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abuehrle

151 karma · joined September 21, 2013

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abuehrle··on I Want You to Understand Chicago
In the northern suburbs of Chicago, we often hear helicopters circling. A gardener was taken on my block. The home owner told the masked agent he didn't have permission to be on his property, and the agent pointed a gun at him.

If you suspect anything is exaggerated, you can look to dozens of videos posted online of how these people act and speak. They roll in caravans of unmarked SUVs. Last week they rolled up to an elementary school (https://www.reddit.com/user/rubinass3/comments/1ol319f/ice_d...).

[Here](https://x.com/LongTimeHistory/status/1986936912134000877) is a particularly hard to watch video of ICE tackling a nonverbal man.

Things feel bad to me in a way (I suppose I'm fortunate to be able to say) they haven't until now. I normally can see the "other side" of issues but I can't fathom how this is what anybody wants. I'm angry and I'm sad.

If there's a silver lining, the community is fired up. The mayor of Evanston talked with an awesome woman who was detained while peacefully protesting (https://danielbiss.substack.com/p/daniel-biss-talks-with-det...). It's a weird and sad time.

abuehrle··on Changing Directions
The person you replied to only commented about burnout, not about who deserves healthcare.
abuehrle··on The collapse of companies like SVB is triggering demand for corporate merch
Because homeless people wearing their company’s merch, in your minds, would further degrade the company’s image? Or something else? I’m an anonymous internet stranger, but I invite you to think about what you’re actually saying, and whether it reflects true views you wish to hold.
abuehrle··on Bezos, Gates, Zuck, Behind every “self-made” millionaire is a father with money
We search for universal, objective, pithy summaries of messy, complicated situations. Both of the following seem to be true:

1. It would be effectively impossible for someone from a disadvantaged background to start Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook.

2. Bezos, Gates, Zuck are extraordinary business people who achieved what 99.9% of their peers would be unable to achieve from the same starting point.

I'm not sure why we keep debating whether these guys are good or bad, impressive or not, as some sort of universal truth.

abuehrle··on Supabase Wrappers: A framework for building Postgres foreign data wrappers
Thanks for the reply. I'll flesh out my thought process in case it's helpful. My immediate reaction was excitement about the abstraction. An example use case is joining my users to their corresponding Stripe Customers in SQL. The kinds of queries I can reasonably write depend on implementation details of the connector. For example, if Stripe has a bulk customer lookup (list of customer IDs -> Customers), and the connector uses it, I can estimate I'd be able to query on the order of 500 Users at a time in a performant way. But if the API only supports looking up one customer at a time, that 500 User query kicks off 500 API requests, which isn't going to work.

You're right -- it's not unexpected -- maybe more like a leaky abstraction.

abuehrle··on Supabase Wrappers: A framework for building Postgres foreign data wrappers
Sorry I couldn't figure this out from the docs, but Stripe data is queried "live" from Stripe, right? The abstraction is great, but won't this lead to unexpected N API calls when joining across my domain + Stripe?
abuehrle··on Stripe’s real pricing: a primer
It's funny to observe the tide shift against Stripe on HN in recent years. I think they are a phenomenal, once in a generation company. Their APIs are beautiful (still, even though fewer people agree these days) and the use cases that can be built upon those APIs are endless and amazing. I always felt the pricing was a steal for what the product delivered.

Their support, on the other hand :(. ! Maybe it will get better with advances in LLMs, because I'd be shocked if I was ever talking to a human.

abuehrle··on Job switchers are earning a lot more than those who stay
Do you mean "heel"?
abuehrle··on Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs
This looks cool. Congrats on the launch and progress so far!

As one piece of feedback, the docs could be better. For example, at https://docs.tryvital.io/api-reference/data/workouts/#stream, I see "Get Daily Activity for user_id", but the endpoint seems to actually return time series data for a single workout. I see a bunch of oversights of this flavor.

Similarly, I'm not sure how pagination works or should work. In one list query, I see a result set of size 100. I'm not sure whether this is because only 100 items were pulled from the provider, or whether I can see more using pagination. Maybe this is in the docs, but I haven't seen it.

It would be good to have some provider-specific documentation to answer questions are set expectations around things like 1) how much historical data is available 2) details about the integration and its stability. For example, I assume with Peloton you are logging in with my credentials and using their internal API. Is this against their terms of service? Is there a risk of this breaking if they change their internal API, which obviously doesn't have the same governance considerations a public API would?

Nice work overall!

abuehrle··on Ask HN: Honest thoughts on no-code or low-code solutions?
I find it hard to evaluate "no code" as a monolith. In some cases, if you can't think like a programmer, the fact that your "code" doesn't look like "code" isn't going to help you. However, (having clicked through to your twitter), I am familiar with Courier, and agree it is brilliant[1][2].

[1] No affiliation

[2] I've built complex notifications systems myself and think Courier is a beautiful solution for coders and non coders alike.

abuehrle··on Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
That's for usage, but aren't auth requests going to Kable too?
abuehrle··on Launch HN: Rownd (YC W22) – Add authentication and accounts to any website
Hey Colin

> We also support auth across N subdomains

I read this to mean you support a session on a.domain.com being valid for b.domain.com -- but you still don't support the same email address tied to different users at different subdomains, correct?

abuehrle··on Launch HN: Rownd (YC W22) – Add authentication and accounts to any website
Nice launch. How does this compare to clerk.dev?
abuehrle··on Launch HN: Rownd (YC W22) – Add authentication and accounts to any website
FYI your API docs page (https://docs.rownd.io/apiandsdks/#/rest) linked from the footer is throwing 500s.
abuehrle··on As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support (2017)
Interesting. I've had the opposite experience. Stripe is my favorite company, and I look to them constantly as inspiration for how to do things in my business, but their support is comically bad -- wrong, clueless, and, in some cases, actively misleading.

The developer chat room is awesome and helpful. Maybe that's what you're talking about?

abuehrle··on Europe's all-time heat record set in Sicily at nearly 120 degrees
Surely the publication's location and readership are the salient factors, and not the article's topic? Or should the article be in Italian because it is about Italy?
abuehrle··on Flat Data
This is really cool! I would have liked to have incorporated this into my vaccine appointment slot finder tool a few months ago. I like using git commits for change tracking too. Seems not dissimilar (though not identical) to what they're doing at Dolt (https://www.dolthub.com/).
abuehrle··on Launch HN: Finmark (YC S20) – Financial planning software for startups
I have mixed feelings about pricing that scales with revenue. Most pricing ends up working this way, but at least when it's expressed as seats or usage it's a bit easier to justify the price tag. Revenue scaling pricing reads to me as "We'll give you the same thing, but you're making more, so pay us more." I simultaneously understand it, and it feels dirty to me, hence the mixed feelings.
abuehrle··on I sold Baremetrics
Congrats! Sounds like a good outcome. From what I've read (my understanding may be wrong), using a revenue multiple at all for valuation is surprising for companies A) under $5M total valuation and B) with lower growth rates (looks like Baremetrics grew ~11% in the last 12 months). Can someone who knows better than I weigh in on the valuation math here (in general -- no one knows the exact details of this transaction, obviously). I'm not questioning it, but I am curious to get perspectives on this real world example.
abuehrle··on Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
How will it work if multiple vaccines are approved and similarly effective? Does that allow us to roll out vaccinations more quickly, or are there shared bottlenecks in the supply chains? Would individuals get whichever is available in their city first, or are there other factors at play?

Apologies if this is answered somewhere else in the comments!

abuehrle··on Launch HN: Artifact (YC S20) – Personal podcasts with the people in your life
I love this. I've wanted this to exist for years but never did anything with it, so I'm thrilled you have. Can you say more about the marketplace of interviewers? How do you recruit them? How are they vetted? How does matching work?
abuehrle··on Indie.vc: Unicorns Are Out, Profits Are In
Once you're already profitable, it's probably not that attractive. I've explained it to myself in the past by thinking about the would-be founder who's bootstrap-inclined, but who'd rather "go for it" now rather than doing nights and weekends for 18 more months before quitting their job. This person might not want or have access to traditional VC, and wouldn't be able to get a traditional loan. If all goes according to their plan, when that 18-36 months is up, they've paid back this "really expensive" loan and own 100% of their now profitable company.
abuehrle··on Notion for everyone
I just checked out Outline. It seems strange that the landing page example is lifted straight from Stripe's docs[1] with "Stripe" replaced by "Acme".

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks#what-are-webhooks

abuehrle··on Mark Zuckerberg Has Quietly Advised Pete Buttigieg on Campaign Hires
Do you have evidence to back up the assertion that his positions have shifted in response to polling? The example I often see is his "Medicare for All who want it" plan which I responded to below (in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21315147).

From the beginning he stated his campaign would first lay a foundation of ideals, then build policies from there. In my view, that's what he's done over the last 9 months.

I have no connection to the campaign, but I'm sure someone reading does. Can you say more about what has turned you off recently?

abuehrle··on Mark Zuckerberg Has Quietly Advised Pete Buttigieg on Campaign Hires
Here he is in February, before officially announcing his campaign. https://ask.peteforamerica.com/K6A-udFnfq4/2878

It's worth watching the entire answer, but the relevant quote is, "In the case of Medicare for All, which is where I think we need to go, I think the way to do it, by the way, is to make some version of Medicare available on the exchanges as a sort of public option, invite people to buy into it, and if people like me are right -- if it's going to be better and more efficient -- then that's going to be a very quick pathway to Medicare for All, and if we're missing something, we'll find out the hard way and fix it."

I'm interested to see any information you have showing an inconsistency, as I've been following him since probably January and have only heard him talk about this approach and implementation.

abuehrle··on Mark Zuckerberg Has Quietly Advised Pete Buttigieg on Campaign Hires
His proposal has been consistent since day 1. He sees "Medicare for All" as the desired end state. "Medical for All who want it" is the glide path to get there.
abuehrle··on Mistakes on Our Way to $88k in Revenue
One other reason to choose a C-corp over LLC is QSBS if plan to sell your company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429286

abuehrle··on DoorDash confirms data breach affected 4.9M customers, workers and merchants
I received the email. I'd asked them to delete my account 6 months ago, and they confirmed at the time they'd "deactivated" it. I guess that wasn't enough to protect me. As an American developer, GDPR seemed like a pain at first, but more and more I wish we had something similar.
abuehrle··on Qualified Small-Business Stock rule helps Silicon Valley workers save millions
Does anyone have insight into whether QSBS could go away in the foreseeable future? We're not interested in selling our small SaaS business now, but will in the next 2-10 years. It would be a shame to miss out on this.
abuehrle··on How I Work from Anywhere in the World
I wouldn't touch Karma with a 1,000 foot pole if I were you. They lie to customers and change terms and limits on existing customers. I, and many others, returned our devices nearly a year ago and have still not received refunds. The company's response when pressed for updates on refunds seems to be "shrug, we'll do it when we do it."

Don't take my word for it. Better Business Bureau: http://www.bbb.org/new-york-city/business-reviews/internet-a...

Plus dig into comments on their facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/getyourkarma/?fref=ts

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