HN user
Why does every product page do the fading in thing?
This is probably going a bit off-topic but I recently switched from Android to iOS and god damn those slow animations are killing me. They seem like an industry standard nowadays. I really don't get it either.
Finland is virtually 100 % cashless. Open markets, grocery stores, restaurants, second-hand shops, flee markets, etc... — they all accept cards. I cannot recall a single place that didn't accept cards. They do accept cash too, though, but most people nowadays use cards.
I have been living in Athens for a few months now. Most brick-and-mortar places, if not all, accept cards but when you go to an open street market, it's cash-only. Also, if you buy something like tobacco, they only accept cash even though they have POS systems in place. It has something to do with the taxes (or circumventing them?).
Mainly tech/programming stuff for which Kagi is outstanding. Lately I've searched a lot about a city (restaurants, places to visit, events, ...) I moved in and it works for that too.
While I think your questions are definitely relevant, in practice, you search less than you think.
I consider myself as a heavy search engine user but, based on Kagi stats, I was surprised how much less I actually searched compared to my estimate. My actual range is about 500-800 queries a month when I originally estimated upwards 1500 queries a month.
Same thing with my friends.
I think I belong to the generation that grew up using just Google so I cannot comment on quantification.
The biggest difference for me is that on Kagi, the first results are always relevant instead of clutter/ads that you see on Google.
Happy customer here. Kagi is by far the best search engine there is.
When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then.
Now? Never.
10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. The results hit home virtually every time.
There are variety of features to customize your searches but truthfully, I never found the need for them. I've only blocked/deprioritized some domains, that's it. The results are just so good.
After defining your target audience and doing a competitor analysis, build a quick landing page with a waitlist. Try to drive traffic there with social media posts (and maybe with paid ads). Loosely said, the more people signup your waitlist, the more they want to pay for your product.
Anecdotal, I once planned to build a sports related mobile app with music platform integrations. I scraped together a BuyMeCoffee page and wrote an extensive Reddit post about the app idea. The post got hundreds of upvotes and comments within hours — and three people even paid via BuyMeCoffee!
It was quite easy to tell I had hit a jackpot. The idea failed though because Spotify's et al TOS' are quite hostile when it comes to commercial apps.
Thought to drop by and mention that you may want to pivot on the name as Lunette is a menstrual cup brand: https://www.lunette.com/
Good luck on the development!
Yep, that's it for me. A loyal, paying customer all the way from beta days doesn't seem to matter much. I truly hoped they would have kept their word and grandfathered the old subscriptions.
Burning your money on the AI and browser nonesense is on you. Don't count me in.
Reminds me of how some nurses in Finland were gifted with an ice cream voucher for their hard work during corona times. [1] The picture translates roughly as:
[The upper text]
"As a small thank you for your effort during the corona year, we'd like to offer you an ice cream during the hot weather in summer."
[The lower text on yellow background]
"The voucher is valid for the selected ice creams in this [kiosk]. You're welcome!"
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Suomi/comments/o9g934/%C3%A4itini_t...
Thanks for helping out, I'll go through the settings one more time. The customer service just repeated the same mantra that the tracking pixel is always added, regardless of what the Open Tracking setting is.
Thanks for the insight. It's the only mailer service I've used so far but seems like I gotta do some exploring.
It makes sense. I'm the one selecting the tooling afterall so I should also be responsible for making sure to comply with whatever laws/directives there are.
This being said, it feels unfair when you try to comply but somebody fucks you over.
As you can see from the blog post, those tracking settings are/were disabled. As a developer I know that it's easy to leave wrong default values on checkboxes so I went to first disable them (it was enabled by default) -> enable -> disable.
The tracking pixel was added in test emails as well as in the actual emails nevertheless.
That's probably the only way with SendGrid to strip down all of the trackers. Single Send is simple to use but apparently dude's gotta write his own mailer script to send emails via the API.
Interesting topic.
I used to work in a payday loan company for couple years, and while my collegues were awesome, the business itself was/is absolute bullshit. Meaningful? Far away from it.
I decided to try my own wings, and that has been one of the best decisions of my life. Software work has become more and more meaningful because for one, I get to decide what's done and when.
When I see a problem in my world, I ask myself if this problem would concern other people's worlds too. If it's a yes, I'll start working on it.
Fundamentally, if I can solve a pain point for others, doesn't it make the world a better place?
My latest meaningful (hobby) project has been working on the General Index published by Carl Malamud couple months ago. Science should be free, and accessible so mr. Malamud released a dump with over 107 million academic papers. I've been building a public search layer on top of this, with my angle being to find connections between scientists.
There's only a 1/6th of a dump, and very very POC phase but it works: https://spider.clousby.com/
Your product seems really interesting.
How do you manage cases like Cloudflare 429 or other bot blocking mechanisms? I'd imagine your business is at risk if your customers' competitors implement efficient ways to block bots/scrapers?
Anyway, congratz on the launch.
Little ironic the blog isn't under a valid SSL cert
Just out of curiosity I went and googled for this. To my surprise, there is actually a service for this: http://duckie.me/
You can thank me later.
Really cool project, this inspired me!
FYI: ZenRobotics has been developing waste separation technology for years now. Not sure on what stage it is now but according to their website, they seem to have some working solutions already. http://zenrobotics.com/
I'm surprised people fail to see that this ad might have actually worked. Referring to @thinkloop's comment, this is the very aftertalk the ad was supposed to create. Okay granted, it might not go to the extent Cards Against Humanity was initially looking for but still... The article mentions that the ad was low on ROI but given that the event was held just last night, it might need a couple of days to take off, right?
Wondering the same thing. Here in Finland and in this industry, I feel like I have more job than I could ever handle. I have been a programmer for four years so I cannot say I'm too skilled nor talented for that matter, but getting a full-time job or freelance projects is quite easy here.
My advice is the same: aim for a junior position first and work your way up from there. If there are no full-time jobs available, try to build a social network, attend to tech meetings in your area, try to find freelance projects and add them to your portfolio. I know, the first steps are hard, but after a while it will suck you in and then you don't have to worry about finding another job.
Reminds me last summer when I was working as a junior software developer in this rather small or medium sized IT company. We used our custom framework written in PHP, and the funny part was that the framework didn't have a single test. Everything had always done by testing manually and hoping for the best. Had I known this beforehand, I would have applied somewhere else.
Anyway, our customer was (and still is) one of the biggest wholesale in some part of the Europe. We had developed online store for them like ten years ago, and the project had become more or less a legacy project where everything was outdated and nothing ever worked. If the customer asked some changes or updates, they were always implemented without proper refactorization nor testing. So you can imagine, if everything is done like this for the past decade with this custom framework, the code base just becomes too complex to maintain, not to mention developing it any further.
So, I had worked in the company for about 3 months when I am given this project. The former developer had left huge changes unfinished without too much commenting nor even briefing me about them. Took me like 3 months to get myself familiarized with the project, finish up the changes and carry out the rest of the requests. The summer ended and everything seemed to work fine in the local as well as in the staging environment. It was Thursday morning I pushed the changes live and everything crashed. Quick rollback, some research, couple fixes and a new try. Same thing. New rollback, some research, some fixes and push. Still broken.
Took me about 10 hours with the help of 2 developers to find out what was wrong. The framework was fundamentally broken in one part, it somehow didn't include files correctly. Still to this date, we don't know why it worked both in local and staging environments but not in production. When I got this fixed, new problems arose: customers had lost products from their carts, logins didn't work, the site was slow... After banging two weeks my head to the wall, everything finally worked. I was so relieved.
These problems affected thousands of users throughout Europe, and I can imagine how pissed some customers might have been. I was so ashamed on behalf of our company, our "framework" and how things were done that I quickly left my resignation.
If I learnt something, discuss the tools and how things are done in the company before applying for the job.
A 25-year-old Finn here.
Like kettu228 explained, those major changes took place a few months ago when the schools started again this fall.
Along with these changes, some teachers have started to try new techniques in teaching such as removing all the tables from the class and replacing them with couches and beanbags [0]. Instead of the traditional (and frankly boring) ways of teaching, they try to cheer up pupils and make learning more fun. Some of the pupils are even able to participate in class planning.
I wish these changes had been there when I was in elementary school. Personally, it really seems to be the right way to go, though only time shows how it will affect. I'd wanted to learn, discuss and debate more about current hot topics, learn (more) IT and be part of influencing what we are taught.
[0] http://nyt.fi/a1305870531097 (Pardon me, the article is in Finnish but it proves the point)
I actually wanted to know how marvel_boy knows that consumers usually deal with EAN13 barcode instead of code128. As he or she states, EAN13 barcodes would make this kind of attack impossible so I wanted to know if this is a real everyday problem concerning most of the stores or only a minority of them.
This was something I wasn't sure of. How do you know this for a fact?
I live in Finland and I see them every now and then. I myself read them quite rarely, though. Only if it's a good offer or it benefits me some other way. Most of those codes are just for more info -type which don't really seem to interest people, including myself. The idea of QR codes are kinda okay but the implementations lack of imagination.
True. It would be interesting to conduct an empirical study about this and raise people's awareness at the same time.
Wow, never really thought a barcode as another attack vector. I might dig a bit deeper and do my master's thesis about it. Sounds really interesting.