sivers

Great metaphor. Thank you.

I use OpenBSD for basically everything: laptop, desktop, server. It's been my server OS since 1999. I play with other OSs and come back to the solid simplicity of OpenBSD.

I chose OpenBSD for https://sive.rs/ti because of its simplicity and security, and that it has the mailserver and webserver built-in.

Starts at 24 minutes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BaDQCjqUHU

It's ksh not bash.

It's only for OpenBSD 7.3 on Vultr.com

It should only be run in the context of the steps at https://sive.rs/ti

I was trying to help non-technical people experience the empowering joy of having their own server, so instead of the usual "you could do this or that, here or there", this is a single-track "just do this".

My previous version of https://sive.rs/ti (until a few hours ago) had no shell script, but just walked people through every step. It took like 50+ hours to write up.

But so many people were getting stuck and frustrated trying to type in all those commands, (and mistaking "l" for "1" and such), that I realized I could help more people have their own server if I put most of those steps into a shell script.

Hopefully it'll be enough to give them a taste of the benefits of having their own server, then they can learn more about the steps afterwards.

My previous version of https://sive.rs/ti (until a few hours ago) used the built-in OpenSMTPD server for outgoing email.

But then Vultr.com is not un-blocking port 25 by request anymore.

That's why I had to switch to a SMTP service.

Same in New Zealand

New Zealanders, here's the link to freeze your credit:

https://www.centrix.co.nz/my-credit-score/suppress-your-cred...

Two years ago they made you submit a manual request then prove with a police file or something that you have real proof that you're in real danger of identity theft. Now it seems it's more automated.

Thanks for remembering that.

Cool! I do this, but I haven't seen anyone else do it. Is any of your code public?

I wrote about it at https://sive.rs/pg

and posted my SQL shopping cart at https://github.com/sivers/store

Please contact me if you'd like to share tips: https://sive.rs/contact

I've founded many companies of many sizes, from 0 to 85 employees, over the last 25 years.

I've used many business banks in many countries. (Wells, Citi, HSBC, ING, BoA, BNZ, OCBC, DBS, Wise, even private banks.)

But I've never been so impressed and happy with my bank as I am with Mercury.

Mercury continues to impress me, even though right now I'm a super-small-fry, their service, features, and attention are top-notch. I love them. I'm a Mercury fan.

Thanks to Aaron for posting this. Such a great reminder.

Anyone interested in this subject, check out a series of three very tiny books called “UPGRADE YOUR HTML” by Jens Oliver Meiert.

They give great step-by-step examples for eliminating optional tags and attributes, reducing HTML to its cleanest simplest valid form. The author is a super-expert in this specific subject, working with Google and W3C on this. His bio here: https://meiert.com/en/biography/

From LeanPub: https://leanpub.com/b/upgrade-your-html-123

From Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08NP4GXY2/

I came here to say this, too. Please don't overlook this comment if you're interested in having the full OED online.

I've lived a few places, and my local library has given full free access to OED to all members. Just enter your library card number and library-given-password, and you are sent to an OED-hosted web app with full access to everything, all historical information - really deep rich full entries.

For example here in Wellington New Zealand, my local library access is at https://www-oed-com.wcl.idm.oclc.org/

If you're interested, just look up your local library's website, and find if they give members access.

Strangely enough, I was living in Oxford England for two years, and that was the only public library that didn't have OED access! But they had a free 3D printer, so fair trade.

Anyway - whenever I set up a new browser, putting in my local OED link is the first bookmark I create, and I use it every day. Highly recommended.

Depends what you're doing.

I was selling CDs from my living room. Making $300 per month.

It was the appropriate solution for the situation.

Wow! Thanks for finding this! I'm so glad someone saved it.

(I'm the original author.)

At the time, the CD was often the practical master. Many recordings had come from analog tape, sent to a mastering house, who burned the final master to a CD.

Anyway, I skipped this detail in the original article, but Apple let go of the requirement to use their special “put the CD in the drive” tool. We were able to deliver using master WAV/FLAC files, converted to their AAC requirements, and uploaded.

Because it concerned my clients — the musicians.

Apple says “we want to sell all of your clients’ music now”.

I post something on the company blog, read mainly by my clients, saying Apple wants to sell your music now.

Kai Oelfke! So glad you posted this here.

https://amicu.app/ is a great example of this idea in action.

Thanks Jake! I read HN every day, but almost never log in to post.

That's amazing!

In 25+ years of keeping people in my database, and writing plain text all day, I'd never once considered keeping my list of people in plain text files.

Thanks for the description and inspiration.

Thanks for this feedback. For what it's worth, the “keep in touch with hundreds” system I describe in this post is not the one you've encountered me using. It sounds like you're just on my list, as you said.

The “keep in touch” approach is more for the people you meet in-person, say if you go to conferences and meet 50 people in a weekend, or are out working as a musician constantly meeting fellow music industry people while on the road.

It's different than the “broadcast → follow” relationship.

(I'm the guy he refers to in that post.)

If anyone reading this builds software like this, and releases it publicly, whether free or for sale, please let me know. I'd be happy to send people your way.

Because of https://sive.rs/dbt I get a few emails a week from strangers, asking if my software is public yet, or if not, what else I would recommend. (And I might never make my software public. It's too tied-in to my now-complex PostgreSQL system of everything.)

I'm definitely going to send people to Jakob's post here now. But if interested in this subject, please email me here:

https://sive.rs/contact

It's weird to come to my favorite forum, and see my name in the title of a post.

It's weirder to read comments claiming to know about my personal life and motivations, though they're all wrong. (Both the good and the bad.)

The public me is not me - https://sivers.org/publicu - so I don't feel a great need to correct the errors here.

But thanks (tw04, lukego, marcinzm, s_a_p) for the reminder that anything I do can be spun negative.

I moved all (30+) of my domains to Porkbun a couple years ago, and have referred all of my friends there since. Everyone has been really happy with their service.

They're just a small team of good people in Portland Oregon running an efficient smart operation. This is their parent company: https://toplevel.design/

Whenever I've had a customer service question, they reply immediately and helpfully.

I try to support businesses like this whenever possible.

I've been using it exclusively for months, and it's great. Fast server. Great features. But most importantly, good leadership whose incentives I feel align with mine.

Why The Lucky Stiff Documentary from 2019:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U

When new parents ask my advice, “Brain Rules for Baby” is the one and only book I recommend. Everyone has told me later they loved it.

Since 2007, I've taken detailed notes on every book I've read, then posted them on my site with my top recommendations up top:

https://sivers.org/book

My top recommendations here for the Hacker News crowd - with a nudge for the under-rated, are:

The Time Paradox - by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd

https://sivers.org/book/TimeParadox

Profound idea that everyone has a primary time focus: either Future-focused, Present-focused, or Past-focused. Fascinating implications of each. Because I'm so future-focused, reading this book helped me understand people who are very present-focused. Also great advice on shifting your focus when needed. I read it 7 years ago, but still think about it almost every day.

--

Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want - by Nicholas Epley

https://sivers.org/book/Mindwise

Many new brilliant insights, especially about over-estimating the differences between you and others, thereby separating into us-vs-them tribalism. Scan to the end of my notes, to see. If you know more books like this, please recommend them to me. I adore this subject.

--

The War of Art - by Steven Pressfield

https://sivers.org/book/WarOfArt

Have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what “Resistance” is. This book is about that. Read it.

--

E-Myth Revisited - by Michael Gerber

https://sivers.org/book/EMythRevisited

Absolutely everyone who is an entrepreneur or wants to be one needs to read this book. I first read it after 10 years of successfully running my company, and was still blown away and totally humbled by its wisdom. Re-reading it today, I'm amazed how my view of business was completely changed by this one little book. See my notes for examples, but definitely read the book itself to get the real impact.

--

The Courage to Be Disliked - by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

https://sivers.org/book/Disliked

Wow. A profound little philosophy book from Japan, communicating the psychology of Alfred Adler - a rival of Freud. Told as a conversation between an angry student and a patient teacher. A little book so good that I rushed home from other activites to keep reading it, and finished in a day. A surprisingly fresh perspective on how to live. (The “disliked” part is not the point, so don’t let the title distract you.)

Wow I was not expecting this here. Thanks jger15 for submitting it.

Well, since we're here, can I share with you the tech side of this that most don't care about?

Instead of using one of the many many podcast hosting services, I wanted to DIY everything, self-host, etc. Everything is done on the command line.

I rolled my own RSS with a Ruby script:

https://gist.github.com/sivers/e3a90a742cfc0802ede9dbf553339...

Each episode is made using sox :

https://gist.github.com/sivers/b900bf4004e148b32a5ddf3fffbe3...

This one is especially fun. See the "pad" function that writes that many seconds of silence before bringing in the desired audio file. Then use that new file to determine the length of the pad to precede the next file, etc.

In the end I have about 8 WAV files that I do a "sox -M" to merge them all together into one combined WAV file, with all the timings correct, and tracks can overlap.

Then for hosting, I just stuck it on the same $10/month Vultr OpenBSD instance that I host everything else on. Nginx delivering static. And it's held up fine. I put it on its own subdirectory (m.sivers.org) in case I need to move it to a CDN some day, but I'm hoping I won't need to.

Finally I use lame -m m -b 96 to make the MP3 and https://mutagen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/man/mid3v2.html to tag the MP3 including adding the photo to it.

I picked up a lot of these tips from various HN threads over the past year.

Thanks for the inspiration, gang. And thanks again for posting this and the nice comments. I really appreciate it.

- Derek

Yep. That was my Catalina frustration, too.

My phone broke last week so I bought an iPhone 11.

My Mac wouldn't connect/sync with it unless I upgraded to Catalina.

So I upgraded to Catalina, and now all of the software I used on Mac doesn't work at all. (iZotope Audio editing, Native Instruments, Cubase, Audacity, and more. None of it works in Catalina.) Catalina also makes my Mac Mini not recognize my LG monitor unless I Cmd-Opt-P-R flash PRAM and reboot a few times just to get it to send a signal to the monitor.

So now the Mac is useless to me. I literally can't use it for anything I was using it for. It has no working programs on it.

So I switched back to Android, found an old Windows laptop, re-installed my audio software on Windows, and I'll just work without Apple until they fix their OS, or maybe never again.