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phmagic

221 karma · joined March 21, 2008

reach me at phmagic at gmail
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phmagic··on Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use
Congrats! I tried it and some feedback:

1. Every action seems slower than Figma and Sketch-my main tool

2. Some short cuts didn't seem to to work, like how I can't copy and paste a canvas. It was hard for me to forego muscle memory

3. Is there a way to try it without signing up for an account? Like a sandbox? I tried to delete my account but because I logged in via Google and it requires me to enter a password (I don't know), I can't delete.

phmagic··on Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'
What are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?
phmagic··on Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living
How do your customers find out about your business?
phmagic··on Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
Good news for NVDA.
phmagic··on House passes bill to limit cost of insulin to $35 a month
Naive question: If the insurance providers are the payers, why aren't they incentivized to collectively negotiate down the cost of drugs?
phmagic··on Fast.ai releases new deep learning course, libraries, and book
I took the fast.ai courses and highly recommend them for anyone who really wants to learn ML.

Are there any plans for courses on reinforcement learning?

phmagic··on Show HN: This Word Does Not Exist
perfect for generating passwords
phmagic··on Launch HN: PostHog (YC W20) – open-source product analytics
Thank you! This is much needed!
phmagic··on Never-Googlers: Web users take the ultimate step to guard their data
(disclaimer: I work at a big tech firm, but I've had this opinion before working here)

I'm confused by the lengths people have gone through to "protect" themselves from internet giants while freely giving away their info to credit card companies, traditional retailers, small businesses. Credit card transaction data have been sold for years without most of us knowing about it. Small startups, boutique stores rarely have the security or data governance resources to ensure your data is stored and used properly. Data breaches are common even at large brick-and-mortar retailers.

Given the state of data security outside of big tech, my best option is to trust only big tech.

phmagic··on Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups?
I'd like to second this. The amount of free compute available to serverless infrastructure is insane! Serverless does have a learning curve but it's worth it to learn.

The next best is Heroku's free tier.

phmagic··on Apple App Store Principles and Practices
I wholeheartedly agree as an iOS dev and as an iOS power user.

However I fear regulators don't have this granular view and technical depth.

I'm more concerned about misinformed, blanket regulation more than the API-restrictions.

phmagic··on Ask HN: Have you ever felt trapped?
Yes. A lot of comments here is about taking a leap to a new role/company/lifestyle. It isn't always easy to do this and often when I leaped to greener pastures, I found that the new role didn't dramatically improve my happiness.

The things that work for me are to: find ways to be independently happy and take small steps towards that goal.

Find ways to be independently happy. I know it sounds fluffy in a industry of highly motivated and technical folks but detaching your happiness from a single job/company will make you happier in the long term. Work towards improving yourself (exercise, read, meet people who you don't normally interact with - best way is to travel). Do things that humble you, that you're an absolute beginner at.

Sam Altman has "compound self" on his list of how to be successful. I think that's very true. I often overestimate what I can do in the short term and underestimate what I can do in the long term. So take small steps to get to where you want to go and keep at it. Not only will you reach your destination before you know it, you will realize that the destination is just a by product of your journey.

I don't know if this is what you were looking for in your question, but this has worked for me so I thought I'd share.

phmagic··on AIVA – Music Engine
I love this tech!

However a more painful problem it was solve for me is putting non-copyrighted sound tracks in my videos. I'd pay for royalty-free music generated on-demand.

phmagic··on Light House, maker of AI-powered security cameras, shuts down
Interested to know people's thoughts on how startups can compete in consumer tech vs the giants.
phmagic··on Why I’m Worried About Google
Google is a for-profit enterprise. Currently the company has optimized its products for what users want: reliability, security, ease of use. The (sad) fact is that users tend to undervalue their own privacy and data because a single person's data is not very valuable. They don't see the power of aggregate data.

The title is a little misleading because it's not Google who choosing this balance between privacy and convenience. We, the users, are making this choice. This is what concerns me.

If users choose privacy over convenience, Google would happily oblige. I'm confident of this seeing the way that the "organic" movement has taken hold.

phmagic··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)
Owl Labs | Full stack web engineer | Boston or Remote (USA) | Full time

Owl Labs wants to make meetings more inclusive for remote workers. Our unique 360˚ camera provides an immersive experience for distributed teams all over the world.

If you're interested in building connected hardware and loves scratching your own itch as a remote worker, we're looking for a full stack web developer to join our engineering team.

Some highlights: + First HW product launched 1.5 yrs ago, tripled in revenue in second year ($millions), on path to profitability, industry leading NPS scores + You'll be helping us build new products to improve team communications

Feel free to reach out to me: phu@owllabs.com

Check out the product:

www.owllabs.com

or read the reviews on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Meeting-Owl-Conference-Automatic-Spea...

phmagic··on Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS
I contemplated building my own machine for deep learning. I'm a geek so I do like building hardware. But I couldn't even justify spending $2k on a deep learning machine.

Paperspace has eliminated my desire to build a deep learning computer thanks to their insanely low prices.

Current prices are around $0.78 per hour for a Nvidia Quadro P5000, that's pretty comparable to a 1080 TI.

On top of that you can even run Gradient notebooks (on demand) without even setting up a server. This is the future when bandwidth costs are minimal: thin clients, powerful servers.

At the end of the day, I wanted to spend more time tuning the ML pipeline rather than fussing with drivers, OS dependencies, etc

Sure there's lots of things that Paperspace could do better, but their existing product is already leaps and bounds better than GCloud or AWS. AWS and GCloud wins through big contracts with large businesses and I'm just a little guy.

Disclosure: I do not work for Paperspace and am not paid to endorse them in any way. I love their product.

phmagic··on Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?
Are there API services that you can integrate with to accelerate the path to having all of the below? For example: Auth0 takes care of SSO.

Team Management Deployment Options Support/SLA Security Role-based Access Control Single Sign-On Integrations Reporting Audit Logging Product Assortment Change Management

phmagic··on Prototyping a YC Startup Each Day
Similar to what jimnotgym said, workflow apps are a huge timesavers but trying to get IT to make or host one is a headache.

A big one I saw while consulting for big enterprises was document processing (esp Excel/CSV). The lowest person on totem pole goes through 100 documents replacing or reformatting some value. Python is great for this!

Is there a way to upload documents into Anvil?

phmagic··on Prototyping a YC Startup Each Day
This is absolutely amazing! Looking forward to seeing more case studies, especially around internal enterprise apps because I suspect that trying to convince departments from a big company of an idea might be as hard as convincing the general public (as is the case with b2c founders)
phmagic··on Apple unveils new iPad 9.7“ with Apple Pencil support
I think Chromebooks will still dominate because:

1. Chromebooks have a much better web browsing experience than iPads. The web is where a lot of classroom exercises and materials are distributed. It also provides a lot of flexibility in terms of loading new applications.

2. Physical keyboard means that there's more room to display content. Imagine typing up a book report on an on screen keyboard, or creating a presentation.

phmagic··on Show HN: Ready-to-use API to convert any web page to PDF using headless Chrome
I love this service! I think ease of adoption you can allow pre-made scripts to be shared so the non-technical can easily set up work flows that go right into their email. For the technical folks, I think it would be great to have examples of things you can do with Apify that is a hassle to do with your local chrome headless.

Great job!

phmagic··on Snap Misses User-Growth Estimate as Facebook Copying Takes Toll
On the bright side, hopefully the amount of millionaires minted by Snap will improve the angel investing scene in Venice Beach
phmagic··on Cloudflare launches app development platform, announces $100M investment fund
Thanks for clarifying.

I guess my main confusion is that I don't understand the audience who would benefit from these apps. I imagine one member of the audience is someone who runs a popular blog and want to add a widget but don't want to copy and paste code.

A quick search on Google would solve my problem, or I'd hire someone on eLance to make the change for me instead of paying a monthly subscription for an app.

phmagic··on Steve Jobs and the Missing “Intel Inside” Sticker
Apple has similar strict guidelines for Made for iPod devices.
phmagic··on Cloudflare launches app development platform, announces $100M investment fund
A platform that pays developers to use it is no platform at all.

Yes, there's exceptions to every rule. But I have yet to see this strategy of a platform fund ever succeed.

Better to build (or tap into) a captive audience and then sell that to developers.

phmagic··on Show HN: Strime – Video project management made simple
Looks great!
phmagic··on Startup Announces Plan for 150-Seat Battery-Powered Plane
The plane does look sexy.

I'm not clear on how this works out economically.

Gas turbines are more efficient than electric at high altitudes and long distances. So the regional hops are where this could make an impact.

IMO regional hop planes are less efficient at moving cargo than trains (or hyperloops). America just doesn't like high speed trains for some reason.

Between trains and jet turbine planes, I'm not seeing where electric passenger planes like this make a huge image.

phmagic··on MakerBot lays off 30% of its staff as company’s scope narrows
Good thing they sold to stratasys when they did.
phmagic··on Is Spotify Going Bankrupt in 2017?
The one size fits all pricing model that Spotify has doesn't work well with how record labels want their royalties to be paid out.

Perhaps it's time Spotify became a record label, like Netflix became a content producer.

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