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ylere

1,041 karma · joined August 3, 2015

Co-Founder and CTO at Wingback

Previously co-founder 1aim Member of the Good Technology Collective

contact: yann<?>leretaille.com

kismet: 7e8a2b83cb4599e5d7c264ac4e78e72ae2bd9fe5b007e1835172c57210c5df48

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ylere··on Show HN: Tally Forms – A free Typeform alternative
Sorry but that makes it even worse. You can't just push ethical decisions to your customers. You are the one building the product and you are the one defining the ethical boundaries within which it can be used by your customers. As technology builders we are at forefront of pushing all kind of societal boundaries and often end up redefining them in the process. As technology moves so fast it can take years for society to catch up and decide that something definitely was a bad idea but by that time it's often too late. No one wants to be the engineer realising years later that what their build was harmful to society, so try be more conscious of the decisions you take. One good framework to reason about the impact of what we build is to simply ask ourselves if there would be any negative long term effects to society of a billion people would use the feature. Right now from your perspective that seems far away and unlikely but in our field this happens all the time, either through scaling or others copying you.

So either put a big disclaimer yourself at which point no one will probably want to enable it anymore except for edge use cases (which hopefully are ethical even though I can't really think of one right now) or just remove it fully. It's a huge breach of privacy and most customers who have issues with drop rates probably should redesign their form and CTA. Unless the reason for people dropping of is that they're doing something sketchy and/or asking for way too much personal information of course, which is exactly the case where I absolutely do not want to have that data nor would I consent to them collecting it before I click submit.

ylere··on Ask HN: Anyone voice code? I had a stroke and can't use my left side
Can Bpc157 actually be administered intranasally? I remember reading about it a while ago and the usual route being subq injections.
ylere··on Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?
Unfortunately, verytrivial is almost certainly right. They deliberately designed it in a way that one will eventually consent by accidentally pressing the button.
ylere··on Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials
"most websites" has not been my experience at all. Sure, for the big ones like email that's and a lot of dev tooling that's the case. But there's a huge amount of services that requires SMS verification and once you loose access to that number you get locked out. A very common case is loosing ones phone (or having it stolen), at which point you have to log into your accounts again from another device but also don't have access to your SIM anymore.
ylere··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2021)
Wingback | Senior Rust Backend Engineer / Integration Engineer | Full-Time, unlimited PTO | REMOTE | Salary: $100k / $80k + bonuses | https://wingback.com

We are Wingback, a new startup building the infrastructure needed to make it easier for anyone in the future to build and grow a SaaS product. If you worked for a SaaS startup before, the chances are high that you got asked to build a custom pricing plan with a custom feature set for one specific client at some point. If so, you probably hated the task and no one in your team wanted to work on it either. Wingback makes it possible that developers won’t ever have to do that again.

Since I first posted here in summer, we have formed a great core team on 5 continents and we are looking for a few more experienced engineers to join us. My co-founder and I have already built and exited a startup from zero to a team of dozens of engineers and $1m+ in revenues in the in the past, so things have been running (mostly) orderly since the beginning. We are on track to ship the first basic version of the product and onboard our early customers soon!

We are currently looking for:

* Senior Rust Backend Engineer

* Integration Engineer (mixed stack with focus on javascript/typescript)

Our previous company was one of the earliest supporters of rust[0] and we are committed to continue to support the amazing rust community through sponsorships and open source contributions.

We do not care about your academic degrees or where you are from, but about the stuff you did and what you could create in the future given the right opportunities. If you are interested in working with us, write me an email at work_with_yann_hn₍ₐₜ₎wingback.com and tell us about the projects you worked on that you are the most proud of and which technological feats of the past inspire you.

[0] https://2016.rustfest.eu/blog/1aim

ylere··on I hate password rules
I had it happen a few times. Usually I would reset it a few times until realizing that it's obviously not saving the password I'm entering, at which point I would try a setting a shorter one.
ylere··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2021)
Wingback | Senior Rust Backend Engineer / Integration Engineer | Full-Time, unlimited PTO | REMOTE | Salary: $100k / $80k + bonuses | https://wingback.com

We are Wingback, a new startup building the infrastructure needed to make it easier for anyone in the future to build and grow a SaaS product. If you worked for a SaaS startup before, the chances are high that you got asked to build a custom pricing plan with a custom feature set for one specific client at some point. If so, you probably hated the task and no one in your team wanted to work on it either. Wingback makes it possible that developers won’t ever have to do that again.

Since I first posted here in summer, we have formed a great core team on 5 continents and we are looking for a few more experienced engineers to join us. My co-founder and I have already built and exited a startup from zero to a team of dozens of engineers and $1m+ in revenues in the in the past, so things have been running (mostly) orderly since the beginning. We are on track to ship the first basic version of the product and onboard our early customers soon!

We are currently looking for:

* Senior Rust Backend Engineer

* Integration Engineer (mixed stack with focus on javascript/typescript)

Our previous company was one of the earliest supporters of rust[0] and we are committed to continue to support the amazing rust community through sponsorships and open source contributions.

We do not care about your academic degrees or where you are from, but about the stuff you did and what you could create in the future given the right opportunities. If you are interested in working with us, write me an email at work_with_yann_hn₍ₐₜ₎wingback.com and tell us about the projects you worked on that you are the most proud of and which technological feats of the past inspire you.

[0] https://2016.rustfest.eu/blog/1aim

ylere··on How to do your first pull-up, and why you should try
In my late 20s my back started hurting. Learning how to do pull-ups and a couple other body weight exercises fixed that completely. I've now installed several pull-up bars on the doors I pass through most during the day, lowering the barrier to do quick sets during the day. The pain is gone, my posture has improved and my back has never been stronger.

If you can't do a single pull-up yet, negatives are often recommended but I found them quite difficult and unpleasant. I made good experience with mostly doing closed stance wall push ups and only a few negatives until I managed to do the first real pull-up. Always keep a close eye on form as you progress and don't rush your pull-ups.

Additionally, I highly recommend to do daily shoulder stretching exercises using bands and dead hangs for spine decompression. Your back will thank you!

I really wish they would have taught these kind of high-strength, low-rep muscle-building exercises and why they're important in PE instead of just making everyone run around and jump in circles. We spend so much time in front of our screens and it's much harder to (re-)build muscle than to maintain it. If everyone would learn how to do these exercises with proper form in their early teens and do 30-40mins of workouts 1-2 times a week at school they would enter adulthood with a much stronger and healthier body and should be able to keep it that way with minimal amounts of exercise.

ylere··on Going from $110k to $24k for more skin in the game
There was a time where I thought the same way: That the founders should reduce their salaries to basically minimum wage until the company is profitable. I believed it was the right and honorable thing to do, while also signaling to investors that we were serious and would not "take (their) money out" of the company until it was appropriate. The problem is that investors are not driven by honor and if things go bad one day they will leave you with nothing and not have your back. You are also always exposed to a higher legal risk and things are a lot easier when you have the savings to pay for counsel in such a situation. The investors even tried to leverage the fact that we had zero savings to force us to agree to very unfavorable terms.

I still believe a founder should demonstrate commitment and not unnecessarily drain the startup of resources, especially early on. But you don't have to earn minimum wage for that. At my current startup, the founders are the lowest paid team members, but in today's world of high developer salaries that still plenty to live comfortably and build some savings. I also believe that once a startup starts having significant growth/revenue or profits, founders should use one of the subsequent fundraising rounds to set aside a safety cushion for themselves - not a huge payout, but maybe a years salary or so. This levels the playing field with investors as rounds and valuations grow and enable the founders to make decisions that are not driven by them being afraid of their livelihoods/living expenses/family. In difficult times you want to have founders who keep a cool head and make decisions that are best for the company and not for themselves.

There is often a phase in the beginning where you a bootstrapping/just starting out/don't have investors yet where there just isn't any money to pay yourself and there isn't much one can do about it except live of savings/family and reduce personal spending (like in this case). But that phase should end once the startup is in a better financial situation.

In the end, founders are expected to work a lot, prioritize the company over personal matters and take a discounted salary. In general that's fine, but we ought to recognize that there should be balance. You don't have to ridiculously overwork yourself be successful and it's OK to draw an livable salary, take occasional holidays and spend time with family.

P.S.: The industry standard in the VC industry is that the general partners collect a yearly management fee of about 2%. For larger funds, that's a lot of money and I've never heard anyone demanding that GPs don't pay themselves a salary and instead only receive the carry (percentage of profits after paying the investors/limited partners) in case the fund performs well a few years down the line. Instead, they always get the management fee (=founders salary) plus the carry (~20% of profits), the later possibly being significantly larger than the management fee if the fund performed very well (=successful exit). If they can live comfortably from their profession, so should the founders.

ylere··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2021)
Wingback | Senior Rust Backend Engineer | Full-Time | REMOTE | Salary: $100k + bonuses | https://wingback.com

We are Wingback, a new startup building the infrastructure needed to make it easier for anyone in the future to build and grow a SaaS product. If you worked for a SaaS startup before, the chances are high that you got asked to build a custom pricing plan with a custom feature set for one specific client at some point. If so, you probably hated the task and no one in your team wanted to work on it either. Wingback makes it possible that developers won’t ever have to do that again.

We are looking for experienced engineers who want to join our freshly formed team. My co-founder and I have already built and exited a startup from zero to a team of dozens of engineers and $1m+ in revenues in the in the past, so you can expect things to run (mostly) orderly from the beginning. We are planning to ship the first basic version of the product in just a few months (ambitious but possible) and will pay extra for everyone who helps us make that happen. After that you can stay on for the future if we fit well together, but there are no hard feelings if you see it as a one-off project either.

Since I posted last time, we have already hired a great core team on 5 continents!

We are still looking for:

* Senior Rust Backend Engineer

Our previous company was one of the earliest supporters of rust[0] and we are committed to continue to support the amazing rust community through sponsorships and open source contributions.

We do not care about your academic degrees or where you are from, but about the stuff you did and what you could create in the future given the right opportunities. If you are interested in working with us, write me an email at work_with_yann_hn₍ₐₜ₎wingback.com and tell us about the projects you worked on that you are the most proud of and which technological feats of the past inspire you.

[0] https://2016.rustfest.eu/blog/1aim

ylere··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)
Wingback | Senior Backend & Frontend Engineers | Full-Time or Freelance | REMOTE | Salary: $100k + bonuses | https://wingback.app

We are Wingback, a new startup building the infrastructure needed to make it easier for anyone in the future to build and grow a SaaS product. If you worked for a SaaS startup before, the chances are high that you got asked to build a custom pricing plan with a custom feature set for one specific client at some point. If so, you probably hated the task and no one in your team wanted to work on it either. Wingback makes it possible that developers won’t ever have to do that again.

We are looking for experienced engineers who want to join a brand new team. My co-founder and I have already built and exited a startup from zero to a team of dozens of engineers and $1m+ in revenues in the in the past, so you can expect things to run (mostly) orderly from the beginning. We are planning to ship the first basic version of the product in just a few months (ambitious but possible) and will pay extra for everyone who helps us make that happen. After that you can stay on for the future if we fit well together, but there are no hard feelings if you see it as a one-off project either.

We are looking for:

* Senior Backend Developers (Rust, Typescript)

* Senior Frontend Developers (Svelte)

* UI/UX Designer (part-time/freelance)

We want to try to additionally take in 1-2 juniors, but you will have to have at least some experience already and we will only make you an offer if we are sure that we'll be able to provide you the right amount of mentoring.

We do not care about your academic degrees or where you are from, but about the stuff you did and what you could create in the future given the right opportunities. If you are interested in working with us, write me an email at work_with_yann_hn₍ₐₜ₎wingback.app and tell us about the projects you worked on that you are the most proud of and which technological feats of the past inspire you.

ylere··on You can't have too many angels
thanks!
ylere··on You can't have too many angels
thanks!
ylere··on You can't have too many angels
Does anyone have experience with Angelists RUV? Is it worth the costs? Does it make it in any way harder for an angel to invest?
ylere··on Can't Unsee
I like how it trains you in noticing issues in alignment, spacing, font setting etc. But as others noted it mixes clear mistakes with highly subjective opinions around size, shape and color choices and even dark patterns while suggesting to use this test to filter out job candidates for design positions [0].

While there might be some merit to this method for educational purposes I'm generally wary of fully automated assessments as they often include hidden biases like in this case and just end up enabling you to hire the same kind of people all the time (which admittedly already is an issue with human assessments/interviews, so lets not make it worse).

[0] https://cantunsee.space/business

ylere··on Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance
The antitrust investigation in this case was launched in May 2019 though.
ylere··on SpaceX Starship SN15 flight test live stream [video]
Looks like the improved raptor engines did the job! Incredible achievement and development timeline.
ylere··on Peter Sunde: dark.fail domain was hijacked through fake court order
dark.fail used to host up-to-date links to many major darknet sites hosted on the tor network. The attacker kept the site online with minor changes and now anyone who visits these links will have the connection go through MITM proxies and their credentials stolen. It's difficult to understand why namecheap hasn't at least shut down the domain after days of this going on.
ylere··on YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability
Is it though? Let's do a very rough estimate: 500 hours of content per minute in 2019, lets say 1 reviewer can review 3 hours of video each hour (by increasing play speed/skipping etc.) and we have a global workforce in lower income countries working 3x 8 hour shifts + weekends. That's 50060/33 = 30000 reviewers, at a monthly cost of $1000 that's 30000100012*7/5 = $504m/year. Youtube had $15b in revenues in 2019, so this represents around 3.5% of revenue. Now this is assuming that we actually need to 100% review every video before releasing it (which is not the case) and one reviewer can probably review more than 3 hours of content per hour with the right AI assistance so the real cost would be quite a bit lower. Even then, spending less than 5% of revenues on content review, moderation and support sounds very reasonable to me.
ylere··on Receiving SpaceX Falcon 9 Telemetry with a HackRF and 1.2m Satellite Dish
People have been running full simulations of SpaceX vehicles just of on-screen telemetry and videos [0]. In the past, SpaceX has been very open towards these kind of efforts, they don't seem to mind at all.

[0] Example for SN9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeBtBidjlvk | https://flightclub.io/result?code=SN91

ylere··on TripSit wiki
To view the site, go to the hosted version: https://dillonjohnbrown.github.io/the-drugulator/
ylere··on I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service
Cool project! Like others noted mail can be such a pain though, you'll need a lot of customers to make it worth keeping it running after the first year.

Note: In the FAQ it says the price is $5/yr, but it seems to be $9.99 now.

ylere··on A TL;DR after analyzing Clubhouse app
I don't get why startups have such horrible security practices so often. It's much harder when you have to improve a legacy application, but these guys started from scratch! Does it really take that much more time to at least follow basic security practices? Even if one wants "to move and break things fast" I don't see how it would take that much more effort...
ylere··on Zsh Tricks to Blow Your Mind
Happy fish+starship user here. Recently all modules where refactored to load lazily: https://github.com/starship/starship/issues/2111 A PR adding full async support is close to being merged, which should fix lag issues for good: https://github.com/starship/starship/pull/2223
ylere··on An experiment in giving cash to recently homeless people [video]
I linked the study below
ylere··on An experiment in giving cash to recently homeless people [video]
They published a impact report with more details about the results: https://forsocialchange.org/s/2020_09_30_FSC_Statement_of_Im...
ylere··on AMD Launches Ryzen 5000 Mobile: Zen 3 and Cezanne for Notebooks
In the posters case, going from their i7-4800mq to a Ryzen 5800u, would result in roughly +50% single core performance while also doubling the amount of cores, resulting in ~3x the performance at 1/3 of the TDP.
ylere··on AMD Launches Ryzen 5000 Mobile: Zen 3 and Cezanne for Notebooks
I really hope there will be more high quality non gaming laptops with good availability. Especially in the upper tier it seems most manufacturers kept their Intel designs (not sure if due to availability, costs of adapting to the AMD platform, pressure by Intel or a combination of these).
ylere··on After raid on Covid whistleblower, it’s revealed password was on FL DoH website
Seems Google has them cached still: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.flo...

These are pretty bad passwords as well, even though I guess it doesn't matter that much if there are no individual user accounts anyways.

ylere··on Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql-databa...

Basic tier, 5 DTUs, 2 GB is listed as ~$4.8971/month or $0.0068/hour on this page. Extra storage would cost more but is not available for the basic tier.

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