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anthony_francoon Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound

The point is that you’ll be unable to deeply read even the “very little” that’s worth your time. Because we never practice it.

anthony_francoon Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web

Use this link on mobile. It’s way better: https://i.reddit.com/

anthony_francoon Ask HN: What do you think of the new Reddit?

Access it from here when you're on your phone: https://i.reddit.com/

I really hope they keep that option alive but the way they're pushing the Reddit mobile app, I'm not counting on it.

anthony_francoon Stripe Billing

Did they email the announcement to you? If you already used Stripe subscriptions in the past, you'll be grandfathered in for free. This is the relevant line:

"Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing."

anthony_francoon Ask HN: We aren't getting users to create stories on our content platform – why?

Out of 100 visitors, 90 will passively look. 9 will participate (commenting/discussing). 1 will create (post).

These are very general numbers of course and really depends on the actual service, but it’s a good rule of thumb to follow.

anthony_francoon The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

Hooked it up to my ESP8266 and now my IoT devices are voice activated. Nice!

anthony_francoon Ask HN: How would you validate a B2B startup idea?

Ideally, you need to validate your product on whatever channel you intend to use.

So if you expect to get signups mainly through your website, you need to test that channel as early as possible.

Eventually you'll be getting hundreds (millions?) of signups through your website. So getting just a dozen for your beta list should be easy. If it's not, then you need to either pivot or find a better channel.

But if your website isn't the way you expect to gain users, then try a different channel.

And I don't think Slack is a good example since Campfire and Hipchat were already in use many years earlier.

anthony_francoon EC2s getting harrassed by vulnernability scans from useragent Jorgee

I'd set up fail2ban on those machines to automatically block the requests.

anthony_francoon Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

Their new mobile version is pretty bad.

I use their old mobile site and it's fast to load and easier to use. I hope they don't sunset it...

https://i.reddit.com/

anthony_francoon Is Arduino no longer open-source?

ESP32 development boards are also very impressive. And the prices are dropping every month. Can't wait to see that ecosystem evolve.

anthony_francoon Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

I use my Raspberry Pi to play around with sensors (such as humidity, temperature, RFID, etc) through the GPIO pins. That's the main selling point, I think. It's an educational product more than anything.

anthony_francoon Enabling DNS split authority with OctoDNS

If you're looking to simply keep two DNS providers in sync, you can just set one up as a Secondary DNS. Dyn provides this as a feature and that keeps our DNSMadeEasy and Dyn accounts synchronized without having to think about it.

anthony_francoon Ask HN: How do I persuade my designer that a character is useful

Ask your customers how they'd feel about a character in the logo, they're a better audience to poll.

And if you don't have customers to ask, then that should be your #1 priority instead of worrying about your logo. Github launched and worried about their octocat way, way later.

anthony_francoon Dodging S3 Downtime with Nginx and HAProxy

Right, but I was referring to the comment regarding the S3 bucket replication.

anthony_francoon Dodging S3 Downtime with Nginx and HAProxy

Was this setup useful during the S3 outage yesterday? Wanted to double check before I implement it.

anthony_francoon Ask HN: How to maintain Feature Flags for new feature releases?

I've never used them but I've heard that's what https://launchdarkly.com/ is for.

anthony_francoon Ask HN: Is anyone able to get transactional emails through to MSN and AOL?

Make sure you have your DMARC, SPF, DKIM all correctly setup. Then test some emails with this tool: https://www.mail-tester.com/

Go through the issues one by one and you should be all good.

I've used Mailgun for years with hardly any issues.

anthony_francoon Ask HN: How much Chinese is required to read Tech Documentation?

You're better off delving deeper into learning the actual framework instead of studying a foreign language.

Something similar happened with NGINX a few years ago. Almost all documentation was in Russian. But once it grew in popularity a few people just translated the documentation over to English.

If you had studied Russian just to understand NGINX better, it would've been a huge waste of time, and my guess is that it'll be similar in this situation.

The caveat, of course, is if you want to study Chinese for other personal reasons. In that case, by all means.

anthony_francoon Ask HN: How to invest in already angel/ seed funded company as CTO?

Why are they not disclosing the previous investment? Have they at least told you what their company valuation is?

anthony_francoon Starting Entrepreneurs Anonymous

Probably best to ask those in a forum setting. Such as here: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

anthony_francoon Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?

https://barnacl.es/ is similar but targeted to self-funded founders

anthony_francoon Starting Entrepreneurs Anonymous

What type of questions or surveys are you looking to have answered?

anthony_francoon Ask HN: How do you renew your SSL certificates?

Lets Encrypt is probably the best option. But if you can't use it like me (since I need a wildcard certificate), you should be getting 3-year certificates instead of 1 year ones. At least it'll cut down how often you have to update them.

anthony_francoon Ask HN: What motivates you in life?

It would depend on your learning style. If you're a visual learner I'd get a $15 Udemy course during one of their sales.

Looks at the example projects made, the reviews from the students. If any seem interesting then just dive right in.

anthony_francoon Ask HN: How did you overcome the trough of sorrow for your startup?

For me, having a cofounder really helped.

Having someone there to pick you up when things aren't going as expected was great. Especially when it seems no one else understands/cares what you're doing.

anthony_francoon Ask HN: What are you using for project management?

We use Lighthouse App. It's got just enough features for us and pretty simple.

anthony_francoon Bidirectional Replication is coming to PostgreSQL 9.6

Looking forward to playing around with this. Native master-master replication is the only thing keeping me on MySQL.

anthony_francoon “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

I set it up once like three years ago and it just works.

I switch between either master with just a DNS update that propagates within 5 minutes.

anthony_francoon “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

For our setup we just have master-master replication across two different hosting providers.