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Title: As someone with varied interests, I feel myself being pulled in a thousand different directions of things I want to know more about. This leads to a sense of anxiety as I realize life is much too short to pursue all my interests.<p>Ideally, I'd make peace with that fact and choose one or two parts of the Universe to really care about, but my mind just doesn't seem to work that way. I'm not even sure I'd want it to.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Google suspended one of my android apps which had been previously checked and approved many times. It was on the store for just over 4 years.<p>It had about 12K active users, with 1-2 IAP sales per day. So people WERE using the app as it was intended to be used.<p>Then one day Google decided to suspended the app without warning because of 'deceptive behaviour'. Saying the app does not work as the title says.<p>The only changed made was we copied and older (previously approved) title and short description to the current one and submitted it. The title was still accurate and true to the app. This title and metadata had been used in the past in experiments too.<p>So that app has gone bust overnight and appealing makes no difference. They just say the same standard response to every email. Sorry we cant help you read this policy page".<p>They never actually tell you actual reason it was suspended. If their was a policy breach they just give it a broad heading without clarifying what the actual issue is.<p>This would not be an issue if you were just having fun, trying your luck or a sccammer / spammer. but if youre running it like a business spending thousands of dollars / pounds on marketing the app its a really big serious issue. All that effort and marketing spend is lost.<p>Independent developers are a key part of Google Play without whom there would be like a few dozen apps and games which users get bored of and most likely stop using the platform. Yet the indie and small developer has little voice. Appeals are like playing the lottery from what I have read online. If the real issue your app was suspended was due to a policy breach then its most important to make the developer understand without any doubt what that breach was. For one it saves a lot time for everyone, it gives a professional level of developer support and also means that the developer can focus on fixing the issue and is less likely to make it again.<p>So what can be done about this?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>r2t2 is a command-line tool for transmitting data through sound using the PC speaker on the motherboard. The name of the tool is a reference to the R2-D2 robot from Star Wars :)<p>In short, you type some message and it gets FSK modulated and transmitted via sound through the PC speaker. Note that this is the speaker/buzzer that you connect to the motherboard and not the regular speakers that you connect to the sound card.<p>I also made a simple web page that listens to the sound emitted by r2t2 and decodes the received messages. The page can be used by simply opening it on your phone and placing the phone near a computer/device that emits data with r2t2.<p>I made this tool mostly for fun, but I think it might have some useful applications too. The advantage of this type of communication is that the hardware is very cheap (~$1/speaker), does not require a sound card and the software is very simple and does not use any 3rd-party audio libraries.
Upvote: | 189 |
Title: I recently signed up for Comcast Xfinity internet (only one available in my area), and ever since I signed up I receive marketing emails almost daily that do not have an unsubscribe link because they are marked as "service related emails".<p>I've unsubscribed from every single email preference in my account, and even went so far to confirm with their support agents that I did it correctly.<p>However, almost daily I receive emails about "See what your wifi can do" or "Don't forget about these new features" etc, that are <i>clearly</i> marketing and not service related. Browsing forums online it seems there are countless others who have the same complaints as me.<p>So, my main question is, how can a company get away with this when it is blatantly in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act? Is it truly just too difficult for any individual to hire a lawyer and go up against Goliath? Does the CAN-SPAM act have any loopholes I'm not aware of that would allow this? I'm genuinely curious to this, and do not want to come off as just an angry customer ranting.
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: I know [RethinkDB][1] used to do this with their SQL-like ReQL language, but I looked around a bit and can't find much else about it - and I would have thought it would be more common.<p>I'm more interesting in queries with joins and doing it efficiently, instead of just tracking updates to tables that are modified, and re-rerunning the entire query.<p>If we think about modern frontends using SQL-based backends, essentially every time we render, its ultimately the result of a tree of SQL queries (queries depend on results of other queries) running in the backend. Our frontend app state is just a tree of materialized views of our database which depend on each other. We've got a bunch of state management libraries that deal with trees but they don't fit so well with relational/graph-like data.<p>I came across a Postgres proposal for [Incremental View Maintenance][2] which generates a diff against an existing query with the purpose of updating a materialized view. Oracle also has [`FAST REFRESH`][3] for materialized views.<p>I guess it's relatively easy to do until you start needing joins or traversing graphs/hierarchies - which is why its maybe avoided.<p>EDIT: [Materialize][1] looks interesting in this space: "Execute streaming SQL Joins" but more focused on the event streams rather than general-purpose DML/OLTP.<p>[1]: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb_rebirth<p>[2]: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Incremental_View_Maintenance<p>[3]: https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/DWHSG/refresh.htm#DWHSG8361<p>[4]: https://materialize.com/
Upvote: | 200 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>So far in my software engineering career, I’ve worked at a product focused company and at a media company (building internal APIs/tools/etc.). I’m interviewing at a small software company that’s more of a consulting shop / contractor. Teams have several active projects, and it sounds like most contracts last for less than a year, with several multi-year engagements mixed in.<p>So my question is: What should I be considering before moving into this sort of work? A variety of projects sounds like it could be engaging, but on the other hand, maybe I’ll get bored writing the same boilerplate over and over? It also sounds like consulting has the potential to expose me to a wider variety of technologies and languages, which I see as a plus. But I’m worried that being involved with shorter term projects means I won’t get the chance to gain _deep_ expertise in any one thing, which might hurt my future job prospects?<p>Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: I have doubts about my intelligence. I'm trying to get a Data Science internship and had several interviews. All of them were on combinatorics/algorithms, and I failed them, though they were relatively simple. I’ve always been bad at this kind of stuff: I have trouble focusing, especially paying attention to details. I also forget things all the time<p>I’m a 3rd-year student at a university which is considered prestigious here (Russia), but getting in was rather because of my high conscientiousness, not intelligence. I’ve always been average academically, but when needed, simply outworked everybody and got decent grades. It doesn’t seem to work this time. In my country, there aren’t many DS internships, so if I fail a few more interviews, not sure if I can find new opportunities soon. It makes me sad, as I have to find a job for this summer<p>Recent average grades at uni/failed interviews in combination with all above made me seriously question my intelligence. There is no Mensa club in my country, but I tried to find reliable IQ tests online: got 86 and 135 on two different ones, have no idea what to make of it. My degree is in economics/mathematics, but I’ve been programming since 16, so I thought DS would suit me as a combination of both. In general, I just really love building stuff with my hands (got some personal projects which employers liked), and making smth with ML seemed cool<p>Is there a way to tell if I’m simply not smart enough for this? It’s not just about interview questions: I genuinely feel I’m thinking too slow in general, always felt. Should I try to move to other fields? I’d be glad to find any other technical internship, at least for now, but I have no CS degree which is a requirement for them.<p>I would welcome any advice because the situation kind of depresses me
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: What: Increase software developer salaries in Western Europe<p>How: Whenever you get an offer (e.g., via Linkedin) you are not interested in, reply with a "Sorry, but I'm not looking for something new unless the salary range is around 90K - 95K Euro/year)<p>Who: Senior developers working in Western Europe who are not looking currently for a job.<p>Why: Why not?<p>I started doing this last month.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: A friend and I started taking up mobile and web development projects on Upwork last year. For the first few months, we took up a few small projects ~$500-1k to build up our reputation. We managed to build a decent profile with favorable reviews on the site. Now, we get 20-30 invites per week from clients looking to hire freelancers/agencies on the platform, and on average, we make around 5-6k per month. I want to get some practical tips and strategies on how to grow our business<p>1. Right now, almost all the clients that we acquire are through Upwork. We are a bit nervous about the risk of getting kicked from the platform in the future for any reason. Not that we are doing anything that violates their terms, but just in case. We don't want to be over-reliant on one channel. What are our alternatives? I know few other sites like Fiverr, Freelancer, etc., but supposedly they are not that great in comparison.<p>2. We are most certainly leaving money on the table because we cannot handle all the job requests we get. We want to grow our team, but hiring developers in the U.S is not an option, given the high wage demands. What country is most suitable for hiring some good developers at reasonable rates/wages and being compliant with U.S labor and tax laws at the same time?<p>3. What are some of the hot areas that we should build our expertise in besides mobile and web app development to expand our business?<p>4. How do we actively look for bigger companies that may be interested in offloading some of their work to a small team like ours? What are some efficient cold emailing strategies? Should we hire salespeople for that?<p>5. Is there a particular type of team structure or hierarchy that works well for services as opposed to in a product company? What roles should we prioritize in hiring?<p>6. Finally, Any tips on how to build web presence?<p>Thanks in advance for your inputs. HN community is incredible!
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Just discovered: Click with right mouse button on the address bar and select "Always show full URLs".
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: I'm running a startup and we're storing north of 10PB of data and growing. We're currently on AWS and our contract is up for renewal. I'm exploring other storage solutions.<p>Min requirements of AWS S3 One Zone IA (<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/?nc=sn&loc=3" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/?nc=sn&loc=3</a>)<p>How would you store >10PB if you'd be in my shoes? Thought experiment can be with and without data transfer cost our of current S3 buckets.
Please mention also what your experience is based on. Ideally you store large amounts of data yourself and speak of first hand experience.<p>Thank you for your support!! I will post a thread once we got to a decision on what we ended up doing.<p>Update:
Should have mentioned earlier, data needs to be accessible at all time. It’s user generated data that is downloaded in the background to a mobile phone, so super low latency is not important, but less than 1000ms required.<p>The data is all images and videos, and no queries need to be performed on the data.
Upvote: | 307 |
Title: I recently had my life’s YouTube channel(5yr/20k subs) deleted overnight with no possible way to recover or even get in contact with support.<p>You can read the full story here: https://twitter.com/gabnworba/status/1384242020659519494?s=21<p>I’m wondering if anyone here went through anything similar and/or found a way to get in touch with anyone at YouTube.<p>I don’t have the social reach to get in touch and HN is my last hope at maybe finding someone on the inside to hear my story.<p>Any help is greatly appreciated.
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: I have reached the end of my rope trying to get Google support to understand our issue.<p>We were using Azlo as our business bank account, but they got shutdown after being acquired. We switched to Mercury and got our account setup.<p>We had no issues getting Apple to add and verify our new bank account, and we are receiving payments as expected.<p>With Google, we were getting an "Unknown error" when trying to add our Mercury bank account. Their support initially said they had to escalate it, but it would take no longer than 7 days. We waited more than 7 days for a reply. The reply was for us to install the Google Pay app on our phone to add the bank account. The instructions were to try to send money to someone, and it would prompt to add a bank account.<p>I replied saying that it felt very weird to use a consumer facing app with our developer account, but did it. However, it still did not show up as a payout option in either Admob or Google Play developer console.<p>After more waiting, I asked for a status update, and was told this:<p>"While investigating this issue, our specialist team discovered unusual activity on your Google Pay profile. So they temporarily suspended it for your security and canceled any pending transactions."<p>Fine, we can do that, but what they didn't say is that when they suspended the account all existing subscriptions would expire due to payment being declined. We found out when an end user contacted Google Play Support and was told there is an issue with the app developer's account (us).<p>My co-founder is based in Japan, and I'm in the US. We have a single account for the company, and he logged into it from Japan, which I guess triggered the "unusual activity".<p>Our users are angry at us for not accepting their payments and allowing them to use our service. This feels horrible because I understand the users' frustration, but there is nothing I can do until Google looks at our verification documents.
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: I've been coding since I was 11-12 years and I can remember the incredible amount of hours I was able to put in just because I was completely zoned out by the fascination of coding.<p>Now I'm 30 and I grew to be, at least according to market, capable (scala/backend) software engineer, but I no longer take any joy in coding. It's been around 12 years I've been coding professioanly (I had my first part time job at 15), and I can build a variety of interesting things.<p>My biggest problem is I can't find motivation and focus to do it. I don't enjoy work, and I'd like to WANT to build new things, just like when I was 12, but I just don't care anymore. I pretty much count down hours when I don't need to code (when does my job finish). When I finally manage to overcome exceptional effort and start coding something of my own, it's usually a lot of fun, and there are some sparkles of fun, but it never turns into fully fledged flame that I used to have.<p>And the next day it's the same again. For the most days I just can't overcome the lazyness to do something useful with my skills. I have balanced life, even considering corona, but overall I would just like to be fascinated by tech as I used to be, and toying with it would be something that I'd look forward to and take as a relaxation instead of something that saps the last pieces of energy that I have from work. I used to be like that, but last few years (5+) it's no more.<p>Any tips on how to perhpas change perspetcive, habits, or what to read, so I can enjoy the skillset that I had developed over the years rather than feel miserable?
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: I am a backend developer and would like to learn about UI design for modern web applications. I'm thinking of aspects like color schemes, font sizes, where to place the elements, spacing between elements, interaction and feedback etc.<p>Are there well known books, courses or video series that teach web application UI design in a systematic way?
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: Methods and systems for grasping, understanding, and making sense of any general knowledge or information.
Upvote: | 136 |
Title: There's currently an article on the front page about the death of UML[2]. While UML's inheritance diagrams have been dead to me for a long time, I still like the sequence diagrams.<p>Besides that I sometimes still draw ERDs and I love JJG's Visual Vocabulary[1] for drawing "interaction diagrams".<p>What types of diagrams do you use with your team?<p>[1]: <a href="http://jjg.net/ia/visvocab" rel="nofollow">http://jjg.net/ia/visvocab</a>
[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26934577" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26934577</a>
Upvote: | 241 |
Title: I just want to know how do people deal with failure and crushed dreams?
As I grow older, I feel like I am settling for "mediocrity" more and more, every venture I tried didn't succeed, so I am stuck doing a job I don't like and asking myself on what did I spend my life on?<p>Any advice is welcome.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Just received below email -<p>---<p>Hello,<p>Your email address used for HN Replies (hnreplies.com) notifications has likely been leaked.<p>I was notified today that a user of this site received a spam email at an email address used solely for hnreplies.com notifications. I investigated how this could have occurred. For a period of several days earlier this year, a .git directory on the VPS hosting this site was exposed to the internet by a configuration mistake, providing enough information to allow an attacker to access the site's database.<p>This website stores only two pieces of personal information: a username to follow, and an email address to notify of new comments for that username. This website does not require passwords, so you do not need to change any passwords.<p>If you'd like to unsubscribe from HNReplies.com, which will permanently remove your email address from the database, you may click here: http://www.hnreplies.com/?unsubscribe=[hash]<p>I'm sorry that this incident occurred. The configuration mistake was fixed and passwords changed. If you have any questions about this email, you can reply to this email to contact me.<p>Kind regards,
Dan Grossman
Creator of hnreplies.com
Upvote: | 137 |
Title: Please. I instinctively go on HN all the time even when I'm in bed. I try to keep all my apps in dark mode and for the most part I've changed all my frequent apps except HN. It hurts my eyes. It hurts my soul a little bit. I like how the app hasn't changed for forever years, but please for the sake of my panache. I'll even built it myself if I could submit a PR.
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: I’m reading tons of articles about remote work and I’m curious how the HN commmunity thinks about it.
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: Just wondering how many projects people are working on simultaneously.<p>Also looking for any insight into your view on this. Are you spread too thin? Do you just have one big project and yearning for more diversity?<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: I am sick of doing web dev and I feel like my career is stuck. Not learning anything new and not making much money either. But more importantly, not doing anything interesting/fun.<p>Someone suggested I try salesforce. I looked around a bit - it has tons of certifications (red flag?), doesn't seem hard to learn. Looks like there are enough jobs, as of now.<p>So my question is - can this be a long term career? at least 8-10 years? Are there interesting projects to work on, or is it similar to doing CRUD web development again?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: What is your advice to a developer that enjoys their current job and wants to continue to WFH post-pandemic.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Hi, I am currently a junior backend developer working on a lot of big data stuff at the moment and the technologies we use such as Kubernetes, Spark, Kafka, EMR, Redis are all very overwhelming.<p>I was wondering what is the best way to learn more about these distributed systems and form better mental models when dealing with them. Any resources or tips would be appreciated.<p>Thank you in advance! :)
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: I'll start:
Co-working $300/month
Bubble.io $150/month (6 apps in production)
Descript.com $30/month<p>How about you?
Upvote: | 81 |
Title: If yes, what are they?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi HN! We are Alexander, Justin, and Trevor from Porter. We're building a Kubernetes-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) that deploys applications on your own cloud provider. Specifically, Porter provisions a Kubernetes cluster in your own cloud account and lets you deploy and manage applications on it through a Heroku-like PaaS layer. And although applications deployed via Porter run on Kubernetes, no knowledge of Kubernetes is necessary to use Porter. Here is our repository (<a href="https://github.com/porter-dev/porter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/porter-dev/porter</a>) and website (<a href="https://getporter.dev" rel="nofollow">https://getporter.dev</a>). There was also an HN thread about us a few weeks ago, posted by someone who discovered us (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26587637" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26587637</a> - thank you OP!).<p>We have known each other since high school/college and have been working on projects together full-time since 2020. When YC funded us in S20, we were building a remote development platform for teams on Kubernetes (kinda like repl.it but for microservices in particular). This was a more enterprisey product and we got burnt out by the slow sales/iteration cycle (we had zero experience with sales, let alone enterprises). So we decided to pivot a few months after demo day.<p>When we were struggling to get traction with the original direction, we learned a ton by talking to engineering teams that are using Kubernetes (k8s). One thing we noticed is that there's an increasing number of startups who start on a PaaS like Heroku and end up migrating to k8s later as their applications “grow out” of Heroku, due to constraints in networking, performance, security, etc.<p>While Kubernetes is great, it incurs a ton of engineering overhead. For teams who don’t know k8s at all, learning everything from scratch is daunting and time-consuming. Even if there are devops engineers on the team who are familiar with kubernetes, adopting k8s slows down developer velocity because other developers always need the devops engineers’ help to troubleshoot the slightest application issues. While we were working on our previous product, we discovered that some companies even built internal development platforms (IdP) that are much like Porter, in order to help developers deploy and troubleshoot their applications without help from the devops engineers. Our goal with Porter is to create a platform that is truly as easy to use as Heroku, without compromising the flexibility of k8s.<p>There are many self-hosted PaaS's that came before Porter, such as Flynn, Tsuru, Dokku, and CapRover, which were all created before Kubernetes changed the DevOps landscape. While these are great lightweight options for smaller projects, a PaaS built on top of the k8s ecosystem comes with many benefits such as scalability, stability, configurability and interoperability across cloud providers. We believe that k8s is the best system to deliver a PaaS on, and we’re not alone - many of the new hosted PaaS’s are also built on top of k8s, although that’s an implementation detail that is usually not advertised to the user. We want to not only deliver the PaaS experience on top of Kubernetes, but also give users full ownership/control of the underlying k8s cluster by running it in their own cloud.<p>How it works: we spin up a k8s cluster in your own AWS/GCP/DO account and let you deploy and manage applications on it through a Heroku-like abstraction layer. For teams using a PaaS like Heroku, Porter can be a drop-in replacement that you don’t “grow out” of. And although our abstraction layer covers most use cases, we let those who want to customize go freely under the hood to interact with the underlying cluster. In each cloud provider, we provision the standard managed k8s offering (e.g. EKS/GKE/DigitalOcean Kubernetes), so the clusters we provision are perfectly compatible with kubectl and any other k8s tooling out there. It’s even possible to connect Porter to an existing k8s cluster—this isn’t the primary use case we’re building for at the moment, but we’d love to discuss it in the comments if anyone is interested.<p>In terms of implementation, we’ve built Porter around the Helm ecosystem, and every application you deploy is packaged as a Helm chart. For those who want more visibility, we’ve built features like “devops mode” that lets you visualize and manage the Helm charts and its underlying k8s objects.<p>We’ve published Porter to be fully open source under the MIT license. We provide a hosted version that is currently in open beta, but it's also possible to run Porter locally. It’s worth clarifying that on the hosted version, the applications you deploy through Porter still run in your own cloud. What is hosted by us is only the PaaS layer, not your applications. We plan to release a self-hostable version of the PaaS layer itself in the near future, packaged as a Helm chart. We do not support this yet because self-hosting the PaaS layer inevitably incurs devops overhead and requires some knowledge of k8s, and we are currently focused on those who just want the Heroku experience without having to deal with k8s in any way.<p>In terms of pricing, we are still figuring out the specifics. Our goal is to not charge individual developers/small startups but instead draw revenue from larger teams based on usage, and with premium features that are geared towards collaboration. Existing PaaS’s like Heroku/Netlify have solid examples of such premium features - review apps, pipelines, and Role Based Access Control are a few examples that we also consider to be potential premium features on Porter. That said, we are currently focused on laying out the stable foundation of the platform, so these premium features are further down on our roadmap.<p>Thank you so much for reading and we'd love it if you could give it a try: <a href="https://github.com/porter-dev/porter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/porter-dev/porter</a>. We'll be hanging out in the comments to hear any ideas and feedback you may have. If you have any experiences related to what we’ve built, we would love it if you could share them below. Very much looking forward to learning from you!
Upvote: | 239 |
Title: Reputation management companies are hired to clean up Google search results for their clients. They usually send scary sounding emails, or letters demanding some "unauthorized", "sensitive" or "threatening" content (created by a user) be removed. They can't use a DMCA notice because it isn't a copyright complaint. If you do not give in to their demands, they will send the same scary sounding notices to abuse@[host], abuse@[registrar] and abuse@[dns provider].<p>The most unscrupulous reputation management company I've ever dealt with (izoologic) has apparently figured out that "phishing" is the best way to get what they want. They claimed a user-generated page on my site was phishing for credentials (because it happened to mention their client's name and had a login form on it). I got this from Namecheap:<p>"""
We are writing from the Namecheap Legal and Abuse team.<p>It has come to our attention that phishing content is displayed on your website at the link:<p>[URL to an entirely innocent page]<p>As a reminder, phishing is expressly prohibited by our Universal Terms of Service Agreement, paragraph 7. "Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)" at https://www.namecheap.com/legal/universal/universal-tos.aspx<p>We need you to act promptly in removing the reported content within the next 24 hours. While we always try to avoid having to interrupt our customers' services, if we receive no response from you or no action is taken within the mentioned time frame, unfortunately, we will be forced to suspend the domain until the matter is resolved.
"""<p>From my logs, I can see Namecheap didn't even visit the page before requiring me to take it down within 24 hours. If I had been on vacation, apparently my domain would have been suspended.<p>If you accept user generated content, you need to be vigilant about handling these weaponized abuse complaints. They can take down your business in a day if you are not paying attention.
Upvote: | 241 |
Title: I would like to transition from my FTE position to a specialized consulting/contracting business that I have been operating for the past several years with annual revenues of $10-12k. Revenues are low because there is not enough time in the day to maintain both FTE and consulting. If you made a transition, how did you do it? I believe I could simply quit and then hold my nose and jump in feet first, expecting a ramp-up time where I draw from savings and hope for a reasonably quick recovery of income. But I suspect there are more strategic options.
Upvote: | 115 |
Title: A recent thread talked about a how to site that was well done but hadn’t been updated in a good 5 years. I’d love to have a list of Linux how to sites and reference#s for how to articles and just basic documentation from general, to distro specific, to scripting. As a macOS user, it’d be cool if there was another set of how to and reference sites that are up to date covering terminal for macOS, including using Zsh which the shell Mac is transitioning to.<p>It woukd be kid of cool to do a lot of stuff on the Mac command line. If you got really good at it, you’d be a far, far more efficient Mac user. Night and day difference.<p>Any suggestions on macOS terminal how to and doc sites, including ones that dive into zsh beyond just recommending Oh My Zsh, which is awesome, but it would be useful to find articles that dive deeper beyond just how to add on to Zsh to make it better automatically.
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: HN's second-chance pool is a way to give links a second chance at the front page. Moderators and a small number of reviewers go through old submissions looking for articles that are in the spirit of the site—gratifying intellectual curiosity—and which seem like they might interest the community. These get put into a hopper from which software randomly picks one every so often and lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page. If it interests the community, it gets upvoted and discussed; if not, it falls off.<p>We started doing this in late 2014. There's an explanation at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380</a>, with links back to others. We've talked about it in comments and whatnot (<a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22second%20chance%20pool%22&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>, <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20re-up&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>), and have intended to publish the list, but only did so recently. We're slow.<p>If you see a submission that didn't get attention and which you think is particularly good for HN, please tell us at [email protected]! We love getting those requests and usually add them to the pool. It's fine if it's your own article, but we like it better when it's just something you ran across and recognized as good. That's more the kind of interest that HN is for.<p>A related list is <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/invited" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/invited</a>. Those are old submissions that we ran across and thought deserved attention, so we emailed and asked the submitter to repost it. Yesterday's top story was one of these (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26982286" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26982286</a>). They all go into the second-chance pool, but maybe it's interesting to see them broken out as a subset too. (If you don't have an email address in your profile, please put one in so we can send you repost invites!)<p>If you read the old explanations I linked to, you'll see that the original plan was to turn this system into software that anyone can participate in, likely as a new way to earn karma: users who discover second-chance links that hit the jackpot (that is, which interest the community) would get karma along with the original submitter. That is still the plan! We're just slow.<p>I think that's about everything there is to say about the second-chance pool. Questions, feedback, ideas, and views are welcome as ever. And please, everybody keep an eye out for obscure, out-of-the-way stories that got overlooked and let us know when you run across them. It's one of the best things you can do to help make this place more interesting. Best of all are the kind that can't be predicted from any existing sequence: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=can%27t%20predict%20sequence%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...</a>.
Upvote: | 543 |
Title: I've seen a couple of projects using CI to build the project and run their test suite.<p>All of them have been interpreted languages like PHP, Python and Ruby. Their builds and tests took between 30-45 minutes. As far as project size and complexity, these were projects that were built and maintained by four person teams over the course of 3-5 years, so it's not like they were massive services with hundreds of developers.<p>I'm still kind of new, I worked at a couple internships and I've been working full time for a year so I might be totally wrong but I feel like these CI pipelines could be optimized to run faster.
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: Hey HN<p>I’m looking for advice and/or suggestions on how to “lockdown/brick” my mobile (iPhone 8) phone to only be able to do a select number of things.<p>I currently suffer with OCD and anxiety, and my addictions to my phone is making me lethargic and causing regular migraines and eye strain issues.<p>I do have a second “dumb phone” (Nokia flip 2720) but due to having a “mobile only” bank account I have to have access to my iPhone.<p>I only really want to be able to text (not WhatsApp) call, and have access to 3 banking apps. I have tried everything, but when I’m feeling “good” or sometimes when I’m feeling rubbish - I will always end up downloading “scroller” apps - Twitter, Instagram, Shopping apps etc - and I quickly waste days and days hooked to it, before prying myself away from it again.<p>Any advice would be hugely beneficial.<p>Thank you
Upvote: | 257 |
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: | 53 |
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: | 128 |
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=27025920" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025920</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025921" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025921</a>
Upvote: | 328 |
Title: It looks like about half of the submissions on /newest are about Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing. All of the submissions are flagged/dead. Why is this? I'm not looking to discuss the substance of the articles in this post — just trying to understand how the divorce of one of the biggest names in tech is not allowed on HN.<p>By contrast, there are many non-flagged/dead articles about Jeff Bezos' divorce.
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: Let’s assume I asked this question in 2010. Your answer should’ve have been cryptocurrency. It is now 2021, what’s the next big thing?
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Context: Recently I've noticed that almost every search ends with ' reddit'. This is because msotly everything on google search shows either ads or content farm articles and listicles.<p>This is also slowly getting into more niche topics too.<p>Does anyone else feel the same?
Upvote: | 131 |
Title: I recently spoke to a woman in her 40s or 50s who would like to go back to work after two decades of not being in the workforce. She worked for the US army as a programmer before she had kids, but took a long time off to raise them. Just talking to her I could tell she was quick, conscientious, and would learn fast, but she doesn't know current frameworks in depth. (For reference, she learned COBOL in college.) She's also looking for flexible or part-time hours, so that she can be home for her kids.<p>I think there are a lot of companies that would like to hire people like this - not FAANG perhaps, but smaller companies who would want someone smart and with life experience, and are willing to train a new employee in their specific technologies. She'd be happy to do a trial period or internship first. But we weren't sure how to reach such companies. Does anyone have experience finding jobs that would fit this profile? Where would you look?<p>(If you would like to hire such a worker in the NY area or remotely, PM me!)
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Okay, so, you've got ideas in your to-do list probably if you're anything like me.<p>I want to know how do you find the time to build that idea out and even during that process of building, do some of the good ideas get left out? Is it partially because you don't have the right kind of developers to work with? If you had your developers friends working with you, would you get more products built?<p>How do you tackle this problem generally and ultimately, what does the process ends up looking like when you turn that to-do list idea into a product?
Upvote: | 141 |
Title: When you send a proposal for a project to a new client, what are the headings? How long? How pretty is it? Can you share an example?<p>I've been freelancing for a few years now, and am pretty ad hoc about the proposals that I write up. I'd love to see examples of how others approach this.<p>FWIW, my headings are usually:
- background (summarises my understanding of what problem the client has)
- vision (what they have asked me to build, in a sentence or two)
- solution (gets more specific about technologies, etc)
- features (details the specific things it needs to do)
- other considerations (browser targets, mobile, data management etc)
- out of scope
- optional extras (sometimes extra sections describing bits that they would have to pay extra for)
- pricing and timeframe: how much I'm charging, how quickly I agree to deliver, and milestones for payment/review<p>I don't think it's perfect. In particular, I think I'm missing a good way to communicate the quality I'm (not) promising, what kinds of iterations/feedback/bugs will be acted on, and various other assumptions.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: As above - what strategies have people got for attracting senior engineers to join a company full-time, when it's pretty much impossible to match day rates pro-rata in the contract market for anyone other than the FAANG's?
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: If not, what alternatives have you found?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I disabled third-party cookies option in my chrome browser and yet cookies are being set from google.com and accounts.google.com domain to other sites like upwork.com.<p>see screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zEm2r4Y.png<p>To see for yourself, disable third party cookies in chrome browser -> open upwork.com -> see cookies info.<p>As per my understanding third-party cookies are those created by domains other than the one the user is visiting at the time. So, why google.com domain cookies are being set on upwork.com?<p>Update: This issue doesn't happen in Firefox.
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: I know the question doesn’t quite make sense - SICP is the SICP of web dev. What I mean is just, are there any great books on the fundamental principles of web development? Books that would make you better at programming for the web no matter what language or framework you work in.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Either here or on reddit I've seen plenty of people mention the option of working as a contractor as a viable option.<p>I have been working as a developer for 12 years. For the first six years of my career I wrote C++ / Python for a finance-adjacent firm.<p>The second half of my career has been the typical full-stack developer stuff. Django / Pyramid / SQLAlchemy backend and several different front-end frameworks like Vue and React.<p>It's enough to say that I'm a generalist and a decent enough programmer.<p>I'd love the ability to work a contract for 6 months to a year and then take a few months off between gigs. But when I search for contract opportunities they seem somewhat rare. Additionally, the contract gigs I find seem to be seeking people who would prefer full-time employment but would settle for the contract as a sort of 'probationary' measure. I never seem to find opportunities where it is seen by all parties as a temporary placement.<p>Am I looking in the wrong place? Are there certain employment agencies that I am not aware of that have these in abundance? Am I lacking in experience? If so, what do I need to do?<p>I live in NYC. I would think that would be helpful but I'm not sure.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: If your status page returns a 502 at the same time that your app returns a 502, you might be in trouble. https://status.discord.com/ really should be on a different domain. Of course the naked 502 from CloudFlare is enough to tell me that there is an outage, but overall this is probably not the ideal way of doing things. Domains are cheap. Get a status page with a different one (or a hosted service).
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: As I get older, I am realising there are tons of things I do not know. I am constantly meeting people younger than me that just blow me away with their smarts.<p>What, is anything can I do to improve memory, intellect, acuity etc..
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: I was reading this article (https://themdpreneur.com/purchase-future-cash-stop-buying-more-stuff/) on HN the other day and it talks about a hypothetical person who buys a condo and rents it out, or a vending machine and has it serviced, and a website that brings in income.<p>I come from a fairly traditional investing background of purchasing equities or ETFs as my primary investments, and am interested in learning what else is out there in a non-traditional sense like the above?<p>What other kind of passive income or cash flow helping investments are out there?
Upvote: | 164 |
Title: I'm trying to get help anywhere I can and a friend recommended I post this here.<p>My business has used AWS for around 3 years and our normal usage is $1k per month in EC2 and S3. In early March a hacker accessed our AWS account through my login via an IP address in Austria (I'm in Austin, TX). They spun up 3 large instances of EC2 which began charging us $1k-$2k per day.<p>In mid-April, while reviewing our books for the month of March, I saw a $26k charge from AWS. I thought it was a typo as $2.6k and asked the accountant. She stated that was the correct amount. I immediately got my dev team involved and we discovered the 3 instances to which we did not have any access to and stopped them immediately.<p>I opened a support case immediately which somehow got posted twice. Because the case was posted twice, the support team marked both cases as duplicates. I reopened one of the cases, it was resolved again as a duplicate. This has now happened several times.<p>I Googled around looking for a way to escalate this matter and found the following emails and cc'ed them on May 5th with an urgent plea via the original support case thread with another summary of the issue and links to my cases with my phone number to no avail.
[email protected]
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected]<p>That email was ignored and I'm not sure where I can turn to next. I've tweeted about this and tagged AWS here - https://twitter.com/csakon/status/1391873413107617799?s=20<p>I'm not sure where to go next, can anyone give me any advice?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Hi everyone! My name’s Aly, and I’m the founder of UPchieve (<a href="https://upchieve.org" rel="nofollow">https://upchieve.org</a>). I’m here with UPchieve’s CTO, Dave (thedevelopnik). We’re an edtech nonprofit that provides free, 24/7 online tutoring to low-income high school students.<p>The idea for UPchieve was based on my own personal experience as a low-income student. I was raised by a single mom who was an immigrant to the US and often couldn’t help me with schoolwork and applying to college. So I went to a community college, and from there it took me 6 years to transfer to and graduate from a 4-year university.<p>College is not the only way for a low-income student to achieve upward mobility, but research shows it’s one of the most reliable. That was the story for me, too. Transferring to Penn helped me get a job on the trading floor at J.P. Morgan, where I immediately made 3x as much as my mom straight out of college.<p>I soon began looking for ways to give back and help other students like me get to college. Volunteering as a math tutor seemed like a great choice because I had tutored my way through HS and college and knew a lot about it, but I couldn’t find any existing volunteer opportunities that fit with my work schedule.<p>That’s when I first came up with the idea for UPchieve: an open source platform that could meet the needs of both younger-student-me (who needed help with schoolwork and college apps, often late at night in my home) and older-volunteer-me (who needed a flexible and convenient way to give back). Students can use UPchieve 24/7 to request and get paired with a live tutor in 5 mins, and volunteers select their availability and then wait for a text notifying them that a student needs their help. You can see a demo of both the student and volunteer side of the platform here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SufRUje0XiM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SufRUje0XiM</a><p>Over the next two years, I realized that many other people cared about what I was doing and wanted to volunteer to help build the platform and tutor students. I also learned more about the state of education in the US and discovered that the gap in college completion rates between low- and high-income students hadn’t changed at all in 10+ years! This led me to grow more and more passionate about both the need for and potential of a platform like UPchieve. In 2018, I finally quit my job at J.P. Morgan to work on UPchieve full-time, with the new goal of scaling free tutoring to all low-income HS students across the US.<p>UPchieve is completely free for eligible students, and it only costs us $10 to give one student an entire year of unlimited academic support. For reference: online tutoring companies charge students $35 per hour on average. Other existing nonprofit tutoring models are prohibitively expensive and difficult to scale, due to factors like 1) cost of paid tutors, 2) in-person delivery, and 3) long-term commitments required of students and tutors.<p>We’re also working to become 100% self-sustaining (i.e., not dependent on donations). Companies like Verizon and Goldman Sachs pay us to provide virtual volunteer opportunities to their employees. Many big companies have budgets set aside specifically for volunteer opportunities because studies have found that employees who volunteer are more likely to stay at the company.<p>So far, we’ve helped more than 7,000 students and matched more than 30K on-demand requests for tutoring. My favorite part of my job has been reading the hundreds of comments we get from students each month, telling us how we’re helping them kick ass in their classes and that they can’t imagine life without us. It’s literally the best feeling ever. You can see some of my favorite student feedback here: <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1w3nqHSNiP-2270_Qxjvy367oRAU9Cn03gSJh7dGT5Lw/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1w3nqHSNiP-2270_Qxjvy...</a><p>If you like what we’re doing and want to help, please consider signing up to volunteer—we especially need more statistics, calculus, and physics tutors! Use this link to sign up and you’ll bypass our waitlist: <a href="https://app.upchieve.org/sign-up" rel="nofollow">https://app.upchieve.org/sign-up</a>. Alternatively, you can also support our work by donating at <a href="https://secure.givelively.org/donate/upchieve" rel="nofollow">https://secure.givelively.org/donate/upchieve</a>. We’re currently covering 35% of our budget with revenue, but we still need additional funding to reach sustainability. We’d be so grateful for your support!<p>Finally, we’d love to hear your thoughts on what we’re doing! Please leave a comment with your feedback, ideas, and even criticisms—we can’t fix it if we don’t know about it. :) Thank you!
Upvote: | 160 |
Title: The New York Times published an article that criticizes dark patterns.<p>They call out several companies that uses dark patterns, but fail to mention how hard it is to unsubscribe to the New York Times (only by talking to a person).<p>That's unfair. It's ok for the NYT to write an article about it. I'm sure the reporter is not responsible for NYT's unsubscribe flow. But if you call-out other companies, have the decency to mention your own company.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/dark-pattern-internet-ecommerce-regulation.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/dark-pattern-inte...</a>
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Hi HN. Like many of you I am working remotely due to COVID.<p>I want to continue working remotely, but my job wants me in the office next month.<p>How would you negotiate this with your employer?<p>Have any of you already had this conversation? How did it go?
Upvote: | 370 |
Title: Me and a friend are setting up a co-living business catering for short-term stays by digital nomads, and one of the many questions we're trying to answer is where in the world is the best place to site it.<p>(We also have a ton of other questions, and it would be super useful if anyone cared to help answer them by spending 3 mins on this quick survey: https://theintro.typeform.com/to/DUSbNl5v)
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hi HN. I'm writing you because I'm a bit miffed about my first electric toothbrush that my dentist prescribed me. It's called a Philips Sonicare DiamondClean and it cost me $180. When you're at the dentist, it's customary to pay at the time of services rendered....I already regret this. The problem is that this toothbrush requires the Philips Sonicare Android/Apple app. I gave it a whirl, but during the setup process I've noticed so many dark patterns. For starters, it requires that Bluetooth and Location be on all the time. Secondly, the app does _not_ allow screenshots to be made of it! It just disables that on Android for me. Third, the manufacturer does not state any of this on the package, and probably has no necessity to do so.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Hi HN! Fernando here. A few months ago [1], I shared Hupreter (<a href="https://hupreter.com" rel="nofollow">https://hupreter.com</a>) with you all and now I am finally opening it up so that everyone can try it for free. The goal is to let users create apps and process data effortlessly, by just describing what the computer should do, in spoken English. We have made a lot of progress since the first post, and even though it is far from perfect, I really want to see how people use it and get feedback.<p>In terms of creating apps, it supports persisting data (you can store/retrieve values), if statements, while loops, etc. For data processing, we currently support uploading tables, calculating the median/variance/etc., plotting, and more. And we will be improving all of those in the coming days.<p>For example, you can tell Hupreter:
Given the table nba_players, calculate the average value in the column "points".<p>More examples are available here: <a href="https://hupreter.blog/" rel="nofollow">https://hupreter.blog/</a><p>Thanks for your time! Let me know what you think, either in the comments below or via fersarr AT gmail<p>Fernando<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945567" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945567</a>
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Jess and Jo here, and we're excited to share Ditto with you all (<a href="https://dittowords.com" rel="nofollow">https://dittowords.com</a>). Ditto is a way to manage product copy—the text found on user interfaces—all the way from design to development. Think of a headless CMS but with the text from your design files.<p>We think product copy is one of the highest ROI aspects of product development today, but also one of the most overlooked. Even more so than the visuals, the text users read is critical to shaping their understanding of how things work. Copy often gets coupled as a part of design or neglected as hard-coded strings, even though it's touched by everyone from design to legal to marketing to engineering. Lack of tooling specifically for copy means it often gets copy-pasted between a patchwork of tools intended for other use cases.<p>Jo and I have been on teams at both small startups and tech giants, and at every place we've seen product copy being written ad-hoc and scattered across mockups, docs, sheets, and tickets. The back and forth required just to fix a simple typo in production often included a backlogged ticket, several Slack conversations, and a ton of wasted engineering time better spent on building.<p>The two of us were fascinated by this problem—one that impacted the day-to-day of so many roles across a company but was rarely addressed. We decided to start working on it part-time while still in grad school and put together a simple landing page describing a tool that componentized product text. The response we got—emails from designers and developers from Salesforce to Square asking for a tool that didn’t yet exist—made us realize we had to pursue it full-time.<p>At its core, we wanted to build a way to treat product text as a system, with the ability to componentize text for reuse (just as we have components for development or design). We spent the last year building out and iterating on Ditto, deciding first to tackle how copy was managed between design files and content writers with our web-app and Figma integration.<p>However, our intent from day one has been to build a single source of truth from end to end, and have text from Ditto integrate into development. Initially, we took a stab at integrating into development by building a Github app that created pull requests for copy edits made in Ditto. This somewhat did the job (democratizing access to making text edits in development), but we saw users struggle with the maintenance it required. We realized it was a piecemeal solution to a system-level problem: Product text and “microcopy” (think text on buttons, error messages, etc.) has context, structure, and hierarchy just like any other content. Maintaining product copy as scattered, hard-coded strings, however, stripped it of its surrounding context.<p>We decided instead to build out an API (with a companion CLI and React SDK) so that Ditto could function similarly to a headless CMS and sync text from design all the way to production. The API/CLI fetches up-to-date product copy from Ditto (and the designs) into local directories as structured JSONs with unique IDs for text and text groups. As a locally hosted and updated JSON, you always own your copy, can see copy diffs on commits, and won't have to worry about latency (we're not a CDN).<p>To check it out (with a quick 3 min video of me talking through the features), you can go to: <a href="https://www.dittowords.com/developers" rel="nofollow">https://www.dittowords.com/developers</a>. To try out our web-app, you can click the “Get started” button.
We also have instructions for setting up / playing around with a sandbox Figma file and React app here: <a href="https://developer.dittowords.com/getting-started/use-our-cli-with-our-sandbox-web-app" rel="nofollow">https://developer.dittowords.com/getting-started/use-our-cli...</a>.<p>Building tools for copy inherently means doing our best to learn about the design and development workflows of other teams. We anticipate that the HN community has members, teammates, or friends that work on product teams, whether as developers, designers, product managers, legal or other roles that touch copy. We’d love to hear how your team currently manages copy — and most importantly your feedback.
Jo and I are roommates (and have been since college!), and we'll be sitting next to each other answering comments. Fire away HN! :)
Upvote: | 223 |
Title: I have a small idea that I am hacking on and was wondering what would be the current recommendation if I don't want to use one of those large cloud providers.<p>I have no JavaScript, only HTML and CSS files and a few Clojure files which run the API.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: It's been 3 months.<p>Don't want to list the username, even tho it looks like a throwaway -- it wasn't listed explicitly as such.<p>Also, I would like to be able to close the feedback loop on all these Ask HN threads -- to see if who is giving good advice, what that advice is, etc.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: We are Allan, CJ and Jesus, co-founders of Moonshot Brands (<a href="https://www.moonshotbrands.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.moonshotbrands.com/</a>). We offer e-commerce founders a simple way to sell their companies, which we then grow.<p>The story behind this began several years ago when CJ and I were trying to sell our e-commerce companies. The process was the most stressful experience of our lives. Drawn-out negotiations. Terrible payment terms. The buyers wanted us gone. We lived with a fear that the businesses we worked so hard to build would be sucked dry and spit out as a shell. We have sold 5 companies and experienced this pain before.<p>Unlike technology businesses where a large group of buyers exists, e-commerce has an anemic acquirer base. We started Moonshot Brands to fill this gap and make getting acquired approachable. We work with both direct-to-consumer brands and those that sell on online marketplaces.<p>Our timeline is fast: we provide a valuation within 48 hours and close in 45 days.<p>We don’t restructure companies. Since founders who have achieved product-market fit are onto something, we want them to join and build with us. We bring the experience and resources to help them grow.<p>Unlike private equity firms, we’re not in it for short-term gains that leave customers and employees on the hook. We invest long-term and make money from sales growth on the e-commerce sites.<p>Our goal is to build the acquisitions company that we wish would have existed when we sold our own businesses. The e-commerce sector is growing rapidly, so the timing is right. We have $160M in funding and $15M in revenue to date.<p>If you know a founder of a profitable e-commerce company looking to sell email [email protected]. We pay finder's fees for successful intros. Also, we're hiring, if you know of any great marketers, devs, or BD email or apply here <a href="https://moonshotbrands.breezy.hr" rel="nofollow">https://moonshotbrands.breezy.hr</a>.<p>We’re excited to tell you about this so if you have questions we’d love to hear from you!
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: Hi all, I'm looking for some good talks on typography. What do you think are the most helpful talks on typography? Or which did you learn the most from?
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: I mean, Kubernetes became a thing after Docker became a thing before(and so on, all the way down to VMs), so it's reasonable to assume that something new will eventually emerge and become the industry-standard.
Upvote: | 141 |
Title: I run www.4dayweek.io (Software Jobs with a better work / life balance) and recently I've talked to 100+ companies trying to convince them to offer their job listings on a 4 day work week (e.g. 32 hours) - for many companies they simply aren't interested.<p>Here are some common responses:<p>- We are a start up working hard to launch so it wouldn't work for us. I read this as: "we've advertised this as full time, but really it's 24/7"<p>- It would require too much effort to change our current culture. I read this as: "it's the way we've always done it, so no thanks"<p>- "We are only looking for full-time employees". This is the most common response. I always find it interesting when companies who struggle to attract top talent don’t consider offering a benefit such as a 4 day week. The law of diminishing returns means there is little difference between the output in a 4 vs 5 day week. This is also due to Parkinson’s Law.<p>If there was a financial incentive, however, I feel many of these companies would be more inclined to offering a 4 day week.<p>So my question is, if you weren't able to get a 4 day work week job (e.g. 32hrs) on a full salary, would you accept a small reduction in salary? Or would you instead stick to 5 days @ 100% salary?<p>I've also created a poll on Twitter asking this [1]. So if you have a moment to give your honest reply, I'd really appreciate it. It may help me convince more companies to offer their roles on a 4 day work week - there are huge benefits for both employers and employees imo.<p>I personally believe that working 4 days per week doesn't equate to 80% output, more like 90%, and therefore I feel the salary should reflect this. However, in order to <i>normalise</i> the 4 day week, I feel that a small salary reduction might be a good first step.<p>[1] Link to the poll: https://twitter.com/philostar/status/1393199633543966723
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I have a theory that you learn lessons from all your colleagues--best, worst, and everything in between. Interested to hear what lessons you feel are worth sharing.
Upvote: | 231 |
Title: Many times you just want to plug something in. PostgreSQL, Node.JS Express, Java Spring, numpy, Three.js. There's many examples where the already existing solution fits well.<p>Sometimes that's not good enough tho. What are some tools, libraries or services you built, are they open-source and why weren't you satisfied using what already existed?
Upvote: | 364 |
Title: And I'm here waiting for my scheduled build to start...
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: I can’t stand software development. I hate the work, hate the people, the culture, etc. The idea of continuing this until for many more decades is sickening. Additionally I’ve pigeonholed myself into an area of the industry that’s is particularly draining (though not for the reasons you may thing).<p>Money is not a huge concern to me, but if I’m going to have to do something I hate 8+ hours a day, I would at least to prefer to be making enough money to distract me from it. I’m not anywhere near there at the moment. I’ve considered maybe just doing the leetcode circus and trying to land mind numbing FAANG job so I can at least have the luxury of otherwise unheard of money. But it’s not ideal and I’m not sure I’d be cut out for it. I’ve never been a particularly good software developer compared to many of the people I’ve interacted with.<p>I’d gladly accept less money (within reason) to work on something that excites me, but that’s about the least likely scenario, between the narrow and poorly definable category of what I would find enticing and the basically impossible to obtain requirements on the fee jobs I do see.<p>I’ve considered going back to school, to try something else, and was actually very close, in fact I nearly registered for classes. But I can’t afford it: not the monetary cost, not the time cost. If I could magically pull tens of thousands of dollars out of my ass tomorrow maybe, or if I wouldn’t be well into my 30s by the time I finished, it would be a different situation. Even then it’s unheard to go from software to anything I’d be interested in.
Upvote: | 110 |
Title: Hi HN, we're Pete and Dan, and together with our team we’ve built Mozart Data (<a href="https://www.mozartdata.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mozartdata.com/</a>), a tool to get companies started on collecting and organizing data to help drive better decisions. Mozart is a “modern data stack” -- we set up and manage a (Snowflake) data warehouse, automate ETL pipelines, provide an interface to schedule and visualize data transformations, and connect whatever data-visualization tool you want to use. For most teams, in under an hour, you can be querying data from your SaaS tools and databases.<p>Ten years ago, we started a hot sauce company, Bacon Hot Sauce, together. But more relevantly, we have spent the last two decades building data pipelines at startups like Clover Health, Eaze, Opendoor, Playdom, and Zenefits. For example, at Yammer, we built a tool called “Avocado,” which was our end to end analysis tool chain -- we loaded data from our production database and relevant SaaS tools like Salesforce, we scheduled data transformations (similar to Airflow), and we had a front-end BI tool where we wrote and shared queries and dashboards. Today Avocado is two tools, Mozart Data and Mode Analytics (a collaborative analytics tool). We basically have been building similar data tools for years (though the names and underlying technologies have changed).<p>Dan & I decided to build a product to bring the same tools and technology to earlier stage companies (so that you don’t need to make an early hire in data engineering). We’ve built a platform where business users can load data and create & schedule transformations with just SQL, wrapped in an interface anyone can use -- no Python, no Jinja, no custom language. We connect to over 150 SaaS tools and databases, most just need credentials to send data to Mozart. There is no need to define DAGs (we parse your SQL transforms to automatically infer the way data flows through the pipeline). Mozart does the rote and cumbersome data engineering that typically takes a while to set up and maintain, so that you can tackle the problems your company is uniquely suited to do.<p>Most data companies have focused on a single slice of the data pipeline (ETL, warehousing, BI). The maturation of data tools over the last decade has made now the time to combine them into an easy solution accessible to data scientists and business operations alike. We believe that there is immense value in centralizing and cleaning your data, as well as setting up the core tables for downstream analysis in your BI tool. Customers like Rippling, Tempo, & Zeplin use Mozart to automate key metrics dashboards, calculate CAC and LTV, or identify customers at risk of churn. We want to empower the teams -- like revenue and sales ops -- that have a lot of data, know what they want to do with it, but don’t have the engineering bandwidth to execute it.<p>Try us out and see for yourself - you can sign up (<a href="https://app.mozartdata.com/signup" rel="nofollow">https://app.mozartdata.com/signup</a>) and immediately start loading, querying, cleaning, and analyzing your data in Mozart. We offer a free 14-day trial (no credit card required). After the free trial, we charge metered pricing based on compute time used and data ingested. We’d love to hear about your experiences with data pipelines and any ideas/feedback/questions you might have about what we’re building.
Upvote: | 106 |
Title: So I'm starting a startup. Its just me and my brother in our apartment really. I have a good idea of what to do and am currently building a prototype/MVP.<p>I'm running into in issue, as I need to integrate with some enterprise-y type APIs for parts of my product and I can't seem to get ahold of sales/anyone. My emails/contacts go unanswered.<p>I am sending from my personal email so I wonder if that's the issue. I'm pretty early so haven't set up a landing page etc. I was thinking to grab a domain with any name / set up a simple webpage to just appear as 'a company' ?<p>Anyone been through this, any tips?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: My background is software development but I spent my COVID year creating a brand of skincare products for climbers.<p>In terms of product dev we did great: we have at least one product that could revolutionize climbing & climbers really like our whole line-up. Our IG, brand & message is well-received.<p>BUT: I feel like I can’t SELL if my life depended on it. Talking to people, let alone selling, turns out to be extremely hard for me.<p>I am DESPERATELY looking for advice on transitioning from development to traditional sales. I LOVE what we built but my lack of sales acumen is slowly killing the brand. Any advice from the HN community?<p>The brand is http://www.chalkrebels.com
Upvote: | 171 |
Title: I'll be starting to work on a new project from next month and I've been reading all but good news about Elixir. I have talked to people in real life, most of the devs had positive things to say about it. Does anyone have any arguments against selecting Elixir? Question coming from RoR developer.
Upvote: | 387 |
Title: Hi HN! We're Capri and Sam — the co-founders of Thryft (<a href="https://www.thryft.shop/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thryft.shop/</a>). We're an easy way to sell things on Instagram.<p>Sam and I met in college at UC Berkeley and Sam previously built an app with 150k+ registered users that allowed users to see which other users, celebrities, presidents, etc. they look like.<p>We built and launched a few marketplace ideas throughout YC. We originally applied with a marketplace for shopping directly from brick-and-mortar thrift stores. While we were solving a clear problem with digitizing brick-and-mortar thrift stores, in the end we didn't see a clear path to scalability with that idea.<p>After that, we pivoted to a curated marketplace for secondhand clothing and accessories, but that didn't work because we struggled to find a differentiator from existing secondhand marketplaces that would solve a real pain point. However, while talking to sellers to get them onto our marketplace, we realized what they really wanted was to utilize their personal brand to sell to Instagram's 1B users. We learned that for thrift and vintage Instagram sellers, each sale is an inefficient, many-step process across collecting payments, buying shipping labels, sending tracking, and communicating with buyers. And Shopify doesn't serve these sellers because it takes a long time to setup and update with their constantly-changing inventory.<p>Therefore, we decided to build a platform that would make it easier for micro and small businesses to sell things over Instagram. We simplify the fragmented process of selling on Instagram into a single step. We automatically generate a website from sellers' Instagram pages and provide unique checkout links for selling over Instagram live.<p>For example, one of our sellers named Katelyn runs an Instagram shop (@abitchforbrandy) and she used Thryft to create her website (<a href="https://abitchforbrandy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://abitchforbrandy.com/</a>). She also regularly uses our product to sell thrifted clothing over Instagram livestreams.<p>Our product is live and being used by our first 45 sellers. Anyone can have access to try out our product by signing up here: <a href="https://www.thryft.shop/signup" rel="nofollow">https://www.thryft.shop/signup</a>. If you don't have an Instagram account, you can view some screenshots of our product here: <a href="https://www.notion.so/letsthryft/Thryft-Screenies-ba1d3d03e2914eca87658150d76db6c4" rel="nofollow">https://www.notion.so/letsthryft/Thryft-Screenies-ba1d3d03e2...</a><p>Thank you for reading, HN community! We are looking forward to your ideas and feedback.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I'm not going to lie, I've amassed thousands of dollars of hosting credits over the years because I've referred many many hundreds of new users to DigitalOcean. Most of those credits (and yours too) are going to disappear a week from now with no prior notice other than an email DO sent out today.<p>Here's a quote from the email:<p>> <i>We recently discovered unused referral credits on your account that were issued more than one year ago. We are writing to inform you that, starting on May 25th 2021, we will be expiring credits earned through the referral program that have gone unused for 12 months.</i><p>I've been a long time user and advocate of DigitalOcean, ever since about 2014.<p>I asked nothing in return for promoting them, I talk about them positively because I've had good experiences using their services.<p>Over the years I've created a number of courses focused on deploying web applications and have used my DigitalOcean affiliate link in those courses because it's a double win. New users get free credits when signing up and I get credits when those users spend money on their platform.<p>In my opinion this is effectively stealing. I referred so many folks to their platform and got compensated by hosting credits in return because that was my only payout option. Now they are taking away those credits but all of those hundreds of folks who signed up through my account are still customers. In other words, DigitalOcean has benefited and continue to benefit from those users and now I lose all compensation for that.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I’m currently a fullstack dev at a big tech company in SV. I graduated college with a CS degree a few years ago and my friends and I want to potentially start a startup with are in the same boat. We understand that 90% of startups fail, but we want to try something new and we would be happy starting a self-sufficient small cash business.<p>I took an entrepreneurship class in college where we read the Lean Startup. My mental model of creating a startup is this. This could be completely wrong and probably is but it's the idea that I developed in my head in college. Steps could be out of order as well, and there might not be an order to these things.<p>1.Think of an idea/ find co-founders (starting a company with friends has risks)<p>2. Interview possible customers and see if this idea solves a great “pain” they are having. A “pain” for Patreons' customer would be that before Patreon existed it was hard to earn money from fans as a content creator.<p>3. See if enough people have this “pain” to even pursue the startup.<p>4. Make a financial model and figure out the business strategy and how the business will make money<p>5. Make an MVP/proof of concept and try to get customers that pay you on day 1<p>6. Grow/market and gain more customers??? No idea how this works<p>7. Secure funding or be self sufficient cash business? Pitch to VC/investor??? No idea about this<p>There is a lot of marketing, sales, financial modeling, and accounting that goes into this.
My colleagues and I just know about tech (embedded/ systems, fullstack) and a little bit of entrepreneurship from the lean startup.<p>What's the most efficient resource to learn more about startups and these concepts? A buddy of mine from college whose startup recently got 200k in seed money told me to look at free videos/materials from incubators/accelerators. Are there any other books or resources Hacker News recommends? I’m probably wrong on a lot of what I think I know.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: I want to switch careers but I'm not sure what I can possibly do. I have been in the field for 11 years. Anyone changed fields? How did you do it? Was it worth it?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: With https://tinyprojects.dev reaching the front page, I was wondering about the other side of the acquisition equation.<p>Who here has bought a tiny project or small business and been successful in growing or scaling the company?<p>Not interested in companies acquiring other companies, but solo entrepreneurs or small teams acquiring a pre-built product or service business.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I've abandoned all faith in reviews online. But the HN crew can give good advice and are extremely unlikely to shill garbage. Consumer Reports is great for finding which manufacturer/model to buy. But what product or service did you buy that you found really useful/entertaining?<p>I'll start: I caved and bought a robovac. Wow, unlike many techno-gadgets, this one really delivers. Real utility, not just taking up space. Low maintenance, runs while I sleep, and the floor is just cleaner.
Upvote: | 483 |
Title: We're Tunde, Boateng, and Landon, the founders of YSplit (<a href="https://www.ysplit.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.ysplit.com</a>). We make it easy to share the cost of utility bills, subscriptions, phone plans & more. When your bill is due, we charge everyone their portion, and then we pay for it.<p>While sharing an apartment with my co-founders during an internship, I was responsible for paying the gas, wifi & rent bills upfront and having everyone Venmo me back. Tracking how much I was owed and getting everyone to pay me back took up a fair amount of time, and I didn't particularly like talking about money with my friends. Fronting the bill also messed up with the budgeting I've set up with my bank, and often I would have to front thousands for our rent payment.<p>We released the first version of the YSplit app a year and a half ago to fix these problems. On the YSplit app, you can link your bill accounts (e.g. Power, Internet, Streaming services, etc..) and invite the people you split the bills with. We use our bill pay partners (Finovera) and in-house scrappers to verify the details, establish a connection then add a YSplit virtual card to the account. When you have a due bill, we charge everyone their share the bills in the app, and then we pay the bill with the YSplit virtual card. We've also added the ability to see a PDF copy of your bill in the app and an in-app balance that you can use to set money aside for future bills. Since releasing the app, we've grown the no. of billers we support to 5,000, covering every major utility provider in each state and the most popular subscriptions (e.g. Netflix, Spotify, HBO).<p>Apart from automating recurring bill splitting & paying, we are developing features like the YSplit card, a Visa virtual/physical card that automatically splits one-time payments, e.g. groceries, takeout, house supplies, night out and more. The card can also be used for splitting recurring bills and is a good option for people who'd rather not share their bill account credentials.<p>The hard part of developing this product has been making sure we are always synced to your latest bills and that they are always paid on time. Luckily, bills have very predictable patterns, so we've been able to build a system that can identify and alert us of bills that are likely to become overdue. It was also tough designing a UX that clearly shows how the app works at every stage since most people are used to P2P payments.<p>We make money from interchange fees and premium options we offer in the app. YSplit premium enables cashback, rent payment splitting via check, and the ability to make multiple YSplit cards.<p>YSplit is live and being used to pay & split bills by thousands of roommates and friends. Head over to <a href="https://www.ysplit.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.ysplit.com</a> to download the app and try it out. We are looking forward to hearing your feedback & ideas.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Hi, we’re pclark, bweitz and anilsevim, the founders of Journey (<a href="https://journey.io" rel="nofollow">https://journey.io</a>). We want to make buying and selling software a better experience. We do this by allowing sellers and marketers to combine all sorts of content—slides, videos, forms, calendars, text—into one sharable webpage, which they can then easily personalize for specific prospects. Think of it like a website that is specifically designed for a specific individual to take a specific action, which answers any questions or objections they may have.<p>For example, I took one of our standard demos and made a "personalized" version for HN here: <a href="https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?prospect=ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?pr...</a>. To customize it, I simply added the YC logo at the top, and a "Welcome HN" video to intro the demo—but you can customize these things as much as you like, as your sales process moves forward.<p>Edit: here's a further example on top of that one: <a href="https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?email=lee%40hn.com&prospect=lambdaschool.com" rel="nofollow">https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?em...</a>. In response to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27235504" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27235504</a>, I made a new version of the "Welcome HN" demo by adding a personalized intro video, changing the logo at the top (I just picked a different one arbitrarily), and restricting it to a specific person (note the "only visible to [email address]" text on the right). Of course it's not really restricted, because we want you all to see it, but it's an example of how you can evolve these demos in response to specific people's questions.<p>Back in 2012 I launched a B2B email marketing startup called Userfox on Hacker News (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715237" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715237</a>), and as that company grew I repeatedly found that it was really hard to create an email that performed well—because if an email is too long users will skim over it, and if it has more than one link they’ll never come back to click them all. Our hope is that Journey helps fix such interactions by allowing you to send users a specific page that has <i>all</i> the content you want them to read, including answers to their specific questions about your product.<p>Sales people have a hard job, and we don’t think their tools help them enough—they have to rely on live meetings and phone calls. Which is annoying because a live phone call is pretty much the last thing I want to do when I want to actually use a product. You have to talk to a sales person because there isn’t a good way to communicate complexity today in an asynchronous manner.<p>Sales and marketing is actually ‘just’ storytelling. You build something and then you tell people why they want it. We often think that the latter part is the easy part—but it isn’t! It’s really hard to introduce your product to someone, even when you know they would benefit from it.<p>If Journey can provide a superior storytelling experience it stands to reason that humans will require fewer live meetings. You don’t need to telephone for a taxi because you have the Uber app.... You won’t need to talk to a human to buy software because you’ll have Journey…<p>Journey specifically is a web app where you can embed and sequence various pieces of content (videos, slides, forms, calendars, …) and then share that sequence (a “Journey”). You can then take a Journey and personalize it for a specific recipient. Once you’ve shared a Journey, you get insights on where they’re spending time, and any comments they may have. Over time, you and your prospect can build up an entire sales conversation this way, focused around what they specifically need from your product. And you can reuse any bits that worked particularly well in your future conversations with other prospects.<p>We’d love to know what HN thinks of Journey, here's a link again to our HN demo mentioned above: <a href="https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?prospect=ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?pr...</a>. From there you’ll be able to sign up, request an onboarding call, view case studies, and learn more. Thank you!!
Upvote: | 141 |
Title: Feel also free to mention methods, places and what have you.
Upvote: | 105 |
Title: I've been looking to take some longer time off in between my current and next role, on the order of 6 months to a year.<p>Any advice from those who have done it? Did you get bored? Was it worth it? Was it more expensive? Things you found helpful when preparing?
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: I worked for a long time in different software engineering positions in b2b tech companies. It looks like a majority of them go through a very similar trajectory - more product, more customers, raise more money, more people, rinse and repeat until you get to IPO or acquisition.<p>On the one hand, this approach is understandable (it’s what business is built for), and the pay is good in such companies. But, on the other hand, life/work balance usually sucks.<p>First of all, there is an unsaid expectation of long hours. A company is always on the verge of signing a new huge business deal, preparing for the magic quadrant, and having critical projects. And even if some reasonable hours are negotiated/achieved, people are forced to have an insane amount of multi-tasking (juggling numerous tasks, initiatives, planning, replanning, strategy shifts, and so on). On the paper, life/work balance is advertised in such companies. In reality, work at such a company is draining way too much energy.<p>Another unpleasant side. As part of this rush forward, engineering usually cuts many corners (both in tech and vetting new hires). This rush creates a mediocre (at best) tech culture with a lot of tech debt and not following well-established best practices. A huge part of solving/fighting these problems falls on the top tech talent (especially on responsible employees).<p>I am at the stage of my life where physical and mental health is more important than a marginal dollar. As a result, I have started to look around, and I would appreciate the advice.<p>Do you know which specific companies or preferable areas have better work/life balance and are more committed to tech excellence?
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: I just got this email from Triplebyte:<p>Hey [name],<p>It’s been 12 months since you found the opportunity that’s right for for you on our platform. We hope things are going great!<p>We wanted to let you know that your profile is no longer hidden from companies on Triplebyte. Companies will be able to view your profile and reach out with opportunities through the platform.<p>If you’d like to maximize requests on Triplebyte, make sure your profile is up to date. We’ll use this information to match you with the best opportunities.
Upvote: | 255 |
Title: Hey HN, I made this because I wanted a fast editing experience when making flowcharts. Other tools (bottom)require clicking and dragging (or editing code). Knotend is keyboard centric and is supposed to feel more like editing a doc than dragging around boxes and arrows.<p>I've tested in on safari and chrome desktop. Its difficult to use on mobile but you can view existing charts.<p>I'd appreciate your feedback on how you use it, the design, any bugs etc. Thank you.<p>Prior art<p>- <a href="https://mermaid-js.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://mermaid-js.github.io/</a><p>- Confluence (Atlassian)<p>- draw.io<p>- excalidraw<p>EDIT: fixed the bug on Safari with escape clobbering edited text
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I find it fascinating how some games turn out to reflect much of my philosophy about life. For instance, I played Inside a while ago and was amazed by how much you can achieve by so little. The game was mostly about timing, and you'd be surprised how much of our life is just "hacking time" (I first heard this phrase in Mr. Robot.)<p>Catan (board game) taught me the power of being forward-looking but also being myopic depending on the type of your opponents. It also taught me that I don't belong to games (situations) where one party is being irrational and acts based on knee-jerk decisions. In Catan, I now try not to reveal my best card and get ahead early on in the game in order to avoid becoming an easy and default target for other players. I think these are really interesting life lessons I (re-)learnt from a game that wasn't even designed with that purpose in mind.<p>I'm looking for any and all games that can potentially teach me something, but are not "educational" games.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: How do you insure you are working on the most important items for the TEAM?<p>Whats the thing that drains you the most?<p>Where do you reach out to get advise outside of your company?<p>What is missing from the tools you currently have?
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: Like most of us, I've been working from home since last March. I've noticed a lot of neck, back, and hip pain developing. Some of it is because of my renewed interest in working out, I'm sure. But I really do believe most of it is from my terrible WFH setup (chair, desk, monitor).<p>Can you recommend a chair (hopefully one that won't break the bank, although at this point I'm almost willing to pay anything).
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi HN! I’m Rowan and with my co-founder Steve we are building Curvenote (<a href="https://curvenote.com" rel="nofollow">https://curvenote.com</a>) — a technical writing tool for sharing data analysis and research from Jupyter with a wider audience.<p>We are building Curvenote to get science communication out of PDFs and help researchers and data-scientists communicate interactive, reproducible results (graphs, figures, maps, etc.) that are linked to the actual data and computation. There are currently two parts to Curvenote: 1) a WYSIWYG collaborative writing environment for interactive, technical documents; and 2) a Jupyter integration that adds version control and commenting and can link interactive plots and outputs directly into Curvenote documents (including any new versions or comments on those outputs).<p>Steve and I met in the open-source/science community and are coming at this from different angles: Steve has led data science teams, and keeping stakeholders and team members in the loop with up-to-date figures/reports took a lot of time (via emails, screenshots, PPT presentations, customer reports, etc.) — leading to what he calls communication chaos. A lot of my experience is coming from writing a PhD thesis, writing papers, presenting early research to colleagues/supervisors, and developing educational/training material around open-source projects.<p>In both our experiences, there is a collaboration gap between working on data science (for us in Jupyter) and getting feedback or enabling other people on our teams to remix the work, add context or ask questions. We each had a lot of hacked-together solutions, that mostly cut out anyone who wasn’t comfortable in git or Jupyter. Curvenote aims to span this gap by providing tools that enable less technical (or busier) collaborators as well as integrations into anywhere Jupyter lives (e.g. AWS Sagemaker, JupyterHub, locally). We are aiming for the collaboration experience of Google Docs, the precise presentation of LaTeX, and first class integrations into computational notebooks - without changing data science tools.<p>The weaving of computational results into documents and keeping all the links pointing back to your Jupyter notebook cells starts to build an interconnected knowledge graph (similar to Notion or what Roam are doing for personal knowledge databases) — with a heavy focus on research, where ideas, equations, figures, code can be browsed, filtered and discovered. This starts to become a “web of science” — with very granular ways to address and remix content across projects. I get really excited about this. A lot of content I was producing during my PhD was shared between various presentations/reports as I developed ideas over many years; I wanted to see how the ideas were linked together and allow other people (and myself!) to reuse parts of the work with the same ease as importing a software library.<p>We are seeing people producing their lab-group meeting notes [1], writing reports that can be shared inside their companies [2], reproducing research papers [3], writing computational textbooks [4], and cross-importing data-science visualizations across projects. Curvenote has a free tier for public projects and we charge $15/user/month for teams.<p>Our other inspiration is coming from distill.pub [5] and explorable explanations [6]. We are trying to make it really easy to create and share these types of interactive documents and connect them to computational environments. A lot of the components underlying our platform are open-source (see <a href="https://curvenote.dev" rel="nofollow">https://curvenote.dev</a>), including our editor which you can try without signing up [7]. We also have an active Slack community [8], with a broad user base: teachers, scientists, data scientists, data journalists. You're welcome to join!<p>Really excited to get some feedback from the HN community - happy to talk more on version control of Jupyter Notebooks, about our open-source article editor, about explorable explanations, and would love to hear if some of the challenges we have faced around collaboration in data science/research resonate with you?<p>[1] <a href="https://curvenote.com/@simpeg/meeting-notes/2021-02-24" rel="nofollow">https://curvenote.com/@simpeg/meeting-notes/2021-02-24</a><p>[2] <a href="https://curvenote.com/@stevejpurves/computational-finance/modern-portfolio-theory" rel="nofollow">https://curvenote.com/@stevejpurves/computational-finance/mo...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://curvenote.com/@lheagy/pixels-and-their-neighbours/pixels-and-their-neighbours" rel="nofollow">https://curvenote.com/@lheagy/pixels-and-their-neighbours/pi...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://curvenote.com/@geosci/inversion-module/inverse-theory-overview" rel="nofollow">https://curvenote.com/@geosci/inversion-module/inverse-theor...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=distill.pub&sort=byPopularity&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a><p>[6] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=explorable%20explanations" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a><p>[7] Editor demo here without signing up: <a href="https://curvenote.github.io/editor/" rel="nofollow">https://curvenote.github.io/editor/</a><p>[8] <a href="https://slack.curvenote.dev" rel="nofollow">https://slack.curvenote.dev</a>
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: I recently picked up 'The Audio Programming Book' [0] and so far, I am really liking it. But I am not sure which resource to pick after reading that. Can you recommend me some audio programming resources which are beginner friendly?<p>[0] <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book" rel="nofollow">https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book</a><p>Edit: My goal is to make a mini-synth which takes input from the computer keyboard.
Upvote: | 358 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Matt and Brendan, co-founders of Fig (<a href="https://fig.io/hn">https://fig.io/hn</a>). Fig adds VSCode-style autocomplete to your existing terminal.<p>We built Fig because of our own struggles in the terminal: we were tired of context switching between man pages, Stack Overflow posts, and Medium tutorials anytime we got stuck. We wanted our CLI tools to be more discoverable.<p>The terminal is powerful, but unforgiving. It emulates the constraints of hardware (like teletype printers and video terminals) that became obsolete a generation ago. There are no built-in affordances. No hints about the 'right way' of using a tool or even finding the right tool for the job. Beginners are thrown in the deep end. And even seasoned developers can screw up their system with a few unfortunate keystrokes.<p>To solve this, we add a UI overlay that is linked with the interactive shell. As you type, Fig pops up subcommands, options, and contextually relevant arguments in your existing terminal. For example, you can type `npm run` and Fig will show you the scripts available in your package.json. You could also type `cd` when SSH'd into a remote machine and Fig will list the folders within your current directory on the remote machine.<p>We use the Accessibility API on Mac to insert text on your behalf and read what you've typed. We also integrate with the shell to determine the current process and working directory. We are built natively for macOS in swift. We built our UI using web technologies so we can ultimately go cross platform. We render it using a WKWebView (not Electron).<p>Fig is free for individuals and always will be. All completion specs - the templates used for generating CLI suggestions - are open source and anyone can contribute [0]. We plan to monetize by supporting autocomplete for companies' custom scripts and internal CLI tools. Ultimately, we want to bring other process documentation (like SRE runbooks or deployment workflows) closer to the environment where it's used. You can see an early iteration of Fig in this HN thread from last July. [1]<p>Fig is designed to be private. All processing happens locally on your device. None of your keystrokes are ever transmitted or stored by Fig.<p>We'd love to hear your feedback on what we’ve built! We're still in private beta (so things may break!!), but we are letting HN users skip our waitlist today and tomorrow using the link above! :)<p>----Edit----<p>We really appreciate all of this feedback! Brendan and I want to address some of the most common concerns below:<p>Telemetry:
Fig has basic telemetry in order to help us make product decisions. We currently give the you option to opt out of all non-essential telemetry by running `fig settings app.disableTelemetry true`. This removes everything except for one daily ping. We use this ping to help us understand how many people were using Fig.<p>Adding this ping was a mistake. We have already removed it and will be pushing this change in our next build (v1.0.43).<p>Business Model:
Under the hood, we've built an API layer on top of the terminal. This API lets you create visual apps. Autocomplete is the first app we've built using this API. We have many more planned for things like interactive runbooks for SREs and automating deployment workflows. You can see some early prototypes here. [2] We plan to monetize these team-based apps by charging per-seat.<p>Autocomplete will always be free for individuals. We will never sell your data.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete">https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23766980" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23766980</a><p>[2] <a href="https://withfig.com/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://withfig.com/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4</a>
Upvote: | 559 |
Title: e.g.:
* Linux with its pipes
* i3 with its window management
* vim
* emacs
* fzf
* pgsql
* google.com
* wikipedia.com<p>I can't help but think that we could do so much more with some tools.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: I’m a freelancer, and very much a generalist. I’ll often say I can do something I haven’t done before (which has proven to be true) as an excuse to learn something new.<p>I find different kinds of projects keep me interested. One month web dev, next month apps, the next month microcontrollers, next automation, etc.<p>I often hear it’s good to find a niche. Wondering if anyone can speak to the benefits of doing so?<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Where would you incorporate your company if you not a US-citizen and most of your clients are online?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Serif, Sans Serif or Mono , Show me some most beautiful fonts that are unique.<p>Open Source or Free fonts are appreciated.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: In recent years, I have noticed that fewer and fewer people in my circle of friends use e-mail. I also use it less and less personally and have switched to alternatives. Is this just a subjective perception of mine or are there similar tendencies among you?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Ryan, Kenny, and Alejandro, the co-founders of Arrived (https://arrivedhomes.com), a real estate investing platform where anybody can buy shares of rental properties in under 4 minutes.<p>Rental properties have historically been one of the best ways to build wealth over time. They provide consistent passive income & allow investors to benefit from rising home values. But buying and managing rental homes has always required a TON of capital, time, & expertise. We want to change this.<p>This is the first time that anyone (including non-accredited investors) can buy shares of individual rental homes online. Arrived acquires properties in the top markets, rents & operates them, and allows investors to invest any amount from $100 - $10,000 per property. We think it’s pretty cool :)<p>On Arrived, investors can browse individual homes (just like Zillow) and then purchase shares with an easy e-commerce checkout experience. After purchasing shares, investors earn rental income quarterly and watch their investments grow as the home appreciates.<p>We’re working to remove the main points of friction to real estate investing so that more people can access this phenomenal asset class.<p>We've just opened our 2nd market and we’d love any feedback from the HN community.<p>Thanks!
Ryan
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: Hello community,
I am looking to connect with HNers who have successfully started a research institute / campus or were among the first joiners.
I am seeking to offer housing and a stipend to researchers, as I am currently acquiring some real estate that I want to put to good use in Germany. I will myself take time off from regular work and focus on research in a vein similar to Steve Grand's investigations into artificial life (not expecting to reach his level, but one needs a quest with lofty goals).<p>Not seeking a particular piece of advice, more looking for somebody to have a conversation with regarding experiences, what worked really well, how to get the ball rolling, essential infrastructure required...<p>End goal as of now: assemble a few great minds, give them the space to work rent-free in a region with good academic infrastructure, ideally let them collaborate, watch the beauty of it.<p>If relevant, an LLC-like structure is available for making this happen, but not 100% sold on how to approach this from a legal perspective.
Upvote: | 287 |
Title: The HN conversations around unikernels suggest that they're not ready for production yet [0] but feel free to set that record straight.<p>In the meantime, a handful of organisations/individuals seem to be working on becoming "Docker for unikernels". That's probably an unfair description, but they're aiming to produce tools for building and managing unikernels: Unikraft [1], NanoVMs/Nanos [2], Unik [3]. Other orgs are producing unikernel-based OSs and VMs [4].<p>What is your toolset for building and managing unikernels? What have you learned?<p>Bonus question: is Unik dead? [5]<p>[0] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=unikernel&sort=byPopularity&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://unikraft.org/" rel="nofollow">https://unikraft.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/nanovms/nanos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nanovms/nanos</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/solo-io/unik/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/solo-io/unik/</a><p>[4] <a href="http://unikernel.org/projects/" rel="nofollow">http://unikernel.org/projects/</a><p>[5] <a href="https://github.com/solo-io/unik/issues/172" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/solo-io/unik/issues/172</a>
Upvote: | 120 |
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