’ for managing relationships, and I’m always interested in hearing about different people think about dealing with staying on top of relationships.<p>I’d also welcome any other feedback about Dex! Feel free to also email me directly at kevin [at] getdex [dot] com. Thanks for your attention! :)
Upvote: | 189 |
Title: I was reading that Mercedes-Benz PRE-SAFE(R) marketing prose, and it prompted me to ask this question that I've been wondering for a while: Why do companies mess up their text and logo images with TM and (R) symbols?<p>To be clear: I understand what trademark laws and registration are for. I am not asking for an overview of the theory of trademark law. I'm specifically asking why they insist on slathering TM and (R) symbols in text and in images. What horrible thing would happen if Mercedes-Benz had not awkwardly slapped (R) after every-other word in that article?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: I am in the process of learning go and i think something like Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial would fit nicely for me right now. I've looked at usegolang.com but i am not sure it has emphasis on API's. Any suggestions?
Upvote: | 131 |
Title: It's the second time in a few months I'm being turned down with the pretext of a failed whiteboard interview. Things like improper syntax and not getting the damned recursive solution fast enough.
Given that I am 42 yrs old and been at this line of work for 14 yrs now I think it's safe to assume that I neither have the time nor the appetite to constantly exercise on solving mind puzzles in whiteboard. I am good at what I do -and I do it at a top level company- but it has nothing to do with coding on a whiteboard. I'm sure that anyone who is a few years _out_ of the university and _into_ a real job finds it both hard and surreal to go through these hoops to land a job. Whiteboarding simply tests for skills that are not needed nor exercised once you're out of uni<i>.<p>Thinking all that it then dawned on me. Maybe this abomination is just a way to take out older candidates and favor young ones. A form of ageism that is legally safe for the company.<p>Dunno - what's your thoughts?<p></i>By whiteboarding here I mean testing the form of questions one can find in places like hackerank and the like. Obviously, drawing a large system design or using a whiteboard as an aid to describe/analyze other aspects of a system is not the topic I'm touching on here.<p>PS 1: I'm done with that sh1tshow myself. I sincerely hope I'm never that desperate to put myself through that again.<p>PS 2: For what is worth here's a repo with all companies that do not use whiteboarding: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: Hey HN: I’m Ryan, the founder of Vendr (<a href="https://vendr.com" rel="nofollow">https://vendr.com</a>).<p>We buy and renew software for companies. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time with software salespeople. We believe that the buying process should be dictated by the buyer. For example, if you want to procure New Relic, you should be able to do it your way, not the salesperson’s way. Vendr was created so that companies can get the SaaS they need without needing to invest the time to procure.<p>My background is in software sales. Previous to founding Vendr, I was head of enterprise sales for InVision and director of SMB sales for HubSpot, so I've learned how to buy and sell software. I’ve witnessed that many salespeople are really good at wasting customers' time (unnecessary qualification calls, demos, etc). Buying and renewing software is complicated, and even more if you want to get the best deal. We take care of all that and get you the software you need, fast, and at the best possible price. We also handle renewals and are able to reduce the price per seat as a company grows.<p>Vendr is currently buying and renewing software for many fast-growing companies. We are currently working with Canva, GitLab, Brex, Drift, HubSpot, InVision, and others. These companies have hired us to save time and money. And it’s working. For example, in our first 12 months working with InVision, we saved them over $1.5M. Many of our customers are good negotiators, but they’ve realized that spending the cycles is not a good use of their time.<p>Here’s how it works: We are typically hired by the head of finance or engineering. We analyze and organize your current SaaS purchases and renewal dates. You introduce Vendr to your vendors and we manage the procurement process from start to finish—getting you exactly what you need without ever having to pick up the phone. We are integrated into your Slack environment to keep you posted along the way.<p>We make money via a monthly subscription to buy and renew all of the SaaS in your stack. Our subscription fee is based on your company size and ranges from $2k-10k+. Happy to chat directly at [email protected].<p>Have you experienced specific issues buying software? How have your experiences been working with software salespeople? We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas, and your experiences!
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: Hey HN, I'm Noah, co-founder of SannTek (<a href="https://www.sannteklabs.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.sannteklabs.com</a>). We're building a breathalyzer for cannabis.<p>I bet some of you have had the same idea cross your mind that we had: "If we have a breathalyzer for alcohol, why don't we have a breathalyzer for cannabis?" We're nanotechnology engineering alumni from the University of Waterloo. Two factors led into us deciding to pursue this idea: 1. Cannabis was being legalized across Canada and police were completely ill-prepared, so we saw an opportunity to help; 2. the science required to make this device exist was particularly interesting.<p>Alcohol breathalyzers are fundamentally a fuel cell where the alcohol in your breath sample is oxidized, which then produces an electrical current that the device then translates to BAC. For alcohol, this works because of Henry's Law, which says that at any given temperature the ratio between the concentration of alcohol in the blood and that in the alveolar air in the lungs is constant.<p>Cannabis is a very different beast. Not only is it a non-volatile, fat-soluble molecule, but the mechanism in which THC (the psychoactive component of cannabis) appears in your breath isn't super straight forward. Also, it is present in much lower concentrations in the breath compared to alcohol. Whereas a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08% (the legal limit in most states) might result in a concentration of 208 ppm of ethanol in the breath, a similarly impairing dose of cannabis results in 0.00001 ppm of the drug in breath.<p>Detecting such a low concentration is difficult, and as a result, cannabis drug use has been detected in a variety of sub-optimal ways. The state of the art is a blood draw, followed by detection of THC at a toxicology laboratory using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. While accurate and well-validated, this approach has several problems. First of all, since THC is fat-soluble it remains in a person's body much longer than alcohol, especially if that person is a frequent user. Frequent users have been known to have detectable THC in their blood one week after beginning abstinence. These people are clearly not impaired all week but could be arrested and charged with a DUI based on many states laws across the US. Interestingly, police have the opposite problem with infrequent users. For most people, the concentration of THC in their system will decay quickly post-consumption. It takes around 2 hours (at best) for a police officer to get a blood draw from a suspect. At this point, many people will no longer have detectable THC in their system. Our device solves both these problems for police. Our breathalyzer uses an ultra-sensitive immunosensor to detect the minute concentration of THC in breath. Breath is the better medium for cannabis testing for several reasons. First of all, THC concentration in breath for both frequent users and infrequent users decays below detectable levels within 3-4 hours post-consumption and we have never detected THC in the baseline for any of our subjects. So our device does not incorrectly identify frequent users as impaired as blood testing can. Secondly, the breath tests can be administered quickly roadside, eliminating the risk of concentration decay seen with blood draws.<p>Our device comes with a reusable analyzer and a single-use disposable cartridge. It costs us $2 to make a cartridge, and police are willing to pay $20 per test. An individual will breathe into the mouthpiece, and our filter system will collect exhaled breath particles (specifically non-VOCs). Currently, we manually "extract" the THC off of the filter into a solvent liquid, but in the future, this will be automated using novel microfluidics. The solvent, with the captured THC, is then transferred to the surface of the sensor- which is an electrochemical immunoassay. When the THC is there, the output signal is different than when the THC is not there (happy to dive further into this in the comments if people are interested).<p>We haven't had enough resources to run any formal trials yet to publish data, but that is changing this year. We've hired a contract research organization, (shout out Curebase), to help us run our very first clinical trial with blood draws. We're going to be looking at the correlation between breath and blood concentrations, at various time intervals after consumption, to validate (or invalidate!) our preliminary in house data.<p>Selling to the police is notoriously difficult, but we're imagining a world where there are one of our devices in every police car in North America. This weekend we exhibited at the IACP DAID and the response from the attendees was great! We have over 30 police departments across North America that have expressed interest in purchasing the device and that number is increasing every day.<p>We're excited to hear all your questions and feedback! I encourage any questions you may have for us :)
Upvote: | 224 |
Title: I know this question has been asked before, in one form or the next. But I'd like to make a push to expand my media diet. Are there any domain specific aggregators you use, or are there any promising new plays in the news aggregation space?
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: I've been looking at the Western Digital My Passport SSD Wireless devices with the idea of setting this up for a client for local server backup.<p>I already have the client setup for backup to remote storage (rsync.net) but for redundancy and speedier access in the case of an emergency I would like them to have access to a local backup. However, through prior experience, I've learned that if any effort is required then eventually good practice stops.<p>So my thought is to have a small box that the user takes home (to avoid loss due to fire or other catastrophe at the office) and then at least once a week brings in to the office for the day and then takes home again. The 'box' would automatically connect to the local wireless network and would be able to use something like rsync and would have access to the server necessary to make a full backup hopefully before the user leaves for the day. I'm thinking SSD is a better choice than a spinning disk for reliability while being carried around regularly.<p>A little research on the Western Digital wireless storage devices suggests linux is running underneath and that it is possible to enable SSH, login as root, and start hacking.<p>I guess my question is has anyone here actually done that and can you provide any additional details? As far as I can tell this is not something that is officially supported by Western Digital.<p>Alternatively is anyone aware of a similar device (mostly closed box, rechargable internal battery, wireless accessible) that either has internal SSD storage or into which an SD card can be installed that also has a *nix filesystem underneath?<p>Access to a solid ZFS implementation would be a plus.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I feel like I'm missing the boat in terms of places online to find new music to listen to. What are some good websites to explore music?
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: A friend of mine has just taught herself the basics of JavaScript then done a code boot camp. She's pretty comfortable writing code now, but hasn't had a chance to get to grips with stuff like complexity analysis yet.<p>It seems to me like she's a member of a large and growing target audience for a book that gets you started with all the stuff you would learn in a computer science degree, with the assumption that you already know how to express an algorithm as code.<p>Can anyone recommend such a book?
Upvote: | 306 |
Title: I'm a 32 years old self-taught programmer who has a strong resume and impressing experience, found jobs all over the world until today easily. But; I don't enjoy building software anymore. I do it just for bringing home money, I got one kid to take care of.<p>I enjoy reading books and learning a lot, so wouldn't mind working hard to start something new from scratch.<p>Getting a degree in Business is an option in my mind. I wonder if that would be a multiplier on top of my programming experience. I'm open for suggestions for studying something else, would be open to hear some ideas.<p>I found out that Arizona State University has a remote program, but it costs about 30k. I can't afford that. It's way above my budget.<p>Do you know any universities that has an affordable bachelors degree program ?<p>I live in Europe but it can be everywhere in the world. It'd be great if it's in US, so I can also improve my English along the way :)
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Question:<p>How does your company scale salary/benefits for part-time work?<p>Context:<p>We're a small startup in the UK trying to figure out our hiring policies. An idea we've tossed around before is that since we offer remote work with fairly flexible hours, there's a terrific opportunity to hire people who are taking a career break due to their personal life (young children etc).<p>Our perceived benefit is:<p>* we're getting access to a talent pool that might otherwise be ignored<p>* the offerings that are very possible as a small company (remote, flexible hours, easy access to management) are far more impactful to someone in this situation<p>* we have a future opportunity to let our bandwidth grow<p>The cost of two part-time employees isn't quite the same as one full-time, since we incur about the same fixed costs anyway (management time in 1-2-1's, payroll administration, dev setup etc). So we're wondering if cutting the salary in half is actually what we want to do?
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: TLDR; My main question if you needed emergency dev work to pay the bills how would you find it? Sob story alert below...<p>I had a decent client back in May/June but on June 1st rent was due and the client hadn't paid so I let them know development would cease till I received payment. I then got an email I was removed from bit bucket and slack and then ghosted.<p>I've been trying to find a new client ever since but for some reason it's been hard going. Usually they find me and I've had to turn them down.<p>I've reached out to all previous leads and clients and nobody has any work right now.<p>We just moved into a cheaper apartment but spent all our savings on deposit, first and last months rent, one month of storage and a uhaul, and groceries and gas.<p>Today my Internet bill came due $247 for August and July plus a moving fee.<p>I'm flat broke, our credit isn't great. I don't have anyone to borrow money from. I even tried r/borrow on Reddit.<p>Without internet I can't even work on my side project I'm trying to build (a Reddit tool for scheduling across multiple accounts, view all inbox messages across multiple accounts, view all slack/twitter DM's, and a scrumboard that I can add leads to via one click and autofollowup with them in a few months. Basically it'll make managing job and freelance on slack and Reddit much easier.)<p>I just need one good client my hourly is $80 but I've even tried dropping back down to $50 and no takers. I'm almost 40 with two boys under 3 years old and at the end of my rope. I'm trying to fight back depression but it's getting harder each day. Imposter syndrome is starting to set in even though I know I'm a solid developer.<p>I know react, Vue, express, ionic, node and laravel. I can also get around in a rails app. What I don't know I can learn.<p>Willing to do weekly pay where I might work an average of 50-60 hours per week for 1800/week.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Pairing is famously a UX nightmare [0]. Even Apple's AirPods cut out constantly, suffer from interference from other nearby devices [1], and apparently just don't work in an open space [2].<p>To people with Bluetooth expertise: Why is the Bluetooth audio experience always so...bad? Are there some fundamental technical limitations in the spec? Are my expectations unreasonable? Or is it just always implemented poorly? Followup: are there competing technologies that Just Work™?<p>[0]: https://xkcd.com/2055/<p>[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-is/HT209369 ("move away from places [with] a lot of Wi-Fi activity")<p>[2]: http://www.iphonehacks.com/2018/04/heres-why-your-airpods-or-other-bluetooth-headphones-cut-out-while-crossing-a-street.html
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: David Koch was one of the most interesting businessmen of our time. Sure, some people don't agree with his views. But, why are ALL posts about his death being flagged and subsequently removed? None of them seem to be violating any of the rules. This is an honest question!<p>Examples:<p>- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20777811<p>- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20777292
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I currently use uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger, but I've become frustrated with having to disable one or both of the above for too many sites--they just break functionality for a good chunk of the web. What's the best setup these days for ad-blocking + privacy/tracker-blocking that doesn't break the web? Thanks!
Upvote: | 277 |
Title: I just got a recaptcha prompt while logging in.<p>Has Google been linking my HN profile to my ad profile this whole time?
Upvote: | 40 |
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