AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

Top comment by lynnetye

Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.com) is a one-woman show (oh hi!). I started Key Values as a side project two years ago, but it quickly turned into my full-time passion and business. I'm doing ~$30k/month and it's almost all profit since I don't have an office or any employees. I recently talked to Courtland of Indie Hackers (already mentioned in the comments) about how I got here: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-va...

I would never have started Key Values w/o Indie Hackers, so I highly recommend you spend some time there. It's a bottomless treasure chest of inspiration.

2. Ask HN: Machine learning resources for audio processing

Top comment by citilife

There's a good class at UIUC regarding signal processing:

https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs598ps/fa2018/material.ht...

Course is led by Paris Smaragdis, one of top researchers in the field of audio processing.

3. Ask HN: I lost my ability to focus for hours on coding. How to regain?

Top comment by MaulingMonkey

There's a lot of factors that might go into this. If you're hungry, sleepy, undersocialized, unkempt, unfit, depressed, in a loud, messy, and distracting office, with unclear and unexciting goals, large monolithic tasks without clear breakdowns on how to move forward, constrained by slow tools, management, or blocked on dependencies... well, it'd be no wonder you wouldn't want to work!

Eat well. Sleep well. Exercise. Dress for success. Socialize, integrate with the team, find the goals that will motivate you - be that helping out your work buddies, or building that sweet new piece of technology.

You want to have energy, health, mood, and motivation. When any of these suffer, your work suffers too.

Don't be afraid to use whatever tools you have at your disposal to cut out distractions and inhibit bad habits, but don't tyrannize yourself either. Working 8 hours straight isn't necessarily your most productive option. Consider scheduling breaks - but use your tools to limit your distractions outside of said breaks. Find a balance that will let you keep your mood up while also getting good work done.

4. Ask HN: How do I improve our data infrastructure?

Top comment by ergest

They built a pipeline that complicated for 100gb? That’s insanely over-engineered! Very typical of engineers who just want to pad their resume at the expense of unsuspecting business people. I’ve worked with single server data warehouses on SQL Server that were 10x in size and served the entire company.

I don’t know what your data looks like, whether it’s just transactional or a combination of transactional and raw server/app logs. You could ETL the raw logs into an RDBMS like Postgres but you have to worry about maintaining it though and it doesn’t sound like you have enough resources for that. To do that you need help from IT/ops to set up a replica of the live server so it can be queried without disrupting transactional operations and then write ETL code or use a service like Stitch or Panoply.

You can also use a cloud platform like Google BigQuery or AWS Redshift to dump raw data in and then create views and table extracts for all the commonly used business functions. That’s still overkill though and a simple RDBMS should suffice.

And if you want to raise awareness see this article by StichFix and the HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312243

5. Ask HN: Most sustainable diet long term?

Top comment by kevas

--READ--

Reading all the comments on this thread is pretty funny.

I was a trainer for many years and the strategy (note that it’s a strategy rather than a diet) that was most successful takes years to complete with the goal of never doing too much at once.

Take the worst thing in your diet. Over the next few weeks, replace it with something slightly better. When your body starts accepting it, move on to the next worst food you consume on your list and repeat the process.

A year or two years down the road, you’ll notice that your entire diet has changed without much effort.

This process isn’t sexy and won’t solve any problems quickly. However, it is aimed at long term change.

As for working out...

To start off, just move around. it doesn't matter. After that starts becoming comfortable, use machines @ the gym that don't require any stabilization on your part--just push & pull. This is because you're not going to be strong. You should be focusing on major muscle groups and that's it when you start out--chest, back, legs. For a few months, just focus on getting your proper form down. Over these first three or so months of working out, even without putting on any further muscle mass, your strength will increase by 20%-30%.

Exercises to do: - Machine Chest Press: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlXTzUUR9AE

- Machine Pull Down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwJeh3QyhVE

- Machine Row: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNUztYbC0G0

- Machine Leg Press: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2KtIZn2vOc

How do you select the weight to use? - Pick something that you can't do more than 20 times the first set.

How many sets: - 3 sets should be good starting off.

How many reps should you do each set? - Up to 20, yet if your form breaks down, stop that set. - Your form is the primary goal at this point.

6. Ask HN: How do you secure your Mac?

Top comment by lukewrites

The thin I do that I think is most important is use Little Snitch (https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html) to track/block/approve incoming and outgoing network requests.

It's how I caught a new Seagate external hard drive making calls to Baidu and Google. https://fosstodon.org/@lukewrites/100907932236227641

7. Ask HN: How do you pay your remote team?

Top comment by scrollaway

Employees don't invoice you, you pay them a salary. Contractors invoice you. If your team is contractors (or you're paying them as contractors for tax/liability/whatever reason), they invoice you and, if you're in the US, you should also ask for a tax form (usually a W8 or W9) based on where their tax residency is.

There's many apps/services to handle your payroll out there. Gusto comes to mind but I've never used it so I don't know what they're like. Some accountants / CFO firms also may handle payroll for you for a fee.

But really, I don't know your situation so ask that question to an accountant. There may be critical details you're not immediately aware of; your accountant will be.

8. Ask HN: How do you secure your Windows PC?

Top comment by hs86

Leave the Defender/Firewall untouched, don't install any additional "security" software and increase the UAC level to the highest one [0] that even prompts for changing important Windows settings.

Obtain all 3rd party tools from the Microsoft Store or scoop [1] or chocolatey [2] (in that order) and not by downloading `foo.msi` from the first search result. This way you can update all your apps in a single step and don't have to rely on built-in updaters.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/identity-p...

[1] https://scoop.sh/ (enable its additional repositories for GUI tools or all possible JDK flavors: https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/wiki/Buckets)

[2] https://chocolatey.org/

9. Ask HN: Do you know of any good product taking advantage of NLP?

Top comment by anthony_doan

Gmail.

It gives suggestion on reply message. I use it a lot.

NLP can be use in informational retrieval such as organizing things into cluster of topics via LDA.

I've met someone with the mindset that AI is a fad and that what have it done so far? I disagree, it may be over hype but I see that person using Siri. I use Hello Google and I consider that to be NLP not the traditional statistic NLP but the deep learning NLP kind.

Also those website translator such as google translator and old school babel translate helped me a lot when I was trying to search for things that were in Japanese. There were a few famous Korean and Chinese novels that are machine translated and it's decent enough to read if you're really into that novel and willing to ignore the quality.

10. Ask HN: Have you ever felt trapped?

Top comment by phmagic

Yes. A lot of comments here is about taking a leap to a new role/company/lifestyle. It isn't always easy to do this and often when I leaped to greener pastures, I found that the new role didn't dramatically improve my happiness.

The things that work for me are to: find ways to be independently happy and take small steps towards that goal.

Find ways to be independently happy. I know it sounds fluffy in a industry of highly motivated and technical folks but detaching your happiness from a single job/company will make you happier in the long term. Work towards improving yourself (exercise, read, meet people who you don't normally interact with - best way is to travel). Do things that humble you, that you're an absolute beginner at.

Sam Altman has "compound self" on his list of how to be successful. I think that's very true. I often overestimate what I can do in the short term and underestimate what I can do in the long term. So take small steps to get to where you want to go and keep at it. Not only will you reach your destination before you know it, you will realize that the destination is just a by product of your journey.

I don't know if this is what you were looking for in your question, but this has worked for me so I thought I'd share.