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Title: For example, I'm currently reading Designing Data-Intesive Applications and am taking notes digitally on OneNote (one page per chapter).<p>How do you guys do it?
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Hi HN, I’m looking for a device that I can give to my grandmother that she can use to video call me and other family members from her care home. It needs to either be completely remotely manageable by me, or it needs to not have any real settings that can be changed accidentally (and can be pre-provisioned). Ideally it would be able to connect to the internet over 4g, so it wouldn’t be at the mercy of whether her nursing home has WiFi. Basically what I want is an office phone with a video screen that can connect to a 4g network. Does any such thing exist? If not, does anyone have any suggestions?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I've been programming all my life and creating drawings/diagrams of anything comes very natural to me. While this happens all the time in my head, I still grab a pen and paper sometimes when the mental overhead becomes too much.
Currently, I'm struggling with a junior colleague. He comes from a different background (sales). Adjusting existing code, fixing and improving features is not a problem for him, but as soon as something becomes more complex he struggles a lot - even simply drawing it on a paper completely blocks him.
I'm looking for advice or resources that can help him improve this skill.
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: I've always considered myself as someone who can do X or can't do Y. I've learned new things, I've been creative and daring - at times.<p>But often times, when someone challenges me to do something new, I respond that I don't know how and would not be able t do it.<p>How do I turn that around? How do I develop a growth mindset?
Upvote: | 150 |
Title: I have worked at Microsoft and Google in multiple different teams.<p>One thing I realized that sometimes engineers go extreme in designing things/code for future cases which are not yet known. Many times these features don't even see any future use case and just keep making the system complex.<p>At what point we should stop designing for future use cases ? How far should we go in making things generic ? Are there good resources for this ?
Upvote: | 243 |
Title: It's been the most toughest times that've ever faced.
Upvote: | 303 |
Title: I think it feels like Jira and I'm really sad. Seems more like a MS move than a GH move...<p>Migrating to gitlab...
Upvote: | 413 |
Title: Today I found out after 11 years on this platform there is no way to delete anything you create and post, including the account itself on Hacker News.<p>This seems strange and ironic considering a lot of our online comments revolve around data privacy, individual rights and the right to be forgotten.<p>I have deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and reddit accounts my life has dramatically improved. However I am unable to delete my hacker news account... leaving me wondering what is the status of my online data and status on this network. Clearly it is meant to be permanent. I wonder if you knew nothing is deletable here, and if knowing at some point you might want to, you’d regret existing on and supporting a network that will profit or benefit from your content in perpetuity without input from you.<p>Meanwhile they reserve extravagant rights to flag censor and ban any content you post at their discretion indicating they’re fully willing to remove content that they disapprove of.<p>My opinion: you should be upset that this platform/network is benefiting off you and not allowing you the rights and benefits to delete and control your own content... Much less paying you for the content you provide.<p>I have emailed [email protected] and they don’t respond.
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: I'm a web developer and I'm working in a small web shop.<p>Actually, i'm bad at coding, but I like to code when I can build something for fun. I'm burnt out.<p>I'm a generalist, have a degree in supply chain, i'm pretty good with coming up with solutions for problems, I can design know a good ammount about UX and Design, I like to learn.<p>I like the web shop life (working hours, home office)<p>I live in europe.<p>I'm a newcomer in coding and lack in fundamental programming skills but don't want to learn it, because I see no future for me in coding professionally.<p>Because i'm newcomer it's pretty hard to switch to something else with my working experience and degrees.<p>What would you suggest?
What jobs are open for newcomers where my skills are helpful?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I dont mean this sarcastically, I just keep hearing how this technology is great and distributed but I cant really see the current use case in current enterprises.<p>Is there something I am missing? Why would someone simply switch their backed databases for something that does not even offer Data Warehousing or other data management tools?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Long story short, I've a mac of 2015 (8gb ram). I've been waiting for that keyboard update. Now that there's the new keyboard they decided to change processor.<p>Thus, should I wait 1 year and get a new mac with ARM or it's better to get the intel one that will last for 3/4 years more?
what would be the problem with Intel based processor? that their life span is shorter since app will be compatible for a while, not for long.
The problme that I see for ARM based mac book will be that the first sets are for betatester with money :D<p>a bit of ref: I develop, and the mac that I own is a bit aged and slow.
PS: should I move to windows/linux and other manufaturer at this point? (I'm a bit skeptical due to the 10+ years on mac and all the apps/keystroke that I use)
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I was hoping that with macos 11 we would see the deprecation of .DS_Store. I'm not running the beta so perhaps it is, but what has surprised me is its sustained longevity. What are the technical reasons for keeping .DS_Store? It is essentially a application-specific (i.e. Mac Finder) solution that pollutes the data store.<p>Off the top of my head I can think of a number of other solutions to store directory metadata: a Finder-specific database mapping values to directory paths, resource forks (ala OS 9), etc.
Upvote: | 106 |
Title: For those who don't know (or belong to a newer generation), Microsoft's IE (Internet Explorer) was one browser that had almost monopolized itself globally for many years mostly during the early nineties decade. They managed to do it but the backlash was such that the public pressure practically caused a storm that made Bill Gates sit in front of the jury and answer some hard questions.<p>And today, I'm seeing history is repeating all over again, only Chrome has taken IE's place but there is no storm coming this time. Unlike our predecessors, we are giving in to convenience, we are acting like its not a botheration at all.<p><i></i>PLEASE DON'T DO IT<i></i>. Consider the sheer browser market share that Chrome enjoys and Google's data interests for a moment, and it might already be too late for us. If a web service insists only on Chrome for best performance then change that service, not your browser! If Youtube gives issues to you then use Vimeo or Lbry instead. Let's unite in this effort and take it seriously, let's bring more diversity to the browser world.
Upvote: | 109 |
Title: I’ve clenched my teeth for 9-10 years. It either happened from a bike accident hurting my left jaw, wisdom teeth extraction, or stress from starting a business. All three happened pretty near together. It is not malocclusion, dentist ruled that out.<p>I clench. No longer damaging my teeth as I have a guard. But I still have tight masseters and neck pain.<p>I would like to eliminate or reduce the habit. Has anyone succeeded in doing so?
Upvote: | 199 |
Title: I'm considering starting a new job hunt, but I'm out of practice. Unlike most folks, I still haven't gotten into competitive companies after doing ~250 or so problems (perhaps because of my aforementioned IQ leading to an inability to problem solve), and I'm not interested in companies that do alternatives to coding interviews as they generally pay significantly worse than what I'm expecting, but whenever I do Leetcode problems I frequently dive into the depths of depression and self-harm because I often can't do Medium problems. I've done CTCI, but that isn't as effective in the market now.<p>I'm genuinely concerned I might harm myself further if I attempt more study, but at the same time, I need to fix my compensation trajectory or else I'll be in the same boat later. What do you use to avoid this?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I primarily use Firefox, but occasionally I have to resort to Chrome for certain poorly-designed websites.<p>Now that Microsoft Edge is Chromium-based, is it any better as an alternative? Is the privacy any more respectable, or does it simply replace all the Google phone-homing with the same level of Microsoft phone-homing?
Upvote: | 140 |
Title: Just reading about air purifiers and wondering what other things like this I completely missed in my life.<p>Personal recommendations: kindle, rice cooker.<p>Edit: It's so obvious to me now (and to most people I guess) that I forgot about my washer dryer. To other young adults reading this, if you can afford it and have the space in your apartment, just get a washer dryer ASAP. Even if you live 5 minutes away from a self-service laundry. It'll actually change your life.
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: I know HN is owned by Y-Combinator. But, as a popular and homogeneous platform there must be many possible ways to earn from it. So what is HN's business model and how its value is measured?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Today is the 10th anniversary of the original publication of The Tau Manifesto, which I launched on Hacker News on Tau Day (6/28), 2010:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1468341<p>Thanks to everyone for your support!
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: A few days ago I got into Mathematical Logic[0] and learned how to reason about
problems through using various branches of mathematical ideas like
proof theory, model theory e.t.c.<p>I found this abstract way of thinking about problems clear, & organised.
"Mathematical Logic" is diffrent from the kind of Math I was taught,
which was a top down approach to solving problems.<p>"Mathematical Logic" seems to be able to derive solutions to problems in
a ground up fashion where a solution can somtimes elegantly present its self
as long as you apply correct mathematical properties.<p>What other techniques do you hackers use to improve your abstract thinking?<p>[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic
Upvote: | 264 |
Title: I still have my job, but I was thinking of not renewing my lease in NYC and just going back home to the parents to work remote in the fall/winter and save a TON of money. Kinda lame because I'm 28 but who cares, since a lockdown will stop most of the "fun" stuff anyway. Would rather run and bike every day.<p>Anybody else doing the same?
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: We've been using Silicon Valley Bank for the last 4 years and while their services generally "work", they aren't the best. We've been working with SVB to setup a line-of-credit just to have in case we need it, and we recently talked with them about their Innovators card. Unfortunately their sales people cannot show you any kind of demo so that you can see how it works or what the UI looks like even. This is a tough ask as the only way to see it is to sign up for an account and start issuing cards. We also talked with Brex about their solution and even looked into Expensify's card.<p>Brex was able to show us a demo and as part of the trial we attached our SVB account which causes a $0.01 deposit and withdrawal. After doing this we received an email from our SVB sales rep acknowledging the transaction: "It looks like I see a penny test from Brex on June 3rd so it may be that you just set something up." I'm not sure what's buried in the SVB ToS, but SVB sales reps looking into our transactions didn't sit quite right with me. Then we told them that we decided to go with Brex because we liked the solution and not being able to get a demo from SVB made it basically a non-starter. A couple days later we get a call from a Managing Director and he tells us that the line-of-credit will need to be venture debt and backed by equity or warrants, which we're not interested in since this is only a rainy-day LoC and we've got plenty of money in our SVB account. Fast forward to today and they tell us that they won't give us the LoC anymore unless we also agree to use their Innovator card.<p>Basically I'm looking for other banks that are great to work with and understand how startups work and the needs they have. I've looked at Mercury, and we have an account there, but I was hesitant to move too much away from SVB because it "just worked", but obviously now I'm reconsidering. Hopefully HackerNews has some good advice and recommendations.
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: It's been "the future" for 40-ish years now, with dozens (if not hundreds) of failed attempts. At some point, one has to wonder: are we there yet? If not, why aren't we?<p>To me it seems logical that designers should one day be building frontends through visual interfaces that are almost as malleable as tools like Sketch. It seems to me that many features from design programs (like Framer) seek to make design closer to development, and we've even seen a Git for design workflows. So why hasn't it happened yet, and will it ever?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I recently noticed that hey.com started offering disposable email addresses. I made a couple pull requests to add hey.com to lists of disposable email providers.
In response to this, the CTO of basecamp has been tweeting out all kinds of allegations about supposed harassment.Ask HN: Startup CTO using his Twitter following to harass me, what should I do?<p>He tweeted a link to my github account to his 426k followers, resulting in several harassing messages and doxing attempts https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1277805249147752449<p>He also appears to be trying to solicit information about me on twitter https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1277825366149591041<p>What should I do about this?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: My wife and I have been reviewing homeschool curriculum for my daughter's upcoming 4th grade year. Here in Utah the laws are very relaxed around homeschooling: you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you tell the state you are homeschooling. I'm not sure I love that, but it does allow for flexibility.<p>What we've been finding is that nearly all the high-rated courses are non-secular and we've decided we want to keep our kids in a secular curriculum. We've evaluated trying to edit the courses or pick-and-choose but it seems like in many of the offerings religion is so deeply-rooted in the work that it would be a very difficult undertaking.<p>My wife feels like the prospect of designing her own courses is very daunting and so it made me wonder if there has been any kind of effort to open source homeschool. Now more than ever it seems like a great time to have something like this available (we don't want our kids in a classroom while COVID is a concern). So far I've found mentions of open source schooling but nothing concrete or usable.<p>What I don't know is: what challenges might there be to creating such a thing? In Utah it seems very usable, but I'm sure each state has their own homeschooling requirements that maybe make this idea unlikely to take hold.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I have been thinking about what the current VC fund structure limits the founder's imagination about the future for a long time.<p>Please share your wildest ideas.
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Hey everyone! We’re Alpha, Matt and Aaron, co-founders of PostEra (<a href="https://postera.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://postera.ai/</a>). The title above is quite a mouthful (we used all 80 characters) so we'll begin by breaking down what it means.<p>What is medicinal chemistry? It’s part of discovering new drugs. A drug hunter decides what disease to focus on and then selects ‘targets’: usually proteins whose activity is key to the disease. Then they look for a molecule that can ‘hit’ that target and stimulate a response which will hopefully have beneficial effects. Developing such a molecule that is potent and safe is medicinal chemistry.<p>Despite it being a crucial part of drug development, this field has relied on trial-and-error approaches—a very expensive way to muddle toward a drug. Where computational tools have been used, they have emphasized the 'best' designs without any awareness of what it would take to physically make the drug in a lab and test it. Our approach is to apply computational methods that know how to make these designs.<p>We’ve been working on developing machine learning tools to advance the field for the last 3 years. Alpha formed a lab at Cambridge in 2017 to apply machine learning to drug discovery. Matt joined the group and soon some exciting results began to emerge, particularly in the area of how to make molecules. We published the first model to outperform trained human chemists in predicting the outcomes of chemical reactions. Alpha then got Aaron, his former mathematics classmate and debate partner at Oxford to leave his job for the world of drug discovery.<p>We decided to focus on the one challenge that exists at almost every step: molecules need to be made. No matter how clever it looks on paper, a molecule is worthless unless it can be tested in a lab. The task of actually making molecules, known as chemical synthesis, is often a challenging problem, involving the combinatorial explosion of games like Go with moves that can’t be defined in a simple rulebook.<p>You start with a set of simple molecules which can be combined through chemical reactions (a ‘move’) to form more and more complex molecules, known as the ‘route’, until you arrive at your desired drug candidate. But how to combine these molecules? Trial and error is not an option, given the enormous cost of doing chemistry, and just enumerating all options to a client is unhelpful given that your average molecule can have hundreds of theoretically-possible routes. Searching this tree of routes and scoring the viability of such routes is where ML becomes very powerful.<p>We developed a machine-translation approach which takes in reactants and outputs the product of a reaction; an approach very similar to how Google Translate operates. This allows us to score the viability of each move. We combine this with fast tree search algorithms, used in models like AlphaGo to efficiently search the large combinatorial space of possible reactions.<p>To get this technology in front of users, we're building a cloud-based platform. Clients input the molecule they want to be made, our system designs a route for how to make it, and then the client can order this molecule through our platform. We don’t own a lab, but we partner with chemical manufacturers around the world who execute the routes we design. Combining automated chemical synthesis with compound ordering creates a better experience for the drug hunter who wants to focus on their science and just wants a vial with their compound without the cumbersome process of figuring out how to make it and where to get it from.<p>All that is what we were working on until the pandemic hit... and now we can answer the second part of the title: COVID Moonshot.<p>We had just finished YC W20 when a tweet from a team of scientists quickly changed our travel (and company) trajectory. A team of scientists at Diamond Light Source in the UK had shown that a selection of chemical fragments were effective at binding to a key part of the COVID virus. We realised there were hundreds of chemists sitting at home, with their projects on hold, who could help take these fragments and turn them into genuine drug candidates—an open-science approach to crowdsourcing a new drug. We created a platform where designs could be submitted and hoped for maybe 50 to 100 submissions. In the first few weeks, we’ve received over 4000 submissions from 200 scientists around the world.<p>This was the start of a COVID Moonshot initiative that we are now helping lead. It is an international consortium of scientists drawn from academia, biotechs, and pharma, all working pro bono or at cost with no IP claims on any resulting drug candidates. The aim is to find an antiviral candidate for COVID-19 by the end of the year—a ‘moonshot’ of a time frame compared with the standard drug discovery paradigm.<p>That standard paradigm is unfortunately broken when it comes to pandemic-related diseases. Biology and chemistry are hard enough, but things become even intractable when there are little or no commercial incentives to develop new therapies. Sadly, this explains why promising antibiotic companies like Achaogen go bankrupt and why, even after SARS-CoV brought the Far East to a halt in 2003, we still didn’t invest in coronavirus therapies during the last 17 years. For therapies that only become critical once every few decades, we need a new approach to developing drugs.<p>We think that drug hunters can learn something from the CS community and its embrace of open source. Similarly to open-source software development, someone has to manage the roadmap and triage suggestions. For Moonshot, the candidate drug submissions are great but we obviously can’t make and test all of them, so how do you pick the most promising ones? Here is where our technology comes in: it can identify which candidates can be <i>synthesized</i> easily. Since in a pandemic you need to move quickly, prioritizing compounds that can be synthesized easily is a natural triaging mechanism. Where a human chemist would take 3-4 weeks, we were able to design synthetic routes for all submissions within 48 hours. The top route designs were then passed on to our chemical manufacturing partner for synthesis. We’ve now experimentally tested over 500 compounds and found several promising candidates which we are now testing further. All data is publicly available on the site: <a href="https://postera.ai/covid" rel="nofollow">https://postera.ai/covid</a><p>Inspired by open-source software, we’re seeing advantages of open-science collaboration in areas where market incentives are lacking. We started with the opportunity to connect drug hunters with the latest ML, but have expanded this into a platform that helps connect scientists with each other. This is particularly needed when it comes to drug discovery logistics—the fragment screens are conducted in Oxford and The Weizmann Institute in Israel, computational methods are done by PostEra in California and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and chemical synthesis is carried out across several countries. Many of the features we are rolling out, such as automated alerts on suggested drug designs, open forum discussions, and live data uploads, feel very akin to a ‘GitHub for drug development’.<p>Identifying biological mechanisms of diseases and forecasting clinical outcomes are huge problems, but we believe that the chemistry stage of drug discovery can become a reliable industry rather than an artisanal craft. Machine learning tech is a key part and we're still working on it, but our clients have been constantly reminding us that just the logistical aspects of drug discovery are a great source of pain. Science software is also notoriously hard to use so we've learned that combining good UI with good ML should be our ambition. Our current mantra is: ordering a molecule through PostEra should be as easy as ordering a pizza!<p>We need more researchers, coders and chemists to help us on this journey and we’d love to hear from you if our vision sounds like something you could get on board with! Here are the open positions within the company we are now actively hiring for: <a href="https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/13332" rel="nofollow">https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/13332</a><p>Over to you, HN! We're eager to hear your feedback, questions, ideas and experiences in this area.
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: Do you have any platform to suggest in order to search for remote jobs?
Upvote: | 57 |
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: | 58 |
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: | 104 |
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 <i>not</i> 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=23702120" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702120</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702121" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702121</a>
Upvote: | 422 |
Title: I'm looking for recommendations for a maths book for a bright, self-motivated child in their late teens who is into maths (mainly analysis) at upper high-school / early undergrad level.<p>It would be a birthday gift, so ideally something that is more than a plain textbook, but which also has depth, and maybe broadens their view of maths beyond analysis. I'm thinking something along the lines of <i>The Princeton Companion to Mathematics</i>, Spivak's <i>Calculus</i>, or Moor & Mertens <i>The Nature of Computation</i>.<p>What would you have appreciated having been given at that age?
Upvote: | 297 |
Title: Hi Hacker News,<p>We see a lot of nuance in Hacker News discussions, thanks to how the community has shaped up and to the tireless efforts of our moderators. And I want that level of discussion elsewhere, too. (Hacker News isn't the right place for every discussion, given its focus on tech.)<p>In particular, the recent takedown of Slate Star Codex has me thinking about nuance and truth, and how little space there is for it in online discussions today.<p>Without getting into any specific politics here, which platforms do you go to for nuanced, rational discussions? And, more broadly, how can we (as technologists) foster that sort of collegiate culture online, given the global scope of the Internet, the permanence of anything we post, and the inherent anonymity of the Internet stack.<p>I have a strong desire right now to 1) be a part of and reinforce existing communities with this ethos and 2) advocate for technology and culture that could make this the norm.
Upvote: | 253 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I've been working from home the last couple of months due to the Covid-19 lockdown. In the beginning, it was great. Being able to wake up and pretty much start working 5 minutes later, having my own kitchen/toilet close by, etc. However, I quickly started to miss the small everyday interactions with my co-workers.<p>That made me wonder, what solutions do you have in place to compensate for the social aspect of working in an office?<p>For example, while not perfect, I have found that just starting a call with a colleague without anything specific to talk about feels better than just hacking away on my own.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: There are what I would call "good oldie" MOOCs that people frequently recommend, like algorithms on coursera. Most of them are from 2012-2013.<p>Now will be some rant and justification for the question, the question itself is in the last paragraph.<p>At the time (2012-2013) I was very hyped and enthusiastic, imagining new courses of the same quality and kind will be appearing at the same rate in future. By kind I mean university level subjects, fundamental topics that have high return of investment.<p>But it seems to me it went quite differently. I don't really see any new courses being published and recommended on the lists among good oldies. My own experience with stuff that came later also wasn't as pleasant, I started dropping courses much more often.<p>The platforms themselves changed significantly:
1. Switch from fundamental to hands-on subjects like technologies and frameworks.
2. Switching to paid model (not that I have anything against it, although being poor in a poor country I avoid paying as much as I can and haven't paid for a single certificate). This leads to less people checking out the course and giving it a "media coverage".
3. Switching from strict start-end date to "take anytime you want". Because of that the social element for me has been essentially lost, the forums are half-dead.
4. Increased amount of courses. Together with (1) this makes it hard to find something by random exploration. When I open edx computer science section I have to go through pages and pages of microsoft courses about their technologies.<p>This made me gradually lose interest in MOOCs and switch to books and self-learning. I occasionally go back to MOOC platforms or MOOC aggregators, thinking maybe I just missed something or something interesting came out recently.<p>Did you take any good (valuable, mind-expanding, long-term rewarding, intellectually stimulating) courses that aren't famous and have a high chance of being overlooked?
Upvote: | 235 |
Title: I received an email today indicating AirBnb will now automatically opt-in user's photo and first name in order to fight discrimination via their "Project Lighthouse"<p>There is no public content about this change, but if you are logged in you can view this page and opt out:<p><a href="https://www.airbnb.com/account-settings/privacy-and-sharing/data-use" rel="nofollow">https://www.airbnb.com/account-settings/privacy-and-sharing/...</a><p><pre><code> Project Lighthouse
If you leave this setting turned on, you’re helping us identify and prevent discrimination from happening on Airbnb—and you’re taking part in an initiative to better understand how and where discrimination happens on platforms like ours.
If you turn this setting off, we won’t use your information, and we’ll remove it from future studies. You can change your mind at any time.
</code></pre>
The bit about being opted in was hidden towards the bottom of the email. Feels wrong.
Upvote: | 391 |
Title: Right now of the top six stories on:
bloomberg.com
economist.com
facebook.com<p>Why are these on HN? Bloomberg seems omnipresent and todays top story "The Dying Mall's New Lease on Life: Apartments". This seems like spam and since Bloomberg is behind a paywall (after a couple of reads) why is this at the top?<p>Can someone explain this to me?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: You know, the weird stuff ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Upvote: | 361 |
Title: So apparently when your iPad is getting low on space, it just deletes all the books from your iBooks library. Without asking for permission or notifying you in any way. It "offloads" them to the iCloud, so you have to re-download them manually.<p>Which is a very unpleasant thing to find out after you went on a summer vacation to the area without the internet, hoping to plug off, having downloaded a bunch of books you were hoping to read.<p>This is the most infuriating moment of using a piece of technology I've ever had.<p>I'm posting this here on the off chance that someone from Apple reads this, since that happens with threads on HN sometimes.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Hello HN.<p>After lugging it with me for a bit over a decade without ever having a good place to re-install it I'm giving away my windmill. It's a 2.5 KW rated variable pitch machine that took over two years and a small fortune to build.<p>The project is documented here:<p><a href="https://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill/" rel="nofollow">https://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill/</a><p>The machine definitely needs work, (1) the slipring assembly and tower shaft and mount will need to be re-made, (2) the whole thing could do with a new coat of paint.<p>It's built with imperial hardware so you'll need to buy some bolts to mount the blades. It is also <i>heavy</i>, you'll need two people to lift it into the back of a vehicle. The blades are 2.5 meters long (three of them), the total machine is 5 meters in diameter when assembled. Some metalworking skills or access to someone who has those is a must. If you have a lathe that would make things much easier.<p>It goes without saying that this is a prototype machine and that installing and operating it is at your own risk, if you live in a city you are likely not going to be able to use it but if you have a remote cabin or something like that with steady wind this will give you power to spare.<p>Let me know if you are interested and able to pick it up near Hilversum, the Netherlands.
Upvote: | 173 |
Title: So, I've been thinking about starting consulting (not freelancing).<p>I am working on my own company that sells a news API. We've launched a month ago, it's fully bootstrapped. I have money for a few more months but at some time might search for a "job".<p>Does anyone here works as a "self-employed" consultant?<p>How do you find your clients?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: What are the best effective measures to retain qualified employees (in general and developers in particular)?<p>I'd like to read you experiences and maybe some studies or articles about the topic.
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: I would love to hear from people who a got job through their side project or got recognized through there blog. What was the experience like and how much leetcoding did you do?
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: I sometimes have the feeling, upon learning that someone hasn't yet learned to program or do mathematics, that they're missing out on a whole realm of opportunities.<p>What are other skills like this, that you have, that you expect many participants on Hacker News lack, and that have greatly expanded the possibilities available to you?
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: I just became a technical lead (spiced with a little product manager) for a team who is working with machine-learning/deep-learning technologies (I have ~6 years of background in this field). I feel like I am performing well, but there is a lot of room for improvement on: how to plan for the future, how to communicate success, how to assign engineers and researchers to tasks, how to define tasks, etc.<p>Do you have any recommendation on what should I do, read to become better and better every day? I want my team to be successful, and to show the improvements we make to the company.
Upvote: | 297 |
Title: When searched within India, Google's Blogspot points to username.blogspot.in as opposed to username.blogspot.com (also in search engines). Most permalinks users use to share are country specific which also reflect on Google Search.<p>Looks like blogspot.in was picked up by a non Google entity.<p><pre><code> Domain Name: blogspot.in
Registry Domain ID: DE2DC9C0E8E694C28ADEF0F444F121B45-IN
Registrar WHOIS Server:
Registrar URL: www.domainming.com
Updated Date: 2020-06-29T20:00:06Z
Creation Date: 2020-06-24T20:00:05Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-06-24T20:00:05Z
Domain Status: inactive http://www.icann.org/epp#inactive
</code></pre>
There is a ceritificate for the blogspot.in along with other blogspot.* domains. Would they end up revoking all the certificates if challenged?<p>https://crt.sh/?q=blogspot.in
Upvote: | 525 |
Title: I opened a ~1 hour video and saw notches in the timeline for 10 different ad breaks. This is as bad as live TV now. Ads play at the end of videos. More videos have long, unskippable ads. More ad breaks in the middle of videos.<p>Multiple people in my circles said they noticed this too when asked, but it could just be a fluke/some kind of group confirmation bias. Has anyone else experienced this? Or even better, collected data on it?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Hey Hacker News! We are Sergey Yudovsky, Dmitry Karpov and Mike Rozhin, founders of ElectroNeek (<a href="https://electroneek.com" rel="nofollow">https://electroneek.com</a>), an automation platform for repetitive business tasks. The product we build let users design software ‘robots’ that imitate human actions in apps and websites, and deploy them to eliminate routine work. Our software also spots patterns of repetitive processes that users do in business app and suggests what to automate in the first place.<p>Some of you may have heard of a technology niche called Robotic Process Automation, or RPA. Basically, it’s about automating user actions on Graphic User Interface level, so no API is needed to automate any type of repetitive work on the computer. It has been known for 20+ years in the software testing space but emerged as a business process automation tool over the last decade, getting big momentum in Enterprise (95% of Fortune 500 use it for back-office task automations). If you know what Selenium is and how it automates work in browsers you may think of RPA that is a Selenium on steroids that can work in any desktop or SaaS app.<p>Basic RPA bots interact with app interfaces using mouse and keyboard, so if some repetitive process can be described by an instruction it can be automated (in theory) with RPA. There are a few fundamental issues with GUI-level automation (like, how should a programmed bot behave if the interface has changed?) but the major limit historically has been the complexity of RPA bot development and administration.<p>The biggest benefits of RPA come from automating complex tasks, sometimes even end-to-end jobs across multiple pieces of software and websites. As you might expect, this approach to automation works great until it doesn't, and then someone has to step in with duct tape, a.k.a. write glue code to stick the pieces together, especially when it comes to variables, cycles and unstructured data (a lot of real business documents). RPA turned into something that business users can not use without having coding experience, which defeats the whole purpose.<p>In 2016-2018, Sergey and Dmitry, long time friends, separately got into RPA consulting business on two different continents. Sergey ran his own boutique firm that worked with big banks and natural resource companies in Eastern Europe and Dmitry was in charge of RPA branding and marketing strategy at EY’s Americas business. The idea to build new software in the space came from Sergey’s inbound marketing pipeline – many mid-market companies understood the benefits of RPA, attended Sergey’s firm demos of RPA bots in action, but walked away from implementations because they haven’t been able to afford them due to limited in-house IT resources and absence of a budget for consultants. ‘Too complex and expensive’ - the most common feedback of such potential clients who in fact were underserved by major vendors and integrators. To move forward with making RPA easier for such customers, Sergey and Dmitry brought in Mike, Dmitry’s college friend with a major in mathematics and career in cloud architecture.<p>We got some momentum among small banks, insurance companies and other companies with relatively tiny IT teams. But then we realized that there are obstacles with this market. The biggest problem lies in finding what to automate in the first place. There is lots of manual repetition going on in companies that people just don't notice. Managers and IT often understand the RPA tech and its capabilities, but struggle to find where to start.<p>An even bigger obstacle to automation is the need to learn complex tools and in fact, the need to code in order to automate significant routines. It turns out that navigating desktop or website interface requires more complex logic than taking data from SaaS A to SaaS B (the land of Zapier).<p>Over the time we adopted a mantra ‘if it can be done with a mouse only, without touching the keyboard, it should be automatable in this way'. At present, about 25% of our bot developers are non-IT. Typically their role in a company is related to working with analysis or operations data. They benefit from automating data extraction or data entry tasks and are motivated enough to learn a new tool to make their own life easier. These ‘Citizen Automator’s’ have a very simple decision-making process when they evaluate automation opportunities: will I get back the time I invest in designing a workflow? What are the time gains? If so, I invest my time and request a budget for a solution.<p>Our big insight about how to solve these obstacles came from the simple idea that ‘robots’ that execute automations also have all the capabilities to passively monitor how users interact with different interface elements, mouse, keyboard, etc. Why not let the ‘robot’ look at what you do in the first place, and attempt to find whether you run the same process repetitively, even if runs are spaced in time. Normally this could be seen as an invasion of privacy but, unlike with time trackers, the purpose of this monitoring is not a control of how people spend their working hours but the voluntarily search for automation possibilities for giving time back to people.<p>From that we built a simple repetitive-actions analytics tool that any users, regardless of IT experience, can use out of the box. Users across a company can download a client that passively monitors how they interact with different interface elements (forms, buttons) across whitelisted applications and websites, looks at clipboard frequency, mouse and keyboard usage patterns. On the back end, the cloud portion of the software identifies repetitive patterns and estimates potential (in hours) for automation on the level of software, users, and the organization. For instance, if a user often switches between 2 application windows and uses Ctrl+C/V in each iteration, this is a pattern of repetitive process that can be automated with RPA. The platform counts specific automation opportunities (like copy-pasting, repetitive click-throughs) to give a better sense on what exact routine it identified. These types of job
are common for RPA automations. Even more common is the case of clicking through a legacy system to process a transaction (for instance, underwriting insurance) – users click on interface element on the same screens in the same orders for 30+ times and don’t even think of accelerating the clickthrough with automation. Or accounting case – many CPAs charge clients for manually uploading ledger account into cloud accounting software, taking data from excel to web forms. ‘Robots’ will ‘eat’ such tasks.<p>Once the repetitive patterns have been identified, it’s time to start automating. Designated users can build bots with no code/low-code. Finding and eliminating inefficiencies is a pretty addictive process. When you have an automation tool in your hands you definitely look very differently at how your teams spend their working hours.<p>On the business side of the house, we adopted SaaS model and charge clients for the access to process discovery and automation suite that has both web and downloadable parts.<p>We eat our own dog food a lot: all of us, from sales and marketing to product, have our own set of automated workflows. In sales, we use bots to automate going to LinkedIn Sales Navigator to enrich contact lists, to check emails in these lists against spam databases (using tool named Scrapp) and then to build email sequences in Gmail, bypassing # of sent emails limit set by CRM vendor on our plan. We're really happy to get to this point and share our story here, thank you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments.
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: Hey HN: I'm Kaveh, the founder of Usage (<a href="https://www.usage.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usage.ai/</a>)<p>We help companies drive down AWS costs. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time manually finding underutilized or overly expensive EC2s. We believe the optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms. At the moment, there are over 70,000 AWS EC2 prices - doing that manually just won't scale at most organizations.
My background is in software engineering.<p>Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups.<p>Here's how it works: We are typically hired by the head of engineering. Usage makes its initial analysis of your organization's AWS usage, then it's passed to a human that manually verifies each recommendation for correctness. The human in the loop may reach out to if they are unsure about a particular recommendation.<p>We make money off of a monthly subscription to manage all of your organization's AWS spend management. Our fee is based on your organization's size and ranges from $2.5k-$10k/month. Happy to chat directly [email protected]<p>Have you experienced any issues with managing your company or organization's AWS expenses? We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas!
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: I really like to see what the most modern/productive setup is that you can run on a piece of hardware. My favorites include a NetBSD desktop with current software I ran on a ca. 2000 mid-range desktop a few years back, or, even more delightfully hacky due to ppc32, a debian-ports system I've got running now on a PowerBook G4.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Hey HN! We are Adam & Ben, co-founders of Yotta Savings (<a href="https://www.withyotta.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.withyotta.com/</a>), an app that uses behavioral psychology to help people save money by making saving exciting. We were inspired to build Yotta by the Premium Bond program (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_Bond" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_Bond</a>) in the UK and a Freakonomics episode on prize-linked savings (<a href="https://freakonomics.com/podcast/say-no-no-lose-lottery-rebroadcast/" rel="nofollow">https://freakonomics.com/podcast/say-no-no-lose-lottery-rebr...</a>).<p>Premium Bonds is a government-run prize-linked savings program in the UK that started in 1956. It’s a savings account where people get chances to win monthly prizes through a random chance raffle. The more you save, the more entries you get. Premium Bonds are popular because many people prefer the chance to win a life-changing amount of money rather than a small interest payment from a bank. As a result, the program has been successful: over 23M people save through Premium Bonds (33% of the population) with over $100B deposited.<p>Human nature makes it difficult to adopt habits we know are healthy in the long-run but painful in the short run. The idea behind prize-linked savings is to use psychology to make saving exciting in the short run so that people will get the long run benefit. Even if you don’t win a prize, at least you still have access to your savings. You can’t lose anything other than the opportunity cost of interest at another bank.<p>In the U.S, people also like the chance to win a life-changing amount of money. This is what drives much of the $80 billion ($640 per household) spent on the lottery every year despite it being a hugely negative expected value proposition. Prize-linked savings was illegal in the U.S until 2015 when the American Savings Promotion Act was passed based on evidence showing prize-linked savings programs help people save more, especially in financially vulnerable populations.<p>We started building this 9 months ago. Ben and I are both former finance people turned tech people. As personal finance and behavioral psychology nerds (Nudge, Thinking Fast and Slow, etc.), we were excited by the idea of building a product that could help people, but that also had big business potential.<p>The market for consumer deposits in the U.S is huge. We make money by earning interest from our partner bank. We view our savings product as an entry point into the banking market, with the potential to offer a variety of revenue generating services to our users as other neo-banks have done. We plan to differentiate ourselves from
other neo-banks by always offering products that make use of behavioral psychology to nudge people toward healthier financial habits.<p>With our app, you save money in an FDIC insured account. For every $25 you save, you get a recurring ticket into weekly random number drawings with chances to win prizes ranging from $0.10 to the $10 million jackpot. We provide a rate of return on savings that on average is in-line with the top yielding savings accounts out there like Marcus or Ally. You might get a higher return if you’re lucky and win more prizes than expected. You might get a lower return if you win fewer prizes than expected. Even in a worst case scenario where you never win a prize, you still have your savings.<p>Yotta is free. The $10 million jackpot would be paid out by our insurance partner. We are funding a jackpot via insurance to solve the chicken and egg problem of offering a life-changing jackpot that we hope will motivate people, even if the odds are extremely low that you’ll win it.<p>Hope you guys check it out. Happy to answer any questions, and looking forward to any feedback.
Upvote: | 240 |
Title: I've been out of the hiring game for 7 years. I love my job, my company but, unfortunately, COVID has affected it more than we would like to believe and layoffs are going to happen soon. I want to be prepared when that happens, so I'm asking my fellow HNers: what do you want to see in a resume and GitHub profile? I'm a Principal Software Engineer.<p>I see all the cool kids with side-projects: libraries, applications, etc. I also see plenty of fancy resumes. I have a 2-page thing in Helvetica, nothing fancy, listing my achievements and skills. I tried to reduce as much as possible since I've been told that the more I put there, the worse it is since it makes me look old and "you can't teach an old dog new tricks".<p>I know a lot of people, and I'm sure I won't be in a pickle. But I don't want to rely on my soft skills or work connections to set me up in the future: what is it that the market is currently looking for and how to adapt myself to it?<p>ps.: Oh, is ageism a thing? I'm 35.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Hey HN: I've pulled together a video for one of the most common questions I get about Amazon: What's it like to receive a question mark email from Jeff Bezos?<p>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1RD-UDE0rQ<p>I've never found any high quality info online for this topic save a few responses on a Quora thread. In the video I promise additional content, but I didn't realize that YouTube had certain thresholds to be able to post a link off of YT to another site, so I am including the link here: https://www.interviewat.com/pl/195251 (it's also in the video description text).<p>This is a good look at the process, deliverables, and outcomes when working at AMZN. For reference, I was the Director of Product Management for the Kindle sw platform. I probably handled no fewer than 10 question mark emails from Jeff over the 3 years I was there.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Khan Academy continually gets held up as a great resource for online courses across the age spectrum for math related subjects. With the continuing pandemic continuing to grow in the US and schools not really sure how to handle things, the GF and I are looking into other options.<p>Is there a recommended resource that gives unbiased (as possible) reviews for middle school (7-8th grade) curriculum? Searching these days really doesn't bring up quality, just options one has to comb through.
Upvote: | 283 |
Title: I've been thinking quite some time now about making the move of quitting my fulltime job as a software engineer, and pursue my dream of founding a startup.<p>I'm 23 y/o and don't have much to lose really (except rent), and yet I'm still STRUGGLING to just make that move and start.<p>I'd love to hear your stories about when and how did you decide to do it? How did you start? How was it going to sleep knowing that you probably not going to have an income in the next upcoming weeks/months?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>Over the last 12 months, I have been building <a href="https://learnawesome.org" rel="nofollow">https://learnawesome.org</a><p>This idea came from Danny Hillis' 2012 talk at OSCON, which itself was inspired from Neal Stepehenson's _The Diamond Age : A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_<p>The dream is to build a tool that matches the right learning material to the right student at the right time. Wikipedia is great, but it doesn't do a good job of leveraging the rich variety of learning resources that exist on the Web. Same applies to GoodReads - which is focused only on books, whereas these days we actually learn from videos, articles, MOOCs, tweetstorms, slack/discord groups, podcasts, livestreams, newsletters, online conferences, apps & games, interactive explorables and much more.<p>For now, I am building it as a social network for lifelong learners. It's open-source, built with Rails + PostgreSQL, and complies with standards like Dublin Core's LRMI extension of schema.org and ActivityPub for integration with Fediverse. A GraphQL API is also available if others want to build alternative clients.<p>I have made decent progress so far: Imported thousands of courses and book summaries, built a browser extension for quick lookup/addition to the repository, a spaced-repetition based flashcard practice module. Users can even discover learning resources by recommendations ELSEWHERE (for eg: "Show me books on History which are highly recommended by venture capitalists")<p>I originally started building this as something to help with my daughters' and my own learning. But it made sense to build this as a public good.<p>It would be great if you can give it a try, and share ideas on what would make it better.
Upvote: | 216 |
Title: When you search for courses on how to learn software development, there are tons of resources, meanwhile when you search for courses on how to stock trade and invest, only investopedia comes up.<p>What are some good resources (preferably video) which are not books, to learn these subjects?
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I work with a company that has a few GPU-intensive ML models. Over the past few weeks, growth has accelerated, and with that costs have skyrocketed. AWS cost is about 80% of revenue, and the company is now almost out of runway.<p>There is likely a lot of low hanging cost-saving-fruit to be reaped, just not enough people to do it. We would love any pointers to anyone who specializes in the area of cost optimization. Blogs, individuals, consultants, or magicians are all welcome.<p>Thank you!
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: At work, I have been asked to build a couple of POC's on a new Angular based framework our company purchased.<p>This is proprietary code for a niche industry so the community isn't as large. I also don't have access to any experts on this software.<p>- A common issue I face is when I want to import a module( and know that the functionality exists) but don't know what do I call and where can I call it from<p>eg: import { XYZ } from '<WHERE>'<p>- I have tried asking questions on their private community but it's pretty dead and no one ever responds<p>There are some tutorial courses but it's can only take you so far. How do I get better at this framework or at least good enough to build some basic POCs?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I was using the HN front page to test a library I was writing when I noticed some links that probably should be HTTPS are in plain HTTP. This piqued my interest a bit so I did a little analysis on how prevalent plain HTTP links are on HN. I probably don't need to rehash the harm of using plain HTTP, even for personal blogs -- they can be snooped, and they can be modified to inject either ads or more sinister payloads. In fact, years ago I once disabled my ad blocker by accident and saw an ISP-injected ad on my personal site; never again, I swore.<p>The methodology is simple. I gathered all links from https://news.ycombinator.com/front ("past" on the navigation bar) for each day from 2020-01-01 to 2020-07-09. These are the top stories of each day. This is a trivial task and resulted in 17566 links (raw data [0][1][2]). There are <100 duplicates, which I kept. Among these are 1112 plain HTTP links, amounting to ~6.3% out of 17566.<p>Next I analyzed how many of the 1112 plain HTTP links are available over HTTPS. Methodology:<p>1. Check if the HTTP version redirects to the HTTPS version; if so, done, otherwise record the HTTP response;<p>2. Replace http:// with https:// and see if the HTTPS URL works; if so, record the HTTPS response;<p>3. Compare the HTTP and HTTPS responses. If they're identical, done. If not, compare the length of the responses; if they differ by <=1%, record this as HTTPS response almost identical as HTTP, and assume the HTTPS version works (the page may not use relative URLs or omit the protocol, so the HTTPS response may be subtly different while having the exact same rendered output).<p>The analysis script is available at [3].<p>---<p>To be continued in a comment since I'm hitting the 2000 char limit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802522
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: Subversion was created because the authors were frustrated with problems in CVS[0].<p>What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?<p>[0]: <a href="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.intro.whatis.html#svn.intro.history" rel="nofollow">http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.intro.whatis.html#svn...</a>
Upvote: | 537 |
Title: Hello HN, It's been a long month of interviewing since I was laid off due to the market shrinking from COVID.<p>My position (Frontend/Full-stack Engineer) became redundant as the company had to change direction. A lot of really great engineers were let go of.<p>I've been interviewing for full-time positions but the process is slow going and I have not yet received an offer. I don't have much more time before my own savings runs out and I am the sole provider for my family, so I am reaching out to the community for help with any leads.<p>About me: full-stack/frontend engineer with 5 years of development experience (all remote)<p>What I'm looking for:
remote contract projects utilizing the technologies below
- or -
remote full-time position as a full-stack or frontend engineer<p>(US citizen in the US, no visa sponsorship required)<p>Skills:
- Node.js
- Go/Golang
- React, Redux/Flux
- TypeScript, JavaScript
- CSS, SASS, HTML
- Mocha, Jasmine, Enzyme, Cypress, Unit/Integration testing
- Mongo, Dynamo, Redis, Postgres
- Docker
- AWS, AWS Lambda, Serverless
- Jenkins, CircleCI, Grafana
- Microservices, SOA
- Linux, Ubuntu, bash, ssh, git
- API and EHR/health system integrations across multiple protocols and dataformats
- Scrum rituals, Agile<p>If you are hiring or know of any teams hiring (ideally that you could introduce me to) then I'd be glad to know.<p>You can reach me at [email protected] — I'd be glad to forward my resume and LinkedIn profile.<p>Thank you for your time! I would greatly appreciate any help.
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: To rephrase, it would be something that someone new to the tech industry might falsely assume is an invention of the modern tech industry (ie in the last 10-20 years) but has actually been around for much longer.<p>EDIT: Removed my initial list of examples because people were making fun of them (and rightly so, the lists in the comments are far better!)
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Seems Apple are moving to their own chips for many reasons, but commercial ones aside, I see reports of Apple chips operating at 25-30% better thermal efficiency than their Intel counterparts.<p>My question is, why is it that Apple can achieve such massive jump in the heat/performance ratio? And why couldn't Intel? Is it just that Intel can not embrace ARM or is it an issue of backwards compatibility forced on Intel that makes their chips so inefficient in comparison?<p>Seems like building a CPU is a very non trivial task and seems this current situation would be similar to Intel making it's own laptops.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: This is for the technically competent Linux users.<p>Which distribution(s) do you run on your desktops/laptops/servers?<p>Why did you choose them?<p>What problems do you face with them and what changes would you like them do make?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: Hi everyone! I’m Peter from Aquarium (<a href="https://www.aquariumlearning.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.aquariumlearning.com/</a>). We help deep learning developers find problems in their datasets and models, then help fix them by smartly curating their datasets. We want to build the same high-power tooling for data curation that sophisticated ML companies like Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla have and bring it to the masses.<p>ML models are defined by a combination of code and the data that the code trains on. A programmer must think hard about what behavior they want from their model, assemble a dataset of labeled examples of what they want their model to do, and then train their model on that dataset. As they encounter errors in production, they must collect and label data for the model to train on to fix these errors, and verify they're fixed by monitoring the model’s performance on a test set with previous failure cases. See Andrej Karpathy’s Software 2.0 article (<a href="https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35</a>) for a great description of this workflow.<p>My cofounder Quinn and I were early engineers at Cruise Automation (YC W14), where we built the perception stack + ML infrastructure for self driving cars. Quinn was tech lead of the ML infrastructure team and I was tech lead for the Perception team. We frequently ran into problems with our dataset that we needed to fix, and we found that most model improvement came from improvement to a dataset’s variety and quality. Basically, ML models are only as good as the datasets they’re trained on.<p>ML datasets need variety so the model can train on the types of data that it will see in production environments. In one case, a safety driver noticed that our car was not detecting green construction cones. Why? When we looked into our dataset, it turned out that almost all of the cones we had labeled were orange. Our model had not seen many examples of green cones at training time, so it was performing quite badly on this object in production. We found and labeled more green cones into our training dataset, retrained the model, and it detected green cones just fine.<p>ML datasets need clean and consistent data so the model does not learn the wrong behavior. In another case, we retrained our model on a new batch of data that came from our labelers and it was performing much worse on detecting “slow signs” in our test dataset. After days of careful investigation, we realized it was due to a change to our labeling process that caused our labelers to label many “speed limit signs” as “slow signs,” which was confusing the model and causing it to perform badly on detecting “slow signs.” We fixed our labeling process, did an additional QA pass over our dataset to fix the bad labels, retrained our model on the clean data, and the problems went away.<p>While there’s a lot of tooling out there to debug and improve code, there’s not a lot of tooling to debug and improve datasets. As a result, it’s extremely painful to identify issues with variety and quality and appropriately modify datasets to fix them. ML engineers often encounter scenarios like:<p>Your model’s accuracy measured on the test set is at 80%. You abstractly understand that the model is failing on the remaining 20% and you have no idea why.<p>Your model does great on your test set but performs disastrously when you deploy it to production and you have no idea why.<p>You retrain your model on some new data that came in, it’s worse, and you have no idea why.<p>ML teams want to understand what’s in their datasets, find problems in their dataset and model performance, and then edit / sample data to fix these problems. Most teams end up building their own one-off tooling in-house that isn’t very good. This tooling typically relies on naive methods of data curation that are really manual and involve “eyeballing” many examples in your dataset to discover labeling errors / failure patterns. This works well for small datasets but starts to fail as your dataset size grows above a few thousand examples.<p>Aquarium’s technology relies on letting your trained ML model do the work of guiding what parts of the dataset to pay attention to. Users can get started by submitting their labels and corresponding model predictions through our API. Then Aquarium lets users drill into their model performance - for example, visualize all examples where we confused a labeled car for a pedestrian from this date range - so users can understand the different failure modes of a model. Aquarium also finds examples where your model has the highest loss / disagreement with your labeled dataset, which tends to surface many labeling errors (ie, the model is right and the label is wrong!).<p>Users can also provide their model's embeddings for each entry, which are an anonymized representation of what their model “thought” about the data. The neural network embeddings for a datapoint (generated by either our users’ neural networks or by our stable of pretrained nets) encode the input data into a relatively short vector of floats. We can then identify outliers and group together examples in a dataset by analyzing the distances between these embeddings. We also provide a nice thousand-foot-view visualization of embeddings that allows users to zoom into interesting parts of their dataset. (<a href="https://youtu.be/DHABgXXe-Fs?t=139" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/DHABgXXe-Fs?t=139</a>)<p>Since embeddings can be extracted from most neural networks, this makes our platform very general. We have successfully analyzed dataset + models operating on images, 3D point clouds from depth sensors, and audio.<p>After finding problems, Aquarium helps users solve them by editing or adding data. After finding bad data, Aquarium integrates into our users’ labeling platforms to automatically correct labeling errors. After finding patterns of model failures, Aquarium samples similar examples from users’ unlabeled datasets (green cones) and sends those to labeling.<p>Think about this as a platform for interactive learning. By focusing on the most “important” areas of the dataset that the model is consistently getting wrong, we increase the leverage of ML teams to sift through massive datasets and decide on the proper corrective action to improve their model performance.<p>Our goal is to build tools to reduce or eliminate the need for ML engineers to handhold the process of improving model performance through data curation - basically, Andrej Karpathy’s Operation Vacation concept (<a href="https://youtu.be/g2R2T631x7k?t=820" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/g2R2T631x7k?t=820</a>) as a service.<p>If any of those experiences speak to you, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. We’ll be here to answer any questions you might have!
Upvote: | 167 |
Title: I always feel a little strange among all the other 9-5 workers. It's really difficult for me to do that every day of the week.<p>Does anyone else feels the same way? How do you handle daily burn out?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: I tried multiple times and it's the same problem: "we have been unable to obtain payment for your recent Apple Developer purchase."<p>I used the same card that I use to to buy apps from the app store - and I tried with other cards too but with no success.<p>And I'm not the only one... https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/126314?page=25<p>The bank says that they didn't get any payment requests, so the problem seems to be at Apple.
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Hello friends,<p>I'm a Full Stack Developer from India. I'm a maintainer at Gatsby, Open Sauced and Triager at ExpressJS, Nest.land, JSHttp etc. I use GitHub a lot, but recently my account got suspended midnight without any notice, From my knowledge I haven't spammed GitHub, I review 3 - 6 PRs in Gatsby per day, It's been a week without GitHub, I have three sponsors in GitHub, they are asking me tons of questions and one of my sponsor stopped sponsoring me (my payout balance got reduced). All of my office work got stopped, I'm the admin of the org that is used in our company. All employees now don't have access to the repo because it is returning 404. I got support from lot of people in Twitter but GitHub is not responding to my ticket for a week. I also created a petition is change.org <a href="https://www.change.org/p/github-inc-my-github-account-suspended-for-no-reason" rel="nofollow">https://www.change.org/p/github-inc-my-github-account-suspen...</a> some people supported me over there too. It would be great if GitHub unsuspends me.<p>My support ticket number: 763327<p>GitHub Profile: <a href="https://github.com/yg" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/yg</a><p>Save Open source developers!<p>Hope Nat Friedman and GitHub will see this!
Upvote: | 657 |
Title: Hi everyone! I'm Lior, one of the makers of Openbase (<a href="https://openbase.io" rel="nofollow">https://openbase.io</a>). We help developers choose the right JS package for any task - through user reviews and insights about packages' popularity, reliability, activity and more.<p>I have started Openbase out of my own frustration as a developer: there are 1.3 million JavaScript packages out there, and I found myself spending an increasing amount of time researching and evaluating packages every time I wanted to accomplish a task - displaying an autocomplete, sending an HTTP request, extracting significant keywords from an page, etc. Each time I would make that research, I spent hours reading different blogposts comparing those packages, going over PRs and commit messages to see how active the development or maintainers are, and trying to cross-reference data from npm and GitHub to get to a decision.<p>We started by gathering data from npm and GitHub - from versions and dependencies, to commits, pull requests, maintainers and tried to figure out what insights we could surface that could help us (and fellow developers) choose the right package. We ended up adding automated insights like star count over time, commit frequency, time between major/minor versions, average time to resolve issues and PRs, percent of commits by the community, dependency insights, and more. Here's what the insights page looks like: <a href="https://openbase.io/js/react" rel="nofollow">https://openbase.io/js/react</a><p>We decided not to stop there, and allow our users to discover the best packages for performing each task and compare them side-by-side. We've already manually curated several hundreds categories, such as CSS frameworks, OAuth packages, and HTTP request libraries: <a href="https://openbase.io/packages/best-javascript-css-framework-libraries" rel="nofollow">https://openbase.io/packages/best-javascript-css-framework-l...</a>
On the long term, we want to build tools that will allow the community to curate and maintain categories, and get to thousands of categories for any imaginable task.<p>Lastly, over the past couple of weeks we decided to try something more ambitious - we want to let developers rate and review open-source packages. While data and metrics are great, we found ourselves often consulting with friends and colleagues about which package to use. We think reviews could reveal a lot of insights that cannot be deduced by looking at metrics alone. To throw in even more fun to the mix, we added badges like "Great documentation", "Performant", and "Hard to use" (check it out: <a href="https://openbase.io/js/vue" rel="nofollow">https://openbase.io/js/vue</a>), and are looking for ideas for more badges.<p>We found that many maintainers want to promote their packages, and unfortunately, there aren't good ways of doing so today. This is a problem for new package maintainers who are having a hard time getting those first thousand users, an API/SaaS company that wants to earn developers' mindshare, or a software firm that wants to showcase their expertise.
We've started by allowing package maintainers to claim their package page, and giving them the tools to promote it for free.
In the future, we want to allow for paid promotion of packages - limiting it to a single, clearly-marked promoted package for each category. We would just surface the promoted package, but the package ratings, reviews, insights, and metrics are obviously untouched. We believe this kind of balanced approach could make Openbase a sustainable company, while not impairing the user experience.<p>In the good ol' 90s, when I made my first steps with JavaScript, and it was all about small scripts to make web pages a bit more interactive. I can't believe two decades later, the JavaScript ecosystem has gotten so huge and complicated, that we've actually built a startup to help you navigate this mess. Strange world, isn't it?<p>We would really love to hear your feedback about Openbase, and in particular about the reviews feature. How would you go about making the reviews a force for good, and making sure reviews are helpful for other developers and the community at large?
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: "When someone important to the community dies, a thin black bar is added to the top of HN as a mark of respect"<p>Because of his inspiration and outreach and attitude I'd think he'd be a great fit for the honor.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: We have recently created a marketplace app. Which allows users to message other users. We have found one user making lewd comments to other users.
After first report we blocked that user.
That user created another account & started doing same thing. How do we block such users? This is a mobile app built with Flutter. We have our own DB + Firebase for messaging.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: What are the effective ways of taking Notes?<p>I am learning programming (/languages) , new things and I think that I should take notes so that i can quickly revise/remember things if i forget.<p>Are cheatsheets helpful? How should i do it? Any suggestions?
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: Hi everyone,<p>I'm Khaled Kteily – and I helped found Legacy (<a href="https://www.givelegacy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.givelegacy.com/</a>). We help men become fathers through sperm testing, sperm improvement, and sperm freezing.<p>To do this, we built an at-home sperm testing kit. Using our kit and courier services, we receive your semen sample at our labs. From there, we analyze your semen for a variety of parameters, most notably count, volume, concentration, motility, and morphology. This helps you understand your fertility.<p>If the analysis concludes that your sperm are healthy, we then offer you the option to freeze at rates more competitive than a traditional clinic. If we find low counts or poor motility (the sperm's ability to swim), we'll provide you with lifestyle recommendations based on your analysis and a survey you completed. If necessary, we'll connect you with our urologist on staff or a reputable fertility doctor in your area.<p>Men often assume they'll have no issue procreating. We also often assume we can have healthy kids at any age. But these assumptions aren't always true. In fact, approximately 1 in 10 men face infertility, as do approximately 1 in 7 couples. In each case, infertility is medically defined as "not being able to conceive within 12 months of actively trying." What's equally important is your ability to produce healthy sperm is not necessarily permanent. Things like testicular cancer, dangerous careers, or serious accidents do happen and as you get older, the quality of your sperm declines each year.<p>I didn't plan on starting a male fertility company. A few years ago, I had an accident that led to second degree burns on my thighs from some very, very hot tea. At the time, I was just grateful to not have had any permanent damage. But when a friend was diagnosed with cancer and froze his sperm before starting chemotherapy, I decided to proactively freeze my sperm, and that's when I realized just how much the process of testing or freezing your sperm today sucks (I am more than happy to talk details about this!)<p>My work experience was extremely helpful in starting a company like Legacy. I worked at Oliver Wyman as a Health & Life Sciences consultant, studied public health and public policy at Harvard, met with successful entrepreneurs through the World Economic Forum, and learned a lot at UN Women about how the world thinks about fertility and family planning.<p>The timing also made sense. In 2017, a major meta-study was released, showing that male fertility had declined 50-60% in the past 40 years. And society is changing! People are older. Couples meet later. They get married later. They try to have kids later. Non-traditional families are much more common than they used to be. Men no longer see themselves as the hands-off breadwinners, but want to be actively involved in raising healthy kids with good values - I know I do.<p>Even if you don't know whether you want kids, if you've at least thought about having kids one day, we can help you understand your fertility and ensure that you have a strong viable sperm sample for future use. Plus: your sperm quality is a great overall indicator for your health, so you'll get an important insight into how healthy you are today.<p>I've been part of the HN community ever since I decided to become an entrepreneur, and I really value this community. I'm very much looking forward to hearing your reactions, feedback, and questions, and to hearing your experiences in this space, which is so intimate and important to so many of us.<p>EDIT: We are operational across the United States, and are actively working on international expansion to Canada, Europe (via Geneva & London), and the Middle East (via Dubai).
Upvote: | 193 |
Title: I just finished Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and was mind-blown. What else do you recommend?
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Hi all! I'm Kennan and I recently founded Jika (<a href="https://jika.ai" rel="nofollow">https://jika.ai</a>). Jika helps Shopify sellers A/B test their product pricing so they can make more money.<p>Let’s say you sell shoes on Shopify for $100 and want to test $110. You’d 1-click install the Jika Shopify App and go to a dashboard where you select and start a test for $110. We then handle the heavy lifting of showing price A to 50% of your visitors and price B to the other 50%. As the test is running, Jika keeps track of revenue, conversions, and visitors at each price point. You’d repeat this process as much as you can since the optimal price for a product is always changing.<p>Up until now, most people have priced off competitors, but that doesn't cut it anymore with big companies getting more and more sophisticated. A prime example of this is Amazon accelerating their development of in-house brands (~640 in late 2019) and using their dataset to outprice other online sellers (2.5m price changes per day in 2013 and more today).<p>One recent test of a best selling product for a Shopify brand doing 1M+ monthly revenue resulted in a data significant ~10% revenue lift from a -7% price. This better price for the best selling product translates to a ~30k+ monthly revenue increase (~180k+ revenue over 6 months).<p>I chose to work on pricing because I love optimization. Past optimization includes dropping out of college after 1 year to be a growth (A/B testing) engineer at Pinterest for 3 years and building an app for discounts + promotions at Hulu. In high school, I also optimized enough to be a top 200 player in League of Legends.<p>Would love to answer any questions or comments below!<p>PS. If you know anyone on Shopify, I'd love to help them nail down their pricing. :D
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: A few days ago there was a discussion about worst enterprise software. What is the BEST one?
Upvote: | 197 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I have a website for a piece of software I make, and Google search traffic accounts for a reasonably large portion of downloads. At the end of April, I moved the site to a new domain (using Google's "site move" tool), and everything appeared to be fine – Google indexed the new site within a few days, and traffic remained the same. However, in the past few weeks, I've noticed a drop in traffic to the site, and when I looked at the Search Console, I realized that all traffic from Google suddenly disappeared in the middle of June: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/S1CCl2f.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/S1CCl2f.png</a><p>Google has all the pages in the site indexed - when I search for "site:[my URL]", the pages show up as expected – but they seem to have been completely removed from any search results. If I search for the exact name of my app, where my site was previously the first result, the site appears nowhere in the 16 pages of results that are returned (I looked at all of them!). Similarly, if I copy a few sentences or an entire paragraph from the site and search for exact matches, Google will return irrelevant results or no results at all, and my site won't be included anywhere in the results.<p>At least from the search console, everything appears fine - there are no errors reported, and the "manual actions" and "security issues" sections are empty. The site content has barely changed in the last few months, so I can't see any reason for the change.<p>What can I do? There seems to be no way to contact an actual human, and since nothing on the site has changed, I can't think of anything to revert. I could try going back to my old domain, but I'm worried that would confuse Google even more, and I'm not sure that's even the source of the issue. Has anyone on HN ever faced this problem before?
Upvote: | 128 |
Title: Dear HN
What are some best ways to market your blogpost to the right audience and gain visibility
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Hey HN!<p>We're Alex & Chris, brothers from Melbourne, Australia, and the founders of Mindset Health (<a href="https://www.mindsethealth.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.mindsethealth.com</a>). We create mobile apps to help people manage chronic health conditions at home. Our programs use hypnosis-based techniques, developed by clinicians, to help people manage conditions like anxiety, depression & Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).<p>Mindset Health came out of a difficult period after Chris and I wound down our first startup. During this time, we experienced a lot of anxiety and stress. I ended up being prescribed anti-anxiety medication, but the side effects and the lack of control I felt caused me to look for non-pharmacological options, like CBT and biofeedback.<p>Someone we trusted recommended hypnotherapy. Chris and I were skeptical about hypnosis (the 'being made to cluck like a chicken' reputation), but after coming around to the benefits of meditation a couple of years before, we were open enough to say we'd look more into the science. We ended up spending a few weeks diving deep into the hypnosis research and were surprised at what we found. Since many HN readers are probably as skeptical as we were, we're going to saturate the rest of this post with references. Hopefully not too many!<p>Contrary to stereotypes of stage shows with outlandish mind control stunts, hypnosis simply involves becoming focused enough to become more receptive to new ideas or perspectives. Turns out that not only can this help with areas like smoking cessation [1], but conditions like anxiety [2], depression [3], IBS [4], sleep issues [5] and chronic pain [6] can be improved using hypnosis-based treatments. Like many topics in neuroscience, the mechanisms behind hypnosis are still being explored, but a 2016 brain scan study by the Stanford School of Medicine identified changes in brain activity related to absorption, executive control, and awareness [7] which is thought to create a more effective context for the delivery of therapeutic techniques like CBT [8].<p>It took some time but we decided to look into booking sessions with local 'hypnotherapists' to try it for ourselves. However, many of the people we came across weren't psychologists or qualified practitioners, and most of this wasn't covered by insurance. So we switched to trying pre-recorded sessions from a well-regarded psychologist who practices hypnosis. Those sessions were deeply relaxing and absorbing. Through using them I was able to learn coping skills helped me stop taking my anxiety medication.<p>This experience gave Chris and me an idea: could we help more people access hypnotherapy by removing the stigma and barriers to trying it? Calm and Headspace had succeeded at doing so for meditation. Similarly to how meditation has become a powerful self-care habit for a healthy mind, perhaps hypnotherapy could become a tool for self-managing chronic health conditions.<p>Chronic and mental health conditions account for a massive portion of the global healthcare cost (80–90% of the $3.5 trillion annual healthcare spend in the United States [9,10]). For many of these conditions, treatment is more about managing symptoms than 'curing' the condition, meaning that patients are reliant on drugs, surgeries, and/or restrictive diets for long periods of their life - with all of the cost and side effects involved.<p>We decided to make our idea into reality, and began Mindset Health with the intention of helping people with these conditions strengthen their self-regulation skills and reduce reliance on pharmacological interventions. We currently have two apps that use hypnotherapy to help people manage health conditions (with more on the way, including chronic pain and smoking cessation).<p>The first app is called Mindset (<a href="https://www.mindsethealth.com/mindset" rel="nofollow">https://www.mindsethealth.com/mindset</a>), which is based on the work of Dr Michael Yapko, an expert in the clinical uses of hypnosis (he literally wrote the textbook) [11]. It involves a series of hypnosis-based audio sessions that teach coping skills that can help manage anxiety and depression. Each hypnotherapy session dives into a specific thought pattern or life challenge and helps you improve by teaching you new skills and perspectives.<p>The second app, Nerva (<a href="https://www.mindsethealth.com/nerva" rel="nofollow">https://www.mindsethealth.com/nerva</a>), is designed for users with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (a condition affecting 10-15% of the population, so 33-49 million Americans). It's based on the work of Dr Simone Peters, who led a randomized controlled trial that deployed a 6-week gut-directed hypnotherapy program; this approach was shown to help 71% of participants improve their symptoms by a clinically significant amount [12]. Nerva delivers this 6-week hypnotherapy approach (audio sessions that use visualization and suggestion to improve self-regulation skills, as well as sychoeducation and breathing exercises), plus a maintenance plan to help users to build on their progress.<p>From past discussions, including the recent HN thread at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23410690" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23410690</a>, we know that the topic of hypnosis can bring up a lot of understandable skepticism. That's why we've included so many links below. We're also happy to talk about it. We've been there ourselves, so please feel free to be skeptical, ask questions, and share your experiences in this area. We want to hear them! And if there's anything you want to say that isn't right for a public forum, you're welcome to email us at [email protected] as well.<p>[1] <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18569754/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18569754/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207144.2019.1613863?journalCode=nhyp20" rel="nofollow">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207144.2019.16...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207140601177897" rel="nofollow">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0020714060117789...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25736234/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25736234/</a><p>[5] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5786848/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5786848/</a><p>[6] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2752362/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2752362/</a><p>[7] <a href="http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2016/07/study-identifies-brain-areas-altered-during-hypnotic-trances.html" rel="nofollow">http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2016/07/study-identifi...</a><p>[8] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK66430/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK66430/</a><p>[9] <a href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/tools/TL200/TL221/RAND_TL221.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/tools/TL200/TL221...</a><p>[10] <a href="https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/Downloads/highlights.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...</a>).<p>[11] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Yapko" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Yapko</a><p>[12] <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apt.13706" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apt.13706</a>
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: Seems that all our domains on Cloudflare are down. They can't be resolved and we can't even access www.cloudflare.com from several locations worldwide.
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: When AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was launched, the young inexperienced me initially understood this was a service to hire virtual servers by the hour, but the price would vary (in an "Elastic" way) according to how much RAM or CPU resources you use.<p>To my disappointment, this was obviously not the case.<p>Now, 15 years of technological development later, would such a service be possible?<p>What is the closest service to a truly "elastic" VM instance to date?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I have tried posting to HN, reddit, etc. Blogging is what I will try next. What are some things you guys have done to increase website traffic?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Been asked several times but interested to see references to more recent posts.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12496558" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12496558</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158116" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158116</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3996652" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3996652</a><p>Have any Hacker News threads ever truly changed your perspective on life, or technology? Post them please.
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Why can a business send an actionable correspondence without a reply channel? What’s the sentiment around this line of thinking?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: My background:<p>CS rising junior, indecisive about choosing a sub field.<p>I want to pursue CS research before I graduate for its own sake and partly to compensate for my lackluster GPA for grad school. But each field seems to have a pet peeve:<p>1) AI/machine learning: too saturated, fear of an AI winter<p>2) Networks/security: boring, reading a research paper seems torturous<p>3) Bioinformatic/quantum computing: may never find their place in real world and die out<p>Etc.<p>It continues to amaze me how some people know exactly what they want to do in their freshman year or even earlier. My question is: what motivated you to pursue what you're doing right now and at what stage in your academic career?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: We're Fitz and Todd, co-founders of Reflect (<a href="https://reflect.run" rel="nofollow">https://reflect.run</a>) - we’re excited to share our no-code tool for automated web testing.<p>We worked together for 5+ years at a tech start-up that deployed multiple times a week. After every deployment, a bunch of our developers would manually smoke test the application by running through all of the critical user experiences. This manual testing was expensive in terms of our time. To speed up the tests’ run time, we dedicated developer resources to writing and managing Selenium scripts. That was expensive at “compile time” due to authoring and maintenance. At a high-level, we believe that the problem with automated end-to-end testing comes down to two things: tests are too hard to create, and they take too much time to maintain. These are the two issues we are trying to solve with Reflect.<p>Reflect lets you create end-to-end tests just by using your web application, and then executes that test definition whenever you want: on a schedule, via API trigger or simply on-demand. It emails you whenever the test fails and provides a video and the browser logs of the execution.<p>One knee-jerk reaction we’re well aware of: record-and-playback testing tools, where the user creates a test automatically by interacting with their web application, have traditionally not worked very well. We’re taking a new approach by loading the site-under-test inside of a VM in the cloud rather than rely on a locally installed browser extension. This eliminates a class of recording errors due to existing cookies, proxies or other extensions introducing state that the test executor is not aware of, and unifies the test creation environment with the test execution environment. By completely controlling the test environment we can also expose a better UX for certain actions. For example, to do visual testing you just click-and-drag over the element(s) you want to test. For recording file uploads we intercept the upload request in the VM, prompt you to upload a file from your local file system, and then store that file in the cloud and inject it into the running test. If you want to add additional steps to an existing test, we’ll put you back into the recording experience and fast-forward you to that point in the test, where again all you need to do is use your site and we’ll add those actions to your existing test. Controlling the environment also allows us to reduce the problem space by blocking actions which you typically wouldn’t want to test, but which are hard to replicate and thus could lead to failed recordings (e.g. changing browser dimensions mid-recording). As an added bonus, our approach requires no installation whatsoever!<p>We capture nearly every browser action from hovers to file uploads, and drag-and-drops to iframes, while building a repeatable, machine-executable test definition. We support variables for dynamic inputs, and test composition so your test suite is DRY. The API provides flexible integration with your CI/CD out of the box and supports creating tests in prod and running them in staging on the fly. You don’t need to use a separate test grid, as all Reflect tests run on our own infrastructure. Parallel execution of your tests is a two click config change and we don’t charge you extra for it.<p>Some technical details that folks might find interesting:<p>- For every action you take we’ll generate multiple selectors targeting the element you interacted with. We wrote a custom algorithm that generates a diverse set of selectors (so that if you delete a class in the future your tests won’t break), and ranks them by specificity (i.e. [data-test-id] > img[alt=”foo”] > #bar > .baz).<p>- To detect certain actions we have to track DOM mutations across async boundaries. So for example we can detect if a hover ended up mutating an element you clicked on and thus should be captured as a test step, even if the hover occurred within a requestAnimationFrame, XHR/fetch callback, setTimeout/setInterval, etc.<p>- We detect and ignore auto-genned classes from libraries like Styled Components. We use a heuristic to do this so it’s not perfect, but this approach allows us to generate higher quality selectors than if we didn’t ignore them.<p>- One feature in beta that we’re really excited about: For React apps we have the ability to target React component names as if they were DOM elements (e.g. if you click on a button you might get a selector like “<NotificationPopupMenu> button”). We think this is the best solution for the auto-genned classes problem described in the bullet above, as selectors containing component names should be very stable.<p>We tried to make Reflect as easy as possible to get started with - we have a free tier (no credit card required) and there’s nothing to install. Our paid plans start at $99 and you pay primarily for test execution time. Thanks and we look forward to your feedback!
Upvote: | 262 |
Title: I have been struggling with my productivity for 8 months now. It has nothing to do with the pandemic.
It just happened slowly. I was studying and learning (programming and ML) almost daily.
But suddenly lost my pace and have been unable to go back since?<p>What can I do to get out of the rut?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Stephen, Jon, and Ashby here, the co-founders of Charityvest (<a href="https://charityvest.org" rel="nofollow">https://charityvest.org</a>). We created a modern, simple, and affordable way for companies to include charitable giving in their suite of employee benefits.<p>We give employees their own tax-deductible charitable giving fund, like an “HSA for Charity.” They can make contributions into their fund and, from their fund, support any of the 1.4M charities in the US, all on one tax receipt.<p>Using the funds, we enable companies to operate gift matching programs that run on autopilot. Each donation to a charity from an employee is matched automatically by the company in our system.<p>A company can set up a matching gift program and launch giving funds to employees in about 10 minutes of work.<p>Historically, corporate charitable giving matching programs have been administratively painful to operate. Making payments to charities, maintaining tax records, and doing due diligence on charitable compliance is taxing on HR / finance teams. The necessary software to help has historically been quite expensive and not very useful for employees beyond the matching features.<p>This is one example of an observation Stephen made after working for years as a philanthropic consultant. Consumer fintech products aren’t built to make great giving experiences for donors. Instead, they are built for buyers — e.g., nonprofits (fundraising) or corporations (gift matching) — without a ton of consideration for the everyday user experience.<p>A few years back, my wife and I made a commitment to give a portion of our income away every year, and we found it administratively painful to give regularly. The tech that nonprofits typically use hardly inspires generosity — e.g., high fees, poor user flows, and questionable information flow (like tax receipts). Giving platforms try to compensate for poor functionality with bright pictures of happy kids in developing countries, but when the technology is not a good financial experience it puts a damper on things.<p>Charityvest started when I noticed a particular opportunity with donor-advised funds, which are tax-deductible giving funds recognized by the IRS. They are growing quickly (20% CAGR), but mainly among the high-net worth demographic. We believe they are powerful tools. They enable donors to have a giving portfolio all from one place (on one tax receipt) and have full control over their payment information/frequency, etc. Most of all, they enable a donor to split the decisions of committing to give and supporting a specific organization. Excitement about each of these decisions often strikes at different times for donors—particularly those who desire to give on a budget.<p>We believe everyone should have their own charitable giving fund no matter their net worth. We’ve created technology that has democratized donor-advised funds.<p>We also believe good technology should be available for every company, big and small. Employers can offer Charityvest for $2.49 / employee / month subscription, and we charge no fees on any of the giving — charities receive 100% of the money given.<p>Lastly, we send the program administrator a fun report every month to let them know all the awesome giving their company and its employees did in one dashboard. This info can be leveraged for internal culture or external brand building.<p>We’re just launching our workplace giving product, but we’ve already built a good portfolio of trusted customers, including Eric Ries’ (author of The Lean Startup) company, LTSE. We’ve particularly seen a number of companies use us as a meaningful part of their corporate decision to join the fight for racial justice in substantive ways.<p>Our endgame is that the world becomes more generous, starting with the culture of every company. We believe giving is fundamentally good and we want to build technology that encourages more of it by making it more simple and accessible.<p>You can check out our workplace giving product at (<a href="https://charityvest.org/workplace-giving" rel="nofollow">https://charityvest.org/workplace-giving</a>). If you’re interested, we can get your company up and running in 10 minutes. Or, please feel free to forward us on to your HR leadership at your company.<p>Our giving funds are also available for free for any individual on <a href="https://charityvest.org" rel="nofollow">https://charityvest.org</a> — without gift matching and reporting. We’d invite you to check out the experience. For individuals, we make gifts of cash and stock to any charity fee-free.<p>Happy to share this with you all, and we’d love to know what you think.
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Hi there,<p>I'm an experienced software engineer (+15 years dev experience, MsC in Computer Science) and quantum computing is the first thing in my experience that is being hard to grasp/understand. I'd love to fix that ;)<p>What resources would you recommend to start learning about quantum computing?<p>Ideally resources that touch both the theoretical base and evolve to more practical usages.
Upvote: | 185 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>The TLDR; 10 days ago I was banned from Cloudflare allegedly for "phishing". I have never phished, nor used Cloudflare to proxy illegal content.<p>I am a long time HN user but I created a throwaway account to avoid being linked to my employer.<p>10 days ago I got an email saying my account was suspended for "phishing". I contacted Cloudflare support immediately and within 60 seconds I got a reply saying my account was permanently banned with no further information. I think this was an automated response. I followed up explaining my account had never been used for "phishing" and it hosted a number of small businesses and would they reinstate it. I never got a reply.<p>My downfall must been related to Cloudflare Workers. I used it to create some apps including proxies that modified mainstream news websites. They acted as uBlock + Stylish for locked down computers where I could not install browser extensions. I did not share these with anyone, but I did not secure them with HTTP auth. I didn't think anyone could guess the xyz.abc.workers.dev URLs to access the proxies but automated software must have detected them and flagged them as phishing sites.<p>I was too clever for my own good, but I was not malicious, I did not abuse the Cloudflare platform and I never phished. I just created an application for my own personal use. I do not think any Clouldflare engineer looking at my Worker code would think it was malicious in any way. My account had current billing details and I was a paying customer in the past.<p>Lessons learnt: Don't be clever and security is ALWAYS important.<p>I would like to continue using Cloudflare. I worry I will be banned from their other services. If I was blocked at an IP level, it would be far more devastating than being permanently blocked by Google.<p>If anyone can help me, even just to clear my name, I would very grateful to you.
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: This last year I finally landed a SDE job at a FAANG company! However, I'm considering quitting because I am not happy.<p>The good: I get paid better than my last jobs. I can browse internal resources to satisfy my curiosity about how things work.<p>The bad: Basically no work gets done and there's no motivation to do any.<p>The dev tools, docs and tech debt impart such a slow iteration speed that even when I am working a full 8 hours, only a few very small changes get done, yet somehow this is even more than most of the rest of my team can muster during an entire week.<p>Because of this, I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week. The other days I only open my computer for standup and if I get an IM. As far as I can tell, if I can be just barely the best on the team by doing there's nothing the company will offer me to work harder. If I get asked about why it takes long to make a simple change I can point to the environment and shrug my shoulders. Of course, it's possible the rest of the team is doing that too, but I have no way of knowing.<p>This amounts to a glacial development pace and when I look back at the progress made since I joined and estimate the cost to the company (salary, servers, etc) it's frankly disgusting. I don't feel what I'm doing is ethnically wrong, because the company is evidently pleased with my current productivity, but I find it unsatisfying and like a waste of my time on earth.<p>So my question is: Is all of FAANG like this? If the market value of such incompetence if FAANG salary, how can I do good work and get paid preportionally?
Upvote: | 738 |
Title: Hello Hacker News! We're Jay and Himank from Reploy (<a href="https://getreploy.com" rel="nofollow">https://getreploy.com</a>). We're building a platform that allows teams to easily configure full-stack staging environments or "previews" of their web app which are created on every open PR.<p>In the past, Himank and I spent time at several startups (~10->200 employees), where we were on customer-facing, product-oriented teams. We often found ourselves in positions where we wanted to share our environment with designer/PM/sales folks who didn't necessarily have a dev environment setup, and ngrok didn't cut it. Further, even when trying to share our environment with fellow engineers, there was always a slow down when requiring that they git stash, git pull, etc..<p>The solution to these pain points was either:<p>1) Waiting for a full staging or production deployment, which in most cases, wasn't really practical (from a cost and/or time perspective).<p>2) Using a static site hosting solution (Vercel, Netlify, etc..) which didn't allow us to preview full-stack changes.<p>At some of these companies, an infra team had tried to build something like this, however, the "preview" workflow was very different than the "production" workflow, so there were annoyances (slow builds, lack of concurrent env support, no populating staging data etc..) that made the tool hard to use. This is where Reploy comes in! Especially in the current remote landscape, being able to have as many staging environments as features is helping teams move faster by simplifying and streamlining the feature development flow.<p>We've put a lot of time into making this dead simple to set up. Just connect your repo, give us the commands that you run on your dev machine, and we'll spit out a live environment on a managed link. All of this configuration can be described in the `reploy.yml` file, which is essentially a simpler version of docker-compose :). And if you already have a docker-compose file, we can use that as well :).<p>Take a look at a demo on our site! (<a href="https://getreploy.com" rel="nofollow">https://getreploy.com</a>).<p>How does it work you may ask? The short answer is k8s. We schedule these environments on Kubernetes, however, we hide this from end-users so that all that they're interacting with is the Reploy configuration (just a series of commands to start up your web app). We've also curated a bunch of "runtimes" which contain common framework dependencies (reactjs, node, rails, etc..) so that if you don't want to worry about docker, you don't have to :) . And for the hardcore folks out there, we also support custom images.<p>A few notable features that Reploy offers (specific to the aforementioned "staging" workflow):<p>1) Caching of specific directories (node_modules, .bundle, etc..) -> faster builds<p>2) Restarts of past environments -> Let's you compare the state of different commits<p>3) Notifications! -> We'll notify your team when a new environment is ready or failed the build process via slack, email, etc..<p>4) A "setup" hook where your team can populate a database with staging data, or configure the host environment to your liking.<p>From a pricing angle, we're looking to charge like most CI providers. That is, we'll charge a base price per engineer/user (~$30) and prorate any additional usage over a max number of concurrent environments. On that note, we've realized that pricing for Reploy is a very interesting problem, as the types of users that are creating environments (engineers, devops teams, etc..) are not necessarily the only users getting value out of the product (PMs, for example). If you have any thoughts here, we'd love to hear them in the comments!<p>Feel free to request access at <a href="https://getreploy.com" rel="nofollow">https://getreploy.com</a> if you're interested in getting up and running; also happy to answer any questions at `jay [at] getreploy.com`.<p>Overall, very excited to be sharing this with HN, we'd love to hear your thoughts and keep the conversation going :).
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: I am a software developer and like the company I work for. I am smart and capable but have few connections. I have a family and several people rely on my relatively high income so I can't drop everything and do a startup. I live in a place where cost of living is obscene and I have no option to move due to family. I am (finally) debt free, but projecting the rest of my life, I will be able to retire at 72-75. I want to get our early.<p>Every day I watch people get stupid rich. I know the startup route and have done that a couple of times, though the products didn't take to their markets. I've tried stock trading, crypto trading, investment, small businesses, various passive income schemes, etc. None of this seems to return any decent investment. My portfolio can give me a solid 6-8% a year return, but unless I already have a couple of million to gamble it will still mean a slow and steady investment over decades which still lands me at a ridiculously old age before it's enough.<p>Every day places like Softbank are giving away obscene amounts of money to mundane or straight up bad ideas. Banks and the government are moving unfathomable amounts of cash around, a bunch of which ends up disappearing to corruption. Bezos just made $13b in a single day during one of the worst economies of recent history. There is plenty of wealth out there to be had, but how to get a slice of it?<p>I am tired and losing hope. Even though I'm better off than most I am still struggling to support everyone who depends on me. I want to get rich and I no longer care about how (as long as it isn't illegal, completely unethical, and does not endanger anyone's life or health). I am not afraid of working hard and when I pick up a project I work on it obsessively until it's done and done right, but it feels like I am panning for pennies in a puddle. What is the best way to get a large slice of a large pie without abandoning everyone who is dear to me for several years?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: This debate has come up at my place of work recently: Should the area where someone lives impact their salary if they are working as a remote employee? Should someone be paid less if they move to an area with a lower cost of living, even if they started in an area where they were making a higher salary?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I'm Andy, one of the founders at Sidekick (<a href="https://sidekick.video/" rel="nofollow">https://sidekick.video/</a>). Sidekick is a new hardware device built to connect remote teams with an always-on video call.<p>Sidekick sits on your desk next to your computer — with Sidekick you just turn to your teammates and talk, as if you're in the same room.<p>Like many of you all, we were recently forced to start working remotely because of COVID. After fleeing NYC to return to our childhood homes, we quickly realized that starting a company while remote was brutal. We were missing out on all the spontaneous conversations and camaraderie that occur when we're in the same room. We knew we needed to simulate being in the same room to build our company.<p>Initially we built Sidekick just for ourselves, but many of the founders in our YC batch wanted to try it out! We realized that our founding team wasn't an anomaly for wanting an always-on video device — we pivoted from our previous idea to start working on Sidekick to help the other founders in our batch.<p>Sidekick works best with fast-paced teams that need to be constantly communicating — founders are a great example. We're working with 25 YC founding teams along with experimental product teams at Store No. 8 and Brex. That being said, Sidekick isn't for everyone! If you don't really want to talk to your team during the day, Sidekick probably isn't a great fit.<p>We talked to many teams that tried to hack together a solution with Zoom on an iPad. From the teams we spoke to, we learned that it's really hard to consistently get the team in the room at the same time. Users are constantly leaving the room for other meetings but for everyone still in the room, it seems like nobody wants to use it because it's empty. This causes a negative feedback loop where even more people leave the room and the hacked together solution quickly becomes useless.<p>Sidekick is built to maximize the chances that you're not in the room alone. Unlike other jerry-rigged solutions, it treats "always-on" as a first-class problem to solve. Some examples of product decisions we've made are:<p>- Push notifications to minimize being alone in the room - when someone joins as the first person in the room, we send a notification to the rest of the team. We want to get other teammates in the room ASAP because the room is only useful with more than one person.<p>- Meeting mode - when you have a normal Zoom meeting with someone outside of your team, you can mark yourself as "in a meeting". This silences the mic and speakers on Sidekick while also setting a status informing your team that you're in a meeting, but you'll be back soon if someone needs you. We're also releasing Google Calendar integration soon, allowing Sidekick to automatically mark itself as "in a meeting"<p>On average our users are in their Sidekick rooms for 6 hours a day. They turn it on first thing when they sit down in the morning and leave it on throughout all their meetings during the day.<p>Our customers pay for Sidekick with a subscription model and we have a special promotion until Aug 1st for $25/user/month. The hardware comes for free and we handle all the shipping. We went with this model because we want our customers to pay us for the experience, not the hardware. We didn't want customers to have to think about whether they wanted to buy a pricy new device when the real question should be whether they want to try the experience.<p>We believe that working in the same room is part of the secret sauce to building an awesome company. We want all teams to be able to have access to that experience.<p>I really love this community and I'm excited to share Sidekick with all of you. We'd love to hear your feedback, particularly if you're working on a team that misses being in the same room. Feel free to ask any questions — I'll be around to answer anything you want to throw our way.
Upvote: | 170 |
Title: I'm an experienced C/C++ programmer and I occasionally look at the generated assembly to check for optimizations, loop unrolling, vectorization, etc. I understand what's going on the surface level, but I have a hard time understand what's going on in detail, especially with high optimization levels, where the compiler would do all kinds of clever tricks. I experiment with code in godbolt.org and look up the various opcodes, but I would like to take a more structured way of learning x86-64 assembly, especially when it comes to common patterns, tips and tricks, etc.<p>Are there any good books or tutorials you can recommend which go beyond the very beginner level?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I've been offline since last Wednesday, driving and camping throughout northern outback australia (escaping the vid!). I have a second rate carrier and tonight I hear my phone ping for the first time since I left. I've had reception before, but usually only while driving, usually passing through a larger town. This time I'm sitting next to the fire, near a town called Nhulunbuy in East Arnhem, aboriginal land, one of the more remote regions on the planet. I'm on a small red cliff overlooking the ocean, I've spotted a largish croc on the sand below only an hour before, and I can see the entire milky way above me (it's a new moon). As i'm writing this I just looked up and saw a satellite. The sky's been pretty similar the last week, but still it's spectacular. Anyway my phone pings and I pick it up and I end up reading the news and checking HN (for the first time in two weeks .. same old stories). What gives?
Upvote: | 333 |
Title: Hi HN. Lately I have been thinking about what I really want to do in life; what really brings meaning and joy to my life. I am currently finishing up my solo "start-up" project, and we will see where it goes, but in the mean time I have been doing some introspection and thinking about the future.<p>I am a software developer (mostly backend, some frontend and some data analytics). I personally don't really have any desire to work at FAANG. I also don't really have any desire to write CRUD for some generic company that pays well either.<p>I want to explore more meaningful avenues of work. Preserving nature, animals and their habitats, is one cause I have been thinking about. I know that most projects are very hands-on, requiring mostly hard labour or specialised research efforts. However, I've been wondering if there is a demand for software in these projects? Particularly in terms of specialised tooling and/or data analytics?<p>I suspect that most research projects don't have the funding to afford anything beyond the bare requirements. The same probably goes for government sponsored programmes; again, this is all speculation.<p>Does anyone have experience as a software dev in these fields? Where might one start looking ?<p>--<p>Because I am sure some people will mention it, yes, volunteering is an option. But money is an unfortunate living requirement in today's society (unless you plan on going off-grid entirely).
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: Time for another AMA. Previous threads we've done: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts</a>.<p>I'll be here for the next 5 hours. As usual, there are countless possible immigration-related topics and I'll try to respond to whatever questions you ask but as much as possible I'd like to focus on issues related to the pandemic and the corresponding travel and visa bans and suspensions, office closures, etc. Please remember that I can't provide legal advice on specific cases for obvious liability reasons because I won't have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and comments and I'll try to do the same in my answers!
Upvote: | 304 |
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