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leftnode

3,922 karma · joined November 20, 2008

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leftnode··on Catalyst – Tailwind CSS Application UI Kit
I paid for it because I love what Adam and team are doing with Tailwind. It's been incredibly beneficial to use as a backend engineer, and the amount of money paid is trivial to the benefits it provides.
leftnode··on FTX thief cashes out millions during Bankman-Fried trial
Is it widely assumed the thief is North Korea?
leftnode··on 37signals Introduces "Once" - Buy software one time
Additionally, I'd wager a good majority of their paying customers had no idea the controversy was happening, or weren't going to change their entire office operating procedures because the owners may have some caustic opinions.
leftnode··on Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu - It's an odd combination of intense physical activity and human chess (setting up attacks in advance while also trying to deflect your opponents attacks, except using chokes or joint breaks). Grapplers are either freak athletes, 120lb stoners, or business professionals. BJJ is one of the most unique sports/martial arts out there, and I encourage everyone to try it at least once.

I started after enrolling my children in it, and then figuring "why the hell not, I should train too."

leftnode··on Mister Rogers had a point – routinely greeting six neighbors maximizes wellbeing
This seems shortsighted. There are dozens of reasons you may want to get to know your neighbors: help each other out, become friends, watch a package, babysit, petsit, and so forth. Sure, nothing may happen from an interaction, but it seems one of the unique aspects of living in an apartment complex is that you can easily know your neighbors.

I live in a large neighborhood of single-family homes and know many of my neighbors, most of which have become good, trusted friends.

leftnode··on Don’t emotionally bootstrap your startup
I agree. From his site it appears he's a "coach" that some executive hires to hold an all hands team building exercise that the rank-and-file completely dread. No thanks.
leftnode··on Defining a new HTTP method: HTTP Search (2021)
That's exactly what we do: submitting a search/filter form through a POST request which creates a record in the database representing the search/filter criteria and then redirects to the same endpoint with the ID of that record. The endpoint looks for the ID in the query, attempts to load the same record, and if found, executes and returns the search results.

It works very well, is completely transparent to the end user, has automatic query logging, and provides a clean URL that can be easily shared.

leftnode··on Ask HN: How do you deploy your side-projects?
Great to hear some people still follow the KISS method. I've done the same for years and this very simple setup can scale to tens of millions of (database intensive) requests per week.
leftnode··on Ask HN: What tech companies/industries will do well in a recession?
Home service businesses (contractors, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, roofers, etc). Even houses owned by banks/investment groups need repairs done. It's a huge industry that desperately needs employees.
leftnode··on Why is selling software so weird?
Not the OP, but also selling B2B software. You can hold a user accountable that they'll actually use the software purchased. The company is spending a lot of money on it, finds value in it, and wants to ensure it's being used and implemented correctly.

B2B software with figures like the OP means you're building a professional relationship with a customer (as opposed to a transactional one), and can push back when they're complaining about something, for example.

> "Your software isn't giving us the numbers you said it would!"

> "It will, if you use it as you were instructed, we're happy to review that with you again, but you have to have the internal SOP that you'll use it in the way it was intended if you want the numbers it can provide."

leftnode··on PHP Pipes in 156 Bytes
Perhaps you could extend the Pipe class and thus the pipe() method returns an object for chainability? That's the only reason I can immediately think of.
leftnode··on Explain the first 10 lines of Twitter's source code to me
"Senior" developers tend to waaaaaay overestimate their abilities, unfortunately.
leftnode··on Ngrok Alternatives
Absolutely amazing project, happy paying customer.
leftnode··on Ngrok Alternatives
As a developer and business owner, I literally can't comprehend this response. I can't imagine idea of having to manage yet another server over running

    ngrok http 8000 -subdomain=my-custom-subdomain
from the root of my application (which is wrapped in a single line shell script). For a business, paying $10/dev/month for ngrok is a rounding error.
leftnode··on East Coast vs. West Coast Butter – What Is the Difference? (2019)
You can generally get good, inexpensive Irish butter at Costco in America easily.
leftnode··on Ask HN: How do you manage your companies knowledge base?
There's a piece of software (that I have no affiliation with) that has a feature like this built in named Guru: https://www.getguru.com
leftnode··on Tell HN: I let my 6-year-old daughter design my website
This is great. Thanks for maintaining this artifact of pre-Web 2.0 days. And who knows, the next hot startup Jubyla may want to buy the domain for millions.
leftnode··on In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
It is, and something an ORM can manage, but I spend a LOT of time in the psql CLI.
leftnode··on In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
That's generally what I end up doing. It's not ideal, but it at least allows me to order the columns how I want.
leftnode··on In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
I love, love, love Postgres! The one feature MySQL has that Postgres doesn't is the ability to add a new column in an arbitrary position in the table. I like my tables to have a common "layout" and I would love to have this feature in Postgres.
leftnode··on Sonic: A fast JSON serializing and deserializing library
I regularly deal with JSON documents several MB in size, but do developers frequently deal with JSON documents several GB in size? If so, where do you encounter something like that? Surely "processing" that much data (for whatever definition of process you have) is orders of magnitude slower than parsing it.

I love the idea of a library trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the CPU, but I'm genuinely curious at the problems it solves in the real world.

leftnode··on HashiCorp – S1
The impact Vagrant has had on my business is nearly immeasurable (and for free, no less). We're a small startup, and I haven't had the time (or motivation) to learn what Docker, Kubernetes, containers, etc are. Seems overly complex.

But, virtual servers I can understand. I've been using Vagrant since 2013 and it ... just works. We've built our own custom box to standardize our development environment as well.

If there is one company and person I'd like to mimic, it's Hashicorp and Mitchell. Work to build an amazing product or products, get it ready for a sale or IPO, and then transition into an IC to continue doing what I love: hacking.

Congratulations on the success!

leftnode··on Launch HN: Jitsu (YC S20) – Open-Source Segment Alternative
Congrats on the launch. Unrelated to the actual software, are any of you actual Jiu-Jitsu grapplers? If not, why'd you go with the name Jitsu?
leftnode··on Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B
Surely Substack uses Amazon SES or another transactional email service to actually send the emails to their user's subscribers, right?
leftnode··on Ship / Show / Ask: A modern branching strategy
It also helps spread knowledge around so more than one person has knowledge of a new feature, bug fix, or sub-system.
leftnode··on Postgres sequences can skip 32 unexpectedly
Another added benefit is that you can build a simple interface to allow end users to adjust their sequences (or our support staff in this instance).

In our system, by default, all objects start at 1000. If a new account is created, and they want to increase a sequence to some value (say they already have 5000 invoices in QuickBooks and they want to start all new invoices at 10000 so they know every invoice #IN10000 and higher was created in our system), we have a simple interface that one of our support staff can go to arbitrarily increase the next value.

leftnode··on Postgres sequences can skip 32 unexpectedly
We have a similar system (multi-tenant database) where each tenant (account) has objects that have unique identifiers for that specific account (customers, locations, jobs, invoices, etc).

Customer #C1010 may have 2 locations #L1899 and #L8443 and many invoices #IN1940 and #IN2399 for example.

When we first built the system, I considered using native Postgres sequences to track these, but decided against them because of how they are affected during a rollback. In our system, each account has a record in a table that controls the next value of the sequence.

We have an event in our ORM to automatically generate the next sequence value as part of the transaction so if the transaction is rolled back, the next sequence value is as well. Sure, it requires locking the sequence record but it's a very small table and generating a sequence is quick. We wrapped everything up in a stored procedure named generate_sequence() which returns the next value of the sequence and increments it. It's scaled to millions of records quite well without issue.

leftnode··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)
ServiceLine | Dallas, TX | ONSITE | Software Engineers | FULL-TIME | https://goserviceline.com

ServiceLine is a company dedicated to building the best software for residential and commercial contractors. With our small team, we've achieved a great deal of success by leveraging modern software engineering practices and standards. Additionally, our small team and commitment to engineering excellence gives us the ability to iterate rapidly, providing an advantage over our competitors.

We're looking to grow our engineering team with a Senior Backend Engineer. The software you'll be working on is built using PHP and the Symfony framework, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis. ServiceLine also makes heavy use of RESTful APIs for communication with our mobile and frontend apps.

You'll be writing software (and tests) for a production environment, so a keen eye for details and precision is required. Experience with building complex software for a non-technical audience is also a highly desirable trait.

Pay: $110,000 USD - $140,000 USD

Apply Here: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2628382253/

leftnode··on The Third Thumb Project
I wonder if this would improve or hinder my Jiu Jitsu.
leftnode··on Calendso: An open source Calendly alternative
Congratulations on launching. My (small) startup is a Calendly user for our sales and support staff. What would cause me to switch from Calendly to your product?

I would never want to self host this. We're a small team, and no one technical wants to manage yet another server, nor do we want the responsibility for when something screws up and a salesperson misses a demo or a support staff member isn't reminded about a training session.

The pricing isn't that competitive with Calendly ($3/user/month savings) which would translate to a savings of $108 annually for us, not enough to justify switching.

I feel pitching this as an open source alternative to Calendly is the wrong angle. The only people who care about open source are developers who are the least likely people to need scheduling software. And people who do need Calendly aren't going to be moved to switch because Calendly works well enough already.

Finally, the copy at the bottom of the page reads:

> For instance, booking a COVID vaccine shouldn't happen on a server in another country that somebody else is in control of.

Are people using Calendly to book COVID vaccines? If I used your product instead, wouldn't I still be booking a vaccine on someone else's server?

I wish any small competitor success against a large incumbent, but I would radically change my approach to compete against Calendly.

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