HN user
Andrew Wilcox
Is there a broader need for a service like this?
This is a good question to ask of people who are like your aging parents (asking here in HN may not be very useful if your potential customers are not HN readers). If you talk to enough people you'll get a sense of who really wants it.
Bizarrely, many search engines seem to think it would be helpful to truncate the titles of search results. For example, the example search "python exceptions" suggested by Kagi on their homepage results in:
How to Handle Exceptions in Python: A Detailed Visual...
A search on DuckDuckGo displays the complete title.
fyi - your fancy scrolling message box at the top of your homepage ("Bringing methane leaks to zero" etc.) is almost impossible to read on my laptop.
Behind Closed Doors by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby.
I opened the link, and my laptop fan started running full blast.
Chrome 108.0.5359.98, MacOS 11.7.1
I opened the Chrome Task Manager and the "GPU Process" was pegging the CPU.
I closed the Readwise tab and CPU usage dropped to normal.
I opened https://readwise.io/read again. After a minute the "GPU Process" CPU usage went back up to 73%.
fyi - some feedback on your website, in case it might be helpful.
I clicked on it first before I read your description here.
Looking at your website, I had no idea what you were doing.
I don't even see "mobile" mentioned anywhere.
The headline says "Turn your app into a link"; I skipped over "APK", and read "get a shareable link to an interactive version of your app"
Um, isn't my app already interactive?
I scrolled through the rest of the page, and still had no idea what you did.
Then I came back here, clicked on "comments", and read your description.
Which was great. Oh, you give a link to a -> mobile app -> emulator -> which can be easily tested without having to get it on an actual phone.
If you took your description here and put it on your home page, it'd be much better :-)
fyi small typo in https://oss-docs.castled.io/deploying-castled/deploy-on-aws-...: "Login to you AWS web console"
fyi Your purple "Deploy on AWS" link (https://docs.castled.io/deploying-castled/deploy-on-aws-ec2) at the top of your README yields a 404.
I don't mind scrolling down to find pricing information. It's not a problem to first describe the benefits and then to describe the price.
The problem is that you don't have pricing information on your homepage. "Join today for $29.99 to start." could mean anything: $29.99 for three days and then $200/week.
All you need to say is "$30/month" on your homepage somewhere and then I know what the price is.
If you don't tell me the price I'm going to assume I can't afford it :)
Pricing is hard to find; the main site only says "Join today for $29.99 to start." which could mean anything ("$30 for the first month and $300/month after that")
I had to click through to the portal and then get past the kit to find the actual pricing. $30/month is quite reasonable if it works, and it'd be reassuring to see that up front!
My favorite method of following a blog continues to be using an RSS feed reader.
(It's kind of like email: email is boring and old-fashioned, and there are many shiny new alternatives, but I still use email more than I use anything else. Same with following a project's progress on a blog using a RSS feed reader).
If you add an RSS feed to your blog, I'll subscribe :)
Smart Choices by John S. Hammond?
Some features in our products use an event sourcing pattern
Ah, sounds very interesting!
Are there any examples you'd be able to share?
E.g. one example of a TLA+ assertion that your event store is serializable, or whatever you can?
https://patentpandas.org/ is a resource site for patent information and for getting help.
I suggest asking Dr. Hossenfelder directly.
I wouldn't latch too strongly onto not being "man" enough. Your partners can tell there's a problem, but aren't sure how to articulate it, and "man enough" is as close as they know how to describe it.
You have behaviors which you learned as a child in response to the situation you found yourself in at the time, and those behavior patterns such as conflict avoidance which served you well at the time (or at least were the best that a child could come up with), no longer serve you well as an adult.
Thus rather than saying "man enough", I think a better description would be not "adult enough", in that particular area of conflict resolution.
I suspect you feel insecure about whether your partner likes you because this pattern of conflict avoidance may mean you haven't tested prospective partners while dating by showing them the real you and seeing whether they like that or not.
The way to build confidence is to address the area where you are weak by learning and practicing in that area until you are good at it, and then you will automatically have confidence about it. E.g. if you don't have confidence that you can ride a bicycle well, the solution isn't to pump up your confidence by boosting your manly power, the solution is to practice riding a bicycle until you are good enough at it, and then you'll feel confident about riding bicycles.
Thus I suggest your first priority should be to study and practice effective conflict resolution, asking for what you want, being assertive about things you care about, setting strong boundaries, etc., ideally in an experiential setting where you can practice interactions rather than just reading about it.
Then I think you'll find that women will find you already manly. Confidence is sexy. Not the fake confidence of boosting yourself up to appear confident while ignoring problems, but the true confidence of being able to say, "yup, I know how to handle this".
Hmm, while someone may legally owe you for example the final $10K in payment (or whatever the amount is), that wouldn't necessarily prevent a judge from perhaps deciding that you are also liable to them for the say $500K in businesses loses that they claim they incurred because of your SEO manipulation. I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but I would encourage someone to talk to their lawyer and to get legal advice before taking action which could be construed as threatening to harm someone's business...
daveramsey.com is a good source of information. See for example http://www.daveramsey.com/radio/highlights/?urlVars=2010/7/1...
A few particular points -
Don't use a debt consolidation company, they're a rip off.
Get a copy of your credit report so you know who has your debt and for how much.
Deal with your debts one at a time -- smallest to largest.
When you have some money, call the first debt collection company (the one with the smallest debt). Negotiate a settlement in full. Don't pay them anything until they agree in writing that your payment settles the debt in full. (Email counts for in writing). Do not send them a personal or business check that has your checking account number on it and don't give them electronic access to your checking account -- they will clean it out. Send them a cashiers check for the settlement amount instead.
Repeat for each debt.
what you think I should do to improve on that
Rewrite.
Write some code, make sure it works, and then look at places where it's ugly and figure out how to rewrite it so that it's better.
You won't write good code the first time, unless you're writing something that's trivial for you (too easy).
While the examples are too Java specific, the book Refactoring by Martin Fowler is a terrific introduction to the skill of improving code.
I don't think there's any way to filter out
How so? Do you mean that you don't believe a filter as I described is technically possible, or that it wouldn't solve the problem for you, or...?
Not making a judgement as to whether it would be better than a private forum for you, merely responding to your comment that you wish there was a way to change HN.
How about a virtual layer on top of HN?
If you start a private forum, this has the disadvantage that it would put up a barrier to people could make use of the valuable information. A public forum would need to be carefully curated to avoid having it drowned out by the clueless majority. Both would need to attract an audience.
HN has the audience and is close to what you want, but the problem is that thoughtful discussion is drowned out by the sea of clueless groupthink. Someone who wants to contribute to the thoughtful discussion has to read, evaluate, and deliberately not respond to the "you're so wrong" comments.
But suppose I could highlight the thoughtful responses, and share that with anyone who wanted to see the thread through that filter. Now anyone can see just the posting and the thoughtful responses, if they want to. And it's a lot less work for them to join in a thoughtful discussion, because they don't have to plow through the clueless majority opinions.
Next, imagine you could create a group, such as "successful entrepreneurs" which would be able to share responsibility for maintaining your filter (instead of just one person having to do it). You would be in charge of membership of a group you created. Now anyone in your group could mark a post or comment as being thoughtful (or interesting or useful) from a "successful entrepreneur" perspective. And if I was interested in that perspective, I could choose to view HN through that lens.
This would also solve the problem of good content quickly falling off the front page. Everything that had been selected by your successful entrepreneur group would remain available in the lens archive.
"meaning I have to go through HR"
By the way, the reason why you haven't been able to find a job is because you have no idea how to land work. (I can tell because saying "I have to go through HR" is as clueless as someone saying "I wrote a program but it didn't work so my computer must be broken" :-)
The relocation option works because you don't need to know how to land work to get hired -- there are jobs all over the place and you just walk around and stumble over one.
That's not a bad idea for your situation right now: if you don't find something just by posting on HN here, you could get yourself to San Francisco, crash on someone's couch, walk around and talk to people, land something that gives you some income. (The trick here is that the more active you are about it -- e.g., if you come to SF, and if you go around and talk to people -- the faster the process will happen).
Now, longer term, thinking about where you want to be next year (that is, after you've resolved your immediate crisis), you might find it beneficial to learn how to land work, depending on your goals. For example, maybe for personal reasons you'd prefer to be in Michigan.
Someone hires you because you will solve a problem for them. Some of the problems that people have can be solved with Python or numerical analysis, etc. Of the people with problems that can be solved with your skillset, a small percentage already know that their problem can be solved with Python or whatever. Those people advertise for jobs. When you don't find a job in Michigan, it doesn't mean that no one in Michigan has problems. It doesn't even mean that no one in Michigan has problems that can be solved using linear algebra and so on. What it means is that people in Michigan with those problems don't know yet that their problems can be solved with those techniques. Thus sending HR a resume listing those skills won't land you a job because the recipient doesn't understand that you can solve their problem.
You can learn how to land work in the same way you learned how to program. Think back to what what your most effective learning method for you, when you were learning to program. (Was it reading books, taking a class, or talking to people who already knew how to program, or what?) Then use the same method for learning how to land work: if reading books works best for you, read a book or three; if classes are your style, take a class or a workshop; and so on.
Having spent far more of my time fixing Windows problems than I really wish to recall :-/, what I've found to work most reliably in practice is to wipe the harddisk and reinstall the operating system.
On the one hand, this will take a day of work (either of your time, or, if you don't have the expertise to do it yourself, of someone you pay to do it). On the other hand, you'll usually end up with a working computer; and the process is usually merely tedious.
On the third hand, naturally you may find a less drastic solution to this particular problem; on the fourth hand, it might take you as long or longer to find that fix than to do the full reinstall.
I don't know enough about Macs to give advice as to whether that would be a better solution for you.
I asked myself if i could do anything, what would I want to do, and really I have no idea.
First, before I get to the advice part, a note: Our ability make decisions in the present based on our current emotional reaction to scenarios we imagine happening in the future is an amazing evolutionary advance (compared to, e.g., what even chimpanzees can do), but where it breaks down is that we have only one emotional response circuit, which got reused by evolution for us to evaluate future scenarios, and it doesn't distinguish between the present and the future.
Thus to ask yourself "what would I want to do", and to have no idea, is completely normal. A standard brain limitation. You're in a funk, where you feel sick. You think of some future scenario, something you could do, and check in with your emotion circuit. It says, "blah" and "feel sick". So do you feel like you want that future scenario? No, you feel sick.
So keep in mind that your emotional future predictor circuit is going to be offline while you're in a funk. Being experimental is a reasonable idea: you can go out and try things like going jogging or meditating or getting a hug or getting more sleep or cutting out the caffeine or taking a vacation or painting your room purple or doing nothing for a day and observe whether you feel a bit better or not, but when you imagine doing things you're not going to feel like you'd want to do them.
Another thing I notice is that in your description you describe your feeling bad as a result of not getting thing done ("I can't focus, and this driving me crazy"; "I asked myself what would I want to do"). I'm imaging that you have, in the past, felt good about getting things done, and so when you are unhappy and not getting things done, your hypothesis is that you're unhappy because you're not getting things done.
I suspect that causality may be going the other way: that is, you're not getting things done because you're unhappy, and when your emotional equilibrium is restored, your natural ability to get things done that you want to do will also be restored.
In the meantime, you need to triage your tasks: what are the things that you actually need to get done (to avoid starvation or homelessness, etc.); and what are the other tasks you "should" or want to get done. If you're having trouble with tasks in the first category, ask for help in getting them done from friends and family. For the rest, set them aside and don't worry about them until your emotional equilibrium is restored.
When you're in a negative emotional state, you need to first get to neutral. Once you're in neutral, working on aspirations and productivity tools are ways to then get to positive. But you can't go from -10 to +10 in one jump. You need to get to zero first.
I went through a period of depression, so I'm quite familiar with the feeling of not wanting to do anything, and being unhappy about it. I found therapy enormously helpful in getting myself up to zero. Eventually I got to zero and stopped going to therapy because I had outgrown it.
So this is my advice, since I've been in this situation and this is what worked for me: get therapy. Recognize that the goal of therapy is to get you reset, to get you up to zero. Once you're at zero, and start feeling like doing things again, that's the time to pursue GTD or whatever that you find useful. Therapists are typically not going to help you much getting past zero, but getting you out of your negative condition and up to zero is something that they're really good at.
Please feel free to email me at andrew.wilcox@gmail.com if there's anything you'd like to ask or tell me privately.
I agree, given some representative sample data and a goal ("make rendering this page go fast"), finding speed improvements likely wouldn't be very hard.
Have you tried http://www.jungledisk.com/ ? It maps S3 to appear as a drive or directory on your computer, so you can use S3 from any program or tool that can read and write files.
Or is there something specific about WebDav that you needed?
Yup, I've experienced a lot of frustration myself the couple of times I've worked with payment API's.