nealrs

If you'd like to do something similar, but for your blog (or any website really) -- I wrote an app that produces segmented videos in both Instagram Story / square aspect ratios. It's called StoryScroll => https://neal.rs/app

Here's a demo video => https://youtu.be/u1k1JZtDzuU

Tangentially related => I used ffmpeg + puppeteer to build StoryScroll https://neal.rs/app, which turns blog posts into scrolling videos for social media.

I also used to build a desktop app that my team uses to download Alexa Flash Briefing metrics (because there's no API for that)

Puppeteer's full-screen screenshots & DOM manipulation abilities are clutch!!

Nothing other than anecdata. My audience has reacted positively to StoryScrolls. I've made a some app sales. People have asked me to share the app with them.

IMO, it's a lot easier to like & follow a video that plays without interaction than to like something you have to clickthrough to learn more about.

I built this because i wanted to make my career advice blog https://nealshyam.com/advice more engaging on social and realized, why even both with clicks?

You can't post links on Instagram unless you're verified or have 10,000 followers. And even then, every link is a roadblock.

Frankly, long form content is at disadvantage on social media, because these platforms prioritize video and advertisements. So, I decided to turn my blog posts into videos. No clicks, no distracting sound, no friction. Just a clean, lean-back, and engaging experience.

It has a few limitations - infinite scroll is hard. It might not work well on a super JS heavy site like CNN. But for static site or square space / word press blog, you should be fine.

And yes, I know the icon is dumb. I'll change it :)

I believe we've known about plastic bags at the bottom of the Mariana Trench since [1998](http://www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/catalog/dsdebris/metadataDisp...)

Ignoring the actual shape/design - they went from 11 colors to 4 (+1 if you consider the text itself). This isn't much of an improvement because printing any swag/tshirts will require a full 4up press (or four spots, depending on how they choose inks) - which is still quite expensive.

The old ChallengePost logo used 4+ colors, which meant every shirt we printed came at a $2-5 premium over a single color.

When we rebranded to Devpost, we came up with a 2 color design (so we could do spot colors), which was an improvement - but I still wish we had gotten down to 1 color.

SpokenLayer | Software Engineers | Full Time | New York City | ONSITE | US $120k-$150k | https://angel.co/spokenlayer/jobs

SpokenLayer is hiring full-time software engineers in New York City (front-end, full-stack, back-end, dev-ops).

At SpokenLayer, we turn content from online & news publishers into streaming audio on Alexa / Google Home / iTunes using real human voices. We've acheived product market fit and are ready to build processes & products that help our team & business scale.

Our stack is primarily Node & Python, Angular, PostgreSQL, with a lot of AWS infrastructure managed with Terraform. We automate repetetive processes, build tools to shorten customer onboarding time, and help our partners reach bigger audiences.

We're looking for creative engineers who know what they are doing, who want to solve tough problems & build new experiences, and who can prove it.

It's a neat gig. We smile a lot because we actually like what we do. We pay market & have great benefits. We have real clients. We act like adults. We build products that people rely on & pay for. We review our code. We improve and learn from our mistakes.

SpokenLayer | New York, NY | Software Engineer | Full-time, permanent | https://angel.co/spokenlayer/jobs/445274-senior-back-end-dev...

SpokenLayer works with premier content partners like The Economist, Wired, TechCrunch, and IGN to bring their brands to give them a voice - literally. We ingest written content, add sponsorship messages, turn it all into audio (voiced by real humans) and distribute it via iTunes, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and on the web. We're the largest supplier of voiced content to smart speaker platforms and our clients dig it!

We're looking for engineers that will help us: build better smart speaker skills / work on dashboards & customer onboarding / metrics & reporting / tools to manage our distributed 'cloud studio' of voice artists.

Our core services are currently written in Node.js and Python. Most apps run on AWS. Among the AWS tools and services we use: CloudFront, DynamoDB, ECS, Lambda, RDS, Redshift, SNS, SQS, CloudWatch, and S3.

We'd prefer candidates based in NYC because you'll be working closely with our sales and operations teams (although we may be open to other options for the right candidate).

Oh wow. I feel like I just asked the reverse of this question 3 min after you posted this.

I was a mechE at Caterpillar for 4 years before I decided that my position was a local max in the organization. So I studied, took the GMAT, and applied to b-school. Ended up at NYU and did lots of internships in branding / publishing / marketing and eventually found a route into tech marketing via account management at an ad-tech company that needed someone with solid excel skills & was willing to get on the phone.

Good marketers are eager to talk to people and figure out what their product can/should be doing for others. Then they feed that back to Product. I think Product/Marketing are two sides of the same product development coin.

One way to position yourself as a marketing candidate is as an excellent SME on tech -- you get tech better than your colleagues, so you become invaluable to the team.

Hey yall - I built an Alexa Skill that says your wifi network ssid & password when you invoke it "Alexa, open Home WiFi" - It uses account linking & Login with Amazon, so no need to create new accounts / no email stored in a db somewhere (just your ssid, wifi pass, and a _skill-specific_ (not amazon-specific) user identifier). Love to get your feedback!

Maybe it's a change in functionality? (new tab vs. new window) or perhaps it affects people's behavior (oh, this is another page on this site - so i won't be leaving / going somewhere else with potentially harmful info)

i don't have a concrete use case yet - but it seems like in a world rife with phishing / bad news / SEO blackhats - knowing if a link is external / internal could be useful.

It's been about 10 years since I left Caterpillar --- but I don't think you can weld (reliably) on PM / sintered parts. This was one of the concerns the crotchety old manufacturing engineers brought up when I proposed replacing some expensive machined bosses with a much cheaper PM part.

Then again, those guys really loved to say stuff like "no, that's not how it's done." - so maybe they're wrong / tech has improved significantly.

Hey yall - I know there are several HN Alexa skills out there -- but this is one of the first which fits seamlessly into your Flash Briefing + includes a separate PH feed. Hosted on a free heroku gear for now & code is here: https://github.com/nealrs/hn_ph_alexa

Love to get feedback on this and my other Alexa Skills: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3... Thanks!

This skill has individual feeds for NYC's Subway system, Busses, Long Island & Metro North Railroads, Bridges and Tunnels. Turn on the feeds you need and ask Alexa for your briefing. The skill reports a concise list of transit options which are running smoothly, those being worked on, and those which are delayed.

Here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/tyXaR12SZE8 Here's the code: https://github.com/nealrs/mtafeed

Right now, this is running on a free Heroku gear, but I'd love to get your feedback on it before I refactor it (and add some much needed caching) . Thanks!

Hey HN, I made this to scratch an itch & experiment with Alexa as a distribution platform. Basically, it's a Flask app that creates audio Flash Briefings for Alexa by doing 2 things:

1. Allowing you to call in and record audio clips, saving them to s3 using date-based filename. (you can email them in too.)

2. Generating a dynamic Alexa Flash Briefing JSON feed based on the current date.

[Live demo of the feed](https://wakeyio-alexa.herokuapp.com/)

[Add this skill to your Alexa Flash Briefing and try it live!](https://www.amazon.com/Neal-Shyam-Wakey/dp/B072LFK83G/ref=sr...)

If you're a frequent content creator/podcaster like Gary V or Justin Kan - this could be a neat way to get into people's daily routines.

Pretty pretty neat. I built [something pretty similar](https://devpost.com/software/cryptopostal) to give my address to family & friends during the holidays. Includes a node generator to make your own. Enjoy :)

[video demo](https://youtu.be/zevMEiR2CZY)

In NYC, most property ownership is through coops or condos. and in both, you'll pay a monthly maintenance fee - which includes things like common charges, landscaping for the complex/building, building mortgage, coop mgmt, real estate taxes, etc.

I pay ~$900/month in fees for my 1 bedroom (charged based on the 113 shares i own) - and then I pay another 20-30 for electricity, which is billed on the same ticket. Then, come tax time, I get to deduct around ~35% of those maintenance fees as real estate tax.

it varies from building to building and borough to borough.

I hacked on something like this a few months ago as a joke: https://github.com/nealrs/readsure

I did a little video about this last week: http://wakey.io/47 and tl:dr; All this does it punish the poor for using cash.

It's not so much that demonetization is bad - it's that it's hard to do with no notice. in a country this big. all at once. with so little time to phase out old bills. All the proposed benefits: more ecommerce, reduced black market transactions, better tax accountability could have been accomplished without going to such extremes. I mean, India isn't even using polymer bills yet -- so there will be at least one more big demonetization in the next 10 years.

Big ups to my pops for driving me to the farm after I asked too many questions about how we got it. Also, Snapchat - for keeping all my snaps in Memories so I could use them a month later as b roll. Really makes me wish I had Spectacles right now.

A little more about the Zamindari system: it wasn't like feudalism where you were expected to raise armies. It was more practical & revenue based. As long as you paid / collected taxes, The Mughals didn't care what religion you were. And the British didn't really care what you did either. And it wasn't sharecropping either.

Oddly, I didn't come across much related to the caste system when I asked & searched around. That's weird right? Can someone with more knowledge help me out?

Yeah, spouse plans are great, _if_ they are significantly better/cheaper. I'm a single dude who doesn't have a ton of health problems, but I see middle age on the horizon and I know I'm going to start going to the doctor more.

FSA is a good option for for reducing total costs -- if you're ok preallocating / can predict your health care costs for a year. Which I don't think most people can.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for someone to improve transparency here w/r/t job hunting. I'm not sure I would have changed my decision about where I was going to work -- but it would have been nice to know what my options were.

The article totally skips over the fact that brutalism comes from French - Béton brut means concrete.

There is nothing 'brutal' or 'brutalizing' about brutalist architecture. I know I'm being a bit pedantic, but words matter. Right?

OK, it really doesn't matter what tech you're using. You should be asking for affirmative consent if you're storing data that can affect privacy. Of course, _everything_ affects privacy these days, so even the exemptions for shopping cart data are kind of silly.

Cookies is a pretty household term - but distinct from local storage, so I wonder if sites are using that as a loophole.

gotta love a Snowcrash reference!!

Devpost | Full Time, Onsite | New York City (Chelsea)

Hiring: Mid-level Web Developer

Devpost helps developers get jobs & powers tons of hackathons. Learn more about your engineering team at http://devpost.com/teams/devpost

Apply at: https://www.jsco.re/9rjz

Qualificationwise, for the past several years, you've been:

- Shipping web applications to production

- Using Test-Driven-Development to guide your software design and catch bugs and regressions

- Treating software engineering as a craft and exploring it outside of your day job

We'd also like to see:

- Experience developing, releasing, and maintaining web applications

- Comfort with a server-side MVC framework (e.g. Ruby on Rails, Django, etc.)

- Ability to write elegant, readable code

- Attention to software development fundamentals

- Track record of collaboration and leadership in agile software methodologies

because it's a demo (and also a joke!) :)

thanks! i'll see what i can do - file issues if you've got more ideas/suggestions!

haha - hadn't seen that one, but it's totally what I was going for!

I'll refactor if people are seriously interested in this :)

i _was_ thinking about taking a browser fingerprint and using that to prevent people from reloading the article / trying a second time. So basically, either you read /grok it or you just don't get to share it -- but that felt like a little much.