Hacker News Reader

neviron Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer

Oh, hell, totally didn't think of that. Ugh

neviron Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer

My navel-gazing take (as a very early Convoy person):

It is really hard to get the kind of exponential efficiency gains in this space that a 'blitzscale'-focused startup needs in order to really succeed.

Trucking is an industry that relies heavily on relationships (trucker <-> broker, broker <-> shipper, broker <-> facility, etc), and you're not going to change that (required for true automation) without already being at an absurdly large scale.

Convoy spent too much effort on chasing things that had the potential to give the company those exponential gains without addressing the high-touch nature of the industry (but were just not a good fit, and ultimately fell flat).

And Convoy—conversely—had very little incentive to spend most of its effort on iterative improvements to the core brokerage (which would have probably led to profitability, but not the kind of returns that VCs ultimately want)

neviron Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer

C̶O̶B̶R̶A̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶d̶a̶t̶o̶r̶y̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶l̶a̶i̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶a̶y̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶i̶t̶

…if the company still exists (see comments above and below)

neviron Goodbye integers, hello UUIDv7

More or less identical to integer ids - they're stored and referenced as a 16-byte integer.

Unless you're manually storing them as strings... (Not ideal, but most dbs are pretty good at dealing with that too)

neviron Linear code is more readable

It really all boils down to cognitive load:

Can the average dev keep all of the variable states & side effects of the function in your head as they read through it? Great! Linear may be a good fit.

Or does one need to jump up and down in the function to /really/ understand it? Probably time to consider abstracting it.

neviron Skip the API, ship your database

Good luck migrating every single client in the real world (unless you are willing to disable old clients & force an upgrade if they get too old)

neviron Skip the API, ship your database

With an API, you can often create facades and other patterns to avoid having to migrate the underlying data

neviron Credit card debt collection

But those thousands of dollars are effectively subsidized by every one making a credit card purchase (e.g. merchant fees) - and not everyone being able/savvy enough to utilize them well

Consider how much cheaper things might be across the board with lower fees

neviron Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

To us in the industry this is pretty obvious—but it's surprising to folks outside of tech.

neviron Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

Tree cover has a pretty big impact on people's lives, especially in hot climates.

neviron I do not use a debugger (2016)

I think the real source of friction is from setting a project up to be debuggable ...and keeping that configuration current.

It's a lot easier for single binary projects (like games) than multi- multi- target projects (web frontend, backend, etc) - plus debugging tools are less mature in those worlds.

If debuggers mostly Just Worked in that kind of environment, people would use them far more often.

And the culture is to not invest in that config

neviron Fake reviews are illegal and subject to big fines under new FTC rules

Can you actually do that?

neviron Cities: Skylines II [video]

As poorly received as the SimCity remake was—it has really left a lasting mark on the look and feel of city builders (it's nice to see that continue!)

neviron World Capitals Voronoi (2014)

So pleasing

neviron Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

Pretty confident this is human-generated. Its definitely the author's usual writing style

neviron Most of my skills are now worth nothing, but 10% are worth 1000x

I do think that this is going to make it a LOT more difficult for people to build up the kind of experience that folks like you have.

The barrier to entry to the role just got a lot lower, but the barrier to gaining enough experience to become a specialist just dramatically jumped up

neviron Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails

The main cost is maintaining high test coverage so that you can be confident in your automation

neviron There's something off about LED bulbs

Home Depot has an exclusively agreement with em

neviron Plunge in regional bank stocks triggers spate of trading halts

...and if they demonstrate less risky behavior, their stock should (hopefully) become valuable again.

neviron Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

Turns out Electron is SUPER SECURE

neviron Wi Flag (2002)

AC was such a fantastic game and community - props to all you at Turbine that worked on it. So many great memories for me!

neviron Bard and new AI features in Search

Google already as its Knowledge Graph - which is a pretty huge set of (semi) structured data about a bunch of things out there:

(totally speculative) If Bard were to form queries against knowledge graph, and then summarize the results, it could be very up to date for a good amount of information

neviron Amazon removes “contact us” support, disables support for wrong grocery orders

Really wish that frugality wasn't used in so many perverted and hypocritical ways (internally, mainly)

neviron Choosing a Postgres primary key

Absolutely (once your business reaches a certain scale).

It can give competitors the ability to estimate the size/success/etc of various aspects of your business.

This was a major motivation for a certain online retailer to generate non-sequential IDs.

Some other interesting examples in an old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7278198

neviron Choosing a Postgres primary key

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

Preventing competitors from estimating the size of your business (or of your customer's businesses, if generating sequential IDs on their behalf) is one big reason for having unguessable public IDs.

neviron Amazon’s distributed computing manifesto (1998)

> We propose moving towards a three-tier architecture where presentation (client), business logic and data are separated. This has also been called a service-based architecture. The applications (clients) would no longer be able to access the database directly, but only through a well-defined interface that encapsulates the business logic required to perform the function.

It is really interesting to see a recent(ish) trend away from this three tier design and back towards tighter coupling between application layers. Usually due to increased convenience & developer ergonomics.

We've got tools that 'generate' business layers from/for the data layer (Prisma, etc).

We've got tools that push business logic to the client (Meteor, Firebase, etc)

neviron “Please be our voice” - Message from students at Sharif University of Technology

If you weren't aware of what's going on in Iran right now. Here's my TL;DR:

* Iran's "morality police" beat a woman to death for improperly wearing a head scarf.

* This has triggered a major uprising throughout the country - people are sick and tired of being oppressed by the regime there.

* Which has led to widespread protests, with security forces responding with extreme force - mowing down protesters with assault weapons, using ambulances to sneak up on & capture protesters, using young kids as security forces, and a lot more. 100s / probably 1000s dead (hard to confirm). Steadily rising.

* The regime has also cut off most internet access, which has made it extremely challenging for people to get word out

The people of Iran could really use help building awareness of this, and getting some international pressure put on the regime that's in charge.

neviron “Please be our voice” - Message from students at Sharif University of Technology

Here's the relevant Reddit commit on the OP (might be a better link for the post)

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xtwnvj/iran_says...

And for some more detail on what happened - plainclothes security forces (basij) surrounded students/professors at the university, have fired on them (rubber and real bullets?) have many of them trapped.

"Iranian forces shoot at protesting students, lay siege to university" - https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xtyias/iranian_f...

neviron Google is shutting down Stadia

I think it begins to address mistrust of new Google products. Which is worth a lot to Google.

If they consistently take this approach for other cancellations, it could change the the common view from:

"why use this? They're just going to shut it down in a few years anyway"

to:

"oh neat, Google's experimenting with something new. Let me try it out. If it doesn't work out, they'll take care of me."

neviron US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

I think you'd be surprised...