skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Need help narrowing down micro-SaaS idea
I've narrowed down my micro-SaaS idea to the following:

-B2B for non-technical customers
-Something customers already pay for
-Preferably something I have some domain knowledge in
-Simplified/dumbed-down app for a niche within a lucrative market
-Something I can code part-time and get off the ground on my own

I'm considering 2 ideas:

1) Scheduling app for business with shift workers, specifically restaurants

2) Online rent collection without the bloat for small property owners/accidental landlords

Only reason I chose 1 is that I work at a restaurant. We use HotSchedules. It's actually pretty good, space is kind of crowded, but I guess I'll try to differentiate on UI/UX.

2 is something I might use personally too, as now I'm living in a property that uses the "mail a check each month" system for rent. There are tons of solutions out there, but I suspect there's an under-served market of non-technical landlords that find the full-suite solutions overwhelming and just want a "set up once, forget about it" online system. Just a theory.

When I browse the forums, seems like landlords really only care about online rent collection and applicant screening, while the rest are "good to haves" (e.g. maintenance requests, property listing, bookkeeping, etc.). I'm planning to build an MVP with just the online rent collection feature first, charge per transaction, try to differentiate on UI/UX.

Am I crazy to just basically dedicate months to creating stripped-down clones of existing solutions and think that it's possible to get traction regardless? Am I wrong to think that, you don't need to be significantly better (or even better) than existing competitors to get some market share? I'm not trying to "win" here, just trying to build up a good number of customers to live off of.

I guess the essential question is, can I do fewer features with simpler UI and still get some customers for me as a solo founder who wants location-independent income?
I was talking to a guy who worked at a hydroponic store.

He said they had to have armored guards at the store, because the thieves knew there was a good chance the customers were paying cash so the store carried a lot of cash and the customers did also.

I personally like cash, but there are some risks. Especially if you're in somewhat marginalized portions of society, cash is replete so robbers are attracted.
Berea Computer Science alumn here. Ask me anything.

I grew up in Appalachia (pronounced "app-uh-lai-cha" by us), and have to say Berea was a godsend. I was lucky to start as desktop support and move on to a network engineer later. The labor program is probably the only reason why I became a somewhat competent programmer out of college, since I was writing "production" code before having my first real full time job. You can read more about the labor program here[1]

The college is very particular about your time there, since it's free and all, so your first year you're not allowed to have a car on campus, enter the opposite sex's dorm rooms, and (in some cases) you're tasked with a job that you may or may not like. Some of this may or may not have changed in the past 10 years. Most people hear this and think, "that's crazy," as I did at the time, but as I've grown older -- I've grown to appreciate it.

Another interesting thing is how forward thinking the community is in the town of Berea. Kentucky isn't the friendliest for being a moderate or liberal, but (I would say) Berea is probably the friendliest community I've ever been apart of. It's a place where you can having engaging discussions and make friends at local establishments (BC&T[2] being my favorite).

With regards to the article, the endowment, and replicating the model -- it would be hard. The college runs itself efficiently while maintaining a high quality of education and student services. Replicating this model elsewhere would mean cutting many staff, removing the luxuries that many people enjoy and most likely lowering salaries. Lower salaries work in Berea because the cost of living is so low; however, that's not the case in many areas and no one is going to volunteer themselves for a salary cut.

The labor program has a lot of infrastructure around it (payroll, staff, processing incoming students) that would be hard to replicate. I think existing universities would have to run a program within or alongside their work-study programs and grow it overtime.

1 - https://www.berea.edu/labor-program-office/a-guide-to-the-la...

2 - https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g39187-d222579... ( Seems that they don't have a website )
Even the best batter in the league goes to batting practice, studies what other good batters do, takes advice from coaches, some will likely study sports science literature themselves (rather than relying on coaches doing that for them). Batters will always want to think of ways to improve their mechanics, and will always want an "edge" over pitchers, and pitchers vary in their techniques.

The great hitters from decades ago did not have access to video footage of themselves, their rivals, and opposing pitchers, for example. So while some of them were exceptionally skilled at hitting baseballs (and not just home runs) (and also running bases and being competent in field positions usually) they were not really experts for want of a body of rigorous literature.

Conversely, one can of course have sub-major-league skills but enormous expertise -- there are batting coaches and sports science academics after all, and even popular analysts. And sports skills decay with age.

Nobel-prize-winning scientists can get senile dementia too; sadly that not just wrecks their skills, it also wrecks their expertise as they forget much of what they've read and studied.
No problem. I missed that it was a multiple page list in the first place and missed the "Slim Fast" name altogether.
I don’t think this is how discrimination works.
Belgian Air Force F-16 destroyed by fire during maintenance
Why BTC Doublers are all scams
>... their recommendations are practically always uninteresting.

I've had Amazon recommend books that I've previously purchased from them.
Well played. Now, what percentage of people were in local jails for drug possession? Pre- and post-conviction?
Something is not "useless" because it is only "useful" to a portion of the population. Floppy disks were a useful tool for file sharing in the 1990s, but not amongst people who didn't own computers.
because you could do all that and more with apache modules, the reason people switched was because nginx didnt get bogged down in all that.

imho its keyword engineering, but you can see given the history why nginx adopters aren't thinking that way.
I have Emacs, why bother with other limited editors?
Emacs can do what they do + far, far more so...
And 10 years later, sharing stuff with people nearby still kinda sucks.

1. Instant Messaging Apps work for photos and contacts, but it's stupid that you need to transfer things via cloud (makes everything hellish slow when the network isn't fast)

2. Airdrop works only between Apple Devices, and when the stars are aligned just right. Other devices might appear, or they might not. If it works, it's fast.

3. USB drives are still the easiest way to share anything between computers. (SMB / AFS / NFS / SCP / rsync are all annoying to set up and always seem to fail for hard to debug reasons)

I think the opportunity for something like Bump is still there, but it seems that most people just don't care enough about the inconvenience....
Censys Subdomain Finder – Perform Subdomain Enumeration Using the Certifica
Every cannabis store has at least 1 ATM inside, and a common transaction involves a trip to the ATM. When the ATM goes down, the store basically shuts down - they have to send people down the street to the nearest ATM, and some customers of course just goto another shop with a working ATM.
How many of them sold fake blood tests to real patients? I think fraud is one thing, putting up a successful facade is not quite fraud.
A good software architect writes code every day? (Twitter poll)
Microsoft Store: The Surface Pro Tablet and Its Keyboard at $799 – SoWiseup
LOL. I quoted 120 an hour, and the response I got was "120 an hour?! thats what we bill at!"

Yeah dumbass. 120 an hour, the bare minimum, for a small company, where I'm not gauranteed shit.

The next comment was even worse "you don't have any overhead!"

To which I replied, "Yes, but I'ld like to get some. So if I don't budget it out, I won't ever get it."

Then I correct him, by telling him 120 was my minimum. Depending on the work, it could be higher.

I dipped to 65, on a multi-month project ("discounted rate for large block of time"). But that was a one-off for that customer.

Rule of thumb is 1:6; but its more like 1:8. So that 120 an hour, is more like earning 15 bucks an hour. And that assuming a full schedule. Sometimes I get clients who try to cheap out, and give x hours per week; to which I just raise my rates.

If you can't afford to pay real wages; or more likely, treat all your employees like shit and skim their salaries to make mega bucks - fuck off.
"As the article you linked clearly states the data is anonymized and cannot be tied to individuals."

You should never believe that for two reasons:

1. Companies often get away with lying about that.

2. De-anonymization techniques, esp if having multiple sources of data to cross-compare, are improving every year thanks to an active, research community.

Most incentives work against your privacy. Most companies act on incentives. Best to just not share your data if you're concerned about where it might end up.
What IP are they protecting? I think the problem is there was no IP. Ever.
check out the story about TRX founder regarding this. You can listen to the How I Built This podcast about it, pretty interesting
There have been intellectually interesting conversations on such topics in the past, though I grant you that they are both rare and precarious. It wouldn't be good for HN to exclude such topics altogether, endless problems though they lead to.
Short of reducing the transaction dataset to purchase amounts and dates, or simply respecting customers privacy and not transferring this data, Mastercard is not anonymizing this data.

Google is using this data to link online ads they display with in store purchases, thus Mastercard is giving them enough data that they can correlate who views an ad from Google's ad network with their in store purchase. Partial names would suffice for this purchase, combined with store location for the transaction, one could de-anonymize most customers in a given dataset by correlating using freely available datasets like the state voter registry (which often provides full names, addresses, elections voted in & more).

Nevermind that Google has location data for Android users (and Google Maps data on Android), and better profiles of people than the voter database has. Their attempts at user de-anonymization will likely be even more accurate.
To get into Berea your family has to meet financial requirements[1]. Translated: "you're poor enough." So, the common background of everyone on campus is pretty humble.

There will be jerks anywhere-- that's a given. But, I can assure you that most of all graduates who come from Berea are very grateful to the institution especially given the insane rate at which tuition continues to increase.

Since it's a liberal arts program, writing and reasoning are a core part of the curriculum. I would say by virtue of going through the program, you're able to better appreciate it at the end. I think learning about the world at an age when your views are malleable is more meaningful than learning about compilers.

1- https://www.berea.edu/admissions/financial-requirement/
I'm one of those people who hug their glass of water, finds a cozy (i.e. devoid of people) corner, and pretends something is very important in their phone. The few contacts I had from those events were never helpful, and I'm not a kind of person to keep an Excel and reach out to people on schedule pretending I care. (I understand there are people who do care, I'm just not this type.)

I found the best way for me to meet new people is... smoking a pipe. It's a greatly enjoyable hobby by itself, and it always draws people at least to comment on the smell or ask me something like "hey, where do you get this stuff?" (I'm in China and naked tobacco is illegal here... go figure). Once the ice is broken, I feel much better about having a conversation. It also helps that most people who are interested in the pipe are somewhat relatable.
> I didn't know creating a 3rd table to track Reputation/Likes between a user and a Story is a database concept called 'Joint Table'.

That's a major problem. Table joins are the most basic concept in relational databases. A so called developer who puts together a database but isn't even aware of table joins is someone who didn't even browsed through a basic SQL tutorial and is completely oblivious to concepts such as database normalization.

To put it in perspective, it's like claiming you are a proficient developer but are oblivious to the use of if statements.

If you're really interested in software development and web services I'd suggest you invest a couple of hours learning the basics of relational databases, including a brief intro to normalization. That is mandatory if you want to avoid more accusations of incompetence.
> Get a rock, water, and a heat source and wait a few million years...

And you get a warm, wet rock.

Statistics, probability theory and physics don't work like that. You can't arrive at the conclusion by stating a premise and wishful thinking.
Of course, but if it was public, that would decrease the value of any individual's pain-stakingly produced copy. Maybe try open-sourcing it on a Google Sheet?
No Wesley snipes was arrested. She was not arrested. There was no trial or due process. Did you skip over that part.
In short: "because science", quite literally.

Astronomers are scientists, they don't make shit up just out of boredom, they only believe theories when they've withstood rigorous testing through observational evidence.

It's important to understand the history of dark matter / "missing matter". It's a multi-decade history that originally started out with a small amount of intriguing but seemingly persistent observational data that couldn't be explained easily (namely that when you measure how much galaxies weigh by looking at how fast the stars are orbiting that figure differs a lot from the weight you get by calculating up the contribution from all the stars and gas and dust and whatnot that we can see (the "light" matter)). In response a huge number of different "theories" (more properly hypothesis) were brought up to try to explain the mystery, while new ways of studying the problem were thought up as well.

And over the many years after the initial evidence came to light (in the '70s) considerably more evidence came to light from a wide diversity of observations. I won't list them here but I'll point out that the wikipedia page on dark matter has a good run down. Anyway, the fascinating twist to the story here is that as this evidence came to light it started eliminating various hypotheses about this missing matter until finally only one was left: the current theory of dark matter. It's not just a crazy idea, it's a crazy idea that fits all of the evidence when nothing else did.

So don't look at the WIMP dark matter theory as though it's just some half-baked idea, it's a hard fought veteran of numerous campaigns to kill it, but it just keeps going because by all the evidence it seems to be the only theory that explains reality.

As to specifically the "modified gravity" theories that compete with dark matter, they have a hard time explaining several observed phenomena, especially things like the famed "Bullet Cluster". There are a few examples where we can observe collisions between galaxy clusters and through different techniques we can map out the distribution of stars and of gas and of mass in the collision. What we observe in the Bullet Cluster as well as some others is that the gas is in a completely different place than the stars (because stars in galaxies mostly pass through one another whereas gas clouds squish together) and the center of mass of the stars of the galaxies is separated from the center of the non-visible mass of the galaxies. This absolutely cannot be explained by any of the modified gravity theories.
With regard to #2, I covered in my comment to the poster your replying to that correlating partial names and the store location with registered voters from your state's freely available voter registry would de-anonymize most transactions in the dataset.

Nevermind that Google has location data for Android users (and Google Maps data on Android), and better profiles of people than the voter database has. Their attempts at user de-anonymization will likely be even more accurate.
She wasnt arrested. She disappears with no due process.
I think you're missing an 'I' or 'for me' in there somewhere. Lots of people find airdrop useful.
Looking at it, that‘s probably where I got it from, thanks for finding!
Me too. I know I'm a nerd now...
Very good point! I happen to roll down windows every time I start up my car for another reason (the air trapped inside the car while it's parked, probably under sunshine, doesn't feel great to breathe in), but you're totally right that the sound gives a lot more clues than just seeing, when backing out of a spot.
All: if you post in this thread, please avoid two scourges: (1) comments on the evils of communism or the opposite—we've all heard it a million times and nothing new on it will ever come out of an internet forum. (2) any trace of nationalistic flamebait from any side.

I'm putting up this banner because every thread related to China has been degenerating badly lately. The idea of HN is to avoid such "night in which all cows are black" threads, so please stick to specifics.
Slightly off topic, but is there a resource for slightly less scientific minds to understand the universe as seen by those who do. I get an impression reading here and there that are theories to describe start and end of the universe (Or the limitations of human mind to grasp the concept of it), but I give up the moment I see too much of mathematics.
Some thoughts:

- I agree with the notion but I don’t think it’s only because it’s cheap. It’s also about speed. Some projects take ages at large companies no matter how much you throw at them

- that’s the reason they havin PMF before you get funding is key. Show the models works and then get money for scaling the business

- I imagine getting VC money for a moonshot is great though when you don’t need to get rich anymore. See Musk
We're huge fans of C interfaces on the sever side. https://kore.io is our preferred stack.

It's primary interface is C. In our opinion, it's lighter weight, and simpler to integrate with your app.
Ok how's this for cute: https://www.nabaztag.com/#karotz

These things really make me mad - the nabaztag I mean, because of the wasted potential. I bought one, my kid loved it, it's super cute wonderful. The api sucks, most of the things didn't work, it has a built in RSS reader (evidently, but the RSS reader supposedly works by compiling the feed down into an application and downloading that and executing it and none of the feeds I tried to get to work [that they recommended] ever worked). aaaarggghhh, really the design of the thing is wonderful. It should take over the world, by the design, but the functionality made it so it didn't do so.

I mean I hate it so much and I am still tempted to buy a new one despite the things that were messed up because 1. those things that were messed up might be fixed by now, they were not insurmountable. Some of them were really the easy bits.
2. the things that did work showed just really good design ideas.

I want one again, but I also want not to feel screwed over.
If your driving a car 5+ years old that was $30k or less, a small nick such as the one I mentioned isn't apt to be repaired. All one is trying to do is satiate the party that had their car damaged, and that is generally possible for a fairly reasonable cost.
What’s the difference to bombing weddings, hospitals, schools etc.? Can you prove that it was intentional?
It will be more difficult finding an excuse for killing a journalist in an embassy in a somewhat peaceful country
Spreadsheet of Steven Pinker’s book recommendations
Cisco fears Australian encryption bill will lead to creation of backdoors
there's plenty of scenarios where the apple users in a room comprise "almost everyone".
Here is a "commentable" copy of the sheet.
(also easier to make a copy of)

http://bit.do/pinker-fav-books
> it still takes VP of engineering approval to get a second $700 monitor because "policy says employees only get a single monitor"

This is a bit shocking for a tech startup. In a crappy backwards bank that was my last job everybody got as many monitors as they wanted, without putting in any request (there was always a pile of new monitors available, you only needed to notify the admin that you're grabbing one). Some people even got five of them.
Negative interest rates and sound monetary policy - allow me to invoke the Chinese ambassador talking to Nixon on that one..
McLuhan's Understanding Media is a seminal work and one of the books that most shaped my thinking. "Electric Speed is synonymous with light and with the understanding of causes..." That line inspired the name for the Internet consulting company I formed in 1999, and espeed has been my online handle ever since.

At no period in human culture have men understood
the psychic mechanisms involved in invention and
technology. Today it is the instant speed of electric
information that, for the first time, permits easy
recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of
change and development. The entire world, past and
present, now reveals itself to us like a growing plant
in an enormously accelerated movie. Electric speed is
synonymous with light and with the understanding of
causes.

— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
This is the environment governments create and also proves it is in human nature. It would be like banning sex and then be amazed how much STD are around.
Really. I have busted my apartment complex having "pre-written" the move out report, complete with thousands of dollars of cleaning "required", before we had the inspection. They just made the mistake of leaving it on the PM's desk in sight of me.
Checking in from Cisco, its unfortunately all open space here now
https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=533980744:534132874
> It seems pretty strange that they can do this. How does copyright even apply here, other than for the defendant? If I buy a book [...]

It might be significant that in this case it is not a book. Copyright is a bundle of different rights, and some of them usually only come up for certain kinds of media.

In particular, one of the rights in the bundle is the right to publicly perform the work. Perhaps broadcasting playing the game could violate the performance right?

> Could someone prevent you from running a service where someone mails you a book, you cut out some pages and replace them, and then mail it back? I don't think so.

I wouldn't be so sure. Here are two cases, both involving a company that apparently buys works of art, mounts them on ceramic, and sells the result.

In the first case [1] they bought books containing good quality prints, removed the prints from the book, mounted each print separately, and sold the tiles separately.

The 9th Circuit found that this was a derivative work and was infringing.

In the second case [2] it was apparently again the same company buying and mounting art. This time the works they bought and mounted and sold were notecards and small lithographs. The 7th Circuit said that this was not a derivative work and not infringing.

[1] https://openjurist.org/856/f2d/1341/mirage-editions-inc-v-al...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/125_F3d_580.htm