1,034 karma · joined August 24, 2018
They explain the fundamental topics of electrical engineering like electricity, circuits, components, communication protocols, signalling and so on in a fun and engagning way. They also sell all of these components with helpful hookup guides. So think of a system you want to make (e.g. conveyor belt), order the components and start building it :)
Once you're comforable these fundamentals you might want to look into the design of control/embedded systems. There are quite a few books on these which you could search online for.
Obviously, manufacturing lines today are built with more robust and established components but the above would probably be a good entry point to help you start understanding how these things work.
You can now drag and drop a markdown file into the editor, write, and download markdown without an account. It also supports math equations and tables, and is fully responsive so you can edit on mobile devices too.
More details here, if you’re interested: https://able.bio/rhett/improving-our-data-portability-and-ma...
Any feedback would be appreciated.
> Then in 2006, it suddenly happened from one day to the next. Jeff Bezos had taken an interest in Basecamp, and Jason and I each sold him a minority, no-control stake of our share of the company for a few million dollars each (Basecamp had been self-funded and profitable from the start, so didn’t need any capital for the venture).
Myself and a partner are building this, here are a few points:
- It's a community to read and write about building things with technology
- Clean, fast and light UX + Markdown editor (https://able.bio/new)
- Bootstrapped with low overheads. No outside investment removes pressure to grow at all costs and the lapse on integrity that we see more of each day.
- No data lock-in. Export your posts in a single JSON file (containing Markdown + HTML versions) accompanied by all images.
- We're finishing up a big set of data portability / data respect features, which we plan to announce soon.
The aim is to build a community of capable people with a genuine interest in technology and attach a job board to the site. Companies can then pay to display their vacancies on the job board and users can take a look whenever they like. No popups, banners or any of that dodgy/spammy crap getting in between users and the reading/writing. In this age we see integrity towards our users as a differentiator.
Building it is fairly straightforward and fun. Some learnings we've gained in terms of 'jumpstarting' it:
- a lot of people are vehemently sceptical after the Medium debacle.
- creating a feed that prioritises good content without "censoring" dev spam or trivial posts is tricky when coming off a smaller user base. For example, upvotes can have outsized effects.
- getting regular volume of good content so that people use Able as source of news/inspiration/learning.
We've had some great posts from people but we need just that little bit more to get the flywheel going. As soon as someone posts something, activity on the site goes up but then dies down again. It's the classic building vs. promoting trade-off. However, we've chosen to get data portability and respect right first as we believe this is fundamental. We're wrapping that up now and then have loads of learnings and ideas we want write about.
We feel that same potential 'renaissance' you're talking about and this is how we want to try and activate it. If you feel inclined, have a look and let us know what you think.
> If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
This is something myself and a partner are working on. Clean UI with a focus on techincal content written in a markdown editor. Any writing about hardware or software is welcome, dev spam gets moderated. We've had a some decent contributors so far but getting the content flywheel going is definitely the hardest part. We're busy fine-tuning a release with updated import/export features and markdown editor updates which will hopefully help attract more people.
I once accidentally ran up a $2.8k bill and after explaining the situation they added a credit to my account to cancel out the charge at the end of the month. They obviously review it case by case but it’s definitely worth a shot.
Been focussing on the markdown editor and finishing up some new data portability (easy import / export of posts) over the last couple of days.
You can try out the editor here: https://able.bio/new
Would appreciate any feedback.
Might be some names you recognise or want to explore.
I also wrote a basic script to rank domains by HN upvotes if you want to distill the list a bit more: https://github.com/RhettTrickett/hacker-news-rank
- Almost all meetings I've been in start with prospective clients mentioning to SAP consultants that SAP has a 'certain reputation'. The SAP consultants acknowledge this.
- Some of the solution pitch ideas they come up with signal they have almost zero knowledge of how some technologies actually work.
- Services we rely on with SAP frequently fail for no apparent reason.
- They are slow and uncooperative with setting up demo environments and responding to support requests.
- Their licences and consulting fees are outrageously expensive considering the lack of quality and performance when compared to alternatives.
- Tech leads in our own company frequently talk about how bad SAP solutions are.
- Their poor UIs are what they are known for in the market. They've tried to address this with things like UI5, Fiori and Fundamentals which feel like too little too late.
- Their attempts at acquiring startups (AI, chatbots, analytics etc) to stay on the edge provide hardly any real value besides propping up the credibility of the buzzwords they cram into their presentations.
Yet SAP remain entrenched in the market and companies still get into bed with them despite knowing the pain they're in for. A lot of system integration companies have tried to attack this market with open source solutions and have failed to make any real dent. The only major player that has started to eat SAPs lunch recently is Salesforce.
Perhaps I'm missing something but surely it would be better for an organisation to have a solution that can be maintained by more than one company so that the company can be replaced if they aren't performing?
The only example I can think of where this is being addressed is the UK's GDS Service Standard which mandates that all government projects should use open source tools to avoid vendor lock-in. It really is perplexing how SAP still maintains its position in today's market.
- Really like the templates. Lots more would be very helpful so that I can build out a presentation quickly without having to fiddle with detail.
- Top toolbar appears crammed when editing text on a laptop. Tried in both Firefox and Chrome. https://imgur.com/a/fZW7oUI
- You could probably cap the number of presentations in the free tier at about 5 before charging (perhaps a cheaper tier without analytics). Presume you're just trying to get the word out for now.
- Once you've got a good foundation it would be nice to start differentiating with more interactive elements.
Great job, though. All the best!
> Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints?
The post suggests searching and hiring outside of the traditional pipeline, which is something that is within control. The comment is then topped off with a strawman argument:
> If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.
50% is clearly a goal that is a long way away but it doesn't mean we cannot work towards it. Yes, it's probably unrealistic to expect anyone to bring 50% representation to a significant sized workforce within an average tenure. It doesn't mean that the pursuit of gender parity is delusional or that meaningful and achievable targets cannot be set.
If anything this top comment is a prime example of the prevailing biased and unwilling attutide to improve representation in the industry, that has been placed on a pedestal.
It will email you a stack trace whenever an error occurs and also keeps a log of them which you can order by frequency and so on. It's an extremely useful service.
When you get bigger and have regular users and need stability then tests start to become important so that you don't break existing things when rolling out new features.
Not having tests comes with a risk though. For example, I once broke our registration flow and didn't know about it for a week. Flipside is we hardly had any users registering at that point. So it's probably a good idea to cover a few of your core user journeys. Hope that helps!
This works pretty well for above the line advertising restrictions in some contries where brands cannot mention competitors in their ads.
It encourages advertisers to focus on promoting their own merits instead of misinformation about competitors.
We chose ProseMirror after doing a lot of research (TinyMCE, Slate, Draft, Medium toolbar) and have been very happy with what it’s enabled us to do so far. We’ll probably write a blog post about it at some point.
Since you know so well what HN is about, you'll know that you should read the content of what is posted and not just drive-by comment based on the title. Then it should have been clear that the post had nothing to do with denying Bangalore as a "real name".
The only agenda was to inform people about something I came across that I thought was interesting. That what a lot of people still refer to as Bangalore has had it's name changed by the Indian government to Bengaluru and that people should probably start using that name.
The title does not say Bangalore is not a 'real name'. That is your intepretation, presumably to justify your argument.
> Respect starts by not forcing pronunciation on foreign languages
Not forcing anything, it was posted as informational. The tone in the link or my comments is not forceful. Your own tone, however? Again, framed justification.
> Edit: Bangalore is called Bengaluru in Kannada. That's about it.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bangalore&t=h_&ia=web&iaxm=maps
https://www.google.com/maps/place/bangalore
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=bangalore#map=12/...
Not just Kannada, all of the above mapping services "actually" recognise Bangalore as Bengaluru. But, if you don't want to do that or take offence to a perspective that differs from yours, that is your prerogative.