prompt
stringlengths 16
15.6k
| completion
stringlengths 4
6
|
|---|---|
Title: Recently, my service <a href="https://next-episode.net" rel="nofollow">https://next-episode.net</a> experienced a huge drop in Google rankings. As I've been running it for more than 15 years, this is far from the first time this has happened. Usually I've been able to attribute big fluctuations (positive or negative) either to something I did, a Google algo change, or some external factor.<p>For example, about 2 years ago, something similar happened. While digging through my Search Console I discovered that Russian websites generated thousands of links pointing to a page on Next Episode with pornographic keywords used as link anchors. This was so effective that they managed to get those keywords to the top of the "Top linking text" in Google Search Console - naturally (most likely) resulting in drop in rankings for the regular keywords and the domain in general.<p>About a week ago, while trying to investigate the current drop in rankings and browsing through my "Latest links" external links export from Google Search Console, I noticed something funny. There were thousands of links in there (from 3 domains) following the same structure as on Next Episode: domain/show-name domain/show-name/browse domain/show-name/season-1, etc.<p>Following these links revealed something even funnier: all of them displayed content directly from my site! Not even scraped/cached content - they were dynamically pulling content from my server and displaying it on their domain. Even the search worked, the news archive and the top charts. Here is a list of those domains as an image: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/PjNKh0b.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/PjNKh0b.png</a>. I've since blocked their access, so opening any of them will not show my website right now, but here is how it looked: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/HBiL3yh.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/HBiL3yh.png</a><p>Now, my first thought was that those were maybe scraping the content as part of a link farm (to spam with ads?), but I also wanted to know more. I experimented with Google searches that included pages from my website, like "Hot Shows - Next Episode" and ones with very specific news posts subjects like "Streaming Services Availability added to Episodes and Movies" (posted in September last year). Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only the domains above were indexed by Google (and were listed in the Search results), but there were 4-5 more domains that did the same thing and some of them even outranked mine!<p>Here is a full list of domains that I discovered by searching for my news posts subjects: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/dAm1CzI.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/dAm1CzI.png</a>. If you Google for site:domain.com you'll see some of them have thousands of pages indexed by Google. Trying out more keyword searches, I was also able to discover these domains: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/s5YjJWK.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/s5YjJWK.png</a> (as they've cached the content, they still work). Those all seem to be part of the same operation, but they serve a different purpose - they have only scraped the home page of Next Episode and all their links point to inside pages on the other domains. I suspect this is to generate incoming links to the other domains and give them some credibility.<p>As with the links with adult keywords text anchors mentioned above - I suspect this whole thing is a negative SEO campaign - I don't see any other reason for it to be happening and it seems to be achieving its goal. Once I found all I could find about the domains involved in this, I took some action:<p>1) disavowed all those domains through the Google disavow tool<p>2) investigated if I could redirect their pages to mine (as they were dynamically pulling the content - I could change it to whatever I wanted). I managed to make it work through JavaScript (though interestingly, it had to be obfuscated as they were doing some sanitizing when pulling my content and replacing strings like "window.location.href" with "window.loc1ion.href"), but in the end I decided against it and:<p>3) I blocked their IPs through CloudFlare (all Russian IPs). An interesting thing here is that once I blocked an IP, the domain would somehow automatically switch to another IP to pull my content from, but once I blocked like 10 or 15 of them - they seem to have run out of IPs and now they stay blocked.<p>I looked for a way to report those domains to Google, but as of today, I've not found the place to do it. Does anybody know? Today, about a week after I blocked the domains that pulled content from my site, they still have thousands of my pages indexed in Google and are ranking better in some search results than me. I'm guessing with time, Google will catch up with the fact they don't show any content anymore and will delist those pages.<p>This whole thing was very new to me so I hope it'll raise awareness that this is going on and maybe help someone else catch it happening to their website. I'd appreciate any feedback on this and I'm around if you have any questions. It would also be interesting to hear about anyone's related experiences. Cheers!
Upvote: | 278 |
Title: (Disclaimer: I'm building up material for https://whyarentyoucoding.com/)<p>I'd love to know, from developers who are being paid to write code, what it is that's stopping you from coding (apart from the obvious, that you're busy browsing HN!).
Upvote: | 221 |
Title: I'm a software developer who recently started to work 4 days a week and consequentially I have some free time I want to dedicate to self improvement. I'm not looking to learn new programming languages or framework, but I just want to learn or improve code agnostic skills to do my work more efficiently.<p>My first idea is to improve the way and how much I use the keyboard with the final goal of typing faster and use the mouse less (my wrist will be happy about that).<p>Is there any other everyday skill you think is important to master? Any advice on how to improve it?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I am an individual contributor with very high performance rating. My boss has been ignoring me for a few months. (Hasn't spoken to me for a long time. No new work). My guess is that, he wants to promote his favorites and he wants me to leave on my own. How do I handle this situation?<p>I know that the most common advice would be, speak to him. I am not considering it. Because it might turn out to be a false alarm I would be assigned a module which I am not interested in.<p>My current plan is to pretend that I am not aware of him ignoring me. And I will spend a lot of time learning technologies (Initially I wanted to quit, because it hurt me. But after reading various reviews, I learned that its pretty much the same everywhere. At least in my current company, the work life balance is very good. Since I am in 40's, I may find it a little difficult in a new company)<p>My question is, have you been in a similar situation?. How did you handle it?. If I want to pretend (that I am unaware), for how long can I do with some self respect?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: What unique or high-quality content only exists outside the English-speaking web? Is there a Chinese equivalent to Hacker News? A Hindi StackOverflow? I would love to broaden my horizons :)
Upvote: | 544 |
Title: Looking at decent e-ink devices to write notes on, I cannot understand why they're so expensive. For the price of a remarkable 2, for instance, you could buy an iPad which supports note-taking, and much more.<p>I know there are some advantages to e-ink displays, but I don't think that's enough to justify the high price tag on these readers/note-taking devices.<p>There's also hidden costs involved, such as buying new tips for the e-ink pencils.<p>Has the e-ink industry reached a dead-end where patents are impeding progress, or are there other reasons involved?
Upvote: | 334 |
Title: Hi HN! Dmitry and Ryan here. We're building Pyroscope (<a href="https://pyroscope.io/" rel="nofollow">https://pyroscope.io/</a>) — an open source continuous profiling platform (<a href="https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope</a>).<p>We started working on it a few months ago. I did a lot of profiling at my last job and I always thought that profiling tools provide a ton of value in terms of reducing latency and cutting cloud costs, but are very hard to use. With most of them you have to profile your programs locally on your machine. If you can profile in production, you often have to be very lucky to catch the issues happening live, you can't just go back in time with these tools.<p>So I thought, why not just run some profiler 24/7 in production environment?<p>I talked about this to my friend Ryan and we started working. One of the big concerns we heard from people early on was that profilers typically slow down your code, sometimes to the point that it's not suitable for production use at all. We solved this issue by using sampling profilers — those work by looking at the stacktrace X number of times per second instead of hooking into method calls and that makes profiling much less taxing on the CPU.<p>The next big issue that came up was storage — if you simply get a bunch of profiles, gzip them and then store them on disk they will consume a lot of space very quickly, so much that it will become impractical and too expensive to do so. We spent a lot of energy trying to come up with a way of storing the data that would be efficient and fast to query. In the end we came up with a system that uses segment trees [1] for fast reads (basically each read becomes log(n)), and tries [2] for storing the symbols (same trick that's used to encode symbols in Mach-O file format for example). This is at least 10 times more efficient than just gzipping profiles.<p>After we did all of this we ran some back of the envelope calculations and the results were really good — with this approach you can profile thousands of apps with 100Hz frequency and 10 second granularity for 1 year and it will only cost you about 1% of your existing cloud costs (CPU + RAM + Disk). E.g if you currently run 100 c5.large machines we estimate that you'll need just one more c5.large to store all that profiling data.<p>Currently we have support for Go, Python and Ruby and the setup is usually just a few lines of code. We plan to release eBPF, Node and Java integrations soon. We also have a live demo with 1 year of profiling data collected from an example Python app <a href="https://demo.pyroscope.io/?name=hotrod.python.frontend{}&from=now-1y" rel="nofollow">https://demo.pyroscope.io/?name=hotrod.python.frontend{}&fro...</a><p>And that's where we are right now. Our long term plan is to keep the core of the project open source, and provide the community with paid services like hosting and support. The hosted version is in the works and we aim to do a public release in about a month or so.<p>Give it a try: <a href="https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope</a>. We look forward to receiving your feedback on our work so far. Even better, we would love to hear about the ways people currently use profilers and how we can make the whole experience less frustrating and ultimately help everyone make their code faster and cut their cloud costs.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segment_tree" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segment_tree</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie</a>
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: Hello HN!<p>I'm Josh, one of the co-founders of Noya (<a href="https://noyalabs.com" rel="nofollow">https://noyalabs.com</a>). Noya is designing a cheaper process to capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere. We do this by retrofitting industrial cooling towers owned and operated by other companies to perform carbon capture. We then sell the captured CO2 to companies that need it, and pay a piece of the proceeds to the companies that own the cooling towers.<p>As the wildfires in California became worse and worse, my co-founder (and roommate at the time) Daniel and I became increasingly concerned that we weren't doing enough to be a part of the solution. The more that climate catastrophes became the norm, the more we became obsessed with one seemingly-simple question:<p>If climate change is caused by having too much CO2 in the sky... can't we just reverse it by yanking CO2 out of the sky?<p>Humans have known how to scrub CO2 out of gas mixtures for almost a century [1]; but, we haven't been able to widely apply this type of tech to scrubbing CO2 from the air because of its high cost. For example, one popular direct air capture project is estimated to capture 1M tons of CO2/year [2], but has an estimated equipment cost of $700M and all-in costs of ~$1.1B [3]. The single largest component of this cost is in the piece of equipment called the air contactor — the big wall of fans you see in the image linked above — which clocks in at $212M by itself. Yet fundamentally, all that air contactors do is put air into contact with something that captures CO2, whether it's an aqueous capture solution or some sort of solid sorbent.<p>These costs felt astronomical to Daniel and I, so we set out with the singular focus to reduce the costs of carbon capture by reducing the costs of the air contactor. But no matter how we thought about it, we couldn’t get around the fact that to capture meaningful amounts of CO2, you need to move massive amounts of air since CO2 is very dilute in the atmosphere (0.04% by volume). Looking at the existing solutions, we began to understand why it makes sense to build something equally massive: so you can go after economies of scale.<p>As Daniel and I were feeling stuck late one night, he got a call from his dad. They started talking about the refrigeration facility Daniel’s dad runs in Venezuela (where Daniel's from), and they started talking about the cooling towers at the facility. Cooling towers move air and water into contact with each other to provide cooling to industrial processes (descriptive video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXaK8_F8dn0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXaK8_F8dn0</a>). As Daniel listened to his dad, Daniel realized that if we could just add the blend of CO2-absorbing chemicals we had been developing into the water his dad’s cooling tower used, we could use it as an air contactor and achieve CO2 capture at the same time the cooling tower was cooling its processes. This eliminates the need to build millions of dollars worth of dedicated equipment to pluck CO2 from the sky.<p>Our cooling-tower-based carbon capture process works as follows: we add our chemical carbon capture blend into a cooling tower's water, we connect the tower to some pieces of downstream processing equipment to regenerate the captured CO2, and then we pressurize the CO2 into cylinders for sale as "reclaimed CO2" to companies that need it. All of this is installed onto a cooling tower that another company already owns and operates. In exchange for letting us install this process on their towers, we will cover the cost of installation, and the companies will get a piece of the revenue generated through the sale of their CO2.<p>We’re well on our way towards making this process a reality. We’ve partnered with a local farm to install our process in their cooling towers, and we've just produced CO2 using our industrial-scale prototype.<p>We're excited for the opportunity to reverse climate change and ensure we have a future on this planet that is good. Please let us know what questions, concerns, or feedback you have about what we're building - I’ll be here all day!<p>[1]: <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5948/1652" rel="nofollow">https://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5948/1652</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2019/10/1-air-contactor.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2019/10/1-a...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118302253" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...</a>
Upvote: | 401 |
Title: Some companies have simple products with no explicit pricing. When I call them, there is no custom or bespoke aspects of the pricing and they simply quote me a price. Why didn't they just put it on their website?
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: I just realized isn't id odd that worldwide there is a sport section as a part of daily news?<p>Relic of ancient times "bread and games" (panem et circenses), time when people were politically
manipulated with biggest distraction. I am thinking there is no cooking news, or musical news... Sport news are about what other people do, not what we personally do. There is no science block, gaming block, music block ... but along weather there is sport section?!<p>I do not in this moment, I do not know, it just feel strange and off, is there anyone else who shares similar feeling?<p>Update: Sorry, for not being clear, I specifically meant TV news, you know prime time. News, from country to country the one it is on around 8pm each day...
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I’m Ferruccio, cofounder of June (<a href="https://june.so" rel="nofollow">https://june.so</a>). We make it easy to set up dashboards for your most important product metrics.<p>After a couple of years working in product teams, we realised that most companies measure the same things. So we created a set of templates that help you streamline the process of getting an insight from your data.<p>With Amplitude/Mixpanel you have to know what you should be measuring and how. Getting to an insight starts from a blank canvas, is intimidating, and requires some expertise. With June, you pick a template, connect Segment, select the right events for your analysis, and get a report.<p>We currently have 9 templates including Retention, Active Users, and Churning Users. We release a new one every week. We’re also starting to allow you to create and share your own templates.<p>To try it out, go to <a href="https://june.so/templates" rel="nofollow">https://june.so/templates</a> and pick a template you’d like to try. Connect your Segment account, select the events required for your analysis, and get your insights.<p>Looking forward to ideas and feedback from the community!
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: My background: 1st year CS student with knowledge in Python, C and some Rust.<p>I have been wanting to learn graphics programming for a while, so I picked up Computer Graphics from Scratch [0] today, but found the math confusing. Can you recommend me some primer books on graphics programming which do not assume much mathematical background? What are some concepts which are absolutely necessary to know? Can you point me to some resources which might be helpful?<p>Thanks!<p>[0] https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>Aakhil, Theresa & Mark here at Worksphere (<a href="https://worksphere.com" rel="nofollow">https://worksphere.com</a>). Our software helps companies manage a safe workplace where employees can work flexibly in-office or remote. Worksphere automates desk reservations, safe entry, and gives companies office usage data to right-size their workplaces.<p>We previously worked together at Lish, a corporate catering marketplace startup catering (pun intended) to tech companies. Last March our revenue went off a cliff. No people in office = no lunch orders. We love our clients and our team, so we got to work on solving a new problem for our primary users - HR, Office, and Facilities Managers.<p>At the start of the pandemic, our users were struggling with how to return to their offices safely. New problems like enforcing social distancing, screening for COVID-19 symptoms, and contact tracing could not be solved at scale with existing tools. New coronavirus workplace regulations have cropped up, which are a pain and come with big financial risk if companies don’t comply (we’re looking at you CA businesses dealing with SB 1159 & AB 685 - learn more at <a href="https://www.worksphere.com/blog/covid-19/guide-to-ab-685-and-sb-1159" rel="nofollow">https://www.worksphere.com/blog/covid-19/guide-to-ab-685-and...</a>).<p>As the pandemic has continued (and continued, and continued) businesses are facing a new challenge. 75% of office employees report that they want a hybrid in-office and remote schedule. No one misses their 5-day-a-week commute. At the same time, collaboration and culture are hard to foster on Zoom and Slack alone. Employees still want access to an office when needed, but don’t want to come to work in an empty space. Businesses want the upsides of flexibility, but don’t want to pay for empty or only occasionally used desks — office space costs $10-12k per employee annually in major US cities. We believe that a hybrid workweek is a better workweek, and that an active approach is needed to make it a win-win for employees and businesses.<p>Our features help businesses reopen safely and realize the full potential of a flexible workplace. We automate the wellness surveys, contact tracing, and capacity limits needed to enforce internal safety guidelines and regional regulations. This alleviates a ton of manual work for Office and HR managers. Employees can create in-office schedules and see who else is in the office to increase collaboration. We track office utilization data so companies can make smart decisions about their office space and lease.<p>Worksphere is $6 per active employee/month, and our clients only pay for employees that come to the office.<p>If you’re one of the 3 of 4 people who wants to work flexibly post-pandemic, or if you manage a workplace, we’d love to hear from you. How frequently do you think you’ll need office space? What problems are you facing in this changing work environment? We’ll reply in the comments or you can email us at [email protected]. Thanks so much for your feedback!
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I realize this isn't super on topic but I also feel like this is the best place I know of to ask for this advice, so here goes. I need some entry-level, remote-based work. What should I do? Help desk work seems the most promising / practical, but I haven't been able to find anything yet. The remote jobs I see posted are nearly all for higher-end positions.<p>I live in the poorest region of the United States, but I do the best with what I have. I’ve worked on my family’s farm and done a couple stints at retail beauty supply shops that friends own. I helped open two of those shops. That’s the extent of my non-existent resume. Given a chance to interview, I believe I would do ok. Maybe even exceed expectations for the sort of job I'm looking for.<p>I need to work remotely for family reasons. I have a special-needs sister and I look after my youngest brother. They are what's most important to me, which is why I don't want to relocate. I have another brother who was helping me, but he accepted a job offer far away. Now I am the only relative near who'll be able to care and look over them. I have time for a full-time job, though, and I need a way to support us.<p>I do have a job offer that would require me to move by March 13th. The problem is that it is far from my family, and with my brother gone, I would be leaving them on their own. The job is at is an auto body repair shop paying minimum wage. I would be stressed every day worrying about my family back home. What I want is a way to work that lets me stay at home, fulfill my family responsibilities, and make money to keep things afloat.<p>I am a techie at heart. I’m a Linux/MacOS person, but I easily adapt to other technologies. My first PC was a Compaq Presario that ran Windows 3.1. My father saw the ‘future’ in it, and he hoped I would be part of that future. To use it, you needed to enjoy torture to some extent. Still, it sucked me in. Something about that mysterious DOS prompt promised treasures if only I learned its magic. A few years later, I was dual-booting an ugly Dell machine (Windows 98 SE and Ubuntu). In between that time, my school still had an Apple IIe on which I loved playing Oregon Trail. I bought one a few years back for nostalgic reasons, but I had to leave it behind at my old residence. I miss it a lot. I hope it got a good home.<p>I am currently working through the freeCodeCamp course and intend to pick up Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke soon. I use VS Code and Spacemacs as my editors. I google like a madman. I have fun playing ukulele and guitar, and I’m teaching my youngest brother about the different parts of a Raspberry Pi. Oh, and I love to read. I am a habitual reader. There’s a lot more, but those are the kind of things that interest me.<p>I learn quickly, I am flexible, and due to working in customer service (beauty supply shops) I have a calm and understanding demeanor. I am a friendly person and I am always willing to find a solution, even when a solution seems impossible.<p>I would be grateful for any advice, and I am particularly thankful for dang's / Daniel's time in editing this to be a better Ask HN submission.<p>I can be contacted at [email protected] and I can provide my GitHub as well, which is mostly documentation editing. I have been told I am a competent writer, if that counts for anything.<p>Edit: I know that this is an unusual Ask HN post and I am grateful to anyone who takes the time to read through it. I'm curious how others in my situation managed to find remote work. I feel lost in all of this. To say that this has been a stressful time would be an understatement, but I'm turning to HN in the small chance the right person sees this and can give me suitable advice or point me in the right direction. I have always found comfort in this community, so this is where I've turned. Thank you.
Upvote: | 740 |
Title: Hey everyone, we're Anton (avais), Kirill (Datkiri), and Volodymyr (vsofi), the founders of Datrics (<a href="https://datrics.ai" rel="nofollow">https://datrics.ai</a>). We help FinTech companies build and deploy machine learning models without writing code.<p>We provide a visual tool to work with structured data by constructing a diagram of data manipulations from lego-like bricks, and then execute it all on a backend. This lets our users accomplish tasks that usually need a team of software engineers, data scientists, and DevOps. For instance, one of our customers is a consumer lending company that developed a new risk model using just our drag-and-drop interface.<p>I used to lead a large data science consultancy team, being responsible for Financial Services (and Risks specifically). Our teams’ projects included end-to-end risk modeling, demand forecasting, and inventory management optimization, mostly requiring combined efforts from different technical teams and business units to be implemented.<p>It usually took months of work to turn an idea into a complete solution, going through data snapshot gathering to cleansing to experimenting to working with engineering and DevOps teams to turn experiments in Jupyter notebooks into a complete application that worked in production. Moreover, even if the application and logic behind the scenes were really simple (could be just dozens or hundreds of lines of code for a core part), the process to bring this to end-users could take ages.<p>We started thinking about possible solutions when a request from one of the Tier 1 banks appeared, which confirmed that we’re not alone in this vision: their problem was giving their “citizen data scientists” and “citizen developers” power to do data-driven work. In other words, work with the data and generate insights useful for business. That was the first time I’d heard the term “citizen data scientist”. Our users are now these citizen data scientists and developers, whom we’re giving the possibility to manipulate data, build apps, pipelines, and ML models with just nominal IT support.<p>Datrics is designed not only to do ML without coding, but to give analysts and domain experts a drag and drop interface to perform queries, generate reports, and do forecasting in a visual way with nominal IT support. One of our core use cases is doing better credit risk modeling - create application scorecards based on ML or apply rule-based transactional fraud detection. For this use-case, we’ve developed intelligent bricks that allow you to do variables binning and scorecards in a visual way. Other use cases include reports and pivot tables on aggregating sales data from different countries in different formats or doing inventory optimization by forecasting the demand without knowing any programming language.<p>We’re providing 50+ bricks to construct ETL pipelines and build models. There are some limitations - a finite number of pre-built building blocks that can be included in your app, but if there is no block that you need, you can easily build your own (<a href="https://youtu.be/BQNFcZWwUC8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BQNFcZWwUC8</a>).<p>Datrics is initially cloud-native, but also can be installed on-prem for those customers who have corresponding security policy or setups. The underlying technology, the pipeline execution engine is rather complex and currently built on top of Dask, which gives Python scalability for big datasets. In the next release, we are going to support Pandas as well as to switch intelligently between small datasets for rapid prototyping and big datasets for pipeline deployments.<p>We’re charging only for private deployments, so our web version is free: <a href="https://platform.app.datrics.ai/signup" rel="nofollow">https://platform.app.datrics.ai/signup</a>. Try it to create your analytical applications with a machine learning component! We've put together a wiki (<a href="https://wiki.datrics.ai" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.datrics.ai</a>) to cover the major functionality,<p>We are super-excited to hear your thoughts and feedback! We're big believers in the power of Machine Learning and self-service analytics and are happy to discuss what you think of no-code approaches for doing ML and analytics generally as well as the availability of them for non-data scientists. Or anything you want to share in this space!
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: The advice can be general or specific like ageism.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: With the growing number of people working remotely from anywhere this presents a major challenge for people who travel frequently. Each country is a new sim card and a new phone number. The only way to get past this is to have one universal phone number. Something like Google Voice. However, some places are now blocking "prepaid" phone numbers. Like, okay. I guess I'm just not allowed to use your app. Stick to emails. People barely ever change their emails.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Hi YC! We are Santiago Aparicio, Julian Torres and Jaime Abella and we are from Colombia. We are building Ontop (www.ontop.ai) to help companies do remote hiring and payouts, all the way from contract creation, to compliance documentation and easy money transfers.<p>COVID-19 has taught us all that remote works. Our bet is that companies in the US and Europe will start hiring more people in LATAM because talent is increasing in quality at a fraction of price compared to what they can get elsewhere.<p>Paying people in LATAM requires local knowledge to get the level of speed and compliance that workers need to get their money on time. We are building a solution so companies hiring in LATAM have to do less paperwork, can easily be compliant and disperse payments to different countries in a single place.<p>In our previous startup Fitpal (multi gym membership in LATAM) we experienced the pain behind signing contracts, collecting documents and sending money to different countries. We had to pay hundreds of gyms in LATAM and were frustrated by the amount of time we spent doing administrative work, when we should have been thinking on how to hack our way to growth.<p>We handle all paperwork, compliance and payments so onboarding new people is really easy. And most importantly, everything done legally, by the book, so that companies are always due diligence proof.<p>Our solution is tailored for LATAM guaranteeing the best speed and compliance in the market.<p>We want to hear your thoughts on our solution. We value feedback and case uses that you might have. Email us at [email protected] and we will personally give you a demo.
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: It seems like to get a software job you need a completely different skill set from the work you do day to day (for some roles). This is why there appears to be an accepted practice of spending a lot of time studying for specific interview questions. And, on the employer side, of asking these esoteric trivia questions that the candidate is expected to be able to think through and answer on the spot while talking, while being closely watched, and under pressure. It seems to me these question really give you very little information about how that candidate will perform on the job, and is just a waste of everyone's time.
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: I've only recently discovered HN and absolutely love the community. I stumbled across it from a comment over on Ars Technica and it got me thinking: what other sites may I be missing out on?<p>People on here and Ars resonate with me, so I figure ask and see if there are others that might interest to me or other members of the community.<p>I'll start. I religiously check these sites, in this order, maybe 4-5 times a day:<p>1. Sydney Morning Herald (smh.com.au)<p>2. news.com.au<p>3. Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)<p>4. Hacker News (here)<p>5. Politico (politico.com)<p>6. Fox News (foxnews.com)
Upvote: | 156 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>Anuj here. My co-founder Amir (Aazo11) and I are building HiGeorge (<a href="https://hi-george.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hi-george.com/</a>). We make localized drag-and-drop data visualizations so that all publishers, even the small ones, can better leverage data in their storytelling. Think Tableau with all the necessary data attached.<p>At the onset of the pandemic Amir and I were looking for local data on the spread of the virus. We visited the sites of large national newsrooms like the NYTimes and were impressed by the quality of data visualizations and maps, but they lacked the geographic granularity for our own neighborhood.<p>We then turned to our local newsrooms but found they presented data in tables and lists that made it difficult to comprehend the virus’ spread and trends. We wondered why. After talking to local journalists and publishers, we found that newsrooms simply do not have the resources to make sense of large datasets.<p>Public datasets are hard to clean, poorly structured, and constantly updated. One publisher explained to us that she would refresh her state health department’s website 5 times a day waiting for updated COVID data, then manually download a CSV and clean it in Excel. This process could take hours, and it needed to happen every day.<p>This is where HiGeorge comes in. We clean and aggregate public datasets and turn them into auto-updating data visualizations that anyone can instantly use with a simple copy/paste. Our data visualizations can be drag-and-dropped into articles, allowing news publishers to offer compelling data content to their communities.<p>Check out a few versions of what we’re doing with customers -- COVID-19 data reporting at North Carolina Health News [1], COVID-19 vaccine site mapping at SFGATE [2], real-time crime reporting in Dallas, TX [3], and police use of force at Mission Local [4].<p>Today, HiGeorge works with dozens of newsrooms across the country. Our visualizations have driven a 2x increase in pageviews and a 75% increase in session duration for our partner publishers. We charge a monthly subscription for access to our data visualization library – a fraction of the cost of an in-house data engineer. In the long run, we are building HiGeorge so that it becomes the single place to collaborate on and publish data content.<p>We’d love to hear from the HN community and we’ll be hanging out in the comments if you have any questions or feedback.<p>[1]<a href="https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2021/02/09/coronavirus-today-feb-9-deaths-top-10000-vaccine-roll-out-focuses-on-equity-and-efficiency/" rel="nofollow">https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2021/02/09/coronavir...</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/vaccine-sites-San-Francisco-Bay-Area-appointments-15935161.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/vaccine-sites-San-Fra...</a>
[3] <a href="https://lakehighlands.advocatemag.com/2021/02/data-crime-trends-in-dallas-lake-highlands-in-early-february/" rel="nofollow">https://lakehighlands.advocatemag.com/2021/02/data-crime-tre...</a>
[4] <a href="https://missionlocal.org/crime-data/" rel="nofollow">https://missionlocal.org/crime-data/</a>
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>Adam and Jorge here, and today we’re very excited to share MindsDB with you (<a href="http://github.com/mindsdb/mindsdb" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/mindsdb/mindsdb</a>). MindsDB AutoML Server is an open-source platform designed to accelerate machine learning workflows for people with data inside databases by introducing virtual AI tables. We allow you to create and consume machine learning models as regular database tables.<p>Jorge and I have been friends for many years, having first met at college. We have previously founded and failed at another startup, but we stuck together as a team to start MindsDB. Initially a passion project, MindsDB began as an idea to help those who could not afford to hire a team of data scientists, which at the time was (and still is) very expensive. It has since grown into a thriving open-source community with contributors and users all over the globe.<p>With the plethora of data available in databases today, predictive modeling can often be a pain, especially if you need to write complex applications for ingesting data, training encoders and embedders, writing sampling algorithms, training models, optimizing, scheduling, versioning, moving models into production environments, maintaining them and then having to explain the predictions and the degree of confidence… we knew there had to be a better way!<p>We aim to steer you away from constantly reinventing the wheel by abstracting most of the unnecessary complexities around building, training, and deploying machine learning models. MindsDB provides you with two techniques for this: build and train models as simply as you would write an SQL query, and seamlessly “publish” and manage machine learning models as virtual tables inside your databases (we support Clickhouse, MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MSSQL. MongoDB is coming soon.) We also support getting data from other sources, such as Snowflake, s3, SQLite, and any excel, JSON, or CSV file.<p>When we talk to our community, we find that they are using MindsDB for anything ranging from reducing financial risk in the payments sector to predicting in-app usage statistics - one user is even trying to predict the price of Bitcoin using sentiment analysis (we wish them luck). No matter what the use-case, what we hear most often is that the two most painful parts of the whole process are model generation (R&D) and/or moving the model into production.<p>For those who already have models (i.e. who have already done the R&D part), we are launching the ability to bring your own models from frameworks like Pytorch, Tensorflow, scikit-learn, Keras, XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM, etc. directly into your database. If you’d like to try this experimental feature, you can sign-up here: (<a href="https://mindsdb.com/bring-your-own-ml-models" rel="nofollow">https://mindsdb.com/bring-your-own-ml-models</a>)<p>We currently have a handful of customers who pay us for support. However, we will soon be launching a cloud version of MindsDB for those who do not want to worry about DevOps, scalability, and managing GPU clusters. Nevertheless, MindsDB will always remain free and open-source, because democratizing machine learning is at the core of every decision we make.<p>We’re making good progress thanks to our open-source community and are also grateful to have the backing of the founders of MySQL & MariaDB. We would love your feedback and invite you to try it out.<p>We’d also love to hear about your experience, so please share your feedback, thoughts, comments, and ideas below. <a href="https://docs.mindsdb.com/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.mindsdb.com/</a> or <a href="https://mindsdb.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mindsdb.com/</a><p>Thanks in advance,
Adam & Jorge
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: This annoying UX issue has been existing for a few years now; why does Google do nothing about it?<p>I know they're mining data from Google Accounts and get more value if I am logged in. However the UX aspect of it seems to be horrendous. Two scenarios that bother me:<p>- I link my account to Chrome. If I unlink my account, and simply login to Gmail in the future, it automatically links the account back to Chrome<p>- I link my account X to Chrome. Later, I sign into another account Y. When I am done with Y, I logout from my Gmail which has "Y", this automatically signs me out of X, and instantly unlinks X. Such an annoying UX.<p>Is it time to say goodbye to Chrome in favor of Brave, Vivaldi, etc. ?
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: Can you ever take a break? What if you go on vacation — or simply out for dinner with your friends — and the server goes down?<p>I guess for less complex apps this can be mitigated with something like Heroku, but still... do they hire freelancers to “watch the shop” when they want a break or are they chained to PagerDuty 24/7?
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: Dear all,<p>As result of the GameStop "upset", I came to realise that retail brokers not only make money by charging commission, but also by untransparently borrowing my stocks for shorting.<p>At this point, I want to know:<p>1. How can I find out if my broker borrows my stocks for shorting?<p>2. How big is the risk for me? Can I lose part of my stocks due to reckless shorting?<p>I asked the same two questions to my broker (Avanza in Sweden), and they haven't replied after 4 weeks.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hey HN!<p>I’m Jason, one of the co-founders at H3X (<a href="https://www.h3x.tech" rel="nofollow">https://www.h3x.tech</a>). We are building the lightest electric propulsion systems in the world. Our first product is a 250kW (330HP) integrated motor drive in a 18kg (40lb) package. It combines the electric motor, inverter, and gearbox into a single unit, resulting in an ultra-high-power density solution for electric aircraft (and other mass sensitive applications).<p>In terms of electrification, we believe the aircraft industry is where automotive was ten years ago. There are many companies working on eVTOL and single-seaters, but very few are working on large commercial single-aisle electric aircraft such as a 737. This class of aircraft is absolutely critical to electrify as it accounts for the most passenger-miles [1] and is the biggest slice of the pie in terms of aviation emissions. Beyond the environmental impact, there are huge potential cost savings from both fuel (or lack thereof) and reduced maintenance for airlines.<p>Aircraft are very mass sensitive so there are two main technology challenges that need to be solved to enable this class of electric aviation –<p>(1) High energy density and efficient energy storage (batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.)<p>(2) Light, efficient, and high-power density electric propulsion systems (electric motors, power electronics, gearbox)<p>There are many people working on (1) and great strides are being made [2][3]. We are focused on solving (2). A study done by the DOE determined that for a 737 to complete a five-hour flight, the propulsion system must be >12 kW/kg [4]. Today, best-in-class systems have a power density of 3-4 kW/kg. With our first product, we are targeting 13 kW/kg, making it an attractive solution for near-term Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) applications as well as an enabling technology for the aviation industry to enter the next stage of electrification.<p>There are some cool things we are doing with the electromagnetics, power electronics, and the integration between the systems to get to the 13 kW/kg. There is not a single magic bullet, but rather a combination of multiple technological advances - 3D printed copper stator coils, high frequency SiC power electronics, and a synergistic cooling system to name a few.<p>Our origins in electrification stem back to our college days where we built Formula-style electric racecars (s/o to Wisconsin Racing FSAE!). During year 1 of the program, we got so fed up with our COTS motors and inverters, we decided to go clean slate and build our own from the ground up the following year. Those were super happy fun times. Lots of dead IGBTs and all-nighters in the shop, but in the end, we got everything working and delivered! It was a true test of resilience and taught us how to GSD. Great preparation for starting a company. This led us to grad school and it became apparent during this time that the electric aircraft industry was a sleeping giant ready to be woken. We felt uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity, so after about a year in industry, we left our full-time jobs and went all in.<p>We’ve got a long road ahead - aviation is tough, there’s no denying that. In addition to the engineering challenges, there are also major certification barriers. However, CO2 is a serious problem and right now the major aviation players don’t have a compelling plan to meet the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement. Innovation needs to come from the outside and that’s what we’re doing at H3X.<p>I’d love to hear your guys thoughts and would be happy to answer any questions you have.<p>Sources:<p>[1] <a href="https://www.transtats.bts.gov/tables.asp?DB_ID=130" rel="nofollow">https://www.transtats.bts.gov/tables.asp?DB_ID=130</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/22/21449238/tesla-electric-car-battery-tabless-cells-day-elon-musk" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/22/21449238/tesla-electric-c...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://hypoint.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hypoint.com/</a>, <a href="https://www.plugpower.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.plugpower.com/</a><p>[4] ASCEND DE-FOA-0002238
Upvote: | 229 |
Title: Hi HN! I’m Aakash, and I’m a long time HN reader. My cousin Manan and I are excited to share our startup Wyndly (<a href="https://www.wyndly.com">https://www.wyndly.com</a>) with HN today.<p>Wyndly is focused on making long-term allergy relief convenient through at-home allergy immunotherapy drops and telemedicine. These personalized oral drops train your immune systems to stop reacting to allergy triggers like pollen, pets, or dust.<p>Manan is an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon and allergy doctor, and in his physical practice, he’s treated thousands of patients with at-home allergy drops, a form of allergy immunotherapy. During allergy immunotherapy, you gradually introduce your immune system to your allergy triggers. Over time, your immune system learns to tolerate these allergy triggers and stops reacting to them. For patients, this means greatly reduced allergy symptoms and long-term relief [1] without any other medicine for years after patients finish their immunotherapy.<p>While allergy drops are 80% of allergy immunotherapy in some European countries, in the United States, allergy drops are just 5.9% of allergy immunotherapy prescriptions [2] and are really only available in university hospitals like Johns Hopkins, University of Pittsburgh, and West Virginia University [3] [4] [5].<p>Part of the reason for their limited availability is physician training, and another part is the health insurance system’s incentives. Most allergy doctors were trained on allergy shots, and prescribe what they are most experienced with. Additionally, health insurance programs incentivize prescribing allergy shots.<p>In his medical training, Manan trained on both allergy drops and shots. When Manan gave his patients the choice between at-home allergy drops and allergy shots, his patients always chose drops, which are safer, convenient, and don’t require needles [6].<p>When Covid-19 hit Denver in March 2020, Manan switched all of his allergy drop patients to online care to continue treatment. After shelter-in-place was lifted, his patients continued online care due to the convenience, which told us one thing—patients preferred and were comfortable with telemedicine for allergy care. And that's why we started Wyndly.<p>We’re trying to make allergy immunotherapy convenient and affordable, so that any one of the 60 million people in America suffering from allergies has the opportunity to get lifelong relief—just like braces straighten your teeth and Lasik fixes your vision.<p>We’ve done our best to make our patient experience as easy as possible. First, we learn more about you and your allergy history. Then, our medical team creates a personalized treatment plan with treatment sent straight to your door. Most patients notice benefits at 6 months, and some patients have reported allergy symptom relief as early as 6 weeks [7]. Patients lock-in lifelong allergy relief after a few years [1]. Throughout this time, we stay in touch with the patient to work with them towards allergy relief.<p>Please let us know if you have more questions or feedback. We love talking about the science behind allergy immunotherapy, our treatment model, and what we’re doing. We're happy to answer any questions!<p>[1] Long-lasting effects of sublingual immunotherapy according to its duration: a 15-year prospective study <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20934206/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20934206/</a><p>[2] Comparison of allergen immunotherapy practice patterns in the United States and Europe <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20084837/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20084837/</a><p>[3] Sublingual Immunotherapy (SLIT) for Allergy Treatment: Johns Hopkins | Q&A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpWomI4iPLY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpWomI4iPLY</a><p>[4] Benefits of Sublingual Immunotherapy | UPMC <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpP41WQ6pBc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpP41WQ6pBc</a><p>[5] Sublingual Immunotherapy: An Alternative to Allergy Shots <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THszgnYNM1I">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THszgnYNM1I</a><p>[6] Efficacy and Safety of Subcutaneous and Sublingual Immunotherapy for Allergic Rhinoconjunctivitis and Asthma <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28964530/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28964530/</a><p>[7] Clinical improvement after escalation for sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT)
<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21938688/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21938688/</a>
Upvote: | 207 |
Title: I've always been wanting to get into space observation, what telescopes and books would you suggest for an absolute beginner?
Upvote: | 223 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>We're Jorge and Julio, cofounders of Abacum (<a href="https://www.abacum.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.abacum.io/</a>). We're not sure how many fintech geeks like us are on HN but we're very excited to launch to you guys anyway!<p>Abacum makes it easier for Finance teams to access real-time data, collaborate and generate reports. Think of having all the operational and financial data modeled in one place, and of the Finance team easily sharing and collecting information for other teams to make faster, better decisions.<p>Scale ups have unique finance needs. First, they have spent the last years growing unnaturally fast, held together by a mixture of google sheets, csv files, a disconnected tech stack and a lot of copy paste. Second, growing 4x a year means that historical data is out of date within 3 months. Finally, with so many channels to stay connected, it's impossible to find where the Tech Lead shared that key assumption for the board forecast. Both Jorge and I have lived these experiences - we've spent too many long nights and days in number-crunching, without the proper time to analyze the data and to provide insights, becoming the key business partner we wanted. So yes, in the middle of the lockdown with 3 children each decided to leave everything to build the product we wish we had!<p>Abacum can now connect to any data source, update a business plan automatically and give you finance specific tools to help you do what you need to. Think performance and pivot tables, cohort and waterfall graphs, and ways to easily collaborate. Our engine provides the flexibility of excel while minimizing human errors, reducing fears of breaking "the model" and scaling up to and past IPO size.<p>We're big believers that collaboration, and not the business model, needs to be placed at the center of the product. Everything we built in Abacum is easily shareable and built to be easily understood by non-finance professionals. Ask (or remind) others in your company to collaborate, be it for updating forecasts or commenting on reporting decks, right where the needed context is. We've also set up different workflows for customers to easily gather the data bottom-up from different teams.<p>We are constantly looking to improve Abacum, so we'd love to hear any feedback, questions or wisdom you have to share with us! We'd love to show you (or anybody that you think may be interested) a 10' demo of our product - please let us know and we'll reach out. Thanks so much, HN!
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: It does not have to be a tech product. Just something that is radically new, not a variation of some other well know product.
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: We are Steve, Tim and Pete, the cofounders of GreaseBoss (<a href="https://www.greaseboss.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.greaseboss.io</a>). GreaseBoss is a hardware and software system that verifies that the greasing of industrial equipment is completed on time and according to specification.<p>Greasing, you say? Yup, you heard that right. Incorrect greasing is the number one cause for machinery failure on industrial sites. Industrial machinery failure costs the global economy $21B a year. Greasing is a big deal!<p>We know this is an unsexy part of the economy, so we won’t judge you if you have never heard of a zerk (grease point) before. Some of our favourite places you can find zerks include super yachts - 200 zerks, private planes - 80 zerks, breweries - 2000 zerks, theme parks - 1500 zerks. Other places with lots of zerks include factories, mines, utilities, farm equipment, trucks and military vehicles.<p>The idea for GreaseBoss came when Steve and Tim saw frequent machine breakdowns due to incorrect greasing while supporting mine sites in Outback Australia. This problem costs Australian mine sites hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity every year - disrupted production, spending on parts and labour for repairs. We built and tested our prototypes during the pandemic lockdowns on the back deck, over Zoom calls. We have now developed our MVP and have quit our jobs to chase GreaseBoss full time.<p>On the hardware side: we put RFID tags that fit like washers under each zerk. These are read by a head unit that is retrofittable to existing grease guns, which includes a custom RFID reader integrated into the nozzle. It also includes a flow meter and supporting electronics. Our device has 4G, Wifi and LoRa for comms, but also operates in an offline mode for customers in remote locations. Our hardware is rugged, dust proof, and water proof for some of the toughest operational environments (and operators..)<p>On the software side, we record each greasing in the cloud, right as the worker greases the zerk. Since most industry is still tracking this using paperwork, you can imagine how much more efficient this is. Our customers get back to production much faster.<p>We are building a HaaS (Hardware as a Service - is that a thing?) business model: we charge customers upfront for the hardware and then a software subscription fee. We are experimenting with per zerk, per machine and per site pricing. We haven’t found the sweet spot yet.<p>We have GreaseBoss installed at a large coal mine, a quarry and on excavators at the dump in Queensland, Australia. We also have a South African greasing contractor using our system.<p>We will be online for the rest of the day answering your questions (we are in AEST timezone). We are very excited to receive your ideas, experiences and feedback!
Upvote: | 250 |
Title: How do you check their health is okay, or if there are any emergencies? Especially if they have any medical conditions?<p>Do you wish something better existed?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: We're Raphael, Florian and Marc, co-founders of weweb.io (<a href="https://www.weweb.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.weweb.io/</a>). We are building a Webflow/WordPress style product, but where users can drag & drop their own React/Vue components and use data fetched from any API.<p>We started working together on a side project in 2016, it was a mobile app in rails that lets people choose music in their favourite bars. The app didn't bring much value to bar owners, but it was fun to build and we made good friends among our first customers. Aside from our jobs we loved spending time building and iterating on different web products, we even built a simple angular web-app that would let anyone create a website entirely from a mobile phone.<p>Fast-forward to 2018, we stumbled upon the Jamstack ecosystem and loved it. But one thing surprised us so much that we decided to quit our jobs to solve it: while many developers were switching their websites to the Jamstack, businesses were (almost) always pushing to go back to WordPress or no-code systems because Jamstack sites didn't come with a no-code interface to update the front-end.<p>The thing is, even with headless CMSes, most changes on a website still need to be addressed by engineers, who usually don't have the time to do it. This situation frustrates marketers, who then argue against their developers' technical choices.<p>That's why we built weweb.io, to allow developers to use their favorite Jamstack tools while providing a nice GUI so marketers can edit their websites in autonomy.<p>The main uses-cases where people find weweb.io useful are 1) when they want to ship websites fast, with a no-code tool that's not a black-box for developers, 2) when they want to create websites at scale (hundreds of landing pages) with data coming from an external back-end (API, database, Headless CMSes, Airtable, etc.) or 3) when they have a custom React/Vue front-end and want to let marketers iterate faster on it.<p>We currently have integrations to fetch data from Airtable, Google Sheets, Ghost CMS, Strapi and any REST API. We are planning to release more integrations in the following months.<p>We have a free plan where users can build a site and redirect on their own domain name for free! We start charging a recurring fee when these sites are becoming more mature (more than 500 visits / month)<p>To deploy a site, users hit a “publish” button and we pre-render the site, optimize the images and deploy the files on a CDN (Cloudfront). We are planning on opening the deployment system so developers can use their favorite platform (Netlify, Vercel, or anything) and choose their favorite SSR/SSG (Next, Gatsby, Nuxt, Gridsome, etc.).<p>We currently support uploading Vue.js components from GitHub out-of-the-box, and make the props editable in our GUI thanks to a simple config file in the component.<p>Furthermore, we're working on improving our support for React. On this subject, we would be interested to get your feedback on how to interpret React from a Vue app. We tinkered with libraries like <a href="https://github.com/akxcv/vuera" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/akxcv/vuera</a> and were hoping to not have to rewrite our whole app using React. If you people have any advice on this, we would be more than happy to hear it!<p>We would also love to hear your feedback about the tool. Feel free to give it a spin at <a href="https://www.weweb.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.weweb.io/</a>
Upvote: | 195 |
Title: Hiii everyone, this is my first time posting here! I have read Hacker News sometimes but only thought about sharing my own post after seeing Manara's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054)last month. I asked them if I can share this here and they said it was a good idea. :)<p>I’m a 19-year-old Gazan female who participated in Manara last year and got internships at Google and Repl.it. I’m so excited I will spend this summer at Google in Europe! I got lots of questions about my experience when people heard about it on Facebook so I wrote this blog post (https://daliaawad28.medium.com/my-experience-as-a-gazan-girl-getting-into-silicon-valley-companies-488062d769a1) to let other young engineers in Palestine and the Middle East know how they can get into amazing companies like this too.<p>If you are an engineer or student like me, read it and apply to Manara, they will help you so much!!<p>Btw I have a few friends who just finished the Manara program and are looking for internships now so if you have opportunities make sure to talk to Manara (http://www.manara.tech). Ask them about Rula and Hend! :)))
Upvote: | 1723 |
Title: Hello HN gang! Lenny and Ross here, working on Milk Video (<a href="https://milkvideo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://milkvideo.com/</a>), a browser-based tool to turn long videos into watchable clips. We speed up the workflow for marketers editing long, boring Zoom recordings and webinars into visually engaging clips with quality templates and styled captions.<p>Ross and I met 8 years ago in Shanghai, where we worked at an education startup and organized tech and design events. When we realized Covid was creating a tsunami of webinars, Ross noticed the growing cost of editing all the new content as B2B companies replaced their in-person marketing channels with online events.<p>Most registrants to online events don't end up attending. They may be interested in the content, but they won’t take time to watch an entire webinar recording. Webinar content has a short shelf life unless it is reworked into a friendlier format. Doing that with traditional video editing software is cumbersome, so it often doesn’t happen. It’s time-intensive to review videos for key moments, ask designers to create appropriate graphics and captions, and receive final approval from managers.<p>We started out contacting companies organizing webinars, and learned they were stuck in a vicious cycle of constantly having to focus on the next upcoming event. We started manually editing videos for them to better understand how the most engaging bits could be reworked. Doing this manually revealed a glaring problem: the technology interfacing with video has changed dramatically, but the editing software hasn’t. Video editing software is designed for film makers or social media, and businesses creating video content have very different needs.<p>Milk Video uses a transcript-to-video based interface to review long recordings and minimize the mental effort around editing. We transcribe uploaded videos, present you with the content so you can quickly clip the best parts, and allow you to use templates to compose visually interesting layouts with additional assets, like logos or static text.<p>We made a drag-and-drop interface for creating short video clips with styled word-by-word captions. In a world where people often don't have their audio on, the timestamp information on a machine-generated transcript is perfect for creating interesting visual elements, such as captions styled one word at a time. This also makes content accessible by default. And because most webinars or Zoom recordings are visually similar, we have the ability to recommend which video templates might be best suited for their uploaded content in the future.<p>The frontend is a React app based on Redux Toolkit and Recoil.js. Our performant transcript interface is made possible due to Slate.js. Our backend is a Ruby on Rails app and depends on a non-trivial number of serverless functions hosted on Google Cloud and AWS. Our speech-to-text provider is AssemblyAI, who we found were both cheaper, faster and better than Google and Amazon.<p>We would love your feedback on the tool. We are spending a lot of time working directly with our first users, and would appreciate all of the input we can get. I’m also happy to go into detail around how any specific parts work! We’ll be in the comments and are eager to hear all your thoughts!
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures inflation and, in the words of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, "directly affects hundreds of millions of Americans".<p>I would have guessed the data used to construct the CPI would be open to everyone.<p>But no, it appears to be unavailable and it is instead a black box due to rules of confidentiality. What is strange is, it appears much of the data is publicly available data. For example, 8% comes from e-commerce sites, the USPS public website, etc. If you browse through the categories, you can also see that almost all the data could be collected from public sources - APIs, websites, etc.<p>So, does anyone know why this data cannot be obtained?<p>Reference: https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/pdf/cpi.pdf
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: We're a SaaS business currently listed on the Shopify App store. Today we got this stern email from Shopify's 'Partner Governance' team.<p>TLDR: Don't even have Stripe as an option for Shopify users or we'll boot you. Also backpay since Jan 2019.<p>"At Shopify, it is critical to maintain high trust and integrity within the Shopify App Store, so merchants have a reliable place to find solutions to grow their business.<p>During a routine investigation, Partner Governance identified your app [our app] as offering external billing for Shopify merchants and not using the Billing API for all payments.<p>[a couple of images of our cart]<p>As you are aware, all paid apps are required to use our Billing API, as noted in our Partner Program Agreement (Section 3.2 Payments, Point 5) unless express permission is granted by Shopify.<p>Payment information should not be obtained from the merchant directly and all charges should be processed through the billing API.<p>We require that you make the required changes as soon as possible to ensure all future payments are handled through our billing API. This would include redirecting any current merchants to select their plan and re-approve the new subscription through the Billing API and ensuring that all new merchants are billed through the API.<p>Shopify has also recently rolled out an annual subscription feature on the Billing API that makes the yearly subscription event easier on the API.<p>Additionally, we will require a report of the merchants who have been billed outside of the Billing API and retroactive revenue share payment for any/all qualifying 20% revenue dated January 2019 - Present.<p>Once the report has been reviewed, we will reach out with next steps on how to submit the transfer of funds to Shopify via wire transfer."<p>Pretty ironic too when you've got Shopify's CEO tweeting about the unfair 30% cut Apple wants: <a href="https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1362411841943711744" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1362411841943711744</a>
Upvote: | 624 |
Title: Hello, HN comrades!<p>I'm Ghalib, with my co-founder Nathan, and we've built Polytomic (<a href="https:///www.polytomic.com" rel="nofollow">https:///www.polytomic.com</a>). Polytomic is a no-code web app to sync your company's internal data from databases and spreadsheets to business systems like Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Google Sheets, and others.<p>Business teams who live in these systems often want data piped in from databases or spreadsheets. Think about the salesperson who lives in Salesforce and wants to generate a report there about which of their customers have logged into the product recently. Well, all the user data sits in a database outside of Salesforce and needs to be piped into the right fields before this report can be generated.<p>I founded and ran the data team at PlanGrid (YC W12) for four years and was at the crossroads of every data request from the business side of the office. So many of the data problems I witnessed could have been solved by sending data to where business teams lived, but I never prioritised enough of that work because of how painful it was. I've always felt guilty about that - my co-workers on the business side worked so hard and I should have served them better. So we decided to start a company to pay for my sins, by inventing a product that removes the pain from solving these problems.<p>The integrations market is not a new one; some of you may remember TIBCO from the 90's, which was followed by MuleSoft and countless other vendors. But our approach is different: we're focused on data syncing and don't make the customer create a query workflow from scratch every time they want to move data. Instead, in our web app, the business team can first create a master model of the data they care about, surfaced from any number of databases and spreadsheets with a few clicks (or SQL queries). From there, anyone can sync any fields from this master model to CRMs or spreadsheets with a few clicks. For example, a single scheduled sync to Salesforce can combine real-time data from production databases, fields from spreadsheets, and analytical data from a data warehouse. We transfer the data efficiently and automatically take care of necessary cross-system joins while not storing any of your data.<p>I've been on HN for 14 years and am always surprised by how varied the community is. So I'm curious: does anyone here regularly work with Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, or other CRMs? Do you face any annoyances with data integrations? Or perhaps you have more general tales of CRM horrors?
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Hey HN! We're the co-founders of Enombic (<a href="https://enombic.com/" rel="nofollow">https://enombic.com/</a>), a tool for designing your own custom stock indexes, investing in them, and sharing them with your friends. By index we mean a weighted collection of publicly tradable securities.<p>With our product, you could, for example, remix the ARK ETFs (<a href="https://enombic.com/13F/ARKK" rel="nofollow">https://enombic.com/13F/ARKK</a>). Or, you could apply portfolio theory to the most popular WSB symbols (<a href="https://enombic.com/mandelbrot/wsb-MPT" rel="nofollow">https://enombic.com/mandelbrot/wsb-MPT</a>). Also, everything is nestable, so you can put all of the above together (<a href="https://enombic.com/aml/diversified" rel="nofollow">https://enombic.com/aml/diversified</a>). Then, it's one click to invest. The investments can be one-off, or on a recurring schedule.<p>We started Enombic because we're personally really fascinated by financial markets. Driven by curiosity, we wanted to hack on different investment ideas. We couldn't find good tools for portfolio and risk management, so we decided to make some. We started doing this work with Python scripts, and sharing it with our friends in group chats. Then we'd wrestle with existing products to implement the strategies we had developed.<p>Eventually, we built a proper web app to make this easy. A lot of our UI / UX is inspired by Github. For example, we built version control and advanced permissioning into the indexes.<p>The ubiquity of zero-commission and fractional-share trading means that diversification and customization is easier than ever. This allows you to think about investing into a curated portfolio, rather than picking stocks for individual companies or subscribing to popular ETFs.<p>We've had users do things like build their own robo-advisor, reweight SPY to fit their existing portfolio, and construct sector-specific indexes in their area of expertise (e.g. gaming, enterprise SaaS, and e-commerce, to name a few).<p>Enombic is free, but we're rolling out a series of subscription-based premium features.<p>We would love your feedback on what we've built so far. Happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you for your time!
Upvote: | 305 |
Title: In the software industry we are advertised that above the Senior SW Engineer level there's a bifurcation in the career progression path (resembling the "Y" letter) and one could possible proceed to:<p>- A management career path<p>- A technical specialist career path<p>While there's plenty of material available on a manager's role and responsibilities, it's much harder to find a consensus on what a technical specialist role looks like.<p>So, are you on a technical specialist career path in you company? In case you are what are your responsibilities, and what does a typical work week look like for you?<p>Also, if your company provides a technical specialist career path (even if you've not reached it yet), how's it structured?<p>Thanks in advance!<p>Related discussions:<p>[1] On Being a Principal Engineer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19128489)<p>[2] What a Senior Staff Software Engineer Does (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851476)
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I'm Archa, one of the cofounders of Insight Browser (<a href="https://insightbrowser.com/" rel="nofollow">https://insightbrowser.com/</a>). We let you deeply customize your search and browsing experience on iOS. You can create extensions on the phone itself, using simple if-then conditions and often without writing any code. For more advanced extensions, you can use JS.<p>14 years after iOS Safari brought the mobile browser to near-parity with desktop, most mobile browsers are still one-size-fits-all, but the internet isn't one-size-fits-all. It's very long tailed, both in content and in how differently people use it. There is now a generation of users growing up with iOS who still crave the power that's available on desktop. Some mobile browsers come bundled with ad-blocking, and there is a limited way to do extensions in Safari, but extensibility on mobile has been nowhere near desktop. Apple has restricted what developers can do with WKWebView, so we started to look into whether there's ways to work with that but preserve most of the usefulness of extensions.<p>We surveyed existing extensions on the Chrome extensions store and realized that most of them fit one of two patterns — augment pages with content or remove content from pages. (There's a third major category of scrapers or dev tools, but we felt that was less relevant for a mobile browser) Inspired by that and frustrated by missing what we had on desktop, we built Insight, where 90% of extensions can be built on the phone with if-then conditions (e.g. if searching Amazon, then search Google Shopping with the same query). Extensions are designed for mobile first. They are swipe gesture friendly and don't clutter up pages. For more advanced extensions, you can use Javascript to write a script that's injected into webpages you pick. For example, the extension to invert bright website colors for better dark mode (<a href="https://share.insightbrowser.com/10" rel="nofollow">https://share.insightbrowser.com/10</a>) works like this.<p>Some of my personal favorite extensions on Insight right now are — Detect fake Amazon reviews (using Fakemeta) and set price alerts (using CamelCamelCamel); Open a page with cookies disabled or a JS-free version of the page (<a href="https://share.insightbrowser.com/11);" rel="nofollow">https://share.insightbrowser.com/11);</a> Make reading articles easier by injecting eye-guiding color gradient on the text (powered by Beeline Reader).<p>Extensions are automatically suggested as you browse pages, simplifying discovery. We do not log identifiable user data, and if you want to be extra safe about privacy, you can disable all communication with our servers in the settings.<p>Insight is still very early. On iOS, it's built on top of Firefox. We're excited about open sourcing the iOS Insight codebase once it's better documented, as well as making Insight available on Android and desktop soon. (Btw, if any of this is interesting to you, we're hiring: <a href="https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/insight-browser" rel="nofollow">https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/insight-browser</a>)<p>A couple of caveats — we don't currently support Apply Pay through Insight. Apple does not allow a regular WKWebView to use Apple Pay, just Safari and SFSafariViewController (<a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_web" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...</a>). We also cannot support syncing bookmarks from other iOS browsers directly, because apps can not access each other's data in any way on iOS. We are however working on a way to import bookmarks from your desktop browsers, and hoping to push that soon!<p>We'd love to hear what you think of Insight. You can download it on iOS at <a href="https://insightbrowser.com/" rel="nofollow">https://insightbrowser.com/</a>. Please tell us your feedback and ideas. We'd love to help you customize the web as you see fit!
Upvote: | 81 |
Title: Got this email from Fangamer about Shopify earlier today.
----
Dear Fangamer customer,<p>Shopify, the company whose software runs the Fangamer store (and more than a million others online), has informed us that an internal security event it has been investigating since late last year included Fangamer customer data. Information regarding customer financial accounts and payment cards was not affected, but we are writing to make you aware of the situation.<p>According to Shopify, certain members of its support team used their Shopify credentials to obtain archived customer data from several hundred stores without authorization. The team members accessed data associated with order fulfillment — names, addresses, email addresses, cart contents, and phone numbers — but did not access or acquire any financial-account or payment-card information.<p>We are extremely frustrated and sorry to be sending you this email; Fangamer's internal development team takes data security extremely seriously. Data not in Fangamer's Shopify store — including Kickstarter backer information, account information and passwords, and email addresses used to sign up for our newsletter — was not accessed, and the store continues to operate as normal. Fangamer Japan, which operates as a separate store, was also not affected.<p>Shopify has terminated the employees who did this and eliminated the vulnerabilities that made it possible. Shopify has also reported that it will be providing any other relevant information to us as its investigation continues, and we'll pass along any new material details. If you have any questions, though, please contact us at [email protected].<p>Thank you,
Fangamer
Upvote: | 175 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>My name is Wayne Chang, co-founder of Spruce Systems, Inc. (<a href="https://spruceid.com" rel="nofollow">https://spruceid.com</a>). Spruce builds open source software that allows for the signed issuance of data to users that can then be verified. For example, transaction histories, educational qualifications, and reputation from online platforms.<p>I grew up on the Internet like many of you. I spent a lot of time on IRC where people frequently tried to dox others, and grew a profound respect for privacy as a result. When your online identity is a big part of who you are, it means a lot more when someone violates your privacy. Online identities will become a lot more of who everyone is, as we’ve seen especially over the past 12 hectic months. Today, we don’t have the right tools to assert control over our own identities or data, and we’re trying to change that with Spruce.<p>When you download your data from Google Takeout, you get a big .zip file that can’t really be used for anything but backups. The same is true with Facebook and LinkedIn. Most services don’t have automated data export and are only required to provide data when you ask.<p>Using new standards from W3C called Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers, our software allows statements about people, places, and things to be issued as a package, linked together, digitally signed, and cryptographically verified. For example, employees can receive digital proofs of employment to get a mortgage. Gig economy workers can port their ratings from one system to another in a way they control. Data sets can travel along with signed statements that they have been stripped of personally identifiable information. By allowing data to move out of silos and increasingly into the hands of their owners, we can loosen the grip of a few large companies in owning everything.<p>These standards are already being adopted by big players open to data portability including Microsoft (issuance via Active Directory), Workday (portable work histories), the Digital Credentials Consortium (MIT/Harvard/UC Berkeley diplomas and coursework), and the World Health Organization (privacy-preserving vaccination records).<p>This technology could fundamentally change how we interact digitally. Instead of advertisers profiling people behind their backs, people can just present their credit card histories from Yodlee to get better offers at competitors. In web services, users can upgrade their accounts if they prove they belong to certain alumni networks. Businesses can reduce fraud and improve conversion while users regain control of their information, like if 1Password could store structured documents and also demonstrate their authenticity, untampered from their origins.<p>At Spruce, we’ve built a cross-platform Rust library called DIDKit that supports the use of Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers, and many adjacent specifications in a neat bundle. Through customer feedback, we have grown the list of supported platforms to include Java, C/C++, and Node.js, with many more on the way. We further embed DIDKit into a Flutter application called Credible that runs on Android, iOS, and in the browser through WebAssembly/asm.js. It’s all open source under Apache 2.0. We make money by selling commercial tools, project roadmap commitments, and support contracts.<p>A great place to start is by building the DIDKit CLI tool and running the example credential issuance and verification shell script on your local GNU/Linux or MacOS machine (also works with Windows using WSL 2).<p><a href="https://spruceid.dev/docs/didkit/#quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://spruceid.dev/docs/didkit/#quickstart</a><p><a href="https://spruceid.dev/docs/didkit/example--core-functions-in-bash" rel="nofollow">https://spruceid.dev/docs/didkit/example--core-functions-in-...</a><p>We invite you to leave feedback about our engineering approach, platforms you’d like to see supported, and interesting use cases that would benefit people if their data were more portable and provably authentic.<p>You can find our repos here:<p>DIDKit: <a href="https://github.com/spruceid/didkit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/spruceid/didkit</a><p>Credible: <a href="https://github.com/spruceid/credible" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/spruceid/credible</a><p>Docs: <a href="https://spruceid.dev/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://spruceid.dev/docs/</a>
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I'd like to build a low power (ideally fanless) server for home automation, data logging, etc, (possibly) pihole, and kodi server, etc running Linux. I've used Rpi in the past, but the sd cards wear out/go bad and I inevitably have to rebuild. Is there a low power/cost way of having a SBC paired with an SSD, or an alternative solution that anyone could recommend?
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: I find myself basically under a 3rd lock-down/curfew, working from home, single with friends scattered.<p>Basically, besides work related zoom meetings and the occasional hello exchanged with the delivery guy, my social interactions have been forcibly reduced to zero.<p>I'm sure other people are in the same boat, and would love to hear how you're tackling this?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I’m Emil, here with our team at XIX.ai (<a href="https://getxix.com/" rel="nofollow">https://getxix.com/</a>). We are building “Entry” - a biometric identity provider that enables secure authentication in web apps by face on desktops using web cameras. It supports SAML 2.0, OIDC Connect, and OAuth 2.0 standards and can be easily integrated into existing app or infrastructure.<p>Users can securely authenticate in web apps by face, using regular web cameras without compromising privacy and security.<p>Entry helps organizations prevent phishing, insider threats, and account takeovers by adding Entry as a biometric factor to their workforce SSO. Companies that employ many contractors or vendors to access sensitive information can prevent fraud by verifying biometric identity during authentication.<p>Developers can use Entry to verify their customers (password resets), strong-authenticate users during high-value transactions (pushing code in master; deleting data, etc.), or streamline the login experience. (documentation and self-serve are coming soon. Please reach out if you'd like to try it now)<p>We came to the world of identity and access management somewhat unexpectedly. In the early days, we tested different product ideas and frequently pivoted while focusing on problems that could be solved with our core expertise, computer vision.<p>During our trial and error period, we were lucky enough to work with the team at DeliverFund, a non-profit organization fighting the problem of human trafficking and child exploitation.<p>More often than not, the only clue an analyst has is a photograph of a missing juvenile. With that photo, they need to search through the web to find any ad or other indications that may lead to the child. To locate a missing child or a victim of human trafficking, they had to manually scroll through thousands of online ads to find a potential match.<p>To solve this, we built a set of scrapers that capture online ads, indexes them, and makes them searchable. We took all images and ran them through face recognition and object detection models. This enabled analysts to drag and drop a child's photo and see if they are being trafficked from ads online.<p>With internal expertise, we were able to build the tool back in 2018. And this experience got us thinking: a malicious actor will make a wide-scale surveillance system with enough resources. It’s not a question of “if,” rather “when.” While brainstorming a potential solution, we’ve realized that, fundamentally, this is an information asymmetry problem. A feasible solution must be market-based, user-privacy-centered, and optimized for perfect information.<p>Such a solution must satisfy a few criteria: a) has to use a face as a biometric modality b) must be valuable enough for a large number of people to use it c) biometrics must be securely stored and 100% controlled and managed by the end-user d) And it has to deliver an order of magnitude improvement in overall security and usability in comparison to existing solutions. This brings us to the world of identity and access management.<p>Passwords can be easily compromised. Additional factor authentication is either convenient but phishable (SMS/Voice/Backup Codes/TOTP/Mobile Push) or phishing-resistant, but inconvenient, expensive, and not widely adopted (FIDO-keys, Webauthn).<p>Biometrics is a perfect solution but by no means a new idea. After all, we are using it already on our mobile phones (fingerprints, FaceID), specific Microsoft devices with Windows Hello, and other desktop devices with fingerprint sensors.<p>However, four key challenges prevented biometrics from being widely adopted: a) the need for a specialized sensor - depth perception for cameras or fingerprint sensors b) 2D webcams are easy to spoof with replay attacks, printed attacks, and mask attacks. c) Scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. Products with ML at the core are notoriously computationally expensive and result in low margins. Accuracy also decays with data growth (more faces = higher chance of false positives), regressing the security over time. d) Privacy. How to avoid having a copy of my face on every website/SSO I login?<p>We’ve spent the last two years solving those challenges, and we’re happy to present to you Entry. It works with a regular desktop webcam and doesn’t require installing additional software. We’ve developed several anti-spoofing layers to make sure the system is secure. Entry is compliant with CCPA/GDPR and supports users from the state of Illinois ( arguably, the strictest biometric legislation in the USA)<p>Please give it a try <a href="https://getxix.com/" rel="nofollow">https://getxix.com/</a>. We’ve rolled out a public Okta instance with Entry set up as a factor to showcase it. We support Okta SSO out of the gate. Others (or working with OpenID Connect) require talking to support.<p>If you’d like to add Entry into your SSO, use it for your customers, or secure high-value transactions, let us know. Documentation is coming soon, but we can help now.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I took a few months off after the birth of my third child and am looking for a new job. I found an opportunity with a great team at an interesting company but there was a catch. After receiving an offer, I inquired if they required a non-compete and sure enough, there is a 1-year non-compete with the following conditions:<p><i>following the termination of my relationship with the Company for any reason, whether with cause or without cause, at the option either of the Company or myself, with or without notice</i><p>...<p><i>any business in competition with the Company's business as conducted by the Company during the course of my employment with the Company</i><p>I'm not a fan of non-competes generally but considering this was written to include any business that the Company believes is a competitor (no idea what kind of scope that entails) and asserts enforcement irrespective of who terminated the employment relationship, I told them I wasn't willing to sign it.<p>I have a friend who was pursued by a previous employer for violating a non-compete and even though he eventually won, it cost an immense amount of money, time (18 months!), and pain to fight.<p>I've also heard horror stories of being presented with a non-compete to sign after starting the new job and leaving previous employment. That kind of behavior seems especially devious, but it seems pretty common as well.<p>Am I making a mountain out of a molehill or should I stand my ground? Anyone else found themselves in a similar situation? Anyone been pursued by a previous employer due to a non-compete?<p>Edit:
This job is in TX.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>There used to be a time, in the dark dark ages of history, 10 years ago or so, when I would encounter issues during the course of my work, and I could fairly confidently assume I was doing something wrong, or I just hadn’t read the manual correctly.<p>Contrast that to now, when I regularly write code, or include a library to do a certain thing, and I find it just does not work. Following my historical logic, I spent a day trying to figure out what I did wrong, only to figure out that it was a bug, or edge case that someone just hadn’t covered (never mind that my life seems to consist of edge cases now) or the documentation is just plain out of date (or nonexistent).<p>Is this a trend? And does it have to do with the average code, or myself? Have you experienced something similar? It’s driving me nuts.<p>I want to rely on other code, but more and more I find that it’s safer to just assume it’ll be broken from the start.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: I'm very passionate to fight the climate catastrophe. Unfortunately my current e-commerce job has nothing to do with it. The best I can do outside my personal behavior is to donate money to some organizations. Are there any IT jobs at companies that are more aligned with my passion? Any idea on how to find them? Most of the companies I found don't seem to need Software Engineers / SysAdmins. I'm living in Germany and would happily do full-remote work.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Hi HN! We are Abel [abelr] and Andrej [neophocion] of Corrily (<a href="https://www.corrily.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.corrily.com/</a>).<p>We’re building a price optimization service for subscription and usage-based companies. By wrapping our API around the prices you display on your frontend and integrating with Stripe, we allow you to experiment with your pricing and find optimal prices, and localize them to the user’s country.<p>When we met, we were both quants, and Abel was focusing on price-formation and market dynamics for a hedge fund (this was before WSB became the authority for price-formation). We got along well, did weird side projects such as parsing 17th Century newspapers and throwing them at NLP models, and decided to launch a startup. Before getting accepted into YC we were working on a slack bot of all things. We probably got into YC, in part at least, thanks to this HN post (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886936" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886936</a>) which made it to the top page a day before our interview and allowed us to get around 60 leads. But we had trouble pricing our service. So we took a deep dive into how businesses do it currently, and were… underwhelmed.<p>Surveys! Whether Van Westendorp [1], Conjoint analysis [2], or Gabor-Granger [3], pricing generally involves sending out surveys to people asking how much they would pay for a service. It’s expensive (a Simon-Kucher engagement will cost you in the high 6-figures), time-consuming (~9 months), and based on ex-ante perception rather than empirical evidence.<p>We strongly believe in charging a fair price, inclusive of the purchasing power of each country. And it also makes economic sense. But because it is so hard to do price-experimentation, only large companies can adapt their pricing per country. Right now, a slack plus seat costs $12 in the US and $6 in India. Netflix’s monthly subscription will range from $3.75 in Argentina to $19.12 in Switzerland.<p>So we dropped the chatbot and built Corrily! Subscription pricing has an interesting psychological dimension which makes the prices you display linked to each other. The price of your first tier will influence the conversion rate of your second tier, and the annual discount you give will influence the conversion rate of your monthly subscription.<p>Our favourite example of the psychological dimension of pricing is described in Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The Economist for a while had 3 subscriptions: an online subscription for $59, a print subscription for $125, and an online + print subscription for $125. The reason to add this odd print subscription was because it reframes the difficult question in the purchaser’s mind from “how much am I willing to pay for The Economist?” to the much easier question “Which of these offers is the best bang for my buck?”.<p>The way we solve this is by testing all prices at once using Bayesian Optimization. We continuously measure the RPV and LTV of users based on the set of pricing they are shown. We briefly experimented with multi-armed bandits to decide when to show a user an experiment, and found that quant finance techniques used for trading ETFs at VWAP perform much better.<p>Corrily is easy to use and integrate with. Here’s our developer portal with some easy-to-use docs to get you going <a href="https://doc.corrily.com" rel="nofollow">https://doc.corrily.com</a> . Let us know if you’re interested in a test API key.<p>We’ve seen early signs of companies growing their conversion rates by >30% as a result of integrating Corrily. It’s not something we’re prepared to shout from the mountaintops just yet, but it is a sign that there are many mispriced prices out there. We’re here to try and fix that.<p>We’re long time fans of HN and have grown up reading it. Any and all feedback or criticism is greatly appreciated.<p>Thanks ~ Abel and Andrej<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensitivity_Meter" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjoint_analysis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjoint_analysis</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabor%E2%80%93Granger_method" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabor%E2%80%93Granger_method</a>
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: Hi HN, Andy and Tom here from STOKE (<a href="http://www.stoke-space.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.stoke-space.com</a>). We aim to deliver satellites directly to their final orbit at 20x lower cost. We’ll do this using 100% reusable rockets designed to fly daily.<p>Even the most advanced rockets today reuse only part of the vehicle (the first stage) a handful of times (the record number is 8). The upper stages of all launch vehicles are thrown away with every flight. That drives cost into each mission, and makes the flight cadence production rate limited. Rapid reuse of both stages breaks this production-limited paradigm, enabling order-of-magnitude improvements to both the cost and availability of launch. We call this ‘Reusability 2.0’.<p>Our team has spent the last 10+ years at Blue Origin and SpaceX working on amazing programs like Merlin 1C, BE-3, BE-4, and BE-3U. We took BE-4 from a literal blank page up through full scale testing. We’ll never forget the night we fired the full-scale engine for the first time – an intense display of raw power, the culmination of years of toil, and an unforgettable moment!<p>We’re massive supporters of the Blue Origin and SpaceX missions to the Moon and Mars. Humanity needs these to be successful. Over the last five years, though, we’ve witnessed a radical shift in the space economy. Hundreds of satellite companies are entering diverse markets enabled by space based IoT, earth observation, telecom, positioning, and other applications. In fact, we’re certain that all four major engines of economic growth – communication, transportation, manufacturing, and energy production – will be anchored in space within 20 years. It’s a massive shift from what was historically a government-centric industry.<p>This got us thinking. If we’re going to have a permanent and sustainable presence in space, and if we’re going to use it for all of our benefit, then we need one ingredient more than anything: a robust, diverse, and profitable space-based economy. It became our passion to focus on that goal, and not any other.<p>Since then we’ve thought hard about the end-state of the commercial space sector and realized that despite all of the progress in the last decade, the truth is that space flight is still in its infancy. Costs are still high, availability remains poor, and direct flights to final destinations are exceedingly rare. There are still orders of magnitude improvements available in all of these areas!<p>To make this happen, more focus is needed on 100% reusable rockets designed to operate with aircraft-like regularity and designed specifically for the commercial sector. That’s the key to really unlocking the space economy, and that’s why we founded STOKE.<p>Our mission starts with building a 100% reusable second stage. The design combines proven technology elements, high structural and thermal margins, and passive failure modes in critical subsystems to allow for rapid turnaround. Its engine performance will have 20% higher than any other small or medium launcher, enabling a diverse set of missions to LEO, MEO, GTO, TLI, and beyond. The upper stage will also offer unique return from orbit “down-mass” capacity. We’re starting here because routine reuse of upper stages is the last big domino to fall on the way to redefining the cost structure of launch.<p>In the past 10 months we’ve hired seven of the smartest people we know, developed our hardware on plan, won contracts with USAF, NASA, and NSF, and recently closed over $9M in seed funding.<p>We’re super excited about the team and technology we’re building, and we’re incredibly lucky to be alive for this New Space revolution. We hope we can move the ball one step further, and can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
Upvote: | 88 |
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: | 76 |
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: | 122 |
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> and this recent story by one of their participants: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26251143" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26251143</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=26304048" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26304048</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26304050" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26304050</a>
Upvote: | 361 |
Title: Hi HN, we are Jay and Frank and we are working on SST (<a href="https://github.com/serverless-stack/serverless-stack" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/serverless-stack/serverless-stack</a>).<p>SST is a framework for building serverless apps on AWS. It includes a local development environment that allows you to make changes and test your Lambda functions live. It does this by opening a WebSocket connection to your AWS account, streaming any Lambda function invocations, running them locally, and passing back the results. This allows you to work on your functions, without mocking any AWS resources, or having to redeploy them every time, to test your changes.
Here's a 30s video of it in action — <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnTSTm5n11g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnTSTm5n11g</a><p>For some background, serverless is an execution model where you send a cloud provider (AWS in this case), a piece of code (called a Lambda function). The cloud provider is responsible for executing it and scaling it to respond to the traffic. While 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/#guide" rel="nofollow">https://serverless-stack.com/#guide</a>. But we noticed that most of our readers had a really hard time testing and debugging their Lambda functions. There are two main approaches to local Lambda development:<p>1) Locally mock all the services that your Lambda function uses. For example, if your Lambda functions are invoked by an API endpoint, you'll run a local server mocking the API endpoint that invokes the local version of your Lambda function. This idea can be extended to services like SQS (queues), SNS (message bus), etc. However, if your Lambda functions are invoked as a part of a workflow that involves multiple services, you quickly end up going down the path of having to mock a large number of these services. Effectively running a mocked local version of AWS. There are services that use this approach (like LocalStack), but in practice they end up being slow and incomplete.<p>2) Redeploy your changes to test them. This is where we, and most of our readers eventually end up. You'll make a change to a Lambda function, deploy that specific function, trigger your workflow, and wait for CloudWatch logs to see your debug messages. Deploying a Lambda function can take 5-10s and it can take another couple of seconds for the logs to show up. This process is really slow and it also requires you to keep track of the functions that've been affected by your changes.<p>We talked to a bunch of people in the community about their local development setup and most of them were not happy with what they had. One of the teams we spoke to mentioned that they had toyed with the idea of using something like ngrok (or tunneling) to proxy the Lambda function invocations to their local machine. And that got us thinking about how we could build that idea into a development environment that automatically did that for you.<p>So we created SST. The `sst start` command deploys a small _debug_ stack (a WebSocket API and DynamoDB table) to your AWS account. It then deploys your serverless app and replaces the Lambda functions in it, with a _stub_ Lambda function. Finally, it fires up a local WebSocket client and connects to the _debug_ stack. Now, when a Lambda function in your app is invoked, it'll call the WebSocket API, which then streams the request to your local WebSocket client. That'll run the local version of the Lambda function, send the result back through the WebSocket API, and the _stub_ Lambda function will respond with the results.<p>This approach has a few advantages. You can make changes to your Lambda functions and test them live. It supports all the Lambda function triggers without having to mock anything. Debug logs are printed right away to your local console. There are also no third-party services involved. And since the _debug_ stack uses a serverless WebSocket API and an on-demand DynamoDB table, it's inexpensive, and you are not charged when it's not in use.<p>SST is built on top of AWS CDK; it allows you to use standard programming languages to define your AWS infrastructure. We currently support JavaScript and TypeScript. And we'll be adding support for other languages soon.<p>You can read more about SST over on our docs (<a href="https://docs.serverless-stack.com" rel="nofollow">https://docs.serverless-stack.com</a>), and have a look at our public roadmap to see where the project is headed (<a href="https://github.com/serverless-stack/serverless-stack/milestones?direction=asc&sort=due_date&state=open" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/serverless-stack/serverless-stack/milesto...</a>).<p>Thank you for reading about us. We'd love for you to give it a try and tell us what you think!
Upvote: | 165 |
Title: Hi Hacker News! My name is Jeff Tang and I'm the founder of Athens Research. Athens is an open-source and local-first alternative to Roam Research. Roam Research is a notetaking application, and what they really got right was the "bidirectional link."<p>The problem with notetaking is that we don’t look back at 99% of our notes. Organization systems like PARA, BASB, and GTD can extend the shelf-life of information, but they’re mechanical and tedious to maintain. On the other hand, without a system, we just hope that search will one day have the answers. What comes after search, tags, and folders?<p>With bidirectional links, you never have to worry about where you write a note. Bidirectional links allow you to connect any two notes together, creating a knowledge graph. Structure emerges organically, bottom-up. This way of joining any arbitrary entities together is a paradigm shift (sorry to be cliché). The graph-based approach subverts the tree-based hierarchy most notetaking apps (and most applications/OSes/computer systems) have used until now. This is fundamental because hyperlinks are primitives, used by every single internet user. Just imagine using computers and phones without links! This is why Athens is about more than just notetaking. I believe networked applications with bidirectional links and data could become a new category itself.<p>Of course, this bidirectional idea isn't new. In fact, it goes as far back as the origin of the Web. It's the original concept of hypertext and Xanadu, which Ted Nelson has been advocating for decades. More recently, aspects of it were attempted by the Semantic Web. Yet the adoption never really caught on, until perhaps now.<p>Something else that's interesting about the most powerful networked tools like Roam and Athens is that you can't really make these apps with JavaScript or plaintext/markdown. For maximum power, you want a true graph database. Both Roam and Athens leverage a front-end graph database called DataScript, which is written in Clojure(Script). JavaScript doesn't have a native analog, and Neo4j is only server-side. This matters because I believe this is the first consumer use case for graph databases. I believe both Roam and Athens are general-purpose platforms where individuals and organizations can centralize all of their knowledge and tasks. I believe the graph is the right data structure to do this with.<p>More broadly, I believe networked applications beyond just notetaking can emerge. These networked applications can develop unique interactions and patterns in-app. They will even be able to share data between one another—Datascript has a native interface for querying multiple databases at once—unlocking new ways for users to synthesize, analyze, and transform their data at scale.<p>I started working on Athens in March of 2020 after interviewing at Roam Research. At the time, I was certain Roam was going to change the world with their vision of networked thought. Pre-Roam, I was a power user of Notion, even giving a Notion productivity workshop to my friends (where I actually mention Roam <a href="https://youtu.be/4HXHk5C3bSc?t=5820" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/4HXHk5C3bSc?t=5820</a>). But it was clear to me that Roam was doing something different from Notion altogether, on the graph. It was clear to me that this was about more than just another productivity app.<p>Unfortunately, I had a glaring lack of Clojure experience. It didn't seem like I was going to get a call back from Roam, so I saw two options going forward. Option one was to find other applications of graphs and bidirectionality. I saw an opportunity in messaging to develop a "Slack Killer." Chat is another place where information was constantly getting lost in streams and siloed channels. Option two was to develop an open-source version of Roam. I wanted to prove I could learn Clojure fast (and hopefully get a return call from Roam). After prototyping these two options for about a week, I tweeted them to the #roamcult: <a href="https://twitter.com/tangjeff0/status/1248060649344831488" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/tangjeff0/status/1248060649344831488</a>. People started contributing and a community started forming. Designers, PMs, and even veteran Clojurians began contributing.<p>Assuming the graph database and bidirectional links are important to the future of computing, then why take an open-source approach? The primary answer is about privacy, longevity, and ownership. Users should have local-first control over their thoughts and their "second brains." Right now, if AWS's servers go down, Notion goes down, which has happened multiple times this year. Roam has notably suffered from downtime and data loss. Local-first and open-source, any version of Athens will always be locally usable, buildable, and modifiable for the rest of time, regardless if Athens the company goes under. User data will first and foremost always be owned by users.<p>Another reason is that open-source is an effective development process, at least in our case. In less than a year of development, with essentially zero spending, Athens has created a “good enough” alternative to a closed-source product that took 3+ years to make. It’s not because I’m a “10x engineer.” It’s exactly the opposite! Athens was built by dozens of engineers and designers who built and designed things in a way I never could (largely in their free time). We’ve had feedback and input from users from day one, directly in the channels we do work in. Not only do the best ideas rise to the top, they can be directly integrated into the source code, improving the experience of all users.<p>As for how we will make money, most users, even technical ones who could self-host, don’t want to self-host (but they value that optionality and insurance against lock-in). They want a subscription SaaS, which will make features like backups, integrations, and collaboration much easier. For enterprises that do want to self-host on-premises, we can provide additional support and security features, similar to Mattermost or GitLab. You can sign-up for our SaaS or enterprise packages through our Open Collective: <a href="https://opencollective.com/athens" rel="nofollow">https://opencollective.com/athens</a>.<p>What are your thoughts? If you’re optimistic and you use Roam, Athens or another networked notetaking app, what are you most excited about for 10-20 years in the future? Or maybe you’re skeptical and you think networked apps and bidirectionality will flame out like Xanadu and the Semantic Web. I'm guessing there will be questions about open-source too, particularly around paying contributors for their work. I'm all ears!
Upvote: | 340 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I don't have a CTO position yet, but it's my career goal.<p>Have you an excellent book to read about how to be a good CTO?<p>Thanks
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Version 12 of Electron has just been released with initial Wayland support. I've been waiting for this for <i>a long time</i> now, so I'm pretty excited about this.<p>This means that now the three major GUI toolkits for Linux (GTK, Qt and now Electron) support Wayland natively.<p>Hopefully the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) will follow suit soon [1] which should make it possible for Steam and Spotify to run natively on Wayland too (as soon as they upgrade, of course).<p>[1] - https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/issues/2804/ozone-wayland-x11-support
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Most wealth creation books are fluff. I wonder of there are any good books out there that have directly contributed to your wealth building endeavors. Which books have helped you make more money.
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: I run a website called Uploader window (www.uploader.win) that helps users to add an upload widget to their own apps or websites.<p>This morning I got a message from google that my site has been blocked for being Deceptive and it has listed my homepage as the deceptive URL. Anybody who will open the site gets a big red screen with a warning.<p>I've checked the source code by hand and everything I could check and I can't find any reason for hack or any security issues.<p>The only possible reason I can think off is we have a demo on our homepage which allows users to upload test files to try out the uploader and we offer a 20MB test space to help users during development. All test files are deleted after 24 hours. I have also disabled both these features since. But Google didn't say if this was the cause.<p>I've submitted a review to Google but not sure how long it will take.<p>We have a paying customers and all sites which have our script are now showing this warning too.<p>I am feeling super helpless and super scared how this is going to affect them.<p>Do you know of any way I can expidite the review? Any thing you can suggest to help me?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hi all! We're Yaseer, Simon and Alex from Axiom. We've built a way for non-technical people to automate work in their browser (<a href="https://axiom.ai" rel="nofollow">https://axiom.ai</a>).<p>Axiom lets you automate by recording actions in the UI, like an Excel macro or Emacs, only it’s for the whole web. It can plug in to your APIs, too, to reach places tools like Zapier can’t. Gartner et. al. call this ‘RPA’ (Robotic Process Automation), but we don’t use this acronym with customers.<p>I’ve been a long-time HN lurker and occasional commenter. I decided to do a Show HN 9 months ago with v1.0, and people seemed to find it interesting: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089243" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089243</a>. That post was pretty transformative for us. We got our first users outside our local network in London. We got shared on international sites that syndicate HN content. We suddenly had users in Japan, Korea, Denmark... eventually 111 countries in 9 months.<p>The HN audience were both usefully kind and critical. With our social automations, you pointed out many violate TOS, and “your team needs to do better” (ouch!). That didn't feel good at the time. But later, we learned this is no way to build a business - battling platform providers like LinkedIn does not scale.<p>We learned our value prop has to also benefit the platform we're automating. LinkedIn automations - though widespread - don't do this. I think we’ve achieved this with our use cases in e-commerce, like helping Amazon sellers do repetitive data entry or report-generation on their store. When we spoke to Amazon about automating repetitive work for sellers, they offered to introduce us to more. Google’s algorithms eventually boosted us to 3rd on the Chrome store for ‘browser automation’, and Microsoft... added special code in Bing to block us. This would have made us sad except, 2000 users later, we have not yet found someone using Bing.<p>Axiom has also evolved significantly. The problems we’re trying to solve with the DOM, Ajax and messy web-apps are hard ones. Not deep-tech hard, but if you’ve ever written a Selenium or Puppeteer script and tried to write an algorithm to detect the end of page-load... it’s not simple. Since our Show HN, we’ve extended the library of algorithms for more weird stuff you see in web apps: iframes, infinite scrolls, drag-and-drop - there's a lot more to do. Web UIs are complex; if Axiom doesn't work on a website, please let us know, we improve our algorithms with every edge-case.<p>Until recently, most of our users were no-code enthusiasts (i.e. users of Zapier or Airtable). They used Axiom in agencies to manage YouTube and Amazon accounts. The dominant use-case was “generate reports by logging into A, B, C and getting data”. Since YC though, we’ve discovered a bunch of developer and startup use cases. A very lightweight automated testing tool is a new one - using Axiom is 10X faster than writing it in selenium/puppeteer + we handle all the annoying logic you need. We're investigating a Node library for this - please let us know if it would be useful. Secondly, startups whose business is ‘we provide an API to do X’ use Axiom to perform whatever the 'X' is behind the API - e.g. booking on a travel website.<p>Although Axiom is primarily a Chrome extension, our cloud product needs neither Chrome, nor an extension! It has a virtual browser, with a full GUI, like you see in browser testing services. You can run it 24/7, or trigger it from Zapier or your API. If you build a bot on the desktop version, we'll guide you through setting it up in the cloud. If you don't use chrome, and would like cloud access, register here: <a href="https://axiom.ai/bot-building-service" rel="nofollow">https://axiom.ai/bot-building-service</a>. Being Chrome-only makes us worryingly dependent on Google - we definitely will support other browsers after YC. Right now though, our small team needs to prioritise fast iteration.<p>We built Axiom on a pretty popular framework, Puppeteer, which requires desktop binaries to run. This means you need an Electron app, too. Trust me, It hurts us more than it hurts you, supporting Electron on Windows, Mac & Linux. This does make us one of the only cross-platform RPA tools - Mac and Linux users have told us they appreciate this.<p>Our cloud product doesn’t need any of this- but it does mean we process your data. With our desktop app, your data is processed 100% locally. We store the code which defines your script, but not the data it operates on.<p>Finally, the community on HN is more influential than you may realize - taking interest in our HN post changed the trajectory of our company entirely. Also, we discovered responding to hard questions from smart people on HN is pretty good prep for talking to investors, or a YC interview. HN's interest was fundamental for us getting in. We'd like to thank the community here. In fact, my first ever submission 4 years ago asked (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15098066" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15098066</a>), 'Ask HN: what online communities offer a high level of discussion like HN?' There's very few. It's a unique corner of the internet.<p>If you run into any issues with Axiom, please reach out to support - we're very proactive at getting you running. Otherwise, please post any feedback, ideas, questions or relevant experience - we'd love to hear it again!<p>Note: M1 Mac users, we have a workaround on our support page for any issues. A hotfix for M1 is imminent.
Upvote: | 160 |
Title: Hi Hacker News! We’re Nurlybek and Michael, the cofounders of Biodock (<a href="http://www.biodock.ai/" rel="nofollow">http://www.biodock.ai/</a>). We help scientists expedite microscopy image analysis.<p>Michael and I built Biodock due to the challenges we experienced in microscopy image analysis while we were at Stanford. As a Ph.D. student, I spent hours manually counting through lipid droplets in microscope images of embryonic tissues. The incredible frustration I felt led me to try all kinds of software. Eventually, I went out to seek help from other scientists. Michael, a computer science student, was working in a lab just across from mine when he got my email asking for help. We got to chatting in a med school cafe and realized that we were both tackling the same issues with microscopy images.<p>Microscopy images are one of the most fundamental forms of data in biomedical research, from discovery all the way to clinical trials. They can be used to show the expression of genes, the progression of the disease, and the efficacy of treatments.<p>However, images are also very frustrating, and we think a lot of that has to do with the current tools available. To analyze their images, many scientists at top research institutions use software techniques invented 50 years ago, like thresholding and filtering. Some even spend their days manually drawing regions around cells or regions. Not only is this extremely frustrating, but it slows down the research cycle, meaning that it takes a lot more time and money to create potentially lifesaving cures. Contrast these tools to the incredible recent headway into deep learning - where applications like AlphaFold have led to incredible gains in what was previously possible.<p>Our goal is to bring these performance gains to research scientists. The current core module in Biodock is AI cell segmentation for fluorescent cells, based mostly on Mask R-CNN and U-Net architectures, and trained on thousands of cell images. Essentially, it identifies where each cell is and calculates important features like location, size, and fluorescent expression for each cell. This module performs around 40% more accurately than other software.<p>So how is this different from training deep learning models yourself? First, our pretrained modules are trained on a huge amount of data, which allows for great performance for all scientists without needing to label data or optimize training. Secondly, we’ve spent time carefully building our cloud architecture and algorithms for production, including a large cluster of GPUs. We even slice images into crops, process them in parallel, and stitch them together. We also have storage, data integrations, and visualizations built into the platform.<p>We know that AI cell segmentation addresses only a small fraction of microscopy analysis in the biomedical space, and we are launching several more modules soon, tackling some of the most difficult images in the space. So far, we’ve been able to generate different custom AI modules for diverse tissues and imaging modalities (fluorescence, brightfield, electron microscopy, histology). Eventually, we want to link other biological data analyses into the cloud including DNA sequences, proteomics, and flow cytometry, to power the 500K scientists and 3K companies in the US biotech and pharma space.<p>We would love to hear from you and get your feedback—especially if you've ever spent hours on image analysis!
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I work for a company with ~250 engineers, and one thing that's frustrated me is that so much knowledge is shared person-to-person rather than being written down somewhere. A lot of times, the only way to discover things about a new domain is to just know who you're supposed to talk to.<p>We have a wiki in Confluence, but it's somewhat poorly organized and doesn't really have anyone owning its content so it feels useless. We have one large repo and many smaller repos that don't have great discoverability, so I don't know that a doc directory in our code base makes sense either. Most of the time when I'm trying to figure out how something works I'm forced to look in Slack for people mentioning what I'm working on (and hoping it's not locked away in a private channel).<p>I'm curious to hear what solutions for documentation have worked well where others have worked? And how to 'start' an effort where I work to better document our various domains?<p>Edit: I'm realizing that I need to specify: I'm not primarily interested in documenting APIs, more things like: * Preferred way of doing X * X domain uses these tables and works like this * This is what X feature does and here's what it looks like
Most of us work in the single large codebase, and we don't have a good separation of responsibility between the pieces yet (it's a work in progress) so for now I mostly want to document what stuff exists rather than formal API documentation.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Anam, Eve, and Nikhil here, co-founders of Alinea (<a href="https://alinea-invest.com/" rel="nofollow">https://alinea-invest.com/</a>). Alinea is an investing app for those who want to understand the companies they are investing in. We explain how each company makes money, how they treat their stakeholders, and their environmental impact on the world so customers can buy stock in companies they believe in.<p>Despite our different backgrounds, the three of us struggled with the same problem. We knew we had to invest our money to build wealth, but when we tried, we felt intimidated and lost. We had so many questions - What kind of stocks do we invest in? Where do we find accurate information? And quickly realized we’re not alone, our friends and other people were also experiencing the same problem.<p>So in early 2020 we started working on a new approach to investing. We wanted to build an experience without the hassle and complexity of charts and financial jargon. We also wanted to move away from a gamified experience which tends to cause stress and anxiety around investing - so we’ve gone as far as removing red and green from the app entirely.<p>There’s a lot of misinformation and confusion around how to start investing in stocks so we guide our users through the process. First, we match you to stocks based on your interests so you can better understand a company. Second, we simplify hard to find research into bite-sized formats, so you can evaluate if it's a good investment. Lastly, we show you the impact of your investment on our environment, society, and workplace. We do the homework, so you can make an informed decision.<p>Underneath the hood, we’re using Drivewealth for stock prices and executing trades and extract data from ISS reports to offer visibility on a companies’ environmental, social and workplace impact scores. We sort through SEC filings and earnings reports to consolidate and synthesize information. We’ve custom built UI in native swift in“swipeable cards” so the information is easy and quick to digest.<p>In the past months, we’ve seen the power of retail investors who want more choices than just putting their money in ETFs, we provide the tools for them to make informed stock investments. We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on what we’re building!
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: I just signed up for (and later cancelled) the "Hacker" plan on Repl.it. When I was ready to cancel, I went to the "My Account" page. On that page, there was a "Billing" section, but it didn't list any record of my subscription. And there was no button on the page for cancelling my subscription. (I was logged in on the subscribed account and had access to my "private" REPLs, which is what the subscription lets you do.)<p>I emailed support and they cancelled it for me, and said:<p>"We are working on cancelling subscriptions being an automated process the user can do on their own."<p>Support didn't respond to my question as to why my subscription was not listed in the "Billing" section, but it was presumably for the same reason that there was no "Cancel" button.<p>According to Crunchbase.com, Repl.it has raised $24.6M. That they didn't have a self-serve cancel functionality (and they had a deceptive "Billing" section that omits actual subscriptions) on their Account page deserves community criticism. Please help spread the word so that they do better.<p>[EDIT]: Someone, seemingly from repl.it writes:<p>"Hey there, we upgraded our stripe library version and missed a part in our code the relied on the old behavior. That resulted in our billing info not rendering for about a day. Sorry about that! A deceptive "Billing" section is definitely not our intention."<p>Someone confirmed that they have indeed fixed this. The purpose was to get them to fix the issue (since support just gave me the run around). They appear to have done so, so this issue is closed for me.
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: Any tips on how to stay focused and motivated while working at home?<p>I'm having a hard time finding motivation when working remotely.
There are days when it is hard staying motivated working remotely or just spending so many hours of your day at home.
Does anyone here feels the same?
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: what are the pros and cons of sprints and daily standups in your experience<p>Coming from old school 'non-agile' financial world focused on bottom line I was in a bit of a shock learning about this daily standup ritual.<p>Besides being a dream for micromanagers, it seems to be more about signalling progress vs. actually making progress.<p>Do these extra bureaucracy layers, meetings, checkmarks and vague "man-points" estimates actually bring any value.
Upvote: | 449 |
Title: Hi everyone!<p>I just released the Practical Python Projects book! (https://practicalpython.yasoob.me)<p>I am happy to announce the first version as a release candidate. I have poured a lot of love into writing this book and would love to hear what you guys think. (A limited 100% off and discount coupons at the end)<p>This is not a pure beginner book. The book does assume some background Python knowledge. You need to know the basics like methods, functions, classes, and such. If I use something that is not typically covered in beginner Python books, I will explain it before I use it. There are no tests for these projects as they are really small and teach you how to glue different pieces together.<p>Some projects that we will be making<p>- A Twilio bot that keeps you updated with the latest match scores from the FIFA World Cup<p>- A Facebook Messenger bot the shares latest memes, jokes, and shower-thoughts scraped from Reddit<p>- An automated invoice generator and deploying it using Flask<p>- Making automated cinema-preshow by downloading and stitching together related movie trailers using moviepy<p>- Generating automated article summaries and overlaying them on top of images<p>- Understanding and decoding JPEG images using vanilla Python<p>- Creating a GUI application using PyQt for downloading online videos<p>- Implementing a TUI email client that allows reading emails in the terminal<p>The first 50 people can use the "hn-love" coupon (without the quotation marks) to get 15% off. I am also offering a 30-day no-questions-asked refund policy if you don't enjoy this book and don't learn anything new.<p>You can buy the book from https://practicalpython.yasoob.me
You can get a free sample chapter from here: https://practicalpython.yasoob.me/sample/chapter2.pdf
You can learn more about my writing style by reading any of my recent articles over at https://yasoob.me<p>(For detailed FAQ, you can head over to the book website: https://practicalpython.yasoob.me)
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Jon and Matthew, the co-founders of Lendflow (<a href="https://lendflow.io" rel="nofollow">https://lendflow.io</a>). We make it easy for software companies to embed lending services into their product. It allows you to easily create your own version of Square, Shopify or Stripe Capital and offer it to your customers in-app.<p>Does it take your users 15-90 days to get paid out by their customers? You can embed a factoring product that gives them the option to get paid instantly for a small fee. Do your users purchase materials, supplies, inventory, or equipment on your platform? Embed a loan in your platform to give them timely access to capital to help them spread out upfront project costs, take advantage of wholesale rates on their purchases, or invest in more assets for their business.<p>We’ve been in the lending space since 2014 and have helped tens of thousands of small businesses acquire financing. We saw the struggles on both sides: how tough it is for small businesses to find the right lending products and how difficult it was for lenders to find the right customer at the right time. Companies like Square, Shopify and Stripe have launched capital programs for their users that allow them to get better priced, more timely funding for their business than they could elsewhere. It’s helped their business customers invest in themselves, grow and transact more, and made them more loyal to those services. And we're only scratching the surface!<p>The problem is that launching lending programs is complex, timing consuming and costly. It can take a team of 10 at least a few million dollars and 18+ months to get to market with their program. It takes significant upfront commitment and investment, making it very risky. This means the lending services aren’t offered and businesses don't get access to the capital they need.<p>It is really gratifying to see the impact of providing increased access to capital. We’ve seen restaurants who invested money in a digital transformation not only survive through the pandemic, but double their revenues and improve their margins by embracing take out and delivery. We’ve seen an HVAC company gain the ability to hire more technicians and triple the amount of customers they are able to service on a given day. A home renovation contractor was able to spread out his upfront costs over time to take on multiple projects at once, increasing his monthly revenue by 3x over the past 6 months. An ecommerce company was able to purchase inventory at wholesale rates and invest in an ad campaign to drive traffic to their store to increase sales by 240%.<p>We provide all of the infrastructure and tools to make it easy to launch capital products that can have this impact for small businesses. We’ve had platform customers get a lending program up and running in a day. You can customize the funding products and experience based on the needs of your own customers. You can use our platform to build a data advantage and more efficiently go to market with your own funding service. We have a lending API, pre-built customizable applications, lending service provider aggregation API, white-labeled sales and support teams to walk customers through the process, and connections into 85 of the top lenders and funding products available to businesses. We also can spin up custom endpoints to add new data points to underwriting models to help businesses obtain better rates/terms and to deliver a better experience. We are paid by 3rd party lenders for the work we do to onboard the small business for funding, and we split those fees with our platform partners. If you build your own funding service, you simply pay a subscription for using our tools.<p>We’re live and integrated with 32 platforms and are processing thousands of business financing applications per month. We successfully helped businesses access millions of dollars from best-in-market lending services. We also have customers who've used the data from their lending program to build their own custom funding products on Lendflow.<p>We’d love to hear how we can build better in-product lending experiences with you. The possibilities in lending are just starting to be explored. We're super excited to build the next generation of lending products. We’d love to hear your thoughts, please leave your feedback below!
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Hi HN! Ryan and Michael here. We’re the founders of Procoto (<a href="https://procoto.com" rel="nofollow">https://procoto.com</a>). We help small and mid-sized companies organize their vendor rates, vendor contact info, and vendor contract terms.<p>Most growing companies find themselves juggling different systems/spreadsheets and overspending with their vendors. Procoto replaces the multiple systems to become their central hub while identifying savings opportunities based on historic rates.<p>Why us? We come from the procurement world and spent time in 30+ procurement platforms as both vendors and users. But when we went to switch from spreadsheets to a centralized solution, we couldn’t find what we were looking for. Our only options were to stay in spreadsheets or to jump to a six-figure platform. We’d be forced to pay for more features than we needed in an outdated UI/UX.<p>So we left to build Procoto for people like us – procurement pros at small and mid-sized companies (25-1000 FTEs) looking for a simpler, smarter way to manage their sourcing process.
We help our users get there in three ways:<p>Savings. By standardizing and leveraging historic pricing data, Procoto identifies savings opportunities to drive down third-party spend.<p>Automated Databasing. Every contract, vendor, and price point is systemically stored in Procoto.<p>Collaboration. Procoto fosters internal communication and collaboration across teams and remote workers. It’s not a tool built just for the procurement team. It delivers status updates and reporting to all stakeholders in the organization.<p>In short, we’re building the procurement solution we couldn’t find. What do you all think? We’d love your feedback. For any procurement pros out there, what would make your life easier?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I have been bad at drawing my whole life, but I think drawing can improve my career as an engineer. I want to be able to illustrate my ideas when writing blog posts and documentation.<p>Where do I start? I have an IPad and Apple Pencil for digital drawing. I tried to learn how to draw by watching videos on Youtube and by practising a lot on my own, but I feel like I'm missing fundamentals.<p>I want to learn both raster and vector graphics. As it turned out, drawing complex real life objects using vector graphics is not easier.
Upvote: | 216 |
Title: I'm essentially stuck at home tonight. Plenty of other more productive things I could be doing, but what are some nice YouTube channels you've found recently that could use a little HN hug?<p>For my part:<p>https://www.youtube.com/c/BreakingTaps<p>Breaking Taps - 21k subs - Originally found via share from Ben Krasnow, definitely worth it. Tinkerer/fabricobbler that celebrates the learning.<p>And these are ones I've been watching for a while but still have relatively low sub count.<p>https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcoReps<p>Marco Reps - 146k subs (ok, lowish) - Another tinkerer, although mostly in high-precision lab equipment and various builds of interesting projects. Also a very funny dude.<p>https://www.youtube.com/c/OonaR%C3%A4is%C3%A4nen<p>Oona Räisänen aka windytan - 2100 subs - She's had a few articles posted here, super creative RF/audio hacker/tinkerer.<p>https://www.youtube.com/c/EdgePrecision<p>Edge Precision - 56k subs - One of my favorite machining channels, zero nonsense, tons of practical advice that I'll never use.<p>https://www.youtube.com/user/NACImageTechnology<p>NAC Image Technology - 650 subs - Commercial account of high speed cameras, just eye candy.<p>https://www.youtube.com/user/corningmuseumofglass<p>Corning Museum of Glass - 150k subs - Fairly prolific publisher of guest artists creating pretty amazing glassware.<p>https://www.youtube.com/c/eastcoastish<p>Eastcoastish - 3.8k subs - Impeccably documented mods and builds of a variety of small displacement motorcycles (Honda Monkey, CT70, etc)
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: For a few weeks, I am doubting if HN is another "user engagement" place like you know Reddit, FB etc.
It seems a waste of times (to me) as I don't see any tangible benefits I am getting out of it.<p>So I would like to know if any of you have such experiences. I am specifically looking for stories like:
1) I posted this project and I started some company. Sold it or earning a lot of money or living my dream
2) I was hired because of my post on HN.
3) Girls chasing you because of your reputation as HN or met your wife because of your cool project ( Please don't hate me for this)<p>Basically money, power etc..<p>Forgive me for being blunt but I am not looking for "10-sec fame". I mean one day you got traffic 100K on the website. Good. But just
for one day. Also, I am not sure blogging count as a tangible benefit unless it is paid service. I hope you understand my point.<p>Also intellectual debate, I get more information, I feel smart as benefits etc. don't count in this context.
Upvote: | 219 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Bernard & Hrvoje and we are Lunatic (<a href="https://lunatic.solutions/" rel="nofollow">https://lunatic.solutions/</a>). Our goal is to improve how you run server-side code by building an open-source runtime that gives you lightweight processes, fault tolerance, and capability-based security for different parts of the application. Basically, we want to combine the power of Erlang with WebAssembly and bring that to new and existing applications.<p>The two of us met in high school, studied computer science together, but then went separate ways working as backend engineers. Bernard worked at CERN and Hrvoje co-founded Amodo, an insurance tech startup. Bernard, being a huge fan of Erlang/Elixir, started working on a similar open-source runtime for WebAssembly which he called Lunatic (<a href="https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/lunatic" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/lunatic</a>).<p>Lunatic runs Wasm modules as lightweight processes with its own heap/stack and preemptively schedules them on a multi-threaded executor. You can spawn those processes using a library we provide (currently for Rust and AssemblyScript) to enable actor-based architectures with message passing. Scheduling is implemented by modifying a Wasm module and adding “reduction counts” (similar to Erlang). You can write seemingly blocking code but it won’t actually block the underlying OS thread as our implementation of WebAssembly System Interface (WASI, think of it as POSIX syscalls) will be implemented with async Rust and a bit of magic [0] :) The code is JIT’ed and we build on top of existing Wasm runtimes Wasmtime/Wasmer for this part (codegen is done by LLVM or Cranelift).<p>To step back from technical details, working on Lunatic for the past few months, we have started to form a bigger picture about server-side applications. Over the years we have witnessed many trends: Docker & containers became popular, asynchronous programming and green threads are ubiquitous for IO intense work, polyglot codebases are always present, microservice architecture became popular, and distributed is being used both for scale and to bring computation closer to clients to lower latency. Two important driving forces are hardware capabilities and how we develop software. Those have changed dramatically from the time operating systems were created.<p>For example, to maximize resource usage of a single machine, we started running virtual machines and then moved to more lightweight containers, both to give isolation and sandboxing to different applications. Serverless is pushing this even further. Lunatic builds on top of WebAssembly security principles [1] to give sandboxing and isolation to enable even more lightweight environments.<p>Servers also needed to handle more and more network connections and spawning an OS thread per connection became problematic so developers used different programming patterns, async implementations, or user-space threads/processes to tackle this problem. Lunatic solves this by using Erlang’s proven approach [2].<p>How we develop software has also changed. Today most of our application consists of third-party libraries and it’s common to have hundreds or even thousands of dependencies and obviously it’s impossible to audit them all. When you compile and run your application, the whole code has the same privileges, so a malicious dependency could easily steal your private keys.[3,4,5] WebAssembly is trying to standardise ideas like Interface Types and dynamic linking between Wasm modules. We could isolate libraries into different modules based on capabilities they require (which “system calls” they use) and let developers decide which parts of their app have what capabilities.<p>Other use-cases that Lunatic and Wasm enable are plugin architecture to run third-party code, sharing code between frontend and backend, polyglot codebases that use Wasm interface types to call each other functions, etc.<p>Currently Lunatic is just a runtime but ultimately we want it to be more like an operating system for server-side applications. The value we want to give to developers is simpler deployment and management of running apps, better capability-based security model, and seamless integration with third-party tools (logging, monitoring, profiling). Ideally all you need to do is compile your app to WebAssembly and you are ready to go.<p>We have built two demo apps to showcase Lunatic. Lunatic.run (<a href="https://lunatic.solutions/run/" rel="nofollow">https://lunatic.solutions/run/</a>) turns any command line application into a web server endpoint. Read HTTP requests from stdin and respond to stdout. The other is Lunatic.chat, a telnet chat server written in Rust using actor-based architecture (<a href="https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/chat" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/chat</a>).<p>We are super excited to work on these problems and we hope we have managed to convey some of that excitement to you. Please share with us your thoughts and questions. Does our big picture resonate with you? Would you like to use a runtime like Lunatic? Do you have some other use-cases in mind?<p>[0] <a href="https://crates.io/crates/async-wormhole" rel="nofollow">https://crates.io/crates/async-wormhole</a>
[1] <a href="https://webassembly.org/docs/security/" rel="nofollow">https://webassembly.org/docs/security/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-websocket-connections" rel="nofollow">https://www.phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-...</a>
[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26087064" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26087064</a>
[4] <a href="https://jordan-wright.com/blog/post/2020-11-12-hunting-for-malicious-packages-on-pypi/" rel="nofollow">https://jordan-wright.com/blog/post/2020-11-12-hunting-for-m...</a>
[5] <a href="https://snyk.io/blog/yet-another-malicious-package-found-in-npm-targeting-cryptocurrency-wallets/" rel="nofollow">https://snyk.io/blog/yet-another-malicious-package-found-in-...</a>
Upvote: | 162 |
Title: Hi, HN. I'm a PhD student in computational biology in Canada. Through my MSc & PhD, I've seen a number of abuses of power from supervisors, both my own and others. Some of these are deliberate (e.g., making remarks to other profs intended to embarrass or discredit the student), while many are evidently unintentional but still egregious (e.g., being grossly neglectful of the student's professional development, so that the supervisor is blocking a student's degree completion and career development by essentially ignoring her). As someone who will be finishing soon and getting the hell out of academia, I want to understand how common these abuses are in industry. Some of these problems may arise from aspects particular to academia:<p>* Maybe students have conditioned themselves to get paid little and be treated with a lack of respect?<p>* Maybe the sunk cost of a partially completed graduate degree compels students to remain to completion, even when the work environment is toxic?<p>* Maybe the "flat" management structure of most labs (3 to 30 grad students report directly to their supervisor) allows more abuse?<p>* Maybe tenure insulates supervisors from consequences for treating their students poorly?<p>Among my late-stage PhD friends, it feels like 80% are unhappy, either because of deliberate abuse from their supervisors, or because of the supervisor's neglect of what the student needs to finish her degree and progress to her next career stage. Is this abuse as prevalent in industry as in academia?
Upvote: | 270 |
Title: There's a lot of buzz around NFTs (non-fungible tokens) lately: https://www.coindesk.com/what-are-nfts<p>Some uses cases like NBA Top Shot seems like they could have lasting value, essentially a digital version of trading cards backed by the official sports league: https://www.nbatopshot.com<p>Other uses cases like buying Jack Dorsey's first tweet for $2.5m seem a bit more like mania to me: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/5/22316320/jack-dorsey-original-tweet-nft-cent-valuables<p>Do you agree or disagree? What are your thoughts on this space and it's future?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I'm Jeff, co-founder and CEO of PingPong (<a href="https://getpingpong.com" rel="nofollow">https://getpingpong.com</a>), where we help remote teams collaborate and stay connected by exchanging video, voice, and screen recordings asynchronously. Think of it as Marco Polo or Snapchat (sans ephemerality) for globally-distributed product teams.<p>We got the idea from our own experience on a different startup. Murphy, the co-founder and CTO, lives in Nigeria, and I live in the US (Utah). We had five other team members spread across three countries and four time zones. The problem for me as a team leader was how to share my ideas, feelings, and updates in a way that felt authentic and conveyed energy. I felt like I was spending my entire life either typing in Slack or scheduling Zoom calls at terrible hours. I had been kicking around the idea for our product in my head for months. At some point, I began thinking more about how to improve communication for distributed teams than what I was working on. In February 2020, after my second child was born, Murphy and I planned to slowly build a solution to these problems on the side. Then, the COVID situation exploded, and we knew it was time to go all-in. We pivoted our focus entirely. When we first started, our name was Girbil. The first version of the site is laughable: <a href="https://www.girbil.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.girbil.com/</a>.<p>In synchronous work cultures, people expect contextual understanding in their interactions because it's assumed that everyone absorbs that context by osmosis in meetings, informal chats, and channels. Workers are used to having large portions of their day plugged into a flow of just-in-time information like a network. With asynchronous cultures, it's better to assume little or no prior contextual knowledge in every communication. Context is given by referring to documentation or by laying it out specifically. Workers are used to having large swaths of uninterrupted time to work deeply. Because we lived across continents, most of our work and communication had to be asynchronous.<p>We felt that current chat tools (e.g., Slack, Teams) are built for synchronous teams. You can see this in many of these products’ design decisions. For example, pressing enter sends a message instead of line-breaking, encouraging short-form messages that provide minimal context. Furthermore, the lack of a message workflow encourages a constant stream of low-value messages. By default, instant notifications are sent for every short message—even when the recipient is in do-not-disturb, the sender has the power to override. All these design decisions promote a constant flow of shallow, quickly-scanned information demanding immediate responses.<p>We want to build a communication product that better meets the needs of distributed product teams like ours—designed first for asynchronous teams across multiple time zones where it can be hard to get face time. We decided to start with video. We felt the medium itself, though not perfect, addresses a lot of the issues we experienced. With video, you tend to record only when you have something important to say. Most creators want to "sound good," so they put thought into what they're saying. Additionally, the listener can't "skim" the messages, and they receive a richer message in terms of intent, tone, and energy. Sharing an asset while screen recording adds another layer of depth and efficiency. But we're still trying to figure out how to maximize the above strengths of async video while mitigating its downsides (e.g., its linear nature). For example, we've limited face and voice recordings to two minutes to encourage succinctness (though screen-share recordings can be 10 minutes). We'd love to hear your ideas here. We've also made some design decisions to help teams focus. For example, instead of channels, we've built conversations. These are designed to be started with a specific goal and are very easy to leave, close, and end. Users can have multiple workspaces, but they’re hidden instead of ever-present.<p>We hope to ultimately build a Slack/Teams alternative designed for rich, asynchronous human interactions that encourages deep work. We still have a lot to build before we achieve this goal, and we'll need to incorporate text and file attachments at some point. Today, we use PingPong for 50-75% of our team communication. When we have to send a file or structured text, we use Slack. We love using our own product to collaborate as we work on it together.<p>We'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and ideas—particularly if you'd like to share any limitations or frustrations you experience with Slack or Teams as we did. Thanks for reading!
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: What tips can be given to someone who wants to change careers to the tech industry in this stage of life?
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: Hello HN! I'm Andrios, from Runops.io - we're building a proxy to commands you run in the terminal that adds Git, code reviews in Slack, and removes sensitive data from results. It's like the Cloud Shells from GCP/AWS, but with more features and using your local zsh/bash terminal.<p>You run an AWS CLI command in the terminal and it goes to Runops instead of AWS. Runops adds the command to Git and gets peer reviews (when required) in Slack before sending it to AWS. After it runs, we deliver the results back in the terminal, but with all sensitive data masked. It works for AWS, Kubernetes, databases, and others.<p>I was leading the Infra team at a Fintech (pismo.io/en), and we wanted to give autonomy to all developers in production. But we couldn’t give them direct access due to compliance requirements. The solution was to have a small number of people (my team) with "full access" to production systems. Engineers would ask us when they needed to run one-off scripts in production. Our goal was to deliver automations so that other teams wouldn't need to ask us to do things. We would build a way for them to do it with compliance, security, and reliability.<p>It didn't work. We were spending 80% of the time processing the queue of requests, and 20% building automations. The backlog was always increasing, and the team was burning out. Engineers were not happy as their requests took a long time to process and clients were angry at them.<p>But some nice automations came out of that. For instance: we needed to review ad-hoc prod database reads to avoid bad queries. So we built a Jenkins pipeline that ran SQL queries from Git after code review using Flyway. Any engineer could run queries in prod, leaving traces on who did it, reviews, when it happened, and why, for every query.<p>When talking to friends at similar companies, I saw the problem was even worse. Some of them weren't trying to automate, they already had dedicated people for running these scripts, i.e., an ops team. I knew there was a better way, so I set out to build it. I quit this job mid last year, with about 8 months' worth of savings to make this work before I'd need to find a job again. It was tough in the beginning, as I’m an engineer and had to learn sales, marketing and product management on the job, but after getting the first few customers things started improving.<p>The goal for Runops is to let any engineer run anything in production as if they had full access, automating as much as possible of security and compliance. When human interaction is needed, we make it synchronous using Slack. Now, instead of having a single team as a bottleneck, you can have everyone do things in production. Centralizing teams with most of the access to AWS, Kubernetes, and databases is bad. It makes for slow Change Management processes using Jira or other tools with manual executions at the end. Runops let’s you add quick reviews from experts (Infra, DBA, security, etc), and automates executions.<p>The primary interface is a CLI, where you run scripts that goes from SQL queries to kubectl exec and AWS CLI commands. We don't create new abstractions, you use the same commands and docs available, we just proxy them. A nice benefit is replacing VPNs and the 10 client tools/credentials you would need today. We also support templates for custom actions in a bunch of languages.<p>We built it using Github Actions for executing commands. We store configurations and credentials as Actions Secrets and they get injected when a command requires them. It's nice because we can run anything that goes in a Docker container in <15 seconds. We have plans to improve it beyond Actions by creating a real-time proxy. That will enable a REPL-like experience.
Runops doesn't have a web interface, this is on purpose, we don't want to be one more tool engineers have to learn. Most interactions happen with our CLI or Slack. We have a simple admin UI in Retool.<p>We do everything using Lisp. The CLI uses Clojurescript; the REST API uses Clojure. It's great to have the same language everywhere, and Lisp is also a fantastic advantage.<p>Today we have big Fintechs using Runops. They use it to let developers run commands inside Kubernetes pods, like Rails Runner and Elixir IEx, SQL queries, DynamoDB queries, and making internal API calls in private networks using cURL. One of the best parts of building this has been seeing developers doing more production work. Regulated companies that never considered giving this level of autonomy to all developers are changing their minds. It's great to see a tool impacting the culture, increasing trust.<p>We're really happy we get to show this to you all, thank you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and questions.
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: 1 month ago our business was sound. We had an Instagram with over 37.000 people that was driving over 100.000USD/y revenues to our website.<p>Then we used a program to analyze our followers (https://www.instagramhelpertools.com/).<p>Before using this service we checked reviews and all looked good.<p>Our surprise was that after using this service Instagram blocked our account arguing that we were a bot.<p>We contacted them and followed their procedure to demonstrate we are human beings, nobody answered.<p>We tried for over a month, and finally they told us our account had been permanently deleted.<p>Instagram cancelled our account because they thought we were a bot, but paradoxically we could never talk with a human from their side to explain the situation.<p>End result: we have lost our main sales channel from one day to the other.<p>This is the power of the big guys.
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: Hi Hacker News! We’re Danny, Shivam, David, and Brian from Bristle <a href="https://www.bristlehealth.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bristlehealth.com/</a>. We’re developing an at-home saliva test to detect the earliest signs of cavities and gum disease - then provide evidence-based recommendations and treatments to help prevent them.<p>Cavities and gum disease are driven by infectious microbes, but today’s dental care only detects the damage they already caused. X-rays and observational screenings detect tooth decay and bleeding gums, which are symptoms, not causes. By the time they are detected, they’ve often become serious issues that require the invasive procedures we all dread - fillings and root canals. We end up spending billions of dollars reactively treating diseases that can largely be prevented with good oral health management.<p>About us:
Our backgrounds are on the research and commercial side of genomics. We have witnessed the rapid adoption and implementation of new technologies in healthcare enable remote monitoring of symptoms, early detection of disease, virtual care delivery, and new generations of therapeutics. Meanwhile, we have people like my co-founder Brian, who constantly face cavities despite great oral hygiene (good job, Brian) and get the same advice as everyone else.<p>Technologies like genomic sequencing and wearables are being applied to important areas in healthcare including oncology, rare disease, and NIPT - but aren't being used for the ones (literally) right beneath our nose. A lot of oral diseases start and progress from a build-up of specific acid-releasing or disease-causing bacteria. Working in genomics, we knew the technology existed to detect these pathogenic microbes at the earliest stages, when they were most treatable.<p>About our test:
Like other DNA tests (think Color Genomics, Ancestry, etc.), our test can be taken from home and only requires a saliva sample. Unlike most DNA tests that look at your personal genome (the collection of your genes), we analyze the oral microbiome: the community of microbes (bacteria, fungi, and viruses) living in your mouth. Imbalance between pathogenic and beneficial microbes can contribute to your risk of oral disease or signal systemic conditions. Decades of research have shown causal relationships between the oral microbiome and preventable gum disease.<p>Most microbiome companies use a method called 16s, which only provides the identification and relative abundance of bacteria at low resolution (often only genus-level). We use shotgun metagenomics to identify and quantify all of the microbes in your mouth including viruses, bacteria (over 150 on average), and fungi. Our test sequences the whole genome of the microbes providing information like functional profiling and higher resolution at the strain-level. This means higher sensitivity and specificity while providing the kind of data needed to develop better oral care products and therapeutics in the future.<p>Oral health tends to be overlooked, but is an important component of overall health with deep connections to the rest of the body. Research has been unveiling links between oral health and the risk or presence of systemic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s (I'll include some links about this below). One of the more exciting things we'll be able to do as we grow our database is look for oral microbiome signatures related to other diseases. Such analysis will only be done on de-identified data, and only go towards the goal of improving health.<p>Our assay will inevitably pick up some of your genome - it’s impossible to completely avoid. But our analysis only looks at the microbes from your sample and we filter out human genome data from downstream analysis. There are some interesting genomic markers we eventually would like to investigate (read about some here: <a href="https://www.ada.org/en/member-center/oral-health-topics/genetics-and-oral-health" rel="nofollow">https://www.ada.org/en/member-center/oral-health-topics/gene...</a>) but for now we only look at microbial data and will obtain consent before analyzing anything else.<p>About our projects:
We are currently running a clinical research study with a leading dental school clinic, and will be bringing the test through clinical validation over the coming months. In the meantime, we’re offering a research version of our test to consumers through an early access program. This program provides an exploratory (non-diagnostic) lens into your oral microbiome, including information on your unique oral microbiome profile and how it relates to health conditions based on current research. The test is $50, but we won’t charge until you’re accepted off the waitlist and we are ready to send your kit. Right now we only ship in the US. If you’re outside of the US you can register at the bottom of our homepage to stay updated with our newsletter and be notified as we expand. <a href="https://www.bristlehealth.com/pages/early-access" rel="nofollow">https://www.bristlehealth.com/pages/early-access</a><p>Privacy is obviously a critical component of all this, and a top priority for us. We are determined to get it right from the ground up. Although we are not a HIPAA covered entity, we maintain a HIPAA compliant infrastructure. In the future, we believe that companies like ours may fall under a HIPAA designation. Operating that way today is our way of preparing for this. Most importantly, it protects your data. We will publish our data protection protocols on our website soon.<p>We believe we have a real opportunity to change the standard of care in oral health. We hope to expand access to patients and users, and give providers a new tool to help treat disease. We look forward to your feedback and questions - so please reach out or leave us a comment!<p>Thanks everyone,
Danny, Brian, Shivam & David
Upvote: | 155 |
Title: I wonder how many HNers create beats/raps/songs or whatever.. share with us !
Upvote: | 263 |
Title: I wonder how many HNers create paintings, pixel art, sketches, 3D renders, animations or whatever.. share with us !<p>Inspired after seeing the great audio content shared in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26391254
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I recently finished reading this book and I can't express how much it added to my life. I wondered if there are similar books in terms of 'way of teaching' out there - smoothly, humorously describing a tough subject.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>We're Bert and Otto, founders of Segments.ai (<a href="https://segments.ai" rel="nofollow">https://segments.ai</a>). Our platform helps computer vision teams build better datasets for image segmentation, an increasingly popular computer vision technique in the world of self-driving cars, autonomous robots, and AR/VR devices.<p>A large, curated dataset of labeled images is the first thing you need in any serious computer vision project. Building such datasets is a time-consuming endeavour, involving lots of manual labeling work. This is especially true for tasks like image segmentation, where every object and region in the image needs to be precisely annotated with a pixel-level segmentation mask. Manually segmenting a complex image can easily take up to an hour, even for experienced labelers. This leads to costs of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for labeling large datasets.<p>With Segments.ai, our goal is to make it easier, faster and cheaper to build such datasets. Our core product is a powerful labeling technology for image segmentation, with automation features powered by machine learning. We're constantly tweaking and A/B testing the UX to optimize for labeling speed, and see empirical speedups of 2x-10x for semantic, instance and panoptic segmentation labeling, compared to traditional labeling tools. Have a look at this video to see it in action: <a href="https://youtu.be/8u1XHU7ueqU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/8u1XHU7ueqU</a><p>Furthermore, after you’ve labeled an initial dataset and trained a first ML model, you can upload your model predictions to our platform and use those as a starting point to label additional images. Our labeling technology makes it easy to correct the predictions, as opposed to labeling each image from scratch. We call this model-assisted labeling, and it allows you to obtain additional speedups by iterating quickly between data labeling and model training. More details in this video: <a href="https://youtu.be/sCbNp9EDtjE?t=42" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/sCbNp9EDtjE?t=42</a><p>Otto and I rolled into this space a year ago, after our PhDs in ML and computer vision. I did my PhD on Scene Understanding for Autonomous Platforms, and experienced the problems with collecting high-quality labeled datasets for image segmentation first-hand.<p>The market for generic labeling platforms and services is very crowded, and so with Segments.ai we’re going deep rather than broad: our focus is on image segmentation specifically, and we aim to be the best in it. We managed to carve out a niche, and have happy customers across a wide variety of industries: from pharmaceutical companies and automotive OEMs to robotics startups. Our bet is that image segmentation is a fast-growing niche.<p>The easiest way to try out our platform is by creating an account (<a href="https://segments.ai/join" rel="nofollow">https://segments.ai/join</a>) and playing around with the example images.<p>We would love to hear your thoughts on what we've built!<p>Bert
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I’m Matthew Knippen, a 10 year iOS dev turned CEO for Charge Running (www.chargerunning.com). We built a mobile app that allows you to run with others from all over the world in real-time, all while being trained by a certified run coach. Think of us as Peloton for running, but way more social. You can learn more about our product here: <a href="http://www.chargerunning.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.chargerunning.com</a><p>I’m a career mobile dev that always liked hacking on things, and worked on over 60 applications ranging from photos, games, and fitness. Over the years, when I come across a problem in my life, I write code to solve it. I built a garage door opener app before it was cool, an electronic Go board, and an app to track different whiskeys I’ve tasted like “Untappd for Spirits.” Charge was born out of a much bigger personal problem:<p>I used to run a fair bit with my friend (and now co-founder) Rory. It was a great way to stay in shape and having someone to talk helped the time go by faster. Unfortunately, when Rory moved across the country for the military, both of us ran significantly less than we did before. I came to the conclusion running by myself… SUCKED! We were chatting about it on the phone one day knowing there had to be a better solution, and that's when we thought of Charge. I spent the weekend hacking something together, and on Monday, we tried it out.<p>Our first version of the app was an all white screen where it showed two things, Rory’s distance, and mine. We hopped on a phone, and used the app to have a friendly competition. A programmer vs a Navy Seal is rarely a fair challenge, and he kicked my a$$, but we LOVED it! On the backend, we utilized Firebase’s Realtime database for data, and a group phone call to manage audio. (Most of this has since been upgraded)<p>As any developer would want to do, we kept building on it, showing things like current pace, cadence, and more. A few friends wanted to join us, so we built support for multiple users, and listened to music while we ran. It was at this time that someone joined us that was a friend of a friend, and said “Now that I know I can run with this, I never want to run without it.”<p>So, we decided to turn our ugly hacked together app into an official product. When talking to our users, we found out that they wanted four things during their runs:
1. Motivation - The hardest part about going for a run is committing to do it and getting those shoes on
2. A social experience - Every other running app focuses on social after the run, not the ability to run with others in real-time.
3. Education - Most beginner runners just start running. After hearing Rory talk with them, they learned proper form and how to improve without getting injured.
4. Music - When asked what a big pain point was, users said they needed to put more work into their playlist than they spent running!<p>We took that information, and made a small pivot into dedicated coached classes, where a certified trainer would guide you through a specific type of workout. Each workout was effort-based, meaning whether you’re a complete beginner, or have run 25 marathons, you could join any class and fit right in.<p>We hired coaches (finding them by doing a bit of web scraping ) and built an audio solution with professional DJ software, allowing the coaches to change the beat of the music and auto-blend them together.<p>Rory and our other co-founder Julie (my sister), would host a few classes a day. I quit my job as an iOS contractor for a big company to focus on a start-up full time, at the same time my wife was 8 months pregnant with our first child. (I have the world’s most supportive wife!)<p>We launched, and we’re instantly overwhelmed. Apple featured us on “New Apps We Love”. MacWorld called us the “App of the Week”. We got 25K downloads, but we're still in a very early beta. We had no on-boarding. No app store video. Calling it a website would be an exaggeration. No one knew what we did, or how it worked, and we churned 99% of the users within the first week.<p>However, the ones that stayed lit a fire inside of us that we never knew we had. We talked to them constantly, and they defined our product roadmap. Since then, we’ve had users run over 350,000 miles in live classes, hosted a wedding day ceremony for them, and have seen people become best friends who live halfway across the world from each other. That being said, we really want to learn more, and keep iterating. We would love to hear the community's feedback and answer any questions.
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: In light of the pandemic and countries slowly opening up again, I thought I'd ask this question that appeared back in 2015 [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9439286" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9439286</a>
Upvote: | 416 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>I'm Paul, one of the co-founders of Remora (<a href="https://remoracarbon.com" rel="nofollow">https://remoracarbon.com</a>). Remora is building a device that captures the carbon emissions from a semi truck. Our device mounts between the truck and its trailer, attaches to its tailpipes, and captures at least 80% of its carbon emissions. We will sell the captured carbon dioxide to concrete producers and other end users, helping companies earn new revenue while meeting their climate commitments.<p>We decided to start Remora because we believe electrification won't work for long-haul trucking. Bill Gates agrees: “Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology,” he wrote, “electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers" [1].<p>Before Remora, my co-founder, Eric, built hydrogen and electric semi trucks. He saw first hand that these trucks have far less payload capacity and range, plus the batteries lose > 40% of their range in cold weather [2]. We also knew that electrification means building a new network of stations with enough charging capacity for semi trucks, replacing every truck on the road, and overhauling the grid, which is still 63% fossil fuels in the US [3]. So we thought:<p>Why can't we just capture the carbon emissions from the trucks' tailpipes?<p>Turns out, my co-founder, Christina, spent her entire PhD answering this question [3]. Mobile carbon capture was first proposed about a decade ago, but academics dismissed it in favor of stationary carbon capture for power plants. The problem with stationary capture, though, is that it takes tens of millions of dollars upfront to design those systems, and they have to be tailored to a specific plant—it’s impossible to make a cheap, modular unit that can be manufactured at scale.<p>So Christina became the first person to test adsorbents (the materials that selectively capture carbon dioxide) in the specific conditions of diesel exhaust. Surprisingly, the adsorbent that worked best was a naturally-occurring mineral that is cheaply available in mass quantities. Christina built a proof of concept to test in the EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Lab, and it worked.<p>While I was finishing my senior year at Yale, I read Christina’s dissertation online. I called her up to ask a bunch of questions and we hit it off. After more conversations, I wrote her a business plan and convinced her to quit her new job at the EPA to start Remora. Then, we sent a blurb to every professor at the top 15 engineering schools, interviewed ~ 50 engineers, and found Eric.<p>Now, we’ve completed our first working prototype and we’re currently testing it on our truck. Here’s how it works: First, we condition the truck’s exhaust to lower its temperature and humidity, then we run it through a bed of pellets that selectively captures carbon dioxide, letting the other gases escape. When the bed is saturated, we heat the pellets to release the carbon dioxide, which we compress into a tank inside the device. To ensure continuous operation, the device includes two beds: while the first is heated, the truck’s exhaust flows through the second; when the second is saturated, they switch, and so on. This process is very energy efficient because we’re able to use the waste heat from the truck’s exhaust to heat the pellets.<p>Our first units will be capturing carbon dioxide on customers’ trucks by August. By the end of the year, we’ll have 40 units on the road capturing ~ 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide per week—the equivalent of planting 248,000 trees [5]. We will start by selling this carbon dioxide to concrete producers and other end users, but as we grow, we will earn tax credits for permanently sequestering the carbon dioxide deep underground.<p>Long term, if we pair our technology with biofuels, we can make a truck carbon negative. We also hope to apply it to other hard-to-electrify forms of long-haul transportation, like cargo ships.<p>We’re excited to hear your questions, concerns, and feedback! I’ll be responding to comments all day, or please feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Moving-around-in-a-zero-carbon-world" rel="nofollow">https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Moving-around-in-a-zero-ca...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://apnews.com/article/04029bd1e0a94cd59ff9540a398c12d1" rel="nofollow">https://apnews.com/article/04029bd1e0a94cd59ff9540a398c12d1</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3</a><p>[4] <a href="https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/151521/creyn_1.pdf?sequence=1" rel="nofollow">https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/1515...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/17/power-one-tree-very-air-we-breathe" rel="nofollow">https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/17/power-one-tree-ve...</a>
Upvote: | 304 |
Title: Hey HN!<p>I'm Julian, co-founder of Haystack (<a href="https://usehaystack.io" rel="nofollow">https://usehaystack.io</a>). We’re building one-click dashboards and alerts using Github data.<p>While managing teams from startups to more established companies like Cloudflare, my cofounder Kan and I were constantly trying to improve our team and process. But it was pretty tough to tell if our efforts were paying off. Even tougher to tell where we could improve.<p>We tried messing around with JIRA which gave us story points and tickets completed but it didn’t help us dig deeper on where we could improve. We found a few tools that integrated with Github measuring # of commits, lines of code, and even comparing engineers using these metrics! - but we didn’t like that approach.<p>We wanted to know (1) how quickly we deliver as a team (2) what bottlenecks tend to get in the way and (3) as we make adjustments, are they helping us improve?<p>We scoured the internet looking for every piece of research on the topic we could find, talked to >500 engineering leaders working everywhere from startups to FAANG, and started to learn which metrics helped answer our questions and which ones just sucked. Once we had a clear picture of what that looked like, we built Haystack.<p>Haystack analyzes pull requests on the team level, giving you “northstar” metrics like cycle time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and 20+ more to help you improve delivery. Teams use Haystack to quickly find bottlenecks like code review, experiment with changes like smaller pull requests or automated tests, and see the result. Using this feedback loop, the top 70% of Haystack users have increased production deployments by 58% and achieved 30% faster cycle times on average.<p>We’re lucky enough to work with some awesome teams at Microsoft, Robinhood, and The Economist. As we continue to build out our product, we’d love to hear any of your experiences with engineering metrics, your thoughts about how to actually get them right, and of course your disaster stories :)
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: I noticed this earlier, and I'm not the only one, I've asked around and people have tried using it in the search bar on Firefox and it just doesn't work.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I went to change a Firewall setting for an app and discovered to my shock all the listed apps in it had been set to <i>"Allow incoming connections"</i> (which I had never done) and the options<p>- <i>"Automatically allow built-in softwares to receive incoming connections"</i> and<p>- <i>"Automatically allow downloaded signed software to receive incoming connections"</i><p>had been enabled, even though I had <i>disabled</i> them. In the Privacy > Advertising section. <i>Limit Ad Tracking</i> had been disabled even though I had <i>enabled</i> it. (And if it needs to be said for some - no, I don't have any malware on my computer).<p>Edit: I am pissed because all I had installed were security updates.
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: Hello there,<p>I‘m in a bit of a pinch. I‘m currently part of a team that needs help with C++ development.<p>My background is around 9 years of iOS / macOS development using ObjC / Swift and a few projects using C#.<p>In the recent months / years I tried to hone my software-craftsmanship and stay up-to-date on stuff like TDD, functional programming, protocol-oriented-programming, moving away from objects, and so on.<p>I could help out my team and my employer by diving into C++. However I have some prejudices which I want to sort out:<p>- I’m hesitant towards C++ as it seems an ancient programming language and I don’t know for how long it will be around.<p>- I‘m hesistant on investing time into C++ as I don’t know how much acquiring this language as a skill will help me advance my career as a software-developer.<p>Could you provide some pro/contra arguments?<p>Best wishes from Southern Germany
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hi, Sven and Pavel here - we're building a self-hosted, open-source framework for developers that want to create serverless applications and websites.<p>After 10 years of running a web development agency and delivering over 100 projects, we tried many different approaches to building apps and websites. When we looked at the patterns for most of the projects we delivered, it was always a combination of custom business logic and a way to manage content, like pages, news articles, and similar. Looking at the options available on the market, we either had frameworks for building the custom logic or ready-made CMS solutions for managing the content. There was no combination for when we wanted to do both. And this is one of the biggest pains we had. We would either force custom logic inside a CMS and break things or make them hard to maintain, or use a framework and take much longer to deliver a project since we'd end up building a custom CMS and making the whole thing more expensive to the client. On top of that, we were just tired of constantly spinning up servers, managing container images, worrying about uptime, network, and security issues, and paying for resources we were not utilizing 100%.<p>Looking for options, we discovered serverless. The premise of not having infrastructure to manage sounded really intriguing. Having fault-tolerant resources that scale automatically when you need them with consumption-based pricing that cost up to 80% less than virtual machines sounded like the ideal solution...until we tried to build something with it. It was almost impossible. All the existing frameworks and CMS options are designed for a "server environment", and couldn't be used to build solutions in a serverless environment. The only tutorials available at that time covered how to resize an image with a Lambda function. Besides that, serverless requires a cognitive change of how you approach code and infrastructure.<p>In all those problems we saw an opportunity. Over a course of a year, we built a framework that allows anyone to quickly build serverless applications without battling all the challenges that come with it. Things like rendering and caching pages, optimizing the cold-start times, debugging function calls, managing connections between functions and the database, CI/CD setup, and many more. The framework comes with a GraphQL API, Admin UI, ACL, CLI for deployment and scaffolding, and more.<p>Because our passion is also tied to content management systems, we decided to eat our own dog food and build a serverless CMS using our own framework. Webiny Serverless CMS uses Lambda functions, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch (the only non-serverless component at the moment) and S3. It scales automatically together with the demand, requires minimal maintenance, and costs a fraction when compared to solutions running on virtual machines or containers. It includes a GraphQL API, asset management, and a no-code builder for static pages and forms. It takes 2 commands to install and configure the whole thing. Today it runs only on AWS, but we plan to introduce the support for other clouds in the future. With our CMS, we hope people will be more confident in the abilities serverless brings to the market, especially when building full-stack solutions. To put some numbers behind our product, we made a benchmark to demonstrate the performance and cost of a Webiny full-stack serverless application[1].<p>Both the framework and the CMS are free and open-source[2] under the MIT license. We do have a paid enterprise offering for those that require support and additional features [3].<p>Give Webiny a spin: <a href="https://www.webiny.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.webiny.com/</a>. We would love to know what you think!<p>Resources:<p>[1] Benchmark - <a href="https://docs.webiny.com/docs/webiny-overview/performance-benchmark/introduction" rel="nofollow">https://docs.webiny.com/docs/webiny-overview/performance-ben...</a><p>[2] Github - <a href="https://github.com/webiny/webiny-js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/webiny/webiny-js</a><p>[3] Pricing - <a href="https://www.webiny.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.webiny.com/pricing</a>
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I’m Jordan from Superpowered (<a href="http://superpowered.me/" rel="nofollow">http://superpowered.me/</a>), here with my co-founders Nikhil, Nick, and Ibrahim. We’re building a calendar app for the Mac menu bar.<p>A few months ago, we were students from the University of Waterloo. We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem.<p>We settled on one we all faced during our remote internships. Our calendars became more important, yet meetings took ten clicks to join and were easy to miss.<p>So, we built a Mac app to bring the platform we check the most, Google Calendar, into the menu bar. We’ve made common actions, like joining Zoom meetings and checking what’s coming up, a click away.<p>We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.<p>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.<p>For those who are curious, it’s built using React + Electron and designed to look as native as possible in the menu bar. Sensitive user data like calendar events don’t pass through our servers.<p>We’re new to the productivity space and still have a lot to learn, so we’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts.<p>Thanks in advance! Jordan<p>Note: We're still early on and are trying to figure out our pricing. We priced it towards the higher end to see if we're delivering enough value to our users.<p>PS - Yes, we have keyboard shortcuts.
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I have a question to junior software developers.....<p>I've been an engineer for last 12 years and during my career I've been mentoring people and helping them learn SQL. I used different approaches but did not find any better approach from learning by [doing] writing SQL queries and solving tasks. Even if it was by leveraging the AdventureWorks database, and/or a real world production database.<p>So my question to people who just entering into any developer role and/or learning just SQL....<p>How do you learn SQL now, and what is the best approach for you personally?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Why even go to work. People getting rich with GameStop, Crypto, and NFTs. Why would anyone work when they can just speculate on stocks and create digital art worth million. Reading these headlines, and it feels like I am doing it all wrong in life. It's evident that value creation is not about working harder or longer but about finding these niches and loopholes that rain money for little time or effort.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Hi HN! Roger here, with Juan and Alex, co-founders of Atrato (<a href="https://www.atratopago.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.atratopago.com</a>), from the YC W21 batch. We're building a solution for consumers to pay on installments their big purchases without a credit card in Latin America. You can see it as "Affirm for LATAM".<p>When it comes to paying for a large purchase (let's say US$500) in LATAM, we have 2 options: paying upfront with cash or debit, or finance it using a credit card. The problem is that 80% of people here don't have a credit card, getting one is hard and even those like me that have one, credit cards are frustrating, expensive and complex to understand. They can make you overspend, the terms and fees are opaque and keeping track of your purchases and payments it's confusing.<p>This problem is pushing a lot of people to go to department stores with their own installment credit, but with incredibly expensive interest rates (+70% APR) or delaying important purchases for months or sometimes years! And merchants (like retailers or ecommerce) are losing potential sales and customers because they can't offer financing themselves or other payment alternatives.<p>We stumbled into this problem while in college because we ourselves had a lot of problems with our banks and we are so passionate about financial services that when we had so many negative experiences with our own credit cards, we were inspired to build a more fair, fast and transparent solution for the people in LATAM. We saw that in many developed countries these solutions were gaining popularity and technology was available, so it didn't make sense for us that there wasn't something like that available.<p>Our payment method lets merchants offer their customers up to 18 monthly installments to pay for purchases of up to US$5k. When they're in-store, consumers scan a QR code, apply in minutes with their phones, receive an instant offer and can enjoy their purchase! We then settle with the merchant upfront and collect the installments from consumers directly. For ecommerce, it works like any other payment method and we developed integrations with the major ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and custom platforms. We make money by charging a discount fee to the merchant for each purchase and interest to the consumer (average ~40% APR, significantly lower than most credit cards in Mexico (~60% APR) and now launching 0% APR programs). Right now we're live with global brands like Specialized Bicycles and Echelon Fitness and ~110 merchants in Mexico.<p>It's been a crazy so far, we are first time founders and started the company while in college (Juan dropt out), learned from scratch how to underwrite credit, fraud, credit scoring and manage risk, built a complete platform (from the loan application, to the servicing software and all infrastructure), raise debt, sales, product design and a lot of other things!
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'm Jeremy, CEO of Venu (<a href="https://venu3d.com" rel="nofollow">https://venu3d.com</a>), and my team and I have created a virtual 3D trade show platform that feels like you're there in real life.<p>We would like to invite you to experience Venu for yourself by walking around a virtual trade show, check out the exhibit booths, come on stage -- all from your computer! VENU will be open for tours today from 12-2pm PST. Come hang out in our lounge while you eat your lunch. Please follow the download & installation instructions and pop on in!
Download Venu at <a href="https://www.venu3d.com/downloads.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.venu3d.com/downloads.html</a> - please enter "HN" for event name.<p>We enable event professionals to host virtual exhibits, fairs, & conferences in a 3D venue, beyond 2D faces on a screen. Venu allows participants to walk through an expo hall as 3D avatars in first person view, have spontaneous conversations and network with others, present on stage to a full audience of avatars, and sell sponsorships.<p>Our customers like Microsoft, YPO, Global Game Jam, Indie Games Expo, Global Pandemic Coalition, Earth Day Summit, have created expositions, networking, and speaker experiences in Venu for their attendees that keep them coming back for more.<p>We're a team of passionate creatives who left our software jobs to pursue our dreams to create a virtual world where people can connect and live life beyond what's possible today with virtual reality as the everyday norm.<p>When I was 14, I was inspired by a TV show called Yu-Gi-Oh that showed me a world of augmented reality holograms and virtual reality, which led me to study at Georgia Tech, join and ship Xbox One at Microsoft, ship HoloLens at Microsoft, start my first startup RoboBear teaching elementary school students college level robotics with robotic teddy bears to pay for rent to start our virtual reality startup today.<p>We've been through 5 fun and challenging years, being one of the first to innovate in the VR market, developing VR games, hosting conferences in San Francisco, opening VR arcades, developing enterprise apps for clients, developing Venu, overcoming running out of money countless times, to make it to where we are today, and we have so many more exciting challenges to tackle ahead of us.<p>We would love to hear your feedback. Please send us questions.<p>Thanks!
Jeremy
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: To you individually, do you believe startup PTSD is real and possible?<p>Do you yourself - or someone you know and/or love - have it?<p>I ask this as a young person who has had both success and failure in tech entrepreneurship, with particular moments from the hardships causing severe negative emotional reactions and ultimately (at least temporarily) debilitating me from accomplishing things effectively, if at all.<p>I’d really like to treat this like any problem in my life: acknowledge it, understand it, take responsibility for it, and work to improve it, but struggle to find authoritative related resources.<p>P.S. I wrote this via my phone while sitting on my couch in silence on a Friday evening pondering this. My apologies for any spelling or grammar errors.
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: Let's say I'm the owner of the nyan cat NFT (I'm not). Is there anything that prevents someone from duplicating the nyan cat and putting it on another blockchain? If not, does the uniqueness of my nyan cat (which is on Ethereum, I believe), rest on the assumption that one blockchain will be the defacto NFT implementation, and the rest won't be taken seriously?
Upvote: | 51 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.