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Title: As a software engineer, I want to learn more about business administration and finance. I want to able to level with CEOs, CFos or other managerial positions.
Upvote: | 280 |
Title: I've been programming since middle school, and have been working as a software engineer for the last 5 years. The pay is great (FAANG-level comp), but I'm extremely bored and considering leaving software engineering altogether.<p>I'd like to better understand what career options other software engineers have explored.<p>If you are a former software engineer:<p>1. What are you doing now?<p>2. Why did you leave software engineering?
Upvote: | 186 |
Title: Hello! I have been an employed software engineer for a bit more than 8 years, after dropping out of a traditional bachelors degree program in 2012, due to financial and personal reasons.<p>I have been the “theory guy” in every job I’ve had in the last 6 years, and I would really like to be able to learn more theoretical math-and-computer-science-related subjects, since I am more financially stable and seeing a therapist regularly. I don’t have much interest in completing my gen-Ed’s, but I genuinely would like to learn more theoretical math/compsci, and I can only get so far buying used textbooks on eBay.<p>Is it possible to get a graduate degree without a bachelors (in the US)? If anyone here has done that, can you give any advice on how?
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: I'm Alex, one of the cofounders of Daybreak Health (www.daybreakhealth.com) along with Luke and Sid. We help teens feel better, build skills for life and achieve their goals through online counseling. Our licensed counselors provide evidence-based counseling to teens through online video sessions, messaging, and a mobile app.<p>The evidence supports that behavioral therapy like CBT and DBT is effective. It works to treat diagnosable conditions like anxiety and depression, and it also works to help young people feel happier and achieve their goals [1][2][3][4][5]. But too often teens don't get the mental health support they need because it is stigmatized, difficult to schedule and attend, and expensive. At Daybreak we bring counseling to the teen on a digital device and we charge less than half the cost of a traditional therapy session.<p>In October of 2018, my younger brother nearly lost his life due to the lack of accessible mental health resources supporting our young people. He is not alone. 1 in 5 teens struggle with a diagnosable mental health condition, but estimates suggest that up to 1 in 3 actually struggle with anxiety - or between 6 and 10M total teens [6][7]. That means the odds are greater than 50% that if you are the average parent raising a family in America with 2 kids, one of your children will struggle with a mental health condition in their teens.<p>To make matters worse, 80% of teens who need mental health support do not receive care today [8]. This results in deteriorating academic performance, increased rates of juvenile crime and substance abuse, and suicide rates that are at an all-time high. Every day, 17 young people commit suicide in the US. It is the #2 cause of death among 15-24 year olds, after accidental injury and ahead of homicide [9]. This isn't a niche problem.<p>Our current system makes mental health support nearly impossible to get for a teen. Stigma makes it hard to admit to yourself you want support, let alone talk about it with your parents. There is a shortage of therapists who specialize in adolescents, making it hard to find a therapist that is close enough to drive to on a weekly basis. Private practice therapy averages more than $200 per session. Even if you could afford to pay, you're going to be met with 2-3 month wait lists. And when you finally do arrive, you sit on an awkward couch in an environment that you may not be comfortable in. That is why an average of 11 years pass between when a teenager first needs mental health support and when they eventually start receiving it in their 20s or even later [10].<p>That is why we started Daybreak Health. Everything we’ve built is designed intentionally for teens and their parents. Teens can download the Daybreak mobile app and are instantly connected to a live guide (Mon-Fri 7am-7pm) who asks about mental health goals and needs. After a video assessment where we loop in the parent, we create a plan and match teens with a counselor based on goals, needs, interests, hobbies and more. Once matched with a counselor, teens meet with them once a week through a 50-minute video call, and can message them on a daily basis through the app. Our counselors help teens develop emotional life skills and work towards goals in a personalized plan that has thematic focus on teen-specific areas like school, healthy relationships and more. Teens can also meet with small moderated groups of other teens on those same topics. And parents are a core part of the process, starting with the assessment, through planning and regular progress reports. For all of this we charge an $89/week subscription, less than half the price of a single 50-minute session in traditional private practice.<p>Dr. Neha Chaudhary, our lead Clinical Advisor, is a foremost expert on adolescent mental health and co-founder of Stanford's Lab for Mental Health Innovation. Together with her and experts from UCSF we have designed a program for teens grounded in clinical science, while at the same time reimagining the way it is delivered to teens. The core of our clinical program is rooted in evidence-based methods like DBT and CBT, but we have taken these approaches and brought them into an easily digestible online experience.<p>But there is a problem: stigma around mental health stops people from sharing their great experiences with counseling, so its benefit is under-appreciated. If you know any parent or teens who might benefit from counseling, make sure they know about its benefits. And if you have thoughts about how to solve the awareness problem, or any stories you can share that may help us better understand the needs of teens and parents, we would be grateful. Thank you!<p>Sources:<p>[1] <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000579670700246X" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00057...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3073681/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3073681/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-3588.2006.00433.x" rel="nofollow">https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/camh.12112" rel="nofollow">https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/camh.1...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09638230601182094" rel="nofollow">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0963823060118209...</a><p>[6] <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/access.html#ref" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/access.html#ref</a><p>[7] <a href="https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor...</a><p>[8] <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/access.html#ref" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/access.html#ref</a><p>[9] <a href="https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml</a><p>[10] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361014/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361014/</a><p>Visit us at www.daybreakhealth.com
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: I've been a software engineer for over 12 years. I went to school for CS. I hate writing code now. It shows too, my work is not great. I'm stressed because I don't know what to do. How do I move on from here successfully?
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Hey everyone, I’m Vlad and I co-founded QuestDB (<a href="https://questdb.io" rel="nofollow">https://questdb.io</a>) with Nic and Tanc. QuestDB is an open source database for time series, events, and analytical workloads with a primary focus on performance (<a href="https://github.com/questdb/questdb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/questdb/questdb</a>).<p>It started in 2012 when an energy trading company hired me to rebuild their real-time vessel tracking system. Management wanted me to use a well-known XML database that they had just bought a license for. This option would have required to take down production for about a week just to ingest the data. And a week downtime was not an option. With no more money to spend on software, I turned to alternatives such as OpenTSDB but they were not a fit for our data model. There was no solution in sight to deliver the project.<p>Then, I stumbled upon Peter Lawrey’s Java Chronicle library [1]. It loaded the same data in 2 minutes instead of a week using memory-mapped files. Besides the performance aspect, I found it fascinating that such a simple method was solving multiple issues simultaneously: fast write, read can happen even before data is committed to disk, code interacts with memory rather than IO functions, no buffers to copy. Incidentally, this was my first exposure to zero-GC Java.<p>But there were several issues. First, at the time It didn’t look like the library was going to be maintained. Second, it used Java NIO instead of using the OS API directly. This adds overhead since it creates individual objects with sole purpose to hold a memory address for each memory page. Third, although the NIO allocation API was well documented, the release API was not. It was really easy to run out of memory and hard to manage memory page release. I decided to ditch the XML DB and then started to write a custom storage engine in Java, similar to what Java Chronicle did. This engine used memory mapped files, off-heap memory and a custom query system for geospatial time series. Implementing this was a refreshing experience. I learned more in a few weeks than in years on the job.<p>Throughout my career, I mostly worked at large companies where developers are “managed” via itemized tasks sent as tickets. There was no room for creativity or initiative. In fact, it was in one’s best interest to follow the ticket's exact instructions, even if it was complete nonsense. I had just been promoted to a managerial role and regretted it after a week. After so much time hoping for a promotion, I immediately wanted to go back to the technical side. I became obsessed with learning new stuff again, particularly in the high performance space.<p>With some money aside, I left my job and started to work on QuestDB solo. I used Java and a small C layer to interact directly with the OS API without passing through a selector API. Although existing OS API wrappers would have been easier to get started with, the overhead increases complexity and hurts performance. I also wanted the system to be completely GC-free. To do this, I had to build off-heap memory management myself and I could not use off-the-shelf libraries. I had to rewrite many of the standard ones over the years to avoid producing any garbage.<p>As I had my first kid, I had to take contracting gigs to make ends meet over the following 6 years. All the stuff I had been learning boosted my confidence and I started performing well at interviews. This allowed me to get better paying contracts, I could take fewer jobs and free up more time to work on QuestDB while looking after my family. I would do research during the day and implement this into QuestDB at night. I was constantly looking for the next thing, which would take performance closer to the limits of the hardware.<p>A year in, I realised that my initial design was actually flawed and that it had to be thrown away. It had no concept of separation between readers and writers and would thus allow dirty reads. Storage was not guaranteed to be contiguous, and pages could be of various non-64-bit-divisible sizes. It was also very much cache-unfriendly, forcing the use of slow row-based reads instead of fast columnar and vectorized ones.Commits were slow, and as individual column files could be committed independently, they left the data open to corruption.<p>Although this was a setback, I got back to work. I wrote the new engine to allow atomic and durable multi-column commits, provide repeatable read isolation, and for commits to be instantaneous. To do this, I separated transaction files from the data files. This made it possible to commit multiple columns simultaneously as a simple update of the last committed row id. I also made storage dense by removing overlapping memory pages and writing data byte by byte over page edges.<p>This new approach improved query performance. It made it easy to split data across worker threads and to optimise the CPU pipeline with prefetch. It unlocked column-based execution and additional virtual parallelism with SIMD instruction sets [2] thanks to Agner Fog’s Vector Class Library [3]. It made it possible to implement more recent innovations like our own version of Google SwissTable [4]. I published more details when we released a demo server a few weeks ago on ShowHN [5]. This demo is still available to try online with a pre-loaded dataset of 1.6 billion rows [6]. Although it was hard and discouraging at first, this rewrite turned out to be the second best thing that happened to QuestDB.<p>The best thing was that people started to contribute to the project. I am really humbled that Tanc and Nic left our previous employer to build QuestDB. A few months later, former colleagues of mine left their stable low-latency jobs at banks to join us. I take this as a huge responsibility and I don’t want to let these guys down. The amount of work ahead gives me headaches and goosebumps at the same time.<p>QuestDB is deployed in production, including into a large fintech company. We’ve been focusing on building a community to get our first users and gather as much feedback as possible.<p>Thank you for reading this story - I hope it was interesting. I would love to read your feedback on QuestDB and to answer questions.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/peter-lawrey/Java-Chronicle" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/peter-lawrey/Java-Chronicle</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22803504" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22803504</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.agner.org/optimize/vectorclass.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.agner.org/optimize/vectorclass.pdf</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/questdb/questdb/blob/master/core/src/main/c/share/rosti.h" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/questdb/questdb/blob/master/core/src/main...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616878" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616878</a><p>[6] <a href="http://try.questdb.io:9000/" rel="nofollow">http://try.questdb.io:9000/</a>
Upvote: | 357 |
Title: It seems that some people easily assume that Google products are the best in their categories. Here is a counter-example:<p>Yandex Image Search is much better at finding matches for an image that has been modified (by Photoshop or by adding extra stuff on top). It has helped me find the source of many memes.<p>Give it a try:
https://yandex.com/images/<p>Here are some images that you can try:
https://img.youtube.com/vi/7g-EFLEkRpQ/maxresdefault.jpg
https://img.youtube.com/vi/v4U2JrmVfdI/maxresdefault.jpg
https://img.youtube.com/vi/VZngU4a23ik/maxresdefault.jpg<p>Often, only Yandex enables you to find the original images that were use to create these thumbnails. While Google just gives you the links to the thumbnails.
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: I’m 30 years old. Recently, I’ve taken time off work, for the first time in my career, solely to cope with mental health. Not months off work... more like a week.<p>I have no debt. I earn several hundred thousand a year.<p>Some of the things at my work are under my control. Other things aren’t under my control. I feel like I have a lot of responsibility and lots of people are counting on me.<p>Lately, my anxiety level is sky high. I wake up in the morning with random work related thoughts that make me almost panic.<p>I keep all this to myself — my husband isn’t aware, and I’m not sure telling him about it will help anyone.<p>Do you work in tech? Have you thought about just quitting? I am not entirely sure what to do next. My career has essentially become my identity.<p>I’m not dealing with WFH that great. I miss the social interactions.<p>I grew up in a poor household. Most of my life has been to work hard but the follow the rules. Creativity or big ideas aren’t something I’m great at.<p>I’m considering quitting my job and finding a lesser paying job with lesser responsibility. On the other hand, I don’t feel that I need to really quit my job. I just need control over my anxiety and a better ability to control my thoughts?<p>Do others here have similar feelings? How do you cope?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Hey HN.<p>We’re Peter, Raza and Jordan of Humanloop (<a href="https://humanloop.com" rel="nofollow">https://humanloop.com</a>) and we’re building a low code platform to annotate data, rapidly train and then deploy Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. We use active learning research to make this possible with 5-10x less labelled data.<p>We’ve worked on large machine learning products in industry (Alexa, text-to-speech systems at Google and in insurance modelling) and seen first-hand the huge efforts required to get these systems trained, deployed and working well in production. Despite huge progress in pretrained models (BERT, GPT-3), one of the biggest bottlenecks remains getting enough _good quality_ labelled data.<p>Unlike annotations for driverless cars, the data that’s being annotated for NLP often requires domain expertise that’s hard to outsource. We’ve spoken to teams using NLP for medical chat bots, legal contract analysis, cyber security monitoring and customer service, and it’s not uncommon to find teams of lawyers or doctors doing text labelling tasks. This is an expensive barrier to building and deploying NLP.<p>We aim to solve this problem by providing a text annotation platform that trains a model as your team annotates. Coupling data annotation and model training has a number of benefits:<p>1) we can use the model to select the most valuable data to annotate next – this “active learning” loop can often reduce data requirements by 10x<p>2) a tight iteration cycle between annotation and training lets you pick up on errors much sooner and correct annotation guidelines<p>3) as soon as you’ve finished the annotation cycle you have a trained model ready to be deployed.<p>Active learning is far from a new idea, but getting it to work well in practice is surprisingly challenging, especially for deep learning. Simple approaches use the ML models’ predictive uncertainty (the entropy of the softmax) to select what data to label... but in practice this often selects genuinely ambiguous or “noisy” data that both annotators and models have a hard time handling. From a usability perspective, the process needs to be cognizant of the annotation effort, and the models need to quickly update with new labelled data, otherwise it’s too frustrating to have a human-in-the-loop training session.<p>Our approach uses Bayesian deep learning to tackle these issues. Raza and Peter have worked on this in their PhDs at University College London alongside fellow cofounders David and Emine [1, 2]. With Bayesian deep learning, we’re incorporating uncertainty in the parameters of the models themselves, rather than just finding the best model. This can be used to find the data where the model is uncertain, not just where the data is noisy. And we use a rapid approximate Bayesian update to give quick feedback from small amounts of data [3]. An upside of this is that the models have well-calibrated uncertainty estimates -- to know when they don’t know -- and we’re exploring how this could be used in production settings for a human-in-the-loop fallback.<p>Since starting we’ve been working with data science teams at two large law firms to help build out an internal platform for cyber threat monitoring and data extraction. We’re now opening up the platform to train text classifiers and span-tagging models quickly and deploy them to the cloud. A common use case is for classifying support tickets or chatbot intents.<p>We came together to work on this because we kept seeing data as the bottleneck for the deployment of ML and were inspired by ideas like Andrej Karpathy’s software 2.0 [4]. We anticipate a future in which the barriers to ML deployment become sufficiently lowered that domain experts are able to automate tasks for themselves through machine teaching and we view data annotation tools as a first step along this path.<p>Thanks for reading. We love HN and we’re looking forward to any feedback, ideas or questions you may have.<p>[1] <a href="https://openreview.net/forum?id=Skdvd2xAZ" rel="nofollow">https://openreview.net/forum?id=Skdvd2xAZ</a> – a scalable approach to estimates uncertainty in deep learning models<p>[2] <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2766462.2767753" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2766462.2767753</a> work to combine uncertainty together with representativeness when selecting examples for active learning.<p>[3] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.05562" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.05562</a> – a simple Bayesian approach to learn from few data<p>[4] <a href="https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35</a>
Upvote: | 157 |
Title: Hey everyone! I'm Max from BaseDash (<a href="https://www.basedash.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.basedash.io</a>). BaseDash is an internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of a spreadsheet. It's like being able to use Airtable to manage your company's internal operations.<p>I was working on a side project a few years ago that required a lot of manual data management. I was using Django Admin which was fine, but wished I could just set up a two-way sync between my SQL database and Airtable (without any crazy Zapier workflows).<p>After building a quick prototype as an internal tool, I realized that there was a space missing for a product somewhere between an admin panel and a database client. Something with an amazing interface that's usable by both engineers and non-technical users who need to access data within their company (e.g. customer support, operations).<p>From there, I built BaseDash with a strong focus on expanding upon existing tools I love, with extra care and polish. The resulting product is a polished, opinionated internal tool, with all the functionality most companies need out-of-the-box.<p>Being a web app, there are some great features that BaseDash enables for cross-functional teams. BaseDash keeps a full edit history of all changes made, makes it super easy to share access to teammates, and enables Google Sheets-like real-time collaboration for editing data.<p>We currently support most SQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redshift, SQL Server, MariaDB), with support for MongoDB and Firestore on the roadmap. We offer a hosted version, or you can host it yourself on-prem.<p>We're still in early access but happy to invite the Hacker News community to try the product out. We're currently focused on small-to-medium sized software companies, with a combination of engineers and non-technical users. Try it here: <a href="https://www.basedash.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.basedash.io</a> and let me know what you think!
Upvote: | 191 |
Title: I recently came into some money and now I have $450K in cash burning a hole in my pocket.<p>I have about $50K in an index fund, own land worth $150K (paid off) and another $200K in industrial real estate investments.<p>Given this spread, what should I do with the cash? I'm not comfortable investing the entirety into an index fund, given the current socio-political climate.<p>I'm located in the Midwest, USA.
Upvote: | 409 |
Title: I have an idea and want to move it forward. Details below. Any advice?<p>(Given HN's technical inclination, I am aware that most will frown on this from the start. Yet another "ideas man".. ;-))<p>Background: I have never developed an app or website. I come from a non-tech project management and statistics background. I've dabbled in Python and R for statistics and academic-type research. So nothing really useful for app/web development. I also don't have any entrepreneurial credentials.<p>Current inclination: learn the necessary tools myself to code/develop my own product. My rationale is that the more I know the ins-and-outs of my product, the better I can sell it. Plus, this path may even help me attract technical talent, or a technical co-founder. But truth be told, part of this inclination is also to ease (at least partially) my imposter syndrome. I know outsourcing the product would save me time in the short-run, but I would feel like a total poser doing so. Also, worst case, the project fails but the technical skills I acquired make me more marketable for tech-type jobs.
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: As I get older, I realized I’m not as sharp as I used to be. Maybe it’s from the fatigue of juggling 2 kids, but I’m very ill prepared for interviews because I simply can’t answer “product questions” and brain teasers. It’s a skill I need, and truthfully I was never good at consultant type questions to begin with but I’m seeing a lot of these questions in Data Science interviews.<p>Any help or resources will be tremendously appreciated.
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: Fairly self explanatory. Similar to HN, but less tech oriented and more geopolitical policy/strategy oriented.<p>Thanks in advance to thread contributors.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: Second internet? Bio-tech? New cryptographies?<p>What are the most interesting things in tech you've seen lately?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: We're Michael and Sam, co-founders of Stacker (<a href="https://stacker.app/" rel="nofollow">https://stacker.app/</a>). We let anyone create custom software powered by data from Airtable or Google Sheets, with a nice UI, auth and rich permissions. Think Internal Tools, Custom CRMs, and Customer Portals.<p>We've been working for ages on building something that lets non-technical people create software without code. We spent about 2 years building a really powerful and complicated drag-and-drop no-code app builder. It was really awesome, it could create social networks, SaaS, marketplaces – the works. The only problem was: nobody could use it unless they were already a developer! It turned out that even though you weren't technically writing any code… you were still actually programming, still thinking like a developer. Just with a really inefficient set of no-code tools.<p>We (eventually!) realised that non-devs were already building systems anyway; but instead of code they were using spreadsheets.<p>Spreadsheets are basically the world's most used database/IDE. They're great for modelling and managing data. But, if you've ever used someone else's sheet you'll know that they're not the best way to interact with the data. Giving someone access to your spreadsheet is pretty much like giving someone access to your SQL database – they won't understand it, they might see more than they should, and they might break the whole thing.<p>Stacker is basically an app layer on top of spreadsheet. We let you set up a nice UI, add user login, and limit who can see/do what using permissions. We also handle abstracting away the limitations of the APIs of Airtable/Google Sheets so that the whole thing stays performant.<p>The main two cases where people find Stacker useful are:<p>1. they want to create internal tools that are easier to use/understand<p>2. they want to allow customers/partners access to some of the data in their sheet without giving the whole thing<p>We've been really excited that most of our early users have been non-technical people who hadn't ever thought they could create software for their business. People have been creating marketplaces, CRMs, resources centres, order-tracking portals, ERPs… lots of stuff. We're a monthly SaaS model starting at $39pcm – we handle all the hosting, infrastructure, and even SSL certs etc.<p>Right now we support Airtable and Google Sheets, but we'd like to expand out to include other data sources like SQL databases, APIs and even MS Excel(!).<p>Underneath the hood we've got a bunch of technology from our original web app builder – a python backend that creates on-the-fly endpoints depending on the user's data model, and react frontend that can flexibly layout the app. Then on top of that, we've got a service that analyses the schema from your sheet and automatically creates your initial Stacker app.<p>I'd love to hear what use cases you can think of for this, either internal or external, and what you'd like to see it do in the future! Check it out here: <a href="https://stacker.app" rel="nofollow">https://stacker.app</a><p>p.s. History update – you might remember us from when we did a very early alpha launch as "Toga" a few months back (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22746663" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22746663</a>). Thanks to everyone who helped us iron out all the bugs from that!
Upvote: | 292 |
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: | 359 |
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=24038518" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24038518</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24038519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24038519</a>
Upvote: | 592 |
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: | 78 |
Title: I have under 1 year total lifetime experience with full-time work, which was in 2010. That doesn't just include software engineering work (which is what I have done for the past several years)- that includes <i>every</i> type of job I've done since I started taking jobs while in high school.<p>I've went back and counted my jobs- at department stores, B2B clients, campus work etc. and I only found one year where I was actually a full-time employee of any kind.<p>In the meantime I fell into a holding pattern of freelance/temp work with little to show in building my network. Many failed attempts to get hired full-time as a SWE are a cause for concern.<p>Also, I am about 2 years away from reaching 40.<p>I'm not quite the same as a spoiled kid who didn't need to work for most of their life. I simply am a guy who has held lot of temporary jobs, but displays little "career intelligence".<p>What advice would you give to an adult that is a late bloomer in professional stability and growth and wants to build a career? How do people build a network from almost zero in a post-COVID world? I might want to glean experiences of class of 2020 students too, to get an idea of network building in difficult times, since I find myself to have more in common with students than the average 30-something professional.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I'm a web and software developer. Contracting and been running on and off various online businesses, with varying degrees of success. Just like everyone else, I had periods of feast and periods of famine.<p>A few days ago I was talking with a friend of mine who among other businesses in Ireland and Croatia runs a bar in Zagreb, Croatia. His reasoning behind running a bar is that the bar serves as a daily cash stream. Something definitely we all need and something that helps a great deal.<p>Anyway, do you have a side hustle like that, and what is it?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: My name is Ish and I'm the founder of Virtually (<a href="https://tryvirtually.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tryvirtually.com/</a>), a platform that allows anyone to build live online trainings with built-in support for payment processing, live classes, and student management.<p>The journey to starting Virtually began last year while I was trapped in a winter storm. I was playing around with some video conferencing software and was very impressed by how far it had come in recent years. With not much else to do, I started brainstorming about what could one day be possible with better conferencing technology.<p>An obvious use case seemed be education. I thought perhaps the best teacher for any niche topic might not actually be someone in the same city or state as you, but, instead, could be someone across the globe. Better video conferencing could lead to more accessible as well as more affordable education.<p>The thought was powerful enough that I decided to quit my job at Facebook to start working on Virtually the next month. My main mission was to enable infrastructure for live online education. The very first iteration of the product allowed for content creators to monetize their time by selling 1-on-1 appointments. I don't know if it was the product or the execution, but it didn't gain much traction. I was lucky to be invited to interview at YCombinator for the summer 2019 batch but didn't make it further in the process.<p>I started to explore other applications of the same technology. One place where it seemed a live component could have added more value was in the world of online courses. In 2019, almost all online courses were pre-recorded. There were a select few experimenting with the live format (Building a Second Brain for example) and it seemed like these courses were receiving significantly higher levels of engagement than traditional online courses. When I dug a bit deeper, I discovered that building live online courses was inherently difficult. Either you were a venture-backed startup and could afford to hire engineers to build out custom technology or you had to "duct-tape" Zoom, PayPal, Calendly, and a dozen different tools together. I pivoted the product to help make this easier.<p>Fast-forward to today- my team and I are working to build Virtually, a React web app (powered by Next.js) that allows individual to build live online courses with built-in support for conferencing, payment processing, and student management.<p>Current course hosting platforms (Teachable, Kajabi, Thinktific, etc.) primarily focus on pre-recorded content. We decided to focus on live online classes as our research showed that live classes generally have higher completion rates. In addition, we hypothesized that live learning would help drive higher content retention through virtual meet-ups, office hours, mastermind groups, etc.<p>We primarily use <a href="http://daily.co/" rel="nofollow">http://daily.co/</a> for video conferencing but allow users to substitute Zoom or any other conferencing link. We also integrate with Google Calendar to make it easier to schedule live sessions.<p>One notable feature is our "Live Room" which is an always-on conferencing room that is embedded within your Virtually classroom. With the tool, you're able to manage multiple concurrent live classes at the same the same time each with its own "Live Room."<p>If you or someone you know is trying to build a live online training program, we'd love to talk to you. Feel free to reach me at [email protected].<p>I'd absolutely love to hear any feedback that you might have and will be around all day to answer questions!
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: What tools did you use? Any particular methodology? Why did it work for your team or company?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: We’re Ken, Nate and Matt, co-founders of Speedscale (<a href="https://speedscale.com" rel="nofollow">https://speedscale.com</a>), a tool that automatically generates continuous integration (CI) tests from past traffic. Carefully scaling rollouts to ever larger groups of customers is the safest deployment strategy, but can take weeks. Even for elite DevOps organizations up to 15% of changes to production can result in degraded service [1] [2].<p>We met as undergrads at Georgia Tech and come from a DevOps and operations background so we’ve seen this first hand. Each of us has over 15 years of experience building high-reliability systems, starting in the early days with satellite earth station monitoring. As interns we once wrote a bug that caused a 32 meter antenna to try to point down through the earth, almost flattening the building we were in. It was a great environment to learn about engineering reliability. We leveraged this experience to tackle monitoring Java app servers, SOA, SaaS observability and cloud data warehouses. What if we could use a form of observability data to automatically test the reliability of new deployments before they hit production? That’s the idea that got us started on Speedscale.<p>Most test automation tools record browser interactions or use AI to generate a set of UI tests. Speedscale works differently in that it captures API calls at the source using a Kubernetes sidecar [3] or a reverse proxy. We can see all the traffic going in and out of each service, not just the UI. We feed the traffic through an analyzer process that detects calls to external services and emulates a realistic request and response -- even authentication systems like OAUTH =). Unlike guessing how users call your service, Speedscale automation reflects reality because we collected data from your live system. We call each interaction model a Scenario and Speedscale generates them without human effort leading to an easily maintained full-coverage CI test suite.<p>Scenarios can run on demand or in your build pipeline because Speedscale inserts your container into an ephemeral environment where we stress it with different performance, regression, and chaos scenarios. If it breaks, you can decide the alerting threshold. Speedscale is especially effective in ensuring compliance with subtle Service Level Objective (SLO) conditions like performance regression [4].<p>We're not public yet but would be happy to give you a demo if you contact us at [email protected]. Also, we are doing alpha customer deployments to refine our feature set and protocol support - if you have this problem or have tried to solve it in the past we would love to get your feedback. Eventually we’ll end up selling the service via a subscription model but the details are still TBD. For the moment we’re mainly focused on making the product more useful and collecting feedback. Thanks!<p>[1] <a href="https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/state-of-devops-2019.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/state-of-devops-20...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/automating-safe-hands-off-deployments/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/automating-safe-hand...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://kubernetes.io/blog/2015/06/the-distributed-system-toolkit-patterns/" rel="nofollow">https://kubernetes.io/blog/2015/06/the-distributed-system-to...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/service-level-objectives/" rel="nofollow">https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/service-lev...</a>
Upvote: | 137 |
Title: My experiment in working backwards from market to problems to solutions:<p>1. Start with listing markets that have a low degree of competition, but don't have a mega-monopoly owning them. These will mostly be small markets.<p>2. Examine the problem space within each and see if new technology (SW / HW) can deliver 10x improvements.<p>3. Determine whether these markets are a short enough hop away from deeper ones.<p>It's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing markets, but am curious about those the community can readily identify.
Upvote: | 212 |
Title: Hi HN! My name is Gleb. I'm here with my co-founder Alex to tell you
about our company Datafold (<a href="https://datafold.com" rel="nofollow">https://datafold.com</a>). Datafold lets you diff
large datasets for fast and powerful regression testing. We support
databases such as PostgreSQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift.<p>One of the biggest pain points in developing ETL pipelines –
chains of jobs that move, clean, merge and aggregate analytical data –
has been regression testing: verifying how a change in source code (mostly,
SQL) affects the produced data.<p>Early in my career, as an on-call data engineer at Lyft, I
accidentally introduced a breaking code change while attempting to
ship a hotfix at 4AM to a SQL job that computed tables for core
business analytics. A seemingly small change in filtering logic ended
up corrupting data for all downstream pipelines and breaking
dashboards for the entire company. Apart from being a silly mistake,
this highlighted the lack of proper tooling for testing changes. If
there had been a way to quickly compare the data computed by
production code vs. the hotfix branch, I would have immediately
spotted the alarming divergence and avoided merging the breaking
change.<p>Without a diffing tool, the typical options for regression testing
are: (1) Data “unit tests” (e.g. check primary key uniqueness, ensure
values are within interval, etc.) – these are helpful, but costly
investment. Frameworks such as dbt make it easier, but it’s
often still prohibitively hard to verify all assumptions in a large
table. (2) Write custom SQL queries to compare data produced by the
prod and dev versions of the source code (e.g. compare counts, match
primary keys). This can easily take up 100+ lines of SQL and hours of
unsatisfying work, which no one really wants to do. (3) "Fuck It, Ship
It" is always an option but too risky nowadays as analytical data not
only powers dashboards but also production ML models.<p>As this problem is common in data engineering, some large
organizations have built and open-sourced their solutions – for
example, BigDiffy by Spotify. However, most of these tools are
CLI-based and produce results in a plain-text format which is hard to
comprehend when you are dealing with complex data.<p>To fit existing workflows of our users, we’ve built a web interface
with interactive charts showing both diff summary statistics (e.g. %
of different values by column) and value-level side-by-side comparison
(git diff style). But since the mission of the tool is to save
engineers as much time as possible, we also opened an API for
automation through Airflow or other orchestrators, and built a Github
workflow that runs diff on every pull request with changes to ETL
code. Since billion-row-scale datasets are not uncommon nowadays,
there is an optional sampling feature that helps keep compute costs
low and get results within a few minutes no matter how large the
dataset is.<p>We've found Datafold to be a good fit for the following workflows: (1)
Developing data transformations – before an ETL job is shipped to
production, it undergoes multiple iterations. Often it’s important to
see how data changes between every iteration, and particularly useful
if you have 1M+ rows and 100+ columns where “SELECT *” becomes
useless. (2) Code review & testing: large organizations have hundreds
of people committing to ETL codebases. Understanding the impact of
even a modest SQL diff is daunting. Datafold can produce a data diff
for every commit in minutes so changes are well understood. (3) Data
transfer validation: moving large volumes of data between databases is
error-prone, especially if done via change data capture (CDC): a
single lost event can affect the resulting dataset in a way that is
tricky to debug. We allow comparing datasets across different
databases, e.g. PostgreSQL & Snowflake.<p>We've set up a sandbox at <a href="https://app.datafold.com/hackernews" rel="nofollow">https://app.datafold.com/hackernews</a> so you can see
how diffing works. Shoot us an email ([email protected]) to set up a trial and use it with
your own data.<p>We are passionate about improving tooling for data engineers and would
love to hear about your experience with developing data pipelines and
ensuring data quality. Also, if you think that dataset diffing can be
helpful in other domains, we are very curious to learn from you!
Upvote: | 189 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>This is Cesar Talledo and Rodny Molina, co-founders of Nestybox (www.nestybox.com).<p>Nestybox has developed a new container runtime that sits under Docker/containerd (it's a new type of runc) and enables containers to act as virtual-servers capable of running software such as systemd, Docker, and Kubernetes, easily and with proper isolation.<p>The motivation came from noticing that containers are great at running microservices but struggle to run system-level software in them such as those mentioned above. That is, in order to run such software in a container, we needed unsecure privileged containers with complex images, custom entrypoints, volume mounts, etc., or alternatively a heavier virtual machine. This did not seem right.<p>We studied the problem and noticed that the container abstraction was not complete enough, meaning that inside the container a root process lacked capabilities to perform certain low-level operations, the namespacing of procfs and sysfs had a few holes, there are limitations for running overlayfs-on-overlayfs, and more.<p>To solve this, we decided to create a new container runtime that would set up the container in such a way that it could run system software easily and without resorting to privileged containers. That is, a user should be able to do "docker run -it some-image" and get a container inside of which she can run systemd, dockerd, or even K8s without problem (much as if it were a virtual machine).<p>After lots of long days, we came up with Sysbox. It's a new type of "runc" and sits below OCI-based container managers (e.g., Docker/containerd). You typically don't interact with Sysbox directly, but rather use Docker (or similar) to launch the containers. Sysbox was forked from the excellent OCI runc in early 2019 and has undergone significant changes since then. It uses OS virtualization techniques such as always enabling the Linux user namespace, uid shifting via shiftfs, partial virtualization of procfs and sysfs, selective syscall trapping in user-space, setting up special mounts into the container, and more. It's written in Go.<p>Here is a video: <a href="https://asciinema.org/a/kkTmOxl8DhEZiM2fLZNFlYzbo?speed=1.75" rel="nofollow">https://asciinema.org/a/kkTmOxl8DhEZiM2fLZNFlYzbo?speed=1.75</a><p>Today we are happy to announce that we are open-sourcing Sysbox (Apache 2.0). You can find it at <a href="https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox</a> . We welcome users and contributors, as it has plenty of room to grow and improve. There are plenty of docs in the repo describing how to use it and how it works.<p>We think Sysbox is a very useful tool to expand the use cases for containers and provides an alternative to virtual machines in many scenarios, particularly for dev environments, testing, CI/CD, and even running legacy apps in containers.<p>In order to pay the bills, Nestybox (the company we founded) will sell a version of Sysbox called Sysbox Enterprise Edition (Sysbox-EE). We are using an open-core model, such that Sysbox-EE is based on the open-source Sysbox and adds a layer of proprietary enterprise level features. We think this model will help us strike a healthy balance between creating useful technology that all can benefit from and keeping the lights on.<p>Thanks for reading and we welcome your feedback.<p>Best,
-Cesar & Rodny
Upvote: | 168 |
Title: Hello all. There are nice frequent Ask HN threads where people share books that made a large impact on them and how they saw the world, and I was just thinking it would be good if there were a similar thread about movies.
Upvote: | 196 |
Title: I was on my annual exploration of Scheme implementations, this time I focused my attention on Gauche for the first time...<p>I was surprised to find the twitter profile of the author, Shiro Kawai [1]. It turns out he also is a professional actor, has an imdb profile [2] and has been part of a lot of movies! People like this always make me feel [even more!] unaccomplished :-).<p>Anyway, thought it would be fun to ask here who knows of other multi-talented software developers.<p>1: <a href="https://twitter.com/anohana" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/anohana</a><p>2: <a href="http://imdb.me/shirokawai" rel="nofollow">http://imdb.me/shirokawai</a>
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: Hi Hacker News,
Few months ago I met someone that shook my world a little. Things were a little crazy and happened over 3 different continents in a very short time. It was wonderful, and it was greyscale. It was grandiose, and it was so desperately poor. It didn't work out.<p>In the beginning of our relationship, just when I was about to leave the country for a few months, I made them a website. A small one, with some notes and songs and interpretations. I'm not a painter and I'm not a musician. Coding was my go-to tool when I wanted to tell them stuff.<p>Recently, love wilted but the website stayed [0]. I thought, all those things that we're doing because of love, aren't they great? Aren't they a beautiful expression of us being humans? Perhaps stupid, senseless, silly - but loving humans. I'm sure I'm not the first one to create something digital, online, out of love. I wished there was this exhibition where people could go and feel some warmth, and be reminded of the different ways love looks like.<p>Did you ever code something for love? Or any other digital form of creation? It would be great if people could share things they've done, and also, if they feel comfortable, I'd be happy to know if they want to get a subdomain at *.thingslovemademedo.com [1] and have their content there. I'm obviously not asking for any copyright permissions, just playing with the thought of creating this anonymous archive of all-things-love. And before someone asks, no, there will never be any ads or analytics there, and I have no plans on monetizing this...<p>[0] chelsea.thingslovemademedo.com
[1] thingslovemademedo.com
Upvote: | 359 |
Title: For me, it was finding that I can use "Stacks" in Finder to clear desktop. For years, I was irritated with screenshots lying all over my desktop screen but didn't have the energy to sort them manually. When I found out Stacks, I was like ...
Upvote: | 326 |
Title: I currently read "how to make friends and influence people", this and many other soft-skills books/trainings offer concepts and ideas of how one should act in a business/social conversations.<p>I always struggle with applying those concepts in real life, I cannot stop and think about what is the most appropriate reaction for a situation and I quickly forget and get overwhelmed with concepts and ideas from the book.<p>How did you apply similar concepts in real-life scenarios, and what ideas worked best for you?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: In <i>High Output Management</i>, Andy Grove stresses the importance of training staff in their duties. In fact, he lists it as one of only two methods of improving performance (the other pertaining motivation).<p>Of course, any time we do anything we "train" ourselves in it and get better at it, but if this was the only training one had, it would be what Grove discourages and refers to as "the customer paying the tuition."<p>So, clearly, Grove refers to actual, explicit training that is not simply learning on the job. He never goes into detail about how to do this; I assume because it's such an obvious, in-grained thing in all other disciplines that it needs no details.<p>Yet I've never seen it done in software engineering. So how does your organisation do it? Why do you think it works? What have you tried that didn't work?<p>Have you decided not to do it? Why?
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: Hello hackers,<p>I am Prasanna, the founder of PrivJs (https://privjs.com) - Internet's first open-core software marketplace.<p>While building a few products, I was wondering if it could be a good practice to release a chunk of my paid software to the open-source community? Will that have any adverse effects on the product? Or will it benefit overall?<p>-Prasanna
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: All software is a force multiplier, but some tools, like Zapier/IFTTT are in a class of their own.<p>Likewise concepts like Compound Interest and arguably knowledge of fallacies, such as "sunk cost fallacy".<p>What are some force multipliers that are available to most people, but which most people don't regularly put into use?
Upvote: | 314 |
Title: Hey HN!<p>My name is Ali and I am one of the three co-founders of <a href="https://rally.video/" rel="nofollow">https://rally.video/</a>. Rally is a video application that makes it easy to hop between breakout conversations. Users can see and hear other conversations around them, as if they were in a shared space.<p>We started Rally because we needed to host a virtual birthday party, and existing solutions suck for larger groups. At the same time, we noticed bars and restaurants closing, and wanted to build a platform that emulated these physical spaces. With that in mind, we added venues, rooms, and tables. A venue (like a bar or banquet hall) can consist of multiple rooms (like a patio, DJ lounge etc). Each room can fit 35 people, and people can form tables (groups) in a room organically. Tables could have up to 9 people, and can be joined with a simple click. Users can create multiple rooms, allowing for events of all sizes, and we are working quickly to expand the capacity of each room.<p>What’s magical about this is how much more it feels like a real party, as opposed to feeling like a meeting. Instead of being stuck in a giant gallery view or siloed into breakout rooms, you are free to switch between tables and rooms as you like. Instead of everyone being on mute, you can choose to vibe off of the audible laughter and chatter from neighbouring tables in the room. You can also create private tables for more personal conversations and take the stage to present to everyone around you.<p>Since launching, people have used our platform for happy hours, team socials, hackathons, brainstorming sessions, conference networking, trade shows, virtual parties, and community gatherings. We know a lot of people are using Zoom breakout rooms for these types of events. Those work fine for board meetings, training, structured workshops and interviews. We think our platform is more valuable when you want less structure and a more social element. Simply put, if you want spontaneity, our platform works. If you want formal structure, use the other tools.<p>Rally is a web app, with video being streamed using WebRTC - so no plugin installation is required. It works best on Desktop Chrome. We are also working on a mobile version - coming soon.<p>I am really excited to share our startup with the Hacker News community. I have tried and failed at building a number of companies, and reading a lot of the content here has helped recharge my batteries and helped me keep going.<p>We are free for anyone to use until the end of August. We are still testing out different use cases and seeing where demand for our product is the strongest. I recognize the space is competitive, and would appreciate your feedback on our product. We’d be grateful if you tried it out for yourself, or joined us for one of our happy hours today or this week. We’d be super grateful if you’d be willing to try it out with a group of 6 or more people, maybe with your work team, and letting us know what you think!<p>Start your own room by visiting <a href="https://rally.video" rel="nofollow">https://rally.video</a><p>Attend a happy hour by signing up here: <a href="https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/happy-hour-at-rally-bar-tickets-116186802855" rel="nofollow">https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/happy-hour-at-rally-bar-tickets-...</a>
Upvote: | 194 |
Title: I run a 2012-ish Macbook Pro which has 8gb of ram. I noticed today that Chrome takes up at least a couple of those gigs throughout the day. I'm looking for suggestions for alternatives, preferably extremely lightweight (memory efficient) and open-source. Would love to hear what the community is using.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I know my password for google suite admin (paid), but they have locked me out due to a suspicious login.<p>Google have locked me out with the following message:<p>"We detected an unusual sign-in attempt. To make sure that someone else isn't trying to access your account, your organization needs you to sign in using your corporate mobile device (the phone or tablet you normally use to access your corporate account).<p>If you don’t have your corporate mobile device with you right now, try again later when you have your corporate mobile device with you. If you continue to have problems signing in, contact your administrator. Learn more<p>Go back & use your corporate mobile device"<p>I am unable to get back in:<p>* Google support doesn't work if you are logged out<p>* I have no primary mobile or corporate device to complete the above step on.<p>What does Google expect customers to do here?
Upvote: | 465 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I’m Trey, the founder of Xkit (<a href="https://xkit.co" rel="nofollow">https://xkit.co</a>). Xkit helps developers build and maintain native integrations by turning OAuth for 25 of the most popular SaaS apps into a single API call that always returns fresh access tokens.<p>I went through YC two years ago in S18 (and some of you may have seen our launch) with Sparkswap, a trust-minimized bitcoin exchange. After a year and half of building that product and building up a small but loyal following, I made the hard decision to shut it down. The audience for a trust-minimized service like Sparkswap was too niche and the regulatory costs were too high. It felt like the only way to stay in that business would be to compromise on some of our core principles (e.g. go after gambling behavior, play regulatory games), so I decided to stop working in crypto and move to FinTech more broadly.<p>While doing customer discovery for a more traditional FinTech service, I encountered a pretty common request: integrations to the SaaS products my prospective customers were already using. As I was implementing OAuth with a slight variation for the 5th time, I realized I was re-writing code that thousands of other developers (probably including a bunch of people here) have already written (and debugged, and maintained).<p>So I stopped working on that FinTech service (for those keeping score at home, yes that's two pivots) and started building a tool to let you outsource the pain of authorizing 3rd party apps with a particular focus on OAuth. From my perspective, for an integration to really be native, it will probably be faster and easier to just write some code instead of fighting against a GUI. But my goal was to make sure that nearly every line of code you write is actually <i>for your integration</i>, not authorization boilerplate.<p>Two years and two pivots after I went through YC, I'm excited to share Xkit: the tool I wanted when I was building native integrations.<p>Xkit is really two things: 1) An end-user experience for viewing and connecting 3rd party apps, and 2) An API for retrieving always-fresh access tokens.<p>To make the first work, we establish a session with your user by piggy-backing on your existing authentication method (e.g. you send us their current JWT, and we validate it). From there, we can handle the OAuth dance: CSRF/state tokens, scope handling, callbacks, etc. For the end-user UI, we have a pre-built integration catalog to give your users an interface to browse your integrations, connect new ones, and repair broken ones. In fact, our integrations page (<a href="https://xkit.co/integrations" rel="nofollow">https://xkit.co/integrations</a>) is just our pre-built catalog rendered directly on our Webflow site. If you want more control over the experience you can do that too: our xkit.js library has all the tools for you to quickly build your own catalog without having to dig into OAuth.<p>For the API, just call it with the ID of the user and the name of the service, and we return a non-expired access token. You can call it from any backend process: a cloud function/lambda, a microservice, or a monolithic server. This makes your integration code a lot simpler: one API call using one API key rather than storing, encrypting, and refreshing tokens. You can even get access tokens on the front-end if you have a valid user session, so if you're building a front-end only app you no longer have to even think about whether a specific provider implements PKCE (looking at you, Atlassian).<p>We already work with over 25 of the most popular SaaS apps (Intercom and Zendesk added just last week!) and setting each one up typically just involves plugging in your OAuth credentials.<p>Imagine you had a team at your company that were experts in all the weird (sometimes undocumented) ways that various providers extend the OAuth spec, and they built an internal service that does all that stuff The Right Way™, lets you move it out of your core applications, and still gives PM and Design flexibility on the integration experience. That's Xkit.<p>You can get a free dev account (up to 10 users) to try it out here: <a href="https://app.xkit.co/sign-up" rel="nofollow">https://app.xkit.co/sign-up</a>, and if you send me an email (trey@) telling me that you came from this post, I'll give you 50% off your first year of the Startup or Pro plans. Thanks for making it through the wall of text. Would love to hear what you think!<p>Trey
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: There are a lot of great YC startups that are experiencing rapid growth -- despite COVID -- and actively hiring in engineering, product and more. We want to create a space for engineers and others to learn more about these companies, their technology, and engage directly with founders, in small groups and 1-1.<p>We’re hosting YC’s first Lightning Tech Talk session on September 10th at 4PM PST. Five YC founders will give 10 minute talks on their technology and business challenges. Following the talks, we’re opening up virtual tables where people can meet founders and team members -- to ask questions about the talk, learn about the business, and find out more about open roles.<p>The first session focuses on software tooling & SaaS, and you’ll meet the following people:<p>- George Deglin, CEO at OneSignal: “How we use Rust to Scale our Infrastructure Efficiently”<p>- Yin Wu, CEO at Pulley: “Building a Flexibly Immutable Accounting Ledger”<p>- Omri Mor, CEO at Routable: “Building an Integration-Forward Platform”<p>- Jeremy Henrickson, VP Engineering at Rippling: “Cutting Against the Grain: Entrepreneurship and Engineering at Rippling”<p>- Sven Delmas, VP Engineering at LogDNA: ”Log DNA: Testing SaaS Done Right”<p>Because we want to keep the event a bit more intimate and personal, we’re asking people to apply. We'll be ranking interest in companies prior to the event, and this will help us do some matching beforehand.<p>If you’re considering working at a startup and have a couple hours to spend with founders, we welcome you to apply to join on September 10th:<p><a href="https://www.workatastartup.com/techtalks" rel="nofollow">https://www.workatastartup.com/techtalks</a><p>Let us know if you have questions, and we’re excited to see you there.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: For the past year, I've been working on a side project called Outpan. Basically it's an app store for web apps (apps written in JS/HTML/CSS).<p>The whole project started out as a simple directory but a few days ago I finally finished the payment/store functionality and released it without any fanfare. To my surprise, one of the developers found out about the new feature and added a paid app priced at $5 (https://www.outpan.com/app/d0b0885a8d/voice-music), I genuinely thought the price was waaaaaay too high and there weren't any proper screenshots (I think the developer was just testing the waters) but the very same day a user actually bought the app!!!!<p>Even though it's only $5 and the user seems to not have liked the app (I reached out to them and offered to issue a refund but they refused!) this is still a crazy milestone for me as all this happened without a shred of marketing and totally organically! I've already put a ton of work into this project but now that I know that there seem to be people willing to transact on my platform I'm super focused on improving the entire buying and payment experience to perfection.<p>Anyways, a really small amount of money but a giant amount of excitement lol Please ask any question you might have about my experience, would be happy to answer.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Hello hackers. What would be your advice for Belarus protesters to keep connected to each other and the rest of the world.There are some solutions for short-range communication (e.g. https://briarproject.org/), but what are the solutions for the mid-range (e.g. city) and long-range (hundreds of kilometers) communication? I suppose the HAM radio could be used for that or AMPRNet. Any ideas how to provide low-cost, decentralized, communication infrastructure for the time when internet is cut off?
Upvote: | 307 |
Title: Hi, I am a freelancer from a South Asian country and I have been working for a client through my friend for a year. The friend is getting $15 from the client and he pays me $9 hourly (i.e he takes 40% cut). I mostly work on the frontend side and handle multiple projects of the same client. Other than that, I communicate with the client directly and manage the work without my friend's involvement.
I deliver the work on time and in good quality, however, I am not employed by him nor do I work full time on the projects (because of some personal reasons and the fact that I have my own client). Rather, I give enough time each day to complete the assignments on due time. Despite this, I think, I am getting a low rate on the basis of the value which I provide.<p>This has been in my mind for a couple of months and I wanted to let it out and pitch a new rate of $18 (double the previous rate) to my friend. But I am afraid this may not be acceptable, as he is getting $15 from the client and the client is already on a tight budget. And, I am afraid if I stick with this offer he will try to arrange some other resource, resulting in me losing this opportunity. Moreover, I do have my own client and work for him for $10.<p>I will really appreciate some help or guidance here. How should I best approach this scenario so there is a WIN/WIN situation for all of us? Am I pitching too high?<p>PS. He is already looking for an extra resource to share my work. And I am willing to go as low as $15
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'm a self-taught webdev with 10 years xp. I have lots of free time right now with a bit less freelance projects coming in, and I'm getting a bit bored of building web CRUDs and feel like I'm not learning much anymore.<p>I'm thinking it'd be better to specialize more, but I'm unsure which direction to go. I'm actually selling myself as a full-stack web developer, knowing JS/react/vueJS, PHP/Laravel, bit of design, server management etc.<p>If possible I'd like a job that can be fully remote or at most 1 day on site, which probably excludes security and high level stuff.<p>I have lots of time to learn so I'm open to any advice even if it's just to git gud and read SICP.<p>tl;dr webdev having done every type of CRUD under the sun - what do now<p>Thanks for your input !
Upvote: | 212 |
Title: Hello Hacker News! We are Rick & Yannick from Orchest (https://www.orchest.io - https://github.com/orchest/orchest). We're building a visual pipeline tool for data scientists. The tool can be considered to be high-code because you write your own Python/R notebooks and scripts, but we manage the underlying infrastructure to make it 'just work™'. You can think of it as a simplified version of Kubeflow.<p>We created Orchest to free data scientists from the tedious engineering related tasks of their job. Similar to how companies like Netflix, Uber and Booking.com support their data scientists with internal tooling and frameworks to increase productivity. When we worked as data scientists ourselves we noticed how heavily we had to depend on our software engineering skills to perform all kinds of tasks. From configuring cloud instances for distributed training, to optimizing the networking and storage for processing large amounts of data. We believe data scientists should be able to focus on the data and the domain specific challenges.<p>Today we are just at the very beginning of making better tooling available for data science and are launching our GitHub project that will give enhanced pipelining abilities to data scientists using the PyData/R stack, with deep integration of Jupyter Notebooks.<p>Currently Orchest supports:<p>1) visually and interactively editing a pipeline that is represented using a simple JSON schema;<p>2) running remote container based kernels through the Jupyter Enterprise Gateway integration;<p>3) scheduling experiments by launching parameterized pipelines on top of our Celery task scheduler;<p>4) configuring local and remote data sources to separate code versioning from the data passing through your pipelines.<p>We are here to learn and get feedback from the community. As youngsters we don't have all the answers and are always looking to improve.
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Dear HN,<p>I am Riwaj, the cofounder of dstack.ai (https://github.com/dstackai).<p>A few months ago, we built an online service that allows users to publish data visualizations from Python or R. The idea was to build a tool that did not require additional programming or front-end development for publishing data visualizations.
Such a code can be invoked from either Jupyter notebook, RMarkdown, Python, or R scripts. Once the data is pushed, it can be accessed via a browser.<p>Open-sourcing dstack:
During our customer discovery phase, we realized that dstack.ai should integrate a lot more open source data science frameworks than we integrated ourselves. For example, as a user, I want to push a matplotlib plot, a Tensorflow model, a plotly chart, a pandas dataframe, and I expect the presentation layer to fully-support it. Supporting all types of artifacts and providing all the tools to work with them solely seems to be a very challenging task.
With this, we open-sourced the framework. Now you can build dstack locally, and run it on your servers, or in a cloud of your choice if that’s needed.
More details on the project, how to use it, and the source code of the server can be found at the https://github.com/dstackai/dstack repo. The client packages for Python and R are available at the https://github.com/dstackai/dstack-py and https://github.com/dstackai/dstack-r correspondingly.<p>What’s next:
User callbacks- so that application shows not just pre-calculated visualizations but also can fetch data from a store and process it in real-time.
ML models- so that data scientists can publish a stack which binds together a pre-calculated ML model and user parameters
Use cases- Support specific use cases that help data scientists to build data science models into data applications as fast as possible.<p>We would be happy to get your feedback on the open-source framework and also get your opinion on what kind of use cases can be built on top of the framework?
Thank you.
Upvote: | 134 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>Kam and Alex here. We’re founders of Papercups (<a href="https://papercups.io" rel="nofollow">https://papercups.io</a>), a live customer chat app written in Elixir. We offer an open-core self-hosted alternative to Intercom for companies that are security and privacy conscientious.<p>Alex and I met in SF around 6 years ago, and have been hacking on small projects together for the past couple years. Before covid, we would spend many Sunday afternoons in coffee shops building prototypes of whatever our latest and greatest idea was… most of these fizzled out after a few weeks or so<p>For 2020, we wanted to take the idea of “building something people want” a bit more seriously. We started off trying to build SaaS tools for ocean freight logistics companies. That failed, but we learned a ton in the process.<p>After our experience in freight we wanted to work on tools that are a little closer to home and tried a completely new idea: a web app that makes it super easy to manage and deploy simple cron jobs and other recurring/scheduled tasks.<p>One thing we learned from the feedback on this product was how difficult it can be to set up and schedule email campaigns. This definitely resonated with us since we've both had this pain professionally. While working at Stripe, one particularly painful project Alex worked on was setting up email campaigns to notify their customers of new regulations. I had a similar experience at Pivotal where I worked on a project to email users about security updates.<p>So we started tackling this particular pain point: setting up and managing email campaigns. A few companies already do this pretty well. Intercom is one, but it can be prohibitively expensive. And for companies that have concerns about sending their customer data to 3rd party services, these products aren’t an option.<p>At this point we figured, why not be more ambitious? Instead of just building an email campaign tool, let’s build an open core alternative to Intercom!<p>So here we are. We’re starting off with chat but we plan on expanding into email campaigns and push notifications. We chose chat to start off with because we wanted something that we could use immediately. For a lot of our previous projects, we had set up chat on our sites to engage with customers.<p>We’ve launched this repo under MIT license so any developer can use the tool. The goal is to not charge individual developers. Features like chat, canned responses, private notes, and auto assignments will stay free and open source. Right now we plan on making money by providing things like a hosted version and support contracts. We eventually plan on making a licensed version where we charge for features that large companies care about like Active Directory support, Okta integration, and compliance exports.<p>Finally we decided to build Papercups on top of Elixir/Phoenix because it seemed like the best tool for a job that requires a lot of “realtime” functionality and first class support for websockets/channels. It’s been great so far! The frontend uses React/TypeScript. We may explore using LiveView in the future, but we wanted to start off with a frontend stack that we were familiar with.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups</a> we have a ton of features in mind would love your feedback and any feature requests!<p>P.S. This is our first time working in Elixir so would love any feedback there too!
Upvote: | 285 |
Title: I'm constantly aggravated by various quirks of containers, and don't really remember any big problems with non-containerized infra.<p>A random and non-exhausting list of things that bother me from time to time:<p>— Must build an image before deploying and it takes time, so deploys are slow (of course we use CI to do it, it's not manual).<p>— If I need quick hot fix RIGHT NOW, I can't just log in, change couple of lines and restart, must go through full deploy cycle.<p>— Must remember that launched containers do not close when ssh breaks connection and they can easily linger for a couple of weeks.<p>I generally find it harder to change how things work together. It's probably possible to spend lots of effort to fix these things, but I don't remember having to do all this cruft with old school infrastructure.<p>Hence the question - has anyone migrated off containerized infrastructure? Are you satisfied? Or I'm misremembering things and horrible things wait for me in the old-school ways?
Upvote: | 345 |
Title: Hi everyone,<p>I’m Lily Tang from Liyfe (pronounced Life) Clinic (<a href="https://liyfeclinic.com" rel="nofollow">https://liyfeclinic.com</a>), which launched just one week ago. We bring clinical knowledge and support to breast cancer patients without them stepping into clinics.<p>I worked 13 years as a cancer physicist in radiation oncology. During that time, I have witnessed repeatedly the problems associated with access to care—those patients who might have been diagnosed earlier, and those whose treatments could have been more compliant, and whose post-op symptoms could have been managed more efficiently after their initial treatment.<p>In fact, the average time a cancer patient gets to talk to a doctor is only 17 minutes. Without sufficient education and communication, patients often cannot understand their home instruction completely, and consequently their compliance is inadequate. All these affect treatment outcome. I wanted to change this situation.<p>If no one enjoys the process of hospital visits, and doctors don’t have enough time to communicate with patients, how about creating a telemedicine platform? It can offer 24/7 access to personalized cancer consultation and support. This is how Liyfe Clinic began.<p>I met Sherry two years ago. We quickly became friends, and soon co-founders. Sherry started to build a HIPAA compliant platform for patient and doctor communication, including iOS, Android, and web versions. The platform has native HIPAA compliant communication infrastructure across all versions. It supports text, image, and video messaging, and file transfers. We also have video chat solution on top of WebRTC.<p>Many cancer patients need to see multiple doctors from multiple facilities, either at the same time or over some years. It is important for them to have a centralized place to store all of their medical records. This way, patients can easily share the records with all doctors—to improve communication efficiency and avoid potential medical mistakes. Therefore, we built a mini EHR system. Patients can upload and organize their profiles and medical records and choose whom they want to share.<p>Currently we focus on breast cancer and offer two types of services: virtual office visits and Liyfe membership. For virtual office visits, patients can choose to get a treatment second opinion, talk to a doctor, nutrition coaching, and emotional support. Once a service is chosen, we will match the patient with a provider, and then the provider can virtually see the patient using the video chat on our platform.<p>The membership program was developed recently after we talked to many patients. What patients really want and need is to be able to access a personalized professional help, anytime, anywhere. The membership program allows patient to text chat with a designated nurse practitioner (NP). Texting is a very low threshold access to care, and it lowers many barriers (fear, expense, inconvenience, time lost from work) to personalized professional care. Most patient questions can be answered by an NP. If there is a need to talk to a doctor or other specialists, the NP will triage that.<p>For long term, we would like work with local hospitals to provide a complete cancer service to patients—hospitals will take care of patients when they are at hospitals, and we will take care the rest.<p>If any of these situations resonates your or your family and friends’ experience, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: If you're in the fortunate position during this time to be both employed and able to move to another location--whether permanently or temporarily--I'm curious to learn where you may be planning to move and what factors are influencing this decision.<p>Stated more broadly to those who may not fall in this bucket: if location did not affect your career prospects and/or economic wellbeing, where would you move and why?
Upvote: | 137 |
Title: Xbox Live And Teams are down. Not sure what else is affected.
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Tella (<a href="https://www.tella.tv/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tella.tv/</a>) is a collaborative online video editor for screen and camera recordings. We're making video creation accessible to people who have no prior editing experience.<p>Sharing screen and camera recordings is a rapidly growing way for people to communicate at work, especially in technology where the subject matter is often on screens (new features, code, designs). But while people are creating more video for work, it's usually for the convenience of the creator and not the viewer. One-take screen recordings can be long, boring, and difficult to watch. We're trying to change this by letting people produce and edit their recordings so that it's a better experience for viewers.<p>Michiel and I used to work at a large remote company and this was where we saw the potential of edited video content in the workplace. One of the biggest challenges was keeping business teams up-to-date with product teams. The most effective solution was product teams sharing videos about their work over Slack, which the rest of the organisation watched in their own time. Product teams made videos about new projects, progress updates, launches, user research, and so on.<p>The most interesting aspect of the approach was that the videos weren't just screen recordings, they were edited and often well-produced videos. The better the production, the better the engagement was. Teams approached the production of these videos in the same way as preparing a slide deck for a presentation.<p>We loved the format and saw its potential, especially in a remote workplace, but it had some problems. Video editing is time consuming, and working on a video with a teammate takes even longer. Video editing also has a high barrier to entry. Purchasing Screenflow or Final Cut (or other long-format editors) and then learning how to use it prohibits people from trying video as a form of sharing information.<p>So we set out to build a video editor that focuses on screen and camera recording (where most of the subject matter comes from at work), allows for collaboration (many people work in teams and expect the tools they use to support this), and makes editing straightforward (putting together a video should be as simple as putting together a slide deck).<p>Our implementation takes a different approach to most editors. We wanted something that was fast, lightweight, and could run in a web browser—appealing to people completely new to video editing. We also wanted to support real-time collaboration. Instead of transcoding all content to a video format, we created our own video player that controls the timing and display of HTML elements. Let's say your video consists of a couple recordings, some text, and some images. Tella plots these different bits of content on a timeline and then plays them back in sequence on a webpage.<p>The benefit of this is that we can use anything that you can do with HTML, CSS and JS to create a video. We're not bound to ffmpeg or other transcoders to generate our video for us. We take the document the user created and display that in the same way to the viewer (no converting step in between). This means we can stay lightweight and let you update the video whenever you like. There are no “snapshots” stored and the link always shows the source of truth.<p>The challenge with this is keeping all the content in sync. Using our earlier example: the first recording should play after the text and then the second recording exactly after the first ends. A more complex scenario would be where two videos need to play back at the same time: a screen recording and a camera recording—these need to start and stop at the same moments. This is called “Media Synchronization”, or MediaSync for short (<a href="https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319658391" rel="nofollow">https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319658391</a>). At the moment browsers don’t have a lot of stable APIs that can help us, but they are in the works! One notable example is the Timing Object (<a href="https://webtiming.github.io/timingobject/" rel="nofollow">https://webtiming.github.io/timingobject/</a>) which outlines how you can sync multiple media elements to the same clock. Right now Tella mostly works by manually syncing all video elements on actions like “play” or “seek”. Eventually we want to implement more of the techniques outlined in MediaSync, like slightly changing the speed of out of sync videos to let them catch up.<p>So far, people have been using Tella to create product demos, team updates, company announcements, sales pitches, investor pitches, and tutorial videos, as well as making video content for blogs and newsletters.<p>We'd love to hear what you think and answer any questions you might have. Thanks!
Upvote: | 221 |
Title: Over the last week we've seen random TCP connection issues in the US-1 East data center in AWS. Has anyone else been seeing this?
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I sometimes interviewed for US companies that stated they will hire an accepted candidate as a remote contractor first, then get the H1B visa process started and relocate within 6 to 24 months.<p>Is this legal?<p>If so, why don’t more US companies do this? I’ve heard that companies with about 20 to 40 employees do this [1].<p>Edit: this blew up, which is really cool! I want to note that it might be wise to view the replies in this thread as inspiration for your own research and not as legal advice.<p>[1] The hiring managers told me themselves. And Basecamp even states it publicly on their latest job ad.<p>P.S. If you're in the US/EU/World education space, checkout my profile :)
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: For a few years now, there's been a rising tide of activism and talk of capitalism 2.0 -- is anyone actually riding this wave, or is it mostly talk?<p>If anyone is actively working on (or with) a social enterprise, or if you know of any, I'd really appreciate it if you can loop me in!<p>Thank you in advance!
Upvote: | 229 |
Title: Do the typing, leave writing to handwritten.js!<p><a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/handwritten.js" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/handwritten.js</a><p><a href="https://github.com/alias-rahil/handwritten.js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alias-rahil/handwritten.js</a><p>Example: <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alias-rahil/handwritten.js/master/screenshots/lorem-ipsum.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alias-rahil/handwritten.js...</a>
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I got the linked ad [1] show up on a website I visited. It’s a scam for bitcoin trading, which is presented using the same website as our national broadcaster. I tried to report it, but the only option that fit was “inappropriate”<p>Does Google really have no way to report scams? I am afraid the reviewers will miss it, as inappropriate often refers to sexual decency<p>This type of scam involving celebrities and fake news articles using national media layouts have been going on for more than a year to my recollection<p>[1] <a href="https://retinasket.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI-ZvVl5af6wIVXcq7CB1iWgO2EAEYASAAEgItuPD_BwE" rel="nofollow">https://retinasket.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI-ZvVl5af6wIVXcq7CB...</a>
Upvote: | 134 |
Title: Name any kind of project in nearly any domain, and you can choose from a dizzying array of possible language choices and tech-stacks. The modern state of software development in nearly any mature ecosystem, and many even that aren't so mature, allows for building just about anything on any platform. Want to build a web app, but don't like javascript? There are so many options in languages that compile to JS, as well as languages with front-end WASM frameworks. Want to write a websocket server? Nearly any language can do that now too. Want to store your data? Phew don't get me started on the infinite ways to do that one, with or without a database, with or without a server... it just seems overwhelming, in part because software development is very time-consuming. You don't want to spend all the time on the inferior choice or the choice that will bite you later and trigger a rewrite and decision fatigue all over again. Or so the psychology seems to go. How do you deal with it?
Upvote: | 158 |
Title: For those who don't know, the Australian Aboriginal flag (<a href="https://i.imgur.com/sGsnLkv.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/sGsnLkv.png</a>) is actually copy-righted by an individual although it is recognized as a national flag.<p>It was created in 1971 by an artist named Harold Thomas and went onto to become culturally accepted as the flag of the Aboriginal people. And then as above, went onto being proclaimed a national flag by the government.<p>Unfortunately, since then, Harold Thomas has licensed the flag to various private agencies. One of the licenses was exclusive to a clothing label, which now means that no other Aboriginal business can print clothes with the flag on it without paying royalties. (Sitting around 20%) A lot of Aboriginals feel dismay at the current situation of the licensing.<p>I am rather free market orientated and do respect the artists desires.<p>But, the situation is rather unique, I can't seem to find any other examples in the world of a nations/cultures flag being owned by an individual.<p>The creator has no intention to relinquish the copyright, so movements have already sprung up.<p>A good timeline of events can be found here -> <a href="https://clothingthegap.com.au/pages/aboriginal-flag-timeline" rel="nofollow">https://clothingthegap.com.au/pages/aboriginal-flag-timeline</a><p>The page above found an artwork released 4 years prior that contains the visual elements of the flag -> <a href="https://i.imgur.com/rKbS2m4.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/rKbS2m4.jpg</a><p>The flag artist studied European art just before he created the aboriginal flag so he may have already copied it himself.<p>For a bit of fun and to build a case, I thought it would be a cool experiment to try find the Aboriginal flag in as many pre-existing artworks as possible.<p>I am looking for API's and libs that would help me achieve this as I think it is a fun problem.<p>Regardless, I've used HN for over a decade and have no doubt some of the smartest people on the planet live here.<p>So if you find this tale intriguing and perhaps unjust, any advice on how to tackle this problem from a public policy perspective would also be great.
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: Hello HN!<p>We are Ustin and Daniel, co-founders of Batch (<a href="https://batch.sh" rel="nofollow">https://batch.sh</a>) - an event replay platform. You can think of us as version control for data passing through your messaging systems. With Batch, a company is able to go back in time, see what data looked like at a certain point and if it makes sense, replay that piece of data back into the company's systems.<p>This idea was born out of getting annoyed by what an unwieldy blackbox Kafka is. While many folks use Kafka for streaming, there is an equal number of Kafka users that use it as a traditional messaging system. Historically, these systems have offered very poor visibility into what's going on inside them and offer (at best) a poor replay experience. This problem is prevalent pretty much across every messaging system. Especially if the messages on the bus are serialized, it is almost guaranteed that you will have to write custom, one-off scripts when working with these systems.<p>This "visibility" pain point is exacerbated tenfold if you are working with event driven architectures and/or event sourcing - you must have a way to search and replay events as you will need to rebuild state in order to bring up new data stores and services. That may sound straightforward, but it's actually really involved. You have to figure out how and where to store your events, how to serialize them, search them, play them back, and how/when/if to prune, delete or archive them.<p>Rather than spending a ton of money on building such a replay platform in-house, we decided to build a generic one and hopefully save everyone a bunch of time and money. We are 100% believers in "buy" (vs "build") - companies should focus on building their core product and not waste time on sidequests. We've worked on these systems before at our previous gigs and decided to put our combined experience into building Batch.<p>A friend of mine shared this bit of insight with me (that he heard from Dave Cheney, I think?) - "Is this what you want to spend your innovation tokens on?" (referring to building something in-house) - and the answer is probably... no. So this is how we got here!<p>In practical terms, we give you a "connector" (in the form of a Docker image) that hooks into your messaging system as a consumer and begins copying all data that it sees on a topic/exchange to Batch. Alternatively, you can pump data into our platform via a generic HTTP or gRPC API. Once the messages reach Batch, we index them and write them to a long-term store (we use <a href="https://www.elassandra.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.elassandra.io</a>). At that point, you can use either our UI or HTTP API to search and replay a subset of the messages to an HTTP destination or into another messaging system.<p>Right now, our platform is able to ingest data from Kafka, RabbitMQ and GCP PubSub, and we've got SQS on the roadmap. Really, we're cool with adding support for whatever messaging system you need as long as it solves a problem for you.<p>One super cool thing is that if you are encoding your events in protobuf, we are able to decode them upon arrival on our platform, so that we can index them and let you search for data within them. In fact, we think this functionality is so cool that we really wanted to share it - surely there are other folks that need to quickly read/write encoded data to various messaging systems. We wrote <a href="https://github.com/batchcorp/plumber" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/batchcorp/plumber</a> for that purpose. It's like curl for messaging systems and currently supports Kafka, RabbitMQ and GCP PubSub. It's a port from an internal tool we used when interacting with our own Kafka and RabbitMQ instances.<p>In closing, we would love for you to check out <a href="https://batch.sh" rel="nofollow">https://batch.sh</a> and tell us what you think. Our initial thinking is to allow folks to pump their data into us for free with 1-3 days of retention. If you need more retention, that'll require $ (we're leaning towards a usage-based pricing model).<p>We envision Batch becoming a foundational component of your system architecture, but right now, our #1 goal is to lower the barrier to entry for event sourcing and we think that offering "out-of-the-box" replay functionality is the first step towards making this happen.<p>.. And if event sourcing is not your cup of tea - then you can get us in your stack to gain visibility and a peace of mind.<p>OK that's it! Thank you for checking us out!<p>~Dan & Ustin<p>P.S. Forgot about our creds:<p>I (Dan), spent a large chunk of my career working at data centers doing systems integration work. I got exposed to all kinds of esoteric things like how to integrate diesel generators into CMSs and automate VLAN provisioning for customers. I also learned that "move fast and break things" does not apply to data centers haha. After data centers, I went to work for New Relic, followed by InVision, Digital Ocean and most recently, Community (which is where I met Ustin). I work primarily in Go, consider myself a generalist, prefer light beers over IPAs and dabble in metal (music) production.<p>Ustin is a physicist turned computer scientist and worked towards a PhD on distributed storage over lossy networks. He has spent most of his career working as a founding engineer at startups like Community. He has a lot of experience working in Elixir and Go and working on large, complex systems.
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: I'm a professional software engineer with two middle-school aged children and a working partner cramped into a small apartment. Since the shelter in place orders happened and my employer switched everyone to work from home, my apartment has seemed less and less suitable for productivity. It's also not the best environment for children to remain cooped up in their rooms on electronics all day, every day. My partner and I have experimented with some online camps and our local public schools have gone purely virtual, but I'm considering alternative schools this year as well as moving out of our cramped apartment.<p>Parents: What have you tried? What did you love? What did you hate?
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: I'm wondering how international law is affecting SaaS Providers. For example, let's say Notion.so has a trademark in the US for the name "Notion". Then someone builds, theoretically, a similar service in the UK, and trademarks "Notion" there. Can the UK entity prevent "Notion Labs" (that doesn't have an office in the UK) to sell to customers in the UK?<p>In a broader perspective, are SaaS providers, that inherently have customers all over the world, expected to register a trademark in all countries or only the countries they are supposed to have offices in?
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: I often have trouble switching off from work during the week as my workspace is my 1BR apartment. I don't have this problem on the weekends, as I don't 'start' a working day.<p>Given that not starting work during the week isn't an option, any tips on how to switch off after-hours during the work week?
Upvote: | 327 |
Title: Hey!<p>Christos, Damien and Nodar here and we're the co-founders of Synth (<a href="https://getsynth.com" rel="nofollow">https://getsynth.com</a>) - Synth is an API which allows you to quickly and easily provision test databases with realistic data with which to test your application.<p>We started our company about a year ago, after working at a quantitative hedge fund in London where we built models to trade US equities. Strangely, instead of spending time developing models or building the trading system, a large portion of our time was spent on just sourcing and on-boarding datasets to train and feed our models. The process of testing datasets and on-boarding them was archaic; one data provider served us XML files over FTP which we then had to spend weeks transforming for our models to ingest. A different provider asked us to spin up our own database and then sent us a binary which was used to load the data. We had to whitelist their API ip-address and setup a cronjob to make sure the dataset was never out of date. The binary provided an interactive input so it couldn't be scripted, or rather it could be but you need something to mock the interactive params. All this took a junior developer on the team a good 3-4 days to figure out and setup. Furthermore after our trial expired we decided we didn't actually need this dataset so those 3-4 days were essentially wasted. Our frustration around the status-quo in data distribution is what drove us to start our company.<p>We spent the first 6 months building a privacy-aware query engine (think Presto but with built in privacy primitives), but software developers we talked to would frequently divert the topic to the lack of high quality, sanitised testing data during the software development lifecycle. It was strange - most of us developers and data scientists constantly use some sort of testing data for different reasons. Maybe you want a local development environment which is representative of production but clean from customer data. Or a staging environment which contains a much smaller, representative database so that tests run faster. You could want the dataset to be much bigger to test how your application scales. Maybe you want to share your database with 3rd party contractors who you don't necessarily trust. Whichever way you put it, it's strange that for a problem most of us face every day, we have no idiomatic solution. We write bespoke scripts and pipelines which often break. They are time consuming to write and maintain and every time your schema changes you need to update them manually. Or we get lazy and copy/paste production.<p>We finally listened to all this feedback, dropped the previous product, and built Synth instead. Synth is a platform for provisioning databases with completely synthetic data.<p>The way Synth works can be broken into 3 main steps. You first download our CLI tool (a bunch of python wrapped up in a container) and point it at your database to create a model (we host the models on the Synth platform). This model encodes your schema, and foreign key relationships as well as a semantic representation of your types. We currently use simple regular expressions to classify the semantic types (for example an address or license plate). The whole model is represented as a JSON object - if the classifier gets something wrong you can easily change the semantic type. Once the model has been created, the next step is to train the model. Under the hood we use a combination of copulas and deep-learning models to model the distributions and correlations in your dataset (the intuition here is that it's much more useful for developers to have realistic data than just sample from a random number generator). The final step is to use the trained model to generate synthetic data. You can either sample directly from the model or we can spin up a database for you and fill it with as much data as you need. The generation step samples from the trained model to create realistic data, as well as utilising bespoke generators for sensitive fields (credit card numbers, names, addresses etc.)<p>You can run the entire lifecycle in a single command - you point the CLI tool at your database (currently Postgres, MySQL and MsSQL) and in ~1 minute you get an i.p. address and credentials to your new database with completely synthetic data.<p>We're long time fans of HN and are eagerly looking forward to feedback from the community (especially criticism). We've made a free version available for this week so you can try it with no strings attached. We hope some of you will find Synth useful. If you have any questions we'll be around throughout the day. Also feel free to get in touch via the site.<p>Thanks!
~ Christos, Damien & Nodar
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: Hey HN!<p>We are Patrick & Chris, bootstrapped co-founders of GA Insights (<a href="https://www.ga-insights.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.ga-insights.com</a>) - a simple way of getting reports and alerts for your tools inside Slack and Teams. We started as a technical tool to monitor client accounts in Slack, interfacing with Microsoft Azure insights, and then pivoted to supporting business intelligence tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.<p>The idea was born out of the angst that we had experienced using disparate tools to monitor our metrics, client & to share information. Google Analytics has an ever-evolving interface that most developers would rather not spend a day getting lost in. We decided to take the primary use cases we had for Google Analytics and provide an engine to process, visualize, and ship to Slack or Teams. This gets us daily or weekly reports on metrics such as page speed, bounce rates, page engagement, and when the cart checkout breaks.<p>Once we started to gain some traction with clients, we extended the capacity to include other data sources like Google Search Console and Google Ads, making it simple for indie businesses and large corporations to extract the value from these reporting surfaces and send them to a channel that we use every day, like Slack or Teams. We use ML to analyze 100s of metric streams to detect anomalies in your data, and are soon expanding into providing root-cause analysis when anomalies occur.<p>Currently, we send 2.6k alerts per week and 3.2K scheduled reports into Slack, Teams & Email. Slack has seen the biggest uptake followed by Teams. We run on Azure, combines NoSQL, Serverless, Redis, Warehousing, and scalable architecture to deal with bursty loads (common in report scheduling).<p>We're launching new data sources and integrations rapidly, with Facebook, Stripe, and Zapier next on our docket.<p>Happy to answer any questions you might have.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Reddit constantly hassles me to use their app on mobile.<p>Why do they care so much?<p>I really don’t want to use their app. I just wish they’d give up and let me use the browser in peace.
Upvote: | 1403 |
Title: Music has always been the least appealing art form for me out of the music-film-literature trio. Now I am looking to get more familiar with its history, evolution and simply discover good music.<p>Is there a music buff's roadmap, some sort of a chronologically-ordered list of the best and most influential albums that gives a coherent picture of how music evolved over the 20th century? And is that a right approach to becoming a music buff? If not, what is?
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>We're Cam, Doug, Lorenzo and Martin, co-founders of Quell (<a href="https://quell.tech" rel="nofollow">https://quell.tech</a>).<p>Quell is an immersive fitness game which guides players through an exciting, effective combat workout at home. Players fight enemies with a low-cost wearable which uses smart resistance bands to simulate real combat training. Our aim is to be Peloton meets gaming meets boxing, at 1/10th of the price. We launched on Kickstarter yesterday, and would love it if you checked us out! Here’s the link: <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/quelltech/quell-real-gaming-real-exercise-zero-compromise" rel="nofollow">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/quelltech/quell-real-ga...</a><p>We started building Quell because for us, exercise wasn’t fun; it was work. We’d tried all the stats tracking apps and the cycling simulators, but they weren’t treating that root problem. Over time, as the novelty wore off, we were left with the feeling that working out was still boring and uncomfortable.<p>As big gamers, gamification seemed like an obvious solution. We looked at what was happening in this space and felt that exercise games tended to compromise on the exercise or the game. We believed that, if we could get both right, we could make something we’d want to play. Everything in the market was focussed on running, cycling or yoga/pilates, so we went with boxing as a more intense and cathartic alternative.<p>We realised that Quell could be a real business when we started talking to people about exercise. Everyone was facing the same two problems: obstacles, and a lack of reward. The absence of immediate rewards when you exercise means that you have to propel yourself using long-term benefits, and most of us are bad at this. On top of that, seemingly small barriers like weather, travel, set-up, knowledge and equipment sharing have a massive impact on people's ability to commit.<p>The team started working together in February, but we all had other things going on. Cam had just left his career in management consulting to do a design master’s. Martin was wrapping up his PhD in sensor tech at Oxford. Doug was building a business providing remote working and development retreats. Lorenzo was doing a design master’s to pursue a career in prosthetic design. None of us had the financial stability to make this our full-time job, so we decided to develop the product over a year or two in our spare time. After a month, we applied to YC with zero expectation of being accepted. Our idea was basically a punching bag with a screen, and we knew it wasn’t where we wanted it to be. We saw the YC application as a forcing mechanism to put some rigour behind the business, and an exciting experience to go through.<p>Then Covid hit, and the target market went from ‘people who don’t like exercise’ to ‘people who don’t like home exercise or running around the same park every day’. We went into overdrive, using all of our days off and lunch breaks to develop the product. Despite all this effort, the pace was glacial. All the workshops closed during lockdown, so we had no tools. We were separated in different parts of the UK, trying to build hardware via Zoom. Then YC accepted us, and we could finally focus! We left our jobs and degrees. Everyone moved into Cam's apartment. We bought a 3D printer, a sewing machine and a bunch of electronics and textiles. We spent all day every day looping through talking to users, collating insights, designing and prototyping.<p>We learned that no one wanted the hassle of a punchbag, but everyone loved the idea of feeling the satisfying physical resistance of punching something at home. We built a wearable which applied customisable resistance to punches through swappable elastic bands, and it landed well. We started looking at computer vision to translate player punches into the game, but our potential users hated the idea of setting up a camera. After hundreds of hours spent punching the air in our living room, we found that we could get high-accuracy, low-latency gesture recognition through a neural net applied to inertial measurement units in the gloves.<p>We made a quick video and website with our first prototype (link here: <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hrIegPSxko2JPzsztm_1UmV4iROdQKki/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hrIegPSxko2JPzsztm_1UmV4iRO...</a>), then started advertising on Facebook and Instagram to see how it landed. The response was incredible, with CPA coming in 75% lower than our benchmarks. We opened pre-orders to test whether these people would convert and got fifty orders in the first month. After drafting our bill of materials, we settled on a price of $200 for the wearable and $10/mo in subscription fees, which works out at less than half the average gym membership. With 55m active gamers paying for a gym membership pre-covid, we estimate a market size of $18bn.<p>With the financials sorted and the early market validation complete, we felt confident in building towards a Kickstarter. For the last month, we’ve been working hard on turning ideas into concept art into game content, making the product look and feel good, shooting the video, writing the copy, pricing, costing, and growing our sign-up list. We launched our Kickstarter yesterday, and have recieved over $60k in pledges in our first 24 hours. You can check out the full video of our new prototype at <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/quelltech/quell-real-gaming-real-exercise-zero-compromise" rel="nofollow">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/quelltech/quell-real-ga...</a>.<p>We’re continuing to develop the hardware and the game in parallel, and would love to hear what HN loves and hates, as well as any questions you might have. We’ll be on here every waking hour (UK time) to respond as soon as humanly possible. Thank you!
Upvote: | 170 |
Title: Hey HN! I’m Uday, and I co-founded Epihub [0] with Kwasi and Michael (<a href="https://epihub.com" rel="nofollow">https://epihub.com</a>). Epihub is Shopify for teaching online. Our software lets you schedule, meet, and bill clients from your own website.<p>A few years ago, we started building a product called Epigrammar, which was a collaborative document annotation tool that let teachers rapidly give feedback to their students by identifying trends in their feedback. Kwasi and I really wanted to see if we could scale the tutoring experience to an entire classroom, since my co-founder Mike was teaching Classics at a private school in Connecticut while running a non-profit tutoring program in Latin/Greek for public school students in New York. Mike would try out our products that we had built over the weekend during the week (sometimes to success), but oftentimes, things were not actually helping him teach. That’s when we'd go back to the drawing board. We spent a few years experimenting with different ideas in edtech trying to scale tutoring, as we obsessed over Bloom’s 2 sigma problem [1] including Superhuman for grading and even a test generator that could build assessments based on “backward-design [2]. We all lived together in Manhattan, built stuff, and would send it out to Mike to see what worked and what didn't.<p>This spring, however, as COVID-19 shut down local businesses across the city (we still live in New York), we realized that there were much bigger problems facing tutoring, coaching, and training businesses like Mike's: bringing the actual business online.<p>Whether you want to start up a coding bootcamp or run a tutoring business, you need a handful of products that are (ideally) white-labeled: a website builder, a way to process application forms, a CRM, a system to book appointments, a ticketing system for virtual classes, virtual classrooms, invoicing, and paystub tracking. When we spoke with tutors, coaches, and trainers, it was clear that there was a similar problem facing many different but similar businesses. How do you handle appointments? How do you handle virtual classes? How do you manage your team’s schedules?<p>We spent our summer trying to build everything end-to-end, and finally, we’re excited to share that product with you today. Epihub lets you build a website (or embeds into your existing website) and also comes with a full system to schedule, meet, and bill clients in one place (you can change all the buttons, images, and language within your account to reflect your business so you can rename your employees to instructors or your currency to Solari).<p>Similarly, you’re working online with individuals or groups, you can start teaching anyone on username.epihub.com and easily grow your entire team by adding additional seats for new instructors to manage their schedules and paystubs. So far, we’ve been working with tutors, coaches, trainers, but we have seen a bunch of interesting use-cases as well (including someone who wants to set up Epihub for virtual wine tasting and tours).<p>The stack actually borrows a lot from our original product: it’s an Elixir/Phoenix application with a React frontend. We have a Zoom and Google Calendar integration, so you’ll also see appointments and requests in your calendar, as each hub comes with yoursubdomain.epihub.com/reserve to handle bookings from prospective clients. It's like a Calendly built to scale your team’s operations by syncing up invoicing, paystubs, and virtual classrooms. (Recently, we’ve been contemplating Liquid templating, and we’re considering building a Wordpress plugin. If anyone has worked with Liquid, Kwasi and I would love to chat.)<p>If there’s anyone running a coaching, tutoring, or training business, or coding bootcamp, we'd love to hear how we could support your team. You can also book a personal onboarding with Mike over Zoom (<a href="https://vip.epihub.com/reserve" rel="nofollow">https://vip.epihub.com/reserve</a>).<p>Finally, I’ve been a member of HN for as long as I can remember. I’ve had my share of unfinished projects, and things I’ve been a bit nervous to launch here. I didn’t think I ever would launch anything, so this is pretty exciting. I’ll be online all day with my co-founders to chat about Epihub, tutoring, backward design, or Elixir in no specific order!<p>[0]: <a href="https://epihub.com" rel="nofollow">https://epihub.com</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_design" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_design</a>
Upvote: | 136 |
Title: Hi HN!,<p>My brother got a 5 years jail sentence but is coming out soon, a few months ago he decided to learn to code with no prior experience.<p>I find the way he is studying very inspirational so decided to post his (simple) program.<p>But first, here is what he needs to go through to learn:<p>- We the family send him javascript and html books
- He studies them and writes programs in pen and paper
- He calls me so I input what he wrote on my computer and we debug it live via a phone call, he has to imagine the program in his head.<p>The crazy part is up until a few days ago he didn't have access to a computer.
However! another inmate has an upcoming trial and because the contents of his trial contain to many papers, they provided this inmate with a simple laptop (no internet).<p>My brother is not allowed to touch this laptop and he can only see this inmate 1 hour a day, so he convinced the inmate to sit next to him for my brother to tell him what to type, the other inmate types in the html+js on a notepad file and this way my brother can finally see his programs on a screen after months of only imagining how to program.<p>Here is the program we wrote today:<p><a href="https://codepen.io/throwaway0944/pen/dyMpqJq" rel="nofollow">https://codepen.io/throwaway0944/pen/dyMpqJq</a><p>My dream is for this to get some traction so when he calls I can tell him his program has users :)
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Hey everyone! We’re Oliver and Hamzah from Hubble (<a href="https://gethubble.io/hn" rel="nofollow">https://gethubble.io/hn</a>). Hubble runs tests on your data warehouse so you can identify issues with data quality. You can test for things like missing values, uniqueness of data or how frequently data is added/updated.<p>We worked together for the last 4 years at a startup where we built and managed data products for insurers and banks. A common pattern we saw was teams taking data from their internal tools (CRM, HR system, etc.), application databases, and 3rd party data and storing it in a warehouse for analysis. However, when analysts/data scientists used the data for reports they would spot something suspicious and the engineering team would have to manually go through the data pipelines to find the source of the problem. More often than not it was simple things like a spike in missing values because an ETL job failed or stale data because a 3rd party data source hadn’t updated correctly. We realised that reliability/ trustworthiness of the raw data was essential before you could start abstracting away more interesting tasks like analysis, insight or predictions.<p>We wanted to do this without having to write and maintain lots of individual tests in our code. So we built Hubble, which connects to a data warehouse and creates tests based on the type of data being stored (i.e. freshness of timestamps, the cardinality of strings, max value of numbers, missing values, etc.). We’ve also added the ability to write any custom tests using a built-in SQL editor. All the tests run on a schedule and you’ll get an email or slack alert when they fail. We’re also building webhooks and an Airflow operator so you can run tests immediately after running an ETL job or trigger a process to fix a failing test.<p>Instead of asking users to send their data to us, the tests are run in the data warehouse and we track the test results over time. Today we support BigQuery, Snowflake and Rockset (which lets us work with MongoDB and DynamoDB) and are adding more on request.<p>We’re planning on charging $200 a month for a few seats, and $30-50 for extra users after that.<p>We’re still at an early access stage but want the HN community’s feedback so we’ve opened up access to the app for a few days, you can try it out here <a href="https://gethubble.io/hn" rel="nofollow">https://gethubble.io/hn</a>. We’ve added a demo data warehouse you can start with that has data on COVID-19 cases in Italy and bike-share trips in San Francisco. Thanks and looking forward to hearing your ideas, experiences and feedback!
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: I'll go first. When I read that it takes a photon over 100,000 years to exit the Sun as visible light, I was completely astounded. Curious what other insights from science people have learned that were completely unexpected to them.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Hi everyone! We are Dragos and Thiago from GitDuck (<a href="https://gitduck.com" rel="nofollow">https://gitduck.com</a>). We are building GitDuck, a Zoom for developers with direct integration to the IDE so software developers can talk and collaborate in real-time.<p>It all started by accident, Dragos and I were working on something else, a screen recording tool and we started to use it internally to record short videos of our code. At first it was just for quick code reviews and to debug, but soon we realized how helpful it was to have a video explanation of the code. Kind of rubber duck debugging with video. ;)<p>After talking to almost 300 developers and learning that other people were facing similar collaboration issues we decided to focus 100% on building this tool. We are the first users and we use GitDuck internally for quick assistance, pair programming, code reviews or just discussing ideas.<p>It has the features you would expect in a video call tool — like audio, video chat and screen sharing, but the UX and the integrations were built exclusively for developers. You can easily share your code and do pair programming. We are building integrations for all the IDEs. This enables you to collaborate without screen sharing (so it's faster and and consumes less bandwidth), directly from your IDE and independently of the IDE that other people are using.<p>Whenever you join a GitDuck meeting, your IDE extension wakes up and allows you to share your code with the other meeting participants (or join the already shared code from other meeting participant). When your peers join your code, they can see and edit your files in real-time, similar to the Google Docs experience. At any given point you can also go to your peers position so you can see in which file and line they are.<p>Check a 1 min demo
(<a href="https://gitduck.com/watch/5f1808919552aefe64ce0751" rel="nofollow">https://gitduck.com/watch/5f1808919552aefe64ce0751</a>)<p>GitDuck currently has integrations to VS Code and VSCodium. In the next few days we are going to release the integrations to all JetBrains IDEs. Vim, Sublime and others coming after that.<p>One important aspect to mention is security. We are the first users of the service so we focus a lot on building something that we would trust to use ourselves. All the files shared from your IDE are always shared via peer-to-peer and are end-to-end encrypted. No piece of code never touches our servers, so we never have access to your code.<p>All calls are encrypted and p2p (if 4 or less participants). If 5 or more people join we switch to a cloud infrastructure in order to maintain the quality, but the media are always encrypted and we never have access to your calls. You can read more about it here (<a href="https://gitduck.com/security" rel="nofollow">https://gitduck.com/security</a>) and we are always open for your suggestions to improve.<p>We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. What are your ideas about tools like this?<p>Thank you!
Upvote: | 264 |
Title: Ok maybe ‘despise’ is a strong word but i still feel there is something irreconcilable in a solo dev’s SaaS and the promotion (s)he has to make to have a chance at earning some money from it.<p>You and I both scoff at pushy newsletters, influencers, affiliate links, even SEO - which by the way made majority of web unreliable.
Yet i know this is the only way to have a try at this attractive idea of working for yourself and introducing a tiny bit more freedom to your life (or is it?).<p>Then leave it to the pros you say? 9to5 looks just as unattractive.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hello HN! Plum Mail (<a href="https://plummail.co" rel="nofollow">https://plummail.co</a>) is a messaging app that gives you better conversation features than email and instant messengers. These features help make conversations more useful and easier to get value from.<p>Today we're launching Plum Mail in early access. You can join our Wait List to be one of the early users by emailing [email protected].<p>Email is disorganised, instant messaging is distracting and group chats are hard to keep track of. But email is great, because everyone has an email address. Why can’t we build an awesome messaging platform that lets us keep our email addresses? Our insight: keep the email
address but replace the emails with something better.<p>The first thing we want to fix is group conversations. Conversations between three or more people in email get messy quickly. We can solve that with the ability to break off-topic messages out into sub-threads or the ability to conclude a thread. We’re working on the ability to highlight text and pin it to a noticeboard so important pieces of information don’t get lost in high message volume.<p>To help solve the issue of distraction created by platforms such as Slack, we’re introducing features like inbox delay, group chat message rate limits, and a complete lack of notification noises. Our design philosophy is respect and simplicity. We do not want to nudge you to check your inbox with things like red dots or read receipts.<p>We are also offering greater control over adding and removing people from conversation threads. Here’s a demo video showing some of this in action: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf-82ychDgA&t=6s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf-82ychDgA&t=6s</a><p>Peter and I started Plum Mail because we had these problems with email and IM ourselves. Group chats quickly get out of hand. We find it really hard to organise our annual ski trips with friends in Whatsapp. Half our mates just want to share <i>hilarious</i>
GIFs that smother the conversation we’re trying to have about dates or hotels or ski hire. I love a funny GIF as much as the next guy so we probably just need to think about where the funny GIFs live and where the details about our hotel reservations live. i.e, not on top of each other.<p>We also have 12 months' experience working exclusively on passwordless authentication technologies in our company DID.app. We realised that the marriage of passwordless authentication with a common messaging platform could be a happy one.<p>Our vision for Plum Mail is to position it alongside other premium inbox products on the market to people that care about new features enabling them to have great quality conversations online. However, Plum Mail will remain open and accessible to all at some level so that users can enjoy the freedom of writing to anyone (whether they’re a user or not) whilst enjoying the clear benefits of messaging inside a common system instead of over email protocol.<p>We would love to hear your thoughts. In particular, what do you dislike about either email or instant messaging? Anything goes! This feels to us like an opportunity to re-imagine how communication online can work.
Upvote: | 118 |
Title: I just find it irritating when typing it in, AND it messes with password managers. But it seems to be happening more and more. What's the logic behind it? Is there some security benefit I don't understand? Or is it just me who hates this?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: In essentially every discussion about desktop applications there are a lot of comments about how not to build desktop apps, but very little sharing of resources showing how to do it right.<p>I’ve seen people defend electron, talk about core logic in a cross platform language and native gui code and any number of other options.<p>As a middle of the road developer I think it’s difficult to find any consensus (besides electron being both simple and hated).<p>What resources are there for building quality, functional cross platform desktop application?
Upvote: | 207 |
Title: Hi HN, I'm trying to find some exciting but not-yet-mainstream tech or market to look into.<p>For the last couple of years I've been completely focused on one field and have not been staying on top of what the latest hot tech trend is, so kind of lost what I should be looking at. Note that I'm not just chasing some tech hype, but just want to know what I've been missing out on.<p>This doesn't have to be brand new tech per se, but could be a re-application of a previously failed technology which makes sense now because the world has changed.<p>Please share anything you think is really cool that may take off soon. Also would be nice if you shared the reason for why you think it will be the next couple of years when they take off to mainstream. Thank you!
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: Hey there! We are Oliver and Anton, and are founders at Depict.ai. We help online stores challenge Amazon by building recommender systems that don't require any sales or behavioral data at all.<p>Today, most recommender systems are based on a class of methods commonly called ‘collaborative filtering’ - which means that they generate recommendations based on a user's past behavior. This method is successfully used by Amazon and Netflix (see the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize</a>). They are also very unsuccessfully used by smaller companies that lack the critical mass of historical behavioral data required to use those models effectively. This generally results in the cold start problem (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_start_(recommender_systems)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_start_(recommender_system...</a>) and a worse customer experience. We solve this by not focusing on understanding the customer but instead focus on understanding the product.<p>The way we do this is with machine learning techniques that create vector representations of products based on the products’ images and descriptions, and recommend matching using these vector representations. More specifically, we have found a way to scrape the web and then train massive neural networks on e-commerce products. This makes it possible to leverage large amounts of product metadata to make truly impressive recommendations for any e-commerce store.<p>One analogy we like is that just as almost no single company has enough sales or behavioral data to consistently predict, for instance, credit card frauds on their own, almost no e-commerce company has enough data to generate good recommendations based only on their own information. Stripe can make excellent fraud detection models by pooling transactions from many smaller companies, and we can do the same thing for personalizing e-commerce stores by pooling product metadata.<p>Through A/B-tests we have proved that we can increase top-line revenue with 4-6% for almost any e-commerce store. To prove our value we offer the tests and setup 100% for free. We make money by taking a cut of the revenue uplift we generate in the A/B-tests. We have also found that the sales and decision cycle gets much shorter by being independent of customer's user data. You can see us live at Staples Nordics and kitchentime.com, among others.<p>Oliver and I have several years of experience applying recommender systems within e-commerce and education respectively and felt uneasy about a winner-takes-it-all development where the largest companies could use their data supremacy to out-personalize any smaller company. Our goal is to build a company that can offer the best personalization to any e-commerce store, not just the ones with enough data.<p>Do you think our approach seems interesting, crazy, lazy or somewhere in the middle? We’d love any feedback - please feel free to shoot us comments below or DM, we’ll be here to answer your thoughts and gather feedback!
Upvote: | 126 |
Title: Is it just because the stock market is doing "well" right now or is there some other explanation?
Upvote: | 134 |
Title: I don't think I've ever seen such a bloated and sluggish website. I'm baffled by the fact that nothing gets any faster as time goes by. The website is being sluggish from early days of beta to this day! How is this ok for a site as popular as Reddit?<p>The app is not much better to be honest. Sure it works, but it doesn't feel optimized at all either.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I have been reasonably successful by some standards at a big tech company, but don't quite think I could ever become a Director or a VP, given the rate at which I am progressing --- it is linear with time, which is not sufficient; I would like to aspire better. I am wondering what kind of things I need to switch about myself and about how I do things. There is the people aspect, and then there is technical aspect. Any thoughts on both of these? Are people willing to share how they overcame similar challenges and "made the switch"?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Open uBlock Origin settings. (i.imgur.com/O8FfkqA.png)<p>Go to 'My Filters'.<p>Enable the filter lists 'uBlock Annoyances' and 'Fanboy's Annoyance' - (i.imgur.com/POboA3n.png).<p>Lists taken from https://github.com/gorhill and https://www.fanboy.co.nz
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I have spent over a decade building software working as engineer and working with product/Business Analysts in enterprise (FAANG or FAANG alike companies). I can confidently say that I can build software with features that delight customers. However, I don't understand how to sell software.<p>1. How to find customers?<p>2. How to sell?<p>Let me know your experience and how you learned to sell software.<p>Cheers.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Got this from Amazon today. I wonder if they're going to refund my money. Also, anyone know of a good alternative?<p>> Dear Customer,<p>We’re writing to let you know about an upcoming change that may affect how you access your content on Amazon Drive, and to help you take steps to keep your content safe.<p>We understand that you have used Synology Cloud Sync or Hyper Backup on Synology NAS to store information on Amazon Drive.<p>Amazon will discontinue access to Amazon Drive by Synology Cloud Sync and Hyper Backup starting on November 1st, 2020. Neither application will have access to Amazon Drive after November 1st, 2020, and the only way you will be able to access your stored content will be via Amazon Drive or Amazon Photos web, desktop, and mobile apps.<p>To ensure a smooth transition, we urge all Synology Cloud Sync and Hyper Backup users to follow these steps:<p>For Photo and Video content:<p>1. If you haven’t already, download the Amazon Photos mobile or desktop app. (The mobile app is for photos and videos stored on your phone. The desktop app saves content stored on a hard drive or computer.) Or, you can use the web version by visiting: https://www.amazon.com/photos.<p>Check to see if your content includes encrypted files or special file formats. If your files are encrypted, you’ll need to save the content in a different format. More information on how to access backup and encrypted data has been provided by Synology and can be found by visiting: https://sy.to/rogvp<p>2. Upload your unencrypted content to Amazon Photos, using the apps or website.<p>... [truncated due to HN limits]
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: For reasons beyond this ask, I'm needing to use a payment processor that is fine with high-risk transactions (which the porn industry certainly fits in) so started looking around what adult websites are using.<p>Many are using probiller, vendo and similar, since Stripe and others have rules against porn/adult industry, citing high risk transactions for this.<p>But then I came across onlyfans.com, which is using Stripe for its payments, although Stripe has a strict "no porn" rule in their terms of service.<p>How does this work? Onlyfans is by now a huge website, with lots of transactions, so it's surely not flying under the radar. It's the only adult website I could find that is using Stripe.<p>Is it as simple as they have an agreement with Stripe to bypass the rule? Or am I missing something else obvious here?
Upvote: | 416 |
Title: Hi everyone! My name is Advait and I co-founded SuperTokens along with
@rishabhpoddar (<a href="https://supertokens.io/" rel="nofollow">https://supertokens.io/</a>). SuperTokens helps companies
securely manage their session tokens, saving developer time and
preventing identity theft.<p>We started SuperTokens 1.5 years ago when we were building a consumer
app and wanted our users to be logged in for a long time in a secure
way. When it came to managing user sessions, there was a lot of
ambiguity. We read many forums (Reddit, Stackoverflow) and blogs, and
found that developers were arguing about best practices, such as using
local storage vs cookies, implementing JWTs, etc. We had to do a lot
of the first principles thinking ourselves to understand the
tradeoffs. Around the same time, Facebook, Docker, Gitlab, Youtube,
Uber were in the news for session vulnerabilities.<p>Stealing a user’s session allows you to access their account as if you
had their username and password. Hence being able to mitigate against
this is important. We’ve audited companies and found large session
vulnerabilities that they were not aware of. For a YC company, we were
able to pull information on users that we shouldn’t have had access to.<p>Through our research, we built something internally and decided to
write a blog post [1] explaining how our system works. While
SuperTokens is not currently open source, you can see the original
codebase on Github [2].<p>Building a good solution for sessions requires a lot of specialised
knowledge and time that could otherwise be spent on building your core
business logic. Detecting session theft reliably is difficult. There
are multiple race conditions, edge cases and network issues that need
to be thought about. In fact, one of our libraries that solves a
difficult race condition has 100K downloads / week and is even used by
Auth0 [3]<p>SuperToken mitigates against all session attacks (XSS, CSRF, etc) by
implementing best practices. For a full list of types of attacks with
real life examples please see [4]. However, it is not possible to
mitigate against all attacks (for eg: social engineering) and hence,
SuperTokens is also able to detect session theft. We use rotating
refresh tokens as per the official OAuth specifications in RFC 6819
[5]. Auth0 has also started offering this, but due to their setup,
they cannot use httpOnly cookies to store these tokens and this goes
against popular compliance recommendations.<p>Besides security, SuperTokens also offers improved API performance and
developer convenience. For clustered and distributed environments,
session verification for each API takes < 1 millisecond. You can get a
user’s ID and access role without any database lookup. SuperTokens can
be implemented in 15 minutes, provides a simple API and has clear
documentation. We abstract away complexities of token management by
providing frontend and backend SDKs.<p>In the coming months we plan to offer Access Control, Internal Auth
between services and for internal tools (i.e. recent Twitter hack was
through unauthorized access to an internal tool), and more! We're
still experimenting with pricing, so you won't find this on our
website, but we'd love to hear your thoughts about it.<p>Thank you for reading! We’d love to hear what this community
specifically has to say and if you have any experience dealing with
this. We’d appreciate any feedback!<p>----------<p>Footnotes:<p>[1] - Blog post: <a href="https://medium.com/hackernoon/all-you-need-to-know-about-user-session-security-ee5245e6bdad" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/hackernoon/all-you-need-to-know-about-use...</a><p>[2] - Github: <a href="https://github.com/supertokens/supertokens-core" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/supertokens/supertokens-core</a><p>[3] - Library used by Auth0: <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/browser-tabs-lock" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/browser-tabs-lock</a><p>[4] - List of attacks: <a href="https://supertokens.io/pdf/attackshomepagev1" rel="nofollow">https://supertokens.io/pdf/attackshomepagev1</a><p>[5] - OAuth RFC 6819: <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6819#section-5.2.2.3" rel="nofollow">https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6819#section-5.2.2.3</a>
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: If you have uBlock or similar, it appears medium logs all analytics pings into HTML5 LocalStorage and will keep retrying to send them (and apparently periodically change domains and subdomains to try and send them).<p>I had tens of thousands of entries in localStorage, wasting quite a bit of space, all of them at least 400-600 characters or more. Each time I scrolled it'd add a few dozen more in, to the point where devtools was freezing. Ridiculous.<p>Example: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/M4E3kqg.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/M4E3kqg.png</a>
Upvote: | 360 |
Title: I'm building an aggregator for building permits and planning meeting notes. My business model is to sell alerts based on coordinates and/or search terms. Would love to hear from anyone bootstrapped selling a platform/SaaS to municipalities because we're considering also selling solutions to the public sector. I assume the sales process is long?
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: Machine learning teams often face operating needs not seen in many other domains.<p>Some example:<p>- instrumenting observability that not only monitors data quality and upstream ETL job status, but also domain specific considerations of training ML models, like overfitting, confusion matrices, business use case accuracy or validation checks, ROC curves and more (all needing to be customized and centrally reported per each model training task).<p>- standardizing end to end tooling for special resources, eg queueing and batching to keep utilization high for production GPU systems, high RAM use cases like approximate nearest neighbor indexes, and just run of the mill stuff like how to take a trained model and deploy it behind a microservice in a way that bakes in logging, tracing, alerting, and more.<p>Machine learning engineers and data scientists tend to have a comparative advantage when they can focus on understanding the data, running experiments to decide which models are best, pairing with product managers or engineers to understand constraints around the user experience, and designing software tools and abstractions around unique training or serving architectures (like the GPU queuing example).<p>Increasingly teams of data scientists are required to do devops work configuring and maintaining eg kubernetes & CI/CD workloads, alerting and monitoring, logging, instrumenting security or data access control compliance solutions.<p>This is harmful because it reduces the time or effort these engineers can spend on their comparative advantages, a direct loss to the customer or user, at the expense of doing devops jobs they are not trained to do and not interested in (which leads data scientists to burnout often) and that many other non-specialists can do.<p>How do you structure teams, build tools and establish compliance or operations expectations that allow data scientists and related statistical scientists and ML backend engineers to flourish?
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: I'm super interested in knowing things like:<p>- Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?<p>- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?<p>- How did you break that first-job barrier?<p>- What were you doing before this?<p>- Any tips for the rest of us?<p>Appreciate your response in advance! Keep hacking!
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: I'm starting to write a series on compiling Lisp to x86-64 and I would appreciate any and all feedback.<p>Find the first post at https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/compiling-a-lisp-0/
Upvote: | 81 |
Title: TLDR: I help with a gaming community-related site that is being targetted by a script kiddie, they are registering hundreds of thousands of accounts on our forums to 'protest' a cheating (aimbot) ban. They then post large ASCII art spam, giant shock images (the first one started after we blocked new accounts from posting [img]), the usual.<p>Currently we use a simple question/answer addon at registration time - it works against all untargeted bots and is just a little "what is 4 plus six" or "what is the abbreviation for this website" type of question. It's worked fine for years and we don't really get general untargeted spam.<p>I am somewhat ethically disinclined to use reCAPTCHA, and there are some older members that can't reasonably solve hcaptcha easily. Same for using heavy fingerprinting or other privacy invading methods. It's also donation-run, so enterprise services that would block something like this (such as Distil) are both out of budget and out of ethics.<p>Is there a way I can possibly solve this? Negotiation is not really an option on the table, the last time one of the other volunteers responded at all we got a ~150Gbps volumetric attack.<p>I've tried some basic things, like requiring cookie and JS support via middleware; they moved from a Java HTTP-library script to some kind of Selenium equivalent afterward. They also use a massive amount of proxies, largely compromised machines being sold for abuse.
Upvote: | 192 |
Title: Episodes:<p>1461 Owen Smith<p>1458 d'Elia<p>1356 Michael Shermer<p>1303 Tommy Chong<p>1296 Joe List<p>1255 Alex Jones Returns<p>1182 Nick Kroll<p>1164 Mikhaila Peterson<p>1093 Owen Benjamin / Kurt Metzger<p>998 Owen Benjamin<p>980 Chris d'Elia<p>979 Sargon of Akkad<p>(Edit):
the whole list can be found<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/ikf9at/full_list_of_every_missing_episode_from_spotify/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/ikf9at/full_list_...</a>
Upvote: | 60 |
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: | 46 |
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: | 184 |
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=24342496" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342496</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342497" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342497</a>
Upvote: | 368 |
Title: I recently got a new job and the culture of what I expected the engineering team to be vs. how I am now experiencing it is vastly different.<p>The first thing that stands out is that during my interviews, everyone had their video on, but now during standups and sprint planning, no one (except me) has their video on; the standups are also everyone saying "yep, working on ticket 455, probably finish that today, that's all for me, no blockers" and no real interactive discussion or engagement.<p>Besides explicitly asking "do you all have video on for meetings?" or "is standup more than just a one line status update?", how do you evaluate (what kinds of questions do you ask) an engineering team when interviewing to get a good sense of their culture?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I just opened up a simple HTTP server to send someone a large file. Then I figured, I never gave this question proper thought.<p>But some of you have, and I figured they make for fun and interesting stories ;-)<p>So what's your favorite method to send large files, of at least 5GB or bigger? Though, I'm also curious on how you'd send 10TB or more.
Upvote: | 319 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>I'm Ivan, one of the founders of Slapdash (<a href="https://slapdash.com/" rel="nofollow">https://slapdash.com/</a>). Slapdash lets you work across all of your cloud apps at desktop speed, sort of like an OS for cloud apps.<p>We have built a uniform, low-latency data browser (kind of like Finder) as well as a unified command line-like interface (kind of like Spotlight) for the applications you use at work.<p>When we left our big company jobs, one of the difficult things to part with was the tooling. Companies like Facebook and Stripe build a class of tools internally that unifies all the employees and any collaboration apps, so you can find anyone or anything the company knows. Everything is just a quick search away [0]. It’s quite a useful way to work. Common questions in day-to-day work are easy to answer. What’s the history of this code abstraction? What are my colleagues working on? What’s the story with this customer?<p>Building such a system today means connecting people's cloud apps, because that's where most of the work is happening today. Even for a small team like us, our work spans Drive, Dropbox, Figma, GitHub, Asana, Notion, Docusign, Slack, Quip, etc.<p>The first thing we built was a low-latency file system for cloud apps. You connect an application like Drive, or GitHub to Slapdash and we give you a way to search and browse the data in a uniform interface (kind of like Finder). It turns your working world into a database you can easily query.<p>We modeled our file system as a graph and we built our architecture to match, with a focus on performance. We built an import system, which effectively solves a graph replication problem (translating the structure of the app data to the Slapdash graph and keeping it in sync). We then built a graph database on top of Postgres, added a data access layer with graph semantics, with GraphQL API delivering the data to the client.<p>Of course, the data we store is encrypted on disk, in-transit and in the data store. Slapdash employees can't see the contents of what we index since everything except the reverse index is encrypted. It’s not zero-access yet, but we’re building in that direction [1].<p>What we discovered is that by applying optimizations to how we store (sharding & colocation) and retrieve data (batching & coalescing) we could achieve an almost zero-latency [2] experience when browsing application data. As a result, it's much faster to browse Google Drive in Slapdash than in the Drive interface itself.<p>While the low-latency file system is interesting, we learned that being able to search and navigate is not enough utility for a single individual. People don’t search as much as they think they do, and most have their unique information foraging habits that work well-enough.<p>However, we wanted Slapdash to be useful for anyone, not just an employee at a big company, so we turned our attention to building a new experience on top of the file system. Our goal was to take a leap in speed with which people can control their computers. We thought this was possible because the difference in UX between desktop and cloud app environments was so acute: the desktop OS is principled, integrated and fast, while cloud apps are latency-laden and confined to crowded browser tabs.<p>To that end, we built the Command Bar (Command Line + Search Bar). The Command Bar is best experienced as a desktop app, where it’s invoked with a global shortcut. You can quickly search your apps, file tasks, peek at your calendar, create zoom meetings, etc: all with a couple of keystrokes. Of course, you can also write your own commands too.<p>In practice, it meaningfully cuts down the time you spend controlling the computer. For example, filing a task on GitHub might take 10 seconds of just navigating to the right screen, while you can start writing the task title within 2 seconds by invoking the "Create New GitHub Issue" command with the Command Bar. Things like searching for a customer record, doing a quick spreadsheet calculation and even routine things like opening an existing document are measurably faster. [3]<p>For teams and companies, Slapdash provides a unified interface to a team’s collective knowledge. This has traditionally been reserved for top technology companies, but we are bringing these advantages to everybody else. And for the individual, we are making the use of disparate cloud apps feel closer to the classic experience of a desktop computer OS - fast, integrated and more productive.<p>We are still figuring out what apps to support, what commands we should build and how we can open up the platform for others to build on as well. We would love to hear from you on any of those counts and any feedback you might have!<p>[0] Facebook has something called "intern" and Stripe has an internal product called "Stripe Home".<p>[1] Content is stored using ECIES (with Secp256k1 curve and AES256 cipher in CTR mode), public-key-encrypted with individual per-user, per-app key pairs.<p>[2] It's actually not zero latency, of course, but by preloading most things on the hover state we can cut ~50ms of perceived latency (as long as the server response time is under that, which we try to do, it feels instant).<p>[3] We use the keystroke-level GOMS model to evaluate interface speed, but the speed difference here is large enough that it can be intuited.<p>Example of filing a task on GitHub: Time controlling computer: open browser, command + L ( focus location bar), type partial URL of repo until it auto-completes, wait for page to load, click on Issues, wait for page to load, click on “New Issue”. Expressing actual intent: typing title of task.<p>Filing a task with Slapdash: Time controlling computer: Type Command + J, type “Cre gi” to fuzzy match “Create New GitHub Issue” command, hit enter. Expressing actual intent: typing title of task.
Upvote: | 227 |
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