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Title: Say you've created a fresh startup at the beginning.<p>You feel you'd benefit from having a board of directors who contribute their expertise and have some stake in success.<p>How much equity to give them, if any?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: There is a vocal crowd on HN cheering for the WFH trend. But that is a big risk for the US SW engineers and a great opportunity for the rest of the SW engineers in Americas.<p>The crowd cheering for WFH seems to assume that the jobs will be available anywhere the suburban US which is ideal for WFH with big houses with enough space to have an office, gym and whatever. They also assume SV level salaries, maybe with a 10-15% haircut and think they can live like kings.<p>But from my personal experience at a company going fully WFH, I can say that those are rosy dreams. I am in a position where I know about the company's hiring plans and salaries. Guess where is a majority of new hires going to come from? Other countries! Guess what will be their salaries? Much lower than what we are offering in the non-SV parts of the US.<p>If the WFH trend continues, it will do to the plum US tech job market what globalization did to manufacturing. In a WFH setup, someone in Mexico is on the same level as someone in Kansas or SV, but much cheaper.<p>It is time for tech workers to look out for themselves and root for a failure of WFH trend. Else for the short term king-size lifestyle in your remote corner of the US, you will destroy one of the last remaining well-paying job market in the long term.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Heya! Not the usual sort of thing to be posted here, but I wanted to show off what I made yesterday. Here's a sample page about H1-B visas issued in Bogota:<p><https://visawhen.com/consulates/bogota/h1b><p>The code is source-available (not open source) at <https://github.com/underyx/visawhen>. It's my first time choosing a source-available license over MIT, mainly out of fear of existing immigration startups just gobbling this data and code up; frankly I didn't think the implications through though, I just threw a safe license on there.<p>The way the project works is:<p>- Use requests-html to find publicly available PDFs from government pages<p>- Use camelot to OCR the PDFs and extract data tables from them<p>- Since the previous step takes crazy long for my tastes (around 8000 pages at around 5 seconds each) I've used dask to split the work into chunks and parallel-process them across my laptop's CPUs.<p>- Do data cleanup and processing with pandas, and save all of it to a SQLite file.<p>- Take data from the SQLite file with next.js and generate a static HTML page for each possible embassy - visa type combination<p>- The pages use ECharts to visualize data, and Bulma as a CSS framework<p>- Build and host each commit via Netlify<p>- But proxy to Netlify from CloudFlare, which I believe has more edge locations in the free plan<p>- Collect any donations via Ko-Fi<p>- Use Google Analytics to have a general idea about visitor counts<p>- Use FullStory session recordings to find out about bugs – I've fixed quite a few and I think I'll probably remove this tracking after a bit of time<p>…and that's where I'm at now. I'm pretty happy about the results. Most pages load in less than 300ms, which is something I care about all too much. More importantly, I've shared the site with some immigration communities I'm part of, and the response has been very positive! Let me know what y'all think.
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: I was reading the comments of this HN post (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695181" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695181</a>) and many were talking about how they have come to realize that they won’t be great, or remembered after their death. How can one do the same? Some have come to realize that the only thing which matters is their family, hobbies, or religion; but how do we get to that point?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: According to [1], Google is transitioning from APK format to AAB (Android App Bundle) which features Play App Signing [2], which, essentially, requires you to give Google your App's existing signing keys, with all the usual implications.<p>Google uses comforting language to portray this as a very convenient feature for 'most' developers. However, this would also give Google an ability to ship modified apps to users, still signed by perfectly valid App key, and this perspective looks really scary to me.<p><i>> To use Play App Signing today you have to provide a copy of your existing app signing key because Google Play needs a copy of it to sign and deliver updates to your existing users. This suits most developers, over 1M apps are using Play App Signing in production.</i><p>They also promise to have a way of signing up without uploading a key 'soon', but it is not clear how it will work from the description:<p><i>> Soon, we will add an additional option for existing apps to opt in to Play App Signing by performing a key upgrade. Choosing this option means Play App Signing can use a new, unique key for all new installs and their updates. However, for this to work, when you upload an app bundle, you also need to upload a legacy APK signed with your old key so that Google Play can continue to deliver updates to your existing users.</i><p>What's your perspective on this?<p>[1]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2021/06/the-future-of-android-app-bundles-is.html<p>[2]: https://developer.android.com/studio/publish/app-signing
Upvote: | 41 |
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: | 52 |
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=27699702" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699702</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699703" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699703</a>
Upvote: | 399 |
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.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/" rel="nofollow">https://seisvelas.github.io/hn-candidates-search/</a>.
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: Hey HN! This is Celine, Julien, and Narae of Flowly (<a href="https://www.flowly.world/" rel="nofollow">https://www.flowly.world/</a>). Flowly is an app that combines VR and biofeedback training to help people manage pain, reduce anxiety, and increase relaxation (we send every member a VR headset and Realtime HR Sensor to use). We started this company to serve the 1 in 3 Americans who suffer from chronic pain and we’re now backed by the NIH and National Institute of Drug Abuse.<p>The opioid crisis has exposed how prevalent chronic pain is and how inaccessible and limited pain management solutions are today. Many pain management tools don't address all aspects of pain because pain encompasses more than physical pain: the top symptoms of chronic pain actually include anxiety, depression, and feelings of social isolation. In other words, chronic pain is a bio-psycho-social condition. It is important to us that we address it as such and this comprehensive approach is one of our core differentiators.<p>I (Celine) started the company because I grew up around pancreatic cancer patients, who were experiencing excruciating pain. People close to me passed away from morphine overdose and not even the cancer itself. I saw how pain affected someone not just physically, but also psychologically and socially.<p>Later when I was developing interactive content at DreamWorks, I got involved with VR and biometric feedback for entertainment experiences. At a certain point, I realized that all this cool tech had actually been studied since the 80s for pain management. This resonated strongly with me because of my personal experience. I brought in my best friend from Yale, Julien, who was at Hyperloop One doing controls on their Transponics team, and then Narae, an internationally recognized designer and animator from Broadway and California Institute of the Arts. Together we convinced the Chair of Anesthesiology at UCLA to come aboard and design the Flowly prototype together.<p>When we developed Flowly we were adamant about two things: it has to be accessible (needs to be easy to use at home) and it has to be science-backed. Our NIH grant cites over 300+ studies using VR and biofeedback for pain and anxiety management. We've conducted case studies, Phase I clinical trials, and have more trials coming up. Our Chief Principal Investigator is the Chair of Perioperative Medicine at UPMC and our Director of Research is at USC.<p>Another aim we have is to make Flowly reimbursable (covered by insurance so people who can’t afford it can use it too)— as you may know, that is not an easy journey, but we are working on it. In the meantime, we provide it direct-to-consumer for those who do have the ability to pay for a subscription which is $30/month. We are acutely aware this price point privileges certain populations to Flowly and that’s why we are working hard to get Flowly to be reimbursable. If you have experience with this or have advice we would love all the help we can get to make Flowly as accessible as possible.<p>The Flowly we've launched today works like this: you receive a kit with your subscription that includes a mobile VR headset and real-time Heart Rate Sensor that work with our iOS App. You enter a Flowly session in VR which helps to tackle pain in a few ways. First, you enter a beautiful immersive VR world that can work to distract you from existing pain or anxiety (called Gate Control Theory). Second, in each session you are guided to autoregulate and control your nervous system, which is where much of the body’s pain response is modulated. You learn to control your nervous system through biofeedback training which is the ability to see your realtime biometric data (Heart Rate, Heart Rate Variability, respiration) and then through calibrated breathing guides, voice-over, and light gamification, we teach you how to control those metrics and shift your body from fight-or-flight mode (your sympathetic nervous system) to rest-and-recovery mode (your parasympathetic nervous system). Third, we incorporate voice-overs in every session that focus on different therapeutic approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Value Affirmation exercises, etc. Afterwards, you can track your progress through a personalized data analytics portal. You'll also get access to a text/call line with our Health Coach for questions or help getting set-up.<p>We're partnered with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, USC, US Pain Foundation, and other institutions to provide Flowly to those who need it. Surprisingly to us, this past year many people we didn't expect to need Flowly also came to us for help— folks like therapists who needed anxiety management themselves, or families dealing with pain and stress at home.<p>We have a long way to go, but we feel passionate about creating an opioid-sparing tool for pain management. Check out our iOS app here: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flowly-relaxation-training/id1485955236" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flowly-relaxation-training/id1...</a>. We're working on an Android version.
We welcome your feedback, questions and advice. Thank you for reading!
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: Hi, what concepts do you think a backend engineer should know which are language agnostic/independent? An example could be knowing the different ways of how to connect to the database from the backend such as ORM or basic SQL and their pros and cons?
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Is it just me, or do you believe your inbox is the worst place for newsletters? Any other medium would be preferable.
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: Hi!
Do you know any books on math optimization that are essential for anybody getting into this field? Is there any classical literature for optimization related to ML? Thanks!<p>My current list includes:<p>1. Numerical Optimization by Jorge Nocedal Stephen J. Wright<p>2. Algorithms for Optimization
- introduction to optimization with a focus on practical algorithms<p>3. Algorithms for Decision Making
- a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty<p>[2] https://algorithmsbook.com/optimization/<p>[3] https://algorithmsbook.com/
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: download.cnet.com is hosting an ancient version of my app and I never submitted it to them or contacted them in any way. They simply stole my installer and content from my website without asking or getting permission. I won't get into my reasons for not wanting any of these download sites to offer my software. They are of course entitled to provide a link to my website and some do that and only that which is OK.<p>there is a link in in old HN post (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2910554" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2910554</a>) that no longer works:
<a href="http://cnet-upload.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2064" rel="nofollow">http://cnet-upload.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2064</a><p>anyone know if there is good contact form or email address for any of these download sites to ask that they not offer my app?<p>If I am not successful getting them to comply, would a DMCA be appropriate and would I be asking for legal troubles if I submit a DCMA?
Upvote: | 152 |
Title: I am looking to equip our house (in Bay
area) with a CB radio device for disaster communication scenario as well as to expand social network. What is the minimum required equipment/permissions needed to start?
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: According the multiple sources, software engineers in the US earns, on average, $100K per year. Software engineers in all other major countries earns about $30K - $60K on average. These countries include: Japan, China, Australia, Germany, Canada.<p>However, if we looked up average household income, these countries aren't too different from the US. And I don't believe American coders are twice the better than coders in the other countries.<p>I can understand that FAAG pull up the average salaries and they can easily afford it.
My question is how do SMBs in the US hire engineers under this type of fierce salary competition?
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: Link:<p>https://github.com/cookiengineer/audacity<p>OK, there are more forks!<p>This is one of the first ones i've found that reverts telemetry.<p>If anyone has a more reliable one, please share :)
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: For many people, as they age and mature, they life goals tend to change. You wouldn't really expect a 40 year old to have the same life goals as a 20 year old. So what has changed for you? How surprised are you by this change?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I've been out of high school for almost 12 years.
And I've never had a job I really loved.<p>I've worked in about 20 different industries from the oilfield to construction to food service, to debt collection, to transportation, to everything in between. Nothing in tech though.<p>Some were possible "good" jobs, but often they're very dangerous. I was an apprentice in a trade that has the potential to earn a lot 5 years in.<p>It's like I work for a bit and I'll get to a point where I just want to quit and be done with it. Or there are conditions I just don't want to put up with anymore so I just walk.<p>I've never felt content or joy at work, which I think is normal, but I also think some other people enjoy their work.<p>It's also part laziness, I can be slothful without a routine.<p>But I just feel so lost. I almost feel too old to keep constantly moving on to something else.<p>Has anybody else been in this situation and come out the other side with meaningful work that they like? And they're able to support themselves?<p>Just feel lost, I guess. Thank you.
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: I have been working in the software field 20+ years. During all this time, I have never really taken a long break. I have thought about it a lot recently, and feel that stepping away from a 9-to-5 grind for some time (with the intent of getting back) would be helpful for the following reasons:
1) Exploring tech you are interested in on your own schedule. If you are exploring something deep, I feel like its very beneficial to set your own pace and schedule.
2) Having a free mind might allow some ideas to emerge that you can refine and work on. And maybe set a track for a new job when you get back.<p>My aim with this question here is not to solicit suggestions on whether a break is good or not career-wise. I am also not concerned about employers seeing a gap in my resume, since I feel I would not do well anyway with employers who raise it as a red flag, and I would avoid them.<p>I am just trying to get an idea of what you did during a break like that, and whether you thought it was worth it, or if it helped you in some way when you got back to the grind. I would be more interested if your activity during the break was somehow related to tech, as that's what I am aiming to do. I am aware that traveling and unplugging/digital detoxing and all are excellent options - just not something I have in mind for this iteration :)<p>Thanks in advance!
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Any side projects, Game, OSS, Hacks.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Building on the "Who is Hiring?" threads, here comes a monthly thread for folks who are in search of a co-founder. Let people know what you are building and what you are looking for in a co-founder.<p>Please state the location and include REMOTE if you are open to building a company remotely. When remote work is not an option, include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are the founder (or one of the co-founders) of the startup. No recruiting firms, venture builders, or job boards. Only one post per company (how many co-founders can one look for anyway). Please explain on a high level what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to these posts telling people why their idea won't work. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in committing yourself to a co-founder role. No "CTO for hire" companies!
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: Hi HN, We are Wojciech and Sylwia, the co-founders of Enso (<a href="https://enso.org" rel="nofollow">https://enso.org</a>). On the tech side, Enso is a visual and textual programming language (you can switch from graph to code and back). On the business side, it's a workflow builder that makes it easy for analysts without a programming background to automate data-driven processes simply by connecting visual components together. Our GUI is like an IDE, but with a graph editor alongside the code. Currently, we’re focused on data analysis—data preparation, blending, and analytics (both in-memory and SQL). You can see a video of how it works here: <a href="https://youtu.be/fQvWMoOjmQk" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/fQvWMoOjmQk</a>.<p>We used to be called Luna and were lucky to have a few big threads on HN over the years [1][2][3][4][5]. Eventually we went into heads-down mode to make a production version based on customer and user feedback. Since then, we've drastically improved the product. It is still rough around the edges, but works much better now. We have also made a few tutorials (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4oMK7cL1ElfNR_OhS-YQAw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4oMK7cL1ElfNR_OhS-YQAw</a>), and
docs (<a href="https://enso.org/docs/syntax" rel="nofollow">https://enso.org/docs/syntax</a>). We've added many new libraries, so you can do many more things with it now. Oh, and we changed the name to Enso and got accepted to YC! :)<p>The problem we address is that data analysts still waste up to half of their time on repetitive manual work that can be automated [6]. To give one example, a company we're working with hires business users who use Excel to define data quality rules. These get manually translated to SQL, then manually translated to Python. This is not only error prone, it’s so slow that it takes them 90 days to introduce a single new rule. There’s 60 days’ worth of overhead in this process—it’s insane!<p>Years ago I (Wojciech) led the in-house development of visual effects (VFX) tools at a motion picture studio. We made tools like cloud renderers and smoke simulation engines. The artists using these tools did not have any programming background, yet they were designing complex algorithms for forces between particles, light subsurface scattering, things like that. Earlier generations of these tools had hundreds of config options, buttons, etc., for masses of different use cases, but this approach got way too complex and people eventually realized that it falls short when you need to do anything that the vendor did not think of. Nowadays they use node-based software (like the Houdini FX) which lets users draw algorithms as a sequence of data processing steps (these steps are often referred to as “nodes”). Later, when I was working in other industries and encountered the same rats’ nests of complex GUIs for solving data processing problems, I realized that the data analytics/science space was in need of the same breakthrough that we had already gone through in the VFX space.<p>Most visual programming languages / workflow-builders do not scale well because they don't let users express abstractions. Try to build a complex pipeline and you'll end with an unreadable spaghetti of connections—it's like coding a web app in assembler. Enso is different because we allow you to build abstractions to manage the complexity. As a result, you never have more than 10-20 nodes on the stage in Enso (nodes are hierarchical). You can create custom data types, custom components (functions), catch errors, etc. All this works because under the hood, Enso is a real programming language. However, naive implementations of such systems are super slow. Each component may be built of hundreds, sometimes thousands of lower-level ones. The real trick is making these hierarchical components run fast. For that you need a dedicated compiler and a runtime system, and this is a hard technical space. Our system involves a dedicated JIT compiler based on GraalVM. For details, see <a href="https://enso.org/language#compiler" rel="nofollow">https://enso.org/language#compiler</a>. In case this is interesting for you, here is our podcast about how the compiler works under the hood: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BibjcUjdkO4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BibjcUjdkO4</a>.<p>Enso is interactive, meaning that we recompute the relevant parts of graphs as parameters change, which shortens feedback loops dramatically. Like a lot of people on HN, we were inspired by Bret Victor's classic talk on instant feedback: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc</a>. We’ve also put a lot of effort into extensibility. You can add Java, JavaScript, R, and Python (soon also Ruby, Scala, Kotlin, Rust, and C) directly into Enso nodes without the need to write any wrappers and with a close-to-zero performance overhead.<p>Enso is open source. Our compiler code is at <a href="https://github.com/enso-org/enso" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/enso-org/enso</a> and our GUI code at <a href="https://github.com/enso-org/ide" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/enso-org/ide</a>. Our business model is based on selling domain specific libraries, on-premise installations with enhanced user permission management, and coming soon, a hosted solution called Enso Cloud, which will be our only non-open-source codebase. Since this is Hacker News, I should add that all our alpha releases collect anonymous usage statistics which we use to improve Enso and prepare it for a stable release. Full details about that are always in our release notes (<a href="https://github.com/enso-org/ide/releases/latest" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/enso-org/ide/releases/latest</a>).<p>Dear HN friends, we are super excited to show Enso to you. Please, share with us your thoughts, experiences, ideas and feedback. It is insanely important to us, as our dream is to make Enso the most useful data processing platform in your toolbox! Also, in case you’d like to build your projects on top of Enso, we would love to help you do it – describe what you have in mind here, and we will reach out to you: <a href="https://airtable.com/shrsnx2mJuRn0MxIS" rel="nofollow">https://airtable.com/shrsnx2mJuRn0MxIS</a> :)<p>=== Links ===<p>[1] <i>Luna: Visual and textual functional programming language</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11144828" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11144828</a> - Feb 2016 (100 comments)<p>[2] <i>Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14612680" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14612680</a> - June 2017 (310 comments)<p>[3] <i>Luna 1.0 Beta is out</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16163769" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16163769</a> - Jan 2018 (167 comments)<p>[4] <i>Luna Studio – Visual and textual functional programming language</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17704989" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17704989</a> - Aug 2018 (64 comments)<p>[5] <i>Luna – A WYSIWYG language for data processing</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20182090" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20182090</a> - June 2019 (86 comments)<p>[6] <a href="https://www.alteryx.com/e-book/idc-study-the-state-of-self-service-data-preparation-and-analysis-using-spreadsheets" rel="nofollow">https://www.alteryx.com/e-book/idc-study-the-state-of-self-s...</a>
Upvote: | 205 |
Title: The HN attitude about blockchain is overwhelmingly negative.<p>Yet what I see with smart contracts on blockchain, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, is a huge potential for change and opportunity.<p>If you don't know what that is:<p>You can run code on the Ethereum blockchain.
The user pays to run your code, instead of you paying to run the server that serves them the code.
This is because everyone who's running an Ethereum node actually has a copy of your code in the blockchain.<p>This is called a "smart contract" but enough people have experimented with it that they've actually built decentralised applications - dApps for short.<p>There are now real world examples of decentralised applications in Finance - DeFi - which includes a Decentralised exchange - uniswap - and decentralised finance like Compound, Balancer and Yield Finance. So there are apps. You can get a loan from a DeFi app today.<p>This seems like it has huge disruptive potential. Mark Cuban has talked about how he could sell tickets as NFTs on the blockchain, and get a percentage of resell, forever.<p>You could in theory build something similar for Airbnb or Uber on the blockchain - just NFT a house/day and then sell it on the blockchain. Same thing with Uber - drivers could auction off their time in a blockchain dApp.<p>Because devs don't pay to keep their code in the ETH blockchain, you can just build software and it will "run" forever, at no cost to the developer. You can also set up the smart contract to give you a percentage every time it runs - see uniswap. Thus user - pays the dev + network on usage.<p>This is a radical change and imo a huge avenue for new innovation.<p>But this is hardly talked about here in HN.<p>Let's ignore, if possible, the whole "proof of work is bad for the environment" question (all I'll say about that is proof of stake is real and in production with DOT/ALGO and that's a 99% reduction in energy consumption). I know it's tempting to go in this direction but again - let's assume all crypto is proof of stake for the sake of argument.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Hey HN, I’m Kyle Corbitt, and I work on Startup School (<a href="https://www.startupschool.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.startupschool.org/</a>), YC’s free program to help people learn how to start a startup. Today we’re launching a new major feature: co-founder matching (<a href="https://www.startupschool.org/cofounder-matching" rel="nofollow">https://www.startupschool.org/cofounder-matching</a>). Interested founders can create a profile, input their requirements (location, time commitment, skills, etc) and quickly review screened candidates. We don’t charge for this or take any equity in the teams formed.<p>Founders face lots of hard problems at the earliest stages—building an MVP, finding users, finding investors—but finding a co-founder can be uniquely difficult. Even if you have a strong network, your friends may not be startup-oriented, and the ones who are may not be available on the same schedule you are [1]. And if you don’t have a strong existing network, the search is even harder.<p>Of course, you don’t <i>need</i> a co-founder to start a company. Many successful startups have started without one, including 4 of the top 100 YC companies. YC does fund solo founders—over 10% of companies in recent batches. But starting a startup is hard, to put it mildly. For most founders, we recommend finding someone to work with and share that burden.<p>YC’s advice has historically been to find a co-founder through your existing network. That’s still good advice—co-founder relationships with someone you’ve known and worked with for years will have a lower attrition rate than a relationship with someone you just met on the internet. (At least one would expect so! We’re going to track data on this.) But for many members of the Startup School community, that isn’t an option. As the internet has increased access to information about startups, we’re seeing lots of new founders who live outside traditional startup hubs (or college towns) and/or don’t have a deep existing network to plumb.<p>The difficulty new founders face in finding a co-founder is reflected in the data. Of over 100,000 active founders in Startup School, 20% say they’re still looking for a co-founder. Of 60,000 aspiring founders who haven’t started a company yet, about a third mention “I haven’t found the right co-founder” as a reason they haven’t started (second only to “I’m not sure what to work on”).<p>Since Startup School is too large for us to be able to work with founders individually the way we do in YC’s core program, we rely heavily on software and especially on building systems to help community members support each other. Building a marketplace to help find a co-founder felt like a natural next step. We're hoping that a dedicated marketplace will be more effective than the alternatives many founders resort to right now, like trawling Twitter and LinkedIn. Since everyone using the service is actively looking for a co-founder right now, the hit rate should be higher. We’ve added the kinds of filters most relevant to co-founding (time commitment, location/timezone, division of responsibilities, etc). Finally, we took inspiration from modern dating apps to make the experience as seamless as possible and let founders review hundreds of potential matches quickly. To the extent that finding a co-founder is a numbers game, we want to make it as easy as possible to review many profiles quickly.<p>We soft-launched this product to the Startup School community in January, and so far have facilitated over 9000 initial matches among 4500 founders. Many of those matches have gone on to work together on trial projects and even form startups. Two of those startups have made it into the latest YC Core batch (S21). We’re hoping that there will be many more over time!<p>You can find out more and sign up at <a href="https://www.startupschool.org/cofounder-matching" rel="nofollow">https://www.startupschool.org/cofounder-matching</a>. This is still the beginning and I expect we’ll be learning and changing a lot as we go, but I’m excited to share this tool with you all. I’d also love to hear from all of you on what has (or hasn’t) worked for finding a co-founder, since I know many of you have gone though this exact process!<p>[1] Timing may be one reason why it’s easier for university students to find potential co-founders: everyone finishes class at the same time, so it’s easy to all agree to try a startup for the summer.
Upvote: | 433 |
Title: Hi HN, we are Elena and Emeli, co-founders of Evidently AI <a href="http://evidentlyai.com" rel="nofollow">http://evidentlyai.com</a>. We're building monitoring for machine learning models in production. The tool is open source and available on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/evidentlyai/evidently" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/evidentlyai/evidently</a>. You can use it locally in a Jupyter notebook or in a Bash shell. There’s a video showing how it works in Jupyter here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtTKYxm524" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtTKYxm524</a>.<p>Machine learning models can stop working as expected, often for non-obvious reasons. If this happens to a marketing personalization model, you might spam your customers by mistake. If this happens to credit scoring models, you might face legal and reputational risks. And so on. To catch issues with the model, it is not enough to just look at service metrics like latency. You have to track data quality, data drift (did the inputs change too much?), underperforming segments (does the model fail only for users in a certain region?), model metrics (accuracy, ROC AUC, mean error, etc.), and so on.<p>Emeli and I have been friends for many years. We first met when we both worked at Yandex (the company behind CatBoost and ClickHouse). We worked on creating ML systems for large enterprises. We then co-founded a startup focused on ML for manufacturing. Overall we've worked on more than 50 real-world ML projects, from e-commerce recommendations to steel production optimization. We faced the monitoring problem on our own when we put models in production and had to create and build custom dashboards. Emeli is also an ML instructor on Coursera (co-author of the most popular ML course in Russian) and a number of offline courses. She knows first-hand how many data scientists try to repeatedly implement the same things over and over. There is no reason why everyone should have to build their own version of something like drift detection.<p>We spent a couple of months talking to ML teams from different industries. We learned that there are no good, standard solutions for model monitoring. Some quoted us horror stories about broken models left unnoticed which led to $100K+ in losses. Others showed us home-grown dashboards and complained they are hard to maintain. Some said they simply have a recurring task to look at the logs once per month, and often catch the issues late. It is surprising how often models are not monitored until the first failure. We spoke to many teams who said that only after the first breakdown they started to think about monitoring. Some never do, and failures go undetected.<p>If you want to calculate a couple of performance metrics on top of your data, it is easy to do ad hoc. But if you want to have stable visibility into different models, you need to consider edge cases, choose the right statistical tests and implement them, design visuals, define thresholds for alerts etc. That is a harder problem that combines statistics and engineering. Beyond that, monitoring often involves sharing the results with different teams: from domain experts to developers. In practice, data scientists often end up sharing screenshots of their plots and sending files here and there. Building a maintainable software system that supports these workflows is a project in itself, and machine learning teams usually do not have time or resources for it.<p>Since there is no standard open-source solution, we decided to build one. We want to automate as much as possible to help people focus on the modeling work that matters, not boilerplate code.<p>Our main tool is an open-source Python library that generates interactive reports on ML model performance. To get it, you need to provide the model logs (input features, prediction, and ground truth if available) and reference data (usually from training). Then you choose the report type and we generate a set of dashboards. We have pre-built several reports to detect things like data drift, prediction drift, visualize performance metrics, and help understand where the model makes errors. We can display these in a Jupyter notebook or HTML. We can also generate a JSON profile instead of a report. You can then integrate this output with any external tool (like Grafana) and build a workflow you want to trigger retraining or alerts.<p>Under the hood, we perform the needed calculations (e.g. Kolmogorov Smirnov or Chi-Squared test to detect drift) and generate multiple interactive tables and plots (using Plotly on the backend). Right now it works with tabular data only. In the future, we plan to add more data types, reports and make it easier to customize metrics. Our goal is to make it dead easy to understand all aspects of model performance and monitor them.<p>We differ from other approaches in a couple of ways. There are end-to-end ML platforms on the market that include monitoring features. These work for teams who are ready to trade flexibility in order to have an all-in-one tool. But most teams we spoke to have custom needs and prefer to build their own platform from open components. We want to create a tool that does one thing well and is easy to integrate with whatever stack you use. There are also some proprietary ML monitoring solutions on the market, but we believe that tools like these should be open, transparent, and available for self-hosting. That is why we are building it as open source.<p>We launched under Apache 2.0 license so that everyone can use the tool. For now, our focus is to get adoption for the open-source project. We don’t plan to charge individual users or small teams. We believe that the open-source project should remain open and be highly valuable. Later on, we plan to make money by providing a hosted cloud version for teams that do not want to run it themselves. We're also considering an open-core business model where we charge for features that large companies care about like single sign-on, security and audits.<p>If you work in tech companies, you might think that many ML infra problems are already solved. But in more traditional industries like manufacturing, retail, finance, etc., ML is just hitting adoption. Their ML needs and environment are often very different due to legacy IT systems, regulations, and types of use cases they work with. Now that many move from ML proof-of-concept projects to production, they will need the tools to help run the models reliably.<p>We are super excited to share this early release, and we’d love if you could give it a try: <a href="https://github.com/evidentlyai/evidently" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/evidentlyai/evidently</a>. If you run models in production - let us know how you monitor them and if anything is missing. If you need some help to test the tool - happy to chat! We want to build this open-source project together with the community, so let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback.
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: Part of the workflow for building my website is the generation of a table in
tab-separated column format (.tsv). The source data is found in four other .tsv
files. I use an SQLite query to perform a 4-way join and write out the new table. For
convenience, I wrote a script that encapsulates the query inside a Bash function.<p>The example below illustrates this technique.<p><pre><code> repertoire() {
pushd $CMM_SOURCES/_data
sqlite3 <<EOS
.headers on
.mode tabs
.import category.tsv category
.import composition.tsv composition
.import concert.tsv concert
.import program.tsv program
.once repertoire.tsv
SELECT
category.name AS category,
composition.key,
composition.composer,
composition.name AS composition,
concert.name AS concert
FROM
category,
concert,
composition,
program
WHERE
julianday(concert.date) < julianday('now')
AND composition.category = category.name
AND program.key = composition.key
AND program.date = concert.date
ORDER BY
category.sequence,
composition.key
;
EOS
popd
}</code></pre>
Upvote: | 134 |
Title: I'm slowly becoming addicted to Emacs, and I'm curious about what everyone else is doing. What are some of your favorite hacks and changes you've implemented over the years?
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: I have never really done a dedicated campaign to get the best position possible. I have no idea how to play companies against each other to boost my compensation. Heck, beyond FAANG, I am not even sure where the good spots are to apply, especially for remote work.<p>Anyone who has gotten a nice juicy raise have a playbook I can follow?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Hi HN, we're Bruno and Louise, the founders of Hera (<a href="https://hera.so" rel="nofollow">https://hera.so</a>)! Over the past 5 months, we have built a MacOS desktop app to prepare, join, and run meetings without the grunt work. Basically, we try to help busy knowledge workers have good meetings without spending all day preparing or scrambling to find back that note in Apple Notes.<p>We were our first users. As a PM, I was spending an unreasonable amount of time preparing user research interviews and kick-off meetings and sharing summaries to the team. A good 45-min meeting would effectively cost me about 2 hours of mental bandwidth. The private beta we launched 4 months ago helped us find good ways to attack the problem:<p>Meetings are broken partly because they are seen as isolated entities in calendar and note-taking tools. We want to make each meeting live next to other related meetings. Kind of like a thread of emails, but for your meetings (think of your weekly product meeting or one-on-one).<p>There is a missed opportunity to automate low-value repetitive tasks as well. Let's say you're interviewing customers for something, your calendar is filled with meetings called "User research with [John]". You should be able to jump into each of these meetings with a template automatically applied, and an easy way to mark highlights to feed a broader source of truth. If you're interested, we've written more extensively about this here: <a href="https://medium.com/hera-hq/your-meetings-deserve-an-inbox-not-a-calendar-c9a6cecf117a" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/hera-hq/your-meetings-deserve-an-inbox-no...</a>. Long story short, our users can swiftly prepare, join, and take notes in meetings.<p>We were pleasantly surprised by the willingness of users to prepare for meetings, before it was officially supported in the product. We tried to make this step as easy as possible: one click to use a template and past related meetings are visible during your preparation. Today, about 50% of the meetings in Hera are prepared beforehand.<p>Unlike tools like Notion, the note-taking experience during meeting is intentionally constrained (only headers and bullet points). We've made it easy to mark a bullet point as a highlight or a next action. To avoid the "I took notes but never used them" curse, we've included easy-to-use exports to Google Docs/Slack/Todoist. To avoid the "What did we say last time?" curse, archived meetings are easily searchable, by title, topic, or attendee.<p>We have a strong focus on speed and keyboard shortcuts in the app, because taking notes in meetings can be hard :)<p>Premium version at $10/month, free version has unlimited features and 4 meetings notes/week. We have set up a discount code HERAHN (20% off for the first three months) for the HackerN ews community. Have a try and let us know what you think! Direct link to install the app:
<a href="https://www.notion.so/Hera-Download-Link-d61273f127314353b1a54dd9a00fb79e" rel="nofollow">https://www.notion.so/Hera-Download-Link-d61273f127314353b1a...</a>. You can also check a 2-min product tour here: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/d227cb4216584d0880be8989b4cb5a59" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/d227cb4216584d0880be8989b4cb5a59</a><p>We would love to get your feedback on the product and hear about the main pain points you have regarding meetings: Is it preparing them, taking notes, refocusing after/before, or just getting value out of them. We'll stick around all day to answer your questions and remarks!
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=It%20is%20difficult%20to%20get%20a%20man%20to%20understand%20something%2C%20when%20his%20salary%20depends%20on%20his%20not%20understanding%20it&sort=byDate&type=all" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a>
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: I'm looking for collection of pitch decks because I'm planning on starting a startup soon and I want to know how good pitch decks look like.<p>It seems like a website[0] of this person is down but I remember it was a good site.<p>[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305196
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Carlo and Anand, and for the past few months, we’ve been building Pabio (<a href="https://pabio.com" rel="nofollow">https://pabio.com</a>). With Pabio, you can get your apartment fully furnished by a professional interior designer and rent high-quality furniture on a monthly subscription.<p>After exiting our previous startups, we had some time on our hands and started visiting many friends at their homes for a coffee to talk about anything and everything. One thing stood out: In most cases, their apartment interior was awful — it was almost always crammed with cheap furniture that didn’t match with each other or the apartment. So, we asked our friends why they wouldn’t hire an interior designer and purchase nicer furniture that fits better, and most of them gave us two reasons: first, interior design seems elitist and expensive; and second, buying a full apartment interior is (a) too expensive, and (b) doesn’t make sense if you rent an apartment and don’t know how long you’re going to stay in it.<p>We figured that if we combine both things—interior design and furniture rental—we can create an affordable package for tenants that’s still very high-quality.<p>Here’s how it works:<p>The user uploads a floor plan of their apartment and takes some photos for our reference. Using these, we generate a 3D model of the apartment and one of our interior designers furnishes it. We send the user a fully rendered, photorealistic view of what their apartment will look like [1]. If they like it, they sign up, we deliver and install all furniture, and the user pays a monthly subscription fee. We also fully insure all items and offer optional add-on services like electricians and bi-weekly cleaning. Once they move out, we take all the furniture back, renovate it, and place it in a new apartment at a discounted price.<p>For the whole process to work smoothly, we developed a semi-automated rendering workflow. We built a web-based drawing tool that allows us to easily draw a floor plan, drag-and-drop furniture items on it, and convert it to structured data [2]. We send this JSON instruction file to a Blender instance where we run a Python script to generate renders using our custom Blender plugins. This process is not fully finalized yet, so we usually have to manually adjust some parameters like the camera placement or applying filters, but give it a few more months (or years... heh), and we’ll be able to end-to-end automate the floor plan-to-render process.<p>Although a lot of our core tech is internal tooling such as the rendering service [2], Pabio.com serves as the web app where users can plan their furniture deliveries, file insurance claims, manage billing, etc. You can test out Pabio at <a href="https://pabio.com" rel="nofollow">https://pabio.com</a>, or check out a sample proposal that we send to customers [1].<p>We’re very excited (and a bit nervous) to hear what you think! Please leave us your feedback and share your ideas about how we can improve our offering.<p>Thank you so much!<p>Carlo & Anand<p>[1] Sample proposal: <a href="https://pabio.com/sample-interior-design-concept" rel="nofollow">https://pabio.com/sample-interior-design-concept</a><p>[2] 30-second demo of our internal interior design tool that generates renders: <a href="https://pabiousercontent.com/marketing-assets/launch-hn/designer-demo.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://pabiousercontent.com/marketing-assets/launch-hn/desi...</a>
Upvote: | 112 |
Title: Hi HN, my name is Rahul Sarathy and I built Homer (<a href="https://usehomer.app" rel="nofollow">https://usehomer.app</a>), a tool to allow creators to build more interactive digital textbooks.<p>Right now the software supports image based scrollytelling with a roadmap to add interactive components such as annotations, animations, backlinks, and more.<p>You can check out a demo of an interactive history book here: <a href="https://usehomer.app/demo" rel="nofollow">https://usehomer.app/demo</a>
Here's another short example of how a personal finance related book could look like: <a href="https://usehomer.app/rahul/8" rel="nofollow">https://usehomer.app/rahul/8</a><p>If you're interested in checking out the UI used to build the demo above, feel free to sign up at <a href="https://usehomer.app/signup" rel="nofollow">https://usehomer.app/signup</a> and create a book.
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Forums that are <i>actually</i> like HN that have a minimal interface and promote actual discussion with tree like threads unlike other forums where you can barely see 4 people's response and can hardly tell who's replying to who.
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: Hey HN, This is Sefa, Michael and Stephen of Suplias (<a href="https://suplias.com/" rel="nofollow">https://suplias.com/</a>). Suplias is a B2B marketplace where mom and pop stores in Africa buy inventory directly from manufacturers using a mobile app.<p>The retail market in Africa is informal and fragmented with 13M independently owned mom and pop stores contributing 90% of the market. To play in the $180B food and beverages market, you have to reach each mom and pop store separately. Meanwhile, mom and pop stores have to lock their stores, travel up to 20 miles and visit multiple wholesalers to buy inventory. This buying experience is stressful, takes hours, and results in a 15% loss of revenue to the store owner.<p>We are 3 co-founders with experience in supply chain and e-commerce. Sefa led GB Foods, as the Business Development Director in Nigeria, to build a retail network of 130k retail stores. Michael was the Commercial Director for Fashion of Jumia in Nigeria. While working with Procter & Gamble, we (Sefa and Michael) saw how mom and pop stores face barriers to getting inventory. We built a manual selling operation to deliver products to mom and pop stores. The problem was that we could only sell products manufactured by our employer, a single manufacturer, while mom and pop stores owners kept asking for product variety across various manufacturers.<p>Sefa saw an ad about Amazon Dash where individuals could just push a button and home care products would be replenished by Amazon. This experience kept Sefa awake all night wondering if such a concept will work for mom and pop stores in Africa. Sefa called Stephen his friend who is a software engineer and convinced him to build an Android app to test if mom and pop stores will be willing to place orders via a mobile app. In parallel, Sefa called Michael, who was in Stanford GSB at the time and urged him to come back so they could transform Africa with the "big idea" :) In 4 weeks, we spoke to 50 mom and pop stores, 30 had smartphones out of which 20 agreed to place their orders on the app. This experiment led us to quit our jobs and focus on building Suplias.<p>To use Suplias, mom and pop stores sign up with their phone number on a progressive web app. (Since we figure most of you probably don’t have Nigerian phone numbers, we made a demo so you can see how it works: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3Wpx2G6W_k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3Wpx2G6W_k</a>.) They place orders for products listed by manufacturers, and get the products delivered within 24 hours. Manufacturers list products and ship physical inventory to Suplias distribution center, where independent delivery associates pick up orders and deliver to stores.<p>We differentiate ourselves by having the most variety for packaged food and guaranteed next day delivery. Order delivery and consistent availability of inventory are actually more important than lower prices to mom and pop stores.<p>We make money via commissions from manufacturers and $1.25 delivery fees from mom and pop stores. In Africa, mom and pop stores don't pay delivery fees for orders from a single manufacturer. We are able to charge for delivery because we deliver products from multiple manufacturers.<p>Beyond the market size, helping small businesses like mom and pop stores thrive has an impact on the African economy in an inclusive way. 70% of our customers are mothers who are the primary source of income for their families. We believe using technology to solve the problems mom and pop stores face is a step towards increasing the standard of living of families in Africa.<p>Thanks for reading. We will be super excited to get your thoughts / feedback in the comments below especially if you have experience in the marketpace, Logistics or SMB space.<p>Best regards
Sefa, Michael, Stephen
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: I realized I've had a long fascination with analog synthesizers going back to the first one I saw in 1977. The band teacher had one in his office.<p>And I was tempted toward random knob twisting today when I saw yet another 'analog' synthesizer runnable in the browser.<p>But I'd really like to have some basic idea of how to put together rudimentary sounds with intent.<p>I was wondering about book like objects that explain the basics. Maybe a good used book to pick up. Thanks.
Upvote: | 166 |
Title: Hey HN, we're Arthur and Tom, 2 brothers from France and founders of Café (<a href="https://at.cafe/" rel="nofollow">https://at.cafe/</a>). Our app lets you decide where to work, depending on who’ll be at the office or working remotely.<p>The world is going hybrid (mixing remote and office) faster than expected. Companies are using spreadsheets to see who’s at the offices and who’s not. People want to see each other, but they never know when and where to meet.<p>We were employees in the same French company during Covid lockdown. When going back to the office (June 2020) we struggled to see our team. We were only a team of 8 people and it was a mess to coordinate everyone because we had no visibility over each other's calendar. We were doing Slack polls for every day in the upcoming week. We couldn't make a decision because we had no data! We started talking to other companies (up to 200 interviews) and everyone was struggling with spreadsheets... We thought there was a better way and launched our MVP (a simple mobile app) in private beta in September with 5 companies.<p>Our mobile and web app shows you who's at the office, how many seats are available, and who's working from another location. You are invited to set your status for the current week and next week (10 days of visibility) and it's done in 10 clicks. You decide where to work from based on who’s where.<p>We're making it easy and flexible—you can customize the whole experience (name/emoji of status), set only half days, and specify the city you're working remotely from. Our solution is as engaging as possible so people actually input their plans.<p>Most companies are using Café to make decisions with data when it comes to their office (should they move out? keep it?) and save money. Some have used it to organize events (e.g. pick the days where there's the most people to do team building). Some are using it to better onboard new employees in their hybrid team.<p>We’re not a desk-booking tool. We're focused on engagement and hybrid employee experience. Our software isn't only about what’s happening between the 4 walls of the office, that’s why we include remote folks in the experience to enable meet-ups inside and outside the office.<p>You can use Café on desktop and web mobile or directly through mobile apps to declare where you'll be working from. We integrate with many tools, like Slack where your status is automatically synchronized, or with HR tools where your days off and paid leaves are synced without having to do anything. Here are quick demos to see how it works: 1-minute demo: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOGPCXSIB8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOGPCXSIB8</a> and 3-minute demo: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSQu3e0LzzA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSQu3e0LzzA</a><p>To sign up (<a href="https://app.at.cafe/" rel="nofollow">https://app.at.cafe/</a>), you only need to have a valid business email. We offer a free plan for up to 50 users. Like Slack, our Premium plan only charges based on usage (for active users), starting at $5 / user / month.<p>We know the Hacker News community has a lot of remote-first people and we look forward to reading all of your feedback. Many thanks!
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: I was reviewing Dirac's Large Numbers Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis) and decided to give it a second go, now with measurements of fundamental constants more precise than 100 years ago.<p>And I stumbled upon a value for Hubble's constant that's uncannily close. Here are the full calculations.<p>https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1K1qoUFvqZp1fWbpcKJWq63nflgwS0ZHh?usp=sharing<p>Meaningless, or meaningful coincidence?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: So, if you're considering replying to a "Who wants to be hired?" thread, do it, ASAP.<p>The original version of my comment wasn't very good, but it still got me traction. I updated it as I improved my resume and interviewing skills, and the improved version[] is what my new employer saw.<p>Thanks HN.<p>[] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27705122
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Hey, we’re Naz and Charlie! We're building Onfolk (<a href="https://onfolk.com/" rel="nofollow">https://onfolk.com/</a>). We’re a couple of engineers who discovered that payroll in the UK is pretty backward and that building good software can raise the bar. You can check out some pics on our Product Hunt post [1] or see a quick video [2].<p>To set the scene: we were software engineers at Monzo for 4 years. Joined at 400k customers, left at 5.5M. We took voluntary furlough in April 2020 ("furlough" is the UK government’s scheme for keeping workers paid for a bit so that companies don't have to lay them off). During that time, Monzo changed payroll provider. The old one sucked and had errors. The new one sucked and had errors. It took a consultant a year to implement the new one.<p>We wondered how on earth a company with our funding, whose main asset was its people, couldn't find a good way to pay them. We dug into what doing payroll actually means (shout out to payroll guru Duane Jackson [3] for the early pointers!). Turns out, payroll is: (1) gross-to-net calculations, (2) reporting that to the government, and (3) making payslips. It’s not conceptually hard but you have to be meticulous. Complicated, not complex.<p>Some of the payroll products in the UK have 0 automated tests in their software. A typical process is run on spreadsheets pulled out of HR softwares or emails to accountants. No validation, data keyed in on the other end. Payroll is unloved.<p>There are a huge amount of edge cases. Tax systems aren't put in place all at once – they evolve over time. So when you're programming payroll you run into things like: gender is a mandatory field to report to the government and a binary male/female. Until April 1977 married women could choose to pay a reduced rate of national insurance (our word for "social security" in the UK). Anyone who opted into that scheme before 1977 might still be on it.<p>Another one: Deep-sea fisherman have their own national insurance rates [4]. The government changes people's tax codes periodically, and sometimes the reasons can seem baffling. It's not a very transparent system<p>Turns out the competition is listed on the government's website [5]. There’s about 130 other payroll softwares. Desktop software still dominates the UK market ("butt" is a feature in payroll land).<p>We discovered the certification process to get on the list, found the right person in the government to email when we had questions, and kinda just started building. We trundled on over our weekends until we got on the list (might still be under our old name, “Hyko”, at the time of writing. Hyko is a dog [6]).<p>Then, a friend whose payroll provider had just got their numbers wrong gave us a shot. I phoned up Charlie, who said “I guess I’d better put the kettle on”. We had less than 2 weeks to get it done and worked like maniacs over Christmas to arrive at something that looked like a payrun.<p>The calculations were run from test files on our local machines, as was notifying the government via their XML API with it's random polling intervals. Payslips were cobbled together on Figma. It was artisanal.<p>Since then, here’s a few ways we’ve tried our best to raise the bar on the software side: Thorough automated unit tests on our calculation logic; integration tests for playing through multiple months of salaries (especially important as tax calculations in the UK care about the cumulative amount paid over a year vs. only concerning the current month); whenever anything changes, we recreate payments for the current month on the fly. So that the user always has a live view of what payroll will be (vs. finding out on the day); Reconciliation logic. So that if things that should add up don't add up, we error loudly way before payday. This reduces the chances that we'll ever run payroll with incorrect numbers (techniques learnt while interacting with banking ledgers); Wrote in a language with a strong compiler (Go); Generally validate the shit out of everything.<p>Since Christmas, the product has expanded from payroll into one tool for everything that touches employee data. We think that a ton of the manual admin work in UK companies results from no 'single source of truth' for employee data (often spread across Xero, accountants, spreadsheets, time-tracking software, Google Drive).<p>The same data is duplicated in multiple tools, which means it has to be synced, which means spreadsheet exports and manual process. e.g. when an employee leaves, you usually want their remaining time-off allowance to be automatically added to their final salary, reported to the government as such, and to have them removed from payroll, time-off rotas etc. Typically, that means a bunch of faffy jobs where people get paid wrong if you mess up.<p>We’ve tried to kick off everything that needs to be done from key actions (new joiner, leaver, salary update, payrun). When a payrun is started, from our backend: the UK government is notified, payslips are created, journals are posted to accounting software, pension contributions are posted, and payments are scheduled.<p>As an employee you don’t have to log in to “myEPayslipPortal” to get your payslip. It’s there alongside your time-off and personal info. Currently we charge £8 / employee / month and have a bunch of startups on board.<p>This autumn we’ll be working on exposing our backend as a UK payroll API, so anyone can have payroll in their product without having to care about unintuitive tax calculations and keeping up with changes in regulations.<p>I’d be interested if our findings ring true with anyone's payroll experiences. Any ideas for applications for a payroll API? Or interesting implications come to mind with having a source of truth for all your employee data?<p>Thanks all!!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.producthunt.com/posts/onfolk" rel="nofollow">https://www.producthunt.com/posts/onfolk</a><p>[2] <a href="https://loom.com/share/3ac431db7c4e46e7a14921c5f98a3f68" rel="nofollow">https://loom.com/share/3ac431db7c4e46e7a14921c5f98a3f68</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/16/i-got-caught-drug-trafficking-duane-jackson" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/16/i-got-caught...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ca42-foreign-going-mariners-and-deep-sea-fishermen" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ca42-foreign-goin...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://www.gov.uk/payroll-software/paid-for-software" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/payroll-software/paid-for-software</a><p>[6] <a href="https://www.lukeleighfield.fyi/blog/hyko" rel="nofollow">https://www.lukeleighfield.fyi/blog/hyko</a>
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>There's a popular post up today - "The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27833064<p>Some commenters have point out that this very well could be just an example of survivorship bias.<p>Did you put in 15+ hours a week for several years on a project that never went anywhere? Please add a comment about it - we'd love to hear about your experience.
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: It seems to me that they would be just as likely, if not more, to get hit.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I was reading this [Joel on software essay](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/) about employment contracts and side prrojects after it was mentioned in another post here.<p>It's been frustrating me for a long time that most companies when hiring are looking for people who do lots of side projects and open source work, yet when you are actually employed, you will usually have a contract forbidding you from having side activities, or potentially trying to grab copyright forr what you do on the side.<p>Most companies also don't let their employees open source their code written at work too.<p>I get that there is a sort of common understanding between employers and employees that lets people have small side projects, but I've never liked the fact that on paper companies can easily claim ownership of them if they become worth it.<p>In a lot of jobs, people end up in a situation where they are actively discouraged from doing anything on the side because it's always hard to know if they're even allowed. Learning new skills, having side projects and doing open source is valued in hiring, but strongly discouraged and sometimes impossible when having a job.<p>Are there any solutions to this problem? Curious what people's thoughts are.
Upvote: | 344 |
Title: Hi HN Community,<p>Today's beginner investors are stuck with zero-interest rate accounts and passive investing. That might work for some but if you are interested to explore more active investing opportunities, you will soon find yourself out-traded by funds and bots who control much of the market volume.<p>We are Gabriele, Zdenek and Oleg, founders of Coinrule <a href="https://coinrule.com/" rel="nofollow">https://coinrule.com/</a>. We met back in 2017 when we were building our previous startups and met at Masschallenge, an accelerator program, in London. At that time all three of us were experimenting with cryptocurrencies investing and soon found that unless we used automation, we could not compete in a 24/7 market. That's when we started to think of a solution, now called Coinrule.<p>Coinrule helps beginner investor build automated rules for trading strategies, currently for cryptocurrencies but later also for other assets - it runs on top of cryptocurrency exchanges and uses an IFTTT-style interface. It's like Zapier for investing.<p>The Cryptocurrency world came along with a lot of controversies, at the same time it gave many makers a possibility to start deconstructing finance. Also for us, cryptocurrencies are a good place to try and build a more equal way of managing your savings.<p>We are part of this market and believe in it. Our ultimate goal is to make trading more accessible and to expand Coinrule to equities, FX and later also to DeFi to give beginner investors the opportunity to manage their funds in a market full of speculators.<p>When we first started investing, we approached it from two beliefs: 1) you are unlikely to grow a portfolio without a small percentage of it allocated to more active investments and 2) tools in the market today are made by traders for advanced traders. Many of our users have learned, grown and improved as traders over the past year of using Coinrule and that's what we think really matters.<p>Of course we understand that the HN community has a lot of cryptocurrency sceptics and we respect that. The cryptocurrency market is still full of scams and bad actors. Whether you like it or not though, it is now big enough that it is here to stay. Despite the bad reputation, there are also many genuine and hard working people trying to build technology that matters. We believe that it is worthwhile to try make cryptocurrencies an easier place to navigate for these 'normal' people. If one of our users does not have the right mindset or could be vulnerable and should not be trading, we tell them that.<p>Coinrule today is registered with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, has transacted over $500m and is run by an international and diverse team.<p>Building a product, as you all know, is hard so we'd appreciate comments and feedback. We'd love to hear anything that helps make Coinrule better, simpler and fairer. Please try us out at <a href="https://coinrule.com" rel="nofollow">https://coinrule.com</a>! Happy to answer any questions and hear your feedback in the comments!
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Hey HN. We are Amit, Chetan, Anubhav and Hari, the cofounders of Weekday (<a href="https://www.weekday.works" rel="nofollow">https://www.weekday.works</a>). We are building a recruitment platform centered around recommendations. We help companies hire engineers who are vouched for by other engineers.<p>Discovering top talent is challenging. It's easy to check for great credentials, but that's not the same thing as on-ground reality and achievement. It works the other way, too: someone with credentials may not be a great contributor, and screening for credentials eliminates many contributors who are.<p>Our company is based on the insight that great contributors tend to know other great contributors and are in a position to recommend them. We believe that a network-driven approach can help to discover high-caliber candidates.<p>We chanced upon this idea when we were doing our previous startup where we found it excruciatingly difficult to hire our first engineer. We tried all job boards and tech hiring marketplaces but nothing worked. We asked 50 of our friends if they knew a good engineer for us. Many said that they would recommend someone, but few actually did. We realized that it was because the friction to recommend is too high. Instead, we asked those friends to do a screen-share call and scroll their LinkedIn connections and just tell us which ones they would recommend. This ended up increasing our pipeline multifold and is what gave us the idea to productize the same approach and try to make it work for a global network.<p>In an attempt to productise the same approach of hiring via recommendations, we have built a Chrome extension which removes the friction of coming up with names to refer. We give people a shortlist of people to choose from (based on a matching of roles we have available and your connections’ profiles) and they can recommend anyone they like out of them. They get financial rewards if the people they recommend end up getting interviewed by companies or get hired. Our business model works on a success fee model, we take 15% of annual salary from the company’s side. We pass on a percentage of that finder’s fee to the engineer who recommended them, while also paying if any of your recommended friends get interviews (as we have seen on avg companies take 20 interviews to hire 1 person).<p>We have experienced that in hiring, neither a fully automated nor completely human-driven approach works. Having to interact only with software can be a dehumanizing experience. A fully human-led approach leads to a lot of recruiter spam as every recruiter in their silo tries to reach out to every possible engineer. We believe our approach of hiring based on recommendations leads to more targeted matching and gives opportunities to people who otherwise would find it difficult in an overly credential-driven job market.<p>We would love to get your feedback on our approach and hear about the problems you have faced while hiring, looking to switch jobs or interacting with recruiters!
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: Everyone says the market is frothy and startups raise unreal sums of money they don't even need at high valuations, yet I'm failling to. I never attended Stanford, didn't work at FAANG and I'm not even from the US, so I don't have relationships with founders/investors. I'm technical, yet need engineers to launch. I built an mvp, pivoted, did customer development etc. I'm full time for over a year, and I'm 25. The market is fairly new and many don't understand it, but I've been working in this space for 8 years, been working with biggest companies. I have multiple ideas I'm confident about if this one will fail. If you had a similar story - please tell it, especially if you failed.<p>So should I sell my house to fund my startup to some milestone? I don't need cars nor houses, I only care about building stuff and learning, only things that make me happy. Should I YOLO the fuck out of my life?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Is something wrong with me that recently I stopped being excited about tech, products, disruptive ideas, making world better etc.<p>And just want to make money, as much as possible, don’t care how (as long as it’s legal).<p>Is it a good start for starting new project in tech world?<p>Because creating software products is the only thing i can do very well.<p>But except few small exceptions all my life I’ve been working for companies, exchanging my time for money, building software.<p>Anyone created profitable and lasting IT business being motivated only by money?
Upvote: | 224 |
Title: I live in Europe after growing up in the States. Every now and then, a link to an interesting news article is suggested to me. Clicking the link, I see this text:<p><pre><code> Our European visitors are important to us.
This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we
work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
</code></pre>
For my European friends, try a link like <www.everythinglubbock.com> or <www.tristatehomepage.com> or <www.khon2.com> or <www.wtrf.com> or <www.wnct.com> or <www.fox46.com> ... or many of the other "local" news sources in the U.S. It's important to note: While these sites cover news in a particular region, we'd need to start calling each McDonald's a local burger joint under this classification.<p>At the bottom of each page: <<a href="https://www.nexstar.tv" rel="nofollow">https://www.nexstar.tv</a>> - If you click <i>this</i> link, you are <i>not</i> geoblocked! In fact, there are a ton of statistics showing just how many resources this media group has at their disposal to address releasing news articles to Europe. Save a click. It's 4 billion USD revenue, over 100 news sites and TV stations, and a reach into two-thirds of American households. This is no mom and pop operation. They just don't---or maybe <i>can't</i>---care.<p>I only focused on one media group, but there are others. Here's a news article from the same year GDPR began enforcement two years after its introduction in 2016: <<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44248448" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44248448</a>><p>A little has changed, but not much! Chicago Tribune is finally available. NY Daily News? Can't access. Baltimore Sun or Orlando Sentinel? Also, no.<p><i>"Why are you complaining?"</i> you might ask. <i>"What is your goal?"</i><p>Besides the obvious---I'd like to read about the communities of my friends and former neighbors---I want two outcomes:<p>First, any giant search engine company with a news subdomain and 100,000 employees could stop suggesting/featuring geofenced articles to European residents. At least weight these results so they aren't the number one, front page feature. (Although in Google's defense, one can usually click the "Cached" button to get the linked story.)<p>Second, say something else. The people living across the Atlantic (and their pesky differences of opinion on privacy) can't possibly be more than an inconvenience at this point.<p><pre><code> You are in Europe. Mind your own business.
</code></pre>
---<p>Edit: First post. No idea how to get links to display properly even following "Formatting Options" instructions.
Upvote: | 231 |
Title: I know this is offtopic, but i figure there are many current or past pot smokers on here.<p>I recently had the idea to quit smoking, but somehow it does not really suit me and i started to ask why i even should. The main argument i keep finding is alike "heavy smokers are lazy and likely won't get successful in their job or life" and stuff like this, which might is true in statistics but not for me.<p>On the opposite i am happy to have a tool that i can use to calm down that isn't valium or alcohol, that helps my migrains as well as is able to give me creative kicks i need for my work.<p>I am wondering what your experience is, what changed?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Spriha and Ankit, founders of MergeQueue (<a href="https://mergequeue.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mergequeue.com/</a>). We enable automatic merges for your Github Pull Requests, based on configurable rules you can set for each repo. These automated merges ensure you never have failing builds on master/main and save time on rebasing your feature branches.<p>If you have a monorepo where a big engineering team is regularly merging changes, the stability of the main branch degrades considerably. This happens because more engineers working on the same codebase introduce incompatible changes, causing builds to break even though their commits pass independently. Here’s an example: <a href="https://blog.mergequeue.com/managing-github-merges-for-high-output-engineering/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mergequeue.com/managing-github-merges-for-high-...</a>.<p>Github has a setting to restrict branches to be up to date before merging, but turning on that setting ends up forcing a rebase-athon within the team. This results in wasted time, and all too often, a stressful scramble to figure out what changes broke the build.<p>We had this problem in our previous company where we looked for a solution to automate the process. We found this paper [1] published by Uber to manage monorepos at scale and we built a lightweight version of that internally. It immediately eliminated the overhead of keeping builds healthy. After that, we decided to build a public version to save others from re-inventing the wheel.<p>We spoke to engineers at Airbnb, Stripe, Uber, Shopify, Quora and other large companies who have internally built similar tools, but teams who need such tools the most often don’t have the bandwidth to dedicate developers to building and maintaining them.<p>MergeQueue (MQ) is a FIFO queue of Pull Requests (PRs) that works as a Github app. To use MQ as a developer, instead of merging manually, you just add a Github Label “mergequeue” to the PR. MQ then takes care of the rest: it sequentially updates or rebases the branch, monitors the configured CI checks and eventually merges the changes. If the checks fail, it will dequeue the PR, add comments describing the reason and move to the next one. For high output teams, MQ also offers batch mode to run CI in parallel batches.
If you’d like to learn more, there’s a lot more here: <a href="https://mergequeue.com/documentation" rel="nofollow">https://mergequeue.com/documentation</a>.<p>Currently, we are also piloting a way to manage “flaky” (i.e. unreliable) tests through MQ. This integrates with your CI provider (we currently support CircleCI), analyses test results and flags the tests that fail inconsistently. When flaky tests are identified, MQ reruns the test depending on the configuration set.<p>We charge by usage in an organization, so for instance if your organization has 100 developers but only 20 of them use MQ, only those 20 will be billed. You can sign up for a free 14 day trial without a credit card. We also support single tenant or on-prem deployments, have webhooks to connect to your other apps, offer multi-queue support, and are SOC2 certified!<p>We’d love for you to try MergeQueue and give us any feedback you have. If you've used something similar in the past, we're also curious to learn what problems you faced so we're better prepared for them ourselves :)<p>[1] <a href="https://eng.uber.com/research/keeping-master-green-at-scale/" rel="nofollow">https://eng.uber.com/research/keeping-master-green-at-scale/</a> - discussed at the time: <i>Keeping master green at scale</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19692820" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19692820</a> - April 2019 (115 comments)
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: On one side, more and more hardware is being thrown in parallel to ingest and compute astonishing amounts of data generated by realistic 3d simulators, especially for robotics, with big names like OpenAI now just giving up on the field as from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27861201 ; on the other side, more recent simulators like Brax from Google https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/07/speeding-up-reinforcement-learning-with.html are aiming at “matching the performance of a large compute cluster with just a single TPU or GPU”. Where do we stand on the latter side of the equation then? What is the state of the art with single, lower end GPUs like my 2016 gaming laptop’s GTX 1070 8GB? What do we lower end users need to read, learn and test these days? Thanks.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Small project, happily using generic VM. Everybody tell me I should use Docker. Where is the catch?
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Thinking of applying myself but the requirements seem intimidating
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: Each YC startup gets one chance to do a Launch HN thread that gets placed on HN's front page [1]. This is one of the three things that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it [2]. We started doing these in 2017 and they've worked out pretty well over the years [3], I think mostly because they're more interesting than job ads. However, they have to be written in a special way for that to work (more on this below).<p>Problem: HN's front page can only accommodate a fixed number of startups while YC keeps funding more (700+ a year and growing). We do two Launch HNs a day during the stampede before each Demo Day, but I think we overdid that in W21, and even 2 per day all year, which is out of the question, still wouldn't be enough.<p>Other problem: I work with the startups to edit their launch texts into a form that HN is more likely to find interesting. Mostly this consists of cajoling, persuading, and (when that fails) forcing them not to sound like marketing, sales, or PR. If you'd like to see the instructions we give founders about this, they're at [4].<p>Founders are used to talking to customers and investors, but those styles work poorly on HN, so most Launch HNs need a lot of editing. Unlike the number of front page slots, this work could be scaled, but it has to be done by someone who's familiar with what HN likes and what its conventions are, and it hasn't (yet) proven easy to train anyone to do it—you sort of have to dip them in the vat of HN over and over until they get steeped, and most people don't want to be dipped in a vat, or at least not this vat. So in practice I am still the bottleneck. 40 startups are currently in the pipe and it's backing up faster than I can process them.<p>Hence, new idea time: we're going to try aggregate launch threads for YC startups, tentatively called "Meet the Batch". These will be like Launch HNs, but with more than one startup, and shorter blurbs. Each startup will post its blurb as a comment and then HN readers can discuss and interact with the ones they find interesting.<p>Since each of these will be in lieu of a Launch HN, the number of threads won't go up, but throughput will. We have no idea how well it will work—it's an experiment. We'll probably start with one per week and do traditional Launch HNs the rest of the time. (Edit: a few weeks later, we seem to have settled on two per week.)<p>Which startups will get standalone Launch HNs vs. being in the aggregate threads? I'll decide that based mostly on what I think HN is likely to find interesting. That's <i>not</i> the same thing as which startups are good (or I think are good!) so please don't take it as that sort of signal. (Edit: it has more to do with what categories haven't appeared lately [5].)<p>So anyway, that's the plan. I wanted to give you all a heads-up, first so you know what to expect, and second so we can answer any questions and have any meta discussion now, instead of later when comments should really be about the startups. If you have questions, feedback, or hounds to unleash, have at it—also, any ideas about how we can do any of this better are most welcome.<p>p.s. Late Sunday is the HN equivalent of a Friday news drop but it's the only spare time I had. We might re-up this thread tomorrow (a la [6]) so others get the info.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/launches" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/launches</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#yc" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#yc</a> - the other two are job ads and orange usernames.<p>[3] Past posts about this: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22launch%20hns%22&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html</a><p>[5] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...</a><p>[6] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308</a>
Upvote: | 272 |
Title: I listen to audiobooks when driving, mowing the lawn or other manual tasks.<p>I've found some great books such as clean architecture and the pragmatic programmer.<p>I've also found some terrible books such as grokking algorithms.<p>I'm sure this community will have some recommendations to help avoid the terrible books.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Brennan and Graham, founders of Hypercontext (<a href="https://hypercontext.com" rel="nofollow">https://hypercontext.com</a>). We make an app that helps managers run their 1:1 and team meetings with action items, feedback, and OKRs (goals) in one workflow.<p>Most managers get promoted into their role with no training. “Oh you’re a good engineer? Great! Now manage a team of engineers and stop coding”. They’re largely leading with trial-and-error tactics. The good ones are reflective and learn, and many eventually read books on best practices and frameworks that can help them. Our insight is that it’s possible to build some of these good frameworks into a workflow so every manager can get them by default, similarly to how a good software framework lets you not have to hand-roll all the boilerplate code, so you can focus on the business logic. We think it’s time managers stop winging it (worst case) or hand rolling their management frameworks (best case) in Google Docs and Moleskin notebooks and start importing frameworks that solve the basics for them.<p>Previously, Graham and I have been co-founders for 10 years together. Our last startup grew to ~40 employees. When we became full-time managers we were shocked at the lack of tooling that existed for general management work. This was where the idea for Hypercontext came from. We started building tools and systems to help us fill the gaps (mainly in Google Sheets/Docs/Forms). We shared them with friends and they were loved.<p>Personally, I stumbled through management in my first startup. I didn’t talk about goals. I didn’t share candid feedback. I wasn’t clear or consistent. I thought I knew how to do other people’s jobs. I learned the hard way every single time. And so did all of my peers. The only way to save a fellow manager from that pain was by sharing personal tips or recommending books. We thought there must be a better way.<p>Hypercontext starts before the meeting: connecting to your existing meetings and helping you and your team build a collaborative agenda and show up prepared. During the meeting, often overlayed on a Google Meet: we help you take notes and action items, and email them out automatically for you. After: ML runs over your notes and generates insights about management blindspots. We then suggest questions/conversation starters for your next meeting to help to resolve them.<p>Finally, we’ve built a powerful goaling tool, complete with the largest library of goal/OKR examples on the internet (free here, broken up by role: <a href="https://hypercontext.com/goal-examples" rel="nofollow">https://hypercontext.com/goal-examples</a>), that helps you collaborate, document, and discuss long-term goals every meeting before the urgent agenda topic.<p>Founders, CEOs, execs use our app all week to manage their job—mainly through their 1:1 and team meetings. We’re specifically helpful for folks who are doing a lot of context switching throughout their day and need to offload the “remember to talk to people about this” part of their brain.
Upvote: | 145 |
Title: Long story short, I have a corneal disease that cannot be fixed with glasses or surgery. I'm able to get about 20/35 to 20/40 vision depending on whether it's a good day or not with glasses.<p>I can get 20/20 with rigid lenses but it's not very comfortable after 3-4 hours and I'm not able to look at anything dark or black in colour so it's not perfect (thanks all you apps without a light mode :(<p>I've been working as a web dev for 15 years since graduation but I know my days I numbered in this field as it requires near perfect vision due to the UI nature and dealing with things on a pixel level.<p>What kind of field could I leverage my experience and pivot into that does not require perfect vision?<p>Thanks, for any advice.
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: We’re Kris, Suhas, and Heather (YCS21) and we’re building Bedrock AI (<a href="https://bedrock-ai.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bedrock-ai.com/</a>). We use machine learning to extract hard-to-find information and assess risk in public company reports (SEC filings). Our platform is used by investors to improve portfolio returns and mitigate downside risks.<p>Most public company data is unstructured and textual. Because relevant information is hard to find, a lot of corporate data is radically underused, to the detriment of investors. For example, our research shows it can take 12-18 months for corporate malfeasance to be incorporated into stock price after clear warning signs appear in financial text. Hard-to-find information that we extract includes accounting and governance choices, product defects, regulatory issues, customer/market reliance and much more.<p>One example is Sino-Forest, Canada's Enron. Sino-Forest was a darling of Canadian investors until an infamous exposé, by short-seller Muddy Waters, in 2011. It turned out it was a forestry company that didn’t actually own any forests. Months before the exposé and crash, there were obvious red flags in the company’s disclosures including buying and selling from companies controlled by their directors and problems with the review of their bookkeeping! Our algorithms picked up these red flags and more, and assessed Sino-Forest as high risk when we ran our models on the company’s historical filings.<p>I’m a CPA and a developer (odd combo). The tech community has largely ignored public company financial disclosure. A few years ago, I published a basic piece using computational methods to analyze cannabis disclosure. The local regulatory agency contacted me to give them a workshop on text analytics. It was then that it hit home how little was being done in the field.<p>Information drives financial markets. The difficulty of assessing risks hidden in long public filings makes earning manipulation, and even fraud, both possible and profitable. Earnings manipulation involves using the flexibility in accounting standards to make financial statements look better than reality. This is easier than most people realize because accounting involves MANY choices and estimates.<p>There is money to be made by accessing and trading on underused predictive signals. Making money by stopping fraud is a win-win situation.<p>There are two main technical challenges thwarting progress in the field: (1) NLP models work best on short (500 character) text, but financial filings are hundreds of pages long, and (2) important and unimportant language sounds very similar in financial text. For instance, this sentence sounds like it could be indicative of terrible things going on behind the scenes but is in fact, just boilerplate disclosure: “We face risks and uncertainties related to litigation, regulatory actions and government investigations and inquiries.” You can see how ML models easily get confused.<p>There’s a big gap in both academia and industry. A lot of effort is being put into forcing results from non-existent linguistic signals. Models that claim to predict specific outcomes often don’t hold up to scrutiny in practice.<p>In order to overcome the technical challenges we used supervised and semi-supervised learning with high quality labels, we focused on tangible facts represented in textual context, and we adapted language models using domain expertise.<p>As far as we know, no other solution is able to identify problematic/risky disclosure algorithmically. Using search terms to do something similar results in overwhelming noise. The disclosure selected by our algorithms is highly predictive of downside risk - validated in deployment and also in backtesting.<p>We launched our core product in April 2021 (see <a href="https://bedrock-ai.com" rel="nofollow">https://bedrock-ai.com</a>) and it’s used by hedge funds and institutional investors. We’re also doing a pilot to support Canadian securities regulators (<a href="https://bit.ly/3wOwOj6" rel="nofollow">https://bit.ly/3wOwOj6</a>). We’ve also just launched a minimalist free site, Ledge (<a href="https://ledge.bedrock-ai.com" rel="nofollow">https://ledge.bedrock-ai.com</a>), to help retail investors stay up to date on material events at companies they follow. Companies are required to disclose material events between their quarterly reports, but these disclosures rarely make the news.<p>Our core/premium product is currently only available to institutions, in part because retail investors generally don’t prioritize risk management and therefore aren’t committed customers. We plan to expand the free site and better support individual investors as we grow.<p>We would love to hear from you. Have you tried to read annual reports and gotten lost in the weeds? What has your experience been in making NLP models work on financial text?
Upvote: | 183 |
Title: There is so much information on the internet that I feel like would benefit my life immensely, but I can't consume it all, and that makes me feel uncomfortable. I bookmark, bookmark, and bookmark all kinds of interesting things I come across on the internet and have amassed a few thousand bookmarks, yet I feel unfulfilled and my hunger for information feels unending.<p>I feel like if I stop, I'd lose out on something that'll be valuable.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: Hello,
every time I post a comment here on HN, I see myself keeping a tab open to my latest submitted comments and refreshing frantically to see if any new reply has been posted. Or upvote given, let's be honest.<p>Surely the HN crowd, with its always so clever folks, has better ways of handling such primitive workflows.<p>Please share your tips to follow up on your own activity.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I worked really hard on two side projects during the pandemic that I am quite proud of (here you can take a peek if you like): www.hopupon.com, www.audiobookmate.com<p>When I was younger I used to list side projects on my cv and employers used to take notice. I find now they don't seem to care, usually are only interested in employment history and tech tests.<p>I also wonder whether side projects speak to the fact that you're not concerned enough with your employer's bottom line. I remember when Ken Cosgrove, in Mad Men, had a side gig as an author and got published in a magazine. Roger Sterling told him, quite sternly, he had to choose between the job and the gig.<p>The thing is I would actually appreciate if a potential employer asked me about the above two projects. I think they demonstrate some of my skills and would be interesting to discuss.<p>What do you guys think: Do you guys still list your side projects? What about for jobs more senior than senior developer?
Upvote: | 133 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Laura, Max, and Aaron, the founders of Epsilon3 (<a href="https://www.epsilon3.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.epsilon3.io/</a>). We make software to help space companies run billion-dollar missions and avoid costly and disastrous mistakes.<p>When you're building a rocket or satellite, you have written checklists and procedures for how to test and operate it. Believe it or not, most companies still do this on paper or Microsoft Word. We are making this digital. Think of it like supercharged checklists plus version control (like Asana + Github). This is useful for the space industry and anyone else with complex testing and operational workflows.<p>There is massive growth right now in the number of space startups and of spacecraft and people launching into space. Payloads are being launched multiple times per day; you don’t hear about most of those on the news. There are so many companies building amazing technology for space (hotels, debris removal, construction robots, etc.). But to support this growth and keep everyone safe, the industry needs massively better software than the inefficient and error-prone stuff that’s out there now. U.S. space mission failures have cost $18.6B ($31B worldwide), and the average company wastes $400,000 in engineering hours per year managing procedures inefficiently.<p>We are a team of engineering and design leaders from SpaceX, Google, Northrop Grumman, and Stanford. I spent 11 years at SpaceX and 5 years at Northrop working on spacecraft operations. I’ve taken part in over 100 launches and was the lead trainer for astronauts who went to the space station and back last year. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t when it comes to software tools and managing operations.<p>Starting Epsilon3 came as a surprise—we were surprised that it was still necessary! I had always envisioned a unified set of tools to operate vehicles and complex engineering systems, and assumed that one existed that I just hadn’t come across yet. But after I left SpaceX and began talking to my colleagues and friends in the industry, it became clear that the tools they wanted (and that I wanted too) just didn’t exist yet. In calls with colleagues across the industry, I heard “I’d use that if it existed,” “I’ve looked for that but never found anything remotely close to what I’d want,” “If you build it, people will use it,” and “Wow, that would be great, tell me when you have an MVP.” So we were lucky to start from the beginning with the knowledge that people were in need of our platform.<p>Our software brings complex operational procedures into a modern web-based platform, built using React, Node, CouchDB, Flask, and Supabase, and running on AWS GovCloud for ITAR compliance. We support the entire life cycle of a project from integration and testing through live operations. With Epsilon3, you can create, revise, and track procedures online with critical mission data collaboratively, all in one place and in a standardized way. Real-time synchronization of procedure status and updates guarantee that everyone’s always on the same page and knows who is doing what, when, and where.<p>This may not sound like the hardest software problem out there, but this industry has a lot of challenges that more ordinary project management tools can’t handle, which is why these projects have stuck with Microsoft Word and spreadsheets (and even paper) for so long. Real-time synchronization of data and user interfaces across earth and space with low latency and high reliability is hard. Supporting complex workflows and detailed tracking while also maintaining simplicity and delightfulness of user experience is also hard. There is also a lot of telemetry and commanding data involved, and finding ways to display and visualize it is tricky. There are mission-critical security and reliability requirements. Finally, everyone’s workflows and data are in different formats and have different needs, and finding generalized solutions and methodologies to support all of them is challenging.<p>Our vision is that when operating your system, you’ll need only two tools to manage it: your C2 (command and control) system, and Epsilon3. You won’t need to communicate via email, chat, tickets, etc. anymore. You also won’t need to store your data on a hard drive or manage an Excel spreadsheet. This will not only simplify your operation, but it will make it easier for the next generation of operators to come up to speed quickly and enable future spacecraft automation.<p>While doing hot fire testing of new rocket engines, one of our customers said, “Epsilon3 makes some incredible software that we use for our engine test operations (among other things) to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up.” Running hardware testing for new robotics, transportation, and spacecraft hardware, another customer said, “It's made running our tests much easier and more systematic.” Those sorts of comments are what we hope to achieve industry-wide!<p>A video demo is available at <a href="https://bit.ly/3AItU2w" rel="nofollow">https://bit.ly/3AItU2w</a>. We’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and questions in this, uh, space!<p>p.s. There was a small HN thread about us a few months ago (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506819" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506819</a>). We’ve made significant progress since then.
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: I recently got into retro computers. Besides just buying them, I want to actually experience and use the technology. So far I've spent most of my time with a C64: programming and learning different system quirks. Programming on these machines is really something else!<p>Right now I have my eyes on Acorn. Mostly because they were the first ARM/RISC computers available in the market (to the best of my knowledge), but I would also love to hear other recommendations. I want to acquire something interesting, that would be challenging and rewarding to program with.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Thinking of moving to Berlin for access to a market with better opportunities for software developers.<p>Background is 5+ years experience in enterprise development roles, docker/K8S/cloud experience included. EU citizen so visa not a problem, also speak German.<p>What are salaries like at the moment and is it still a good option for developers?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: Hi HN, we are Benoît and Avi, co-founders at Payflow (<a href="https://www.payflow.es/" rel="nofollow">https://www.payflow.es/</a>). We’re making a better app for workers to instantly access their earned wages. We launched a year ago in Spain (where we’re based!). Anyone in Spain can try our product. Otherwise, here’s a demo video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSDlGhoFNyM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSDlGhoFNyM</a>.<p>75% of employees in Spain and Latam live paycheck to paycheck and many have no savings. They often run out of cash before payday, especially if they have an unexpected expense. This is an issue for employers too, because high employee turnover amongst low-income employees is costly. Most employee perks (e.g. health insurance, flexible benefits, snacks in the office), which are so familiar to HN, are usually reserved to white-collar workers in Latam. Said employee perks are too expensive for blue-collar employers, and more importantly are not what employees who are struggling with financial instability actually need.<p>Given the inequality (and wealth) of our societies, we could argue that low-wage workers ought to be making more in the first place, but in the meantime people are making what they make and often have an urgent need to access that money faster. For example, a few weeks ago, we received a call from an employee who was stuck at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. He was out of gas and out of money. We helped him activate his Payflow account so he was able to instantly stream a portion of his earned wages. This allowed him to pay for gas and to continue on the road.<p>Every week we receive emails from potential users (who are unable to use our app because their employer has not yet signed a contract with us) and they literally tell us “I need money”. We thought employees would use our app because it’s innovative, but they mostly use it because they really need the money. This came as a surprise to us. We knew there was a need, but we did not realise the need would be so pronounced.<p>We met 8 years ago at MIT and discovered a company called DailyPay that was offering on-demand pay in the USA. We thought this was really cool, but didn’t really see it working outside of the USA. 8 years down the line, we saw a couple of players pop up in Europe and realised there was an opportunity to take on-demand pay to other countries. The pandemic was the perfect time to start because demand for short-term credit spikes in a crisis. That’s when we decided to get back together in Spain and launch Payflow for Spain and Latam.<p>Our mobile app allows users to see and withdraw their accrued wages in real-time. Employees value our product because it’s free, private and instantaneous. It’s free because we charge employers, not workers. More on that below.<p>When the user makes a withdrawal, we issue a real-time payment to their bank account, so they receive the money within seconds. On the backend, we have an integration with the employer’s payroll software so we know how much should be available for them. This is the tricky part. We need to know how much they have earned and if they are still employed by their company. It is hard to gather this information: payroll systems are complex in large companies, most integrations are on-premise, the market is fragmented and it is hard to create plug and play solutions. We realised we could solve it when payroll providers started opening their APIs to third parties. We saw this as an opportunity to solve a longstanding problem using technology. In reality, things were (as usual) harder than expected because a lot of payroll software integrations still have to be done on-premise.<p>This is a hot market right now: there are 150+ startups worldwide working on it! The hype is recent, most of the 150+ are just getting started, less than 10 have raised $5M+ in funding. However, almost all of these startups charge employees a fee for each transaction. That makes them effectively a payday loan in disguise. By contrast, we sell our service as a true employee benefit, which the <i>employer</i> pays for. Our solution is completely free for employees. This is an important distinction!<p>Workers living from pay check to pay check have traditionally been vulnerable to exploitation, and the entire payday industry has a bad reputation because of this. We’re building on what we hope is a much better foundation by being free for the employee and selling the product to companies. Our product means that people are much less likely to go into overdraft at their bank or to take out a payday loan. Both of those solutions are extremely costly. We want to fight financial institutions who are taking money from people who don’t have any. Second, we are truly committed to financial inclusion: we have launched two more products, Learnflow (a financial education platform to allow employees to learn about how to manage their personal finances better) and Saveflow (a saving tool that allows people to set money aside because we believe that financial freedom starts with healthy saving habits). Third, numbers show that people use our main service Payflow for very small amounts ($50-70) so we are not reinventing a loan but instead helping employees cover unexpected expenses and get paid in a more flexible way. In fact, we even give employers an optional feature where they can set a cap on the % of salary that their employees can withdraw. Some employers really like this function because it ensures employees will have enough money left over at the end of the month to pay for their rent!<p>Building a product, as you all know, is hard! We have a long way to go, but we are passionate about what we’re building. We’d really appreciate any comments and feedback, we’d love to hear anything that can help make Payflow better. Thanks in advance!
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Hassan and David from hotglue (<a href="https://hotglue.xyz" rel="nofollow">https://hotglue.xyz</a>). We make it easier for developers to build user-facing integrations. In this context, an integration is a way for users to sync their data from their business apps, like Salesforce and Quickbooks, to another. For example, if I wanted to use an app like Mailchimp, I’d use their Salesforce integration to sync all my contacts over automatically.<p>We came across this problem while working for a startup that was struggling to scale the Salesforce integration they built in house. We needed a tool that would sync the customer data from Salesforce directly to our backend, but there were very few solutions available. After talking to other engineers who had dealt with user-facing integrations, we found many teams were frustrated by building their own integration solutions from scratch (not to mention maintaining them). This inspired us to build a tool that helps engineering teams add integrations to their products without taking on more tech debt.<p>Often people are surprised this isn’t solved yet – what about all the data movement tools like Meltano, Airbyte, Fivetran, Stitch, etc.? The difference here is that the integrations we're talking about are not back-end things like pulling your own Google Analytics data to BigQuery so that in-house analysts can work on it. Rather, it’s things like importing a user’s Quickbooks or Salesforce data into your product so that your product becomes more useful to <i>them</i>. That’s what we mean by “user-facing”.<p>There are a few reasons why building such integrations in-house is tricky. SaaS platforms and their APIs vary widely—while products like Stripe offer stellar APIs and resources, other platforms run on legacy software requiring more involved integrations (such as closed-access APIs or legacy SOAP/XML systems). Second, reliability while syncing at scale can be a challenging task when onboarding users with higher volumes of data – no engineer wants to spend their weekend debugging why their infra crapped out. Lastly, building auth flows and handling API tokens can be cumbersome: catching permission errors and expired tokens can take hours of debugging when dealing with the more "enterprisey" business products.<p>In short: it’s a pain to have to build one of these for several different apps, and not the sort of thing anybody wants to specialize in. Projects to build these usually end up on the back burner, frustrating customers who expect your product to integrate cleanly with all their other business apps.<p>We make it easier to build user-facing integrations by providing a scalable framework that minimizes maintenance. Our integrations are built on open source Singer.io connectors that eliminate the need for you to directly interface with APIs (saving you from dealing with breaking API changes, rate limits, authorization, and more). We provide a catalog of all the data each source provides and allow you to pick the data you need without having to grok long API docs. This also means you aren't locked in to our library of connectors – you can write your own connectors in Python. From there, we orchestrate syncing data for you. Just set a schedule, or kick off a job via our API – we provide the infrastructure, so you don't need to worry about building a data pipeline from scratch.<p>Although we are minimizing the dev work to build an integration, we are *not* a no-code solution. In our experience, no-code tools can be powerful for simple use cases, but are often too restrictive to handle custom logic. hotglue features a Python transformation layer to enable you to manipulate the raw data from third-party apps before it gets to your backend, cherry-pick the data you need, and implement more complex logic. For example, you can join multiple tables, filter out data based on a complex expression, make API requests, write custom logic for specific users, and more.<p>We are super excited to share hotglue with the HN community. We’ve created a quick demo for you to see what an integration looks like:<p>Video: <a href="https://youtu.be/ZzSsL66fSUE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ZzSsL66fSUE</a>
Interactive demo: <a href="https://bit.ly/3rsLR0G" rel="nofollow">https://bit.ly/3rsLR0G</a><p>We’d really appreciate hearing your thoughts, experiences, ideas and feedback. Your feedback is vital, as it is our dream to make hotglue the standard for building user-facing integrations. Also, in case you’re thinking of adding new integrations to your product, we would love to help – sign up for a free trial at <a href="https://hotglue.xyz" rel="nofollow">https://hotglue.xyz</a> (we have a startup plan)<p>Thanks for reading this far, and happy Thursday! :)
Upvote: | 144 |
Title: Airbnb, Expedia, Hotels.com all seem down
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: There seems to be a pretty widespread DNS-related issue at the moment. Does anyone have insight as to the root cause?
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: This is the inaugural "Meet the Batch" post that we discussed a few days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280</a>. There are 8 startups in this thread. I've attempted to squeeze a reference to each in the title above. The initial order is random.<p>Direct links to each startup:<p>Portão 3 (YC S21) - Corporate travel for Latin America - <a href="https://portao3.com.br/" rel="nofollow">https://portao3.com.br/</a>,
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930563" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930563</a><p>Sitenna (YC S21) - A marketplace for wireless cell sites - <a href="https://sitenna.com/" rel="nofollow">https://sitenna.com/</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930564" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930564</a><p>ContainIQ (YC S21) - Kubernetes observability based on eBPF - <a href="https://www.containiq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.containiq.com/</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930569" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930569</a><p>Appollo (YC S21) - A single API for launching to eCommerce platforms - <a href="https://www.tryappollo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tryappollo.com/</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930570" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930570</a><p>Beau (YC S21) - Automate repetitive client-facing tasks - <a href="https://beau.to/" rel="nofollow">https://beau.to/</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930568" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930568</a><p>Telm.ai (YC S21) - Real-time data quality monitoring - <a href="https://www.telm.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.telm.ai/</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930566" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930566</a><p>Filadd (YC S21) - Online courses for LatAm university - <a href="https://courses.filadd.com/" rel="nofollow">https://courses.filadd.com/</a>, entrance exams <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930567" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930567</a><p>Shimmer (YC S21) - Online video support groups for mental health - <a href="https://shimmer.care" rel="nofollow">https://shimmer.care</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930565" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930565</a><p>You are invited to share your questions, thoughts, feedback, and experiences in any of these spaces! Simply reply to the founder's post you want to discuss.
Upvote: | 219 |
Title: Those of you with a webapp or SASS who are currently making $, how did you validate product/market fit? Did you sign up paying customers before quitting your day job? Just trying to get some perspective here.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: How do you think the world would evolve in the mid-term: economy, globalization and debt; state of the pandemic with vaccines and variants, mass surveillance and social tensions, etc.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: https://www.google.com/doodles/doodle-champion-island-games-begin<p>What technologies could be used to create that JRPG game in a browser?<p>Is it fundamentally very different from other frontend web development?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: YouTube did it. It managed to get me to subscribe. With loud (way louder than the videos), repetitive, unskippable ads that has nothing to do with me, I figured YouTube was trying to bully me into paying, so I did. I payed, so I could enjoy videos without being interrupted every 5 minutes. But you know what? YouTube is still not happy. Today when I opened the app on my phone, it still showed me an add. It is infuriating at least. This won't probably make it, but I needed to share.<p>https://imgur.com/a/BM7XoTe<p>The image above is an ad inserted in the middle of the recommend content, but before that there was a full page ad about the same crap, which I could not get a screenshot.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I tried to watch <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id6AqKIxd94" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id6AqKIxd94</a> (the discussion between Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein about free will) and Youtube is asking for age verification (that can be done by submitting your ID or by using a credit card).
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: Usually gaming mice have a few extra buttons that can be mapped and some gaming keyboards have extra keys for mapping/chaining functions to them in games. Of course there is also the world of people that build custom keyboards. Has anyone used these extra buttons/keys for programming uses? Is it helpful and what are the details?
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Yasir and Zain introducing InstaKin to you (<a href="https://www.instakin.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.instakin.com</a>). We’re a platform to help immigrant communities manage tasks in their home countries.<p>Every year, 250M migrants send $550B back home to pay for tasks for themselves and their families. Migrants far away from their native countries are dependent on family friends or unknown vendors to make decisions on their behalf. What many folks don’t know is that it is common for these funds to get misused, or for migrants to send funds to a vendor back home and receive poor service or get cheated.<p>Zain and I are originally from Pakistan and have been living in the US and Europe for 12 years. We have regularly sent funds back home to pay for tasks for ourselves and family members. Whether it is for paying home bills or a home renovation, we have done it all – just like millions of other migrants in the US – and experienced all the problems: funds getting misused, vendors pushing for advance payments and then disappearing…you name it and we have seen it. This got us thinking about a platform where we could connect migrants with vendors back home — something to reduce misuse of funds and ensure that vendors perform tasks as agreed.<p>We talked to hundreds of migrants from India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Uganda, and more, and found that lack of access to reliable vendors and misuse of remittance funds back home are common problems. Just last week, we came across a migrant from Senegal living in the USA who mentioned the same challenge.<p>Initially we operated on WhatsApp to receive orders from migrant customers and also get their feedback. Thousands of migrants contacted us within the first few months of launching our startup. That validation convinced us to build a full product—a solution for migrants built by migrants. We have focused on two key features: (1) provide migrants with access to services back home, and (2) pay vendors based on milestones to eliminate payments fraud.<p>Historically, companies focusing on the migrant community have pushed for making it easier to send remittances back home easily though even today it can cost between 2-8% just to remit funds. Our key insight, though, is that money transfer is not enough. It is only transactional. What’s needed is to ensure last-mile fulfillment. With InstaKin, migrants don’t send funds back home ‘blindly’ hoping that things will get done — you pay for fulfillment directly.<p>Migrants use us to do things like: hiring a ‘runner’ to manage last-mile tasks for their aging parents back home; connecting to a vendor for verification and attestation of educational documents; ordering personalized gifts and having them delivered; paying contractors for home renovation projects.<p>We started off with helping Pakistani migrants but our goal is to become the platform of choice for migrants globally. The best part is that while we were reaching out to Pakistani migrants, we started getting requests from other communities (Indian and Bangladeshi migrants).<p>We’ve been surprised at how strong immigrant networks are globally. When we launched, we thought we would receive orders from migrants in a specific city or location only. Turns out that is not true. We have had referrals from all over the world (example: a migrant customer living in London referred us to a migrant living in Chicago who referred us to a migrant living in Singapore). We hope what we are building will help migrants not just from one country but from everywhere in days to come.<p>We would love to hear back from the community! If you are a migrant yourself, please share your experiences with us and feel free to reach out.
Upvote: | 202 |
Title: I'm currently working on a side project and will be searching for early users / alpha testers in the near future. Our target demographic is established, but we want to keep an open mind as we iterate on the product. Anyone have any "dos" or "don't"s that you can share? Also, sharing a brief description of the product/service itself would be really helpful as well.<p>For context, I am working in the computer vision space.
Upvote: | 134 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>Recently I finished Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. All I can say is I wish I read this years ago. I'm a software engineer and didn't know a lot of the things I learned from that book.<p>This got me thinking, what other books have I missed out on reading to advance my (software / tech) career?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hi HN community,<p>I would appreciate if you could share which trading brokerage (if any) you prefer the most and why (execution quality, UI, fees, user support, etc.)<p>Thank you!
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I'm a machine learning engineer and the job requires a great deal of thinking and mental energy which I actually like. The problem is that I noticed that after work, I am not at all as chill as who I am on the weekends. Both my gf and mood tracker acknowledge that my mood is much more chill on the weekends.<p>Initially, I assumed this is because our projects are open-ended and after work, I'm still thinking about what to do tomorrow or some research ideas. This is partly correct but i tried 10 min meditation after work, 30 min reading a book and going out for 5 min to smoke. These helped not to think about work but I still feel that my "thinking motor" is still on and active. I think about a lot of things (this time not about work) and I am not at all as mindful and as chill as what I am on the weekends.<p>I noticed that on the weekends when I look at the flowers, i cherish the experience and enjoy this little thing. But after work, i still notice the beauty, but don't feel that good experience of enjoying observing a beautiful flower. I think because I am not as mindful and as chill as what I am on the weekends.<p>Is it because deep down the work anxiety is still there? or scientifically we have a notion of "thinking motor" which we turn on during the day and it's not clear how to turn it off? if we can turn it off and be like weekends, how?
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: From https://t.me/barinsta_updates :<p>Hello,<p>At approximately 21:33 UTC July 26 2021, I have been hit with a cease & desist letter from a law firm repsenting Facebook. The letter was sent to one of my personal email address as well as Barinsta's public inbox (and as a result, it is published).
https://github.com/austinhuang0131/austinhuang0131/issues/2<p>In response, the source code has been taken down, and all promotional materials within my control has been adjusted to reflect the fact.<p>While I believe it is nearly impossible to fight a resourceful multinational firm and reinstate the app, we will still try to get as much resources as we could to navigate in this crisis.<p>At this dire moment, I ask you to do 1 thing: Please let others know what is happening here. Such bullying behaviour against a young university student is in no way excusable. Such bullying behaviour against many internet users is in no way excusable.<p>It has been an honour of a lifetime to serve as one of the main contributors of Barinsta. I am forever grateful for the countless supporters along the way.
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Hello HN, I'm Tejas from Atmana (<a href="https://atmana.org/" rel="nofollow">https://atmana.org/</a>). We have an app and community to help people cut back on their compulsive (or just excessive) use of pornography and other digital activities like social media and gaming. Our community currently has 100k members.<p>Compulsive porn usage is a taboo topic. Millions of people want to get away from this behavior, but it's an embarrassing problem to discuss socially. Those who are struggling tend to get anxious and lonely which increases the chances that they further indulge in compulsive porn watching. This is the classic addictive cycle.<p>After discussing with many psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as our users, we have built features that help the user with: (1) Accountability: accountability to one's goals is quite important to succeed. With this in mind, we have a buddy system. Users can add a friend who controls the content allowed on the device and gets daily reports on what kind of content was accessed. (2) Judgement-free support: we have a community of over 100,000 people who are trying to overcome their porn problems. Users can participate anonymously in our community. This reduces shame/stigma and helps people get support from peers. (3) Blocking: We have an inbuilt blocker in our app which cuts out all ways to access porn and we have built it quite robustly so that there are no easy ways for most users to bypass it.<p>I've spent the last 3.5 years working on apps to do with habits. A colleague and I got started with building apps that we ourselves wanted for becoming healthy, like an app to gamify going to the gym everyday and an app to wake up early. After failing to monetize any healthy habit apps, I decided to work on reducing harmful habits, hoping this would be easier to monetize. I had personally benefited by cutting down porn in my life and it was quite difficult to quit this behavior. Hence I decided to help others who had a similar problem and launched NoPo, a porn de-addiction app. After a year of building many features, I closed it down due to lack of engagement. But after speaking to over 200 users of NoPo, I realized what our app didn’t do, which was: not showing the user their progress, not keeping the user accountable and not blocking porn on the device. After fixing all these issues, I launched BlockerX (<a href="https://blockerx.net/" rel="nofollow">https://blockerx.net/</a>), my fifth app, which users are finding valuable in overcoming their porn related problems.<p>Blocking adult content effectively is quite challenging as users will always find ways to bypass the blocking. The difficulty is to make the blocking robust enough that the user can't bypass it, but at the same time that the blocking only happens on adult content and not others (minimizing false positives). We have done a bunch of optimizations on our Android and iOS apps to make it just right – we consider multiple signals before blocking to ensure the blocking is accurate most of the time.<p>We have a freemium model. Advanced features on the app require a premium subscription (like ad free experience, unlimited blocking, syncing of blocked items list across devices) but main functionality, e.g. blocking of adult websites, is free to use. Also, our marketing is currently oriented towards 18-to-30 year olds but this is just a starting point. We recognize that these problems are not limited to any age group and want to help everybody we can.<p>We would love to hear from all of you. If you have faced problems with porn or have seen someone you know face this problem, feel free to share your experiences and feedback. Thanks!
Upvote: | 202 |
Title: Hi HN, we're Phil and Paul and we make Abbot (<a href="https://ab.bot/" rel="nofollow">https://ab.bot/</a>) – a tool for building and running simple automation via chat (currently Slack, Discord, and MS Teams). It's common to go from "I have an idea" to having a fully deployed chat command in under an hour.<p>The term "ChatOps" comes from GitHub, where the two of us worked together. GitHub was always a distributed company and early on developed a culture of doing most work via chat. Engineers automated the most repetitive processes (and some of their sense of humor, too), and that grew into a shared chat-based command line called Hubot. By typing terminal-style commands into chat, you can execute any sort of process that it makes sense for your team to automate. And because it’s in a shared chat room rather than hidden on your own machine, every time you run a task, you teach someone else how to do it.<p>Hubot has been wildly successful at GitHub and is amazing in action. We saw GitHub’s ops team fight off the biggest DDoS attack in history from chat using Hubot, while people were cheering along in another channel using Hubot to find appropriate hype gifs. But the effect on day-to-day work was even more amazing. Anyone could easily find out what was recently deployed, how to deploy, monitor servers, page people, you name it. New employees could see how to do all those things as soon as they joined. Since there were fun commands inside of Hubot, it was great for team building, too.<p>We believe more companies would benefit from working this way. When Covid hit, many companies suddenly found themselves struggling to make distributed teams work better. It is challenging to understand what everyone is doing, or even how to do regular tasks, since it's not easy to tap someone on the shoulder and ask. We decided to build Abbot to help teams adopt this style of work.<p>When we started, we built a list of what <i>wasn’t</i> fun about Hubot. Hubot required a lot of configuration, wasn’t reachable if chat was down, testing new scripts could be painful, there was no unified way to manage permissions, and so forth. We built Abbot as a hosted platform that handles all these things so developers don’t have to.<p>Because Abbot is a platform, we provide a unified interface for auditing, access control, data access and more. If users understand how to use a single Abbot command (or “skill” in Abbot parlance), they'll know how to use any other Abbot command. Since we built Abbot to support multiple chat systems, we made it so that all Abbot commands are cross platform – commands written for Slack will work in Discord, and so forth. You can write commands in C#, Python, or JavaScript (we will support more languages in the future). We also do a lot of things Hubot does not, like allowing users to control access to the execution of their commands from inside of chat, or exposing an API endpoint for every command so that they can react to the outside world. There’s nothing to fork or configure – you can get started in two clicks from our website.<p>Abbot has a Package Directory where people can share the commands they’ve written. There are a few dozen packages in the directory today, with more being added every week. Packages are MIT licensed and installable in one click. Because it's so easy to create new commands, teams tend to create a lot of small ones that accomplish a single task. For example, we have a `tweet` command that allows us to use chat as our communal Twitter client (available in the Package Directory at <a href="https://ab.bot/packages/aseriousbiz/tweet" rel="nofollow">https://ab.bot/packages/aseriousbiz/tweet</a>).<p>Today, people use Abbot to deploy Git branches to staging environments, track daily standups, figure out time zones for all their teammates, give each other internet high-fives (well, sparkle points), and even open their office door. We are focused on DevOps and customer support teams right now, but believe ChatOps can make a big impact on every team that has a channel in your chat.<p>We are open for business! You can add Abbot to your Slack, Discord, or MS Teams chat by clicking "Try for free" at <a href="https://ab.bot" rel="nofollow">https://ab.bot</a>. We have a free tier that allows people to try it out without any commitments. We don't ask for any information to sign up, you just have to authorize Abbot into chat. For paying users, we charge based on the number of custom commands, number of actions taken, or access to paid features like access controls. Right now we are SaaS only, but will offer a hybrid-premises version in the future.<p>We are sure that many of you have built your own chatbots and ChatOps tools before. We’re especially interested in hearing about what worked well and what was challenging when building and operating them! And we hope you can give Abbot a try. Have at it, HN!
Upvote: | 143 |
Title: I don’t even know how to describe mine or where to begin. I literally can’t remember certain details as if I suffered from trauma. I lasted 3 years and never got close to a 6 figure compensation. I’ve never even experienced working with a senior developer. Despite this the clients using my work were F500 companies.<p>It would make sense for me to begin elaborating on some of my stories, but it is really difficult for me with how upsetting a lot of this was. Maybe I'll try later in the comments. All I can think to say is that I eventually quit when asked to implement a plainly unethical surveillance feature. It was long overdue. Trying to stick it out at one place for a while, as if it would make me appear dependable and valuable, has to be one of the biggest mistakes of my entire life so far.<p>This was 2 years ago, and I have not worked since. I would like to, but it doesn’t even feel like a choice for me. All I wanted was to get my foot in the door and begin my career yet I somehow feel farther behind than when I started.<p>So who else has a totally shit developer career? Can you make me feel better by telling me about it?<p>Edit: This is a throwaway for obvious reasons, sorry dang.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Aditya and Sri Teja, founders of Swipe (<a href="https://getswipe.in" rel="nofollow">https://getswipe.in</a>). We make it easy for local businesses in India to invoice their customers over WhatsApp. Instead of giving a paper invoice to their customer, Swipe users send a WhatsApp message with a link that allows them to pay instantly with a variety of payment methods.<p>We were building software and IoT for industrial automation before we started working on this. We dealt with a lot of invoices, purchase orders and estimates for different customers/vendors on a daily basis. We used to manually make invoices on spreadsheets and store them locally on our computers. Initially, it was working fine but as we got more sales it started to get difficult to manage. On top of that, we had to file monthly tax returns where we would manually consolidate our sales on spreadsheets and send them to our accountant for filing. The whole process is tedious and the existing software available to do it is riddled with accounting jargon and primarily targeted towards professional accountants.<p>We quickly realized that these efforts were not helping the company and that the time and energy would be better spent on talking to our customers and focusing on our product. Interestingly, we also found out that most of the ~75M SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) in India still rely on manual processes in tracking sales, purchasing inventory, cash management, tax filings, and payments—all highly inaccurate and inefficient and a huge opportunity for us to make an impact.<p>We launched with a simple MVP, with just the Sales module in January and recruited our first few customers. With continuous feedback from our initial customers, we quickly iterated and improved our MVP and started adding Purchases, Estimates, Expenses and Inventory modules. Now we have over 1000 businesses onboarded with us and growing.<p>Using Swipe, business owners can now create invoices, purchase orders and quotations in a few seconds without any accounting knowledge. Based on their sales, purchases and expenses, we automatically update inventory, payables and receivables and make it easy for them to manage accounting. We also instantly generate those awful monthly tax filings!<p>Thanks for reading. We would love to hear your thoughts, experiences and the time you spend on accounting and tax filing. We are live on <a href="https://getswipe.in" rel="nofollow">https://getswipe.in</a>. Please share your feedback with us.
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: Here's the second issue of our new Launch HN format ("Meet the Batch") - previous one was <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930562" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930562</a>, meta is at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280</a>.<p>There are 5 startups in this thread. The order is randomized. Here are direct links.<p>Odiggo (YC S21) - Connect car owners with mobile mechanics in the Middle East <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996058" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996058</a><p>Genuity (YC S21) - SaaS for companies to manage IT and buy business software <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996059" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996059</a><p>DailyBot (YC S21) - Chatbot and toolkit for team collaboration and asynchronous work <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996060" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996060</a><p>Virtually (YC S20) - Easily manage Zoom events <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996061" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996061</a><p>Glitzi (YC S21) - At-home beauty and spa services for Latin America <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996062" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996062</a>
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: YouTube started adding a new parameter "pp=sAQA" to video URLs on most index style pages (e.g. /feed/subscriptions, search results, the /videos page on any channel). The actual video pages (/watch) strip the pp= parameter, and it doesn't appear to be added to the URLs for the "recommended" videos.<p>Does anybody know what this parameter does and/or why it was added? It's really annoying; using YouTube URLs in the shell now requires quoting due to the "&".
Upvote: | 109 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Vineet and Chris, founders of HomeBreeze (<a href="https://www.homebreeze.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.homebreeze.com</a>). We make booking home services radically simpler for homeowners. We do this by using details about the home to provide upfront, guaranteed prices and instant scheduling, with work completed by a network of qualified professionals. We’re starting with hot water heater replacements and are live in Southern California so far.<p>Many homeowners struggle to find contractors who will provide quality work without gouging them on price. They burn hours of time contacting pros and hosting onsite scoping visits, just to get prices and availability—with little insight on quality. Lead generation platforms like Angi and Thumbtack only solve a narrow slice of the problem - finding pros - without helping to price, schedule, or guarantee work quality.<p>For contractors, it’s hard to manage lead generation and sales, while spending most of the day in the field, doing work. To grow their business, contractors often buy expensive leads from Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack and more, but convert those leads poorly because of their unreliable communication. Because of the high stakes, they spend nights and weekends following up to sales calls. Great for the lead generation platforms, but bad for both service pros and homeowners.<p>Chris bought his first home and experienced this first-hand. Quotes to paint the outside of the house ranged from $7K to $25K and getting painters to show up for quotes took hours across dozens of phone calls and text messages. Digging into the problem, we found complex operations and a fragmented, old-school market. I had worked at Opendoor and Chris at UberEats for years, so we were no strangers to operational complexity. We decided to build the solution.<p>With just a little bit of information from homeowners, we give them upfront, honest prices for water heater installations (and soon other home services). They can schedule online if they’d like to move forward. Nearly all service pros we talk with insist on scheduling an on-site visit before providing prices. Our clients can avoid this time-consuming step and almost always get better prices.<p>On the backend, we’ve built a system that takes those inputs and prices jobs fairly, based on criteria we’ve gotten from our network of service professionals. We match the jobs with the plumbers who we know are available to do them. Importantly, we enforce strict quality standards by remotely auditing before/after photos of the installation, aligning contractors to our quality principles before their first job with us, and verifying that every plumber in our network is licensed and insured.<p>I’m sure every homeowner in this community has had their own experiences with home services. We’ve love to hear about them - the good and the bad - and get feedback on our initial approach.
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: I'm sure some of your heard about what's happening in my country, Tunisia. (tldr: the president made some 'unconstitutional' moves to thwart rampant corruption. Five days later, everything seems fine ... for now).<p>Even though it seems the president is keeping his promise on freedom of speech, I don't think it would be extravagant to get prepared for the worse.<p>So, what should I do to keep myself safe online?<p>Edit: I'm not worried about my physical safety, I'm just asking about protecting my privacy online if the government decides to go full on Big Brother.<p>P.S.: I tried to submit this question with a throwaway account, for obvious reasons, was told to "please slow down".
Upvote: | 274 |
Title: Hi, I'm Ishita, cofounder of Matrubials (<a href="https://matrubials.com/" rel="nofollow">https://matrubials.com/</a>). We are developing milk-derived therapeutics to address infectious diseases.<p>I have extensive experience in microbiology and infectious diseases in both academia and industry. Taken together, our founding team has ~100 years of combined experience in microbiology and ecology, food science and chemistry. My cofounders have previously founded other health companies with specialized products (eg. Evolve Biosystems and BCD Bioscience).<p>We have been focused on structure-function analysis of mammalian milk and the benefits individual components can bring to human health for about two decades. In recent years, we discovered peptides in milk that have selective antimicrobial activity, meaning that they know who the pathogens are, and essentially go after them fast for elimination while bypassing the "good" bugs, leaving them around to continue their jobs. That was the moment we decided we needed to bring these to the market.<p>One niche in the human body where the imbalance between the good and the bad is really bad, is the human vagina. We've been focusing on specific bacteria that reside in the normal human vagina and those that take over to cause disease. In particular, we hope to reduce the burden of bacterial vaginosis, which remains unresolved with current antibiotics. This is especially important because these infections tend to recur, and can lead to secondary infections and reproductive issues.<p>Antibiotic discovery is hard, technically and financially. To develop candidate molecules from early stage research to clinically viable products, with efficacy and safety that do better than current standard-of-care, is a major challenge. An opportunity like this one doesn't come around often so we're pretty excited about it.<p>Converting milk components into therapeutics- now isn't that a great hack? We think so! Happy to hear your thoughts and answer questions!
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: TL;DR: <i>Consider listing your contact details in your HN profile!</i><p>There are lots of interesting conversations happening here on HN. But sometimes people might want to continue the discussions even after threads fall of the front page.<p>Have you considered listing your contact details on HN so that people can get in touch with you more easily?<p>If you want to do that, please note that it’s <i>not</i> enough to fill in the email field on your profile. <i>Only</i> the HN admins can see that field.<p>If you want others to see your e-mail address etc, you need to explicitly put it in the <i>about</i> text area.<p>Some members want to keep a low profile and I certainly respect that. But please consider what you might be missing. There’s also no requirement to use your main e-mail address. One could also use an alternative e-mail in order to stay pseudonymous.<p>There are just so many interesting people here so I thought that one might not want to miss out on all interesting connections that could occur. For example, interesting job offers are not uncommon here.<p>Just my 2¢ though, do what thou wilt. Peace!
Upvote: | 266 |
Title: How do you plan your day? And how do you plan your week?
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: Any suggestions/ frameworks on how to learn specific skill, retain the knowledge and be able to share it(in for ex. written form)<p>I usually jump in straight away and start learning "on the job" but I realised that I forget too much and i do not have any notes to refer to later on.<p>Examples of specific skill:
- How to write a good cold email
- how to learn some snowboarding trick
- how to store your bitcoin safely
etc.
Upvote: | 247 |
Title: Tinder is full of gorgeous women and well, the profiles just don’t seem right somehow.<p>Compared to genuine profiles which have ordinary looking women, with profiles that have narrative text, real locations, it’s easy to see which are the fakes and which are real.<p>Obviously it’s Tinder posting the fake profiles because they want men using their software.<p>But I wonder is there any way to prove that Tinder is cat fishing it’s own users?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I'm currently looking for a new job and in addition to the many more typical jobs I'm applying to, I'd be very interested to hear about positions in what I'm tempted to call "activism". I'm not 100% sure what it is I'm even asking for, which is part of the motivation for this thread; hoping that someone more knowledgeable might be able to guide me in the right direction.<p>What I'm looking for is this:<p>- Champions of Free and Open Source Software / Hardware, Right to Repair, and other like causes
- A full-time or part-time role (with other programming responsibilities) within a product or consulting company which gives time and resources to a team of like-minded folk, or
- A full-time position as a writer / evangelist / technology new reporter, or
- A policy oriented position with a US politician, or
- Everything else that I'm not thinking of...<p>I'm a coder by training and at heart, but I currently am having a hard time turning a blind eye to the state of our industry. I'm thinking I should at least try and ask about way I can devote my time to the solution.<p>On that note, if a paying job addressing these issues isn't really in the cards, I'd be curious to hear how others are making meaningful impact in their free time.<p>Thanks.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Luxotica is a monopoly [0] that uses its market power to control the market price and force suppliers and other manufactuerers to joining their empire. For example Oakley was forced to sell-out to Luxotica when they were shutout out of retail outlets in a time before internet allowed them to go direct to consumer [1].<p>Question is what multi-sport sunglasses do you use that aren't Luxotica or made in Asia?<p>[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-glasses-lenscrafters-luxottica-monopoly-20190305-story.html<p>[1] https://www.oakleyforum.com/guides/oakley-luxottica-sunglasses-history/
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: After reading quite a few books and blog posts on event-driven architectures and comparing the suggested patterns with what I've seen myself in action, I keep wondering:<p>Is there any company out there that has fully embraced this type of architecture when it comes to microservice communication, handling breaking schema changes or failures in an elegant way, and keeping engineers and other data consumers happy enough?<p>Every event-driven architectural pattern I've read about can quite easily fall apart and I have yet to find satisfying answers on what to do when things go south. As a trivial example, everybody talks about dead-letter queues but nobody really explains how to handle messages that end up in one.<p>Is there any non-sales community of professionals discussing this topic?<p>Any help would be much appreciated.
Upvote: | 284 |
Title: Hi HN, I’m Marcus, I’m the co-founder of Heimdal together with Erik (<a href="https://www.heimdalccu.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.heimdalccu.com/</a>). We remove atmospheric carbon dioxide and trap it in materials that are used to make cement. More CO2 is trapped in our process than is re-emitted in cement production.<p>Concrete is responsible for 8% of global CO2 emissions. Cement is usually made from mined limestone, which is one of the largest natural stores of carbon dioxide. Using that to make cement is a bit like burning oil. The world is addicted to concrete, so this problem is not going away. We make synthetic limestone using atmospheric CO2, such that when it is used to make cement, the process is carbon neutral.<p>We were both master's students in engineering at Oxford University in the UK. I decided to write my dissertation on direct air capture of CO2. While looking through existing solutions it struck me that none were sufficient. They all operated a circular process that left them with gaseous CO2 that needed to be stored somewhere. A circular process is one that uses a sorbent to trap atmospheric CO2 but then re-releases the trapped CO2 as a pure gas stream to regenerate the sorbent for re-use. We don't have enough high-quality cheap stores of CO2 to justify such an approach. Storage must be permanent and safe. We realized that by taking a linear approach, we both make the process of capturing CO2 profitable and avoid the problem of where to store the CO2. We make sorbents for trapping CO2 in the form of mineral carbonates, these compounds are inert and trap CO2 for millions of years. They can also be commercialized as raw materials for making building materials including glass and concrete. In one step we solve three key problems of carbon capture: 1. How to trap CO2 energy efficiently 2. How to store the CO2 3. How to make money while doing all this.<p>Specifically, we use renewable electricity to extract dissolved oceanic CO2 as mineral carbonates of calcium and magnesium by contacting seawater with our proprietary alkaline sorbent. These mineral carbonates are important ingredients in cement as well as other building materials. The undersaturated ocean then re-absorbs an amount of atmospheric CO2 equivalent to the amount we removed when reacting with our sorbent. Effectively, the world’s oceans become our air contactor.<p>There are other companies addressing emissions from concrete production, but they don’t address the unavoidable process emission from the raw materials used in concrete. Start-ups in this space have so far focused on curing concrete with CO2 at the end of the production process. These are great solutions that can create low-carbon cement, however they’ll never get to carbon neutral cement that the world needs. The 70% of emissions from production are not being tackled by anyone on the market today. Until now concrete producers have favoured capturing emissions at the point where they’re released as their “2050-solution”, ie. in the distant future. Point source carbon capture can expensively capture 80-90% of emissions. This solution has the same problem as circular DAC solutions where a method of permanent CO2 storage is needed. There is a trial $3B (!) project in Norway to pump CO2 into empty gas fields at a cost of ~$1000/tCO2. This is expensive and complicated engineering. On the other hand, all we need is renewable electricity and seawater.<p>We make money from selling synthetic limestone to cement producers and commercializing parallel byproducts including green hydrogen and desalinated water. We also generate carbon credits from our process. We are currently negotiating with concrete producers to decarbonize their limestone supply. Response has so far been very positive with multiple LOIs signed with producers across Europe. We are also working with a construction company to build the world’s first carbon neutral houses this decade. We are currently building a demo plant just outside Oxford. It has the capacity to remove and store 1 tonne of CO2 per year. We will use this plant to make enough product that we can deliver to our commercial partners to confirm compatibility with their manufacturing set-up. Following successful testing, we will scale this up to replace all of global limestone mining; currently >2 billion tonnes of limestone per year.<p>We're excited to hear any thoughts, insights, questions, encouragement and concerns in the comments below! Erik and I will be monitoring the thread over the course of today to answer any questions. Also feel free to reach out to me by email at [email protected].
Upvote: | 617 |
Title: Hi HN - Hassaan, Quinn & Rishabh here and we're the founders of Tavus (<a href="https://tavus.io/" rel="nofollow">https://tavus.io/</a>). We generate personalized videos that realistically imitate your gestures and voice. See a short demo at <a href="https://video.tavus.io/video?id=2302" rel="nofollow">https://video.tavus.io/video?id=2302</a> and play with it at <a href="https://tavus.io/playground/" rel="nofollow">https://tavus.io/playground/</a>.<p>Companies like Loom and Vidyard have proven the value of personalized videos for sales, onboarding, marketing, and more. The problem is the time it takes to create a video for each prospect. We make it scalable by generating thousands of personalized videos of you in the time it would take to record one. Our users get the benefits of personalized videos, like large increases in open and reply rates, without having to invest all that time.<p>We struggled with LinkedIn outreach and email marketing at every company we all worked at. It took too many emails and felt spammy. The best responses we got were from emails that we wrote specifically for clients we were particularly interested in. We then tried our hand at video marketing, with generic videos sent to each lead over LinkedIn, which ultimately performed much better than any traditional campaigns we ran.<p>What if we personalized the videos like we personalize emails at scale? We decided to test that, and the results were incredible. People loved the fact that we sent natural videos with our own voices and faces, and we achieved massive increases in demos booked (250% spike). The sales industry is seeing this shift towards more individualized video content as well; companies like Loom are growing rapidly and seeing validating results such as 4x meetings booked. We also found that these videos perform well outside of sales and marketing, specifically in recruiting, onboarding, and customer success.<p>To get started with Tavus, users train an AI model with their voice and face, by submitting a 15 minute video recording. Next they set up a base video template(s) that includes the pitch that they will be giving in the video, along with the associated branded landing page and video background. Once that is set up, videos can be generated at the click of a button. One-off videos can be generated in the Tavus portal, or a CSV can be uploaded to process videos in bulk. Videos can also be generated programmatically through the Tavus API. Each video is automatically personalized in the user’s voice for each unique prospect, and can even automatically generate unique backgrounds, such as a prospects LinkedIn profile or website.<p>People don’t notice imperfections if the content is interesting to them, and unless you are specifically looking for artifacts, Tavus videos are practically indiscernible from a manually recorded video. Therefore our focus is not on generating the most advanced voice-cloning or lip syncing—plenty of great researchers can do that way better than we ever could. Instead it is to provide many immersive personalization options that cater to the customers' leads. A recruiting company can use video outreach very differently than a sales company, and so on. Our core effort is supporting each of those use cases in depth.<p>Also, people don’t trust videos that have professional green-screen backgrounds, perfect lighting and a voice actor recording for you. They want to see you, see that you are real, they want to hear your voice. In our experience, slight imperfections in your video can actually lead to better outcomes as long as you get the content right, as they make for a more engaging experience. The point is not to fool people into thinking that a recording is fully ‘natural’ but to provide them an immersive experience that is personally relevant to them.<p>Our revenue is generated from a subscription model. These subscriptions typically include things like video strategy consulting, branded landing pages, and a quota of videos that can be generated per month,<p>We would love to get your feedback on Tavus, and in particular, hear any ideas you have! We’re super excited about this product, and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us :) Thank you!
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.<p>Bonsai (YC W16) (<a href="https://www.hellobonsai.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.hellobonsai.com</a>) offers freelance contracts, proposals, invoices, etc.
Upvote: | 47 |
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