Hacker News Reader

kashnoteon Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced

Aaand I got a 404 after you subscribe and get redirected to gemini.google.com. Nice job Google

kashnoteon Delete or hide life-wasting apps

One thing that helped me get rid of all of these time-wasting apps was deleting them from my phone, but allowing myself to use the app’s website. It only took a few days for that small bit of friction to make me want to avoid the apps altogether. I did this with all my social media apps a while ago and eventually deleted the accounts.

I recently had to do this with YouTube because YouTube Shorts were getting very addictive. I still use YouTube on my computer, but my overall usage is significantly down.

kashnoteon Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

Over Covid, I got really into solving the Rubik’s cube. I couldn’t find any minimalistic apps to help me time myself and learn algorithms. So, I ended up writing an app for myself, which I later showed off on Reddit.

People really seemed to like the design, so I cleaned it up a bit and made it available to everyone. The site (https://cubedesk.io) has been free to use for 3 years and has 50k users.

Most recently, I've been working on an email marketing platform to help me email those 50k users. I noticed that emailing all those people was expensive and tedious, so created and launched https://cc.dev

kashnoteon Full Resolution Photo Archive

So weird how so many people are complaining here. These are some stunning photos. Thanks for making them available.

Not sure what the upload limit on Unsplash is, but that’s where I share my photos so that they can be downloaded for free. Maybe try uploading them there?

kashnoteon Amazon acquires Fig

Slow. Clap.

kashnoteon NASA mission to a $10k-quadrillion asteroid is two months from launch

It’s just $10 quintillion. Not sure what they wrote it out like that…

kashnoteon Show HN: I made Grammarly for accessibility code violations

This looks nice! I've heard of companies getting sued for accessibility violations. Pricing seems reasonable compared to a lawsuit.

Seems like there are 3 rules you guys are checking for right now. What's next? Also would be cool to see something like AI generated img alt text for user-uploaded images.

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

It’s listed on the Data page! No need to open the database up to the whole internet. Just whitelist one IP.

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

EmailOctopus looks really nice! If I have a fraction of the success you guys seem to have, I'd be very happy haha

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

Amazing points, thanks so much! Totally agree with you on the docs. I'll definitely look into creating some sort of agent (or some other solution), but I agree that some docs explaining everything will ease the minds of those who are on the fence.

Hm interesting point on the open sourcing and monetization. I've been thinking a lot about this and still not sure if it's wise to open source it. I definitely want to generate revenue from this. Perhaps going open source would be detrimental to that.

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

Emails are sent using your own AWS SES account, which will handle all of that. No real concern of people sending spam because they would be damaging their own SES reputation.

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

The service is technically ready for use and I've already sent several thousand emails with it, but I have the Beta tag on there for now just to tell people that it's new and to reach out if they want to chat about their specific use cases before proceeding.

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

I haven't added link tracking yet, but it's on my list. To be honest, I'm hesitant to add open tracking because it always felt a bit creepy to me and also plenty of email clients are blocking them nowadays, so they're becoming useless.

As for the data question, when you create a campaign, the following gets stored for each email that will get sent:

- email address - JSON blob of the required variables that exist in the subject and body of the email (ex: {first_name: "John"}

That's pretty much all the data that will be stored in our database which is sourced from your database. This data is stored for 30 days then removed, but I'd like to make this be configurable.

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

The target market is someone who

1. is tech-savvy and runs an app/service with a bunch of users

2. has tried existing emailing platforms and feel that they're too expensive

3. wants full freedom of who they target their emails to

A tech-savvy person could make their own solution, and that's what I wanted to do with my site CubeDesk, but it's surprisingly difficult and time-consuming, which gave me the idea for this service.

The English -> SQL thing is just a fun feature I added since I'm excited about LLMs. Comes in handy for folks who aren't SQL experts (like me).

Totally agree on the security concerns. That seems to be the main feedback in this thread and will be my main focus going forward!

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

Definitely taking all the security measures I can, but you're right, things can go wrong. I do encourage (and would like to enforce) that db credentials provided should have very limited read access to only the tables/columns that the user wants to query.

Having said that, it's totally understandable that some orgs won't want do open up their db. The idea with going open source would be that they can host the platform in their VPC so that their data is never leaving the premises.

Not against having an SDK or API at all, but I would need to think about would work because the whole syncing issue is one that I'm focused on addressing here.

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

Woah cool! I actually hadn't heard of this. Would be cool if I can integrate this into the platform. Been thinking of adding other backends like Sendgrid and Resend.

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

Yup! On the Data page there's an Unsubscribed list where you can import unsubbed emails. And you can include [[unsubscribe]] anywhere in an email template and that will be replaced with an unsubscribe link which the user can click.

kashnoteon Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

Very legitimate concern and one I've been thinking about a lot. Honestly, I think the best way to address this is to just go open source, which I'm totally open to. I think once I've validated the idea a bit and know it's something people are interested in, I'll focus on this issue and come up with a solution (whether it's open sourcing or something else)

kashnoteon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://kg.dev/thoughts

Haven't written anything in a little bit, but planning on putting up a new post soon.

kashnoteon Ask HN: Is GitHub down?

Are these status pages updated manually? At the very least it should be able to detect that the home page doesn't even load and turn itself red.

kashnoteon Tell HN: The “Y” logo in the top-left corner has been upgraded to SVG

This the most HN string of replies I've seen. Cheers haha

kashnoteon Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

Idk if this counts but I built myself a Rubik's cube timer and eventually made it public:

https://cubedesk.io

It was a weekend project which I used for several weeks before sharing it on Reddit. The feedback was so good I decided to make it public.

kashnoteon OpenAI to discontinue support for the Codex API

Imagine your laundry and dryer unit both break. Sure, you can wash everything by hand and hang dry, but I’m assuming most people are going to scramble to get it fixed instead of throwing up their hands and going back “to the old way”

kashnoteon OpenAI to discontinue support for the Codex API

I think the problem will be context and token limit size. Right now, GitHub Copilot uses the current file “and related files” as context. But if you have several thousand files, even GPT-4 won’t be able to handle that. Either you need to cleverly know exactly which files to feed in for context or have a very very high token limit size.

kashnoteon Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

Lots of people saying that a programmer's job is more than just writing code, and I agree. But consider this:

You give ChatGPT-58 some startup idea and ask it to incorporate the company, build the software, do the marketing, etc. It starts doing a pretty good job. It's in charge of the whole system, so it doesn't need human intervention to give it context. The company grows and is making $1M/yr. It has now replaced 10 potential jobs in the market.

I feel like that's the worry many folks have. It's a pretty dystopian view of the future but if you can make $1M/yr and not have to pay any employees that money and all you had to do was pay OpenAI about $100/mo, would you not do that?

kashnoteon What does Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse mean for the financial system?

They actually sent out an email about 2 hours ago:

Hello,

Silicon Valley Bank was taken over by the FDIC [0] today, Friday March 10th. We’re monitoring the situation closely and it saddens us to see the closure of a bank that partnered with many of you.

If you’re impacted by the SVB closure and need to open a new bank account, we are here to guide you through it.

Choosing a banking partner

- We’ve worked with startup-friendly banking partners like Mercury (mercury.com/partner/atlas) and Novo (novo.co/a/stripe-atlas) to get Stripe Atlas companies priority access to signing up.

- You can also choose to use any bank such as JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or PNC, and often your personal bank offers business services.

kashnoteon If I died tomorrow, how long would my webapp keep running?

Also, all of the eyes are in the same exact position in all of the pics.

kashnoteon Tell HN: I got my first open source PR after 5 months

Yup! Plus two others by him.

kashnoteon Show HN: IngestAI – NoCode ChatGPT-bot creator from your knowledge base in Slack

Probably gonna get downvoted for this but people on HN take the Privacy Policy of brand new websites way too seriously.

This is probably some template they downloaded from the web, not some sly document they had their nefarious lawyers put together.

kashnoteon Launch HN: Depot (YC W23) – Fast Docker Builds in the Cloud

This looks interesting! Congrats on the launch. Question, though, why is it asking for credit card information for the free tier? Would be nice to try it first without giving my card info.