skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Need some advice about my SaaS
Long time reader, and read HN many times a day. Feel like it’s time to get some advice about my situation.

I’ve wanted to run a company for years, and finally bit the bullet and left a very successful startup where I was the VP of Engineering. COVID hit a week after I left!

I wanted to build a product company, but wanted control of my destiny and to be able to do it on my terms and without the risk of my IP being taken (contract with employer at the time)

I started a company and was offering consulting services to bootstrap the product side. Two years of consulting success later the wheels started to slow as I got tired of hustling so hard. We launched a product and get great feedback for it, but it’s been a limited commercial success. (https://www.pearler.ai)

I’ve been chasing a big enterprise client and they have helped us to refine the product dramatically- it seems like it’s going to come together but it feels like too little too late. I guess I’m just a bit burnt out.

I’ve stopped all the consulting services and taken a day job. I own all of the company and it’s just me now (after having nearly ten people working in the company). I feel like the company is well setup (legally and financially), and I have the skills to lead and run a company. Just I feel stuck in the chasm of low revenue from Product. We’ve had investors interested but I’ve never sought external capital because I don’t feel confident enough in its prospects. It feels unfair to put someone else’s capital on the line until it’s a confirmed success? I think that’s holding me back.

The product is a typical SaaS product but is still small revenue ($1000 MRR)

I think what I’ve been missing is a co-founder that can help with marketing, customer demos, helping with website and organic content to bring in more customers.

We get great feedback but I’ve always been time poor and never been able to go all-in. I feel a bit stuck.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
Thanks, the YouTube clip linked below is how it's pronounced in the UK. Given how much exposure we get to US voices over here it's rare to find a word whose pronunciation throws me.
We don't plan to move permanently to the US, we are thinking between 2 and 5 years.

If we would be very, very unhappy I guess we could pack and leave, but that would be a worst case scenario that I'd like to avoid for the enormous stress that it would cause.
The whole idea of "liveability index" is strange to me. Different people have different needs to live and different places have different cultures. This is biased towards the European and generally western style of living which although might be preferable to most people does not mean it's preferable to all.

In addition to there being probably hundreds of variables that are subconscious and/or can't be accounted for with studies.
This comment captures my experience from lowly Eastern Europe as well, even though the US has some exceptional business opportunities.

It's true that money can insulate you from this societal degradation, but because of this approach by the upper class, the income percentile to maintain isolation is getting narrower by the day, until it practically evaporates.
Thanks, I wish I could read those pronunciations.
Thank you very much. Your post should be the first chapter in that Wikipedia article.
There are also better descriptions of a country than "it's great, as long as you're not from here."
Banks disappearing is awesome though. They're a blight and the small branches offer usurious services almost exclusively.

Large chains being replaced by smaller establishments would be great but I don't have high hopes here.
I fully agree: I am a trained journalist and a programmer.

Ten years ago it was possible to feed a family with an editors salary and have a work environment that made for all around decent articles.

But then the public decided they are not going to pay for journalism anymore and that's exactly the reason we are where we are today. Endless SEO-Content-Attacks, a new breaking news headline every 30 minutes and editors that are not "editors" anymore but "content managers" - people who "write articles" for 20 dollars a pop and content creators who have to finance their notebook reviews with affiliate links of said piece of tech - wonder how independent these review are going to be. All the while publishers trying to get ouf of the reds and into the black and trying to appease the almighty Google ad good as possible.

You people brought that onto yourself. Anybody who wants to write for a career today must be able to afford it...
I am using WSL2 right now and it is not better than 'glass of cold water for someone stuck in hell'. It is better than running Virtualbox, but doesn't hold a candle to real thing.
Why filmmusic.io is stopping online sales (tl;dr humanity)
There's always that risk, but there's not much worse than a logging framework that makes it's far too easy to affect system behaviour in unpredictable ways (looking at you log4j), or be unreliable in a way that you have no source of what's happened when it falls down itself.
Please explain. I really cant see how that might be the case.
> it's far bigger

It's also the only country in the West were regularly every year there are a few mass shootings.

That's the real problem, they have normalized it, all other countries have usually zero mass shootings for many consecutive years.

What matters is that USA can't stop them.

> Of course the US is less likely to have shooting-free years

Not bigger than

Albania + Austria + Belgium + Czech Republic + Finland + France + Germany + Italy + Macedonia + Netherlands + Norway + Serbia + Slovakia + Switzerland + United Kingdom = ~363 million people

USA = ~330 million people

---

Typical (Median) Annual Death Rate per Million People:

Team Europe (363 million people) = 0

USA (330 million people) = 0.058

p.s. read the study I linked
I lived there half my life. It's a wasteland in comparison. That's how I know from first-hand experience and immersion in both sets of media that this isn't about "skewed info" but a complete lack of info for some people who have never lived somewhere they're comparing their country with. This guy is asking about where to go be old, which is a real thing that's going to effect his life... to me going back to the US as an old person is a nightmare. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, especially in the current state of deterioration.
Google Guide is an interactive tutorial and reference for experienced users
Attempting a concise rebuttal to doom-forecasting about USA’s future:

Which decade since 1900 was worse than the one before it? Did the daily newspapers predict the most impactful events of the decade (positive or negative)?

I share most of your current outrage and concerns, but history shows a clear net positive trend
Right… so by that definition US (and Canada) was already the old new USSR? Since this scheme is basically identical to ESTA.
Dev.to simply is too focused on the open-source community and the web, it promotes and pushes up Javascript related content, presumably because a lot of the open-source repositories available on Github are JS or TS based.

It's not a true knowledge sharing platform, it's just a popularity platform where being the first to write about the new ANGULAR version 9999 is seen as a sign of great wisdom and being "on top of your game as a dev".

I wrote there a lot and stopped exactly due to the misalignment between what I wanted to consume and write about.

More generally, I find that ad-hoc aggregator websites like HN have a much higher hit ratio with my own interests.
Also, if you're a professional developer actively involved in open-source and working within the JS/TS ecosystem you'll likely get a bit more value out of dev.to than I did, I guess it's just not my style...
Note: sorry, my english is not my native language

My only advice(s) as someone in mid '40s are:
1. Don't jump to such a sudden and radical change, many-many things in US are vastly different that what are you accustom (strong point since you're from Germany)
2. Give it a try since you're mostly working as freelancer, spend 1-2mo (tourist visa) so you will not break up from your wife
3. See how's living there, if you can accommodate
4. Let us know (start ablog) :)
I’ve been putting my own on https://swizec.com/blog for over 10 years. About 15,000 people agree they’re good enough to stay subscribed.
Crypto’s biggest critics won’t back down
I believe it is usually furniture (anything built with particle board) that keeps off gassing formaldehyde in normal households.
Depending on how your apartment was built, the walls themselves could be particle board.
To be clear it is not the wood, it's the glue that holds the wood together.
UK isn't member of EU anymore. Thus no special relationships. And EU mostly believes treating everyone else equally outside those with special rights and usually these special rights are in blocks.
This has to come, from what your place is made of or where it stands, as aritmo mentioned in his bad cleanup situation he found.
In LV chances are it is various formaldehyde outgassers. The main ones are UFFI = Urea Formaldehyde Foam Insulation and numerous plastics made with phenol and formaldehyde. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea-formaldehyde

UFFI is a prolific outgasser of formaldehyde because of 3 reasons, 1 - a stoichiometric excess of formaldehyde to drive to extinction the remanent urea.
2 - badly employed people/equipment 3 - gradual decomposition of the foam over time.

UFFI was touted as a good way to seal and retro insulate older houses via foam injection into hole drilled in residential wall gaps - often in the 1-2" range, but could be more.
All worked well, people were told the stink of free formaldehyde was fade over time. This was true, but the time was long and the summer bakeout by sunlight on the walls returned. Many were sensitive to formaldehyde.
Government here outlawed this government approved insulation and many people received grants to remove it - a very difficult process.
it has largely faded as formaldehyde is volatile and this was years ago.
https://www.csmonitor.com/1981/0917/091704.html

Your levels are low, it may be something else in the air

So was your place foamed years ago or is this a recent home job by the landlord with industrial foam not intended for houses?
Search government web sites. and test web sites.
https://www.canadianhomeinspection.com/home-reference-librar....
> I advise against trying it in JavaScript

A bunch of news sites use their own line wrapping tools, though they cause a “jump” (reflow) late in the page load as the JS kicks in. You’ll see this on the Times for instance: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/text-wrap-balance.html
Sure, but this choice shouldn't be the concern of the code writing the log message.
Already subscribed to yours ;) Good newsletter content.
Web-based fractal viewer, with an editor
Recently, I discovered the world of web development and WebGL. So I ported a fractal editor I made a couple of years ago into a webpage.

No support for WebGL(1) for now, so it won't work on apple devices for now.
This is great... thanks for sharing.
> You won't be coming home to visit family for Christmas.

Especially if COVID-19 or similar comes back. That cut me off from my family for multiple years.
And part of the problem is that whenever someone points out a way in which it could improve, especially with an proven example from the rest of the world, the mental shutters come crashing down, and it's assumed that you're "hateful". Like trying to help someone do the beneficial thing that other people do is an act of hate now? It makes sense only as pure projection.
Wow, this is garbage, I wonder who made it…

And surprise surprise, this was founded by an ex-GOP consultant. There’s no need to consume fascist propaganda as part of a balanced media diet. Most of the outlets on the far right don’t qualify as news, and CNN isn’t hard left no matter how much it makes Republicans shriek.

This is like a food chart and on the left we see fruits and veggies and on the right we see various animals droppings.
I’ll invite you.

Just send me an email.
No. This gives a huge advantage to candidates that have been around something interesting or prepared a made up scenario in advance and are smooth talkers.

It's ok to ask basic details about previous projects but then change the requirements and ask the candidate to update the design on the spot multiple times.
There is another aspect though that my childhood playground looked not completely unlike the pictures but most kids didn't bother using anything. Most kids didn't want to climb on the monkey bars because it was boring after the first few times.

The playgrounds I see now while being safer look way more fun and the kids actually use them. There is one near me that while the ground is this almost foam padding the actual playground looks like something from American Ninja Warrior. No kid would pick a bunch of scrap metal over it if given the choice.

This whole thread reminds me of Danny Carvey's Grumpy Old Man character from old SNL. Back in my day the playground was 30 foot off the ground and if you fell off they had to amputate your leg.
> credit card terminal likely might not have either

There's a process for taking the details for an offline credit card payment[0] which is settled later.

[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8322/how-are-cr...
To be entirely fair, you are in a Muslim country with heavy internet censorship. I wouldn't really call it naive as it's the nature of TLS (1.2), you can see the hostname but can't inject a page into the middle without blatant warnings. South Korea, etc all do the same thing
I really don't think the PNW and coastal Poland is similar (if it's anything like Sweden). The PNW is like if the Alps had a huge coastline and almost no population to speak of. Check out Olympic National Park and remember that pictures are not the same as being there. It's breathtaking, pristine nature. Florida is extremely boring, the only thing it has going for it is the warm water. Hawaii on the other hand is completely amazing, paradise on Earth, but the water is a bit chilly.
I entered a project with the understanding that the client's systems work with Linux, but that wasn't the case. WSL saved me there -- for me it's much much better than developing on pure Windows. Still at the bottom of my choices though (Linux > Mac > Win WSL > Win).
> even if the deaths are weighted by population, choosing the median is far more likely to give a non-zero value for larger countries.

the reasoning is well explained in the link I posted.

The main reason, for those who don't want to read it or went straight to comments without reading my post in full, is that

*The data itself supports this interpretation, as the United States endured mass shooting events all seven years, but the other countries all experienced mass shootings during only one or two years. Thus, in a typical year, most countries experience zero mass shooting deaths, while the US experiences at least a few.*

If that doesn't scare people enough, maybe this[1] or this[2] will.

[1] https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/number-mass-...

[2] https://yubanet.com/usa/over-70-of-mass-shootings-in-develop...

Over 70% of mass shootings in developed countries happen in the US, international analysis shows

“Mass shootings are a uniquely American problem, particularly in relation to other developed countries.”
See, mentioning hard work is pretty meaningless. It is a given.

And thus the missing component ultimately is roids really.

Because if you don't use roids, by far most people can't get roided tiktoker/marvel super hero look. Hard work or not.

The fact is, that most actors in those movies get there very quickly, relatively speaking and they do use roids. With some very, very rare exceptions.

The hard work isn't the missing component, the roids is the missing key component.
Generally speaking, kwargs in dispatch functions is a dangerous software engineering practice, IMO. I've debugged more function calls than I can remember, just because someone had mixed up functionality.

> Adapters, Bridges, AbstractBeanFactories, and other stuff still causes me nightmares

The "Javanic" approach is dreadful, I agree, but adapters and bridges (or really: using interfaces) can give you a clean and small design. I think that's what you're trying to achieve with "Pythonic if approach+composition using kwargs".

But as usual, what's the best implementation depends on the context.
A cluster of new shops isn't necessarily a sign of boom though, that's also how it looks like when landlords still haven't yet failed finding substitute renters in an ever accelerating sequence of try-and-fail. I know places where the same "newly opened!" signs in the windows keep getting reused since the aughts.
I freelance and love it. The hard part for you will be getting your foot in the door. I’m about your age, and so far haven’t had any problems with employers in our industry. The rise of remote work probably helps you a bit with the employment side of your question.

As for the negative comments, what the comments here don’t address is this: the US is almost more like a bunch of countries rather than one single entity. Which of the states you choose- and which city— makes a huge difference as to your experience. There are absolute hell holes (Flint, Michigan comes to mind) and surprisingly pleasant places (my town of Greenville, SC which was run by an Austrian mayor for so long that it has a fairly European feel to it).

On average, the food here is worse. The bread is much worse. The coffee is terrible. But you can find great bread, coffee, etc if you go out of your way to do so (I do). And in NJ and NY metro areas, you’ll have plenty of good options.

The healthcare system is dumb and annoying, but fine (where I am) as long as you have insurance (which you should have through your wife). The fact that your healthcare is tied to your employer is so, so dumb. If you freelance and get a visa, maybe you can buy your own. That’s what I do, and it’s my preference.

Politically, we are really more divided than I can remember in my lifetime. But it doesn’t affect me at all in my day to day life. I suspect the next two years will be pretty rough if you care about politics. Personally, I just tune it out. I vote. But other than that, I focus on my family, job, local community, and hobbies, and I’m quite happy here.

Edit: one more thing: my wife and I are considering moving to France. I work remotely, so this is simpler for us than for many. Our plan is to start by testing the waters with a long term (3 months or so) rental. If you can do something similar, do it!
Thanks for the tip, looks great!
Will it notify for possible aurora borealis sightings as well?
I think what is more likely to cause that is when someone does this for music, as the RIAA is 100% going to sue whomever pulls off "give me a song about my ex girlfriend that sounds like Taylor Swift singing a cover of a song in the style of one from Bob Dylan".
I’m at the upper end of that spectrum, so I think yes.
'Value' Has Nothing to Do with a Dev's Salary
This article is thoughtful and naive at the same time. Deploying an autonomous weapon is just like deploying any other weapon. Once a gun is fired, the human is out of the loop. Autonomous weapons will end up the same way. People will get to exercise judgement early and late, but AI will make decisions during execution, just like a bullet follows the flight path.

The reason we need humans is for accountability. You can't court marshal a machine. Firing the operator doesn't fix anything or prevent it from happening again (next operator will be just as fallible), it just satisfies some primal part of our brains that needs to blame someone when something bad happens.
Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
Wait what?

I definitely did that in past.
Sounds like an anemic domain model.

OOP is orthogonal concept to data-driven programming.
Producing code, that primarily solves the real world problem (not aesthetic ones).
Producing a working system during a 1-hour interview is not a good measure of skill. That's not what interviews are for.
I refer to the fact that, however beautifully typeset the document is, the substance of the document is abhorrent and objectionable. So: a beautifully presented piece of horrific fucking shit.

I'm not American either (thank goodness).
Homebridge – HomeKit Support for the Impatient
Yeah but anyone can become disadvantaged.
IMO these social blogging platforms for developers lowered the overall quality of online technical content by a lot, and made researching technical topics a fair bit harder.

It used to be that well-researched people and passionate people blogged about technical topics they knew very well, and when they blogged about unfamiliar topics they usually declared that upfront.

Nowadays there are an order of magnitude more grifters churning out a massive amount of blind-leading-the-blind garbage to "build a presence", and they usually pose as experts even though they barely know the topics. As an example, whenever I try to compare two similar technologies/libraries I'm not familiar with, I can almost always find one or more Medium or whatever articles on the topic, but 80+% of the time it's quite clear the author basically wrote the useless crap of an article after reading the READMEs, or slightly better, the bare minimum example projects.
You can't have hours and hours of training without the fast recovery effects of roids and various PEDs.

Mentioning hard work is completely unnecessary, it is a given.

Following the programme and rep-ing till failure isn't necessarily particularly "hard work" especially if you're roided up.

The difference between using and not using roids & PEDs is so massive, that all this mentioning of "hard work" is extremely disingenuous.
Your are right - sorry.
Different plans have different rules and I don't know Princeton's. I think that family plans won't generally require a freelancer spouse to obtain health care (my employer's excellent plan doesn't require my freelancing wife to do that), but I can't speak for every plan out there...
Artists who end up seeing parts of their artwork on T-shirts getting a “no, but an AI did this” will be equally angry.
The point is that his heart failed, not some other organ, and while it was functional for a time, the surgeons had stated that it would be functional for longer.

While you can soften the failure by highlighting the patient's broad systemic issues, this is still a notable failure that will likely put a damper on future similar pig transplants.
The ability to pull nazis out of thin air never ceases to amaze me
Besançon is fantastic both in the winter and in the summer, it's a wonderful place to live in if you have a chance.
So basically authorities were peddling lies, then after getting caught red-handed, they doubled-down on the lies and tried to gaslight the public and label doubters as conspiracy theorists.
How can the government rebuild trust after such behavior? It would be hard to rebuild trust after the lies on their own, but the actual gaslighting is just insane... Governments have been acting like literal psychopaths. Everyone knows you can't trust a psychopath.
I agree, generally terrible performance all around and poor build quality for the price (almost £3,500 fully specced out).

I installed Linux on it recently thanks to the linux-surface project which improved the experience quite a bit as I don’t have to deal with Windows 11 shit anymore, but the performance is still dreadful. You know it’s bad when after 30 mins of it being on it’s slower and laggier than a £500 laptop.

Will never by a Surface product again, easily one of the worst purchasing decisions I have made.
Equating Seattle with Rome, this is just an absurd statement.
You need to use pg_dump from the new version, not from the old version.
I don't believe my answer would make any sense for anybody beside me as I am a very peculiar person and chose the brand after trying dozens of others.