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Title: I've had 7 development jobs and I haven't enjoyed any of them. I'm not that great at it and I can't handle the stress any more.<p>I need an exit plan but I have no idea where to go. I want a job that's about half as technically demanding as fullstack-wear-every-hat jobs at $70k-80k.<p>Could I get some ideas?
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: I'm curious to learn about staff performance management at other companies to understand what works and what doesn't. How does your company set goals, evaluate performance, etc? Do you use OKRs or a similar tool? Thanks!<p>Edit: Clarified that I am asking about staff and employee performance management. Thanks!
Upvote: | 212 |
Title: I can't find any news about him since he left Google.
Upvote: | 161 |
Title: There are a few I'm a big fan of:<p>- LindyBeige for European history told in a funny way. His extended stories are amazing (most recent was Last Charge of the Light Horse)
- Journey to the Microcosmos for amazingly shot videos of the microscopic world with interesting voiceovers
- Technology Connections for interesting tangents about technology from a (funny) pedant with strong opinions about all kinds of things
- Ben Eater for building an entire computer starting with logic gates, and also a nice 6502 series
- Cody's Lab for all kinds of strange things, most recently mushroom growing, told by someone passionate about it<p>Others worth mentioning but sometimes hit or miss for me are PBS Eons and PBS Space Time, Half as Interesting, Kurzgesat, Kings and Generals, Invicta, LGR, 8 bit guy, Strange Parts, N-O-D-E.<p>I'm always on the hunt for more great interesting channels like these, and always love sharing the ones I've found.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: I’m intrigued by the psychology of the relationship between managers and directs.<p>For instance, can it ever be the same as it can be if you didn’t work together for?<p>Do you instead maintain a layer of “professional distance”, that means you won’t ever be as close?<p>I imagine it could just depend exclusively on the personality each has...
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Almost eight years ago I launched an online “Linux sysadmin course for newbies” here at HN.<p>It was a side-project that went well, but never generated enough money to allow me to fully commit to leaving the Day Job. After surviving the Big C, and getting made redundant I thought I might improve and relaunch it commercially – but my doctors are a pessimistic bunch, so it looked like I didn’t have the time.<p>Instead, I rejigged/relaunched it via a Reddit forum this February as free and open - and have now gathered a team of helpers to ensure that it keeps going each month even after I can’t be involved any longer.<p>It’s a month-long course which restarts each month, so “Day 1” of September is this coming Monday.<p>It would be great if you could pass the word on to anyone you know who may be the target market of those who: “...aspire to get Linux-related jobs in industry - junior Linux sysadmin, devops-related work and similar”.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.linuxupskillchallenge.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.linuxupskillchallenge.org/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxupskillchallenge/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxupskillchallenge/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://snori74.blogspot.com/2020/04/health-status.html" rel="nofollow">http://snori74.blogspot.com/2020/04/health-status.html</a>
Upvote: | 780 |
Title: In my case I'm specifically building a REST API with Lambda, but I'd be interested in any API design books you found valuable.
Upvote: | 298 |
Title: I'm building a mobile app to create and share social events with your friends. A social event would be going to the bar, house party, or meeting up for coffee. You can fill out a simple form (event name, description, date, time) and post to a feed for your friends to see. Your friends can notify you they're going by pressing the "attend" button.<p>Right now I'm trying to solve the communication problem. Everyday you might meet up with your friends at the bar after work, invite them to lunch, coffee in the morning, or dinner in the afternoon. But you have to do the dance. You text everyone who you want to come, wait for them to reply and they may not even want to go. And for each person you invite you have to do the dance longer. This has many times wasted over an hour for me.<p>So I propose a faster solution. If you want your friends to meet you at the bar, create an "Event". The event has a title of what the event is (e.g. "Going to the bar"). It has a description to get your friends excited (e.g. "$2 margaritas"). It has the address (e.g. "123 SomeBar St."). Lastly it has the time (e.g. "Tonight at 8pm"). As soon as you post it to the feed all of your friends get a notification that you just created a new event. They can then all tell you if they are going by hitting the "attend" button.<p>Now I'm trying to get my first users. Yesterday was my first day. I made a spreadsheet of everyone I can message that live in my target area. My list is 82 people. Yesterday I contacted 24 people and got one person to sign up, I was hoping to get five. But most of the people I messaged didn't even respond.<p>It's definitely a grind. I was wondering if anyone has any tips on how they got some of their first users. What was it like? Or any stories of how they got their first signs of growth.<p>Also if you have this problem I could really use some feedback on my app. You can check it out by searching "bbook.io" in the Apple App Store.<p>Thank you guys for reading!
Ryan Sam
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: I imagine my practices are similar to many other HN readers. I follow some privacy best practices but don't generally seek anonymity online. You can google me and find my social media accounts, some articles I've written or for which I was interviewed, and figure out what city I live in. That is to say, my online persona is not entirely locked down.<p>Let's say I wanted to prevent myself from being doxxed. What steps could I take to make it more difficult?
Upvote: | 112 |
Title: To me the aha moments where as follows:<p>1. When I was introduced to QBasic<p>2. When I got to know how simple and amazing Lisp is<p>3. When I was able to code at the speed of my thoughts with VIM<p>4. When I got to know Express.js (after learning Django)<p>5. When I knew that everything in Smalltalk is a message including if else statements
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: We started a consultancy company 4 months back with two medium sized projects that we got as individual freelancers.
We have the expertise and experience in healthcare technology ( FHIR, interoperability ), which is a niche. But now we have zero leads from last month. We cannot figure out how to reach the potential interested clients who need this technology.<p>https://alstonia.io
Upvote: | 224 |
Title: Hi! I work at a mid-sized tech company as a Software Engineer. There are, probably, tons of things we can improve in our processes, infrastructure, technologies, etc. But sometimes it's hard to see the place with most impact from within, especially if you are pretty long in the company. That's why I'm looking for some inspiration.<p>So, how did you improve your company? By that I mean: processes, tech stack, optimization, etc.
Upvote: | 181 |
Title: My partner runs a small charity in the UK whose office infrastructure is based on Google Drive. (Sheets, spreadsheets, email, etc). Her trustees are advising that since Google cannot guarantee that her data is being stored in the UK (apparently?), they need to migrate. Like seemingly every organisation these days, they're looking at MS Office 365. But having a partner with GNU and emacs stickers all over their laptop, she's wondering what alternatives are out there. It'd need to be low (or better no) maintenance, comparable in cost to Office 365 and quality too. It could be web-hosted or based on Next/OwnCloud or something, as long as it works without a load of pain points. Oh and UK-hosted too. I assume others here must have thought this through already, so thought I'd ask the hivemind!
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: I would like to drastically reduce my amount of work hours per week.<p>My dream is to come down to about 15-25 working hours per week.<p>I don’t mean to work part-time for all of my career. But I would like to have such an arrangement for the coming five years or so.<p>Has anyone tried this? If so, how did you manage to achieve your goal?
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: Are there any well funded tech startups / companies tackling major societal problems?
Any of these fair game: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_issues" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_issues</a><p>----<p>I don't see or hear of any and want to know if this is just my bias or if there really is a shortage of resources in tech being allocated to solving the worlds most important problems. I'm sure I'm not the only engineer that's looking out for companies like this.<p>Ran into this previous Ask HN (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24168902" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24168902</a>) that asked a similar question. However, here I wanna focus on the better funded efforts (not side projects, philanthropy etc).<p>One example I've heard so far is Tesla. Any others?
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Apple has twice rejected a minor update to my Hacker News app for iOS, Octal [1], for breaking Guideline 5.1.1 - Legal - Privacy - Data Collection and Storage [2]. For the first rejection, they included a screenshot of the app's search functionality, searching for the term "Covid", which obviously contains HN submissions with "Covid" in the titles. For the second rejection, they included a screenshot of the app's main "Top Stories" view, which happened to have a COVID-19-related submission [3] as one of the top stories. Have any other iOS app developers out there encountered this issue with App Store Review?<p>Apple's rejection notes:<p>> We found in our review that your app provides services or requires sensitive user information related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis, services and information related to it are considered to be part of the healthcare industry. In addition, the seller and company names associated with your app are not from a recognized institution, such as a governmental entity, hospital, insurance company, non-governmental organization, or university.<p>> Per section 5.1.1 (ix) of the App Store Review Guidelines, apps that provide services or collect sensitive user information in highly-regulated fields, such as healthcare, should be submitted by a legal entity that provides these services, and not by an individual developer.<p>> Next Steps<p>> To resolve this issue, your app must be published under a seller and company name of a recognized institution. If you have developed this app on behalf of such an institution, please advise your client to add you to the development team of their Apple Developer account. If your client does not yet have an Apple Developer account, they can enroll for one as an organization through the Apple Developer website.<p>[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octal-hacker-news/id1308885491<p>[2] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#data-collection-and-storage<p>[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24384308
Upvote: | 188 |
Title: Anyone seen anything exciting/interesting in the field of TUI's? Any language, as long as the library is interesting with good examples or screen shots/videos.<p>For those unfamiliar, a TUI is a text mode user interface library, for building user interfaces within character oriented plain text consoles.
Upvote: | 93 |
Title: I'm not talking about lower level jobs, but in important areas. I'm noticing incompetence and complacency from people in positions which could very negatively impact lives. I'm seeing it more now than ever before.<p>For example, I've been trying to get medical records for 3 weeks and the office keeps: faxing the wrong number, faxing the wrong release forms, giving us incorrect status info, etc.<p>Another example is a legal matter I'm now involved with. The officer wrote the citation for the wrong statute (more serious), gave us incorrect information in how to request records, misspelled a name on the citation, and put the wrong time (by hours) on the citation. The court also gave us incorrect information on requesting records, gave us the wrong kind of subpeona and won't correct it, and the staff doesn't even know what an affidavit is.<p>We saw several doctors during an SVT event 48 hours after multiple simultaneous immunizations. They all said unequivocally that the events were unrelated, but could not produce data to support their opinion nor refute the thousands of arrhythmia events in VAERS data. (There's no data to concretely prove or disprove, so it's unknown). So now I have to submit ther VAERS report. Doctors like this will lead to under reporting, impacting studies on safety.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Hey HN --<p>I’m Chad, and I co-founded Tappity (<a href="https://www.tappityapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.tappityapp.com</a>) with my friend, Lawrence. We’re building a healthy alternative to Youtube that entertains and educates kids (4-10) with interactive lessons—starting with science!<p>Tappity’s story began ten years ago when I developed an app for my Biology professor to teach kids about evolution. It was my first time building a product for kids, so I learned a ton about designing for an audience who couldn’t read or sit still for very long. Also, their brutally honest feedback was refreshing! We ended up getting 20,000 downloads, and I learned kids <i>love</i> interactions. After that great experience, I continued to create apps for kids on the side for fun.<p>About two years ago, parents started paying for one of these apps. Kids loved a segment we had shot on a whim at our friend’s house, in which they could interact with a real live science teacher. Parents were excited, too. We gave them something engaging, fun, and educational for their kids, which is shockingly rare. The sad reality is that 99% of kids apps fall into three buckets: ad-riddled games, cheap & buggy ABC/123 apps, or YouTube. We wanted to do better. Shortly thereafter, Lawrence and I quit our jobs (where we had met) to start Tappity!<p>We leaned into this idea of live-like experiences. We felt it’d enrich screen time without sacrificing the fun. So, with Tappity, kids don’t just passively watch, they play along and direct our live-action characters on screen. For example, you could tell Haley—our version of Bill Nye—what she should do next in her science experiment, and she would actually do what you say. Unlike traditional TV programs or videos, where you know the person on screen is talking to a million other people, Tappity makes it feel like characters are interacting with <i>just</i> you in real time. Turns out, this format is super engaging. Best of all, kids don’t feel like they’re learning—they tell their parents they're hanging out with Haley!<p>So far, we’ve produced ~40 hours of original content, and we’re rapidly building out our library. While we shot much of our content initially with an iPhone in my garage, we’ve now graduated to filming with an actual crew at a studio in Los Angeles!<p>We're excited to share Tappity with the wider HN community, especially those of you with younger kids. With many families still spending a lot of time at home, we're hoping to make at-home learning a bit more fun and bearable. You can download it for free on the App Store [1]. Would love to hear what you think!<p>Chad, Lawrence, & Tanner<p>P.S. We also just launched the first online science fair for kids [2] hosted by Kari Byron from Mythbusters to encourage families to do more science experiments at home (and win prizes)! Check it out!<p>[1] <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tappity-interactive-stories/id1265019371?ls=1&mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tappity-interactive-stories/...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.juniorsciencefair.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.juniorsciencefair.com</a>
Upvote: | 146 |
Title: Apologies for the clunky question. We have a growing base of adult English students. Our teaching methodology is content-first, basically we find any material of interest to our students, based on their interests, sector and language goals and build lesson plans and discussions around that 'centerpiece'. A lot of the work is curation and creating reusable discussion questions.<p>I have been searching for a tool that can scan a paragraph and extract the grammar tenses and features (past simple, present continuous, passive voice, indirect question) as it's a recurring question with our students. We have tools to tell us the approximate level, suggested vocabulary and word count, but does this even exist (yet?). Thank you in advance.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I’m Taylor Cooney. My co-founder Lucas Playford and I are launching (<a href="https://www.openunit.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.openunit.com</a>) - software for managing self-storage facilities.<p>Lucas and I met 5 years ago at a startup in Toronto. Since leaving the startup, we’ve been looking for ways to “get the band back together” ever since. I would hack on side projects, such as an order-ahead food app and applicant tracking system for recruiting tech employees, but most of these fizzled out after a few weeks.<p>Despite our best efforts to get something started, we quickly realized that good startup ideas don't just happen out of nowhere. Or do they? 12 months ago my landlord came to me with an offer: they wanted to sell the place I was renting, and they’d give me a surprising amount of money if I could be out with just a few days notice. Pulling that off though meant finding somewhere to keep all of my stuff while I looked for a new place to live. Within the first hour of searching, I discovered how antiquated the process of finding and booking self-storage is.<p>After digging in, I found that for many facility owners having the time, technical skills, and frankly, money, to piece together a system that lets customers rent online, is hard. If you’ve ever tried to find self storage yourself, you probably noticed that many of the small operators have horrendous websites that are slow, non-responsive, and don’t give you the ability to rent without picking up the phone. After talking to self storage owners directly, I also learned that they spend hours every single day doing back-office work that really should, and could be automated.<p>Since I was actively working on side projects, and I had just had this terrible experience trying to rent a storage unit, I decided to focus my time diving even further into the self-storage industry. I took time to research the tech used in the industry and connected directly with storage facility owners and operators to get a better understanding of the pain points of this large and, what appeared to be, technologically-backwards industry. Wanting to take the idea of “building something people want” a bit more seriously, I joined the Y Combinator’s online Startup School program (before it became a Continuous Program) to work more formally on what would later become OpenUnit. After Startup School, I was invited to take this idea out to Mountain View for an interview with YC. Two months later Lucas and I had quit our jobs, the band was back together, and we were on our way to California.<p>The initial idea was to build a marketplace that makes it easy for people to find and instantly rent a storage unit online. But after speaking with more storage operators and hearing the same themes over and over again, we thought, why not be even more ambitious? Why not build a product that solves the problems of the renters AND facility owners? It turns out that self-storage generates $48 billion in rental revenue a year. But, while you might see big players - Public Storage, Extra Space, CubeSmart etc. — in downtown cores, 74% of all self storage facilities are small and self-reliant. And they can’t afford expensive software.<p>As a result, the bad software they end up using creates terrible business inefficiencies and a lackluster customer experience. When I rented my storage unit, I experienced this firsthand. For the most part, large enterprises can spend enough money patching together systems to deliver an acceptable customer experience. But, for mom-and-pop operations, that is done with shoe leather - or it’s not done at all. Instead of just building a marketplace, we were going to build a truly affordable, all-in-one management ecosystem.<p>So here we are. We provide self-storage facilities exactly what they need — merchant solutions, lease agreements, websites and more to provide an amazing customer experience. We designed OpenUnit so that a typical facility can get up and running fast and with zero paperwork. We also tailored the features we’re offering to meet the unique needs of small operators first. As a result of this, our hope is that the entire experience is less overwhelming than competing management tools. Our enterprise package for facilities with >5 properties is 15% more affordable than anything else we’ve seen in the market and customers get a lot more than what’s included with the other storage solutions.<p>Surprisingly, we're seeing an increased level of interest due to coronavirus. Many operators and facilities are looking to adopt a contactless move-in process (think eSignatures for rental agreements, with customers managing their own profiles/information and payment methods), which is something we’ve kept in-mind, and can be accomplished out of the box with OpenUnit, keeping employees and customers safe.<p>As a team, we’re firmly focused on the web: the core technology that powers our applications on all platforms. It’s hard to pin down a name for this stack, but it’s a majestic monolith, built using Ruby on Rails. We embrace a “HTML over the wire” architecture, of server-rendered HTML, and “sprinkle” bits of interactive JavaScript. Season with Redis and ElasticSearch, we should have all we’ll ever need. For the foreseeable future anyways. We’re taking a privacy-first approach to customer data and use lockbox, which aims to make encryption as friendly and intuitive as possible for Rails.<p>If you have experience or if you have close friends, relatives, or colleagues that are in the storage space, please reach out! We're keen to get the community's input, in the comments below or at [email protected]. After reading this, don’t be surprised if you start to notice the number of self-storage facilities in your city.<p>Thanks so much, and we can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
Upvote: | 133 |
Title: You need mottos. There's nothing like a good motto to keep you directed toward your goals [1]. What’s your best motto? Thank you!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/changepower/201508/9-reasons-you-need-personal-motto" rel="nofollow">https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/changepower/201508/9...</a>
Upvote: | 212 |
Title: HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. are all established communities with users. How do you start a community when you don't have any users?
Upvote: | 128 |
Title: I've been programming for a while purely as a hobbyist for many years and as a professional for less. I've come to realize I'm not very good at it and thats unlikely to change. I have basically no CS knowledge and am not even really that great with the "practical" stuff despite having been at it for so long. There's not a single language I'd consider myself good with, maybe one or two I can write and maybe one I'm ok with. I can read most code and I suppose consider myself well read when it comes to tech in general, in that I have very surface level familiarity with all sorts of things many most people have never heard of, although I must stress the "surface level" part. Its good for temporarily sounding smart or experienced, but most of that however is unfortunately useless. I can recall my last interview tripping up on questions about very basic OOP concepts, which you'd think I'd have internalized now and there's no way in hell I'd make it past a phone screen for your average whiteboarding company. I know many people much less experienced or even relatively new who are significantly better at this. I suppose that some people are simply more intelligent or at least more inclined to the proper skills than myslef, which isnt neccesarily good or bad, more of just a fact. I also suppose that I'm an ok "hacker" in that I can get very interested / fixated on certain problems, although my solution is more likely to be a complete mess.<p>Main problem is I'm not sure what quite to do about it. I'm not sure this is a "try harder" type solution, as I've been at it much too long for brute forcing to be realistic, but most of the alternatives seem dreadful. Not sure what options I have given my strengths and weaknesses.
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: I want to make the interview experience better for applicants but have no control over the format or time. There is a lot of criticism of the algo centric approach and I'd like to change that within the confines given to me.
Upvote: | 150 |
Title: I spent most of my undergraduate degree (in applied math/physics) with my head down powering through courses and working a job in the evenings to pay for my education. Over that time, I met a bunch of talented people, many of whom I keep in touch with, but none of whom I could ever see myself working with. Moreover, they're also all engineers as well with skillsets that more or less resemble my own.<p>I'm at a FAANG company at the moment and I'm finding it quite unfulfilling (nothing new here), and for the last several months I've been hacking away on my own projects just to keep honing my skills and to try to figure out what's possible in terms of turning technical know-how into commercial products.<p>The last one I built felt like a relatively solid idea but I quickly realized (a) how much of the difficulty in launching the product depended on having a good network and knowing how to utilize it, and (b) how much I felt poorly equipped to do (a). Moreover, I'm also understanding how deeply reliant tech products are on domain knowledge in the industry they're attempting to push into.<p>The conclusion here seems to be that I'd be far more effective at reaching my goals working in partnership with someone who checks the above boxes (which, in hindsight, was incredibly obvious). The problem I'm having now, though, is that none of my friends are similarly motivated to me, and networking feels nigh-impossible with the COVID-19 situation.<p>Does anyone here have tips on how they meet people and feel out whether there's any professional compatibility – especially in the current situation? While I'm not opposed to just riding this out and trying to network the traditional way when the world reopens, it seems like there has to be a more effective way.
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: I have been in the field for a few years, mostly doing backend development.<p>I'll preface this by saying this field has never been my passion, just a profession I like.<p>I have been having an extremely difficult time with getting and clearing interviews. Screening rounds have become at least 2-3 hour long algorithm solving sessions which can range from dumb (requiring me to know some syntax that I am not allowed to look up) to extremely demanding.<p>System design rounds require me to solve problems that the top engineers in the world spend months on. One question I was asked was "How do you make sure that a celebrity's tweet reaches all of her followers in less than 3 seconds?". I had no idea, I have never handled that kinda scale. In fact most of my work experience is kinda vanilla and boring, so I generally have nothing much to draw on or much to talk about.<p>Also, I'm not talking about FAANGs here. I never even applied to them. I apply to basic CRUD development roles, half of them entry level, and even there, the grilling has become intense, if I even get an interview.<p>I haven't even applied to jobs for weeks now, because in interviews I feel like I'm getting humiliated and I want to apologize and end them half-way.<p>I'm sorry if this is incoherent.<p>I'm sure the problem is me, since other people are doing fine. I need to draw a line and figure out some good indicators of when I should quit this industry, and anyone here who could give a few pointers on that, I would be thankful. I don't want to throw more time and resources into an industry where baseline expectations are something I can't/won't reach.
Upvote: | 155 |
Title: For those who have seen the film on Netflix already; what are your thoughts? I am especially interested in hearing from people involved in any algorithm-driven platforms.<p>This is the first time I have seen such coherent, powerful and accessible explanation on the mechanics of algorithms and negative consequences of social media, and I wonder if this film can be the push that non-technical people need to take a step back and maybe even delete their accounts.<p>Anecdotally, it was my non-technical, Instagram-loving partner who saw this film first and recommended it to me. She re-watched it with me and is now asking serious questions about the platform and her continued use of it. She can't be the only one.<p>What will the cultural impact of this movie be?
Upvote: | 331 |
Title: Memory Pill passively records the last time a medication bottle was opened to prevent over- and underdosing of medications when you cannot remember if you have already taken a scheduled dose.<p>https://www.hackster.io/nickbild/memory-pill-9f6b2e
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: I've know a number of people who were <i>really</i> good at one thing or a handful of interrelated things. That might be a programming language or specific technology, some business domain or something else, but I've never quite figured out how they did it.<p>I've tried the deep dive thing a few times and always come out frustrated. It seems like the important stuff that differentiates the expert from someone with casual knowledge isn't documented. Sometimes it's explained by the knowledge being locked behind a paywall or IP protection of some sort. Sometimes its not, but the knowledge seems to be locked in the brains of a few individuals or organizations and can only be unlocked if your'e lucky enough for them to take you in (employment at a company that specializes in something, or having a mentor type relationship with another expert). On the other hand, a minority of the experts I know are nearly completely self taught and I'm struggling to figure out how to manage. Generally as a hobbysit Like I said every time I've tried to deep dive I reach a point where I'm not sure what I'm missing, where to find it.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I am looking for examples of companies that consist of an ensemble of mainly software engineers (could be mixed skills with hardware, graphic, architecture), that work in a guild like fashion.<p>- They work mostly on internal products, mostly on a project-basis<p>- Are relatively small (<15-20 people) and are primarily a flat, partnership structure<p><i>Do you have any good examples?</i>
Upvote: | 126 |
Title: When you are just starting out and building your team, how do you decide who is actually a co-founder viz-a-viz an early employee with equity
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: searched a few days ago for felons.io,
looked for unique names for simple game
didn't know if I wanted it or not<p>guess godaddy decided for me:
1 days old
Created on 2020-09-16
by GoDaddy.com, LLC<p>just a warning if you have a special name do not use godaddy to check if its available
Upvote: | 1656 |
Title: Called Airbnb today and they said they are REQUIRED to record me (wont talk to me without it) and will NOT allow me to record them (they will hang up if you try)? Totally unfair, just like their service, VRBO anyone?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Howdy HN<p>A teenager I am close with would like to become a computer engineer. Whet resources, books, podcasts, camps, or experiences do you recommend to support this teen's endeavor?
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: I am trying to learn Rust few weeks, but it seems to me a very hard language, to be honest, I never thought only learning a language will be this hard. I am following books and few youtube tutorials. Any suggestions?
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Older people can remember what it was like to be young. Younger people, on the other hand, cannot know first hand what it is to be or grow old. They can only see others around them and get some sense of the struggles, imagining themselves to be immune to those.<p>In your experience, what is it like to be or grow old (whatever your definition of old is) from the physical health aspect and the general frailty of the aging human body?<p>What are the health related struggles that have come into your life or have gotten worse because of increased age and how have you dealt with them?<p>With your experience and knowledge, what would you advise younger people (or even your own younger self of decades past, if you could)?
Upvote: | 247 |
Title: My understanding is that Lego bricks are a system. Their website footer says <i>LEGO System A/S, DK-7190 Billund, Denmark.</i><p>And that in the US systems are not copyrightable: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102<p>Example 1: If someone views https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/product.bi.core.pdf/6259467.pdf (generic airplane), and physically creates the model with Lego bricks, is there copyright infringement?<p>Example 2: If someone looks at a picture of LEGO bricks: https://www.flickr.com/photos/shamisenfred/50193102497/ and builds the same result, is there copyright infringement?<p>If there are no trademarked or registered copyrighted works present in the Lego bricks, is it infringement to then sell that collection of Lego bricks and/or custom generated instructions that use no LEGO brand assets or trademarks with a disclaimer that it is not an official Lego product?
(People are doing this, but the part that’s unclear is <i>“is there copyright on the Lego creation itself, or just the “cookbook” that is the instruction manual and graphics therein?</i>)<p>It is 1000% clear that you cannot reprint LEGO group or anyone else’s instruction book as that would be clear cut copyright infringement. My understanding is that two people could produce instructions that generate the same result as they describe a system for building.<p>So Lego Group and anyone else who creates their own custom instruction manual can have copyright over the manual as an expression, but not the system it builds is my understanding.<p>If you are a Lawyer or know a lawyer who'd be interested in talking more, I'm happy to pay for your time. Make sure your email is on your profile or link to it here. HN has all walks of life so there may be one here!
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Every once in a while there are some good, __in-depth__ replies to posts on HN, worth bookmarking. What are your favourite HN comments?
Upvote: | 342 |
Title: Whose blogs should I read? Can be technical or personal or essays. Basically anything interesting!
Upvote: | 171 |
Title: I am going to get my first salary so I was looking around for investment options. Do you have any advice for someone just starting out? How do you manage your investments? Any apps/services that stand out? Also, any resources for understanding index funds would be great. I know they are a basket of securities but I don't understand why they're traded on the stock market just like a stock. Because if they're traded on the stock market then they're prone to be affected by the forces that affect the stocks.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: It does not make business sense for Apple or Google to allow them for obvious reasons. They get money from in app purchases. If every app was a PWA they would lose a lot of revenue.<p>Even for businesses that are ad supported they are better of with native apps. You can block ads on a PWA very easily because it's a web app. With a mobile app good luck switching the ads off.<p>Now, I get the technical advantages of a PWA but it seems to me that it has failed to take off because of the business reasons above.<p>Is my assessment correct?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Some context for this question: I'm a mechanical engineer by training and I now work in robotics; developing path planning models in a research setting. I didn't have a traditional education in Computer Science. When I look at the computer engineering posts and comments on HN/Reddit, I feel woefully inadequate. I've never used these technologies like Kubernetes, Docker etc and feel out of place.<p>So, how do I write better code? How do I plug my CS foundation to better suit the current scenario of engineering?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I own an old bricks-and-mortar kind of business.
Over the years, I’ve often tried to go a step beyond to help people out in hiring decisions, giving folks a second-chance. This “policy” (if you can call it that) has worked out well exactly once (but a spectacular success). The same policy has turned out quite poorly on several occasions, and twice, disaster.<p>We have an in-house software project.<p>One applicant (call him “Jake”) interviewed rather casually, in dirty clothes. His interview was great. His portfolio was very good. His references responded tersely. I hired him.<p>Jake excelled at the project, worked long hours, and the project made fast progress. He became project lead.<p>After a couple of weeks, Jake surreptitiously “moved in” and started sleeping at the office.<p>After hours there started to be problems. Damage to the walls (~a dozen holes). A tile in the bathroom shattered. One of Jake’s monitors shattered. Complaints from the other building tenants about screaming on the weekends (yes, screaming).<p>(He fixed the walls and replaced the monitor.)<p>The problem is this: during the day, when we’re focused on the software, he’s great. Really great.
When he veers off into his personal past, or if he’s having a bad day, it’s a lot of unresolved parent issues and talk of witchcraft and auras. Then he tells you earnestly that he’s not crazy (he uses the word “crazy” a lot, actually).<p>The seemingly obvious solution is for him to move out. He could easily afford a local apartment. Judging from his responses to my suggestions (and our in-house experience) it may be difficult for him to keep an apartment. I have concerns that his odd behavior might put him in jail (he is also black).<p>Everybody was fine with him at the beginning. His work is still great. Now everyone has become apprehensive about him.<p>So my choices seem like A) Leave him alone, B) Move him out, C) ...I don’t know.
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: Bear Blog (<a href="https://bearblog.dev" rel="nofollow">https://bearblog.dev</a>) has just hit 2000 blogs.<p>Due to the optimization of DB calls, the text-only content (no static files) and Cloudflare's awesome CDN, my single Heroku dyno is running at only 31% capacity.<p>Full stack:
- Django/python running on a Hobby dyno
- All HTML content is generated using Django templates
- Postgres also on a Hobby dyno
- Cloudflare CDN (free)
- Sendgrid for confirmation emails
- LetsEncrypt SSL certs<p>Thought this may be interesting :)
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: There has been hype around hydrogen fuel cells being a source of green power for decades, but the hype cycle is currently ramping up significantly. Hydrogen fuel cell stocks such as PLUG and FCEL have gone up 10x despite the lack of any significant new breakthrough technology and a history of loss making and value destruction.<p>Just today, Bank of America research released a 103 page "Hydrogen Primer" in which they predict that the hydrogen space will generate $2.5 trillion in direct revenues and $11 trillion of indirect infrastructure potential. They believe that a tipping point is coming soon because of the falling cost of renewable energy and electrolysers used to produce "green" hydrogen, as well as better efficiencies in fuel cells.<p>My question is for the experts in the crowd here, either based on engineering experience or on first principles and physics, does this seem likely to you? Why do we really need hydrogen? It seems we are getting to the point where wind power and particularly solar power are now cost effective. Once we have better batteries for storage, what problem do we have left that requires hydrogen to solve? Is this just a giant promotional bubble being pushed by Wall Street and unscrupulous companies trying to sell a dream? I may sound skeptical but I genuinely don't know and would like to hear from people with more expertise.
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: Content creators don't want to leave the platform because of discoverability. The audience doesn't want to leave because of content creators. People say that we should do decentralization like blogs in the past. However, it's hard to be discovered.<p>How about making a platform that crawls the internet for videos and build a recommendation algorithm. Therefore no matter where you host your videos you'll be easily discovered? This seems to fix the problem of discoverability while allowing decentralization or outright another platform to get traction.<p>EDIT : ghgr puts it nicely
> Interesting concept. So you propose to have a landing page
with a selection of videos tailored to the taste of the
visitor? And seamless combining results from YouTube, Vimeo
and others? You would be effectively relegating YouTube to a commoditized CDN for videos.
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: Hi all, I’m Per, co-founder of Scrimba.<p>We are building an interactive video format for teaching and learning how to code. The main benefit is that students can pause the video and edit the code whenever they want.<p>We think this is needed is because over 70% of people who are trying to learn to code today use videos. But since videos aren’t interactive, students end up mirroring the instructors’ code line-by-line in their local code editors. This is time consuming, and it often causes problems with local dev environment setup.<p>Scrimba solves these problems as it enables students to pause the screencast and modify the instructors’ code directly inside the player. So when a Scrimba student feels confused, she jumps into the screencast and plays around with the code (editing, running, debugging) until she’s made sense of it. As a consequence, she learns faster.<p>Technically, this is possible because we have merged the IDE and the video player into one tool. To understand the technology in-depth, please watch this cast: <a href="https://scrimba.com/scrim/cww679T9" rel="nofollow">https://scrimba.com/scrim/cww679T9</a><p>The Scrimba format also opens the way for other features that can further enhance the learning experience, like searching inside videos, in-video hyperlinks, audiovisual code feedback from teachers, remote pair programming between students, and more. The more we work with the format, the more of these opportunities we see. So we have decided to use the format as the backbone for an online coding school as we continue to improve it.<p>After launching a bunch of shorter courses the last couple of years, we launched our first full-degree program this summer. It's called “The Frontend Developer Career Path” and it contains 75 hours of content and 100s of interactive coding challenges. It costs $19 per month and the teachers are well-known instructors like Gary Simon, Cassidy Williams, and Kevin Powell. Students are also paired up in Study Groups, in order to make the online learning experience feel less lonely. So far, over 3000 people from 110 different countries have enrolled.<p>Here’s a link to the course: <a href="https://scrimba.com/learn/frontend" rel="nofollow">https://scrimba.com/learn/frontend</a><p>Fun fact: Scrimba is built entirely in Imba, a programming language that our CTO has created. It’s a Ruby-inspired language that compiles to JavaScript, and it excels at creating high-performant web apps. The first version of Scrimba was created because Sindre wanted a better way to teach Imba. You can learn more about Imba here: <a href="https://www.imba.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imba.io/</a>
Upvote: | 242 |
Title: This is my first time speaking on this subject so I hope I am able to convey my position with reasonable coherence.<p>I learned to build websites around 2011 when I was in my mid 20's. I had been working as a cleaner for some time and had come to realise I needed to escape that particular poverty trap. My father and grandfather were also cleaners for the majority of their working lives and often expressed regret before they passed. After some months self-learning I had amassed the courage to start applying for internships and junior jobs. No luck initially, though eventually I was able to begin a data entry job on a 12 month contract. I was finally able to sit at a desk and have a work assigned email address!<p>Half-way into my contract I organised a dozen or so meetups at Google Campus. There I met people who gave me the inspiration to continue applying for jobs. I was a fish out of water but it was a fantastic time. Finally, after another year or so of searching, I received an offer. I was able to jump in at the deep end had full project ownership over critical projects for several international brands. Over the next year I was able to fit in a wealth of experience and saw my career progress nicely as I jumped from project to project.<p>Eventually I was offered the chance to join a small business services company and lead development of financial systems there. I accepted, and I have been here for over half a decade now with some success. However, I now feel woefully under-experienced compared to my peers and sorely need mentorship.<p>I feel hopelessly trapped and constantly on the precipice of professional and personal catastrophe. I am not fit the for job market as a senior engineer, and I no longer have the financial means to take a step back into a less senior role at a company with a larger engineering team.<p>My scenario is certainly not unique but I have no peers to discuss this issue with so I am reaching out to HN for stern and dispassionate advice.
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: First time entrepreneur here. I am creating a product that will solve address a large potential. The more I think about it and read about startup, I am finding that a key to early and often success is Sales.<p>I am been engineer by choice and engineering manager by profession. I have never done sales. I understand you learn by doing similar to driving. I am a bit talkative but sometime I have hard time not getting bogged down by emotions.<p>How do I get started? Can you share books, videos, tutorials, prior recorded sales call references?<p>Where can I learn about metrics to track? Any ideas?
Upvote: | 865 |
Title: This is a project I've been working on since the start of Covid-19. I built an app so that I don't have to put data into online tools like JWT debugger, JSON formatter, URL decoder, etc...<p><a href="https://devutils.app" rel="nofollow">https://devutils.app</a><p>The app works entirely offline and is open-source. I'm selling the pre-built version of the app to earn some revenue for my time. If you want to try the app but can't afford the price or don't have XCode to build the app, drop me an email (my profile), I'll be happy to provide you a free build.<p>I would love to hear all the feedback/suggestions. Thanks!
Upvote: | 241 |
Title: I have recently developed a keen interest in coding and technology in general. I was suggested by a friend to go through Harvard's CS50, which I did, and now have a decent understanding of some basic data structures and algorithms. Now I want to learn more skills that will help me build projects independently from start to finish, and eventually create my own startup.<p>Since this is YC's official forum, I figured that folks here could give me solid advice on what technologies I should learn to start a startup. I have a vague idea that knowledge about web dev (React, Javascript etc.) and cloud (AWS) is in high demand in industry, but are they the first things I should pick up? What about mobile apps? And blockchain? Where should I start? What area is the easiest to pick up and has the most resources online?<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: My initial thoughts; learn to drive, first aid, a sport, play an instrument, a language, how to manage finances, to speak in front of people.
Upvote: | 254 |
Title: Just trying to understand if this a legitimate violation of HN policy, or if HN is being trolled?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Is there a "Product Hunt for recipes"?<p>I want to be able to filter by time to make and by ingredients required.
Upvote: | 99 |
Title: I have been in my current role for about 6 years. While I wasn't hired for it specifically, my average week has my time split between product management, managing a small team to develop those products, ux design, and front-end JS/Python development. It's really a roll where I am all over the place and I do really enjoy it. However, due to the Covid reality in the world right now I am starting to think my time here is up. How can I find another job that isn't specialized to one specific roll as I really do enjoy being a jack of all trades master of none and would like to continue to do that in my next role. I'm also fairly experienced with 16 years of "jack of all trade" type positions.
Upvote: | 193 |
Title: There is a lot of material out there for teens and older kids.<p>I am curious what material or activities you use for kids ages 6-8 for helping them to learn to think on their own.
Upvote: | 264 |
Title: Hi HN,
We’re Ahmed, Cedric, Matt, and Mike from Narrator (<a href="https://www.narrator.ai" rel="nofollow">https://www.narrator.ai</a>).<p>We’ve built a data platform that transforms all data in a data warehouse into a single 11-column data model and provides tools for analysts to quickly build any table for BI, reporting, and analysis on top of that model.<p>Narrator initially grew out of our experience building a data platform for a team of 40 analysts and data scientists. The data warehouse, modeled as a star schema, grew to over 700 data models from 3000+ raw production tables. Every time we wanted to make a change or build a new analysis, it took forever as we had to deal with managing the complexity of these 700 different models. With all these layers of dependencies and stakeholders constantly demanding more data, we ended up making lots of mistakes (i.e. dashboard metrics not matching). These mistakes led to loss of trust and soon our stakeholders were off buying tools (Heap, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Wave Analytics, etc…) to do their own analysis.<p>With a star schema (also core to recently IPO-ed Snowflake), you build the tables you need for reporting and BI on top of fact tables (what you want to measure, i.e. leads, sales…) and dimension tables (how you want to slice your data, i.e. gender, company, contract size…). Using this approach, the amount of fact and dimension tables grow in size and complexity in relation to the number of questions / datasets / metrics that need to be answered by the business. Over time the rate of new questions increases rapidly and data teams spend more time updating models and debugging mismatched numbers than answering data questions.<p>What if instead of using the hundreds of fact and dimension tables in a star schema, we could use one table with all your customer data modeled as a collection of core customer actions (each a single source of truth), and combine them together to assemble any table at the moment the data analyst needs that table? Numbers would always match (single source of truth), any new question could be answered immediately without waiting on data engineering to build new fact and dimension tables (assembled when the data analyst needs it), and investigating issues would be easy (no nested dependencies of fact and dimension tables that depend on other tables). After several iterations, Narrator was born.<p>Narrator uses a single 11-column table called the Activity Stream to represent all the data in your data warehouse. It’s built from sql transformations that transform a set of raw production tables (for example, Zendesk data) into activities (ticket opened, ticket closed, etc). Each row of the Activity Stream has a customer, a timestamp, an activity name, a unique identifier, and a bit of metadata describing it.<p>Creating any table from this single model made up of activities that don’t obviously relate to each other is hard to imagine. Unlike star schema, we don’t use foreign keys (the direct relationships in relational databases that connect objects, like employee.company_id → company.id) because they don’t always exist when you’re dealing with data in multiple systems.<p>Instead each activity has a customer identifier which we use, along with time, to automatically join within the single table to generate datasets.<p>As an example, imagine you were investigating a single customer who called support. Did they visit the web site before that call? You’d look at that customer’s first web visit, and see if that person called before their next web visit.<p>Now imagine finding all customers who behaved this way per month -- you’d have to take a drastically different approach with your current data tools. Narrator, by contrast, always joins data in terms of behavior. The same approach you take to investigate a single customer applies to all of them. For the above example you’d ask Narrator’s Dataset tool to show all users who visited the website and called before the next visit, grouped by month.<p>We started as a consultancy to build out the approach and prove that this was possible. We supported eight companies per Narrator data analyst, and now we’re excited for more data folks to get their hands on it so y’all can experience the same benefits.<p>We’d love to hear any feedback or answer any questions about our approach. We’ve been using it ourselves in production for three years, but only launched it to the public last week. We’ll answer any comments on this thread and can also set up a video chat for anyone who wants to go more in-depth.
Upvote: | 143 |
Title: Which resources/degree programs/books/projects would you recommend to a person looking to enter the field?
Upvote: | 94 |
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=24651637" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651637</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651638" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651638</a>
Upvote: | 426 |
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: | 175 |
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: | 54 |
Title: It's time for me to use an RSS reader again after 6 years of not using one. I used Feedly back in the day, but I wonder what I should use now.<p>What RSS reader do you use?
Upvote: | 137 |
Title: We use an external company for network management. They've put a Citrix ADC load balancer in front of our web servers, which is also terminating TLS. I'm not sure if it was always like this (before I joined the company) but downloading a 1000 bytes file via HTTP takes ~15ms while the same file via HTTPS takes at least 110ms. The external company ignores this and claims that SSL termination is expensive. I can understand a few ms, but clearly 100ms is rubbish.<p>What do you think folks?
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: I’m a single male living my entire life in a place that’s barely a few steps up from hell.<p>I have some skills and fluent English but:
* Dropped out of high-school
* In my mid-30s now
* Not a good team player yet
* Holding the passport of a country almost nobody wants to deal with<p>I make about USD 2K a month from mostly passive income and have about USD 50K to invest, so I can support myself for a while.<p>I just want to live in a safe, clean country with a non-toxic culture (and preferably a cool climate).<p>What options do I have, apart from landing a lucky job or foreign wife?<p>I can provide more details in the comments, and thank you.
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: Considering it's been 6 months since most office workers have started WFH, this is a question I've been thinking on.<p>Of course, remote work has many benefits such as cutting down on commute times, being able to work at your own schedule, and less office distractions. But one thing I find sorely lacking & so far irreplaceable is the spontaneous interactions that used to happen. You know, water cooler talk, catching up with a friend you run into, side conversations before a meeting etc.<p>I was toying around with the idea of an app that can help you "bump into" your coworkers again, but only when you're on break & want to chat. I was curious if people even had this problem in the first place?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I’m happy to be able to directly attribute my livelihood to Linux, which is kind of a cool thing to think about.<p>Would love to hear other anecdotes as to how others got into tech/Linux.<p>I’m 44 and got my start in 2009, after doing a myriad of other things, like carpentry, aircraft catering, etc.<p>After an injury, I was basically ruled out of any jobs that required consistent physicality, so I hunkered down and decided to just focus in on Linux full-time (I was already somewhat of a Linux hobbyist, but knew I had a lot of learning to do). After about 6 months of self study, I decided I wanted to work for a webhosting company, and that I really wanted to work in the hosting/server/datacenter/Linux environment. So NOC Technician is basically where it’s at for that sort of thing to get a foot in the door.<p>I was hanging out in an IRC channel for a local Linux user group, and lo and behold, there was a guy who worked in a local datacenter/hosting company. I got the manager contact from him, and basically called and emailed and bothered the hell out of him until he relented and said OK come work as an unpaid intern. I worked hard, learned and incredible amount there (they hired me on after a few weeks, albeit very cheaply of course)— DNS/network/webserver/troubleshooting, all the fundamentals, and there were incredibly smart and brilliant people there that I learned from. Those were very cool days.<p>From there I kept learning and have done fairly decently for myself. Good amount of luck on the way probably, sort of right situation/right timing... have worked at two very large ISPs/telecoms in Systems and Server Operations since then.<p>Wanted to share this maybe to also give encouragement to people just to keep trying and working hard and it can work out. Potentially also a good message in this hard time of the Coronavirus.<p>Would love to hear some other foot-in-the-door stories.
Upvote: | 171 |
Title: There are lots of channels that teach beginner level stuff. What about advanced programming concepts?
Upvote: | 147 |
Title: The topic is very important to me, and I believe it should be important for any learner. I read Deep Work and loved it, but I think it is just one step in the right direction. We need to think more about it. How to lose yourself with the book or in your work. That skill that became very rare. I am assuming that there is knowledge out there somewhere that could help. So do you have any tricks for that other than the usual (like quitting social media)?
Upvote: | 115 |
Title: My research tells me that spontaneous conversation in office is one important factor in inspiring new ideas and increasing productivity.<p>I'm studying if there is any strategies to compensate the loss of these conversations in remote working and do people really need a new strategy. So, I have a few questions do ask.<p>1. Do you miss these conversations? Back to the in-office time, when do you usually have a spontaneous chat that is interesting and also meaningful to your work? (eg. After a conference)<p>2. In remote work, have you tried to restore these moments? What did you do? Is it working well?
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: If any.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I know that many HN readers are having their own side-project.<p>My side project [1] became my full-time job. I decided to quit my well-paid full-time job which got me bored (comparing to my own project). I am nowhere near making as much money. Though, we have early traction with a decent growth rate (2x month over month).<p>Just curious how many of you made it to generating revenue for your side-project.<p>[1] https://newscatcherapi.com/
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: As more people become aware of Facebook's deleterious effects on society, will having Facebook on your resume be seen as a liability? Is it already a liability? It's certainly happened to ethically challenged companies before. Former employees of Enron, for example, found it difficult to get work after Enron imploded. Similar reputational damage greeted employees of Arthur Andersen.<p>I'd love to hear from anyone involved in the hiring process at their organization.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hi HN! I made a really quick web app to help people validate their ideas.<p>The app is a simple landing page builder, but every page includes a really simple Yes/No "Are You Interested?" poll.<p>Every vote is recorded and tracked, and if they click yes they are brought to a page where they can submit an email.<p>This makes validating ideas super easy because you can post your link to different communities and get statistically significant results as well as build an email list.<p>Given an hour, you could easily create 50 different landing pages and be able to validate your ideas in bulk.<p>The site (click Sign Up in top right - no cc needed): <a href="https://areyouinterested.co" rel="nofollow">https://areyouinterested.co</a><p>Example landing page (Built in <60s): <a href="https://areyouinterested.co/site/pals-insurance" rel="nofollow">https://areyouinterested.co/site/pals-insurance</a>
Upvote: | 93 |
Title: So I bought a rather sensitive item outside of FB on a retailers' webpage. Thought using private browsing was enough (I always do even for trivial stuff).<p>Now, somehow FB tracked me, found a similar item in FB Marketplace and shows me it in the main app menu as a suggestion next to Marketplace option. Like in this image, but the white Marketplace panel also has a thumbnail: https://brayve.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/echo/fb_menu_revamp2.png [1]<p>I deleted all the stuff from ad preferences, "activity outside FB", turned it off completely. I long-pressed the thumbnail and asked FB not to show it anymore, but it persists.<p>Does the HN crowd know how to disable this crap if asking FB not to show it doesn't cut it? Now I can't open FB in the public... :/<p>[1] Won't post my own screenshot, because image censorship is easy to screw up, I couldn't find a screenshot with such thumbnail on the web.
Upvote: | 145 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>Being locked down with plenty of time in my hands, I clearly noticed a problem that I faced and also felt passionate about tackling.<p>- Excessive screen time in our day-to-day
- Diminishing attention spans<p>It was consistently tough to properly read quality longform content online. From screen related tiredness to having ads and notifications pop up and demand a share of my attention, my focus was compromised.<p>Long story short, I wanted to read longform content that lives online (and there is a ton of high quality out there), in an inherent offline medium, paper :p<p>Fast forward 5 months, we just published the beta of (<a href="https://myscreenbreak.com" rel="nofollow">https://myscreenbreak.com</a>)
We are redesigning webpages from scratch and making them print optimised.<p>While we aim to be able to deliver physical books by q1 2021, our current print-at-home version for single articles and collections can give you an indicative idea of how v1 product will look like.<p>If there are any other paper/book loving weirdos out there, happy to hear and learn from them :)
Upvote: | 204 |
Title: I have temporary access to a monster PC (32core thread ripper + 2x2080ti).<p>I've been playing with deep fakes which is fun (I look good as Neo fighting Morpheus).<p>But what other fun + awesome open source projects can I run with it before I have to give it back?<p>I'm a programmer (making apps, websites, games etc). But don't have a lot of deep learning experience though want to learn.<p>Any suggestions?<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: In the book Coders at Work by Peter Siebel, he asks peter norvig this question:<p>"So is there any essential skill needed to be a programmer? Different domains obviously have different requirements but ultimately is there some commonality to writing code regardless of domain?"<p>Peters answer to this _really_ resonated with me - his first two sentences were "You've got to be able to make progress and then improve on it. That's all you need to be able to do in life."<p>How would you answer this question?
Upvote: | 144 |
Title: Y Combinator runs our annual Work at a Startup Expo as a way of introducing promising YC startups to engineers (and others) who want to learn more about startups and might consider working at one. This year’s event will happen on Thursday, December 3rd and be entirely online, including both the founder pitches and the virtual expo hall:<p><a href="https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-career-expo-s20" rel="nofollow">https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-career-expo-s2...</a><p>The expo is an efficient way to meet a number of great startups all at once, and not have to seek them out yourself. We start the event with rapid pitches by founders -- like Demo Day, but for engineers instead of investors -- to give you a quick way to survey the companies. There is also custom software to let you easily like the ones that stood out, so founders can reach out to you.<p>After the pitches, we open up an expo hall (again, all virtual) to give you a chance to meet founders and early employees, learn more about the domain and technology, and hear about open roles. We’ve been experimenting with the format over the last few months, and recent participants of YC events say it’s just as good as our past in-person events. (Thank goodness!)<p>We aim to have 40 or so YC startups attend and give pitches, with a bias towards ones that have graduated in more recent YC batches (W20, S20). These startups are vetted by YC and have raised a healthy round of funding. A good number of the roles they are hiring for are in engineering and design, but there will also be non-tech roles as well.<p>Working at a startup isn’t for everyone, and many HN users will be the first to point that out. Justin Kan, a former YC partner himself, has this great post on what you will and won’t get out of working at a startup, and it’s pretty accurate: <a href="https://www.atrium.co/blog/work-at-a-startup/" rel="nofollow">https://www.atrium.co/blog/work-at-a-startup/</a><p>That said, we’re finding more people are joining YC startups this year, and for a variety of reasons: to pursue something better aligned with their values, to have a bigger impact through their work, to grow skills in ways that their current jobs won’t allow, and (yes) to seek out “the next big thing”.<p>If you might be considering something new -- or even if you’re just curious to know what’s out there -- we welcome you to join YC and our founders for an informative and efficient evening of networking, job hunting or just seeing if startups are for you.<p><a href="https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-career-expo-s20" rel="nofollow">https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-career-expo-s2...</a>
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Or in other words, when would you recommend using them, and when would you avoid them?
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: Brian here - I am one of the creators of Doppler and I’m pumped (and kinda nervous!) to share it with HN.<p>Doppler is an easy way to manage and share environment variables and secrets -- things like API keys, database credentials, feature flags, and configuration like a port or a hostname. We’ve heard it's “GitHub for secrets”.<p>While working at Uber and small startups, managing app config via env vars really sucked. Simple options like .env files were a nightmare to keep updated. Enterprise tools like HashiCorp Vault and AWS Parameter Store felt like we were stuck using FTP instead of Dropbox!<p>For the past 2 years, we’ve been heads-down building a secrets manager we actually want to use. For our customers, it's now their central source of truth for secrets and app configuration. They use Doppler to quickly organize and sync secrets with teammates and across infra, from local to prod on every stack. It has the features you'd want in a secrets manager, like sharing, audit logs, versioning, and integrations with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Heroku, Docker, Netlify, Laravel Forge, etc.).<p>We’re deeply committed to strong security controls and highly available infra. Best-practices like data tokenization, security driven design, and external pentests help keep us secure: <a href="https://doppler.com/security" rel="nofollow">https://doppler.com/security</a>. And fully managed encrypted fallbacks in your infra means your secrets are always available, even in the rare case we aren’t.<p>To support our community, we’re committed to offering a community plan that's free forever for unlimited users. Paid plans start at $6/seat/month.<p>For visual learners like me, here's a 4-min video of us installing Doppler: <a href="https://vimeo.com/447918575" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/447918575</a>.<p>Take a look if you're curious: <a href="https://doppler.com" rel="nofollow">https://doppler.com</a>. Let us know what you think!
Upvote: | 222 |
Title: Time for another AMA. Previous threads we've done: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts</a>.<p>I'll be here for the next 2.5 hours and then again at around noon for another 2.5 hours. As usual, there are countless possible topics and I'll be guided by whatever you're concerned with but as much as possible I'd like to focus on the meaning and impact of the State Department's latest (October) Visa Bulletin. Please remember that I can't provide legal advice on specific cases for obvious liability reasons because I won't have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and comments and I'll try to do the same in my answers!
Upvote: | 251 |
Title: I know I can film a current newspaper to prove one side, how do I prove the other side? In other words how can I prove the current time of message? I think this should be possible but every idea I come up with, it seems to be possible to fake in the future tense.<p>Is live streaming the only true method? Or am I missing something?
Upvote: | 110 |
Title: Hi there,<p>I have just released my first product: OpenDeck.app.<p>It's 1,200+ startup slides searchable by category: Team, Market, Competition, Funding, etc. You can also download all 60+ decks at once.<p>100% free.<p>Would love some honest feedback as it's my first product and looking at building more.<p>Cheers!
Steph
Upvote: | 203 |
Title: Jan Swillens, the head of the Dutch Military and Information Service (MIVD) advises large organizations not to meet with a smartphone or tablet on the table, because the risk of espionage is too great.<p>(original link, in dutch: <a href="https://www.nu.nl/tech/6083317/mivd-baas-vergader-zonder-smartphone-risico-op-spionage-te-groot.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nu.nl/tech/6083317/mivd-baas-vergader-zonder-sma...</a>)
Upvote: | 204 |
Title: Examples I've noticed so far:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/foone<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/simonw<p>I find this a great feature for keeping track of individual sources.<p>---<p>You can still use the domain without the username to see all submissions:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I know nothing about building houses. I've never even bought a house. However, we bought some land, got an architect to draft up some custom plans, now we're in the bidding phase.<p>What sorts of HVAC systems are out there and as a nerd/engineer, should I want a completely analog system or 'state of the art' HVAC system or something in between?<p>Besides the usual, I'd like as much fine grained control over different parts of the house, at the very least control separately the temperatures in the basement, 1st and 2nd floor.
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: What I mean by system design is to understand seemingly endless options when it comes to data handling on backend side.<p>For example...<p>- Kafka<p>- Rabbitmq<p>- Kinesis<p>- Spark<p>- Elastic search<p>- Map reduce<p>- Bigquery<p>- InfluxDB<p>- Hadoop<p>- Teradata<p>- Snowflake<p>- Databricks<p>...<p>I understand Postgres the best, and would love to know why these and others exist, where do they fit in, why are they better over PSQL and what for, and if they are cloud only what's their alternatives....It seems all of them just store data, which PSQL does too, so what's the difference?
Upvote: | 246 |
Title: Google Drive keeps popping up messages like this:<p>> [redacted]@gmail.com "Mentioned you in [Russian-looking document name]"<p>What gives? Why on Earth would I be notified of documents mentioning me? And how do they know it's me? Is it basically any document containing my email address or something? This seems such an obvious phishing/trojan attempt that I've not clicked on any of them.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Due to the nature of HN, once a post is out of the homepage it more or less falls into oblivion.<p>There had been a lot of good threads over the years, but It's hard for someone late to the party to unearth such gems.<p>Do you have any such threads bookmarked?
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: This is a throwaway account. I'm a programmer in my mid 30s. I love computers and programming but modern office life has become unbearable for me.<p>I can’t stand the ego trips, wars of attrition, power struggles, insecurities and of course the wrong system of incentives that pits people against each other.
Most of the time I feel either extremely frustrated and or angry.<p>I tried accepting that there a things I can’t control and adopt a more stoic approach to it all but it doesn’t seem like I'm succeeding.<p>A lot of people feel this way part of the time but are able to cope. I believe I'm just more susceptible than the average person. I've tried different companies of different scales but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.<p>Some of you might suggest I am depressed and I wouldn’t exclude the possibility but I know depression well and I don’t believe it’s the case. I very content, even happy with everything in my life except work.<p>I did experience serious mental health problems in my 20s and even though I have been stable and functioning for a long time, it’s still there, more or less buried but who knows for how long.<p>I have some network but not enough that I can just abandon the comfort of my salary. I have a family that depends on me and the pressure to provide is there (at least in me).<p>I know some of you escaped the rat race and there are wise people in here. What can I do?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Hi HN! We are Lucia and Jimmy, co-founders at Osmind (<a href="https://www.osmind.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.osmind.org/</a>). We build software that helps mental health doctors treat their patients in evidence-based, data-driven ways. Along the way, we develop better methods of diagnosing and treating people in a personalized manner.<p>Jimmy and I met at Stanford in a healthcare IT class at Stanford last year where I wrapped up my MBA and Jimmy is on leave from medical school. We’ve dedicated our personal and professional efforts to healthcare - I led operations and business at AI-driven neuroscience biotech Verge Genomics (S15) and Jimmy founded multiple healthcare nonprofits across digital health, care delivery, and research. Like many, we’ve seen too many of our loved ones fail to find the right mental health treatment for them. We realized we want to build something to help -- and we’re optimistic that neuroscience and psychiatry are on the verge of a revolution. We’ve built Osmind to maximize access to innovative mental health treatments for those who need it the most.<p>Over 20M Americans who suffer from treatment-resistant mental health conditions, which means they’ve tried and failed two or more conventional treatments. Oftentimes, finding the right mental health treatment means years of trial & error and suffering. On top of that, patients with treatment-resistant mental health conditions annually cost $900B+ in direct medical spend, twice as much as people with less severe versions of the same conditions. Researchers and doctors just haven’t been able to find mental health therapies that work well (conventional antidepressants have an estimated ~30% effectiveness rate). This is because pharma lacks sufficient understanding of mental health pathophysiology while clinicians lack the right data on what treatments work best for which people.<p>We approach this problem in two ways: 1) we build software for doctors and 2) generate insights for better development of therapies, treatment algorithms, and diagnostics.<p>First, we sell an electronic health record (EHR) to doctors working with treatment-resistant mental health patients. Our EHR enables doctors to measure how patients are doing in between appointments via an integrated patient mobile app to drive personalized, improved clinical decision-making. For example, we can use data science to automatically detect symptom exacerbation or improvement (from patient-reported outcomes or functional metrics such as activity levels) and get them in for treatments at the right time. This is a rarity for EHRs, especially in treatment-resistant mental health, which is known to lack evidence-based practices and consists of a difficult-to-treat patient population. Our EHR also automates administrative tasks such as collecting intake forms and getting reimbursement from insurance companies. Our ultimate goal is to make recommendations to the doctor on what treatments work best for people based on objective criteria such as their past medical history, demographics, and more. That way, doctors can deliver the best possible care, and patients can get better. We launched the software in June and are serving over 125 clinics nationwide covering over 20,000 patients receiving FDA-approved psychedelic medicine, neuromodulation, and general psychiatry treatment.<p>Second, we can extract insights from the software to find better and more precise ways of treating individuals. Our software above aggregates clinical, patient-reported, digital, and biological information, which has never been done at scale in mental health. For example, establishing more objective predictors of depression and correlating them with treatment impact can help us diagnose people more precisely and determine what makes one type of treatment better than the other. We can use this information to better design clinical trials that actually succeed, potentially saving billions of dollars of sunk costs to develop therapies that work. New innovation in mental health is on the horizon with the development of efficacious treatments like ketamine, FDA-approved psychedelic medicines, neuromodulation, digital therapeutics, and more. Long term, the holy grail would be to obtain a biological understanding of mental health and find diagnostics and therapies that can end suffering brought on by mental health issues.<p>We care deeply about patient and clinician privacy as well. Our platform is HIPAA-compliant and protected by end-to-end encryption. We work with independent third parties to verify our compliance and security. Patients own their health data and have the right to all of it. Any analysis we do is always on anonymized and aggregated information and never traceable back to an individual or clinic. We openly state that our mission to advance new treatments to the patients and doctors we work with and have found that the whole field is motivated to help - everyone realizes it’s an all-hands-on-deck movement.<p>Please drop us a line if you’re at all interested in learning more or have any feedback. We’re also hiring software engineers and would be grateful to be in touch with anyone in this community! You can reach us at [email protected].
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: For an architectural overview, view source of the page. Bottom has an ascii diagram of the geometry, and how the program works.<p>For example: "a hexagon is six equilateral triangles (length h) put together around a common center"<p><pre><code> ____ _______
/\ /\ « each bisected \ | / (1/2, √3/2)
/__\/__\ triangle in it h \ | /
\ /\ / is defined by \|/ 60°
\/__\/ h the unit circle » (0,0)</code></pre>
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: Just received [1] a push notification from Uber to support California Prop 22. This seems incredibly scummy, there must be a rule against this in app store.<p>[1]: https://gist.github.com/jridgewell/db36fbb03da337e16db0742358213f6c#file-screenshot-jpg
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: In the 3D printing world, there are plenty of open source choices, allowing manufacturers to drive down costs. On the other hand, it seems 2d printing is stuck with legacy companies with completely closed drivers and hardware (you have to buy cartridges from the original manufacturer).<p>Apart from the nozzle why is it hard to manufacture and/or design?
Upvote: | 288 |
Title: Hi, it's Yury and Steve from Openland (<a href="https://openland.com" rel="nofollow">https://openland.com</a>). We make it easy for any person or business to build a chat community.<p>We believe that in the next five years there will be a massive shift from audiences (top-down content broadcasting) to communities (two-way communication between organizers and members and among members). For members, communities fulfill fundamental social needs: new friendships, safe space for self-expression, learning from peers. For organizers, communities help collect leads, sell, drive customer success, or earn direct revenue from members.<p>Today, building a great community is super hard. Getting people in one place, explaining and enforcing the rules, collecting member info, and interacting in a scalable personalized way takes a huge amount of time.<p>That's why we've built Openland. At its center, there's a new fully-functional messenger, comparable to FB Messenger or WhatsApp. On top of that, we added tools for onboarding, automated messaging, integrations (CRMs, etc.), analytics, and paid memberships. Community automation is what sets Openland apart from other messengers and community platforms.<p>Openland has actually started as a marketplace for urban land. While working on its messaging module, we realized that professional messaging in general is much underdeveloped and our talents are better suited for building a horizontal messenger than a vertical marketplace. We made a pivot shortly after YC graduation and spent the next two years quietly building a new messenger for communities.<p>Since our soft-launch this Summer, 250+ communities launched on Openland around educational programs, professional services, tech products, content creators, and nonprofits. There are also standalone communities built from scratch. The largest community has 14k+ members who've already sent 500k+ messages. Openland is free to use. Today, we take a small revenue cut from member-supported communities and will add premium plans for business-led communities later in the future.<p>If you want to start a community for your customers, students, fans, or followers, we'd be delighted to help. To coordinate, ping Yury at <a href="https://openland.com/yury" rel="nofollow">https://openland.com/yury</a> or email at [email protected].<p>Openland is built on FoundationDB, Node.js, and React Native. For anyone interested in messaging tech, we share our engineering lessons at <a href="https://openland.com/tech" rel="nofollow">https://openland.com/tech</a>.<p>We’d love to hear your thoughts and questions. Do you run a community? Thinking about starting one? What tools have you tried so far? What worked and what didn't?
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: Twitter.com
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: I've been working as a programmer for almost 20 years now. I have experience with the JVM and the Node.js platforms and what's necessary to keep them operational: containerization, cloud computing, databases, etc.<p>I think I've reached an upper bound as a grunt programmer. I tried management as a new direction but it didn't work out, I just can't do it, it makes my life miserable. I noticed however, that I have a unique ability: I really like talking to people (including business folks), wrapping my head around their problems and figuring out robust solutions for them including all the models, documentation and preliminary implementations (POC/MVP). I'm also good at sharing the knowledge (right now I'm working as a tech trainer).<p>I did this a few times as part of some contract work and everybody was very happy with it but I don't know how to scale this into a consulting business. What I want to keep doing is getting projects from 0 to POC/MVP state. I can help putting together teams, figuring out the architecture, and concrete solutions / algorithms, but if I keep doing the grunt work instead, it won't pay that well. So to sum it all up I can apply my skills in an area that has higher returns, but I don't really know how to get there.<p>What should I do to achieve this? What makes this harder is that I'm not living in the USA (I live in Hungary, Europe).<p>Edit: I quit my day job half a year ago. I was thinking about a sabbatical, but people from my network started to appear and now I'm swamped with work. What my goal is to streamline all this and turn regular grunt programming into a specialized format where the ROI is much better.<p>I also have a business partner who has similar ideas but a different skill set, and I'm trying to shape this into something that's more effective.<p>I already have a blog, a GitHub portfolio, and I'm regularly talking on meetups, but you are right, I need to focus on this much more, thanks for this tip!
Upvote: | 227 |
Title: First, RS has informed us that they're migrating some volumes and that'll require downtime:<p>1st of Oct:<p>"The above volume has been selected as available to clone and migrate to prevent being affected by the maintenance listed below. If the volume migration is not completed before October 16 at 22:00 CST, it will be affected by the below work. New volumes and clones of existing volumes will be placed in the new datacenter location and will not be affected by the below work."<p>5 hours ago:<p>"Unfortunately you have one or more volumes that we have not yet been able to bring back online. The following volumes are impacted by this issue:"<p>Then a few minutes ago:<p>"Following extensive troubleshooting we have been unable to bring the host server on which your volume is hosted back online and as such we are unable to recover data for your device.<p>You have the option to deploy a new Cloud Block Storage device."
Upvote: | 134 |
Title: It looks like PostgreSQL is more feature-rich and reliable, though it's written in only 1491985 LOC vs 4466967 LOC for MySQL. How is that?
Upvote: | 119 |
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