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Issue #301 - December 15, 2024
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring? and Who wants to be hired? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
Top comment by nspeller
I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
https://www.lightnote.co/
2. Ask HN: What should I do with meet.hn?
Top comment by n144q
The fact that there are only about 30 hackers in NYC says that people don't want to sign up. I am quite sure there are many more than 30 people who saw your post at least once and would be interested.
There is something I don't see other people talking about that likely contributes to this.
I don't want to put my username out there and let people associate me with this username. Many people do, but I don't, and I suspect many other people don't. In fact, this is a throwaway account -- I think the 4th HN account I have. That said, I very much would like to connect with other people offline with my real name.
Why? I have a lot of experience, I read a ton of things on HN and other places and have a lot of knowledge of many things. But I also have strong opinions that other people don't agree with, and may occasionally write those opinions in a not-so-nice way. (I don't find that necessarily a problem -- that is what Internet is for, and I should have a bit more freedom than what I say or how I say things at my company, especially criticism). In addition, I do want to hide my identity here, so that people don't dox me when they don't like what I said (I can guarantee you that happened), or people who know me IRL can associate me with this account based on things that I say.
I share a lot of knowledge in my comments, and run knowledge sessions at my company. I would love to network with people. But I don't see myself signing up on meet.hn -- I'll go with meetup.
3. Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?
Top comment by pwg
https://kno.wled.ge/
Many 'effects' already prepackaged. Plus the ability to schedule time based changes (on/off/change pattern/etc.). Includes a web server to provide "app like" control over a phone or PC. Also includes integrations for several "home control" systems and a http API for programmatic control from another system. Can even synchronize plural controllers into a whole 'net' (note, I've not used this feature yet).
Small ESP32 boards (with wifi capability) such as this example (no affiliation, just an example that works):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Y8X1GK7
WS2811 LED strings [1] (of which there are an infinite variety) suitable for outdoor use. One example (no affiliation):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYZF1WCR
Suitable power supplies, outdoor weather sealed boxes, and wiring (all left to you to locate).
Willingness to assemble the pieces and some time to do so. Having a soldering iron is helpful here, although one could possibly get by with screw terminal blocks inside weatherproof boxes if need be for many of the 'connections'.
[1] Or other 'programmable LED' strings for which WLED is compatible (it works with numerous different programmable LED standards, browse the WLED website for details).
4. Ask HN: Git Alternatives – Sapling vs. Jj
Top comment by IshKebab
There's also Pijul. I have only had a brief play with Jujutsu and I haven't tried Sapling but from what I can see, Jujutsu is definitely the best option if you want to actually get stuff done while mostly maintaining Git compatibility.
Pijul is definitely still in the research prototype phase, and definitely not Git compatible. I don't know how Git compatible Sapling is, but large parts of it are still labelled "Not yet supported publicly, OSS is buildable for unsupported experimentation." It also feels like a VCS that was designed for Facebook and then open sourced, so it is targeted at the use case of "massive company monorepo, and we have 10 guys that run the infra". That's great, because Git is bad at that use case, but it might not be what you want.
5. Ask HN: Does retro computing make you feel younger or older?
Top comment by WoodenChair
I think I can speak to this a bit since I run a hobby business[0] selling restored Mac mini G4s (originally from 2005) with a hacked version of Mac OS 9 on them from Mac OS 9 Lives so that retro computer users (people still using production software for Mac OS 9) can have the fastest possible machine to run classic Mac OS. After selling more than 60 of them, my customers (from what I can tell) are largely in five categories:
- People doing this for their kids so the kids can use the software of their parent's youth (my own motivation that led me to fall into this [1])
- People doing this for work (still using old music production software for example)
- People doing this because they care about historical software (had a couple museum curators buy one)
- People who are tinkerers but want to tinker with software not hardware so they buy from me
- Retro gamers
In all of these cases I don't think it's really about feeling old or young. It's just about doing something that they perceive as better than they can achieve on a modern machine. And by "better" I mean better to them. Not objectively better. They just love those games from the 90s. Or they just think that the educational software back then was less addictive/better for their kids than the software today.
Sure, if we think about anything from our distant past it can make us feel old. But I think it's more that this hobby (or work) actually serves a purpose for these customers and they don't think along the old/young axis.
0: https://os9.shop
1: https://x.com/davekopec/status/1780032912768770448
6. Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
Top comment by freeone3000
That’s the point of generative AI, though, isn’t it? You put in text, you get out an image, no more need for discernment or skill or labor. No amount of explanation of vector math will change the fact that article headers can now be generated from the article, or you can say “give me a spaceman on a planet looking at twin moons” and a Steam game header is generated with some basic cropping. Incidental and corporate art, which is how a lot of professional artists make a living, is in real danger of being automated away.
7. Ask HN: What are your experiences with scaling a company?
Top comment by bootstrpppin
The main learning I took away from growing from 20 to 250ish employees, 1 product to multi-product and 1 geo to multi-country:
As a startup, your speed of execution is a function of your simplicity.
It's about your only advantage over the big players.
Adding employees, adding products, and adding new markets increase your complexity non-linearly. ie. Going to 1 product to 2 products doesn't increase complexity by 2x, it increases it by 4x.
Avoid this complexity if you can: it makes you slow, makes you hire middle management, and makes what could/should be simple decisions, multi-dimensional.
So the lesson: stay as simple as you can for as long as you can.
If you can't stay simple, don't underestimate the exponential drag of complexity.
Hope that's helpful
Top comment by yen223
The sun will disappear on August 12, 2026 over Western Europe, unless the locals agree to give me treasure
9. Ask HN: Why do banking apps care about your phone OS
Top comment by salomonk_mur
Besides the security part, many companies us that data in their Machine Learning models. I've used it myself extensively over the past 10 years in Fintech.
As a small tidbit of information, did you know iPhone users are ~40% less likely to default on a small loan than Android users (at least in my country).
And the differences go all the way to specific models, OS versions, installed apps, IP range, browser of choice...
10. Ask HN: Please recommend university open courses for software design?
Top comment by dotdi
Engineering Software as a Service (pt. 1 and 2)[0] had some of the all-time best ROI regarding time and effort. This is the same course that they taught at Berkeley (recordings from the classroom). It was excellent.
It was exceptionally well done, and taught me things I still cherish to this day. Assignments were graded by automated tests, which is always nice. They provided a VM for a more hassle-free workspace setup.
Unfortunately, it has been discontinued, and I doubt that it can still be followed due to dependencies going out-of-date.
Maybe somebody can weigh in with a more recent course that offers a similar experience.
[0]: https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:BerkeleyX+CS169.1x...