Hacker News Reader

samdungon Kenyan court declares law banning seed sharing unconstitutional

It is sad that the law was enacted in the first place (lobbying by 'the usual suspects') and others had to fight to repeal what is violating common law, common sense and natural justice.

samdungon Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files

Incompetence compounds at an astonishing rate.

samdungon The surprising benefits of giving up

'When' does one give up? That is the question that needs an answer.

samdungon Why our website looks like an operating system

I hate you.

samdungon [dead]

FWIW, NSA has a history

Paper from 1996

HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/mone...

samdungon Why random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions

The Complicated Business of Electing a Doge

https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge

samdungon Postcard is now open source

A few years ago AWS used to be quite generous with SES. As a result it became the source of a lot of spam. Thankfully they started becoming strict since the last 2 years. This along with new features like managed warmup, multi-region sending, has made AWS SES very desirable.

samdungon GCP Outage

:))))))

samdungon GCP Outage

GCP just updated their status

samdungon Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law

Breach. Get sued. Pay Fine. Rinse. Repeat.

At this point it looks like governments want the money and companies are gleefully willing to pay.

samdungon Open-Source Is Just That

Now i have an article i can refer people to who ask me for a deadline on OSS features they request. ;)

samdungon A love letter to the CSV format

CSV works because CSV is understood by non technical people who have to deal with some amount of technicality. CSV is the friendship bridge that prevents technical and non technical people from going to war.

I can tell an MBA guy to upload a CSV file and i'll take care of it. Imagine i tell him i need everything in a PARQUET file!!! I'm no longer a team player.

samdungon Launch HN: Modernbanc (YC W20) – Modern and fast accounting software

I can't help but recommend an accounting software called Manager (https://www.manager.io/). You install it on your computer and its free. It's probably the most beautifully designed accounting software i have come across. They also have a cloud version.

I first came across Manager about 5 years ago and wanted my accountants to use it. However they chose Xero because they were 'used to Xero'.

I still have Manager installed and play around with it whenever i need inspiration.

The downloadable version is single user. All data is stored in an SQLITE file which you can just copy-paste if you have to move computers. You can decide where you want to store the SQLITE file. I ended up choosing a shared dropbox folder. Guess what, now i have a multi-user version. Although, i'm not sure if the Manager team would recommend this approach.

I'm not affiliated with Manager.

samdungon Betting on the Pope was the original prediction market

Unrelated. Just finished watching the series 'The Young Pope'. What a visual spectacle it was.

samdungon Jacksonpollock.org (2003)

Since we are on Pollock ...

https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/

samdungon Show HN: I built CSVIZ to turn your CSV files into insights instantly with AI

The tool looks great. The 100KB limit is too less. I can open a small CSV file in excel and eyeball it to make sense of the data.

I would suggest atleast a 3 MB file. That's the amount of data where human cognitive limits are reached and your tool will become helpful.

samdungon Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics

This is great. I'm def going to use it.

Minor bug: "See Live Demo Dashboard" url is wrongly pointed.

samdungon Gandhi's Letter to Hitler (1940)

The British committed more atrocities (going by body count) in the 20 odd years of India's "peaceful freedom movement" headed by MKG.

1919 - Jallianwala Bagh massacre (over 1500 shot dead in a few minutes). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre

1943 - Bengal famine of 1943 (over 3 million dead). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

1947 - Partition of India (2 million deaths) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India

Indian school text books just gloss over British brutality in India.

samdungon The PlanetScale vectors public beta

I have the same question. I have a small DB on Planetscale and happily pay 39 for it. IMO, Vector DB's are the next frontier. I can understand the tough decision for Planetscale, given that the cloud services can just offer it as a service and corner all value of an open source project.

samdungon Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

Yup makes sense from that point of view.

samdungon Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

I have a small story about McKinsey from friend of mine in the Indian Bureaucracy from about 10-12 years ago.

McKinsey was doing some work for their dept. I asked him what they did. He said, "McKinsey asked us for lots of information. Then they put it into a dossier and gave it back to us."

samdungon Software is about people, not code (2020)

We have this motto in our company -

More than knowing what to do, we know what not to do - a perk of having donkey's years behind us.

samdungon Antiquities of Mexico (1831–48)

https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/collections/antiq...

da-vinci came first or this?

samdungon Swiss watchmakers put employees on state-funded leave as luxury demand disappear

I recommend and "independent watchmaker + in-house movement". Need not be Swiss.

If you are getting started with mechanical watches buy an Orient watch (https://orient-watch.com/). You can get one for < $200.

When you want to upgrade - Nomos (https://nomos-glashuette.com/en). $2500 +

Above this is what you can afford but always look for "independent watchmaker + in-house movement".

I also like the designs of Junghans (https://www.junghans.de/en/) but they use a thrid party movement.

samdungon Swiss watchmakers put employees on state-funded leave as luxury demand disappear

The thing about luxury watch makers is, the independent or family owned ones (Patek, Rolex) never seem to have a recession. LVMH and Kering own most of the other luxury brands and they mass produce these luxury watches. Patek for example cannot/will not produce more than a certain number of watches every year

It's just supply and demand.

If you are buying a luxury mechanical watch buy from an independent/family owned company rather than from LVMH or Kering.

samdungon Show HN: AnythingLLM – Open-Source, All-in-One Desktop AI Assistant

I really hope this becomes the norm.

samdungon Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

We don't bill much with Stripe but have been using it for a very long time. At this point i have to say that Stripe is just extracting it's tax. Anything you do on Stripe is taxed. If you want to get an invoice paid that is charged 0.4% and then you have to pay $2 just to generate an invoice to provide proof of transaction to your customer. And then recurring billing charges went up to 0.7% (from 0.5%) without any reason. (recurring billing charges are over and above the base fee).

https://stripe.com/pricing

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wqs3LHNPZsKymxszsmSa...

samdungon Study: Consumers Actively Turned Off by AI

In just a few months every website that has had a customer support chat-plugin seems to have become 'AI Powered'. And all they seem to do is go on in a circular drivel.

samdungon Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer

You can visit the following page for documentation on how to integrate it into your angular web app. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@send-with-ses/ng-email-design...

You can integrate your api call in the exportHtml() method to save it to your database. And you can load the same template into the component by providing it to [template].

ex: <lib-email-designer [type]="selectedTemplateType" [template]="selectedTemplate" #emailEditor></lib-email-designer>

samdungon Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer

Totally understand your point of view. HN community is largely well intentioned and net-net the software world is the better for it. The designer we have open sourced is part of our much larger communication platform (https://sendune.com).