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Title: I am Trump opponent. The implications of Trump being disappeared from the modern internet, however, are very troubling. He's a sitting world leader, but Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, Cook and Pichai snap their fingers and he is effectively erased from the internet almost overnight. Of course Twitter should be able to block him, they're a private company, he can go to another network. But when he goes to another network (Parler) it's shut down with 24hrs notice by Amazon. To anyone who's the least bit of a political dissident, alarm bells should be screaming in your ears. If a handful of tech execs can (and will) do this to the US president, what chance would you stand against them, or anyone, if they want to silence you?<p>My technical question: What would it take to stay online in a situation like this? Twitter/Facebook/Reddit etc. are out, running your own network on AWS is out, Cloudflare DDOS protection is probably out.<p>Would it be possible to host your political views on any commercial hosting vendor in this case? Is running a server at home enough, assuming you can avoid DOS somehow? Would you have to start your own ISP, and if so, could your ISP be kicked off the backbone?<p>I'm interested in this as a technical (<i>not political</i>) question: is there any way to speak online if big tech decides they don't want you to?
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: The topics and quality of discussion have really changed over the past week and I'm not that interested in more free speech flame wars or questions like "Would decentralised distributed git-blockchain replace twitter and save us from tyranny if Trump pushed one block to it?"<p>Anyone else feel in a similar way? How are you dealing with this?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: There's likely no way to ask this without sounding dramatic. Governments rise and fall all the time, no one is immune. I do not personally know anyone that has lived through events similar to what's going on in the US right now so I am unprepared if the destabilizing events happening in the US right now keep escalating.<p>What can I do to prepare myself for potential further instability?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Because the role varies across companies, and could be vastly different between mainly tech vs non-tech companies,
could you provide the industry the company operates in as well?
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: I recently saw that some Google employees are attempting to unionize and someone mentioned that Google's customers wish they could unionize.<p>That lead me to wonder: Could Google's customers form some sort of union and attempt to hold discussions with Google?<p>On the one hand I think it would in Google's interests to do everything to prevent having another party to have to negotiate with. On the other hand, if there was a union of customers and they occasionally demanded something everyone thinks is reasonable in the press, that may start something. Especially if Google caves on some of these issues.<p>What do you think?
Upvote: | 336 |
Title: My kids are in lockdown homeschooling, and sitting in on some of the live lessons you can see the cracks - very slow, kids moving at different paces, and much much harder for teacher to see who is keeping up and not.<p>Yet my recently hired collegue insists he spent more time learning from Youtube than from lectures at "proper" university.<p>There is quality "content" out there - but how do we ensure "mastery" is achieved (ie the concepts understood). It seems quite feasible but who is working on it? What are the impacts when we go back to normal?<p>What as time constrained parent should I look at? (beside spending "quality" time with them. They don't like that :-)<p>PS
There are seemingly complete areas like thenational.academy or khanacademy but I am not sure how they linknsubjects to syllabus (especially US/UK syllabuses)
Upvote: | 144 |
Title: I'm just curious how we trust companies such as Signal, Telegram, Mozilla, that claim they don't store and sell our data?<p>Thank you
Upvote: | 264 |
Title: It is often mentioned that Software Engineer salaries in Europe are significantly lower compared to US salaries, even adjusting for lower Cost of Living.<p>The consensus on why that is seems to be:
* Individual contributors in Europe are not as valued as much as managerial professions, due to cultural/historical reasons<p>* Salaries in the US are skewed due to the presence of FAANG companies and VC money, which inflate salaries through the large amount of capital they inject in the system<p>* Europe has less freedom of enterprise (debatable), is in general more risk averse, and has a less dynamic job market (more difficult to fire lower performers), which results in lower wages to compensate for these factors.<p>Reasons aside, how can the European tech job market become more competitive?
Upvote: | 392 |
Title: Hi HN, I'm curious to see what cool things everyone's building. What side projects are you developing? What are you applying to HN with?
Upvote: | 529 |
Title: I remember I was using Google login to login to my Dropbox and in the last year or so Dropbox started asking me to access my contacts in Google. I would always deny access and still manage to successfully login. Yesterday I tried the same but with no luck. I contacted Dropbox support and this is their reply:<p>> I'm afraid that is not possible at the time. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.<p>Interesting that they chose this route when users are getting more and more privacy-aware.
Upvote: | 618 |
Title: I am trying to convince people to switch to Signal. I am not able to post signal.org link. Moderators / Administrators are approving the posts.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Mac app can't connect, iOS app doesn't send or receive any messages, a friend has the same problem.
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: Dear HN,<p>I’m feeling a deep sense of gratitude this morning, and wanted to share it with you all.<p>On this day in 2013, the Webflow co-founders were huddled around our usual desk that we claimed every early morning at the Hacker Dojo (a co-working space) in Mountain View, working like hell into the evenings to get something off the ground.<p>We had quit our jobs about 6 months prior, and totally underestimated how long it would take to build even a beta. I had personally convinced my wife that we’d only have to be income-less for 3 months – the amount of savings we had in the bank – but that time had now doubled, and those savings were long gone.<p>The Kickstarter campaign we had poured all of our savings into producing had fallen through, never even making it live because we hadn’t read the Terms of Service to learn that they didn’t allow SaaS subscriptions to be funded. We had high hopes about getting into YC for the winter batch, but were rejected since we only had a non-functional demo of a product and zero traction.<p>On top of all that, my oldest daughter (3yo then) was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, requiring expensive surgery that didn’t get much help from our cheap “catastrophic” health insurance plan with an ultra-high deductible. Credit card cash advances became the way we were paying for rent and food.<p>So with all this, we started contingency planning to try to get our old jobs back. As a last ditch effort, we sold two of our cars and pulled out what equity we had in them to buy a little more runway. Then we had to come to terms that we couldn’t actually build a full product in the time we had left, and decided that the best we could do was to create a demo or playground that could hint at what the future product could be – and hope for the best.<p>In March of 2013, we finally finished that demo and put it up live. It’s still there: <a href="http://playground.webflow.com/" rel="nofollow">http://playground.webflow.com/</a><p>Now came the time to get users. We were targeting mostly designers and non-technical folks – so we posted it on Digg (heh, remember those days?), Reddit, and several designer-centric forums. But none of those posts got any meaningful traction. We were at a loss.<p>Then, with tempered expectations about how a visual development tool for designers would be received in the hacker community, we posted here to HN. The title was “Show HN: Webflow – design responsive websites visually” [1] and we crossed our fingers really hard at this last-ditch effort.<p>What happened next was nothing short of life-changing. The post took off like wildfire, staying at #1 for the entire day. Incredible words of encouragement were all over the comments. Over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list. VentureBeat wrote a story about us that same day. Tons of people started talking about Webflow on Twitter, Reddit, etc as a result. This led to a ton of word of mouth and even more signups.<p>This amazing traction helped us get into YC several months later, gave us momentum to raise some funding from some angel investors, and most importantly gave us the confidence that we were truly on to something that can be really valuable for the world.<p>Since then, Webflow has grown to millions of users, over a hundred thousand customers, and over 200 team members. I still have to pinch myself when I see that Webflow has somehow become one of the top YC companies of all time. Out of our customers, tens of thousands use Webflow exclusively to make a living – to run an agency, build websites and light applications, create websites for clients, or for their own startups. Tons of YC startups (e.g. lattice.com, hellosign.com, many many more) now use Webflow to run their marketing.<p>I’m 1000% convinced that if that HN post did not take off, we would have gone back to our jobs and that early Webflow demo would have been a mere mention on our resumes somewhere. Thousands of people wouldn’t be empowered to build for the web the way they can now. I can’t imagine what that alternate future would be like, and it hinged seemingly on just one submission to this community.<p>So this is a very belated, but very huge THANK YOU to HN for being kind to a trio of co-founders who wanted to make something valuable for the world, and were at the end of their rope in many ways. You gave us confidence, hope, encouragement, and a lifeline that got us through the lows of building a startup.<p>Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499</a>
Upvote: | 1364 |
Title: How did you discover the role? Did you apply through the careers site or a job board? Have you even heard back? What level of experience do you have?<p>Just curious how the year has started for people looking for a new role.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Signal has been built by whatsapp co-founder, why did they choosed to use java and not erlang like they did for whatsapp?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: 3:40pm every day my wifi loses internet access. My devices remain connected to the network, but all traffic dies. Almost exactly 1 minute later everything is resumed. I have no idea what the cause could be.<p>How could I begin investigating this? I have a spare Raspberry Pi and and old Android phone at my disposal, and some programming competency.
Upvote: | 308 |
Title: My small AWS account which I use to handle emails from web applications and sites is not allowing me to log in anymore. ( i need to pay a small bill since that VISA is expired, which requires login)<p>I know my credentials and i can access my email. OTP is always successfull ( One Time Password).<p>I have my phone with me, but no notifications coming in ( I have never enabled MFA on this account, and i'm not receiving any SMS)<p>Every customer support issue directs me to urls where I need to login, but I can't.<p>Is there a way to let them call me and verifying my account without doing that verification step? Because that's literally the issue.<p>Or any other advice? ( It's a small account, but it will give me a lot of hassle and errors if i have to reconfigure every website/webapp and approve every email again. Setting me back for > 2-3 days)<p>Edit:<p>Thank you all!<p>I changed the default SMS app ( the default was the normal one for Android) and it showed me a lot of missed messages, including OTP ones from Amazon.
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: I know VMs don't work for it yet. How has been otherwise programming on a mac with arm chip?
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: I feel frugality is one of the most important points for startups and entrepreneur. I'm curious to hear more from you guys regarding this, as what's your take on frugality and any other need/must to have qualities to be a successful entrepreneur?
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: Hey everyone<p>I've heard countless times through posts or videos about advice for programmers. One of the most frequent advice is to find a mentor, preferrably someone you look up to that can help you in getting better at your skills by evaluating your work and giving you advice based on his/hers experience throughout your career.<p>I'm from a small town with not that many people who I'm able to relate to and it seems that the internet is a good solution for my problem<p>My question is how do I develop such a relationship with a person through the internet without being pedantic or straight up rude?<p>Would love to hear your advice and experience<p>Thanks
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I am looking for examples of open source projects showcasing best in class use of Golang. It doesn’t need to be the famous products we all know about.<p>I am looking at examples of real world professional usage for somebody already familiar with the language constructs and syntax.
Upvote: | 199 |
Title: JavaScript implementation of the famous `10 print chr$(205.5+rnd(1)) goto 10` one line of BASIC code.<p>data:text/html,<script>a=()=>{document.write(Math.random()<0.5?'\u2571':'\u2572');document.body.style.cssText="margin:0;padding:0;font-family:monospace;word-break:break-word;font-size:3em;letter-spacing:0;font-stretch:ultra-expanded"};update=()=>{a();window.requestAnimationFrame(update)};update()</script><p>Copy and paste the above "link" in your browser.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I've noticed a trend in technical material being authored on Medium behind a registration wall. Are people really generating enough revenue to warrant publishing tech articles on Medium to offset the greater good of making the material broadly available?<p>Gist offers public visibility and commenting without the requisite barrier to entry.<p>Thoughts?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I'm no more productive at work. I produce in a week the same amount of code I used to produce in a day before the pandemic.<p>Am I alone to feel work-from-home made things worse?
Upvote: | 702 |
Title: Hi HN, we are Jay and Frank from Seed (<a href="https://seed.run" rel="nofollow">https://seed.run</a>).<p>We've built a service that makes it easy to manage a CI/CD pipeline for serverless apps on AWS. There are no build scripts and our custom deployment infrastructure can speed up your deployments almost 100x by incrementally deploying your services and Lambda functions.<p>For some background, Serverless is an execution model where you send a cloud provider (AWS in this case), a piece of code (called an AWS Lambda function). The cloud provider is responsible for executing it and scaling it to respond to the traffic needs. And you are billed for the exact number of milliseconds of execution.<p>Back in 2016 we were really excited to discover serverless and the idea that you could just focus on your code. So we wrote a guide to show people how to build full-stack serverless applications — <a href="https://serverless-stack.com" rel="nofollow">https://serverless-stack.com</a>. But once we started using serverless internally, we started hitting all the operational issues that come with it.<p>Serverless Framework apps are typically made up of multiple services (20-40), where each service might have 10-20 Lambda functions. To deploy a service, you need to package each Lambda function (generate a zip of the source). This can take 3-5 mins. So the entire app might take over 45 mins to deploy!<p>To fix this, people write scripts to deploy services concurrently. But some might need to be deployed after others, or in a specific order. And if a large number of services are deployed concurrently, you tend to run into rate-limit errors (at least in the AWS case)—meaning your scripts need to handle retries. Your services might also be deployed to multiple environments in different AWS accounts, or regions. It gets complicated! Managing a CI/CD pipeline for these apps can be difficult, and the build scripts can get large and hard to maintain.<p>We spoke to folks in the community who were using serverless in production and found that this was a common issue, so we decided to fix it. We've built a fully-managed CI/CD pipeline specifically for Serverless Framework and CDK apps on AWS. We support deploying to multiple environments, regions, using most common git workflows. There's no need for a build script. You connect your git repo, point to the services, add your environments, and specify the order in which you want your services to be deployed. And Seed does the rest. It'll concurrently and reliably (handle any retries) deploy all your services. It'll also remove the services reliably when a branch is removed or a PR is closed.<p>Recently we launched incremental deploys, which can really speed up deployments. We do this by checking which services have been updated, and which of the Lambda functions in those services need to be deployed. We internally store the checksums for the Lambda function packages and concurrently do these checks. We then deploy only those Lambda functions that've been updated. We've also optimized the way the dependencies (node_modules) in your apps are cached and installed. We download and restore them asynchronously, so they are not blocking the build steps.<p>Since our launch in 2017, hundreds of teams rely on Seed everyday to deploy their serverless apps. Our pricing plans are based on the number of build minutes you use and we do not charge extra for the number of concurrent builds. We also have a great free tier — <a href="https://seed.run/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://seed.run/pricing</a><p>Thank you for reading about us. We would love to hear what you think and how we can improve Seed, or serverless in general!
Upvote: | 178 |
Title: Hey everyone! My name is Laila and with my co-founder Iliana I’m building Manara (<a href="https://www.manara.tech/" rel="nofollow">https://www.manara.tech/</a>). We support software engineers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to get great jobs at tech companies worldwide. These companies appreciate being connected to skilled talent that is diverse and inclusive (50% of our engineers are women).<p>I grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza. My dream was to become a Silicon Valley software engineer. Eventually I hacked my way there successfully, becoming a software engineer at Nvidia. I like to joke that the hardest part wasn’t escaping Gaza in the middle of the 2014 war, but rather, my first interviews... which I totally bombed. ;)<p>Once I got to Silicon Valley, I was surprised at the lack of women. In Gaza, more women study computer science than men! I was also surprised to learn how hard it was for companies in Silicon Valley to attract the talent we needed. During interviews with candidates I’d often think, “I wish I could hire my friends in Gaza. They’d be great.”<p>That’s when I re-connected with Iliana. She and I had met in Gaza when she was running Gaza Sky Geeks (GSG), the first startup accelerator in Gaza. Her work was widely covered and has a few threads on HN including <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858963" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858963</a>. Iliana asked me “How can we produce more success stories like yours?”<p>I told her that engineers in the MENA region don't lack talent, but they lack other ingredients. They're mostly not aware of opportunities outside their region, and even if they are aware, they think you have to be a genius to work at a company like Google. Also, they have no idea what sorts of resumes recruiters want to see and don't have brand names to put on them. They don't have referral networks to get their foot in the door. And they're completely unprepared for the style of interviews that tech companies go for. As we talked further, it became clear that all of these problems would be fixable with the right kind of coaching and support, and that bringing this growing talent pool to the global job marketplace would benefit both sides (accelerating the success of global companies, while redistributing wealth to the region).<p>We developed an approach to address those gaps - and it worked. Just last week, 67% of the people we referred to Google for internships made it past the hiring committee (they’re now waiting for their job offers, so if you work at Google and have internship headcount, let us know!) We’ve heard Google interviewers say several times, “This is the best junior engineering interview I’ve ever done.”<p>I want to emphasize that we are <i>not</i> a zero-to-hero bootcamp. Manara is a career accelerator for skilled software engineers at all levels with a focus on junior engineers. Students learn the technical and soft skills they need to pass interviews and get introductions to companies with jobs that are either remote or on-site (in Europe or Canada). We charge an affordable fee to both candidates and companies, only if a successful match is made.<p>We focus on MENA (and specifically Arabic-speaking countries in the region) for a few reasons. On the business side, that's where we're from and where our connections are, so we understand the dynamics and have comparative advantage there. Second, the region has a huge opportunity: the youngest population in the world, 2x more university graduates than 10 years ago, women studying computer science at high rates (in some countries more women study CS than men: 52% in Palestine, 62% in Tunisia, 70% in Qatar), and so on. Third, it lends itself to scale. Our graduates have a high sense of affiliation and loyalty to the region, which means that as soon as we place 1 candidate at a company that’s growing, s/he comes back to us looking for 3 more to hire.<p>But we’re not building Manara just for business reasons; rather, we were motivated to launch Manara for social impact reasons. The unemployment rate for recent college grads is ~60%; for women who studied CS, it can be as high as 83%. It pains us personally to see highly talented friends of ours struggling to find (meaningful) work. We originally planned to build Manara as a non-profit, but after <i>lots</i> of research, we realized that a social enterprise approach would better support our mission: the pressure of becoming self-sustainable forces sharper thinking and execution, and will make it possible for us to deliver this solution at scale.<p>A powerful part of our impact is the community we are building. Students study in cohorts. Within each cohort, they compete to see who can solve more coding problems, and form strong bonds and support each other. Students also meet volunteers from tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Wayfair, Stripe, etc for mentorship and mock interviews once they achieve certain milestones (e.g., 100 questions on Leetcode). This leads to high motivation and retention. It also gives them access to professional networks like those Americans have when graduating from universities like Stanford. Often these networks later help them with their job hunting: just last week, a candidate got an interview at Uber thanks to a referral from one of our volunteers who works there.<p>Our volunteers love the chance to use their professional skills to mentor engineers from untraditional backgrounds. Several told us that they spent years looking for an effective way to contribute. One recently wrote to us, “I'm in awe of the work Manara is doing. I love interacting with my mentee and providing mock interviews - so thank you for giving me a platform to be able to support these students.”<p>If you're hiring, check out <a href="https://www.manara.tech/hire-engineers" rel="nofollow">https://www.manara.tech/hire-engineers</a>. If you'd like to get involved or join our newsletter, check out <a href="https://www.manara.tech/get-involved" rel="nofollow">https://www.manara.tech/get-involved</a>. Most importantly, we can't wait to hear what you think, wherever in the world you might be.<p>Over to you, HN!
Upvote: | 202 |
Title: Can be super esoteric or super generalized, I love it when I get them, or when I just learn something new.
Upvote: | 740 |
Title: To me it just seems simply impossible to start a side business while having a job. Between general life things, health, work and family/significant other, there seems to be barely any time to work on a side business let alone launch one and make it successful. If you have, how did you do it?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: I have a life science and computer science background. Given the increasing interest in biotechnology, synthetic biology, and life extension research on this site, I am considering building out a hacker news style discussion board for biology, with an emphasis on biotechnology and bioengineering.<p>I have noticed a lot of discussions related to life science topics on HN tend to be overly speculative, poorly grounded in empirical research, or simply pseudoscientific. The level of biochemical knowledge here is rather inconsistent compared to say, CS or physics. Most of the time the conversation is merely parroting existing popular science buzzwords, with no real understanding of scale, difficulty, or time to market. I hope by making a new platform that is life science focused rather than on software (yes I am aware HN isn't exclusively for software discussions only), there can be greater agglomeration effects for biotechnology research, akin to what hacker news have done for promoting internet startups.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I’m Rami, cofounder of Finmark (<a href="https://finmark.com/" rel="nofollow">https://finmark.com/</a>). We make it simple for companies to manage their runway, hiring, and cash.<p>Three years ago a bad financial model almost killed my last company. A miscalculation in our behemoth of a financial model led us to overestimate the amount of cash we had coming in, and in turn, to overspend. When we finally discovered the error after 5 months, we were forced to shift from aggressive hiring to aggressive cost cutting and had to lay off employees.<p>We were able to course-correct and sold the company successfully in 2019, but I kept coming back to how difficult and time-consuming financial modeling is for founders. So after taking some time off to recharge post acquisition, I pulled my old team together to start Finmark.<p>We built Finmark so all founders, not just finance pros, can easily create, update, and share custom financial models without having to spend weeks laboring over complex spreadsheets. While the flexibility spreadsheets afford is great, they are also susceptible to human error, challenging for collaboration and version control, and time-consuming to create and maintain.<p>Finmark takes complex financial concepts and calculations, distills them down into a simple dashboard, and makes it easy for startups to create and share their financial plans, manage burn rate and cash, forecast revenue and expenses, and plan for fundraising<p>Finmark is modular, so rather than using a template that might not be a great fit for your startup, you’re building a completely custom model based on your individual business needs. Finmark integrates with your entire stack to reconcile your actuals without manual data entry. It is also very easy to create, compare, and share as many different scenarios as you’d like, e.g. a base plan, upside plan, and downside plan.<p>Since launching in Fall 2020 we’ve had over 1,000 companies sign up for our waitlist, and have onboarded over 400 companies so far.<p>Subscriptions start at $25/month and increase based on a company’s monthly revenue. You can check out our pricing calculator here: <a href="https://finmark.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://finmark.com/pricing/</a><p>We are skipping the waitlist for anyone signing up from HN. Follow this link for a 30 day free trial: <a href="https://hubs.li/H0Fc7Ss0" rel="nofollow">https://hubs.li/H0Fc7Ss0</a>. We're looking forward to your comments and are eager to hear your feedback on Finmark and your experiences with financial modeling in general!
Upvote: | 191 |
Title: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/</a><p>Some unverified Twitter chatter talking about unwanted legal attention after pumping up GameStop stock:<p><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/wsbmod" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.twitter.com/wsbmod</a>
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: I'm bored/disappointed with all the major tech companies, including Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Intel, Twitter, Zoom, Slack, Amazon, Microsoft, pretty much all the unicorns that come out of Silicon Slopes, and several more.<p>Innovation largely seems to have stopped. Products and services shut down. Walls put up. Costs inflated. Privacy deflated. Overall lower user experience and satisfaction.<p>It's pretty discouraging. So tell me, what companies are you excited about and why? Who's actually making a positive difference and changing the world for good these days?<p>* Non-profits count too.<p>* Yes there are some exceptions (e.g. Apple's M1 chip; Google's Go language continues to get better) but on the whole these advances seem minor considering the companies' nearly infinite size and resources.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Amazon aws and related services can charge you a rate per email, or per unit time of computation, so why can't news sites just charge you $0.01 to read an article, or even half that?
Upvote: | 109 |
Title: Are you in a job that you love and get paid well? What do you do and what do you love about it?<p>Disclaimer: I am currently a scrum master/software engineer in a team that has a lot of pressure. I haven't had a 'relaxing' holiday without worries in over 12 months and so I'm considering a change. I want to understand if there exists a well paid, comfortable position in this stress-saturated industry.
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: Hi, I'm 19yo. I bootstrapped a SaaS in March last year together with a friend (he does sales, I do engineering). Currently we are at 250k ARR and growing fast. (Based in Netherlands).<p>I'm sharing this because I'm looking for people who went through a similar situation. I went from "coding in my bedroom next to my university study" to "doing technical interviews with senior engineers" and "enterprise sales to c-level people" within a year. I do like to push myself way beyond my comfort zone (it's my go-to strategy for learning new stuff) but sometimes it is quite overwhelming. Sometimes, when I can take a step back, I realize how insane this situation is.<p>Luckily I have supporting parents and peers, who try to advise where they can, but none of them have experience running a fast growing company.<p>Anyway. If anyone has had a similar experience, please share. If you know a community/network with similar people, please share.
Upvote: | 235 |
Title: I think general assumption is that a high level programming language/tool:
1. protects you from many technical dangers;
2. empowers you to relatively easy implement complex business logic;<p>But does it also strike back with these downsides:
1. limits your ability to create "novel" or technically non-trivial systems;
2. moves you closer to the business and thus forces you to deal with many levels of management that influence not only "what" you program, but sometimes also "how" you do it;<p>Having enough experience with high-level stuff I have this stupid idea that going closer to the OS/metal and wisely choosing tools can somehow protect an engineer from politics and provide an environment with more grunted, real, technical constraints.<p>Anyone did such a switch? Please, let me know how this corresponds with your experience.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Google support is refusing to let us know what happened and not even giving access to retrieve emails to other drive data.<p>We are facing completely hopeless situation where no one is providing us any answers or providing support for PAID service.<p>Can anyone help or provide any clues on how we can talk to actual support team?
Upvote: | 243 |
Title: I often read here of some success stories about people making thousands off of their business idea (usually people who never even got into the 9-5 grind in the first place).<p>99% of the projects I see of these successful people are things that I would personally never pay for and are some very specific things that I would think already have a solution and I'm genuinely surprised that anyone is paying for. Basically they boil down to a web app offering subscription service to make some menial task slightly more comfortable.<p>1. How did you come up with this idea? Is it something you actually care about or found out it would make cash? Personally if I am to make something similar it rather be about something I care about and would use, sadly I don't care about many things.<p>2. How do you actually find the time/motivation to start some side hustle when you spend 8+ hours in work (even if it's from home). Last thing I feel like doing after work is more work.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Hey HN! I’m Andy, founder of Aviron (<a href="https://avironactive.com/" rel="nofollow">https://avironactive.com/</a>). We make a high-intensity version of Peloton for rowing, with competitive games, live races and strength programs. Our content puts a focus on HIIT (high intensity interval training) due to its physical and cognitive benefits.<p>I feel like sometimes this pisses the hardcore rowers off but I’m not a rower, I’m a tech guy. I also think fitness is important and have been working out all of my adult life. Before Aviron, I worked full time and long hours so I did a lot of my thinking during late night gym sessions. Like many people I avoided the rower because not only did I not enjoy cardio but damn that machine was hard and boring. There was a moment at some point in 2016 when I realized I could do something with this. The connected fitness market in the US at that time was small but growing rapidly.<p>Aviron is a rowing machine because it’s the most efficient and effective workout you can have in a short amount of time on one machine. The rowing motion is low impact, engages 85% of muscles, is very difficult and as a result can also be boring. This makes the rowing machine an ideal ‘candidate’ to pair with the gaming-inspired, competitive content I began thinking about in 2016.<p>The research was telling me there was a definite potential market niche I could fill but what I didn't know was that no manufacturer would speak to me. I probably called and emailed 50 manufacturers. I eventually kickstarted a few conversations and finally a relationship, by flying to Taiwan, connecting with a local who could translate, and knocking on doors in person. It sounds reasonable in hindsight but the process to finalizing a production contract start to finish took me a full year. A year of trying to understand the manufacturing landscape, developing relationships and convincing potential suppliers that I would eventually be worth their time.<p>Ultimately my key takeaway is that Taiwanese manufacturing relationships are just that - relationships. Manufacturers are looking for long-term trusting partnerships and they are much less motivated by money than my initial assumption. I’m reminded of this constantly - this month alone I have received emails re: product delays twice - and I stupidly tried to throw money at the problem, in the process offending the Taiwan team by implying they would work harder if money was on the table.<p>Finding and building a solid relationship with a production partner was challenging but I would give it a 7/10 relative to the hurdles that came later. The manufacturer had no experience or interest in getting the machine to work along with our custom android touchscreen. As much as I see myself as a “tech guy”, I don’t have an engineering degree. My dad does and so does my brother but I went the business degree route. Long story short, figuring out the details of making these two pieces work together was a nightmare. Again, in hindsight, it’s kind of cool - I understand my machine inside and out; I’m confident I could take it apart down to the screws and put it back together. I can also work comfortably with an oscilloscope and understand how most of the components work on a typical fitness equipment circuit board - there was a lot of circuit board soldering trial and error at one point.<p>I knew that I was taking on a lot with a software and hardware venture but what nobody tells you is how many miles you’re going to drive and fly when you’re taking on hardware. During our slow tip-toe pivot from B2B to B2C sales, we discovered home customers would find 10x the problems a gym would. There was a week in 2019 I drove to a customer’s home 6 hours away multiple times a week for nearly a month. Each trip I thought we had found the solution; the ride back was crushing. This was one of many problems we faced.<p>I’m happy to be able to say the bugs are mostly worked out! Our customers navigate a 22” touchscreen to browse 250ish content options - like my favorite and the first game we ever developed - Last Hope, an end-of-the-world inspired game where you’re being chased by zombies. As your row to escape the Ai will benchmark your fitness output and adjust the zombies’ speed to maintain a challenging pace for your fitness level.<p>The content for Aviron was developed with strength training and High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) in mind. For example, one of our 6 workouts categories is “Pros vs. Joes”, a program that allows you to compete against pre-recorded Olympians and professional athletes in a race.<p>Our customers are fitness enthusiasts who don’t enjoy long cardio workouts and crave the competitive and challenging pace of activities like CrossFit and F45, at home - especially throughout Covid. HIIT workouts tend to be shorter, have been proven to improve cognitive ability and help slow the aging process via preservation of DNA.<p>To me, the dual cognitive and physical benefits were really key. I began to work out in my teens, physically I felt better and my self esteem improved. Cognitively, I went from dealing with undiagnosed ADHD and struggling my way through school to slowly noticing an improvement. People told me I was “growing out of” ADHD - which is probably partially true - but something clicked when I was researching fitness programming for Aviron. Learning about HIIT and it’s (data proven) benefits, I started to realize that my commitment to consistent and challenging physical fitness had likely paid a large part in my “growing out it” as well.<p>Currently, we have bootstrapped Aviron to a good place; we’ve sold nearly a thousand rowers to gyms, hotels, schools and even Nike headquarters as well as homes. Or churn rate is <1% and our customers are telling us they’re happy. And they’re paying their membership every month so we believe them. :)<p>We are continually working on Aviron to improve the software, content and customer experience so if you have a chance please check us out and let me know what you think. I’m excited to hear from the community. I’ll be hanging out in the comments all day.
Upvote: | 184 |
Title: I run <a href="https://next-episode.net" rel="nofollow">https://next-episode.net</a> (a TV tracking service).<p>As part of my maintenance routine and on a daily basis - I look for newly released trailers for the most popular upcoming shows.<p>A weird pattern I noticed through the years are rogue YouTube channels like this one:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-VJ2EpzBRQMJYLO1fV1X3g/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-VJ2EpzBRQMJYLO1fV1X3g/vid...</a><p>(I've stumbled upon 5-6 channels EXACTLY like this one - same channel and video naming pattern, approximately the same number of videos, just for different shows)<p>Check out 2-3 random trailers. Notice anything out of place?<p>Each and every one of these seemingly innocent TV show trailers have a short video stitched before the actual trailer (and sometimes after as well).<p>These stitched videos are always scary news reports about people being attacked, robbed or murdered.<p>The choice of shows to upload trailers for seems random at first, but if you look closer - those are all relatively obscure and niche shows with fairly small following.<p>To me - it looks like it's a concerted effort by some entity to try and raise (certain?) peoples fears?<p>I'm not sure who or why would be doing this, but I thought it might be a good idea to expose this here for some discussion and further investigation?
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>Michel here with John, Shrif, Jared, Charles, and Chris. We are building an open-source ELT platform that replicates data from any applications, APIs, databases, etc. into your data warehouses, data lakes or databases: <a href="https://airbyte.io" rel="nofollow">https://airbyte.io</a>.<p>I’ve been in data engineering for 11 years. Before Airbyte, I was the head of integrations at Liveramp, where we built and scaled over 1,000 data ingestion connectors to replicate 100TB worth of data every day. John, on the other end, has already built 3 startups with 2 exits. His latest one didn’t work out, though. He spent almost a year building ETL pipelines for an engineering management platform, but he eventually ran out of money before reaching product-market fit.<p>By late 2019, we had known each other for 7 years, and always wanted to work together. When John’s third startup shut down, it was finally the right timing for both of us. And we knew which problem we wanted to address: data integration, and ELT more specifically.<p>We started interviewing Fivetran, Stitchdata, and Matillion’s customers, in order to see if the existing solutions were solving their problems. We learned they all fell short, and always with the same patterns.<p>Some limitations we identified are due to the fact that they are closed source. This prevents them from addressing the long tail of integrations because they will always have a ROI consideration when building and maintaining new connectors. A good example is Fivetran which, after 8 years, offers around 150 connectors. This is not a lot when you look at the number of existing tools out there (more than 10,000). In fact, all their customers that we talked to are building and maintaining their own connectors (along with orchestration, scheduling, monitoring, etc.) in-house, as the connectors they needed were either not supported in the way they needed or not supported at all.<p>Some of those customers also tried to leverage existing open-source solutions, but the quality of the existing connectors is inconsistent, as many haven't been updated in years. Plus, they are not usable out of the box.<p>That’s when we knew we wanted Airbyte to be open-source (MIT license), usable out of the box, and cover the long tail of integrations. By making it trivial to build new connectors on Airbyte in any language (they run as Docker containers), we hope the community will help us build and maintain the long tail of connectors. While open-source also enables us to address all use cases (including internal DBs and APIs), it also allows us to solve the problem inherent to cloud-based solutions: the security and privacy of your data. Companies don’t need to trust yet another 3rd-party vendor. Because it is self-hosted, it will disrupt the pricing of existing solutions.<p>Here’s a 2-minute demo video if you want to check out how it looks: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKDviQrOAbU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKDviQrOAbU</a><p>Airbyte can run on a single node without any external infrastructure. We also integrate with Kubernetes (alpha), and will soon integrate with Airflow so you can run replication tasks across your cluster.<p>Today, our early version supports about 41 sources and 6 destinations (<a href="https://docs.airbyte.io/integrations/destinations" rel="nofollow">https://docs.airbyte.io/integrations/destinations</a>). We’re releasing new connectors (<a href="https://docs.airbyte.io/changelog/connectors" rel="nofollow">https://docs.airbyte.io/changelog/connectors</a>) every week (6 of them have already been contributed by the community). We bootstrapped some connectors using the highest-quality ones from Singer. Our connectors will always remain open-source.<p>Our goal is to solve data integration for as many companies as possible, and the success of Airbyte is predicated on the open-source project becoming loved and ubiquitous. For this reason, we will focus the entirety of 2021 strengthening the open-source edition; we are dedicated to making it amazing for all users. We will eventually create a paid edition (open core model) with enterprise-level features (support, SLA, hosting and management, privacy compliance, role and access management, SSO, etc.) to address the needs of our most demanding users.<p>Give it a spin: <a href="https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte/</a> & <a href="https://demo.airbyte.io" rel="nofollow">https://demo.airbyte.io</a>. Let us know what you think. This is our first time building an open-source technology, so we know we have a lot to learn!
Upvote: | 178 |
Title: Anyone else noticing a widespread internet outage on the East Coast of the US?
Upvote: | 283 |
Title: I'm looking for all around stuff, tech questions, process, business etc.<p>I'll go first:
When interviewing perspective employees, does the entire team participate in the interview process and make a hire / no hire decision as a team?
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: Hey everyone,<p>We’re Connor and Adam and we’re working on Axle Health (<a href="https://www.axlehealth.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.axlehealth.com</a>).<p>We provide an API for sending health professionals to people’s homes to deliver medical services. For example, a telehealth company can use our service to request an in-home blood draw for their patient.<p>Healthcare has traditionally been delivered in an office or hospital. In recent years, telehealth - providing healthcare remotely, without the need for people to come to a healthcare facility - has taken off as technology has improved, but physical tests are still often needed to make
diagnoses, and physical contact is needed to administer treatment. Without physical interaction, telehealth physicians can only handle a subset of common visit reasons. In all other cases they’re required to refer patients to a lab or in-person doctor. As a result of this lack of continuity in the patient’s care journey, most use telehealth platforms for one-off needs like getting a prescription filled. The goal of our platform is to be an extension of the physician in the patient’s home, working on the doctor’s orders to administer physical services that would normally require a visit to a lab or office.<p>I ran across this problem when I moved from New York to Los Angeles. I had received the first dose of a vaccine (not the COVID vaccine, unfortunately) before moving and needed the second on arrival. My only option was to find a new doctor who required me to do a full physical exam before I could receive the second dose. I did it, but needed to take a couple hours off of work. I thought “why can’t I just get this done at home”. It’s not just me, studies show that completion of multi-dose vaccine courses is as low as 33%. Life just gets in the way.<p>After I had my experience, I called up my friend from college, Adam, who worked at UberEats and we started thinking about the economics of bringing care to patients’ homes. The wealthy already have access to in-home healthcare. The question was, could we drive enough operational efficiency and optimization to make this available to everyone while only charging a small per visit fee for companies to use the platform. Solving this problem would have far reaching implications by expanding access to treatment in healthcare deserts, enabling decentralized clinical trials, improving uptake of basic preventive services, and leading to better health outcomes.<p>The operational and technical challenge of sending a health professional to a patient’s home is complex. There are a couple of old line national phlebotomy companies that go in-home, but phlebotomy (drawing blood) is the easy part. When you start moving up the licensure ladder from phlebotomist to medical assistant to licensed practical nurse to registered nurse, their scope of practice expands. Each state has its own laws governing the scope of practice of each of those professionals. For example, our appointment assignment algorithm needs to account for the fact that in Florida a medical assistant can start an IV line, but in California they can’t. We need to ensure each professional has the right mix of supplies for their daily appointments to drive maximum efficiency - a nurse might go from administering an immunotherapy IV at one home to a vaccine at another. Luckily Adam is crazy enough to like these logistical headaches :P<p>But, Adam won’t need to solve these problems manually. We’ve built a good bit of software around matching patients with in-home professionals. The process is fully programmatic meaning partners can use our API to find available services in a zip code, pull time slot availability and pricing by geography, indicate special instructions from the doctor, book visits, and receive visit updates via webhooks. Health professionals from our network use the Axle app to get shift assignments, indicate to patients that they’re en route, and write up any visit notes. Patients can even see their health professional on a map in real time just like an Uber. We want to make the process of getting in-home care as seamless as possible for patients and health professionals.<p>Our API documentation (<a href="https://developers.axlehealth.com" rel="nofollow">https://developers.axlehealth.com</a>) is publicly available. We’re hoping to enable the next generation of healthcare startups by offering them the ability to physically interact with patients, through us. We wanted to make the API as straightforward as possible, so we welcome any feedback on the documentation or our product at large!<p>Thanks for reading!
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I'm sure there are a ton of people asking themselves:<p>> What the heck is happening right now with GameStop?<p>So if someone could provide a straightforward explanation, I'm sure a lot of people would be grateful.
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Hello HN! We’re Shaw [sterwill] and Doug [doug_neumann] and today we’re very excited to share Arpio with you (<a href="https://arpio.io" rel="nofollow">https://arpio.io</a>). Arpio is a SaaS that protects AWS environments from downtime by making it easy to recover from outages, ransomware, cyber-attacks, and human error.<p>What that means is that when critical AWS services go down (like the Kinesis outage in November [0]), Arpio can launch identical workloads in a healthy region. Or if a bad actor does bad things in an AWS environment (like Codespaces [1] or Webex Teams [2]), Arpio can quickly restore everything to an alternate AWS account.<p>Our story goes back to the big S3 outage of 2017. In February that year an AWS employee made a typo at the command line, and inadvertently took down much of AWS’s Northern Virginia region. That outage lasted 5 hours, and we were among the thousands of companies impacted.<p>All outages suck, but the timing on this one was particularly bad for our business. And worse, we had no control -- all we could do was wait for Amazon to get us back online. As you can imagine, the execs weren’t exactly happy about that...<p>With Arpio, we’re building the solution we wish we’d had back then. Arpio maintains an exact replica of your production AWS environment in a different region (that you choose) and optionally in a locked-down AWS account (that you own).<p>This recovery environment includes your data and your infrastructure, and it’s updated frequently as your environment evolves. It’s also checkpointed, so you can roll back to a prior state to recover from data corruption or ransomware. And when you aren’t using it, it’s dormant, so you don’t have to pay AWS for resources you don’t need.<p>But when you need it (or want to test it), Arpio can have it up and running in a few minutes.<p>Disaster recovery is usually custom-engineered for a given workload. With Arpio, we’re building a general-purpose solution that works for most AWS workloads. We handle the complexity ensuring every route table is rewired, every security group rule is correct, every private IP address is preserved, and every database hostname is aliased. And handling that complexity makes Arpio simple to implement. We can often get new customers onboarded in under an hour.<p>Arpio works today with EC2, EBS, RDS, ECS, ECR, ELB, VPC, IAM, ACM, Autoscaling, Cognito, ElastiCache, and CloudWatch. We’re delivering Beanstalk and EFS support in the coming weeks. If we don’t yet support your environment, drop a comment below - we’d love to get your feedback on what we should build next.<p>We encourage you to take it for a spin. Or if you’re up for a chat, send me a note (doug[at]arpio.io) - I’d love to walk you through it in person.<p>So, HN, what do you think? We’re excited to get your feedback!<p>Thanks,
Shaw & Doug<p>[0] <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/message/11201/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/message/11201/</a>
[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909791" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909791</a>
[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24319293" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24319293</a>
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Let's say I wanted to find out what textbooks are being used in stanford graduate finance degree or something like that. How can I go about finding that out.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I have used Vanguard, Etrade and M1 finance (https://www.m1finance.com/). I heard good things about Interactive Brokers. What are the other ones. Would love to see some research on this.<p>What about Ally or Alpaca? Can one trade using those banks (api) ?
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: I've deliberately stayed away from WSB so far, but curiosity got the best of me now, and I took a look.<p>The amount of pumping behind GME is unbelievable. On of the top comments as of right now justifies burning a year's worth of income, <i>just to stick it to Wall Street.</i><p>The thing is, I don't think anyone at Wall Street is touching this stock right now. The stock price is far too high for a buy grounded in fundamentals, and shorting this particular stock right now can backfire catastrophically, as we have seen.<p>This has the veneer of a crowd sticking it to someone they felt exploited by, but in the end, they're just being exploited by someone else.<p>Right now, the only ones benefiting from someone sticking a year's worth of incoming into GME are those doing the pumping.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Hi HN-<p>My name is Ashish, and I’m the CEO/ co founder of InpharmD (<a href="https://inpharmd.com" rel="nofollow">https://inpharmd.com</a>). We take questions from doctors and return curated, evidence - based answers.<p>I was a clinical pharmacist offering a remote service from a University for 10 years. Ask us anything, we begged, and our team of pharmacists, residents, and students would look it up, get through the paywalls, and provide the answer.<p>I passed out business cards around local hospitals. They were lost over time.<p>Then I passed out business cards with magnets. They stuck around, but there aren’t that many places in the hospital with the magnetic surfaces.<p>Eventually, people stored our number, but we’d ask so many questions when they called, they couldn’t ask theirs: who are you, where are you calling from, what’s your email, spell it, etc, etc, etc. Often, they’d hang up on us, and I don’t blame them. The average doctor now sees five patients an hour.<p>I realized I wasn’t alone, and hundreds of other academicians, all leading their own teams, had the same problem. So, we formed a network and interviewed hundreds of our customers about how they’d ideally interact with us. What we needed to build was simple: one touch request.<p>My co - founder Tulasee built that and since, we learned that AI can transcribe PDFs faster (but not yet better) than our pharmacists. We started with 5,000 of our own study abstracts, assigned weights for corresponding content in their respective PDFs, and now we continuously reassign the weights until the algorithm can completely make our own abstracts. Our latest test revealed 94% accuracy against a matched human control, but with medical information, this will need to be 100% before we can rely on it.<p>We think Watson was a missed opportunity, so we called our algorithm Sherlock. We’re launching a partnership with the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists® (ASHP- <a href="https://ashp.org" rel="nofollow">https://ashp.org</a>), using their database of 1,300 vetted drug monographs, so Sherlock can field questions at the point of care.<p>We’ve been fortunate to find early adopter health systems to pay for our service: WellStar, Ochsner, University of Maryland, Georgia DPH, and St Francis. We’re typically compared to the cost of their healthcare providers manually searching, and we end up cheaper.<p>We love this community and we’d welcome your ideas/ experiences/ feedback on what we’re building!
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: I'm a graduating as a software engineer in a city with a limited number of tech jobs. Due to divorce + kids living in this city, I won't likely be able to move to a major tech center. But, I've a job offer with one of the larger local companies with an option to work remote. I've thought about taking the remote option and staying with remote companies to get access to a bigger job market than I can locally.<p>Anyone here who's done something similar, what's your experience been? Pro's, Con's, unexpected good things, unexpected hurdles, that kind of stuff.
Upvote: | 226 |
Title: As the title says, what would happen if Stack Overflow decides to interrupt the service? Realistically speaking how much damage could that do to everyday work?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Hi,
I need to be off-grid for 24 hours, I will be powering a device that consume 2kw.<p>I live in Africa, so Sun is not a problem here.
Thanks,
jongi
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: On Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l8rf4k/times_square_right_now/
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Hi HN, Lyn & Colin here. We’re co-founders of LayerCI (<a href="https://layerci.com" rel="nofollow">https://layerci.com</a>), which gives you a modern DevOps experience (CI/CD & staging environments) with as little work as writing a Dockerfile.<p>Most teams need CI/CD (run the build and deploy every time a developer pushes) or staging (host a server with my app in it to share), but current approaches always have at least one of these problems:<p>- Simplistic (only run unit tests)<p>- Slow (wait 10 minutes to run the same repetitive setup steps like "npm install")<p>- Complex (cache keys, base images, a slack channel to reserve staging servers, …)<p>We’ve spent over a year iterating with our customers to build a product that solves all of these problems.<p>Our configuration files (Layerfiles) look like Dockerfiles, so regular developers can write and maintain them. Here's one that creates a staging server for create-react-app:<p>FROM vm/ubuntu:18.04<p>RUN curl -sS <a href="https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg" rel="nofollow">https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg</a> | sudo apt-key add - &&
curl -fSsL <a href="https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x" rel="nofollow">https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x</a> | bash &&
apt-get install nodejs python3 make gcc build-essential<p>COPY . .<p>RUN npm install<p>RUN npm test<p>RUN BACKGROUND npm start<p>EXPOSE WEBSITE <a href="http://localhost:3000" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:3000</a><p>We charge a flat $42/mo/developer on our paid plan. Because it's a flat fee and not usage based, we're incentivized to make things as fast as possible: Our current margins come from a custom-built hibernating hypervisor that lets us avoid running "npm install" thousands of times per day.<p>We’ve upgraded the free tier to 5GB of memory for new installations this week. It’s perfect for personal projects or small MVPs where you’d like a powerful demo server that will build on every push and automatically hibernate when it’s not being used.<p>The easiest way to try out LayerCI is to follow our interactive tutorial: <a href="https://layerci.com/" rel="nofollow">https://layerci.com/</a> or look at the docs: <a href="https://layerci.com/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://layerci.com/docs/</a><p>We would love to hear your thoughts about CI/CD, staging, and what we’ve built!
Upvote: | 174 |
Title: I am currently at a place where thinking about doing anything on the computer is making me anxious. Over the last two months I’ve worked for maybe 5 days in total (recovering from Covid, taking vacation days). I am at a senior dev position with the highest salary amongst devs, yet lately I do not contribute and it is very noticeable. I have zero will or passion to work. Am I getting too old (44)? Am I experiencing burn out? What is the way out?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: The most recent and complete book on Distributed Systems that I'm aware of is Design Data Intensive Application (2017). I'm currently reading it. I also want to learn about other problems and ideas:<p>- Ideas that stood the test of times<p>- Ideas that were not feasible but now possible thanks to hardware improvement.<p>So, what's your recommendations for books and papers on these topics?
Upvote: | 302 |
Title: Hey HN! I’m Topher, here with Winston and AJ, and we’re the co-founders of Albedo (<a href="https://albedo.space" rel="nofollow">https://albedo.space</a>). We’re building satellites that will capture both visible and thermal imagery - at a resolution 9x higher than what is available today (see comparison: <a href="https://photos.app.goo.gl/gwokp4WT8JPvyue98" rel="nofollow">https://photos.app.goo.gl/gwokp4WT8JPvyue98</a>).<p>My technical background is primarily in optics/imaging science related to remote sensing. I previously worked for Lockheed Martin, where I met AJ, who is an expert in satellite architecture and systems engineering. We’ve spent most of our career working on classified space systems, and while the missions we were involved with are super cool, that world is slower to adopt the latest new space technologies. We started Albedo in order to create a new type of satellite architecture that captures high resolution imagery at a fraction of the cost historically required. Winston was previously a software engineer at Facebook, where he frequently used satellite imagery and realized the huge potential of higher resolution datasets.<p>While the use cases for satellite imagery are endless, adoption has been underwhelming - even for obvious and larger applications like agriculture, insurance, energy, and mapping. The main limitations that have prevented widespread use are high cost, inaccessibility, and low resolution.<p>Today, buying commercial satellite imagery involves a back-and-forth with a salesperson in a sometimes months-long process, with high prices that exclude all but the biggest companies. This process needs to be simplified with transparent, commodity pricing and an automated process, where all you need to buy imagery is a credit card. On the accessibility front, it’s surprising how few providers have nailed down a streamlined, fully cloud-based delivery mechanism. While working at Facebook, Winston sometimes dealt with imagery delivered through FTP servers or physical hard drives. Another thing users are looking for is more transparency when tasking a new satellite image, such as an immediate assessment of when it will be collected. These are all problems we are working on solving at Albedo.<p>On the space side, we’re able to achieve the substantial cost savings by taking advantage of emerging space technologies, two of which are electric propulsion and on-orbit refueling. Our satellites will fly super close to the earth, essentially in the atmosphere, enabling 10cm resolution without having to build a school bus sized satellite.<p>Electric propulsion makes the fuel on our satellites way more efficient, at the expense of low thrust. Think about it like your car gasoline going from 30 to 300 mpg, but you could only drive 5 mph. Our propulsion only needs to maintain a steady offset to the atmospheric drag, so low thrust and high efficiency is perfect. By the time our first few satellites run out of fuel, on-orbit refueling will be a reality, and we can just refill our tanks. We’re still in the architecture and design phase, but we expect to have our first few satellites flying in 2024 and the full constellation up in 2027.<p>The current climate crisis requires a diverse set of sensors in space to support emissions monitoring, ESG initiatives/investments, and infrastructure sustainability. Thermal sensors are a key component for this, and very few are currently in orbit. Since our satellites are larger than normal, they are uniquely suited to capture the long wavelengths of thermal energy at a resolution of 2 meters. We’ll also be taking advantage of advances in microbolometer technology, to eliminate the crazy cooling requirements that have made thermal satellites so expensive in the past. The current state-of-the-art for thermal resolution is 70 meters, which is only marginally useful for most applications.<p>We’re aiming to adopt the stance of being a pure data provider (i.e. not doing analytics). We think the best way to facilitate overall market growth is to do one thing incredibly well: sell imagery better, cheaper, and faster than what users have available today. While this allows us to be vertical agnostic, some of our more well-suited applications include: crop health monitoring, pipeline inspection, property insurance underwriting/weather damage evaluation, and wildfire/vegetation management around power lines. By making high-res imagery a commodity, we are also betting on it unlocking new applications in a similar fashion to GPS (e.g. Tinder, Pokemon Go, and Uber).<p>One last thing - new remote sensing regulations were released by NOAA last May, removing the previous limit on resolution. So between the technology side and regulatory side, the timing is kind of perfect for us.<p>All thoughts and questions are appreciated - and we’d love to hear if you know of any companies that could benefit from our imagery. Thanks for reading!
Upvote: | 202 |
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: | 47 |
Title: (Update for Feb/March: Manara, a company in YC's current
batch, has discovered many talented software engineers in the MENA
region, half of whom are women. If this is of interest, see their
launch thread at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054</a>.)<p>Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA
when that 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=25989762" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989762</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989763" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989763</a>
Upvote: | 461 |
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: | 110 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>Seb here, with my co-founder Mat. We are building an open-source observability platform aimed at the end user. We assemble what we consider the best open source APIs and interfaces such as Prometheus and Grafana, but make them as easy to use and featureful as Datadog, with for example TLS and authentication by default. It's scalable (horizontally and vertically) and upgradable without a team of experts. Check it out here: <a href="http://opstrace.com/" rel="nofollow">http://opstrace.com/</a> & <a href="https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace</a><p>About us: I co-founded dotCloud which became Docker, and was also an early employee at Cloudflare where I built their monitoring system back when there was no Prometheus (I had to use OpenTSDB :-). I have since been told it's all been replaced with modern stuff—thankfully! Mat and I met at Mesosphere where, after building DC/OS, we led the teams that would eventually transition the company to Kubernetes.<p>In 2019, I was at RedHat and Mat was still at Mesosphere. A few months after IBM announced purchasing RedHat, Mat and I started brainstorming problems that we could solve in the infrastructure space. We started interviewing a lot of companies, always asking them the same questions: "How do you build and test your code? How do you deploy? What technologies do you use? How do you monitor your system? Logs? Outages?" A clear set of common problems emerged.<p>Companies that used external vendors—such as CloudWatch, Datadog, SignalFX—grew to a certain size where cost became unpredictable and wildly excessive. As a result (one of many downsides we would come to uncover) they monitored less (i.e. just error logs, no real metrics/logs in staging/dev and turning metrics off in prod to reduce cost).<p>Companies going the opposite route—choosing to build in-house with open source software—had different problems. Building their stack took time away from their product development, and resulted in poorly maintained, complicated messes. Those companies are usually tempted to go to SaaS but at their scale, the cost is often prohibitive.<p>It seemed crazy to us that we are still stuck in this world where we have to choose between these two paths. As infrastructure engineers, we take pride in building good software for other engineers. So we started Opstrace to fix it.<p>Opstrace started with a few core principles: (1) The customer should always own their data; Opstrace runs entirely in your cloud account and your data never leaves your network. (2) We don’t want to be a storage vendor—that is, we won’t bill customers by data volume because this creates the wrong incentives for us. (AWS and GCP are already pretty good at storage.)
(3) Transparency and predictability of costs—you pay your cloud provider for the storage/network/compute for running Opstrace and can take advantage of any credits/discounts you negotiate with them. We are incentivized to help you understand exactly where you are spending money because you pay us for the value you get from our product with per-user pricing. (For more about costs, see our recent blog post here: <a href="https://opstrace.com/blog/pulling-cost-curtain-back" rel="nofollow">https://opstrace.com/blog/pulling-cost-curtain-back</a>). (4) It should be REAL Open Source with the Apache License, Version 2.0.<p>To get started, you install Opstrace into your AWS or GCP account with one command: `opstrace create`. This installs Opstrace in your account, creates a domain name and sets up authentication for you for free. Once logged in you can create tenants that each contain APIs for Prometheus, Fluentd/Loki and more. Each tenant has a Grafana instance you can use. A tenant can be used to logically separate domains, for example, things like prod, test, staging or teams. Whatever you prefer.<p>At the heart of Opstrace runs a Cortex (<a href="https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex</a>) cluster to provide the above-mentioned scalable Prometheus API, and a Loki (<a href="https://github.com/grafana/loki" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/grafana/loki</a>) cluster for the logs. We front those with authenticated endpoints (all public in our repo). All the data ends up stored only in S3 thanks to the amazing work of the developers on those projects.<p>An "open source Datadog" requires more than just metrics and logs. We are actively working on a new UI for managing, querying and visualizing your data and many more features, like automatic ingestion of logs/metrics from cloud services (CloudWatch/Stackdriver), Datadog compatible API endpoints to ease migrations and side by side comparisons and synthetics (e.g. Pingdom). You can follow along on our public roadmap: <a href="https://opstrace.com/docs/references/roadmap" rel="nofollow">https://opstrace.com/docs/references/roadmap</a>.<p>We will always be open source, and we make money by charging a per-user subscription for our commercial version which will contain fine-grained authz, bring-your-own OIDC and custom domains.<p>Check out our repo (<a href="https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace</a>) and give it a spin (<a href="https://opstrace.com/docs/quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://opstrace.com/docs/quickstart</a>).<p>We’d love to hear what your perspective is. What are your experiences related to the problems discussed here? Are you all happy with the tools you’re using today?
Upvote: | 316 |
Title: One where you don't care if it makes money or gets a lot of attention, but you are working on it regardless. I don't think I mean private hobbies, exactly, but projects that could or will be shared with others - you just don't care about the outcome.
Upvote: | 228 |
Title: I've noticed in the last couple of years, the mind's a little slower, the flame isn't quite as bright, the desire to learn YetAnotherProduct isn't there. When I was younger, I remembered the grey haired hackers that were a little abrasive, knew their stuff and didn't take crap from their employer...and that's starting to resonate with me.<p>And I'm really not sure I have a forum of people I can talk to about it. It's not something you want to volunteer at work, and it's not something someone who isn't in IT might fully understand.<p>There's a little anxiety in that I've still got a decade or so before retirement and am afraid of being left behind....but when you learn your 7th SIEM, they all kinda look the same after awhile, and most of the administration is getting sewn up behind the scenes in the cloud.<p>OR should I just suck it up?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Hi HN! We're Yair and Yo'av of Zaraz (<a href="https://zaraz.com" rel="nofollow">https://zaraz.com</a>). We make websites faster by loading their third-party stack in an optimized way. By “third-party” we mean utilities or additional products you add to your website (eg. analytics), not things you build your website with (eg. React).<p>Before we started this we worked on opposite sides of this battle for third-party inclusion: Yair was working for the folks asking to implement just-one-more analytics tool, while Yo'av was a developer trying (and often failing) to push back. Avoiding bloat to begin with would be preferable, but anyone working for even a medium-sized company knows how hard that is - usually when a higher up agrees to try or add a new tool, resistance is futile. Hence the question becomes, can you do it without harming your performance?<p>The average US top 5,000 website loads 22 different third-party tools - analytics, customer success, marketing and whatnot. We wrote a bot that scanned these websites and discovered that third-parties account for 40% of their “Time to Interactive”, and other metrics like TBT, FCP, FID and CLS were hurt in a similar way. From the user perspective, the page usually behaves exactly the same without these tools (...except 40% faster).<p>These new metrics are becoming more popular for two reasons. Firstly, users actually feel them - unlike events such as "DOMContentLoad" & "Load" that can be triggered long before the user can actually do anything, these metrics provide a much better proxy to the real user experience. Secondly, with Google soon penalizing slow websites, they're becoming more and more important for SEO. We see the growing popularity of these metrics as a good thing. We want a faster web.<p>Nowadays, the most common way to integrate a third-party into your website is either to just paste its `<script>` snippet somewhere in your code, or use some "Tag Management" software (awful name!) like Google Tag Manager, Tealium, or even a tool like Segment. All these options pretty much come with the same cost - everything loads by default together with your page, and users just have to wait and wait. If all this slowness doesn't feel so bad on your devices now, remember that much of the world accesses the internet through devices that are probably a lot slower than yours.<p>We built Zaraz to be a performance-first third-party manager. Each tool is different, but the concept is to run whatever we can on our backend instead of in the browser, leaving it to focus on loading your website. While other solutions serve all your visitors with the same script and then evaluate it in the browser (should we run this conversion pixel? Should we load this analytics tool?) - we do this on our backend. But the real magic is that we created an environment living inside a Cloudflare Worker, that executes the actual third-party scripts instead of having them run in the browser. Google Analytics, Reddit conversion pixel, LinkedIn Insight, you name it - we’re turning all those things into miniature server-side applications that your visitors’ browsers need not to worry about. If a certain tool still needs to fire a request from the browser (eg. it needs to set a cookie), only the resulting URL from evaluating its script will be sent back to the user browser. It’s a server side environment executing third-party code, that you have 100% control over. When we measure the speed of a website optimized with Zaraz, third-parties have close to zero effect on it, because the browser almost does nothing.<p>We are already serving a few customers in production, and we’re seeing huge improvements in speed (and revenues!) with all of them. Zaraz is probably the easiest way you can make your website faster, today (try our analyzer to see how we can improve your website: <a href="https://zaraz.com/analyze" rel="nofollow">https://zaraz.com/analyze</a>). Aside from performance, since we have total control on what data is revealed to our isolated environment, we are using it to help companies protect the privacy of their visitors by masking PIIs, hiding IP addresses, disabling fingerprinting etc. We designed our infrastructure as a set of serverless, storageless and stateless functions - to make sure your visitors data is never saved, not even by accident.<p>We are currently onboarding mostly enterprises and high-traffic websites, but we plan to introduce a free tier after we are done creating a self-onboarding flow. We are on a mission to make the web faster and we want all websites to benefit from it!<p>We would be thrilled to hear what you think, and if you have more ideas on how to make websites faster please do share them with us. Thank you!
Upvote: | 145 |
Title: Hey HN! I’m Omri and I co-founded Routable (<a href="https://routable.com" rel="nofollow">https://routable.com</a>) with Tom Harel. We are a business payments platform built to make bill payments and mass payouts fast and seamless, especially as your company scales. We were in YC's S17 batch, but are doing a Launch HN now because we recently completed a huge integration with NetSuite, which will help larger enterprises automate their business payment workflows.<p>Tom and I started working on Routable in early 2017. The idea was sparked while we were eating hummus in Tel Aviv. When we first met up, we had no intention of spending years of our lives trying to figure out how to make bill payments and invoicing easier. But we realized after a three hour conversation that at our two different marketplace companies we had both spent 40% of our engineering resources on building internal tooling to pay out sellers, drivers, restaurants, etc.<p>After we realized we'd experienced the same pain at different startups, we asked ourselves, “what did we do wrong?” Was there a solution that worked across finance, engineering, and operations that we were simply not aware of? To find out, we interviewed over 300 people - CFOs, VPs of Finance, Heads of Engineering, you name it - to understand how businesses scaled their business payouts and invoicing (think: growing from 1,000 payments per month to 400,000+ payments per month).<p>The two main answers we received were: (a) Like us, they'd spent thousands of hours and engineering dollars to build an in-house internal tool, on top of processors, and wrote their own custom integration to an ERP; or (b) they hired an army of overqualified individuals to run daily data entry across thousands of bill payments and invoices (which was tedious, not to mention very expensive).<p>These conversations confirmed what we had suspected: There was no tool for easy payments that worked across multiple departments. We realized that what we had built at our marketplace start-ups could potentially help hundreds of other companies. In 6 weeks we spun up a Routable MVP and were making money for customers. Today, we're deployed across some of the largest marketplaces and gig economy companies. We’ve focused on working with engineering and finance departments as much as possible to save them from building custom in-house solutions.<p>Our recent integration with NetSuite has been by far the hardest we’ve done – especially since we built it on top of a SOAP API and extended native functionality with SuiteScript – but it was worth it, because we gained a deep appreciation for how complex enterprise business payment operations can be. To make sure we “got it right,” we again did plenty of customer development interviews to best understand what data needs to go into and out of NetSuite, and made sure to record each interview so we could share their unique pain points with our engineering team.<p>Before we wrote the first line of code, we interviewed a bunch of NetSuite users and learned what was lacking in other NetSuite integrations out there: tools that only synced in one direction, needing to recreate fields multiple in different platforms, processes that were breaking because the workflow had changed in your ERP, but not in your AP software. The one thing we learned throughout this whole process is that once you build an integration to an ERP, you’re never really done, so we expect as a team to forever tinker on sending data back and forth with the goal of continuously improving our integration and hopefully saving our customers 30 seconds to 10 minutes of work at a time.<p>Thank you for reading this story - I hope it was interesting. We’d love to hear your feedback about Routable, your experiences in this space, and answer any questions you have!
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Dear hackers. I am a non-us citizen and was working remotely to a US company for 3 years. While I am a contractor my contract doesn't says contract, it says "Employee" everywhere.<p>Yesterday after a week of severe depression episode where I ended up in the hospital they fired me. I suspected they were going to fire me (scheduled 1am call with HR) and I've decided to share with them 3 days ago my Bipolar Diagnosis. Although I wished not, I shared this this because I've read that in the US ADA would protect me and they would have to accommodate me before firing me. My performance never dropped, only my communication. I never stopped coding.<p>This was pure discrimination, and they got away with this because I am not us-citizen. The real relationship with them was employee and my salary was in the six figures.<p>Is there anything I can do? May ADA or similar act legally cover me? They are a well respected and known company. Although I may want to seek some monetary compensation for discrimination, I also am upset they did not care about my condition.<p>If you know a lawyer that can help me, hope this is a precedent and doesn't happen to anybody else. Mental health is health.<p>Wish you a healthy day.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Also interested in non-tech talks from any field if they are particularly awesome, and accessible to non-specialists. Thanks!
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I am just a regular software engineer at a Silicon Valley company. I go to bed and wake up with anxiety on an almost daily basis. It all seems to stem from work.<p>Psychologically and philosophically speaking, the root cause is not work, rather my own mind etc. but :shrug:<p>I want to do a pulse check to see how common it is for folks working in tech, to suffer from this level of anxiety.
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: Last night I was awaken by my Xiaomi Mi Band 5.<p>A few days ago I took a nap and set the DND –do not disturb– on a timer for 1h. Once the timer finished it went by default to "Turn off DND", which is the same as "disturb me please".<p>It's worth mentioning that before setting the DND for an hour, I had it one a schedule so it wouldn't disturb me from 10:30 pm to 8:30 am. It didn't go back to this one, it went to "disturb me please".<p>It's probably also worth mentioning that there is another mode called "Auto turn on", which detects when you're sleeping to avoid awakening you. Because this thing knows when I'm sleeping. But someone decided that the default should be to awaken someone if they receive an email at 2am.<p>So the thing that I bought precisely to improve my sleeping was designed to wake me up in the middle of the night.<p>Because of this I was wondering when did the "disturb" mode became the default? This applies to my phone as well, which I always have with DND turned on. How is it that we have to _turn on_ DND. Shouldn't it be "turn on disturb mode"?<p>What are the arguments that support this behaviour from a UX point of view?<p>-end of rant
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I think there are amazon affiliate banner image links from the 90s that still display images, such has the 'buy a book' icon. How about google image logo links from 1998. I wonder if those still work.
Upvote: | 194 |
Title: Hi everyone!<p>We’re Noah and Josh from Emerge (<a href="https://www.emergetools.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.emergetools.com</a>). Our company is building a monitoring and analysis tool to help iOS developers reduce their app’s size.<p>You might have heard about app size challenges faced by large iOS apps, particularly those with Swift codebases. I was an iOS engineer at Airbnb for 4.5 years and personally worked on their size reduction efforts.<p>App size is tricky to quantify. The size users most commonly see (what’s on the App Store page) is the install size thinned for their device. This is the size measured after stripping out assets like images and other media not needed for your screen size, or code that doesn’t run on your device’s architecture. However, this isn’t the only size metric out there, there’s also download and universal size (read more about this in our docs [1]).<p>Our tool makes app size easy to understand by visualizing the size contribution of every file in your app, from localized strings to machine learning models. To better our understanding, we even reverse engineered compiled asset catalogs and Mach-O binaries to show size contributions of original images, source files and Swift modules. With this perspective we often see files that don’t belong or are suspiciously large.<p>While testing our tool we analyzed and learned from over 150 iOS applications and found that keeping app size in check is really hard— even for industry leaders. Here are some of our more interesting findings.<p>Dropbox (<a href="https://www.emergetools.com/apps/dropbox" rel="nofollow">https://www.emergetools.com/apps/dropbox</a>)
From the visualization, you can clearly see why Dropbox’s iOS app is 270 MB— it’s 35% localization files. These files are duplicated from the main app into 7 different app extensions and they all include comments that provide translators with context for the strings. Just removing these comments from the production app could save 46 MB.<p>eBay (<a href="https://www.emergetools.com/apps/ebay" rel="nofollow">https://www.emergetools.com/apps/ebay</a>)
This is an interesting architecture because although the main app’s executable is only ~150 KB, 86% of the app’s size comes from executables, the biggest one (32 MB) being EbayApp.framework. When building a Swift framework, the binary contains symbols which are not needed in the build uploaded to the App Store. These symbols can be stripped using the method described in our docs [2]. Stripping binary symbols would reduce Ebay’s app size by over 40%. Emerge can generate a script to add to your Xcode build phase to strip symbols for you.<p>Spark (<a href="https://www.emergetools.com/apps/spark" rel="nofollow">https://www.emergetools.com/apps/spark</a>)
About 1/10th of Spark’s ~230 MB app is font files. 10 MB of those font files are duplicates found in an app extension. After a closer look, the fonts duplicated are all SF-Pro-Text, look familiar? These have been system fonts since iOS 11 (the minimum version for Spark). If the system font was used directly, 10% of the whole app could be deleted!<p>If you want to dive in a bit deeper you can check out our Medium post which goes into detail on some other popular apps [3].<p>Our analysis consistently shows that without guardrails in place, app size can get out of hand very quickly. Emerge wants to help developers reduce their size and keep it that way. Our continuous monitoring and binary size profiling prevents regressions by alerting developers of size changes in their pull requests, helping teams build better, smaller apps.<p>We offer a free Growth plan designed for independent developers and small startups. Our paid plans start at $499/month, you can view more details here: <a href="https://www.emergetools.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.emergetools.com/pricing</a>.<p>If app size has come up in your development process, we’d love to hear about how you handled it. We’re always looking to improve and grow our product and we’re especially excited to hear feedback from the HN community!<p>Thanks, Noah + Josh<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.emergetools.com/docs/what-is-app-size" rel="nofollow">https://docs.emergetools.com/docs/what-is-app-size</a><p>[2] <a href="https://docs.emergetools.com/docs/strip-binary-symbols" rel="nofollow">https://docs.emergetools.com/docs/strip-binary-symbols</a><p>[3] <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/how-7-ios-apps-could-save-you-500mb-of-storage-a828782c973e" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/swlh/how-7-ios-apps-could-save-you-500mb-...</a>
Upvote: | 115 |
Title: I had a bad freelance experience at a startup where we agreed on fulltime work & hourly rate. I worked normally, some days working late on features into the evening, some days wrapping up early. After a month I invoiced for ~38 hours per week & the founder who was also my manager literally threw a tantrum saying that my invoice was "immoral" and that I "should only bill for productive hours." I don't know what he means by that, as I was working full time, sometimes with him side-by-side or clearly committing code at 8pm, 9pm etc. I left that role because of the founder's lack of professionalism.<p>My next experience with a Berlin startup we agreed to a full time role. I got great feedback from them for 6 months, they said the app looks good & is fast, we didn't go live but they showed investors in meetings and we were in good shape. They said things were great and they were happy with my first hire to the dev team. Then just before my 6 month probation as "Director of Engineering" was up, they abruptly hired a CTO above me, kept me for an additional week of onboarding the new CTO while dodging my questions of "how does the new team hierarchy work?", and then fired me. All without ever giving me anything but glowing feedback (this is the short story, leaving out a few promises made by them and not lived up to). It felt like I was being used as a 6 month freelancer.<p>Before I moved to Berlin I heard that there's better work life balance here, more vacation, etc. Though lower pay. In my experience the people I've worked for have seen their employees as disposable. Or had a general lower level of respect for dev contributions to the team and less professionalism than I experienced in NYC.<p>In NYC I got accustomed to a culture where if a company has a developer that is productive and professional that person is a valuable asset to keep around.<p>Is that not true in Berlin? Is the culture different? Or have I had a couple weird bad luck experiences?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Just received an email from Apple regarding the DTK program returns, won't paste content in case they have stenographed the email (NDA'd). The program has been a joke from the start with minimal response from Apple. The developer forums are packed with complaints, hardware arriving DOA, endless reboots and no opportunity to return or refund out of the program.<p>Really surprised with Apple's handling here.<p>One of the most active threads with zero Apple input was asking "has the DTK program been set adrift" in the title with more than 2500 views.<p>I guess we have our answer.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi HN! I'm Ivan, the co-founder of Feroot Security (YC W21) (<a href="https://www.feroot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.feroot.com/</a>). Feroot Inspector is a security scanner for the client-side javascript code of web apps made for app sec teams.<p>If you're not testing the security of the client-side code of your web app, there’s a good chance you could be exposed to Magecart skimmers, malware and spyware loaded with third-party scripts - css, pixels, tags, trackers, and more. We use synthetic users (i.e. bots—good ones!) to detect keyloggers, spyware, security misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, anomalies in the client-side code of web applications. Simulating activities that real users do, our scanner triggers all code activities first. And then it performs security testing and assessments of actual JavaScript code and everything else that is loaded into the browser when your users are using your web app. Pretty much what security scanners (like Qualys and Acunetix) are doing to test the application side code of web apps, but we do it for client-side code.<p>So why did we build Feroot? First, nobody knows what actually happens on the client-side of web apps. Client-side code is a mystery and nobody knows when keyloggers are stealing users’ keystrokes or doing anything else sketchy.
Second, existing web app security testing tools don’t perform data asset discovery. They don’t tell you what web forms exist throughout the user journeys and what information is ingested by the web app through each and every web form. All that is missing. Third, client-side code of web apps is highly variable and dynamic. As web developers are moving logic to the client-side a lot more externally controlled JavaScript code is included into users’ web browsers. Meaning, that every script, third-party and open source library can open a backdoor for hackers to exploit.
We saw a need for a simple self-serve solution that brings security, developers, marketing and compliance teams together to help them secure the client-side of web apps.<p>Feroot Inspector uses synthetic users and headless Chrome, which use algorithmic and heuristic approaches, to do activities that real users do -- type input into forms, submit forms to trigger potential keyloggers, skimmers, and all other client-side script activities. It also monitors all incoming and outgoing network traffic from the browser and uses data traps to terminate outbound network requests, to avoid any impact during the scan.<p>Tech specs: 1) Support single-page/multiple-page web apps, and auto-discovery pm multi-page websites; 2) Resolves captchas, undetected by bot detection systems; 3) Tracks script changes, stores scripts content, detection of unauthorized scripts; 4) Audits page and frame security matrix, permission model for main frame of the page and all child-frames; 5) Detects data input and data ingestion points and report on data transfer, active data read (keystroke read), data access model; 6) Form-based authentication for scanning password-protected websites and custom scenario based authentication; 7) Detects data transfers from browser of user sessions to third-party hosts and domains; 8) Geo-decoding in real time of the destination country of data transfers; 8) Report export to: JSON (using API), CSV, Excel, and PDF; 9) Native Integrations: Slack, Jira, Datadog, PagerDuty, Splunk, JupiterOne, Sumo Logic, AWS Cloudwatch Events/logs, Opsgenie, ServiceNow, and webhooks; 10) Inspector performs non-intrusive, outside-in scanning of production live web apps.<p>We would love to hear your feedback about Feroot scanner, as well as answer questions you might have!<p>Thanks, Ivan & Vitaliy
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Matheus & Jérôme and we’re the co-founders of Tint(<a href="http://www.tint.ai" rel="nofollow">http://www.tint.ai</a>). We help companies add insurance to their products.<p>Many companies, such as marketplaces, merchants, and travel agents could include insurance as part of their products and services to make them more valuable to their customers. For example, insurance will be included when you rent a campervan for a weekend trip at Outdoorsy, to protect you if anything goes wrong. Our platform provides everything that is needed: software, access to insurers, compliance—everything required to manage risk and protect users, profitably.<p>We met in 2014 when we were early employees at Turo, the car-sharing startup. While there, we saw the potential that insurance products have and also saw how hard it was to fully capitalize on it. Turo has an obvious and pressing need for insurance, but to fill it, they had to build their own systems, find insurers to back the program, and ensure compliance with state laws. None of this was their core business. We got inspired by the problem and by the opportunity to solve it, so we decided to create Tint.<p>Here is a real example from Riders Share, one of our clients: you go to their website/app to rent a motorbike for the weekend and find an awesome Harley Davidson. You proceed to checkout, see a few protection/insurance options, select one, and book the trip. You won't notice, but Riders Share's app has used Tint to risk-score the transaction, decide if it should be confirmed, and calculate how much the protection should cost.<p>Now, imagine you are a developer working on this project and need to add insurance to the product. What do you do? Instead of reinventing the wheel and adding more lines of code to maintain, you can leverage our APIs to integrate all the touchpoints required to sell insurance to your users (risk selection, quotes, issuing policy, claims, …). All the logic for the API responses is configured from our app so your insurance team can easily iterate on the next versions of your insurance product. Oh, and we also train machine learning models so we can recommend ways to improve its performance.<p>We're live in production and have helped our clients embed hundreds of thousands of insurance policies. While our tech applies to any insurance use case, we are initially targeting marketplaces that embed insurance.<p>We'd love to hear any of your ideas or experiences in this space.<p>Thanks, Matheus + Jérôme
Upvote: | 133 |
Title: Hey everyone! I am Hana, and along with my co-founder Josue, we are excited to launch MagicBell (<a href="https://magicbell.io" rel="nofollow">https://magicbell.io</a>). You can embed MagicBell in your web/mobile application to show users workflow notifications in-app and real-time. If the user is not online when you send them a notification, we can send them an email (or text). For example, a project management app can use MagicBell to show new tasks assigned to a user or tasks due soon. A code collaboration app will notify users of pull-requests that need their review. These notifications keep the workflow moving.<p>Building a notification system is challenging. We built robust email notifications at my last startup SupportBee [0], and it took us weeks to nail down the threading, reply by email, unsubscription links, and notification preference management. When we wanted to add an in-app inbox, I felt that we were building a mini email client into our app. A well designed in-app experience needs real-time updates and state management (read/unread/archived) apart from a lot of UI polish.<p>Not only do we save you months of work to begin with, but we also have an extensive product roadmap with features like email templates and grouping of notifications. Your customers will get a better experience each day without you having to invest in the development effort. Apart from customer-facing features, we plan to add a debug interface and analytics so you can get more visibility into your notifications.<p>Our embeddable notification inbox is written using React and MobX, and we use Ably.io for real-time updates. We offer a React SDK [1] that lets you build a custom interface, and we use Storybooks to test our UI. Fun fact: you can see the entire catalog of React components we offer [2]. We extracted the network layer of our embeddable into a Javascript package so customers not using React can use that to build a custom interface [3]. We'll work on Vue & React-Native SDK next. Our backend is hosted on AWS.<p>Thank you for reading. Please try out our product and send us your feedback, questions, and ideas. If you have built a notification system at work, we’d love to hear about your experience!<p>[0] <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ama-i-am-a-transgender-entrepreneur-and-i-bootstrapped-to-over-40k-mrr-9f0f615f3a" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ama-i-am-a-transgender-ent...</a> [1] <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/magicbell-react" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/magicbell-react</a> [2] <a href="https://magicbell-react.netlify.app/?path=/story/magicbell-introduction--page" rel="nofollow">https://magicbell-react.netlify.app/?path=/story/magicbell-i...</a> [3] <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/core" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/core</a>
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Scott and Dan of Text Blaze (<a href="https://blaze.today" rel="nofollow">https://blaze.today</a>). Text Blaze lets you create programmable text snippets that you can insert anywhere in Chrome by typing a brief shortcut.<p>Before Text Blaze, we designed and built internal tools for thousands of sales and support reps at Google. As much as we tried though, our tools could never automate all repeated work for all users. We saw that there were always tech savvy reps who would build additional scripts to fill gaps and help save even more time. With Text Blaze, we wanted to create something for those kinds of reps to speed up and automate their boring repetitive work (and make it super easy for them to share with teammates).<p>Text Blaze snippets help users to do this. You can start by taking all the repetitive messaging that they have and making it insertable with a few keystrokes. Many of our users easily save hours a month of typing just doing that.<p>Technical users can go much further though. Our snippets can include form fields like text boxes or drop down menus in them and have dynamic fields with formulas. Users can use this to:<p>- calculate a 15% service charge automatically when entering a price in a snippet text field.<p>- or automatically pulling in the name of contact when sending a message in LinkedIn,<p>- or saving data to a Google Spreadsheet every time they use a snippet,<p>- or create patient diagnostic templates where the snippet may include a drop down to capture whether the patient is a smoker. If (and only if) the answer is yes, a follow up question and text box (number of cigarettes a day) will appear.<p>Think of Text Blaze a little like Zapier meets Emmet. Some of the ways people use Text Blaze have amazed us. For example, the Customer Success department at a European delivery company, uses Text Blaze to standardize their comms with customers and drivers and automate much of the related processes. For example, their snippets read conversations with drivers in Intercom and automatically send a summary of the required information to a rep in the relevant Slack channel.<p>Our most common users of Text Blaze are in customer support and recruiting, but we’re also seeing a lot of adoption in other areas like education (especially with the increased levels of remote learning with Covid).<p>Text Blaze is free to use for many use cases and we have paid versions with additional features and improved collaboration for teams.<p>Want to try Text Blaze out? You can get started by installing our extension from the Chrome Web Store (<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadaccgipmpannjkmfddolnnhmeklj" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadac...</a>).<p>We’re a Chrome Extension as we see more and more users are spending all their time in Chrome and we want to be able to closely integrate with the different web applications they use.<p>We would love your feedback on the Text Blaze here and your experiences with tools for end-user automation in general. What’s worked for you and where are there opportunities to improve existing approaches?
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: 2021 Edition. This is a continuation of the previous two threads which can be found here:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299180<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13660086<p>Other resources:<p>https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x<p>https://github.com/AlgoryL/Projects-from-Scratch<p>https://github.com/tuvtran/project-based-learning
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: I noticed on every text-based web browser I’ve tried (lynx, links, w3m), hackernews comment threads do not maintain the correct indentation in the comment tree, collapsing all parent and children into a single list. Are there perhaps any easy fixes or workarounds, such as another text-based browser to try, or some other way to parse comment threads that maintains the correct indentation?
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: I didn't buy that much on Google Music, it was mostly indie, self-published bands/groups who needed a platform, but from 24th All Google Music is being deleted and the platform shutdown.<p>This is the email I received:<p>> We'll soon delete all of your Google Play Music library and data<p>> On 24 February 2021, we will delete all of your Google Play Music data.<p>> This includes your music library, with any uploads, purchases and anything you've added from Google Play Music.<p>> After this date, there will be no way to recover it.<p>> You can download your Google Play Music library and data with Google Takeout, or transfer it to YouTube Music.<p>> As a reminder, with one click, you can still transfer your music library, including uploads, playlists and recommendations, to YouTube Music before 24 February 2021.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: It boggles my mind why the thing that's meant to sit in one dark spot is protected from glare and the thing that's meant to be carried around is not. Is there any reason for this?<p>I understand that mobile phones have glossy screens to be more scratch resistant (although I'd still prefer a matte phone), but why laptops? Even MacBook Pro used to have a matte screen option 10 years ago but now all you can do is either buy an ugly screen protector or hide from the light.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I've got ~5 years experience as a business app developer with some networking / DevOps experience in there as well. The more I learn about the networking side the more interested I am in how to secure this, and I'm less interested in writing code.<p>Obviously security is becoming more and more important, and I'd like to focus my career toward this. In terms of talent, I'm an average Developer, and I know there are roles that focus toward knowing how to secure applications at the code level, which could be interesting, but I also would be interested in securing networks.<p>I've read that OSCP certification is very good for getting a role in Penetration Testing. Is PenTesting a good place to enter the field?<p>Any general advice would be much appreciated.
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: Hi, we’re Ali, Hassan and Alistair and we co-founded Infracost (<a href="https://www.infracost.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.infracost.io</a>). Infracost is an open-source cloud cost estimator for your pull requests. When you change your infrastructure code (Terraform), Infracost posts a comment in the pull request, which tells you the impact of this change to your cloud bill, e.g. “this will increase your bill by 25% next month”.<p>Existing cloud cost management products focus on post-bill analysis and target finance and management teams via charting dashboards. We built one of these back in 2013. They are all missing an important piece - the people who are responsible for purchasing cloud resources are not shown costs upfront, so they don’t know how much the resources will cost before launching them. We want to make cloud costs simpler to understand for developers and DevOps so they can make better decisions, which we believe will lead to more cost-efficient systems.<p>In 2011 Ali and Hassan started a cloud cost forecasting company based on Ali’s PhD research. They applied to YC and got through to the interview round. RightScale acquired them in 2012. I read about their YC interview experience on HN, reached out and ended up joining them. We went on to form the team that built RightScale’s cloud cost management product (now called Flexera Optima).<p>In our most recent startup (which failed) we were launching cloud stacks for users on-demand and we wanted a way to work out the cost of each. We hacked together something by building a GraphQL-based cloud pricing API and a CLI that parsed our Terraform code and output a cost breakdown.<p>We released the code on GitHub as Infracost and discovered that others had similar problems. We got requests to support more cloud services and integrate it into pull requests. At the moment, Infracost supports Terraform for AWS and Google Cloud (we’re adding new resources every week). It can be integrated into GitHub, GitLab, CircleCI, Bitbucket and Atlantis, or can be used anywhere through the CLI. In the future we plan to add support for more cloud vendors and infrastructure-as-code tools (Azure, CloudFormation, Pulumi, etc).<p>We now spend a lot of our days trawling through the cloud pricing pages working out how pricing works for different cloud services. We’re grateful for the contributors who have helped us with this. AWS currently has over 2 million price points and this is constantly increasing. Users are requesting better support for usage-based services like data transfer, S3 and Lambda. Currently we allow for usage estimates to be passed into the tool, and are looking at other methods, i.e. based on last month’s actual usage. We’ve also learned, the hard way, the importance of UX in CLI and workflow tools.<p>So far we are seeing a few use-cases for Infracost. Some enterprise users have integrated it into their “self-service” cloud catalog to set cost expectations before provisioning. Other users have integrated it into their CI pipeline as a safety net to catch unexpected costs. And some users are running it at design time to compare options and model usage.<p>We’ve talked to Sid Sijbrandij (CEO of GitLab), and Ian Tien (CEO of Mattermost) about when and how to monetize. Currently we are thinking about a buyer-based open core approach, in which the individual contributor edition will always be free, and enterprise paid features will include multi-team support, management reports and private cloud support.<p>We’d really appreciate it if you try it out and give us feedback. You can check out the repo at <a href="https://github.com/infracost/infracost" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/infracost/infracost</a>. We’d love your thoughts on our approach, and anything that has worked, or hasn’t worked for you when it comes to managing cloud costs.
Upvote: | 190 |
Title: Hi HN! It's Assaf and I'm the co-founder of Jiga
(<a href="https://app.jiga3d.com" rel="nofollow">https://app.jiga3d.com</a>). We make it fast and easy to produce parts for hardware products.<p>You can upload a 3D model (such as STL or SLDPRT) file and get a production quote within seconds. We have a vetted network of manufacturers around the world who can produce your part with 3D printing (plastic and metal), CNC machining (plastic and metal), or sheet metal. It's literally 3 clicks: 1. upload your file on <a href="https://app.jiga3d.com" rel="nofollow">https://app.jiga3d.com</a>. 2. select manufacturing process 3. select quote and order.<p>We built this because we are hardware makers ourselves. I was running a 3D printing manufacturing service before starting Jiga, and we were shocked by how bad an experience it was to get quotes and order parts online, or from machine shops. I spent a significant amount of my time and money on inefficient communication, paperwork, sourcing and quoting.<p>Ok, so now you're probably asking how we're different from other online manufacturing companies? Well, besides being not as fast, they act as an unnecessary middleman. They cut a huge fee, block hardware builders from talking directly to manufacturers and getting professional feedback (such as making sure they can produce that 0.15mm tolerance exactly on that little hole).<p>For examples, take some of our customers: an enterprise that builds jets for the US army, a company that builds a device that enables tractors to be autonomous, a hospital that builds 3D printed ventilation machines to tackle Covid-19 (first parts ordered with Jiga!) or a company that builds robotic arms.<p>These companies start by looking for the right supplier to make their part. They email quote requests with the designs, some suppliers reply after a week, some don’t. They log this data into spreadsheets and folders while making comparisons. Finally after two weeks the supplier is ready to take your order but oh no! They mixed up the email threads and made a mistake - and the wrong part was produced.<p>Worse, when getting into producing more than just prototypes, they have to manage the supply of many different components and timelines, making sure that that they won’t find themselves delaying over some little component and avoiding any miscommunication about parts or revisions. All this inefficiency is not only frustrating but also costly - makers and companies lose millions every year because of miscommunication and delays. We built Jiga to make this process efficient and painless.<p>We handle all logistics (always first class/priority shipping) and make sure that customers are 100% happy with every order that they get. Additionally, we let you read supplier reviews, check their certifications and communicate directly with them. Want to make sure that the supplier is aware of that 0.15mm hole? No problem, reach to them over our platform and they will answer promptly.<p>We make money from commissions on orders based on agreements with suppliers.<p>I’m looking forward to talking to anyone who builds hardware, and to hearing your feedback and ideas and experiences in this space. If you've ever needed parts for things you were making, I hope you'll give us a spin. Have at it, HN!
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: I treated myself to a solo hackathon this weekend and built
<a href="https://next-season-of.com" rel="nofollow">https://next-season-of.com</a>. The data is scrapped from IMDB and the website is generated using the hugo template engine. There's still a lot of optimization to be done but I'm planning to use this as a learning ground to try and get my pages to rank in Google. It would be really cool to search "next season of Ozark" and see a link to next-season-of.com.
Upvote: | 127 |
Title: Just turned 30 and truly would appreciate some advice from you. Anything goes, be healthier, buy $BTC, don't buy $BTC, etc.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I can't find a single place without politics and pessimism. It should be easy to differentiate between conspiracy theorists but lately, I have been finding it harder. Every thread here results in accusing companies of wrong doing even when the evidence isn't quite clear. Other places like reddit and blogs are even worse.<p>While I understand there must be politics in every day life and it is inescapable but the issue and discussion seems to go round and round. I am not finding anything insightful from any political discussion online. Is it just me? I feel like most things come down to people wanting to have enough resources to live happily. If they just had enough money, most of their problems would be solved.<p>Is it selection bias that commenters on the internet tend to be more depressed/lonely?<p>Has the demography gone down in age which results in lot of shitty behaviour like witch hunts and trending non-issue outrage? Young generation seems to like these and they especially love twitch from what I have seen. Maybe an impact of that?<p>What do you think is the biggest reason for the current condition?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I’m Ned and along with my co-founder PJ (pjmurraynz) we’re building Great Question (<a href="https://greatquestion.co" rel="nofollow">https://greatquestion.co</a>) to make it easy to do customer research as part of every sprint or product release.<p>The maxim of Y Combinator is “talk to customers, build something people want” yet relatively few software teams regularly engage in customer research. This was definitely the case for us in our last startup, and even when we sold that business to a place with a well resourced research team we were largely on our own. Without any real tools or processes to do customer research we ended up muddling through, but it was always ad hoc - and often skipped so we could just get a release out the door. Bad news.<p>By talking to lots of customers (meta!) we learned that one of the biggest challenges teams face is in the logistics of research: finding customers to talk to, scheduling calls & paying incentives. The research community calls this Research Operations. We’re setting out to fix these problems by building tools that make it easy for small teams to do what companies like Facebook and Google do with massive teams of research coordinators.<p>We help you do better customer research, more often in four ways:<p>First, we help you build an on-demand pool of research subjects. These are customers who opt in to be notified about customer interview requests and surveys, or find out about beta product releases. They could also be customers you find in other forums or communities, through content marketing or direct outreach.<p>Second, we let you book time with a customer in a couple of clicks, or send out a survey or prototype test. We give you templates to save you creating these things from scratch every time, but also to keep you following best practice. Templates like Product Market Fit surveys are live now with more advanced ones like Van Westendorp pricing surveys coming soon (email me for early access).<p>Third, we handle all the messaging on platform to protect the privacy and consent of your users but also to manage what's called "participant fatigue", and handle any incentives to make sure you get the responses you need.<p>Finally, we make it easy to share what you’re learning with your team. Store your notes, observations, video files and transcripts in one place. Post it to Slack, get an email digest of learnings & upcoming interviews, and find previous research reports in one central place.<p>All of this is to say we’re building the tool we wish we had while building product at our last startup, and also in the belly of the beast after we got acquired. The tool that helps you go from having some big gnarly question to start getting answers in minutes, and which brings your team along for the journey. We use the tool religiously in-house and it's had a massive impact on not only our own product development process, but our first engineering hire (ex Twitch) has noted how much more connected he feels with our customers and the product he's building.<p>What do you all think? We’d love your feedback on the product and our approach. In particular we’d love to know how customer research works at your company and the challenges you face making it happen!
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>Pranay and Ankit here. We’re founders of SigNoz ( <a href="https://signoz.io" rel="nofollow">https://signoz.io</a> ), an open source observability platform. We are building an open-core alternative to DataDog for companies that are security and privacy conscious, and are concerned about huge bills they need to pay to SaaS observability vendors.<p>Observability means being able to monitor your application components - from mobile and web front-ends to infrastructure, and being able to ask questions about their states. Things like latency, error rates, RPS, etc. Better observability helps developers find the cause of issues in their deployed software and solve them quickly.<p>Ankit was leading an engineering team, where we became aware of the importance of observability in a microservices system where each service depended on the health of multiple other services. And we saw that this problem was getting more and more important, esp. in today’s world of distributed systems.<p>The journey of SigNoz started with our own pain point. I was working in a startup in India. We didn’t use application monitoring (APM) tools like DataDog/NewRelic as it was very costly, though we badly needed it. We had many customers complaining about broken APIs or a payment not processing - and we had to get into war room mode to solve it. Having a good observability system would have allowed us to solve these issues much more quickly.<p>Not having any solution which met our needs, we set out to do something about this.<p>In our initial exploration, we tried setting up RED (Rate, Error and Duration) and infra metrics using Prometheus. But we soon realized that metrics can only give you an aggregate overview of systems. You need to debug why these metrics went haywire. This led us to explore Jaeger, an open source distributed tracing system.<p>Key issues with Jaeger were that there was no concept of metrics in Jaegers, and datastores supported by Jaeger lacked aggregation capabilities. For example, if you had tags of “customer_type: premium” for your premium customers, you couldn’t find p99 latency experienced by them through Jaeger.<p>We found that though there are many backend products - an open source product with UI custom-built for observability, which integrates metrics & traces, was missing.<p>Also, some folks we talked to expressed concern about sending data outside of boundaries - and we felt that with increasing privacy regulations, this would become more critical. We thought there was scope for an open source solution that addresses these points.<p>We think that currently there is a huge gap between the state of SaaS APM products and OSS products. There is a scope for open core products which is open source but also supports enterprise scale and comes with support and advanced features.<p>Some of our key features - (1) Seamless UI to track metrics and traces (2) Ability to get metrics for business-relevant queries, e.g. latency faced by premium customers (3) Aggregates on filtered traces, etc.<p>We plan to focus next on building native alert managers, support for custom metrics and then logs ( waiting for open telemetry logs to mature more in this). More details about our roadmap here ( <a href="https://signoz.io/docs/roadmap" rel="nofollow">https://signoz.io/docs/roadmap</a> )<p>We are based on Golang & React. The design of SigNoz is inspired by streaming data architecture. Data is ingested to Kafka and relevant info & meta-data is extracted by stream processing. Any number of processors can be built as per business needs. Processed data is ingested to real-time analytics datastore, Apache Druid, which powers aggregates on slicing and dicing of high dimensional data. In the initial benchmarks we did for self-hosting SigNoz, we found that it would be 10x more cost-effective than SaaS vendors ( <a href="https://signoz.io/blog/signoz-benchmarks/" rel="nofollow">https://signoz.io/blog/signoz-benchmarks/</a> )<p>We’ve launched this repo under MIT license so any developer can use the tool. The goal is to not charge individual developers & small teams. We eventually plan on making a licensed version where we charge for features that large companies care about like advanced security, single sign-on, advanced integrations and support.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz</a> We have a ton of features in mind and would love you to try it and let us know your feedback!
Upvote: | 226 |
Title: Can y'all share any team fun event ideas that have worked well for you during the WFH/pandemic period? My folks miss the natural in-person interactions that occur in the office, and we could use some time together to decompress. But, how do we do that remotely? Maybe you long-time remote teams are already experts at this? Is there an "awesome-remote-team-fun-events" GitHub repo?<p>Any ideas are welcome, but I'm particular interested in events with $0-$100 per person budget and work with team size of 5-20 people. Thanks.<p>Edit: This is something we'd do during work hours.
Upvote: | 216 |
Title: How is the team morale given the current events on politics, data and privacy?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: We are building GitDuck, a video chat tool for developers and one of the features we needed the most was to be able to share our terminal between ourselves. We didn't like the idea of sharing the screen, as it's not fast or interactive and tmux was too complex for many use cases.<p>We built a terminal integration that enables you to easily share your terminal session with anyone that is talking with you on a GitDuck call.<p>You can share by just typing on your terminal:<p><pre><code> $ gitduck share
</code></pre>
If you need to give write access to your colleagues, you can share with:<p><pre><code> $ gitduck share -w
</code></pre>
All the connections are P2P (with WebRTC) and encrypted, so nothing touches our servers.<p>If you want to see it in action, check the video demo or install and try it live. :)<p>- GitDuck on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/gitduck<p>- Our website: https://gitduck.com<p>- Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t1MMi4QReU<p>Let us know what you think and why (or why not) would you use this when you need to talk and collaborate.<p>thanks!
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>We are Martin and Matija, twin brothers and creators of Wasp (<a href="https://wasp-lang.dev" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev</a>). Wasp is a declarative language that makes it really easy to build full-stack web apps while still using the latest technologies such as React, Node.js and Prisma.<p>Martin and I both studied computer science where we mostly focused on algorithms for bioinformatics. Afterwards we led engineering teams in several SaaS companies, on the way gaining plenty of experience in building web apps.<p>Moving from one project to another, we used various technologies:
JQuery -> Backbone -> Angular -> React, own scripts / makefile -> Grunt -> Gulp -> Webpack, PHP -> Java -> Node.js, … , and we always felt that things are harder than they should be. We were spending a lot of time adopting the latest tech stack and figuring out the best practices: how to make the web app performant, scalable, economical and secure and also how to connect all the pieces of the stack together.<p>While the tech stack kept advancing rapidly, the core requirements of the apps we were building changed very little (auth, routing, data model CRUD, ACL, …). That is why about 1.5 years ago we started thinking about separating web app specification (what it should do) from its implementation (how it should do it).<p>This led us to the idea of extracting common web app features and concepts into a special specification language from which we could generate code in the currently popular technologies. We don’t think it is feasible to replace everything with a single language so that is why we went with a DSL which integrates with the modern stack (right now React, NodeJS, Prisma).<p>Wasp lets you define high-level aspects of your web app (auth, routing, ACL, data models, CRUD) via a simple specification language and then write your specific logic in React and Node.js. The majority of the code is still being written in React and Node.js, with Wasp serving as the backbone of your whole application. To see some examples of what the language looks like in practice, take a look here: <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutorials/TodoApp/main.wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp/blob/master/examples/tutor...</a><p>The main difference between Wasp and frameworks (e.g. Meteor, Blitz, Redwood) is that Wasp is a language, not a library. One benefit of that is a simpler and cleaner, declarative syntax, focused on the requirements and detached from the implementation details.<p>Another benefit of a DSL is that it allows Wasp to understand the web app’s requirements during the build time and reason about it before generating the final code. For example, when generating code to be deployed to production, it could pick the most appropriate architecture based on its understanding of the web app and deploy it to serverless or another type of architecture (or even a combination). Another example would be reusing your data model logic through all the parts of the stack while defining it just once in Wasp. DSL opens the potential for optimisations, static analysis and extensibility.<p>Wasp’s compiler is built in Haskell and it compiles the source code in Wasp + React/Node.js into the target code in just React and Node.js (currently in Javascript, but we plan to move to Typescript soon). The generated code is human readable and can easily be inspected and even ejected if Wasp becomes too limiting.<p>We are currently in Alpha and many features are still rough or missing, but you can try it out and build and deploy web apps! There are things we haven’t solved yet and others that will probably change as we progress.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp</a> and give it a try at <a href="https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://wasp-lang.dev/docs/</a>.<p>Thank you for reading! We would love to get your feedback and also hear about your experiences building web apps - what has worked for you and where do you see the opportunities for improvement?
Upvote: | 222 |
Title: I keep seeing the captchas more and more whose obvious purpose is to train their self-driving NN, and they're getting out of hand. Sometimes I have to work through 5+ images. How is that legal that they can just interrupt me on a whim and ask for me to do work for them? Is there an alternative solution available?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: throwaway account for obvious reasons, but here are the facts:<p>- startup founded in early 2010's, took on some venture funding and recently got acquired
- startup forced employees to exercise options within 90 days of leaving company, so lots of employees exercised options with post tax dollars. I would guess anywhere from $500k - $1 million.
- all financials released to shareholders, company is now profitable and has a decent warchest.
- Series A,B,... etc investors getting some money back because they have preferred shares
- employee options/common stock are now worth nothing because of liquidation preference
- multiple executives receiving 7 figure payouts<p>Is this common practice? Is there anything we can do as ex-employee shareholders? Are there any instances of companies paying back their employees for the option exercises during an exit event? What would you do as a founder in this instance?
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>We are the team behind Spacelift (https://spacelift.io/). Spacelift is the CI/CD for infrastructure-as-code, be it Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation or Ansible (coming soon), and policy as code. It enables collaboration, automates manual work and compliance, and lets teams customize and automate their workflows.<p>Here’s what you can do with Spacelift<p>- Build sophisticated Git-based workflows<p>- Use Open Policy Agent to declare rules around your infrastructure, access control, state changes, and more<p>- Author and maintain reusable modules for your organization; we even have a full CI solution for modules to make sure they’re healthy<p>- Declare who can log in (and under what circumstances) and what their level of access to each of the managed projects should be (SAML 2.0 SSO out of the box!) using login and access policies respectively<p>- Use Spacelift’s trigger policies to create arbitrary workflows and dependencies spanning multiple infrastructure-as-code stacks<p>- Manage stacks, contexts, modules, and policies in a declarative way using Terraform or Pulumi<p>Before Spacelift, we built bespoke solutions (e.g., Geopoiesis, https://www.reddit.com/r/Terraform/comments/fu6pj1/geopoiesisio_anyone_knows_something_about_it/), currently used by two of the largest European scaleups.<p>In the past few months, we’ve been onboarding our first customers and making sure everything works as expected. You can check out our starter repo at https://github.com/spacelift-io/terraform-starter. It's an easy way to learn all of Spacelift’s capabilities in 15 minutes without tapping into your own cloud resources. We’d love your thoughts on our approach and anything that has worked or hasn’t worked for you.<p>P.S. We are hiring https://spacelift.io/careers.html<p>P.P.S. We just announced our funding round https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/11/cloud-automation-startup-spacelift-raises-6m-series-a-led-by-blossom-capital/
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: 2021 Edition. I posted this about a week ago as well, but didn't get much traction. This is a continuation of the previous threads which can be found here:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299180<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13660086<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26039706<p>Other resources:<p>https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x<p>https://github.com/AlgoryL/Projects-from-Scratch<p>https://github.com/tuvtran/project-based-learning
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hey everyone! I’m Ali and, together with my co-founders MK, Alex, and Warren, I’m building Chorus Meditation (<a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/</a>). We provide online group meditation classes led by trained instructors.<p>MK and I met after we both had found the benefits of a traditional meditation practice, but only after much difficulty getting started because it took over 30 days to feel the benefits and it can often feel isolating and like nothing is “working.” At the time, MK was a top SoulCycle instructor. She is a master at creating community and motivating people to be their best through a perfect balance of humor, approachability, vulnerability, and acceptance. I was an avid SoulCycle rider and we bonded over our shared love for meditation and separately, our love for the instantly gratifying and social experience that SoulCycle had created. She and I decided that if we could create an experience for the mind that mirrored what SoulCycle had done for the body, we could help millions of people just like us.<p>So, we spent months, combining different mindfulness techniques into a new method, testing out various versions on our living floors. We tried starting the class with a 3 minute traditional meditation before moving into the breathing pattern - no dice - we had promised people non-traditional meditation so when we hit them with exactly traditional meditation right at the start, it turned people off. Next we tried getting into the breathing pattern right off the bat -- still no dice. But we kept at it, and 16 major iterations later, we landed on what is now our Chorus class.<p>Traditional meditation can be life-changing for those who stick with it, but the unfortunate truth is that for most people it’s hard to sustain the discipline to stick with it long enough to unlock the ah-ha moment. Once you cross that threshold you feel its power, but with Chorus we are trying to help people who struggle with that onboarding phase cross the threshold more easily. We've found that one of the main barriers many people run into with traditional meditation is that they're doing it alone, and they often feel like nothing is happening. So, we made Chorus 1) social, with warm, personable teachers and fellow class attendees, 2) fun, with new and popular music, and 3) designed to give motivating results in the first session and on-going. For example, the breathing pattern we use brings more oxygen into the body than normal inhales and exhales, which causes a tingling sensation, giving users a quick and satisfying feeling even in the first session. You can think of the tingles like endorphins in exercise - they feel good and tell you that <i>something</i> is working - so you are satisfied and want to come back for more. Everything in Chorus is designed to motivate you to keep going.<p>Our members pay $40-a-month to have access to live and pre-recorded classes set to the beat of popular music like Beyonce, Odesza, Bon Iver, etc, that help them start their day with a positive mindset or unwind at night before bed. If you want to give it a try, we just launched a new class specifically designed to help you sleep — <a href="https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class" rel="nofollow">https://chorusmeditation.com/#book-a-class</a><p>One of our users, a mother of young twins, shared: “my first experience unlocked something in me. Something visceral, and I thought - ‘this is so worth exploring.’” This is exactly the kind of reaction we’re going for.<p>I want to emphasize that we’re in no way trying to replace traditional meditation. We, ourselves, are reverent students of traditional practices. And we're well aware that we don't have anything to teach the millennia-old traditions of India and China. What we are trying to do is bridge the gap for people who find traditional techniques challenging so that they can avoid the discouraging feeling of “I’m doing this wrong” and empower them to develop their own mindfulness practice.<p>Another thing we do to support our users in the early stages of practice is provide a community in which they can share their experiences and get encouragement to keep going. This is one of the more satisfying aspects for us, because people report their positive experiences as well as their challenges. We hear from users who report feeling more calm and focused, or sleeping better, all the way up to "Chorus has truly transformed my life...I didn’t think I would ever have a relationship with my mom again, and now because of Chorus, I do.”<p>We are building Chorus for our collective community, so I’d really love to hear this community’s feedback. We'd love to hear from everybody, whether you're a complete meditation skeptic, someone who's found meditation challenging, or a seasoned meditator who has achieved total equanimity! We're eager to hear your experiences and thoughts and feedback!<p>Over to you, HN!
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: Hey HN community -<p>I’m Ulrik from Cord (<a href="https://cord.tech" rel="nofollow">https://cord.tech</a>) in the current YC W21 batch [1] - we are building software that allows people to label their data intelligently using a toolbox of various ‘labeling algorithms’. Labeling algorithms are any units of intelligence (e.g. a pre-trained model, or an interpolation algorithm) that help automate the annotation process. This enables data science and machine learning teams to rapidly iterate on their ML models without having to farm out labeling tasks to an external workforce.<p>Today we’re launching the first part of our product, our Web App, which serves our initial set of automation features through a GUI. It also allows you to classify images and draw vector labels, visualize data, and perform collaborative QA.<p>Computer vision ML algorithms are widely used for tasks like detecting everyday objects such as cars and pedestrians. However, they are yet to see widespread adoption for things like detecting cancerous polyps during an endoscopic procedure or blood clots in MRI scans. The lack of massive-scale labeled training datasets that fuel contemporary approaches is often the blocking element in building ML applications that solve these more specialised tasks. We also believe that the core part of the IP of an ML application stems from the labeled data used to train it.<p>Creating these datasets is challenging for several reasons. Labeling the data requires expensive domain-expert annotators, and privacy might prevent the data from being sent to an external workforce. Ultimately most labeling work tends to be done using open-source tools that were not created for speed and purpose-built to handle massive-scale datasets[2]. These tools also tend to provide a poor experience for the end consumer of the training data (e.g., data scientists, ML engineers) because they lack intelligence and require high manual input.<p>The initial seed of the idea came while I was working on a CS master’s project of visualizing massive-scale medical image datasets. I saw saw how much time and effort was being spent by doctors on labeling data. I met my co-founder Eric, who had worked as a quant researcher in finance, and after meeting him we realized we could take an algorithmic approach to tackling the labeling problem. Instead of writing trading algorithms, we turned our focus to writing labeling algorithms.<p>For example, for a food calorie estimation project we translated image level classifications of food items to individualized bounding box labels using a labeling algorithm we wrote with our SDK, requiring only one manual label per food item. Although it was an image dataset, our algorithm approximated noisy bounding box labels by using a CSRT object tracker across images. It then trained a shallow Faster RCNN ‘micro-model’ on the noisy labels, ran inference on the data, and suppressed earlier noisy labels. We then quickly visually reviewed and adjusted the results on our Web App[3]. We have applied a similar approach in areas such as gastroenterology[4] and pathology.<p>The days of relying on an army of human annotators and waiting to start the model building process are hopefully (soon) over. We are incredibly excited to be driving for that change - and are delighted to be sharing Cord with the HN community! We would love to hear your feedback. How are you going about creating and managing training data today? What are your key constraints? If you have used a creative method to label your data before, please share. Thank you so much in advance!<p>[1] What I Learned From My First Month at Y Combinator - <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-from-my-first-month-at-y-combinator-5b35fb9ebb7b" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-from-my-first-month-a...</a><p>[2] Why You Should Ditch Your In-House Training Data Tools (And Avoid Building Your Own) - <a href="https://medium.com/p/ef78915ee84f" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/p/ef78915ee84f</a><p>[3] Label a Dataset with a Few Lines of Code - <a href="https://eric-landau.medium.com/label-a-dataset-with-a-few-lines-of-code-45c140ff119d" rel="nofollow">https://eric-landau.medium.com/label-a-dataset-with-a-few-li...</a><p>[4] Pain Relief for Doctors Labelling Data - <a href="https://eric-landau.medium.com/pain-relief-for-doctors-labelling-data-72f3e5e31c92" rel="nofollow">https://eric-landau.medium.com/pain-relief-for-doctors-label...</a>
Upvote: | 64 |
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