skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I made $10000 by posting on Hacker News about my microstartup
I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it.
A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with the pandemic, I had very little motivation let alone travel anywhere. It took me 3 months to do research and plan out the architecture to the last detail.

I looked at some of the B2C bootstrappers offering a lifetime deal and getting success. That's possible because they don't have a huge recurring cost with each customer, but in B2B SaaS, you have a recurring cost with each customer.

But I thought let me add and see how it goes. So added a lifetime deal with for $199. At that time I posted it on Hacker News [2] and it made it to the front page and all the lifetime deals were over in 12 hours. Then I added $299 which got over during the week. So far I made over $10000 and got more than 35 customers.

Even though it might not be profitable in the long run, I got the cashflow and customers in less time and it removed the pressure to chase customers. Now I can focus on the product.

One of the biggest challenges of a SaaS startup is to acquire the first 50 customers. I have seen many startups achieve this over 6 to 12 months, some even a few years. But with this initial business model, I have cashflow for a year which is the best thing that can happen to a B2B SaaS. Lifetime deals can be a powerful way to get initial customers especially when you are getting started.

[1] https://simpleops.io/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23880071
Simon, once again, wise beyond his years. I love watching this young man and his new family grow together.
Both at work and in other professional activities, a number of workshops, team meetings, etc. I've been in, we've all pretty much collectively decided that three to four hours a day is about the most we can productively handle. We've done some combination of just paring back material and smearing things over more days.

Not that professionals necessarily have the greatest attention spans; I've only somewhat joked that I couldn't deal with all-day high school classes today even in-person. But all-day Zoom seems totally undoable for kids.
It doesn't help with the issue of hard-to-reproduce work, but apparently working for a company making products aimed at scientists can be a place to see this happen (if the company is good about talking to customers).
Yes, 'find -print0' / 'xargs -0' is the workaround that guided my thinking. (Which was essentially "how can I make 'find -print0 |' easy enough to use all the time, and flexible enough for more than one glob at a time?")
Yep. It's a crisis facing many museums as well as other businesses depending on tourist dollars around the world.
They are only cooled by the wind when there is wind. Sometimes there is a lot of sun and no wind. One side of the blades will heat up more than the other, and potentially undergo rapid cooling when a rainstorm hits.
Jitsi too
I agree with that. I think what gave me the motivation to continue with the project that succeeded was the fact that the product got ~200 daily users immediately after launch.

I still remember the many, many times I wanted to give up on that project. What kept me going was the small number of users who used the product consistently and wrote Emails providing feedback. Some users who noticed the product hasn't been updated for awhile wrote an Email asking me if I was still working on it. That really got me off my arse.

I have great respect for entrepreneurs who are able to work for years on a product without a single user/customer. That takes some serious self-belief and persistence.
I agree - for me, its about continuing to use React/Python/Go/Node for new projects, instead of trying (say) Elixir or Clojure. I'm already much less focused..

For Pieter its about staying with PHP.
It seems to vary. Our district has our kindergartner in front of a screen for about 2 hours (not continuous). Then they give us activities to do with our kids, at our convenience, that we submit via an app. The teacher reviews and comments on it. There's around 7 per day, but they aren't too difficult for our 5 year old: write 10 T's, read them a book, collect then count some stuff, etc.

Our school is 100% distance learning. When they were going to allow distance learning and in person, they were planning to have completely separate classes for this so they could better optimize for your particular medium.
While it's been years since I was in a location with the tech deployed, it was 100% a consulting first gig. Nothing was done without an Palantir Engineer. The sad thing is the extra expenses not accounted for in the contracts too. For example, the clearances / costs were often covered by host agencies (at an extremely steep price) for the analysts, something usually passed on to the vendor to cover. So in a sense, they paid for software, paid for an employee, and paid all the associated fees to clear / maintain the employee. I don't think this flys in the private sector at all and it shows with their limited client base.
sounds neat please link the open source repo so we can check it out
I can't speak for everyone, but in terms of administration, it's much easier to deal with than having to sort through the filesystem sundae you end up making with device mapper frameworks and the filesystem cherry on top of it all. In a humorous twist, subvolumes are basically thin provisioned logical volumes too and btrfs still had quotas to make them behave as such.
> Even if someone uploads Rust bindings to C or C++ code to crates.io, as a library user you would still need to manually install the C/C++ library on your end, along with a compiler.

Not if the library comes with your system. One can use this macro to generate a more "ergonomic" "safe libc" crate, that just introduces UB in safe Rust.
Hopefully Google picks up the pace quickly with those important features like the ability to force-mute everyone but the presenter.
There's a workaround available for this issue.

This issue only affects joining Zoom meetings through the web client. If you join using the desktop or mobile client to the meeting ID directly, you should still be able to join a meeting.
Here's hoping that Starlink will resolve some of these problems instead of just making them worse.
Yes, that Oxfam shop is dire, even if you find the odd interesting book it will be priced accordingly. I've never found a bargain in there.
Jitsi, WebEx, Microsoft Teams
And it doesn't matter if the facial recognition is done by a human or a machine. They both produce false results on a regular basis.
Has there ever been a video service that hasn't gone down? This really concerns me if this is the future of a remote world.
To use that analogy, no, its more like moving to a different house because lead paint remediation is too costly and error prone.
Yes you're right - thank you. On a re-read I see that I had the assertions the wrong way round.
The reasoning for running a scrub after an unclean shutdown is not to catch corruption of the filesystem structure, but to catch data corruption resulting from the RAID5 write hole.

If you're not using RAID5 or RAID6 for metadata, the write hole won't affect the filesystem structure and there shouldn't be any issues for btrfs-check to find.
Yes.

The US\UK model of capitalism has 2 properties that combine to make Billionaires both necessary and sustainable: they are very capital intensive AND they are consumer based societies.

Modern economies need big piles of capital. Somehow you have to get (say) 50bn USD together every time you want a new semiconductor fab facility or Facebook. Someone has to pay for that.

Historically, that money was raised from the middle class: if 20m people have $2500 each in the bank, the bank can pool that and a $50bn pile and lend it to make new businesses.

Those days started to end with consumerism: instead of sitting on a small bank balance, the average American\Brit(\Aussie) is in debt. So that means there were loads of opportunities out there going unfunded. So people who did have piles of cash could now reliably get big returns from lending. They could lend to capital intensive new businesses AND to companies like credit card providers for average Americans to use to fund pure consumption.

That's why you've seen these historically high rates of return on capital for the last 40 years. That's what caused billionaires in the first place AND what sustains their existence. That's why the US\UK have so many, while countries with strong savings cultures (Germany or Japan) have so few. It is also why you "need" billionaires: someone has to fund the average person spending more than they earn and fund new businesses (and to a lesser extent government debt). We could kill all the billionaires tomorrow, spend their cash for the new few months, then suddenly your credit card company would cancel your card as there was no one to fund you buying things and not paying for them, your employer would have to restructure as the interest on it's debt shot up as no one was lending etc.

A billionaire is just someone with a 100m AND 30 years of 8% RoI. They're the natural consequence of under supply of capital and high demand for products.

Wealth inequality is very much a function of individual over-consumption on a mass scale. If you want fewer billionaires, spend less than you earn and put the rest of the money into investments (a bank account or a shares\bond account). Vote for higher taxes and less spending to get the government doing the same thing. Billionaires are flourishing because they basically they hold a monopoly on the capital supply and the rest of us demand ever more capital.
It's going to affect longevity somehow due to uneven wear. But whether that means 2 hours less service or 2 years I have no idea. In Norway, where it is not generally as hot as some other locations, probably 2 hours.
> ZFS has no Raid5 write-hole...no traditional Raid problems at all (z1/2/3)

The thread was about where CoW is problematic, both ZFS and Btrfs are identically problematic in this sense.

> No...just NO, just for a special Cases like a Database.

Like... for what we were talking about.
Equally non snarky, what is something in law enforcement that has led to equitable outcomes?
Until I moved west in 2017, I lived 4 miles from Madison, WI (one exit south of the beltline) and the best I could do was a WISP that was $62/month for 2 Mbps down and 250Kbps up
Cool! Do you have it available for download?
I made a web app to help my wife with our pre-K kids 7 zoom classes, it has made a huge difference and he is able to connect by himself most of the time. I have no idea how non-technical people can cope with this, its still insane but at least manageable.
Classic example of concentrating on wrong part of text. Important bit is question what do we place as important value.

So, big problem is generational and inheritance on its own, giving ability to certain groups of people to gain wealth beyond comprehension.

People in general do not have feeling how big is the gap between 100K income and 1 billion.

Biggest question is if AI does all the work, how will population of 8 billion minus 1000 wealthiest get means to survive?
Further in world of smart machines, who should be owner of that AI and the wealth creates?
Lastly what will people do, and should they do anything that requires "earning" to survive?
Something jarring about the 'Dracula PRO' colour scheme unlabelled advertisement in the middle of the article.
honestly, I've only ever needed to rebalance on a desktop system when statfs() returned an f_bavail=0 and some program decided to take this information seriously and refused to write at all. There are still quirks with statfs info coming from btrfs volumes only solved with intense rebalancing.
The Truth About Socially Conscious Marketing Messages
Any test that doesn't involve full nationwide UBI is subject to the same criticism, and I predict that even a large-scale three-year-long test that involved every western state will still be dismissed as unworkable for the same reasons: no barrier between eastern and western states, and everyone knew the test would end in three years.
Klerksdorp spheres: created or naturally occuring?
S mode is active by default in regular, non-Surface Lenovo Ideapad laptops.
I hope you intended a "not" to be somewhere in there lol
Will do, thank you for mentioning it
Before the whole virus situation started, I had never even heard of Zoom, and now it seems it's everywhere. What happened to Skype? I remember it being the thing I was forced to use during pretty much every client meeting back in the day.
Well, one could invent some mean VM to run upon a universal TM, and program it instead. With some hardware codec to translate inputs/outputs between this VM and the UTM... but yeah, if you want to do arithmetics, start with Odhner pinwheels.
Even if it broke, who would go back and fix it?

I do not see that happening, especially with complex library bugs.
Active or passive cooling?
Is there a transcription of this podcast available anywhere? Sounds interesting.
>The key to chaos engineering is injecting failure in a controlled manner.

Doesn’t that sorta defeat the point of “chaos” a bit?
Ooh interesting, I'd be interested in that code/work. I'm somewhat familiar with Tornado codes but haven't looked in years
Would it be insane to use chrome webdriver to do something like this; manipulating a normal chrome(/ium) instance from Emacs?
Last night I watched an episode about Eagles on PBS NOVA. They said predatory birds like eagles are constantly looking down and they also have a ridge above their eyes to block the sun. They basically don’t look up, maybe the white looks like clouds so they don’t think they can run into it.

It’s a pretty cool episode. They use eagle watchers to turn off turbines when an eagle gets too close but the human can’t see in the direct sun. They built a robot with a 360 camera and 2 cameras that rotate to find eagles. It worked much better than a human.

IdentiFlight system:
https://www.identiflight.com/
The predictions for the consequences of climate change are not in anyone's self-interest. Therefore it's apparently not a problem with prioritizing self-interest. It would seem more likely that there's a trust problem with the consequence predictions.
For those who didn't check the link yet, this is not about Ubuntu the linux distro, but an ideology that has its roots in mid and south Africa.

>[Ubuntu philosophy] is often used in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity."
The success depends on how much both value marriage itself
Zoom was the fallback plan. There hasn't been enough time and resources to get everything set up with even one monolithic infrastructure provider. Faculty and staff at universities have been working overtime over the summer to adapt in-person classes, learn new systems that keep changing, and get new students' accounts set up and secure, all while doing it at home -- often without childcare.
> The destruction of culture is an important part of progress.

You lost me here.

> This is seen as unfortunate for the viewers on the outside but swapping a ramshackle house that floods for a brick box that works and access to McDonald's is a godsend for the occupants.

Do some reading about all of the terrible things large fast food conglomerates have done to our food supply. Cheap food is easy to get in places like India -- rice and dahl for what would be pennies in USD -- and eradicating their culture via McDicks benefits no one.

> Now the (physical) Irish pub delivered in a shipping container has gone to a (designed) shipping container Irish pub.

This sounds like all of the worst parts of Irish drinking culture, inside a metal container, and without any of the things that make Irish pubs appealing, such as old crackpot sods who've sat at the same stool for ~20+ years.
I was thinking socio-economic and transportation connectedness rather than genetic resistance. Anglo-centric Cook Islands vs. French Polynesia, for instance, and the evolved political, economic, transportation, and health systems.

It could be something as simple as incoming flights mostly originating from one of Sydney, Singapore, or Hawaii and the travel restrictions implemented at each hub. We are also maybe placing to much emphasis on zero-per-hundred-thousand compared to one-per-hundred-thousand stats.
The extremely high failure rate indicates it is either a flawed concept entirely, or people are going about it completely the wrong way. If you had a computer that only booted, or a car that only started, 40% of the time - you wouldn't say, well.. the system is ok - sometimes it works out!

Still, it is encouraged on every front. Venerated by society, and financially subsidized by the state. Yet when its failing, very little good advice available. I've found most marriage counseling to be very unhelpful. Designed to save something (that maybe be shouldn't be saved) with really weak aphorisms that don't get to the psychological depths needed to explore WHY we do the things we do, attract and even unconsciously desire chaos and failure, etc..

But married couples too often lose the fact that it's about the relationship first. More important than the house, the cars, even the kids. People forget that everything started with two people and two people only. They stop having compassion and being kind to one another. They stop having sex (so important), that feeds the relationship. The relationship is a living thing. If you starve it, it dies.
> This was done to deal with remarks Chromium devs had against Rust C++ binding.

I have a hard time believing those Chromium devs know what they want.

Their request allows safe Rust to introduce undefined behavior, making the unsafe Rust keyword meaningless (since now you can't even grep for the places in the code where this UB is introduced), and eliminating the actual reason they want to use Rust in the first place (to avoid undefined behavior, segfaults, CVEs, etc.).

The only thing complying with the request will achieve is hurt the language. Once the chromium devs start hitting the same CVEs and segfaults in Rust that they were hitting in C++, they will just tell the whole world that Rust is as bad as C++ and using it is not worth it.
I'm pretty sure Fedora Workstation comes with firewalld enabled:

$ systemctl status firewalld
● firewalld.service - firewalld - dynamic firewall daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/firewalld.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Chinese sticky tape
Inaccurate ...

You made $9000 by building a service people were willing to pay for, and marketing it to the people for whom it was made.

Edit: The original title said $9000 ...
I've had the same conversations and I've been warning my teacher wife that the path they are going down ignores what people in technology have already lived.

The issue though comes down to each school is mandated to have so many school days and hours of instruction for the year. You can't just have a school year of 1 hour days and call it a year.

If they don't actively teach the students for 900+ hours for the school year, they are in violation of the state mandate. Does giving an assignment online with no instruction count as hours? How many hours?

When in doubt, take what you know, which is in person lectures online and reach the mandates. The children will suffer. The teachers will suffer. Administration/Government will meet their mandates.
I wish we had the same thing but for music. I have friends subscribed to Apple Music, GPM/YouTube Music, Spotify, Deezer, Amazon Prime Music.

If only I could send them a link to a specific song, artist or album and have it open in the platform of their choice without having to search.
Thank you.

Fortunately, the developers of the NYT website were kind enough to use JS-based nag, which means it's enough to disable JS (one click in uBlock Origin) in order to read the article.
Totally understand. I had to use WebEx for a vendor last week... I don’t know how they never managed to improve their product.
I see no reason why anyone in their right mind would need more than $50M. Hell, make that $10M. I'd personally be happy with $1M. There's no shortage of money, it's just all in the wrong places.

For that matter:
$16384 birth bonus
$512 monthly contribution
40 years
2.56% compounded daily

By age 40, you'd have close to half a million dollars.

1. start your own business.
2. buy a nice(er) house, keep working.
3. buy a clot of remote land, live like a goddamn monkey.

Up to you. But most people having half a mil at 40 I think is better than 2200 people having 90% of the wealth in the world, mostly for doing no effing work.

I've been working since I was 14, but I didn't find out about compound interest until much later. I'm now 60, and only have about $80K for retirement. Sucks to be me.

BTW, Eat the Rich.
If they're all nofollow it's no surprise there would be no SEO value.
Trends become Buzzwords. The less syllables the better... Mix that with some perfectly timed marketing and heaps of free licenses, and Zoom becomes ubiquitous within a few months.
Also top of mind- "Why you will revive an article from 4 years ago..."
You sometimes do. This is known to be common with the flu vaccine for example. But as the article mentions, we'd always expect a few rare cases of reinfection even if people do in general have long-lasting immunity. So while it's always good to experimentally confirm things, this observation is doubly unsurprising.
New Chrome Extension
https://gettweet.in , download any video/gif from twitter with a single click.
The researchers caution not to jump to conclusions like this
Spent the whole year working on https://pingr.io which is similar to yours :) Well, your is better for sure, you know your deal very well.

Added lifetime deal and posted here twice, barely got any customers sigh

But I still trying :)

YOU is inspiration for other solo founders
Microsoft bought it and gutted it, it has terrible usability now. I think when the pandemic hit the most usable system was bound to get tons of traction quickly, and I guess that happened to be Zoom.
Ubuntu is now dead to me unless they get rid of this horrible new package manager
The Growth Machine: How Noom Runs 365 Landing Page Experiments per Year
Top TikTok Alternatives
Why on earth would you specify your styling in your JS ?
Damage to Arecibo Leaves Gaping Hole in Astronomy
For many, Zoom has moved into the essential area of internet/cell service.

Lots of people are using their paid zoom accounts more than their cell phone during the day and even for work.

Downtime means work is down too - not just for classrooms.
laziness. well thats at least why I use it.
Have you paid for subscription to any independent publisher? If so, which?
Admittedly I haven’t tried either of these methods, but just from reading this post, they both seem prohibitively over-complex. There’s also no mention of Spaced Repetition, which is unquestionably the best method for remembering things.

Instead of complex note systems, try this: write down quotes, paragraphs, summaries and other related information, add them to Anki / another SRS, and do the cards everyday. That’s it. Simplicity is key to building habits and I’d bet any money that SRS works better anyway.
Did they try posting a scarecrow on top of the turbine?
Great to see an attitude other then pitchforks and torches.