The best Hacker News stories from All from the past day
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Summary After Four Months with Ada
Hell Is Other REPLs
iPhone 13 to support LEO satellite communication
Train Wheels Are Cones
Train Wheels Are Cones
Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
Please don't list things that just need more bodies - specifically looking for intellectual blockers that can be answered in this thread.
Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos
Hello HN,<p>Over the last year we've been building ente[1], a privacy-friendly, easy-to-use alternative to Google Photos. We've so far built Android[2][3], iOS[4], web[5] apps that encrypt your files and back them up in the background. You can access these across your devices, and share them with other ente users, end-to-end encrypted. You can also use our electron app[6] to maintain a local copy of your backed up files.<p>We've built a fault-tolerant data replication layer that replicates your data to two different storage providers in the EU. We will be providing additional replicas as an addon in the future.<p>We're relying on libsodium[7] for performing all cryptographic operations. Under the hood it uses XChaCha20 and XSalsa20 for encryption and Argon2 for key derivation.<p>We have documented our architecture[8] and open-sourced our clients[9].<p>We did a soft-launch on r/degoogle[10] sometime ago, and have since then ironed out issues and polished the product.<p>But we are far from where we want to be in terms of features (object and face detection, location clustering, image filters, ...) and user experience. We are hoping to use this post as an opportunity to collect feedback from fellow hackers.<p>If there's anything we can do better, please let us know, we would like to.<p>Best,<p>- Vishnu, Neeraj, Abhinav<p>[1]: <a href="https://ente.io" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://ente.io/apk" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/apk</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ente.photos" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ente.photos</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ente-photos/id1542026904" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ente-photos/id1542026904</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://web.ente.io" rel="nofollow">https://web.ente.io</a><p>[6]: <a href="https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/latest" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/latest</a><p>[7]: <a href="https://libsodium.gitbook.io" rel="nofollow">https://libsodium.gitbook.io</a><p>[8]: <a href="https://ente.io/architecture" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/architecture</a><p>[9]: <a href="https://github.com/ente-io" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ente-io</a><p>[10]: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_an_endtoend_encrypted_alternative_to/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...</a>
Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos
Hello HN,<p>Over the last year we've been building ente[1], a privacy-friendly, easy-to-use alternative to Google Photos. We've so far built Android[2][3], iOS[4], web[5] apps that encrypt your files and back them up in the background. You can access these across your devices, and share them with other ente users, end-to-end encrypted. You can also use our electron app[6] to maintain a local copy of your backed up files.<p>We've built a fault-tolerant data replication layer that replicates your data to two different storage providers in the EU. We will be providing additional replicas as an addon in the future.<p>We're relying on libsodium[7] for performing all cryptographic operations. Under the hood it uses XChaCha20 and XSalsa20 for encryption and Argon2 for key derivation.<p>We have documented our architecture[8] and open-sourced our clients[9].<p>We did a soft-launch on r/degoogle[10] sometime ago, and have since then ironed out issues and polished the product.<p>But we are far from where we want to be in terms of features (object and face detection, location clustering, image filters, ...) and user experience. We are hoping to use this post as an opportunity to collect feedback from fellow hackers.<p>If there's anything we can do better, please let us know, we would like to.<p>Best,<p>- Vishnu, Neeraj, Abhinav<p>[1]: <a href="https://ente.io" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://ente.io/apk" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/apk</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ente.photos" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ente.photos</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ente-photos/id1542026904" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ente-photos/id1542026904</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://web.ente.io" rel="nofollow">https://web.ente.io</a><p>[6]: <a href="https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/latest" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/latest</a><p>[7]: <a href="https://libsodium.gitbook.io" rel="nofollow">https://libsodium.gitbook.io</a><p>[8]: <a href="https://ente.io/architecture" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/architecture</a><p>[9]: <a href="https://github.com/ente-io" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ente-io</a><p>[10]: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_an_endtoend_encrypted_alternative_to/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...</a>
I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem
I hacked an office telephone to play Doom
Launch HN: Hotswap (YC S21) – Easily migrate customers away from competitors
Hi! We're Jay and Len (kevlened) from Hotswap (<a href="https://www.hotswap.app" rel="nofollow">https://www.hotswap.app</a>). We automate the process of changing software vendors by helping you migrate user data during your onboarding process. In other words, we make it easy to steal customers from your competitors!<p>We've built a lot of enterprise software and done a lot of painful migrations over the years.
I (Jay) have managed engineering teams at Frame.io, Squarespace, and Rent the Runway. Len was an early employee at Okta. At every single company we've worked at, we've spent a lot of time doing painful migrations. At Rent the Runway, we migrated our warehouse from UPS to FedEx. We changed credit card processors. We migrated ERP systems. It always took a ton of time, was not career-building work, and consultants charged $250/hr or more. We also were often stuck using platforms that weren't optimal because it was so hard to move.<p>So we decided to solve this problem: make it easy to change vendors, and make it easy for new companies to be able to bring on new users by automating the process.<p>We are essentially an ETL for SaaS products. We figure out how to extract data from the old system, even if there is not a clean API to do so, and automate it. We then help transform that data into a format that you can load into the new system. Our product is not self-serve. Instead, we work with you to understand how data maps to your system and integrate that logic into our migration engine. We then provide a Plaid-like widget for your users to connect their old systems and migrate data.<p>This is difficult, not in the "computer science" sense but in the "data is messy" sense.
If there isn't an API to extract data, then we end up doing a lot of screen scraping, and many companies don't want to take the risk of maintaining that kind of code because it can break.<p>Our two biggest competitors are internal development teams (who end up being stuck doing this kind of work) and consultants (who charge a ton of money.) We take the burden away by working with vendors directly to automate common migration flows. We don't mind building and maintaining a lot of smaller one-off type projects for our users, as we benefit by building a repertoire of supported platforms.<p>The fact that modern applications have moved to SPAs has made this work easier than in the past. Every website essentially exposes an API, so it is not as difficult to extract data as it used to be. Our software tends to be more shelf-stable than people expect. Think about tech companies you've worked at: how often do you actually "break" the website by completely breaking the data or the UI? Len has had experience managing these kinds of integrations at Okta, and by using continuous automated testing we're able to quickly identify and fix breakages.<p>Currently we export data from Chartio, since it is shutting down next year, and Wix. If there is a platform you want to steal customers from, please contact us! We're openly eliciting suggestions and continually adding new platforms.<p>We'd love to hear your stories about painful migration experiences. And if you're a business whose customers ask "how do I move my data from the old platform?" then we would be super interested to hear how you work with these folks today!
The Future of discord.py
FB messenger silently censoring links, claims they were sent
FB messenger silently censoring links, claims they were sent
Weird Languages
Weird Languages
The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks
Show HN: I made a meme creator that makes around $4k a month
App store payments will have increased competition
App store payments will have increased competition