The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: YTT Tech – My curated database of instructional YouTube Videos
Show HN: YTT Tech – My curated database of instructional YouTube Videos
Show HN: Haven – Run a private website to share with only the people you choose
Show HN: Haven – Run a private website to share with only the people you choose
Show HN: Haven – Run a private website to share with only the people you choose
Show HN: Haven – Run a private website to share with only the people you choose
Launch HN: Routable (YC S17) – Scale payouts without building in-house tools
Hey HN! I’m Omri and I co-founded Routable (<a href="https://routable.com" rel="nofollow">https://routable.com</a>) with Tom Harel. We are a business payments platform built to make bill payments and mass payouts fast and seamless, especially as your company scales. We were in YC's S17 batch, but are doing a Launch HN now because we recently completed a huge integration with NetSuite, which will help larger enterprises automate their business payment workflows.<p>Tom and I started working on Routable in early 2017. The idea was sparked while we were eating hummus in Tel Aviv. When we first met up, we had no intention of spending years of our lives trying to figure out how to make bill payments and invoicing easier. But we realized after a three hour conversation that at our two different marketplace companies we had both spent 40% of our engineering resources on building internal tooling to pay out sellers, drivers, restaurants, etc.<p>After we realized we'd experienced the same pain at different startups, we asked ourselves, “what did we do wrong?” Was there a solution that worked across finance, engineering, and operations that we were simply not aware of? To find out, we interviewed over 300 people - CFOs, VPs of Finance, Heads of Engineering, you name it - to understand how businesses scaled their business payouts and invoicing (think: growing from 1,000 payments per month to 400,000+ payments per month).<p>The two main answers we received were: (a) Like us, they'd spent thousands of hours and engineering dollars to build an in-house internal tool, on top of processors, and wrote their own custom integration to an ERP; or (b) they hired an army of overqualified individuals to run daily data entry across thousands of bill payments and invoices (which was tedious, not to mention very expensive).<p>These conversations confirmed what we had suspected: There was no tool for easy payments that worked across multiple departments. We realized that what we had built at our marketplace start-ups could potentially help hundreds of other companies. In 6 weeks we spun up a Routable MVP and were making money for customers. Today, we're deployed across some of the largest marketplaces and gig economy companies. We’ve focused on working with engineering and finance departments as much as possible to save them from building custom in-house solutions.<p>Our recent integration with NetSuite has been by far the hardest we’ve done – especially since we built it on top of a SOAP API and extended native functionality with SuiteScript – but it was worth it, because we gained a deep appreciation for how complex enterprise business payment operations can be. To make sure we “got it right,” we again did plenty of customer development interviews to best understand what data needs to go into and out of NetSuite, and made sure to record each interview so we could share their unique pain points with our engineering team.<p>Before we wrote the first line of code, we interviewed a bunch of NetSuite users and learned what was lacking in other NetSuite integrations out there: tools that only synced in one direction, needing to recreate fields multiple in different platforms, processes that were breaking because the workflow had changed in your ERP, but not in your AP software. The one thing we learned throughout this whole process is that once you build an integration to an ERP, you’re never really done, so we expect as a team to forever tinker on sending data back and forth with the goal of continuously improving our integration and hopefully saving our customers 30 seconds to 10 minutes of work at a time.<p>Thank you for reading this story - I hope it was interesting. We’d love to hear your feedback about Routable, your experiences in this space, and answer any questions you have!
Show HN: I wrote a rust program to translate images into textual line art
Show HN: Time tracking with plain text files
Show HN: Time tracking with plain text files
Show HN: Archivy – Extensible Self Hosted Knowledge Base – v1 Release
Show HN: Archivy – Extensible Self Hosted Knowledge Base – v1 Release
Launch HN: Zaraz (YC W20) – Use third-party tools without slowing your website
Hi HN! We're Yair and Yo'av of Zaraz (<a href="https://zaraz.com" rel="nofollow">https://zaraz.com</a>). We make websites faster by loading their third-party stack in an optimized way. By “third-party” we mean utilities or additional products you add to your website (eg. analytics), not things you build your website with (eg. React).<p>Before we started this we worked on opposite sides of this battle for third-party inclusion: Yair was working for the folks asking to implement just-one-more analytics tool, while Yo'av was a developer trying (and often failing) to push back. Avoiding bloat to begin with would be preferable, but anyone working for even a medium-sized company knows how hard that is - usually when a higher up agrees to try or add a new tool, resistance is futile. Hence the question becomes, can you do it without harming your performance?<p>The average US top 5,000 website loads 22 different third-party tools - analytics, customer success, marketing and whatnot. We wrote a bot that scanned these websites and discovered that third-parties account for 40% of their “Time to Interactive”, and other metrics like TBT, FCP, FID and CLS were hurt in a similar way. From the user perspective, the page usually behaves exactly the same without these tools (...except 40% faster).<p>These new metrics are becoming more popular for two reasons. Firstly, users actually feel them - unlike events such as "DOMContentLoad" & "Load" that can be triggered long before the user can actually do anything, these metrics provide a much better proxy to the real user experience. Secondly, with Google soon penalizing slow websites, they're becoming more and more important for SEO. We see the growing popularity of these metrics as a good thing. We want a faster web.<p>Nowadays, the most common way to integrate a third-party into your website is either to just paste its `<script>` snippet somewhere in your code, or use some "Tag Management" software (awful name!) like Google Tag Manager, Tealium, or even a tool like Segment. All these options pretty much come with the same cost - everything loads by default together with your page, and users just have to wait and wait. If all this slowness doesn't feel so bad on your devices now, remember that much of the world accesses the internet through devices that are probably a lot slower than yours.<p>We built Zaraz to be a performance-first third-party manager. Each tool is different, but the concept is to run whatever we can on our backend instead of in the browser, leaving it to focus on loading your website. While other solutions serve all your visitors with the same script and then evaluate it in the browser (should we run this conversion pixel? Should we load this analytics tool?) - we do this on our backend. But the real magic is that we created an environment living inside a Cloudflare Worker, that executes the actual third-party scripts instead of having them run in the browser. Google Analytics, Reddit conversion pixel, LinkedIn Insight, you name it - we’re turning all those things into miniature server-side applications that your visitors’ browsers need not to worry about. If a certain tool still needs to fire a request from the browser (eg. it needs to set a cookie), only the resulting URL from evaluating its script will be sent back to the user browser. It’s a server side environment executing third-party code, that you have 100% control over. When we measure the speed of a website optimized with Zaraz, third-parties have close to zero effect on it, because the browser almost does nothing.<p>We are already serving a few customers in production, and we’re seeing huge improvements in speed (and revenues!) with all of them. Zaraz is probably the easiest way you can make your website faster, today (try our analyzer to see how we can improve your website: <a href="https://zaraz.com/analyze" rel="nofollow">https://zaraz.com/analyze</a>). Aside from performance, since we have total control on what data is revealed to our isolated environment, we are using it to help companies protect the privacy of their visitors by masking PIIs, hiding IP addresses, disabling fingerprinting etc. We designed our infrastructure as a set of serverless, storageless and stateless functions - to make sure your visitors data is never saved, not even by accident.<p>We are currently onboarding mostly enterprises and high-traffic websites, but we plan to introduce a free tier after we are done creating a self-onboarding flow. We are on a mission to make the web faster and we want all websites to benefit from it!<p>We would be thrilled to hear what you think, and if you have more ideas on how to make websites faster please do share them with us. Thank you!
Launch HN: Zaraz (YC W20) – Use third-party tools without slowing your website
Hi HN! We're Yair and Yo'av of Zaraz (<a href="https://zaraz.com" rel="nofollow">https://zaraz.com</a>). We make websites faster by loading their third-party stack in an optimized way. By “third-party” we mean utilities or additional products you add to your website (eg. analytics), not things you build your website with (eg. React).<p>Before we started this we worked on opposite sides of this battle for third-party inclusion: Yair was working for the folks asking to implement just-one-more analytics tool, while Yo'av was a developer trying (and often failing) to push back. Avoiding bloat to begin with would be preferable, but anyone working for even a medium-sized company knows how hard that is - usually when a higher up agrees to try or add a new tool, resistance is futile. Hence the question becomes, can you do it without harming your performance?<p>The average US top 5,000 website loads 22 different third-party tools - analytics, customer success, marketing and whatnot. We wrote a bot that scanned these websites and discovered that third-parties account for 40% of their “Time to Interactive”, and other metrics like TBT, FCP, FID and CLS were hurt in a similar way. From the user perspective, the page usually behaves exactly the same without these tools (...except 40% faster).<p>These new metrics are becoming more popular for two reasons. Firstly, users actually feel them - unlike events such as "DOMContentLoad" & "Load" that can be triggered long before the user can actually do anything, these metrics provide a much better proxy to the real user experience. Secondly, with Google soon penalizing slow websites, they're becoming more and more important for SEO. We see the growing popularity of these metrics as a good thing. We want a faster web.<p>Nowadays, the most common way to integrate a third-party into your website is either to just paste its `<script>` snippet somewhere in your code, or use some "Tag Management" software (awful name!) like Google Tag Manager, Tealium, or even a tool like Segment. All these options pretty much come with the same cost - everything loads by default together with your page, and users just have to wait and wait. If all this slowness doesn't feel so bad on your devices now, remember that much of the world accesses the internet through devices that are probably a lot slower than yours.<p>We built Zaraz to be a performance-first third-party manager. Each tool is different, but the concept is to run whatever we can on our backend instead of in the browser, leaving it to focus on loading your website. While other solutions serve all your visitors with the same script and then evaluate it in the browser (should we run this conversion pixel? Should we load this analytics tool?) - we do this on our backend. But the real magic is that we created an environment living inside a Cloudflare Worker, that executes the actual third-party scripts instead of having them run in the browser. Google Analytics, Reddit conversion pixel, LinkedIn Insight, you name it - we’re turning all those things into miniature server-side applications that your visitors’ browsers need not to worry about. If a certain tool still needs to fire a request from the browser (eg. it needs to set a cookie), only the resulting URL from evaluating its script will be sent back to the user browser. It’s a server side environment executing third-party code, that you have 100% control over. When we measure the speed of a website optimized with Zaraz, third-parties have close to zero effect on it, because the browser almost does nothing.<p>We are already serving a few customers in production, and we’re seeing huge improvements in speed (and revenues!) with all of them. Zaraz is probably the easiest way you can make your website faster, today (try our analyzer to see how we can improve your website: <a href="https://zaraz.com/analyze" rel="nofollow">https://zaraz.com/analyze</a>). Aside from performance, since we have total control on what data is revealed to our isolated environment, we are using it to help companies protect the privacy of their visitors by masking PIIs, hiding IP addresses, disabling fingerprinting etc. We designed our infrastructure as a set of serverless, storageless and stateless functions - to make sure your visitors data is never saved, not even by accident.<p>We are currently onboarding mostly enterprises and high-traffic websites, but we plan to introduce a free tier after we are done creating a self-onboarding flow. We are on a mission to make the web faster and we want all websites to benefit from it!<p>We would be thrilled to hear what you think, and if you have more ideas on how to make websites faster please do share them with us. Thank you!
Launch HN: Zaraz (YC W20) – Use third-party tools without slowing your website
Hi HN! We're Yair and Yo'av of Zaraz (<a href="https://zaraz.com" rel="nofollow">https://zaraz.com</a>). We make websites faster by loading their third-party stack in an optimized way. By “third-party” we mean utilities or additional products you add to your website (eg. analytics), not things you build your website with (eg. React).<p>Before we started this we worked on opposite sides of this battle for third-party inclusion: Yair was working for the folks asking to implement just-one-more analytics tool, while Yo'av was a developer trying (and often failing) to push back. Avoiding bloat to begin with would be preferable, but anyone working for even a medium-sized company knows how hard that is - usually when a higher up agrees to try or add a new tool, resistance is futile. Hence the question becomes, can you do it without harming your performance?<p>The average US top 5,000 website loads 22 different third-party tools - analytics, customer success, marketing and whatnot. We wrote a bot that scanned these websites and discovered that third-parties account for 40% of their “Time to Interactive”, and other metrics like TBT, FCP, FID and CLS were hurt in a similar way. From the user perspective, the page usually behaves exactly the same without these tools (...except 40% faster).<p>These new metrics are becoming more popular for two reasons. Firstly, users actually feel them - unlike events such as "DOMContentLoad" & "Load" that can be triggered long before the user can actually do anything, these metrics provide a much better proxy to the real user experience. Secondly, with Google soon penalizing slow websites, they're becoming more and more important for SEO. We see the growing popularity of these metrics as a good thing. We want a faster web.<p>Nowadays, the most common way to integrate a third-party into your website is either to just paste its `<script>` snippet somewhere in your code, or use some "Tag Management" software (awful name!) like Google Tag Manager, Tealium, or even a tool like Segment. All these options pretty much come with the same cost - everything loads by default together with your page, and users just have to wait and wait. If all this slowness doesn't feel so bad on your devices now, remember that much of the world accesses the internet through devices that are probably a lot slower than yours.<p>We built Zaraz to be a performance-first third-party manager. Each tool is different, but the concept is to run whatever we can on our backend instead of in the browser, leaving it to focus on loading your website. While other solutions serve all your visitors with the same script and then evaluate it in the browser (should we run this conversion pixel? Should we load this analytics tool?) - we do this on our backend. But the real magic is that we created an environment living inside a Cloudflare Worker, that executes the actual third-party scripts instead of having them run in the browser. Google Analytics, Reddit conversion pixel, LinkedIn Insight, you name it - we’re turning all those things into miniature server-side applications that your visitors’ browsers need not to worry about. If a certain tool still needs to fire a request from the browser (eg. it needs to set a cookie), only the resulting URL from evaluating its script will be sent back to the user browser. It’s a server side environment executing third-party code, that you have 100% control over. When we measure the speed of a website optimized with Zaraz, third-parties have close to zero effect on it, because the browser almost does nothing.<p>We are already serving a few customers in production, and we’re seeing huge improvements in speed (and revenues!) with all of them. Zaraz is probably the easiest way you can make your website faster, today (try our analyzer to see how we can improve your website: <a href="https://zaraz.com/analyze" rel="nofollow">https://zaraz.com/analyze</a>). Aside from performance, since we have total control on what data is revealed to our isolated environment, we are using it to help companies protect the privacy of their visitors by masking PIIs, hiding IP addresses, disabling fingerprinting etc. We designed our infrastructure as a set of serverless, storageless and stateless functions - to make sure your visitors data is never saved, not even by accident.<p>We are currently onboarding mostly enterprises and high-traffic websites, but we plan to introduce a free tier after we are done creating a self-onboarding flow. We are on a mission to make the web faster and we want all websites to benefit from it!<p>We would be thrilled to hear what you think, and if you have more ideas on how to make websites faster please do share them with us. Thank you!
Show HN: A retrainable subtitle synchronizer you can now build your own
Show HN: A retrainable subtitle synchronizer you can now build your own
Show HN: Deploy ML Models on a Budget
Show HN: Deploy ML Models on a Budget
Launch HN: Albedo (YC W21) – Highest resolution satellite imagery
Hey HN! I’m Topher, here with Winston and AJ, and we’re the co-founders of Albedo (<a href="https://albedo.space" rel="nofollow">https://albedo.space</a>). We’re building satellites that will capture both visible and thermal imagery - at a resolution 9x higher than what is available today (see comparison: <a href="https://photos.app.goo.gl/gwokp4WT8JPvyue98" rel="nofollow">https://photos.app.goo.gl/gwokp4WT8JPvyue98</a>).<p>My technical background is primarily in optics/imaging science related to remote sensing. I previously worked for Lockheed Martin, where I met AJ, who is an expert in satellite architecture and systems engineering. We’ve spent most of our career working on classified space systems, and while the missions we were involved with are super cool, that world is slower to adopt the latest new space technologies. We started Albedo in order to create a new type of satellite architecture that captures high resolution imagery at a fraction of the cost historically required. Winston was previously a software engineer at Facebook, where he frequently used satellite imagery and realized the huge potential of higher resolution datasets.<p>While the use cases for satellite imagery are endless, adoption has been underwhelming - even for obvious and larger applications like agriculture, insurance, energy, and mapping. The main limitations that have prevented widespread use are high cost, inaccessibility, and low resolution.<p>Today, buying commercial satellite imagery involves a back-and-forth with a salesperson in a sometimes months-long process, with high prices that exclude all but the biggest companies. This process needs to be simplified with transparent, commodity pricing and an automated process, where all you need to buy imagery is a credit card. On the accessibility front, it’s surprising how few providers have nailed down a streamlined, fully cloud-based delivery mechanism. While working at Facebook, Winston sometimes dealt with imagery delivered through FTP servers or physical hard drives. Another thing users are looking for is more transparency when tasking a new satellite image, such as an immediate assessment of when it will be collected. These are all problems we are working on solving at Albedo.<p>On the space side, we’re able to achieve the substantial cost savings by taking advantage of emerging space technologies, two of which are electric propulsion and on-orbit refueling. Our satellites will fly super close to the earth, essentially in the atmosphere, enabling 10cm resolution without having to build a school bus sized satellite.<p>Electric propulsion makes the fuel on our satellites way more efficient, at the expense of low thrust. Think about it like your car gasoline going from 30 to 300 mpg, but you could only drive 5 mph. Our propulsion only needs to maintain a steady offset to the atmospheric drag, so low thrust and high efficiency is perfect. By the time our first few satellites run out of fuel, on-orbit refueling will be a reality, and we can just refill our tanks. We’re still in the architecture and design phase, but we expect to have our first few satellites flying in 2024 and the full constellation up in 2027.<p>The current climate crisis requires a diverse set of sensors in space to support emissions monitoring, ESG initiatives/investments, and infrastructure sustainability. Thermal sensors are a key component for this, and very few are currently in orbit. Since our satellites are larger than normal, they are uniquely suited to capture the long wavelengths of thermal energy at a resolution of 2 meters. We’ll also be taking advantage of advances in microbolometer technology, to eliminate the crazy cooling requirements that have made thermal satellites so expensive in the past. The current state-of-the-art for thermal resolution is 70 meters, which is only marginally useful for most applications.<p>We’re aiming to adopt the stance of being a pure data provider (i.e. not doing analytics). We think the best way to facilitate overall market growth is to do one thing incredibly well: sell imagery better, cheaper, and faster than what users have available today. While this allows us to be vertical agnostic, some of our more well-suited applications include: crop health monitoring, pipeline inspection, property insurance underwriting/weather damage evaluation, and wildfire/vegetation management around power lines. By making high-res imagery a commodity, we are also betting on it unlocking new applications in a similar fashion to GPS (e.g. Tinder, Pokemon Go, and Uber).<p>One last thing - new remote sensing regulations were released by NOAA last May, removing the previous limit on resolution. So between the technology side and regulatory side, the timing is kind of perfect for us.<p>All thoughts and questions are appreciated - and we’d love to hear if you know of any companies that could benefit from our imagery. Thanks for reading!