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smaps

117 karma · joined July 15, 2014

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smaps··on Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?
I just started working full time on my mortgage loan officer SaaS tool again. I had started building it when I worked for a mortgage company in 2017 because I was annoyed at having to enter the same data on 6 websites 20-30 times a week. Ended up getting some paying customers but somewhat unconsciously avoiding selling too many, a personality defect I have since seen.

If you know a mortgage loan officer, tell them to email tyler at lightningestimates dot com and mention HN. I'm just trying to fix an industry problem at a reasonable price.

smaps··on X Engineering Year Retrospective
Cloud storage is expensive, I’m willing to bet that’s a lot of money saved at their scale.
smaps··on An Internet of PHP
Can you explain why you think it’s an awful language? It definitely used to be lacking in features, but the improvements in the recent versions have been great.
smaps··on Ask HN: What should I do next for my career?
If you've been working as a developer for 5 years no one will care about your grades in undergrad, and a Masters in Comp Sci is unlikely to be worth the opportunity cost.

I would suggest starting to look for developer jobs at smaller companies or startups. You're much more likely to be working on all kinds of things instead of being stuck in small areas of the code. Working at FAANG is likely to be the exact opposite where you'll be a bit more of a cog in the machine that works on some small feature.

smaps··on How PHP Opcache Works
Without those cpanel hosts I wouldn't be a web developer today. It was so easy for me to start messing around and teaching myself to code using them.
smaps··on Coinbase from YC to DPO
What's the reasoning behind your opinion?
smaps··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2021)
Lightning Estimates | Full Stack Developer | Remote (US only) | Full/Part Time

Lightning Estimates is a SaaS tool for mortgage loan officers that saves them time and effort in creating accurate estimates for customers. I've been developing/selling it all by myself and am looking to bring on a developer to start taking over the tech side of things. The tool has a small user base, but makes enough to cover the cost of running it.

Everything is done using AWS... EC2 for the web server, RDS for databases, Lambda for some process intensive parts. The backend is done in PHP using Laravel while the tool itself is a SPA built using Vue. You'd basically be coming in as a co-founder and would get a good chunk of equity and profit sharing.

I'm happy to chat more about what's going on and what I'm looking for, and willing to work together to figure something out that can help take tech responsibility off of my plate!

Apply at https://angel.co/company/lightningestimates/jobs/1118025-ful...

smaps··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
> Personally I think we are watching the slow death of the USA. May be from France I am not getting all the subtle details about the situation on the ground but the country seems to be completely divided.

I live in Washington DC and completely agree with you. The division has only been getting worse for years.

smaps··on U.S. Feds Seized Nearly $1B in Bitcoin from Wallet Linked to Silk Road
Seems like HN might be blocked as referrer here... clicked on the link and got a 404. If I go to the link directly it loads.
smaps··on A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
Check out https://reflect.run/ as a replacement for Cypress. I started using it recently to do E2E testing at work in our staging environment to run a suite of tests before we move anything to production.

So far it's been great and has saved a couple of releases in a month or so of use!

smaps··on The Unspoken Hard Bits of Bootstrapping a SaaS Product to Life
A tool for mortgage loan officers (or anyone who actually runs the numbers) to automate creating accurate estimates. It started out as just a tool to save myself time that I built more onto over time.

It makes money, and my "worst case" scenario of it helping to land me another job through personal growth played out. I'm still pushing it along, but it's a struggle at times.

smaps··on The Unspoken Hard Bits of Bootstrapping a SaaS Product to Life
> The psychological toll of not feeling like you’re “all-in”

I'm bootstrapping my own SaaS solo and this one hit real close to home. I've been at it for a couple of years, and as of Feb this year it became a nights/weekends project as I had a great opportunity for a full time job that I couldn't pass up.

Life definitely gets in the way and makes me feel like I'm not working hard enough, but it's a hard balancing act with a full time job. Plus having a wife who's pregnant with twins (our first kids), so just another wrench thrown in there!

smaps··on Ask HN: Have you been laid off?
I'll second it as an awesome place to work!
smaps··on Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole
The hassle is because of the implication that is super easy to run a self hosted solution. It's a decently complex task that your average person couldn't come close to doing, and many here would still take a bit of time to grok it all.
smaps··on Myequifax.com Bypasses Credit Freeze Pin
I think he missed the sarcasm tag...
smaps··on Announcing unlimited free private repos
Not every young developer is a student. If Github had offered free private repos a couple of years ago I'd probably be using it instead of Gitlab.
smaps··on SIPC Says It Has Serious Concerns About Robinhood's New Product
I had a bit of interest on this when I first read about it, but was a bit skeptical then... I wouldn't touch this at all now with no guarantee that the deposits are insured.
smaps··on Show HN: Strength News – An HN-inspired website for sport and gym enthusiasts
If you go over to /r/fitness there are some active and well informed people, so I'd have to disagree with you.
smaps··on Show HN: Strength News – An HN-inspired website for sport and gym enthusiasts
No discussion is a big negative for me
smaps··on A $3B Plan to Turn Hoover Dam into a Giant Battery
This a repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17635063
smaps··on A 3-Year-Old, $50k Bitcoin Puzzle Solved
Agreed, because it's only a $36,000 Bitcoin puzzle as of right now.
smaps··on Website Glitch Let Me Overstock My Coinbase
"bcash" as you call it really is more like the original Bitcoin than bcore. The whole chain split and scaling debate shouldn't have existed, the 1mb limit was only put in place as a temporary measure to stop spam early on in Bitcoin's life.
smaps··on Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker
>The worst proposal, increasing blocksize, is not currently being considered because of its impact on centralization.

Hard drive space is cheap! Increasing blocksize isn't going to cause centralization, it's the easiest and most effective way to scale for now.

smaps··on Launch HN: Lambda School (YC S17) – CS education that's free until you get a job
Any potential for time changes in the future? I'm on EST and being in a class M-F 12p-9p is a bit harsh.
smaps··on VPN Report – Reviews of the top VPNs
Agreed on PIA being good with no major issues here either
smaps··on Why are all my friends buying an overhyped digital currency?
>I find the recent popularity of cryptocurrencies very interesting as I spent a lot of time in 2007-2008 studying and researching Bitcoin from the academic perspective of economics (My undergraduate degree).

>In 2008 I downloaded a BTC miner and had everything set up but then never started the machine because I was running folding@home and thought that was a better use of my distributed compute. Doh!

The first version of the bitcoin software was released in 2009, the white paper was published in October 2008.

smaps··on The Pop-Up Employer: Build a Team, Do the Job, Say Goodbye
That is one of my favorite books!
smaps··on China talking with European Space Agency about moon outpost
I too am curious about this calibration and think that's a good book to use for it.
smaps··on Ask HN: Do you have examples of Facebook using your microphone for ads?
Axciom does all of the data buying and creating models to figure out what people like.

Source - Used to work with Axciom data myself

smaps··on Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API
The correct way to be neutral in english would be "tuned to their needs"
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