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Title: From the smallest startup, to Google, almost everyone I've ever interviewed with has required unpaid project work.<p>I rarely, if ever, get feedback on these projects. In later rounds, it's obvious most interviewers haven't seen the project or even know you did it.<p>Why is software engineering the only industry I'm aware of that requires you to prove that you know how to do things you've been doing for years and years? Your projects on Github, degree in your field, and resume don't matter and are rarely discussed.<p>Unpaid projects, over and over.<p>Companies are too lazy to do their own work and we are all getting screwed.<p>How many hours of free work have you had to do, only to get ghosted, denied without feedback, or see your work turn up in their product later?<p>It isn't that hard of a problem to fix: stop being cheap and pay people for their time.<p>"But we can't afford it..." - nonsense! Esp. big companies. Poppycock.<p>If it's "too expensive", you need to have a better funnel upfront before the project stage.<p>Properly compensating for interviews would be a huge differentiator for recruiting.<p>Great engineer A: "I interviewed at Company X, and didn't get it. But they paid me $1000 for a day's work. It was pretty cool."<p>"Rockstar" engineer B: "Wow, that sounds neat. Too bad you didn't get it!" (Maybe I'll interview there too...)<p>vs. ill-will from unpaid<p>Great engineer a: "Yeah I interviewed with company X and they made me do a 3 day unpaid project. I didn't get any feedback and they made me do a technical interview AFTER I had already submitted the project, where they just asked unrelated trivia. One line rejection e-mail."<p>"Rockstar" engineer B: "Yeah that sucks. They sound awful. You dodged a bullet" (continues working where they are)<p>If I do work for you, pay me for it.
If I do work for you, give me feedback.
If I do work for you, respect my time.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I am curious to know what companies and projects are trying to repurpose old phones, laptops and other tech devices.
I feel this area is not explored as much as it should be.<p>Like converting your phone into a security cam or a radio controlled device, turning laptop into a streaming device etc.
Upvote: | 376 |
Title: Has anyone figured out a cross-platform setup for reading PDFs / ePubs with the ability to synchronize highlights / bookmarks among iPad / iOS / Android / PC / Linux etc?<p>What do people use today?
Upvote: | 168 |
Title: Hey Hacker News! We're Josh, Sean, and Cyrus from Deviceplane (<a href="https://deviceplane.com/" rel="nofollow">https://deviceplane.com/</a>).<p>Deviceplane is an open source device management tool for embedded systems, IoT, and edge computing. More specifically, we manage any device running Linux. These can be found in many different categories of hardware such as single-board computers (Raspberry Pis, Jetson Nanos), IoT devices/gateways, and servers running at the edge.<p>The use cases for Linux devices span many different verticals/industries: robotics, consumer appliances, drones, autonomous vehicles, medical devices, and much more. Your first thought might be that a tool for managing robots and a tool for managing medical devices are quite different, but after talking to a variety of companies, we've found that the pain points across these industries are actually quite similar!<p>Deviceplane solves the biggest infrastructure problems for these use cases:<p><pre><code> - Orchestrating and deployment of remote updates
- Network connectivity and SSH access
- Host and application monitoring
- Device organization: naming, labeling, searching, and filtering of devices
- Access and security controls
</code></pre>
Deviceplane is designed to support a variety of hardware, from small embedded devices to large x86 servers. Today’s tooling ecosystem suffers from being segmented by hardware size.<p>For smaller devices, the Yocto project is popular. While it's good for building custom Linux installations, it has downsides for delivering applications. It's hard to understand, can take hours to compile, and solves only a portion of the problems present in device management.<p>For larger devices, many companies seem to build and maintain their own internal tooling. We've seen everything from systems built around configuration management to scripts polling for new Debian packages in S3. These systems are usually brittle, fall short of a complete feature set, and drain precious engineering resources with their maintenance.<p>We think Deviceplane is a great replacement for all of these. Not only is it suitable for all of these hardware sizes, it also presents a way to standardize the tooling across them.<p>One of our goals with Deviceplane is to make device management more accessible to developers. To do this, we build on technologies and concepts popularized in cloud deployments:<p><pre><code> - Applications are packaged as containers and defined in a format resembling Docker Compose
- Updates can be rolled out and tested gradually by using "canary" deployments
- An intuitive and scriptable CLI that will feel familiar to Docker and Kubernetes users
</code></pre>
Deviceplane integrates with your device by running a lightweight static binary via your system supervisor. We can be used with nearly any Linux distro, which means you can continue using Ubuntu, Raspbian, a Yocto build, or whatever else fits your needs.<p>Deviceplane is completely open source. The code for everything from the agent to the backend and UI can be found on GitHub (<a href="https://github.com/deviceplane/deviceplane" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/deviceplane/deviceplane</a>). We put a lot of effort into making our open source version as easy as possible to run. You can even run the backend of Deviceplane with a single Docker command:<p>docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped -p 8080:8080 deviceplane/deviceplane<p>For more information on hosting Deviceplane yourself, check out our docs (<a href="https://deviceplane.com/docs/self-hosted/" rel="nofollow">https://deviceplane.com/docs/self-hosted/</a>).<p>If you'd rather jump right into managing devices, we have a hosted version available at <a href="https://cloud.deviceplane.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.deviceplane.com/</a>.<p>Lastly, we'd love to hear more about your experiences managing devices! What have your biggest pain points been, and what infrastructure do you wish existed to solve those? Either comment here, or shoot us an email anytime at [email protected].
Upvote: | 185 |
Title: I know there are lots of really interesting problems out there waiting to be solved, but I haven't been exposed to much in the software world besides web technologies.<p>I'd love to hear about what interesting problems (technically or otherwise) you're working on -- and if you're willing to share more, I'm curious how you ended up working on them.<p>Thank you :)
Upvote: | 442 |
Title: This is how YOU have chosen to do it. Let us know if it is physical or virtual.<p>I found an old post from 2009 about this, wondering what the answers will be a decade later : <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526517" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526517</a>
Upvote: | 245 |
Title: Hey HN, I've noticed a huge uptick in the toxicity online in the last 5-7 years. Before, around 2010-2012, people who disagreed would usually leave it at that and walk away respectfully. Now, it seems like everyone treats everything as an argument or debate to be won at all costs. Even niche sites like HN are not immune.<p>So how do we fix this? I've heard some talk that upvote systems and algorithms might be at fault. Do we ditch them and go back to a literal timeline? Or is this more of a social problem that code can't solve? Let's hear some input on this, because I can't shake the feeling that tech isn't totally innocent in this mayhem.
Upvote: | 422 |
Title: Dear HN,<p>Apologies in advance for posting something non-technical and personal, but I have no other place online to ask.<p>I am having an emergency. I have been homeless in Los Angeles for the past 2 years. Prior to this, I was a developer for over 10 years. Mostly I worked at small startups. And let me just get the stereotypes out of the way: I don't do drugs, I don't drink, I'm not a criminal, and I'm not mentally ill. I'm just a spectacularly unlucky coder who worked for a series of not so great startups that failed, slowly ran out of money and savings between jobs, and fell through the cracks to become totally stranded living on the streets. I have no family to ask for help--only-child, parents deceased. The only reason I have survived this long was by working part-time on 2 remote contracting gigs, but I was paid sub-minimum wage. It's extremely difficult to do remote development work without electricity nor WiFi. The Public Library and Starbucks have been life savers.<p>I am now down to my last $40 dollars and I am panicking. That's it. I expect to run out of food in about 4 days. Then I guess it's the end for me. But I refuse to lay on the sidewalk and starve while pedestrians step over me. I'm afraid I am going to be pushed into doing something dire that there is no coming back from. I wish it were otherwise, but that's the one thing I still have control over, so I'll do it on my own terms.<p>The nearest food bank to where I camp is over a 10 mile walk away, but what they provide requires refrigeration and a stove. You'd think there would be more food banks for the homeless in the 2nd biggest city in America, which is also home to over 20 billionaires. Food stamps are not an option for me because they tell me I don't qualify, due to the new Federal rule change (Thanks Trump). Local assistance from the city welfare office is needlessly complicated and I have been shocked to discover just how little is actually available.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Email:<p>Hi there,<p>Mailgun is adjusting our plans and pricing to more accurately reflect the value users get from the service and to make room for some great new deliverability features we just released.<p>Throughout 2019, we were hard at work adding and improving our email capabilities and optimizing our support to help your business grow. While many of these updates were made behind the scenes, the truth is that Mailgun can do a lot more than it could two years ago when we last updated our plans.<p>What does this mean for you?
On March 1, 2020, we will automatically transition your account to the new Flex plan, a pay-as-you-go plan comparable to the Concept plan you’re currently on. You’ll receive your first invoice under the new plan on April 1 if your amount due is greater than $0.50. According to your usage last month, your invoice under the new price per message of $0.0008 would have been $0 for December. It’s a modest change, but we wanted to be transparent about it.<p>What’s changing with the Flex plan?
Flex offers you the same pay-per-use model you were used to on the Concept plan. The main differences are that we are no longer offering 10,000 free emails or 100 free validations per month, and our support options now include limited ticket support as well as enhanced self-service Q&As so you can find answers faster. Additionally, while your existing routes will still be functional, new routes will not be supported on this plan.<p>What other options do I have?
We have several other plans available with additional features and service levels, including a new subscription plan called Foundation that starts at $35 per month. This plan provides access to new deliverability tools like Inbox Placement so you can effortlessly increase your deliverability and email ROI.<p>Looking for validations, inbound routing, or more support? Foundation is a great starter plan. If this is something you’re interested in, check out your plan options.
Upvote: | 422 |
Title: I'm a software engineer with ~4 years of experience in the IT industry. Since I've always liked designing systems (of any kind), I'm thinking I'd love moving to a software architect role.
Currently I'm working closely with some software architects and I guess this can count as practice.
But what about theory? Which are the resources (courses, books, etc.) that helped you become a great software architect?
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and supporter of Assange, claims, based on transcripts of emails between Swedish policemen and his own fluency in Swedish, that the senior police officer told the policewoman to "rewrite" the purported victim's testimony: he accuses the Swedish police of "proactive manipulation of evidence"[0][1].<p>But then a HN reader, based on a screenshot of the transcripts provided in [1], comes to the conclusion that Melzer is confused about the emails[2]. However, in the tree belonging to that HN comment, another commenter posted the link to the entire freedom of information document provided by the police[3].<p>Could those of you who understand Swedish take a look at that document (I think one would want to start at around page 9 of 16) and clarify the emails and the situation?<p>[0] https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=24838<p>[1] https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange<p>[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22203599<p>[3] https://data.ddosecrets.com/file/Assange/Assange-Sthlm-polismyndighet.pdf
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I am in a location where not every hospital/clinic is digital and not neccesaily one can have access to others. In this case I have to always maintain and carry the thick file of prescriptions and reports with me for every visit . Is theer a open source tool or web based tool where records can be maintained chronolgically for me and family members.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: It could be a tool that you have created, a process that you have started or anything else which created a big and lasting impact on your workplace.<p>For me, it was probably starting holding regular tech book review sessions.<p>Over time the discussion around both architecture and implementation details got way more structured, quicker and more satisfying to all parties.
Seems obvious, but building up mental model of software development through a structured approach is better than just letting it happen naturally during work hours.
Upvote: | 255 |
Title: Robocalls and unwanted calls are one of the biggest hassles these days. Over 50% of phone traffic is spam.<p>I'm the founder of CallStop: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callstop/id1455892856" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callstop/id1455892856</a><p>CallStop allows you to:<p>- Block 100% of robocalls on your current number, using your contacts as a whitelist<p>- Effortlessly email call invites to an any email (that can be joined in one tap, the PIN is embedded), where the recipient can only call you starting 5 minutes before the meeting start and up until 5 minutes after the meeting end<p>- Pause call filtering and have it automatically resume after a certain time<p>- Accept whitelist requests to join your whitelist, and receive notes from the callers prior to accepting<p>- Specify PINs you can give to loved ones or groups to reach you from unknown numbers.<p>- Get a second phone number with which you can give out in lieu of your primary.<p>CallStop is a productivity tool that lets you better manage your time and who can reach you.<p>If you're expecting a call from a business from an unknown number, or want to limit a salesperson from calling you more than once, CallStop is perfect for managing these interactions.
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: I’ve heard wisdom defined as knowing what to avoid, or knowing what to filter out / not give any attention.<p>Motivated by that definition, what are some things (behaviors, products, type of people, etc.) that you either think should be avoided or have been rewarded by consciously avoiding?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: I wondered if there are other places besides Upwork that you would recommend when looking for software development freelance work? I would prefer smaller jobs but tips for any good platform would be welcome. Thanks you!
Upvote: | 142 |
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: | 133 |
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: | 88 |
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=22225312" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22225312</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22225313" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22225313</a>
Upvote: | 349 |
Title: I'm interviewing with several companies for SDE roles and have a gap of > 12 months since my last job. Is this a career killer and a huge red flag for any hiring manager?<p>The real reason for a break was medical but then got out of hand given i had enough savings to support myself and sort of slacked for a while (like 3-4 months).<p>Now i feel completely healthy, refreshed, passionate and ready to rock again.
What is the best way to mitigate this issue when applying / interviewing?<p>Do you have any advices learned from previous experience or caveats i should be prepared for?<p>PS. My total work experience is 5+ yrs.
Upvote: | 222 |
Title: What are some skills (technical or not) you think someone should consider acquiring in 2020?
Upvote: | 930 |
Title: I had an epiphany this year that I focus too much on myself and came to the realization that I might be a narcissist: I tend to talk too much about myself, I don't enjoy listening to other people, I tend to judge situations only from my perspective, I have an inflated ego and take things too personal.<p>These traits have affected my personal and professional life and would really like to fix them.<p>I did some search on Amazon but it seems that all the books are written for people who were affected by narcissistic people. Couldn't find any book for people who are narcissistic themselves and want to fix that.<p>Did anyone here had the same issues and can recommend me some tips/books on how to deal with this?
Upvote: | 358 |
Title: I'm only a mid-level developer. I've been offered a position as a tech lead with the aim of building a team. What advice would you give a new, inexperienced, and ambitious tech lead?<p>Thank you HN
Upvote: | 766 |
Title: I saw the same questions asked on the Bogleheads forums and I'm curious to see what the HN crowd says.
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: I recently changed managers and I haven't been doing 1:1 meetings with the previous one. Since the new manager seems to prefer a more systematic approach, I figured I could ask you guys - do you have a plan before going into these kinds of meetings? What kind of talking points do you often have?
Upvote: | 288 |
Title: If you have unlimited time and/or resources, what single software engineering problem would you address? I'm not talking about "Peace on Earth"-type problems, but rather real world practical problems facing software engineering that could be actually solved if you could pay an rationally large team of serious hackers a rationally large amount of money for a rationally long period of time. Another way of asking this is: What's the most important piece of technical debt across software engineering, that could practically be solved if we put enough energy into it?
Upvote: | 208 |
Title: I'm writing an article about The Golden Era of User Groups, and I'd love your input.<p>This idea came to me when I mentioned user groups to a young person who'd never heard of them. Oh no! It was such a special time of community support! Let's not permit the memories to go away!<p>So tell me about your experiences!<p>The basics:
When, where, what type of group, how big it was.
Your role, if relevant. (e.g. I was president of one group, VP of another, and on an international board of user groups... you might be "just a member" which is fine!)<p>Your memories: How involved were you, for how long? What drew you to the user group? What made it special?<p>Mostly I want to hear stories, anecdotes, and nostalgia. So please share! (And let me know if I can quote you, at least by first name.)
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: Hey guys, I like to read blog bosts about developers that run some kind of project (rentable or not) and usually are pretty open about its development and how things are going.<p>However, it's really hard to find some of those, unless you found those somewhere. Hacker Newsletter today had a pretty good article https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-2/<p>I'm mostly looking for something similar since this kind of blog post can give some good insights.<p>Thanks.
Upvote: | 621 |
Title: I've found lots of resources for x86, but considerably less for x64. Pentester Academy has a promising course on it, along with shellcoding, but I'm not sure what else is out there.
Upvote: | 492 |
Title: Technical or non-technical.
Upvote: | 298 |
Title: Stories for starting remote teams also welcome!
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: Heya :)<p>A colleague/friend and I are building a test automation SaaS platform. We live in the Netherlands. We work at a scale-up as lead full-stack developer and head of architecture, but the one thing we want most in life is to work on our product full-time.<p>How do we find investors to help build our company?
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: I’m a SR. Dev at a big company we all know trying to rid myself of the insecurities that come from an informal education.<p>This is the resource in question: <a href="https://teachyourselfcs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://teachyourselfcs.com/</a>
Upvote: | 360 |
Title: hello everyone, hope you are having a good day, my background is CS in university after that worked on some agencies did many things, from back end JAVA EE to android apps, and recently (3 years ago) moved to do React and frontend mainly, I live in Copenhagen and have a decent job and a good pay
my question: is it worth it switching to IOS development and do that mainly for the next few years, my motivation is mainly investing more in the exclusive apple ecosystem, looking to expand my area and work in completely different constraints and runtimes<p>Also if you have a better career idea please suggest it<p>thank you
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: Not levers and wheels and gears, but Velcro and paper clips. I’d put “modern” as after 1700, and “simple” as “you can pretty much build it yourself”, but you can argue theses (as I’m sure you will! :-)
Upvote: | 253 |
Title: There are a lot of great things I want to learn but I often drop the intensive learning process after a few days. How have you found ways to actually learn things through? How do you stay motivated?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Hello remote workers!<p>If you're in a remote team you know how difficult is to "connect" with other colleagues. Everybody is always in a hurry so there's no deeper synchronization.<p>In my team, we're doing a "check-in/out" inside each meeting where we take turns by answering "With what emotion you're entering/exiting this meeting?". From time to time we change the question with something different in order to build awareness. This helps with establishing mindfulness and understanding what is the emotional climate in the team. For a team of 5-10 people, it takes 5-10 minutes to do it. It makes space to slow down before jumping to the agenda. We also do retreats every 3rd month but a lot of stuff can happen in 3 months...<p>What are your habits for increasing your team's emotional intelligence?<p>Disclaimer: I'm doing product research in this field by implementing a tool[1] which helps teams to harmonize their emotional states.<p>[1] here's a sneak peek <a href="https://imgur.com/a/dDkfRVg" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/dDkfRVg</a> but I won't go into details as I fear it may derail the topic. Part of it is inspired by research from Yale and Geneva universities and their departments for EQ.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: As a single developer, I would usually just keep a .txt file with interesting things that I've learned throughout my tenure. It's a lot harder to replicate that efficiency for a large team; especially a distributed team. How do you effectively share knowledge with your co-workers? What have you seen work/fail?
Upvote: | 198 |
Title: Interested in initiating a discussion about what worked for you to keep your productivity up. What'd you learn about yourself working for so far and what'd you think most of us are doing wrong?
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: A continuation of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13660086 which has been incredibly useful to me.<p>I recently finished this phenomenal book called "Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications":<p>https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/building-enterprise-javascript-applications<p>Which takes the reader from zero to building a non-trivial production fullstack application with JavaScript. I also recommend "Building Git". The title is self-explanatory:<p>https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/<p>Other resources:<p>https://github.com/AlgoryL/Projects-from-Scratch<p>https://github.com/tuvtran/project-based-learning
Upvote: | 852 |
Title: Hey, Im wondering how do people go about managing their financials, between paying off loans, saving money and investing. Do people feel like they are making the best decisions when it comes to money?
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: Frequently finding upvoted links to paywalled news sites, which usually ends up in a search for a similar article from a free news source. How much time could we save each other by not linking to paywalls?
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: I just had a client pay $8,200, and they must have hit the submit button over and over. 6 times actually, but luckily their bank blocked all but 3 of the payments.<p>I had to refund 2 of those, and Stripe has charged me $714 in refund fees.<p>Their live chat and phone support all insist that it's expected that Stripe would process $8,200, submitted over and over within seconds to the same credit card, and wouldn't block it.<p>I guess it's true that I signed up for this when I signed up for Stripe. And it's obvious that the payment flow was misconfigured and the least I could do is disable the submit button upon click.<p>Although wow... I would have trusted Stripe to have some degree of obvious safety net against duplicate transactions until today.<p>I figured I'd put this out there in case anybody else finds themselves in the same situation.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: For 2020 I've decided to focus on taking online courses to further my education. With that, I have a rough budget of $50/month to spend. Looking for suggestions on paid or free courses you may have taken that you found beneficial.<p>edit: 2020, not 2019
Upvote: | 195 |
Title: Also curious about highest value skill for least duration
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I've seen many examples of database schemas but don't always recognise a good design over a mediocre or poor design.<p>This is what I mean by schema (is this a good design?)<p><a href="https://www.drupal.org/node/1785994" rel="nofollow">https://www.drupal.org/node/1785994</a><p>When I read about database schemas with thousands of tables I wonder what kind of problem could possibly require so many tables.<p>What are good schema examples? And what are some poor examples?
Upvote: | 437 |
Title: Let's consider I am a company and I want to donate 1000$ for Open Source projects and Open Source libraries as I am using them heavily. What can I do?<p>Option 1: Pick my favorite project and send them 1000$ -> simple but only one project benefits from my donation
Option 1: Find projects or libs I am using and accept donations, use their donation systems, distribute the 1000$ -> very time consuming and cumbersome, I have to use different systems, but can support multiple projects. Unfortunately, the donation for one project will be quite small as it is just a fraction of the donation of 1000$.<p>Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the 1000$ or support Open Source so that the 1000$ is used as effectively as possible?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: When in the past I've picked up a reference manual or something of the sort I'd go slowly, lookup every word I didn't understand and started experimenting as soon as possible.<p>But that is quite time consuming and intense.
I've been considering skimming through the whole things to get kind of a big picture of what the thing is and where I'm going and then going back a second time to catch then the details and experiment.<p>Any other ideas? How do you tackle learning something new and complicated?<p>(ps. the complicated thing for me right now is kernel development, including writing proper C)
Upvote: | 420 |
Title: tl;dnr: Unhappy at my job after >7 years. Love being a jack of all trades. Love learning new things. Hate being stagnant. Hate being the smartest person in the room. Need something new. What roles out there fit the skill set of someone that is good at a whole lot of things, but doesn't feel like a master/senior in any one of them?<p>-<p>I've been at the same small company for over 7 years. I started at the bottom, worked my way to the top after 3 years, and I've been here since. For a couple years I created new positions for myself because I hate being stagnant, but there's nothing else to do here.<p>I'm proficient in many things and enjoy doing all of them. Development (full stack), server admin, data center management, DevOps, project management, managing teams, VoIP, routing/switching, training, sales... the list goes on.<p>My issue is I haven't had formal training in a lot of it, and I didn't have any mentors or people above me to teach me more because this company is too small. I just love learning and love moving forward so I kept teaching myself new things, and then using them in the company. I don't actually feel like I have impostor syndrome, but I also feel like someone that is filling these roles at another company probably knows/does it better job than I can. I'm just a big fish in a small pond here.<p>So finally to my question: what role/job title I should be looking for? All the searching I do points me to one specific roles. PHP Developer. Systems Admin. Network Engineer. Etc. Are there any other "Jack of all trades" out there that can tell me what your job title is, and what I could be looking for?
Upvote: | 496 |
Title: I know IRC still exists and there's a lot of people there, but for some reason I don't feel like it is the same ~vibe~ as when I used to use it growing up in the 90s
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: If you are a solo founder would you share what your week looks like e.g. spend an afternoon on x?<p>I have productive days and days when I feel like I am scratching around for scraps of leads and SEO. I am currently doing 1k ARR so money is tight and I want to make the best use of my time.
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: Also, what integrations do you wish you could use?
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: What frameworks or services do you use for personal dashboards? Something to keep all of your tasks, goals, financials, etc in one place. Something with api integration for other services like Mint, Todoist, Evernote, etc. Does such a thing exist?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: For my travel site side hustle (beatthatflight.com.au/), I find and publish cheap flights for Australians. Sounds simple, but even if say, someone gave me the flights each day, there's posting the, sometimes to deals sites, as well as then editing it and posting it on my site, and out to social media, and then to specific mailing lists on mailchimp, depending on the source city of the deal, or type of post.<p>A LOT of that becomes tedious. Mailchimp can auto post to FB/twitter/instagram etc, but even converting the blog post into mailchimp emails gets tiring, as you need to choose a feature photo, the specific mailing list etc.<p>I'm a selenium guy, so have built some scripts to minimise some of it, but the rush each time of finding a deal still pains me when I think of the tedium ahead of publishing it.<p>Ideally, my goal would be to submit [to][from][when] to a script and the whole process would be automatic. I can see that selenium <i>could</i> do it, but my goodness, it'd be slow and potentially flaky all via the web UI for those sites.<p>I'd love suggestions, examples of automation you've done, and tools used?
Upvote: | 408 |
Title: Hi everyone,<p>It's Harry, Ethan, and Omid here from Motion (<a href="https://inmotion.app" rel="nofollow">https://inmotion.app</a>). We built a Chrome extension that uses real-time interventions to prevent people from unknowingly wasting time on online distractions.<p>A few months ago, I mentioned that I was spending too much time on Facebook. Omid recommended a browser extension to block certain sites. It worked well - my time wasted dropped to 15 minutes the next day. However, a few days later, I was setting up my company’s Facebook page, and the extension blocked me at the 15-min mark, the time I set for myself. I needed to finish that page, but there was no way around the hard-block, so I had to uninstall the extension.<p>Later, I tried other similar extensions. Each was either so permissive that it wasn't useful for my purpose, or so strict that I had to uninstall it. We realized that existing solutions did not work because their approach is too prescriptive and simplistic. They didn’t recognize that people also need to use Facebook, Youtube, etc. for legitimate purposes. The problem is really intricate. On one hand, Facebook is great for getting reminders on friends’ birthdays or managing business pages; on the other hand, every minute spent on Facebook could potentially lead to a trap. These traps come in all forms - video autoplay, news articles with catchy titles, and sponsored content that looks just like your friends’ posts. Instead of always being hindered from visiting these sites, I needed to have access to their useful parts, but be careful to not get distracted in the process.<p>I decided to build a simple tool for myself - a countdown timer each time I visit a distracting site. We all started using it and liked it, so we decided to hand out the extension to some friends. Surprisingly, despite many bugs, our user retention was infinitely higher than our previous ideas. In fact, we built 6 MVPs during our pivoting process - commission-free prediction market, recruiting platform for quant traders, intercity carpooling service, workplace motivation app, online travel agency, and crypto options market making (last one because both Ethan and I were options traders before our startup; Omid was a college student until this year. For backstory - Ethan and I were best friends in college, and Omid and I have been friends since high school) Since none of these ideas had worked and we were finally getting some users, we decided to work on this one. Also, with this one we were solving a problem that we ourselves had.<p>Here’s how it works now: each time you visit a distracting site (e.g. Twitter), we show a screen where you can choose to either leave or proceed to the site with a visible countdown timer. On sites like Facebook and Youtube, you can choose to hide the newsfeed or video recommendations. Once time is up, we ask you whether you're done. When you visit less distracting sites such as Gmail, you get reminders on how long you’ve been on these sites, so you don't unknowingly spend too long on things like responding to email.<p>Before you start working on something, you can write down your task, and it will show up with a timer on every tab you visit until you clear the task, so you don't get sidetracked. Finally, every morning, we give you a report on how you spent your time the previous day, and allow you to mark the sites that are distracting.<p>We firmly believe in data privacy, and promise that we will never sell user data. We do not collect the URL or content of sites you visit. We had to decide between using Chrome's "all_urls" permission and the more narrow "activeTab" permission. If we only had activeTab, each time the user opens a new page they would have to manually activate our extension. That would be an unacceptable user experience in our opinion, so we settled on the broader permission.<p>The extension is free at the moment. We plan on releasing for other browsers in the upcoming weeks. We plan on monetizing either through a premium tier with productivity tools built for power users or charging a very low amount from every user.<p>Big tech companies have been attacking our attention with sophisticated technology, spending billions of dollars to optimize their engagement metrics. We may think we are in control, but often we are unknowingly being exploited by companies who profit handsomely off our attention—which, if you think about it, is the most valuable asset we have. If we could just simply turn off all these products, that would be an effective defense, but for many people that's not an option, so something more is required.<p>It's far from complete, but we believe we're on the road to building a more useful tool to help individuals defend their attention against these traps. This is a problem many in the HN community have thought a lot about. We’d really love your feedback and learn what you would like to see in a tool like this - what productivity problem do you have that a tool could help solve? How can tooling help to give us back control over our own attention? Thanks so much in advance!<p>Harry, Ethan, and Omid
Upvote: | 210 |
Title: I was having trouble accessing my account, so I gave a call to customer service. The service rep proceeded to (accurately) describe my own password to me. Should I report this somewhere? I'm not really sure what to do.
Upvote: | 442 |
Title: Use this stack.<p>1. DynamoDB for database<p>2. AWS Lambda for backend<p>3. Netlify / Now / Surge for frontend<p>4. S3 for file/image hosting<p>5. Cloudinary for image hosting<p>6. IFTTT to webhook for cron<p>7. RedisLabs for queues, cache<p>8. Figma for designing and prototyping<p>9. Porkbun for $6 .com domains<p>10. Cloudflare for DNS<p>This setup is enough to handle ~1M/requests month, more or less, depending on the application.<p>If you are getting more traffic than that, your startup will be making money so you won’t mind upgrading. :)
Upvote: | 143 |
Title: Hi HN! We're Parthi and Kunal from FounderPhone (<a href="https://founderphone.com" rel="nofollow">https://founderphone.com</a>). FounderPhone is a shared customer support inbox for SMS and calls in Slack.<p>We've built and shipped 7 products recently and if there's one thing we've learned, it's that your personal relationship with your customer is your secret weapon as a startup. Having customers email [email protected] or message a bot via Intercom doesn't feel personal. People are skeptical they will ever get a response. We've had a lot of success giving out our phone number to the top customers we really care about and telling them to text us whenever something comes up. Apparently, lots of great founders like Patrick from Stripe did this for their VIP customers while growing their startups.<p>The problem is that a single SMS inbox isn't sustainable at scale. So we hacked together a solution for ourselves where we made Slack a shared inbox. When a customer texts or calls me, our team can also see the messages and incoming calls. We can discuss how best to handle the issue in Slack and then anyone can respond via text. For calls, anyone available can redirect calls to their own number. From the customer's perspective, they're just texting a single number. They're not frustrated with messy tickets or being routed to 3 different people. They will always read your responses because it's in their SMS inbox instead of being lost amongst their 20,000 unread emails.<p>This is just the start! We're looking into building a whole suite of software to make customer support feel both personal and immediate. We're making an integration with Segment and Sentry to alert you when a customer has an issue so you can reach out to them about it before they complain to you.<p>Text our FounderPhone (510) 756-2522 with your name or email [email protected] if you have any questions. Thanks for checking us out!
Upvote: | 106 |
Title: Hey HN!<p>We’re Cameron, Trung and Matt from API Tracker (<a href="https://www.apitracker.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.apitracker.com</a>). We make tools to help with using third-party APIs in production.<p>When software teams integrate with APIs they often run into outages, network issues, interface changes or even bugs that cause unexpected behavior in the rest of their system. These problems are hard to predict and prepare for so most teams don’t deal with them until there's a outage and have to do an emergency build to add logging and get to a root cause.<p>This is what happened to us. Trung and I are both software engineers and we spent a lot of time and energy trying to make our API integrations robust and reliable in production. We found ourselves instrumenting all our API calls so we could know how many calls we were making, how long they were taking and if they were failing. We set up alerts for errors and latency increases and integrated with PagerDuty. We wrote retry logic with exponential backoff. We wrote failover from one API provider to another. At the end of it all we built a lot of tooling that required maintenance and wasn’t even applied uniformly across all of our integrations.<p>After building all this infrastructure we realized that many other teams are reinventing the same wheel.<p>To solve this problem we built an API proxy that takes requests and relays them to the API provider. By proxying this traffic we are able to instrument each call to measure latency, record status codes, headers and bodies, and add reliability features like automatic retry with exponential backoff. From there we can monitor and alert on issues and provide a searchable call log for debugging and auditability.<p>We knew that because we were asking teams to run their mission critical API calls through us that we had to build a highly available and scalable proxy architecture. We’ve done this by designing a proxy that can be distributed across multiple regions and clouds. We are currently running out of AWS. Global Accelerator allows us to use their private internet backbone to quickly get traffic to our proxies which run behind AWS Network Load Balancers. While this can help us ensure resilience against infrastructure outages, we also need to protect against self-inflicted wounds like bugs and bad deployments. Upon release we bring up a new set of proxy instances, deploy the code, and run our full test suite to make sure that each instance is able to proxy requests correctly. Once all instances are healthy they begin to go into the load balancer.<p>For companies with more stringent needs we support on-premise installations as well as a client-side SDK that can do instrumentation without the proxy.<p>Today we offer the service as a subscription. We hope to make it easy for teams to get visibility and control across all their integrations without having to build it themselves. This includes:<p>- Detailed logging on all of their third-party API calls<p>- Monitoring and alerting for increased latency and error rates<p>- Reliability features like automatic retry, circuit breaker and request queueing<p>- Rate limit and quota monitoring<p>We would love to hear from the community how you are managing your API integrations. Our story is a result of our experiences and how we dealt with them, but we know the HN community has seen it all. We would love to hear from you about problems you’ve had and how you dealt with them. Please leave a comment or send us an email to [email protected]. Looking forward to the discussion!
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: Larry Tesler has died. Larry was in the middle of many of the most influential of Silicon Valley projects and an insightful contributor. See his Wikipedia biography for a snapshot. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler</a>
Upvote: | 1346 |
Title: I recently started a new job (web developer). One of the other coworkers is passive-aggressive and judgmental. Someone broke production today and he left several comments in Slack that seem intended to make this person feel bad. His comments are usually just tame enough not to be obviously abusive but hurt nonetheless. He frequently leaves the thumbs-down emoji as a comment on a PR (with no explanation or suggested improvement) and tells people that decisions they've made "don't make sense" or are "weird". Leadership doesn't seem bothered by it and even invite him to "do his worst" when leaving comments on a PR. I've only been here a few months and I'm completely sick of it. I come home wiped out whenever I have a bad interaction with this person, which is several times a week. I would like to quit but I don't have another job opportunity. How would you deal with this person? Just ignore them? Call them out when they are being passive aggressive? I've tried to feel out my manager about the situation and he seems mildly unconcerned. It feels like there's a lot of potential for me to be labeled "too sensitive" or "not a good fit".
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi HN! I am a grad student with a focus on CS, specifically Software Engineering. I like to explore different technologies that are used to build a product and am fascinated by the way people design such big complex systems. For instance, I am taking a class on Operating Systems right now which also requires me to develop my own kernel. I am finding it very exciting, challenging and fun. I would really like to know what all I can do to get better at designing such big complex systems. I try to read open source but it always feels like a challenge. I don't know if I have the aptitude for this but studying CS and the thought processes of people who have spent so much effort in this field gives me a lot of joy. So, if you have any advice, resources, books or tutorials that you think might help me, please do share. I would be really obliged. Thanks!
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: I feel like I would like to learn modern JavaScript (as supported by the most recent version of V8) from the very basic to the <i>perfect and complete level</i> (which makes the whole point of the question, ways to mediocre proficiency are countless and obvious).<p>I believe this is possible (and maybe not even hard) as I only mean the language itself - no browser APIs, no frameworks/libraries/tooling, no patterns and practices beyond those necessary to understand the features and the quirks of the language itself, what they can be used for and how to deal with them correctly.<p>Where do I go and how hard is this actually going to be?
Upvote: | 223 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Chris and Dan, co-founders of Goodcover (<a href="https://www.goodcover.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodcover.com</a>). Goodcover provides renters insurance (only in California at the moment) and operates as a cooperative. We take a fixed fee on every policy, pool the premiums to pay claims, and then return what’s left over back to Members through an annual dividend. Thanks to this model and good technology we’re able to cut the price of renters insurance in half.<p>I (Chris) worked in traditional insurance for 8 years. That time taught me to love insurance and how it picks people up after disasters, but it also gave me first hand exposure to the things people hate about it – the ever-increasing prices, the adversarial claims negotiations, the mountains of paperwork, and the byzantine decision making. All these inefficiencies kept us from really understanding and working for our policyholders – the people we were meant to serve. I became convinced technology was coming for this industry.<p>I moved to SF in 2016, which is where I met Dan through a family friend. Dan had co-founded Cloudkick (YCW09) and was now looking to start another company. He also knew technology was coming for insurance, especially after his early career at IBM where he saw just how many “tech consultants” were placed in State Farm. Meeting him was a breath of fresh air – we started Goodcover in 2017 and got into YC right after.<p>And then… it took us two years to get a product to market. We had opportunities to get going faster – you can get an agent’s license, buy off the shelf software, and sell other companies’ products in a matter of weeks. But they would be the same crappy, overpriced, adversarial products that everybody sells, and everybody hates. What good is that? Instead, we didn’t take the shortcuts and stuck it out to change the business model to cut the price in half, and Goodcover is the result.<p>The story of how we did this starts with how insurance prices are made. If you have lots of claims data, you can run regressions to learn how underwriting factors like location, customer data, previous losses, etc all affect the frequency and severity of claims for every dollar of coverage you are providing. You then load that claims model with your expenses and desired profit margin, and boom you have insurance rates. You then have to get the Department of Insurance in each state you enter to sign off on your rates (not too low so you lose money, not so high that the government calls out your gouging).<p>We knew technology would save us a lot on processing costs – with Dan’s technical background we knew that we could build technology that would run the business for a fraction of the cost that the typical industry vendors charge. We weren’t going to be saddled with huge agency forces or massive brand advertising. But, we didn’t have any claims data.<p>Enter Quirk 1 of the insurance industry: all personal lines insurance pricing is public. Since all product and pricing is approved by the state government, to start something new you need to essentially reconstitute work other companies have done, proving that the elements you choose work for your target market. This is why most new insurance offerings are basically just another version of the pricing model sold by the “Insurance Services Office” (ISO – yes, that’s a company, not a government agency). It’s approved everywhere and used by everyone, so it’s a quick start. Lemonade uses ISO with one important modification: they set their minimum premium at $60 instead of $120, allowing them to claim an introductory price of $5 a month. If you buy more than the minimum coverage though, you’ll quickly get to “everybody else’s price” territory.<p>However to cut the price without sacrificing coverage, we couldn’t use the same model that everyone else does. We needed a more granular model where we could charge the safest 99% people very little in exchange for charging the riskier 1% more. In my insurance career I had learned a lot about models designed for high-value homes, jewelry, cars etc – these models price in catastrophe (like hurricane and wildfire) very precisely to manage exposures in high-risk places. This granularity results in much lower prices for safer risks, since prices there don’t need to subsidize risky ones like they do in traditional “mass market” models. We decided to adapt these models to build our own that would be applicable to our target market, i.e. Renters. Our competitors that don’t use these models are in a bit of a pickle, because they can’t raise prices for high risks too fast thanks to regulatory constraints, meaning they have to keep prices high in safe places to balance the book.<p>It also meant we could start with a coverage baseline that was better than the usual Renters Policy, including coverage for mold remediation, water damage originating from other peoples’ apartments, etc. We modernized the coverage, getting rid of extra coverage for things like oriental rugs and replacing it with more computer coverage. And critically we lowered the expense base, allowing us to offer huge savings thanks to the compound effect of lower costs and more granular pricing for our target market. The biggest apples-to-apples discount we’ve clocked so far is 71%.<p>Custom model in hand, we were a critical step closer. But we still couldn’t offer insurance until we had the capital ready to pay claims. Insurance regulation sensibly makes sure that before you sell insurance to anyone you are adequately capitalized to pay your claims. Thus we set out to raise more capital.<p>Here’s where we ran into Quirk 2, and something I should have known all along. Insurance Claims Capital is inherently not venturable. VCs look for 10-100x return on investment. But, as we grew the company, by law our claims capital reserves would always need to be at least 3x our expected losses (8x is normal). That geometric growth pattern is not scalable. Even if we raised over and over again, by the time we “made it big” we would be selling shares to normal investors, people who value insurance companies on a multiple of their cash on hand. Today’s insurance monsters have grown their cash base slowly for about 100 years. We found it was inefficient for us to own this capital, and therefore impossible to pitch. Money we raise should go to scaling our operations, not sitting around in case we had more claims than premiums. This meant we need to get claims capital partners – aka, rent it from insurance companies.<p>We had hoped to avoid this because of quirk 3 of the insurance industry, “underwriting profits”. It used to be you could run an insurance business with huge expenses at a loss and make money because interest rates are great. No longer. The way insurance companies make money today is by keeping the difference of premium minus claims and expenses, or “underwriting profit”. This sets insurers up to be in conflict with their customers, and my experience in the industry showed me that if there was a root cause for all the reasons people hated insurance, this was it. So not only would we now need to ask insurers for help, we’d need them to give us their profit back to return to Members.<p>This process took over a year. Fortunately we secured in-principle approval from a great reinsurer (TransRe) early on. The next step was to find a “primary” insurance partner to get us set up in California. We still have the chart of our emotions on the whiteboard in our office from that time – with huge ups (like when we moved to board-level conversations with one of California’s best cooperative insurers) to huge lows (like when those talks collapsed because that insurer’s agency force wouldn’t allow the channel conflict of a digital partner). Eventually we got it done, inking a three-party deal that worked for everyone, providing a more or less stable return for our capital partners but with the excess profit returning to Goodcover’s Members. With model and insurance capital partners in hand we then moved to get approval from California, which went as well as a process like that could, thank goodness.<p>While we were working on these business objectives we built the necessary technology to service policies, quotes and maintain regulatory compliance. The easiest way to think of insurance is it works like an append only database. For instance, to remove coverage you would amend a person’s policy contract to remove a coverage, and so similarly in our tech stack we append an event that describes the changes to the policy which outputs a final policy. As a side benefit, this allows us to see the current state of a policy at any point in time. This model works well for us considering most, if not all, of our code is written in a functional language (Scala).<p>Which brings us up to late last year when we wrote our first Goodcover policy. Honestly it’s been quite an ordeal, but we think the changes we’ve been able to implement have been worth it. I am so thankful for the hard work and persistence of the team, and for all the feedback and help the HN and YC community have given us over the years (shout out to anyone who remembers our “Advice” Show HN from 2018! - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17465114" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17465114</a>).<p>Renter’s insurance in CA is just the first step, (home and more states on the way) We have a ton more listening to Members to do, but we hope you enjoy the benefits – and are super grateful for any feedback you have!
Upvote: | 158 |
Title: I just received an email from Google Cloud Platform:<p>Hello Google Cloud Vision API customer,<p>We are writing to let you know that starting February 19, 2020, the Cloud Vision API will no longer return gendered labels such as 'man' and 'woman' that describe persons in an image when using the ‘LABEL_DETECTION’ feature.<p>What do I need to know?<p>As you know, the Cloud Vision API can perform feature detection on a local image file for the purpose of identifying persons by sending the contents of the image file through ‘LABEL_DETECTION’.<p>Currently, when you request the API to annotate an image with labels, if you use this feature on images with people, it may return labels describing them in an image with gendered terms, like ‘man’ or 'woman’.<p>Given that a person’s gender cannot be inferred by appearance, we have decided to remove these labels in order to align with the Artificial Intelligence Principles at Google, specifically Principle #2: Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.<p>https://ai.google/principles/
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: James, Tim and Aaron here - we are building a self-hosted, open source Mixpanel/Amplitude style product. The repo is at <a href="https://github.com/posthog/posthog" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/posthog/posthog</a> and our home page is <a href="https://posthog.com/" rel="nofollow">https://posthog.com/</a>.<p>After four years of working together, we originally quit our jobs to set up a company focused on tech debt. We didn’t manage to solve that problem, but we learned how important product analytics were in finding users, getting them to try it out, and in understanding which features we needed to focus on to impact users.<p>However, when we installed product analytics, it bothered us how we needed to send our users’ data to 3rd parties. Exporting data from these tools costs $manyK a month, and it felt wrong from a privacy perspective. We designed PostHog to solve these problems.<p>We made PostHog to automatically capture every front-end click, removing the need to add track(‘event’) - it has a toolbar to label important events after they’re captured. That means you’re spending less time fixing your tracking. You can also push events too.<p>You can have API/SQL access to the underlying data, and it has analytics - funnels and event trends with segmentation based on event properties (like UTM tags). That means we’ve got the best parts of the 3rd party analytics providers but are more privacy and developer friendly.<p>We’re thinking of adding features around paths/retention/pushing events to other tools (ie slack/your CRM). We’d love to hear your feature requests.<p>We are platform and language agnostic, with a very simple setup. If you want Python/Ruby/Node, we give you a library. For anything else, there’s an API. The repo has instructions for Heroku (1 click!), Docker or deploy from source.<p>We’ve launched this repo under MIT license so any developer can use the tool. The goal is to not charge individual developers. We make money by charging a license fee for things like multiple users, user permissions, integrations with other databases, providing a hosted version and support.<p>Give it a spin: <a href="https://github.com/posthog/posthog" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/posthog/posthog</a>. Let us know what you think!
Upvote: | 282 |
Title: Hello HN!<p>We’re Fitz & Malis, the founders of Freshpaint (YC S19) (<a href="https://www.freshpaint.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.freshpaint.io/</a>). Our product is a more flexible way of setting up your analytics and marketing tools.<p>With our javascript snippet, Freshpaint automatically instruments your site by tracking every behavior for you, up front. From there, you can create events for behaviors like clicks, pageviews, etc either through a point-and-click interface or code (whichever you’re more comfortable with). In one click, Freshpaint sends data collected for that event – past or present – to 80+ analytics or marketing tools.<p>What does retroactive mean? Install Freshpaint’s snippet today. In 6 months start tracking something new, and you'll have the last 6 months worth of data that our product has already collected. We make it easy to backfill that historical data into your tools.<p>There’s two types of people that get the most value out of Freshpaint:<p>1. The developer that owns data infrastructure at their company, and wants to lighten the load through automation.<p>2. The non-technical marketer/customer success/PM (or founder!) that makes use of the tools that require customer data.<p>We both met while working at Heap (YC W13) – Malis led the database team and Fitz led product marketing. When starting Freshpaint, we were inspired by a phenomenon we saw while working with customers at Heap. Even though they used Heap for analytics, we kept seeing companies also writing tracking code for each behavior they wanted to use in other tools, either with a routing service like Segment and mParticle or building direct implementations and their own pipelines. Across analytics, product, and marketing it was common to see a dozen tools that required the same data including tools like Hubspot, Intercom, Fullstory, advertising platforms, data warehouses, and more.<p>Let’s say you want to see how many users clicked your signup button or played a song in your analytics tools. Or you want to take the users who added an item to their cart and engage them in an automated marketing campaign. First, you have to write code to collect and log each behavior that you want to track. Then you have to send it to your marketing and analytics tools.<p>This requires a massive engineering effort and it’s distracting to maintain (it’s not uncommon to delay shipping a new feature by 2-3 weeks because of this tax). If you didn’t track something or made a mistake, that data is lost forever.<p>Developers have to do a bunch of work that (1) is not core product development, and (2) they often aren’t the ones to get value from that work because they’re not the end users of this data. Flip this problem around and you have marketers and PMs that are slowed or blocked from their work, and have to distract developers to get unblocked.<p>This is painful for multiple teams. Fitz experienced this a few years back as part of the growth team at Quantcast, and he always had to work with engineering to instrument what he needed to trigger marketing flows and or get analytics telemetry on his experiments.<p>We built Freshpaint to lighten the load and streamline the workflow for both groups. How it works:<p>1. Install Freshpaint’s javascript snippet on your site. It takes 60 seconds, and from that point Freshpaint collects every behavior like clicks, pageviews, etc.<p>2. Connect destinations like Google Analytics, Amplitude, Hubspot, Fullstory, Intercom, and a data warehouse. This is done by copying and pasting an API key or account ID. Complete integrations list here: <a href="https://www.freshpaint.io/integrations" rel="nofollow">https://www.freshpaint.io/integrations</a>. We plan to build more so let us know what you’d like to see.<p>3. Create events for clicks, pageviews, form submissions, and more from data in Freshpaint. Create events thru code or point-and-click in our UI. Data is retroactively available back to the day you installed Freshpaint, regardless of when the event is created. We also support manual tracking and server-side tracking.<p>4. Send data to the destinations we support in one click. You can even backfill past data that Freshpaint has collected.<p>We're eager to hear your feedback, since we know HN has a ton of members who are familiar with this space from all different perspectives!
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: I started a newsletter sending out daily startup ideas. After a year, I transitioned to weekly ideas with more in-depth details.<p>I recently posted all of them to the website and made them searchable. Check it out and let me know what you think. By providing more than just an idea, my hope is to help someone start their next business.<p><a href="https://www.startupsfromthebottom.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.startupsfromthebottom.com/</a>
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: I used to work as a programmer. In 2017, I had to stop working because of health issues. I remember Rust was a cool project, JS had plenty of frameworks fighting between themselves, SPA was a thing albeit I was skeptical of it, and I was in love with Go. Big words like Data Science and Machine Learning were thrown everywhere. Whas has changed in this scenario? Are there new stuff I should know about? Thanks.
Upvote: | 249 |
Title: With the recent posts on successful/profitable side projects, I figure it'd be good to learn about some failed ones. Let's stick to "launched" projects instead of those that never happened.<p>What was the project and why did it fail (best to your knowledge)? Or what's a side-project of yours that's actively losing money?
Upvote: | 196 |
Title: I'm 41 years old and I find I'm not aggressive enough, neither at work nor (probably) in personal life. It was something my boxing coach (various years ago) told me quite often.<p>I'm not passive or shy; I speak up, I tell people (and managers, and girlfriends) uncomfortable truths, I'm usually confident and (quite) assertive, but I'm usually too calm and understanding when things heat up in a discussion. It's totally OK for me to give up and think something like "ok, that person is having a bad day, I shouldn't fight fire with gasoline".<p>Now I feel that's a problem; because, very often, those discussions are those when you "win" an argument (especially in the eyes of colleagues or managers) or lose it.<p>When I approach again people that treated me harshly, they usually say "I thought that was already settled, wasn't it?" or something like that. I work as a software engineer, and I think this is preventing to step up in my career, despite the fact that most colleagues regard me as a really authoritative (and not authoritarian!) source and respect me a lot.<p>I know that some of you will tell me "find a better company". But I've changed some jobs already in my life, and ultimately some things don't change - I don't work in an horrible politics-only corporation - and I think it's high time to step up to what the game is.<p>Any kind of recommendation? Books, trainings, professionals that can help me?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Remember "The Grid"? It was a much-hyped website builder that supposedly used AI to automatically design websites. All that remains now is a landing page https://thegrid.io/<p>All of the websites people created are locked, the founders disappeared on social media, and no one who paid hundreds of dollars for "lifetime" memberships are being refunded. What a disaster!<p>Twitter Drama, conversations about people filing class action: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40thegrid%20%20&src=typed_query&f=live<p>Reddit Drama: https://www.reddit.com/r/theGrid_io/hot/<p>Summary of the saga: https://www.pagecloud.com/blog/what-happened-to-the-grid
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I'm a software dev with almost 10 years experience, and not a single day in the last 10 years has gone by without me feeling the pressure to work, learn something new, or build something. I feel like I should be programming all the time, and if I'm not, I'm wasting my time / missing out / not progressing.<p>It's driving me insane. It is sucking the joy out of life.<p>I need to learn how to truly disconnect from work, so that I can recharge. I need to learn how to drop this feeling, this heavy weight on my shoulders, that I'm not a good developer, and that I need to work more to get better.<p>The problem is that the reality of our field is such that:<p>a) There is a lot of opportunity
b) There are a lot of really smart people, doing very cool things, capturing that opportunity.
c) If you aren't learning, or getting better at the craft, then you're falling behind, becoming irrelevant, and certainly you aren't going to make anything of significance.<p>How do you return to the joy of the craft? How do you forget about the outcome, and learn to love programming again?
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: I do not belong to USA or UK. I am a software engineer with a Bachelor's degree in computer science. But I would like to do a distance learning program to earn an additional bachelor's or master's degree in math or physics or another related topic to satisfy my eagerness to learn more.<p>I would like a distance learning degree from a UK or European University because they are cheaper than American ones. Any suggestions of degree programs and universities?
Upvote: | 161 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>We're Allison and Steve of Syndetic (<a href="https://www.getsyndetic.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.getsyndetic.com</a>). Syndetic is a web app that data providers use to explain their datasets to their customers. Think ReadMe but for datasets instead of APIs.<p>Every exchange of data ultimately comes down to a person at one company explaining their data to a person at another. Data buyers need to understand what's in the dataset (what are the fields and what do they mean) as well as how valuable it can be to them (how complete is it? how relevant?). Data providers solve this problem today with a "data dictionary" which is a meta spreadsheet explaining a dataset. This gets shared alongside some sample data over email. These artifacts are constantly getting stale as the underlying data changes.<p>Syndetic replaces this with software connected directly to the data that's being exchanged. We scan the data and automatically summarize it through statistics (e.g., cardinality), coverage rates, frequency counts, and sample sets. We do this continuously to monitor data quality over time. If a field gets removed from the file or goes from 1% null to 20% null we automatically alert the provider so they can take a look. For an example of what we produce but on an open dataset check out the results of the NYC 2015 Tree census at <a href="https://www.getsyndetic.com/publish/datasets/f1691c5d-56a9-47d4-8df7-a373a2894c8b" rel="nofollow">https://www.getsyndetic.com/publish/datasets/f1691c5d-56a9-4...</a>.<p>We met at SevenFifty, a tech startup connecting the three tiers of the beverage alcohol trade in the United States. SevenFifty integrates with the backend systems of 1,000+ beverage wholesalers to produce a complete dataset of what a restaurant can buy wholesale, at what price, in any zipcode in America. While the core business is a marketplace between buyers and sellers of alcohol, we built a side product providing data feeds back to beverage wholesalers about their own data. Syndetic grew out of the problems we experienced doing that. Allison kept a spreadsheet in dropbox of our data schema, which was very difficult to maintain, especially across a distributed team of data engineers and account managers. We pulled sample sets ad hoc, and ran stats over the samples to make sure the quality was good. We spent hours on the phone with our customers putting it all together to convey the meaning and the value of our data. We wondered why there was no software out there specifically built for data-as-a-service.<p>We also have backgrounds in quantitative finance (D. E. Shaw, Tower Research, BlackRock), large purchasers of external data, where we've seen the other side of this problem. Data purchasers spend a lot of time up-front evaluating the quality of a dataset, but they often don’t monitor how the quality changes over time. They also have a hard time assessing the intersection of external datasets with data they already have. We're focusing on data providers first but expect to expand to purchasers down the road.<p>Our tech stack is one monolithic repo split into the frontend web app and backend data scanning. The frontend is a rails app and the data scanning is written in rust (we forked the amazing library xsv). One quirk is that we want to run the scanning in the same region as our customers' data to keep bandwidth costs and transfer time down, so we're actually running across both GCP and AWS.<p>If you're interested in this field you might enjoy reading the paper "Datasheets for datasets" (<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.09010.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.09010.pdf</a>) which proposes a standardized method for documenting datasets modeled after the spec sheets that come with electronics. The authors propose that “for dataset creators, the primary objective is to encourage careful reflection on the process of creating, distributing, and maintaining a dataset, including any underlying assumptions, potential risks or harms, and implications of use.” We agree with them that as more and more data is sold, the chance of misunderstanding what’s in the data increases. We think we can help here by building qualitative questions into Syndetic alongside automation.<p>We have lots of ideas of where we could go with this, like fancier type detection (e.g. is this a phone number), validations, visualizations, anomaly detection, stability scores, configurable sampling, and benchmarking. We'd love feedback and to hear about your challenges working with datasets!
Upvote: | 124 |
Title: In this age of IoT where devices are being taken over by strangers and (service) companies are storing clear-text passwords, how do you manage your home security? I'm talking less about motion sensors and door/window open/close sensors, and more about video surveillance. I want to add a couple of IP cameras but I'm completely petrified by the thought of someone getting access to a live feed from my house, due to the negligence of the service provider.<p>I've looked around and there are plenty of options for IP/Wi-Fi cameras with a tone of cool features, which can be accessed through a smartphone app, which, of course, is handled by the manufacturer (feed goes through its servers).<p>What I'd like is an IP camera that provides an API to which I can connect from my home server and let me see the feed only trough it. Motion sensing is also a cool, and useful feature, as it would allow me to send notifications.<p>How would you solve this or better yet, did you have this issue and already solved it?
Upvote: | 140 |
Title: See title
Upvote: | 297 |
Title: I signed up online and they gladly accepted my credit card, but when I try to cancel my subscription, I am left with 3 choices:<p>Call us
Text us
Chat with customer care (which is btw busy at all times)<p>What kind of BS is that ?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Today my web app ViralQuotes was hacked. My DB was erased, instead, there was a new table called Warning with a message 0.08 BTC to recover my DB.<p>After 5 hours I was able to rebuild my DB, but unluckily I lost all my historical data within my 400+ users data among them.<p>Of course, there are some lessons learned about it:<p>Don't forget to set up regular backups.
I know, I was really silly for not doing it, but I never thought that someone would hack my insignificant website. So, stop what you are doing, and go and set up some way to back up your DBs and significant files at least once a day. Some providers offer it for a few extra bucks a month.
Don't be like me, maybe your product is not generating thousands of dollars and you think that no one will waste his time hacking your site, but remember that is important for you and that's is enough.<p>After looking into how that could happen, I realized that I pushed to my server my .env file with all the database credentials in it, which Is pretty simple access to it especially if you use Laravel.
I found out that is a pretty common mistake, If you google DB_USERNAME filetype:env you will find thousands of Laravel env files exposed
Therefore, remember to actually set your variables from the .env file as environmental variables in your server and destroy any .env file that is around there.<p>For sure there are more lessons to learn about this, but I realized that I Would like to hear if some of you have had bad experiences like this one, and what do you recommend to prevent them?.<p>Cheers,
Nico
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: These are all participating founders. It is a great way to learn what they are all up to now:<p>* YC S2017 <a href="https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230735563034021893" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230735563034021893</a><p>* YC W2017 <a href="https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230735739861618691" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230735739861618691</a><p>* YC S2018 <a href="https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230734925881470976" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230734925881470976</a><p>* YC W2018 <a href="https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230735246502424577" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230735246502424577</a><p>* YC S2019 <a href="https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230728767556833280" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230728767556833280</a><p>* YC W2019 <a href="https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230734559743922178" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230734559743922178</a><p>Also:<p>* YC S2020 <a href="https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230850014617862145" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230850014617862145</a> (will be populated in the future)<p>* YC W2020 <a href="https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230849940101844999" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/i/lists/1230849940101844999</a> (will be populated in the future)
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: I have an Indian colleague who is smart, articulate, and very technically capable. His work products are excellent, and he’s a delight to work with.<p>I recently learned that he has not gotten a raise in the time he has worked for our present employer, in spite of his increasing responsibility and consistent good results. When I probed him on why, and why he hasn’t been negotiating for one, he explained to me that he is dependent on our employer for his visa. My understanding is that it’s very challenging to both change jobs and stay in the USA under this visa due to the burden placed on the employer to get this visa.<p>Strategically, that puts him in a really bad negotiating position: ultimate leverage over your employer in this scenario stems from the threat (implied or not) that you might leave. This appears to be a trump card he doesn't have in his hand, as he wants to stay in the US.<p>What can I do to coach him to getting paid more? What sort of strategy can he use to show his value and demonstrate his leverage?
Upvote: | 183 |
Title: Hi Hacker News, We’re Harley and Lukas from Probably Genetic (<a href="https://www.probablygenetic.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.probablygenetic.com</a>). We built an at-home physician-ordered DNA test that covers all genes and looks for pathogenic variants related to thousands of rare genetic conditions.<p>Why rare genetic conditions? It may seem like a niche problem but there are ~400 million people worldwide with a rare genetic condition, half of which are currently undiagnosed. To put this into perspective, it’s estimated that 1 in 10 Americans has a rare condition and while each of the individual ~10,000 conditions is rare, the population that suffers such conditions is larger than cancer and HIV combined. Furthermore, for the patients that have been diagnosed, it takes on average 8 years for doctors to identify their conditions. You’ve already heard of rare genetic conditions, you might just not be aware of it. Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS? Most of these diseases initially look like more common conditions, such as autism, chronic pain, ADHD, or even the flu, before patients get worse. This diagnostic odyssey can be extremely costly for patients and in our experience, some are spending more than $30,000 and seeing more than 10 doctors before they get access to the right specialists and testing.<p>We have seen this problem first-hand. Lukas is a rare-disease expert and worked on the world’s largest rare disease project (the 100,000 genomes project) as a PhD candidate at Oxford University in the UK. I am trained as a theoretical computational astrophysicist and during my PhD and fellowship at Cambridge University and Oxford University, I spent my spare time working with National Healthcare Service doctors developing and publishing medical diagnostics with machine learning. Our original idea was actually slightly different from what we have now. We spent a lot of effort on developing a symptom checker specifically for rare conditions with the idea to comb through existing medical records and flag patients with potential rare genetic conditions because, unsurprisingly, WebMD and others aren't really great for this purpose. As we were building this, we realized that for the patients we worked with, even if their symptoms were suggestive of a genetic condition, access to clinical-grade genetic testing was extremely difficult for many as it was either too expensive because insurance wouldn’t cover the cost, or they couldn’t find a doctor that would order it. Thus, we decided to use our expertise to both find these patients more efficiently and built up a service to drastically reduce the time and cost to access clinical-grade genetic testing.<p>About the test:<p>Just like most DNA tests, you can do this from home and it’s noninvasive, all we need is a little saliva. Unlike most DNA tests, ours is physician-ordered, sequenced in a CLIA-accredited and CAP-certified lab, the results are signed out by a licensed clinical lab director, all users have access to genetic counseling, and we try to incorporate as much phenotypic data as possible into the analysis. Our product is a whole-exome sequencing test with 100x coverage and covers all of the more than 20,000 genes, where 85% of known disease-causing variants occur.<p>People always ask, how are you different from 23andme? Looking for a rare genetic condition is kind of like trying to find a typo in a novel. Using a 23andme (or similar) test to look for such a condition is like trying to find a typo in the first Harry Potter novel and stopping after 75 words. Those tests are just not meant for this purpose. Most are based on genotyping arrays that look for very specific variants at predetermined locations in the genome. However, the variants that cause rare diseases can occur anywhere. For example, there are over 1,700 different mutations in the CFTR gene that can cause cystic fibrosis. Approximately 85% of the known pathogenic mutations occur in the protein-coding regions of DNA called the exome. Our test is a whole exome sequencing test rather than a genotyping array, which allows us to cover all of the genes in a person’s DNA. We often get the question, why not do whole genome rather than whole exome? Right now it simply comes down to accessibility. For most consumers, whole genome sequencing is still too expensive and the additional gain in terms of coverage of pathogenic mutations doesn’t necessarily warrant the significant price increase. That being said, if you are interested in clinical-grade whole genome sequencing, we can soon offer this as well.<p>Patient privacy is a huge concern for us and something we think about all the time. Quite simply, we will never share any of our users' data without explicit consent and we are more than happy to both delete our users' data and destroy their sample if requested.<p>Interestingly, we often have the opposite problem where we receive inbound requests of people trying to share their data with us to see if we can help them. Out of the more than 10,000 rare diseases, over 95% do not have an FDA-approved treatment, which is why the rare disease community is so motivated to leverage their personal insights. We have started a waitlist to provide such services and are actively seeking ways to help these people and integrate them into our community, even if they have not had sequencing through us.<p>Finally, how much does it cost? A single test right now costs $899 on our website, but we try to offer the test in trios where we sequence both the patient and two family members as this often gives a higher diagnostic yield. The latter option is $1,799. We expect that the test price will decrease significantly with time as the cost of sequencing drops and more of the analysis can be automated. We don’t currently accept insurance; however, in our experience, using more traditional channels to access this kind of testing can result in bills of >$10,000, not all of which may be covered. Many insurance providers don’t even cover this kind of testing, except for very specific purposes, despite more and more of the medical literature recommending exome sequencing as a first-tier diagnostic for specific indications. Ideally, we would make the product so affordable that it simply makes sense to use us rather than billing insurance for the test plus the numerous doctor and specialist visits needed before and after it’s ordered. We are currently offering the test at cost, as we aim not to profit off of the patients that need it most, and this is sustainable because, with the consent of the patients, we can leverage our data asset for drug discovery, clinical trial recruitment, and drug repurposing.<p>Consumer genetic testing is growing rapidly as an industry and nearly doubling every single year. What is missing from this market is accessible physician-ordered testing that can genuinely help those with complex symptoms and undiagnosed genetic conditions. This is what we hope to provide. If you have any questions or feedback, we would love to hear it and please check us out at <a href="https://www.probablygenetic.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.probablygenetic.com</a>.
Upvote: | 109 |
Title: I'm at my wits end.<p>I was made homeless and had my financial support dropped at the beginning of the year, and am currently staying in squats etc in the Netherlands. I have nearly no income - 10 euros a week in donations towards an open-source project I'm working on to build a live video streaming platform for the fediverse, and occasional requests for solidarity funds.<p>My situation is... not great. Half my time is taken up by anxiety around police violence, illegal evictions, my friends being arrested. Still, in the immediate term, it's better than sleeping rough.<p>I'm not sure how to find work; I've not had a paying job in the last 8 years. I've worked on software for myself and others in hackerspaces and the like; and helped run a volunteer cafe for a large portion of last year (sinking 20+ hours a week into that fairly consistently), but I can't seem to even turn that into an actual paying cafe job. I go through bursts of sending dozens of applications a week to anything that is vaguely relevant to anything I've done in the past, and receive... mostly nothing in response.<p>I don't know what's wrong with me. All I want is to make enough money to survive. I'm going to be dead in a few months if I can't work something out.<p>Does anyone have any advice, at all?
Upvote: | 323 |
Title: Hello.<p>I have been working on this longer than it takes for some to get from idea to exit, so maybe I am the last person who should have been working on this, haha.<p>Anyway, I started working on a system to guide founders from idea to launch and early traction. The first MVP was made in Excel (took around 4 years), covering the whole shebang (and some other bits). I shared part of it Jan 2019, crickets, but it was not unexpected.<p>I then started working on MVP v2, this time in Access, finished October / November 2019. It does not feature all the steps, but rather, only the first few covering:<p>1. Idea Breakdown
2. Problem Research
3. Market Audit 1
4. Audience Disposition
5. Audience Outreach
6. Audience Interviews
7. Interview Results
8. Signals (ICP and Persona Generation)<p>Currently, I am working with a few founders, working on bottom of the funnel content for Startizer, and continuing targeted outreach one to one.<p>Once in a while, I will also be posting in more public places to see the response, get feedback, see what I can improve in Startizer and indeed any blind-spots I might have. Much to learn... always much to learn really.<p>So, anyway, please do check it out, comments, feedback, would be much appreciated. To finally reiterate, it's made in MS Access which makes it PC only: <a href="https://startizer.com/" rel="nofollow">https://startizer.com/</a><p>Cheers, Ace.
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: We are a startup making our first hires. We are three founders, who respect each other hugely, help each other and forgive mistakes. We've been thru a lot together.<p>We raised money and are looking for core hires. Given our personal bond, we would like the core team (first 3-4 hires) to share our passion to some degree. Perhaps naively we'd like them to become pillars of our company and help us inspire future employees.<p>A former colleague of mine came forward, very bright and capable guy. Exactly the technical talent we need. He likes the project, but he offered to work three days a week for us because he would like to continue working on personal projects in parallel. While I appreciate his honesty, I cannot easily decide if he is the right kind of first hire. Had he joined us a year later, I would hire him in a heartbeat. But right now I feel like lack of commitment from him could possibly influence our culture in a negative way. Is this a right way to think about first hires? What would you do?
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: Hello, I would like to know if anyone has celiac disease and how do you deal with that? I know that this is not reddit or Facebook group, but I would like to hear opinion from you. For example, in my country (Lithuania) this disease is still quite rare, and it is quite hard for others to understand the depth of it. For example, even with grandparents I still need to tell them that they can't give any buns for kids, even single one or that you can't cook in the same pan if you cooked something with wheat and so on. My family has not been in a proper restaurant since we found about the disease. What are the most gluten free countries? How do you deal with this?
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Successful companies institutionalize the knowledge of their employees; this leads to better continuity and faster on-boarding. Things like huge monorepos of useful code, internal tools, process manuals, etc. are example products of this. Young companies tend to depend on the dedication and talent of key individuals, and in maturation, must somehow make the jump to institutionalized knowledge (so that "if someone got hit by a bus" things are ok). What are some successful methods you have used or seen used to accomplish this transition? What are problems you faced (skeptics, opponents, etc.)? I am involved with an organization that is slowly growing, is about to lose key personnel, and is looking to prepare.
Upvote: | 547 |
Title: Adam's tweet -> https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1233517884619546631<p>Tailwind UI is a library of responsive HTML components, built using Adam's framework Tailwind CSS. It's only been selling in early access for three days!
Upvote: | 214 |
Title: Let's say you visit a webpage like Reddit and want to search for $string. Maybe I am too stupid, but in my opinion it's just not possible anymore. :( Content is dynamically loaded in and out and you have to scroll carefully not to miss a $string when using browser based CTRL-F. That is just ridiculous.<p>For me infinite-scroll is one of the most stupid features of the "modern" web. It just makes the experience <i>worse</i> to crank up some dubious engagement numbers.<p>And to make it clear: I don't want to search for stuff via $string site:reddit.com via some search engine. Often I really want to search for <i>exact</i> $string on a page, but on something like Reddit that does not work anymore.<p>[/rant]<p>EDIT: Thanks for all the answers. And I think I hit a nerve here :) Maybe it makes some frontend developers take a step back and really think if it's really a good idea to implement that "feature".<p>As suggested you can use old.reddit.com in case of Reddit, but for some pages, there just isn't an option and the worst offenders even hijack your CTRL-F and want you to use their own terrible search.
Upvote: | 101 |
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: | 129 |
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: | 97 |
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,
please 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=22465474" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465474</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465475" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465475</a>
Upvote: | 400 |
Title: Hey,<p>Thomas and Petr here from Raycast (<a href="https://www.raycast.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.raycast.com</a>). We are building a command-line inspired native app to save developers time on non-coding tasks, such as managing active sprints in Jira, sorting out notifications in GitHub, or checking metrics in Amplitude.<p>Both of us are software engineers and we noticed that we were spending less time coding and more time managing the software development process. We had to keep track of bug reports, manage sprints, comment on pull requests, release new versions and many more things that eat up a big portion of our time. All of those tasks are spread across web tools that aren't optimized for power users. When we used these tools every day, loading times became annoying, animations turned into pain and clicking 10 buttons for the simplest things didn't feel right.<p>We built an internal productivity tool that addresses this issues in our previous jobs at Facebook as a side project. It was a desktop app for macOS that sits in the menu bar and connects to the internal issue tracker. The app displays your open issues and has a global shortcut to create a new one. The tool allowed us to replace the slow web app for the majority of our work and saved us time. When other engineers enjoyed the simplicity and speed of the tool, we realized that such an app can be applied to other web tools as well.<p>Everybody has to deal with one of these. Take Jira, for example: to update the status of an issue, you have to open the browser, create a new tab, navigate to the website and find the right issue. Only then can you change the priority. This feels broken! This kind of interaction shouldn't take that long. In fact, you should be able to do this without opening a browser, without seeing a loading indicator and without switching context!<p>Raycast is inspired by command line interfaces. These interfaces are a great way to escape from the clutter of typical web tools. They are simple, responsive and extensible. However, they also have drawbacks: rich media elements aren't well supported, ASCII characters are too limiting for advanced UI design and it's very hard to discover commands. Raycast is our attempt to combine the benefits of a command line with those of a modern user interface. Its UI is similar to Spotlight or Alfred. You can launch the app with a global shortcut, search for commands, and perform quick actions. Similar to CLIs, you execute application-specific commands in Raycast, such as creating an issue in Jira or opening a pull request in GitHub. An integrated store makes it easy to install new extensions.<p>The app is entirely designed to keep developers in the flow. Most important: it's fast! Our client-first architecture makes every interaction instant. The app is written natively to deliver the best performance with the least amount of resources. It won't drain your laptop battery and it's accessible via keyboard shortcuts.<p>Consistency is key to being more productive. Once you've learned how to create an issue in Jira via Raycast, you know how to schedule a meeting in Zoom, create a pull request in GitHub, or set a reminder for tomorrow. All commands follow a similar structure and share UI components to make them look and feel the same. The components are built for speed: Text fields have autocompletions, elements in dropdowns are searchable and automatically remember previous choices. The app doesn't require a login and your data is stored encrypted on your local hard drive. All the API requests go directly to the third party services and we don't track any sensitive data.<p>At the moment, Raycast is only available for macOS and we're focusing on the fastest experience for Jira. Upcoming extensions will include an inbox for your GitHub notifications or utilities such as reminders. We can't build all extensions ourselves and believe in an open platform. We will release an API to build custom extensions and use the private beta to make sure that we can provide a great developer experience. We have tons of ideas and would love to hear what would you like to see in a tool like this.
Upvote: | 160 |
Title: I got a minor in CS, MS in genetics and have been looking for an industry job for about a year now. I got an interview for a minimum wage Jr. Dev but didn't get the job. Post every time to the Who Wants to be Hired but never heard anything.
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: I'm a self-taught spaghetti coder webdev with thirteen years of beginner experience; mostly learning by googling how to do everything as I built web apps for small businesses or wired up forms and APIs through agencies. It worked for a long time, and yeah I'm probably that guy who wrote that stinky codebase you're dealing with. I'm not particularly proud of that.<p>Anyway, my "skills" (heh) seem to be mostly irrelevant now. I hated frontend ever since the responsive era, but I got by sticking to less design intensive stuff. These days the web is evolving very rapidly and I've kept up sorta, but I'm not passionate about this field, I'm getting older and there's lots of competition now and I'm unemployed. I basically want to get as far away from Node and React and CSS as possible. What's a good path out?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I want to improve my note-taking skill. I've started writing a text file with notes from class, however, I don't have a systematic way of writing. This means at this point I just wrote down, arbitrarily, things the professor said, things the professor wrote, how I understood the information, and everything else, mostly all over the place.<p>I'm wondering if anyone developed a system like this I could adapt to myself, and how did they do it.
Upvote: | 294 |
Title: Hello! Can the HN community recommend me a STEM toy (or similar that would educate and entertain him) for my 3 yo boy? He's highly curious but I can't find many things to play with him :( The things that I like bore him and the things that he likes bore me (or are way too messy and dangerous to let him do them)...
Upvote: | 117 |
Title: Hi everyone!<p>We’re Nick & Omar from Flowdash (<a href="https://flowdash.com" rel="nofollow">https://flowdash.com</a>). We help companies quickly build internal tools to track and execute human-in-the-loop workflows.<p>We’re built specifically for technology companies that have manual work behind the scenes. For example, a fintech that has a beautiful mobile-first experience for its end users, likely also has a risk team internally approving new accounts, or reviewing suspicious transactions for anomalies. These teams need tools to get their jobs done, but building those tools is time consuming and often means spending your limited engineering resources on internal tools when you’d much rather invest in building user-facing features.<p>What’s more, maintenance of these tools is an ongoing endeavor. As the company scales and the operations team identifies ways they can improve their workflow, they’re often bottlenecked on engineering availability, forcing the team to implement workarounds in the interim, such as working out of spreadsheets and Slack. These workarounds, while easy to implement, come with pitfalls such as tasks slipping through the cracks or data getting out-of-sync.<p>With Flowdash, we’re combining the best of both worlds. We want to enable the deep integration that comes from building custom software, while making it possible for operations teams to iterate and improve their workflow over time. We’re able to do this because we’re not trying to be a general-purpose low-code platform, but really focus on use cases where a team of humans works through a backlog of tasks.<p>Flowdash was inspired by our own experience. Omar and I were early engineers at Gusto and over the course of six years, built several internal tools to support our payments, risk, and payroll operations teams. We saw first-hand the benefits of equipping our ops teams with great tools, but also struggled to prioritize improvements to these tools against user-facing features.<p>We think of operations teams as unsung heroes. Their work is critical to the day-to-day operations of the company, yet few people externally know they exist. We want to give them better tools to get their work done.<p>Here’s how it works:<p>Flowdash’s core primitive is a Flow, which we define as a pipeline of work, where tasks move through a set of stages from creation to completion. Every Flow exposes an endpoint where developers can push new tasks with a single POST request. Users then claim tasks and move them along the pipeline. Additionally, actions can be customized in a number of ways, such as sending email, calling a third-party API, or talking back to your main application. Because stages and actions can be customized without code, the end-user can change how they work without requiring engineering intervention. From the developer perspective, you can think of it as a human-powered background job.<p>As a concrete example, let’s consider a fintech onboarding new clients. When a new client signs up, a task is automatically pushed to Flowdash. From there, a risk agent reviews the account and decides whether to Approve or Reject the client. In turn, that action issues a callback to the main application to complete onboarding. Here’s a 3-min video setting this up end-to-end: <a href="https://flowdash.com/demo" rel="nofollow">https://flowdash.com/demo</a>.<p>We’re excited (and a little intimidated) to be on HN today, and would love to get your feedback. Have you had to build similar tools? What were some of the pain points or challenges? Thanks in advance!<p>Nick and Omar
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: HN is a treasure trove of information. The primary way I read HN is to bookmark stories and read the comments when the discussion is complete. Others actively participate. Some get jobs via "Who is hiring?". We all use HN differently.<p>There are ways to read HN other than this website. However, I have not found one that meets all of these requirements:<p><pre><code> - Self-hosted.
- Offline access of data.
- Query data via SQL.
- Full text search of stories and comments.
- Notification of replies to comments.
</code></pre>
Some ideas:<p>1) A tool that maintains a copy of the HN API[1] in an SQLite database, with indexing and full-text search[2]. This supports the development of the other tools.<p>2) A command line tool that demonstrates how to use the database and supports the development of scripts. For example:<p><pre><code> #!/bin/sh
# Run notify whenever someone replies to a comment.
$ hn replies username | notify
</code></pre>
3) A web UI for browsing and searching. This can be hosted locally or on a remote server.<p>What features interest you?<p><pre><code> [1]: https://github.com/HackerNews/API
[2]: https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html</code></pre>
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: From the surface, Space Repetition seems like the best way to memorize (and don't forget) large amounts of factual information. But from what I see, it's not that popular.<p>If you tried it, but stopped why?
If you heard about it, but never tried it, why?<p>For those who haven't heard about it:<p>- https://ncase.me/remember/<p>- https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition<p>- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
Upvote: | 65 |
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