Hacker News Reader

alonmoweron A cell so minimal that it challenges definitions of life

If you’re interested in this area I highly recommend “The Vital Question” by Nick Lane if you haven’t read it.

The TLDR of his theory is that life originated in alkaline hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, where natural energy gradients could have driven primitive metabolic reactions before the development of DNA.

Book goes into a lot of layperson-accessible detail.

alonmoweron How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

The necessity of higher quality data from vetted experts is why Mercor just raised at 10B

alonmoweron It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

you could say the same thing about a search engine. if they keep an edge on brand or quality they can find ways of monetizing that attention

alonmoweron The problems you'll face developing product onboarding in-house

Author here

I think it really depends. I agree that the prototypical pop something up in your face that forces you to interact with it and blocks your usage of the product make your product harder to use.

But stateful experiences don't inherently suffer from this problem. Checklists, embedded cards, context specific empty states, e.g. can all make products easier to use, and don't get in users' ways. And what someone should be shown should look different if they're in an empty product they need to setup, vs an experienced user that's very familiar with the product. Not treating these distinctly means you're compromising the experience for someone.

I do agree that keeping track of journey state in analytics tools, and getting that data to go to market teams are crucial too, but they won't make your product easier to use.

alonmoweron Lately I've been using timers daily

I gave up the moto when my wife and I started trying for a kid, and this is by far the thing I miss most about it. Instant mental clarity on demand. I bike a lot now but the lower stakes mean it's not quite the same.

alonmoweron Launch HN: Frigade (YC W23) – Faster, better product onboarding

We're taking the same developer-centric approach to onboarding at Dopt and this really is fundamentally different than the existing tools (Userflow, Pendo, Appcues, etc...).

I wrote up some longer thoughts on why their approach breaks down https://blog.dopt.com/dopt-vs-other-tools

alonmoweron Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout

Let's say a small farm or winery employees 20 employees and pays them an average of $50k a year. Holding three months of payroll alone will be over the FDIC limit, let alone other money they'll need to buffer all of their other expenses.

alonmoweron Ask HN: Who needs beta testers?

Thanks for the feedback, we're planning some larger updates to the website so helpful to hear!

We do have an interactive example gallery that we're building out for the reason you call out, would love any feedback you have on them: https://www.dopt.com/examples

alonmoweron Ask HN: Who needs beta testers?

https://dopt.com

Project Description: We’re building a tool to design and run user state machines (we call these ‘flows’). It’s comprised of a shared canvas for modeling and versioning user flows, SDKs for instantiating those flows per user, and a platform to persist user flow state that handles migrating users between versions on the fly.

The SDK gives you hooks to manage state for each node (we call these ‘blocks’) and Dopt handles any side effects, transitioning all dependent blocks for you. Reactivity is also built in: those side effects on the user state graph, along with any others (e.g. updates to user properties or API invocations) are propagated in real time to the SDK.

We started Dopt because we’ve seen teams struggle when trying to build experiences that are contextual to what a user/workspace has done (e.g. product onboarding and education flows). Doing so requires modeling user state graphs in the DB, migrating the schema/data across versions of the graph, tying in product state to state outside of the product, and lots of back and forth with product and design.

What do you want to be tested: We're looking for more folks building with Dopt during our private beta. We're giving the product away for free during this period and cutting discounts for folks that build with us now once we go GA.

Contact: info@dopt.com (or you can sign up for the beta on the website and reply letting us know you found us on Hacker News to skip the line)

alonmoweron Ask HN: Is it a bad time to apply to FAANG companies?

One caution is that later stage private companies that raised big rounds at huge valuations will have a very hard time growing back into those valuations. Options granted have the potential to have high strike prices and limited to negative upside. If you’re getting RSUs it’s less of an issue but you may need to discount a bit from what they tell you they’re worth when you evaluate your offer.

They do have lots of cash though, so you can probably negotiate strong salaries.

alonmoweron Show HN: A tool to design and run user state machines

We’re currently anchoring our messaging around onboarding as a use case. The experiences are highly stateful, but the product itself is a visual flow builder to model the state machines and SDKs that let you reference and manipulate that state while you build. We’re not living at the UI layer at all so while people can build tours with the product, it’s not limited to that.

alonmoweron Show HN: A tool to design and run user state machines

I'm Alon, one of the cofounders at Dopt. Joe, Phil, and I are around if anyone has any questions or feedback!

alonmoweron Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)

Nice, will look into this!

alonmoweron Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)

Nice, I have a pretty similar setup but don't have the reservoir, what are you using for that? My issue is that the CNC uses a drill bit so i get much bigger chunks/dust than the ultra fine particulate i get with the laser/3d printer

alonmoweron The Disappearance of the Ashtray

Roughly half https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3i83rv/til_i...

alonmoweron Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)

The fan is in the enclosure and wasn't strong enough to collect everything but it blew it around and coated everything in the enclosure. It also sprayed it around a decent amount of it outside on the side of our house (vs just venting the gases when using the laser or 3d printer).

I've seen some people set up vacuums that attach to the head so that dust is actually collected (and you get a filter in the vacuum to collect the dust). That seems like a better approach. I don't use the CNC very often so I haven't bothered. For now I just keep the fan off and occasionally stop the job to vacuum up the dust that's been produced with my shop vac.

alonmoweron Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)

I bought a combo laser cutter/3D printer a while back and ended up putting an enclosure around it and a dedicated dryer vent in my garage wall with a blower fan attached to it so the whole thing is at negative pressure. Few hundred dollars an a couple of hours of my life but I feel a lot more confident using it now.

I mostly did this because of the laser cutter (plywood can let out some horrible smells when cut), but it's nice to be able to do it for the 3D printer too. I know PLA is considered 'safe' but I figure better safe than sorry for these kinds of things. Hard to unwind damage that may take a long time to manifest.

The printer also has a CNC but I very quickly learned that I should _not_ run the blower fan when that's running. That was no fun to clean up.

alonmoweron Guitar Effects Guidebook, Vol. 20 [pdf]

Couldn’t agree more. I haven’t kept up with it but back in college I used to make replicas of discontinued pedals as gifts for some of my guitar playing friends. Dirt cheap parts, some fun circuit analysis and modeling, soldering practice, and very happy friends.

alonmoweron Universal flu vaccine against all known subtypes takes promising first steps

Having just got over the hump of a pretty bad flu I picked up traveling over the holidays this can’t come soon enough. I got a flu shot earlier this year so I either picked up a different variant or shudder to think that this experience could have been even worse than it was (three days of 102+ fever).

It’s pretty disheartening to see so many comments here questioning the flu vaccine. So much anecdotal fallacy happening here. I would expect numeracy of this audience to be relatively high…

alonmoweron Bright flash is a black hole jet pointing at Earth, astronomers say

You would be ripped apart instantaneously while everyone outside of the black hole would see the light you emit as you’re crossing the event horizon frozen in time. It’s an optical effect, nothing magical is happening to you as you fall into the enormous mass

alonmoweron Woodworking through the mind of an engineer

The added benefit of arriving it via this path is that getting really handy teaches you a lot of valuable lessons applicable everywhere else in your life (ones that extend far beyond knowing when contractors are taking advantage of you).

e.g. things in the world aren't as permanent as they appear to be, you have agency to change and improve things, taking a step back to take two steps forward is sometimes the right path, etc...

alonmoweron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2022)

Dopt https://dopt.com | Multiple roles | Onsite (Hybrid) | Oakland, CA | Full-Time

We are a seed stage company (raised 5.1M) building a set of APIs and SDKs that help developers build better product onboarding and engagement flows. You can read more about why we started Dopt here https://blog.dopt.com/dopt-raises-a-seed.

We're hiring for developer relations and engineering based out of our Oakland office (hybrid, at least two days in the office per week).

We're a TypeScript and Go shop. The closed-source bits live in a polyglot monorepo that leverages yarn workspaces heavily. We support local and dockerized development to provide a first-class developer experience regardless of what you develop on Mac or Linux. Our platform is built on NodeJS, React, PostgreSQL, and OpenAPI.

We're offering generous equity, 10-year exercise windows, and the option to early exercise to everyone. We think this is the most flexible and inclusive approach! We've also pledged 1% of our company's equity to charity through pledge1percent.org

More details on our careers page: https://www.dopt.com/careers

If you're interested in learning more you can email careers@dopt.com

alonmoweron New motorcycle lighting design could save lives

As the article points out single headlights are extremely hard to gauge the speed/distance of at night. I believe turning in front of a motorcycle having misjudged its distance/speed is one of the leading causes of deadly accidents, so improvements to lighting that help solve this would be huge.

alonmoweron US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

It feels like we're in a momentary slow down but there's still so much potential for software to be applied to problems to increase efficiency. Taking a step back from the current economic cycle makes me feel like there's so much more room left to grow

alonmoweron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2022)

Dopt https://dopt.com | Multiple roles | Onsite (Hybrid) | Oakland, CA | Full-Time

We're hiring for developer relations and engineering based out of our Oakland office (hybrid, at least two days in the office per week).

More details on our careers page: https://www.dopt.com/careers

If you're interested in learning more you can email careers@dopt.com

alonmoweron Ask HN: Onboarding as a service startup idea? Please help evaluate

Send me a note (my email is in my profile). I can get you access this week.

alonmoweron Ask HN: Onboarding as a service startup idea? Please help evaluate

This is pretty much what we’re building at Dopt (dopt.com). A user adoption platform built for devs and PMs. We’re a visual flow builder that lets you define the logic and targeting of your flows with APIs and SDKs that let you build with your own UI components.

We’ve seen a ton of discontent with the existing tools as you mention (they’re brittle, don’t match the brand, force you to use a limited set of modalities).

We’ve seen a lot of companies forgoing them to go the route of building their onboarding flows themselves, but then they’ll run into another set of issues (logic/targeting/state management is complicated and hard to build/iterate on, non devs struggle to understand what users will actually see).

As you mention it makes it hard to move quickly and test experiences, which is what you need to do if you want to figure out what works for your product and users.

alonmoweron DALL·E Now Available Without Waitlist

They do, at least to the degree they can, while not being outcompeted by other plumbers. Source: one just quoted me 350 to swap out a faucet

alonmoweron Show HN: I created a library to create product tours / walkthroughs

Here's the thing: if done right it can have a _massive_ impact. One onboarding experiment I ran in a past life doubled trial activation.

Trouble is that lot's of people do onboarding poorly. What you and the parent comment call out is a failure mode: to build effective onboarding you need to understand who you're building it for and what they're trying to accomplish. A tooltip tour approach might be effective for certain kinds of products/users/use cases, and extremely ineffective for others.

What I've seen be most effective (at least for B2B SaaS products):

1) tailoring the experience so people are being onboarded in ways that are relevant (e.g. their role, are they the first user or nth user, their use case/job to be done, how familiar they are with the domain/similar products, etc...) and

2) do>show>tell: get people to use the product to learn how it works vs plastering signs all over it. Which modalities are most effective is product/user/context dependent.

Source: I've been responsible for onboarding at a few SaaS companies now (and am now building a platform in the space)

alonmoweron France experiencing worst drought on record

Ya the original is a good example but that's probably still too apocalyptic, one can watch that and scoff saying "it'd never get that bad".

Stuff that's more focused on the immediate, painful changes but still in line of sight from our current reality. Children of Men did a pretty good job pulling some subtle "here's how society has changed for the worse" world building in (obviously all based on it's underlying premise that no more children are being born)