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abra_kadabra

46 karma · joined September 7, 2017

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abra_kadabra··on Ask HN: US Health Insurance for Startup Founders?
Take a look at your states health exchange and get the plan that you think is right for you. I got a silver plan thinking I would save some money but one trip to the emergency room meant that I could have easily bought the gold plan.
abra_kadabra··on Ask HN: Would you open source an Enterprise project
I've seen Enterprise projects become open sourced in the past and the biggest problem that they face is that no community builds around them. It is not trivial to get other folks to hack on your project and contribute code or use your code, it takes some marketing (hackernews, reddit, etc) and a lot of patience and answering questions. For most projects I would not bother open sourcing them, because trying to build a community around them can be just as much work as what was spent coding them in the first place, but there are a few gems that I would if I could.
abra_kadabra··on Ask HN: Library recommendations for a Client / Server project (all Java)
First for a bit of background.

How much data will you be pushing across? Things are easier if you can send full objects instead of partial objects.

How much does latency matter? If this has to be as close to real time as possible (ie. stock prices etc), or can this be 1 second updates?

Using Protocol Buffers works well if you need to be very optimized, JSON is really nice for being extremely widely supported but special care needs to be taken for having API versions if you make drastic changes to the API

I think what would be nice would be to know a little bit more about your intended use case, I would say I typically like to build web apps more than native apps because then the server code and client code can be updated as a single unit, instead of having older native clients out in the wild and having to support then until the users decide to update, but some use cases it's better to have a native client.

abra_kadabra··on Ask HN: How did you 'do things that don't scale' for your B2B startup?
At the last startup I worked at one thing we did was we manually input data for our customers. The application only really became useful after a time investment by the users to load up their data library, so we would offer to do it for them.
abra_kadabra··on Ask HN: What are signs of a startup failing?
It might be subtle and is similar to what others have said, but if you find the founders running out of steam, losing passion, for the startup, that can be a sign.
abra_kadabra··on 50% of Millennials would give up their right to vote to get student loans erased
Capping student loans would definitely be a positive first step in the process. A study conducted by the federal reserve bank of NY found that:

"We find apass-through effect on tuition of changes in subsidized loan maximums of about 60cents onthe dollar, and smaller but positive effects for unsubsidized federal loans. The subsidized loaneffect is most pronounced for more expensive degrees, those offered by private institutions, andfor two-year or vocational programs"

http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr733.pdf

abra_kadabra··on 50% of Millennials would give up their right to vote to get student loans erased
I think this really shows 2 things.

1) the amount of debt accumulated by this group for their degrees is much larger than they're comfortable with 2) how much more important personal finance is as compared to government finance at this particular point in time

abra_kadabra··on How to Move 8PB from NYC to SJC?
So I do agree with the rest of the comments that the absolute fastest way is to ship the disks and then copy the data. Now that being said if you can't or would rather not ship anything because of disks getting ruined, then the best thing to do is to find a high bandwidth internet connection and use something like IBM Aspera (https://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/high-speed-file-...)

Aspera is used widely in the Movie industry to move Tb size movies around (~2.5Tb). The key to Aspera is that it assumes that packet order doesn't matter so it will max out your pipes and it doesn't have to immediately report back about what packets were dropped and therefore is pretty efficient at getting the data across quickly.

abra_kadabra··on Ask HN: The core values of the Python “platform”
I really like this list and would add one more that I think if very important.

Enable Fast iterations

Weather it's a fast loop to test and make changes, or the batteries included mindset that means you can use someone else's code, fast iterations are a big win in the Python world.

abra_kadabra··on Ask HN: which tools/services would you recommend to fellow web developers?
It all depends on what the web developer is trying to accomplish. Without knowing that the best advice I could give is make sure you have a quite environment. Everything else aside, being able to focus for long stretches of time is more important than most things.
abra_kadabra··on Ask HN: How can I find 20-25 hour week programming jobs?
I'm earlier in my self employed consulting journey then you are and I'm seeing a similar pattern. When I'm busy I'm extremely busy working lots of hours, but then I'll have some time off and it usually means marketing/networking, haha, it's not easy, but I do like the freedom.
abra_kadabra··on Augmenting Human Potential with Omatum
So I was excited to understand what this tool was all about, but I got lost in the text pretty quickly. At first it seemed like a personal organization tool, then it looked like a team management tool, then I wasn't really sure and bailed. If you were giving me an elevator pitch, what would it be?
abra_kadabra··on Show HN: Manage your cost of app subscriptions in one place
Thanks! I'll definitely have a look at these.
abra_kadabra··on Show HN: Manage your cost of app subscriptions in one place
That makes sense to me. Are you planning on doing any Google advertising or Facebook advertising? I ask because I'm hoping to launch my own SAAS in the next month, and am trying to figure out what works for connecting to the developer community.
abra_kadabra··on Show HN: Manage your cost of app subscriptions in one place
Great idea. Your page has a really nice design, it's easy to tell what your product is and the value proposition.

Also I had a look through your blog, I saw that your marketing checklist included Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Reddit, do you have any plans after those?

abra_kadabra··on Friends Are Genetically Similar (2014)
I'm not sure that you could extrapolate to that wide an audience. One of the largest factors would have to be exposure to that interest, if you aren't exposed to it, then you can't know if you enjoy it (Nurture).

In small groups that are already interested in something, finding genetic similarity would mean that their nature is similar, and that nurture has also had an opportunity to take effect.

So small groups of people interested in something, can't necessarily be extrapolated to a larger group.

abra_kadabra··on [dead]
I'm curious how this list got put onto reactdom, I bet there is an interesting story behind that.

PS. I'm a huge Scala fan, I've used it both professionally and for side projects

abra_kadabra··on Friends Are Genetically Similar (2014)
This is interesting as I've typically made friends along lines of interest. I guess my next question would be are genetically similar people more likely to have similar interests.

edit: corrected grammer

abra_kadabra··on Show HN: Trade your abandoned side projects on Borderline.biz
I think pricing a project could be pretty tough and taking a quick look at your site I didn't see any guides or advice on pricing, it might be worth offering some direction to potential sellers.
abra_kadabra··on The Emotional Journey of Creating a Successful Product Hunt Project
Thanks for sharing this. I've got a few side projects that I need to finish and launch, and this will help me stay motivated to get it done.
abra_kadabra··on Virtualenv's Bin/activate Is Doing It Wrong
My 2 cents.

Instead of having to manually load a virtualenv, why not have that information contained in the project, and running a command would use that virtualenv similar to how npm, sbt, or maven work.

The majority Python projects I've worked on have had a requirements.txt file anyways that was specific to a single project, so I haven't seen a situation where having a bin/activate was beneficial.

abra_kadabra··on Show HN: CheckPhish – Zero Hour Phishing Detection
I could see this being very useful. How did you initially populate your dataset with urls?