terryjsmith

I'm working on a "low code" web app that helps developers build web apps (not marketing or blogs or e-commerce sites). Create your data models in the app and get an API, a database (or connect your own), and a Next.js app with all of the scaffolding, models, forms, validation, API calls, policies, access and authorization, etc. ready for you to use and customize.

TBH I didn't dig all that deep. Once you look at the size of the market (~6000 US hospitals, most of them in groups [0]), annual subscription (would need to be some fraction of what they would pay in penalties), percentage of market share you could capture (say 25%), discounts for groups, level of support, investment and unknown source systems, etc., I didn't evaluate it as a viable / likely opportunity, especially outside of our existing market.

All of that said, if you knew the space and backend systems and could figure out a way to make it easy, one thing I did hear is that hospitals don't like to be non-compliant, so I think they want a solution (or this to just go away), it just needs to be a really minimal investment for them in cost and time to implement and maintain. The provider data coming into play in 2023 may be the main driver to "normalize" some of this being out in the open.

Usual disclaimers again: my views, not my company's.

[0] https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals

Edit: add source.

I agree with everything you said. We're in the ACA space, so this should been right up our alley (government puts new legislation in with penalties to force employers to do something they don't really want to), but the ACA had a much bigger stick and a much longer runway.

Starting January 2023, insurance companies and plan providers need to publish similar data, so to your point that might be the interdependency required for compliance.

Obligatory these views are my own, not my company's.

I did some research into this for my current employer and the challenges are pretty well laid out here: the penalties are minimal ($300 / day or $~110,000 per year), the data is kept in the invoice or billing systems, which are complex, and the hospitals do not want to share the truly groundbreaking data, which is the per-provider costs.

In addition, when you Google for competitors you don't find a lot of them, but once you start looking at hospital websites you find that quite a few of them (about 50% of the ones I looked at) have at least a partial solution, often provided by their analytics company as an add-on or footnote.

It does not appear there is a great market opportunity here unless the penalties increase (which the CMS has talked about vaguely, but hospitals are already asking for relief until after the pandemic).

My understanding is that the bonuses were paid out in the final stages of the negotiations for the bailout package.

This is great. How do they deal with the on-going maintenance of the tools they build? Do they move to the main product team or does the internal systems team continue to maintain them?

I find it humourous that the latter is "normal". Netflix and online streaming really have changed our perspective; I'm not even that old (30!) and I wouldn't call "watch any show anytime" normal.

Just show up - I started this last year going to the gym - if I didn't feel like going to work out, I just went to the gym and messed around, did whatever I felt like, even for 15 or 20 minutes and then left. The discipline has translated into other projects - a camper reno, a game engine, etc. Just showing up is more than half the battle, even if you don't accomplish much on one given day.

Two reasons in my experience: first, reproducability gets orders of magnitude more complicated as you grow. One person can do something over and over with no documentation, a few people can learn from them, but once you get to 10 - 20 staff in a role and you have some churn, you need good documentation, training, and QA since your risk for errors goes up no matter how good the documentation and training is.

Second, as others have mentioned is coordination. Now introducing a new process, feature, or whatever to clients or internally means creating the requirements, the documentation, working with sales or client services on timing and release, working with QA on test scenarios, working with training to get it into training programs, etc.

Plus kids clothes! My wife and I do about half of our clothes shopping for our 2.5 year old at Value Village and bring stuff there that we or she don't use anymore. She doesn't care about labels, the clothes are cheap, and she'll grow out of them in 6 months (and they may end up donated back again).

Technically, of course you can, but practically, if someone sued, you would probably have a hard time convincing others that you are complying with your own policy. It's probably easier to just to change your ToS/privacy policy.

This is spot on. I would add that as a manager, it is my job to foster good relationships with other managers and use those to remove bottlenecks for my team. I spend a good portion of my day on the phone and walking around the office connecting the dots and getting buy-in or compromises and making sure everyone is on the same page about what's being built. On top of that is having a clear "second" who people can go to when you're out to do the same thing.

Another piece is being able to make decisions and stand by them. That doesn't mean never backing down, or always being right, but you'll often make quick decisions with less than ideal information and need to be comfortable with that. You'll be wrong a non-negligible portion of the time, so you'll need to own that, work to fix any issues, etc. and not take it too personally.

As a manager of other managers, I like to tell my team that you're in a good place when work can continue on without you; your job is to push things forward, drive process changes and improvements, message successes up and down, etc.

There are definitely valid criticisms on the application of zero tolerance policies; I agree that bullying in school is a go to for overreaching. But sexual harassment and harassment in general have pretty rigorous tests (repeated, stated to be unwanted, etc.) and a good HR organization will vet complaints and sort out the frivolous or vindictive or whatever from the serious allegations. The latter is where zero tolerance applies.

That's the issue, right? Everyone wants "diversity", but no one wants quotas or hard lines that could discriminate against other groups. I think you need to do your best to root out any biases in your hiring process or people. At Uber's size there is also an evangelism role that can be played to reach out and encourage a more diverse applicant pool to apply for roles. But this report falls flat on how you could possibly measure whether your team is "diverse" or "inclusive" enough and also fails to call out any existing practices, processes or people that would've gotten them there in the first place, opting instead to use those principles as PR tools.

While there are some concrete next steps in here (hire a COO, management training, HR training, the "Rooney Rule"), what is the goal and how do these steps connect to it? As far as the harassment stuff, I think the solution is clear: have a zero tolerance policy and enforce it. But it otherwise says the words "inclusion" and "diversity" a lot, but never really connects those words to achievable outcomes and seems superficial. Maybe the end result is to restore Uber's image - in which case doing those things makes sense - but without any goal posts or authority, many of these recommendations seem to fall short.

As someone on the hiring side of the table, I rarely care about how technically complicated it was and more about WHY it was hard, how you figured it out, and how you avoided it in the future. I've made some really dumb typos in my code that caused a debugging nightmare for me in finding them.

As a recent example, in my game engine I copy/pasted some code for framebuffer and texture creation and missed renaming one variable. A stupid mistake that took me 2 days to find. But to solve it, I needed to look at all of the various textures on-screen. Some of them are non-linear, some are single component (just red) which doesn't display well, so I ended up writing a method that allowed me to render all of the various stages of my renderer out to the screen (color, shadow, light, depth, normals, etc.) as a debug method. Only then did I realize that the shadow buffer texture was sized to width * width instead of width * height. Again, a stupid mistake, but now we've got something to dig into a talk about and it's much more about the solution than the problem.

As with any interview, I like to make it as personal as possible. Tell me about something you have architected and why you've architected that way. I will ask probing questions about why you chose this stack, this database tech, this integration layer, questions about security concerns, areas for improvement, what you learned and would've done differently, etc., etc. This also allows you to see the interviewee's excitement and really turns the table to put them in a comfortable position where they are the most knowledgeable person, which makes for a much smoother interview. If that goes well, I may turn to some specific tasks or problems we have faced or are facing and discuss at large how those might be addressed, again really focused more on brainstorming than any "right" answer.

If you don't have any projects or work to talk about, the interview is basically over as I don't see much value in talking about cookie cutter problems.

In my experience this goes hand and hand with getting your messaging right. If you have a product people love then you can work to articulate what they love about it and your marketing efforts become more focused and profitable. I agree that those channels can help develop your message, find early customers, etc. but that's different than investing in growth and trying to make your sales process repeatable; you're still learning at that stage. Investing serious money in marketing before you have the right product and the right messaging is the big mistake that I see a lot of startups run into.

Having helped a company that went through our accelerator to get a start-up visa for the three founders, the deal isn't great, but it is a more direct path to citizenship. You do need to go through not just an accredited investor, but a "chosen" one. One of the main issues is that the list of investors from which you can take money is pretty small (mostly those who helped design the program) and there is no gatekeeper, so they are overwhelmed with applications from companies of all sorts and as a result largely don't respond at all . As with all things investment, you need to know someone who knows someone to help you secure and complete the application. Even then the process is long.

The idea itself is great, but the execution on the program since its inception has been weak. It needs more resources and better support for the firms and investors who can assist. All of that aside, I have seen the program work, but you can expect to put in the same amount of work as raising a small round and then some to make it happen.

I've thought about this on and off for a few years and have one thought: e-mail will find a way out of the inbox. It is now an almost ubiquitous way to deliver something to a contact, especially on mobile.

I know this is fuzzy, but I imagine Facebook notifications being sent via e-mail and if Facebook is "installed" either on the device or via opening the browser, opening the e-mail would deliver you to Facebook, or just display as a regular e-mail otherwise. Taking this one step further: if I deliver you a to-do list item, it would open in my default to-do list app making e-mail more of a platform or launcher than anything else.

If you ever figure out how that would work, let me know. I've tried and haven't been able to connect all of the dots connecting those sending the e-mail and those receiving the e-mail as a platform, how it interoperates and where to start. I'd use the hell out of this though.

FWIW I second this, it looks beautiful, but setting up a site on my VPS takes work; even if it's 20 seconds to download and install, I have to set up configs, DNS, directories, etc. Would love to see a demo.

An account service network for developers: http://www.gowalli.com/

We connect freelance developers (and small shops) to a professional account service person (we're recruiting AS people from larger agencies to do some extra work) and help them with spec, contracts, billing, change requests, and on-going support.

It's free for developers; we just add 5 - 10% to your final invoice depending on how much work we did.

Hey HN,

Developer here. I would certainly appreciate any and all feedback. As a consistent over-developer, I am trying a more minimal MVP approach to see if there is interest in where we're going from developers. We have seen significant interest from client service people.

When you sign up, there is a link to a 3-question survey which will help me determine where to go and what to build. Even if you don't sign up, I'd love to get the feedback and the form is available here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1PREar3pMWkPWK9nOT4UzVmD4vqA...

As someone who has/still is coping with burnout, I still find relaxing to be very difficult most of the time. I exercise now, eat better, my day job is no longer in programming, but while relaxing I still feel like I am being unproductive and that I should either get some work done or feel bad. It's gotten better, but almost 1.5 years after I really burnt out, it's still a struggle.

Having friends and family who you explain this to (and actually understand) helps immensely. You need someone who drags you into relaxation and keeps you there until you really do enjoy it and who forces you to try new things. IMO that's the best advice of this article.

I imagine it's not much different than different real world currencies; they'll all become relative to one another through a common conversion rate (ie. USD).

Plus somewhere in the middle someone will create a meta-cryptocurrency payment service and sign up vendors to accept any type of cryptocurrency while making a conversion fee.

This was likely an inode issue on the operating system/kernel and how it represents S3 on the filesystem, especially if you're using something like S3FS.

I would argue that they're definitely made up, but not completely bullshit. It's a yardstick for a sale price: if the investors need to get out at least X, then that's a good starting place to start shopping the company around. If the entrepreneur is forward thinking it also means they know they need to find a way to get annual revenues up to $Y to justify the investment and give back any semblance of a return. So not a great judge of a company's "worth", but outside of revenue, probably the best thing we have.

Well Porter as an airline is likely making a big bet on this for their downtown airport in Toronto so there is definitely a use-case there. I'm not sure if this is a contingency plan on their campaign to get the runway extended and noise by-laws lifted, but it sure seems like they're hedging their bets on this.

* Written from the downtown Toronto airport lounge.

I'm disappointed with the tone here; not in a "you should be nicer" kind of way, but because he seems to assume that Musk is acting insultingly in his proposal.

This seems to me to be the way all startup ideas start: there's a hypothesis about X, so far I've found documentation to support that it is likely feasible to do (there are no immediate show stoppers), here's why, and so therefore I'll go off and build it and deal with things as they come up. I imagine this is how Musk works and that this is how SpaceX and Tesla started. The only difference is that this time Musk can't take it the rest of the way so he wants the community to take over the next phase if there's ample interest.

This article reads to me as coming from someone who wouldn't take on this endeavour themselves, and that's perfectly fine, but he instead comes across as entirely destructive, condescending and insulted (somehow?) when he may very well be able to contribute something.

What changed when you were 25(ish) if I may ask?