nirushiv

Hey HN, we're building Pinbase after years of frustration at previous workplaces trying to:

1) find the right person or team to go to when things broke

2) onboard hires quickly, but instead bombarding them with a stream of links or huge docs that link to tens of other docs.

3) not knowing a valuable doc or dashboard existed or spending hours digging to no avail

4) providing endless support to external teams by sending links on an ad-hoc basis through Slack/Teams. When we tried public-facing docs for our teams, they inevitably went stale because 'out of sight, out of mind'.

We're tackling these four issues by

1) Backlinking - got paged and found yourself on a team's dashbard page? Our browser extension links you back to their Pinbase page (if the've pinned the dash) so you can see who's on the team and leverage the other documentation they've deemed public.

2 and 3) making Pins flat (non-nested) and easily searchable and tagged with, for example, #ramp-up or #oncall. We've found that flatness reduces cognitive load by an order of magnitude, because it gives a source-of-truth that does less deferring to other sources. If you have 10 design docs, pin each of them rather than a Dropbox folder called 'docs', and we make the search good enough to find.

+ making pinning easy (1-click) through our browser extension, so you don't have to break your workflow to pin something that may help a teammate (or yourself) in the future.

4) putting Public and Private Pins on the same page, color-coded, so your team looks at each on a daily basis. If a private Pin (maybe a dashboard for your new service) should be public, they can just drag and drop it to change visibility. Only need your team to know about your #staging stack? Put it under 'Private', because other teams are unlikely to need it.

There are 8 teams currently trying out our product and giving great feedback. If you'd also like to try it out, there is a form on the website to get access (in the next few weeks, based on backlog).

We decided to go with Teams as a startup (usually Slack is the go-to for startup) and it’s been surprisingly good.

They’re not for you. They’re for your manager’s manager to get abstract stats reports

I'm not the author, but he's a member of the same incubator. If any questions come up, I can have him join here.

They were/are also incubated by YCombinator. They’re a darling here, for all the reasons you mentioned, but I also get the impression that they build in a “see what sticks” manner. I’ve found some of their recent announcements neat but not immediately valuable long-term or for non-casual users.

Good suggestion! Thanks

I wish Auth0 was a little more customizable so I can control the sign in views better instead of their default popup. For an mvp it should be fine though

Hold up - Google docs didn’t already use canvas? You’re telling me the existing docs apps is HTML and CSS? That’s a mighty impressive engineering achievement to have gotten it working as well as it does now.

Hey! Where does the 139 apps/user number come from? Not saying it's incorrect, but very curious about the source

> `import shopify` makes an API request.

Especially for a company that prides itself on great API design, this is head scratching.

‘shopify.Init()’ seems like such an obvious solution

Really interested to learn more about how Uber scaled like that. Would you be ok if I emailed you? I’ve been thinking hard about growing teams lately - would love to pick your brain.

From what I see, this is focused on snippets, and you can execute it directly

I really wish the rest of the Reddit site wasn’t so buggy. The search sucks and is unintuitive. The mobile website forces you onto the app, but deep links don’t work 90% of the time.

On both platforms, the site loads so slowly. If you try to delete a post or comment, the operation often fails with no error message. Sometimes you comment, there’s a long pause, then an error message and 2-3 copies of your comment show up. Pages break randomly on the back button. On mobile, login tends to break context - this is a feature even bootcamp projects have now.

I really don’t understand how it’s possible to be so bad after so many years and so much complaining. Conceptually, Reddit isn’t a very complex site. There is a core set of maybe 10 user flows, of which over half are broken on at least one platform.

I understand they’re trying to become hot for VC attention and are trying to monetize (are they profitable yet?)

I actually don’t mind ads on Reddit as they’re generally relevant and clearly marked (minus the shilling, which is an unsolved problem on many platforms). I just wish they’d make the core experience less obnoxious before trying to add these big features.

I didn’t mean to hijack the thread with this rant - it just hurts when the site for a community you really enjoy also sucks to use, and drains the joy out of it.

Hey,

We’re working on a really new approach to this problem (I worked at 7 different companies and ramp-up/oncall sucked every time). Our alpha users really liked the approach we’re taking.

I’d love to give you a demo of what we’re building. Could you shoot me an email (my email’s in my profile)?

This looks awesome! Congrats on the launch. For a financial product like this, what does your tech stack look like? Do you use off the shelf databases to store account balances for example, or is there specialized tech for that? or does the brokerage handle that?

How do you approach security? I’m guessing a lot of work went into it, but some details would be great for a curious customer like me :)

But.. but... they didn’t report significant effects

I was just talking to SO (non-tech) about this! I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing, but it came up because SO and other non-tech friends seemed to be so impressed by my ability to detect edge cases in everyday things.

I am not a “rockstar” engineer - mostly I just tend to think in terms of truth tables, or case coverage because that’s a huge part of my day job.

Why do they consider Square and Paypal dirty companies? Do they support Bitcoin?

Do you need money to fund your startup or have a roof over your head? There’s a difference.

If it’s the second:

Harsh, but whatever you can get. Take care of yourself before your product.

If it’s the first:

As a founder, you want to build towards your first paying customer. Would it be great to have angel investors in friends and family? Yes, but you need a path to profitability. Every hour you spend working a job is an hour you’re more fatigued, following something you’re not passionate about, and not building a product. I think I can answer this question better with some idea of how much money you need, but this is the best I can offer as of now.

I’m working on a tool to onboard new hires faster - initially focused on developers/PMs because that’s the area I know best, but general enough for non-tech employees.

I’ve onboarded at 6 different companies, and each time, spent probably 3 months more than I needed in an ideal setting to onboard. That’s a lot of money down the drain for both the companies and me (opportunity cost).

We’re very close to releasing something, so if you would like to learn more or try it out early, please email me. I’d love to show what we’ve built, and to hear your thoughts. (I think you’ll find our tool helpful if your team has >10 people, but I’d love to chat even if that’s not the case.)

Submitted this as interview details, especially with questions, are rarely shared. Apparently interviewers were OK with this.

ai is the Internet country code top-level domain for Anguilla. I wouldn’t take the endings at face value.

How does this work implementation wise? One private key per application? Per user? Or refreshed on a per-login basis on the first POST?

Right, absolutely. But the pattern of “I’ll say something I may regret next year but I’ll just delete it if I really do regret it” isn’t present.

Thanks for highlight this, though. A lot of people are seeing it for the first time, I bet.

I think they mean that other partnered restaurants get 30%. I could be misreading it though.

There are different types of lies. A lie of commission would be like Grubhub saying “All restaurants are our partners”. The second case (which applies here) is a lie by omission. They are withholding very important information in an intentional way.

Since we’re on the topic of food: It’s like if someone asked, “Hey did you eat the whole pizza?” and you reply “I ate my three slices”. That’s true, except you also ate the other nine slices. Lie of omission.

It’s not bad logic. It’s you failing to recognize a basic tactic used by companies and four year olds and everyone in between.

Dang and many other members put in a lot of work to uphold the culture here. But a lot of it comes down to two things:

- The hacker and academia cultures have historically been welcoming of beginners, eager to share, and open to learn and discuss. They comprise the vast majority of the community.

- Since you can’t delete posts or comments, and can’t edit them after a while, you really do have to think before you speak. Compare this to Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook where being toxic or unconstructive in one corner of the site doesn’t affect your other activities, and can be erased or edited in the face of backlash. This difference changes the dynamics tremendously

I’m hoping we all have a happy, healthy 2021.

2020 was very rough, and the [almost always] insightful projects, debates, and experiences shared here helped me persevere (and sometimes procrastinate!) through the year. Thanks to you all for making this the least toxic “general purpose” online community I’ve found by far.

You’re grasping at a lot of straws here. Showing your business on a globe is pretty old idea. Stripe “ripped off” someone too. Shopify was doing this for cyber monday many years ago.

I also don’t think the ICE and DoD deals are relevant here at all (or to any of Microsofts’s other products)

The simple answer is because Salesforce was willing to pay a ridiculous multiplier - something like 70 times revenue.

Slack came dangerously close to making Dropbox’s mistake of thinking it’s a platform. Sure, you build stuff for Slack, but the API surface for them is tiny. They’re extremely easy to port to other chat platforms.

With Salesforce, they can leverage an experienced - well, sales force - to push Slack, but more importantly, to truly make it a platform for users to more easily interface with Salesforce’s other products.