For a B2B SaaS company, the easiest/most likely[1] algorithm to succeed[2]:
1) Be embedded in the industry for a while
2) Make lots of connections, build credibility
3) Build SaaS app to solve key pain point you experienced in #1
4) Sell to the folks you know from #2
5) For bonus points/de-risking: find 25 potential customers (from #2) and reach out to them and validate this idea (Jobs-to-be-Done). Get a handful of them to commit, even verbally, to buy this when you've got an MVP built.
[1] Clearly this is not the only way to be successful, but "I have a random idea lemme build it" is a great way to be not successful
[2] Succeed = your business that makes enough revenue to support you and a reasonable lifestyle, equating (and/or eventually surpassing) what you would typically make at a W2 gig, from a diversity of customers and not trading your personal time for money.
The single best advice Patio11 has given is "charge more". Seriously. It's been one of the scariest thing to do in the beginning, but I've now 4X'd my pricing (from 3 figures to 4 figures a month!) and the customers got 10X better, complain less, I work less and earn more. Please! If you read this, double your prices today. See what happens in the next 3-4 weeks.
Hi everyone! Boris from the Claude Code team here. @eschluntz, @catherinewu, @wolffiex, @bdr and I will be around for the next hour or so and we'll do our best to answer your questions about the product.
This is about 100 years too early. Seriously why do people think neural networks are the answer to AI? They are proven to be stupid outside of their training data. We have such a long way to go. This fear-mongering is pointless.
I'm a nurse and I find the 7th point on the post especially relevant. I will add a disclaimer that I never worked in the ICU so I can't speak for what happens in that type of unit.
There is a serious issue with the flow of information in healthcare, (or at least in the U.S, I never worked elsewhere to know if it's any different). But If you find something during your shift which will be important to know later on, it will certainly be lost as soon as you are off for a few days, or even as soon as a new nurse comes on. To think of a somewhat crude example, if you find out that it is much easier to obtain a blood sample from the veins on the left arm of a patients vs the right, many nurses will still stick the right arm countless times hoping to get something.
And you can leave a chart note about things like that or speak about it during report, but for the most part few people will think "hm, I wonder what everybody else had to deal with." They are probably too busy handling a thousand different things happening all at once. And, even if that is not the case, from what I observed it's simply not part of how things are done. And very often patients will get (justifiably) angry, saying "I've been complaining of x thing for days!" or some version of that. I think it would be much better for both patients and healthcare staff alike if there was a greater emphasis placed on focusing on the series of successes and failures that happen over the course of someone's care, not just seeing it as a single shift or a single problem happening in some isolated point in time.
I've been working on a little website to pull out links from the comments on the "Ask HN" page. Often there is some great advice in there, and it seemed in the spirit of Hacker News to automate that.
I'll give a little background how that came about. At the time, I was promoting the use of Rust within Fuchsia. The team was largely composed of badass C++ programmers, who of course were very familiar with reasoning about programs in terms of exactly how things were laid out in memory. The official Rust documentation was at a more abstract level with respect to a lot of this stuff, in many case careful not to overspecify because a lot of the details of memory layout are not normative and may in fact change. In explaining the most common and important Rust data types, I found these kinds of diagrams useful, and it grew into the page you see there.
It's not very hard to do. The trick is to know a resource that only the user can access and then trigger an HTTP request to it.
For instance if you have website a and say the user profile "mitsuhiko" can only be edited when you are logged in as "mitsuhiko" on http://a.example.com/profile/edit/mitsuhiko you could use this code to see if the logged in user is "mitsuhiko":
Why does this work? Because onload is fired if the resource answers with 200 OK, not if it's a valid script. onerror is called for any other error code.
So if you know what you are probing for: easy.
// Edit: Yes, this is most likely not what Facebook is doing if that's their only method of security. However see my reply to the first comment here about the security aspect for a possible way to solve this problem.
I wish I was being facetious, but I really don't think I am. IBM hired extensively from my university, I know people who worked there or adjacent to IBM in industry.
They hired the bottom of the cohort (computer science/software engineering) at university and didn't hire anyone who could code. They emphasised communication over technical ability (fine, ok), but their style of communication is business buzzwords in slide decks, not substance. They are keen on business understanding, but that's not product thinking, understanding systems, or the limitations of solutions or anything like that, it's marketing, it's how can we look good.
A friend of mine worked for a company who regularly tidied up IBM messes. He was brought on to a project that had been run by a 5 person IBM team for a year. After a year they had detailed requirements for a system that no one wanted. His team of 3 spent 2-3 weeks building a boring CMS on top of Postgres and S3 and the client were ecstatic because it solved the problem they'd had for years.
The tech talent at IBM still exists, but it's doing the quantum computing research, or developing their mainframe or server business. The rest is a below average consultancy company.
The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirrors if the main site disappeared.
Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway. Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work. It might become harder to find literal worked examples, but even those are mostly duplicated elsewhere and SO is just making it easier on search engines to find it.
The stack on this story so far (newest ones at the bottom—if I've missed any, can you let me know at hn@ycombinator.com? this is sort of an experiment and we may eventually write software to support building lists like this collaboratively):
A VERY timely article for me. About a month ago here in Silicon Valley, I noticed that a crow had been violently torn apart and the pieces scattered all over my backyard lawn. I assume the killer was a raccoon--another improbably intelligent animal. How those fat, little ninjas do what they do is beyond me, but one had apparently caught a crow. A few hours after I noticed the carnage, I grabbed a paper grocery bag and some rubber gloves and went outside to collect the crow parts.
As soon as I touched the first piece (a large, black, detached wing), a dozen crows appeared out of nowhere flying in tight circles over my head (about the height of the roof of my 2-story house) and shrieking. They must have been standing watch for hours waiting to see what would happen. Within a minute or so, their numbers had doubled, swarming like bees and screeching. They went so berserk that I thought for sure they would swoop down and peck at me like Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", but they didn't. They stayed up there and screeched the whole time I was cleaning up (maybe ten minutes).
I took the bag over to the recycling bin on the side of the house. Property is expensive, so the houses are close together leaving only a narrow slit of sky above me. The crows followed me and flew back and forth right above the gap, still screeching at me. I hadn't killed the bird, but they were acting like an angry mob blaming the wrong guy.
I was already aware of the studies showing that crows recognize individual people and can bear grudges for years. I was afraid that's what I was going to end up with, but after that event, they never bothered me again, and I see crows around my house frequently. Maybe they DID know that I wasn't the killer, but they had some other agenda. From my perspective, they (and raccoons) are essentially alien intelligences living among us that I always underestimate and still don't understand.
Bill Gates is the wealthiest person in the world (or arguably Arnault).
You might say, no, Musk and Bezos are worth 50% (or ~60 billion) more. On paper yes, but that's not a great metric. When I think of wealth, I think of what you can reasonably acquire.
If you multiply Musk's shares in Tesla times the current share price, sure you get 180 billion. But if he tried to sell a large number those shares, they'd plummet in value as he was selling them. Without Musk, I'd be surprised if Tesla is worth 20% of its current valuation. To a lesser extent, this is true of Bezos too, although Amazon without him is still a very valuable company.
On the other hand, Bill Gates owns 1.6% of Microsoft, which I believe is his biggest holding, followed by Berkshire Hathaway stock. I'd bet he can sell both of those holdings completely without a huge hit to either stock price (but definitely some hit). Same with his farmland and other alternative assets. On top of that, having already sold his Microsoft shares, he's not subject to as much capital gains tax as Bezos or Musk, each of whom pretty much owe 20% of their total net worth the second they want to sell.
So on paper, Musk and Bezos are wealthier, but if all of them decided to Scrooge McDuck it and put all their money into a gold filled vault tomorrow, Bill Gates' vault would be the fullest.
EDIT: typo above... Originally said that Musk owns 180 bn in Amazon stock :)
I'm sorry, but I have to be harsher than usual with my (granted, unsolicited) feedback now because you've been a designer for 11 years and I find your design - to be blunt - inconsiderate and inconsistent.
I hope you can school me on design in general by answering these questions:
1. Why is 3/4 of my screen empty space, while 1/2 of the content is invisible, forcing me to scroll down like I ran out of screen space? Seems inconsiderate.
2. Did you make this website for your own use, or for other people to use as well? If for other people, then why are you not accounting for the fact that lightgray on white is difficult to read in general, but especially hard to read for older folks? Seems inconsiderate.
3. What are the tiny circles with pictures supposed to tell me on the home page? They're just super tiny images with no information or tooltips. Seems inconsiderate.
4. Why do the "Create profile" and "View examples" CTAs look like buttons, but the mouse pointer is different when hovering on them? Seems inconsistent.
5. Why are you messing with the scrollbar to force me to scroll through the main CV? Seems inconsiderate.
6. Why is the "View example" button taking me to a page that wastes my time by showing me the exact same CV that I am forced to scroll through on the main page? Seems inconsiderate.
7. Why is the text on the main CV not selectable, yet on the "View Example" page it is selectable? Seems inconsistent.
8. Why are the links in the footer so close together? Seems inconsistent with the rest of the spacing on the page.
Force people to add months to the years! You only asks the year when someone started in "Work Experience". If I read "2012-2013" I can't tell if someone has been at a place ~12 months or ~1 month. This information is very important.
Also, please calculate the durations to allow readers to grasp tenure faster. Sometimes people need to skim through 200 CVs per day, so every inch of improvement is a big deal. Check how Linkedin does it: "May 2012 - June 2012, 1 year 1 month"
> This seems like the government stumping on small money launderers while giving the big guys a tax: employ some people, and rent some real-estate
I did work on this bill (my Congresswoman is its author). Let me defend the thresholds.
The point of this bill is to require beneficial ownership disclosure for shell companies. Legal ownership of an entity is one thing. The beneficial owner is the human who ultimately owns and controls the entity [1].
Tracing the beneficial owners of economically-active entities (i.e. not shell companies [2]) is expensive. Imagine doing this for Apple. You would need to look through every ETF that holds it to its mutual fund owners to their pension fund owners to their holding companies to their pensioners. That is a multimillion dollar exercise, largely useless and reasonably opposed. This expense in its extreme stopped similar legislation in the past. As a result, someone from Russia could create a BVI company that opens a Delaware LLC and gain near-total transactional anonymity.
This bill tries to exempt economically active entities. The thresholds are easy to identify, reducing paperwork, while low with respect to most companies. (Small businesses have simple ownership structures and a small number of beneficial owners.) The bill is not a general anti-money laundering bill. If you have employees and revenues, you are engaging in sophisticated money laundering. If you have a thousand shell entities, you are doing something else (and more common).
Wow reading all these stories about Apple really is eye-opening, as I've only usually heard these types of things about Amazon before.
I say that because I work for Amazon, and my work environment is pretty bad by my standards (my team cuts a lot of corners, we are given unrealistic deadlines by upper management, our on-call is paged at least 10 times a week, we have a huge backlog of tickets and bugs that we can never prioritize, and it is overall a very stressful environment.) I guess it can always be worse...
Sentiment analysis whenever a language is brought up, particularly JavaScript.
Then it would be great to see how many users have a negative sentiment associated with the "ageism" threads on HackerNews, and find a union of the users who fall heavily negative in both threads. All bets on 100% overlap.
Hi, thank you for the feedback - yes, we do get quite a bit of positive mentions in online forums, we try to keep an eye out for them but we could be better about that.
Syften looks interesting, I don't think I've received an email from you yet though - did you send to ian [at] 33mail [dot] com? We can also be reached at support@.
1) Be embedded in the industry for a while
2) Make lots of connections, build credibility
3) Build SaaS app to solve key pain point you experienced in #1
4) Sell to the folks you know from #2
5) For bonus points/de-risking: find 25 potential customers (from #2) and reach out to them and validate this idea (Jobs-to-be-Done). Get a handful of them to commit, even verbally, to buy this when you've got an MVP built.
[1] Clearly this is not the only way to be successful, but "I have a random idea lemme build it" is a great way to be not successful
[2] Succeed = your business that makes enough revenue to support you and a reasonable lifestyle, equating (and/or eventually surpassing) what you would typically make at a W2 gig, from a diversity of customers and not trading your personal time for money.