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ralfhn

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My online bank doesn’t support international wire transfers. I had to wire money to a local bank then go to the branch in person, twice, to wire money to my own brother in Europe. He then had to schedule an appointment with his own bank, go in person, and justify why he received such a big transfer, mind you, it was 8k…

So yeah, it’s not about regulation. If crypto can help streamline all this, it’s a net positive

virtual staging in real estate media If you can make this work with exteriors, Landscaping design is huge. Maybe start with something simple like desert landscaping (which is really just rocks, turf, Pavers, maybe small palm trees)

I’ve been working at a fully distributed company for 3 years and I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that none of my 700+ coworkers will ever use something like this. You may find some traction now with companies abruptly transitioning to remote work and not having a clue how to get work done without being in an office, but long term, I’m a sceptic.

I can tell you, however, that I would absolutely consider using this at home: my wife spends at least 3 hours a day on video calls with her family back home and it took some time to get her elderly parents accustomed to Smartphones, messenger/whatsapp, etc. they’ll start a video call on messenger and just keep it on for hours while doing their shores or whatever. An always on device, especially if you add in remote management, would be useful. Another use case is kids. Right now most schools are doing distance learning and loosing the social aspect is certainly going to hurt. This could allow them to stay connected while doing homework, craft, or even playing video games without having to start meetings.

I think this is a good idea, my only advise would be to try other growth channels besides startups.

This is neat. Vetting dependencies is an essential yet understated task, and there are simply no existent tools on the market. I started creating a similar tool on the side (by starting I mean I just bought a domain name ;-) depvet.io)

Here are some random ideas I've been thinking about, maybe some of it would be useful to you:

Possible monetization strategies:

You mentioned "paid promotion of packages" as a way to monetize, what I had in mind is a bit different: on-premise installation. You provide tools to scan an entire Github org then build your UI based on that. Besides vetting, there are plenty of features you could add:

- Blocklists: it is common for companies to have a list of packages you cannot use. It could be based on a number of criteria like authors, licenses, collaborators, etc. We have one in Confluence and I always forget to look it up.

- Commenting/Rating: When looking at a dependency, I usually do a Github search to find other teams that use it and ask them about their experience. Sometimes there are specific caveats that you can't find online; sometimes, we already have a fork that we need to use instead. A tool where I can see all projects using a particular package, internal comments, rating, and maybe even integration code samples would certainly be welcome.

- Security vulnerabilities: While there are plenty of startups in this area, most of them appeal to the security org and not the engineers. If you integrate the security component into the vetting process, I think you can touch a bigger audience.

- Fork maintenance: forks are a pain to maintain and keep up to date. Sometimes you forget why you had a fork in the first place. I'm not entirely sure how this would look like, but I think it's worth exploring.

Challenges:

- Github has been doing an excellent job recently. Building all this out is way simpler for them since they own the source data. Don't be surprised if they take you out of business by implementing similar features. Have a backup plan for when (not if) this happens.

- Github API rate limits: 5000 requests per hour is not much, it may be enough for one language, but you eventually have to add more. If you were thinking of using the user's OAuth tokens, plan on having a robust security practice, because it will be scrutinized.

- The single most important metric, in my opinion, is not present in your tool: The total number of dependencies. The flaws in direct dependencies are just as bad as flaws in indirect ones, and while I can quickly look at the package.json to determine the first level, there is no simple way to see/vet all transitive dependencies.

I wish you the best of luck and I think you have something here, but I suggest spending some time on your monetization strategy before you go any further.

The two most bike-friendly cities in the US (Minneapolis and Portland) are not on or near the coast.

Any "best schools" ranking will show you that at least 7 out of the first 10 districts are not in coastal cities.

I'm not sure where you've lived before or if you have family or kids to have researched this matter seriously but the US offers a lot of choice depending on where you are in life and how you want to live it.

Discarding half the country as a "desolate wasteland" can only narrow your options in life.

Interesting. Can you give some examples of things you take for granted in a costal city that you don't get in a major non-coastal one?

what does "local infrastructure" mean here? because I know schools, for instance, are way worse in coastal cities with high taxes than, say, the midwest.

25 Years of PHP 6 years ago

You don't know how good you have it with composer until you try other package managers.