skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my (uninvited) observations:

You seem to have a strong focus on persona's: makers, bloggers, designers, agencies. But have you actually checked if these specific target groups need a service like yours? And if they are willing to pay for it?

The vast majority of makers, bloggers and designers, arguably will use cloud services or platforms to get their content out. Those who do host their own website, probably are either tech savvy, or rely on a third party to take care of the operational side. Agencies either go with dedicated hosting parties who include monitoring services in their SLA's already.

There's also this weird spread between individuals - bloggers, makers, designers - and agencies, which is a totally different market.

You are competing with others who offer the same service either as a part of their offering or as a separate offering but better and far more focussed. Like these guys:

https://ohdear.app/

For instance, you offer basic monitoring, but you also add this concept of "snapshots" and it's entirely unclear how that tacks onto monitoring. Moreover, you're vaguely stating "Coddle will help you check that your work looks tight on various different devices." and "You can choose to take snapshots with a variety of different device options too. Perhaps you could use some of these in your marketing and designs too?" So, what are you offering here to prospective clients?

The other guys simply solve one single question through 6 distinct parameters: Is my site still up? Yes or no? That's it. It's crystal clear what they do.

They focus on the quality of their service. Do one thing, but execute it to a T. For instance, by offering all kinds of API integrations for their uptime monitoring service with push notifications.

Then there's the pricing. It's unclear if those prices are per month, week or year. Also, how does the "checks frequencey" make any difference to the customer? And what does "check logs" mean? What are you actually selling here?

Moreover, the other guys offer their service - 50 sites - for 25% cheaper then yours. Plus, their pricing contains far more tiers to cater to different segments of the market.

Notice also how they don't differentiate their users. It doesn't matter who you are. The only differentiator they have: do you have this problem? Yes / No. If yes, then this is what we offer without thrills.

I don't endorse Oh Dear app. It was the first thing that came to my mind when I clicked on your link. I think you might find it useful to see a comparison on how that might help you in the future.

I think my biggest tip would be to clearly define which problem your solving, make sure you ruthlessly stick to the scope (does it help solve the problem) - no matter how interesting tech like snapshots might be - and you make sure your communication / marketing is unambiguous about the solution you provide.
Mapping Wikipedia
“He who makes mountain out of mole hill should open ski resort in Kansas” A. Nonymous :)
Exactly. No different than gambling. Stick to no fee mutuals and other balanced investments.
> Bipolar insights have no value whatsoever.

I love the extreme tension this sentence creates. Both within itself and with the rest of the authors post.
>Record low unemployment

The actual, real rate of unemployment is called "Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate" and covers all adults (16 or older) who are not working.

As you can see from the diagram on the BLS website, the participation rate is ~ 63% which is close to the lowest level in 40+ years.

Booming economy, for FAANG and Wall Street, perhaps. Just barely off the lows for most people, though.

https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
There are two mutually exclusive views of the web. As a set of protocols to allow individual humans to share information about things they love and the web as a set of protocols to make a living.

There are real reasons for the for-profit web to want to limited cert lifetimes since revocation doesn't really work in practice. In terms of browser dev the two views are mutually exclusive and the one that funds the coders gets it's way. Especially with the W3C marginalized and a mix of corporations and corporate-centric standards groups running things now. Expect to eventually be unable to host a visitable or indexable website without relying on at least one third party service in the near future.
There was a time where this got so bad at one company, that I was getting neurotic. To put an order of magnitude on it, my mentor got fired for calling out his boss on some of the demo-ware shipping bullshit.

Before this all came to a head, I started doing proof of concept work as command line only. This allowed me to give them estimates they had to listen to, instead of them just assuming that because they could see a UI that we could just pretty it up and ship it next month. Clearly, they reasoned (as if anything they did resembled reason) my two to three month estimate was sandbagging and it was okay to tell the customer we’re almost done.
https://www.scanfortable.com/

No traction so far most likely because of founder not good at sales.
That's extremely serious for China's economy, and the world's.

It's highly likely that China will be in recession this year, which is basically unheard of since the death of Mao, with ripple effects throughout the world. Obviously we also need to watch the risk of political instability on China as a result.
I have found you need a queue in front of ES for better write reliability, more so than other DBs. The read/aggregation performance is fantastic though.

Also, you should know a little about GC tuning too
We have both, and I'm really glad we do. A good QA team tests more than just "funtionality" and "usability" -- they test the product in its entirety, and notice all sorts of things that non-QA people would miss. Our QA people also often poke the database and look at REST request/responses too. I think going without this kind of full spectrum testing is just shooting yourself in the foot. You can totally do continuous delivery but still use a QA team.
Also published at:
https://paulosman.me/2019/12/30/production-oriented-developm...
It's more about the difficulty, but the cost is a part of it. People without a lot of money aren't going to go to the trouble of opening a brokerage to invest 200, 400, maybe $2000 dollars. Keep in mind you used to have to go to a physical brokerage or get on a call with an online firm before you could trade.

When it's an app, and you can do it all from your couch, maybe that makes it worth it.
We understand FreeHugs comment, that's why we keep on improving it.
There’s room for improvement. I’d start with the typography. While it’s not cheap, Typewolf’s Flawless Typography Checklist is an incredible tool for sprucing up designs (https://www.typewolf.com/checklist). Once you’ve refreshed the typography, take a look at these design tips from Steve Schoger (https://twitter.com/i/events/994601867987619840). His book, Refactoring UI is also a solid reference.
Just going to chime in with a slightly tangential issue. It's sad to see that many threads like this are being suppressed on HN (probably just from lack of interest). I have to use the HN search tool to find them.

From what I can tell, there are lots of smug "it's just the flu" takes prevalent in the mainstream of HN commentary.

Sad, because I think there is lots of interesting discussion that could be happening around various facets of this outbreak.
Sadly, it may be the taxpayers who will no doubt have to bail out people who speculated, just as they did during the real estate bubble, the dot-com bubble, etc.

(Yes, the Government forgave capital gains taxes on stock options for speculator-investors who claimed not to understand the tax event caused by exercising options but not selling them.)
Well, you could also start from scratch multiple times and get better and faster each time, as you learn more things. And in the end you get a more fitting design for the final learnings.
Basically the same article had been run every year for the past decade. Each time it is accompanied by statements of fact about the biggest economies. Even if this time is true, they regularly push the doom and gloom angle.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy because they always predict it's comimg, ignoring when they're wrong.
"We extend the capabilities of neural networks by coupling them to external memory resources, which they can interact with by attentional processes. The combined system is analogous to a Turing Machine or Von Neumann architecture but is differentiable end-to-end, allowing it to be efficiently trained with gradient descent. Preliminary results demonstrate that Neural Turing Machines can infer simple algorithms such as copying, sorting, and associative recall from input and output examples." https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5401.pdf
The average "mom and pop" investor can give 2 craps about trade execution. An execution price with a 20bps delta is MEANINGLESS to them.
If a certificate never expires, revocation lists have to grow without bound forever.

If a certificate expires, revocation lists only have to hold revoked certificates that haven't expired.
I've been running a very shitty threaded message board for years ("running" being a very loose term - I mean it's still there). There is a parallel facebook group that exists solely to tell me when I've f'd up.

The people still on it, are the people who use it as a "separate space" to all the rest of the bazillion dollar alternatives - hellbent on shoving adverts, tracking and all the rest.

I'm only going off on this tangent, as maybe what appears to be lack of traction, could also be (if you squint hard) a benefit. Could you cookie-cutter out instances of your product?

If you can, then maybe you could position it as a micro-ecosystem for events people don't immediately want to integrate into their existing mega-social world.

e.g. Weddings.
Could on-board all people invited to the app (click this link to say if you're going or not), let them get to know each other a bit first, share photos they took of the event, plan stag events, enter dietary requirements, link to the wedding list, buy a nice photo from the official photographer, send a message to that bridesmaid you thought you were getting on well with, click on faces in photos to see who they are etc etc.
It seems plausible that it's mostly the former. Kind of like gambling: if you know you're going to lose $20 just for playing, you have to be significantly more confident in your ability to win than if you don't have to lose anything just for playing.

The article cites some random blue-collar worker who makes a good point: trade costs mean you're paying basically 7% in fees on smaller stuff, which is what most "Mom and Pop" investors can afford. Nobody wants to do that.
> It’s easier to build something once you know what you want than it is while you’re discovering what you want.

Oh absolutely. Thing is, in my case, what was needed was clearly defined since the beginning. It's the "developers" who built it who were incompetent af.
There are only two outcomes of Google acquiring CreditKarma and neither of them are good.

A) Google shuts it down or neglects it like it has done with so many other products

B) Google now has more information on users to target advertising and now has an even larger part of the duopoly on advertising and has more information about users - including social security numbers and credit information.

I don’t see how either is a good outcome.
If the trade is free you increase trade volume. Say fair weather stock investors come out an play, the more they trade the more they usually lose, and the more they need to refill their trading accounts from their hard earned Money.
Why not?

A growing part of Google's business relies on b2b transactions. Are you also concerned that you're going to suddenly have to subscribe to search?
Now featured in "The Startup". Feedback appreciated!
That post doesn't come across as anything but pure elitism, it makes no real point and just claims "yeah system and free fonts are just worse".

Fonts like Roboto, Fira, Open Sans, Ubuntu, Merriweather or Vollkorn are all "professional grade" font families with lots of variants and options. Basic typesetting knowledge is going to get you much much further than buying a random professional font if you're designing "a document".
In my experience, the vast majority of error handling has been essentially limited to bubbling the error up, cleaning up unmanaged resources, and either re-trying the operation with some back-out logic or giving some details to the user about what happened and letting them decide what the best thing is.

I have very rarely seen something useful to be done by code automatically to recover from an error, other then re-trying. As such, I feel that the way Go makes you constantly write error-handling code is counter-productive, since it forces you to think about something that really doesn't need that much thinking about.

And as I said earlier, the deluge of non-handling error handling code can serve to mask the rare cases where errors are actually handled in some tricky intelligent way.
yep, downvotes as expected. God forbid we express any meta commentary about potential blind spots/biases in this community.
Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? (1981)
I'd suggest making it a little more generic and targeting the agriculture space. Have templates for animal alerts etc but also days without rain when plants need to be watered, etc. You might get more usage from busy people trying to have a backyard garden than more professional farmers that have already solved this problem.

And email doesn't cut it as an alert mechanism. You'd need to support both SMS and have native apps to support iOS/Android notifications.
My wife and I took a road trip to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA for our honeymoon in 2002. We were passing through a storm along I90 in South Dakota when we later realized we drove between 2 tornados.

Since then I've wished that Google Maps would add a road trip weather option given that it predicts roughly where you'll be and when for possibly the next 10 hours in a drive.
I don't mean to imply that it's meaningful to them, but I think it's meaningful for this audience.
Extremely verbose is right. Here's one such approach in java that I found last year - https://github.com/sgreben/regex-builder.

Yeah, regex can be a bit clunky at times and has a steeper learning curve, but they're pretty industry standard at this point, and portable across languages with a few caveats.
> Go is a low-blub language whose advocates are proud of the fact that they never made it past 200-level CS courses.

One of them is Ken Thompson, Turing Award winner.
Two joysticks, plus gyroscopic sensors, actually. You use the gyro controls mainly to move a pointer, which is OK, although a mouse would be better on some situations. What's genius is being able to use the pointer along with the joysticks, making movement effortless once you get used to it. Also, rotating objects by rotating the controller feels amazing and extremely natural.

Honestly, after trying Dreams I wouldn't be surprised if DualShock integration became a feature of serious 3D modelers and game engines.
It's not new. Agreed. But the degree and scale to which it's being exploited is new.
I'm gonna say this with all the respect in the world for the technical view —I'm a nerd and I agree with you guys 100%, a huge upvote for the whole thread— but experience taught me something along those lines:

There are such situations (people and places) that command one to put their mindset in "agreement mode", not because of logical reasons¹, but absent or even contrary to those, because of a need to reduce friction². In this meta-knowledge space³ lies the solution space⁴ for all your problems in a human environment.

When you approach things like that, you tend to see where "tech" fits in a wider landscape, and it tells me when to speak and when to shut my big nerdy mouth (whenever it's counterproductive, e.g. premature abstraction⁵ is just as bad as premature optimization). It tells me which lines in the code are "political", "organizational", "structural" not to the tech but to the humans around; and by elimination, which lines are left for us nerds to think about deeply.

It's a dance, really, there's no right/wrong/perfect, but there's a certain way to rise above these human contingencies and actually facilitate the path to market while having a blast — just set your expectations right as to what you can and can't touch, at least for now, reassess on a need-to basis.

So when you see a dark "anti" pattern (OP's case), sure you naively ask 'why', but then if you see org/pol structure, if you see this rigid wall of "this is how we do it, this is who we are", you know it's not about tech anymore. It's personal. Don't hit there. People (especially when insecure, so all of us at times) tend to protect their knowledge like it's a judgment on themselves, like it's proof of their worth, and it's very hard but doable to notice when you're entering such territory with someone.

____

[1]: you might be smarter than your boss, you may be "right" technically

[2]: "friction" in the economic sense, which includes overhead in your code as well as overhead from meetings. What stands between idea and productive execution.

[3]: literally, larger than the technical, including all aspects of engineering, organization and market forces.

[4]: the product that which you seek to make, i.e. that people use. The "internal" side of the product is the organization and codes that make it, that support its continued existence.

[5]: in this case, we "abstract prematurely" when we presume to know a system better than their maintainers, or that our "outside looking in" "fresh" pair of eyes has all the answers already. There is often much more than the technical to consider.
The main point of this was to see if can establish a workflow that produces random numbers. Then by changing the nature of the materials / crystal growth I wanted to see if the data tells us about order / disorder transitions in the material. That is one idea anyway.
Where can one find better order execution? Citation needed, but I read the market makers buying these orders tend to get investors prices better than the bid-ask spread, so it's still good for retail investors. And it's not like it's any worse than when it was $10 per trade.
>“There’s sometimes no fundamental reason for it. It just is based on perception — a perception based on narratives that run only an inch deep,” he said in a note. “Let’s see how much longer it persists. This kind of activity often unwinds much faster than the windup.”

I think this is very, very risky. Families or individuals putting a lot of money into stock that is largely driven by the media and rally around the stock price increase is how you ruin people's financials. The Tesla stock mentioned in the article being one of them, as the recent bitcoin-esque rises are really hard to explain by fundamentals.

But it seems to me to be the case for a lot of tech stock in particular. Lots of them going up 40% or 50% year over year yuo really have to ask at some point if this is going to continue for another ten years or if it's going to come down at some point.
https://archive.md/6PDmQ
As an aside, I always found it strange that eating wild land animals is looked down upon as "bushmeat" and unsustainable and unhygienic, while eating wild sea creatures is just "seafood" (with farmed aquafauna looked down upon as the inferior product).
> Those charts are using “3gslow” mode, simulating a ludicrously slow and lossy mobile connection.

"3gslow" mode, unfortunately, accurately reflects the day-to-day connectivity most people see in non-capital cities around my country. It might be ludicrous, but it isn't necessarily far from the norm.
Similar to the infamous: "temporary" workarounds...
Agreed, this is just one of those moments where I learn that other people have a very different workflow from mine.

I can't write an algorithm without coming up with decently descriptive names for the components. Of course, sometimes I come up with better ones later, but the entire idea of using placeholders is deeply foreign to how I think.

Which isn't to say I don't use single-letter variables, `d` is a perfectly cromulent way to spell delta although `Δ` is better if it's allowed. It's uncommon, and when I do, they're no more likely to change than any other name.
My situation is the complete opposite.

I have a great idea, did some decks/mockups/simulation's.

Was actually offered 6-figure angel investment (I passed).

Yet haven't been able to make reall progress with an MVP. I am a very experienced developer, but never did any web/saas stuff.

I feel embarrassed.

I have tried joining recently a tracking and discussion forum and it's been really helpful.
I like the idea but the problem I can see with this, is that good reviews on 20+ years old goods from brand X tells very little about the durability of same good from same brand bought new today. Actually, every brand with a good reputation is merely a brand that's been late to convert its product line into the new fashion of programmed (or engineered) obsolescence.
Counter argument https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
One has plausibility and some evidence from DNA sequencing and mutation rates on its side, the other hasn‘t.
Somewhere I read that for airplane wifi pricing, there isn't a big usage difference between $10 and $1, but it's huge between $1 and free.
Yes. It's "Klassenfeind".
This is so good I imagine you're gonna need more.
6502 Interrupts Primer
People need to learn the difference between something being widely popular and something being good and achieving it's technical goals.

My project vintagesimulator.com did not become popular, but that doesn't mean it failed. It just means I did not put enough time and effort into creating content and promoting it. I achieved the technical goals. Despite a lack of interest I would never call it a failure.
Fiat currency, coupled with an economy based on usury (aka interest), is definitely not sustainable. It's scary to think about what may happen when it all comes down.
There's no need for personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't.

Cherry-picking one post from a statistical cloud and calling it typical is dodgy. Even the distribution in this thread doesn't match your description. Actually, even the comment you're picking on doesn't match your description.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22397156.
Living in a crossroads area for shipping readily shows me this is coming. Supply chains are freezing up. If I don't see as many tractor-trailer rigs on the road and not as many ships in the harbor then supply chains will freeze. "Just In Time" will break rather catastrophically for some companies.

Oddly enough, the trade war with China instigated by President Trump unintentionally has had a good outcome in light of the current coronavirus worries. Companies that went all in on offshoring to China started diversifying again where their plants happened to be located. That start to deleveraging might keep a few manufacturers afloat as some or all operations per company relocate.
Were they not able to monetize it? I know Mint upsells and has some ads, but was under the impression that the real value was in the data.
It's also quite possible that these doctors were smokers. Chinese doctors smoke at least as much as the general chinese population, which already suffers the highest per capita smoking rates in the world.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3519549/ - Tobacco smoking among doctors in mainland China: a study from Shandong province and review of the literature
Great Depression.