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redstripe

939 karma · joined December 17, 2009

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redstripe··on Show HN: Tabular – Email design tool that generates bulletproof email HTML
This looks nicely polished and I might pay for this since it provides some real value but it has the same problem many other front-end SaaS products have - it hijacks the end user.

What I mean is that I can't use it without sending my users to your site. For example, I use sendgrid for marketing and transactional mail. I think our bill fluctuates between $200-500/month. I would consider using Sendgrid's WYSIWYG editor (even though it's not very good) but I can't do it without:

- sending my users to their website,

- managing separate accounts/permission,

- breaking continuity with my product,

- storing potentially private attachments offsite,

- loosing any integrations I could provide

What I would like from a product like yours is to be able to use your frontend as a javascript embed without the other clutter. i.e. a hosted library rather than a full product.

Your embed would have to define some sort of plug-in API for uploading images/attachments and browsing existing ones and then your clients would have to provide end points for those APIs.

I would then request the completed HTML after editing and handle all the sending and related issues myself (through my vendor like sendgrid).

I know building hosted javascript embeds isn't as sexy as a full SaaS offering but there is definitely a market for it. Lots of people sell products that send email - you could sell to those people.

redstripe··on Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds
Fine. Perhaps I shouldn't have said any nation, but Afghanistan is not a modern nation state. It's a time warp back to some era 1000 years ago with poorly run government theater that only existed to keep the kleptocrats stealing from their wealthy benefactor.

Do you imagine some well armed coalition of militias in Idaho or wherever is going to be rampaging through the American countryside and declaring a new nation? I wonder if these guys hugged their rifles in their last moments: https://youtu.be/t9K0fhMCTGk?t=102 NSFW

redstripe··on Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds
What's admirable about it? This is just a fiction that you Americans tell yourselves about the next revolution.

Name one, just one way, that ease of gun ownership has protected Americans from their government in a way that citizens of other western democracies have suffered?

There is no scenario in which any citizen with a gun in any country defeats their government. Your gun will keep you safe about as well as your password protected Word document keeps you safe from the NSA snooping.

redstripe··on Billions in 'unknown' funds flowing into Canada's housing market [video]
I don't know anything about the situation over there but did they really ban it? For example this bloomberg report talks about foreign ownership via holding companies. So are foreigners not able to hold stakes in NZ companies or are NZ companies not able to hold realestate (doubtful?).
redstripe··on Billions in 'unknown' funds flowing into Canada's housing market [video]
Doesn't it still exist in Quebec?
redstripe··on Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.
Hi there, nice site.

I'm really like this combined side scrolling table + graph component you use on the pulse page. Looking at the source I see a mention of echarts in the html but I don't think I've seen anything like that in their examples.

Did you build this yourself as a custom rendered chart or is this something that someone else built?

redstripe··on New book contends that Catch Me If You Can is mostly made up
I don't know. I wish I fell for their scam back in 2009/2010 when they were flooding HN with bitcoin posts. There were so many it seemed coordinated.
redstripe··on Jaguar Land Rover to suspend output due to chip shortage
I don't know if we should give Toyota any praise over their supply chain management. Consider the situation with their electric vehicles.

The plug-in hybrid "rav4 prime" has a 2 year wait list. They sold 3200 last year because they don't have any battery capacity. https://insideevs.com/news/466641/us-toyota-rav4-prime-sales...

This is a bit of digression on this thread, but it's stuff like this that makes it seem like traditional car companies are still out to lunch vs Tesla. They're just too slow to adapt and give up what has worked for decades.

redstripe··on Craigslist Cars EDA
Price Distribution by Year -- this is an interesting one. Looks like eventually there isn't a huge variance in price. So brands with "good resale value" probably don't matter if you're keeping your car a really long time.
redstripe··on Free for Developers
I run a hobby .net core website on a $5 digital ocean instance and it runs fast as hell. You definitively don't need to spend $30. I'm using a PG database but it looks like maybe it would even be possible to run SQL server on a 2GB instance.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...

You just have to bite the bullet and learn a few linux admin tasks like setting up nginx, supervisor, file permissions.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy...

redstripe··on Reinventing virtualization with the AWS Nitro System
Can you explain the 5x difference between physical and virtualized benchmarks here:

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r19&hw=...

redstripe··on How does the Gmail unsubscribe button work?
This would certainly be convenient, however if your mailing lists contains a lot of old people then they forward your emails to their friends. Their friends who are annoyed by this then unsubscribe the original recipient without noticing that the email was forwarded by their friend.

This is a real problem for us - not a made up scenario. So we remove the auto-filled email on the unsubscribe form.

redstripe··on Welcome to C# 9.0
My guess it's to counter those popular code-golf language comparisons that make c# look verbose for short apps.
redstripe··on U.S. arrests former Green Beret, son, in connection with Ghosn escape from Japan
Is leaving a country really that hard if you have a little money? Seems like something you should be able to do without the assistance of green berets unless you're in a movie.

A country like Japan must have: 1. Dozens of private jets leaving it's airspace daily. 2. Hundreds of fishing boats leaving it territorial waters daily.

redstripe··on Userdir URLs like https://example.org/~username/ are dangerous
You'd think this was just an archaic relic but Bambora payment processing (which hasn't updated their site since uppercase HTML tags and framesets were a thing) has a userdir feature that lets their customers upload static file to their "secure webspace" which is hosted on the same domain for all customers.
redstripe··on Show HN: UIDesignDaily – soft launch with 600 open-source designs
Thanks, I'll bookmark this.

As a programmer with no design skills, I maintain a folder of screenshots from various SaaS apps that I find helpful whenever I need inspiration for layouts, information presentation, multi-step interaction breakdowns, widget use, progressive drilling down, etc..

redstripe··on Windows Terminal Preview v0.10 Release
In regular cmd.exe you can use "title xxx" to rename windows. Maybe this works in the terminal too?
redstripe··on Ask HN: My web app was hacked today – Bad experiences and how to prevent them?
Bots also regularly check for .git in common folders:

404 - GET /admin/.git/config 404 - GET /shop/.git/config 404 - GET /beta/.git/config etc..

or adhoc backups using the current date -- stuff that you think nobody would even try.

404 - GET /2020-02-27.zip 404 - GET /backup20200227.zip 404 - GET /backup.zip etc...

No webserver should be serving .folders in it's default config.

redstripe··on Coding Stories: Me vs. the VNC Guy
I worked in a large call center and we used VNC to monitor the agents. This worked until one one of them figured out what the VNC tray icon color change meant - which meant they soon all knew what it was.

So I had to do the reverse hack of this guy. Easiest way was just to load up the VS resource editor and change the icon so that it always looked like there was no connection.

redstripe··on Fix: Use autocomplete=“discourse” to disable Chrome address autofill
That won't work for long. It will start offering suggestions of data that you have previously used on the "discourse" fields.

On our CRM, Chrome is constantly offering to fill in data that I don't need. Or even worse, it will overlap custom autocompletes and input helpers with it's own UI.

redstripe··on De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
That's not saying much. Most of us don't understand most science behind anything outside of our limited specializations. These beliefs are manifestations of people's distrust of large institutions.

People believe GMO is bad because they believe that large corporations would do anything for a buck regardless of long term consequences.

Alien abduction, anti-vaxers, 9/11 inside job and other conspiracy theories are just ways for people to express their distrust of government.

Global warming deniers don't trust the liberal media.

The pattern is: I don't trust X. What is the worst thing I could believe about X.

redstripe··on Adolescents’ rich and nuanced relationship with risky behaviour
This is totally a drive by comment - but random street view shows that graffiti seems to be a popular past time in this town:

https://www.google.ca/maps/@-41.1389439,-71.3092729,3a,75y,2...

I'd say the kids are bored.

redstripe··on Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)
Was there ever a DOS binary? That would be worth firing up a VM for.
redstripe··on Fake WhatsApp update from “WhatsApp Inc.” with Unicode whitespace: 1M downloads
And of course you go to their website by googling them. Maybe clicking one of the 5 adword links at the top of the page that look like search results. Works out nicely for someone.
redstripe··on Show HN: Build live location sharing in your app with HyperTrack
How much of a battery drain is it to be constantly GPS tracking?
redstripe··on Japan labor shortage prompts shift to hiring permanent workers
I know it's cynical but it feels like the term "labour shortage" is just a way of complaining about not being able to find desperate laborers at bottom dollar. Here in Canada, I've seen plenty of job ads that were more or less "we have job, come work here". It's like they don't even try and then proceed to step 2: complain about the labor supply. I can only image that the situation is a lot worse in a country that overworks it's people as much as Japan.
redstripe··on How We Knew It Was Time to Leave the Cloud
What kind of dell discounts does dell typically give larger customers? We get 0 (from HP) at my workplace and I've always wondered.

I'm sure it depends on how much you buy.

Does it vary by components? They seem to charge a lot for drives so I'm guessing those can be heavily discounted.

redstripe··on North Korea defied world with nuclear test. Now it seeks aid for flood disaster
The US has sustained the fiction that terrorists are going to attack "real soon now" and people still accept it like some existential threat. Meanwhile we're onto the 15th year of toddlers killing parents with their own handguns outnumbering terrorists attacks. So I guess we can't really be surprised by their fears - it's the whole world against them and it sort of makes sense for them to dig in deeper.
redstripe··on Job offer at amazon canada
In burnaby $1500 will get you a 2 bedroom. For $2500 you can rent the main floor of a house.

http://vancouver.craigslist.ca/search/apa?bedrooms=3

$125k is a great salary for Vancouver. It probably puts you in the 95% percentile provincially. Developer salaries seem to be comparable to most other white collar jobs however, so you may take a big hit if you ever leave Amazon.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/f...

redstripe··on “We’re winding down Starfighter”
Maybe twitter should hire tptacek's company for a security eval.
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