skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the sibling comment. There's no real alternative to the trackpoint. Nothing comes close, but the initial hour or so of using it is weird ; frankly, I don't remember it because I did it about 20 years or so ago, but everywhere I've worked, I've made sure to buy a keyboard with a trackpoint.

Currently I'm using the Tex shinobi keyboard, and before that I used the IBM USB keyboard with the X220 layout.

When navigating with the mouse on the web, I currently have my thumb for the mouse buttons, my index finger on the trackpoint, and middle, ring, and index for movement on the HJKL keys. Nothing beats that for speed and hand movement a mouse is a little more accurate, but I'm willing to trade that for not moving my hand all the time. (I also just realized I switch hands a lot for moving the mouse - not something you can do with a mouse.)
I don't want to rub salt in the wounds here, but that design is extremely mediocre. The primary mistake here imo was to think you needed professional web design in the first place. You didn't.

Professional web design is best suited to companies with a strong brand or websites with complicated UX/UI that needs wireframing. You're just a small business selling KVMs D2C. That doesn't need anything fancy.

There are some really good (free) AI logo generators out there you can use to generate logos very similar (perhaps even better) than this. In recent years I've used them almost exclusively to generate some initial logo ideas then either made minor alterations myself (where needed), or paid someone a little to do it for me.

Similar things can be said for web templates. There are some really good customisable templates for simple sites like yours out there today. I don't know why you'd pay someone for something so simple, especially when the design is so generic and forgettable (no offense).

I don't mean to be so critical. The design isn't bad. The site looks clean and it's pleasant to use. It's just insane to me that your main takeaway here was that you should have hired a freelancer instead of an agency.
You pretty much nailed it. Also can’t really hire a US based agency with US salaries and expect a rebrand to be cheap. OP also went though a ton of design rounds which is just throwing money away. It should have been capped in the contract to something much lower, like one or two designs.
The only way to fight this practice is to make it financially unviable.

Simply don’t buy their cars (new or used). Advocate for that response widely and loudly. The people here actually have quite a lot of reach. We are the cutting edge of technology. We get to define the future. We get to decide if this is ok. It is NOT ok.

Don’t start an arms race of hacking back. Start a boycott. They’ve broken the social contract by selling us a thing and then charging rent to use it. You break the social contract you get cast out.

Don’t ever buy a BMW again. I would say “until they roll back this idiocy.” But this one needs to hurt. BMW is on my permanent blacklist ( I was a bmw fan for the last two decades, I’ve bought my last one)

If we don’t nip this now it’ll be the standard in ten years.
That’s not the future any of us want.
> And now we all have to be solidary with Germany energy problems

I this it's still better than Germany importing Russian gas. Their whole decarbonization strategy was based on Russian gas. This is how we ended up with gas labelled as "green".

If you don't like'em, don't buy German cars, buy Seat. Technically also a German car built in Spain. At least you keep the factory workers employed.
Curious why do you think that though? It’s only dooming if there’s no reasoning behind the negativity :)
There’s two parts. The conservation easement strips the land of its development capacity, and that restriction rides with the land to future owners in perpetuity, while the non profit stewards the land and enforces those legal claims if necessary.
Well, software is knowledge work and it's in big part creative. I am not sure that construction - where people are trained to do one thing in only a few certain ways - is that similar.

I mean, surely there are "oh crap" moments when something not foreseen needs to be addressed, but I don't assume each construction project is a product of spontaneous creativity and improvisation?
I was really into using my trackpoint until suddenly my index finger literally started trembling uncontrollably whenever I tried using it. I think its because it requires too much force to move the cursor or I guess my ligaments are that weak although Im still young. Sadly had to give up using it since it was quite convenient
We hire out to various agencies, and I'm not sure any of them disclose to us what their cut is, but from talking to the people, it sounds like most only take a low single digit percentage on the hourly rate (1~5%). e.g. engineers on $150/h contracts saying their paystub says $140-145/h. YMMV
Trial set to begin for Twitter worker charged in spy case
> Your usage of "premise" and "conclusion" as shorthands for "the state of the world at a time t" is somewhat confusing to me

I agree, and the correct terms are "antecedent" and "consequent"; a premise is a type of antecedent, and a conclusion a type of consequent. But using those terms right away makes it harder to relate to formal arguments.
fartingwizard[at]hhhhhsssshssss[dot]dev

I primarily code in Python so that's why the weird domain name.
You can / should change the sensitivity so it doesn't require so much force. I like it to move all the way across the screen with very little effort ; if you're getting finger strain, you should look into its settings.
Don't overlook all of wal-mart's vendors and service providers then, I guess? Those aren't one organization, but thousands.
How do you scroll with the trackpoint? I have a ThinkPad and the trackpoint is nice, but I always end up back on the touchpad for two finger scrolling. I used to use scroll bars, but they are so small these days that they’re really only useful as an indication of where you are in a document.
Amazon has been HIPAA-compliant for years at this point. Even Alexa has been since 2019.[1]

[1]: https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/ff33dbc7-6cf5-...
> You're effectively saying you think the remainder of the 21st century will be worse for the industrialized west than all recent history

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. And there is ample evidence for this, despite HNs general refusal/inability to process this.
You're getting a little beat up here...I'm not piling on, I am actually interested, because I need to reinforce my skill in this area, do you have any learning to share about how to better assess the character/ethics of whom you are selecting?

I do appreciate your honest assessment of your project. One of my investors is pushing me to build a team of outsourced workers; it seems suboptimal to me to say the least. I find the clues you share in retrospect to be helpful. Thanks.
Nothing about scancodes and mapping the physical location of the key to the character depending on the keyboard layout (QWERTY/AZERTY/etc)?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scancode

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout
Lots of companies are run by bad people who should never run companies. Sometimes you don't know they're bad until they completely fail to handle adversity properly.

A company I once worked for was violating several state laws. When I brought it to the owner's attention, he threatened to sue me. When I reported it to the state†, he fired me and said he was going to send his lawyers after me.

They never got the chance. The state shut him down a few weeks later.

†Note: When you report something to the state, in some states, you have no right to privacy. Not every state has whistleblower protections. This was explained to me by the state liaison I spoke with. He said under state law, he had to tell the employer who filed the complaint.
Slow news day at Bloomberg?
> a trackpoint in the keyboard?

non-ironically, this is the last thing that is giving me doubts between going for the frame.work for my next laptop or sticking to old-trustworthy thinkpads.
Germanies economy is in the shitter* and I have a feeling they will be tightening immigration shortly.

*Still a strong economy in the grand scheme of things, but during period of contraction unable to support short-term generalized expansion of foreign labor. I do think they are in a position to expand foreign labor again in the long term (although it may require finding a way to refactor their energy policies).
~115 parking spaces can fit on a normal 1-acre paved, marked parking lot. You can double that when cars park in long rows at the cost of having attendants.

You can unquestionably have smaller lots, but it’s hardly a massive plot of land.
Requiring Chrome is a dealbreaker for me. I prefer statistics without spyware.
Ask HN: How do you run your container image as non-root user?
Do you create a new user and set it as user? If so, what permissions should be given to this user?
> I would think giving it to some federal parks/wildlife agency would come with stronger protections than an NGO could provide.

This largely depends on whether an NGO is more trustworthy than the party in control of the federal government when it comes to conservation. Half the time, the answer seems to be "yes".
I haven't tried it yet but I've seen 10x Management[0] mentioned on Hacker News. It's essentially the model you're describing.

[0] https://10xmanagement.com/
Everyone will tell you to read a bunch of books or look at how others use your product.

There is a simple secret to a great UX.

USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT.

Ignore designers, they have no idea what a UX is about. Pretty != Workflow. Workflow is king.

Find something you do all the time that takes 5 steps. Make it 1.

Find something that annoys you? Fix it.

Find something that's slow? Make it fast.

Find something that confuses you? Make it clearer.

That's all you need for a good UX.
Middle click with thumb, mouse with index finger for moving through the document.
Huge respect for your TinyPilot project (especially for the free version of the software over at https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot), but I think you were ripped off and not enough care/attention was given to your page :-(

I'm not trying to be one of those people who say, you gave too much money for something I would create in 2 weeks with only 4k, but I'm trying to give a friendly advice to a fellow software engineer :-)

Two things that should be fixed in revision 2.0 of your page:

- If we select the "Product" option from the top menu, we're taken directly to the order page for the TinyPilot Voyager 2. If we go to the root page for the products (https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/) we get a page not found!!!

- Although you're also selling something else, the TinyPilot Pro software (over at https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-pro) this isn't visible in the "Product" selection or from the main page. Maybe you should rename this selection to "Products" since you have at least 2 things you sell. The page for buying the software is only referenced from the Voyager2 page and from nowhere else.
Solving Storage Sharing in Kubernetes/EKS at Scale
Editing it to say 'If you work for a FAANG your total compensation just crashed' would make it honest. Guess the admins can do that, I've never looked much into the internal workings of HN.
I'd like to hear more about this or get their take. Maybe if I could gather some interviews it'd be easier to get the word out about what's been going on. But most people don't care, and will keep getting jabbed without thinking twice.
From the article: “The real issue, [WebAgency CEO] said, was that I was their only hourly client. I would always be at the mercy of long-term retainer clients pre-empting my project.”

— and —

From the article: “They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.”

___

That’s bait-and-switch in my opinion and might very well be illegal.

My suggestion would be to immediately stop talking about this to random people on the internet and speak to an attorney specializing in contract law. Prepare a brief covering what you did in the blog, have copies of any emails, specs, contracts, etc. — and have them clarify if there was a material breach of contract that would warrant damages and/or any evidence showing the web agency committed illegal acts.

I would also be very careful about identifying the company, since they might file for legal damages. If the CEO’s first name is real, I would immediately remove it from your blog and the reference to finding them on HN to make any claim you did identify them harder.
> Even though the ruling occurred in a U.S. federal court, Judge Tse said he made the ruling based on New Zealand law, as Zuru intends to sue in that jurisdiction

How can a US federal judge interpret New Zealand law? My mental model of the legal system is that a judge in the US would only make decisions based on US law.
Just recently Amazon allowed me to buy a kindle book for my specific kindle device, which turned out to not be supported. But they still allowed me to purchase and deliver it to this kindle. Only once I went to the device to sync it did I learn that it was incompatible. I was not allowed a refund.

Amazon is full of minor counts of fraud like this and at their scale I bet it adds up to real money.
> they have very different goals than you have

I've been seeing stories like this about out of control software projects as long as I've been working as a developer (so since about 1992). The conclusion is always that the root cause is either malice or incompetence - but it's awfully suspicious that software is conspicuously alone in attracting this much incompetent malice. Of course, we hear stories like this about general contractors, but they're the exception rather than the rule - for the most part, when somebody hires somebody else to build a house, they get a house and it costs mostly what they were quoted up front and takes mostly as long as they were told it was going to take.

While I guess nobody would take time to write about a software project that went exactly as predicted, my experience is that those are the exception rather than the rule, and the cases where a software project was accurately quoted in advance are relatively trivial projects.

I can understand why the people who are writing the checks want software projects to be predictable, but in 30 years of practice, I've never figured out a way to accurately predict them, nor have I met anybody else who could. I've met a lot of people who accuse me (and software developers in general) of malicious incompetence for not being able to foretell projects in advance, I have yet to meet one who rolls up their sleeves and says, "here, let me show you how to estimate this stuff accurately" except in very abstract terms like "first write down every task you're going to do, then write down how long each task is going to take, and then add up those numbers and voila! Estimate complete!"
Again? This is old claim by the Deutsche Physik. It is tedious and wrong. As a completely unrelated and random remark I would recommend honest work against any feelings of inferiority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
It's not piracy if it's a naval vessel. If it's a sanctioned military action, it's "defending national interests".
Looks like the poll doesn't tell them how much it cost in the question.
I think this is like the 20th time I have said that YouTube doesn't care about the small creators and only appeals to the channels and accounts used by corporations, media giants and some of the largest creators on the platform.

As for smaller creators, good luck getting YouTube to change its ways. They will never change and it will only get much worse.
When's the next update to cover io_uring?
I'm one of the founders here. Yes, we work with hundreds of startups and large FN 500 companies. Happy to answer any questions. That's why we created Facet - trying to eliminate recruiter spam and create a better experience for engineering, product, or design contractors. Dev founded - dev run.
Naming the agency might give them more pressure to make it right.
Do periods of war, disease, and famine typically get noted by wether there is a recession? In many cases I suspect it would be assumed that there is one. Or does the increased spending from government’s combating crises usually gloss over the recession?
It's strange they consider increasing jobless claims a positive.
The headline here is — "if you care about the state protecting your privacy — don't live in New Zealand", rather than "...don't post on Glassdoor":

From the opinion:

> In New Zealand, statements of opinion are not categorically protected. New Zealand makes available a more limited protection, allowing the defendant in a defamation action to assert the defense of "honest opinion." ... The honest-opinion defense is an affirmative defense: the defendant bears the burden of proving that he honestly held the opinions he expressed.

> Here, then, the question under New Zealand law isn't whether the reviews on Glassdoor.com were opinions, but whether, if they were opinions, they reflected the reviewers' honest opinions. That question can't be answered now. The reviewers haven't even been identified, much less appeared in court and offered evidence on the genuineness of their opinions. Zuru, at this point, just wants discovery—to learn who wrote the reviews.
If adding this check to an existing table with millions of records, will it scan the entire table checking all of the records, or just check when the records are inserted or updated.
I guess we can be thankful that not all dreams become true.
Walmart has done tons of work lowering the prices they pay on their self insurance. They pretty recently started flying everyone who needs knee surgery out to some hospital in bumfuck Pennsylvania. From what I hear most of that hospitals business is now knee surgeries for Walmart. It makes sense, the hospital can specialize and you can do in patient rehab for way cheaper since land and labor are cheaper in the rust belt. In house primary care is only the beginning.
Yeah then people wonder why people prefer going with Wix/Squarespace etc

That's why. It also tones the "customer nitpicking every detail" way way down, when you can only pick from set choices.
I was a patient there during the change in administrations in 2016 in DC.

It was a weird combination of doing everything online and no HTTPS paired with things like sending REALLY sensitive things literally in the body of an email.

(Glad those STD results were clear at least, yikes)

I would have stayed with them, had I found work in DC after Trump took office.

It hurt my feelings on a deep, personal level that their model meant full on MDs would sometimes seem to have an almost purposeful incongruency of care, stemming from stuff like politely noting the issues above and asking to use the phone in the future until the issue is sorted.

(They later added HTTPS for example, and then I was more willing to use an online portal.)

Their model works if you need a nurse practitioner to see if you need a strep test, they go off the rails when it comes time to refer to any sort of specialist.

They contributed to a deep distrust of the medical system during a very stressful period in my life, and offered zero help lining on continuity of care when I had to move from the District of Columbia back to my home state.
Show HN: I made a visual test tracker to find more bugs
Headlamp is a Chrome extension that shows where you're missing tests.

It reveals gaps in testing for solo testers, test teams (collaborative bug-bash, anyone?), and test automation (Selenium, Puppeteer, Playwright).

Using it is easy as 1-2-3!

1) When you start testing, Headlamp puts a dot on each link and input element.

2) The dots are cleared when you click a link, type some text, or change a selection.

3) The remaining dots show you which things you missed. It also provides insightful test activity reports.

It's free to use as a solo tester. Give it a try today!
I work in interdiction/interception (a long time now), yes people are way over paranoid about this type of stuff. Media makes so much sound like we're some james bond movie..
This is where business mindset could really help working class people.

I'll illustrate with a personal anecdote, recently I was looking at levels.fyi negotiation service, and I thought to myself $1800 seems way over priced! but then it dawned on me, so long the EROI is > $1800 in better offers, then I might as well use it, right?

For what workers lack in individual power, they overwhelm in aggregate value, if a service could provide positive value on $10 a month to a lot of workers they could make bank. Would you pay $10 a month to

1. Have a better manager

2. Get paid a high percentage of your true maximal value

3. Avoid companies that require therapy during/after the fact

4. Increase your inter-company mobility reducing periods of unemployment

An ideal glassdoor should be able to provide this.

As I write this out I kind of realize this is kind of like a market solution to unions.
It was generally an in good faith comment specifically about the application.

The relevant bit to this is the “quite trivially” do X, Y, and Z non trivial thing.

Technical people often underestimate the value of good UX, generally there’s a lot of demand for it. That’s also where a lot of the value is in making something good. He also acknowledges as much in his reply to Drew.

In this case the “main benefit” of the flipper being ease of use, software, and hardware vs. some random components off of Ali express just reminds me of that.
If Glassdoor could verify without needing to know everything about a person, it could trust in the reviews while not being able to dox them even when forced.
Always love your writing, mtlynch. FWIW, I really do like the redesign. The logo is great, as are the illustrations. They obviously had a talented bunch, even if mismanaged. This is one of my fears with hiring freelancers, and why I really haven't done it so far. I could use the help, but I feel like it'd suck my time and wallet to get the results I'm after. Probably just haven't talked to the right one yet, if such a thing exists.

I worked as the dev lead for an ad agency in the past it always came down to sales under pricing, not listening to the team about what they thought costs would be. Like, "oh yeah, we can definitely build this complicated ecom site for $10k!" -- no way, mumbled the team. What you spent was pretty typical for a "$10k" project. And then frustrated clients would be due to PMs not being truthful about what the situation really is, spewing the same BS that sales sold them on.

Maybe that was the point, and the business model -- taking advantage of your clients? I wouldn't put it past them, at least when it came to the ad agency I worked for. It wasn't my favorite place to work, that's for sure. Constantly being over budget and past deadlines sucked.

Towards the end of my venture there, I almost always recommended using Shopify for any ecom project, to stay within the project's budget, instead of WooCommerce, Spree, or Magento (never again). Even if 9/10 times it didn't happen that way, I still made the recommendation.

But these days, a very simple ecom site could even be built by offloading onto Stripe Checkout, though I'd still probably go with Shopify to future-proof on product catalog growth.