Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | founderling's commentslogin

My guess is that you subconciously know that the outcome would not be that great.

Why do you want to do a full-time job PLUS a side project?

What kind of life is that? You would work most of your waking hours. That is not the kind of possible future that motivates one to push through.


> My guess is that you subconciously know that the outcome would not be that great.

When it comes to the product, this is very much true. I second guess all my ideas, even the ones that other people have build successfully.


I don't mean the product.

Your subconscious mind is not motivated by the product.

Tens of thousands of great products are created each year. Your subconscious mind does not care if there is one more or not.

It is motivated by how good of a life you will have.

If it imagines "more sitting in front of a computer and typing into a keyboard" it will not get excited.


Ok, I understand what you mean. But that's very much not true. Because when I look at what the eventual end goal is, i.e. having a side project turn into my full time job, that's very much the life I want. Being able to do my own thing, and decide my own hours, or location where I work from.

I'm not scared of doing the work, or putting in the hours.


>I'm not scared of doing the work, or putting in the hours.

Maybe the fear isn't in doing the work, but in doing the work and still failing?


I definitely have to fear of failing, not necessarily because it would mean the work I've put in is lost.


Well, tweeting where?

If it is tweeted on an account with 0 followers, then certainly not, right?

And when tweeted to one millioin scientists in the same field, then certainly yes, right?


> 4 articles were prospectively tweeted per day by a designated TSSMN (Thoracic Surgery Social Media Network) delegate and retweeted by all other TSSMN delegates (n=11) with a combined followership of 52,893 individuals and @TSSMN for 14 days


Tweeting is science now.


I beg to differ. They did not "add" a non-compete. They scared him into signing one.

Someone at Amazon put a paper on his desk and said that unless he signs it, they would not "authorize my employment". Whatever that means.

    So I signed. Because what
    other options did I have?
The option not to sign. He had an offer from them and he agreed. That is a legal binding contract that they have to abide. So don't sign and say "Sorry, but we have a legally binding agreement. And this is not in line with it.".

If you let people scare you by saying something, they will continue to play tricks on you. Stick to what is written.


He was on a work visa. If he loses his job, he loses his right to stay in the country.

That puts a lot of extra pressure on someone to keep their job.


Yes. That is how they scared him into signing it.

But I suggest standing your ground in such a situation. They wanted to work with him. They had a contract with him. So there was a lot of pressure on them too. If they breached the contract they would lose an employee and face legal repercussions.


I think you're vastly overestimating both the leverage a low-level employee would have in one of those megacorps and the amount of autonomy that an HR rep would have in a case like this. They have a process to follow, and that process does not include negotiation. Maybe they have the power to escalate the request to someone with decision making power, but that's going to take time, and their flowchart probably does not allow for allowing somebody to start work provisionally until that escalation is solved.

What "legal repercussions" are you thinking of? The author stated that their new contract was "at will", so their employment could be terminated for any reason at all.

(Not defending Amazon here. But the employee had been put into a position where they had no realistic choice but to sign.)


What does it give you over simple server-side rendered templates?


Chakra UI is a widget toolkit, so it's not on the same level of comparison.

React will use JSX and can use all the cool new JS stuff, e.g. module imports, template literals. With webpack there's automated code splitting. The toolchain is under very active development (from react, to webpack, to babel, to new dependencies I've never heard of - aside: a downside is the dependency graph in node can be crazy)

If your site is simple enough, server site templates will do. For anything non-trivial, where there's a lot of reusability and its very async / API heavy, the benefits shift dramatically to including a frontend framework.

Regarding server side templates, there's limitations to how far templates engines (e.g. django templates / jinja2) can take you. Extending templates works when done carefully, as does overriding blocks. Anything non-trivial becomes very hard to manage - there's no type safety, setting variables is burdensome.

On parataxic, there's no server. It's all static files served from cloudfront via Gatsby (to get an idea of this: https://jamstack.org/)


I have never found sever side rendered templates simplate on harder and more complex web apps. But that's me, maybe it just does not map with your mental model, or maybe I started php and django with the wrong foot. All I know is that for the moment I find react simpler to reason with. I looked a bit at angular and angular, and they also seemed simpler than SSR templates.


The way I read it, they scrape 25k pages per day?

I wonder if that could already bring them on Googles radar. If so, Google would probably send a cease and desist letter and this startup would simply give up.

I wonder if Google would also demand their legal expenses? Probably a couple thousand dollars?

I know, nobody would go to court against Google - but what would happen if this did go to court? Which laws would Google cite to deem this illegal?


I wonder why they price their products so cheap.

They seem to be totally overrun by demand. And give a terrible user experience when you try to order from them. Friends of mine have ordered (and paid!) Pine64 products weeks ago and get no information when they will be shipped. When you send them an email, it either gets ignored or you get a reply by someone who does not speak English. Telling you something like "Yes will inform you when be shipped".

Why not charge 50% more and treat your customers like customers?

This taints the whole Pine64 brand for me. I totally want a Linux phone and a Linux tablet. But I don't know if I should trust a brand that treats their customers like this.


This isnt really a finished product that they are comfortable selling to the general population. I actually feel like they are doing a pretty good job of setting customers expectations. From the order page for the pine tab I see these disclaimers:

    The PineTab comes with UBports OS build installed. Please note that the OS build is still in a beta stage, and while most core functionality works, some elements remain a work-in-progress.

    Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect.

    When fulfilling the purchase, please bear in mind that we are offering the PineTab at this price as a community service to PINE64 communities. If you think that a minor dissatisfaction, such as a dead pixel, will prompt you to file a PayPal dispute then please do not purchase the PineTab. Thank you.
To me that means, this is not a "product" in the traditional sense. They're just trying to accommodate hackers by providing more fully fleshed out development kits in hopes that they can make a more fully fledged product in the future.


The PineTab comes with UBports OS build installed. Please note that the OS build is still in a beta stage, and while most core functionality works, some elements remain a work-in-progress.

Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect.

When fulfilling the purchase, please bear in mind that we are offering the PineTab at this price as a community service to PINE64 communities. If you think that a minor dissatisfaction, such as a dead pixel, will prompt you to file a PayPal dispute then please do not purchase the PineTab. Thank you.


Their honesty is so refreshing. Wish more companies were like this.


That doesnt mean their customer service as in giving an estimate of a shipping time should be that bad. They could at least say "hey, we're a bit overwhelmed right now, we'll let you know when it's ready to ship but dont have more info right now, sorry" or something like that


How does the statement about dead pixels help people who ordered and paid a phone but get no information on when it will be shipped?

Regarding general population vs hackers: Do you imply that hackers value low price higher then others? Are hackers particularely poor? I thought hacker often means coder which usually means higher income then the general population.

Personally, I would totally prefer to pay 50% more and have my emails answered and my orders shipped.


I'm not that much into discussion of terms "hackers" vs "community", but maybe you can track updates in the first post in this tread: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9942

Quoting from there:

> We're under constraints that we have no control over (e.g. border being closed between HK and mainland China), the shipping companies and carriers are under many constraints (self-imposed or imposed by regulators) and the logistic chain as a whole - including people - is under regulatory constraints. In short, current situation is not business as usual. I am getting many PMs and emails asking about status reports - as soon as I know something, I post it here, there is no need to PM or email me. Thank you for your continued patience!

Also, somewhere I've read that their shipping team is 4 people packing about 1000 items per day. Why increased demand doesn't cause increase in shipping team - that I don't know.

You can also connect to IRC/Telegram/Matrix channel and ask there - somebody with more knowledge might answer you.


[flagged]


They have said that orders for people who opted for the faster DHL shipping option had already shipped out 6/5 - 6/6 and would be given a tracking number and contacted by DHL, yet there are some of us who have still received nothing in terms of updates.

Here we are, a week later, and even after their update 3 hrs ago, the Pine team has yet to acknowledge this.

Ordinarily I would have shrugged it off, but the shipping carrier needs to reach out to collect their taxes before we can get our devices.

E: offtopic, but there's no need for the namecalling. We like to think we're classier than that 'round here.


> Just go buy a finished product from a store

Not that you're wrong about the rest, but we can't actually do this; there are no stores that will sell you a working smartphone or smartphone-based tablet. (That is, with compiler, shell, kernel- and driver-patching, etc that constitute a operating system.)


Counter-perspective:

On price:

By releasing things as cheaply as they can within reason, this vastly broadens who can get one. Given that they depend on the community to create most if not all of the software, this means that software support gets there much earlier than it would otherwise; compare the progress on the Librem handset to the PinePhone: one took three years, has gone over the predicted timeframe multiple times, and still isn't quite right (or released), while Pine64's is actually surprisingly decent, and got there much faster.

On 'customer' experience:

Every time I've ordered from them they've been perfectly responsive and have gotten things shipped on a reasonable time frame. They're based in China and, if you weren't aware, there's kind of a big event happening over there that's interrupted their everything. They're not Apple and it'd be worse if they were trying to be; they aren't treating their customers badly, they're treating their workers well; chill out.


> By releasing things as cheaply as they can within reason, this vastly broadens who can get one. Given that they depend on the community to create most if not all of the software, this means that software support gets there much earlier than it would otherwise;

This is exactly it, if we want linux on phones to be a real experience that can offer something on par with Google and Apple, then the very first step is getting hardware into hackers hands; the software will never follow if there aren't any users. The exact kind of person you want using these devices is someone willing to pay less money and pay with their time instead.


> This taints the whole Pine64 brand for me. I totally want a Linux phone and a Linux tablet. But I don't know if I should trust a brand that treats their customers like this.

Frankly, it seems like this isn't the device for you. I agree, you should probably wait. But words like "taint the brand" seem incredibly strong to me.

These devices are for developers and tinkerers, not the general population. The goal is to get these devices into as many hands as possible, hitting a price point as low as possible. This allows for more people to get access to the hardware and start tinkering, helping to build out the (woefully lacking, at this time) software ecosystem.

To be honest, I feel like they have done a really good job of setting expectations around this, so I'm not terribly sympathetic to this class of complaint. I ordered a PinePhone and am patiently waiting for it to ship. I'm glad it's so cheap! It's not going to be a device to replace my primary phone (yet), it's a project to tinker with. As such I don't want to spend much more money.


I ordered a pinebook pro on April 1st and arrived on June 3rd. I knew it was a pre-order when I paid. This meant months before the product arrives and that I would have to monitor the news from their website. They posted monthly (and bi-weekly, towards the end) updates on the shipping status, manufacturing issues and coronavirus impact. I had a problem because I am moving houses and their support team has been very helpful in accomodating me.

When I got the laptop I was expecting a cheap plastic build but got an aluminium sturdy frame. Best laptop purchase I ever had, this comment is actually being written from my new pinebook pro.

I m sorry you feel you are not treated like a customer. Given the company's size they are really doing wonders.


This explains why so many people have trouble with Kickstarter and I love it. I think these things are not for you. You have a lower risk tolerance and strong quality requirements for your customer experience. I think there were adequate signals that these were not going to be met, but if I ever do something like this I'm going to make it even clearer that this is early-access tool for the community and there are lots of failure points.

Honestly, I suspect this experience is just not for you, man. It's like when we funded the glowing plant on Kickstarter, or the smart mattress topper that became Luna and then Eight, or funded the development of neovim. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. These are people experienced at doing a thing but not all the things around the thing. There's going to be drop-offs.

I really wish there were a way to just say "If you have normative expectations, go elsewhere". I really want to be able to participate in this specific subsector of the economy without the general-consumer folks increasing costs because I'm willing to accept lots of cut corners on beta products and they want all the trappings of working with folks.

As an example, one of the things I bought they took two weeks to respond to me (it was a combination GPS/Glonass/Galileo antenna for cheap). That's okay for me. It took months to arrive with many delays every few months. That's also okay for me. I don't want them to hire more folks to ensure they can respond to everyone. I don't want them to hire more folks so they can manage the customs hassle. I want them to be able to validate the product itself because I want more of that product.


> Friends of mine have ordered (and paid!) Pine64 products weeks ago and get no information when they will be shipped. When you send them an email, it either gets ignored or you get a reply by someone who does not speak English. Telling you something like "Yes will inform you when be shipped".

They are very transparent about the delays in shipping. You can find the most up to date information in a sticky post on their forum[1].

> This taints the whole Pine64 brand for me.

That's an extremely charged response, you definitely should check the forum post to get some perspective. In short, there were QA issues with the first batch of Pinebook Pro and PinePhone orders, they are running the remaining unshipped units through a second round of testing before shipping, and the combination of COVID-19 and China/Hong Kong border issues have further delayed shipping.

[1] https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9942


My PinePhone was lost in shipping during the start of the pandemic like you mentioned. They happily sent me another a few short weeks later, no complaints! Awesome customer service


I think it's a bit much to expect their entire support staff to write in perfect English, since they are not based in an English-speaking country. I don't think it's a very big operation, either.

I have one of their boards and can only say I had a good experience buying from them. I think compared to some of the alternatives in the price range (ie., random, no-name eBay crap), their documentation and forums is very good.


I will get one, just to have one. Just like I wanted to get that $100 laptop a decade (or more?) ago but I never got the chance. I see it more as supporting an endeavour that may benefit more people down the road, than any thought I got on my mind.

For anyone who wants a a decent tablet (Android 5 though) on 10", I suggest the Amazon Fire HD (7th gen is fine), you can get a used for for £30-£50, then "hack it" to remove the Amazon crap/bloatware (plenty of sites with instructions out there) and use that. I have set up multiple friends like that. They buy it, meet for a coffee, I de-crap it for them in 20mins and they end up with a nice 10" android tablet to read and watch Netflix.

(Not advertising or affiliated with Amazon)(I think Bezos should give more to his staff and less to his pocket) ;)


Raising the price to $110 might make demand match their supply (by dropping, say, 80% of demand), but losing $10 per unit sold may be an extremely good deal for all the marketing the excess demand generates.


From my Pine64 experience as an initial backer, I 100% agree.

I think where Pine64 failed to deliver is that they overpromised on when they could deliver the product. I received mine very late and I couldn't boot the OS and support wasn't helpful.

Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi 3 with 64bit support was announced after Pine64 and delivered before the Pine64 without hiccups.

Pine64 could have improved but I woule rather stick with something like a Raspberry Pi where there is a better level of support (from my experience).


"Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi 3 ..."

The Raspberry PI foundation essentially is a branch of Broadcom, a chipmaker with $20 billion revenue in 2018. Pine64 had to crowfund their first boards 5 years ago while Broadcom already had been a chip vendor for the US military. They are not even comparable.

Moreover, I wouldn't take the Pi Foundation as an example after what they did with the Zero, which was sold for years in extremely low quantities at cost, or bundled with unnecessary stuff, just so that word of mouth of that price would prevent people from purchasing boards from competitors.


They are upfront they are selling hardware to developers, pretty much.

The complete opposite of Librem, who do the same thing but charges $2000 for a laptop that barely boots without hacking libreboot every week and then proceed to use that money in marketing for their linux mobile phone which will be in the same sorry state and sold for the same high price and empty promises.


I happen to agree. I am still waiting for my phone. They do have defense with Covid impact, but, were it any other company, I doubt I would be as patient or forgiving. They have a lot of goodwill. They should do what they can not to squander it.

Adjusting pricing may be better for them especially if demand is that high.


I see this as a really good sign. It implies marketing is not yet running the show... into the ground.


it seems like they would benefit from a purchasing experience that's a bit less like the traditional e-commerce checkout. i think this is one of the things kickstarter really excels at - allowing companies to sell products that aren't really ready for normal consumer purchasing without it "tainting their brand", because it sets expectations correctly.

If pine doesn't want price to be a barrier to purchasing their products (which is an admirable position), and they don't have the resources to serve all the orders they're getting, they should throw up some other barriers in the purchasing process to handle the demand. instead of selling direct, do bulk buys through linux user groups or something like that.


But how elastic is that demand? Would they have the same amount if the price was higher?


They could easily charge $250 for the Pinebook Pro without losing many sales IMO.


I just wanna say I had a great experience with the customer support after I ordered my Pinebook Pro. They were super helpful and polite!


From this announcement it seems PHP was not a language at first but rather a set of higher level tools.

From what I read on Wikipedia, this version did have language features already. Can somebody in the know explain why they are not mentioned in the announcement?


I use the Music-Map for my "music journey". Every other day, I start from an artist I already like and travel through the names until I stumble into an area I have not been to before:

https://www.music-map.com


Will check out music map, ty.

HypeMachine tracks the music being written about across thousands of blogs and still works for me as a great discovery / serendipity engine.

https://hypem.com/

Tracks link to artists on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Spotify, the write-up that got them picked up by HypeM, and any work from the artist previously covered.

I usually listen by genre and pick those per the kind of work I’m doing. There are many genres. 98% of what I hear is new to me. I favorite and skip tracks and open especially tasty ones in new tabs for deeper-dives.

It’s always a pleasure to go back to my feed of favorites every few weeks. I revisit tracks i took time to explicitly like and have long uninterrupted sets to enjoy. This is usually when I do deeper dives and buy stuff on SoundCloud and Bandcamp.


This is really great. Every now and again I'm fortunate enough to stumble onto a new / unknown artist to me. Weirdly, Grooveshark was really good for this (as it gave me some of my very top favorites through a Grooveshark Premium thing -- Quiet Company and Justin Townes Earle) but I've found generally limited utility in going from those new bands into either Google or Spotify's "More Like This" functions.

Looking at the map for Quiet Company yields a list of names that are mostly foreign to me that I'll be plowing through as I work.


I miss Grooveshark, it's radio feature brought me so much amazing music.

Surprisingly, Youtube Music has pretty decent music discovery in the form of it's radio feature, sort of like Grooveshark.

I wish they would combine Google Music's functionality and organization with Youtube Music's discover-ability and expanded library.


That's very cool, I've been thinking about making a similar thing to discover new music but for a few bands I checked this does both provide bands I know to be similar as well as bands that I don't know.

This seems to be powered by http://www.gnoosic.com/, is this the only source of data?


I'm guessing that The Mars Volta may be one of your pet loves. I worked this out via ... ESP

;)


Indeed! But that wasn't what I tried. Just tried that one though and a few limitations pop up. Omar's solo projects turn up a large distance away from the band, lesser known bands that I consider to be very close in sound don't show up close to it. And there are multiple entries for Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, with and without the dash.

I'm starting to feel that depending on users to provide explicit lists misses a lot of interesting data, unfortunately.


That is fantastic. Will use, will recommend!

Putting in a few unpopular artists that I like came up with a lot of related bands that I already know and like, plus double that number that I now need to add to my ever-growing music to-do list.


Interesting, that you say longer for travel.

To what extend is travel restricted at the moment? What happens when someone from - say - Germany flies to the UK?

As far as I can see, flights can still be booked.


What happens when someone from - say - Germany flies to the UK?

In that case I think it's still allowed, but there are a lot of entry bans and visa restrictions in place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_restrictions_related_to...) that probably won't be lifted for a long time.


The EU allows flights from the EU, EEA and the UK, but no others, so Germany-UK happens to be allowed but there are no flights from any non-European country to Germany.


Entry for non-residents isn't possible, but flights still are as far as I know. Of course very extremely reduced, but it appears you can still book tickets for some flights. (Not counting one-off government recovery flights getting tourists back home, which probably make the majority of "passenger" air travel entering the EU right now)


    If the message is altered then the most pain
    anyone will have is connecting somewhere else
    for the first time
If the page is altered so it loads 3rd party tracking code, then the pain is to be tracked.

If the page is altered so it opens a "Please enter your ebay login" phishing site in the background, a user might switch tabs, think "Oh, I logged out of ebay somehow" and enter their password into the attackers site. Exposing them to the pain of ecommerce fraud.

If the page is altered to use a 0-day exploit, the pain is to have a zombie machine afterwards.

Etc etc ...


If you can inject such content (as in an arp poisoning or other man in the middle scenario) why wouldn’t you go after the dns requests?


HTTPS will protect you against hijacked DNS requests as well.


Not by itself, if you have special HTTP headers it will. But some of those are deprecated (HPKP; for example)[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning#Browse...


If you hijack the DNS request and respond with the IP of a different server, that server will not have a valid certificate for the domain in question. Why are any extra features required?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: