prompt
stringlengths 16
15.6k
| completion
stringlengths 4
6
|
|---|---|
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: | 128 |
Title: Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA
when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is <i>not</i> an option,
include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn't a household name,
please explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about
something. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://findwork.dev/?source=hn" rel="nofollow">https://findwork.dev/?source=hn</a>, <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>,
<a href="https://hnhired.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hnhired.com/</a>, <a href="https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don't miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037364" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037364</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037365" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037365</a>
Upvote: | 357 |
Title: Just logged in to bookmarks, and found this message: https://imgur.com/a/OQ7YZqB.
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: Just follow the super easy steps below to try it right away:<p>1. Open any youtube video and play it in the browser.<p>2. Edit the youtube.com video URL to you---tube.com (adding three hyphens between "you" and "tube" in the address bar)<p>3. Enter and Done, Share the URL with others for them to join or live-stream your co-watching stream.<p>(private and visible only to people with the URL you share)<p>Example: Modify https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX2qFMC8cFo to https://www.you---tube.com/watch?v=eX2qFMC8cFo and press enter in the address bar.<p>Voila!
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Here's the third "Meet the Batch" thread - previous one was <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996057" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996057</a>. This time I've tweaked the title slightly in the hope of doing better re <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996536" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996536</a>.<p>Here are 6 startups for you to read about and engage with where interested. The initial order is random.<p>Lernit (YC S21) - Corporate training program for Latin America - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049505" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049505</a><p>StandardCode (YC S21) - APIs to easily comply with child privacy laws - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049504" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049504</a><p>Scispot (YC S21) - Workflow automation for life science - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049501" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049501</a><p>Muse (YC S21) - Allow anyone to build 3D websites - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049502" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049502</a><p>Ruth Health (YC S21) - Digital, at-home post-pregnancy care - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049503" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049503</a><p>Deskimo (YC S21) - Book workspace by the minute in Singapore and Hong Kong - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049507" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049507</a>
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: ProtonMail is in cooperation with authorities.<p>ProtonMail, which claims to be a "secure e-mail service from Switzerland," supplies user data to security authorities. User data also goes to law enforcement agencies in the USA, as a current case shows.<p>The proceedings concern threats against, among others, the well-known immunologist Anthony Fauci. In a series of emails, the sender threatened, among other things, to kill Fauci and his family.<p>As the U.S. Department of Justice writes, the defendant used "an email account from a provider of secure, encrypted email services based in Switzerland."<p>According to the corresponding affidavit, this email service was ProtonMail. The relevant emails end accordingly with "Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email".<p>On the basis of data from ProtonMail, which was sent to the USA by way of legal assistance, it emerged that the defendant had used several user accounts at ProtonMail.<p>According to his own statements, the accused had switched to ProtonMail because he believed he was protected by Swiss data protection law and end-to-end encryption. Nevertheless, the sender could be identified in the interaction of data from ProtonMail as well as other online services.<p>https://steigerlegal.ch/2021/08/02/protonmail-daten-usa/<p>https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/press-release/file/1416926/download
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: What would be a good book to learn from the experience of others the best practices around Microservices design, implementation and production life cycles (deploy, upgrade, etc)
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: By <i>email-first</i> I mean services that the email is the principal (or only) interface between the service and the user. For example: Posterous before Spaces. Thanks.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Hi HN, we're Ryan, Tyler, and Patryk, the founders of Turion Space (<a href="https://www.turionspace.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.turionspace.com/</a>). We're building spacecraft to remove orbital debris and provide services to existing satellites.<p>Orbital debris poses a significant risk to mankind's future in space. There are currently over 250k objects in space that would destroy a satellite if a collision were to occur. Large uncontrolled objects like depleted rocket upper stages and dead satellites pose the greatest risk because of the potential to break upon impact with small debris into thousands of smaller pieces. There is currently no system in operation that can deorbit large amounts of space debris. If this problem is not addressed in the next 5-10 years, it could render entire orbits unusable for generations.<p>Our spacecraft (which we’ve decided to call the “Droid”, shoutout to Star Wars!) aims to remove debris by docking with it using robotic arms and dragging the debris to a lower orbit using the ion propulsion system we are developing under a NASA technology transfer license. Once the debris is in a low enough orbit, upper atmospheric drag will cause the debris to naturally decay in altitude until it burns up during atmospheric reentry. Critically, the Droid would undock with the debris after dragging it to a low orbit, then orbit-raise, and go on to perform other missions. In other words, our solution is a reusable approach, designed from the beginning to complete multiple missions during its lifetime.<p>Our team encountered this problem when brainstorming ideas to answer the question, "with the rapidly declining cost of getting things into space, what can we do now that has never before been possible?" Asteroid mining seemed like the obvious answer, but the capital required to start a business on that premise seemed like a longshot to say the least. We found the most important problem we could solve while building the foundation to asteroid resource extraction was to create a satellite system capable of removing orbital space debris.<p>Our team has extensive experience working on operational space flight hardware and building software products from the ground up. Ryan comes from an 8.5-year run at SpaceX, working primarily on propulsion development and dynamics analysis of the Merlin, Superdraco, and Raptor engines. Tyler comes most recently to ATA engineering, working as a consultant for various aspects of thermal, structural, and dynamics analysis across a wide range of now-operational space-flight projects. He also worked at Electroimpact, where he designed and built aerospace-assembly-automation systems using robotic arms. Patryk comes most recently from Marshall Reddick real estate where he developed the company’s in house CRM that was vital to the company's growth over the last 5 years.<p>We expect to begin servicing sometime in 2024. We have gained interest in several use cases through conversations with customers to complement our orbital debris removal efforts, beginning with low-earth-orbit operations. For low-earth-orbit satellite operators, we can raise their altitude or modify the inclination of their orbit. We have also partnered with launch providers to expand their mission capabilities by offering our last mile tug service for their payloads. For example, suppose a small launcher can only lift a 200 kg satellite into a 500km orbit altitude, but that payload wishes to end up at a 1200km altitude. In that case, we can dock with the payload once it has been deployed from the launch vehicle and bring it to its final orbit.<p>Check out the services section of our website at <a href="https://turionspace.com/satellite-tracker" rel="nofollow">https://turionspace.com/satellite-tracker</a> and track satellites or get pricing estimates for different mission scenarios! We'd love to hear feedback and chat about orbital debris removal!
Upvote: | 200 |
Title: Hi HN, we're Zain and Grant at Keyri (<a href="https://keyri.co/" rel="nofollow">https://keyri.co/</a>). We make a white label passwordless authentication SDK that companies can embed into their mobile apps for instant biometrics-based registration and login on any device. Keyri can be used for (1) authentication by itself, (2) an auth option in addition to passwords and OpenID, (3) step-up identity verification in high risk-score scenarios.<p>Passwords suck - they're terrible for security and terrible for ease of use. 2FA solutions are clunky and still insecure - for example, SMS-based 2FA doesn't work when you travel abroad, and it can be defeated with phishing and SIM swapping. They also allow users to share their subscription accounts with others, robbing companies of revenue. Password-based auth also enables the sort of bot activity that renders sites like Ticketmaster and StockX unusable for real customers.<p>2FA methods currently in the market represent a tradeoff between security and ease of use. Secure 2FA methods like USB keys are a pain to use, while easy 2FA methods like SMS passcodes are unsecure. Keyri essentially takes the USB key concept and puts it in users' phones. This is hard to do in a secure way while maintaining a seamless UX due to the need for two-way communication to prevent phishing. Some enterprise-focused smartphone-based passwordless solutions require a Bluetooth or WiFi connection between users’ phones and their other devices to ensure security, which is obviously untenable for rollout to mass audiences. Our system works securely 100% over HTTPS and computer vision (beyond just reading QR codes). An additional difficulty is that companies don't want to force their users to download a third-party app. We solve this with our SDK that allows companies to bake our passwordless auth capability into their apps.<p>Keyri replaces passwords with public key cryptography plus biometrics. Instead of remembering and typing in your credentials, authentication happens by just scanning a QR code (on desktop web) or tapping a button (on mobile web and mobile native apps). Thanks to biometrics and cryptographic functions happening in the background, multi-factor authentication happens in one step that takes less than a second.<p>At registration, the Keyri SDK generates a key pair, stores the private key in the phone's secure enclave, and sends the public key to the relying party's (our customer’s) credential server. At login, the SDK first verifies the user's identity via biometrics (Face ID etc.), then generates a signed authentication request using the stored private key, then sends that request to the relying party's auth server, which authenticates the user by verifying the signature using the public key it received during registration. The user's private keys never leave their phone. There's a lot more cryptography, handshakes, secret sauce, etc. that happen during the auth flow, but those are incidental to the core concept outlined above.<p>What's different about us? 1. Keyri is available as a mobile SDK, allowing any company to offer passwordless onboarding and WhatsApp-like QR code login entirely within their own app without a long and tricky dev cycle. 2. Keyri doesn't require any typing or setup / opt in. Other passwordless solutions require typing out a username/email address and/or connecting by bluetooth, specialized onboarding, etc. 3. Key backup and recovery is handled automatically via the cloud (iCloud / Google Drive). Additional backup/restore options are available in our SDK. 4. Privacy: unlike OpenID and some other passwordless solutions, Keyri’s server does not store or see any private keys or any personal information. Our API simply facilitates the transmission of public keys and encrypted signed authentication requests.<p>We charge companies based on how many unique users use Keyri to log in to their web services in a given month. We can provide our API in a self-hostable format for companies in heavily regulated industries. Our auth endpoint code is open source, but our API and mobile SDK are not.<p>If you want to try the experience, check out our live demo here: <a href="https://keyri.co/demo" rel="nofollow">https://keyri.co/demo</a>. Note that this demo uses our standalone authenticator app, which is available for companies that don’t have their own mobile app, but our main product is the white label SDK that incorporates the authenticator app’s full functionality (and then some) into our customers’ apps.<p>As a long-time HN lurker, I know the community has expertise and strong opinions on authentication. It would be great to get your feedback, and I’d be happy to answer any questions. We’re very actively building out the system, so any ideas for bolstering our system are welcome.
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: Not sure if this is a perfect fit for HN but seeing as a lot of people here have some good insight into mental health from time to time, and a lot of people here have struggled. I have done a bunch of googling and I am at a loss to find resources that are more than just surface level. I have my own mental health issues but the depression I've struggled with in the past has always been something I've fixed by improving my life and prospects. So am at a loss as my poor partner is suffering terribly and has been for a while, and I don't think I've been a great help by just trying to fix things in our life and situation as it feels like I'm not really doing all that I can be.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Here's the fourth "Meet the Batch" thread - previous one was <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049500" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049500</a>. I've given in on titles (per <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049881" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049881</a> and sundry others).<p>There are 9 startups in this thread. The initial order is random:<p>GamerPay (YC S21) - Scam-free marketplace for gaming skins and assets - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073552" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073552</a><p>Warrant (YC S21) - APIs for authorization and access control - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073557" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073557</a><p>Abhi (YC S21) - Pakistani fintech focused on Early Wage Access - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073555" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073555</a><p>Perfekto (YC S21) - Imperfect produce in Latin America - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073551" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073551</a><p>Chipax (YC S21) - Quickbooks for Latin America - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073556" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073556</a><p>Inai (YC S21) - Segment for global payments - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073554" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073554</a><p>Titipku (YC S21) - Instacart for Indonesia - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073549" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073549</a><p>Jestor (YC S21) - Tool-builder for COOs - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073550" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073550</a><p>Nino Foods (YC S21) - Cloud Kitchens in India - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073553" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073553</a>
Upvote: | 130 |
Title: I explored an alternative way to view codebases to the typical folder/file list, showing a bird's-eye-view of its structure.<p>https://octo.github.com/projects/repo-visualization
Upvote: | 283 |
Title: What investments have you made in yourself as a developer that have really paid off?<p>I've found high level books written by experienced developers have really helped me. In the past I'd try to learn this or that shiny new thing but found little long term gain.<p>What's been your long term successes?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: This expression shows that we have several disagreements between programming languages about what is the end result:<p>=====<p>EXPR = (((((((788)*(8.46))))+8342*1.803-1))*4186.4*(15))*(((22%284/((7530/((2)*(((((25))-421))))))*597%2663)+7283.8-9.60+167.8644%((3))))+(8871)<p>POSTGRESQL = 8291561284461.33301440<p>SQUILU = 8291561284461.3<p>JAVA = 8.291561284461331E12<p>D = 8.29156e+12<p>SQLITE = 8290383058308.3<p>PHP = 8035491468054<p>JAVSCRIPT = 8036090802426.098<p>MYSQL = 8036090802312.071<p>PYTHON = 1.1107636287e+13<p>RUBY = 11107636286950.146<p>LUA = 11665910614443<p>=====
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: I'm posting this as a warning to other startups who might be thinking of using Stripe to process payments.<p>I was employee #10 at Eventbrite, founding engineer at Reforge, Techstars alum, startup founder X 3. I can't imagine treating my users like this and I am really upset with how Stripe is handling this situation.<p>The situation: I own an online SaaS company that processes $500k+ per year through both Stripe and Braintree. I've been using Stripe for years.<p>Today I received this email:<p>[b]"Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This unfortunately means that we will no longer be able to accept payments for<p>Refunds on card payments will be issued in 5–7 business days, although they may take longer to appear on the cardholder's statement. Please refer to your dashboard for a list of the charges to be refunded[1]."[/b]<p>I have NO idea what payments they could possibly be referring to & support doesn't respond to my numerous messages. They won't tell me which payments are being refunded (dashboard link they provided just sends me to the list of ALL our payments).<p>There was a button to verify my identity, which I did, and an hour later, I got:<p>[b]"Thank you for completing our verification process. Unfortunately, after conducting a further review of your account, we’ve determined that we still won't be able to accept payments for xx moving forward."[/b]<p>I have messaged my friends who work at Stripe, and edwin@stripe who works there who responded to the last HN thread there was about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030633).<p>Until I get a response through a backdoor way in, my business is at a complete halt.
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: Hi HN, we're Jacobo, Sergio & Pablo, founders of Arengu (<a href="https://www.arengu.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.arengu.com</a>). We let you build cutting-edge signup flows as Airbnb, Stripe, or Slack for your SaaS, without dedicating a full engineering team.<p>Building an application requires coding boring flows like signup, logins, payments, and waiting lists. As applications grow, more complex flows are required, and most of the time they can only be edited by engineering teams. If something breaks, sometimes it takes time to notice. Measuring where users drop off can be tricky. Growth and marketing teams want autonomy to sign up users in landing pages, test new flows and get insights into what performs better.<p>At our previous jobs, we were constantly asked by clients to customize the signup, adding logic or integrations. We didn't find a good solution to cover the UI and custom logic with APIs other than coding from scratch. So we built a low-code platform, suitable for non-engineering teams, where you can build all the UI and integrations with a visual interface. Then you embed the flow in your site where you want it to appear with just a line of code.<p>Key features include: email or phone verification with OTPs; Stripe integration to enroll users in trial subscriptions; rate limiting to avoid spam or brute force attacks; approvals to build a waiting list and manually approve or reject signups; analytics events to track any user interaction with your flows; native integrations to send data back and forth between us and your apps; custom HTML/JS to extend your flows’ capabilities.<p>We make money based on the volume of submissions you have per month or based on product capabilities (eg. adding payment flows in your signup).<p>Watch our product intro video (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go_Dxbj0Jdo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go_Dxbj0Jdo</a>) or if you scroll down our homepage (<a href="https://www.arengu.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.arengu.com</a>) to “Try a sign-up flow demo” you can see what the product looks like to the end-user and play around - it’s not to sign up to Arengu :P. There are more demos for every of the common use cases we have (<a href="https://www.arengu.com/use-cases" rel="nofollow">https://www.arengu.com/use-cases</a>).<p>We would love to get feedback about your experience building signups flows: painful parts (eg. UI, logic, security, etc), complex flows (eg. KYC, OTPs, data verification, etc); anything you would like to share with us, or if you think we can help you, feel free to reach out at jacobo [at] arengu.com :)
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: After latest apple content scanning privacy debarcle, I will likely migrate away from apple. They have destroyed my trust such that I can’t tolerate the uncertainty they may change their minds later or introduce a hash inspection function secretly.<p>Which leaves the question: where to go? What is the best alternative to apple products?My current working suggestions, but would greatly appreciate others weighing in.<p>Phone: Pixel with graphene OS
Laptop: System 76 laptop or X1 carbon
Watch: Garmin variety of some description
Cloud storage: probably nextcloud self hosted
Upvote: | 109 |
Title: Hi HN! We are Uzo and Iyanu, the founders of BlackOakTV (<a href="https://beta.blackoak.tv" rel="nofollow">https://beta.blackoak.tv</a>). BlackOakTV is a subscription video platform serving black audiences by making it easy for them to watch TV shows and movies that feature black stories and characters.<p>Nearly three-quarters of Black people want to watch more content that portrays their lives and experiences (Target Market News, 2018), but they can't find enough of it, and when they do find it, it usually hasn't gotten the budget or development resources that more mainstream content does.<p>When I grew up in the 90s, it seemed like black people had a relatively high number of TV shows to choose from like "Martin", "Living Single," and "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air". It felt good. I felt represented. Unfortunately, it turns out the 90s were an aberration, and over the next 2 decades, black content would become widely underrepresented in Hollywood. Having watched too much TV as a kid, I foolishly decided to get into media as an adult. I worked as a journalist, producer, media strategist and executive, loving to make content, but always being reminded that my culture wasn’t getting the representation it deserved, and always hoping to do something about that someday.<p>When I started at YouTube and Google, I thought I would finally be able to help change that; I thought the internet and the world's biggest video source would bring black people the same awesome experience they were creating for other viewers and creators. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Black millennial users of YouTube, despite using it more than any other millennial group, often expressed that the comments on YouTube could make it an uncomfortable place. And black creators often did not get the same chance at success that their mainstream counterparts did, leading to some black creators filing lawsuits against YouTube. Despite YouTube's good intentions, systemic biases in how non-black users treated black creators, as well as the economic realities of Black people only representing 10% of the U.S. audience, have led to YouTube never doing quite enough to address this.<p>So I left YouTube, and Iyanu and I decided to address this on our own. The creator economy is booming, with black influencers among the most creative, and black consumers often among the most energetic and prolific users. I knew that energy could be harvested into a platform that gave black viewers the content they want, and creators the chance to make it. So we started BlackOakTV with the goal of delivering the most, and the best, Black content possible.<p>We license content from indie creators and make it available in one place, so Black viewers have a one-stop shop for the content they want to see. We're also creating/commissioning original content, to raise the bar on quality. We're different from Netflix in that our focus on black content means we can identify new black voices earlier, make it easier to find black content on our platform (hint: it’s everywhere!), and better serve the diversity of black viewers rather than just treating Black people as one single niche. As for the other streaming services targeting black users, our main differentiator from them will eventually be our product. Iyanu is an amazing engineer, and with his prowess, our product will provide a unique viewing experience, full of the features black viewers want.<p>But Netflix’s business model is where we aim to be a lot like them. Because Netflix changed media not just because of how they made their content available, but because for the first time in TV history, the aggregator of the content owned a direct relationship with the end user--and that’s why streaming is so valuable. And it’s why we want to have a product that makes users want to view our content exclusively through our properties. Today, users can go to blackoak.tv or download one of our apps, and after subscribing to our 7-day free trial, they can watch all of our content, on-demand, simply by scrolling through our catalog of shows and films. And because we appreciate the HN community taking time to hear our story, for a short period of time, we’re making some of our original black TV shows available for free on our site and in our apps on iOS, Android, Roku and Amazon Firestick. You don’t even have to sign up, just find the "free section" on our homepage or click the following link: <a href="https://beta.blackoak.tv/categories/free-episodes" rel="nofollow">https://beta.blackoak.tv/categories/free-episodes</a>.<p>With that, I welcome any feedback, ideas, or experiences similar to ours. It’s been very challenging trying to enter a quickly maturing business with a lot of competition from public companies, and while we think we have some of the answers, your suggestions, thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated!
Upvote: | 377 |
Title: I’m recently joined a new team where we are tasked with building out a website with around 15-20 unique pages. There are 3 main types of pages, and the majority of them are lists of links to external PDF documents.<p>We’re using a headless CMS with content in the page broken into hundreds of individual elements, where a React client app renders the data from the CMS API to our users.<p>In addition we seem to be grabbing the PDFs from the server, converting to Base64 and then rendering as an object in the react app (rather than just linking to the pdf file directly).<p>The team (4 developers, 1 automation/QA, 3 designers, scrum expert, product owner and product manager) is in their second quarter working on the site, and aiming to release this MVP next quarter so around 9 months to build 15-to-20 page site.<p>When I started my career 20 years ago, this is the type of project where maybe 2-3 people would build out over a few weeks.<p>When Content Management Systems were first introduced, one of their selling points was that it reduced reliance on developers for ongoing BAU content updates as ‘business people’ could make content updates and potentially even some sort of workflow to have reviewed or signed off (perhaps by compliance etc) with our set up the CMS is so complex that we’ll have any requests for changes submitted to team and have a developer make the update.<p>What benefit do we get from this complexity compared to just having static HTML pages that someone would update manually?<p>There are no concerns from our project sponsors around how long this is taking or the costs involved.<p>How on earth did we get to this stage where such bizarre complexity is accepted as normal?!
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: I just saw this one https://unsigned.io/openmodem/ and was wondering if someone was working on a open hardware 3g/4g usb dongle ?
Upvote: | 153 |
Title: I have nothing to do with domain squatting, but I do own a .co.uk domain for over 20 years and 18 years ago I tried to buy the .com from what I then found out was a squatter, out of principle I turned their offer down and the .com domain remains vacant, it’s not a particular interesting or valuable domain, so I’m not surprised no one else bought it.<p>Fast forward to a few months ago, and I let one other domain expire, it was for a brand I was creating, the domain was a made up word and a squatter registered that domain as soon as it expired, assuming some service registered it without any human supervision as that made up word holds no value to anyone else and I consciously decided to let it expire.<p>Since I made up that word and it was 14 characters long, are they just going to keep it for 20+ years?<p>This just made me wonder how many vacant domains we have today, that it must still be (unethical and) profitable and if it’s time to do something about it?
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: Midway through the pandemic, I was hopeful that work wouldn’t just go back to how it was before, now that more people were aware they could be perfectly productive working remote. Fast forward to now and almost all major companies I can think of are at best doing a hybrid system, which IMO is just a way to soften the blow of returning to office full time. There’s been a bunch of articles and HN posts about quitting for remote, but how many of you are actually doing it?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Hi HN, my name is Amar, and I am the founder and CEO at HyperLinq (<a href="https://hyperlinq.io/" rel="nofollow">https://hyperlinq.io/</a>). We are building HyperTrader, a simple yet powerful native desktop trading terminal. Our app currently supports cryptocurrency trading, but we will soon expand into other asset classes like US stocks. We make it easy for traders to track multiple portfolios, discover the best prices, execute orders faster and analyze their trades.<p>Between my co-founders Karamvir and Kunal and myself, we have over 30 years of experience building trading systems. Karamvir and I worked at an inter-dealer broker in NYC and built many trading systems together. We also used to trade cryptocurrency. Back then there was a huge price disparity between exchanges, so we were able to do arbitrages.<p>We looked around and couldn't settle on a tool that could help us simplify the workflow, so we set out to build our own, not because we wanted to start a business but because we simply wanted to spend less time. In early 2018, we hacked out a small app that did no more than price aggregation and comparison. Price discovery was the main focus rather than managing portfolios or orders.<p>Soon we had many friends using the app. By mid-2018, we realized there was a business potential, but we found out that people did not want the new features we had been building. So we threw away our roadmap and started interviewing users. What they told us boiled down to two significant asks: (1) A blazingly fast app; (2) Efficient ways to execute orders. None of our users cared about multiple exchanges. They just wanted an app better than the exchange they were trading on. So we decided to build that.<p>As we always wanted to build a desktop app instead of a web app, we decided to go with Node.js, C++, React, Redux, and Electron. We are aware that Electron is not ideal in terms of CPU and memory usage and also the build sizes are huge. But to begin with, we wanted to use something that can work cross platform with a single source code. Eventually we have to move to better options for a true native experience - a goal for 3.0. For the most part, our team has done a decent job at managing CPU and memory so that our app is fast and reliable even when built with Electron. Majority of the processing happens directly on the users' machines—only a small portion of data/processing happens on our servers. The app connects directly to the exchanges. Unlike many other aggregators, we chose not to pick an open-source project for connectivity. Instead, we wrote our own connectors in C++ and deployed them as Node.js add-ons. On the server-side, we chose to remain 100% serverless. We wrote our lambdas in either Python or Node.js.<p>Building a desktop app gave us many advantages in terms of performance. Also, the peer-to-peer connectivity with the exchanges made sure that we do not hit issues related to API rate limits or network delays. It also helped us keep our costs low.<p>We plan to introduce stocks and forex trading in 2022. We want to keep building it further and add as many asset classes as possible. Our goal is to create a terminal that caters to all kinds of traders.<p>If you’re interested, please try out the app and send us your feedback. What do you think of our product? How can we make it better? Happy to answer any comments or questions!
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: There is a general sentiment that Google's search capability has degraded over the years. Many disagree, pointing to metrics that suggest an increase in utility and successful searches for the average user over time. For the instances where Google users have difficulty finding relevant results, the on-going battle with SEO practitioners is cited, with the difficulty of distinguishing legitimate pages from ad farms and the like suggested as an answer to the question of why we see such failures and an increasing reliance on big-name sites as a trustworthiness heuristic.<p>I want to sidestep that debate somewhat by describing my experience with a more controlled environment: voice searching for YouTube videos to play on my Google Home Mini device. Many will remember how remarkably accurate searches were at initial release c. 2017; songs could be found by reciting lyrics, humming melodies, or vaguely describing the thematic or narrative thrust of the song. The picture is very different today. It's almost impossible to get the system to return even slightly obscure tracks, even if one opens YouTube and reads the title verbatim. Recently, I was trying to listen to a song from Neil Cicierega's Mouth Dreams album, Aerolong. Just that one song. No combination of terms would bring it up. Several times, my Mini tried to play the entire album as a playlist. But just as often, it would return something that was just off ("I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" by Aerosmith) or completely unrelated (Bohemian Rhapsody). We should be clear: this is an Alphabet-produced device and interface tapping into an Alphabet-built index with an Alphabet-developed search function and being absolutely incapable of returning the correct result. One may wonder if this might have something to do with the obscurity of the track in question, but Neil Cicierega is an artist of note, if not mainstream; and, besides, it <i>found the correct album</i> and, presumably, would have eventually gotten to the correct track while making its way through the playlist. But that's not what I was asking for as a user; if the system found the correct track but insisted on not going directly to it, it's making a decision for me that I did not ask it to. That would be a horrifying finding, if more evidence could be compiled (beyond this being a commonly-encountered scenario) to show that this, specifically, is what was happening. At this point, however, the only thing that can be definitively concluded is that Google searches are not returning results that they ought to; results that, by all accounts, they would have been able to a few years ago; and results that must not have bren influenced by efforts to eliminate the effects of abusive SEO practices. Something else is going on.
Upvote: | 141 |
Title: A few days ago, I read that math is not that much important of you want to be a computer scientist.<p>I read this sentence as a provocation and caught me so much that I'm still thinking about it.<p>I studied math and computer science and I strongly believe that having a math background helps you a lot to reason about a problem and formalize the solution. I do believe math can help you to implement some clean code, e.g., that solves a problem without a bunch of if else statements (or to identify state machines where they are not so easily spotted).<p>In my experience, math helped me a lot, even though so far I never implemented compilers, interpreters or defined new languages (tasks where most of scientists agree that having a math background helps).<p>What do you think: is learning math useful to be a good computer scientist?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi HN, we are Stefan and Konstantin, co-founders of Financial Choice (<a href="https://financialchoice.com" rel="nofollow">https://financialchoice.com</a>). We offer a checking account alternative that lets users invest their balance (not FDIC insured), otherwise it works like a normal checking account.<p>Our background is in computer science (we’re ex-Googlers), but we also love modern portfolio theory, and long-term investment in low-cost, broadly diversified index funds (we’re big Bogleheads fans). Annoyed by our checking account’s low returns, we asked ourselves if there was a way to invest our checking account balances, but still keep the checking account features.<p>Financial Choice (FC) is our answer. When a user deposits money with FC, like a paycheck, FC automatically invests that money according to our user’s investment preference. When a user withdraws money, e.g. for rent/mortgage or at the ATM, they get money instantly, while FC automatically triggers a sale of their investments to cover the withdrawal. In many cases, investments sell in time to directly cover the withdrawal, while other times, the withdrawal is made on margin until the investments’ sale completes.<p>Users choose what they want to invest in based on what risk they are comfortable with. Many invest in stock index funds (e.g. S&P500 with 10.3% average annual return, -43.1% worst year [1]). Some users invest in bond index funds (e.g. 6.1% average annual return, -8.1% worst year [1]). Some choose socially responsible investments. Those with the lowest risk tolerance invest in US treasuries.<p>On a macroeconomic scale, we believe that our approach can solve major problems of the current banking system. Today, banks invest customers' deposits and keep the returns mostly for themselves (the national average interest rate is just 0.03% [2]). When there are losses, FDIC guarantees that customer deposits never lose money, but when the losses become significant enough (like they did in 2008 [3]), the taxpayer ends up paying with bailouts. With FC, users invest their money directly, so returns are transparent and there’s no need for bailouts.<p>Beyond giving people a choice, there’s also a couple other cool features that we’re excited about. Naturally there are funds flowing in and out of a checking account (paycheck, rent, bills, etc), and we can use these to automatically rebalance a portfolio. Similarly, we can optimize our users’ tax burden by being smart about which investments get sold and performing tax-loss harvesting.<p>Financial Choice is currently free to use and available in the US. We build on top of Fidelity that provides all checking and investing features. Building on top of an existing financial institution has been hugely helpful to get a full-featured product to our customers quickly (but it does mean that users have to share their credentials with us, similar to Plaid).<p>We’d love for you to try it out (sign up at <a href="https://financialchoice.com/signup" rel="nofollow">https://financialchoice.com/signup</a>), and give us feedback. We would also love to hear what you do with your checking account balance, and what you think the major problems with today’s banking system are (and how they can be fixed).<p>[1] <a href="https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/how-to-invest/model-portfolio-allocation" rel="nofollow">https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/how-to-invest/model-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/resources/rates/historical/2021-03-29.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/resources/rates/historical/...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932008" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80...</a>
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Hi HackerNews! We’re Matt and Igor from Lightly (<a href="https://www.lightly.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.lightly.ai/</a>). Most companies that do machine learning at scale label only 1% of their data because it's too expensive to label all of it. We built Lightly to help companies pick the most valuable 1% to be labeled.<p>If you wonder what data labeling looks like for images then think about these captchas that want you to tag images in the web containing objects such as a bus or person. When we were working on training machine learning (ML) models from scratch, we often had to do this labeling ourselves. But there was always far too much data for us to be able to label all of it. We talked with more than 250 ML teams ranging from small groups of 2-3 people to large teams at Apple and Google, and they all face the same problem: they have too much data to label.<p>Not only that, but there wouldn’t be a lot of value in labeling everything. For example, if you have billions of images, it's a waste of time to get humans to label every one of them, because most of those labels wouldn't add useful information to the model you’re hoping to train. Most of the images are probably similar enough to other images that have already been labeled and they have nothing new to tell your model. Spending more labeling effort on those would be a bit like labeling the same image over and over again—quite wasteful.<p>As soon as your ML model surpasses the initial prototype stage, you’re most interested in the edge cases in your dataset — the ones that represent rare events. For example, a few days ago, there was a Twitter thread about failure cases for Tesla vehicles. One Tesla has mistaken a yellow moon for a yellow traffic light: <a href="https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/1418413307862585344" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/14184133078625853...</a>. Another edge case is a truck full of traffic lights: <a href="https://twitter.com/haltakov/status/1400797882891091970" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/haltakov/status/1400797882891091970</a>. Finding and labeling such rare cases is key to having a robust system that will work in difficult situations.<p>Rather than labeling everything, a better approach is to first discard all the redundant images and keep only the ones that it's worth spending time/money to label. Let's call those "interesting" images. If you could spend labeling effort only on the "interesting" images, you'd get the same value for a fraction of the cost.<p>Many ML companies in a more advanced stage have had to tackle this problem. One approach is to pay people to go through the images and discard the "boring" (nothing-new-to-tell-me) images, leaving the "interesting" (worth-spending-resources-to-label) ones. That can save you money if it's on average cheaper to answer the question "boring or interesting?" about an image than it is to label it. This solution scales as long as you have an increasing human labeling workforce every year. However, ML data doubles every year on average, and therefore the labeling capacity would need to double too.<p>Much better than that — the holy grail — would be for a computer to do the work of discarding the "boring" images. Compared to paying humans to do it, you'd get the "interesting" subset of your billion images almost for free. You would have much less work to do (or money to spend) on labeling, and you'd get just as good a model after training. You could split the savings with whoever knew how to make a computer do this for you, and you'd both come out ahead. That’s basically our intention with Lightly.<p>My co-founder Matt and I worked on many machine learning projects ourselves, where we also had to manage tooling and annotation budgets. Dealing with data in a production environment is different from academia. In academia, we have well-balanced and manually curated datasets. It is, as some of you know, a huge pain. The solution of the problem boils down to working with unlabeled data.<p>Luckily, in recent years, a new subfield of deep learning has emerged called self-supervised learning. It’s a technique to train models to understand data without any labels. In natural language processing (NLP), modern models like BERT or GPT all rely on it. In computer vision, we have had a similar breakthrough in the last year with models such as SimCLR or MoCo. Back in 2020, we started experimenting with self-supervised learning to better understand unlabeled data and improve our software. However, there was no easy-to-use framework available to work with the latest models. To solve that problem, we built our own framework to make the power of self-supervised learning easily accessible. Since we want to foster research in this domain and grow a bigger community around this topic we decided to open-source the framework in fall 2020 (<a href="https://github.com/lightly-ai/lightly" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lightly-ai/lightly</a>). It is now used by universities and research labs all over the world.
We realized that the ability to understand and visualize unlabeled data is also valuable to other ML teams and decided to offer our solution as a SaaS platform. The platform builds on the open-source framework and helps you work with the most valuable data.<p>Here are some examples where Lightly can help you:<p>Analyze the quality and diversity of your datasets. Our platform can also use metadata or labels if available. Uncover class distributions, dataset gaps, and representation biases before labeling to save time and money. You can do it manually or automated through our data selection algorithms which ensure the most diverse subset of your dataset is chosen. (<a href="https://docs.lightly.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.lightly.ai/</a>).<p>Once you have a labeled dataset and trained your model, our active-learning algorithms allow you to gradually select the next data to be added to your training set. Only label the best data for model training until you reach your target accuracy. <a href="https://docs.lightly.ai/getting_started/active_learning.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.lightly.ai/getting_started/active_learning.html</a><p>Check it out yourself with this quick demo video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38kwv0xEIz4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38kwv0xEIz4</a><p>Lightly integrates with an API directly into your pipeline, is available on-prem, and can process up to 100M samples within hours.<p>We're excited we get to show Lightly to you all. Thank you for reading! Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments.
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: What cheap yet very useful things have made a substantial change and improvement to your life?<p>For me it has always been USB flash drives. I'm scared of getting ransomware'd one day, but I am safe in the knowledge that I'd have to have every thumbdrive I own plugged into my PC for some real damage to happen. They are a lifesaver, and they get cheaper every year too!
Upvote: | 233 |
Title: In a recent YC survey one of the questions was about whether or not we would apply to YC again. I answered "no".<p>I am now 58. I consider myself a highly accomplished multidisciplinary engineer as well as a capable business operator.<p>To lend a bit of context, I have hardware orbiting the planet right now. I also helped design hardware going to the moon in the next few years. I self-funded, grew and ran a startup that almost had an exit in the tens of millions of dollars before the 2009 economic implosion took us out. After that I wrote apps for the iPhone, I designed hardware for the motion picture industry, I manufactured custom technical furniture, built data centers and even entered the aerospace industry to help one of the most well-known companies in the segment get people to the International Space Station.<p>Throughout this I became very interested in the VC world. I have always self funded, mostly out of a desire to just get going. YC seemed to be above the fray, above some of the nonsense I experienced (I participated in at least one incubator program that ended on an ugly note).<p>I signed-up for and graduated from Startup School. We applied for YC and were not accepted. I continued with Startup School for a second term. Applied again. Nothing. We likely applied about three times, if not four. I honestly don't remember. This included pivots. I wasn't trying to do the same thing and expect different results. The only thing that remained constant was me, a solo 50-something founder.<p>I, of course, realize YC has to choose from among tens of thousands of applications. I am not here to suggest I was wronged. I am not entitled to anything and YC owes me nothing at all.<p>I think age discrimination is an ugly unresolved reality in the world of technology. As I have gone in and out of entrepreneurship I had periods of time during which I said to myself "just get a job for a few years".<p>When I was younger this was easy. I could get a job within days or a couple of weeks. As I got older it became very obviously harder, even through I became a better engineer, with vastly more knowledge and experience spanning a range of disciplines and fields of study.<p>My conclusion was reached after looking at YC age data, reading through related threads and, in general terms, watching my own path in and out of various technology sectors over the last decade or so.<p>My feeling is that the YC process includes several elements that, when combined, might result in unintentional discrimination against older founders:<p>- Asking for your age rather than "Are you 18 or older?"
- Asking for a personal video where you see the applicant
- An established bias against solo founders
- Younger people evaluating the applications
- A physical relocation requirement<p>I am not suggesting YC evaluators are explicitly biased. There is such a thing as unconscious bias. We know and understand this in the racial domain.<p>Completing the survey made me think about whether YC was worth the effort for me. My conclusion was that, while I can deal with rejection just fine (sales will teach you this reality), I am not interested in a scenario where my age becomes a disadvantage --even if not explicitly so. It feels like YC, as a 58 year old solo founder, is an exercise in futility or, perhaps more kindly, an not an optimal path.<p>Once again, please take this as constructive criticism and, perhaps, as a reason for introspection rather than an attack on YC. I think YC is a fantastic resource and one that has allowed many who would otherwise not have the opportunity, to create and launch some of the most amazing companies in the world. YC is, in many ways, a gift to the world of technology. I just don't think it is for older founders, and, in particular, solo older founders.
Upvote: | 288 |
Title: For those —like myself— who are upset about Apple's recent decision to share perceptual hashes of your phone's private content with a third party, what do you intend to do about it? Are people changing phones to opt-out, or installing custom ROMs?<p>It's been very heartwarming to see that a large part of the Hacker News community shares many of my concerns regarding what I feel is a very invasive overreach by Apple. For my own part, this has been the incentive to stop procrastinating and finally get myself a phone that can run a custom Android ROM. I know this doesn't solve all of the issues of privacy on mobile phones, however it is a move much more consistent with my ethics, given my own dislike of Google's business practices.
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Here's the fifth "Meet the Batch" thread for YC's S21 batch. The previous thread was <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073548" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073548</a>, and if you're wondering what it's all about, the description is at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280</a>.<p>There are 7 startups in this thread. The initial order is random:<p>Clarity (YC S21) - Run your distributed team with a single weekly doc - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128962" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128962</a><p>Mentorcam (YC S21) - Get advice from public figures - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128958" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128958</a><p>Sirka (YC S21) - Tackling obesity in Southeast Asia - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128964" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128964</a><p>Echoes HQ (YC S21) - Measure the effectiveness of engineering organizations - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128961" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128961</a><p>PayHippo (YC S21) - Loans to small businesses in Nigeria - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28130022" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28130022</a><p>ContraForce (YC S21) - All-in-one cybersecurity platform - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128959" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128959</a><p>Palenca (YC S21) - Payroll API for Latin America - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128960" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128960</a>
Upvote: | 116 |
Title: I'm very interested in moving from IC to management, is this transition easier within the same company, or switching company. How did you make it?
Upvote: | 93 |
Title: I would like no video or audio to play unless I click on it. After this morning's upgrade to version 91, I am back to videos on Twitter (and possibly elsewhere) starting to auto-play just by scrolling into view. In my preferences, I have "Block Audio and Video" for all sites with no exceptions. In my Twitter profile, I have "Autoplay" set to "Never", but, I also look at threads without logging in.<p>Do you know what I need to do to be able to look at a Twitter thread while not logged in without triggering autoplay? Unfortunately, I do not remember what I had done previously which made it so that I almost never encountered autoplaying media on any site.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Hi HN, I'm Kenneth and I'm the founder of Slip (<a href="https://www.slip.so" rel="nofollow">https://www.slip.so</a>), a marketplace for programmers to build and sell courses, including interactive elements like in-browser code execution, popular programming embeds (CodeSandbox, StackBlitz, Replit repls (Coming soon)), and videos.<p>Instead of spending 3 or more months building their own course platform, developers can use Slip to create engaging interactive courses and make more money faster from their knowledge<p>In January, I built vim.so in 3 days, and made $11k in my first month. I even did a Show HN for it (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25846347" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25846347</a>). I was able to do it in 3 days because I had previously spent 3 months building an interactive course for Python fundamentals. That previous experience reduced the time it took me to build a new course, which was the only reason it made sense to do. 3 days of hacking was low-risk enough that when I had the idea for vim.so, it made sense to actually try and see.<p>The results blew me away and actually changed my life. If sales continue at the current rate, I'll make about $50k this year with vim.so. This experience gave me confidence that I could build something and sell it on the internet. It helped give me credibility as a developer, and got me connected with lots of other cool folks building cool things.<p>After launching vim.so, I started getting lots of inbound requests to build other interactive courses on various topics: Ruby, Git, Bash, etc. At first I thought I'd just build all these myself but quickly realized other folks could teach these topics at a much deeper level than I could. But why weren't they building these courses? It's because it's currently too hard to make an interactive programming course. After maybe the 5th Twitter DM asking me for an interactive Git course, I decided to start a platform that helps other devs do the same thing I did with vim.so.<p>The main tool in Slip is an online course editor that allows you to build a course with a variety of "block types". You can use markdown, videos, code snippets, figma embeds, CodeSandbox Embeds, and executable code snippets. Code executions happen in remote one-off Docker containers. Code snippets are built using the open-source Ace Editor react component.<p>The editor is free to use. We take a 10% cut of sales made via our site (plus processing fees). We handle payments via Stripe and accept and remit VAT taxes for the author. Slip also has features to help authors make more money with their courses. For selected courses, we can run a presale campaign. We also publish and feature courses directly on our site that meet a certain quality bar.<p>Some devs who have rolled their own interactive course platform have spent more than 6 months just on that part! If we can remove that 6 months of non-content work, more devs will be able to build better educational materials. I've met multiple folks making over 6 figures a year teaching programming courses. Slip will be a success if we can help many more people do that, a lot more easily.<p>If you have any experience building educational programming courses or ideas on what programming courses are lacking today, or have any thoughts to share, I'd love to hear from you!
Upvote: | 399 |
Title: Hackernews is what I would consider a website with solid discussion about technology. However it's extremely skeptical when it comes to cryptocurrency.<p>I'd like know if there is a similar technically minded community for crypto.<p>I sometimes read /r/CryptoCurrency but its mostly shilling and asking about prices, so it doesn't really interest me.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: A bit of a click-baity title, apologies. I'm a senior eng and want to really push myself to better levels. My non-tech skills (comms, collab, leading) are one of my strengths and I'm constantly trying to make them better. I constantly keep feeling that I don't know enough tech stuff, there's a ridiculous amount to learn and foundational blind spots and holes that keep cropping up.<p>One of the questions I try to ask myself is, if I joined a new team or company, what skills would I need to really help the team succeed quickly and effectively.<p>A lot of ya'll have been around the block a lot, and either been or worked with such folks. Your insights would be super appreciated
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re SenpAI.GG (<a href="https://senpai.gg/" rel="nofollow">https://senpai.gg/</a>). We help gamers get better by providing real-time, personalized suggestions and feedback before, during, and after games.<p>It takes a lot of time and effort to become good at popular games. Even after learning a game, you need to adapt your gameplay to meta changes (game updates). We’ve developed a desktop application to accelerate your learning curve, as well as easily adjusting your gameplay as games get updated. We provide personalized recommendations before the game to set up strategies, give instant notifications and feedback while playing the game, and detailed post-game analysis to improve your gameplay.<p>We're friends from college and played many games together during our dorm life in the early 2010s, especially Age of Empires II (we're old-fashioned). We were very good at 2 vs 2 matches and were considered the best in our dorm. A few years later, we decided to play AoE II again and got destroyed in the first 3 matches. We googled the ways to improve our gameplay and found two ways in addition to orthodox methods such as reading guides. The first was to watch hours of streams on YouTube or Twitch. Considering we had demanding jobs by then, it was impossible to watch long videos. The second was to pay for professional feedback from “human” gaming consultants.<p>Then, we came up with the idea that we can mimic human gaming consultants and create a scalable system. We could use statistics to provide fundamental level suggestions to improve the gameplay. This is how we formed the basic idea behind SenpAI.GG. Since we know AoE II has a limited number of players, we decided to start with League of Legends and developed a prototype in 2018.<p>Our Desktop application is now available (beta) for League of Legends, VALORANT and TFT. League of Legends players need to pick the champions, runes and items just before they start a match and play. We provide champions, runes and items suggestions to improve their winning probability. Our recommendations can be imported to the game with a single click. We provide some tags pinpointing the game characteristics of opponents and teammates. For example, we have an "Early Ganker" tag for the gamers who tend to gang in the early game. After the match, gamers can take a look at their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, we provide a tag of "Early Game Gold Loss" for a gamer whose gold/minutes ratio is significantly less than the lane opponent in early game). We provide these tags based on only publicly accessible data on the official game publisher API. For example, any gamer can search for the opponents’ game data and conduct a similar analysis.<p>For VALORANT, we have a Voice Assistant. For example, we start a counter when a spike (Spike is a type of "bomb" with 45 second detonation time.) is planted and provide verbal notifications (10 seconds, 7 seconds, etc..). For healer agents, we notify the gamers if any of the teammate's HP is low. This information is already available on the screen (health bars) but we provide an extra verbal notification. During the match, we don’t provide any information about the opponent.<p>We follow the guideline of the game publishers and do not share any information or suggestion that is not available on the screen of the player. We consider SenpAI as analogous to a friend sitting next to the gamers, making recommendations based on the data they see. In the case of sports, the best analogy would be an ‘analyst’ or a ‘personal performance coach' that provides some training and insights about the opponents based on the publicly accessible data. An approximate analogy to, say, chess might be that we tell about the chess clock and provide verbal notifications about time spent while the player is thinking.<p>We have a Desktop application (built on Electron.js) and a web application. We have two sources of data. We have access to the official API of game developers (specifically Riot Games) and we utilize computer vision to extract information (e.g., health bar) from the game in real-time. For League of Legends, we trained a deep learning model to predict the results of matches. We provide pre-game suggestions to maximize the winning probability of this model.<p>It's free to use SenpAI.GG, however we have plans to launch a freemium business model inspired by popular video games. Basically, gamers will need to subscribe to unlock certain features and remove ads.<p>We would love to hear what you think about our application. You can download the app from <a href="https://senpai.gg/" rel="nofollow">https://senpai.gg/</a> (currently available for Microsoft Windows) or try our web application at <a href="https://app.senpai.gg/" rel="nofollow">https://app.senpai.gg/</a>. We will be here today to answer any questions and hear your feedback in the comments!
Upvote: | 182 |
Title: Please recommend a boomer friendly photo sharing service that is also privacy conscious…if such thing even exists.<p>Looking for easier/better alternatives than doing Nextcloud, ownCloud, etc.
Upvote: | 136 |
Title: Is the Hacker News source code and infrastructure public? I'm interested in web application security and performance and was hoping I could learn more about HN's source code and infrastructure.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Welcome to another "Meet the Batch" thread for YC's S21 batch. The previous thread was <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128957" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128957</a>. The original announcement is at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280</a>.<p>There are 6 startups in this thread. The initial order is random:<p>Kodex (YC S21) - Easy responses to government data requests - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156465" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156465</a><p>HeyCharge (YC S21) - Low-cost EV charging in multi-user buildings - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156463" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156463</a><p>Parallel Bio (YC S21) - Improving drug discovery by replacing animal models - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156464" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156464</a><p>Secoda (YC S21) - Company data discovery tool for teams - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156461" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156461</a><p>Oneistox (YC S21) - Skill-building, cohort-based courses for designers - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156462" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156462</a><p>Zeit Medical (YC S21) - Early detection of stroke - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156466" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156466</a>
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: Every time I do a screen recording, I have to go trough the hassle of converting the video to MP4 on my Apple computer.<p>Even my iPhone can export to MP4 so I there is no reason for it not to work on my computer.<p>Come on Apple, please fix this super annoying business crap from the past when you tried to increase QuickTime installs on Microsoft machines by enforcing this now ancient format.<p>Just get over it.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: If you're authenticated with GitHub, visit a repo's page and press ".". A web version of Visual Studio Code will spin up in your browser. This is distinct from the Codespaces launch yesterday.
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: Kicked off by everything happening with Apple, anyone in this community who has tried these different devices? What's your impression? What are the big problems that need solving?<p>I've seen a lot of people referencing these devices so figured I would ask about firsthand experience.
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Watch this episode of Apropos where Adrian Smith and I show a novel approach to developing native mobile apps with JVM Clojure, GraalVM, SCI and Skia:<p>Video: <a href="https://vimeo.com/585335551" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/585335551</a><p>Code: <a href="https://github.com/phronmophobic/mobiletest" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/phronmophobic/mobiletest</a>
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: Hi HN, we’re Iona Mind. We provide app-based mental health support, with a focus on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).<p>Mental healthcare is difficult for many people to access, whether because of cost, stigma or waiting times. According to a recent pre-covid study in England [1] 18% of people are experiencing a mental health issue, yet only 5% actually access help through an employer’s assistance plan (if one even exists) [2] . The majority suffer in silence. In addition to the human cost, there are significant economic costs. In the U.S., mental health issues cost employers thousands of dollars per employee per year in medical costs and lost productivity [3].<p>At our previous company, we lost a colleague to suicide. Since then we’ve been on a mission to bring evidence-based mental healthcare to as many people as possible. We were surprised to find that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is backed by over 30 years of research, and over 250 meta-analyses [4], yet remains difficult for people to access. CBT has been shown to be effective for a wide range of mental health conditions, even when administered digitally [5] or in books (so called bibliotherapy) [6]. While we do not believe that self or app administered CBT can replace the human touch, it does provide a convenient, affordable, always accessible and stigma-free way for many users to access support, when they may not have been able or ready to seek it in person. In the UK, the NHS presents a progressive “stepped model” of mental healthcare, depending upon severity from step 1 to step 4. We see apps playing a part in step 1, step 1a and possibly step 2 of this model [7].<p>While there are a number of CBT apps available, we wanted to base ours around Low-Intensity Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, a relatively new variant which has been used extensively in England to treat people with mild to moderate conditions at scale. In low-intensity CBT, the patient more or less treats themselves by doing exercises, and the therapist supports the process. This approach to CBT is especially suited to delivery through a digital form. Our clinical director, Professor Paul Farrand, was the architect of using Low-Intensity Cognitive Behavioural therapy at scale in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), and the editor of one of the first international textbooks on the subject [8].<p>Our app presents the user with a chatbot which guides them through CBT techniques and exercises. We went for a chat-style UI to make the software more engaging—it’s a challenge to make an app of this kind be more than just a “content board”. Our chatbot engine is graph-based. At some nodes in the graph, classifiers applied to the user’s free text entry determine the path through this graph, along with the user’s state and past inputs. We want the paths within the app to be predictable and ensure that the chatbot doesn’t do anything unexpected. We’d seen more freeform generative seq2seq style chatbots produce potentially dangerous output at times in other apps and wanted to avoid this. Also, CBT has been shown to often work better when “therapist drift” is minimized—this is where the therapist drifts away from the prescribed structure of the exercises in CBT [9]. A graph-based conversation is a good way to keep things on track.<p>We offer the app as an employee wellness benefit to organizations. Since only 5% of employees tend to use the Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) at their employer, the app offers a way to support the “missing middle” for whom mindfulness/meditation apps are not sufficient, but who aren’t ready to access their employer’s EAP. We offer use of the app completely anonymously if the user wishes. It’s in the Apple App Store at <a href="https://apps.apple.com/app/iona-anxiety-mood-support/id1491343580" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/app/iona-anxiety-mood-support/id14913...</a> and Google Play at <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iona.mental.health" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iona.menta...</a>.<p>We’d be really interested to hear from the community about any ideas or experiences you've had when it comes to delivering mental health support digitally. We appreciate this is a sensitive topic so if you’d rather email us we’d love to hear from you at [email protected]<p>[1] <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/556596/apms-2014-full-rpt.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.eapa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/UK-EAPA-Reseach-Report-The-evolution-of-employee-assistance-FINAL.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.eapa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/UK-EAPA-R...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1924724/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1924724/</a> indicates major depressive disorder alone costs $4426 per ill worker per annum<p>[4] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/</a><p>[5] There are a wealth of papers on so-called “iCBT” or internet delivered Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, covering both fully digital and human-in-the-loop variations. The approach dates back to the days when iCBT was actually just static content delivered on CD-ROM. I attach a couple below <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421393/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421393/</a>
<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23419552/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23419552/</a><p>[6] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5788928/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5788928/</a><p>[7] <a href="http://www.swscn.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/non-guidance-commissioning-stepped-care-for-people-with-common-mental-health-disorders-pdf.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.swscn.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/non-gu...</a><p>[8] <a href="https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/low-intensity-cbt-skills-and-interventions/book265983" rel="nofollow">https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/low-intensity-cbt-skills-an...</a><p>[9] <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26752326/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26752326/</a>
<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19036354/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19036354/</a>
<a href="https://www.vgct.nl/stream/vr-keynote-9.15-waller.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.vgct.nl/stream/vr-keynote-9.15-waller.pdf</a>
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: Hi, HN! I’m Cody Pawlowski and my co-founder is Chase Bonhag and we’re FirstIgnite (<a href="https://firstignite.com/" rel="nofollow">https://firstignite.com/</a>). We help researchers at universities connect with companies interested in funding or licensing their research.<p>Currently, a vast majority of all research goes uncommercialized. This includes everything from new cancer therapies to energy storage improvements and other solutions to universal problems. By connecting research to relevant companies, we increase the probability that research will be commercialized.<p>We met while I was running a natural language processing startup at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chase was working at Illinois Ventures, the venture capital arm of the university. U of I conducted over $900M a year worth of research, much of which was going uncommercialized. Because university research portfolios are massive, diverse, and highly complex, it's nearly impossible to figure out which companies to partner with for which research. We realized that we could apply NLP to the problem because it was written in scientific text via patents and publications!<p>We started by taking unpaid pilots from universities in fall of 2019. Seven schools gave us two pieces of research to match to industry. For 6 of the schools, we completely failed and were unable to connect any of their research to companies. But for one school, we managed to connect both of their technologies to 5 companies each. We learned that patent databases had company interest and activity in text format that matched well to research publications. We also learned that matching to patents was not quite enough, but if we also looked at the competitors of those holding patents we were able to identify a large enough top-of-funnel to find success on almost any topic. We built our initial product and process around that approach.<p>Researchers upload scientific documents describing their research and receive tailored lists of companies interested in that research. Using natural language processing and graph theory, our software analyzes the texts and matches their research to industry activity consisting of nearly 3 billion relationships stored across public and proprietary data. We’ve had success mainly leveraging USPTO full-text and competitive intelligence data, with plans to bring in European patents, SBIR, clinical trials, job postings, corporate filings, press releases, social media, and any other text that hints at what a corporation is interested in.<p>What’s unusual is that we’re the only solution that allows you to upload a piece of research and receive a tailored list of companies and leads to contact. We call this active marketing—helping researchers get in touch with those who are most likely to move their research forward—as opposed to a passive marketing approach, where researchers upload their technologies in hopes of companies reaching out to them (of course, they usually don’t). Our approach results in an average of 5 meetings with companies per scientific document vs our competitors' passive approach which is lucky to result in 1 meeting. We currently make money by selling software and service subscriptions to universities.<p>Some examples: Professor Chou at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia uses our tool to identify companies working on cancer therapies and connect with them about potential research partnerships. Carnegie Mellon University uses our software to market "moonshot" research topics to companies to identify future funding partners. UC Davis uses our tool to identify companies interested in licensing their intellectual property.<p>We’re really excited to share FirstIgnite with this community. We’re open to all thoughts and ideas, we’d love to learn about experiences you’ve had working on research projects, things you know about university research or corporate R&D, or anything else that can help us. Thank you!
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: https://github.com/denvaar/pgdiff<p>I cobbled together various programs into a bash script to compare how data changes between two points in time. My idea was basically to have a `git diff` but for data inside postgres.<p>I wanted a util like this to help get to know a new code base: Interact with an app and watch how the data changes.<p>You run the script with a given key (anything) before interacting with an app, then run it again with the same key to see the data diff.<p>I'm not much of a bash scripter, as you can probably see from the script, but it was a fun and useful tool to make. Might make some more improvements in the future (eg. BYO diff command, etc.) but we'll see.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I knew that my friend's startup was doing well, but I didn't know it was doing <i>that</i> well. I just found out that his net worth is several hundred million $. I don't know how to handle it... I am very happy for him but since hearing about it I feel like I've been wasting my time in my job. How do you deal with this?
Upvote: | 143 |
Title: How long does it take for an experienced programmer to learn Elixir good enough to get a job?<p>How good is the Elixir and Phoenix job market?
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: Hey everyone Mahyad from SigmaOS (<a href="https://sigmaos.com" rel="nofollow">https://sigmaos.com</a>) here, a pleasure to meet all of you. SigmaOS is a new type of browser, designed to make you better and faster working on the web.<p>If you’re anything like us, you work hours a day on the web, buried in a sea of tabs and web apps, constantly losing context and always one click away from being distracted. We believe that a radically different UX can help with this and that’s what we’re making. Here’s a demo video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_XfTSsaAA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_XfTSsaAA</a>.<p>This project is the overlap of our obsessions. I have always been obsessed with organizing because of my ADHD, and became a power user of software that could organize and clean up my workflow, like Superhuman and Notion. I was frustrated by how cluttered my desktop was with irrelevant Safari windows and tabs that I didn't need for my work right then. Also, I always felt overwhelmed by the constant switching of windows and apps to save information I was finding or send stuff to people I was working with. This led to the idea: what if there could be a much more organized browser, and you could easily access any app or tab or note directly from within the browser without needing to change to a different window?<p>Ali has always been into neo-browsers. Rockmelt (released when he was 11) was the first piece of software he deeply cared about and referred his friends to. Since Rockmelt's shutdown, multiple different neo-browsers came out, but none were as mind-blowing to him. He is also a power user of Photoshop and loves their single-key keyboard shortcuts. Saurav rarely cares about software but is a massive Vim fan. He is obsessed with how fast and powerful Vim makes him at text-editing. So, if you think Rockmelt crossed with Notion crossed with Vim, that’s basically what we’re working on :)<p>SigmaOS users create workspaces that hold apps and pages related to a project or task. We present those apps and pages in a list format. Users have 3 main actions to go through tasks quickly: they can mark a page as done, snooze a page when they don't need it right away, and move a page once it is no longer required for that task but maybe for some other one.<p>We help solve the problem of information loss and overload with our search tool called Lazy Search. You can quickly find pages in your history and already-open pages across workspaces. This makes it easier to find anything you have opened or searched before and navigate to it quickly.<p>We have a split-screen feature to quickly open a second webpage, for example for a quick new search you want to do or multitask by working on two pages at a time. This cuts down on opening unnecessary tabs and navigating away from what you are focused on.<p>One of the most straightforward but also most powerful aspects of SigmaOS that we’ve put a ton of thought into, is an intuitive and easy-to-learn repertoire of keyboard shortcuts for all the most-used commands and actions. This makes you a lot faster at your work on the web and feels like the other tools (cf. Vim above) that you’re traditionally productive in.<p>SigmaOS connects your web apps and your browsing activity to understand the context around your actions and searches. Your information is organized by projects, your work is shareable and collaborative, and information retrieval feels effortless. We charge $15 per month, no ads, and no data monetization.<p>Thanks for taking the time to read our post. We appreciate any and all feedback on what you think is the best thing about SigmaOS and what might not be so great. Please download SigmaOS from our website and give it a try yourself and let us know what you think here :)
Upvote: | 161 |
Title: Hi HN, I'm Stacy from Awesomic (<a href="https://www.awesomic.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.awesomic.io/</a>). Awesomic is a website where you create a design task and receive a draft from a professional designer in 24 hours.<p>On freelance platforms, it takes up to 7-14 days to find the right designer. You negotiate, then manage, and you need to look for a new person every time a new task is needed, like branding first and then a website design for web and mobile. With Awesomic, our algorithm connects you based on availability and expertise required. Then, you never manage this person or worry about deadlines—we do it automatically and guarantee a 24h turnaround. You have all skills covered under one fixed price subscription.<p>While running a local online business (coding school, the first Github partner in the CIS region), we had the hard time hiring the right designer part-time. We experienced a lack of quality, style consistency and speed as freelancers changed. Roman, my co-founder, thought that being matched with the right person on subscription would be the perfect solution. We got traction in 10 days just from the idea, with no product. Our first client was YC alumni Outtalent, and the next 20 clients came from word of mouth. Our best-selling ad was a napkin left in a co-working space—it brought us People.ai as a client.<p>For the first 2 months, we emulated the app processes manually and turned the tasks around in 24 hours via email. Since then we’ve been gradually building software for everything that can be automated, including matching tasks, managing daily updates, files and communication.
Our matching algorithm defines the criteria of each task (like timezone, type of task, software) and finds the best-fit designer due to them. When you create a logo task, you work with the best logo/branding designer. When you do an app or landing page that requires different skills, an algorithm will match you with a great UI/UX designer. If you like the result, you will continue to work with the same person based on matching.<p>When you log into our app (<a href="https://app.awesomic.io/login" rel="nofollow">https://app.awesomic.io/login</a>), you can choose any popular design task brief or add a custom one. Then you describe the task, and it gets matched with the best-fit designer. In 24 hours you see the first results, and every business day a new update is guaranteed for you. So you can iterate fast on any visuals and stick to your deadlines. The expertises covered are branding, graphics, product UI/UX design and animations. You communicate with the designers directly in the app, via comments or screenshare calls. All files are stored on private DigitalOcean Spaces and are accessible over the platform, so you don’t need to go back and forth between various tools, email, etc. We operate on a subscription model, but it is flexible: startups can upgrade/downgrade or cancel their plans anytime. This helps to stay cost-effective and scale easily.<p>Here’s a case study on how we made a redesign for the most funded app on Kickstarter: <a href="http://awesomic.io/case-study/memory-os" rel="nofollow">http://awesomic.io/case-study/memory-os</a>. Here’s one on a Norwegian fitness startup using us for 18+ months already—their app is in the top 10 most popular apps in the country: <a href="https://www.awesomic.io/case-study/entirebody" rel="nofollow">https://www.awesomic.io/case-study/entirebody</a>.<p>As specialists, we’ve been reading HN for quite some time and we are really excited to share our story with you. We would love to hear back from the community! How do you manage your design tasks? What is the most painful?
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: I'm 34. I work in quant finance in London, UK (in ML/statistics). I graduated with a PhD in CS and sort of fell into this field when a recruiter contacted me with the promise of $$$ that is hard to get in any other field unless you're at Google. I'm on a pretty decent salary even by London standards, but I'm utterly miserable.<p>1. The job is meaningless. When I first started in the field I thought I enjoyed it, but now I see that the bonuses were what excited me about the job, not the actual work.<p>2. Although the money is good, an 'adequate' house in London would cost at least 10 times my salary. I'm renting a flat with my partner. It's a reasonably decent flat by London standards, but because we're renting we can never really make it a home.<p>3. London is a horrible place to live. I have no affinity for it whatsoever. Even if I could afford a house I would not want to live here.<p>4. My home town is an hour flight away but if I were to move home I would most likely take at least a 2/3 pay cut. I would prefer to live back home. But doing that would ruin any chances I ever had of being able to retire early.<p>5. My parents, like most boomers, had a much better standard of living when they were my age. My father had a pretty average salary, bought a massive house for a reasonable price, and saw his wealth multiply many times over. It's not like that for my generation.<p>My partner is in a similar job to me and he is making multiples of what I'm making (although it's more stressful than mine). Luckily for him, he hates his job less than I do, so he could probably stick it out a few years longer.<p>I have just come back from 2 weeks holidays at home with my parents and was pretty much in tears this morning starting another day at work. It's so hard to muster up any motivation for the job, especially now that the company is in a dry period pnl-wise. I much prefer my home town to London, but I can't expect my partner to move back with me, as he is doing extremely well in his career and it would be career suicide for him.<p>I have racked my brain trying to figure out what field I would prefer to work in, but I can't think of anything. I just go round in circles thinking about it. Given that anything else would involve a massive pay cut, I think I would regret leaving the job I'm in. I could probably grind leetcode for a couple of months to try to get into Google, but I would find working at Google utterly meaningless as well. I have the ability to work hard to pass an interview, but I've been working for long enough now that I find it difficult to muster up any enthusiasm during job interviews, which is probably a red flag for potential employers. I'm no longer young and excited about this stuff!<p>I'm interested in computers and programming in general, but doing it for a living ruins the joy. I would love to be able to retire and get into meditation / travelling the world / learning about things for fun.
Upvote: | 185 |
Title: Hey all<p>My name is Sindre, and I am the CTO of Scrimba (YC S20). For the last 7 years, I have written all my web apps in a full-stack programming language called Imba. It compiles to JavaScript and its main goal is to make web developers more productive.<p>I just launched a major overhaul of Imba, so I wanted to share it here on HN, in case anyone are interested in learning more about it. It is very opinionated, so some of you might not like it, but I would love to hear anyones feedback regardless. Constructive criticism appreciated!<p>The backstory:<p>Imba initially started in 2012 as an effort to bring the elegance and conciseness of Ruby into the browser, and also because I felt that JavaScript and the DOM should be more tightly coupled together. Over the years, I have taken inspiration from React/JSX, and also Tailwind.<p>Since 2013, I have built several business-critical apps in Imba, so this is not a toy project or an academic exercise, it is extracted from a real project trying to solve real problems. Today, we are currently a small but passionate community of devs who use Imba all over the world.<p>The nitty-gritty details:<p>As mentioned, Imba compiles to JavaScript, and it works on both the frontend and backend. The quickest way to get a feeling of how it works is by checking out this video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XS5q9xhaMc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XS5q9xhaMc</a><p>Alternatively, here is a list of the main benefits of the language:<p>* Clean syntax with built-in tags and inline styles<p>* Imba's Memoized DOM approach is *an order of magnitude* faster than Virtual DOMs (Vue, React). Learn more here: <a href="https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-virtual-dom-is-slow-meet-the-memoized-dom-bb19f546cc52/" rel="nofollow">https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-virtual-dom-is-slow-me...</a><p>* Imba works with Node and the npm ecosystem, and integrates tightly with both JS and TypeScript<p>* Blazing-fast dev/build tools based on esbuild<p>Each of the benefits above are explained more thoroughly in our docs here, so please check it out if any of the above points spark your interest: <a href="https://imba.io" rel="nofollow">https://imba.io</a><p>With this version I feel that I am very close to my vision for what Imba should be. In other words; it is finally ready for public consumption. I'd wholeheartedly advice you to look into it and give it a whirl if you are interested in web development :)<p>Hope you like it, and please share any feedback you might have in the comments!<p>PS! We're also hiring Imba developers at Scrimba - see <a href="https://jobs.scrimba.com/" rel="nofollow">https://jobs.scrimba.com/</a>. We don't expect you to be a seasoned Imba developer, but we expect you to pick it up fast :)
Upvote: | 1216 |
Title: Here's the latest Meet the Batch thread for YC's S21 batch. The previous thread was <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156460" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156460</a>. For the original description see <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 initial order is random:<p>Monto (YC S21): Salary on Demand for Latam - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209932" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209932</a><p>Plug (YC S21) - API for multiple payment providers - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209933" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209933</a><p>Abstra (YC S21): Figma-like front end development for web apps - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209934" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209934</a><p>Levo (YC S21) - High yield savings account for Mexico - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209929" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209929</a><p>BoldVoice (YC S21) - Accent coaching app for non-native English speakers - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209930" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209930</a>
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: Looking at syscalls, I see Zoom desktop reads all processes and arguments.<p><pre><code> [pid 3844872] stat("/proc/1", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0555, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
[pid 3844872] openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/1/stat", O_RDONLY) = 4
[pid 3844872] openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/1/cmdline", O_RDONLY) = 4
[pid 3844872] readlink("/proc/1/exe", 0x20c0520, 1024) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
[pid 3844872] stat("/proc/2", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0555, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
[pid 3844872] openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/2/stat", O_RDONLY) = 4
[pid 3844872] openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/2/cmdline", O_RDONLY) = 4
[pid 3844872] stat("/proc/3", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0555, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
[pid 3844872] openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/3/stat", O_RDONLY) = 4
[pid 3844872] openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/3/cmdline", O_RDONLY) = 4
...
</code></pre>
Why would it do that? Is there any way to prevent it?
Upvote: | 547 |
Title: Hi Hacker News,<p>I’m Andrea and I have a strange problem with Google that I’m wondering if any of you here can advise about. It’s affecting several people with the same name as me, whose lives are being impacted.<p>In January 2021, I published a non-fiction book about a difficult, traumatic topic: my victimization and sex crimes that I witnessed toward other women. Because I am a victim, I chose not to put a photo of myself online. In fact, I have never ever taken a selfie nor had a photo of myself online.<p>Four months after I published my book, Google created a knowledge panel for me and, because I didn’t have a photo online, they just grabbed a photo of another Andrea Vassell who lives in Canada and displayed it alongside my book and claimed this woman was the author. After spending weeks sending feedback and trying to get help from Google support, they finally deleted the woman’s photo, but then promptly replaced it with another Andrea Vassell who is a pastor in New York. She, the pastor in New York, wrote to me that she has been “attacked” because people believe she is me.<p>I contacted Google again and asked them to please delete the knowledge panel because I did not have a photo on the Internet; therefore, any photo that they displayed alongside my book would be of the wrong person. By this time, some of the characters in my book were also being negatively affected because now it seemed they had harmed a pastor of a church.<p>I kept contacting Google and finally at the end of May, the knowledge panel was deleted, only to return a week later with a photo of a man who had been fired for his threats toward me. That photo remained until July 2021, and was then replaced with the pastor in New York again, although this time it’s a different photo of her.<p>I know that I am not a celebrity or an important person, but I spent two years writing a very difficult and personal book and to have a large corporation come along and continuously and consistently misrepresent my work and cause distress to others is becoming exceedingly stressful for everyone involved.<p>I contacted the Federal Trade Commission and they told me to contact the BBB and IC3.gov. I received an automated response from BBB and I don’t understand the reasoning behind contacting IC3.gov. I am currently working on a second book which I assume will be added to this knowledge panel with the photo of the wrong woman.<p>I would greatly appreciate any input about how to get this corrected so that I and others can move on. I know this is probably just an algorithmic glitch, but it’s affecting not only me but several others, and at this point I have no idea how to get Google to take it seriously.
Upvote: | 964 |
Title: I'm starting to realize that I'm a mediocre yet "smart" developer who might not be cut out for doing this long term. I find reading about software really interesting, built a number of my own apps, was able to pick up elixir professionally quite quickly and design some cool things at my last job. However, I can't for the life of me get into a place where interviewing seems natural at all and still after four years of experience struggle to get through medium leetcode problems.<p>I've had a taste of the "strategy" or "product" side of things and wonder if that's a better path to transition to, especially since I don't want to be a developer ten years down the road. The thing that's hit me the hardest is realizing I probably don't have the chops or mental energy to do my own startup. Just working at a startup during covid caused me to burn out and basically quit to maintain sanity.<p>For those of you who left tech but still make equivalent income either on the strategy, ops side etc I'm curious of how you came to make your transition and how your path changed soon thereafter.<p>Thanks
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Due to the controversy around Apple's CSAM backdoor plans, it seems like quite a few people are wondering what kind of alternatives are available. Let's share them!<p>My choices:<p>- Desktop: Manjaro Gnome, because it feels like macOS. It even does the 3 finger swipe up to see all your apps with Apple's Touchpad. My wireless Apple Keyboard also works fine.<p>Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/UYPfgkC<p>To install it on my older MacBook Pro from 2014, but I had to use Android internet tethering to install the WiFi driver.
To install it on my super new desktop, I had to use an ISO with a newer Kernel (5.13) due to the Radeon 6700 XT graphics card. I got that one from https://github.com/manjaro/release-review/releases/ instead of the Manjaro main website.<p>- Phone: I considered a Pixel with CalyxOS, but ended up buying a OnePlus 8T with microG variant of LineageOS from https://lineage.microg.org<p>Alternatively a Pixel phone would also run this version of LineageOS. MicroG (https://microg.org/) re-implements some parts of Google Play Services, while safeguarding your privacy, like push notifications. It also has some other Google-specific features re-implemented. I have over 40 apps and only found 1 that didn't work so far (which is Uber Eats, because they seem to require Google Advertisement ID). I pushed a modified Google Camera app to it (from https://www.celsoazevedo.com/), so my camera is better supported. I think only 3 out of 4 cameras are working, but I don't care.<p>- Watch: Amazfit GTR 2e with the official app. Alternatively it should work with Gadgetbridge if you don't want to use the offical app ("Zepp"). Amazfit GTR 2 is a better option if you want it to have WiFi and want to store music on it. Alternatives I considered: OnePlus Watch and Fossil Hybrid.<p>Apple features that I gave up:<p>- Apple Carplay: Because I don't want to use the Google ecosystem, Android Auto is not an alternative. I'll use my car's own GPS system, or I'll end up using my phone's offline maps.<p>- Apple Pay: My bank luckily has a contactless payment app for my phone, but I won't be making payments with my watch anymore.
Upvote: | 529 |
Title: I've worked for startups for 10 years and recently joined a FAANG company. Compensation and stability were part of my motivation, but the biggest reason was the assumption that I would be able to work with A+ players solving hard problems.<p>Instead, I'm on a team that has and horrendous turnover and is staffed with below-average IQ people.<p>This company builds EVERYTHING in house, and the toolset is like going backwards in my career 10 years.<p>If I do want to stick this out and turn this team around, I'm going to be working nights and weekends for at least a year - there's just too much to fix.<p>I've told this to lots of people who work in other division (that I can trust) and they've said the easiest thing is to just accept it as it is and coast. I've never done that in my career and don't think I could do that.<p>Has anyone been in the same boat? I'm told that it becomes easier to switch teams after a year.<p>I feel like I've made a terrible decision and don't know what to do next.<p>Any advice is appreciated.
Upvote: | 169 |
Title: We’re Ricky, David, and Minjeong and we built Flow Club: <a href="https://www.flow.club" rel="nofollow">https://www.flow.club</a>. Flow Club is a virtual co-working space to help you focus. You work in hour-long sprints of up to 9 people led by a host and designed to get you into flow quickly. Here’s a video showing how it works: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svl68znFgLc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svl68znFgLc</a>.<p>A lot of innovation around work today focuses on helping employees collaborate while distributed. The problem? Either you can’t get any work done from the constant Slack pings, excessive emails and agenda-less Zoom meetings, or (if you unplug from all that) you’re isolated and without structure. Then it can get hard to figure out which tasks to work on or find motivation to start. The challenge is to craft a virtual environment that is conducive to doing deep work and at the same time feeling connected to other people. That’s what we’re trying to solve.<p>David and I got back together to do our third startup in 13 years. I’m a hard worker, but David takes it to another level. When we would get together in coffee shops, we’d start pomodoro timers to make sure we don’t talk forever instead of working. When the pandemic began, we made a virtual timer overlay for our Zoom meetings to do stretches of work together while WFH. It was effective, but we didn’t think about it as a startup because we were working on other, more social products. None of those got traction.<p>The hard part about building a social product, especially for “older” people (i.e. everybody but the super young), is that purely social value props no longer work. Our desire to meet people, self-express, etc., goes down as we get older and busier. So how to bring busy people together? That led us to think about working as part of a “club,” and we went back to our simple timer, which had solved a real problem for us, and developed the idea from there.<p>With Flow Club, you work in sprints in the style of a group workout class. Every session takes place in a small group setting led by a host. The first five and last five minutes of the hour are reserved to hear a bit about what each person is working on and to celebrate their progress. Over time, as you attend more sessions, you start to feel connected to the community of “co-workers”.<p>If you’ve tried remote co-working with friends and found it distracting, you could try bringing your friend to Flow Club instead. It’s harder to slack off / goof around when there is structure, community norms, and a clear leader. We help you get started on big tasks like writing, coding, or creating, as well as keep you accountable for smaller tasks to unblock you for the first type of task. I’m writing this in a Flow Club right now because I read HN everyday and I am intimidated to post to HN. Tasks that scare you a little bit are great for Flow Club :)<p>Our members have launched their startups, finished their pitch decks, finished research papers, gotten to inbox zero, finally sent their investor updates. Others come at specific times, for example, to follow up right after a meeting, or to fight an after-lunch slump.<p>So please check out the demo video we made and let us know what you think! If you’ve tried your own Zoom coworking with friends, we’d love to hear how that went as well. We know that live video coworking isn’t for everyone—we actually initially thought it might just be for solo or new founders working on their own projects, but we’ve been very pleasantly surprised by who it has resonated with. We also keep hearing from community members who thought it sounded weird, but tried it, and now have been back to hundreds of sessions.<p>If this sounds like something you might like and benefit from, we created a special invite code for a limited number of Hacker News readers. We have a waitlist because session space is limited. This will also get you a special HN tag to find other HN members, and see a few HN-only sessions David is hosting: <a href="https://in.flow.club/invite/HNRunsOnArc07" rel="nofollow">https://in.flow.club/invite/HNRunsOnArc07</a>
Upvote: | 184 |
Title: Hi, we're Mike, Jon and Nick, founders of Govly (<a href="https://www.govly.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.govly.com</a>). We’re building a place for companies, resellers, and distributors to work together to bid on government contracts.<p>The U.S. government buys lots of things. In 2021, over $218B will be spent purchasing technology products alone. The problem is, it's super confusing to participate in the market.
You have to understand the rules, have the right connections to government contractors, have a record of strong performance selling to the government, and usually a sales force focused specifically on government sales. This friction leads to fewer companies (especially smaller companies) participating, less competition, and ultimately the government buying the loudest or most insider-connected products instead of the best or most innovative.<p>Jon and I have been experiencing this problem for the last 15 years at various technology manufacturers, technology resellers and government contractors. As we saw little improvement in the process throughout this time, we ultimately decided to try to improve it ourselves with Govly.<p>Currently, Govly serves as a platform where all the stakeholders in government procurement (manufacturers, distributors, value added resellers, prime contractors and government agencies) can securely share information about things the government wants to buy and then collaborate on fulfilling those purchases (talk through specs, iterate on quotes, etc.). Most people don’t realize, but the vast majority of government opportunities are only released to a subset of organizations called “prime contractors”. We have built a network of these prime contractors who are uploading their “private” opportunities into our application. These opportunities can then be shared to other stakeholders in the network via "Govly partnerships", which are like friend requests between the different organizations, e.g. prime contractor → manufacturer.<p>We've also built automation tools that help prime contractors stay compliant in their work and with the agencies they work with. Many government opportunities are required to go through a specific channel called a "contract vehicle" which are typically managed by specific agencies. For example, one of the largest and oldest contract vehicles is managed by NASA and is called NASA SEWP (Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement). This is actually how you become a "prime contractor" in the first place: if you apply for access to a contract vehicle, and you're selected, you're a prime contractor. Once you are a prime contractor, you're required to do various reporting tasks in order to stay compliant on your contracts. As you can imagine, there is a <i>lot</i> of bureaucratic detail with that. We've built automations to make it easier.<p>This space is exceedingly complicated and confusing but it also has a ton of room for tech-enabled efficiency, transparency, and growth. We plan to chip away at the problems we find until we can change the system into the simpler, fairer, more efficient system we know it can be...or at least bite off some pieces that can.<p>On the technical side, we’ve had fun solving some low hanging fruit that has made a huge difference in the lives of our customers. For example, the way that opportunities on contract vehicles are distributed is mostly via email. Companies were managing this by receiving thousands of emails per day and creating email filters to try to filter down to opportunities of interest. The first iteration of our product allowed them to redirect emails to our system so they could be parsed and indexed in Elasticsearch. We then helped them build specific queries as saved searches so they could get instant notifications when a new match hit, or a digest of match activity for the day. It was cool to create such a simple solution that immediately provided substantial value for end users.<p>Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read our story. There is a free version of Govly that you can poke around if you'd like. It essentially scrapes public opportunities from <a href="https://sam.gov" rel="nofollow">https://sam.gov</a> and provides our search and saved search interface on top of the data. To be honest, it probably is not of much interest to the readers here <i>and</i> the public version has not been a priority (so it's not that good...) Regardless, if you want to check us out at <a href="https://www.govly.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.govly.com</a>, any and all feedback is appreciated!
Upvote: | 274 |
Title: The behavior I am seeing is demonstrated here: https://gfycat.com/thornyfeistyleafcutterant<p>I am always returned to the page that I was linked to if I try to browse elsewhere on the site.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: Founding a startup is often associated with grinding, long hours and low pay (for a possible high compensation in the exit). I want to start a startup but I feel that I am bit too late because now I am 35 years old software engineer and has a family with 1 toddler and another child is coming in couple of weeks.<p>Is it possible to build a good startup part time (while still working in another company for full time)? Is there any founders out there which still can start and grow their business successfully while raising up children? Should I wait once having enough life saving and once my children a bit older so that I will be more ready for grinding?<p>This is the only link related to this topic in HN[1].<p>[1][<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019268)" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019268](https://news....</a>
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: ... any blog post that had a major impact on your life, workflow, career, understanding, etc. qualifies.
Upvote: | 614 |
Title: Here's another batch of S21 startups for you all. The previous thread was <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209928" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28209928</a>. The original description is at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280</a>.<p>There are 6 startups in this thread. The initial order is random:<p>AlgoUniversity (YC S21) - Job-driven virtual education hub for engineering students - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233917" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233917</a><p>Enerjazz (YC S21) - Battery swapping stations for EVs and e-rickshaws - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233919" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233919</a><p>Astek Diagnostics (YC S21) - Determine antibiotic treatment in one hour - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233918" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233918</a><p>DigiBuild (YC S21) - Construction software powered by blockchain - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233920" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233920</a><p>Karbon Card (YC S21) - Corporate credit cards for Indian Startups and SMBs - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233924" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233924</a><p>Sequin (YC S21) - Debit card that builds credit for women - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233922" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233922</a>
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Checked a few other users with proofs on their accounts e.g:<p>* Stavros (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stavros),<p>* Janisz (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=janisz),<p>* Simonebrunozzi (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonebrunozzi),<p>* divbzero (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=divbzero),<p>* as well as my own,<p>and all of our HN proofs seem to have broken with no profile edits or account changes of our own, and reverifying the proofs isn't proving to be successful in my case. However, it seems to be inconsistent, with users like<p>* Woodruffw (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=woodruffw) and<p>* axiomdata316 (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=axiomdata316)<p>continuing to have valid HN proofs.<p>Can anyone else with an existing proof verify or refute this? And does anyone have insight into what might've broken? Comparing working proofs against nonworking proofs isn't yielding any syntactical differences... or really any differences or irregularities at all that could hint at what might be breaking.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I've been using LinkedIn almost since Day 1 and I'm not sure why. I had ~10,000 e-mails from headhunters, only about 150 of which were somewhat relevant, of that 1 resulted in directly putting any money in my pocket.<p>In my connections I had ~6,000 connections, and about 150 of them I had worked with, 50-60 would pass the beer test, and maybe 25 I would recognize.<p>Meanwhile LinkedIn has pretty much become a business-oriented spammy Facebook, so I deleted my account.<p>Is GitHub the best place to show off my skills / hold a resume, or are there any other worthy alternatives which haven't just become Facebook clones?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Recently found that my LG Dryer & Washer are uploading/downloading 1GB of data per day. I looked into it after the LGThinQApp's privacy policy changed to gather information like personal information like DOB, gender, voice recordings, profile photos, network activity: "such as URL, ad block info, redirect URL, bookmark history etc.. Their privacy policy looks like it was meant for instagram..<p>This wasn't the case at all before when I purchased the product. The nice feature was that I could preload my clothes and trigger them to wash/dry before I'm about to get home. That's all I expected from this. I even called support and asked them to deactivate my account but they said this can only be done through the app. And I can't use the app unless I accept the new terms and services.<p>edit: added the privacy policy link here
https://us.m.lgaccount.com/spx/customer/terms_detail?country=US&language=en-US&terms_type=A_ITG_PRV
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hi, we're Andres and Ryan, the founders of Ancana (<a href="https://en.ancana.co/" rel="nofollow">https://en.ancana.co/</a>). Ancana is a marketplace for buying fully managed vacation homes through fractional ownership.<p>Demand for vacation homes has driven up their price, putting these properties out of reach for most buyers, who only plan to use the home a few weeks a year. This pushes many people into timeshares, which are notorious for hidden fees, pushy sales tactics, and difficulty to sell. With Ancana, you can own a 1/4 or 1/8 share of the home and split expenses with the other co-owners. If you buy a 1/4 share of a home, you have access to it for 3 months of the year. For each property we set up the investment trust, find qualified co-owners, and handle the entire real estate purchase transaction. Costs are split amongst the co-owners, and we take care of the furnishing and ongoing property management.<p>We accomplish this by creating an investment trust for each property and dividing it into individual, purchasable shares that represent ownership in the property. We furnish each home and find and vet the co-owners. Once all of the shares of the property are sold, we retain no ownership stake in the property and transition into the role of property manager, ensuring the home is well maintained and handling any issues that arise. Unlike a timeshare, Ancana owners own a real asset (the property) versus a block of time. If you decide you want to sell your share, you are free to do so at any time, either through us or on the open market, and capture any appreciation the property has accrued.<p>Once you own one of these homes, our goal is to make scheduling visits to the property as easy and equitable as possible. Our scheduling system breaks a 12-month booking window into "high-demand" dates/seasons and "general" stays. Each co-owner selects 1 high-demand date before additional bookings are permitted. Priority order is determined by the owner's purchase date (1st buyer gets 1st choice, 2nd buyer gets 2nd choice, etc), with the order rotating each year (2nd buyer gets 1st selection in year 2, 3rd buyer gets 1st selection in year 3, etc.). Outside of the initial high-demand selection process, co-owners are free to book the property anywhere from 2 days to 12-months in advance, up to their allotted days per year.<p>We'd love to speak to any of you that are curious about fractional ownership or have any ideas for where we should go next or how to improve our offering!
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: I've been a paying Heroku customer for a decade, with multiple businesses (a surf company, tennis reservation system) and personal projects hosted without issue.<p>On Tuesday, I woke up to sites down and my login not working. No emails from Heroku. After emailing support, I got an automated response that I'd been banned for violations of the Acceptable Use Policy. No details, just instantly dropped.<p>I've sent 10s of emails to every Heroku and Salesforce support and security department, called the SF offices, and tried social media. I still have no idea why my account was suspended, and apparently I have no recourse to get my company data back (backups, credentials...everything is through the Heroku login).<p>Heroku is trying to put me out of business, I recommend you leave them before they do the same to you!
Upvote: | 182 |
Title: It's been years since I've used a debugger (Turbo Debug), never bothered to learn how to use a debugger for non-assembly code, and tend to just sprinkle `print` everywhere until I can narrow down the problem.<p>I'm a Vim person, and am envious of IDE users with integrated breakpoints, stepping, and variable inspection with just a mouse, but only today found out about Vim's `termdebug` :headdesk:<p>So I'm wondering... what does the HN crowd use to investigate code problems:<p><pre><code> - sprinkling print
- IDE with integrated debugger
- termdebug (i.e editor with gdb in another pane)
- debugger by hand on the command line
- other (please comment)</code></pre>
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hey HN! I'm Richie from Fella (<a href="https://www.joinfella.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.joinfella.com</a>), a telehealth clinic for men with obesity. Fella helps men get to a healthier weight by matching them with a board-certified obesity doctor to prescribe an FDA-approved medication, while they undertake personalized health coaching.<p>I personally struggled with stress eating for 6 years. During that time, I was at Cambridge University, then built and sold my first company working with the UK government. It was tough, and poor eating habits as a teenager became a coping mechanism as an adult.<p>Fella first started as a "CBT+community" product to help men battling stress eating. It resonated due to the stigma around men's eating struggles. But we realized we were only half-serving most of our customers: even when no longer stress eating, most guys weren't getting to a healthier weight.<p>So we started researching effective, evidence-based treatments for obesity. When I say "we", I really mean my co-founder Luke. He studied medicine at Cambridge University, developing a patented AI approach to detecting cancer at a YC bio company, before moving to Microsoft Research. He parses bio papers better than me...<p>Obesity treatment is about to radically change. This is thanks to a breakthrough medication — NY Times called it a "game changer" in Feb 2021 [1]. The medication was approved by the FDA in June 2021 [2]. It leads to an average 15% decrease in body weight, efficacy close to bariatric surgery [3]. However, medication-assisted treatment for obesity is still stigmatized by family doctors and therefore hard to access.<p>Moreover, only 10% of those using weight management services are men, despite men representing 50% of those with obesity. This is because almost all programs market to women, placing too much emphasis on looks and not enough on health for a male audience. Stress eating is widespread among bigger guys, but mostly ignored — with too much focus on willpower and "eat less, move more". This needs to change.<p>So we pivoted to the Fella you see today: a telehealth experience with a board-certified obesity doctor for FDA-approved medication, combined with personalized health coaching. We went live in Texas in July, and are soon to be live in California and New York. Fella is a 12-month program and costs $149/month, paid quarterly. We’ll bring costs down over time to improve accessibility.<p>We still have lots of difficulties ahead. The main one could be insurance reimbursement: the latest wave of medications are expensive and insurers don't like to cover them [4].<p>We’re excited to hear your ideas, questions, concerns, feedback — and maybe any personal stories. I’ll be responding to comments all day, or feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/health/obesity-weight-loss-drug-semaglutide.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/health/obesity-weight-los...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-new-drug-treatment-chronic-weight-management-first-2014" rel="nofollow">https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183" rel="nofollow">https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-19/weight-loss-drug-wegovy-could-help-millions-will-insurers-buy-in" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-19/weight...</a>
Upvote: | 190 |
Title: I've created and posted on github a number of visually high quality preimages against Apple's 'neuralhash' [1][2] in recent days.<p>I won't be posting any more preimages for the moment. I've come to learn that Apple has begun responding to this issue by telling journalists that they will deploy a different version of the hash function[3].<p>Given Apple's consistent dishonest[4] conduct on the subject I'm concerned that they'll simply add the examples here to their training set to make sure they fix those, without resolving the fundamental weaknesses of the approach, or that they'll use improvements in the hashing function to obscure the gross recklessness of their whole proposal. I don't want to be complicit in improving a system with such a potential for human rights abuses.<p>I'd like to encourage people to read some of my posts on the Apple proposal to scan user's data which were made prior to the hash function being available. I'm doubtful they'll meaningfully fix the hash function-- this entire approach is flawed-- but even if they do, it hardly improves the ethics of the system at all. In my view the gross vulnerability of the hash function is mostly relevant because it speaks to a pattern of incompetence and a failure to adequately consider attacks and their consequences.<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28111959" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28111959</a> Your device scanning and reporting you violates its ethical duty as your trusted agent.<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28111908" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28111908</a> Apple's human review exists for the express purpose of quashing your fourth amendment right against warrantless search.<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28121695" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28121695</a> Apple is not being coerced to perform these searches and if they were that would make their actions less ethical, not more.<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28097304" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28097304</a> Apple uses complex crypto to protect themselves from accountability.<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28124716" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28124716</a> A simplified explanation of a private set intersection.<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28101009" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28101009</a> Perceptual hashes at best slightly improve resistance to false negatives at the expense of destroying any kind of cryptographic protection against false positives (as this thread has shown!). Smart perverts can evade any perceptual hash, dumb ones won't alter the images.<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28097508" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28097508</a> Apple's system and ones like it likely create an incentive to abuse more children<p>And these posts written after:<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28260264" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28260264</a> A second "secret" hash function cannot be secret from the state actors that produce the database for Apple.<p>- <a href="https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX//issues/1#issuecomment-903181678" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX//issu...</a> fuzzy hashes with resistance against false positives tracable to sha256 are possible, but require you to value privacy over avoiding false negatives.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX//issues/1#issuecomment-903094036" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX//issu...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX//issues/1#issuecomment-902977931" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX//issu...</a><p>[3] "Apple however told Motherboard in an email that that version analyzed by users on GitHub is a generic version, and not the one final version that will be used for iCloud Photos CSAM detection." <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx5yzq/apple-defends-its-anti-child-abuse-imagery-tech-after-claims-of-hash-collisions" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx5yzq/apple-defends-its-ant...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28221538" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28221538</a>
Upvote: | 196 |
Title: I'll be starting a CS PhD (specifically comp bio/biomedical datascience) at Columbia this September and have been thinking a lot about what sort of workflow/tech stack would be best to use during this period of time. I've only ever worked in academic research and haven't always had the most structure which would usually resemble a waterfall type workflow.<p>So far I'm thinking kanban to organize ToDos, SciWheel for citation management, Evernote for general notetaking, overleaf for LaTeX, and Doom Emacs as an IDE all used in an Agile-esque way.<p>Are there any suggested organizational methods/tools that you might recommend?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: Hello HN,<p>Wondering how people with almost no distribution channel manage to validate their ideas!<p>I've built and published many apps throughout school without validating the idea, but they received 20K+ installs in a short span.<p>After reading tons of books and articles, I realized people validate their ideas before spending too much time on them.<p>So I decided to build a landing page with a waitlist for my product and posted it on Twitter and Instagram.<p>Though a lot of people I spoke to sounded "excited", I got very few signups.
(They're not my target audience, so I didn't ask them if they'd pay for such a product)<p>Now I'm wondering if my idea is bad or if my distribution is awful.<p>What am I doing wrong?<p>(P.S I'm working on a creator SaaS product)
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>My name is Melvin and I am currently working on an MVP for a web service called View, to make it easier for developers to upload, process, and deliver media in their apps.<p>The idea came to mind while I was working on a photo-sharing app and noticed first-hand how needlessly complex and expensive existing services are.<p>I wished someone would create an easy-to-use and affordable API/SDK ala Stripe but for audio, video, and images.<p>Is this something that was a pain point for you? I'd love to hear about your experiences building apps with user-generated content.<p>Cheers
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: I've been working in web development coding mostly in PHP / Laravel since 2008. I enjoyed my time at the beginning when everything was procedural code and things started changing (for the better).<p>At the digital agency I worked at, we moved to frameworks like Laravel and the frontend side of things was pretty static with custom CSS and some custom Javascript. Everything was hosted on a big dedicated server that would eventually become a VPS per client. The web was really simple then but understandly so were users' expectations of what the web could do and so there wasn't this mismatch that I feel I'm finding now.<p>Fast forward to today and I'm doing primarily product development for early stage startups.<p>CSS is a problem that is solved with Tailwind (for me at least anyway, I know it's a contentious topic).
Backend is a problem solved with Laravel which truly does provide everything I've ever needed and in cases where it hasn't (for compute heavy services), I've pulled those areas out into a mini Go service and whacked it on a separate server.
Javascript is just a problem...<p>Anecdote 1: I've worked at startups that had Laravel Monoliths where they tried to decouple it into microservices of their own, but this failed; it introduced so much complexity, mental concentration overhead of switching between code-bases and reduced developer autonomy: unless you knew how to deploy these new things and how code libraries should be shared amongst the new services you might as well pack up your toys and go home; you're not smart enough for this. Anyway, the services were bought back into the main repository because it was getting out-of-hand and frustrating to work with.<p>Anecdote 2: I recently deployed a Laravel app for a startup on an EC2 server. It worked great. I used Laravel Forge to do it and it took me half a day at most (once the dependancies I needed in PHP extensions were sorted). The startup wanted to move to Docker and have a CI / CD system. Previously I could just push changes to `master` and it would deploy using Forge. I watched as a CI / CD system was built that when production moved to it, it kept falling over and not really working very well. Additionally my autonomy to fix things was then taken away because there are layers or technologies stacks some of which I know but some of which I don't in the way. The whole thing became so frustrating to see. What was a perfectly working server that took me half a day to setup has now taken over 3 - 4 engineers full time work to end up with something that gives 0 benefit (except the idea that the server can never die, but that doesn't seem to be the case because it kept dying on any deployment and ended up with more downtime than the EC2 server ever had).<p>So why are companies with technology stacks that really arne't getting huge amounts of traffic or require huge amounts of complexity, choosing to use microservices based architectures or build their entire application in something like next.js which requires wiring together so much stuff (Prisma, Auth0) etc. Why do we introduce so much complexity that needn't be to this entire thing?<p>At some point, even though my speed of delivery with my framework and stack setup is frankly very fast and I can provide real value to people, it seems the perceived value of the above shennanigans is greater than the value of actually shipping stuff that matters if you look at the job boards, technologies used and pay given. I would love to be Bilbo Baggins in The Shire minding his own business, but I worry that if I don't jump on the bandwagon of overengineering everything to make myself feel smart then I'll quickly become irellevant in the job market. Am I completely missing the point of why these things are being done or is modern web development choices with regards to language and architecture just certifiably insane?
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Web services and sites really should stop using dark theme forcefully matching it to a browser or system dark UI theme. Users often use dark theme to distinguish UI from content, not blend content with UI. Properly speaking it's not very user and eye friendly to read for long white text on a dark background. Sites that automatically force a dark theme on visitors remind me of a noob user that learn a new colorful style trick in Word processor who starts applying it in every document.<p>It's good if a site offers dark theme option via some kind of switch but forcing it on visitors is not the brightest decision. E.g. browser version of Google Books automatically force dark theme while reading a book in case a browser uses one for UI.<p>More and more I notice that sites do that. And often they even don't offer option to switch the site to a light theme. They just use a browser's UI theme as a guide. It requires to switch a browser to a light one for such sites to use light theme. Thankfully, Google Books offers an option to switch but it's annoying to do it every single time I open it.<p>Dark UI is to distinguish from, not to blend with content.
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Hi, we’re Ben and Joe from Buoyant (<a href="https://www.buoyant.aero/" rel="nofollow">https://www.buoyant.aero/</a>). We build small unmanned cargo airships and use them to move air freight at half the cost per mile of a small plane.<p>An airship (or blimp) is an aircraft that gets most of its lift from a lifting gas like helium. It’s the most efficient way to fly, which means it’s cheaper than any other aircraft for many missions. We’re starting by building an aircraft for middle-mile air freight in remote and rural areas—warehouse-to-warehouse or post office to post office. This is a $6B market in the US alone, and freight volumes are only increasing. By building autonomous blimps, we can lower shipping costs, increase quality and speed of service, and cut out millions of tons of CO2 emissions.<p>So far, we’ve built and flown four airships. The latest is 20 feet long and can fly up to 35 miles per hour.
Here’s a video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEYOfVcwRhk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEYOfVcwRhk</a>.<p>We’re starting in areas where freight is already moved on small planes and helicopters. In these remote areas, availability of goods is lower, shipping takes longer, and it’s more expensive. For example, food in rural parts of Alaska is twice as expensive as in Anchorage. Small air freight is particularly expensive because of the cost of fuel, maintenance, pilots, and airport infrastructure. To make major cost reductions we need a new type of aircraft.<p>Ben is a mechanical engineer from Alaska and grew up in the outdoors, so is familiar with the challenges of remote supply operations. He has built aircraft tracking technology for the DoD, flat panel phased array antennas, GPS data loggers for motorsports, and helped start a company that made shirts with upside down pockets. I’m an aerospace engineer who’s built and flown spacecraft at two internet satellite startups, spending a lot of time on complicated flying machines. We met at MIT and have been friends for almost a decade since.<p>We spent years building satellites and antennas to provide internet connectivity to rural areas, and while doing so learned about the transportation challenges in remote places. Many drone delivery projects have focused on delivering small packages in suburbs, and are too short range or low payload to serve rural areas. We realized small airships were a technical approach that could work to move cargo in these areas, and decided to tackle the challenge.<p>An airship is the most efficient way to fly because it gets most of its lift from buoyancy, rather than spending energy on rotor lift or aerodynamic lift over a wing. This lets us fly further and carry more payload than other small aircraft. Other attempts at unmanned cargo aircraft have used quadcopters or quad-plane hybrid drones. These are useful for some missions but lack the flight efficiency to carry large payloads long distances. Airships have other benefits too: they are safer and quieter than quadcopters or multirotor-plane hybrids. If the motors fail, an airship floats to the ground, while a quadcopter comes crashing down. And it’s an easy way to build an aircraft that can takeoff and land vertically, like a helicopter.<p>Our airship is a fabric envelope filled with helium, with an attached payload bay, motors, and power system. It gets 2/3 of its lift from buoyancy, and the rest from aerodynamic lift. This combination is called a hybrid airship, and allows us to drop off a payload without needing to take on ballast. The aircraft flies autonomously and can take off and land in inclement weather, using centimeter accuracy GPS for approaches. The full scale version will load 650 lbs of cargo at one end, fly to the destination while we pilot it remotely, deposit the cargo, and return. Our first operational vehicle will be battery electric, with a range of 200-300 miles and a cruise speed of 60 mph. Future vehicles will have hydrogen powertrains for longer-range missions.<p>We started off with a last-mile delivery concept (“Amazon box to the house”). But in conversations with logistics providers, we found a recurring problem transporting 300-600 lb shipments between warehouses or between airports. Using drones to deliver to houses is operationally complex, and the path to doing so at scale is still murky. But with a 650 lb payload, our drone can fit neatly into existing supply chains in the middle mile. This makes our operations much simpler and should allow us to get to market relatively quickly with a few aircraft on a few routes. We’ve closed $5M in LOIs, including one from a large regional air carrier in Alaska, and have two pilot programs planned.<p>We loved reading the thread a couple weeks ago about hydrogen vs. helium for blimps, and are excited to see what people think about our airships! Where do you see the biggest use case for vehicles like ours? Let us know any other thoughts or ideas, and we’ll be active in the comments today.
Upvote: | 302 |
Title: We are Alex and Daniel, the founders of Zen (<a href="https://www.yayzen.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.yayzen.com</a>). We make a desktop app that mirrors your posture and gently alerts you when you slouch. It uses your webcam to monitor your posture, without recording or storing any visuals.<p>Alex started coding when he was 11 years old and eventually developed a severe case of "forward head posture" (a.k.a. nerd/text neck), a postural deformity that's often caused by unhealthy habits like slouching while coding. He created prototypes of Zen in his college dorm room at the University of St. Andrews to help with his posture. A couple of Alex's classmates saw him using the app throughout lectures and asked if they could test it out. After more feedback from his classmates he took advantage of an opportunity to move to San Francisco, California to work more on the project. We met at our co-living space and are still roommates today.<p>I (Daniel) went from playing football and doing splits at Yale University (<a href="https://storage.thephapp.com/split%281%29.gif" rel="nofollow">https://storage.thephapp.com/split%281%29.gif</a>) to terrible low back pain and carpal tunnel for over 8 hours a day from working hunched over my computer at Adobe. Eventually I met with an ergonomist at Adobe to get support. Ironically, Alex told me about the project when I got home that day. I tried out his prototype, loved it, and we came together to build Zen.<p>Here's how it works: The app takes video stream as input via your webcam (without recording or storing anything) and utilizes a locally stored computer vision model that analyzes the video to find and output key posture points/indicators (joints, nose, ears, etc.). These posture points are fed to a mathematical model that constantly compares your current posture position to the original baseline posture position that you set as your "healthy posture" position when starting the app. In addition, the app applies geometrical formulas to vectors formed by your current posture position and your original baseline healthy posture position to determine if you're slouching.<p>Your current posture position is displayed to you through a blue avatar named Zen that mirrors your posture in real-time. Zen sits in your menu bar (tray menu) and turns red when you slouch. Whenever you slouch for an extended period of time, you get alerted through a visual notification and/or an audio alert. The alert will go away when you move back to your original baseline "healthy" position.<p>The majority of our users leave Zen on throughout their workday, but our initial studies show that users see significant health benefits from using the app for just 10 minutes a day during short "posture sessions". Posture session reminders, slouch alerts, and other important settings can be customized to ensure that they align with your work style. The app is currently available for Mac and Windows.<p>We're offering a deal to the HN community (<a href="https://www.yayzen.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.yayzen.com</a>):
Annual - $23.99/year with 7-day free trial (normally $69.99/year)
Monthly - $3.99/month with 7-day free trial (normally $12.99/month). You can see a demo video at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll5UB-bpbic" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll5UB-bpbic</a>.<p>Our core business model is focused on selling to companies that offer Zen to employees as a benefit/perk (similar to Calm/Headspace).<p>We would love your feedback on the user experience and to hear more about any workday health pain points you have! Happy to offer any guidance on choosing the right chair, mouse, keyboard, and other equipment. I'll be here all day, cheers!
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: Tested on my iPad and MacBook, if you have an iCloud sync turned off and sign out of your account, upon the next login all the iCloud switches gets turned on and you have to manually turn them off again.
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: Does anyone have any advice for managing people's career progression (pathways, performance reviews, targets etc.) when they have no interest in progressing?<p>I need / am supposed to offer regular career planning with my team, but many of them are quite happy and settled doing what they're doing - and I'm totally cool with that because they do it well and are enjoying their work. They have families, they have lives outside of work, and they want to just get on with the work rather than constantly climbing the ladder or doing performance review documents.<p>I myself am more interested in the work I am doing right now (i.e. building features that deliver more value to the business than the effort/time/money it takes to build them) rather than constantly planning semi-arbitrary "targets" every 6 months for a promotion I may not even want.<p>So - how do you manage people's career planning (including yourself) when they have no interest in progressing? Is it OK to just say, "I'm happy doing what I'm doing"?
Upvote: | 248 |
Title: Hey Hacker News, We’re Vlad, Molly, and Asa from Level (<a href="https://trylevel.app/" rel="nofollow">https://trylevel.app/</a>). We allow lending companies to trade their loan receivables into upfront working capital that gets them off the ground and grows with them as they scale.<p>Building a lending company is challenging because it requires a lot of capital to get started. You need lending history to access capital, but you can’t access capital until you have a history of lending. To get around this, founders traditionally raise a large dilutive equity round and then lend off their balance sheet, or they find a family office or credit fund willing to offer a loan, which usually comes with high interest rates, warrants, and covenants. Even once your company succeeds in reaching the scale necessary to secure a traditional loan, the process takes at least 3 to 6 months and costs >$100k in legal fees to set up.<p>We didn’t think to work on this problem until it came to us. During a process of pivoting from a different business, a lot of fintechs were asking for help with raising debt from our CEO Vlad, who was a venture debt banker at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Vlad provided connections to traditional debt providers, but these startups were turned down because traditional debt providers don’t work with pre-seed or seed stage startups—the deals are just too small. Since a lot of these startups were showing solid progress, and were being turned down for reasons having nothing to do with how good their business was, we decided that this was a good problem to tackle.<p>Also, companies like Pipe and Capchase turn MRR receivables into upfront capital for companies with recurring revenue. It seemed to us that the same principle could be applied to the loan receivables of lending companies, where the problem is even more painful.<p>Our solution is to purchase loans that lending startups have originated at a discounted rate, then forward the customer’s loan payments to Level as they come in. If you are familiar with financial arrangements, it’s similar to a forward flow agreement (<a href="https://www.finleycms.com/what-is-forward-flow" rel="nofollow">https://www.finleycms.com/what-is-forward-flow</a>). It’s different, though, in that we calculate the discount of purchasing loans by integrating directly into a company's ongoing bank balance and loan performance. This enables companies to get a lower cost of capital as they become a stronger lender and more stable business.<p>We integrate with a startup’s banks via integrations similar to Plaid, making it possible to track the company’s cash position and burn rate. In addition, we integrate with their loan management system to watch loan performance over time. In the event of default or prepayment, the company can buy back the non-performing loan or substitute in a new one. We allow a startup to sell more loans as its loan book grows and becomes more predictable, providing a flexible alternative to costly warehouse facilities. We make money by buying loan receivables at a discount from the total value of the receivables we collect.<p>If lending startups get better access to capital at the earliest stages, more companies will enter the market and drive competition based on the merits of the financial services they provide. This is good for existing borrowers and opens up new finance options for the underbanked and unbanked.<p>We’re building Level so that innovative founders can responsibly scale up a lending business without traditional constraints. We’d love to hear the community’s ideas, experiences, and feedback so we can do our best on this problem. Thanks!
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Hey everyone.<p>A little background: I’m a backend developer. I have around 7 years of experience working on various backend code bases in PHP, Python, Node, etc. I also have a masters in Software Engineering.<p>I got into web development because in my home country that’s your only choice as a software grad. You’re either a front-end/backend dev or you’re unemployed.<p>I was completely fine with the job in the first few years because it was easy money. But lately I’ve been thinking about moving to different areas (game development, embedded, etc.) to explore a little especially since I moved to north america a while ago.<p>But honestly after all these years working on these start ups and “fast-paced enviroments”, i feel like i’m not in touch with the basics and fundamentals anymore to make this jump.<p>I’m not sure about the best way to go about this. Do I need to read books? Do I apply to specialized junior positions that interest me? Do I need to get the comp-sci notes out?<p>How would you do this? What’s your advice?<p>Also I’m 31 right now (not sure if it matters)
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Hello dear HNers.<p>Each year for the last two years I have asked companies of one, meaning companies that consists of only one person of what tech stacks you use. Feel free to link to your site or project for show case if you want.<p>Here is the last two threads:<p>(2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25465582<p>(2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21024041<p>What is your tech stack?<p>Why did you choose it?<p>Do you think your choices had any impact on your success?<p>Thanks in advance!
Upvote: | 312 |
Title: Hi HN, my name is Anisa and I am the founder of Litnerd (<a href="https://litnerd.com/" rel="nofollow">https://litnerd.com/</a>), an online reading program designed to teach elementary school students in America how to read.<p>There are 37M elementary school students in America. Schools spend $20B on reading and supplemental education programs. Yet 42% of 4th grade students are reading at a 1st or 2nd grade proficiency level! The #1 reason students aren’t reading? They say it’s boring. We change that by bringing books to life. Think your favorite book turned into a tv-show style episode-by-episode reenactment, coupled with a complete curriculum and lesson plans.<p>1 in 8 Americans is functionally illiterate. Like any skill, reading is a habit. If you grew up in a household where you did not see your parents reading, you likely do not develop the habit. This correlates to the socio-economic divide. Two thirds of American students who lack reading skills by the end of fourth grade will rely on welfare as adults. To impact this, research suggests that we need to start at the earliest years.<p>I am passionate about the research in support of art and theatre as well as story-telling to improve childhood learning. Litnerd is the marriage of these interests. The inspiration comes from Sesame Street and Hamilton The Musical. In the late 60s, Joan Cooney decided to produce a children’s TV show that would influence children across America to learn to read—it became Sesame Street. Cooney researched her idea extensively, consulting with sociologists and scientists, and found that TV’s stickiness can be an important tool for education. Lin-Manuel Miranda took the story of Alexander Hamilton and brought it to life as a musical. Kids have learned more about Hamilton’s history thanks to Hamilton the Musical than any of their textbooks. In fact, this was the case so much that a program called EduHam is used to teach history in middle schools across the nation. When I heard that, the lightbulb went off and I decided to go all in on starting Litnerd.<p>We hire art and theatre professionals to recreate scenes directly from books in episode style format to bring the book to life, in a similar fashion to watching your favorite TV shows. We literally lead 'read out loud' in the classroom while the teacher/actor is acting out the main character in the book. We have a weekly designated Litnerd period in the schools/classes we serve and we live-stream in our teachers/actors for an interactive session (the students participate and read live with the actor as well as complete written lesson plans, phonetic exercises etc). We are currently serving 14,000 students in this manner.<p>The format of our program is such that if you don't complete the assigned reading and worksheets, you will feel like you are missing out on what is happening in later episodes. In this way, reading is layered in as a fundamental core to the program. Our program is part of scheduled classroom time.<p>A big part of our business involves curating content and materials that capture the interest and coolness-factor for elementary school students. We’ve found that students love choose-your-own-adventure style stories, especially ones involving mythical creatures—something about being able to have autonomy on the outcomes. So far, it seems to be working. We've even received fan mail from students! But we are obsessed with staying cool/relevant in our content.<p>Teachers like our product because it eases the burden placed on them. US teachers typically spend 4 to 10 hours a week (unpaid) planning their curriculum and $400-800 of their own money for classroom supplies. That's outrageous! When designing Litnerd, we wanted to ensure our product was not adding more work to their plate. Our programs are led by our own Resident Teaching Artists, who are live streamed into the classroom and remain in character to the episode as they teach the Litnerd curriculum built on top of the books. Our programs come with lesson plans, activity packets, curriculum correlations, educator resources, and complete ebooks.<p>Traditional K-12 education has extremely long sale cycles and is hard to break into. It can take years to become a contracted vendor, especially with large districts like NYC Department of Education. Because of my experience with my first YC backed startup that sold to government and nonprofits, coupled with my experience working at a large edtech company that built content for Higher Ed, I understand this sector and how to navigate the budget line item process.<p>Since launching in January, we have become contracted vendors with the New York City Department of Education (the largest education district in America). As a result, we’ve been growing at 60% MoM, are currently used by over 14k students in their classrooms and hit $110K in ARR. Our program is part of scheduled classroom time for elementary schools—not homework, and not extracurricular. Here’s a walkthrough video from a teacher’s perspective: <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/9ffc59f0d7ed4a66964003703bba7b94" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/9ffc59f0d7ed4a66964003703bba7b94</a>.<p>I am so grateful for the opportunity to share our story and mission with you. If you loved or struggled with reading as a kid, what factors do you think contributed? Also, if you have experience teachIng Elementary School or if you are a parent, I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how you foster reading amongst your students/children! I am excited to hear your feedback and ideas to help us inspire the next generation of readers.
Upvote: | 127 |
Title: Hi HN! We’re Adam and Sean from Evidence (<a href="https://evidence.dev" rel="nofollow">https://evidence.dev</a>). We’re building a static site generator for data analysts. It's like Jekyll or Hugo for SQL analysts.<p>In Evidence, pages are markdown documents. When you write SQL inside that markdown, the SQL runs against your database (we support BigQuery, Snowflake, and Postgres - with more to come). You can reference the results of those queries using a simple templating syntax, which you can use to inline query results into text or to generate report sections from a query. Evidence also includes a component library that lets you do things like add charts and graphs (driven by your queries) by writing declarative tags like: <LineChart /><p>How is it different? Most BI tools use a no-code drag-and-drop interface. Analysts click around to build their queries, set up their charts etc. and then they drag them into place onto a dashboard. To stick with the analogy, if Evidence is Hugo, most BI tools are Squarespace. BI tools are built that way because they assume that data analysts are non-technical. In our experience, that assumption is no longer correct. Data analysts increasingly want tools that let them adopt software engineering practices like version control, testing, and abstraction.<p>When everything is under version control, you are less likely to ship an incorrect report. When you can write a for loop, you can show sections for each region, product-line etc., instead of asking your users to engage with a filter interface. When you can abstract a piece of analysis into a reusable component, you don’t have to maintain the same content in multiple places. Basically, we’re providing the fundamentals of programming in a way that analysts can easily make use of.<p>Reporting tools have been around since COBOL, and have gone through many iterations as tech and markets have evolved. Our view is that it’s time for the next major iteration. We worked together for five years building the data science group at a private equity firm in Canada. We set up ‘the modern data stack’ (Fivetran, dbt, BigQuery etc.) at many of the firm’s portfolio companies and we were in the room during a lot of key corporate decisions.<p>In our experience, the BI layer is the weakest part of the modern data stack. The BI layer has a poor developer experience, and decision makers don’t really like the outputs they get. It turns out, these two issues are closely related. The drag and drop experience is so slow and low-leverage that the only way to get all the content on the page is to push a lot of cognitive load onto the end user: global filters, drill down modals, grids of charts without context. Like most users, business people hate that shit. And because the production process isn’t in code, the outputs are hard to version control and test—so dashboards break, results are internally inconsistent, and so on, in just the way that software would suck if you didn’t version control and test it.<p>As early adopters of the modern data stack, we saw the value in treating analytics more like software development, but we were consistently disappointed with the workflow and the quality of the outputs our team could deliver using BI tools and notebook products. Graphics teams that we admire at newspapers like the New York Times don’t use BI tools or Jupyter notebooks to present their work. They code their data products by hand, and the results are dramatically better than what you see in a typical BI deployment. That’s too much of an engineering lift for most data teams, but with a framework designed for their needs and their range of expertise, we think data teams could build products that come much closer to those high standards.<p>Evidence is built on Svelte and Svelte Kit. This is the JS framework that the NYT has used to build some of their more recent data products, like their Covid risk maps. Sean and I fell in love with Svelte, and we owe a huge debt to that project. In this early stage,Evidence is really just a set of convenience features wrapped around SvelteKit to make it accessible to data analysts (the markdown preprocessor, db connections, chart library). The core framework will always be open source, and eventually we plan to launch a paid cloud version of our product, including hosting, granular access control, and other features that enterprises might pay for.<p>We would love to hear your thoughts, questions, concerns, or ideas about what we’re building - or about your experiences with business intelligence in general. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions!
Upvote: | 263 |
Title: I'm planing on taking some serious time off to work on my side projects.<p>I'm open to any country in the world, I want to just work on my games. So with that in mind I'll need good internet access. From what I can see, this is very doable in Eastern Europe.<p>Eventually, I do plan on returning to the US, but I want to spend at least 6 months overseas.
Upvote: | 306 |
Title: Hi,<p>Just wondering how useful it is to have pay walled content posted on Hackernews and why there is no option to see/block it upfront?<p>More and more content behind the pay wall is posted to HN littering the section.<p>So who is doing it? Why? Getting on one's nerves by suggestions and then hitting the pay wall makes it not more possible to get more subscription.
I don't even have the possibility to pay easily and if I see something interesting but paywalled, I look up Google for exact that information - and sometimes find something more interesting than this paywall providers offer.<p>So what's the idea behind making the HN unusable in some terms<p>(Disc. No offense. I just try to understand why this is done and whether the one's doing that is really not realizing, that doing so might have negative impact?)
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: This is most likely the last batch thread of S21 startups. The previous thread was <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233916" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233916</a>. The original description is at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280</a>.<p>There are 4 startups in this thread. The initial order is random:<p>Snowboard Software (YC S21) - Fast and automated data catalog for Snowflake - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315047" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315047</a><p>Jovian (YC S21) - Online data science school for professionals - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315045" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315045</a><p>Chari (YC S21) - Ecommerce and fintech app for mom and pop shops in North Africa - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315043" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315043</a><p>Tuli Health (YC S21) - Turning UK pharmacies into diagnostic centres - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315046" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315046</a>
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Hello HN crowd.
I worked on this project on weekends and evenings. I'm excited I made it into a presentable MVP, and it is so satisfying.<p>I would like to get some honest feedback from this great community.<p>I made <a href="https://freeoptionscreener.com/" rel="nofollow">https://freeoptionscreener.com/</a>, to scratch a personal itch. I myself trade options as a hobby, and I didn't find a screener that satisfies my need to be able to explore raw options data freely and without preset constraints. So I made this app that allows playing with options market data and extract interesting opportunities.<p>The techs used:
- Laravel + Jquery + Mysql
- Tradier API for market data
- DigitalOcean for hosting
- OVH for domain name<p>It costs me 5$/month to run the website. I'll be glade to continue if it proves to be a viable product in the long run and maybe I will take it to the next level and try monetize it.
Note: the app is not suitable for phone screens yet, although this is a planned feature.
Upvote: | 501 |
Title: Hi! We're Jay and Len (kevlened) from Hotswap (<a href="https://www.hotswap.app" rel="nofollow">https://www.hotswap.app</a>). We automate the process of changing software vendors by helping you migrate user data during your onboarding process. In other words, we make it easy to steal customers from your competitors!<p>We've built a lot of enterprise software and done a lot of painful migrations over the years.
I (Jay) have managed engineering teams at Frame.io, Squarespace, and Rent the Runway. Len was an early employee at Okta. At every single company we've worked at, we've spent a lot of time doing painful migrations. At Rent the Runway, we migrated our warehouse from UPS to FedEx. We changed credit card processors. We migrated ERP systems. It always took a ton of time, was not career-building work, and consultants charged $250/hr or more. We also were often stuck using platforms that weren't optimal because it was so hard to move.<p>So we decided to solve this problem: make it easy to change vendors, and make it easy for new companies to be able to bring on new users by automating the process.<p>We are essentially an ETL for SaaS products. We figure out how to extract data from the old system, even if there is not a clean API to do so, and automate it. We then help transform that data into a format that you can load into the new system. Our product is not self-serve. Instead, we work with you to understand how data maps to your system and integrate that logic into our migration engine. We then provide a Plaid-like widget for your users to connect their old systems and migrate data.<p>This is difficult, not in the "computer science" sense but in the "data is messy" sense.
If there isn't an API to extract data, then we end up doing a lot of screen scraping, and many companies don't want to take the risk of maintaining that kind of code because it can break.<p>Our two biggest competitors are internal development teams (who end up being stuck doing this kind of work) and consultants (who charge a ton of money.) We take the burden away by working with vendors directly to automate common migration flows. We don't mind building and maintaining a lot of smaller one-off type projects for our users, as we benefit by building a repertoire of supported platforms.<p>The fact that modern applications have moved to SPAs has made this work easier than in the past. Every website essentially exposes an API, so it is not as difficult to extract data as it used to be. Our software tends to be more shelf-stable than people expect. Think about tech companies you've worked at: how often do you actually "break" the website by completely breaking the data or the UI? Len has had experience managing these kinds of integrations at Okta, and by using continuous automated testing we're able to quickly identify and fix breakages.<p>Currently we export data from Chartio, since it is shutting down next year, and Wix. If there is a platform you want to steal customers from, please contact us! We're openly eliciting suggestions and continually adding new platforms.<p>We'd love to hear your stories about painful migration experiences. And if you're a business whose customers ask "how do I move my data from the old platform?" then we would be super interested to hear how you work with these folks today!
Upvote: | 345 |
Title: Hello Hacker News! Rian and I are co-founders of Lemonade Finance (<a href="https://lemonade.finance" rel="nofollow">https://lemonade.finance</a>). Lemonade is a digital bank for the African diaspora. There are over 20M African immigrants in North America and Europe and many are running some form of business back home. We provide multi-currency accounts to help them manage their unique banking needs.<p>Rian and I have worked together over the last several years helping to build African fintechs such as Opay (in Nigeria) and Okash (in Kenya). As directors of operations and finance, we were instrumental in scaling Opay from $0 to $2B monthly transactions.<p>It stood out to us that Africans can pay up to 30% more than the global average to move money abroad, and most African countries are only enabled to receive, and unable to send. Looking further, we discovered that remittance (sending money back home) wasn't enough for the diaspora—a lot of them run one or two businesses back home. There's limited access to African currencies abroad, it's difficult to open and maintain accounts back home, getting money out of Africa is a challenge, and the size and frequency of their transactions is much greater.<p>We issue bank accounts to our users in both their country/currency of origin as well as in their country/currency of residence, and provide them with the tools to manage both their personal and business banking between continents. We integrate and build open banking APIs in the countries we operate, manage floats across countries, and obtain the licensing that enables our users to store or move money across borders.<p>8 of the 10 fastest growing international migrant populations are African. The African diaspora represents a $10B market opportunity. We launched 10 months ago and are currently processing $5.5M per month and made $23k in monthly revenue in July. We are licensed to provide our services in the US, Canada, and the UK.<p>We are really happy we get to share this with the Hacker news community. Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comment section below.
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: My friend and I were debating the other evening if one person can create/run a $1 million company. Is anyone here doing this?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Sometimes I get cold email from recruiters. These are uniformly useless. I don't mind too much, except for the ones who make a point of following up four times on the same day of the week.<p>I found a few old gists poking around but is there something like the hosts.txt files used for ad blocking?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Unless someone made money teaching philosophy about life, I think it is phony for rich people to tell others about "moderation, family, values and what not". I mean they become rich by putting everything on backseat and then when they hit millionaire or billionaire, they start preaching online, writing "lessons learned" and worst make more money by "selling" philosophy. I can't stand this anymore. Any one else feels this way too?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hi HN, we're Ahmad, Sashakt, and Harshit of Kalam Labs (<a href="https://www.kalamlabs.in/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kalamlabs.in/</a>). Kalam Labs lets 6 to 14 year old kids learn their favourite science topics by watching live game streams and playing science games. It's like Twitch for science, except you also get to play :)<p>Here's a sample video of our live stream: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGMmUg0N0HE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGMmUg0N0HE</a><p>High curiosity in kids is directly linked to better academic performance and better outcomes when they grow up. However, school leads to a drop in curiosity as they discourage asking questions and encourage “focussing on the blackboard.” Parents don’t have a solution, as internet resources are unstructured and unreliable and encyclopedias are static and boring for the kids.<p>We were batchmates at our undergraduate degrees and worked together at India's largest educational body, NCERT. There we interacted with hundreds of kids, and they were really curious about science. Their heads were filled with questions like: Why is the sky blue? What is inside a black hole? etc. But the conventional teaching mediums were just too boring for them. So we started searching what do they want?<p>Turns out almost every kid was on Roblox and Minecraft. There were entire communities there hanging out, hosting live streams chatting with each other. Digging deeper, we saw that Roblox and Minecraft are being extensively used as educational media. Microsoft has launched Minecraft for Education and Roblox has launched Roblox Education, and this was prompting teachers to migrate from Zoom to these multiplayer games. So we got it: we will use live game streaming to help kids learn science. We launched our MVP and saw phenomenal results. Generating $1k USD revenue in just a couple of days, we saw a market potential of scaling it and hence decided to start a startup around it.<p>At Kalam Labs we host daily live game streams on kids' favourite science topics like space, black holes, and dinosaurs. During the live stream, an instructor takes the kids around a virtual world where they learn new topics by playing game-based exercises. The cool parts are: unlike a typical live game-stream on Twitch/YT where only the video of instructor playing a game is shared, at Kalam Labs kids can play the game with the instructor. This helps the instructor to give short fun activities for kids to solve for explaining any topic. In addition, our Live Chat has a tag-feature, which is really loved by kids. Instead of typing the entire chat, kids can just tap on the different recommendations and convey their thoughts. This leads to very high-engagement with sometimes kids liking the tapping feature more than the game itself.<p>We are seeing cool metrics pop out due to this: Our average watch time of a live stream is 40 minutes - 5x higher than Youtube. Further, just launched in Mid-June our product has amassed thousands of paying customers growing 50% week-over-week.<p>Please share your thoughts and feedback!
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: Please don't list things that just need more bodies - specifically looking for intellectual blockers that can be answered in this thread.
Upvote: | 263 |
Title: Hey all,<p>I'm 3 years out of college from a Physics Master's, I went into finance and feel like I haven't kept up with anything since I left.<p>What are your favourite tech based books that I can read on my upcoming holiday.
Upvote: | 65 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.