skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"there’s plenty of reason for scavengers to risk it: A single brass steering station can go for $5,000 or more on the internet. The thousands of pounds of bronze used to make a warship’s propeller can earn about $500,000 in the scrap market. Factor in the fact that a single ship might have two or more propellers, and you’re talking about a significant amount of cash."
Actually, it reflects what Facebook wants you to see. They might take your interests into account in order to maximize the potential for ad exposure, but you're definitely not in charge.
Perhaps you should be interested in the mechanism ntp is syncing you to then.... atomic clocks are fascinating too.
It's likely that the SaaS you want to clone is far more sophisticated than you think. Even if you clone the features, you still have to clone the customers, marketing, business models, etc.

Is there a niche of customers that use the product you could target with a more unique offering? Find a way to provide more value to the niche. Yes, cheaper offers more value for the same product but there is more money in solving a valuable problem and charging more based on that value.

Competing on price alone is a really tough road to take in business. You end up with everyone losing margin and it is a race to bottom. Only really sophisticated operators can drive cost out of their business fast enough to stay ahead. If you don't want to be the next Walmart, don't compete on lower prices.
Yes I agree. It did not take long before it started getting into a fight not being about game journalism anymore but about more diversity in games, misogyny, racism etc.
I suspect there's no free lunch here. If they are designed for hobby r/c aircraft, they are designed for shorter runs with lots of free prop-driven fan cooling. Not for sustained runs without a prop cooling it.

So, it would likely work, but have a shorter lifetime. The barrier to using them was having a low voltage / high current controller. This fills that gap.

So, not a bad idea, but there's almost surely a durability tradeoff. And maybe that's fine for a hobbyist cnc application.
James Mickens, move over. There's a new sheriff in town.
Fastmail is an Australia based company. The do operate servers around the globe and have a significant presence in the USA.

https://www.fastmail.com/about/company.html

I am not implying this is any better or worse for your privacy. I personally use and trust Fastmail with the security and privacy of my email. However everyone concerned about such matters should do their own research and decided based on their own needs.
Custom subdomains are available for non-paying users too. You just need to create a free account.
This is a great question! My opinion is that it's a really bad idea, the cheapest solutions are typically really bad businesses because they have far too little resources to invest in their product and company. Our pricing is always going up because our best customers are the ones who pay us more, not only because we make more money but because they have more resources to invest in their success and they churn less. if you double pricing you need half the number of customers to make the same revenue but you have way less people to make happy.
Historically, hobbyists have chosen stepping motors because they can be controlled with a fairly simplistic controller, and there are lots of solutions out there... check out some of the step motor drive boards at Pololu Electronics. But stepping motors have limitations, namely speed and torque per unit motor size. Note that as a hobbyist, I'm still living in the stepper motor world, so I'm interested in this project.

Brushless servo motors offer the potential for much higher torque and speed in a small package, but require a different form of electronic control, and the gist of this project is that such controls haven't been available for hobbyists. So it's a matter of finding a gap in the existing project / product space, and filling it.

Note that e-bikes use brushless servo motors, so somebody has done the math on what motor technology is most efficient. I also think these motors are in electric cars, and even appliances such as washing machines.

I will be reading with interest. I'll also start keeping an eye out for what kinds of motors are available.

As for "industrial level," I'd say that it's a matter of pushing machine speeds up to a level similar to what you might see in a factory. Often, with stepper motor driven gadgets, you accept the fact that your machine will take a long time to do anything, but who cares, it's a hobby.

On the industrial side, you very quickly run into the situation where your motor is no longer the limiting factor affecting speed and precision, but the design and assembly of the mechanism is.
toggle-help is '?'. It toggles the sidebar.
Can you provide a solution to force all miners to run the same software forever? Exactly
There's absolutely zero info.

So even if he isn't making it up, there's still nothing to discuss on this, and he's ratcheted the hype up to 11.
Sunken warships are graves (graveyards maybe, not a sailor myself). So stealing them is grave robbing.
How does that work for webhook testing? They are just going to POST to a url you give them...
Having worked on projects with includes within includes within includes, and dealing with global variables defined in one file, used in another and reused elsewhere, it's definitely not the best way and it seems to destroy encapsulation.

If you can keep it under control, though, of course it's no different than includes in C/C++ (it probably literally is a wrapper around the macros.) But modern PHP prefers using autoloaders, so you never actually have to use include statements to begin with. You could just as well define those directories and include them through a Composer setting.
Comments are more likely to be a vehicle for raising awareness about something meaningful than pictures.
But why would the client use _your_ DNS server? It will just use its local resolver, which will most likely use the router, or ISPs DNS server, and so forth.
How Companies Prey on Your Ignorance of Tech and Your Fear of Hackers
Sure, the issue with brushless motors isn't the motor, it's the encoder.

The encoder is what "closes the loop" and allows you to get the accuracy you need. If you have a way to relate the position of the thing being controlled to the motor position, then you can use any motor.

So, it's a nice driver, but it doesn't make the encoder any cheaper.
The biggest benefit is simplicity, the greatest drawback is lack of extensibility (optimizer, etc).

Memory footprint is not really optimal, because T3X9 keeps both the entire source code and the entire executable in memory all the time. I wanted fast compilation, though. For small footprint, I would have made it a two-pass compiler.

An early T3X compiler ran in tiny on DOS (64KB for code and data).
Most industrial motors are also 'cheap', but controlling them is expensive.

There are two things that matter: accuracy and repeatability. Most of the time accuracy is not a problem. But repeatability is. For example when you move something heavy a motor can loose a step. When you don't know this the rest of the accurate moves are out of control.

That's why industrial controllers have good feedback systems. They know a step was performed. If not, you can act on it.

So it's more about control than about motors.
But cheap motors wear out faster.
The post author has an active handle on HN (api)
Mar 2016:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald...

mid-July 2016, post BrExit:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/reveng...

The elites were ignoring their own voters and listened only to those with money (Wall Street, tech leadership) who wanted cheaper labor through global labor arbitrage (eg, through exporting work to lower wage countries, illegal alien reform making 11 million illegal low-wage residents legal, increasing the number of H1-B Visas).

Trump spent almost half the money as Clinton and he did not take money from tech elite (except Peter Thiel) or from Wall Street elite. The remaining Dems except Sanders and all other Republicans sold out which is exactly what Trump was claiming.

Instead of addressing the global arbitrage problems caused by global trade, the elites resort to ad hominem of Trump voters as Hilary Clinton said, "a basketful of deplorables."

In France, there are similar issues which is why Le Pen is doing so well. The French elites are ignoring the harms of global labor arbitrage from globalization to normal non-elite people.
At the low end, you aren't going to be competing with SaaS providers, you're going to be competing with people who just self host a similar solution that's either open source or they built themselves.

If you think you can knock out a cheap version with a few developers all of your potential customers are going to be thinking the same thing.
I read all these Poe's predictions many years ago in physic books. Before Poe, Plato came to same solutions with thought experiments.

Extremely interesting, read the all article.
For more about the [0] Olbers' Paradox you should also read the wiki page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27s_paradox
> I am looking forward to dabble in SaaS. I want to create something for which market already exists. Should I create a clone of any popular SaaS with rock-bottom pricing?

Certainly. Do you have the domain knowledge of why it's already been created? Do you know all the problems it's trying to solve? Do you know other problems it may solve?

That last part is important. Even if you clone an existing app, you may see other uses for it. Now develop that other functionality and you are better than your competitor.

As for rock bottom pricing. Well this will only get you so far. Need to hire support? Can the business now support itself? Nope? Oops, need to raise pricing now.

Also marketing, can the business pay for that and sustain it, to keep on getting new customers? Nope? Oops, now need to determine pricing to support marketing.

> Would I be able attract customers?

Anything can attract potential customers, converting them is another story. You may have rock bottom pricing, but that may actually turn a segment off. Will you still be there in 6 months? What's your stance on privacy? What will you do with my data?

A big thing, is why they should use you, compared to similar saas products.

If I may ask, what is the SaaS product you are looking to clone?
Handling bot attacks against a Tor hidden service
Interesting, thanks! Ordered a copy.
How to Be Part of Virtual Design Master Season 5
discussion a few months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295975
My.02. If your selling point is "I'm cheaper than X", then it doesn't worth it IMO. Think about how you can deliver added value to the solution and maybe you can steal some customers.
And some $100+/hour consulting/maintenance, of course.
Please :-)

Here are the documentation links to get you started:

Hardware: https://github.com/madcowswe/ODriveHardware/

v3.2 schematic: https://github.com/madcowswe/ODriveHardware/blob/master/v3/v...

Firmware: https://github.com/madcowswe/ODriveFirmware

PC config and analysis support: https://github.com/madcowswe/ODrive

FPGA: https://github.com/madcowswe/ODriveFPGA "... the FPGA logic and software that runs on the FPGA based ODrive. This is not currently in development, but may be resumed at some later date."

----

The hardware is based on a STM32F405RGT6[1] driving two TI DRV8301 brushless motor controller chips[2] and a bunch of MOSFETs to handle the power switching. I/O is a USB, CAN with driver chip, and SPI unbuffered on headers.

[1] High-performance foundation line, ARM Cortex-M4 core with DSP and FPU, 1 Mbyte Flash, 168 MHz CPU, ART Accelerator
http://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers/stm32f405rg.html

[2] DRV8301 Three-Phase Gate Driver With Dual Current Shunt Amplifiers and Buck Regulator
http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/drv8301.pdf
I only have second hand experience with Instagram, but it feels they got product placement right. I regularly see people asking where they could buy the dresses/accessories/gifts featured in the photos, actively following brands instead of blocking what ads shovel in their face.
This issue gets worse if you use multiple such services. Alone they’re worth it, but combined...

IRCCloud (4$) + ngrok (10$) + some free libre email provider (5$) + 1TB cloud storage (10-12$) + ...

The combined cost for me is enough that it’s cheaper to rent a dedicated octacore xeon with 16G ram, 250G SSD and 1TB HDD and unlimited traffic with a 1Gbps line[1], and run my own services. In fact, I pay less than 50% of what I’d pay for the services, I have far more performance, and can offer these services to 10 people at no cost, and still come in better.

These services might be worth it if you’re in SV, but 10$/mo is something different to a person earning 300k$/year in SV, and to a student earning 8k$/year somewhere else.

________________________

[1] Server price and performance comparisons between several hosters, previously featured on HN: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...
Solid advice, thanks!

Hadn't really considered that the company might like to replace me with another, cheaper student. I do, however, consider my position guaranteed for at least the year's end, but I suppose that's what everyone says before they get let go..

One of the main advantages that I see in zero-hour contracts (=less time spent on the job) would give me more opportunities to participate in i.e. open source, since I'd probably not be too exhausted after a work day. This, I think, would contribute more to my growth than stagnating in the current job too much. Of course, there is the risk that the increased spare time would not be spent on anything even remotely useful.

I agree that it might make sense that it could be best to change the company, but that's something I'm not ready to do, at least in the near future. The current projects are too cool for that
> but at least it's 100% your own infrastructure

This is probably a good thing for security. But for the use case of development against third party services, it seems like an unnecessary constraint.
That's where new generations disagree with you :)
In my experience, it often means variables that are used before they are initialized, or dangling pointers.
Ask HN: What developer jobs will be most linux compatible?
I have been working as a enterprise software developer for a while now and keep getting more and more offers regarding Windows-specific jobs (.NET, SQL server, etc.) As a long time linux user that loves his dotfiles and his vim workflow in the terminal: What areas should I look into to get jobs that offer more freedom regarding the platform and tools that have to be used?
I'm a software engineer trying to learn hardware. I noticed in the article, the author drew some schematics.

These days, I don't use UML to write apps (everything in my head as I do everything myself anyway, and sometimes I write comments and unit tests), but I remember it being useful during my early days of programming.

I'm thinking, since this is my early days of hardware, I should use write schematics (just like I did with UML). Is that a good idea? Where to get started?
> because Node doesn't really bring anything new on the table

You can't write a production grade web socket server in PHP. and no ReactPHP isn't my definition of production grade. If your app is real time you just can't use PHP for that.

So yes, Node brings something new to the table.
"Losing a step" makes me think you are thinking about stepper motors, which can be a problem, but for brushless motors it's a bit more complicated than that, since we don't drive them in the same stepwise fashion.
does this mean that it can be triggered by a web browser ?
And here's the documentation for future generations! :P
Wouldn't the crew be long disolved?
Good news and bad news for you.

Good news: You want to create something for a market that already exists. Good.

Bad news: You assume that cheaper pricing will make you win. Not even close.

There are tons of SAAS clones out there for every successful saas. Do you know how many Trello clones are out there ? Slack ? What matters is your ability to execute and sell. Cheaper pricing is one small factor that may get you a few clients but in order to run it as a successful business, you will need a lot more things. Some checklist:

- What significant advantage are you offering over existing ones that you are cloning ? Please tell me pricing is not the only differentiator. Most clients won't care. Trust me.

- What is the reputation of your company ? Even if you are starting out, you need to show that people can trust you.

- How easy is your UI/UX ? Are you creating a better clone or a worse clone ?

- Can you win on customer support ? Lot of people want to switch from their current provider due to customer support. Pricing does influence that decision but not a whole lot.
From their website:

As a word, AKASHA ( [aːkaːʃə], आकाश) has roots in Sanskrit and means “ether” in both its elemental and metaphysical senses.
The ancient Sanskrit-speaking civilization envisioned akasha as a metaphysical information network connecting humanity with itself and infinite knowledge. In this paradigm, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and experiences are stored forever and shared through the ether, which acts as an universal field connecting multiple planes of existence.
Thousands of years later we have created a modern information network openly connecting humans with each other and perpetual knowledge.
As a decentralized application AKASHA deploys a next-generation information architecture born from the fusion of Ethereum and the Inter-Planetary File System. Thanks to these technologies we were able to create a planetary-scale information network immune to censorship by design, where your thoughts and ideas will echo throughout humanity’s existence.
Nice work! I've been a huge fan of workflowy for quite a lot of time (and VIM), and this seems like a very interesting project. Cheers!

p.s. kudos for open sourcing it
If there's a prevailing opinion that the existing popular SaaS is overpriced, you might get some traction. Especially if there's currently little competition.

On the other hand, if you go too low, you won't attract the same customers. You'll get a more miserly crowd that is comparing it to running something themselves on a cheap VPS. They won't be easy to deal with, and will come and go.

I get that being more specific is hard if you're trying to keep the idea to yourself. But, I suspect the answer is very specific to what SaaS you're considering competing against.
People having bills is irrelevant to consumers. If your product pricing relies on pitching a sob story about how you're a small indy developer, you've failed.
Wouldn't the sailors have a grave elsewhere? I don't think place of death (or last known location since many would abandon ship prior to death) qualifies as a grave.

The first thought that came to my mind was that the scavengers are cleaning up a small part of the pollution in the oceans.
That's a bit of an over simplification, but for a hobbyist application, sure.

You are absolutely right that the encoder is a BIG part of your system design, but the motor quality will make a difference. If you are doing something like a robotic arm, or slow speed motor control, you don't just care about encoder ticks, you also start caring about things like torque ripple in the motor if you want decent motion quality, regardless of how good your encoder is!
Price is the least relevant variable.
he's pushing for immigration and criminal justice reform: https://www.fwd.us
Consider if you will be fulfilled by selling a commodity.

It's a race to the bottom and unprofitable users often demand the same level of attention and support as ones who pay more.

Also think about hidden costs. The other company might be priced as they are for a reason.

Is it a product where differentiating on price is something that would even matter to the user? The difference in price would be enough to choose you over the competition?
Then they are trained wrong. It is imperative that cops--the people who patrol the neighborhoods our children play in, who are the first response to a (usually harmless) mentally ill person violating social norms, who are the recourse of overwhelmed parents with unruly children--it is imperative that cops are approachable, amicable, empathic, and reasonable.
Seems great for little enhanced sensors and things in between tiny and "just run Linux and call it IoT"
It will definitely be interesting to see how public internet providers (airports, coffee shops, etc) handle IPv6 in the future. Will they leave their LAN_IN firewall open and leave filtering to the client, or will we keep the status quo and filter at the router?
What's the difference between scrap metal and historically significant sites?

The Neolithic stone circle at Avebury, Wiltshire, had several stones removed by local villages who wanted stone to build cottages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury

In the centre of this screen, just south of Tunnel House In, you can see a square outline in a field. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Coates,+Cirencester/@51....

That's a Roman camp. It's been ploughed over (it's just a field) and unscrupulous metal detectorists have plundered the site: http://www.bgas.org.uk/tbgas_bg/v119/bg119083.pdf

People taking this metal from sunken ships aren't just cleaning up a mess, they're destroying historical information.

And who knows what stuff is on the ships (oil, fuel) that isn't being properly cleaned up, just dumped into the ocean?
Yes, somebody should scan all the links on YC for autoplaying videos and ads, rate the severity and provide the results via an API so that one can use a greasemobkeyscript/browser extension to highlight all the shitty links.
Advertising in the real world is unquestionably negative. Almost all advertising works by creating a sense of lack where none previously existed, or co-opting your decision making process by creating gratuitous associations. Advertising that accurately reflects the merits of a product in an unbiased way doesn't "work".

I am not opposed to the idea of advertising, but what we have now is really a form of manipulation rather than information.
The fundamental equation you need to get right in SaaS (esp in a bootstrapped business) is to have a customer lifetime value that's vastly higher than your customer acquisition costs. Lower prices than your competitors mean that you'll also need to be able to get customers at much lower customer acquisition costs. This is A LOT harder than one might think.

Worse, and contrary to popular opinion, lower pricing _does not_ necessarily mean lower customer acquisition costs in SaaS!

Are you a marketing/growth expert with a proven track record of doing just that? If no, prepare for years of learning a lot of fundamental basics the hard way. If yes, well, do get in touch with me! ;)

Another aspect to consider is that, assuming you're looking at B2B, lower pricing doesn't mean that your product will be more attractive to B2B buyers. If anything, you'll often find that the opposite is true.