simon_weber

briefsky is what I switched to. I found the Open-Meteo feels-like numbers to be way off in NYC but Pirate Weather has been fine.

I use SES for sending + a forwarding service for receiving and the combination works well. Usually my SES bill is a few cents and AWS just waives the bill.

An ethernet card is in the works: https://twitter.com/frameworkputer/status/139594629558862233.... It looks like full-sized SD was popular in that poll too.

As of a few years ago there's a similar FDA approved ingredient available in the US as BioMin. It works well for me and is cheaper than importing NovaMin.

Any idea when reviewers will get their hands on it? It'd be nice to have some reviews prior to pre-orders going out.

There's a similar formula available in the US called Biomin that's FDA approved and distributed by Dr Collins. Their fluoridated version isn't FDA approved yet, but it works well for me used 50/50 with an OTC stannous fluoride toothpaste.

Hah, I ran into this guy on the support forum thread about this issue: https://github.community/t/why-does-this-forum-need-permissi...

I'm on his side - I think the copy is bad - but he was pretty unhelpful in the thread and ended up getting it locked.

Interestingly, Google later wrote their own relational db in javascript called lovefield, which was motivated primarily by the deprecation of WebSQL: https://github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/dd/00_i...

Oh, I just recently started using envwarden for managing dev secrets. I have some customizations for that use case on a fork, in case it's helpful to anyone: https://github.com/envwarden/envwarden/compare/master...simo...

I noticed the issue in May 2018, so getting my data in February was just in time for 2019 reporting (I had mixed up the timestamps when I originally wrote I got the data in April).

On a recommendation from a friend I filed a complaint online at https://ag.ny.gov/internet/online-forms. I wrote up the situation and attached a pdf copy of the support interaction I'd had with Google.

It wasn't quick, but it did seem to work. Here's the timeline:

- May 2018: I contact Google about being unable to export my accounting data from last month

- November 2018: after nothing but "thank you for your patience" emails, I complain to the AG

- early February 2019: I get a letter in the mail from the AG saying they'd forwarded the complaint to Google

- late February 2019: Google finally gives me my data [edit: I'd had April originally, but that was a separate request].

If I'm understanding the timeline correctly, it's not just recent signups but anybody who has wanted to monetize an extension from March until now, who paid under the expectation that the temporary ban would be lifted.

Haha, this is so ridiculous and completely on-brand for Google at this point. I've run a Google Music extension for a few years now and would have absolutely no migration path since I don't have a backend -- but it doesn't matter since they're shutting down Google Music anyway!

A related fun fact: accounting data exports for extensions have been broken for me (and I think all extension merchants?) since April 2018. I had to get the NY attorney general to write them a letter before they would actually respond to my support requests so that I could properly file my taxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20588493. I'm sure that will be fun this year!

I've moved everything to https://buyvm.net after trying a bunch of cheaper providers. They've been good to me for the ~two years I've been using them: no outages and quick support.

If you end up liking them, here's my affiliate link: https://my.frantech.ca/aff.php?aff=3397

https://repominder.com sends release reminders for your open source projects. It works by monitoring the diff between your development branch and how you release (eg tags or another branch).

It works well for me and one other power user, but hasn't grown beyond that. My guess is it's just a failure of marketing -- I make lots of these projects that scratch an itch and then just hope people will find them.

At least it's cheap to run ($2/month for the vps plus <$10/year for the domain).

Ugh. I settled on Mailgun for this use case recently and now I'll have to switch.

I used to use https://medium.com/@ashan.fernando/forwarding-emails-to-your... to do this cheaply via SES, but it was a pain to set up for new domains and had some odd behavior at times.

https://improvmx.com was something else I came across, but I don't feel great trusting an unknown service with all my incoming mail.

Zoho works and is free for one user but the webapp is pretty rough to use.

https://forwardemail.net is an open source option but I wasn't sure about how reliable it would be.

I used Brave for a while on Android and found it to work well. However, in the last month or so something changed and it started freezing constantly.

I've since switched to Firefox, which is much better on Android than when I last tried it.

It is! I should make it clearer that the published email is just an example of what's sent out. There's been about a post a week since it's started.

edit: updated; thanks for the feedback!

Thanks!

There's around 1k members right now. I stole the 10k catchphrase from The Listserve. Consider it aspirational!

Yes, people can be selected multiple times, but they must submit a post before they can be selected again.

No, I don't currently plan to release the posts. I might change that at some point but I'd want authors to opt in -- even though the license allows it without their consent I doubt everyone understands that.

I named a project after these! https://www.kleroteria.org

Google's Web Store payments system is terrible in my experience. I haven't been able to export accounting data for https://autoplaylists.simon.codes since April 2018: I spent almost a year badgering support so I could properly file my taxes.

A letter from the New York AG got them to respond, but I still need to email them every time I need my data (they get an engineer to run a db query manually, from what I can tell).

I did get an email today that they're migrating to a new system, so maybe it'll work in the future, but I wouldn't trust them based on what I've seen.

Browser extensions are an important part of my small business since there are some things I can't reasonably do without them. https://autoplaylists.simon.codes is a good example: Google Music just doesn't make some metadata available over their OAuth apis.

I understand the broader extension security situation is pretty atrocious, but I like to think there's some small improvement from url-limited extensions like mine (that would otherwise exist as scripts that ask for plaintext credentials).

Depends on the use case. I think the main factors are reliability and security: if it's not a crucial service and isn't handling anything sensitive, then there's no reason to pay more.

Yeah, I suppose it's true that I'm more willing to keep these projects around when they aren't costing me each month. It also makes it easier to toss ideas out and see what's worth actually investing in.

On other hand, I think I'm much lazier when it comes to marketing them since there's no urgency to make a profit.

Pings from instances to nodequery are 98% on the low end and 99.9% on the high end. It looks like I'm at 500+ days up at impactvps.com, though I used to see cpu and disk degradations somewhat regularly with them. I haven't had any major outages in a few years of use, though one provider went bust recently after an overly-aggressive sale (alpharacks).

I generally run one instance + sqlite and accept the downtime. The next step up might be two vms across two providers + a cheap managed db.

I don't think I have any super strong recommendations. I did become a fan of BuyVM recently due to their $1/month shared sql plan. But, they're apparently they're planning to retire it, which puts them at a similar price point as something like vultr.

I'm something of a free tier connoisseur, and recently built an entire project with 13 forever-free tiers. It was more of a personal challenge than a business decision, but it might be a good reference for what's out there: https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-fo...

Some other services not mentioned there that I've used for free recently:

- humio cloud for log aggregation

- nodequery for server monitoring (though its future is unclear)

- braintree used to waive a big chunk of payment fees ($50k?) for startups, but I'm not sure the program exists anymore

Beyond things that are literally free, I'm a big fan of cheap vps providers if your uptime can take it and you can do your own ops. One of my projects makes ~$200/month and is hosted for $6/year on a 256MB vps. Lowendtalk/Lowendbox is the usual place I find these.

Hm, it seems to work fine for me. Do you get an error message or anything like that?

I run a few projects for ~$400 MRR. Here's my numbers from last year: https://www.simonmweber.com/2019/01/07/side-project-income-2...

Since there are questions about company formation in the comments, here's my notes on US taxes/legal from when I got started: https://www.simonmweber.com/2016/07/11/launching-a-chrome-ex...

I'm not too familiar with Spotify integrations, but I'm surprised to hear you need their permission. Is that an api terms thing?

In my case it's been a better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission situation. I've had almost no official contact with Google and do my best to abide by their terms.

Feel free to reach out via email if you'd like to chat! There's a chance I'd be interested in buying it if you're planning to shut down.

I don't have anything planned yet, but I also haven't looked into their replacement service.