catskull

Hi HN! The other day at work, someone posted a link to a confluence page that linked to the status pages for all our SAAS apps, to which someone replied "what if confluence goes down?". I was thinking about that, and thought it would be easier to have one URL that shows the status of all the services we use in one place, so I built StatusDash! You can build a custom dashboard for your organization in seconds and everything is stored in the URL so saving/sharing it is a breeze!

For the tech, I built this with Vue 3 + Vite and host on Netlify. I had a lot of fun building this!

I tried to get some of the most popular SAAS apps, but if I missed any, feel free to request a new service and I'll do my best to get it out soon! https://github.com/catskull/StatusDash-issues/issues/new?ass...

Interviewed with PolicyFly over a year ago and can't speak highly enough of the team. Ended up not joining the company, but I'd highly recommend others check out this job!

Possibly! The examples are to show how input types are specified in iOS 12.2, not necessarily how you should do them. For the time being it will need to be another attribute in addition to the types that worked on iOS < 12.2.

Took the words out of my mouth. I'd love a contingency, but to set up stripe I'd need some server (or "server less" function), write my own shopping cart, write my own order fulfilment system, write a shipping integration, and even then it wouldn't be as trusted as PayPal. Or, I could pay some company $20 a month to do it for me. Just doesn't make sense. I cannot understand why stripe does not have a competing solution for this.

Wow I think this is the first time I've been mentioned on hacker news! That was a super fun project and I use the header utility very often!

Just my 2 cents: I run a hardware side business that is ramen profitable. I started selling extra pcbs I had because I only needed one and the fab would only sell me 10. In the last 3 years it has gone from that to about 40k/yr in sales and continues to grow despite no marketing or sales efforts on my part. I simply focus on selling a good product in a really niche market.

That said, these 3 years have felt like the trenches. I hand assemble everything. It takes forever. I work full time at a successful SAAS company and it makes me ache when I see how little effort it takes to just rake in money. Everything I sell has a fixed amount of time and effort associated with it. My advice when people pitch me random hardware ideas is that hardware is hard and if it doesn't already exist you need to think long and hard about why.

But the point of my comment is that is _is_ technically possible to build a profitable hardware business without a significant amount of capital. I borrowed $50 from my checking account to order those first boards and components and since then it's been bootstrapped and profitable. I signed up for their mailing list because I'm at the point where I think this could be my full time thing, but I don't know exactly how to get there. I truly feel that 1 year runway would give me the time I need to really see how far I can take this. Additionally the mentorship and community would be absolutely critical as I have none of that now.

Totally open to answer any questions!

Wait so it only works on those 4 websites? I've only heard of Popular Mechanics, but I rarely (if ever) visit their site.

If this was more like Youtube Red, I'd be all over this. I would love to pay to remove all google ads. I get that uBlock exists, but I want to support the sites I use.

Unrelated: the sidenav thing is empty? WTF?

Did you use some kind of UI framework? Is it just bootstrap? This design is awesome. I _love_ the minimal direction we're heading.

One thing not mentioned in the article is the impact horseshoe crab farming has had on the Red Knot. PBS made a really interesting documentary about it, I would highly recommend you check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGMLuEsvHAw

Thanks!

Out of curiosity, what system do you use primarily?

The reason I ask is I suspect you use something very specific that allows you to be very productive.

Also, what kind of work do you generally do?

System76 seems cool, but their hardware is just kind of clunky to me. I would much rather by an old Thinkpad, but even still that doesn't fully solve my OS dilemma.

> Don't you think that it's rather stuff on top of Darwin (e. g. Cocoa and the default apps) and the hardware support that make "things work" on macOS?

You're right. I have never actually used a BSD OS that is no OS X, but I have a suspicion that a lot of the stability in OS X is due to BSD.

> What Linux distributions / desktop environments have you tried so far? Setting up dual-boot on a Macbook is rather good supported IIRC.

A few years ago I spent quite a bit of time playing with Ubuntu. I grew up with Windows, but after 8 came out, I had essentially no desire to ever touch Windows again. People claim Windows 10 is not that bad, but not that bad isn't good enough. Linux Mint was pretty nice as well. Elementary OS seems cool. CrunchBang was nice for a super lightweight system.

> The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

This. I have actually lost sleep since the announcement. I keep going over in my mind alternate hardware, but the fact is that macOS (OS X) is the single best operating system for developers today. I am generalizing "developers". For any embedded development, or HDL stuff, OS X will not be a nice experience. But for web or mobile development (which I anticipate is quite larger than development that could not be done in OS X), it's just better. Things work. If the don't, there is a massive support system in place and worst case scenario you can drive <1hr to an Apple store and let them take care of it. Sure, there are edge cases there as well, but compared to the ultrabook you bought from Costco or any distribution of linux, you have much more support available. I do love my macbook pro (glass trackpad, backlit keyboard, good display), but I absolutely must have macOS. At this point my only hope is that a new distribution of Linux evolves that can seriously compete and works flawlessly on off the shelf hardware (such as the Dell XPS), but we're not there yet. Elementary OS looks promising. Perhaps developers would fork Darwin completely and make a macOS competitor.

I guess I should have seen the warning signs. The biggest was macOS Sierra that offered me no reason to upgrade. Apple seems to be stuck inside of an "innovation" echo chamber. Innovating for the sake of innovating.

Sorry for the wall of text, but if you have any suggestions for me, please share them.

This is something I was pondering the other day: given nano's proliferation, I wonder how many devs use it in a regular basis? My suspicion is that nano is more popular than vim or emacs, just used less. Many devs who do not primarily use a command line editor use nano when they have to. It's like a screwdriver: it's nobody's favorite tool, but it's probably the most popular.

That's a good question to ask. My opinion: nothing, basically, on either side. You could argue that being an official GNU project gives nano a level of legitimacy and carries with it an implied quality level. I wonder if nano would ship by default on basically every *nix distribution without the help of GNU. Last I checked, it was nano, not emacs that comes preinstalled on an Ubuntu image.

I think nano helps fulfill the GNU project's original goal of a flexible OS. I think of emacs and nano as having a similar relationship as wordpad and notepad. That's a bad comparison, but you could say both tools are valid and functional for the purposes they were designed for.

As it stands I think nano is better off hosting development on github or the like. People go to great lengths to install and customize their text editors, so hard core users will seek out the best nano. What sucks is I would be surprised if the next version of OSX includes a non GNU nano, thus fragmenting even further.

This is my 2 cents, and I'm mostly talking through my hat.

So with Crouton, you don't actually dual boot. It's more like a VM, but it uses the same kernel that Chrome OS uses, so it's more like Docker than Virtualbox.

I have a cheap 11" Acer C720 and I probably use it more than my Macbook Pro. I have command line only Ubuntu installed, and the result is a tab I can open to have a full linux shell, much like how you would use a macbook. For all intents and purposes, it's the same OS, but it's not.

A few things I particularly like are battery like (maybe 8 hours?), no fans, matte screen, and macbook like keyboard and trackpad. Also Chrome OS maps the F1/F2 keys to forward/backward keys in Chrome, which I use all the time surprisingly.

All in all, I would highly recommend a Chromebook. For development it's great. If you don't want to use Crouton, a linode server you can SSH into is just as good as a macbook really. Now that they will be able to run all Android apps, it's even more tempting.

That I have no idea on. I couldn't find many details either. I assume it's because CHIP doesn't want this to be a selling point on the project because most likely it won't happen given Allwinner's past total disregard for being GPL compliant.

Supposedly the CHIP computer project has committed Allwinner to open source their SoC. I don't know exactly what that entails since it's an ARM core chip, but I'm tentatively holding my breath for that. I will be extremely surprised if they deliver on that commitment, but if they do it could be really great for the open hardware community.

> This open-source requirement of ours ended up influencing the selection of almost every piece of hardware, including the main CPU, the battery controller, and the Wi-Fi module. For example, we couldn’t use Intel’s x86 microprocessors because they can accept firmware updates that we cannot debug or inspect. Instead we chose an ARM-based Freescale i.MX6 system-on-a-chip, which has no such updatable code embedded. (A system-on-a-chip, or SoC, is similar to a microprocessor except it has more of the supporting hardware, such as memory and peripheral interfaces, needed to make a complete computer.) The i.MX6 does have some code burned into it to coordinate the computer’s boot-up process, but this firmware can’t be changed, and its unencrypted binary code can be read out and analyzed for possible security problems.

I'm confused. They claim the open source requirement prevented them from going with an intel chip, but then they say the reason why was because intel could push firmware updates. Furthermore, the Freescale SoC has firmware built in, but it's not open source.

Is this what we consider open source these days? Sure, a good whitepaper is nice, but it's not open source. Don't get me wrong, this is still nice effort on the open front, but calling this a "laptop with no secrets" seems like a stretch.

Location: Provo, Utah

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rails, Angular, Coffeescript, Haml, C++

Resume: http://goo.gl/w6PXKT

Email: bro@catskull.net

Electrical Engineering freshman. I've been doing Rails development full time for the past year, and am looking to continue doing it part time while I'm going to school. I've participated in launching several rails apps as part of a team. My favorite work is developing and implementing APIs.

Team Treehouse is what I used. It may be a little slow if you have java experience, but it's very thorough. I went from knowing nothing about java/android to building a useful, simple app integrated with an external api within a week. They recently updated the whole course for material design, android studio,and lollipop.