Hacker News Reader

benwerdon What is the most useful project you have worked on?

I made an open source social networking platform that was used by non-profits like Oxfam and Greenpeace to train aid workers; the Canadian government as an intranet; the Spanish anti-austerity movement as an organizing platform; universities like Stanford and Harvard to teach; and Fortune 500 companies as a social intranet.

I had no idea what I was doing at the start. I'm very, very lucky that it worked out the way it did.

benwerdon Share Openly

Totally fair! This is an experiment - we'll see what comes out in the wash. The biggest impact I'm hoping for is to encourage more sites to remove their "share to Twitter" buttons.

benwerdon Share Openly

I, uh, will soon!

In all seriousness, I think it's true that those buttons mostly are useful as reminders that you can post / share elsewhere. Which is another reason why moving on from the "share to Twitter" / "share to Facebook" paradigm from 2009 is probably a good idea. There's a whole open social web out there that people need to be encouraged to explore.

benwerdon .well-known/avatar

Honestly, I like it. I'll happily build this into Known.

benwerdon Is This 'Magic' Roundabout Made of 5 Mini-Roundabouts?

I've driven this. It's really not as bad as it seems, although that's a high bar, and I was screaming the entire time.

benwerdon Multigenerational Living Often Makes Sense. That Doesn't Make It Easy

This. My father has been living with me, my partner, and my son since last year, following my mother's death. It's a similar situation to the one described here, where he helped with the downpayment and we pay the mortgage, taxes, and bills.

And, sure, there was some friction and growing pains as we all (re-)learned to live with each other. But it's been fine and good, and it lets me support him in a way I couldn't otherwise. It's definitely a different dynamic to if we lived in separate places, but it's not a bad dynamic at all.

benwerdon Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

I was honestly ready for this to be one sad train icon chugging its way across the United States. I'm really pleased to see it's more than that.

But not much more, and it makes me so sad that we undervalue real public transportation here. I wish we could do better.

Still! This is something! And this website is cool!

benwerdon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2023)

ProPublica | Senior Product Engineer | Remote or NYC (US only) | Full-time

ProPublica is a Pulitzer prize-winning non-profit investigative newsroom that reports of abuses of trust in the public interest. You know it from stories like Clarence Thomas's relationship to billionaire funders, or Peter Thiel's investments through his Roth IRA.

The product team supports the platform for this journalism: the website, data layer, and infrastructure. ProPublica is looking for a senior developer - ideally with Node, Python, and/or PHP skills - to join this team.

Learn more and apply: https://boards.greenhouse.io/propublica/jobs/4272524006

benwerdon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2023)

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Remote: Yes (only, but willingness to travel to the office from time to time)

Willing to relocate: No

Resumé: https://werd.io/cv.pdf

Email: ben@benwerd.com

I'm a serial CTO and startup founder with an engineering background and a focus on the intersection between tech and media. I founded one of the first open source social networking platforms, was a VC at Matter Ventures, and was the first CTO at The 19th.

Looking for engineering management, CTO, or equivalent positions. I'm also open to contracts if you need nearer-term help.

benwerdon Unions work

That's why these are two forces: the interests of the business, and the interests of the workers. The idea is that they negotiate and compromise, and a good balance is found.

benwerdon Unions work

To clarify, are you saying that fighting systemic discrimination is a bad thing?

From my perspective (as, for what it's worth, a cis white man), ensuring all my colleagues have equity is a pretty strong win. I want my company to have the best working conditions possible. That means ensuring that the most talented people feel welcome there, regardless of their demographics. Which, in turn, means removing systemic ways that people from some demographics may not feel welcome or able to take those jobs. Where's the downside?

benwerdon Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

Here are some I've read recently that I can highly recommend:

Fiction:

- How High We Go in the Dark, a deeply moving science fiction story about loss - https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-high-we-go-in-the-dark-sequ...

- Severance (no relation to the TV show), which works as a pretty good double bill to the above - https://bookshop.org/p/books/severance-ling-ma/9880874

- Ripe, about the artifice of Silicon Valley and its human cost - https://bookshop.org/p/books/ripe-sarah-rose-etter/18992345

Non-fiction:

- The Jakarta Method, on US foreign policy (really should be required reading for every US citizen) - https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-jakarta-method-washington-s...

- Poverty, by America, which is in some ways a cathartic read about the systemic ways poverty is incentivized (by the author of the deservedly award-winning Evicted) - https://bookshop.org/p/books/poverty-by-america-matthew-desm...

- README.txt: Chelsea Manning's memoir, which is riveting - not just about her story, but also in the little details about the information work she did while she was deployed - https://bookshop.org/p/books/readme-txt-a-memoir-chelsea-man...

benwerdon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2023)

ProPublica | Principal DevOps Engineer | Remote US | Full Time | $130-155K

ProPublica, the nation’s largest nonprofit investigative news organization, is seeking an experienced, versatile and pragmatic engineer to lead our cloud infrastructure efforts. This person will serve a vital role in helping ProPublica achieve its mission — to publish journalism with real-world impact — by ensuring our tools and systems are effective, efficient, simple and secure.

We are looking for someone who enjoys operating at multiple levels, setting long-term strategic guidance as well as implementing hands-on technical solutions, all in close collaboration with colleagues. This includes helping evaluate new technologies, selecting and managing vendors, budget planning, as well as coaching your peers and delivering high-quality code.

Stack: AWS infra; Ruby, PHP, Node, Python depending on site / subsite

https://boards.greenhouse.io/propublica/jobs/4252949006

benwerdon Show HN: Browser extension replacing the X with the original Twitter logo

Is there one to replace its CEO?

benwerdon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://werd.io

I've been a founder (2x), CTO / tech lead, engineer, product lead, VC, film reviewer, and writer. My site is about all of those things. Mostly I write about tech, startups, ethics, and journalism, interspersed with links I find interesting.

I also post a live view of my RSS subscriptions over at https://sources.werd.io/ - I'm excited to add some more from this thread. Thanks for starting it!

benwerdon Meta Is Trying, and Failing, to Crush Unions in Kenya

I'm glad this post is showing up here. We need to take care of our moderators and community managers - wherever they might be in the world. It's a hard job, both practically and emotionally, and we tend to undervalue workers in (1) non-technical positions (2) in the global south. Meta needs to concede and workers inside Meta need to push for it to do the right thing.

benwerdon Ask HN: What other news feeds do you read besides Hacker News?

I start every day with RSS subscriptions using NewsBlur (https://newsblur.com) and Reeder (https://reederapp.com).

I've also set up a page so other people can see my subscriptions / what I'm reading: https://sources.werd.io

benwerdon Nostr – Decentralized social network

For what it's worth, Nos is a pretty great iOS app for this: https://www.nostrapps.com/apps/nos-social

benwerdon Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

No shade to Edinburgh! I miss it every day. But I'll tell you this: there was no startup ecosystem there worth talking about in 2003, and a lot of people who would side-eye you and tell you to get a real job.

benwerdon Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

I use Substack for the newsletter associated with my blog. It's pretty good! But it's as much a blogging platform as a newsletter engine, and you should consider what your exit strategy might look like if it ever shuts down. At a minimum, I'd configure a custom domain to use with it.

benwerdon Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

A blog is a long-term endeavor. You want to be able to run it long after any particular platform has declined. Ideally, it should be your portfolio that follows you throughout your career. That means you should minimize dependencies.

Also: a domain means links add value to your online identity, not the platform you happened to choose.

benwerdon Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

I've been blogging since 1998 and can trace every major step forward in my career to my blog.

In 2003 I started writing about social networking and education - the replies to that blog post helped me kickstart my first startup.

In 2009 my blog posts about technology ethics led to me giving a talk at Harvard, which led to my becoming the first employee at a media tech startup.

That in turn led to me learning more about media tech accelerators. I applied to one with a new startup idea, and got in, in part because my blogging on the open web was picked up by the New York Times as part of a story.

Blogging for that startup helped us find customers and a like-minded community.

When that startup was acquired, blogging both externally and internally at the acquirer helped me make friends and share ideas that wouldn't have reached the right people otherwise.

And so on. Sharing ideas - not just tips, but thoughts about the why and who behind technology, as well as being vulnerable in public - has let me cut through from being a nobody in Edinburgh to someone with a pretty great technology career in SF.

And even if none of that had happened, writing is a wonderful way to structure your thoughts, consider what really matters, and reflect.

I recommend it. Start a blog - on your own domain, on webspace that you control.

benwerdon Ask HN: Firing an employee under a month before vest?

No. Why does this one employee get to vest early and the others don't? It's a legal minefield and sets up the wrong precedent.

benwerdon Tell HN: I interviewed my dad before he died

I'm very sorry for your loss.

I did this with my mother and have hours of iPhone video that I'm very glad for now; she died last year and I'll be able to show my future children who their grandmother was.

A few things for people who might want to try this in the future:

1. Audio matters a lot. My biggest regret is using the built in iPhone mic. I wish I'd thought more about sound.

2. Have a plan for sharing it with the rest of the family. I did not and I still don't, really.

3. Be clear with them on who can see this video in the future. That might change what they say or how they say it.

4. My mother had also recorded my great grandfather about his escape from the white army and travel to the US, but unfortunately the tape was not adequately preserved. Make sure the data is available for generations if needed.

benwerdon PiBox: a tiny personal server for self-hosting

"Finally, a NAS that lets you use a standard operating system that you're used to, like Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS." So this isn't really for non-technical users. But still very cool!

benwerdon Show HN: Emery – Personal productivity workspace

I love it. It's simple and easy. Yes, I'd prefer to have a desktop app, but whatever - I can figure that out myself. Just having the day view + tasks in one screen really helps me.

My one niggle: it'd be useful to have a keystroke I can use to the task I'm typing in a collection. But it's tiny and I can definitely do without for now.

benwerdon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2022)

The 19th | Remote (USA) | Full-Time | https://19thnews.org/

The 19th is a non-profit newsroom that reports on gender, politics, and policy. We make the content created by our diverse newsroom available with a Creative Commons license, and have been republished by The Guardian, USA Today, Teen Vogue, and many more. Our mission overall is to make the news more representative.

I'm looking for a web applications engineer to join our team in order to (1) help maintain the web platform that supports our journalists (2) realize our open source ambitions. My background is in open source startups and as CTO, that's a key part of my strategy here.

The benefits are incredible; the team is empathetic and very inclusive; the work is meaningful. Come join me (and let me know if you have any questions).

Position / application: https://19thnews.org/19th-news-web-applications-engineer-job...

My personal blog post with more info: https://werd.io/2022/building-an-inclusive-independent-open-...

benwerdon Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

The common theme was revealing more about how I thought about tech and my work in general: not so much technical solutions but my mindset and how I thought about the future. The more detailed I was with my opinions, the more people were able to resonate with them.

benwerdon Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

Completely. Every single progression in my job over 24 years (I started blogging in 1998) has come through my blog. Some of those were huge.

Self-hosted is the way to go. Start small; post on a regular schedule; comment on other peoples' blogs.