Fission

This is fun, but what I think would be even more interesting and potentially actually useful would be to generate a word from multiple ideas — to help express complex ideas in one word. Like Frühstücksbrotübersättigung

I'm quite a big fan of this idea. There is a lot of local history that I suspect I'd never have learned about if some map like this didn't exist.

The one thing that would greatly streamline my own usage is a direct link to the Wikipedia page on the pin itself (without having to open the pin, wait for the modal, scroll to the Wikipedia link, then click through). I'm clicking around the local spots and opening the Wikipedia pages for the interesting locations in new tabs to read them all at once.

The male astronaut with coffee [1] (that I believe you're using as a "verified" example) has an extra finger on his right hand

[1] https://www.rubbrband.com/static/media/astronaut_with_coffee...

Since Scale.ai provides labeling services to the US Department of Defense, how do they address the issues presented in this article? Have their labelers go through government background checks? Provide labeling software but not the labor?

There are a lot of different translations with varied ease of reading, modernity of prose, and fidelity to the original source.

The one by Gregory Hays is one of the newest and is my preferred translation.

That’s because your data is stored locally, so special characters in the title = special characters in the filename, which isn’t possible. Small but very worthwhile tradeoff.

To be fair, this doesn't appear to be an official account (i.e. one that is affiliated with YC). Seems like a project by an unaffiliated developer that happened to grab a relevant Twitter username.

If anything, I believe that https://twitter.com/hackernews is HN's official, YC-affiliated Twitter account.

I wanted to link to an older comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714286) I made on this topic, because I keep on seeing this article. It's turned out to be one of my most upvoted comments on HN, to my genuine surprise.

Reproduction:

I keep on seeing this link pop up. Since no one is replying, I'd like to point out that I think the Wirecutter is actually in the right here. Another HN member did some investigation and found that Xdesk is stretching things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144078

In general, having been able to talk with some of the people there, I'm convinced that WC was focused first and foremost on truth-seeking and quality at this point in their life (pre-acquisition) — however, the consensus seems to have been that after the NYT acquired them, they started becoming more incentivized to grow revenue, and started to jump the shark.

An open-ended question for you @dang — why don't you think You and Your Research gets more attention from the HN community? It's a good talk by a highly reputable source, about having an impact with the work you do. I personally hold the talk in high regard, and I'd expect it to do well on HN, but it seems like that isn't the case.

I did this recently to start creating a public (but unlisted) developer log, à la Carmack .plan. Obsidian has a community GitHub backup plugin, but you can also just manually push to a repo whenever you want to update the site. Then you can use that repo as a proto-CMS, and pull it in with, say, NextJS to create a static site. Anything with built in CI (Vercel, Netlify, GH Actions) should be able to detect the change to the CMS repo and rebuild your static site. Both steps are quite easy (took me under 10 minutes total).

That said, if you don’t need special control over your content/presentation, then you could alternatively just pay Obsidian $8 a month for their Publish feature.

A tip for the Muse team: based on my experience with first-person 3D, a substantial portion of users don't understand pointerlock, and the built-in notification that browsers give usually are insufficient. It might be a good idea to put a persistent indicator that ESC can be used to get out of pointerlock.

It seems like there are some major accessibility issues that are a result of embedding text/inputs/etc. within threejs itself. Have you considered using an HTML element and dynamically positioning it with CSS transforms (i.e. update style per useFrame call)? It's a little more work, but it should solve a large class of accessibility issues, and is performant to boot.

There are a lot of virtual office tools out there (I'm not affiliated with any so I feel comfortable asking this question). What makes Spot compelling vs. the alternatives? And if the main difference is 3D, how have you leveraged that to create a differentiated experience?

I'm a maker of satchel.com. This is one of the core problems we aimed to tackle. In doing so, we've actually build out _exactly_ this.

There are still some crucial obstacles to ensure robustness, but I'd love to get your feedback nonetheless. Could I ask some questions over email? I can't find yours, but I'm at andrew@satchel.com

I buy physical books like crazy. Unfortunately, I can similarly describe Amazon's book shipping practices.

Some of the things Amazon's done to the books I've ordered:

- shipped in a huge box without padding, so books bounce around inside the box, crushing their sides and corners

- shipped in mailing envelope, arriving bent

- shipped out of the warehouse with large rips in the cover and inner pages

Apparently way back when, Amazon was shipping books shrinkwrapped between two pieces of cardboard, which protects them. They certainly aren't taking that level of care now.

If there's a bookstore (marketplace) with decent inventory that actually takes care of the books they ship, I'd pay a premium.

This is one of the problems we try to solve at Satchel (https://satchel.com/). We write long-form guides to help startups figure out the best tool for them to use.

This is something we wrote at decent length about in the past — let me know if this is helpful for your use case.

https://satchel.com/knowledge-base/

I have to agree. It feels like punching below the belt. The only reason why you know that the smaller startups have failed is because the founder has humbly written up a writeup on what went wrong and lessons learned, in the hope that it'll help others. By including them, the article is functionally punishing them for being open about their mistakes.

Maybe for larger companies this is debatably okay, because there's diffusion of responsibility. But to call out a startup with one or two founders who have been shouldering the weight of the startup? Who wrote a post because they wanted to be helpful, and now they're being publicly shamed? Come on

I keep on seeing this link pop up. Since no one is replying, I'd like to point out that I think the Wirecutter is actually in the right here. Another HN member did some investigation and found that Xdesk is stretching things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144078

In general, having been able to talk with some of the people there, I'm convinced that WC was focused first and foremost on truth-seeking and quality at this point in their life (pre-acquisition) — however, the consensus seems to have been that after the NYT acquired them, they started becoming more incentivized to grow revenue, and started to jump the shark.

There was a really interesting debate here on who should get credit for the patent (Charpentier & Doudna vs. Feng Zhang and to a lesser extent George Church, i.e. discovery + characterization vs. making things practical). I find it interesting, but not surprising, to see that only the former are getting the Nobel Prize.

This is why we started Satchel (https://satchel.com/). It's like The Wirecutter or Consumer Reports for SaaS.

The goal is to provide an independent opinion and overview of different SaaS categories, as well as recommendations of the tools we think are best. The main downside is that writing high-quality opinions are difficult and time-consuming, but we've got some ideas on how to sidestep a lot of those challenges.

I think that's okay though. If we're only representative of only 5% of the iA userbase, but we're willing to pay more than 20x of the subscription price ($5/yr → $8.33+/mo), then the 5% of users like us can double iA's revenue.

Thanks. I was just going to ask what made it unique.

We use iA Writer daily at satchel.com. We pay a one-time cost of $30 per seat, but I think we get much more than $30 worth of value from iA Writer. So when I read the article, I thought that the $5 per month price is much too low for the value we get out of the product. And then I realized it's actually $5 per year.

Which brings up an interesting observation: the folks at iA seem to be tech purists at heart, and seem disinclined to ask for more money for their products. But I suspect that people would surely be willing to pay more money, and that if they were to price-segment their customers (e.g. by building out some collaboration features for teams, which we would love to have, and then charging a premium for that), they might be able to effect a step function in their business.

There are two that come to mind:

Divjoy, made by a former YC founder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

OpenChakra, an open source editor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22307270

Luckily, there's some decent precedent indicating that this should be okay in the long-run.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Git

We use a similar (but clumsier) tool for our Gatsby site. It excels for quick content changes. However, for us specifically, we found that we didn't really edit the content as much as we anticipated, and that most of our quick changes boiled down to styling changes instead. So maybe an ideal product for us will allow editing of styling as well as text? It'd probably look a lot like webflow.

Would you mind elaborating on what you don't follow on? I generally agree with everything you've said, so normally it'd be A-OK, but I think there's a question here somewhere (though I'm not exactly sure what) and I want to make sure I can address it.

I also agree that this is a problem. This is why we're evaluating the old-school solutions for each problem. For payroll, this is ADP + PayChex; for knowledge bases this is Confluence; for payment processors we're even dealing with Authorize.net, even though I'd think most startups would eliminate that choice based on repressed memories alone.

I believe we've also done a good job of this in our current guides: we discuss LegalZoom and lawyers in our incorporation service guide (even though bonafide startup incorporation services themselves are relatively novel), and for our store of money guide we even went so far as to stick our money into Fidelity (the definition of old school) to get a cash management comparable.

Our event-based analytics guide doesn't have any old school evaluation, but that's because event-based analytics tools, in the grand scheme of things, are really quite a recent development.

Hey Austin, I appreciate the thoughtfulness and the kind words.

I think even though we're working in different directions, we share a lot of the same values and see similar issues with the status quo. When (I hope not if) quarantine's over, let's grab a coffee :) — my email's in my profile