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Title: Hello HN, I'm a new grad fresh out of college who just started my first gig as a software engineer. My team currently has very few docs for their codebases and it lead to quite a difficult and long onboarding process. Good documentation has always been an incredible help for me while in school and working on side projects but I've never really learned or put in the effort to WRITE good documentation myself. I think my team could really use a revamp in their documentation and I would love to be the one to provide that but I don't even consciously know what separates good docs from bad docs.<p>Are there specific "design principles" for writing documentation? For example, what sections should there be, how should the info be structured, etc.<p>When it comes to diagrams, UML seems like the framework to learn but are there others?<p>Btw, these would be internal and not public facing.
Thanks!
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hey HN - we’re Roger and Roger, the founders of R2 Capital (<a href="https://www.r2capital.co/" rel="nofollow">https://www.r2capital.co/</a>). We provide flexible working capital to small and medium businesses (SMBs) across Latin America by integrating with payment processors, point of sales systems, and marketplace apps. This enables us to get paid back with a percentage of their online sales.<p>We come from entrepreneurial families in El Salvador and Honduras, and understand the impact small businesses have in terms of job creation and economic security. We’ve also witnessed our families struggle accessing capital for their businesses in both good and tough times. In fact, SMBs generate ~60% of jobs but only 25% of GPD in Latin America. They often can’t grow because it’s really difficult to access capital - not enough assets, tedious paperwork, onerous personal guarantees - and the onset of the pandemic only made it worse as banks retrenched from financing this segment. We started R2 last year when many SMBs in the region were forced to sell digitally in order to survive.<p>Banks tend to underwrite small businesses according to their total assets or the creditworthiness of the owner. Banks don’t, however, analyze SMBs based on their daily sales and underlying customer base. By partnering up with processors and marketplace apps, we access underwriting-rich data and figure out what companies to fund.<p>In the US, platforms such as Stripe, Square, and Shopify have all started capital programs recently. Our goal is to equip comparable platforms in Latin America with their own capital program, so that they don’t have to build out this service internally from scratch.<p>I previously worked at Reef, which operates dark kitchens in the US, where all orders went through marketplace apps such as DoorDash, UberEats, and Postmates. I spent a lot of time ingesting, cleaning, and standardizing their data to determine how each virtual restaurant was doing. This type of data can also be quite useful to assess the future performance of a small business.<p>Using the platforms’ data, we carry out the risk assessment on their behalf. We also provide the capital, which ensures an optimal experience to both platforms and merchants. We’ve done the legal setup in Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador, and make sure we’re following local compliance which removes any risk to our partners. We also handle the marketing, servicing and capital management in order to scale each program.<p>We don’t charge the platforms we partner with. Instead, we invite them to participate in our financing upside so that they can activate a new revenue stream. More importantly, they get to provide a valuable financial service without having to take on the financing and regulatory risk.<p>We’re just getting started but excited to be working with platforms such as Rappi and Sr. Pago already. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what we’re building and on how we can improve so that we can finance a lot more SMBs in Latin America.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Hey HN! I’m Kathy, cofounder and CTO of Queenly (<a href="https://queenly.com/" rel="nofollow">https://queenly.com/</a>). We created a marketplace and search engine for formal dresses (think wedding, prom, quinceanera, etc). Our search and recommendations system focuses on showing the buyer these products at the level of precision they are looking for, in terms of body shape, color, style, height, skin color and fabric, trained on the text and visual signals from our user-generated content.<p>It’s always been a tricky process to find the perfect dress. The women’s formal wear industry has been decentralized and offline for decades, fragmented across mom-and-pop boutique shops, with sparse inventory available online and within department stores. In other words, finding the perfect wedding gown or prom dress meant driving for hours to different stores hoping these stores carry your size or the style you want. This is especially frustrating when that special occasion you are shopping for means so much to you. Similarly, it’s been tough to resell these items after that special occasion is over, as buyers on generic marketplaces like eBay or Poshmark tend to not focus on giving a safe and easy shopping experience for this type of inventory. Moreover, it takes a lot longer to sell dresses on these platforms since the buyers there have much lower intent on purchasing this kind of inventory.<p>Queenly attempts to solve that two-sided problem. We’ve launched a web, iOS, and (pared-down) Android app for consumers to upload their dresses that they no longer have a user for and for small business owners to bulk upload their dress inventory to help them generate more revenue.<p>We’re solving this problem because of our personal backgrounds: Trisha and I are two minority immigrant founders from low income families. For us, having that transformative Cinderella dress was tremendously meaningful but never truly attainable. My cofounder, an emancipated youth, found her Cinderella opportunity through joining pageants during college. For her and many young women, these pageants had not only helped her personal growth, but also helped her pay tuition and survive. This experience gave us both a strong pillar of support and got her through tough times, and so we dedicated ourselves to the mission of providing affordability and access to dresses for young women. Through forging friendships with other girls we met during pageants, and working with formalwear fashion designers, we found solace in a diverse community of those trying to push the boundaries of what it means to feel beautiful and confident in the modern age, that such traits can come in all shapes and sizes, and embracing them wholeheartedly.<p>From this experience, we understand that search precision for one’s body type, skin tone, height, and budget in this market is not a secondary concern but rather a first-order necessity. The 50k+ dresses uploaded onto Queenly are indexed by color, fabric, dress size, hemline, neckline, silhouette and sleeve length. In beta testing now is searching by skin tone, filtering by height, and computer vision image search.<p>If you’ve experienced this frustration buying or selling formal dresses, or know someone who has, we would love to hear your feedback. We’re very excited to be sharing this with HN, and we’ll be here to answer questions you want to throw our way!
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: i read a book best described as dark patterns 4 office politics. It was sociopathic. I disliked it.. but here we're. I gotta develop my office political skills asap. share ur wisdom nuggets<p>I've noticed who writes the best code doesn't matter and there're opportunities which no one will offer, u have to take them<p>Laws of prosperity:<p>1) Prioritize VISIBILITY<p>- ask ur way into bigger meetings show interest in biz/product side, biz start to trust u and u become the crucial bridge<p>- propose new ideas as question to whoever above u'd listen<p>- do value work. emergency fixes and high ROI projects. lots of PRs alone are of no value<p>- give presentations, move cards in trello. updates to manager his/her manager. ask 4 future plans<p>- bigger things udo, more biz and architecture knowledge gets locked up in ur head, more valuable u become<p>- propose & get entire project to yourself. leaving grunt work. massive visibility<p>- go hard on crucial proj. visibility is double edge sword. keep spacing<p>2) Socialize<p>- do this u're already beating most of engineering team. hangout, talk daily<p>- remember what ppl say<p>- talk about industry<p>- get to know their network in the company<p>- ask questions only they can answer<p>3) Get transferred to non-eng team<p>- u're THE engineer in marketing, adops...<p>- become go to tech person, do their tickets fast. eventually ask to join their team. u'll have so much industry specific knowledge.<p>4) Make it hard 4 others to encroach ur territory<p>- 4 new projects structure ur code differently than rest. no frameworks. big files. minimal comments. u get it done in 1 day.<p>- use new tech. most would be too lazy to pick it up and be totally happy to give that part of the code base to u. to mgmt, u're the owner of this code now = more valuable.<p>- use odd conventions & make sure every PR adheres to it. nobody will like that code.<p>goal is to do min work, max impact and have all the cards
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: I've noticed a lot of ads related to crypto lending ("make your assets work for you") and recently noticed a remark in the comments section on HN where someone mentioned they avoid taxation by taking a loan on their bitcoin. However, I haven't seen much discussion about this practice, or much attention in media.<p>It looks like this is growing very rapidly (e.g. [0], though not sure how reliable this source is), so it seems significant to the evolution of the market. It looks like mostly people are lending to themselves (so that they effectively have leveraged/borrowed bitcoin) rather than lending to others.<p>Is this a tax loophole that makes bitcoin very attractive for people trying to keep their money "off-shore"? Is it a tactic to get more bitcoin for the same amount of dollars? Is this a sign that bitcoin is maturing and starting to back economic activity (after all, paper money also started as bank IOUs on gold)? I'm not sure whether to see this as a major red flag, or whether legitimate new markets are forming here.<p>[0] https://ambcrypto.com/how-did-bitcoin-lending-become-so-popular/
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: At the beginning of the century there was a thriving web community doing basic HTML + CSS. If you were a "real programmer" you could convert your page to PHP and get into algorithms and databases. I know some peers who started like that, same as me. You could easily create a "professional level" web page at the time. Teenagers were building web pages for pocket money.<p>Nowadays, we have Medium, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, ... Mostly noone needs a custom blog. What do kids these days to start with programming?<p>Since I got a kid I was wondering what I can do for him to show him the marvels of that world. Everything seems to be less accessible than anything from the time of my childhood. Including stuff made for that purpose, like RPis. What did you do to tech programming to your kids?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Recently, it's seemed that Google has failed to find answers for information I've been seeking. Even using keyword search, it's been returning very poor informative information. Has anyone else experienced this lately? Thanks for your input.
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: Hi folks, Alex here – I’m the CEO and one of the cofounders at Mezli (<a href="https://www.mezli.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mezli.com/</a>). (I’ve also been a Hacker News lurker since high school and always hoped I’d be posting a Launch HN one day!)
We make “auto-kitchens”, fully autonomous restaurants in a shipping container form factor. They serve our menu of Mediterranean grain bowls for pickup and delivery, at a low price point enabled by our approach’s low costs.<p>The three of us met as grad students at Stanford where we were all working on different things – I was doing AI research before dropping out of my PhD, Alex G was in a robotics lab (and just finished his PhD!), and Max was in aero/astro. We worked on a variety of classes, research, and side projects together, but we wanted to start a company and none of our ideas were looking particularly commercially viable. Then, as I was winding down a project building an autonomous weeding robot, it crossed my mind that one of my own biggest daily frustrations was something that was worth building a company to solve.<p>That frustration was that eating well in America requires spending a lot of time cooking or a lot of money buying meals. In grad school, I didn’t have enough time to cook every meal, but I also couldn’t afford to spend $10 or more at Chipotle, Sweetgreen, etc. It turned out that most of my friends, in and out of grad school, had the same problem. So, with Alex G and then Max as well, I started looking into why good/healthy restaurant meals in America are so expensive.<p>It turns out that a lot of it comes down to costs that are passed down to customers. An average Chipotle restaurant costs a million dollars to build and runs up a $600K/yr bill for on-site labor. That all gets passed on to customers, so that a $10 burrito bowl has only about $3 worth of ingredients in it, but also $3 of restaurant labor and $4 to cover things like rent and profit margin – which for most restaurants is quite thin. We realized that reducing the cost of building and operating a restaurant could unlock much cheaper great-quality meals. So Alex G and I, soon joined by Max, started talking to people all over the restaurant and automation spaces and brainstorming how to solve the problem.<p>It turned out that if we constrained ourselves to bowl-style meals (grain bowls, salads, soups, curries, etc.), we could use a lot of existing automation equipment off-the-shelf, put it in a shipping container and integrate it with a few pieces of custom hardware to make an autonomous restaurant-in-a-box. The hardest part turned out to be the dispenser technology – putting ingredients in a bowl reliably is not trivial! We came up with a new approach for that that we’ve recently filed a patent application on and we'll be able to talk about more publicly once the patent is granted.<p>Like most restaurant chains, we do the bulk of our prep in a central kitchen and then the auto-kitchen itself uses a variety of heating and finishing steps (e.g. applying sauces and dry toppings) to make bowls to-order. Unlike some food automation companies, we’re focused on creating a fully automated “restaurant in a vending machine” rather than human-in-the-loop partial automation. Getting our tech to work reliably enough to not need a human to monitor it is a challenge, but comes with benefits like being able to make more meals, faster, out of a smaller space. It also gives us food safety advantages because there’s less room for human error, and we can also do things like bathing the insides of our boxes with high-intensity UV light that kills germs but would not be very employee-friendly!<p>We’re also taking the point-of-view that solving food automation requires leaning into special-purpose hardware, rather than just trying to program a robotic arm to do everything a human cook does. As a former AI researcher, I can speak to the difficulties of programming arms to do even simple tasks like pick-and-place, let alone cooking full meals. And if you’re going to constrain the kitchen environment to help the arm’s actions be more repeatable, you might as well use special-purpose hardware that can do the same tasks more quickly and reliably.<p>We’re now executing on both the food side and tech side of things in parallel. Our human-powered ghost kitchen is dishing out our Mediterranean menu from our San Mateo location (Stop by! <a href="https://order.mezli.com" rel="nofollow">https://order.mezli.com</a>). At the same time, we’re building our full-scale food-safe v2 prototype and are shooting to have it up and serving customers later this month. Once our auto-kitchen is working reliably and is robust enough to handle a few knocks, we’re going to start forward-deploying it to parking lots and garages in the Bay Area to test out our operational model. Then, it’ll be time to build multiple auto-kitchens and eventually develop multiple concepts so each auto-kitchen rotates to a new menu on a regular cadence.<p>At that point, we might start partnering with restaurant chains, chefs, etc. to roll out their menus/brands to many of our auto-kitchens at once. Since our hardware can make just about any kind of meal that goes in a bowl, and the side of each auto-kitchen will be a digital billboard, we’ll be able to roll out new brands to hundreds of locations overnight without having to update signage, retrain staff etc. – a sort of “AWS for bowl-style meals” model.<p>We’d love to hear any thoughts from the HN community. Do you have experience in the restaurant and/or automation spaces? Are you a prospective customer with opinions on our offerings? Another perspective yet? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Upvote: | 201 |
Title: First some background, I have an undergraduate degree in computer science and one and a half years of professional coding experience which ended when I got fired for performance issues. I have worked diligently at Leetcode for those 5 years (exceptions occurred when I got ill). I have been personally coached by a google software engineer for months. I have done and given 100s of mock interviews and paid for some to be done by professionals. I have spent 100s if not thousands of hours on Leetcoding and algorithms trying to improve in any way I can imagine. I'm still not good enough.<p>This all came to a head yesterday when someone on Leetcode made a post about being able to solve every single Leetcode problem in a year within a year while managing a post doc degree and having almost no programming background (link at bottom of post). It made it clear that Leetcode is a game of talent not hard work. The difference between someone like her and someone like me must be noted by the programming community. The majority of people would not ever be able to accomplish that. I dedicated myself for 5 years to Leetcoding almost exclusively and still am no where near what that person has accomplished. I have put in much more work than that person and have gotten much less from it.<p>I believe the programming community can learn from this contrast. The culture of always trying harder and thinking success stories apply to everyone that is pervasive in programming circles is toxic. The is reality not everyone is lucky enough to be intellectually gifted to succeed and not all hard work pays off. I am proof of that and this is the type of story that needs to be shared and heard too.<p>I am quitting programming out of humility and recognition of my limitations. It’s ok to give up and wise to do so when you aren't good enough for something.<p><a href="https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/1108530/leetcode-journey-how-to-solve-1600-leetcode-questions-in-one-year" rel="nofollow">https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/1108530/leet...</a>
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: Hi HN!<p>We’re Thorvald, Nikolai and Henrik from Enode (<a href="https://www.enode.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.enode.io</a>). At Enode we build APIs that allow energy providers to connect to electric vehicles, heating, solar panels and home batteries. Energy providers use our API, for instance, to make sure that your Tesla is being charged when the price of electricity is low, saving you roughly 20% on your charging. Now that we have thousands of EVs connected to our platform, we also build software that bundles them together into virtual power plants that replace fossil fuel driven power plants during high demand.<p>This all started when Nikolai, our CTO, wanted to add more EV brands to his popular Tesla app. He had seen a broader selection of EVs in another energy app, but couldn't find a simple way to add many at the same time. He therefore started implementing one car brand after another, and after launching it in Norway an energy supplier reached out and asked if they could use his solution in their app. And that is how we got our first customer.<p>Being from Norway we are seeing the effects of EV adoption and electrification, which has been a huge inspiration for working on Enode. More than 2/3 of new cars sold in Norway are now EVs and 98% of the electricity produced comes from renewable sources. The increase in demand from EVs and electrification, combined with the transition to volatile renewable energy from solar and wind create enormous challenges for the energy grid. The result is that we have to shift from an energy system that responds to demand to one that responds to supply.<p>Heating and (soon) EV charging makes up a large portion of the total energy demand. In a place with solar production it might be better to start heating a couple of hours before you get home from work because there is excess solar generation. Also, maybe your EV charging should be moved to a time at night when wind generation is expected to increase. The optimal consumption pattern will vary from place to place, from day to day and from season to season. Such as in this example, changing the demand can often be done without affecting your daily life. But to make it possible your EV and heater must be connected to the internet and managed by someone, for instance your energy provider. This is what our API enables.<p>Our customers are the next generation energy providers that use our API to connect EVs, heaters and other products to their apps. If done right, people are very excited about these apps as they save money on the bill and consume cleaner energy.<p>We would love to hear what you think. If you have any questions or ideas please let us know! Thank you!
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Peter Thiel has written about the "10x rule" for startups, where your innovation has to be 10 times better than the second best option [1].<p>Have you personally experienced such 10x improvements in your own interactions with software? What were they?<p>[1] - https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2015/07/13/the-10x-rule-for-great-startup-ideas/
Upvote: | 441 |
Title: Hi HN! Neil, Chris, and Randy here, co-founders of Navattic (<a href="https://navattic.com/" rel="nofollow">https://navattic.com/</a>). We help you create better product demos to sell your SaaS application. With our software, you can create a shareable copy of your application, add guided tours, and send it out via a distinct link.<p>Regardless of how you feel about Oracle, they're masters of the enterprise sales process, yet we were sales engineers there and even we were struggling to demo SaaS products to customers effectively. Day in and out we delivered product demos to prospects, but we didn’t have a great response when the prospect wanted to get hands on with the product. We then hit the phones and spoke to 200+ SaaS companies and learned that this is a widespread problem. Typically, SaaS companies are limited to the following options: share an unguided sandbox that requires setup and training, provide a trial (which isn’t feasible for many integration-heavy products), or send over a video or slide deck.<p>We looped in a college friend, Chris, as our third co-founder and while we were co-quarantined in Colorado, hacked together an MVP of our sharable demo platform. Our objective was to turn anything that runs in the browser into a deterministic, replayable web app that performs as close to the real experience as possible. We explored this from multiple technical fronts, including: A) serializing network requests by developing basically a cache.match() with fuzzy matching on the edge, B) serializing the DOM state by hacking CSS, patching Web APIs, inlining values, etc. We were lucky enough to get some amazing early customers who were patient with us during this early experimental phase. In the end, we are happy with our approach that balances ease of creation, broad application support, and maintains the integrity of the application’s experience. We allow any non-technical person to create these shareable demos in a matter of minutes through a Chrome extension and our web app.<p>With this method, teams can create a replication of their app that looks and feels like the real thing, but can easily be shared with prospects without worrying about overwriting data in the environment or juggling access credentials. Because our solution relies on serializing the DOM state, it is framework and language agnostic and can be implemented without involving engineering teams.<p>We also added tools like guides and user analytics to allow teams to create step-by-step walkthroughs within the app and track user engagement with the tour. So far we’re seeing these interactive product demos shared as a followup after a live product demo, embedded on their marketing site or sent in outbound messaging. We’ve seen some promising early results with customers reporting a 4x increase in booked meetings when including interactive demos in their outbound emails.<p>If you want to see how it looks for a generic product, check out <a href="https://demo.navattic.com/" rel="nofollow">https://demo.navattic.com/</a>, and if you want to try it out on your own product, start here: www.navattic.com/onboard/plan.<p>We would like your feedback on all of the above, are happy to answer questions, and look forward to hearing about your experiences and ideas. We’ll be hanging around in the comments - fire away HN!
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: It's been ~one year since the first lockdowns started. What are you working on now?<p>I'll start: I'm building PriceUnlock, a tool that will help you find the best pricing for your SaaS product. I'll post more in the comments so as to not hijack the post's description!
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: Hey HN! I'm Andy Su and I'm here with my cofounders Hayden Jensen, Tiffany Wong, and Alex Sailer. We are the cofounders of Pry (<a href="https://pry.co" rel="nofollow">https://pry.co</a>). Pry is solving finance for founders. Instead of using Excel, founders and finance analysts can use Pry to manage their budget, hiring plan, and cash runway.<p>As a long time HN lurker, I'm excited to share this project with you. In a previous life, I cofounded a tech-enabled accounting company. We help thousands of companies keep their books (accounting) up to date. While growing, I could feel Javascript improve year after year but the way our finances were done in Excel just got worse and worse.<p>The product I wanted was simple: something to replace the Excel files that the finance gurus use. I looked around and couldn't find anything that did what I wanted so I decided to start working on it (originally <a href="http://budgithub.com" rel="nofollow">http://budgithub.com</a>) two years ago.<p>There is a lot to build. Most Excel files have these components:<p>- A summary view with budgets and actuals<p>- Separate tabs for different departments<p>- A hiring plan (list of employees) and a hidden pivot table to make things work<p>- A revenue model<p>- A dashboard<p>Today, I'm happy to announce that we have finally launched a release that covers all of these components and it's available for anyone to try for free.<p>We built this tool to serve the startup and small business community. Our pricing ranges from $50-$100/mo and we're determined to continue offering our full suite of functionality at an affordable price.<p>We have a lot to build still - integrations, currency support, etc, but if you are using Quickbook Online, Xero, or don't have accounting set up, give us a try. We connect to most US banks, and we have a few happy overseas customers using Pry + Xero.<p>One of our guiding design principles is the Ruby on Rails "convention over configuration". We've done a lot of things the hard way. Happy to answer any questions over the next few hours.
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: Having an IT background, I thought I understand fairly complex topics (FFT, sorting algorithms, calculus), but in a moment of reflection I realised that I either don't (eg. I tried to explain them and failed) or they are fairly simple (eg. I tried to explain them and was done in 5 minutes). I asked a friend this question and he replied "women" (I call BS on that one :-). Which is the most complex concept you understand?
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: Hey HN! We’re Kevin, Jeremy, and Josiah, and we’re in the current YC batch. We’re building Finley (<a href="https://www.finleycms.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.finleycms.com</a>), software that streamlines the debt capital raise and management process, starting with compliance monitoring and reporting.<p>Debt capital is basically a corporate loan of over $20 million used to fund operations and growth. That’s a universal business need, so it’s not surprising that debt capital is huge—add up all the venture capital investments in 2020 and you’d still be $70 billion short of debt capital investments over the same period. [1]<p>Debt capital also comes with rules. Hundreds of pages of them. Here’s an example of a typical credit agreement, which is the type of contract that borrowers and lenders sign when they agree to a loan:<p><a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1357204/000119312511160440/dex1020.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1357204/000119312511...</a><p>The credit agreement dictates all the conditions that companies have to comply with in order to maintain access to their funding. These conditions are known as covenants. [2] If companies don’t submit the right reports to lenders on a weekly basis that show they’re in compliance, they can lose access to tens of millions of dollars of their loan.<p>The problem is that borrowers today manage their credit agreement compliance with some combination of email, Word, Excel, head knowledge, and Post-it Notes. Today’s options for managing credit agreements are outmoded, error-prone, and end up costing companies millions in fines and lost access to capital (Fintech founders often unwittingly discover this after starting their lending business, as Stilt (W16) co-founder Rohit Mittal has pointed out. [3]).<p>Our software helps companies automate their regular reports on debt capital to their lenders. Consistent with Murphy’s law, this seemingly boring task turns out to be quite a difficult technical problem. It starts with encoding the conditions of credit agreements into properties that companies can query their loan data against to monitor and report on in real time. The process of turning unstructured data from credit agreements into structured data is challenging, but tractable, and we’ve been encouraged by the similarities we’ve seen across our credit agreements and excited by what doing this can enable.<p>Jeremy, our CEO, saw firsthand at Goldman Sachs that keeping track of credit compliance can require a small army of bankers and lawyers. At Ironclad (S15), a contract management startup, our COO Josiah worked on the Collaboration and Negotiation team and helped launch an in-app contract negotiation tool. [4] And as the first engineer at Nova Credit (S16), I saw how existing financial systems can be made much more efficient with modern technologies. [5]<p>What excites me the most here is the chance to build infrastructure in the capital markets space, which has ramifications far beyond reporting. In the longer-term, we’d love to empower companies to conduct debt capital raises faster and more effectively (the current process of raising debt capital comes with exorbitant legal fees and can take 6+ months).<p>Today, we’re helping startups manage hundreds of millions in debt capital and, as you might expect, building the plane as we fly it. We’d love your thoughts on our approach, questions about debt capital or fintech infrastructure, and any other feedback you might have.<p>Thanks!<p>--
Kevin<p>[1] See full report here: <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/private%20equity%20and%20principal%20investors/our%20insights/mckinseys%20private%20markets%20annual%20review/mckinsey-global-private-markets-review-2020-v4.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/private...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/covenant.asp" rel="nofollow">https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/covenant.asp</a><p>[3] <a href="https://rohitmittal.substack.com/p/a-brief-guide-to-starting-and-building" rel="nofollow">https://rohitmittal.substack.com/p/a-brief-guide-to-starting...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://ironcladapp.com/blog/introducing-ironclad-editor/" rel="nofollow">https://ironcladapp.com/blog/introducing-ironclad-editor/</a><p>[5] <a href="https://www.novacredit.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.novacredit.com/</a>
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Hey HN, we’re Noah and Dick. We founded Chums (<a href="https://www.chums.co" rel="nofollow">https://www.chums.co</a>) to help you recommend products to your friends and have more fun shopping online. A lot of people ask their friends for advice when they're shopping. We think this can be more fun and we think your friends can help you find the right product, especially during COVID when we're stuck at home.<p>Noah launched the first version of Chums in late 2019. Originally, the app was a platform for users to find and share referral codes. Users could create a profile page and add their favorite brands to it. Soon they started adding products and reviews to the brands on their profile, and it became clear that the social shopping opportunity had much more potential than sharing referral codes.<p>Noah started digging into the world of ecommerce, social shopping, and affiliate marketing, and a mutual friend introduced him to me (Dick) as a potential advisor. As the fourth employee at Honey, I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of my life thinking about ecommerce. Honey built a product beloved by users, but struggled for a long time to convince investors and partners of the business’s potential. But perception of the browser extension and affiliate business models has shifted a lot in recent years due to the success of companies like Honey.<p>2020 saw a 50% rise in ecommerce, and while we expect brick and mortar shopping to have a resurgence as the world reopens, online shopping will probably continue to grow. It’s clear, though, that shopping online isn’t nearly as fun as shopping in person with your friends. In addition to being a lonely experience. 90% of millennials make purchase decisions based on recommendations from their friends, but there aren’t any good tools/platforms for those conversations right now. Also, shopping online has risks. You can’t trust reviews on Amazon [1][2]. “Impartial” review sites are often bankrolled (either directly or indirectly) by the brands they’re reviewing [3]. Top 10 gear/gadget lists are impersonal and missing context [4].<p>We aim to fix these problems. On Chums, you can review and save products to your profile, start group chats, ask questions about purchases you want to make, and recommend products to friends. Our focus is on shopping with your friends and friends-of-friends, with the hypothesis that input from your community will help you have more fun getting the right product. When you buy something, we split our affiliate commission (usually around 4%) with you. What makes Chums unique is that you can’t keep that cash--you have 24 hours to give it to the friends who helped you decide what to buy. We hope that this “pay it forward” mechanic will encourage more fun and genuine recommendations.<p>Looking forward, our plans include a social mobile app, an upcoming browser extension, and live shopping experiences. Shoot us an email at [email protected] or [email protected] if you want to start a conversation. You can also join the HN group chat on Chums by opening this link on your phone: <a href="https://chums.link/rBQ6" rel="nofollow">https://chums.link/rBQ6</a>. Last thing: we’re looking for a full time design lead and front end engineer. If you or someone you know might be a good fit, please let us know!<p>We’d love to hear what the HN community thinks! Noah and I will both be in the comments all day.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581727" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581727</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459434" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459434</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/9/23/13153814/casper-sleepopolis-lawsuits-mattress-reviews" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/2017/9/23/13153814/casper-sleepopolis-la...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/the-problem-with-relying-on-wirecutter-reviews-f024574fc7c2" rel="nofollow">https://onezero.medium.com/the-problem-with-relying-on-wirec...</a>
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: I’m sitting here at 11 at night watching my 3rd straight hour of TV. It’s embarrassing, but I’m so wiped out after a day of work, that my brain just doesn’t feel like doing anything.<p>I’m sitting here in my bedroom looking at a book I’ve been meaning to finish for months, but it’s complex enough that when I start working on the next chapter, I get a quarter of the way through it and have to put it down, because I just dont “get it” when I feel this way.<p>Across from me is my desk, with a computer where somewhere on it, is a half built personal website I was using as a way to teach myself web development. But when I open it up and start working on it, I feel like I’m missing that spark that makes the right connections to learn new things like JavaScript objects and how they work.<p>I have Duolingo on my phone, which I complete in spurts lasting 2 or 3 days then I drop for maybe a week or so, even though I know it’s only “10 minutes a day”. If I do it now, I won’t remember most of it tomorrow.<p>My job isn’t particularly demanding. It’s average. I don’t work more than maybe 8-9 hours a day on stuff that I understand most of but still have a chance to learn new things. My point is it’s not like it’s a brutal work culture at all.<p>I even exercise mid day or after work (depending on how busy I am) which is proportioned to give one energy, not take it away.<p>But yet at the end of the day, I’m just beat.<p>How do you find the motivation to do the things you genuinely enjoy, when you’re too wiped out to do them?<p>Is this normal?
Upvote: | 221 |
Title: Hello everyone,<p>We are a 3 founder team. Myself Pranav. Sojan and Nithin are my co-founders. We are building Chatwoot (<a href="https://www.chatwoot.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.chatwoot.com</a>, <a href="https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot</a>). With Chatwoot, businesses can connect channels like website live chat, email, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc and talk to the customers from one place.<p>Chatwoot is an open-source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk etc.<p>We help companies in regulated industries to manage customer data without sharing it with third-party providers. Since the software is open-source, it is easier to build custom workflows that suit your business on top of Chatwoot.<p>We started building Chatwoot as proprietary software in 2017, but the startup failed. Seeing the data privacy regulations and people taking interest in self-hosted alternatives, we open-sourced the product in 2019, we got a lot of love from the HN community. (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139</a>).<p>Over the last year, we have been working with the community to build the software. Seeing the interest from the open-source world, we decided to quit our jobs and work full time on Chatwoot. We introduced support plans to validate the need for self-hosted solutions and it worked out well. We applied to YC and got into the W21 batch.<p>Right now, there are 1000+ companies using Chatwoot. We have around 7.2k stars and more than 100 contributors in our repository. The software can be used in more than 25+ regional languages.<p>Apart from the omnichannel support desk, we are adding more features like a self-service portal, marketing campaigns, customer segmentation, workflows etc.<p>We make money by charging a license fee of $99 per user per month for features like customisable dashboards, SLA Management, Agent scheduling software, IP blocklisting etc which are suited for large enterprises.<p>We will continue to work with the community to build Chatwoot. We would love to hear your experiences, thoughts and ideas!
Upvote: | 396 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>We are Jason, Todd and LV - we're building Taloflow (<a href="https://www.taloflow.ai" rel="nofollow">https://www.taloflow.ai</a>) to help developers find and evaluate cloud and API products based on their use case, requirements, and budget.<p>Have you ever wondered whether you should move a particular workload off of AWS to GCP? Or which database to build on? Or which APM is best for your size, architecture, and budget?<p>A little over a year ago, we launched a cloud management tool for AWS. A few months after launch, we learned that many of the dev teams we were working with were actively looking for alternative cloud products and dev tools to improve their stack. They generally found the investigation and testing process to be error-prone and a time suck (finding what fits the use case requirements, reading docs, sitting on sales calls, projecting costs in complex spreadsheets, etc.).<p>Similarly, while building our own product, we implemented several cloud and dev tools into our own stack. Some worked, and some were terrible. Time after time, we were fooled by the marketing language, lacked use case-based information to inform our decision, and generally found third-party review sites not as helpful when it comes to buying a cloud or dev tool. Why? Comparing options with info relevant to our specific use case was the missing piece, and there were several dozen dimensions to consider.<p>We built two ways to help you pinpoint which products best fit your use case.<p>The first walks you through a "Quick match" questionnaire that is designed with the help of domain experts for particular categories (e.g.: object storage, data pipelines, APM, etc.) to help you define your requirements and then rank options within a product category based on the inputs.<p>For example, in object storage, we collect use case info (Do you provide information to customers frequently and quickly? Do you perform intensive ML tasks? Do you work with large graphical or video objects?, etc.), integration info (CDN, Redshift/BigQuery/ or other Data Abstraction Tools), budget, compliance, etc. to build a holistic use case profile to help filter and rank products.<p>We then scour our database of developer docs, pricing pages, private pricing, reviews from experts, and internal tests for various types of use cases to find the best use case fit.<p>The second way we solve this is by actually ingesting telemetry from various cloud applications (AWS, GCP, Azure, Twilio, Datadog, etc.) and providing a cost-benefit analysis on the performance and cost trade-offs of implementing various products. We can answer questions like "What are the egress and hidden fees of moving from Azure Blob to Backblaze B2, Storj or Wasabi?" or "What's the most performant APM for my architecture?", etc.<p>We’re currently experimenting with pricing, but we make money by selling more advanced or ongoing analysis to our members, up-selling our SaaS solutions for cloud infra and dev tool management, and occasionally collecting a standardized referral fee from vendors who happen to be good matches for you.<p>We're currently live for Object Storage and will soon launch for AI/ML tools, CPaaS (e.g.: Twilio, MessageBird, etc.), CI/CD tools (e.g.: Jenkins, Buildkite), and APM (e.g.: DataDog). If you don't mind getting ad-hoc analysis for categories we don't fully support yet, we have an option for that too. We'd love your feedback on our product and want to hear from you what product categories you need help researching.
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: From time to time, we have had the discussions here about whether actually naming these assistive agents makes any sense. And there are pros and cons either way when you compare OK Google to Siri.<p>When I showed this particular five-year-old OK Google, she was interested, but didn't really do much with it. Then she discovered Siri.<p>Since that time she has used Siri nonstop. Asking all kinds of crazy things, and series doing a pretty fair job on those conversations. Some of which are frankly hilarious!<p>I thought it might make for some interesting discussion. My observation is that her ability to address it in the same way she addresses other people has proven very compelling. The skills she already has she can use and get something meaningful. Identifying with Siri as a person seems to map right over in her mind, and she thinks she's getting a real person, the kind of attention a young person craves.<p>She asked what time of day it is, what the weather will be like, how many Sexes do frogs have, how come papa calls me squid, all kinds of crazy things.<p>That's it,<p>I think naming these agents have advantages. It's a lower friction UX experience, and I think if we're interested in capturing the up-and-coming people, this matter is worth some thought.<p>Edit: the real fun part in all of this is just how difficult I am finding it to convince her otherwise. To her mind a lot of things are evidence that you and I wouldn't count as evidence but she does. It'll be an interesting few days working through this. Maybe longer, who knows?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi HN, We’re Emre and JJ, the co-founders of Stacksi (<a href="https://www.stacksi.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.stacksi.com</a>), a product that helps fill out security questionnaires so smart people can focus on higher-value tasks (like actually managing security, or engineering or selling, or really anything but filling out forms).<p>At our last company, we were the ones who filled these things out. We hated doing it, but got them done because we had to in order to close deals that could meaningfully impact the trajectory of the company.<p>If you’ve had to deal with these, you understand that they’re the worst way of broadly assessing a company’s security with a reasonable time / cost tradeoff…except for every other method that we currently have at our disposal.<p>Problem is, that they’re often 200+ questions sent to salespeople and forwarded ASAP to some other poor soul (often some sort of engineer). The questions asked (e.g. what is your company’s encryption standard? or “what events do your logs capture?“) - assuming that they’re even correctly phrased - touch sufficiently detailed aspects of a company’s security practices that make it difficult for someone who doesn’t have at least some security / compliance background (e.g. a salesperson) to answer properly. All of this means that high-capability individuals (CTOs in earlier-stage companies, Solutions and Security Engineers in later-stage ones) end up spending significant amounts of time answering the same questions that they answered a few days ago, just phrased sufficiently differently that rote copy-paste isn’t a viable solution.<p>This is what we’re trying to fix.<p>We do it, in a nutshell, by taking two things: 1) a company’s security docs (e.g. policies, diagrams, vuln scans) and 2) the questionnaire in whatever format it’s in (GRC portals, web forms, excel, word, PDF, tea leaves). Putting those two things together, we get the questionnaire done accurately and quickly using a human-in-the-loop model. (We combine a tuned BERT model searching on the company’s docs with manual review by a human on our team).<p>The product works something like this: Upload your docs; Upload the file, schedule 15 minutes to review with us in the next couple days, then forget about the questionnaire until the review call and do other work. In the background, we index all of your documentation and run a search for each question to find the most relevant sections of your documentation. Once that process is complete, a human on our team reviews what the system has output to make sure that answers are accurate and high quality. We then mark it as reviewed and you receive notification.<p>When Stacksi’s internal review is done, our team takes a few minutes to review it with you (usually within ~48 hours so we have enough time to ensure quality across many questionnaires), and then you send it back to the company that asked for the assessment.<p>In instances where your docs don’t touch on specific information (often comes up with questions around app-specific authentication options like “Does your application support SSO with our Identity Provider, [INSERT IdP here]?”), our software also has collaboration features to make it easy for teams to work together to get the questions answered without pulling out all their hair deciphering asinine questions or nagging teammates for answers. It then uses those answers to inform future questionnaires.<p>We currently charge for questionnaires per-question ($2), so companies don’t have to pay through the nose to get help or commit to a subscription. We’ve gotten some feedback that we are under-pricing right now (maybe too much), but our goal right now is to grow the number of customers we’re working with rather than trying to squeeze every penny out of every customer. The more customers we have, the better our product gets for everyone, since (quality) data is the biggest driver of a good vs garbage model. For that reason we want to make it as much of a no-brainer as possible for people to sign up and get started. We're super focused on making sure the NLP handles the majority of the work and not making this a business that relies on having a bunch of questionnaire savants reviewing questionnaires all day every day.<p>Our goal is for a human to spend <15 seconds per question in review and thus, we're pricing this as a software product, not a services product. We also hope that pricing this way puts us in better alignment with our customers’ success (the more time we save them, the more we earn, without locking them into a contract that forces them to pay whether they get questionnaires or not). Some bigger customers actually want the subscription for financial predictability reasons, so we’ve started supporting that, too. Finally, for companies that don’t yet have policies written, we help customers create and manage them, and charge separately (kind of like Clerky, but for security policies).<p>We want to support builders in growing their companies (in our own small way) and allow talented people to put their skills to more productive use than filling forms.<p>We would love feedback from the community, and we’re happy to answer any questions that come up!
Upvote: | 134 |
Title: The company I work for keeps organizing social events and expects everyone to be present. I have no interest in having lunch with a random set of co-workers or play random games on Zoom. I like to get my work done and collaborate with my team members, I don’t want these random interruptions.<p>This happened as well before COVID with quarterly events where we would do the most random stuff: play music, cook, scavenge hunt... Something completely irrelevant to what we do on a daily basis.<p>Do you see this at your company as well? How do you deal with it? I understand that we can be supportive of each other, but to me it almost comes across like people have given up on their personal lives and now need to somehow compensate for it at work.<p>I love the work that I get to do on a daily basis, but these work events drive me nuts.
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: Am I crazy or what? Has anyone noticed tons of ads on youtube? Every single dang video even as short as 10 mins has several ads. Can't even jump through the video without seeing several ads.
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Hey HN! We're Phil, Rich & Rob, the co-founders of Kanda (<a href="https://www.kanda.co.uk" rel="nofollow">https://www.kanda.co.uk</a>). We allow general contractors (electricians, builders, etc) to offer pay-monthly options to their clients. Contractors get paid in full like normal, and their clients pay us back over time.<p>Rich was an electrical contractor and after running his firm for 10 years he started to find it harder and harder to compete on price against bigger companies because they could offer pay-monthly options to their clients and he couldn't. When he started to look into it he realized how unrealistic it would be for a little guy like him to be able to offer a pay-monthly option anytime soon.<p>Why? Because lenders put arbitrary barriers to entry like needing to have a yearly revenue of a $1M, so local contractors like Rich get frozen out and bigger companies can dominate the market. Over 80% of construction businesses are local contractors and most of them face the same problem Rich did.
So, together we set out to build a solution and we ended up with Kanda.<p>Kanda is an estimating tool that contractors can use to send clients estimates. When the client receives the estimate, we (Kanda), will offer the client the option to pay the contractor in full (like they normally would) or to pay them monthly.<p>If they choose to pay them monthly, then we pay the contractor in full once the client signs off the work and then the client pays us back over the term of the finance agreement, which could be from 10 months to 10 years. This not only helps the contractor to compete on price but it also makes it more affordable for the homeowner to have work done on their house. Win-win.<p>The way we see it, buy now, pay later is revolutionising e-commerce (for good or bad), and the only reason it isn't happening in offline services like construction is because it's hard to standardize the process of a contractor offering the finance. So, that's what our product aims to do. It aims to standardise how contractors send estimates and how they offer finance. Making it easy for them to do both.
We’d love your ideas and feedback on what we are making.
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: As an engineer I run cycles of listening, paraphrasing and then solutionizing almost every day. This doesn't translate well in friendships & relationships where the other person just wants someone to listen. At the same time I rate lowly on empathy scoring tests on the internet. Other technical folks here who might have gone through this,<p>1. How did you develop your listening skill?<p>2. How to be more empathetic?<p>Update: Some more questions<p>1. What common failure modes do you hit in your relationships as a low empathy person?<p>2. How do you avoid them?
Upvote: | 212 |
Title: For me it was running. Went from couch potato to regular runner for whom HMs don’t need any planning. Running always makes the day better. Physically I think exercise releases endorphins, mentally it’s my one win for the day.<p>Wondering what works.
Upvote: | 360 |
Title: Hi HN! I'm Arjun, one of the co-founders of StartPack (<a href="https://startpack.io/" rel="nofollow">https://startpack.io/</a>). StartPack helps US and non-U.S. small and medium businesses (SMBs) set up U.S. based bank accounts so that they can accept payments from customers globally. We take care of everything you need to form an LLC, set up a bank account, accept payments, and manage ongoing compliance and tax filings.<p>When my co-founder JP and I started our US company, it was too complex and time-consuming, especially as a non-US team. We were looking to create a Delaware C Corp but as JP was a non-US resident we did not know how to properly form our company, and make sure we were fully compliant with US tax laws. We ended up setting up our C Corp and it cost us money (thousands total) and time: even after "forming" we were bogged down in paperwork regarding compliance for our company, ensuring we had submitted forms to the IRS correctly (83-b elections) and we felt in the dark around maintaining our company + having support around what to do. Sure "forming the entity" was fast but after that, we really had no clue what to do / what was in store.<p>As we went through a pivot from our first company, we were going through the process of setting up yet another company and realized we wanted an "initializer" that would start our company for us, but not just stop there. We wanted someone (or something) to help us maintain our company, and provide long-term support in case we had any questions or needed help. This got us thinking: why can't a startup / product deal with this so we can focus on building our business, instead of forming it and maintaining it?<p>For any entrepreneur, just "starting" a company isn't the goal. Growing a business is. This is hard enough... then there's <i>everything else</i> founders have to deal with and spend valuable time on. We've learned (and personally know from our experience) that founders don't want a checklist of things to do. They want someone who can handle it for them. Not a one-time offering that forms a company. But a long-term partner, where the incentives are aligned to provide ongoing support and handle all the administrative work. And also help setup and maintain the initial stack of software and accounts needed to get a business off the ground.<p>The bigger thing we've realized is that despite the fact that SMBs power the global economy, they're often overlooked when it comes to forming and maintaining a US company. Most founders globally don't want to raise US venture capital (and don't need a C Corp); they want to build a profitable bootstrapped business and try to create something from scratch or sell something online. SMBs don't raise millions in capital. SMBs don't make the front page of TechCrunch. But people who start SMBs are still entrepreneurs just like anyone else and they are overlooked (or not even supported).<p>We want to help small and medium businesses globally launch and maintain a US LLC, get access to US banking + and access US payments. This is what fires us up about working on StartPack. So many people out there don't even realize it's possible to form an LLC as a non-US resident and being able to make this reality come true for creators, e-commerce sellers and SMB founders, even one company at a time, is incredibly rewarding.<p>Let us know if you have any feedback, questions, comments or thoughts, we're more than happy to answer and looking forward to hearing what HN thinks of StartPack!
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Hello HN,
As one of the managers of apache/incubator-age repository, I'm trying to figure out ways I can do to improve the README section. I think I need more images that can show what kind of project we're dealing with, but I'm not sure if that's the main priority for this case. What do you all think this README page need? What does a good README page require?
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: (as a software developer or just someone using software, in whatever field you happen to be working in).<p>An example:<p>-> As a software developer, I've come across the need to work with CSV-"like" files several times in my career (at several different jobs), for different reasons.<p>And it was most frustrating when they had like 100 columns or so. Having to change column 63 at line 58 is not something you do easily in Notepad++. Import to Excel was my way to go, but since the file was not a standard CSV file (e.g. also had sections like an .INI file) it was time consuming: first just select a subsection from the file, save to a different file, import to Excel, modify, paste back, etc. Maybe it was not the best approach, but that's not the point I'm making.<p>Not having found an existing tool (maybe my problem was too specific) I eventually made a small desktop application which I would use to edit the files directly. The interface was similar to Excel (grid of cells); It was simple and tailored to what I needed.<p>But maybe you are not a software developer and don't have the "luxury" of building it yourself.<p>So, would you share your experience of similar situations?<p>If the solutions to your problems are relatively easy to implement, then someone can create a tool for the job, making your life easier. And on the off chance that these tools are useful and will be wanted by more people (with similar problems) these "tools" can turn into a more general "product", thus a win-win situation in the end.<p>What i'm saying:<p>- There are already talented people working in their spare time on e.g. open-source projects (no shortage of people wanting to tackle the problem, if it is reasonable)
- The shortcoming is that domain specific problems, which people are facing, are not visible enough (except to them).<p>If this question should get enough attention and answers, the next step would be to structure the answers into a git repository/website.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Kevin and Sigurd (SigKill9), the founders of Kitemaker (<a href="https://kitemaker.co" rel="nofollow">https://kitemaker.co</a>). We've been working on building a tool to replace typical issue trackers for remote teams and we're excited to share it with you.<p>We made Kitemaker because in our previous jobs, we were managing distributed teams and we always had a bunch of challenges with the tools we used. It was really hard to find a tool that the whole team was comfortable using. Designers were never happy using GitHub Issues, engineers were never happy using Trello, and no one was happy using Jira. We would often hear grumbles from the team that we used these tools because they were "good for the managers", but as the managers we were completely unhappy with the tools too! We had to bug people just to get them to go into the tool and update things.<p>Even more of a bummer was the fact that these tools didn't really help us solve the core problems we had working in a distributed team. Things like the fact that discussions often started before anything reached the issue tracker, spread out across a maze of Google docs and slack discussions that often resulted in (at best) a giant mess or (at worst) critical people missing discussions. Or that engineering would have a tough time keeping track of the never ending flow of new designs from our designers. Or PRs that would be created and rot while waiting for someone to review them.<p>So we built Kitemaker to try and scratch our own itch - to be a tool that can help manage the development process from end to end and connect to all of the other great tools teams use every day. One of our top goals is to make Kitemaker a tool you actually want to use, whether you're a developer, PM or designer. It's flexible without having a lot of fiddly configuration. It's really snappy, you can do everything without lifting your hands off off the keyboard (Superhuman was a big influence for us), and our editor supports markdown and a bunch of different elements (images, Loom videos, Figma designs, code blocks, etc.). The editor is built with SlateJS in case anyone's curious.<p>Remote teams tend to rely a lot more on written communication, so we made Kitemaker to be a place to gather things that would otherwise be spread across documents and chat threads. Our work items are rich documents where teams can document their plans, break down their work into individual tasks, and have discussions in Slack-like comment threads.<p>Finally, we wanted to hook into the other tools our teams used every day and connect activities happening in those tools back to the work items in Kitemaker. Our GitHub integration provides the same kind of functionality that you get from using GitHub issues (GitLab is on the way too!). Our Slack and Discord integrations make it easy to link chat conversations to work items so you don't lose things in your chat history, as well as providing access to a lot of Kitemaker's functionality right from your chat app.<p>We also have a freshly-launched GraphQL API. It's early days but we'd love for people to kick the tires and see how it feels. It has webhook support via Diahooks (that was launched here on HN the other day).<p>The two of us have been working tirelessly on Kitemaker and we're really excited to share it with all of you. Head over to <a href="https://kitemaker.co" rel="nofollow">https://kitemaker.co</a> to sign up and try it out. We're hanging out here all day and would love to hear your feedback, questions and cool ideas!
Upvote: | 266 |
Title: I'm in the market for a security camera setup for my home. Optimally, I'd prefer PoE cameras instead of Wifi, but if there's good arguments to be made either way, I'm all ears.<p>Does anyone have any suggestions?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: - bachelor and master degree in computer science<p>- around 8 years of experience<p>- pretty average developer (can deal with Ansible, the command line, MySQL, Go, Vue, and tons of other toys; can talk about Turing machines, the pumping lemma, CORS, or about the sudoers file)<p>- pretty average guy to work with<p>- earning around 75K Euro (gross) per year as an employee (30 to 40 hours per week). 30 days vacation per year (plus public holiday)<p>- currently, sort of "tech lead" within my team<p>I cannot complain about my current lifestyle, but I see that I'm approaching the "glass ceiling" for software engineers in Europe (I don't see myself ever earning more than 100K Euro as a simple software engineer) and I cannot help but think: why on earth I don't quit my job and work for an American company from Europe? I would be doing basically the same but from starters I would be making double (avg. of 150K USD/year according to Google) but more importantly, the "glass ceiling" in USA is above 150K USD.<p>Even after taxes and health insurance, the net amount each month is way higher with a American salary.<p>The more I think about it, the more stupid seems my current situation. I think the main thing that's holding me back is that I would probably need to work as a contractor instead of an employee, and this is something I've never done before.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Hi HN! I’m Julien. With my cofounder Quentin, we created Routine (<a href="http://routine.co/hn" rel="nofollow">http://routine.co/hn</a>), a macOS/iOS app that combines todos, notes and calendar for busy professionals not to waste time switching context and as a result losing focus.<p>I became an entrepreneur in 2010 and struggled to maintain control of my work environment which quickly became very chaotic with many email/chats to answer, a ton of meetings to schedule and attend, time to find to focus on important tasks and hundreds of thoughts going through my head that I needed to write down somewhere not to forget.<p>Over the years I improved my own workflow, from sending myself emails, to todo apps, to GTD, to programming my own small tools with keyboard shortcuts.<p>Talking with many busy professionals (entrepreneurs, investors, managers etc.) we quickly discovered that everybody had the same problems: they cannot stay in control of their time, they rely on manual "hacks" based on a single product (e.g Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion or else) to do almost everything and they hate context switching between apps.<p>Given how many people are unhappy with their workflow, we decided to build Routine to become a productivity operating system (so to speak) and solve these problems.<p>In particular, we find it super annoying to be forced to switch between todo and notes taking apps. We believe some information is actionable (tasks) while others are not (notes). We see no reason why they should not be stored in the same system. This is why we decided to include notes (daily notes, meeting notes, topic-based pages etc,) and tightly-bound them to tasks. In Routine, tasks can be enhanced with a media-rich description (i.e a note) but notes can also embed checkboxes which are full-fledged tasks that can be scheduled, delegated and more.<p>Another problem with existing tools is that they do not take into account your work preferences. Maybe you prefer to concentrate in the morning and take meetings in the afternoon. Or maybe the opposite. Routine allows you to define such time preferences when it comes to deep work, internal and external meetings, administrative work etc. Routine will then take those into account whenever you want to schedule a meeting or block time in your calendar in order to work on an important task. Think of it as Calendly for all the activities in your life (not just meetings).<p>We also think that existing workflows are just too slow. Switching to your browser to then click on the Google Calendar tab to be able to look at your next meeting is just too much work. Likewise when it comes to taking meeting notes or writing down a task to perform later. Such actions should not take more than 3 seconds, in particular since you perform them several times a day. This is why we've made Routine controllable through a single keyboard shortcut. Just invoke CTRL+SPACE anywhere on your desktop to pop up Routine's console which can be used to capture a thought, create a calendar event, glance at your calendar, take notes and more. This way you do not need to switch apps and lose focus!<p>By combining these concepts, you can for example turn an email into a task and secure time in your calendar to make sure it gets done; just invoke the console over Gmail and type "... for 1h in Focus" (with Focus being the name of one of your pre-defined time slots).<p>The app is still in heavy development. For now we've been focusing on having a strong backbone with tasks, notes and calendar. Some of the features above will be shipped in the next release. We have the core concepts but we need time and your feedback to help us find the right direction. So if you feel information is spread between too many tools and that you are constantly wasting time switching between apps, let us know what you think, ideas you have and recurring problems you face.<p>Feel free to give it a try (note that we are in the process of rebranding and the app is not up to date yet!): <a href="http://routine.co/hn" rel="nofollow">http://routine.co/hn</a><p>Thanks.
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: I'm a UX designer, and my wife is a health coach. We recently decided to dip our toes in the digital nomad lifestyle, and took off in our small motor home a few weeks ago. We are loving it so far.<p>The one huge thorn in my side is data caps.<p>Turns out, we're both on zoom calls, a lot. Back home, we've got a fiber connection and it's no big deal. But remote, I burned through my 'unlimited' 15gb hotspot plan with verizon on Tuesday of my first week and got cut to 600mbps (really more like 400) which is pretty rough.<p>I also have a Skyroam Solis, which just might be the most disappointing thing I've purchased in recent memory. The device itself is meh, their app and website are full of typos and other issues, and the actual service has, so far, been slower than my throttled verizon plan - and that's in an area with a ton of cell coverage. And, of course, their 'unlimited' plan is 10gb, which at actual broadband speeds, is damn easy to blow through in a day or two of zoom meetings.<p>Luckily, we have a wifi connection where we are now that pretty consistently pulls down 4-10mbps, so we're ok for now.<p>So - what's your experience been? What equipment are you using? How are you managing your data consumption? If my work consists of video calls and connected tools like G Suite and Figma, is this possible without wifi?
Upvote: | 248 |
Title: I have ended up using Microsoft Edge v2 (Chromium)
a lot recently.<p>In part to attempt escape from Googles eco system.<p>Edge can now use Chrome Extensions without any problems, but that also bring problems.<p>If Google removes an extension from their store that now impacts Edge.
If there are vulnerabilities in an extension that now impact Edge.<p>Edge has its own extension store but there are very few extensions that live there
(so far)<p>What I have started to wonder if how much of Chrome or Edge is Chromium.<p>Is the extension hosting / executing code in Chromium?
Is AMP in Chromium?<p>What are the borders between the open source project and the closed source derivative?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I'm most interested in opinions from xooglers. From what I see it's still a great company and great place to work. Some xooglers seem to think it's lost its luster. I'm trying to collect all opinions.
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: If so what is your workflow and what do you use? What do you find most difficult, if anything?
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: So I've always been interested in how teams respond to crises. I love reading about teams that handle crises well, and try to figure out what I can learn from their actions for the teams I lead. (Apollo 13 continues to be an all-time favourite movie of mine...)<p>Recently, there've been two discussions on HN [1,2] that have gotten me thinking about this topic again. And now I'm wondering: are there any good books on the topic that you can recommend? I'm not restricting myself to any domain - business, politics, engineering, natural disasters, could all be interesting.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506920" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506920</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26539495" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26539495</a>
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: Is there any book or essay that has lead to a change of perspective, a new view on reality so novel to you, that you decided to completely change certain aspects of your life based on the premise of the text or your conclusions resulting from it?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Several companies I've worked for ask their employees to set annual/quarterly goals. In theory they should be measurable, they should be relevant for the growth of the company and the employee. Sometimes the SMART acronym is used to describe them, some others use a FAST approach, but the essence doesn't change: you have to come up with some tasks (on top of your "normal" duties), discuss them with your manager and execute them. In my current company, your bonus depends on the execution of such goals (which is measured in percentage). If you fail to execute them, you may be subject to disciplinary actions.<p>As a developer, I find the definition and execution of these goals very distracting, worthless and sometimes even stressful. (I work for a quite famous company in engineering.)<p>My question is: what's the ultimate purpose of these goals? Is there a scientific (or even psedo-scientific) proof that they work for both parties? Do people really believe that they help in some way?<p>EDIT: typos
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: This is more of a thought experiment, I know a multitude of ways to do this which require loads of setup, jumping through AWS hoops, etc. I'd like ideally way to deploy to a hosted service with a single command. Imagine Heroku but even easier.
Upvote: | 451 |
Title: Recently in the news [1] I read that Apple is cracking down apps related to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak that aren't from recognized institutions like governments or hospitals.<p>Today, I am facing the same issue with my HN reader app - HackerNewsX [2]
Using search feature reviewer found stories containing COVID keyword and flagged app as a breach of 'Guideline 5.1.1 - Legal - Privacy - Data Collection and Storage' [3]<p>> Per section 5.1.1 (ix) of the App Store Review Guidelines, apps that provide services or collect sensitive user information in highly-regulated fields, such as healthcare, should be submitted by a legal entity that provides these services, and not by an individual developer.<p>Please advise how I can negotiate with Apple and resolve this matter.<p>[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-apple-coronavirus-apps-health-organizations-who-cdc-misinformation-2020-3<p>[2] https://apps.apple.com/app/hackernewsx/id1507756607<p>[3] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#data-collection-and-storage
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Now and again I see someone say they're an investor, perhaps the kind who'd be willing to hear a pitch. Is there a registry or summary of such HNers somewhere? Perhaps one that says what type of investment they want to see, amounts, what stage, etc?
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: Any good recommendations for downloading desktop backgrounds? I'm looking for pictures or artwork to use for my dual screen monitors. But I find it difficult to find high res downloads from safe sources.
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: Hey HN! We're Nick & Hrishi, founders of Greywing (<a href="https://grey-wing.com" rel="nofollow">https://grey-wing.com</a>). Greywing is software that optimizes operating a vessel in the high seas, focused on seafarers and crew changes. We take the information you (a ship manager) have about a vessel (route, plans, crew composition), plus information externally available (piracy, flights, fuel costs), and tell you where to route your vessel and what the best choices are for the crew, and the purchases you're making.<p>Maritime is a surprisingly decentralized industry, even in 2021. Large vessels (container ships, gas tankers) are complex entities, with a single vessel operated simultaneously by multiple companies (ship managers, charterers, technical managers, crew managers) domiciled in different countries. These companies manage flights, fuel purchases and consumption, cargo and charters, crew welfare, and a hundred other things that go into completing a single trip. Once a trip is done, most of these things change before the next voyage.<p>There is often no central source of truth for any of this data, let alone systems that connect one to the other. Parties involved—travel managers, port agents, vessel captains—communicate over email, with no clear idea of what the other hand is doing. This means that a single crew change can take up to a week to decide, with no clear idea if it was the optimal outcome. Crew changes had been getting more complex for a while, with increasing budgets and slowdowns, but Covid turned this into a humanitarian crisis [1], with over 800,000 seafarers stuck at sea or unable to work for more than a year.<p>Vessels are often short-staffed and overworked due to lack of space, so crew operate on three to six month contracts and spend about the same amount of time on land. As crew rotate, you have an exchange of oncoming crew (onsigners) with outgoing crew (offsigners). Crew managers try to do this with minimal disruption to the route, while making sure the crew don’t overstay contracts and the vessel consumes fewer resources (fuel, flights, etc). Crew managers work with imperfect information under time pressure, and the wrong decision (or no decision) can cost thousands of dollars and have strong impacts. Tired crew that haven’t been home in a long time make mistakes (and these mistakes have increased in recent past), but deviating too far from cargo requirements will take a vessel off-hire.<p>A bit about us: Nick is a maritime native, having worked on vessels and done many of the jobs we serve today, all the way up to running a maritime startup for 10 years. I (Hrishi) spent most of my career in a diverse set of industries, from fast-moving ones like crypto and robotics to the other end of that spectrum with reinsurance and semiconductor ball bonders. We met in Singapore after Nick uprooted his life to start something new. Having seen the effects of 2008 on the maritime industry, we felt that we could build software that increased the resiliency of shipping to systemic shocks. We started in 2019, and as it turns out a pretty big shock was around the corner. Since then, our goal has been to solve problems with human-augmentation, by automating as much as possible and then getting out of the way of the people who operate a vessel.<p>Having started in maritime security, one of our first successes was in building a real-time dataset for piracy around the world. Incidents are usually reported to local authorities, and published in pdf bulletins on separate sites. The next step was turning this into structured data, and connecting it to an internal database of ports, as well as a routing tool that we had to build from scratch. By the time we focused on crew and the effects of Covid, we had most of the tools we needed to tackle the issue, and it became a job of incrementally adding connections to our data around airports, flight prices, agency costs, fuel consumption, so on.<p>We combine this information to provide immediate guidance on where a vessel should go, and what actions it should take along the way. We use the data at our disposal, both public and private, to optimize for the best route for the vessel so it can change crew, while burning the least fuel, spending less on flights, and where immigration and port restrictions are open [2]. It's basically n-dimensional pathfinding, once you’ve got clean relational data. We do this through our intelligence tool CRY4 (named after [3]), and to date we estimate that we’ve saved our customers over 20,000 USD per vessel per year.<p>So far, we've automated over 50,000 crew changes and are now monitoring more than a thousand vessels, while saving our customers more than 20,000 USD per vessel per year. We've had users turn to Greywing to evacuate critically wounded crew as fast as possible, organize nation-wide exercises to conduct charter flights to alleviate some of the still-building pressure around ports, among other things we've written about [4]. We're humbled by the effect software has had on this problem, and some days it's still surreal to think of code that didn't exist 6 months ago making a difference in maintaining global trade networks.<p>We'd love your feedback on what we've built. We've just expanded to a team of three, and are hiring frontend developers. Our priorities are UX and algorithms - solve problems with good software, and build interfaces that make those solutions useful. We’d love to hear any feedback you have, and are happy to answer any questions!<p>[1] <a href="https://hrishioa.github.io/one-million-mariners/" rel="nofollow">https://hrishioa.github.io/one-million-mariners/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://blog.grey-wing.com/why-deep-tech-is-the-future-of-maritime.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.grey-wing.com/why-deep-tech-is-the-future-of-ma...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19449" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19449</a><p>[4] <a href="https://blog.grey-wing.com/a-vessel-manager-us-2-5-million-72-hrs-a-true-story.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.grey-wing.com/a-vessel-manager-us-2-5-million-7...</a>
Upvote: | 131 |
Title: I did some research and wrote about how the default 25-minute time intervals is better for breaking a procrastination habit, but longer time intervals like 50 minutes are actually needed to do deep work. Link: https://tinyurl.com/r5drje9p<p>I know only like one person who actually does the technique. So if you do pomodoro, how has it helped and in what ways? How do you make it stick?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: In my immediate family there is no precedent for following a career. I'm the first one to graduate college, so I approach my jobs like how my dad treats his blue-collar job. Just doing something that pays the bills. I do like programming otherwise but not with the pressure to be super-ambitious.<p>I want a software engineer job where most people are basically coasting, but everyone seems to look down at my slow career growth. They expect a "story" in my resume with a definite "beginning" and "end" with development and accomplishments in the middle. Sorry, but I haven't yet adjusted to that mindset and I don't know if I can.<p>This worked fine for me in 2010, but in 2015 and beyond it has gotten way more difficult to get job offers. I never even have a proper FT job. or retirement accounts. I'm now a part-time freelancer that chases after short projects but doesn't earn enough for a livable salary.<p>Is this the industry telling me I'm not cut out to be a <i>career</i> programmer? Am I just now limited to using programming as a hobby, to tinker around with home projects while I take a job in something very different? I don't know what else I'd like to do (that doesn't require returning to college) and I don't like where that possibility is heading for me.<p>I just wanted to model my career after the pacing of my parents' jobs since that is what I have been most accustomed to in my life. Is there still room for older but lower-end programmers who work like this?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Where do you find people to validate your idea / MVP and get feedback from?
I've been building something over the past year that primarily scratches my own itch and I'm getting ready to use it myself but I was wondering how I could see if other people are interested in this as well.<p>I've read about landing pages and MVPs so that's kinda what I did: I've made something small, usable, that solves a single problem with myself as my user persona (i.e. scratching my own itch).<p>The problem I'm running into now is that I can't seem to gather any useful feedback and I don't know where to get that feedback, or how to get it.
There are a few people registered on my site but none actually active enough for me to try and reach out to them.<p>How do you get feedback on your project / MVP without spamming HN or reddit in the hopes that one or two people leave a comment?<p>P.S. A fiverr clone for product owners or analysts might be what I'm looking for here.
Upvote: | 273 |
Title: Hi folks, I've been working as a software engineer for about 10 years but always in small companies with few or none programmers or as a freelancer. I've been able to always have work on my desk because I'm always moving and talking with people in the industry but some months ago I decided to go to work on a proper medium software company.<p>I'd been assigned a medium complexity task and I've failed to accomplish it, the code was all filled with hardcoded values, wrong structure, difficult to debug bugs and similar things.<p>I've realized I'm not a senior software engineer as I thought and now I don't know what to do next. If you read my resume it'll seem I am a senior but I don't really know where to place me in the "experience" spectrum. I've always managed to solve the problems in front of me but in a "hacky way" and now the issue was totally revealed to me.<p>I'm thinking about looking for semi senior roles but I'm afraid it'll look weird for the company interviewing me to hire a semi senior with +10 years of experience.<p>I've also thought about transitioning to a PM role but I'm not sure if I can be a PM if I'm not able to code things the right way myself.<p>A third option would be to take a break from work and try to learn to write good code but I'm not sure it's possible without working on a company with other people.<p>As you very probably see, I'm quite lost right now so I'd be very grateful if you can advise me what I could do next with my career.
Upvote: | 320 |
Title: Aside from your full time job, like a flexible second job that brings in money, but it is also typically something that you are passionate about, that you don't get to pursue in your main job.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I'd like to move into data science by taking a ~3 month bootcamp. Which bootcamps are most respected by employers? I have a PhD in Computer Science.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: Today after recovering from an illness thanks to the pandemic I feel like I lost everything. I fell sick during the pandemic and for 45 days was in a very bad state. I did not check my emails where there was an outstanding to pay to Digital Ocean.<p>The amount was $3.4 over my account limit. And totally for a month it is $25 I spend. I am a long term customer with them since 2013 paying and using the service as a small time developer and service provider. I do not have enough resources to do external backups. But I do keep backups turned on and some of my projects were as snapshots requiring almost very little resources for DO.<p>Am so devastated to find today that after I cleared my paltry balance due, I found all my droplets, backups, and snapshots wiped clean. When I wrote back to DO explaining I was sick, I am a customer since 2013 paying regularly, and this is so devastating to me, they simply said sorry nothing can be done.<p>When I prodded more, they said they understand the pandemic situation and credited me some money into the account. They neither will escalate beyond their low level customer support nor say can restore anything.<p>Is there a way anything can be recovered if at all from their servers? Am even ready to pay them to do so for me. Some of it is a lot of work I had put in. And the data is valuable to me.<p>Also, I understand they will want to mitigate any non-payment risk. But think this kind of draconian policies applied to all customers is ridiculous in this age of big data and ai. Surely, they can give different credit limits for different customers (like me, a very small user for over 7 years with no issues till now) and do just a little more before automated emails and deletion.<p>What use is giving me credits now? If they had even put in $10 into my account a month before I would have not been in this situation now.
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: I'm a software developer with nine years of experience. I'm forced to look for extra money because one of my family members requires expensive surgery.<p>I tried soccer betting in desperation, but I lost a few hundred bucks and decided to close my account.<p>I started working on creating a programming course that I will post to udemy when I finish.<p>Could you share tips on how to make a side income as a software developer?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I'm currently looking for a solution to provide (non-technical) team members with a way to interact with a SQL database (MySQL at the moment; PostgreSQL in the future). Basically, I want/need to build several very simple web-based CRUD-forms. Does anyone remember MS Access...<p>While my initial thought was to build a simple Django application, I'd prefer something non-developers could also work with. -> Low-/No-Code Solution<p>While I'm generally willing to pay, I'd really prefer an open and self-hosted solution.
Upvote: | 208 |
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: | 159 |
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: | 60 |
Title: 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=26661279" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26661279</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26661442" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26661442</a>
Upvote: | 416 |
Title: There's a page on one project's GitHub Wiki with a lot of images (font specimens) which will get you flagged as abusing GitHub's infrastructure - and institute a rate limit:<p>https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall<p>Click at your own risk! ;>
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: For example:
https://twitter.com/LadyAshBorg/status/1378237638671364099<p>But the actual reality is closer to this:
https://huyenchip.com/2021/02/27/why-not-join-a-startup.html<p>The same founders will lay you off in a heartbeat if the situation demands, and they keep on preaching to naive employees about trust, loyalty, and shit!<p>PS: To be clear, I'm not totally against working at a startup, if you like their mission, please go and work for your chosen startup. My issue is that they should be more thankful to the employees who have joined them in their journey and not treat them as a resource!
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Hi HN,
With the recent major advancements of Linux phones and tablets, convergence becoming a reality, I was wondering:<p>How to make a living creating apps for Linux, whether it be for the Desktop or the phones?<p>Do you have any experience or examples you want to share?<p>Are in-app subscriptions and enterprise support the only way to go? As the usual distribution channels (repositories and 'App Stores') don't seem to provide a straightforward way to sell software.
Upvote: | 131 |
Title: ...25 years after launching.<p>New site: <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/</a><p>It seems the developers understand the legacy of the original site, as you can still access it: <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/1996/" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/1996/</a>
Upvote: | 152 |
Title: I'm interested in keeping tabs on my spending and comparing prices of items I buy at grocery stores, because I tend to not think about it when I need something. I am conscious of the extreme price discrepancies for the exact same items at stores just blocks apart here in NYC, but it's difficult to keep track of the prices of each item at various places to optimize shopping.<p>I want to build a system that can keep a running tab of my purchases by item, price, and store. I need to find a library that can effectively scan a receipt, recognize the store (usually name, number, address and logo at the top), and differentiate each item label and its price. I plan to manually tag each item label from a store's receipt with the item's barcode the first time it is seen.<p>I have been sporadically googling the past 6 months but am still unsure which OCR library(s) I should invest my time in. Or how low level I should start. Should I grab a library like tesseract and do my own feature extraction or libs that spit out semi-structured objects with text and hope it returns something similar enough across store receipts to make sense of consistently?<p>I'm ok with this being an extended project, but I would like some input on choosing a solid library with accurate OCR and advice on how to approach training/parsing from someone with more experience.<p>Other solutions and advice are also welcome++
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: I have been building good amount of CRUD apps for the past 10 years or so, but I feel stuck, like a massive wall in front of me.<p>I started coding in 2010 when I was in High school using JScript and Microsoft PageBuilder with the Help Manual(chm file) that it came with (I had no internet connection). Later I picked up PHP, JS, Java and a whole lot of other technologies which allowed me to be an amazing CRUD app developer, My resume is filled with the latest trendy words like Docker, Scala, Kafka, Spark, Hive, react, K8s or any new framework that seems to make a buzz. All this was amazing but I recently realized that I am not so smart and I can't seem to build anything other than CRUD apps and it is quite depressing.<p>There is a world out there about compilers, run-times, drivers, emulators, VMs and OSes that I can't seem to grasp, it is just too complicated for me. My Computer Science degree and the newer degrees do not focus on these, they have become 4 year long coding boot camps that focus on getting people job ready with AWS, React, Ruby or whatever trendy. This is true for the majority of the not so prestigious universities out there.<p>I see a pattern and I feel the older generation is way more capable and knowledgeable when it comes to Computer Science in general. I am pretty sure a lot of people are or were in the same boat as me. I don't really have the time(Have wife & kids) to take a compiler course or set out to build my own OS, what would be the easiest way to learn these lower level things?<p>Things I have tried so far,<p>1. Reading the Dragon book(I find this would be useful only once you have built a bad compiler)
2. Paying people older than 40-45 to teach me some C/C++ and some tricks of the trade (expensive but I gained a huge amount of knowledge in a short time)<p>any other tricks, or comments about your own journey would be helpful.
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: I'd like to hear about different approaches others are using to write web sites or apps today. What languages, frameworks, or libraries are you using? If so, why and what do you like about it?
Upvote: | 345 |
Title: If you buy a mobile phone today, the choice is between Android and iOS, or, more specifically, between Samsung and Android.<p>[LG's announcement to stop making smartphones is a testament to how the technology and (economy of scale) of Apple and Samsung have evolved to a duopoly of smartphone brands. For most consumers, two choices are enough. Quick: name the third in line: Coca Cola, Pepsi and ...? Or McDonald's, Burger King and ...?)<p>Will the same happen for electric cars? Ford is already building their EVs on a VW chassis.<p>For example: whether you buy an electric Kia or electric Porsche, what are the real engineering differences between the car, considering:<p>- the drivetrain is electric
- the center of gravity is lowered in almost all EVs because of the (current state of the art) of battery placement
- Many key (security) parts are bought OEM from the same suppliers, including tyres, audio systems and airbags.
- The manufacturer with the most driven miles will likely have the least amount of "bugs"<p>Will car brands go even more the way of fashion brands, where the difference between Porsche and Kia will be like the difference between Balenciaga and Nike: both are functional footwear, but I'd choose the Nikes and save the difference.<p>Will "internal luxury" and "prestige" take the overtone in marketing and branding for the next 20 years, as opposed to how "clean" a car is and the engineering of their engines? And, of this technology, how will supercar automakers adapt? E.g. why buy a Ferrari if the "soul" (engine) is replaced with an electric drivetrain that is likely less mature in engineering than what would be inside a Tesla S?
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I am the creator of senatestockwatcher.com and im finally happy to say that the same data that is filed from the House of Representatives is now live for everyone to watch, report against, and use.<p><a href="https://housestockwatcher.com" rel="nofollow">https://housestockwatcher.com</a><p>When Senate Stock Watcher was released, the US was in the midst of an election year and after the COVID market crash the SEC had opened some investigations on 3 Senators for insider trading allegations. My interest in politics and finance lead me to build that website, but the number one question I always got was "where is the houses' data?"<p>The House of Reps exclusively files their transactions reports in PDF forms that vary wildly in quality and format, so OCR was not a trustworthy and tenable solution. There is a supporting platform for the community to contribute to this dataset so that it can eventually be 100% complete.<p>To date, I have transcribed over 690 transactions. There are literally hundreds of thousands more to go. If you would like to help on this front - you can also go to:
<a href="https://contributor.housestockwatcher.com" rel="nofollow">https://contributor.housestockwatcher.com</a><p>This data is available, totally open, in both JSON and CSV format so that people more savvy than me can uncover trends and patterns.
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: I find that as I'm getting older, I am appreciating the work that a product owner or technical project manager does at a large company (think person who writes JIRA stories, understand the technology or development enough to talk to everyone, can get people on a single line of thinking and can lead discussions, likes working with people and business, and is not hands-on engineering all day).<p>I also constantly hear from people who are in these sorts of roles that they would 'kill' for the technical background that an engineer has (as that would make them more effective).<p>Now there is me, with SRE and DevOps background, who applies for product owner, technical project manager, or any sort of similar role as described above, and can not for the life of me figure out why I keep getting "upsold" engineering roles instead, when I am very explicit about applying for the less technical ones. Is it true that there is really no world for a technologist to transition into one of these less technical roles? Does anyone know what the secret sauce is here (besides the line item on the job description that asks for "having been a product owner/<INSERT TITLE> for X years at a previous company")?<p>What can I, as someone who is in engineering, and would like to do one of these sorts of jobs instead, do at application/interview time to demonstrate that I am a good choice/fit?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'll probably get a lot of flak for this. Sorry.<p>I'm an average developer looking for ways to work as little as humanely possible.<p>The pandemic made me realize that I do not care about working anymore. The software I build is useless. Time flies real fast and I have to focus on my passions (which are not monetizable).<p>Unfortunately, I require shelter, calories and hobby materials. Thus the need for some kind of job.<p>Which leads me to ask my fellow tech workers, what kind of job (if any) do you think would fit the following requirements :<p>- No / very little involvement in the product itself (I do not care.)<p>- Fully remote (You can't do much when stuck in the office. Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect.)<p>- Low expectactions / vague job description.<p>- Salary can be on the lower side.<p>- No career advancement possibilities required. Only tech, I do not want to manage people.<p>- Can be about helping other developers, setting up infrastructure/deploy or pure data management since this is fun.<p>I think the only possible jobs would be some kind of backend-only dev or devops/sysadmin work. But I'm not sure these exist anymore, it seems like you always end up having to think about the product itself. Web dev jobs always required some involvement in the frontend.<p>Thanks for any advice (or hate, which I can't really blame you for).
Upvote: | 2022 |
Title: Basically title. I have 2 YOE as a full-stack developer without degree and I am really interested in moving to Europe from non EU. Any help appreciated!
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I have built an application to scratch my own itch. It’s a tool that I had a need for in my day job for years. The problem it’s solving is a problem that I felt many people had too. But when I talked to people about it, most times it didn’t really click. So I thought “crap, they don’t get it, cause they don’t see it. Once I build it, they’ll get it”.<p>I didn’t spend an awful lot of time on it. And I think the app is ok-ish for an MVP.<p>Now I posted it here and there and sent it to a few people I know, but it doesnt seem good enough.<p>I realize now the importance of having a broad reach. If I was someone like Mike Bostock, with a bunch of followers, I’d just post it to Twitter and voila. Someone said earlier on HN: building an MVP should include a distribution strategy. And I can feel that pain. Now distribution is something I have zero skills at.<p>What should I do? There are a few things I could be doing, like:<p>- get better at marketing, make a video for my target customers<p>- try and build an audience through blogging and things of that nature<p>- go and sell it to customers in real life.<p>- try and find a co founder who would have the time and skills to do these things.<p>- add more features to the MVP that people tell me are missing<p>- create more documentation for the MVP, so that onboarding is smoother.<p>What would have most impact in getting the app in front of people?
Upvote: | 246 |
Title: The website itself, not the content.<p>Although I'm just a casual user of Reddit, it's hard to avoid the fact that Reddit is absolute garbage. It seems to me as everything they've done in the past few years is to the detriment of users; especially with them following the trend of writing it all in a shiny SPA (that doesn't work half the time).<p>Apart from constant connection errors, lots of the time the site "forgets" I'm logged in, then all a sudden remembers, actively bombards users on mobile to install their app (even though the site could work fine on mobile, alas they are probably trying to crank their app install numbers up), uses dark patterns all over the place and is just generally unpleasant to use.<p>Thank goodness for old.reddit.com but I don't know what all of the users who have starting using the old subdomain are going to do when they eventually shut it off.<p>Really makes me wonder as a small time dev what's went wrong in Reddit the company to produce this absolute garbage site.<p>Just my 2c of course, and this was just a small list of the problems, I'm sure if you really wanted too you could spend all day listing them.<p>Interested to find out what others feel.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Today I have found out that hibernation is by default disabled in my Ubuntu 18.04 distribution. After this, I found this 11 month old post <a href="https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/re-visiting-hibernate-on-ubuntu/15953" rel="nofollow">https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/re-visiting-hibernate-on-ubun...</a> where I realized that the Linux community does not seem to be able to implement a working implementation of hibernate. Is there any reason why this is a difficult problem? I would like to have an option in my OS like VM's have where everything that is currently running is saved on disk and can be resumed later without issues.
Upvote: | 322 |
Title: Hello HN, I am a new solo developer who quitted job 19 weeks ago.<p>At this moment of my writing, I just don't want to work. I come across this problem a lot recently.<p>I don't have the urge to work, and it feels too difficult to focus.<p>I know that once I start, I will be productive. But I don't have a recipe to start. If my mood changes, I work. If not, I dont' know what to do.<p>I recently read that no matter what, you just work. I tried and failed to just work.<p>Any advice?
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: I'm at the point where I feel a certain fatigue writing Bash scripts, but I am just not sure of what the alternative is for medium sized (say, ~150-500 LOC) scripts.<p>The common refrain of "use Python" hasn't really worked fantastically: I don't know what version of Python I'm going to have on the system, installing dependencies is not fun, shelling out when needed is not pleasant, and the size of program always seemingly doubles.<p>I'm willing to accept something that's not on the system as long as it's one smallish binary that's available in multiple architectures. Right now, I've settled on (ab)using jq, using it whenever tasks get too complex, but I'm wondering if anyone else has found a better way that should also hopefully not be completely a black box to my colleagues?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I've tried quite a few programming languages/frameworks for both backend and frontend, and I found that I absolutely love working with React on the frontend and I'm on the fence between two options for the backend: Django (because it's so easy to come up with something) and Golang + GraphQL, due to the typed nature of Go and how you combine them with TypeScript on the frontend.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: It seems every other day there's news on the front page here about some major privacy or performance feat by Firefox or some other minor browser.<p>It makes me wonder, for those of you who use Chrome and browse this site (implying you're above average in tech knowledge, privacy worries, etc), why do you use Chrome?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'm 35, working for an IT consultancy company and I feel my career is going at a dead end.<p>I did well with my career (maybe too much?) and after 10 years I'm far away from coding activities, more involved in project management and I'm not sure that this is what I want.<p>I like coding (that's why I started this job, I also consider myself good at coding) I like to learn and explore new things.<p>The problem is that, at same time I feel that coding can't be a lifetime career: what will happen in 10 years from now? Maybe company will prefer younger coders to hire and I will not be able to find a job anymore? (I have family, I can't risk to lose my job)
Shall I find now another role or company that may be can offer me a job where I can cover for both roles (Coding and project management)?<p>I'd like to hear your point of view, maybe I'm missing something here. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Upvote: | 165 |
Title: This is my summary of Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. It's funny, you can replace censorship with anything really and still argue the statement is true.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Something that the world hasn't yet noticed but you think will be huge.
Upvote: | 347 |
Title: I've always felt pretty good about leaning on HN and Reddit for tech related news. As a SysAdmin some of the Reddit subs have been pretty decent for me in the past for getting news and opinions about AWS, RedHat, Python etc. But as I've gained more experience they seem quite repetitive and centred around people getting started and/or people getting certifications.<p>So where else do people look for general tech news? I'm pretty open to anything and as someone who is hoping to pivot more towards development and automation anything along those lines would be valuable.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: How do I learn to speak confidently in a group setting ? Sometimes when I start speaking and if people are silent or if I can not read their expressions, I start loosing confidence. If someone interruptus and start asking questions or criticizing, I loose my train of thought and start second guessing my ideas and opinions. I start to avoid participating or stop presenting my ideas. This is stopping me from growing in to a good engineer. How do I get better ?
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: I'm building an open source company (https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope) where we're very upfront about intent to eventually monetize via cloud-hosted version as many open source companies do.<p>We, in a way, have financial upside to people completing (some) of the issues we've posted, so sometimes it feels like it would be mutually beneficial to pass some of that through to the contributors as people contribute.<p>I'm wondering... if we added a "bounty/reward" in the issue text that said we'd pay $X amount for someone to resolve the issue, would that make people more or less likely to contribute?<p>On one hand it seems to go against the historic "vibe" of open-source, but on the other commercial open-source seems much more acceptable these days and would maybe be a nice bonus for the. contributor.<p>Any thoughts, experience, or ideas here? Anyone have experience really incentivizing people to contribute to open source?
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: I'm the founder of a tech startup in the field of telephony and we use Twilio for parts of our service.<p>A little over 3 hours ago our entire account was suspended without reason. We received an email stating that fact without further explanation.<p>Since then, we are trying to get in contact with them through every channel we could find: email, Twitter, LinkedIn, and I even tried emailing Jeff Lawson, their CEO. They don't have a support number we can call.<p>We are not a small customer and we have been with them for more than 6 years. It's deeply frustrating that despite that fact, we don't seem to matter to them at all.<p>If you work at Twilio or if you can help us get in touch with them, I'd be indebted to you forever!
Upvote: | 312 |
Title: I very recently realized that my product has more annual subscriptions than monthly ones. This was very surprising because it goes against everything I've read online. I offer only one tier that gives you access to all features; it costs $X/month or $10*X/year (the typical two-months-free-if-you-pay-annual thing you see everywhere). The split in subscribers between the monthly and annual plans is 44% and 56% respectively and I don't know how to interpret this information.<p>Does this mean I should simply increase prices? Is it fair to interpret this as the majority of the market saying "I'm happy to pay the highest tier your product offers"? I'm know that HN always suggests increasing prices all the time, but I'm wondering if my situation is an even stronger signal to increase prices.<p>Does this mean I should offer more than one tier and segment the market with different features for different prices?<p>My product isn't very niche or anything like that. It's a typical internet/web SaaS, so I believe most advice should be generally applicable.
Upvote: | 106 |
Title: I've been trying to get a job for over a year now. I've interviewed at Google, Facebook, Dell, Airbnb, Palantir. Too many to list. I've applied to companies from the whoishiring thread every monthly. workatastartup etc. Always ending with ghosting, or a impasive rejection letter. I tried improving my interview skills. Reading Meyers, Knuth etc. books. Reading advice on Reddit etc. But I still always get rejected. I worked at EA (QA on Apex Legends), and IBM (dev) at 18. Quit due to lowpay/no insurance. Got referrals etc. dropped out my freshmen year at a top 40 college. Was on the cyber security team etc. College was too expensive so I had to dropout.<p>Got a low level customer support role at Amazon. But I only made $15 with no health insurance. Found some flaws within the anti-fraud system at Amazon, and wrote a detailed e-mail to the VP in charge of the anti-fraud system. It was fixed by 1am. Also was concerned about support reps being able to access any customer's data simply by pressing 'bypass' on the security question promt page. I couldn't transfer internally until a year later as well. Would ping your manager each time you apply as well. Have to delete your emails constantly due to only having 1gb email space. Assessment was similar to the one I took for CIA. Cognitive based assessment.<p>I even got ghosted after a interview for a manual labor job at Home Depot. I tried cold contacting executives at a few companies. Got meeting with SVP at Dell, Cisco etc. was fruitless though. Spoofed number to bypass contact whitelist etc.<p>I welcome any and all advice that any of y'all could offer. Even if it's brutally candid. I need a job with decent health/dental insurance. Medicaid is useless. I might be homeless soon. I'm scared, and I don't know what to do. I'm afraid that I'll end up like Bill Landreth.<p>e: [email protected] will reply with a different email address.
Upvote: | 529 |
Title: We all know the most popular books for software engineers. One could just google it (e.g., Clean Code, DDIA, SICP, TAOCP, K&R books, Steven's books, etc.).<p>What are the not-so-popular-but-still-good books in computer science/software engineering out there?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Engineering is a team sport and leadership is a major dynamic necessary for groups to get stuff done together.<p>What was your biggest leadership challenge of your entire career? How did you overcome it? What happened then?
Upvote: | 260 |
Title: How does google know I bought Voltaren?<p>Is my bank purchase history shared with google somehow?<p>I guess it could just be coincidence?
Upvote: | 323 |
Title: As a Devops engineer, I have seen a multitude of stacks used in the projects I helped deploying.<p>As a former developer, I have had countless of project ideas and choosing the tech it's going to be written in has always been a [unnecessary?] long topic, often leading to procrastinating and giving up on the idea.<p>I often hear (and claim) the argument that "one should use the stack they [the team] are the most comfortable with". While I strongly agree, I find my personal [developer] stack to be slightly outdated (as a system engineer, lots of Python, some Node with Express, and some irrelevant languages - C, scripting, ...).<p>Focusing only on the development side, what would be YOUR goto stack for very quick prototyping/MVP, say for a webapp/saas service?<p>Long term code support doesn't matter much here, the goal being able to bring ideas to life very quickly. Let's say 10k users max (or much less).<p>Some recommendations I've had:<p>- Node: Nest + Next.js - modern and popular stack with quick prototyping possibilities<p>- Elixir/Phoenix - attractive ecosystem, developer oriented<p>- PHP: Laravel + Livewire/Blade - very quick prototyping and social features<p>- Python: Django - because I'm already very comfortable with Python
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Dear all,<p>I am aksing myself if cryptocurrencies provide ANY "real-economic value" AT ALL! I would be glad if anybody could convince me of APPLICATIONS where cryptocurrencies provide any real-economic value.<p>My thoughts:<p>- By "real economic" value creation I consider eg the introduction of the "SEPA Instant Credit Transfer" schemes (pan-European credit transfers in <10 sec). This creates real economic value by minimizing both (i) speed and (ii) fees. This really benefits general society.<p>- Q1. What is the benefit of using cryptocurrencies over such schemes? I see none. On the contrary, cryptocurrencies add an ADDITIONAL (and therefore, if not yielding a benefit, by definition unnecessary) LAYER.<p>- Q2. Why should cryptocurrencies exist at all? Every country already has its native currency. Why introduce another one? (In fact, why MULTIPLE ones?) Suppose you want to transfer USD-->EUR. Why transfer USD-->BTC-->EUR instead? This incurrs (i) 2 instead of 1 currency trafo risks and (ii) 2 trafo fees.<p>- Q3. "Smart contracts". All (democratic) countries have courts in place to settle legistlative disputes between two parties. What's wrong with this arrangement. Again, blockchain-based "smart contracts" would just an ADDITIONAL (unnecessary) LAYER.<p>Conclusions:<p>- ALL you need for the creation of future "real-economic value" is the INTERNET. Currencies are in place. Legislative institutions are in place. You just have to further digitize. There is no need to add additional (unnecessary) cryptocurrency layers.<p>Comments:<p>- I am not anti-crypto (owned quite a bit until I came to above conclusions, and definitiely consider it valuable at least from a academic perspective). I just can't see how "it is useful" beyond "speculation".<p>- I don't accept explanations like "Bitcoin is Gold 2.0", "Hedge against inflation" unless they are really founded. To me these sound just like made-up hype narratives.<p>Best regards
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hi All,<p>I’ve been working on Aidmin for quite some time now, and finally released a beta version of it.<p>I’ve focused most of my efforts on security, making sure that Aidmin can’t negatively impact your database. I talk about that a little bit in the Security Overview (<a href="https://github.com/aidmin-io/docs/blob/main/security-overview.md#abstractions-over-querying">https://github.com/aidmin-io/docs/blob/main/security-overvie...</a>).<p>I would love to know if Aidmin would be helpful at your workplace, and if not, why? Are there any features that are missing which would make it much more useful?<p>Thank you for checking out the project!
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I've been using AWS lambda a bit recently, mostly as a way to glue together various bits and pieces.<p>Maybe I'm doing this wrong but does anyone else find the experience to be really frustrating?<p>I can unit test bits of the code just fine, but at some point I always end up stuck in a slow feedback loop where I deploy the code, do some manual invoking, go and dig through the logs in CloudWatch, add another print statement in my lambda... and so on.<p>What I want is to run the lambdas locally, ideally more than one, and then exercise them with streams of test events (perhaps captured from a real environment). It would be quite cool if I could define BDD style tests around them too.<p>Anyone have any suggestions or share my frustrations?<p>I have heard localstack is quite good although I haven't given it a go yet. Would that work for me? I did try SAM but I was a bit underwhelmed and I don't want to use a separate IaC tool for these.<p>Alternatively, do other FaaS providers solve this problem?<p>Thanks for any help.
Upvote: | 422 |
Title: Several years ago, I had a client whose salespeople were using Excel to generate sales proposals. This was inefficient and the resulting documents looked awful, so I developed a new process for them using a no-code platform. It featured a web form that was tied to a workflow engine, and a fancy PDF got emailed to the customer to sign.<p>When the client loved the solution, I knew I was on to something. However, the no-code platform wasn't very customizable, so I decided to rebuild the process as a SaaS product. The client's CTO wanted in and we became cofounders.<p>Today, we passed the $2,500/mo. threshold, and couldn't be more excited! (<a href="https://pricetable.io" rel="nofollow">https://pricetable.io</a>)<p>Things started slow. I wasn't a software developer by trade, so I was constantly "drinking from the fire hose." Also, my cofounder and I had disagreements regarding features, UX, sales strategy... you name it. We never fought, but initially there was a sense of disconnect.<p>Then one day, everything clicked. His company started to pilot our product, and after a few months became our first customer. Receiving feedback from real users was a breath of fresh air. It was also really eye-opening to see which assumptions we had made were slam dunks and which were hilariously wrong!<p>Things might have been easier had I picked a more mainstream stack like Rails/Django, but once I got up to speed with Elixir and Vue, development became a Zen-like experience. Both communities are very welcoming and immensely helpful. HN has also been an extraordinary source of inspiration; reading success stories always makes me launch my code editor! Similarly, hearing from companies that didn't make it helps us keep our expectations realistic.<p>Now we shift focus to finding new clients. We have a very solid success story and metrics to back it up. However, both my partner and I still have day jobs we need the income from, and the product requires a fairly high-touch sales approach. Any advice would be appreciated. :)
Upvote: | 381 |
Title: I'm a 20 something software engineer building primarily web apps, apis, etc. Most of my career has been around cloud based hosting on AWS and friends. I run quite a few side projects and like to have space to experiment and try out new technologies and ideas.<p>For the past few years I've been doing this across AWS and DigitalOcean but I'm starting to think I can probably get more bang for my buck by colocating a rack server and spinning up a few VMs. The up front cost of a used rack server don't seem too bad and the monthly colocation costs are then much better than what you can get for the same price on a cloud provider.<p>I'm pretty happy to spend the extra time and energy on the management side since it's mostly side projects and experimentation that I'll be doing with it.<p>Before I take the plunge and give it a go, I'm wondering if there's any gotcha's I should know about that aren't immediately obvious to someone who's not done this before? I'll be looking to colocate probably a single 1U or 2U server somewhere in the UK if that makes any difference.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: The pandemic made more meetings necessary. Besides zoom fatigue there has been a lot of frustration by different team members that often meetings are not necessary, they could have been avoided with a briefing or people just join because they are afraid that they miss information if they don't. How do you handle meeting feedback for meetings by others to make sure it is not just a random meeting with talking, no agenda, no clear outcomes and mainly information sharing? How do you make your own meetings as efficient as possible?
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: Even though I'm mostly surfing the internet because of procrastination, most of the time I do find some interesting nuggets of wisdom, though I never make notes on them, do not reflect and forget most of them pretty soon.<p>Some time ago I've read a bit of pretty good advice: "Every time you encounter a piece of new information (lecture, blog post, book, etc), you should try to recall it immediately after". I understand the importance of active recall, and I've been pretty much hard on myself since most of the time I'm on auto-pilot just skimming everything.<p>Nevertheless, I struggle to make efforts to consistent active, mindful reading, questioning and engaging with information.<p>How to stop consuming and begin to think?
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: It's been three years since the last thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16166645), maybe there are more mature solutions now.<p>Interested to hear about current setups, and how it works for you.
Upvote: | 142 |
Title: Would like to make the homepage of my me-too FOSS project (a command-line static site generator (IT'S DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHERS, I SWEAR)) as sexy as possible. Even more than that I want it to be functional and clear. Would you mind linking to super-good home pages of CLI projects? For example, I think Jekyll's is pretty darn good but Hugo, which product I much prefer, has an oddly subpar home page.
Upvote: | 170 |
Title: Seems I can't link to the incident (gets marked as a deadlink), but here it is: https://status.auth0.com/incidents/zvjzyc7912g5?u=3qykby4vypfp
Upvote: | 195 |
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