Developers often launch a feature without understanding the impact it has on their users and business. This is a big deal, because only 1/3 of product launches actually improve the desired metrics. Of the rest, 1/3 have no effect, and the last 1/3 actually hurt [1]. The best way to measure this is to use feature flags and controlled experiments (A/B tests).

Jeremy and I worked together for 10 years at an ed-tech startup as CTO and software architect. We spent far too long just building and launching features without really knowing how they impacted our users and if they were adding value to the company. We had product analytics, but there was too much noise in the data to draw real conclusions. We knew the “right” way to do this was to build feature flags and run controlled experiments, but that was daunting for our small team.

We looked into 3rd party tools, but it bothered us that they didn't use our existing data warehouse and metric definitions, and we really didn't like the idea of adding an API call in the critical rendering path of our application. We also didn’t want to send our data to 3rd parties, didn’t feel good about vendor lock-in, plus the vendors were expensive. So, we did what any engineers would do—build it ourselves. After all, how hard could it be?

After a couple painful years, we hacked something together that (mostly) worked and used it to help grow revenue 10x. We started talking to other teams and realized just how many larger companies spend years building these feature flagging and experimentation platforms in-house because, like us, they couldn’t find any tools that met their needs. So we took everything we learned and built the tool we wish had existed back when we started.

GrowthBook is an open source platform for feature flagging and A/B experimentation. Our SDKs are built to be fast and cache-friendly. We take data privacy seriously and don’t use cookies or deal with PII. We sit on top of your company’s existing data warehouse and metrics so you can maintain a single source of truth. We’re open source (MIT), so you can either self-host the platform (with Docker containers), or use our managed cloud offering.

In GrowthBook, feature flags are added and controlled within the UI. Engineers or PMs can add targeting rules (e.g.”beta users get feature X, everyone else does not”), do gradual rollouts, and run A/B tests on the features. The current state of features are stored in a JSON file and exposed via an API or kept in-sync with a cache/database using webhooks. Engineers install our SDK and pass in the JSON file. Then they can do feature checks throughout their code (e.g. `if feature.on { ... } else { ... }`).

For A/B test analysis, a data analyst or engineer connects GrowthBook to their data warehouse, then they write a few SQL queries that tell GrowthBook how to query their experiment assignment and metric conversion data. After that initial setup, GrowthBook is able to pull experiment results, run it through our Bayesian stats engine, and display results. Users can slice and dice the data by custom dimensions and/or export results to a Jupyter notebook for further analysis.

We’re used by over 60 companies in production. We have self-hosted and cloud versions (see our pricing here: https://www.growthbook.io/pricing), and both are self-serve and simple to set up. We currently have SDKs for Javascript/Typescript, React, PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, and Android with more in the works (C#, Java, Swift, and Elixir). We support all the major SQL data warehouses as well as Mixpanel and Google Analytics.

You can give it a spin at https://github.com/growthbook/growthbook. Let us know what you think! We would especially love feedback from anyone who has built platforms like this in the past.

[1] https://exp-platform.com/Documents/ExPThinkWeek2009Public.pd...

I’m Matthew Knippen, a 10 year iOS dev turned CEO for Charge Running (www.chargerunning.com). We built a mobile app that allows you to run with others from all over the world in real-time, all while being trained by a certified run coach. Think of us as Peloton for running, but way more social. You can learn more about our product here: http://www.chargerunning.com

I’m a career mobile dev that always liked hacking on things, and worked on over 60 applications ranging from photos, games, and fitness. Over the years, when I come across a problem in my life, I write code to solve it. I built a garage door opener app before it was cool, an electronic Go board, and an app to track different whiskeys I’ve tasted like “Untappd for Spirits.” Charge was born out of a much bigger personal problem:

I used to run a fair bit with my friend (and now co-founder) Rory. It was a great way to stay in shape and having someone to talk helped the time go by faster. Unfortunately, when Rory moved across the country for the military, both of us ran significantly less than we did before. I came to the conclusion running by myself… SUCKED! We were chatting about it on the phone one day knowing there had to be a better solution, and that's when we thought of Charge. I spent the weekend hacking something together, and on Monday, we tried it out.

Our first version of the app was an all white screen where it showed two things, Rory’s distance, and mine. We hopped on a phone, and used the app to have a friendly competition. A programmer vs a Navy Seal is rarely a fair challenge, and he kicked my a$$, but we LOVED it! On the backend, we utilized Firebase’s Realtime database for data, and a group phone call to manage audio. (Most of this has since been upgraded)

As any developer would want to do, we kept building on it, showing things like current pace, cadence, and more. A few friends wanted to join us, so we built support for multiple users, and listened to music while we ran. It was at this time that someone joined us that was a friend of a friend, and said “Now that I know I can run with this, I never want to run without it.”

So, we decided to turn our ugly hacked together app into an official product. When talking to our users, we found out that they wanted four things during their runs:
1. Motivation - The hardest part about going for a run is committing to do it and getting those shoes on
2. A social experience - Every other running app focuses on social after the run, not the ability to run with others in real-time.
3. Education - Most beginner runners just start running. After hearing Rory talk with them, they learned proper form and how to improve without getting injured.
4. Music - When asked what a big pain point was, users said they needed to put more work into their playlist than they spent running!

We took that information, and made a small pivot into dedicated coached classes, where a certified trainer would guide you through a specific type of workout. Each workout was effort-based, meaning whether you’re a complete beginner, or have run 25 marathons, you could join any class and fit right in.

We hired coaches (finding them by doing a bit of web scraping ) and built an audio solution with professional DJ software, allowing the coaches to change the beat of the music and auto-blend them together.

Rory and our other co-founder Julie (my sister), would host a few classes a day. I quit my job as an iOS contractor for a big company to focus on a start-up full time, at the same time my wife was 8 months pregnant with our first child. (I have the world’s most supportive wife!)

We launched, and we’re instantly overwhelmed. Apple featured us on “New Apps We Love”. MacWorld called us the “App of the Week”. We got 25K downloads, but we're still in a very early beta. We had no on-boarding. No app store video. Calling it a website would be an exaggeration. No one knew what we did, or how it worked, and we churned 99% of the users within the first week.

However, the ones that stayed lit a fire inside of us that we never knew we had. We talked to them constantly, and they defined our product roadmap. Since then, we’ve had users run over 350,000 miles in live classes, hosted a wedding day ceremony for them, and have seen people become best friends who live halfway across the world from each other. That being said, we really want to learn more, and keep iterating. We would love to hear the community's feedback and answer any questions.

A little introduction about myself is necessary.
I'm 22 years old. I live in Israel. My main occupation right now is studying physics. However, I am not a student in a university, nor am I affiliated with any other kind of academic institution. It's been about a year and a half since I've started studying physics in this independent way. I used to be an official student, a few years ago. I was an undergrad in Electric Engineering. I quit there after one year. Then I decided to start studying math independently. I did that for about a year and a half. Then I stopped with math and decided to start studying physics, with the goal of figuring out how the universe works.

So I'm about a year and a half into my quest. I can say that up to now I studied Special Relativity and Classic Electromagnetism.

The thing is, I feel that I have diverted from the ways of academic physicists. Actually, after these 1.5 years it has come to a point where I feel like I'm speaking a different language than the one they're speaking. Perhaps I took a wrong turn somewhere and I'm heading into a dead end? Perhaps the mainstream physicists took a wrong turn and I'm taking the right one? Or maybe some other possibility? I am hoping that you, HN readers, will be able to shed some light on this gap.

What are these differences between me and them? It will take some exposition before I could explain. Some of the things I say about physics may seem wrong or provocative to you. If you feel the urge to tell me I'm wrong, please do it with a thorough, logical argument. If anything seems unclear, please ask. Here we go:

In Newtonian mechanics, life was simple. There was a collection of bodies in different places. Each pair of them exerted forces on each other. There were rules that said exactly how much force they exerted. With these rules it was possible to calculate exactly what the force on each body was. After you knew the force for a body, you could know the acceleration that that body would have, according to the revered formula, F=m a, or in its more useful form, a=F/m. After you knew the acceleration, you could advance the simulation by a small time-step. The bodies would then move a bit, and you would calculate the forces again, and so on.

If you took a small enough time-step, you could calculate the outcome of any physical system to any desired accuracy. All the subjects taught in Newtonian mechanics, such as angular momentum, centrifugal forces, conservative fields, and kinetic and potential energies would appear as emergent phenomena from these rules. They were just epiphenomena to the true axioms of physics: The force equations and F=m a.

That was Newtonian mechanics. In approaching Special Relativity, I expected the same style, maybe a bit more complicated. Eventually that's what I got, but it was hard work, and I had to build big parts of the system myself, with only hints from physics textbooks (more about that later.) It turns out that Special Relativity is just a tad more complicated than the above description of Newtonian mechanics. Instead of the formula a = F/m, there is a more complicated formula:

a = (F- v (F v)/c^2)/(m gamma)

(Where v is the velocity, gamma is some function of the velocity, c is the speed of light and that (F v) is a dot product.)

And the formulas for calculating forces become more complicated as well. I will not list them here, since the mathtext will become too cumbersome, but if anyone will insist I'll post them. These equations are eventually what is called Classic Electromagnetism. All the revered Maxwell equations turn out to be just special cases of these equations.

(Also, in Special Relativity there is the issue of Lorentz transformations: but that is important only if you want to change viewpoints, and even then it can be deduced from the rules above.)

Another note: I know that the system I described is not an end-all model of the world. It does not include Quantum Mechanics, and thus it will be valid only for macroscopic bodies. (It also does not include General Relativity, and thus it could not deal with gravitation, but that is less important in my opinion.)

I mentioned that I had to build most of that system myself, and that physics textbooks don't give this system explicitly. That is the biggest gap between the physics community and myself. Physicists do not seem to accept this system. The equation for the acceleration that I supplied above cannot be found in any textbook, or at least I didn't find it. That is even though it can be easily derived from known equations of Special Relativity. The equation for the Electromagnetic force is almost as hard-to-find, although it can be derived from the well-known Liénard-Wiechert potentials. Why are these things not mentioned in textbooks? Am I blind to something? What are physicists doing, how can they research anything without knowing this system?

About Quantum Mechanics: Even though the system I described will break down at the quantum level, I think it's indispensable for trying to figure out how the quantum world works. It is true that as you go smaller and smaller, the physical reality will deviate from this macroscopic model; But if you want to study and understand these deviations, you should understand the macroscopic model first, so you will know exactly what to compare the physical reality against!

That's my opinion. I may be wrong, and if I am, I would love to hear a well-reasoned rebuttal. I really hope you guys can shed some light on this.

Ram.

As retail investors we noticed that many retail products have some combo of the following shortcomings: high paywalls, tricky to navigate web design, oversimplification of investing principles, and misaligned incentives that push users to trade more—instead of giving them adequate education to manage a successful portfolio. They are very non noob friendly.

Further, I am personally very “triggered” by the lack of financial education myself and friends were not given growing up. I am fortunate to be a software engineer, but it really hurts me to see a lot of close friends, and even family get bit by the financial system since they are not educated by it. And it’s not our fault. Much of America and the world falls into this bucket, which was exasperated by a deflationary financial brokerage environment that led to trading apps which would allow anyone to trade stocks in minutes from their pocket (for free!). Honestly, that’s great. Access to markets is important. However, many people are following a similar story line, you get easy access to trading for low costs/free, you probably started in the bull market from the covid flash crash, made some money if you’re lucky, but have since fallen into the red/realized how clueless we all are for what investing actually is.

I remember so clearly a few years ago looking at a Yahoo Finance page and feeling overwhelmed by price ratios, reported financials, stock prices cross stocks, analysts, different news articles from the same publishers saying the opposite headlines… It honestly felt impossible to learn. Especially since my family/close friends aren’t into finance or investing.

Then one day, sitting on my bed in NYC hiding from COVID in 2020, I stumbled upon Daniel’s Youtube account. I do not follow celebs, I don’t know famous people, I don’t twitter, but there was something about Daniel and the investment education content he put out that immediately had me captivated and drawn to his account. He is well spoken and presents investing and financial analysis in a way that I actually could understand, and it blew my mind. I proceeded to feverishly ingest his Youtube content for months.

I began to notice a pattern in Daniel’s videos, he would sometimes use third party sites to show investment graphs, but he would often open an excel sheet with 3-5 stocks in it (columns), and then fill in rows for financial metrics. I will quote Daniel “I spend about 5-8 hours a week making these spreadsheets, it takes a lot of time but it’s worth it”. So I’m an engineer sitting here watching this and I think… I could definitely write a program to do this. And better yet, I could give it to Daniel as a thank you for all the great work he puts into Youtube.

So on a weekend I whip up this program to automate his spreadsheet creation and give it to Daniel… I mean I tried to, but Daniel didn’t answer my Youtube comment! GASP!!!! Ok… so, I found his instagram, but still no luck. I was honestly pretty pissed, like this dude is so smart how could he not recognize that I can save him 5-8 hours a week if he used my program to automate his spreadsheet creation.

Well, another 2 months go by. Every week I iterated on the program more, started ranting to my co-worker at the time Nick (we were at Oscar Health together), and kept pinging Daniel shamelessly across multiple social channels. FINALLY he answered me… we ended up hopping on a zoom call, which itself went for 2-3 hours, a beer was cracked… the rest is well, history!

I was able to pretty easily write a Python script to hit a financial data API (Alpha Vantage at the time), and Daniel, Nick, and myself all saw a vision for us to create a software platform that actually taught users how to invest, without oversimplifying the process, and at a price that didn’t break the bank.

The moment at which this turned from a side project to a company, was when I shared my program with Daniel Pronk’s investing discord community and people basically freaked out. “This is the best thing ever”, “can you make it generate _this_?”, “how can I pay you for this”... I basically took the classic “push back chair from desk” moment and knew it was time to take this full time. Thankfully, Nick was also on board! We had a founding team of 3, and at the time the project was called “Stonk Reporter” (I’m still a bit salty we didn’t keep this name). After a long 4 month beta/pilot with around 200 users from Daniel’s discord, we launched Stock Unlock on December 11th 2021. Jake and Nick met Daniel for the first time a couple weeks ago, until then it was a fully remote co-founder relationship!

Today we provide a modern/easy-to-use web app which has data visualization tools for financials, and contextual, inline education. Sites like Investopedia are good for term lookup, but the education isn't given at the time the investor needs it. Typically you get confused, search the internet, and land there—we show it to you in place. For users who already know the ropes, our graphing tools allow users to compare 70+ financial metrics across as many stocks as they want. These tools either don't exist or are part of extremely pricey programs like Bloomberg Terminal (no retail investor can afford that). We have existing investors using Stock Unlock who say they save 80-90% of their time on company analysis with our tools.

Our current business model is that we give everyone a 7 day free trial, no credit card/totally free to try the site. We ask for email, but you can give a fake email if you want and we don’t verify it/anything like that. After the 7 day free trial we are priced at $6.99 per month / $74.99 per year (USD, prices will vary for Euro/Canada).

We build the consumer web app layer and get our financial data from another startup called Finnhub. We are “serverless” using AWS for all our backend infrastructure. We use Cognito for user auth, Api Gateway & Lambda (Python) for the API, Dynamo & Postgres for data store, S3/CloudFront/Route 53 for static hosting. The frontend is all ReactJS with special help from Material UI for our designed components/us not needing to write tons of CSS (yay), and recharts for the lib to help draw pretty graphs. There are also a ton of fun technical challenges that we solve, currency conversion/alignment for the 122,000 global stocks we support has been hairy/filled with edge cases, also data staleness for prices/market caps is another area of complexity. Not to mention building around a 3rd party HTTPS/JSON api and caching those endpoints/storing some data internally is a fun juggle!

Your feedback/your stories about any of the above or this space in general would be amazing. I look forward to interacting with everyone in the comments, we embrace constructive feedback and feel fortunate knowing that you will hold us to your highest standards.

If you do decide to try our application, please let us know your thoughts! We launched with a pretty raw MVP and are adding features to the site weekly, with no end in sight. Cheers!

As many of you know, I endured the banhammer on my main WoW account. I'm as bitter as anyone would be, but not because of all the time I lost. I can get mounts, titles, pets, gear and all of my 80s back within time. I think what I'm the most bitter about is how Blizzard went about this and how I have to basically bend over and take it in the rear constantly from this company.

I know gold selling is a bannable offense. It's stated in the ToS, it's stated (sometimes) when you log in. I knew it would happen eventually- but not like this.

After over 10 emails exchanged with the account admins, I was replied consistently with the same copy/paste format each time until I guess I annoyed them enough and it was taken up by a supervisor. I am still awaiting a reply.

After reading hundreds of forum posts, threads, and the like- people are getting banned for the dumbest stuff when it comes to gold. A guild breaking up and the GM splitting the guild bank between the 3 officers? Perma ban. Someone buying a crimson deathcharger from someone face to face instead of the auction house? Perma ban. Sending 140k to a brand new alt on the same account? Perma ban.

Most of these aren't even getting unbanned, let alone replied to. These people were doing normal things in the game yet were put on the same page of wrecking the economy, goldselling, etc. as me? It makes no sense. I in no way defend what I do/did. I sold gold. I made loads of cash. Call me a bad person, but it was good money. These people on the other hand? Did nothing wrong. From what I read, Blizz has a way of tracking large amounts of gold being moved. I get it- it makes sense. But do they not realize 100k is not a lot of gold anymore? You can make that in one day with proper farming, watching prices, and especially when a new expansion is released OR during Darkmoon week. If they're going to track gold and ban people for it- at least up the amount to track.

What really grinds my gears out of all of this is how quick they were to reply about the incident. Over the past 2 years I have contacted NUMEROUS GMs for harassment and threats made in and outside of the game WITH PROOF. I got blown off completely, and sent the same copy/pasted email format as to what action was taken. On what level is harassment and threatening a player put below selling currency? I don't understand.

REGARDLESS

I will not stop selling gold. It's almost like a bad drug addiction. The income was nice and I got to do things I would not have been able to had it not been for selling gold.

Game Stop is an okay job but pays for absolute shit. There's no way in hell I can make a living from that job but with it + gold I was making a pretty decent income.

I get sick a lot. I have a very weak immune system that treats a common cold as the flu. If I ever catch the actual flu, or even pneumonia- I will die, no questions asked. During December I had to call in multiple times because I was sick nonstop. Of course in December is Christmas- so every white trash child and his mother was trading in their nasty, dusty, smoke plagued items for minimal amounts of cash. Even with using hand sanitizer in between transactions, washing my hands to the point of where they were red and raw, you just can't get away from it. Long story short- I was out of work for a very very long time trying to recover.

With that said, I remembered I had sold gold here and there over the course of 2 years. I'd say maybe done it 6 or 7 times. I figured since I was going to be at home a lot, and there's no going back to work for a while as I am basically a biohazard- I'd start making some money on the side until I fully recovered.

It started off as just farming herbs occasionally on my mage, 1-2 maybe 3 hours at a time. I wasn't raiding and had loads of free time. This was a bit after Cataclysm was released so they were still decently priced. I did this for a few days and made well over 300k. I pawned off all of it to guildmates and ni hao sites via Paypal and transferred that money to my bank. After some time I realized how much quicker I could be making gold if I had instant flight form and could shadowmeld mobs off of me. Spent a few days leveling druid from 80-85. Max herbalism.

Hundreds and thousands of gold, time, herbs sold, volatile life sold, and many happy guildmates and customers later- I was sitting on well over 2,000$+ over the course of a month.

It almost became sort of a high for me, like a Colombian drug lord/trafficker. If you think about it- it is almost like the exact same thing, take away the prison time and health deterioration inflicted on others.

People want gold. Gold buys people what they want, which in return makes them happy and makes the game fun for them. Not all people have time to farm gold.

I wanted money. Money bought me Xbox games, my first Angelic Pretty dress set, a kickass birthday for my mom, a Valentine's day present for my boyfriend, and multiple breakfast/lunch/dinner outings my mom and I were never able to have- which in return made all of us happy. I have all the time in the world to farm gold, with very few hours I was working and an addiction to the exchange of currency to cash.

The argument is there I could just go get a better job. And you're right- I can. I have offers I can take any day, and probably will sooner now that I lost one of my accounts. Will it stop me from selling gold? No. Will it give me the same sense of fulfillment and the rush that gold selling does? No.

PROS OF GOLD SELLING

No real life human interaction. no sickness, no stress, no bashing of the head against the counter. Most transactions were done with very little communication, communication via Facebook, or were done with people I already know.

Making money from the comfort of my own home. I can get up at any point and go play Xbox if I get bored. I can eat when I want, where I want. I can play with my dogs and screw around while I wait on a transaction to finish, or just because I can.

Happiness. There is the saying "money can't buy happiness"- but I disagree. Money pays for doctor bills which in return give you medicine for your severe depression. I actually was taken off of my anti depressants because I had such a rapid change in my attitude towards life, and was more motivated and excited about things.

Fulfillment. I had a daily responsibility that fulfilled me in ways my job was unable to. Instead of secretly hating everyone that walked in the store, I was now excited to talk to people and help them get gold without spending a fortune. I am also able to pay off my student loans without stressing to get it done on time. With this, I have been able to look at potential other schools for later on in life.

Relationships. I've met loads of people through selling gold. Most of them turn out to be really awesome people that I still play with. Just like my job- I had repeat customers for having excellent communication, prices, and overall customer service. Like I told one of my regulars- you're helping me help you, vice versa.

My mom. My mom and I have always been very close. As I was struggling looking for work before I was hired at GS, we were having a rough time making ends meet. We never got to go out for dinner, we had to watch every penny, struggled with phone bills, dealing with my constant streams of sickness and doctor visits was depleting our money, and it was not a fun way to live. Now that I have my job combined with the gold income, we are able to finally go out, have fun, and do things together we originally were not able to do. It sounds superficial, but it's true. She has been less stressed knowing we have extra money to fall back on if something happens.

CONS OF SELLING GOLD

Time. I have to put forth lots of time in order to keep up to date on current auction house prices, dual box farming herbs, checking mail, doing transactions, waiting on paypal, and waiting on paypal money to transfer to my bank account, keeping up with constantly changing gold prices and adjusting my prices to always be lower. It's almost a full time job as I'm constantly at the computer doing one of the above. I also have to stay up very late into the night/early in the morning as that's when the ni hao sites have their live support up.

Sleep. Tied in with the above, I lose lots of sleep from waking up constantly to check auctions, put up more auctions, receiving mail, talking to china, responding to facebook mail, responding to emails, farming and the like.

WoW fun. The game has lost its luster 100% after making it a job. I did raid here and there, and that was fun. But overall? It's not a source of enjoyment for me. I can stop at any time, yes. But it's also a source of income and brings me again that sense of fulfillment.

Addiction. When I am outside of the house or away from my computer, I think of it as what sometimes goblin NPCs will say- "time is money, friend." The thought is correct and it sucks. Time I'm not farming is potential money lost- even in miniscule amounts. Even hanging out with my mom, boyfriend, friends- the thought lingers. It's not enough to make me rush home and tak tak tak on the keyboard, but it's enough to be a bit of an annoyance.

*Job. Although I spend hours upon hours doing this, have taught myself some simple Chinese greetings, and make a living for myself- it's not something I can put on a resume and claim as a previous job. I can't just walk into a business and say oh hey I farmed and sold gold on World of Warcraft for 2 years, hire me plz.

Overall, it's been a fun, rewarding experience. I don't plan on stopping anytime soon. All transactions will be done on a third account once I get it opened up. I will stop someday, maybe once WoW dies. Even when I end up at Best Buy (the offer is on the table already) I will still carry on with selling gold on the side. I'm giving them their 15$ a month on top of extra accounts, and I'm making money that in return gives me the things I want. Everyone's happy.

Don't bother flaming- I got banned for a bannable offense. It's not a real job. Etc. you're telling me what I already know. I just wanted to share my experience =)

I wanted to share the situation that I currently am with my co-founder and ask for some advice, and maybe even get it from people who've been in similar situations.

In the beginning, him and I were co-workers (both web developers) and really good friends. One day we decided to start some project together, and shortly after that he proposed we do something he'd been wanting to do for a long time. After quickly evaluating the feasibility of the idea and the current competition in the market, I agreed we should do that instead. I wasn't part of the target market for it, but he was, and knew plenty of people who were, too. After a few months of struggling to make decent progress on our free time, I decided I was gonna start working part time, and spending the other half of the day on the startup. I had a lower cost of living and I could do it, and I've always been more risk averse. He needed his full salary and couldn't do it, but appreciated my gesture. He asked me if I wanted more equity for it (the deal was 50/50), and I said 'no'. I know. BIG, rookie mistake. I thought we'd be making a living out of it in a few months, and didn't mind working a bit more and earning less for that long.

Well, after six months of me working part time (during which, his job was basically to give his opinion on look&feel, features, etc), we launched, and since then he also took responsability for system administration tasks, since he knows about that and I don't. Our startup has quite a lot of traffic, so its sysadmin necessities are a bit high, but definitely not even a part time job. I'd say now, two years after launch with +20M pageviews a month, it's about 5 hours a week on average. Some weeks a lot more, others nothing at all.

Two monhs after launch, I decided to quit my job and work full time on the startup. I had a side passive income business that gave me enough to live by, and to be honest I was only excited to work on this, and not my job anymore. It took us an extra year from this point to make any revenue for the business, so for another year I was working full time, while he did the occasional (but important, none the less) sysadmin tasks. Also, he'd convince his friends, who were target market, to become users. It's true, we wouldn't have been able to grow our user base without his connections (or it would have been a lot more difficult), but it's not like he had to convince each one by one or anything. Our users are already using competition services, so it's a matter of knowing them (check) and sending invitations with some custom message on his behalf. From there, it grew pretty much on its own. He also dealt with a friend of his who's a jackass, but a partner who brought an important number of users in the beginning.

So one year after we launch, we start getting revenue. In 2-3 months, it's the same that he's making at his day job (which is a good salary), and increasing every month. 3-4 months after that, it's already 30-50% more than he makes. And here we are, about 10 months after starting being profitable, and he's still raking in his average 5 hours a week on sysadmin stuff, still no word on when (if ever!) he's gonna quit his job to work full time on the startup. To be honest, I am very disappointed in his behavior and commitment, and I don't think he deserves the 50% share of the company he has. Not to mention the fact that he's just a reactive person (something breaks? we fix it. customers complain? we address it.), but nothing really "creative" comes out of him: let's do this, even if noone asks for it; let's try improving this metric; let's aim for higher revenue; etc. Long story short: for the last year and a half, I've been the one who's been running the business, while he's the sysadmin guy who for some reason, I have to check with first before doing anything major, and who also takes 50% of profits.

For a while I tried to just think of him as some early investor that was lucky to get into the deal, but it's just there in my head all the time. The unfairness of it all, and it's really affecting my ability to focus on the business. I'm constantly thinking of new ideas and projects (even spending time on some of them), even when I know there are just a shot, and I already have a great, profitable business in my hands. Only because I wouldn't have him in those businesses.

I'm sure most of you will be thinking of "well, just talk to him and ask for more equity!" The thing is, we've had difficult conversations before, and they didn't go well. For example, in the beginning we said (yes, nothing on paper or concrete, again, rookie mistake) that I'd get some compensation for my extra time spent (part time, then full time) on the startup once we were profitable. Once that time came, the conversation was more like "well, nobody told you to do it, you did it because you wanted to!", so the compensation he thought was fair was ridiculous to me (like a two month salary, for a year full time and half a year part time).

Also, I'm sure he'd be quite on defensive if I brought this up. "You're trying to take what's mine!". Keep in mind he's the one who's part of the target market, so he feels very emotionally attached to the business, a part of it, after so long. And on top of that, he's in quite a bad personal situation right now, and it's gonna last at least a few months, so even more of a reason to take it badly.

Any advice on what to do? Has anyone been here before?

P.S. I'm using a throwaway account because I don't want this whole drama to be traceable to my startup, sorry.

EDIT: I guess I should've answered as well "What would make me happy? What's the ideal outcome?". Well, talking to him and him accepting to lower his equity significantly would be the ideal outcome. 25/75 would be ideal, 40/60 would be OK as well. I guess what I'm afraid is having the conversation, not getting to any agreement but instead worsening the situation with him. We went to such a phase before, and it wasn't pretty (and I was totally unproductive).

For years I've been asking myself "why are people still purchasing windows machines?" myself knowing how superior they perform as personal computers it's baffling.

I think I've come closer to the answer… windows users like playing games, very complex, puzzling to the extent of frustrating… games… like a crossword puzzle.

Let me explain.

My mother has envied my Macbook for years and I had talked up the Mac enough that she finally broke down and had me buy one for her. I picked up a Macbook for her and figured I'd be a good son and set it up for her. I go to do so and quickly realize, unlike my days in the windows world, there was little "setting up" to do. So I ran software update that way I could at least feel like I did something.

Then when showing my Mom how to use the Mac I realized… there wasn't much "showing to do". Once she was on the web browser it didn't matter what was "around" the browser… as long as the browser worked without flaw by all means my mom was already a master of the mac. So I twiddled my thumbs.

The Mac is like a blank sheet of paper and a pencil, ready for you to do with it whatever you choose… and for some that can be intimidating, paralyzingly so.

Windows is like a sheet of paper with a tic tac toe grid and one x already drawn, always ready to be played… this is comforting because even if you do not have a task to perform with the paper and pencil you can burn time by playing the game.

So if Mac is "the absence" and Windows is "the game" what is it that is absent from Mac, what is this game that is Windows?

The game could be called "The defragging anti-viral registry cleaning pop-up blocking trojan horse riding Hero and his conquest of Windows".

While many Windows users claim they are frustrated with the annoyances that plague the Windows world (like viruses and all to often system maintenance tasks) I'm not so sure this is true. In fact I'm beginning to realize that they love it!

I'm not saying this satirically or sarcastically, but literally.

Windows users never have to stare at a blank piece of paper. The Windows operating system, with it's myriad of "upkeep" tasks ensure one is never left to his/her own imagination but instead be enticed to play "The Game".

I'm guessing most Mac users have Google as their homepage and that's comfortable for them… it's sparse and ready to be commended to do whatever one so choose.

But most windows users probably have a portal as their homepage, like Yahoo or AOL. Portal sites do not require a catalytic action on the part of the user, the user instead is provoked to act in a predictable fashion: read this article, watch this video, read this email. Always a tic tac toe game with one "x" already marked… enticing you to strategically mark an "o".

In conclusion

There may always be a place for a personal computing design that implies a user act on it instead of just acting with it. Windows user today are going to begin to make a new statement with their choice to continue to use Windows (wether they like it or not). The statement?… "I like the old days when a guy would take care of his computer, clean it of viruses, defragment it's hard drive… it just made you feel good when you knew your's would run better because you took better care of it".

If you have things to do with your computer… get a Mac. If you have time to indulge yourself with games there will always be a cheap Windows machine waiting for you.

post script: technology inevitably dematerializes, loses it's weight and gravity… eventually it becomes ambient: everywhere and nowhere. Google Chrome OS is the eventuality of this movement… an operating system that is essentially a web browser running on lightweight silicon and nothing more. With less becoming less we return to nothing, and we return to a childlike state of curiosity of "what could be". Make no mistake I like seeing people switch to the Mac but my awareness campaign will be over before began as the new choice will be of "which browser" not "which computer".

During the pandemic, we found ourselves spending more and more of our lives on digital content. Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, even HN were always right there, and the impulse to open and consume became stronger than ever. We realized how much of our technology use was compulsive rather than intentional. Willpower alone was not enough to solve the problem. Most of these products have been designed to activate dopamine feedback loops and, to be blunt, keep users hooked [1].

Not wanting to be addicted, we started cobbling together "attention protection stacks": iPhone shortcuts, Chrome Extensions, custom /etc/ files, anything to create digital environments that aligned with our own goals rather than the engagement metrics of big tech. We had some surprising successes with that, so we decided to build a comprehensive and approachable solution. We began with our worst pain point: mindless scrolling on our phones.

How it works: you tell us what apps you want to reduce your usage of (edit: and websites! we just rolled out website support this week), and we do the following to train better habits:

(1) App Intercepts: we inject a mandatory 15 second breathing exercise before opening apps you’ve added to Clearspace. This helps to break the dopamine feedback loop that your brain has learned, where tapping an app icon yields an instant reward.

(2) Intentional Sessions: at the end of said breathing exercise, you tell us how long you want to use an app for. Then you enter and we'll pull you out after that amount of time.

(3) Cumulative Progress: each day you stay below your intended time limit adds to your streak of successes. Over time, protecting your streak frequently becomes more important than a "quick scroll" before bed (and if you get a 100 day under-budget streak, we'll send you a hat).

(4) Teammates: you can add “teammates” who will receive automatic texts if you exceed your budget on an app, remove it from Clearspace, or delete Clearspace entirely.

You may notice how this is fighting fire with fire: we use tech to limit your tech use, social features to curtail social media, and so on. The mechanisms built into the big apps have such a conditioning effect on the brain, they’re nearly impossible for most people to resist. We invoke similarly powerful mechanisms on your behalf, to help your life be less dominated by these things.

Some of this only recently became technically possible. The new ScreenTime API from Apple allows users to connect apps on their phone to third party apps (like us). We receive opaque "tokens" for each user app selection and we can perform actions on the tokens, which affects the apps without us knowing what the actual apps are. We can add and remove "shields" to a token, which presents an obstructing interface over an app or website. We can display a user's usage of a token over a time period and display that data to them.

Btw, after 3M "app intercepts" (a 15 second wait), we’ve found that people opt not to continue to the app they tried to open 54% of the time. We think that says something about how much of our social media use as a society is compulsive rather than intentional.

Here are some typical testimonials from users who have been recovering their time by using our app: https://twitter.com/martindaniel4/status/1630175865496584193, https://twitter.com/timzyu/status/1632551744340123650, https://twitter.com/jandralee/status/1650674167174377473

If you're an iPhone user, we'd love for you to try our app and let us know what you think! We have a freemium model: adding one app is free, paid tier gives you unlimited apps. Your feedback on the app would be deeply appreciated and more broadly we’d love to hear about how you’ve navigated this problem in your life.

[1] though maybe not HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77173, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372593.

Here’s a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsh8M3hIjDA.

Customers from our previous product wanted custom dashboards but didn’t want to spend on technical staff to build them. They wanted customizability of the dashboard yet simplicity of the building experience.

So, we studied the approaches of Devin, Claude Artifacts, and v0 and wanted a version that was purpose built for making dashboards and admin pages to solve this problem. This way anyone could spin up highly custom dashboards fast without knowing PowerBI, Tableau, Python, or SQL.

The interface is similar to Cursor, where you attach database context and then prompt Bin on a side chat to make visual components (charts, cards, graphs). You can then click to add these components onto your panel.

On the backend, Bin spins up the components in React code and data queries in Python + SQL code in one go. We’ve wired up Bin with tool calls so that it can make the query given the schema and table context of your selected database, execute the query, and then make the component with the query key passed into our useQuery function. We make all of this code for the component and query viewable and editable on the platform.

Once components are added, you can then drag and drop, resize, and reorganize them on the panel layout. The dashboard will self-update over time as more data enters your database (the queries are re-executed with every refresh). After finalizing, you can deploy the dashboard or embed it onto your other internal tools.

You can try Bin today on a test database for free at https://bi.new. Please do let us know what you think – we’re open to feedback and suggestions as we continue to improve Bin.

Given

* We are seeing highly publicized layoffs across many companies in many industries.
* These companies are not uniformly underperforming relative to the market. Some are even doing well in absolute terms.
* These add weeks of runway to their existing years.
* Executive and shareholder compensation is not being cut in correspondence.

How do we, as tech-labor, coordinate in the same way for the conditions we want? Knowing the distaste for union labor in the West, especially in the tech industry, what are the next steps.

* Can we coordinate secretly, without letting management know?
* Can we avoid preventative firings of organizers?
* Can we do this while providing meaningful material improvement in outcomes for all tech workers without being suborned by leftist-style factionism?

I hope everyone laid off comes back ready to acqui-unionize.

So I'm asking the HN community in order to get a feel of what you are living for.

* What is your way of life (e.g., an entrepreneur) and what are the most important things in life in regards to your way?

* What is your personal mission in your way of life?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

A coworker opened up his Facebook account today and this was what we saw. The first post on his feed was something Storylane had sponsored - a post on my behalf. I didn't know that I had allowed Storylane to post on my behalf (my bad, apparently) but more importantly I had no idea that they could pay to promote that post on my friends' feeds.

So, what just happened here? I log into a website, then that company - through a series of now acceptable events - pays to convert me into a spokesperson... even though I only logged in to check out their design and don't actually care much about their platform at all. Is it just me, or is that going a bit too far?

Here is a quick(ish) screen-recroding explaining how it works: https://youtu.be/ZpY6SIkBosE

Best results when training a custom router on your own prompt data: https://youtu.be/9JYqNbIEac0

The router balances user preferences for quality, speed and cost. The end result is higher quality and faster LLM responses at lower cost.

The quality for each candidate LLM is predicted ahead of time using a neural scoring function, which is a BERT-like architecture conditioned on the prompt and a latent representation of the LLM being scored. The different LLMs are queried across the batch dimension, with the neural scoring architecture taking a single latent representation of the LLM as input per forward pass. This makes the scoring function very modular to query for different LLM combinations. It is trained in a supervised manner on several open LLM datasets, using GPT4 as a judge. The cost and speed data is taken from our live benchmarks, updated every few hours across all continents. The final "loss function" is a linear combination of quality, cost, inter-token-latency and time-to-first-token, with the user effectively scaling the weighting factors of this linear combination.

Smaller LLMs are often good enough for simple prompts, but knowing exactly how and when they might break is difficult. Simple perturbations of the phrasing can cause smaller LLMs to fail catastrophically, making them hard to rely on. For example, Gemma-7B converts numbers to strings and returns the "largest" string when asking for the "largest" number in a set, but works fine when asking for the "highest" or "maximum".

The router is able to learn these quirky distributions, and ensure that the smaller, cheaper and faster LLMs are only used when there is high confidence that they will get the answer correct.

Pricing-wise, we charge the same rates as the backend providers we route to, without taking any margins. We also give $50 in free credits to all new signups.

The router can be used off-the-shelf, or it can be trained directly on your own data for improved performance.

What do people think? Could this be useful?

Feedback of all kinds is welcome!

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables computation on encrypted data. This is essentially the ultimate privacy guarantee - a server that does work for its users (like fetching emails, tweets, or search results), without ever knowing what its users are doing - who they talk to, who they follow, or even what they search for. Servers using FHE give you cryptographic proof that they aren’t spying on you.

Unfortunately, performing general computation using FHE is notoriously slow. We have focused on solving a simple, specific problem: retrieve an item from a key-value store, without revealing to the server which item was retrieved.

By focusing on retrievals, we achieve huge speedups that make Blyss practical for real-world applications: a password scanner like “Have I Been Pwned?” that checks your credentials against breaches, but never learns anything about your password (https://playground.blyss.dev/passwords), domain name servers that don’t get to see what domains you’re fetching (https://sprl.it/), and social apps that let you find out which of your contacts are already on the platform, without letting the service see your contacts (https://stackblitz.com/edit/blyss-private-contact-intersecti...).

Big companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft) are already using private retrieval: Chrome and Edge use this technology today to check URLs against blocklists of known phishing sites, and check user passwords against hacked credential dumps, without seeing any of the underlying URLs or passwords.

Blyss makes it easy for developers to use homomorphic encryption from a familiar, Firebase-like interface. You can create key-value data buckets, fill them with data, and then make cryptographically private retrievals. No entity, not even the Blyss service itself, can learn which items are retrieved from a Blyss bucket. We handle all the server infrastructure, and maintain robust open source JS clients, with the cryptography written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. We also have an open source server you can host yourself.

(Side note: a lot of what drew us to this problem is just how paradoxical the private retrieval guarantee sounds—it seems intuitively like it should be impossible to get data from a server without it learning what you retrieve! The basic idea of how this is actually possible is: the client encrypts a one-hot vector (all 0’s except a single 1) using homomorphic encryption, and the server is able to ‘multiply’ these by the database without learning anything about the underlying encrypted values. The dot product of the encrypted query and the database yields an encrypted result. The client decrypts this, and gets the database item it wanted. To the server, all the inputs and outputs stay completely opaque. We have a blog post explaining more, with pictures, that was on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32987155.)

Neil and I met eight years ago on the first day of freshman year of college; we’ve been best friends (and roommates!) since. We are privacy nerds—before Blyss, I worked at Yubico, and Neil worked at Apple. I’ve had an academic interest in homomorphic encryption for years, but it became a practical interest when a private Wikipedia demo I posted on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31668814) became popular, and people started asking for a simple way to build products using this technology.

Our client and server are MIT open source (https://github.com/blyssprivacy/sdk), and we plan to make money as a hosted server. Since the server is tricky to operate at scale, and is not part of the trust model, we think this makes sense for both us and our customers. People have used Blyss to build block explorers, DNS resolvers, and malware scanners; you can see some highlights in our playground: https://playground.blyss.dev.

We have a generous free tier, and you get an API key as soon as you log in. For production use, our pricing is usage-based: $1 gets you 10k private reads on a 1 GB database (larger databases scale costs linearly). You can also run the server yourself.

Private retrieval is a totally new building block for privacy - we can’t wait to see what you’ll build with it! Let us know what you think, or if you have any questions about Blyss or homomorphic encryption in general.

Some demos: https://twitter.com/AlistairPullen/status/162848600700289433... and https://twitter.com/AlistairPullen/status/162848600806408601...

We’ve been devs on projects ranging from mobile apps, arbitrage trading systems, VR platforms to on-demand startups. Without fail, whenever a codebase gets over a certain size or we inherit legacy code, we get slowed down from not knowing where a certain snippet lives, or how it works. I’m sure we’ve also bothered our colleagues when we first get onboarded for longer than they would like.

Current code search products aren’t too different from CMD + F. We’ve often wanted results that aren’t captured by string matches or require some nuanced understanding of our codebase—questions such as “How does authentication work on the backend?”, "Find where we initialize Stripe in React”, or “Where do we handle hardware failures?”

To build a tool to help developers quickly search and understand large codebases requires contextual understanding of every line of code, and then how to surface that understanding in a useful format.

First we need to parse your codebase; this isn’t a walk in the park as we can’t simply embed your code files because in that instance if you were to surface a result for a specific search you’d only be brought to the file that the result was in, and no deeper. To be able to find specific snippets of code you’re looking for, we need to be much more granular in how we split up your codebase. We’ve used a universal parser (TreeSitter), so we can traverse the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of your code files to pick out individual functions, classes, and snippets to be embedded; not the entire file. This allows us to work on your codebase on a more semantic level than the raw source code.

Once we have extracted all of the relevant code from the AST, we have to embed them. (We use a number of other search heuristics too, such as edit distance and exact matches, but embeddings are the highest weighted and core heuristic.) We’ve learned a great deal about the best implementations of embeddings for this use case, particularly in this case when using embeddings to search between modalities (natural language and code) we found that hypothetical search queries were the optimal way to surface relevant code, as well as creating a custom bias matrix for our embeddings to better optimize them at finding code from short user queries. Simply embedding the user’s search query and searching the answer space with it was a poor solution.

One embeddings heuristic we use is a HyDE comparison, which involves using an LLM to take the user’s search query, and then generate code that it thinks will be similar to the actual code the user’s trying to find. This process is well documented and has given us a huge increase in performance (https://www.buildt.ai/blog/3llmtricks). Another heuristic allows us to achieve “search for what your code does, not what it is” functionality—this involves the embeddings gaining some form of understanding of what the code actually does. For this we used embedding customisation to create a bias matrix to mutate the vector space in such a way that the embeddings cluster code by its functionality rather than simply its literal strings (https://www.buildt.ai/blog/viral-ripout).

By having a product that lives in your IDE instead of your Git repository, we give you the power of contextual understanding in real time as you’re working on your codebase. There’s no need to context switch or change apps—everything is self-contained; you can easily search for code, have your code refactored and fresh code written from a single extension.

Buildt is free for now as we’re still in beta, but in the future we’ll charge something like $10 per seat per month. We’re currently building the last part of what we consider our core features, cross-file codegen. Soon you’ll be just ask Buildt to instantly perform request such as ‘add firebase analytics to every user interaction’.

We started Buildt as a product to tackle our own frustrations and we’d love for you to try it out and let us know what you think. We can’t wait to hear your feedback, questions, and comments!

I've been looking for a job that suits me, a meaningful and/or interesting job, in what many call a "hot" market, and I'm at a stage where I wonder if it's raining only on me. Many would say I have unmatchable standards. When in fact, I believe my ask is fairly basic.

For starters, many recruiters/employers seem to get stuck on a keyword in my profile, or lack of a keyword, and want someone to help out with said keyword. It's enough to ask a simple question as "why <keyword>?" that they freeze. "What do you mean why should we X? Because that's what everyone does, because otherwise our employers will not find it cool here and leave, etc"

I get that teams want to redo their tech stack at times, but if they don't specifically ask for it, nor does the product/company have plans to expand/grow, then why create unnecessary work? Hire for boring maintenance. Many are happy to do just that. But more work will not make your people happier. It's just maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand.

Sometimes you like the hiring manager (which is important!) and go to the next interview only to find out that the hiring manager is actually about to leave soon, or that the manager is 100% misaligned with the team/product.

Sometimes you go through the entire process, get a really good offer, and they ghost you.

Sometimes they throw at you some shitty challenge, exactly like a school exam where they test your memory and obedience, but not your abilities.

Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score).

Sometimes you rephrase your entire pitch to highlight what you want to do next, but nobody reads that, their eyes still fall on stupid keywords.

Sometimes they think you're a good match, but they dig and dig only to find something that doesn't fit, and then you catch them red-handed: actually a former employer left and now they hire for a replacement, and they are looking for the exact set of skills. A clone. Because a clone will be so happy to replace the quitter... That's some fine logic right there! Not.

Sometimes you get the job and when you start rolling questions and ideas, you get a "talk to the hand" followed by "that's now what you're here for". Why hire a senior person as a poster, if you're not willing to be challenged and listen to different ideas? Nobody is asking you to agree, just play ball with convincing arguments. Too much of an ask, I guess.

I have worked and hired at times some of the nicest, most loyal, most engaged people I'll ever know - almost none of them checked all the boxes. I hired for potential. One of them even confessed years later "I'm baffled why did you take me in without a test, knowing that I don't know the tech stack, etc". Because you had mega potential, and you exceeded everyone's expectations in the end!

Almost nobody seems to hire for potential these days! Everyone wants to be different, by doing the exact same thing as everyone else, and then complain that they can't find good people.

Am I the only one in this dark movie? Am I the only "unlucky" software engineer?

We are Bastien, Guillaume and Alex, founders of Lazy Lantern (https://www.lazylantern.com). We work on detecting what really matters as it happens in your website or app.

As software engineers in various companies, we repeatedly got overwhelmed by the amount of product analytics we had to keep track of. What specific metrics are you supposed to monitor when you have dozens or hundreds of them, each metric having contextual information about the user, device type, location, language, etc.? This can represent thousands to millions of useful sub-metrics. Despite spending significant time monitoring analytics dashboards on Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Grafana and more, we had to keep track of so many metrics and user segments that impactful events regularly went unnoticed. We often missed technical incidents, but also business opportunities such as not knowing that a feature really moved the needle or that there was sudden adoption for a specific user group.

We started Lazy Lantern to build an automated way of analyzing any number of metrics in real-time. The goal is to provide a good picture of impactful events as they happen, both in the case of negative anomalies (outages, bugs, crashes) and positive anomalies (virality, marketing, growth). In practice, we automatically detect abnormal patterns for each metric, in particular temporary spikes/drops, level changes, trend changes and seasonality changes. In case of anomaly, we surface the user segments that are most affected and we group correlated anomalies together to give you a better picture of what parts of the product are impacted.

On the implementation side, there were a couple of requirements for an effective anomaly detection algorithm. It has to be:

- Autonomous: avoiding manual configuration to be able to scale to arbitrarily high numbers of metrics

- Unsupervised: being able to detect anomalies for all types of businesses without knowing beforehand what a typical anomaly for each business looks like

- Dynamic: accommodating all kinds of seasonalities and trends, which excludes using static thresholds

- Fast: deciding whether a data point is indicative of an incident in minimal time

To fulfill these requirements, we first tried the Holt-Winters seasonal models, but finally got the best results with a procedure based upon Facebook’s Prophet forecasting model. To provide a better sense of each anomaly’s severity as well as what areas of the product are affected, we integrated two additional functionalities:

- Anomaly severity scoring based on the number of impacted users, deviation from prediction and anomaly duration

- Anomaly grouping using a reproduction of VARCLUS, which groups metrics by clusters based on their partial correlations

For this initial launch, we are targeting Segment customers, which makes enabling our product a breeze. If people find it useful, we will provide wider support. Pricing is based on the number of metrics you want to track. If you email us at contact@lazylantern.com mentioning this post, we’ll extend the free trial to 3 months. If you are interested, sign up in one minute on our website at www.lazylantern.com.

We’d love to know if you think this product might be useful to you or if there is a better way to approach the problem. Thank you!

One of my many side projects is a cute little photo blog. I won't name it, because if I do somebody will just accuse me of trying to promote it, and I'm not.

It's been around for about a month. My goal? To tag my funny photo collection and share with people. I also put things on there I want to remember.

Today I found a cool picture that involved programming, protesting, and outsourcing. It's not a "funny picture" but it grabbed my attention. I couldn't attribute the damn thing, so I posted something like "Anybody know what kind of protest this is?" But it occurred to me that traffic was so low I was unlikely to get a response.

Speaking to a friend, I mentioned maybe submitting it over here. You guys love coding, love protests, and love talking about stuff like this. Surely you've seen the picture and could have fun explaining it.

My friend was adamant: "Don't do it! If you post that over on HN, they'll flag it and ban your site forever!"

I'm like what? Why wouldn't they just let it slip off the new page and ignore it? Why wouldn't somebody just post a comment like "Here's where they got it from, Daniel. It's related to X" and that would be it? After all, it's just a picture and a question, it's being submitted from somebody who's been here over four years. There are no ads. It's not attributed, but hell, that's why I had the question to begin with.

In short, it's something I think would interest hackers. I might be wrong, but hell, been wrong a lot before. It's nothing new.

But, you know, he's right. Looking at the new page with ShowDead on, there are dozens of real people out there submitting stuff that nobody will ever see, and they don't even know it. Any kind of article that can be perceived to have be some kind of trick ("they'll say you're just blog spamming!") will not get ignored -- nope -- that'd be too nice. It'll be flagged. We must assume the worst and we must punish immediately.

But that's not all. Just last week I submitted an article about startups. I wrote it myself, it was highly on-topic, and I have written many similar articles over the years. It got five votes fairly quickly -- it was a good read -- and then somebody flagged it. That's right. They didn't comment on what I did wrong or correct me or anything. I pissed in somebody's cornflakes and this was payback time. Over the years how many people have I pissed off? Now I have to try to figure out when to submit when none of them are online? That's fucked. A couple of weeks ago I said something slightly unflattering about the Chinese government. I was refreshing the page to see if there were any new replies (I am anal like that) when I saw somebody come in, downvote my comment 3 times, then go and downvote the last 3 comments I had made. I wasn't trashing anybody, I just probably wasn't as PC as they liked.

So here's my simple question: is this what we want the site to be? Have we reached the point where if you piss off a few percent of the population, you can never submit things? Do we want to have third-world people hungrily trying to get attention for their blogs while we secretly just waste their time? Is anybody taking a look at the poor saps who add reasonable comments to the discussion, think they are contributing, yet nobody can see what they're typing because they've been banned without their knowing it? Have we reached the point where anything that can possibly be spun a bad way will automatically be assumed to be deceptive? The front page is full of gossip, meanwhile we have to plead with people to be nice to the new startups that are posting because it seems you can't submit anything here without some snarky response? Is that what being a hacker is all about?

I'm just asking. This isn't the kind of community I joined. I'm just wondering what happened to it.

It's a lament. Probably not a lot to add.

We’re an event-driven queueing system. Existing queueing solutions have pretty terrible UX. We solve this by making it simple for you to write delayed or background jobs by triggering step functions from JSON-based events.

At a high level, Inngest does two things:

- Ingest events from your systems via HTTP (pun intended)

- Triggers serverless functions in response to specific events — async, either immediately or delayed.

This allows you to build out async functions (eg. background jobs, handling webhooks) much faster, without worrying about config, queues, scaffolding, boilerplate, or infra. Because of the decoupling, it also means cleaner code. We talk about the benefits here [1].

Previously, Tony ran engineering at https://www.uniformteeth.com/ and Dan was the CTO of https://buffer.com/. At both places, we had to build and manage a lot of complex async logic. You could say that Buffer is one big queue, and at Uniform we had lots of logic to run for compliance… managed via queues. So we're very familiar with the problem.

Technicals and how it’s different:

Functions are declarative. They specify which events trigger them, with optional conditionals. This is great because you can then deploy functions independently from your core systems, and you get things like canary deploys, plus immediate rollbacks.

Each function can have many steps, represented as a DAG. Each step can be any code — an AWS function, custom code in a container, an HTTP call, etc. Edges of the DAG can also have conditions for traversal, and can “pause” until another event comes in, with TTLs and timeout (eg. after signup, run step 1, wait for a user to do something else, then run the next step).

Because the functions are event driven, we also statically type and version events for you. This lets you inspect and generate SDKs for events, or to fail early on invalid data. It also lets you replay functions, test with historical data, or deploy functions and re-run historical events.

Architecturally, we’ve focused on simple standards that are easy to learn and adopt. Events are published via HTTP requests. Functions use args & stdout.

You can get started without knowing any implementation details. You only need to send events via POST requests and write functions that react to them — nothing else required.

What people use us for:

- A replacement for their current queueing infrastructure (eg. celery).

- Running functions after receiving webhooks

- Running business logic when users perform specific actions (eg. publishing things at a specific time)

- Handling coordinated logic (eg. when a user signs up, wait for a specific event to come in then run another step)

Where we’re at:

We’ve open sourced our core execution engine [2], which allows you to run an in-memory environment locally with a single command. We’re working on opening more and more of the platform to allow you to self host — that’s currently our main goal. Right now, you can use us “serverless”. Because we record function state, we charge per ‘step’ of a function invoked.

We’ve documented our core OS architecture [3], and we’ve also released the function spec and interfaces in our repo. We’ve talked more about about goals, vision, and why in our open sourcing post [4]. There’s also a minimal demo w/ a Next.js backend [5].

We know we’re far from feature complete. There’s so much more we can do. If there’s things you’d like to see, feedback, or improvements, please let us know — we’d love to hear from you and make this better, and get your initial thoughts.

[1]: https://www.inngest.com/docs/what-is-inngest

[2]: https://www.github.com/inngest/inngest-cli

[3]: https://www.inngest.com/docs/high-level-architecture

[4]: https://www.inngest.com/blog/open-source-event-driven-queue

[5]: https://github.com/inngest/demo-nextjs-full-stack

Strange question, I know, but I feel this is a good place to ask the question: What would be classed as a "Ghost" detection?

I do not believe in anything; ghosts, deities, witches, skeletons with bows and arrows, zombies or anything else. But I'm obsessed with Ghost hunting YouTube channels. I know it's a load of nonsense, however, like Mulder, somewhere deep down "I want to believe". I understand it's all side effects of being human with good filmography that make this entertaining.

These hunters use some strange equipment, "Rem Pods", EMF testers, "Spiritboxes", etc. These are all easily debunked.

But it got me thinking; What would actually prove the existence of a ghost? What phenomena and what evidence would actually be required?

I don't think anything will ever be found as concrete evidence, but without knowing what the acceptance criteria is, we're ultimately always going to be looking in the wrong place.

PS. It's Halloween soon so thought this may be a fun thought experiment.

I don't think I would drop it, because I ultimately intend to go in computer science at Stanford. Therefore, I would have to leave the Bay Area at the end of August in order to move back in Quebec and stay there during the year and come back in the summer when I'm finish my program.

I would still have time to work on my startup during the year, but at a much lower pace (2-3 hours each night and 8-12 hours on weekends). The other guy on my team (he's 17 too) is in a much less intensive program then me and he could continue working almost full-time on the startup.

Yet, if you guys tell me that I would absolutely need to continue working full-time on my startup, I will consider dropping school more seriously. It would be hard for me, but if it's really necessary I could do it. The thing is, the program I'm currently in, International Baccalaureate, is a program that I must complete in two years. The special thing about this program is that we are the same group for every class (we started 40 now we're 28). If I drop/fail a course, I'm out. And I then need to go in regular science. If ever I were to be selected for YC, the choice would be quite hard as I said, because I really enjoy my program, I'm fond of the other students and I appreciate the teachers a lot. And I also fear that I won't go back to school if I enter the startup world.

At least, I'd like to finish my program and then maybe take a break from school to focus on my startup. My program requires a lot of effort, it's considerably more challenging than regular science, and I just don't see myself dropping it when I'll be halfway through it, but still there's a lot of chance I would - it's 50/50. I'm constantly debating in my head whether I should drop or stay, but I guess I'll wait to see if I'm selected for YC to make a final decision. Ultimately, I feel I would drop my program, because YC is such an amazing opportunity and also because I have a very good co-founder who is a long-time friend of mine. He would definitely succeed in convincing me :P

Moreover, I'm the only one writing code. My co-founder (who's currently studying in Business Management) will be working on the marketing (posting on the blog, making videos showcasing the app, posters in schools and other places, talking with other companies so that they use our app, etc.) I also have a graphic designer that will not be directly involve in the startup but that will do my logo and help me design icons, textures, etc.

Without even knowing anything about my idea (I can tell you though that even if I'm the only technical founder, it's not an overwhelmingly complex app and I am confident that I could manage the coding alone. All features would get implemented during the summer. During the year, I would only make little changes to the user interface and update the content of the app, but I probably won’t implement radically new features, that is if I choose to stay in school. The goal during the year would be to get as much users as possible and that’s exactly what my co-founder would be working on full-time. Complex new features would get implemented in the following summer.), because really I don't want to be chosen for my idea but rather for my team (I've got this interesting idea that I want to work on, and I like it because I would actually use the app, and actually, I’ve got a bunch of startup ideas (I’m the kind of guy that always has tons of ambitious projects going on and new ideas in mind: I want to code apps, make feature films and crazy edits, learn new monologues by heart, run marathons, travel around the world and learn new things!), but this particular one is not too complex to implement, yet if it turns out that I choose to do a completely different project, then so be it! Anyway, I don’t think the idea I apply with matters that much (but it ought to be good obviously), because anybody could apply to YC with a similar idea and develop a similar app. But would they really be as much passionate as us about the app and as much caring about the users, would they achieve to convince companies of using it, would they convince people of using it? I know we would. My point is that I’m expecting to be chosen a lot more because of my team than because of my idea. (If you're interested to know what my app is though, email me (frabrunelle@gmail.com) or skype with me (francisbrunelle)). I want to build useful products and it thrills me that with the internet millions of people could be using them! But what thrills me even more is that if ever I do YC, I would be hanging around with dozens of other developers that are in the same situation as me. I want to discuss and debate about ideas with those developers. It would be an insanely great and enjoyable experience. And that’s exactly why I want to do YC: for the experience.), do you think I have any chance of getting selected? Or should I wait for next summer, when I will have finish my program? The thing though is that I will still continue to go to school (Stanford, MIT, McGill or somewhere), so again I will have the same problem as the one I have right now.

I truly enjoy school but the real reason I want to go in c.s. at Stanford is to meet other c.s. students and start a startup with them. I'm also interested in studying in theatre, so I'm really not dropping school soon. But I don't want to wait after university to finally apply for YC, I feel ready now. The reason I want to go through YC is to meet interesting people, discuss ideas and because I'm sure it would be a tremendous experience. If I don't get chosen, I will still develop my app over the summer, but I just think YC is an outstanding opportunity and that I ought to at least submit an application. I will continue submitting applications every summer until I'm chosen.

P.S. As a developer, I'm not that skilled, but I always manage to figure things out by myself and find a way to do what I want. If I'm stuck, I don't easily give up. Nevertheless, I'm more of an idea guy. I'm currently following tutorials from http://www.raywenderlich.com/store since December in order to get more familiar with the iOS 5 SDK. When I'll finish them, I'll look at the Parse SDK (http://parse.com) and then at the Facebook iOS SDK (https://developers.facebook.com/). I will then code an app similar to FML but it will be called "You know you're in IB when...", IB being the program I'm currently in. I will integrate the Parse SDK and the Facebook iOS SDK in this app. It's a simple app that I want to do for testing purposes and also because I know that my other classmates would actually use it and that fact motivates me a lot. I will then start working on the real app that I want to do for my startup. My goal is to have a working app with bare minimum features for the end of May so that I have something to show if ever I move to the Bay Area. I'm working toward this goal 2-3 hours everyday and 8-12 hours on weekends.

Decentralization has three major problems:

- Identity: how do I know I'm talking to you? ("Zooko's Triangle" = decentralized, secure, human-addressable) What is your reputation for X transaction? Where can I find Y thing that you made?

- Language and Storage: What is the format of the data we exchange, where is the data stored, and who has access?

- Hosting/Install/Upgrades: The UX of installing software sucks for programmers, even more so for non-programmers. How does a non-technical user install/upgrade without knowing anything technical?

Second solves those problems:

- Identity: stored on the Stellar blockchain as usernames/namespaces.

- Language and Storage: everything is a "node" that has a "type" that defines the schema of the data. NodeChains are tied to identities, have permissions, and are easily mirror-able over IPFS.

- Hosting/Install/Upgrades: a Second is a thin shell around a VM that runs nodes (nodes are both data and logic). Upgrading capabilities or UIs is as simple as replacing nodes (based on who you trust).

Two videos are on the homepage that give a technical overview (basically same as above, with a few more details), and a walkthrough of the alpha software.

https://www.getasecond.com

First of all, most of us spend about 30-40 years of our life to even find out what are we optimizing for. AKA we don't even know what the f we want. Often this involves going down the wrong path for years (or decades) finding yourself in a miserable state (mid or third life crises come to mind).

Second, our constraints change all the time over our lifetime. We get more (or less) wealthy, we get more (or less) time, we achieve more (or less) overall freedom to pursue our goals, etc...

This whole thing seems a bit hopeless: shooting blind at a moving target with a gun that is running out of bullets (like most guns - what a metaphor). On top of all of this, there's one constraint that's only ever getting tighter: time. You are not getting more of that shit ever, despite what some Silicon Valley anti-ageing-cryogenic nutcase is telling you.. Entropy moves in one direction and it's not in the direction of youth.

There are people who genuinely enjoy not knowing where they are heading; and that's totally fine! However, for the rest of us, the recipe for a good life seems pretty straightforward:

1. Find out what you're optimizing for in life quickly (but ideally after you turned 30). Make it concrete and short. Make it fit into two sentences, at most. Spoiler alert: roughly 90% of art that was ever generated on this planet by humans is trying to tell you that the answer is NOT money, fame or power. So take a hint!

2. Once you have your target, map out your constraints. What are the things that hinder you in getting to your goal? Which are the 3 biggest ones? Which one can you reduce the easiest? Know that, and whenever you can, work on moving that in the right direction.

Btw, at this point it might feel like the universe is mocking us... Even working on your constraints is a constrained optimization problem on its own FFS. But constraints and removing them are vitally important. The difference between getting to your goal with and without some constraints can be decades. I.e. you can either enjoy the life you wanted for yourself for a few decades, or barely just get there to then suddenly die.

3. Remind yourself every single day of 1. and 2. Then zoom out and do the work that moves you to 1. while respecting 2. The rest will follow. It's not in your control at this point, so chill the f out and enjoy the nice moments you get on your way to the minimum (or maximum - depending on how you set up your optimization problem).

Alternatively you can just become a devout Buddhist and realize that it all starts and ends with "wanting stuff", then try to deprogram 3.5 billion years of evolution in your monkey brain and simply not want things...

Here is how helpful they were, you be the judge!

you: Does WebSphere support business models that have retail, wholesale, independent brands and distributor arms?

Justin O.: Yes websphere would .

you: any case studies or live examples that you could point me to?

Justin O.: Are you looking at purchasing a websphere product ?

Justin O.: Can I have your name and company please ?

you: I am currently looking for what's available in the market

you: any case studies or live examples that you could point me to?

Justin O.: Can I have your name and company please ?

you: can't you just point me to case studies without getting my details? :)

Justin O.: Sorry , I couldn't I need to comply with IBM'S Export and Compliance Regulations .

Justin O.: Please refer to our website .

you: I am not trying to be difficult but IBM's Export and Compliance Regulations doesn't allow you to point a potential customer to a case study or relevant information that would help him/her to find further information about your product without getting their details?

Justin O.: I'm not trying to be difficult either , but we need to know who we are speaking to . Really sorry about this There is relevant information on our web site re Websphere .

you: I am requesting you to point me to publicly available information about your product that demonstrates your product's capabilities and you can't do that without knowing my details.

you: Thanks for your help.

Justin O.: Again apologies , have a nice day .

you: You too. Bye

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Would we still use a desktop metaphor? Would we still have file paths? Etc.

Assume in this thought experiment 90%+ user adoption: other OSes would be too specialized for widespread use or would be vastly inferior. Also assume today's hardware/network technology (which makes this a little anachronistic because much of the hardware/network today has been influenced by OS design choices). This is sort of a remix/reboot what-if: What if you were back in the late 70's, early 80's and could set the table for how people used computers for the next 50 years (or more), what would it look like knowing what we know now about computer usage?

Up to now, we organized our work in iterations of 2 weeks.

Before each iteration starts:

1. Product team will assign stories for the next iteration.
2. Engineering team leads will break down stories into technical tasks.
3. After technical tasks have been created, we use [planning poker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker) to assign points to each development task.

For the most part, this works fine. However, we have a few emerging problems:

* Breaking down stories into technical tasks is taking a long-time. Team lead will spend about 16 hours.
* Once broken down, tasks do not necessarily align with what actually needs to be developed, i.e. as developers start working, they realize more optimal ways to break down tasks.
* As a startup, we have a lot of tasks that are added mid-iteration. This scope creep accounts anywhere from 10-30% of each iteration.

As a result, engineers proposed that we abandon iterations and story points in general.

* All stories would be organized in a single priority list.
* Development tasks would be created ad-hoc to match what is being developed.
* We would stop tracking engineer velocity using story points.

My hesitation with this proposal is that without knowing team's velocity, we cannot plan when features will be completed.

I am curious to know how engineering work is organized in your organization, if there are similarities to how we organize / consider organizing work, and pros / cons you have observed.