skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Sendgrid is breaking my product. What to do?
Hi HN,

I had a successful Show HN weeks ago of my product Serial Literature (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752). The core of it is emailing periodic installments of classic novels to subscribers.

I use Sendgrid for the email delivery and it is currently breaking my product. I have almost 1,000 subscribers already, which translates in about 200 emails to be delivered each day. Because I am on a free trial I am limited to 100 emails per day (their copy doesn't say that, it says "Send 40,000 emails for 30 days, then 100/day forever.", implicitly saying that the daily limit is only after the 30-days period, but it's not. I see both a warning in my dashboard saying I reached the 100-emails limit and can see my requests getting rejected after the ~100th request).

The catch is, Sendgrid also doesn't allow me to upgrade! Is says my account is too young. I already opened 4 support tickets with them, to no answer at all! -- btw, they have a weird automation on their ticket system where I create a ticket with priority P1 (critical impact), as it is breaking my product, and they automatically change it to a P3 (general) right after I submit it. This is probably throwing all my requests to the end of the queue.

I just need the ability to upgrade! What should I do?

I am hoping to get some Sendgrid's team replying appealing to the "HN as customer service" that I saw working before, which I think is on-topic since my only publication and traffic source is the Show HN I mentioned.

But if that doesn't work, what should I do? I am worried that changing email delivery provider now will have some negative effect on my deliverability. Is that correct to assume? That changing providers and IP for my domain will be looked badly by spam filters?
A similar story I saw a few months back on reddit is of Jacob Hendel, who also suffered from locked-in syndrome due to Acute Toxic Progressive Stage 4 Leukoencephalopathy.

He's got a website www.jhaendelrecovery.com and youtube https://www.youtube.com/c/JacobHaendelRecoveryChannel/.

It's super inspiring and he regularly provides updates on youtube on his recovery progress.
The Force of Statistics by Stephen Leacock (1910)
Didn't realize machetes were such a prevalent thing to contend with over there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJq_Wqw0a0o&lc=UgxRTCqLVWkWD...
Let’s be fair, even if you did pay more up front, they’d still get ads from you. The whole thing is pervasive and we need legislation for it.
... but if Facebook were _preferentially_ putting machetes in the hands of people most likely to use them for nefarious purposes?
Run it in a docker container
In the beginning some said that there was a bioresearch facility in Wuhan. But there is always secrets around these things.
This happened after the invention of the printing press as well. Pamphlets and broadsides recounting (often fictitious) atrocities committed by protestant against catholic and catholic against protestant were circulated widely before and during the 30 years war. We figured out how to prevent that from happening again with print media. We don't have to start from scratch with digital media, but it sure feels like no one is paying attention to what happened last time.
They grossed $694M in 2016, according to Wikipedia[0].

I think Craigslist benefits from a transparent business model that doesn’t rely on capturing and manipulating consumer data. They charge for job ads, which is a pretty straightforward model. Contrast that with the miasmic, tailored advertising business that Facebook has created.

Craigslist isn’t necessarily leaving money on the table, they just operate a more transparent business that’s more closely aligned with the public good. It’s still not realistic to expect companies to not try to maximize their earnings potential, that’s like asking your favorite football team to score fewer touchdowns. Facebook as a business is fundamentally misaligned with the public good.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist
Facebook isn't in China right now.
Based on serological studies, we missed that many people in March/April and the average viral load per case is lower.
Duplicates:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24476929
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24476300

Near duplicate:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24477045
Can REPL be used in industry enterprises?
It’s journalism 101. You provide the identity of your source to help the reader evaluate his credibility.

Anonymous sources are supposed to be used only in extreme circumstances. But these days that gets abused all the time.

The New York Times has published its rules for making a source anonymous, and they’re pretty good, IMO.
It seems to be assuming everyone knows the context about Ellen, which they may not - I don't.
Privacy advocates are failing to respond to the “nothing to hide” argument
I thought there were some insightful things in there. For one the biggest problem with staying motivated over a long period of time is the lack of instant gratification. Humans aren't good with delayed gratification - hardly surprising or revolutionary, but right on the money.

The other thing I liked was the somewhat non obvious advice to stay focused on your goal and not be open to other opportunities. This sank a lot of my projects over the years. Hot, exciting new idea beats familiar, hairy, in progress idea. But if you keep chopping and changing you'll never finish anything. There is a risk you ignore a really much better opportunity, so you can't do this 100%, but you do really strongly need to bias towards finishing what you started.

Lastly when I started on the project of teaching myself to write software more than half my life ago now, I hated it. It was alien and difficult and boring. If I'd quit after a month I would have not found my passion, and I would have missed out on a pretty great career.

Also, I would say learning to enjoy the gym took a lot more than a month.

So don't give up so soon, but also three years is a long time if you really are not enjoying what you're doing. Maybe something in between, based on how you feel about it.
It’s an rpi connected to a dual core laptop on a home connection, presumably without a battery backup. Nothing about this is remotely semi-serious.
The company where I work has about a hundred engineers, and a team who makes tools for those engineers. There are uncountably many small niches of software customers, whether they're external or not.
Artificial Intelligence is the single most overused buzzword at the moment. Just an example among many:

"We’re building an AI-powered writing assistant that helps people communicate and connect"

https://www.grammarly.com/jobs

Compared to AI "Full Self-Driving Capability" isn't any more implausible. Yet we don't call those AI companies fraud.

This is how Tesla marketing Model 3's Autopilot. Marketing speak for sure, but lie?

"Autopilot enables your car to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within its lane. Full Self-Driving Capability introduces additional features and improves existing functionality to make your car more capable over time"

https://www.tesla.com/model3
> I think the idea of psychodelic-assisted reeducation is a promising and humane strategy if we want to avoid total social collapse in the West over the next 3 decades

..when your idea to fix things as well as your dialogue is way too close for a Marvel supervillain's plot to control the world, you might want to rethink it.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9847955

And, of course, in the same vein: https://www.nand2tetris.org/
<insert DigitalOcean joke here>
I prefer CapRover; it supports inbound webhooks so you can hook it up to Gitea/GitLab/GitHub with its own ssh deploy key and it will autodeploy from a specific branch, so you don’t need to push to it.
There's a name for that kind of thinking, but I can't recall what it is.

Essentially you're minimizing cost by paying the lowest possible local rate, but isn't it just as valid for someone else to maximize quality by paying a competitive rate for the most expensive locale?
Presumably both would be pushed to a middle (location independent) wage because the company minimizing price will (presumably) have issues hiring all bottom-of-the barrel employees, while the company optimizing for quality will have issues paying top dollar when it only provides marginal gains over a high-average wage.
Sun Microsystems had some Sparc servers where the on die cache didn't have ECC. And, cosmic rays created issues: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10...
We elect a senior/experienced team member to provide most on-boarding, and continued assistance/training/mentorship during the new hire's probation period (usually 3 months). We then interview the new hire at the end of their probation period to get feedback on the training they received from the senior member they were paired with, and the on-boarding process in general.

We rotate between the senior members for each new hire, where it makes sense.
The senior member in return receives a $ bonus during this time, and their effort also contributes towards their performance review.
I've also noticed it helps the new hire integrate with our culture.
Apple devices still contact the mothership nonstop even with telemetry disabled, for a bunch of different reasons, even if you don’t use any iCloud or Apple services. Don’t be fooled by the DNS logs.
I disagree. I believe Facebook profits from hate speech, this incentivizing is spread. I don’t buy that Facebook is merely a mirror and just reflecting what is already there. I believe is promoting and making stronger this kind of behaviors.
“anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics” should be treated with skepticism.

I completely agree. There seems to be a spate of anonymous blockbusters lately.
> There are many nuances to the English language that are difficult for non-native speakers to pick up.

Being condescending is bad, but being condescending whilst also being clearly wrong is doubly so. Get out.
Pennsylvania's Covid-19 Shutdown Orders Ruled Unconstitutional by Federal Judge
Wow! I'm impressed at how such an image can be decoded from only 4 KB.

Would any mathematicians be able to take it an order of magnitude further? The legendary DeCSS code is only 433 bytes, and can be represented as a prime number [0]. Imagine if images could be represented as prime numbers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
The Great Filter of Startups
What Are Transformer Models in Machine Learning?
Why would they give up control of the world by doing something silly like that? Think about how much political influence Twitter has based solely on which tweets they show the President and corporate press. Consider how much untraced in-kind donations these companies can make by tweaking which news stories you see. The crazy thing about it is these things can be tweaked by humans, but it's largely controlled by AI now, which no one person will completely understand what's happening in any of these systems. We're in the early stages of AI controlling the global political future and it will tend to create whatever kind of future generates the most clicks. It's kind of like the game Universal Paperclips, except with clicks/rage/ads.
TikTok rival: YouTube Shorts, initially in India
What's your plan for artificial natural selection?
some customers? I heard it was IBM.
There is a counteracting technology known as borders.
> Adding 100+ columns to an existing table

Whaaaa 100+ columns? How often do you need to add 100 columns to an existing table?

I mean honestly that has to be as rare as chicken teeth.
English as first language speaker here. Your comment at the end was rude.

And I think you’re wrong. I think your parent post agrees with you. Not every conversation includes the requisite specificity of language to make declarations of perfect understanding of original writer’s intent.

We will need OP to confirm.
intelliHR | Software Engineer - Intermediate | Brisbane, Australia | Full-time | Brisbane or Remote from within Australia (Australian Work Rights Required)

intelliHR is a rapidly growing Software-as-a-Service (web application) startup specialising in innovative human capital management. We strive to make workplaces better for people, provide insights for leaders, and aim to transform traditional ways of working through open communication and data-driven analysis.

We are currently looking for developers of different specialisations (full-stack, back-end, and front-end). Our tech stack is built with a wide range of technologies such as:
- ReactJS, TypeScript, GraphQL
- PHP (Laravel), Python, NodeJs
- Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services, Jenkins

The primary responsibilities in this role are:
- Leading decision making and architecture for domain features
- Assist in establishing a technical vision
- Helping maintain the technical quality of team deliverables
- Take on complex bugs or refactoring projects
- Assisting mentorship of junior engineers in culture, behaviour and approach to problem solving

You should have at least 1 - 2 years of experience in web development.

Full job ad here: https://www.seek.com.au/job/50489130
I've worked in two of these top investment banks and the amount of red tape that needs to be crossed is just breathtaking.
Something as simple as provisioning a kafka topic? Go raise 2 requests, have it approved by these 4 people including your manager, then create multiple system accounts for each environment, each with its own approval steps.
Agreed that these approvals and audit trails are necessary - but surely they can be simplified.

In office - you always knew someone who knew someone in that team. It was just a matter of picking up the phone, calling them and getting them to expedite your request.
Now that everyone is WFH, you ping them on IM and wait for them to respond. With back-to-back zoom calls, it's honestly the last thing people want to do.

Couple that with the fact that there isn't a divide (like commute) between work and home anymore - so there's just more fatigue and higher levels of irritability.
Maybe even more troubling than the potential that the virus is engineered. It's that why are American institutions trying to limit distribution on a scientific literature just because of the literature's implications? Chilling...
WFH was awesome when I was young. Shared a 3 bedroom house with 3 other friends. My bedroom was a bed, desk, and about 1.5 square meters of empty floor space. After work I could instantly head to the living space to hang out with my actual friends rather than co-workers who would lose interest in me if my work output ever turned subpar.
So, no assault nukes?
I would say there still needs to be more regular checkins, even for experienced engineers. The onboarding stage is almost always way longer than anyone wants to be stuck onboarding, and direction is very important, especially on teams that own way too many features.
I was using the pi4 with 4gb ram. Were you booting of an sd card? That might have been my issue.
Curious Karen - Create surveys that people will actually want to answer.
Science was supposed to be about objectivity. Not who published it or how it was funded... Had to question whether I'm living in the 1600s or 2020...
So you can calculate, for a given thrust/energy ratio, what velocity you have to exceed to get more energy out than you put in. For relativistic effects to make enough difference to matter, that velocity would have to be pretty close to c. That translates to an extremely low thrust.

(I've been told that for a photon rocket, the threshold velocity is c, implying that a reactionless drive won't violate conservation of energy as long as it's no better than a photon rocket. I haven't done that math myself though.)
> If you don't want to live, I respect your decision, just please don't force it on other people.

This is exactly the problem. In the default state of nature the entirety of erosive processes lead to a natural cycle of decay and death. Life extension is the alteration to this, to bend all of society's energy, focus, and scientific endeavor to stave off the absolutely natural erosive process that is the engine of Darwinian evolution, so that some gluttonous individuals and spend "centuries in hedonistic pleasure".
Varchar(max) is fine for some cases but you can't use it for everything because there's some limitations compared to varchar(1000) because the latter is stored in the actual table structure while the former is not.
The problem to me with that approach seems two-fold:

1, companies all expect you to work in the traditional way with local repos etc. All their tooling is geared towards that. If experienced users who set the standards aren't being migrated over, then they'll reinforce that status quo, and so will people who learned on repl but were forced to migrate off (monkey ladder experiment style).

2., using older tools is a point of pride. There's definitely a strain of "if you use repl.it / etc. and not emacs / vim / vscode you're a noob." This obviously is toxic and not great, but it does exist, and acts as another obstacle to online IDE adoption I think.
They didn't provide the identity of their source. They instead doxxed a third party who wished to remain private for her safety.
This needs to be more understood by the population.

Our world-destroying-AI paperclip maximizer is here. It's called a "news feed".

The thing that gets the most clicks is outrage, as the AI has discovered. We're setting people against each-other in a more and more efficient fashion.

The result has been clear since the Arab Spring. Good things don't come from helping people hate each-other in the most efficient way possible.

Banning AI-driven-click-maximizing news feeds would be a healthy start. Right now, they're doing serious damage to our world.
This is terrible, and I feel powerless to prevent this type of injustice.

The people involved should be hung.
Maybe I'm overly empathetic here because my partner works in a psych unit, but it seems pretty misguided to blast a probable mentally ill man's name & face out to the public in this way.
No text looks better or reads more easily to me while coding than a monospaced bitmap font at about 10pt and 100ish DPI. (And yes, I've read properly antialiased text on a high DPI screen).

Of course this is probably a product of nostalgia and familiarity as much as it is actual general readability.
Scientists Discover compound that prevents and treats SARS-CoV2 in Animal Models
I look forward to the day everyone can have IPV6. For now many of us still have to deal with NAT sadly - especially if we're open sourcing our software for users to deploy on any network.
Over the last decade there's been progress in communicating with people who are in a vegetative state by getting them to think of distinct things like swimming or playing tennis to provide a Yes/No response.

https://montilab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/...

> “Scott, are you in any pain? Do any of your body parts hurt right now? Please imagine playing tennis if the answer is no.”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/05/how-science-fou...
Context matters too. No reasonable person would expect a company to post a promotional video of their vehicle "in motion" just to show off that it has wheels that can roll.
> has a disciplinary puritanical feeling to it which I really don’t relate to at all. This profound pessimism is alien to me. I can’t help but feel that there are ultimately some religious undertones at play here.

You're reading into this what you want to. That is some kind of bizarre binary thinking that doesn't exist.

As for "alien", there have been literally thousands of human cultures that have been erased and replaced with the current spur of "scientific" advancement that holds the world in exactly one way, a conveniently self-centered and tragically misguided one, IMHO.
Yeah, logical step in this shitshow "government": "what's right is whatever we say is right". Just like every other authoritarian state. Congrats America.

As for Britain, see also Boris Johnson's illegal new bill: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/14/brexit-inte...
Are there any open source alternative for Airtable?
I don't see how switching to a reputable email service could negatively impact you, but I might be wrong
It's great if that stuff gets documented, but if your team didn't already have a culture of writing good docs, what makes you think they magically will develop one now?
Depending on the rules of your jurisdiction having authority (JHA) it may not be possible for you, as a homeowner, to install such a system in a code complaint way. This will definitely require a permit. Most JHAs make some allowance for homeowners to be permitted to pull permits for work on their own home, but there are usually pretty strict limits on what these permits would cover and I think most JHAs would require that permits for a central UPS be obtained by a licensed electrician.

And as mentioned elsewhere, I doubt the JHA or the manufacturer of the UPS would approve of this kind of installation. There are UPS specifically manufactured for a hardwire installation and that's what ought to be used here. That said, I am sympathetic, because UPS can become very expensive very fast. I'm balking at the cost of 2U rack models from Eaton, he will have had to shell out a good chunk more based on his VA requirements but at least he avoided the significant premium for hardwired.
That's not ageism though. Getting pushed out because they lost the shelter of their patron(s) or because they were on the losing side of a political battle, which is a common cause of the departure of people like that, is a different thing entirely.
Publicly shaming people charged with a crime is SOP. Even if they're cleared you've got Google preserving mug shots and newspaper articles for years.

Granted, I think it qualifies as "news," but I've always thought it was handled poorly by all involved and largely makes "innocent until proven guilty" irrelevant in practice.
It has been 12 years since the Last Lecture. Imagine what we could have accomplished in those 12 years if we had really tried.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Lecture

Here’s the video:

https://youtu.be/ji5_MqicxSo

A few trillion in wars, a few trillion in bailouts... it would have be great if cancer(s) at least became manageable.
Blaming viral content on bad algorithms is naive. All that’s needed for fake content to spread everywhere unchecked are a few bad actors, group messages, and forwarding (the reshare button). In some cases this results in genocide [1]. No fancy algorithms are necessary to get exponential spread of rumors. Friends and family will spread any memes that confirm their biases themselves.

To prevent this from happening, it has to be actively suppressed, or at least there needs to be something slowing it down so it dies off. A hands-off attitude isn’t going to do it.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/facebook-still-working-on-the-whole-geno...