Sort of an off-the-wall idea: Do some kind of event, maybe a promotional thing connected with the business model of your intended product. Or maybe a hackathon or competition of some sort with a cash prize. It can let you find people who are keen, willing to get out there, and you can interact with them to try to ensure a good fit. Most startups fizzle out. In any early-stage thing, you need some initial folks with open-ended skills - willingness to work hard to learn new tech, and ability to see thru the clutter to get to a working result. Virtually any code you need can be found now on github, right? So for your first guys(or gals), you want folks with a prospectors mindset. And that means you will have focus now on prospecting also. Since everything is changing fast now, the town or city you are in can help - people in same profession tend to cluster. Figure out where the clusters are (Universities, big shared workspaces, etc.) and put the word out and describe what you are looking for. And remember that randomness is a good friend. If one looks at success stories, random contacts - at conferences, coffee-shops, etc., often figure in the process. Best of luck!
Yes. Yes. You can use HTML and write just fine. It's a markup language,
like old runoff, which could be used to generate nice, fancy prospectus
documents for a major gov. agency in a far northern country I worked in,
when I was a wee child. A good markup language is all you need.
It makes for better writing, because the writer focuses on content,
not the pretty presentation, which should be done after the content is
written.
I am getting my nose rubbed in this truth - about the benefits of basic
minimal website design. Most websites are useless. Mine is pretty useless.
I write it to have a web-presence, promote my consulting business, and
because I feel a need to write (maybe that is an illness? - not sure..).
I find writing forces me to think better, and the investment side of our
business, requires I think well, or we die quickly. It's a harsh world now.
I found this Hackernews post, by researching how to update critical browser
stuff, which has been borked for us, by our trading platform provider.
Updating browser on Linux - and guess what? - lose all bookmarks, all
customizations, everything. Arrrrgh!!! (happens EVERY update, of course).
Simple is often better. And the Web (most of it) has become crap, mostly.
Or dangerous, toxic vector for economic assault. Bloody awful, nasty and
sad. So it goes.
I am converting our crappy website from a provider (one.com) which bought
our simplesite.com website builder thing, which worked pretty good.
But the site had all this fancy stuff for menus and images and videos, and
a truckload of .css stuff - sure, nice and fancy. But the conversion to the
One.com builder stuff, does not work, of course. We cannot update (at all)
our site from the data-description that one.com has in it's website-builder
software. As of the forced conversion, we were complete off the air. Borked.
SO, this is stupid. Complexity and fancy design - is mostly stupid, and
it also creates contrived dependency (keeps customers locked, makes them
be forced to open their wallets and send you cash - good for providers,
bad for customers.)
I got so pissed off, I decided to do it all ourselves. We built our site
at AWS as an EC2 instance. Fucking website-building software is a scam,
mostly.
The original poster is right. All you really need is HTML (AND some stuff to
render videos and audio and maybe code to get paid for stuff, maybe...). Most
of the .css stuff is fluff. And people are getting REAL tired of being
dusted with fluff. OP is right.
Our old website is https://www.gemesyscanada.com It was a mess - a long
bunch of stuff, posted over the years, research-logs, blogs, notes, etc.
But now that it is a One.com, we cannot update it. The websitebuilder
software gets to 90%, and then hangs - and we do not even get any error
messages telling us what the problem is. Arrrgh.
We are building a simpler version - using AWS-EC2 - we have one free EC2
instance which I am experimenting with: http://35.182.107.190 and that
is it. We have not even got a domain set up yet - it's all hacking & testing
for now. But it looks like we can go this route. The whole thing is an
exercise in vanity and ego. It really is, honestly. But why not? It is
what our tiny little business does, and it is what I am. I've been doing
AI since I went to Dr. Geoff Hinton's classes, and got a copy of Xerion
working on a P/C running Linux - back in the 1990's. One must not hide
one's light under a bushel, right? So, we need a website.
And a bad one, that looks goofy, and is honest, is better than a really
fancy one, full of obfuscation, deception, dis-information and old-fashioned
lies. (Kinda like - oh - just about most things now?)
All you may need is HTML. Yup. Mostly true.
- M. Langdon, Director, Owner, Floor-cleaner, Barn-builder, Portfolio Manager
GEMESYS Ltd.
This may sound silly, but:
- my hacked iPad. It's first generation, original software was stupid, but with "RedSn0w" and all of Freeman's Cydia apps, it has turned into my favourite device. It has a full, Linux-like file system, I can have all sorts of material on it, SSH works fine, can use it as a controller, and I can still browse (some) internet sites. (Using it to write this). I have Macbook Pro, a bunch of Linux boxes, couple of nice Acer laptops, but this ancient iPad is so very well made, and all the Cydia stuff just works. My partner has a modern iPhone, but I like this old iPad, where each key on the screen is half-an-inch across!
- my AR-15. AK's are prohibited where I live (and so now is my AR), but folks need to understand what a fine triumph in modular design and excellent ergonomics, the American-designed AR-15 rifle really is. Early rifle designs were just not good - soldiers would pull the trigger, and be blinded as the breech blew up in their face. The AR is light, lethal, and reliable. Like most good design, it is the result of continuous improvements over a long time span.
- The Piper PA-28 "Warrior" general aviation light aircraft. This is just an amazingly successful design effort. Everything in aircraft design is a series of trade-offs, weight, strength, durability, reliability, ease-of-use, safety, complexity, simplicity, and so on. I did all my fight training as a young fellow on Cessna 172's, which are also excellent examples of very good design. But the 172 feels like what it is, to fly - a solid, simple workhorse. The PA-28, with a 160 or 180 hp engine, manages to feel quite different - like being able to drive a Camaro around in the sky. It's not a Ferrari, but it had several fine design features that made it feel like a much more substantial and flyable aircraft, especially for a kid learning to fly. It was real fun. The wings were tapered. Compared to older "Cherokee" models, which did not have tapered wings, the difference was significant. It is, of course, a low-wing aircraft. This makes for a much more attractive flying experience - you are driving a platform, not hanging from a wing, in a little box. And this aircraft has a stabilator, instead of a tail-plane and an elevator. On the Piper, as you pull and push the control wheel, the whole rear wing tilts up and down. This is just a genius design feature, and gives the aircraft a nice lively feel, even if you are flying the cheapest, entry-level version, which does not have retractable gear. (If renting at a flying club, you probably won't have any retractables - since some student might forget to drop the gear, and may well wipe out the aircraft.) Our club had one Warrior, and it was a very big treat, when I could book it and take it away up north, for a weekend. The little design genius features, made it very fun to fly. I recall dropping the flaps involved pulling on a lever, much like a sports-car emergency brake. (On the Cessna, to put down flaps, you throw a switch on the panel, and listen for the servo-motors). But on the Piper, you pull on this lever, and feel the wind on the flaps, as you pull them down. You literally could feel the air, as you flew thru it. And with those tapered wings, and the rear stabilator, you could drop a wing and dive down quick, and the whole experience was wonderful, because of these specific design improvements over the old square ( non-tapered) wings of the older "Cherokee" models.
- lastly, (call me crazy, if you must), the original APL computer language, which I learned when very young, because it was the only interactive environment available. APL was (is) very different, but it turned out to be an amazingly useful languange and environment to learn. I met Ken Iverson (the inventor author of APL), and he and I did not see eye-to-eye on things. But APL was a work of genius. APL was very popular inside IBM in the early days, and the first IBM P/C was actually pre-dated by an IBM Personal Computer that ran APL, called the SCAMP, which came out in 1973, if I remember correctly. I still use APL applications, and we use them, because they make us money. And that is always important in any product design... :)
I debated for a while if I should post this - but decided I had to.
I actually built a working IEC fusion reactor in my basement, back in 2005-2006.
I got to "first fusion" on Sept. 25th, 2006, and posted a video of the reactor
working, on Youtube. I just checked, and the video is still there.
IEC (Inertia Electrostatic Confinement) fusion can be done, with a high-vacuum system, a high-voltage DC supply, and a vacuum-chamber with a high-voltage feed-thru. It is dangerous, but doable, and I believe I had the first working, amateur-built fusion reactor in Canada. One can confirm that fusion is occuring, by using sensitive chemical neutron detectors that workers in nuclear fission plants typically carry. I used BTI (Bubble Technology Inc.) detectors, which look like little test-tubes, and show small bubbles in a gel-like liquid, if exposed to a neutron flux.
My reactor was never able to produce more than 10^6 to 10^7 neutrons per second, which is a very weak neutron field. I used a small "lecture bottle" of non-radioactive deuterium (heavy hydrogen gas), and it worked well. I had to construct a deuterium injection system, using some high-vacuum valves, and a gas-feed-thru on one of the vacuum-chamber ports. The vacuum-chamber itself, and the high-vacuum diffusion pump (which used a mechanical vacuum pump, connected to a device which uses hot-oil vapour) and the high-voltage DC power supply, were all sourced from surplus equipment found on eBay, and imported from USA into Canada. The importation of each item was an adventure in itself.
One needs to put about 15,000 to 25,000 DC volts negative, on the confinement grid, and the vacuum chamber needs to be evacuated to about 10^-4 torr or better. I estimated the device needed mean-free path length of almost a 1 cm, for the D2 ion circulation, which is a very rarified environment.
What is really interesting about fusion, is how difficult it is to make happen. A palladium-wire grid would be better for the spherical confinement grid, but I used stainless steel. (Palladium is expensive, I had no source for it, and I am not Tony Stark...)
But the reactor did produce nuclear fusion events, using the D2 gas, and the high-voltage charge on the confinement grid. This technology was first invented and patented by Philo Farnsworth, an American researcher and inventor, who in the 1930's, invented electronic television. He invented the first electronic TV camera - the iconoscope - and fought with Sarnoff at RCA for years over the patent rights for electronic TV. Farnsworth's IEC fusion reactors also worked, but attempts to scale up the technology were not successful.
The various attempts at creating commercially viable fusion reactors are interesting. We keep getting close - but nothing that produces a useful level of net energy output, has yet to demonstrated, as far as I know.
I sincerely hope some sort of breakthru is possible, at some point.
My device - and most of the IEC devices - are able to produce a significant amount of neutrons, and research efforts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, were able to demonstrate a powerful IEC reactor, which produced an intense neutron flux, sufficient to ablate the walls of the vacuum chamber (the chamber wall looked like swiss-cheese, under electron-microscope examination), so we know this technology is able to produce a serious amount of fusion events.
But taking this approach and using it to generate a net-energy output, has not been possible. My device was roughly 1500 watts in, and 1500 watts of heat out, plus maybe one or two extra milliwatts (or maybe a few hundred nanowatts). Not even enough to really measure.
I have followed all the various attempts to get some net useful energy out of fusion reactor technology, and I truly hope something becomes possible. We seriously will need this technology, and we are so close to having it. I wish all these researchers - public and private - the very best of luck.
Are you familiar with LFTR and if so can you indicate why fusion is practically superior to it? Cost, fuel availability, safety, vessel lifetime, etc.
LFTR scales down, has working examples (fit in a closet in ORNL)
fuel availability: lots of thorium, ignition fuel is a problem though
vessel lifetime: lots of caustic stuff in LFTR, but fusion is high temperature and will suffer vessel degradation from neutrons, won't it?
Safety: LFTR is meltdown proof due to liquid fuel and plugs, and seems to consume all its nuclear fuel (compared to solid rod). Fusion is "clean" but makes the reactor eventually radioactive?
Cost: Fusion is a ???, LFTR is undeveloped, and both will be a decade+ down the road during which solar/wind/battery will get substantially cheaper, moving the goalposts for cost/investment.
Yes, absolutely, I want to say this also. Hacker News / Ycombinator is very fine and excellent. Thanx for running this site. It is unique, the format is genius simple, and I learn and discover things here I would otherwise have no knowledge of. We are in rural location in Canada, coming in via Starlink now. The internet is critical for us. It is our economic, social and scientific link to the world. Sites of the quality of Hacker News are rare now. If we ever manage to get to and live on Mars, I hope we can have satellite relay link to HN. Happy Thanxgiving to everyone. And best of luck for everyone's future projects!
There are a few good things, but mostly, much of the modern tech is nasty and just not good - honestly. I am in my 60's now, and still remain a pure hacker of tech - really. I built a working IEC fusion reactor in my basement, I run a 12+ node LAN at the Farm, and recently bought another car. I love the idea of Tesla, and the F-150 Lightening, but the Tesla SUV is $120,000 in Canada, and that is just too much. But I do have Elon Musk's Starlink dish, and it is just magic wonderful. It's $145 per month here, but we can afford that. Some tech is truly great - but an awful lot is just terrible. You need to know this. And it gets worse each year. Honestly, aeriously.
My partner has a MacBook Air - the SSD just died. We are lucky, since it is a 2012 version. We just ordered a 250gb upgrade (and the damn little 5-point screwdriver to open the back of the damn thing. But we expect to be able to fix it fine. But since 2018, the vermin at Apple have been soldering the (failure prone) SSD chips to the mainboard.
We find the old-tech is good ( I run mostly Linux boxes - for various needs).
Honestly, everything is getting crappy and nasty. You need to appreciate what I saw when younger - the first Moon landing - and the last on in 1972, with the electric car on the moon.
It's 2021, and we could not go to the moon, if Earth's life depended on it.
I watched and experienced the transition from propeller drive Viscount aircraft, to DC-9s, and then 747's. As a kid in University, I flew to England, on Wardair, and we drank cheap drinks in the upstairs lounge for most of the flight. Way better than Concorde!
I put email into a major Gov't Ministry (as an independent consultant, and I watched it make major changes, as a stiff, old-world style org was flatlined by the technology (we used Novell Networks). We installed a DecSystem 2020, and changed completely how a big, powerful group operated. We watched the Space Shuttles debut, and promise space-travel for all nations, with the ISS, which was billed as a stepping stone to the planets and maybe even the stars.
I bought and demonstrated a Z80 Northstar 64K, with a working Pascal compiler which could do what the DEC 2020 could do, at a tiny fraction of the cost. We saw the disruption of the disruptive tech that was only a few years old. I paid $6000 for an initial IBM 5150 P/C, with dual drives, which had a Fortran compiler, which was solid and good and gave the right answers.
And I bought one of the first lunch-box sized cellphones, which was just awesome, science-fiction level cool - and then replaced it in a few years with a Motorola handset - and then a flip-phone.
The technology was wonderful, it was reliable, and bloody well made.
Now, it is crap. Seriously. It still is sort-of workable, but I find everything has some kind of trick, or some kind of gotchya worm built into it now.
Stuff fails regularly.
Products are released, and the public customers are used as
testers. Early versions of anything now are riddled with bugs, flaws, and are horribly, badly engineered.
Boeing builds expensive aircraft on the cheap, and the dogshit crappy software flies perfectly fine aircraft into the ground.
The USA gives up on space - were it not for Elon Musk, they would have no civilian space transport to the ISS.
Electronics are built with custom ASIC chips, not industry standard hardware - so that failure in in-built, and hardware has to be thrown away every few years.
The internet, which promised knowledge and access-for-all, has morphed into a shit-stained back alley, dominated by scammers and hard-core criminals.
Everything good, useful or honest is behind a paywall.
I have to grit my teeth to use it now.
This was not how it was supposed to be.
It's wonderful to see the videos on the little helicopter flying on Mars - really very amazing. But exploring by sending robots is tragic and cowardly - and offers so little.
Honestly - we need to change the program. We need to deregulate basically everything. Everything.
It sounds crazy, but otherwise, the future is going to be 20 or 30 billion people, choking on their own fumes, fighting over the few remaining resources.
We need to drive the technology forward with a military-grade urgency. I know it's possible, because I saw it happen when I was young. And it is not happening now.
This is cool. Good to see. Thanx for posting this. If someone is coding some serious math hackery, drill down into the app and you'll often find someone's variant/version of the old IMSL library routines, written - in Fortran - back in the 1960's. Why? Because that code was extensively tested and was deemed trustworthy. And even better - just went to my bookshelves and found it: "Optimization Techniques With Fortran" - James L. Kuester, Joe H. Mize, McGraw-Hill, 1973, ISBN 0-07-035606-8. It's just an awesome book - it's 9inches by 11 inches, 500 pages chock full of detailed explanations of many of the state-of-the-art circa 1973 optimization techniques for search methods, linear and quadratic programming tricks, least-squares (linear and non-linear methods), dynamic programming (a math technique for making a series of interrelated decisions), and so on. The book has code, examples and detailed explanations - with numerical examples - and flowcharts even, to explain exactly how the code works, and what the program is actually doing.
And its all Fortran - some of it IBM/360 Fortran - all in Courier font that's easy to read and use.
I had a client that just typed in all the code for a Simplex LP program, and used it to construct a big optimization solution for how to structure the re-investment actions of a large bond portfolio in a treasury department of a big organization.
Before there were neural networks and image-hacking, there was the gritty math-hacking to optimize big gobs of interrelated stuff that had to happen in the right order. It was almost always done in Fortran, and I suspect a lot of it still is. (And if it was not done in Fortran, it was done in APL. Ask an Actuarial scientist, if you doubt this..)
Please don't laugh at Fortran. It can not only help you fly your spaceship to another planet (and get you home again!), it can also make you (and your client) rich, since you can build solid, bulletproof code from those old libraries that just works, and hence create flaw-free solutions to really critically important applications.
This proposed extension looks useful.
(https://github.com/wch/r-source says that's 23% of the source. It includes vendored libraries, like a 5MB .f of LAPACK code. I bet a lot of the C code in R was f2c'd at some point in the past)
Oh man, just seeing those letters—I M S L—brought back the distinct smell of the IMSL documentation in the UIC computer lab in the 80s, which along with a lot of other mainframe documentation was on special racks where three ring–punched documentation could be read (but not actually brought to a terminal where it could be useful).
I had six apps on Google Playstore several years back. They were free, no adverts or in-app tricks... Google removed them, since I didnt keep creating new versions. Oh well. But the API churn has become explicit neo-monoploy strategy. Google and Apple should be broken up. Two companies control all mobile software distribution - and restrict and block independent developers using all the classic tricks of monopolists. It's just nuts. No other industry is this concentrated. There is no innovation happening here. 15% smaller size? So what. This whole exercise is to maintain and extend control. Regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum, this is just "company store" monopolist tricksterism, and the solution is to dust off the old Anti-Trust laws and break this abusive entity into three or four seperate companies. "Trust Busting" is something both the Right and the Left can agree on. Break Google up. If - as a developer - you want to distribute your code as an .APK, then you and your customers should be able to make that choice. This current economic model is not only bogus - it is actually contrary to black-letter US law.
Genuine question: why not distribute them yourself (e.g. on GitHub)? If more and more developers do this, it will be like pc software. We don't have to accept a storefront (on Android at least).
It has been established that distributing APK anywhere else (Github, etc.) other than the Play store would have a drastic impact on the exposure and discoverability of the app, which will lessen user engagement and revenue stream.
Disclaimer: I'm not an app developer, but works in PR and marketing.
I think you answered the question of "why distribute on the Play store", not the question of "why not distribute on GitHub". Presumably you could do both?
I had to go look it up, the clause was:
Issue: Violation of Malicious Behavior policy
With this as the explanation:
Potentially malicious external APKs within the App.
The App had a link to our website on it's dashboard, our website had a download for all installers (we're cross-platform) and it was the same APK but because of potential for it being malicious, they suspended the app with no recourse. (We did remove the APK download, but couldn't update the App to remove the link to the website)
This was in 2018 and we had been in the store for about a year at that point. It was a patch update that triggered it.
I would love an alternative Android store that's curated to filter out the 90% of crApps that show up for me these days in the Play store. Along with a checkbox to exclude those with ads, in-app purchases and other such tricks.
Apps on F-Droid/IzzyOnDroid are FOSS and usually pretty good. As for things from Google Play, Aurora Store has some filter capabilities, although the app has some glitchiness.
Established by whom? Many people host their apps on Google Play just so they don't subject their users to warnings about "installing apps from unknown sources" and for convenient updating.
> user engagement and revenue stream
Well, if you're making an app for the sole purpose of making charts go up...
A sizeable portion of Android users are not technology savvy, the "installing apps from unknown sources" message will deter some of them.
>Well, if you're making an app for the sole purpose of making charts go up...
Unless the app is a hobby project, most people would put maximizing their potential revenue stream and marketability of their product as a high priority.
This is not entirely true anymore. I can whitelist apps to install apps instead of making it on a per app level. So I can simply add stores and only confirm the 'danger' message once
So it turns out the original "disruptors", using scorched-earth business techniques, and despite adhering to the mantras of open-source software, have become uncontrollable monsters?
It should make you think a little about how things are done in Silicon Valley.
Is there really that much API churn on Android? I have a cruddy old app originally written for API 16 and it still works. It's not on the play store, though.
After nearly a decade of mobile development I have stopped developing for Android & iOS as well.
Apple had(has?) two years policy for app removal if not updated, I feel that's fair considering quality & security.
But Apple did me real good when overnight it moved my arcade type game from Arcade category to some other generic category because it named its game store as 'Arcade'.
That was the beginning of the series of events ending with semi-mandatory vaccine apps being available only these platforms (no web) to put bad taste in my mouth. Now I've gone back to web development for my products.
The only reason an average app publisher want their app to not be on web is because it cannot steal as much private data(or users can easily protect themselves) .
This is a good and important essay. I was crazy-lucky, being born at a time and place when kids could be left alone to build stuff and play with real technics when still young. I built hovercraft, rockets, ballistic devices, and hacked with vacuum tubes and transistors and tesla coils and radios and early computer stuff. It was wonderful. Oh, and biotech, too. All before high-school. Now in my sixties, but still like a crazy kid with tech. The tech helped me learn the complex stuff - the math - but it also taught me early I could get help/assistance and better faster results working with smart people. Doing - not just reading about it - but doing it and testing and trying again, and failing and then nailing success - this is so powerful and good. We got airplane crazy for a while - and I built no-airfoil Laminar winged models which flew fine. There were no video games - we built stuff and hacked it and sometimes had accidents... But I learned most of what I needed to know in life doing - doing and failing and fixing and then getting it to work.. This is the algo for life. You will have silly setbacks and make awful boneheaded mistakes - but when DOING you learn quick that nothing is final. If you didnt get killed, you can try again.
I never heard this called "agency". But doing - and learning to think, and plan, and then act, and then evaluate - this is really key. Many folks who just write and talk - they never experience true harsh failure of the system. But nature is a really good teacher. She shows clear truth - and you can learn just by keeping your eyes and brain open - and remain curious and driven to know the why and the how.
The studio is maybe the kitchen table, or the basement. And maybe the library and Google and DuckDuckGo. But build something. Build a car. Build a go-cart or a rocket. Build a working computer from a bag of parts bought online from Mouser or Digikey. Build a working fusion-generator ( you can buy "lecture bottles" of non-radioactive deuterium. ) Learn to program, and hack together a working version of mplayer from source code, and get it running on a Linux box, and listen to streaming Radio Caroline (the original pirate-radio in the UK from the beginning of open-source hardware). The author here is wise,and makes a very key point. DO something - MAKE something - pull together the bits and pieces of stuff and knowledge that transform nature and get her working for you - instead of you being a slave to her. I remember school was pretty awful... It had to be endured. And it interfered with my experiments. :)
I built a TEA laser in my basement. You need a DC power supply, and a bunch of stuff you can buy at Staples - plastic sheets, aluminum foil, etc. It was first written up in Scientific American in 1974.
And I also built software machines to hack the markets. To my great surprise, they seem to work. If a dullard like me can do it - any sufficiently motivated person can. :)
Do things and make things. You will learn skills that can be used to make the things you want to happen, actually happen. Good essay. - Russel F.
If its a big idea, break it down into smaller pieces and try to prototype smaller parts - eg before organizing 100m, see if your idea works on 20 people. Also, try to boil the big idea down to an actual example where it does/does-not work or apply.
Also - review the history/literature of your idea. This is key. You will always find historical analogues for just about any idea you can conceptualize. Someone will have had the same or similar idea before, and it will likely be in the historical record somewhere. Read the history, to go further, faster.
And if the big idea is worthwhile, share it with others and get their views - but try to use your ears to listen. Don't listen with your mouth (as so many do).
Recognize also that big ideas and results that come from them, often start - in science especially - from careful observations of small anomalies. Try to pay attention to see things that others miss - often these micro-observations are both the source of and can hold the solutions to something that turns out to be really significant.
Also, if the big idea is also a problem, you might benefit from using the tricks and techniques of creative thinking algorithms of De Bono - invert the idea, transpose with random phrases, etc.
And final comment - beware of "big ideas" that are just sophistry and obfuscation. You deal with those by using courtroom techniques to pull out the truth, and show that your counterparty is either just "talking his position", or perhaps outright lying.
