NetToolKit

NetToolKit | Full-stack Developer | ONSITE (Santa Clara, CA)

NetToolKit offers a variety of services such as geocoding, map tiles, and CAPTCHA.

Entry-level and junior candidates are welcomed to apply: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RwxCghey6xDnjvBhi87GsGWg...

FYI, my site (NetToolKit) offers per-request pricing, in increments of $10 (for 100,000 requests): https://www.nettoolkit.com/docs/geo/overview/geocoding -- no monthly fees if you do not make requests.

I agree... I also think that for people with specific use cases, the rapid depreciation means that there are great deals available for used LEAFs. I wouldn't buy one new now.

But the LEAF is a great car :)

Out of curiosity, could you describe the data set here?

I have no idea about the 10% factor

As a single data point in California, the factor for my solar installation was 15.4% for the last twelve months, so your guess seems pretty reasonable

Thanks for the explanation

I know you're being funny, but I don't understand the joke: why does brown culture avoid Korean cars?

While there is an effort to make this so, it does not yet appear to be law: https://www.calbike.org/bicycle-safety-stop-faqs/

What features are you looking for in a Mapbox alternative? Tiles? Geocoding? Anything else?

Might take a while before anyone can get it at $35k: "The GM brand will begin Equinox EV production with two higher priced trims, a front-wheel-drive RS model that starts at $48,995 and an all-wheel-drive variant at $52,395"

Other details: 319-mile range, "early 2024"

Neat! Thanks for sharing!

Sounds like an interesting story that I'm curious about... how did putting a strong magnet in the ground help you install your main water line?

In terms of implementation, one key difference is that Cloudflare sits between your servers and your users, whereas with Gatekeeper, your servers query Gatekeeper before deciding what response to send to users. One of the ramifications is that with Gatekeeper, your users never see a third-party page about verifying that they are not bots. It also means that when using Gatekeeper, you can actually debug if/when something unexpected happens.

Gatekeeper also allows you to look over previous traffic patterns and adjust your custom rules. Philosophically, our assumption is that website operators know their sites the best, and know what content they are sensitive about and Gatekeeper is a tool to help review traffic and express custom rules. I think Cloudflare is a better fit for operators who don't want to spend time fiddling with various very granular knobs to optimize for their specific site and their specific concerns.

Gatekeeper can also be used for other purposes. For example, the idea behind Gatekeeper originated because we have a site where we want to make information freely available to humans, but not to scrapers. However, Gatekeeper could also be used to upsell users who frequent your site (e.g. "We noticed you've viewed 10 articles in the past week, please subscribe!").

If you're considering custom logic like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33160679 , Gatekeeper already has a rules engine so that you specify such policies without having to write your own infrastructure.

I'd be happy to chat further to learn more about what you're looking for and to see if Gatekeeper might be able to help. Feel free to reach out via email (in profile) if you'd like to talk more.

If you're interested in a non-Cloudflare solution, we have developed a service called Gatekeeper, and we'd really like to get your thoughts on whether it might suit your needs: https://www.nettoolkit.com/gatekeeper/about

Essentially, Gatekeeper is a rules-engine with a fancy UI that allows you to craft policies specific to your site and the traffic that is visiting your site. For example, you can say "Allow Googlebot" and "Show CAPTCHA to visitors from AWS on every fifth visit". If you'd like to communicate offline, you can find our email address in my profile.

Hi there,

Not the personal advice that you're looking for, but would you, your partners, and your investors be interested in selling the zombie startup? We serve enterprise customers, and think that a "couple hundred k in revenue" is quite impressive, especially for just two years with very little professional experience.

If you have current customers, they might appreciate knowing that there is continuity, and might be more open to you if you were to ever reach out to them again.

Thanks. [email in profile]

Sure, no problem. I actually would not be able to distinguish between you two, since the OP used a throwaway handle.

Try applying to smaller companies. Smaller companies aren't going to land the candidate from a top 10 school who already interned at multiple Fortune 500 companies. But small shops need to hire talent too. They're digging deeper and they have to read the resumes more closely. There isn't much of an HR department, and the hiring manager might be sifting through the raw resumes themselves.

This describes my situation when I'm hiring entry-level developers: I, the hiring manager, am reading each application that comes in. However, I think this is probably more true for smaller companies that are not venture-backed; venture-backed companies probably have enough funding to hire senior developers (and are probably more rushed to do so).

For the OP: I'm not hiring developers at the moment, but if you'd like to send me your resume (you can reach me through my profile), I can offer some feedback.

Thanks for your response. Your numbers are better than what I came up with, but I thought I'd check just in case I was missing a great deal somewhere.

Yeah, I've been eyeing the EPYC servers, but RAM pricing seems to very roughly be in the ballpark of $1,000 for 128GB, so $4k for 4T sounded very attractive and I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. As cvwright pointed out, you can get old DDR3 RAM for less, but I haven't found servers that can fit that many DIMMs. Thanks for your response.

now you can get single servers for ~$4K with 4T of RAM

Does the $4K include the cost of the RAM? Where can I find these servers? Thanks!

And unfortunately, people who hand write personalised outreach don't know if the recipient is like you or the parent poster.

Not sure about your specific use case, but we at NetToolKit offer address autocompletion in the US; you can see a demo at: https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/autocomplete

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at support @ [domain].

We at NetToolKit offer map tiles (both vector and raster), geocoding, and for the US, we offer autocompletion: https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about

$10 for 100,000 transactions (e.g. geocoding requests, tile sessions)

We have a tool to compare geocoding results across different providers: https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/demo

We also have a JavaScript library (MapWrapper) that makes working with maps easier (including allowing you to easily switch among a few of the different tile providers).

We welcome feedback!

Self-plug: NetToolKit Geo (https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about) offers very affordable map tiles (both raster and vector) and geocoding (plus a simple autocomplete feature for within the US). You can also configure whether your account automatically replenishes credits if they fall below a certain threshold, so you can have better control of spend.

Our contact form does not pipe into a ticketing system (it goes into support@[our domain, available via our profile link], which is just a G Suite email account that you can use to contact us directly).

I'd very much appreciate hearing your thoughts about attacks and understanding what an effective solution would be. Thanks also for your note about Stackpath -- we aren't a CDN, but Gatekeeper could help reduce bandwidth usage by denying requests.

We at NetToolKit have been working on related problems for years and might have two products that directly address what you are looking for.

We launched Shibboleth (a CAPTCHA service) about a year ago, and you can select from a variety of different CAPTCHA types (including some non-traditional types; different types have different strengths and fun factors): https://www.nettoolkit.com/shibboleth/demo There are a variety of options that you can set, and you can also review user attempts to solve CAPTCHAs to see if you want to make the settings more or less difficult.

Recently, we launched Gatekeeper ( https://www.nettoolkit.com/gatekeeper/about ) which competes against Distil and others, but without fingerprinting. Instead, site operators can configure custom rules and draw on IP intelligence (e.g. this visit is coming from Amazon AWS or this IP address has ignored ten CAPTCHAs in two minutes), and Gatekeeper will indicate to your website how it should respond to a request based on your rules. There's also other functionality built in, such as server-side analytics. Some light technical integration is required, but we're happy to help with that if need be.

As with all NetToolKit services, we have priced both of these services very economically ($10 for 100,000 credits, each visit or CAPTCHA display using one credit).

We would very much appreciate a conversation, even if it is only for you to tell us why you think our solutions don't fit what you are looking for. I would be happy to talk to you over the phone if you send me your phone number via our contact form: https://www.nettoolkit.com/contact

We currently don't offer a self-hosting option, unless it were in the context of an enterprise agreement. If this functionality interests you and you have a large volume of visits, please contact us and we can talk about specifics.

We were not aware of Shibboleth single sign-on before we launched, and someone noted the name collision on our Show HN thread. If many people are confused about this, we would certainly consider a different name. The development team wanted a non-generic name (e.g. CAPTCHA), and naming has proved a challenge for us, so if you have any suggestions, please let us know.

We just launched Gatekeeper: https://www.nettoolkit.com/gatekeeper/about

Server-side analytics, upsell tool (script interactions on your website), and bot protection all rolled into one.

We're happy to answer questions (see profile) and we'd love to get insight into your decision process.

If Server-Side tracking looks too complex for you, you might want to reevaluate the balance of technical knowledge in your enterprise.

Shameless self-plug: if server-side analytics is too complicated for you, consider using the tool that we just launched to help with that (other functionality gets included as well): https://www.nettoolkit.com/gatekeeper/about