jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Contacted by a potential acquirer. How much data do I share with them?
(I've been on HN for a long time, but wanted to post this anonymously, for obvious reasons.)

I developed a profitable bootstrapped web app a few years ago ... we have a strong subscriber base and show good growth, despite competing against some others in our space who've gotten a lot of media attention and funding.

I was contacted yesterday by a large web company wanting to discuss a possible acquisition. I wasn't expecting (or looking for) an acquisition ... I figured we'd run a 37s-style "Italian restaurant" for the life of the business. ... My question at the moment: When we have an initial phone call with the potential acquirers, what figures are we expected to provide? What data should we keep private?

For example: Userbase size? Monthly revenues? Growth rate? I imagine each of these could factor in (positively or negatively) to the size of the offer they make. What data would they expect us to make available before they've even made a formal declaration of intent? (And, if we get an LOI, what info would we then give them?)

I'd love any other advice / thoughts / article links / etc., but my main question at the moment deals with the issues of what to share / what to keep from them in these initial conversations.
MindMup just became 10x more useful
http://blog.mindmup.com/2013/02/privacy-team-work-and-lot-more-mindmup.html
Privacy, Team Work and a lot more... MindMup just became 10x more useful
JDateTime - Iranian (Shamsi) Date for PHP
https://github.com/sallar/jDateTime
jDateTime is a PHP wrapper for DateTime class enabling developers to use Iranian date/time in their projects.
Digital Ocean's network is down?
https://www.digitalocean.com
My sites are down and I cannot sign in to their site.
Send SMS messages from any sender
http://translate.google.se/translate?hl=sv&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsmspuck.se%2F
Swedish service.

Update: I tried. works
Show HN: Airforms – never build another CRUD app
https://airforms.com/
Airforms is a database form builder. You can lower software development costs by using Airforms instead of developing custom CRUD applications to enter and update data. Airforms lets you build forms using a simple drag-and-drop interface. No coding skills needed.

Airforms was built from the ground up to support relational databases. Joins and lookups, and query parameters including multi-valued and cascading parameters are supported.

Airforms also includes a graphical query builder, and tools for browsing database schema, relationships and data. An automatic database diagram generator is also included.
Show HN: Metlo (YC S21) – An Open Source API Security Tool
https://github.com/metlo-labs/metlo
Metlo - An Open Source API Security Tool

Hey folks! Excited to share what we’ve been working on for the last couple months. Metlo is a self hosted, open source first API security platform that inventories, tests and protects your API endpoints:

- We inventory your endpoints by scanning API traffic and detecting all your endpoints along with the sensitive data they contain.

- We generate information your security team may find useful like Open API Specs and risk scores for each endpoint.

- After this we discover vulnerabilities like unauthenticated endpoints returning sensitive data or missing HSTS headers.

- Finally Metlo detects any anomalous behavior on sensitive endpoints in real time so you can detect 0-day attacks as they're happening.

We have a demo environment to play around with here http://demo.metlo.com/. Also, Here's a demo video if you would like a quick walk through of the product :) https://www.loom.com/share/349c9e5f267741e9a0fcd2dfd1f9956f
India drafts rules to stop developer mode and side loading of apps
http://egovstandards.gov.in/comments-on-guidelines-for-aod
The Union IT Ministry has issued a draft guideline with instructions on not installing unnecessary apps on new mobile phones without the user's permission. When it comes into effect, the new phone will come with only basic apps like calling, messaging and gallery. Nowadays, many companies pre-install many apps with new phones. Most of these are self-updating and cannot be removed by the user. App developers also pay mobile manufacturers for this.

The new draft guidelines also stipulate that the user should be given a notice while collecting information over the phone. Consent must be sought when collecting personal information. The purpose of collecting the information and whether the data will be sent outside the country should also be specified.

∙ The phone's security system should prevent downloading apps from other than authorized app stores. (Currently this is allowed)

∙ App stores like Google Play are fully responsible for the security of apps

∙App stores must have company registration in India. There should be nodal officer and grievance redressal mechanism.

∙ Developers also need Indian registration if the app is for Indian users. If the app is international, the user should use it at his own risk.

∙ Mobile cloud service for users in India must use servers in India.

∙ 'Developer Mode', which allows app developers to make significant changes to the phone software, will be available only on sample phones.
Business Intelligence Rap Video
http://themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com/2009/05/26/business-intelligence-rap-video/
Two startup co-founders (full disclosure: I'm one of them) bust rhymes about why so many startups are doomed.
Hivelogic Podcasting Equipment Guide
http://hivelogic.com/articles/podcasting-equipment-software-guide-2011/
In December of 2009 I took a leap of faith, launched 5by5 Studios, and started broadcasting and podcasting full-time. In this article I share what I've learned about podcasting, videocasting, and audio recording gear.
M-rge Is Offering $1 Million of Free Coworking Space and Classes for Hackers
http://betabeat.com/2012/08/mrge-m-rge-1-million-free-office-space-coworking-alleynyc-lean-startup-machine/
up to 500 hackers/designers apply: http://m-rge.com
Making your ruby fly
http://alisnic.net/blog/making-your-ruby-fly/
Inspired by http://spin.atomicobject.com/2012/11/06/is-your-application-running-with-ruby-slow/
Ask HN: Software Developer Statistics (a day in your life)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEQ1WTYwY2FVVmpOUXpOVVRlTWpwR3c6MQ
I am making a little study on software developers.
I would really like to know more about our profession and I believe you would too.
The questions are targeted toward everyday routines and making something similar to this http://www.inc.com/magazine/201109/inc-500-infographic-a-day-in-the-life-of-a-ceo.html
If you participate, I will share the results with you and hopefully make a blog post with our daily life habits.
I will not be selling you anything during this questionnaire nor requiring any contact. But please, be honest and reduce trolling to achieve good results :).
Live: Guido van Rossum talks about Tulip (asynchronous I/O for Python 3)
http://nicholsonjf.com/blog/guido-on-tulip
In five minutes, the creator and BDFL of Python Guido van Rossum will give a talk at LinkedIn, Mountain View about Tulip (asynchronous I/O for Python 3).
Show HN: Spacelift – first all-in-one CI/CD for Infrastructure as Code
Hi HN!

We are the team behind Spacelift (https://spacelift.io/). Spacelift is the CI/CD for infrastructure-as-code, be it Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation or Ansible (coming soon), and policy as code. It enables collaboration, automates manual work and compliance, and lets teams customize and automate their workflows.

Here’s what you can do with Spacelift

- Build sophisticated Git-based workflows

- Use Open Policy Agent to declare rules around your infrastructure, access control, state changes, and more

- Author and maintain reusable modules for your organization; we even have a full CI solution for modules to make sure they’re healthy

- Declare who can log in (and under what circumstances) and what their level of access to each of the managed projects should be (SAML 2.0 SSO out of the box!) using login and access policies respectively

- Use Spacelift’s trigger policies to create arbitrary workflows and dependencies spanning multiple infrastructure-as-code stacks

- Manage stacks, contexts, modules, and policies in a declarative way using Terraform or Pulumi

Before Spacelift, we built bespoke solutions (e.g., Geopoiesis, https://www.reddit.com/r/Terraform/comments/fu6pj1/geopoiesisio_anyone_knows_something_about_it/), currently used by two of the largest European scaleups.

In the past few months, we’ve been onboarding our first customers and making sure everything works as expected. You can check out our starter repo at https://github.com/spacelift-io/terraform-starter. It's an easy way to learn all of Spacelift’s capabilities in 15 minutes without tapping into your own cloud resources. We’d love your thoughts on our approach and anything that has worked or hasn’t worked for you.

P.S. We are hiring https://spacelift.io/careers.html

P.P.S. We just announced our funding round https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/11/cloud-automation-startup-spacelift-raises-6m-series-a-led-by-blossom-capital/
Show HN: APIs and SDKs to help developers build pricing plans faster
https://docs.stigg.io/docs/welcome-to-stigg
Hello HN Community,

As an ex-founder of a developers-for-hire agency, I was fortunate to build for many different software organizations around the world, and partner with the most talented product teams.

One of the things I learned by coding was how painful it is to build & maintain pricing in SaaS.
The pricing structure and logic always end up being coupled with the core application code and the billing platform. The product catalog is typically managed in spreadsheets, by the product & monetization teams, while all the possible package types, including the legacy ones, are typically hardcoded across different git repositories.

Together with our founding team, we have decided to devote ourselves to help solve this problem, and make it much easier for developers everywhere to build out pricing.

At Stigg, we’re building APIs and SDKs that allow engineering teams to safely launch and roll-out pricing plan changes, faster. At their core, our APIs allow you to model any pricing (Trials, Freemium, Usage-based, Subscriptions, Per seat) and handle the access control and provisioning logic. We’re trying to build our platform in such a way that after the first integration, any future changes could be deployed by anyone - allowing developer teams to free-up their time from this tedious maintenance work.
We have planned ahead and have already introduced reach functionally like plan migrations and versioning, multiple environments support, a/b testing, and embeddable components you can use such as paywall widget, or customer portal widget. This way, you can ship pricing plans without having to do a full Phd on pricing & billing ontology.

We're just getting started and have a bunch of things on our roadmap. But we’d love to get feedback from the HN community to check that we’re on the right way.
SF Open Data Mashup: Your Favorite Restaurants Are Filthy
http://reasonengine.wordpress.com
Combining Department of Public Health open data records with Yelp restaurant review scores paints a revealing picture of dining our in San Francisco.
Soyuz 11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11
Soyuz 11 crew was the only human deaths to occur in space.
Ask HN: Could you help me meet successful female entrepreneurs?
I'm trying to do more interviews on Mixergy.com with women. Could you help introduce me?

Here's what I'm looking for:

- Entrepreneur or investor in entrepreneurs

- Built a tech company (eg web, ads, iPhone, software, hardware, etc)

- With a big business success or big failure

http://mixergy.com/contact
An actually usable .NET virtual machine in javascript
https://github.com/mkol/il2js
Small comment: I see this as a dart contender, from what I hear, there is a Visual Studio debugger coming, meaning we will be able to debug c#, but have it walk through javascript on page. Sounds amazing to me, thought I should share.
Follow the link in the readme to more detailed documentation. The amazing thing here, is that the produced javascript is small enough to warrant using it for real projects.

The compiler is not yet open source, they said that if there is more interest, they will open it later.
Guide to Low Cost, High-Impact Websites
http://blog.wajsbrem.com/index.php/guide-to-low-cost-high-impact-websites/
15 tips for kickstarting your web project. Almost 40 shopping sites listed at bottom.
CoffeeScript 1.8 released
http://coffeescript.org/#changelog
HN doesn't allow resubmission of the same link that points to the change log [1], so here's the change log:

The --join option of the CLI is now deprecated.
Source maps now use .js.map as file extension, instead of just .map.
The CLI now exits with the exit code 1 when it fails to write a file to disk.
The compiler no longer crashes on unterminated, single-quoted strings.
Fixed location data for string interpolations, which made source maps out of sync.
The error marker in error messages is now correctly positioned if the code is indented with tabs.
Fixed a slight formatting error in CoffeeScript’s source map-patched stack traces.
The %% operator now coerces its right operand only once.
It is now possible to require CoffeeScript files from Cakefiles without having to register the compiler first.
The CoffeeScript REPL is now exported and can be required using require 'coffee-script/repl'.
Fixes for the REPL in Node 0.11.

[1] http://coffeescript.org/#changelog
https://www.google.com
Google
Google Code Blog: Chrome Extensions for Web Development
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/chrome-extensions-for-web-development.html
The page that features Chrome extensions for web development:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/featured/web_dev
Ask HN: Why is Reddit so awful?
The website itself, not the content.

Although I'm just a casual user of Reddit, it's hard to avoid the fact that Reddit is absolute garbage. It seems to me as everything they've done in the past few years is to the detriment of users; especially with them following the trend of writing it all in a shiny SPA (that doesn't work half the time).

Apart from constant connection errors, lots of the time the site "forgets" I'm logged in, then all a sudden remembers, actively bombards users on mobile to install their app (even though the site could work fine on mobile, alas they are probably trying to crank their app install numbers up), uses dark patterns all over the place and is just generally unpleasant to use.

Thank goodness for old.reddit.com but I don't know what all of the users who have starting using the old subdomain are going to do when they eventually shut it off.

Really makes me wonder as a small time dev what's went wrong in Reddit the company to produce this absolute garbage site.

Just my 2c of course, and this was just a small list of the problems, I'm sure if you really wanted too you could spend all day listing them.

Interested to find out what others feel.
Show HN: GPT-3 powered Ouija spirit board that moves your mouse
https://ouija.attejuvonen.fi/
Hi HN! I've been tinkering with this mini-game / horror experience for a while. I hope it creeps you out!

You can go into settings to toggle between 2 different chatbots: a scripted experience (with achievements to unlock) and a more versatile GPT-3 mode. Let me know what you think! :)

There's also a toggle to show how the mouse magic is made.

Source is available here: https://github.com/baobabKoodaa/ouija
Ask HN: What do geeks in Palo Alto do on weekend nights?
How do you (or do you) socialize? What do _most_ do?

Yes I realize that geeks are normal people too. But lets not kid ourselves... they aren't.
Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
https://dailyprompt.org/
Journaling is a great practice to learn more about yourself - if done daily.

I tried it multiple times and couldn't stick to it.

This project is how I finally fixed it for myself.

It works by eliminating my excuses.

There is only one question a day that I'll answer - no time spent on "finding the perfect topic".

I only need to go to the page - not find my notebook or create a new note/paragraph in another app.

I only left myself a relatively small input area, less than a page in a small notebook - that way the commitment doesn't feel too big.

I really enjoy the process and it has become something that I do early in the morning - a little bit of time for myself.

It's now public because I am sure it could work for you too.

Bonus: The data is all local, the input will be saved in the browser (IndexedDB) while I type, no login necessary - the full journal is accessible as a CSV (bottom right).

https://dailyprompt.org
Results of: 7 developers, working 24/7 for 90 days, 1 house (in Colombia)
http://alexander.letmego.com/2009/07/29/how-productive-was-the-letmego-immersion/
Colombian entrepreneur Alex Torrenegra hired a small team of developers and for 90 days, they worked every waking moment, and except for one family weekend break, they did not leave the house. Food and other logistics was taken care of by another company. Here he tells how productive the experience was.
The dark side of NoSQL
http://codemonkeyism.com/dark-side-nosql/
There is a dark side to most of the current NoSQL databases. People rarely talk about it. They talk about performance, about how easy schemaless databases are to use. About nice APIs. They are mostly developers and not operation and system administrators. No-one asks those. But it’s there where rubber hits the road.
Git: the minimum you need to know (sorta like a cheat or nutshell)
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/everyday.html
note that hyphenated commands are now officiall discouraged/deprecated

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/72874
Vbuild: “Compile” Vue components to standalone HTML/JS/CSS
https://github.com/manatlan/vbuild
Its main purpose is to let you use components (.vue files) in your vuejs app, without a full nodejs stack. Just use python2 or python3. BTW, it provides a method to minimize your js scripts (es2015 compliant).

(It provides methods to help you to build your vuejs app without nodejs)

Available on https://github.com/manatlan/vbuild (MIT licence)

Available on pypi : https://pypi.org/project/vbuild/
The Speaker (Or: why the iPhone's speaker is on the bottom of the phone)
http://dcurt.is/2011/10/12/the-speaker/
Ever wonder why the iPhone's speaker is on the bottom of the phone?
At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind
http://greenmonk.net/spain-gets-53-of-its-energy-from-wind/
*during high winds at 5:50am on a Sunday morning
Show HN: Send a GitHub webhook to a private URL
https://github.com/openziti-test-kitchen/webhookz
I work on the OpenZiti project and I have a CI server that accepts GitHub webhooks, but I don't want to expose my server to the internet with open ports. I used the Python SDK for OpenZiti (overlay networking platform) to create a GitHub Action that sends the webhook to my private server via overlay instead of via the open internet.

This GitHub repo is a template that I made to show you how it all works. You can use it right away to run the sample server (httpbin-go) and see the GitHub Action in...action. Relevant threads include https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32596212 .
Ruby's Date/DateTime classes rewritten in C.. 20-200x perf improvement
http://github.com/jeremyevans/home_run
Fast Date/DateTime classes for ruby. By just installing the home_run gem/lib you'll get an amazing performance increase!
Show HN: A programmer's approach to finding gifts
https://givetheperfectgift.co/
Hey Folks,

I’ve been really annoyed with the search part of finding gifts.

It’s hard to use keyword search for something when it’s an “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of deal.

So I thought, what if we scraped/indexed TONS of products and then just focused on removing the things we don’t want and then see what’s left to see if there’s anything cool?

I built it in Flutter so it's both iOS and Android but it could be web too.

I’ve only just started the scraping/tagging of products and if anyone has suggestions for bulk tagging images/content I would love to hear them. That’s the current bottleneck.

Any feedback would be welcome!

cvanvlack AT gmail DOT com if you want to discuss 1-on-1.
Show HN: Recycled a piano into a work desk
http://mrsamberapple.com/piano-desk
With a little paint and 2-3 days I recycled this 1910s piano into a work desk. Cost: paint and manual labor to pick up the piano from craigslist.I'm here to answer questions incase you are interested in doing the same.
Show HN: Hathora – Multiplayer Game Development Made Easy
https://docs.hathora.dev/#/
Hi HN, this is Harsh, I am the developer behind Hathora. I tried making a simple multiplayer game a few years ago and, as someone with software engineering experience but no gamedev experience, I found it to be very challenging. On top of the challenges of building a single player game, you now have to constantly battle the network and latency, find ways to prevent cheating, and figure out how to make a scalable backend architecture. With Hathora my goal was to encode best practices for online multiplayer game development into a framework so developers can simply focus on implementing their game logic.

Some technical pieces of Hathora I wanted to highlight:

- Hathora includes a system I think of as “gRPC for games”. You define your API in Hathora’s declarative format and the framework spits out typesafe data models, clients, and server endpoint stubs across multiple programming languages (although currently only Typescript is implemented). Minimal packet sizes are achieved through a binary serialization format which includes a delta encoding feature, allowing the framework to efficiently synchronize state by sending data diffs.

- Hathora includes a Swagger-like Prototype UI generated from the API definition. This allows you to view the game state and call server methods all in realtime, letting you interact with your backend logic without writing a single line of frontend code. Once you are happy with the backend logic, you can create a fully custom frontend using any framework/technology you’d like and just use the Hathora client to communicate with the backend.

- By handling generic game functionality (state synchronization, messaging, persistence, etc) for you, Hathora lets you create multiplayer games with very few lines of code. For example, see chess which is implemented in under 200 lines of user code: https://github.com/hathora/hathora/tree/develop/examples/che.... I also made (a massively simplified version of) Among Us in under 200 lines of code: https://github.com/hathora/among-us-tutorial

I am looking for developers interested in making online multiplayer games to try out Hathora and give me feedback. Additionally, if the roadmap seems interesting to you I would gladly welcome contributions: https://docs.hathora.dev/#/roadmap. I’ll be around to answer questions, let me know what you think!
Ask HN:  Anyone using Haskell in production?
If so, what projects/products? I'm curious to know what jobs you found that Haskell was awesome for and other languages couldn't keep up.
Repairing a TV with a cool hack
http://www.lonelycoder.com/blog/?p=14
"Surprisingly the snooper worked at first attempt. I didn’t even care to check that I didn’t mixed up SDA and SCL. Apparently Murphy had other things to mess up that day."
Rails is a Ghetto... [NSFW for Language]
http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html
Some pretty harsh words...
10,000-core Linux supercomputer built in Amazon cloud
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040611-linux-supercomputer.html
HPC vendor Cycle Computing recently built a 10,000-core Linux cluster on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, in what might have been the largest HPC deployment to date on the Amazon service.