jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Show HN: SolidInbox – Find new customers on Twitter
https://www.solidinbox.com/
Solidinbox helps you scale your Twitter outreach through automated DMs. So basically you can find relevant Twitter profiles that you want to reach out to using bunch of great filters. Create collections and send mass personalized DMs (eg: Hey John) all on automation.

I found DMing people very useful and I see its very helpful for early founders, agency owners and freelancers too so I thought it would be cool to build something around it.

Other features like setting up "auto-reply" are also there.

Happy to say we have 150+ users now on our platform and we are growing rapidly. See if it helps anyone.

Cheers!
Ask HN: Proactively reducing a contract daily rate?
Hey IT contractors, have you ever tried or are going to proactively propose a reduction of your daily rate to save a gig? Did it work?

My current devops job at NASDAQ-listed IT company has full JIRA backlogs from the existing customers. Although we successfuly transitioned into everyone WFH I have a feeling that new high touch customers acquisition stopped completely. The company seeks cost cuts actively now, mostly in infra bills. No rumors of layoffs yet, but I am looking for options to avoid a potential axe.

Has reducing your contract rate helped you?
JFormer - A jQuery Form Framework
http://blogupstairs.com/framework/jformer-a-jquery-form-framework/
jFormer is a form framework written on top of jQuery that allows you to quickly generate beautiful, standards compliant forms. Leveraging the latest techniques in web design. jFormer helps you create web forms that can validate client-side, server-side and process without changing pages (using AJAX).
Programmer wage gap data: I challenge employers to prove you're fair
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm
So, people were saying the direct link to the giant table of data was confusing, so here we are.

There is a pay gap between men and women in computer programming and software engineering. Women who are classified as "Software Developers" on average make 86 cents for every dollar their male peers make, and women classified as "Programmers" on average make 93 cents on every dollar their male peers make. Here is the data straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm and again in a nice little screenshot http://imgur.com/vMoOU (thanks heypel).

This is a challenge to companies which hire either programmers or software engineers to release statistics proving that they treat men and women equally. I understand pay-gap is not the end-all-be-all yardstick of equality so you can break down the statistics by seniority, experience, or any other metrics you like.

The idea is to compile a list of companies which do prioritize treating people equally so that employees can make informed decisions about where they would like to work.
Lucid Dreamers Produce The Fastest Brainwave Frequencies Ever Recorded
http://themindunleashed.org/2014/06/lucid-dreamers-produce-fastest-brainwave-frequencies-ever-recorded.html
An interesting look into the measurable effect of what some people may consider 'fringe' science, and others consider a part of their daily (nightly) lives.
On Not Leaving Academia
http://beki70.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/on-not-leaving-academia/
As a response to "On Leaving Academia", http://cs.unm.edu/~terran/academic_blog/?p=113
F.C.C. Calls on F.A.A. to Allow Electronics on Planes
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/fcc-calls-on-faa-to-allow-electronics-on-planes/
Now the United States government is telling the United States government to allow devices on airplanes during takeoff and landing.
For when you feel overwhelmed . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZdiXvDU4P0
Vienna - Billy Joel.
Show HN: Generic Hooking Mechanism for Python
https://github.com/pyrustic/hooking
Hi HN ! I'm Alex, a tech enthusiast.

A few days ago, if someone asked me how to augment the method of a given class in Python, I would suggest creating a new class that inherits from the parent class, and then overriding that method. In the case of a function, I would propose to decorate it.

Decoration would also work for methods, but since OOP offers out-of-the-box functionality (method override) for this very situation, it seems more natural to stick with this functionality.

Today my answer would be different since I wrote a new iteration (which I find satisfying after several attempts) of a Python library I built to implement hooking [1] in my projects.

This library exposes a decorator [2] to tag methods and functions (targets), and so when they are called, user-defined hooks will be executed upstream or downstream according to the spec (Before vs After) provided by the user.

Arguments to targets are passed to hooks which can modify them or replace the targets themselves with an arbitrary callable [3] or None [4].

Thanks to the tagging mechanism, hooks are not directly tied to targets but to tags (either user-defined or derived from functions or methods themselves). Thus, hooks are loosely coupled to targets and dynamically bound to tags.

The library, minimalist and intuitive, is written in Python and is available on PyPI [5]. I would like to know what you think about it. Your questions and comments are welcome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooking

[2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0318/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callable_object

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_pointer

[5] https://github.com/pyrustic/hooking#installation
ECloudEdit Part 2: CouchDB
http://blog.erlware.org/2011/02/12/ecloudedit-part-2-couchdb/
Part 2 of the eCloudEdit of Erlang, Webmachine and Backbone.js
Save Blink or die trying
https://github.com/adnrw/saveblink
Watch as we follow one man's battle against the odds to save <blink> from evil Mozilla corporation.
Ask HN: Which of these 3 email subject lines most grabs your interest?
At Correlated (http://www.correlated.org), we publish a new statistic each day based on the results of all previous days' polls.

Users can sign up for a daily results email, which contains the latest statistic and the current day's poll question.

I'm trying to figure out which subject line is most likely to grab people's interest:

1) [First name], here's your daily results email for Friday, April 15!

2) April 15 results: Cats, cursing, and crying

3) Today's poll: How often do you dine out?

The first option personalizes the subject line by using the recipient's first name, but aside from that it remains pretty standard from day to day.

The second option teases the latest silly statistic.

The third option presents the current day's poll question, which the recipient can respond to by clicking a link within the email.

What do you think, HN readers? Which of the three subject lines do you think would be most likely to grab your interest on a daily basis?

(I'm also open to alternative suggestions.)
Ask HN: How to find out who your customers are as a consultant?
I started out as a ruby freelancer in London, April 2014, it's what I marketed myself as(lety.co). Then I figured I'd market myself as freelance CTO (I've been CTO of two startups) as it was closer to what I was actually doing (as well as coding).

Now I'm moving towards software consultant (because the freelancer label means less pay and who knows what a freelance CTO does).

I have no idea on who I should be targeting as my customers. When I started I originally thought it would be small businesses but my first client was a studio with a cool game idea (runanempire.com), and my next was a small startup.

I know this isn't startup specific but I imagine it's a problem many/most face, customer acquisition.
World's First -  frictionless offline social media sharing now with WEIBO 
http://thenextweb.com/asia/2012/10/25/reallifeconnect-adds-sina-weibo-support-to-its-nfc-based-event-platform/
RealLifeConnect is the first company in the world offering frictionless offline social media sharing for the Chinese social media and event market via RFID/NFC technology. For the launch into this market, RealLifeConnect selected Sina Weibo’s API to connect its Platform. Sina Weibo is China’s most popular social media network, with around 368 Million users and more than 130,000 companies from all over the world already having official accounts there.
Response to Hawking: AI Helps Us Understand a World We've Endangered
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506213247-158494375-response-to-hawking-ai-helps-us-understand-a-world-we-endangered?published=t
Last week, a group of scientists led by Stephen Hawking warned that advances in artificial intelligence could produce uncontrollable and disastrous consequences for humanity.

The physicists and computer scientists who co-authored an article in the British newspaper The Independent raised the specter of superintelligent machines. Those machines, they wrote, may spin out of control one day, evolving without human intervention to become more powerful than, and uncaring toward, their creators.

That dystopia is compelling, and familiar. It’s been aired repeatedly every few decades as society’s fears attach themselves to each newly imagined technological threat. Of course we can't know all the repercussions of what we create, and by that token, the scientists’ article is irrefutable. That said, their fearful argument should not be the last word on AI.
Sept 24: World Day Against Software Patents
http://stopsoftwarepatents.org/
Didn't know this until just now, but apparently today is the day for protesting software patents. Since there are lots of startup founders on here, who may have a different take than the average hacker, what are your thoughts on the software patent issue?
Ask HN: How do you ensure you web app goes live without a major bug?
I have not worked at a lot of companies, so I am a bit in the dark how companies typically test their software (I am specifically interested in web applications).

From talking to some friends at mid-size or larger companies, they seem to rely significantly on manual QA testing from their dedicated QA teams. I was actually surprised to hear that many of these people told me that automated testing is virtually nonexistent. Or if it does exist, it is simply as a supplement to the manual verification steps.

How do smaller companies ensure there are no show stopper bugs when they push some code live? Do they rely simply on automated testing, or do even the small guys typically have people doing manual QA?
Craigslist: Please Don't Shut Down PadMapper
http://www.change.org/petitions/craig-of-craigslist-please-don-t-shut-down-padmapper
And yet, without warning or explanation, last Friday PadMapper received a Cease and Desist notice from Craigslist: effectively shutting down a selfless service that is used and loved by thousands of people.

PadMapper and Craigslist are a match made in heaven, but their lover's quarrel threatens to ruin a perfect marriage. Please stand with me in reuniting them once and for all.

Craig of Craigslist, Please don't shut down PadMapper!
Ask HN: I need help gather data-sets and API suggestions for NYTimes Hack Day
I'm trying to build a comprehensive list of new and interesting data-sets, tools, API's for the TimesOpen Hack Day in December.

The goal is a quick-start page for people to get up and running quickly with whatever project they decide to do. This would ideally would be useful for other events too.

- API's beyond the obvious
- Frameworks
- Classes, wrappers, and such
- Open source projects that can be utilized
- Sample code
- Data (interesting, useful, electoral, esoteric...)

Please feel free to re-state the obvious stuff (Google, Twitter API's, PhoneGap, JQuery docs and such) since you never know what might get missed.

I'm hoping to provide a few Xbox Kinects for people to dev on so anything else beyond whats already on openkinect.org is be welcome.

Not to plug the event, but to get more info on it:

http://nyti.ms/tohackday

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/timesopen-hack-day/
Show HN: I built a SSL expiration notifier
http://www.ssl-expiration-notifications.com/
Thoughts? Feedback? Suggestions?
Being your own angel investor
http://blog.pwinty.com/being-your-own-angel-investor-or-cross-bootst
"Would I do this with my own cash" is perhaps the startup founder's equivalent of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
1-2 projects that I work on every week or so
Poll: How many side projects do you have and how often do you work on them?
Like many on HN, I'm afflicted with an abundance of interests and ideas, which often manifest themselves in the form of side projects. Too many side projects, which often end up languishing unfinished. I've been looking for ways to make more progress on these projects, including dropping some to focus on others, and I'd like to get an idea of whether other people deal with the same issues. Comments with more details and info on your projects are of course appreciated.

To be clear, I'm talking about projects that you don't feel are complete, but also aren't ready to abandon.
How to Make a Twitter Resume
http://tracksuitceo.com/2008/06/03/the-resume-of-the-future-brought-to-you-by-twitter/
Here are some examples of twitter resumes, all using 140 characters or less.
SmartTwitter Posts Your Tweets On Facebook, Minus The Noise (attributed to HN)
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/smarttwitter-twitter-facebook
First posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1813624
Developer Todo List
http://swapoff.org/DevTodo
Dev Todo is small command line application for maintaining lists of tasks. It stores tasks hierarchically, with each task given one of five priority levels. Data is stored as XML, so various XSLT templates can be executed on the XML to convert it into different formats (eg. HTML).

Data is stored in a file named .todo in the current directory. Depending on the setting of backup in your configuration file, there may also be files named .todo.1, .todo.2, etc.

Enjoy it, hackers ;)
How Much Does it Cost to Get Your Mobile App to the Top 10?
http://blog.appintop.com/articles/how-much-does-it-cost-to-get-your-mobile-app-to-the-top-10.html
If you are building a mobile app startup, you are probably looking to estimate how much your marketing cost will be. Here is a precise answer how to calculate it for any iOS app in any country's App Store / any category.
Finding Balance in Life: Retreat Versus Engagement
http://www.openmindbody.com/findingbalance.html
A lesson for all of us: "If we do not offer the body and mind a period of rest, retreat, and recovery, our “engagement” with the world becomes a form of self-injury, of overload. We don’t develop resistance or resilience.
Dear HN'ers, please check out my new startup
http://www.masteryourcard.com
:)
Show HN: Dockerfile Generator
https://github.com/easypanel-io/builders
While it's not hard to write a Dockerfile, I think it's hard to write a good one.

Every language has its own quirks, and every framework has a special way of building things.

I was looking for a collection of well-written and well-maintained Dockerfiles, but I couldn't find one.

Thus, I thought of creating one!

I realized it's not enough to have a simple Dockerfile. Sometimes you need other files for your build: nginx.conf, php.ini, my.cnf, etc.

I also realized that people have different preferences. In Node, some use NPM, some use YARN, some use PNPM. In PHP, some use Apache, some use FPM with Nginx.

So I build a set of "builders", Dockerfile generators. You define a form using JSON Schema, and then define a function "generate" that returns an array of files.

In the future, I can make a CLI tool that will generate prompts, similar to how the form is generated on the web.

For now, I only implemented a builder for Next.js based on their official Dockerfile example.

Source-Code: https://github.com/easypanel-io/builders

Playground: https://easypanel-builders.netlify.app/

---

1. Do you have any feedback for this project?

2. Can you link some good Dockerfiles that I should include?
Map sharing tool made out of frustration with gmaps, 4sq, yelp (MVP)
http://my.atl.us
Here's a map sharing tool hacked together that makes it easy to share a customized map. We built it out of frustration with google maps, foursquare, and yelp. We're using it to share our favourite restaurants in our city with our friends, and we're trying to figure out if other people are interested in using it this way too.
Ask HN: Most reliable domain registrar
My current registrar leaves me with a few concerns, so it's time to move.

I've Googled for "most reliable domain registrar" and there are thousands of hits, many of them just affiliates trying to get you to use their registration link.

The folks at HN are probably more able to judge this so I'm asking here for recommendations. Low cost or ease of web interface isn't what's most important. Reliable (ie can get help if needed, and my domain won't get stolen or lost, or the company won't go out of business) are the most imporant.

Thanks
"Toxt" tool circumvents basic torrent blockers
http://toxt.sexopmijniphone.nl/
Some universities block the downloading of torrent files by not allowing users to access files with the wrong mime-type or file extension. This simple block is easy to get around, and that's exactly what a new site called "Toxt" does. It came in handy for me while I wanted to download legitimate Revision3 torrent files...
Need Volunteers To Help With 1M/1M
http://www.sramanamitra.com/2010/01/19/need-volunteers-to-help-with-1m1m/
I am looking for volunteers to work on the 1M / 1M project - help 1 million entrepreneurs reach 1 million in revenue. Tomorrow morning, at 8am PT, I will be hosting an online roundtable to discuss the strategy.
Ask HN: How many of you use business coaching etc?
As I mentioned in a previous post - I'm interested in doing some self-help iPhone applications, so I'm gathering market research right now.

How many of you have your personal business coach? How many of you would use the services if you had an opportunity? What stops you? What do you think about business coaching?
Homeless people as mobile wi-fi hotspots
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17345926
"An "experiment" which involved using homeless people as mobile wi-fi hotspots has attracted criticism, forcing the advertising agency (Bartle Bogle Hegarty - BBH) behind it to defend itself."
Is socket.push(bytes) all you need to program Realtime Web apps?
http://sadache.tumblr.com/post/26784721867/is-socket-push-bytes-all-what-you-need-to-program
There are quite a few web frameworks that target the development of realtime web applications. Mostly, however, the solution is by providing an API that allows developers to push/receive messages from/to an open channel.

Though this kind of API offers an opportunity to get started doing Realtime Web, it doesn’t offer a programming model for dealing with the challenges encountered when programming with streams of data, including creating, adapting, manipulating, filtering and merging streams of data and all of the synchronization involved.
Ask HN:  I program in pure PHP - Should I be doing something different?
I graduated from a state university with a degree in Marketing, but I started programming as a junior in high school. Besides a few high school courses, I have no formal training and program for the web in php with no frameworks (except jquery for javscript/ajax functions).

I see a lot of rapid development discussion and I like cranking out relatively simple websites quickly, but I think I am limited by the programming techniques I am using. For example, I programmed (isWearing.com and SmarterFootball.com), and I used a lot of the similar features into a prototype I made this past week (foodmarkit.com). All three sites are relatively uncomplicated (mostly database driven), but it took a long time to recreate the same basic processes. I'm assuming "there's gotta be a better way". So... what is out there?

I've heard a lot about django, ruby on rails, pythong etc... What do you think is the best option for me and rapid development?
Show HN: Aperture Open Source Flow Control and Reliability Platform
https://github.com/fluxninja/aperture
Hello people of HN and fellow SREs!

Over the past year, we have been building Aperture - an open-source flow control and reliability platform for cloud applications. Over the past few years, companies like LinkedIn[1], Google [2], Netflix [3], Stripe [4] have built cutting-edge flow control technologies to keep their applications reliable. Flow control is powerful because it enables graceful degradation- the ability to preserve key user experience pathways, even in the face of application failures. With Aperture project, we hope to democratize building reliable applications with effective flow control.

Using Aperture’s powerful policy language, you can deploy flow control techniques such as weighted fair queuing for prioritized load-shedding and distributed rate-limiting for abuse prevention to your applications. Using modular components to build policies allows you to maintain optimal user experience during traffic spikes, prevents cloud resource wastage by regulating abusive users, and ensures that new feature rollouts don’t result in accidental downtime.

We are excited to release Aperture as an open source project under the AGPL v3 license and invite SREs, DevOps, enthusiasts to give the project a try. We would love to hear your feedback on Aperture and how we can improve!

Github: https://github.com/fluxninja/aperture

Docs: https://docs.fluxninja.com/

Announcement: https://techcrunch.com/sponsor/fluxninja/fluxninja-announces...

Explainer Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEl4SMo3KNo

[1]: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2022/hodor--detecting-...

[2]: https://sre.google/sre-book/handling-overload/

[3]: https://netflixtechblog.com/keeping-netflix-reliable-using-p...

[4]: https://stripe.com/blog/rate-limiters
Ask HN: Do any of you have degrees in Physics? What career path did you take?
I do, and I feel like my current job (web developer - mainly pushing pixels around until the designer is happy with it) is not mentally stimulating enough. I'm looking for some inspiration to change the direction of my career.
Apple to revolutionise global personal health and medicare
https://medium.com/trends-predictions/298fe08e1c4e
Yesterdays Apple event did not pass unnoticed. With small emphasis on the new iOS7 — it simply just swooshed by.Apple however made big emphasis on the new chipset. So trying to see the bigger picture I’ll lay down a thesis. let’s begin.
Show HN: YoLinks, a human-readable URL shortener for teams
https://yolinks.app/
Hi HN,

I've been working on YoLinks (aka YoLinks.app) for the past few months. Most URLs are long, unmemorable, and opaque. YoLinks allows anyone in your organization to create aliases that anyone else can access. These aliases end up being shorter, more memorable, and transparent. Imagine using yo/onboarding instead of https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pyJy21G5F508r6Fbg0AMlE8a.... All aliases are private to your organization.

My primary goal in building YoLinks was learning. I was also frustrated that my current company doesn't have a similar tool; you can learn a lot more while solving a real problem (this is why I didn't sign us up for similar products on the market).

Here's a list of concepts and tools I learned while building this:

* React for the frontend

* Cypress for in-browser tests

* Concepts around building a multi-tenant product for enterprises (roles, managing mappings between users and their organizations, SSO)

* Google Identity Platform (which also exposes you to Firebase Authentication) for authentication and supporting OIDC auth for multiple tenants

* Mixpanel

* Browser extension development (manifest v3 for Chrome and Edge; v2 for FireFox)

I'd love any feedback!