prompt
stringlengths 16
15.6k
| completion
stringlengths 4
6
|
|---|---|
Title: We often hear about cool new things in STEM fields, but much less frequently about non-STEM fields. What are some of the most exciting things right now in other fields?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: I like the Rails model of ActiveRecord and Spring Data too. Any other models, tools, frameworks that make building CRUD apps easy and also provide flexibility?
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms?preview=20191210#main<p>> Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes
>
> YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.
Upvote: | 133 |
Title: Frequent job posts by YC companies prioritized on front page:<p>ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring a Full-Stack Engineer in SF - 1 hour ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508840)<p>ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring a Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 20 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21318785)<p>ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring a Full-Stack Engineers in SF and in ATX - 32 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213893)<p>ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring 2 Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 39 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21146429)<p>ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring 2 Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 46 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21080481)<p>ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 54 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21003584)<p>ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring a Director of Engineer in SF - 75 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20822555)<p>ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 89 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20695766)<p>ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20571209)<p>Would love a setting to turn this off, so new posts from same company are auto hidden.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: My friend invented a very exciting technology over the course of many years and received a patent on it. We have been casually working together on developing and commercializing it and there are many promising signs. We work well together and trust each other, and plan to formalize the project by incorporating.<p>I know typically founders are encouraged to assign all relevant IP to the new company, but my friend thinks his patent is worth >$100m and wants to maintain personal ownership of the patent. I'm worried that if we start a company that uses the invention without owning the patent, our company could be killed at any time by the patent holder. While I trust my cofounder, investors may be turned off and the patent could always end up in the hands of a less benevolent owner.<p>Is there any way we can safely start a company using his invention without holding the patent? Perhaps my friend can grant a license/authorization to the new company? Or is my friend being delusional and should just assign his patent to the company?<p>Any thoughts will be appreciated–thanks!
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: How does your company visualize and report on what’s happening in the business?
Upvote: | 427 |
Title: I’ve been enjoying Fluent Python and started looking for a nice book on SQLite, which made me wonder what great books there are in other areas that could help me be a more well-rounded developer.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: How did your team build out AI/ML pipelines and integrated it with your existing codebase? For example, how did your backend team(using Java?) work in sync with data teams (using R or python?) to have minimal rewriting/glue code as possible to deploy models in production. What were your architectural decisions that worked, or didn't?<p>I'm currently working to make an ML model written in R work on our backend system written in Java. After the dust settles I'll be looking for ways to streamline this process.
Upvote: | 387 |
Title: Please show me the best free / online courses to allow me to gain a further understanding of CS theory and other closely related theory (Maths, cryptography, etc). If this has been asked before or something similar please link. Thanks.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: I am a web developer, and usually, have for 3 - 4 hours free when back from the office. I always want to learn or make something. Can you show me something?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I'm in the process of creating a website for my development/consulting freelance work, and could use some inspiration.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I work with and speak to many startups. When I ask questions around the product value, especially in context of defensibility, they assert that their "long term play is using machine learning on our data". This has been pretty consistent in the last few years, regardless of the nature of the product or the market for which the product is targeted. This typically comes with assertions such as "data is the new oil" and "once we have our dataset and models the Big Tech shops will have no choice but to acquire us".<p>To me this feels a lot like the claims made by startups I've encountered in past tech-hype-cycles, such as IoT and blockchain. In both of these areas there seemed to be a pervasive sense of "if we build it, they will acquire".<p>The question I have for HN is in two parts:<p>1. Why is it that a lot of startups seem to be betting the farm, so to speak, on "machine learning" as their core value?<p>2. Is it reasonable to be highly skeptical of startups that make these claims, seeing it as a sign they have no real vision for their product?<p>[EDIT]: add missing pt2 of my question
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: I mean how many of you stick with this test driven development practice consistently? Can you describe the practical benefit? Do you happen to rewrite the tests completely while doing the implementation? When does this approach work for you and when did it fail you?
Upvote: | 248 |
Title: Having a hard time to reading without the annoying popup for your sign up, please, let me know which other platforms do you use?
Upvote: | 137 |
Title: Example: https://imgur.com/a/XMeiO4D<p>Is it only me? Is something is wrong with Firefox installer?<p>I'm trying to download Firefox from official mozilla website and Chrome says that the file is harmful. For reference it's not the .dmg extension because if I go to Chrome and download googlechrome.dmg it gets downloaded without any problems.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I need to print something once a month at best. I can use FedEx or other to print but it can be a PITA. I was hoping there are others here on HN that are in a similar situation. I'm looking for a printer that will do fine with infrequent use and the ink will still work when I go to use it.<p>I'm looking to print way less that 100 sheets/yr, we are talking shipping labels here, nothing serious.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: I'm asking this from the context of ideas & solutions, I'm facing this sort of struggle that I'm unable to find solution that is completely outrageous. I feel that my level-headedness could be one of the factors for my failure to come up with some out-of-the-box thinking.<p>HN, am I valid in this assumption or completely stupid?
Upvote: | 159 |
Title: Hope everyone is having a good weekend. The title says it all – how do you guys manage formalities (e.g. minutes for BoDs/shareholders meetings, resolutions, annual reports, etc) for your corporation?
In my previous company (sold 2 months ago) I took care of the legal formalities, however I whished I had a little more support/ guidance to make sure our processes were compliant (our accountants were mostly focused on tax filings and didn’t have their support on this). We didn't use Clerky ourselves, I believe they may be taking care of this with one of their packages. Curious to hear what others founders think of this subject/ how you guys handle this
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: In your field of expertise, what's not possible now, but will become possible in 3-5 years? What about 10 years?
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: I would like to pick the brains of experienced managers here and se what they think are things a new manager should do, study, look for etc.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: The most influential journalist ever, his reputation smeared and possibly being slowly murdered.
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: Hi all, I have Bose Quiet Comfort nc headphones from 2004. I loved them. Electronically, they still work great, but mechanically they are on their last legs.<p>I’ve had a hard time finding what seem like good reviews online.<p>My use case is primarily for airline flights.<p>Can anyone make any suggestions? Any thoughts about in ear vs over ear?
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: One gets the terms of conditions updates via email, like linked-in, or just as start-up popup when you init the app, like xcode, anything that helps to understand exactly what changed especially for well-known apps?
Upvote: | 168 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I've been going back to UML to try to tame some of my design/notes for my projects. Is there something that generates some more modern looking UML diagrams out there?
Upvote: | 223 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>We’re Roger and Chris, co-founders of Convictional (<a href="https://www.convictional.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.convictional.com/</a>). Convictional makes it possible for online retailers to find, onboard, and integrate with third-party suppliers. We do this by connecting them to a network of suppliers that manage the inventory and ship those products directly to the end consumer on their behalf.<p>The idea behind Convictional started when Roger worked at GNC, a large natural health products retailer, at the age of 17. One of the biggest challenges was onboarding. As a retailer, you either buy inventory or ship from third parties ("drop shipping"). They decided to expand their catalog by selling some products that were shipped directly by the supplier. To do this, GNC required both sides to implement EDI (an old school, pre-internet data format for exchanging information between business systems) or manually exchange flat files for things like inventory, orders, and product information. We only got a fraction of the total vendors we wanted to onboarded because of this.<p>A few years later, we met while working together at Shopify on B2B. There, we saw that the challenge of onboarding third-party brands still existed for retailers, and people were experiencing the same pain trying to use EDI to get it done. Online retailers also didn’t know how to find third-party brands to work with or struggled to dropship with existing partners.<p>Convictional’s product is an app and API that syncs product information, inventory, orders, fulfillments, and payouts between online retailers and all of their suppliers. We do this by integrating with the systems used on both sides through an API or pre-built connectors to ecommerce platforms like Shopify. We later added a way to find suppliers after online retailers told us that they also wanted to access a network of connected third-party brands.<p>We’re using a generalized data model in the middle with a bunch of mapping, transformation and transmission steps on each side. Similar to what EDI does but much easier to set up. The goal is to turn what today requires a 6 month IT project into an email invite and an app install. It’s an industry that has existed since the 60s, and it’s probably the last major software industry that touches commerce but has not meaningfully been updated.<p>To do this we developed our own queueing system in Go that can map events from buyers and sellers, transform them from the source format into the destination format, validate and apply a bunch of domain-specific business logic to make sure what crosses the bounds of buyers and sellers actually makes sense, and then send those into another queue that passes it to their partner. We basically have to control the state of three systems for each transaction. Before us, it could take up to 24 hours to know whether that loop succeeded or not but we’re able to do it within a few seconds. There are a lot of real life things that enables, but mostly it enables a good experience for the buyer’s ultimate consumers and less inventory for both sides.<p>Our belief is that online retailers will be less inclined to take on inventory. That’s why we started by building the tooling necessary to automate dropship. Over time, we’ll launch tools that can enable more forms of B2B trade in a way where regardless of IT skills, both sides can have systems doing their purchasing and selling for them. Today large companies enjoy significant advantages through this integrated approach, and soon every buyer and seller can too.<p>Brands and suppliers can join our seller network for free. If you make or sell physical products on an ecommerce platform, consider joining. For online retailers, we charge a flat monthly fee and a percentage of GMV, depending on volume and which work gets outsourced to us.<p>If you have questions, we’ll be here to answer them. We’d love any feedback, ideas, and/or EDI horror stories that you may have as well. Thank you!
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: I'm taking quite a few notes at work, sometimes just reminders, sometimes a quick scribble, you know the deal.<p>I think I've filled several notebooks this year and I wonder whether there's something better than putting ink on dead wood.<p>Does HN have any good alternatives? Possibly without some strange app which is coupled to a 3rd party service or something like that.<p>Full digitalization of the notes would be great, but I'm up to whatever you can recommend.<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: A lot of what hackers do takes years of building knowledge upon knowledge. That's also true for physicists, marketers, salespeople, managers, etc.<p>Are there any quick wins that 30 ~ 60 minutes of intense concentration can generate?<p>For example an average person, if focused, can learn to read (but not understand) Korean decently in under an hour.<p>A person can also learn a few guitar chords and possibly play a carefully-chosen song in that time.<p>But those aren't valuable skills in themselves.<p>Do you know of any simple + valuable wins in your area of interest?<p>("valuable" intentionally left vague)
Upvote: | 1460 |
Title: As many of you have already read, Private Internet Access has recently been acquired by a company named Kape Technologies. Kape Technologies is a huge company that also owns the likes of CyberGhost and Zenmate. I decided to read more and found facts that thoroughly shocked me:<p>1. CyberGhost was acquired by Kape Technologies(previously named Crossrider) back in 2017. Crosrider was known to hide malware/adware in their software and then sell data collected by it.<p>2. The co-founder of Kape Technologies, Teddy Sagi was sentenced to prison in regards to fraud and bribery back in 1996.<p>3. CyberGhost was also found to have WebRTC, IPv6 as well as DNS leaks multiple times, risking its users’ privacy.<p>4. Private Internet Access hired Mark Karpeles (ex-CEO of MT.Gox BitCoin platform) as their CTO. Karpeles was arrested and found guilty when tampering with financial records, trying to hide the platform’s loss by combining his personal finances with the exchange’s.<p>5. Private Internet Access’s founder Andrew Lee, also known as Rasengan on HackerNews, made serious allegations against ProtonVPN.<p>6. Allegations against NordVPN followed, where PIA’s employee was caught sharing a misleading PDF as a ‘concerned citizen’.<p>7. An ex-employee of PIA was threatened due to disclosing management issues, therefore spilling a lot of information about the company.<p>8. The same employee disclosed that PIA faked Reddit comments and ordered to downvote negative feedback about the product.<p>9.Another thing to consider is that before acquisition, Private Internet Access was in debt of over $32 million.<p>The facts about these companies were easy to find, to be honest, I didn’t need to dig deep to find them. I am just truthfully shocked about this and how much I didn’t know about the companies beforehand. Personally, given this knowledge, I am not going to support these companies, especially when they potentially have criminal past and present activities.
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Hi HN community! We’re Tom and Pasha, co-founders of InsideSherpa (<a href="https://www.insidesherpa.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.insidesherpa.com/</a>). Our website hosts online courses (which we call ‘virtual experiences’) that allow any college student to learn from companies for free, and then get hired by them. These courses are created by companies like JPMorgan Chase [1], General Electric [2], Deloitte[3], Citibank [4] and Latham & Watkins [5].<p>There are many talented and determined college students who get overlooked during the hiring process because of arbitrary measures like what university they went to, how their resume was written, or by not having any connections into a company.<p>Tom and I saw this in our corporate careers—we used to work in law and big 4 accounting—and spent a lot of free time helping disadvantaged students improve their resumes. We found that with a bit of editing, skill-building and some exposure to people from big companies, we could increase the likelihood that someone would get an interview and land a job at a big organization. After doing this process manually day-in and day-out we thought there had to be a way to improve employment outcomes for students, at scale!<p>So we started InsideSherpa and decided to take a student-centric approach to understanding the recruitment process. To do this, we talked to tons of students and found consistent anxieties arose: 1. Students were anxious about choosing a career for the next 5 years of their life (and do it in a risk-free manner) 2. Students weren’t sure if they had the skills to be useful to employers (usually when they actually did have the skills) and 3. Many students felt like the big companies were so inaccessible to them they didn’t even consider applying at all.<p>On top of this, we’ve found many large companies tend to only visit a tiny percentage of the campuses in the US. This meant many talented students we met, in more isolated or non-target universities, weren’t even getting a shot to apply for a job.<p>To solve these problems, we created our “Virtual Experience Programs”. These are like an online course, but instead of teaching you theory, like they do at college or in MOOCs, you receive tasks that simulate what professionals do in industry. For example, one task in our JPMorgan Chase Software Engineering program is to quickly update a Python script to find the average of two financial data feeds—something junior software engineers actually do with traders. Other tasks on our platform allow students to build practical skills in law, mechanical engineering, management consulting and investment banking.<p>By doing the Virtual Experience Programs, students can get their name and profile onto a CRM that our partner clients are using for early-talent reachout and hiring. JPMorgan Chase prioritizes its Virtual Experience participants for review in the application process for software engineering summer internships and full-time roles. Students can always opt-out of sharing their data with any firm at any time as well.<p>Our programs are free for any college student to do. We make money by charging employers rather than students. Employers love what we do as it allows them to reach out and find college students who genuinely want to pursue a career in their field, no matter who they are or where they are.<p>We’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can make the hiring process better for college students!<p>[1] The JPMorgan Chase Software Engineering Virtual Experience: <a href="https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/R5iK7HMxJGBgaSbvk/Technology%20Virtual%20Experience" rel="nofollow">https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/R...</a><p>[2] General Electric Program: <a href="https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/EhPoi4AiGigk4CJKq/Global-Leadership-Program" rel="nofollow">https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/E...</a><p>[3] Deloitte Program: <a href="https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/FqFtWwQzNxJ8Qsh5H/Technology%20Consulting" rel="nofollow">https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/F...</a><p>[4] Citibank Program: <a href="https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/icdo6cFXmnQtb8WLK/Virtual-Banking-Program" rel="nofollow">https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/i...</a><p>[5] Latham & Watkins (Law) Program: <a href="https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/jDTDRBDa5XfECcEk9/LathamWatkins-Mergers-Acquisitions-Virtual-Experience-Program" rel="nofollow">https://www.insidesherpa.com/virtual-internships/prototype/j...</a>
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: Hi everyone!<p>We’re Steve and Eric, the founders of Berbix (<a href="https://www.berbix.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.berbix.com</a>). We make it easy to instantly verify photo IDs. Our goal is to empower platforms to accurately identify their users while being responsible stewards of sensitive information.<p>Today, we’re launching our self-service ID checks (<a href="https://www.berbix.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.berbix.com/pricing</a>) to organizations of any size that need to answer the question: Are you who you say you are?<p>We’re taking a privacy-first approach to identity verification. Your government-issued photo ID is one of the most sensitive pieces of information you own, and sharing it with a company online can be scary. We’ve invested significant effort to try to do this the right way from a security perspective, ensuring all images that ever leave our system are aggressively watermarked, and enforcing short retention policies to automatically purge data. We aren’t—nor do we ever intend to be—in the business of selling personal data.<p>Unless you’re a credit card processor, everyone knows that you’d be crazy to collect credit card numbers directly without using a system like Stripe because of PCI compliance. But there’s no equivalent standard for identity documents. It’s still the wild west when it comes to best practices around this extremely sensitive data. Companies inevitably will need to collect this data, whether to comply with regulations to verify age, confirm the identity of a GDPR or CCPA request, or deter fraud on a marketplace. It may come across as self serving, but we’d rather have a privacy-oriented company collect that data on their behalf.<p>We were the product and engineering leaders of the Trust & Safety team at Airbnb for several years where we were tasked with stopping all bad things from happening on Airbnb—both online and offline. This was a challenging problem as it included your typical online fraud like chargebacks, account takeovers, and wire scams in addition to much more novel offline risks like property damage and personal safety issues.<p>We learned to distinguish between “premeditated” bad actors who come to a platform with the intent to cause harm and “opportunistic” bad actors who would swipe a $20 bill on a nightstand, as an example. Some techniques work well against one group, but not the other. One effective means to fight both is to check a government-issued photo ID. Premeditated bad actors will often leave to find another platform with fewer protections, and opportunistic bad actors will think twice before doing something malicious in the moment when they know their ID has been checked.<p>Historically, checking IDs online has been hard. It required a 5-figure contract with a legacy ID verification provider, would take minutes or more, and the quality of the data returned left a lot to be desired. We knew there had to be a better way, and so we started Berbix. Our product returns a result in 2 seconds or less and leverages the machine- and human-readable components of a photo ID to maximize accuracy.<p>We’ve designed Berbix in a way that we, as developers, would want to use it (<a href="https://docs.berbix.com" rel="nofollow">https://docs.berbix.com</a>), with backend API libraries that make an integration simple and intuitive. We offer client-side SDKs for a number of platforms including React, iOS, Android and more (<a href="https://github.com/berbix" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/berbix</a>). We make integration simple enough to be completed in a matter of minutes, while also providing flexibility to offer custom configurations if desired. Using our API, you can request the information you need to verify your users, while isolating your servers from ever handling the sensitive user-submitted ID images directly.<p>We’d love feedback from the HN community. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Upvote: | 106 |
Title: I'm in the middle of a job search. Here are some stats:<p><pre><code> - 50 applications submitted
- 21 no response
- 3 no longer hiring
- 11 rejected without interview
- 15 first round interviews
- 9 technical interviews
- 2 rejected after technical interview
- 2 onsite
</code></pre>
I have ~6 years of experience as a self-taught fullstack web developer with a bit more professional experience on the frontend, though I'm comfortable with both sides. I've had a senior level title. All of my performance reviews have been positive and I don't have trouble doing the work. My current CTO said that I was one of the smartest developers on our team of 20. I got similar feedback from colleagues at my last company and I was promoted there 4 times in 3 years. I blog regularly about programming, including posts that have been on the front page of Hacker News. I spoke at a conference this year. I have a decent amount of work on Github, including some contributions to well known open source projects.<p>I feel like the numbers for this job search are not good but I can't figure out what the problem is. A large majority of the companies rejected me without an interview, either sending a form letter or not response at all. There hasn't been any feedback about why they're not interested in me. This has been especially true of larger, more well-known companies. I'm completely qualified on paper but there's no interest.<p>I've also started to lose confidence for technical interviews. They feel so arbitrary. Some times I do really well. Sometimes not. But in both cases, I don't feel like my skills have been tested or demonstrated. When I do well, the stars lined up and when I don't, they didn't. The whole thing makes me feel increasingly insecure about my ability to build a career, even though I've demonstrated that I can do the work once hired.<p>Is this the average experience or is there something going on here?
Upvote: | 243 |
Title: It was an open secret, linked from Microsoft MSDN page on code signing [1] - if you are to enter Digicert site through https://www.digicert.com/friends/sysdev link, you'd get a 50% discounted offer on all certificates <i>including EV code signing</i> certs. Coupled with Digicert's US-based no-nonsense support it made buying an EV cert from them an absolute no-brainer. Recommended them more times than I can remember.<p>Then they "absorbed" Symantec.<p>First, the quality of the support took a nose dive. Live chat that used to be almost instantaneously available started showing queues of 10-15 minutes. Earlier this year the support started deflecting all sales-related questions to "your sales representative, who will get in touch with you shortly." What useв to be a 30 second chat to get the renewal price matched against the last year now turned into some painful bullshit that ended up with sales rep claiming no discounts were available, but he'd be willing to make a massive one-time exception of 5% off.<p>But the /sysdev link still worked, the hope that these Symantec influences will blow over was still there.<p>No more. The link now redirects to $600/yr pricing. Support is slow and useless, there are now industry-standard obnoxious sales reps, where none is needed, and so Digicert is all but Symantec now. What a shame I say.<p>Just FYI.<p>[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/dashboard/get-a-code-signing-certificate
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: It feels like a lot engineers now days don't seem to have a good cs background. They don't seem to understand things like cache, paging, virtual memory,cpu pipelines, algorithms or other things pretty important to CS.<p>I know we have a lot of bootcamps and people are joining because it pays decently, but is this necessarily a good thing
for the industry?<p>When we have the next industry crash (.com crash) will these people stick around?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: What's the best static site builder these days? One that generates static assets you can host yourself, say, on S3, etc.
Upvote: | 199 |
Title: I was wondering if anyone else is in the state of constant anxiety, not only at work, but at home too. How do you cope?<p>Here are the several contributing factors in my case:<p>- feeling of incompetence at work
- sole provider for the family.
- lost the will to code (I try learning new things but give up after a few days).
- I’m 43 and have not accomplished anything, not even financial security for my family.
- too scared to change the job I hate (gambling industry, corporate JIRA sweatshop, for 13 years) because I’m incompetent.
- social anxiety.
- racing mind, incoherent thoughts.<p>Edit: so incompetent I don’t know how to create a bullet list here
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: Finding answers to basically any question is now behind a walled garden that requires that you create an account.<p>This is the exact thing expertsexchange did before StackOverflow came and ate their lunch.<p>What do you think about it?
Upvote: | 1007 |
Title: Carmack, Torvalds, Bellard, Wozniak, et al. Who do you personally admire as 10x or otherwise brilliant coders? What do you consider their most notable or emulable accomplishments, habits, or contributions?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I've been having elbow pain recently and decided to do an audit of my desk ergonomics. It turns out, my desk was too high to enforce proper typing technique. I've been looking into some split keyboards, as well as vertical mouses.<p>What have you guys done as professionals that sit at a desk most of the day to improve your ergonomics?
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: I am trying to find the ideal way to start a space business without immediately needing substantial financial resources.<p>Create a space industry giant from scratch with little external funding.
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I’m Stephen, the founder of Scanwell Health (<a href="https://shop.scanwellhealth.com" rel="nofollow">https://shop.scanwellhealth.com</a>). We’re a modern diagnostics company, and we’ve created the first at-home UTI (urinary tract infection) test with same-day treatment options.<p>With a lifetime of experience in the diagnostics industry (literally––my family’s business is in manufacturing in-vitro diagnostics, and my first summer job was assembling pregnancy tests), I’ve always been interested in making these tests more convenient and cost-effective.<p>Why start with UTIs? Some studies estimate that up to 60% of women experience UTIs, prompting 10 million doctor visits in the US each year. Getting treatment for a UTI at urgent care costs around $150, while visits to the emergency room can cost over $2000––and one study found that ER visits for UTIs adds $4B a year in unnecessary healthcare costs. By taking the same urine test performed in doctor’s offices, hospitals, emergency rooms, etc. and making it accessible to anyone who has a Scanwell UTI test kit and a smartphone, we’re drastically reducing the time and cost it takes to treat UTIs.<p>Just like a traditional test, ours uses a chemically treated test strip that reacts with the patient’s urine sample. But instead of being read by a urine analyzer in a lab, the Scanwell app uses computer vision to assess the results. Results are provided to the patient in 2 minutes, with the same diagnostic accuracy as a urinalysis performed in a clinic. If the user has signs of a UTI, we’ll directly connect them to a healthcare provider who can prescribe treatment.<p>Our UTI product is FDA-cleared, and we are working to obtain clearances for other tests. One such test is our chronic kidney disease (CKD) test, which is currently being piloted with Kaiser Permanente to improve screening for and monitoring of chronic kidney disease at home.<p>Telehealth continues to grow but the piece that is missing is diagnostics, and that’s what we hope to provide. Whether it’s for detecting acute conditions like UTIs or managing longer term conditions like chronic kidney disease, we believe that the more we can enable at-home testing the more accessible healthcare will be for everyone.<p>We’re excited to hear your feedback and answer any questions you might have about Scanwell. Thanks everyone!
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: I’m a 20something software engineer on a year sabbatical from a FAANG company and thinking about my employment options. My earnings are relatively high I think (at senior now, ~350k total comp with bonuses and auto-sell RSUs). However, the idea that I’ve already reached the max expected value for the effort I’m willing to expend as an employee in the industry is a little dreary to me (note: I am very lucky and also feel bad about saying that).<p>Does anyone know of a route to equivalent earnings outside of FAANG? Assuming that I am willing to live anywhere and work on any type of software, but do not want to go into management or start a company.<p>edit: thank you for the responses
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: The SQLite website states that it works well for low to medium traffic websites (e.g. 100k hits as a conservative estimate). However, the site cautions about using SQLite as a client/server database when multiple clients are trying to write to the database. [1]<p>Have you ever used SQLite in the second scenario? What was your experience? Why did you stick with SQLite over a client/server database like PostgreSQL? What it simplicity of usage and deployment? Or was SQLite simply fast enough for your needs?<p>[1] https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I've spent the last decade in two FANG companies, and I've got to a high level where my total compensation is ridiculous.<p>The problem is that it bores me to tears, and I don't want to do it anymore.<p>At first thought, maybe I am burned out? However, I can still come home and write code for a side-project, so I don't think this is "burn-out". I don't know to be honest. I think the best description is that I am cynical of the "mission", and I can't connect my work to people I care about. How do I know what the source of the problem is?<p>However, I wanted to pose two questions.<p>First, what is the environment like for exiting high-level former-FANG employees?<p>Second, what are some of the surprises post-FANG that I would be in for if I wanted to start a company?<p>Thank you for your time.
Upvote: | 670 |
Title: We run a small SaaS where users are able to create accounts, submit billing information and upload/call ML artefacts.<p>In order to not reinvent the wheel we use external services where possible: Auth0 for authentication, Stripe for handling billing, etc. For this question, I am considering this a 'microservices' architecture. I am aware that this definition will spark its own discussion, but I believe that the problem generalises to a lot of the other (better, more complete, etc.) microservice definitions. So please, bear with me.<p>Now, in the lifecycle of a customer (createAccount, addBilling, deleteAccount, ...) at various points we expect operations to occur atomically. By which I mean (simplified) that upon creating a new account, I also need to ensure a customer is created in Stripe as well as register the user in Auth0 - but if either of these subtasks fail, the operation (createAccount) should fail completely and in fact 'undo' any state changes already performed. If not, I risk high-impact bugs such as double charging customers.<p>Now, in a 'conventional' setup (without external services), I would resolve a lot of this by ensuring transactional operations on a single source-of-truth database. I understand that 'idempotency' comes up a lot here, but whichever way I try to apply that here - it always seems to explode in a (fragile/brittle) spaghetti of calls, error handling and subsequent calls.<p>Surely this has been resolved by now, but I'm having a hard time finding any good resources on how to approach this in an elegant manner. Concretely:<p>Do you recognise the problem of atomicity in microservices architecture?<p>And,<p>How do you deal with guaranteeing this atomicity in your microservices?
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I created Flowshare (<a href="https://flowshare.io/" rel="nofollow">https://flowshare.io/</a>) to make creating step by step guides with screenshots and annotations as easy as recording a screencast.<p>As a reader, I find screenshots and text much easier and faster to follow than watching a long screencast. As a creator, recording a screencast is much easier. Flowshare gives you the best of both worlds.<p>You can search existing guides at: <a href="https://flowshare.io/search" rel="nofollow">https://flowshare.io/search</a><p>Here is an example of one the most popular guides:<p><a href="https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-block-spam-invitations-from-your-google-calendar" rel="nofollow">https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-block-spam-invitations-from...</a><p>I'm including a link to the chrome extension which is used to create guides: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flowshare-how-to-guides-f/lfegkcljaabalcnccemlmakgligfjnml" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flowshare-how-to-g...</a><p>Would love to hear any feedback/suggestions.
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Are there any resources you recommend? Or do personal projects give you enough problems? And how do you map solving these problems to patterns you can use in a future problem you’ll face?
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: I think this gets asked most years, and I always enjoy the threads that come out of it. I am thankful for a family that I enjoy spending the holidays with. I am thankful that I had a safe childhood and got a good education throughout my life.<p>I am also thankful for the HN community. People dump on this site sometimes, but over most of the past decade HN has been an overwhelmingly positive part of my life. Thank you to everyone for what you bring to the community here.
Upvote: | 418 |
Title: I'm an educator with a CS / programming background. There's a possibility that I'll be moving into the 'Information and Communications Technology' role next year at my medium sized high school (grades 9-12, ~700 students, diverse student population). My jurisdiction's curriculum in this area is not well developed, and there are no standardized tests to prepare for. I'll have an amount of freedom in deciding course content that's unusual for high school teachers.<p>What would HN have the modern western high school student learn with respect to "Information and Communications Technology"?
Upvote: | 200 |
Title: Doing post-thanksgiving shopping and thought the HN folk might have some cool gift ideas and deal-hunting strategies to share.<p>Preferably tech-related since this is HN, but really anything that improves your life / others would be great to hear about.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Burning out as an early stage start-up employee. I’ve been employed there a few years, worked miracles, but getting recently getting some poor feedback. Confusing situation. Wondering if I should just quit? Is career salvageable?
I solved the business’ biggest issue. Start-up was founded to do X, founders couldn’t figure out how to do X, I was asked to do X. Under enormous pressure I single handily figured out how to do X, conducted all the R&D, built the prototype, supervised the engineer and release. Its still a prototype, but solves one of the industries biggest problem. Non-founder team lead is unhappy some minor issues have slipping in the chaotic process of getting this to market. I’m doing several different jobs and do everything. My solution is going to change the market, the idea is worth millions of dollars, likely more.<p>Founders are very please, but getting poor feedback from team lead. Team lead has hindered more than helped, gives conflicting advice, blows hot and cold, has created a toxic environment etc. Admittedly some minor things have slipped through the cracks, but much of this comes from my team lead playing politics, creating silos and conflicts etc.<p>My team lead is grinding me down with their constant nitpicking and I really just want to go and do something else, anything else, work in a bar or something. Considered going to the founders with the issue, but I can’t see how this can be resolved beyond creating a new role or transferring out of my area of expertise. I did a sanity check and have reached out to others. Lots of others have take issue with my team lead as well, so its not just me.<p>I’m pretty burnout, and definitely in need to some time out before moving on. I don’t think I’d come across very well (or as sharp as I usually) in interviews at the moment without a break.<p>Anyone been through anything similar? Anyone have any advice?
Upvote: | 278 |
Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.<p>Bonsai (YC W16) (<a href="https://www.hellobonsai.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.hellobonsai.com</a>) offers freelance contracts, proposals, invoices, etc.
Upvote: | 89 |
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=21683552" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21683552</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21683553" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21683553</a>
Upvote: | 295 |
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: | 100 |
Title: We’re Travis and Sam, co-founders of Vouch Insurance (<a href="https://vouch.us" rel="nofollow">https://vouch.us</a>).<p>Vouch is a new insurance company that provides business insurance for startups. We make it easy for founders to get all of the business insurance they need as they build their companies -- ranging from basic coverage for business property through to more complex coverages such as Directors and Officers (D&O), Errors and Omissions (E&O), Cyber, Employment Practices Liability and a range of others that companies need to close financings, scale their teams, do deals and take on office leases. Moreover, these policies protect against painful but all too frequent risks that we all face as we build our businesses.<p>We started Vouch after seeing how painful it is to get insurance the old way, and also experiencing many of the risk events that all-too-often happen as one scales a company. Previously I co-founded and led the U.S. arm of Funding Circle, a role I held up until our IPO last year; through this experience I had to purchase insurance many times -- and each time, the experience was slow, painful, opaque, and paper-based. Travis previously worked at Silicon Valley Bank and say that pain-point across their portfolio and, at the same time, saw the interesting developments in other insurance sectors -- Root, in auto insurance, for example -- and similarly believed that there must be a better way for startups to buy and manage their insurance. Although there’s been a lot of work done on the distribution side of insurance (better agent and brokerage-type businesses) no one has really tried to build better insurance products tailored to meet the needs of startups.<p>Traditionally, a founder needs to go through a broker to purchase the coverages we offer directly, and that process can take weeks, or even months (it took us over 60 days to get the E&O coverage we needed at Vouch to start writing business, as one ironic example). We designed the Vouch experience so that a typical company can get everything they need in under 10 minutes and with 0 paperwork. We also tailored the insurance products we’re offering to meet the unique needs of technology startups. As a result of this, our hope is that the entire experience should feel more tailored, and basic policies are quite affordable -- as little as $200/year. Our basic package is 30% cheaper than anything else we’ve seen in the market and on average we’re seeing our members save ~13% relative to other options.<p>We started the company after years of experience building and investing in other companies. Our view is that building a company is hard enough -- worrying about risk management and insurance shouldn’t be, and we’re building Vouch so that can be the case. We’re now live in eight states, and are excited to say that we can now serve companies based in CA -- a state that’s home to many startups. We’ll be in many states all across the country shortly, as we want to help entrepreneurs wherever they’re building great technology companies.<p>If you have questions about business insurance or any current insurance needs we’d love to connect. And we’d welcome reactions, feedback and any of your experiences around business insurance. Thanks for reading and if of interest check us out at: <a href="https://vouch.us" rel="nofollow">https://vouch.us</a>
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: As I see it, there are 2 main ends of a spectrum when it comes to releasing projects that aim to solve problems:<p>- top-down approach: you state your problem, think it through, consider all related work in this problem space, think very hard, come up with multiple possible solutions, evaluate their trade-offs and implement the best one (a-la Hammock-Driven Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc&t=1816s)<p>- rapid prototyping: you state your problem, come up with the easiest possible solution, test it, repeat (a-la Lean Development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development)<p>I know some great examples of the first approach (Clojure, Datomic, maybe Git?), but I don't know that many successes of the second approach. Furthermore, my personal work experience leads me to believe that the second approach, at least in practice, leads to a lot of wasted effort, so I'm interested to know whether it is so or not.
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: Hi there HN!<p>Excited to share Referlist (https://referlist.co/), a simple way to increase sign-ups on your landing page for pre-product launches. Give your users early access to your product when they share it with their friends!<p>I make A LOT of landing pages. Whenever I want to test an idea, I'll make a website with a sign-up form to see how excited people are about a concept. I wanted to encourage word of mouth growth and incentivize my users to share these sites with their friends. Robinhood was able to amass nearly one million sign-ups via their referral program, so I tried googling for an easy way to add something similar to my page. Everything I found was expensive, too complicated and came pre-packaged with a landing page which I didn't want. I ended up building a custom solution for myself and it worked great!<p>I noticed other friends launching projects doing the same, so we built Referlist to save everyone some time. No coding required. It's plug-and-play like Drift. Takes 5 minutes to setup. It's free to get started. You only pay if you get more than 100 sign-ups so you can feel free to launch as many failed experiments as your heart desires at no cost! You can export your users to CSV or Mailchimp. Also add a custom message, custom colors and seed your waitlist so that it doesn't look completely empty for the first few sign-ups.<p>Any feedback is welcome! Also feel free to email me directly at [email protected]<p>Cheers,
Parthi and the Referlist team
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: What channel do you hang out? What do you use it for?
Upvote: | 260 |
Title: Also, why?
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>We’re Joseph, Aleesha, and Jijo, the founders of Buy Me A Coffee (<a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.buymeacoffee.com</a>). We make it super easy to accept contributions and recurring memberships from your audience.<p>A bit of backstory - Joseph and I grew up in India. When I was 12, I started making a little bit of money from my blog, and it had a huge impact on my life. I got to buy books and gadgets, pay for web hosting, none of which I could’ve afforded otherwise. We built our first product in 2010. It was an ad network for bloggers called AdIndigo. There were a bunch of Adsense alternatives doing well at that time, and it grew to serve 6 million impressions at its peak. We later had to shut it down because of the expenses. Buy Me A Coffee is our third (and only successful) attempt at building for the creators.<p>When we started working on Buy Me A Coffee as a side project, it was a quick way to spin up a page or a button to accept one-time contributions. For artists, OSS developers, and YouTubers, it was an unobtrusive way to monetize their work. They appreciated the simplicity and friendly branding and started requesting more features. Some even noticed that they’re getting more contributions compared to a Patreon or PayPal button. It’s probably because of the no-signup-required payment flow. Supporters also get to leave a note after the payment, and it ends up becoming this ‘wall of love’ for creators.<p>Today, you can do a lot more with Buy Me A Coffee. You can accept recurring payments and give rewards in return. For e.g. Maria Shriver is using Buy Me A Coffee to monetize her newsletter ‘The Sunday Paper’ (<a href="https://thesundaypaper.buymeacoffee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://thesundaypaper.buymeacoffee.com/</a>) with a link in the footer of every edition. Slowly (<a href="https://slowly.buymeacoffee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://slowly.buymeacoffee.com/</a>) is a self-funded team using Buy Me A Coffee to accept contributions and feedback from their users. We also built Widgets that allow you to accept payments right from your website. Built-in email features let you share updates and rewards with your audience. We’re also working on a community feature to create a group chat with your supporters. Creators are already doing this with Discord and Slack, and we're excited to build something more focused.<p>We believe anyone, anywhere in the world who creates something that people find useful or entertaining, should have the option to get paid for their work.<p>We’re excited to hear all your questions and thoughts about Buy Me A Coffee :) Thank you!
Upvote: | 206 |
Title: Let's say I have an app, residing at app.example.com. I want a separate landing page for this app at example.com.<p>This landing page should be easily managed for updating content and also have multiple pages. What stack would you use for this today?<p>I want it to be SEO optimized.<p>I use Vue for the app but feels overkill for the landing page and also not ideal in terms of SEO. I don't feel like going the SPA+SSR way either.<p>Is wordpress still a good alternative?<p>Or maybe just a html+jquery site hosted at for example Firebase?<p>I don't expect to update it too much with news etc so a CMS is not required.<p>What would you do?
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: Although I know self help books are of little value, but wondering if any author has really nailed the topic? Would be even be better if the book is specific to tech leadership.
Upvote: | 882 |
Title: I started a new job a month ago, and was hesitant to do so, because I'm yet to overcome certain patterns, that may be affected by a recent realization of having attention deficit. I'm a frontend developer, but feel little real intensity in the job, little stimulation, and haven't been that productive at picking up the codebase. This is also in an office for the first time in years, after being somewhat effective in a remote position. I'd also be interested about other people who struggled to tune their skills for productivity.
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: I found out that about a week ago, a real estate company whom I previously was a tennant of, has posted the full front page of my passport including address, dob, passport number and address along with a picture in a private facebook group.<p>I flagged the post, but it's still up, I submitted a help request to FB's sensitive information page but they denied it, I think maybe because that line was more targeted towards nude selfies being posted for revenge.<p>Is there anything I can do to get this taken down? I have a feeling FB has some support line hidden somehwwhere but they make it impossible to find anything. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I feel like I'm being set up for identity theft here.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: I am a software developer (paid) for about 6 years now. I basically did everything (Mainframe, Java, Frontend, Python, NodeJS...). This perfect job market made it very easy for me to transition between jobs. I did full time and contract jobs at around 6 companies.<p>Every company I stayed at wanted to extend the contract or told me I was one of their best developers they worked with.<p>However, my own perception is different. In every company I was good at creating a team spirit and to analyze problems. Every company had this one (or more) people who just coded and could put a solution into code super fast. I on the other hand sometime feel like in between.... I grasp things fast but my code was never as clean, good or delievered fast enough.<p>I wouldn't have a problem with it if it wouldn't be for my boredom of NodeJS. I decided to switch stacks and taught myself Go.<p>Now I got hired at a really big brand and I joined the team last month. And oh boy, these guys are good. I mean they come up with solutions I couldn't even remotely think of.<p>I highly doubt mu abilities now and actually thinking of quitting (partly it's hard to be a "senior" developer and now see how much further my team mates are).<p>The question is: How can I tell if I am good enough or doing a good job? My old projects told me I am good (enough), now they hired me and I feel like a failure.<p>Is there a way you find out where on the scale you operate? If I am too low, is there a way to get better to maybe match them one day?
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: What was the specific mistake, what did you learn from it, and how did you change the way you do business as a result?<p>For example, I was told by someone who started a project without taking an advance, only for the client to decide not to pay. So he now refuses to take on a project without at least 30% advance.<p>What lessons did you learn the hard way?<p>I'm setting up my own consulting practice: kartick.org and would like to learn from other people's mistakes rather than repeating them myself.
Upvote: | 622 |
Title: Hi,
I believe I'm a decent programmer, may not be a rockstar or anything. Recently I've changed my company to one of the "sought afters", and I've noticed that I've been getting some comments about the quality of work and some uncomfortable questions about my skills. I've been forced to change my design more than once during code review and there were other times when my PR was outright rejected as it did not meet the required standards.<p>Now I'm a little worried that if my situation doesn't change, my career would suffer. I've started to watch a few videos online about design. But I'm not sure if they're going to really help as they usually talk about very basics which doesn't help in real world coding.<p>I usually take 3-4 tries with some significant amount of testing to get my code to a working state. I refer to stack overflow or ask my colleagues if I get stuck on some design / technology feature which I haven't seen before. I feel the above contributes to reduction in my speed of delivery and the rush to complete the deliverable on time, compromises the quality.<p>Are there any good ideas to improve one's coding / design skills significantly ? The challenge here is to deliver good quality code, while maintaining a decent speed of delivery.
Upvote: | 200 |
Title: Hello guys,
I in my early 30s, spent 10 years building a career around my small video production company. Just found out I had cancer in May, and spent the whole summer in hospital, went through 2 surgeries and radiotherapy. Luckily I'm fine now, but due to the surgery my right hand is now disabled. I can't work in video production anymore, and frankly I'm depressed and feeling useless.
I just want to ask what I should do now. I'm weaker now but I can still use computer with my left hand. I'm not asking for a money making method to get rich, just something to make me feel useful and help pay the bills. (All my savings are spent on the surgeries).
Thanks.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I'm looking in particular at sites that advertise consultancy services / personal branding etc. The more minimalist the better!
Upvote: | 145 |
Title: Everyone talks about books and sites they read all the time, but I barely ever see videos talked about on HN, despite videos containing some of the most interesting (and, unlike text, unsearchable) bits of computing history, information and anecdotes.
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: Why doesn't anyone use Datalog (or another limited-by-design logic programming language) as the query language in a public Web API? The adoption of GraphQL suggests demand for letting the API user write more sophisticated queries even at a performance cost per query. Datalog would let the user do more, likely saving many HTTP round-trips. A lot more research exists on optimizing Datalog than GraphQL. It is unclear that the total impact on performance would be significantly negative compared to the typical GraphQL API. If this line of thinking is valid, where are the Datalog API experiments?
Upvote: | 162 |
Title: I never visited Reddit much, but occasionally web searches take me there for tech support questions. Every time I visit in the past year or so I'm shocked at how slow the interface is, and don't even understand how its possible to make web sites so unresponsive to user input. It's as bad as visiting a local news site that is laden with ads and several auto-playing videos, but it doesn't seem to be running that much ad content.<p>How does one make such a bad web app, and what technology choices should I avoid to make sure I don't end up with a mess like this?
Upvote: | 238 |
Title: I'm a technical co-founder and invested a lot of time building our website, app, backend and CMS over two years.<p>My co-founder recently decided to shut the company down, focusing on what he/she does best rather than being reliant on tech/design loops by making our amazing designer create a Shopify site that he/she can manage him/herself.<p>Without going into details, it is fair but we will need to have serious talk once everything has settled so I can move forward.<p>Anyhow, as my payment for these past years, I get to sell whatever we have created, code wise, and get the dough for it.<p>The problem is that I have no clue how to properly handle a sell like this.<p>There is a bunch of new startups that has recently popped up, doing what we initially did with a caveat; they lack an app for it, currently hustling to make things work. So there might be a pretty good possibility for us to sell it.<p>To give you an idea what we are doing; an React Native app that sell and connect a very specific type of workshops with costumers over custom WebRTC Video chat(fork of React Native-based Jitsi Meet). What I can tell, I haven't seen another custom Jitsi-Meet integration yet that gives the ability customize the UI that we have.<p>We use Firebase as our backend and Stripe as our payment integration. Data entry / workshop scheduling is managed using a custom built CMS. We have custom emails + in-app notifications work through Firebase Cloud Functions.<p>Should I contact these startups? Anything I should do first, legally wise?<p>I'm clueless.
Upvote: | 382 |
Title: Hi, I wrote this article "6 Github repos for instant knowledge boost" (https://dev.to/mfarajewicz/6-github-repos-for-instant-knowledge-boost-3mo0) and it received a really warm welcome on dev.to and other comunities.
I wanted to share it more, perhaps some of you will find it useful.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Recently i stumbled on too many clickgates on the Medium blog Towards Data science. Considering that most people publish to share knowledge on Medium and are driven into putting their content behind a paywall, without actually getting paid for it, including myself. I felt like Medium is running the academic publishing scheme. Get free content and get paid for it. So I decided to create a small script to bypass the paywall on Medium, it turns out it also works on other newssites. Heres the website: https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium/
For the curious I will explain the technical aspects in a comment.
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: I started as a temp and I'm told I'm being hired as a "full-time temp" which is not only an oxymoron, but it is simply ironic, since I already work full-time (40hrs/week). I was assigned some work "to keep me busy for 2-3 months" that I finished in about 6 hours.<p>I'm really running out of patience with this whole thing. I'm being paid $25/hr to sit around and look busy. I ask my manager for work, he says things will pick up after Christmas. The other day I was too depressed about this situation and slept in, and showed up at 1pm. No one batted an eyelid or said anything. There wasn't a single email addressed to me, I had no calendar invites, no nothing, so why should I even be here? What do I do with my time? Well, I am trying to teach myself a bit of Ruby on Rails in AWS, do some freecodecamp (I desperately want to learn to code, under the impression that it will liberate me from this, but it might just be a pipe dream).<p>My manager told me that a coworker would like my help with "business continuity forms" (this is healthcare IT, so this is a thing). I've approached her and reminded her that I'm happy to help whenever she wants but she just grumbles about not being able to find someone to walk me through the EpicCare web app things.<p>So I am really losing my motivation to keep learning important things, and find myself drifting over to Reddit memes. I spend about 3-4 hours a day on this site and the rest of the time trying to teach myself computer science stuff. But it is extremely demoralizing doing this alone and "secretly" while waiting for something to happen.<p>I would look for a new job but frankly, I don't even know if this experience is transferable anywhere else. I get declined for internal job postings, so I think I just need to turn my 6 months' experience into a year to appease HR. Please advise.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I'm currently reading Seven Databases in Seven Weeks [1] and finding it to be a really fun and interesting look at some tech I don't know much about. I'm wondering what other interesting books there are out there that focus less on teaching you all the technical details of a technology, and more on what makes it exciting and interesting.<p>What books do you suggest?<p>[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13130963-seven-databases-in-seven-weeks
Upvote: | 139 |
Title: Do you still write code in BASIC? If yes, which BASIC compiler or interpreter do you use?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: It’s our pleasure to announce the initial public release of<p>Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, JavaScript Adaptation
(<a href="https://sicp.comp.nus.edu.sg/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://sicp.comp.nus.edu.sg/</a>)<p>A community effort led by Martin Henz and Tobias Wrigstad, this project provides the full content of the textbook classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman, using sublanguages of JavaScript, instead of the language Scheme. We provide our SICP JS adaptation in three editions: a mobile-friendly interactive web edition, an interactive PDF edition and an e-book edition. Readers of the textbook can click on the programs and run them using the Source Academy [<a href="https://sourceacademy.nus.edu.sg/playground" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://sourceacademy.nus.edu.sg/playground</a>], a web-based programming environment that supports a collection of purpose-built language implementations of the JavaScript sublanguages Source §1, Source §2, Source §3 and Source §4 [<a href="https://sicp.comp.nus.edu.sg/source/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://sicp.comp.nus.edu.sg/source/</a>], each of which are designed to serve the respective chapters of SICP JS.<p>SICP JS has been used by the National University of Singapore in the computer science freshman programming methodology course CS1101S [<a href="https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs1101s/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs1101s/</a>] since 2012, and is maintained by the CS1101S community as an open source project. We share it with educators and learners and welcome contributions and suggestions.<p><pre><code> https://github.com/source-academy/sicp
</code></pre>
Full announcement: <a href="https://sicp.comp.nus.edu.sg/announcement.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://sicp.comp.nus.edu.sg/announcement.html</a><p>- Some fun examples:<p><pre><code> * A spiral with a twist, by Yuki Akizuki ---- https://tinyurl.com/SICPJS-twist
* Bohemian Rhapsody cover, by Siddarth Nandanahosur Suresh ---- https://tinyurl.com/SICPJS-rhapsody
* Times tables using the curves library ---- https://tinyurl.com/SICPJS-timestables
* NUS Sumobot 2018 (video), a robotics contest conducted in Source ---- https://youtu.be/-8aZNwjWp7c
</code></pre>
Martin Henz and Tobias Wrigstad
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: What are some of the best ways to volunteer as someone working in tech? Many of us have valuable skills that we can put to use such as software engineering, data analysis, product management, project management, etc.<p>What are some of the best ways to use those skills to help out those in need?<p>Ideas that come to mind:
* Contributing to civic tech projects
* Contributing to open source projects
* Helping out non-profits
* Donating money made by using the aforementioned skills<p>Which methods of volunteering or giving back do you think are most effective?
Upvote: | 170 |
Title: HN threads from 2016-2018 complain that JWT gives us too much rope with which to hang ourselves, and some advocate for alternatives like PASETO instead. Today it's not clear however that any alternatives like PASETO have crossed the threshold of adoption to warrant preference over JWT when choosing a stateless auth token solution.<p>What solution would you choose today for stateless auth tokens?
Upvote: | 373 |
Title: Hello everyone,<p>I created product on the side as a side project in my own time and it has become a huge hit in the community to a point where my employers wants me to transfer the code-base over. The company does OSS and my side-project is also Open-Source.<p>I've developed it on my own time but the product directly relates to what my employer does so I've sort of cornered myself in a bad place. In hindsight, I also made some mistakes in how I went about evangelizing it.<p>Ideally, I want to keep the ownership with myself but I doubt that is going to work out.<p>I think what I want is:
- to be compensated in some form for all the time I've put in over the last two years
- to have control over the product roadmap (this I'm fairly confident won't happen in the way I want in the long run)<p>What are my options here?
What should I ask for here? I don't have much clue as to what can I ask for here so any suggestions would be helpful. People at my company generally wants to work things out to keep everyone happy to some degree.
Upvote: | 264 |
Title: What are your favorite nonfiction books of 2019 (Read in 2019)
Upvote: | 156 |
Title: Visa List started out as a simple list of visa requirements for all countries with detailed visa process and documents for 50 countries so that travellers can go anywhere they want easily. This was a solution to visa issues I faced when I wanted to travel. Since then it's grown to 100+ countries and now features visa exemptions, dual passport requirements and many data points like flight prices, weather, distance, economy status and travel advice. I’m adding new countries every day so that you can use Visa List for all your visa requirements.
Visa List makes money mostly from ads and affiliates. Most of the site is freely usable but to use some filters, community chat and visa advice, you need to pay. Users pay monthly, annual or once for a lifetime membership. Revenue ranges from $5,000/m to $6,000/m. It became profitable after 2 months of launch.<p>But it didn't start making $5000 immediately, it started with $500 per month and grew slowly over the span of a year.<p>Initially I placed ads on visa list and was getting around 100K pageviews around a month. But the ads revenue was not that great at all. I tried to apply for skyscanner partnership because I knew that there would be good need after getting visa, but unfortunately I got rejected. I think the main reason was it was I was not getting a lot of traffic.<p>With a heavy heart I tried different ad networks like video ads, content ads but none of them improved the revenue. All this while, i never lost sight of my goal to increase the SEO and along the way get more users to Visa List.<p>Suddenly after a month I got an email from skyscanner from saying that they are interested in partnering with, this was another team. I was so happy and realised that things come around eventually. In a month I integrated skyscanner and it started a good stream of revenue from visa list.<p>After 5 month around june, people from iVisa contacted me. They provide visa service and visa assistance across the world which was perfect. I was very happy to partner with them as well and thus opened 3rd revenue stream.<p>Along the way I also learning AdOps so i could monetize the traffic I was getting and finally after 6 months things started working out. So my first channel also started contributing a good chunk to overall revenue.<p>After around 8 month i started an experiment with Visa List membership which i have been sitting on it for a long time. I was not really sure what was the most valuable information that travelers really need so they won't mind paying. Looking at Nomad list and starter story, i finally put in a set of features that i thought can be useful for Pro members. I'm happy that the experiment paid off adding to the 4th revenue stream.<p>So looking back, it was not a single thing but a lot of small things done right over a year.<p><a href="https://visalist.io" rel="nofollow">https://visalist.io</a>
Upvote: | 226 |
Title: I wanted to read a book on nutrition which is backed by extensive research and is easily readable by a common person so that he/she can make changes in his/her lifestyle (especially vegetarian). Most of times, they are contradictory views related to diet and food we consume even in the top 10 results of google. I understand that diet is something which is dependent on person to person, but some universal truths like don't mix sour foods with dairy always work.
This would help a lot, rather than me reading every other blog on which food combinations do not go well together, or is dairy good, is keto diet healthy, is plant-based diet better than others etc.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: Any great books you cannot wait to read next year? Maybe something you wish to learn? Curious about all kinds of great book suggestions for 2020. Thank you for sharing! (And I wish you all a great, educational new year)
Upvote: | 421 |
Title: I’ve been a long-time user of CNN Lite (lite.cnn.com) since first learning of it here. It seems to have been deprecated, showing just a single message to update your app. Sad times.
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Hi Everyone,<p>It’s Brian and David here and we want to share what we’ve built — ultra thin Bluetooth labels called Got-it (<a href="https://got-it.com" rel="nofollow">https://got-it.com</a>). It’s like Tile, but for B2B or Enterprise.<p>Got-it is for tracking things at work as a team. Simply peel and stick, no different from a barcode sticker. But, these are active Bluetooth labels. They're flexible and roughly the size of a little Avery barcode label (28mm x 76mm) and less than 0.5mm thick. They communicate with the phones already in employee pockets, even in background mode. That means no scanning like RFID, and no readers or gateway infrastructure to install in the ceiling or the doorways.<p>A few photos here: (<a href="https://imgur.com/gallery/rApt25P" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/gallery/rApt25P</a>)<p>We started Got-it as a solution for all that really simple stuff that went missing at home. There were loads of little things, like iPhone charger cables or even Chapstick, that when forgotten or went missing, made life a little difficult. Sure, I could put a Bluetooth tracker on everything… but they’re expensive and a little clunky, especially for a $1.99 stick of Chapstick. The reality though, is that when stuff around the house goes missing, it’s just kinda annoying. At work, it’s a different ballgame. It costs money.<p>Here’s how it works for businesses. Anyone at work sticks a label on shared things like tools, equipment, storage boxes, or packages to ship. By everyone just walking around as normal, in a warehouse, factory, or campus, the Got-it app picks up a beacon from the labels. The location of the item (within an approximate 10 meter zone) and who it’s been with, is then shared with the team if a coworker needs to know.<p>Our integrated software stack makes it happen. We stumbled on a way to make our Bluetooth beacon firmware more reliably trigger background processing in phones, while still preserving ultra low power consumption. To do so, we ended up writing low-level embedded code, in less than 1.5KB and 135 Bytes RAM, to control the radio registers directly, without a BLE stack. Phones receive just enough information from our labels to enable a lean, low-power positioning algorithm we wrote.<p>The labels we make ourselves, in house, here in the USA and UK. It’s a reel-to-reel manufacturing process (like making tape) that we developed. We’re printing circuits using coatings on thin films. We can create passive components, like inductors and capacitors using these inks and laminates by taking advantage of the thin geometry of the substrate itself. Our bill of materials is just a few lines long, so sourcing in China isn’t needed.<p>We also came up with a way of electrochemically coating our circuit to form our own battery source that lasts over a year. That’s particularly why we decided to keep the manufacturing in-house. The process is fully automated, involving just the machine we built, and an operator. It just didn’t make sense to hand over the manufacturing IP to a contract manufacturer or outsource this to China.<p>Manufacturing ourselves, locally, also helps in avoiding tariffs and contract manufacturing mark-ups. That’s key since the labels will be sold in volume at very small margins. The company makes money from a recurring SW model around asset and inventory tracking services. Note, the $99 pricing for ten labels on our website is just for the kit to get started today with your company team. Our target cost at scale will be less than $1.<p>We just ran our first pre-production lot, and are pre-launching with some inventory to ship right away. It’d be great to learn your thoughts on how Got-its might work for you or applications we might be missing. We’re ramping our manufacturing line into higher volume production in the Spring of next year. Keep tabs on our twitter @realGot_it for launch announcements.<p>Thanks in advance!
Brian
Upvote: | 411 |
Title: I am a serial note taker that is continually logging thoughts, ideas, links, todos and stuff. No matter what tool I use things eventually spiral out of control and become unusable, and deletion ensues. Is there a trick to keeping things more organized and useful long-term?
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: Successful online communities like dev.to seem to come up every now and then, in all kind of topics. They reach a stable and high growth, and then they die at some point.<p>What makes these communities different from the one that did not succeed?
Upvote: | 441 |
Title: I am currently in an undergraduate university considered "elite" in US. CS is the most popular major. My friends have switched from finance & medicine to CS majors - for the money and because it's obviously a good idea to do so right now. All the worries my classmates have is how to get an internship at FAANG. Again not that they'll do interesting work (which is rarely the case), but for the resume item...<p>I've been coding for half my life, out of pure interest for the building things and never got into it for the money. CS career being obviously a good choice and every smart kid I know majoring in it, <i>mostly</i> for the cash, honestly makes me worried about the future of the field in terms of whether it'll still be a good career in the future. I think smart people will do good work, just for the wrong reasons ($) and this might impact the field negatively. In 5 years maybe things will still be okay, but if the trend continues for 10 years? Will CS become unsustainable hours like working in the quantitive funds or unsustainable competition and workload like in medicine, or both?<p>PG has said something along the lines of "if everyone thinks something is a good idea, it's probably a bad idea" and Peter Thiel's competition theory where profits get competed away if everyone's doing the same thing are two ideas I think most about.<p>What does HN think?
Upvote: | 384 |
Title: I self taught myself a few things over the years and I can play my way through a lot of songs. But I'd like to dig deeper into music theory and have never been able to sift through a vast array of music theory blogs and tutorials to find something that made sense. I want a different perspective from the HN crowd. How did you teach yourself music theory?
Upvote: | 673 |
Title: Inspired by Shane Parrish's tweet - https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish/status/1207271914227609601
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: The Inquirer is closing the curtains. This is sad, I loved their style.<p>https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3084741/the-inquirer-reaches-end-of-life
Upvote: | 152 |
Title: I'm an average full stack developer working freelance. I've got some experience managing myself, and mentoring other developers, running a business not so much. Currently I have the luxury to spend about a third of my time working on side projects.<p>I would like to try use this time to bootstrap a startup. The focus will be enterprise software for a specific industry, unrelated to my other work. However, I do have some insight, and connections to this industry. I want to manage the project as a single developer and eventually sell subscriptions to SaaS.<p>One model for funding is a single client that pays upfront (at discounted rate), with the understanding that it's my product, and I'll eventually on-sell it. This is not practical in the industry I want to focus on. My product should be impartial, not associated with a single player. An idea only will be too hard a sell, I'll need a MVP to generate some interest.<p>Another approach is to pay for the project with my time, maybe also spend some savings paying contractors. I'll be invoicing myself for developer time.<p>It occurred to me that I can give people the opportunity to buy in by paying a part of the cost. Maybe even pay for specific features. As incentive, rather than shares in a business, I would offer future profit sharing. Investors can buy in at any time and pay as much or as little as they want. The profit share is determined by the fraction of dev time that you've contributed, or paid for in cash. Does this make sense, am I using the right terminology? Am I just describing a specific type of share ownership in different words?<p>Anyone tried this before, any tips or recommendations on how to structure such an agreement?<p>Tbh, I imagine the subscriptions only making a modest amount of profit if the project is successful. I'm fairly confident the bootstrap cost can be kept to a minimum. If costs start spiraling, or subscriptions just don't sell I want to walk away and continue doing contract work.
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: Hi folks, I've launched "Booky" - app for organizing notes from books you read.<p>App Store: https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/booky-organize-books-notes/id1492092565<p>With the app you can:
1. Snap picture of the book while you're reading it
2. Quickly highlight your favorite quotes
3. Sync your book shelf with Goodreads
4. Search in the notes you scanned<p>Promo video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lfnwb8cvi5oyfd9/preview.mov?dl=0<p>Those features are similar to what you might find in ebooks apps but the app enables you to do that with physical books. I'm not sure how to build any business model around it so I'd love to hear your suggestions :)
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I am curious if you know any good audio book for developers.<p>The topic of programming usually don't lend itself well for audio books.<p>I know there are a lot of podcasts about
programming out there. Most times I don't think you learn by listening to them.<p>This is why I am searching for good audio books about programming.
Upvote: | 163 |
Title: Hello HN!<p>We're currently working on a work automation platform. We have a few capabilities that we're building to help you do your work better. For guidance it would be super helpful to hear directly from the HN crowd :)<p>Please do comment below about one thing you'd like to see automated. Would super awesome if you could complete this quick 1-min survey: https://bit.ly/2MjN6fd<p>Many thanks!
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I've gotten a lot of good recommendations for software from this community - most recently AVRFuses and pyenv. These both focus on being simple and "doing one thing really well". They're tools and don't require much active thinking to use them regularly, which I really like.<p>I'm trying to get my finances set up better, and I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a "setup" of bank account, credit card(s), investment platform, budgeting tools, etc along these lines. Ally Bank and SoFi seem good, as does Wealthfront, but I'm just not sure if I'm using them right. I have Mint but it spams me with notifications and I'm not sure what exactly it does for me. Credit cards feel stressful to think about with keeping track of what to use for what purchase or making sure they're all paid off - I recently got a Citi card and the app alone makes me want to get rid of it.<p>Does anyone have a "setup" for how you manage your money that you really like? Anything that follows the "don't make me think" philosophy?
Upvote: | 200 |
Title: After years of solo development I'm presenting: Angeldust, an <i>omni-compatible</i> action RPG and building game!<p>Website: <a href="http://angeldu.st" rel="nofollow">http://angeldu.st</a><p>My single server hosts 250+K active players in one giant, dynamic fantasy world. Angeldust's game server is pervasively multithreaded, implementing John Carmack's dream of processing an immutable world state each tick.<p>Both world handling and network traffic routing uses any number of threads. For networking, a typical game session only uses ~3Kbps of bandwidth, enabling decent play even over 2G/EDGE networks.<p>The client is programmed in C++ with bits of C, Objective-C, Java and PHP. It runs really well on very low-end and obsolete hardware, all the way up to modern systems with fast GPUs.<p>Angeldust works perfectly on Windows XP+, even without hardware OpenGL; Mac OS X 10.6+, even on the first 2006 32-bit Intel GMA945 MacBook1,1; Linux 64-bit glibc 2.17+; Android v2.2.3+, supporting Bluetooth game controllers; and iOS 6+, though iTunes App Store forces iOS 8+ (any way around this?).<p>I live stream weekly on YouTube and Twitch, even right now! Come ask me your development questions! I often see developers playing together with their kids.<p>YouTube channel: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/AngeldustLive" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/AngeldustLive</a><p>One more thing: the Angeldust website ( <a href="https://angeldu.st" rel="nofollow">https://angeldu.st</a> ) uses plain HTML and CSS to offer interactive, game-related actions. It's fully functional even without JavaScript enabled.
Upvote: | 716 |
Title: I'm interested in any guide to this - what I need in the contract, how to protect myself, how to find good contractors, etc.
Upvote: | 80 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.