jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for listening to your articles
https://beta.readtomyshoe.com/
ReadtoMyShoe (RTMS) is a web app that lets you upload articles (via URL or via directly pasting) and listen to them (via text-to-speech) at a later time. Some features:

* Offline-first: All the articles in your queue are available offline. RTMS is usable even in airplane mode.

* High-quality text-to-speech: RTMS uses the Google Cloud Text to Speech WaveNet voices. It's not quite human yet, but it's pretty nice.

* Saves your progress: Don't lose your place in your reading material. RTMS will save where you are. So next time you play an article, it'll resume right where you left off.

* Lockscreen controls: Play, pause, jump 10 seconds. It's all available from the lock screen or notification bar of your mobile device.

* Runs anywhere: Since RTMS is a web app, it runs everywhere a (modern) web browser runs.

* Add to Homescreen: RTMS can be added to your homescreen and behave just like a native app.

"Doesn't this exist?" Eh, sorta. I was using Pocket to listen to articles before this, and it was terrible. The UI had (and continues to have) show-stopping bugs, and there are practically never updates for it anymore. There are other apps too, but most of them are native apps, and the only decent ones I could find were also pretty exploitative (lots of pop-ups everywhere, free trials with no pricing info, etc.)

Source code: Everything here is open source. Please leave comments, open PRs, open Issues, etc. at https://github.com/rozbb/readtomyshoe . The whole thing is in Rust!

Finally, a note on this demo site: I can't run this site for very long. Google Cloud TTS is $16 per 1M characters. The average news article is like 6.5k characters, so $0.10. That's not scalable for me, so I gotta shut down the server after a little bit. I do have a rough plan to scale this though and allow for people to pay for their own TTS though: https://github.com/rozbb/readtomyshoe/issues/29
Show HN: An investment forum where everyone manages a $1M imaginary portfolio
https://www.longtermboard.com
Hi there! Made LongTermBoard.com as a Jr. FE engineer fresh from leaving the investment field but still in love with it.

Back then, I'd read articles on investment forums and wanted a quick way to determine if I should spend time reading the analysis. I wanted a quick way to determine if the author is a good investor.

LongTermBoard solves this by making it easy to view the competency of the author by seeing his investment performance of his profile. It's long-only for now, as the goal is to look for great long-term businesses to invest in.

It ain't perfect as its a controlled investment environment, but my hope is that over the longer term, the portfolio performance should be a good proxy.

It's super rough now, so hope it doesn't break.
CloudStack drops 'open core' goes completely open source
http://cloudstack.org/blog/cloudstack-the-best-kept-secret-in-cloud-computing.html
CloudStack, the IaaS cloud behind Zynga, Edmunds.com, Godaddy and 60 other of the largest clouds announced today that it was releasing as open source, all of the proprietary features that had been historically been held back.
Ask HN: Review Cash Curve, our free webapp.
https://cashcurveapp.com/
I am working at Brighten Labs, a startup founded by a couple of my college friends.

We first built CashCurve in February 2009 to be our own cash flow management tool. To me, it seems simple and effective, but we would like feedback. Thanks!
Don't Break The Chain
http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-281626.php
Some good advice that can apply to any aspiration
What habits of yours kill your creativity?
From a Steve Jobs interview: There's an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: "For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you." As I'm going to be 30 in February, the thought has crossed my mind.
Mac OSX Hacker News Y Combinator Menu Tab
http://www.guidefreitas.com/2012/03/hacker-news-menu-tab.html
Great Mac OSX Menu tab app to read Hacker News
Ask HN: Should I pass on a new job because they want me to sign a non-compete?
I took a few months off after the birth of my third child and am looking for a new job. I found an opportunity with a great team at an interesting company but there was a catch. After receiving an offer, I inquired if they required a non-compete and sure enough, there is a 1-year non-compete with the following conditions:

following the termination of my relationship with the Company for any reason, whether with cause or without cause, at the option either of the Company or myself, with or without notice

...

any business in competition with the Company's business as conducted by the Company during the course of my employment with the Company

I'm not a fan of non-competes generally but considering this was written to include any business that the Company believes is a competitor (no idea what kind of scope that entails) and asserts enforcement irrespective of who terminated the employment relationship, I told them I wasn't willing to sign it.

I have a friend who was pursued by a previous employer for violating a non-compete and even though he eventually won, it cost an immense amount of money, time (18 months!), and pain to fight.

I've also heard horror stories of being presented with a non-compete to sign after starting the new job and leaving previous employment. That kind of behavior seems especially devious, but it seems pretty common as well.

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill or should I stand my ground? Anyone else found themselves in a similar situation? Anyone been pursued by a previous employer due to a non-compete?

Edit:
This job is in TX.
Ask HN: What 'deeper technical skills' make up a strong engineer?
A lot of online software industry content is focused on junior engineers: algorithms and data structures, usage of SQL, etc... But I don't think we often discuss what really sets mid/senior engineers apart.

My list would probably look something like:

- ability to use a proper debugging stack (not just tests/printf, use of microbenchmarks for optimisation, systems tracing for services)

- optimisation of how their app interacts with the environment (kernel, network stack, cache lines)

- debugging beyond application level issues (e.g. ability to use core dumps, knowledge of how the JVM works)
Segregation Now – separate and unequal education is coming back
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/segregation-now/359813/
>Segregation Now ...
Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, show how separate and unequal education is coming back

was trying to fit in the whole subtitle.
Show HN: Venice – open-source Plaid to Postgres in minutes without code
https://github.com/usevenice/venice
Hi HN!

Tony & Ali here, we are super excited to introduce Venice - an open source financial data integrations platform. Our MVP is getting financial data from Plaid into your postgres database in under 5 mins.

We met while building our own respective fintechs. We noticed how much developer time went into setting up and maintaining the infrastructure rather than actually building the fintech itself. In Tony’s last project Alka for instance, the engineering team spent 30%+ of time building and maintaining the data connectivity and pipeline rather than the core work of accounting.

What we wish existed is a Segment / Airtable for fintech, letting you get financial data from wherever they are produced to anywhere they are useful. We think the most basic version is a Plaid to Postgres database connector with a self-service portal where your customers can add / remove / repair and manage their financial connections. This takes less than 5 mins to set up without writing a single line of code. In fact, we went so far as asking non technical people to get set up and they were able to do it just as fast using Vercel, Supabase and Plaid.

Today, our product is perfect if you’re just starting out or using it as a hobby, but eventually we hope any sized fintech could use what we’ve built as the project matures and community grows.

We wrote it using full stack TypeScript, and paid special attention to composability and extensibility. There is a core connect & sync library with its own cli, a HTTP API (thank you to the amazing folks at trpc + zod), a set of headless React components, theme-able data-connected UI library leveraging tailwindcss, and finally a next.js application that puts it all together. Each layer is built on the one before, so you can start with no code at all while drop down to any layer of abstraction as your need grow. What we are shipping today is a complete, instantly deployable next.js application which you can use either as a standalone portal via redirect, or embed into your application via iframe. The default setup uses Vercel as we expect you to bring your own database and authentication that powers the rest of your application.

The repo is licensed under MIT & ELv2, so you are completely free to use it for your own projects and companies while we retain the right to being the only one to release a cloud hosted version in the future.

Check us out at https://github.com/useVenice/venice. We have a ton of ideas in mind and would love your feedback. Hit us up at hello@useVenice.com or on slack at http://link.usevenice.com/slack
Show HN: Interval, CLIs in browser with no front end code
https://interval.com/
Hey HN,

I'm Alex, founder of Interval [0]. We’re bringing internal tools written like CLIs to the browser to make them more powerful, through a Node.js SDK which attaches them to a hosted dashboard without any frontend code. Large companies have full teams that work on internal dashboards and tooling. Interval brings that infrastructure to anyone.

In our previous project we had ~65 CLI scripts for tasks like provisioning user accounts, moderating content, and migrating data. These were quick to write and powerful. They also turned into an ongoing timesuck. Non-technical coworkers needed to bother an engineer every time to run one. Some of them were powerful enough to be footguns, and because we had to rewrite validation every time, we were always a bit scared of them.

We wanted to bring the power and speed of cranking out CLI scripts into the world of modern software development: testable, easy to expose to colleagues via a URL, and works with Everything Else by default. That’s why we made Interval.

We built:

- A Node.js + TypeScript SDK – this embeds in your backend codebase and provides APIs for defining tools + collecting input + displaying output. These APIs are simple awaitable functions that return parsed, validated, and soundly-typed user input. You put your Interval actions in source control, test them, run CI/etc exactly like you do for all your other backend code.

- A hosted UI, which handles I/O for the scripts in a less brittle way than command line arguments do, while also taking care of auth, permissions, and audit logs.

This lets you take your CLI commands out of an engineer’s terminal and share them with the whole company. Give support the ability to ban spammers but not drop the prod DB. Require two people for sensitive actions. Echo commands to a Slack channel. It’s a powerful set of primitives out of the box and lets you do anything else you want in the code you’re already writing, without making you have to spin up a second company just to support your internal tools.

Under the hood, your CLIs and the hosted dashboard talk through a 2-way message passing system. We felt this approach was the best of both worlds:

- UIs are hosted by Interval: We build, host, and maintain the part most people don't care about for internal tools.

- Backends are self-hosted: We can't see your business logic, secrets, etc.

We're in public beta today. I hope you like it and I'm happy to answer any questions/feedback in the comments.

[0]: https://interval.com
Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?
Hi HN

I'm from Warsaw and as Germany is opening market for Polish workers the upcoming year, I'm considering Berlin as a destination - been there, love the city, like German people.

Could you give me some info:

1. cost of life and earnings, basically the same as in this topic http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1778185 (no Berlin there)

2. a quick view at the scene - are there any interesting companies, startups, etc. doing python?

3. popular job boards, message boards, where to look at? see nothing at djangogigs

tx
Show HN: A design-by-contract Python package in ~100 lines
https://github.com/StefanUlbrich/design-by-contract
Greetings! A 2.5 weekends project to teach myself newer Python features (>= 3.10). Conditions are written as Lambda expressions that annotate parameters and return types, and coexist with type annotations. Symbols to share values between conditions are also supported to a limited extend.
Ask HN: What are current trends in webdeveloping?
I've been out of the business for last few years and I am wondering what's new. I'd like to know what should I read about to get up to date. I am not only interested in new technologies but also trends like eg. "web 2.0".
Types of Speakers to Ban from your Tech Conference
http://www.bandwidthblog.com/2011/05/24/2-types-of-speakers-to-ban-from-your-tech-conference
I’ve attended a number of tech conferences in South Africa and at every one of them one of two topics seem to raise it’s head, and frankly I think we need to ban the types of people pushing these topics on stage from speaking…
Using nginx as a load balancer
http://mickeyben.com/2009/12/30/using-nginx-as-a-load-balancer.html
Nothing new, all is in the documentation. I just tried to make the things simpler for noobs as I was few hours ago on this subject.
Show HN: Bootstrap your startup with high end gigs
http://grouptalent.com/welcome/startups
Hey guys, we just launched a platform to match top startups with high end projects. We're focused on supporting startups that would rather take on a short term consulting gig than raising a round of funding. We'd love some feedback. Thanks!
Show HN: OpsFlow – Low-code DevOps – Webflow for infrastructure
https://opsflow.app/
Opsflow cofounder here! We launched a bunch of things recently, some of them well received (Terragen, AWS Bootstrap). It's no secret that AWS is hard, and our mission is to make it simple.

What HN crowd helped us realise is that the UI was still not simple enough. Rather confusing in fact.

So in the last couple weeks we have radically simplified it based on your feedback. We have removed the unnecessarily complex concepts like Services and Environments - it's just Apps now. All options are now on the new Settings screen. Instead of Infrastructure and Software deployments there is now a sequence of steps.

Check it out - and tell us what you think!

Here's our launch on ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/opsflow
Server-side view or client-side MVC?
http://kailuowang.blogspot.com/2013/02/server-side-view-or-client-side-mv.html
DHH claimed that the development experience of client-side MVC is inferior compared to traditional Rails development. And he only gave two vague reasons - ruby and 'unnecessary' complexity. his article first shows some code comparison between the two paradigms to demonstrate the software design drive for client-side MV* and then talks about the business drive for client-side MVC(*) - interactivity.
Citizenfour HD
http://cryptome.org/Citizenfour-HD.7z
https://twitter.com/Cryptomeorg/status/566616227582582785
Very Cool 3D Sketching Program
http://rhondaforever.com/
Video on the homepage shows an example of using it and some sample drawings. This blew my mind when I first saw it.
My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
Transcript of Richard Stallman's Speech, 28 Oct 2002, at the International Lisp Conference
Benchmark of Python web servers
http://nichol.as/benchmark-of-python-web-servers
A benchmark of 14 different Python WSGI web servers.
Show HN: Lota – An online ePub reader with VS Code style
https://www.lotareader.com
Previously when I wanted to learn languages by reading the original, I started looking for an EPUB reader.

I wanted it to be

1. browser-based, so I could use my browser extensions

2. cross-platform, so I could read on different devices

3. able to read multiple books at the same time, so I don't have to open multiple windows

Unfortunately, I didn't find it.

As a developer, I really like the flexible layout and power of VS Code, so I tried to combine its design concept with EPUB reader, and Lota was born.
Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
https://desklamp.io/
Hey HN!
I'm Prajwal, the co-creator of Desklamp! I just completed my undergrad, which is where we got the idea for Desklamp.
A bunch of friends and I built this because we hated the experience of studying on our laptops. It was boring, and we found ourselves staring at the screen for hours on end with no output to show for it.

To make reading more engaging and to make sure we could remember what we read, we built a note-making system integrated with a PDF reader. The aim is to encourage you to make notes! LaTeX support, clipping out sections from the document, linking notes to sections in the PDF - everything is designed to really make sure you have no excuse to not make notes as you read.

We've also added a lot of fixes for minor inconveniences (scrolling across sections, hitting the wrong page number, light mode, viewing your highlights at a glance). And all of this is collaborative, because that just makes notes even more useful.

It's free for a while - we want to know what the rest of you think! Feedback can only help us make this even better. It's available as a web-app and a desktop app for Mac and Windows (Linux users, mail us, we're operating on a very closed beta right now).
Show HN: Ants Sandbox - an ants simulator
https://www.ants-sandbox.io/
I was inspired to make a web based ants simulator after watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81GQNPJip2Y

Any feedback appreciated.

Best viewed on Chromium based browsers. Firefox is slow for some reason and Safari is not tested as I don't have a Mac.
Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?
This is a general question, but I didn't want to ask specific one because I'm still trying to understand the bigger picture.

We "collect" data all the time, and sometimes it helps us learn something. On one hand we have things that were created by others: funny images, movies, articles on the web, books. On the other we have things creted by us: personal insights, thoughts, snippets of code. How do you manage/organize all of this? Do you have apps/tools for organizing specific type of information and if so, why this particular one? Do you have ideas how to organize/manage this efficiently?

But we're not only collecting information [0], we also learn from it. Most people store all this knowledge in their heads for their whole life, but I think it's not efficient (memory loss, can't search, not always reliable etc.), some people create some kind of personal knowledge bases (e.g. personal dokuwiki/mediawiki on localhost). How do you manage/organize things you learn?

It may seem that I should create 2 different topics, but for me both concepts are connected[1]. What I'm trying to find is an efficient solution to managing (almost) all the information that enters (and already is in) my life. I don't think that there exist a good app for that, I know that there are some that solve parts of this problem (evernote, wikis etc.), but I'm more interested in your ideas on the whole topic, how to approach this problem, where to look, how to think about this etc.

I'm curious about your solutions, ideas and "setups" for this problem(s). If you have any resources (books, research papers etc.) about the topic, I'd love to learn from them. Thank you for your time.

[0] as in bits on the disk, learning can be viewed as collecting new information, I guess

[1] I liked quote from a book, some code from LLVM gave me an insight into a compiler design etc.
Godaddy's official position on SOPA - Just Posted
http://support.godaddy.com/godaddy/go-daddys-position-on-sopa/
This was just posted today.
Show HN: Infracost (YC W21) – Open-source cloud cost policies
https://github.com/infracost/infracost
Hi, we’re Ali, Hassan and Alistair, co-founders of Infracost (https://www.infracost.io/). Infracost shows engineers the cost of each Terraform change in CI/CD before resources are launched. When something changes, it posts a comment with the cloud cost impact. e.g. you’ve added 2 instances and volumes, and have changed an instance type from medium to large, this will increase your bill by 25% next month from $1000 to $1250 per month.

We launched the first version of Infracost just under a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588). As we said in our first release ‘the people who are purchasing cloud resources are not shown costs upfront, so they don’t know how much the resources will cost before launching them’. Our assumption was that because we are open source and engineers are flying blind, they (the engineers) would pull us into their workflow. Actually, something different is happening:

The engineers are not pulling us in - it turns out to be the senior DevOps, SREs and platform teams. One of their challenges is figuring out how their small team of 7 people can fulfill the infrastructure requirements of hundreds of engineers. To solve this, they have created and put in place processes for engineers to provision infrastructure when they need. Now they want to implement cost policies and guardrails so that these hundreds of engineers don’t blow past all budgets. For example, if a change will result in a higher than 15% increase, leave a warning. If a change results in a >25% increase in costs, block the change till a team lead has reviewed it.

This has two implications for us. First, we need to create an output that isn’t only used by humans but is also digested into other systems to make further decisions. The second is the people we have been speaking to are not our end users. We need to figure out how we can get introduced to our end users, and create a different set of questions for each persona.

We’d really love your feedback around the cost policies use-case. We've created examples with standard policy tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA), HashiCorp Sentinel and Conftest. Check out the repo for GitHub Actions at https://github.com/infracost/infracost. Our other CI/CD integrations are listed here: https://www.infracost.io/docs/#4-add-to-cicd.

We'd love to hear how you think about policies and guardrails for containing cloud costs!