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offskyon Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

Marketing is not my strong suit and is one of my 2023 goals to improve on. I have not noticed the competition in this space to be fierce. Maybe when I become better at marketing I will notice.

I have not found a direct competitor yet because ValidBot monitors more things and different things, that others don’t.

offskyon Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

https://www.validbot.com

A website I made to test other websites for valid configurations. Sort of like chrome lighthouse on steroids with the ability to automatically monitor and alert if some configuration changes.

offskyon Tell HN: Google Cloud lets anyone add you to a project without your permission

I stopped using Google Calendar years ago because it was possible for anyone with my email address to add events to my calendar, and I couldn’t decline or remove them. Not sure if this is still the case.

offskyon Ask HN: How do you recall ideas/eureka you get during walks, showers, etc.?

For the shower I have a slate with a pencil, intended for scuba divers. Works great.

offskyon Ask HN: Laid off employees, did the company ask you to return equipment?

You could ship it by COD? If they don’t pay, it gets returned and you can assume it’s yours.

offskyon Stripe account suffered a card test

What is the best way to implement rate limiting if our site allows payment without a login? By IP?

offskyon Amazon Is Gutting Its Voice-Assistant Alexa

My problem with any voice assistant is that it doesn’t have a UI, so it’s hard to know what it’s capable of. You have to try a command and have it fail. And then you don’t know if maybe you worded your request wrong. Or you can go to the marketing website and try to memorize all the commands it understands which is too difficult. So that’s why we all just use it for timers and weather and nothing else.

offskyon Show HN: Tweek Calendar – A minimal weekly planner and to-do list

Toodledo.com does this. I know because I made Toodledo, although I no longer own it.

offskyon Ask HN: Am I the only one who does not want IoT in their solar panel setup?

I read a story about a solar installer that blew my mind. The customer posted a negative Yelp review about the installer. In retaliation, the installer remotely deactivated the customers internet connected solar panels and held them ransom until the negative review was removed.

If the installer can do that, so can the analytics company and probably any competent hacker. I don’t think security is top of mind for this industry.

So, no internet connected solar panels for me.

offskyon Ask HN: Companies of one, how do you ensure business continuity?

As a company of one for 20 years, I have made lots of websites. My advice is to intentionally design the product to be low maintenance from the start. When considering a new feature, always think about future maintenance costs.

For example, integrating a 3rd party API? How reliable is that API, what happens if it goes down, is there an alternative API to have on backup, etc? I reinvent the wheel sometimes, if its not too hard, just to decrease external dependencies.

Thinking of allowing user generated content such as uploading images, or writing comments/posts? Prepare to spend a good deal of your time moderating that content and managing spam. I go out of my way now to avoid having UGC on my sites, even when it would enhance the product.

Going to use the latest bleeding edge technology? What happens in 3 years when it's obsolete or the next upgrade has breaking changes? I try to use dumb boring old LAMP with vanilla JS whenever possible. I have several 10+ year old websites using this boring tech stack that are still chugging along that I literally haven't looked at in years. Whereas I have an old angular 1.0 website for which I have forgotten the build step because I failed to take notes and I doubt "npm install" would work anymore for its ancient dependencies, so its stuck in dinosaur land unless I want to do a total rewrite. Keep it dumb.

offskyon Charl-e: “Stable Diffusion on your Mac in 1 click”

Can someone please explain how I can run this on my computer but something like GPT3 is too computational intensive to do the same? Isn’t text easier than images?

offskyon A Web UI for Stable Diffusion

I’m waiting for someone to wrap this up into a desktop app that I can install and run on my Mac.

offskyon Flight Simulator 2022: Ultra Realism on RTX 3090 with $100 Graphics Mods [video]

Are there any ultra realism simulators for other professions (aside from soldier)? I’m thinking cargo ship captain, electrician, kindergarten teacher, phlebotomist, etc.

offskyon Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

FreeCAD is getting nearly $500/week from Liberapay. Let’s see if we can get this up to $1000 to support an OS alternative.

https://liberapay.com/FreeCAD

I’m going to contribute.

offskyon Steve Jobs negotiates Apple's deal with Microsoft (1997)

Does nobody remember Apple’s CyberDog web browser from 1996-7? In an alternate universe people are surfing the web on CyberDog 12.0

offskyon Zipcar will charge your credit card for no reason

Based on all the comments here, Im confident this is Zipcar's fault and not the OP. However, I have had some experience being on the other end of this type of billing problem (not at zipcar) so I'll share my experience.

Several times I have received an email from someone saying that my website charged their card incorrectly. In each case the amount charged has been an amount that is impossible based on what I sell (my product is $10, but they are billed for $17.23). I attempt to lookup the transaction in my Stripe dashboard using the date, amount, and last 4 digits. Nothing. I have to reply with something similar to what OP got back from support. In every case where I received a followup with the customer, they had misread the credit card statement and it was for a totally different company's charge. I guess there was a company with a similar name. Sometimes customers get quite irate, but they never apologize when they realize it was their fault.

offskyon The biggest threat facing middle-age men is loneliness (2017)

Someone needs to make a "dating style" app that helps people find platonic friendships based on shared interested.

offskyon Paper Airplane Designs (2013)

Author of the website here. Always fun to see my site pop up in my own news feed.

Happy to answer any questions.

offskyon Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?

For your first kid you will be so nervous about doing everything right. Everything will be sanitized and organic and over researched and helicopter parented. Second kid is eating jellybeans off the floor.

offskyon Longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons (2005)

My parents hosted a wedding reception at their house. After the reception, my aunt insisted on digging through all the trash. We let her have her fun. She triumphantly returned an hour later with a dozen pieces of my moms silverware. People are careless.

offskyon Deadbolt locks offer false sense of security (2014)

You can get aftermarket security film applied to windows that makes it very difficult to bust through. This saved my office from a burglary.

offskyon Tell HN: Amazon.com is limiting purchases of Audio CDs to four-per-week

To fix rating spiking could they simply remove reviews if the customer returned the item?

offskyon Ask HN: How do you avoid video game addiction?

What worked for me to quit an addictive game was to educate myself on the dark patterns that games use to make us addicted. Knowing their tricks makes them less powerful (at least for me). I used my research into dark patterns in games to make a website about it. https://www.darkpattern.games/

offskyon Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?

I don’t allow myself to have my phone in my pocket at home. I keep it with my keys. Reduces the urge to glance at it a million times. I can still hear if I get a call or text. It makes me more present with my family. So far it’s working.

offskyon Mozilla HTTP Observatory

For some reason TTL recommendations seem to cause heated debates. In my opinion, it really depends on what sort of website you are making. A Google type website will need different TTLs (among other things) than a personal blog. The point really is to think about it and make a conscious decision instead of just accepting the defaults that your DNS provider uses. I think 1 hour is just fine.

offskyon Mozilla HTTP Observatory

No general purpose testing tool like this can be a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. In the future I plan on adding configuration options so you can disable tests that you don't care about.

If you know what you are doing, but all means feel free to disregard any tests that you don't agree with. The suggestions that Validbot makes are meant to be general purpose "best practices" to help web developers make sure they are paying attention to everything they should be. Sounds like you are and have made some good decisions.

offskyon Mozilla HTTP Observatory

Here is a more comprehensive website testing tool.

https://www.validbot.com

Full disclosure, this is my project.

offskyon Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord

If Discord had one more level of hierarchy, that would make it work like a pretty good forums. Server > Channel > Topic > Messages. Where mods make the server/channel and users can make topic/messages

offskyon Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord

I wish someone would make an app like Discord but with functionality like forums. Hosted forums in an app with topics that persist and can be searched. On discord it’s all one long conversation and anything older than a week is hard enough to find that it’s pretty much gone.

offskyon Show HN: Validbot – Comprehensive website validation tool

OP here to introduce my new tool for web developers. Most devs are hopefully familiar with Lighthouse and maybe some other testing tools to make sure your website is configured correctly and follows best practices. Lighthouse is a great start, but it doesn't test everything (DNS records, for example). There are many different tools that check different things, but there wasn't any single tool that brought them all together into one test suite. This is why I built Validbot.com. Its aim is to run a comprehensive suite of tests against a public website to look for mistakes or areas for improvement.

Currently there are over 100 tests with plans to add many more in the near future. It currently tests the domain registration, DNS records, SSL, lighthouse tests, server response headers, meta tags, email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), Favicons, robots.txt file and more. To check all these things without Validbot you would need to manually run your website through a dozen different testing websites and tools.

Happy to take suggestions or answer questions.