panorama's comments

panorama | 1 year ago | on: Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021)

That's a good point, and I completely agree. It's not that I was seeking fame or attention, but rather I wanted to put out ideas and find like-minded people (in my case, saas founders/"indiehackers") to talk shop with. Even if it were just a couple people each time, that would be plenty, but I still felt that was beyond reach.

Even this HN reply thread alone is more engagement than I would normally get on social media ;). I'm not saying this to complain, I'm okay with it and it's just the nature of the internet with all its noise. But to get back on topic, I can totally see why people don't choose to maintain a blog as much anymore.

panorama | 1 year ago | on: Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021)

Sure, I do journal for myself and do a lot of in-person teaching/coaching, but presumably the original article is geared towards those who still choose to write publicly, which I now rarely do.

No offense taken, but I had been blogging _way_ before my marketing tech startup (which itself is almost a decade old). It's not so much about the metrics, it's that there are far higher-leverage things I can do than publish articles that only a handful of people will ever see.

panorama | 1 year ago | on: Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021)

As much as I enjoy writing and teaching, it feels like a fruitless endeavor when your content doesn't get any visibility. I've written on Twitter, Bluesky, and self-hosted my own blogs (I've even been front-paged on HN before), and each time I give up eventually because it's so hard to build a consistent readerbase.

Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about. But the point is, I don’t blame people for posting on Twitter instead of going through the effort of setting up a blog. The vast majority of written content gets little to no reach, so choosing the platform with the lowest barrier to entry makes the most sense.

panorama | 1 year ago | on: 1% Equity for Founding Engineers Is BS

I have some fairly basic questions:

1. What happens if an employee loses access to the wallet their company-ownership-tokens are on? Is it just a matter of re-emitting new tokens and distributing it to them? How are the old tokens handled (e.g. if the wallet is found at a later point in time)?

2. Could you ELI5 how you correlate the company value with token value?

3. Presumably, if everything works out, this allows your team (as well as anyone else) to sell their ownership tokens at any point, but also buy others' tokens that are available on the market as well right? I can see a few issues with this including insider dealing (some people having earlier access to great/awful news before others and making token transactions based on that).

I think it's an interesting idea but I think there are a lot more details that I'd like to see ironed out based on the little that's in the doc (that also has public-write access on it for some reason)

panorama | 1 year ago | on: Station of despair: What to do if you get stuck at end of Tokyo Chuo Rapid Line

Seems most people in this thread are on roughly the same page, but here's an anecdote to give you an idea of why people are specifically comparing to the west:

Just today I was walking home from Nakameguro station in Tokyo and saw an orphaned protein bar wrapper on the street. I was shocked, it was the first time I'd noticed obvious trash (most likely not intentionally littered) on this street in years.

While living in Manhattan last year, I grew accustomed to holding my nose when walking past actual piles of garbage strewn about the street. This is not figurative as most people have used this phrase throughout this thread—You simply leave your rotting garbage on the street for trucks to pick up (obviously stray trash would get picked up by the wind and tossed into the air, descending upon Manhattan en masse). Only starting last November did they start using actual trash bins.

There was even a day when I saw multiple public garbage cans lit on fire and kicked into the street (in Chelsea, a fairly nice Manhattan neighborhood). Could you possibly imagine that happening anywhere in Tokyo? It would be news coverage for a week.

For all the nuance and exceptions one has to go out of their way to find when talking about trash in places like Tokyo and Singapore, it's unbelievably ages ahead of New York City, the richest city in the world.

panorama | 1 year ago | on: Macrodata Refinement

One of the best things I've ever seen and I watch quite a lot of TV and film. I'm really only making this comment so that a passerby will see this abundant confluence of support for the show and decide to try it out on a whim. Just a fantastic absurdist, surrealist comedy that's also well-acted and well-written.

panorama | 1 year ago | on: Hacker News for Gamedev

This is neat, but I was wondering if anyone has a forum for discussing game product development (i.e. less the code that goes into game dev, moreso the decision making that goes into making quality games, is there a better name for what I'm referring to?)

panorama | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2023)

MightyScout | Growth Marketer | REMOTE | Full-time | https://mightyscout.com

MightyScout is a bootstrapped and successful B2B SaaS in the Influencer Marketing space. We've been fully remote and profitable since we founded it in 2016 and we're an engineering and product-led organization. We help brands and agencies save time by offering a full-suite of automation tools to solve the trickiest, most tedious parts of the influencer marketing workflow.

Edit: Previously this post mentioned an infrastructure/ops role but we've filled that position.

We're also looking for our first growth marketing hire who wants to apply their creativity at a SaaS with greenfield opportunities.

Apply by contacting me (the founder) at kevin@[the root domain] about what gets you excited about your field of work, a bit about your previous working experience, and we'll chat from there :).

panorama | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

I run a successful SaaS and while we have 2 engineers including myself, sometimes there are issues that are outside of my skill level (usually devops or db-related) or just aren't worth it for me to deal with on my own. I would likely pay 3 figures a month (maybe low 4?) just to have the privilege to field technical questions a couple times per month and ensure I can get good advice/help quickly.

It's not that I don't have developer friends, it's moreso that I respect their time and would rather not bother them for tech problems related to my business. I would love to pay for help, but at the same time my friends would never accept my money, so you can see my dilemma. I've used codementor.io in the past but there's a lot of friction in terms of finding a developer/posting a "job", scheduling a time with them, and so on. I'd like to just field these questions into a discord group, feel zero guilt/shame about it, and feel like someone smart will be able to help me within a reasonable time frame.

Of course, whoever figures this out would need to figure out how to balance the costs and the scope of the problems (i.e. I obviously wouldn't be able to have someone just rewrite my entire app), but for example here are some things that I've recently had questions about that I would love to have solved for me that vary in difficulty:

- What CSS do I need to write for me to get these boxes to look this way given that the widths/heights can be variable? (css questions)

- Figuring out what is going on with node-sass and later versions of Webpacker preventing me from compiling assets. (js problems)

- I have no idea how to do this query in an effective manner, here is my data model, can someone help me write an ActiveRecord or SQL query for this? (DB-related questions)

- We have a massive performance bottleneck in this part of the app, here is the business context of why we did it this way, but also why it ended up being really bloated, I'd like some help talking through a better way of fetching and serializing this data for the frontend. (performance problems)

- Our site is going down intermittently and nginx is giving me weird errors (devops problems).

- Here's a feature we want to implement, what do you think is the best way to execute this in terms of tools, packages, and so on? (general consultative questions)

I know these questions on HN are usually fishing for some 100% automated software solution, but after 5 years of building SaaS, this is the one recurring problem I've had.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not looking to hire a consultant specifically, but rather that I think something like this can be productized if someone were ambitious enough to want to assemble this sort of marketplace.

panorama | 4 years ago | on: How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder

This tactic is exactly how I found our idea.

Of course you won't strike gold on the first person you talk to. Be smart about it, talk to people who work in an industry you would like to serve (doctors, lawyers, marketers, mechanics, etc.) and figure out the inefficiencies in their day to day life. It's not as hard as you've made it out to be.

panorama | 4 years ago | on: Remote OK Open Startup

Slightly off-topic but it was Pieter's dashboards like these, specifically the robots downtime grid, that inspired to build my own internal metrics and status dashboard for my SaaS. I have beautiful 3rd party UIs for superfluous stuff like my stock portfolio, why not my own business's data? It's one of those things that can take some time to build and doesn't add much value for customers at first, but delights me each time I visit it. And now that I've started measuring a bunch of different stuff, it has ultimately translated into indirect better user experience because I spot anomalies earlier.

panorama | 4 years ago | on: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history

I'm glad to hear you think we should refer to people by their chosen pronouns! Perhaps there's some woke to you after all? ;)

I still would love to hear how you think people should refer to you, especially if you have not asserted your own pronouns. It seems, in reference to you, this is a classic, centuries-old case of singular 'they' being perfectly acceptable.

panorama | 4 years ago | on: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history

It is curious to me that it seems okay to defer to the author's assumption that Satoshi is a singular person, while at the same time denouncing how they refer to that person. You are okay with one uncertain assumption but not another. I think if you are willing to defer to the author here that benefit of the doubt should extend to the rest of their writing.

However, if we assume that Satoshi is a singular person, how do you suggest we refer to pseudonymous individuals whose gender and identity are unknown? Again, is it acceptable that I insist on referring to you as she/her without knowing who you are?

Assuming that it is the chosen, gendered name-on-the-internet that matters, if I were born biologically male but then undergo a sex change procedure and then and adopt a feminine name like Jane Smith in my work, would it be acceptable in your eyes to refer to me as she/her by default? Surely in this case, he/him or they/them would be unacceptable, if I follow your logic correctly.

panorama | 4 years ago | on: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history

You've "made stuff up" about entire languages in your previous reply. I am struggling to find more ways to explain that, in English, it is acceptable to refer to unknown quantities or identities of people with "they" and "them".

"My bank denied my loan application again, I can't believe them!" - Correct - Unknown, amorphous entity, regardless if the rejection was specifically caused by a man or woman or otherwise.

"temp8964 replied to me on HN again, she's quite persistent." - Incorrect - Without knowing who you are, is it still acceptable for me to blindly assert that you must be a woman and doing otherwise is wrong?

panorama | 4 years ago | on: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history

An author on the internet has adopted a writing style that you're clearly uncomfortable with, it's not grounds for disparaging the author.

Your individual politics don't matter here, it is a technology article that happens to use a pronoun for an unknown entity which is entirely acceptable in common parlance. No one is clamoring that he/him is unacceptable, but to disparage people for their choice of expression in writing feels awfully similar to what the anti-woke crowd claim the woke do.

Additionally, plenty of languages use non-gendered pronouns.

panorama | 4 years ago | on: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history

Because Satoshi's identity and whether or not they were a singular individual or a group of individuals is unknown. It is entirely acceptable, and more often than not probabilistically and politically correct, to use they/them here.

I doubt anyone would be upset at people using he/him when referring to Satoshi, but also along those same lines, it seems strange to be upset at they/them usage for an unknown entity.

panorama | 4 years ago | on: TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app

I'm not who you replied to, but I find it hard to believe that you went to an account with the username "systems_analyst", who posts videos on networking and cybersecurity in an informative manner, and decided it was "aspirational meme garbage".

On HN, I give people who I disagree with the benefit of the doubt and assume they're always intelligent. But that doesn't extend itself to believing they're always arguing in good faith. I find it unfathomable that a critically thinking person truly believes a social network with close to a billion users is devoid of any useful content. I "feel" like you're trying to be contrarian and edgy for the sake of being so.

I think my earlier Twitter analogy is apt here. Of course you can't expect TikTok to be on par with Coursera. Similarly, you don't go to Twitter for dissertations. These social networks are entertainment first, and their algorithms and restricted formats lend themselves to a certain type of content. But the natural evolution of social networks at scale is that people easily discover new content that is legitimately useful to them, or find a community based on their professional or side interests.

I went to the #softwareengineering hashtag on TikTok and very quickly found a few helpful accounts. You can do this with any hashtag. Frankly, software dev TikTok feels more friendly than HN at a cursory glance.

https://www.tiktok.com/@shanselman

https://www.tiktok.com/@coderintuition

https://www.tiktok.com/@dantechtok

TikTok's audience age skews younger. I'm not saying these profiles will be helpful to you personally, but if I were in high school with a passing interest in development and got exposed to TikTok-style entertainment/info content, I probably would've started coding a lot earlier.

panorama | 4 years ago | on: TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app

It's surprising to me how many people in these comments are trying to gatekeep art, as if art must only be the life's work of famous masters. Museums are full of crude drawings, sculptures, tools created by people who didn't consider themselves artists. Art reflects the social mores of its time and we can also take interest in art to simply get a glimpse into the past.

Plus no one in their right mind would have compared the Pieta to a local bard with a talent for singing and dancing getting paid to entertain people. Just a lot of backward comparisons all because people have in their mind a single definition of what "art" is and should be.

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