March 2020

Launch HN: Pillarlus (YC W20) – Automatically create construction blueprints
6 by namankas | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, we’re Naman and Rushil, founders of PillarPlus ( https://ift.tt/3dHyOBg ). We build software to automate the creation of construction blueprints. Specifically, our software generates engineering blueprints for air conditioning, ducting, fire, electrical, and plumbing services over the floor plan of the building. MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing) designs are a set of 15 technical drawings. We got started in India and are currently operating there, but MEP is standard enough that the software can apply to Western markets also, given that we have incorporated international building codes. Architects and contractors hire consultants, who still design the building manually. Complete dependence on human effort results in a process that is slow, error-prone and unreliable. Also, the number of consultants is limited resulting in higher fees, long delivery times and difficulty accessing the services. Rushil started practicing architecture and had troubles dealing with the available MEP firms for his own projects. Naman built an optimization software for the Indian Railways. We’ve been friends for 13 years, and often discuss our problems and achievements. Naman hacked a prototype for plumbing drainage plans that worked perfectly over Rushil’s project, and got us excited about the possibility of such a software. Our software takes in the floor plan as the input, understands the building and designs the MEP services like an engineer would. A month of engineer’s work gets cut down to a day. We require artificial intelligence algorithms to decipher the floor plan, constraint modelling techniques to encode building codes, routing methods to create pipe paths and optimization algorithms to minimize material wastage. The software even calculates bill of materials with project cost estimates. It is important to note that MEP accounts for 25% of all project costs! Since the quantity of materials is huge, selecting the right items and vendors is a challenge in an unorganized sector like construction. We recommend what products to install and which brands to choose, as per geographic locations and availability. The input to our software is the building’s floor plan. The floor plan gives us complete data of the building, with which we can do a lot more. We can generate structural blueprints, 3D models, and create interior design renders! We're eager to hear feedback and answer questions. Do share your experiences from the construction industry, and your opinion on the use of software to make construction work more efficient.

Show HN: Soft-launch, first page on HN – here are the numbers
3 by andreigaspar | 6 comments on Hacker News.
[1/2] Thursday evening (Mar 26) we made a soft launch for https://ift.tt/2UmnXFb (a UI website that I built for my wife) The goal was to get some feedback, fix bugs and get about 30-40 subscribers in the mailing list, to see how the newsletter performs. The launch went better than expected, and the feedback was generally positive. Below are some numbers for those interested. I posted it to 4 channels, IH, HN, Reddit and Twitter. It was best received on HN with 203 points, it made it in the top 10, and it stayed on the front page for a good while. Reddit also surprised me, I posted in r/SideProject and got 26 upvotes and only positive comments.. ? That is so not what I expected from reddit... Was very pleasantly surprised to say the least. Analytics: - 6.659 Users - 6,757 New Users - 7,906 Sessions - 19,125 Page views - 61.81% Bounce Rate - 10.1% Returning Visitors Users timeline: - Mar 24 - 0 Users - Mar 25 - 4 Users [Soft Launch] - Mar 26 - 2458 Users - Mar 27 - 3693 Users - Mar 28 - 706 Users - Mar 29 - 186 Users - Mar 30 - 190 Users As you can see, there’s been a spike and seems like it’ll stagnate around ~150, but it remains to be seen. It might dip even further. Newsletter: - 546 Subscriptions - 52.1% Open Rate - 6.7% Clicks - 7 Unsubscribes Slack Community: 40 Members. Interestingly enough, the Slack ad only received 30 clicks total. This means most users came through the welcome email, which has a slack community ad included. Ad Performance: - 35744 Impressions - 836 Clicks on Website - 8 Clicks in Newsletter

Show HN: Create a free photo sharing social network for your Startup
2 by mkelso1 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Consumers have become numb and cynical of most brands on social media. The constant barrage of highly-curated, highly-targeted, and polished posts are turning people away from these platforms. More people are taking refuge in online communities and messaging apps devoid of ads and self-promotion. So, how do brands reach these savvy and wary consumers in an authentic way on social media? Authenticity. Like consumers, brands worry about the content they share with the larger global audience. They must promote photos and videos that appeal to their core customers without alienating or offending others. Needless to say, brands also need channel(s) on social media to share most comfortably. Diverse and inclusive companies are starting to build private communities on social media where they can share more casually and engage their followers. In these private communities, brands are also able to crowdsource customer-generated content and receive feedback from their fans. All of this helps build trust and loyalty among consumers. Our startup, Pixz, is focusing on building channels for individuals and companies to share together. Pixz (https://pixzapp.com) is a private photo sharing app for groups and events that allows people to crowdsource photos in real-time without hashtags and uploads. Main Features: 1. Create unlimited private groups for any occasion and/or audience 2. Take photos that share instantly & privately within group 3. Crowdsource photos from guests at events in real-time 4. Upload up to 5 photos at a time with separate captions 5. Schedule events to limit posts before or after an event 6. Share and download full-resolution photos from group members 7. Comment and like photos people share like other social networks 8. Discover groups and events near you Pixz is a free download from the app stores. Email me with questions & feedback: mkelso@pixzapp.com

Show HN: ActionsPanel – Manually Trigger Your GitHub Actions
7 by abatilo | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Hi all! I wanted to share a small project that I've been working on with a buddy. https://ift.tt/2QYkkSQ One of the problems that currently exists with GitHub Actions is the fact that there is no way to easily trigger your Actions unless you cause some kind of GitHub event. This could be pushing a new commit, or creating an issue on a repository. But if you just want to run an arbitrary action, there's not currently a good way to do that. This is a well known feature request: https://ift.tt/2UnIglF GitHub somewhat recently added an API for `repository_dispatch` which is an available trigger for a GitHub Action. There are many blog posts that explain how you can create a Personal Access Token to send your own `repository_dispatch` via some curl command or postman request. For example: https://ift.tt/2vVM3gx ActionsPanel uses this same API but does so with a GitHub App token so that you don't need to worry about managing your own PAT. This also makes it much easier to trigger your actions across teams with multiple people. Then you don't need to share the PAT with each other or each create your own PATs. You configure your buttons with a declarative yaml file that you leave in the repo, and ActionsPanel will read that file and dynamically create your UI for you to trigger your actions. We'd love to get your feedback on this project. It's very simple still but solves the core problem of triggering your actions. If you do have feedback or any questions, feel free to post in this thread, or email us directly at support (at) actionspanel (dot) app Looking forward to your feedback!

Show HN: I Made an Event Countdown App in React Native
3 by NewBieBR | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I recently created an Events Countdown app for iOS. Basically, user can create event like Birthday, Anniversary, ... and the app will show a countdown time until or since the event. User can also add reminder days, weeks, months before or after the event. It's not shown in the video but the user can choose different display mode like: List, Grid or Carousel and sizes,... This is my first time trying this business model my apps. It's free to use. You can create unlimited number of events, reminders, you can switch between dark/light theme... All the core features of an Event Countdown apps are free. But there are interstitial ads after the user created an event once in a while. (using facebook audience network and google admob). Some premium features like layouts, online gallery, cloud syncing,... are unlocked through a subscription monthly or yearly. I created the project with [typescript-react-native-starter](https://ift.tt/2JhyVFu). I also tried to contribute some open-source components like: - [react-native-easy-icon](https://ift.tt/2UAlcPA wrapper component of react-native-vector-icons to use icon easily - [react-native-unsplash](https://ift.tt/2WH879A The online gallery feature that you see from the video use directly this component. It's basically a photos browser using the unsplash api. - [react-native-store-rate](https://ift.tt/2JhS0r7 I'm still testing this so I don't recommend you to use All of my components above are written in typescript so it's kinda self-documented, I didn't have the time to update the documentation so PRs are welcome. You can download it here: https://ift.tt/33LRpaz I would love to hear feedbacks. Thanks.

Show HN: Panther v1.0 – open-source, Cloud-Native SIEM
3 by jacknagz | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, My name is Jack Naglieri. I’m the founder of Panther Labs - an SF-based cybersecurity startup funded by S28 & Innovation Endeavors. Prior to Panther, I was an engineering manager at Airbnb. Before that a security engineer/analyst/forensic analyst. Today, I’m excited to announce Panther v1.0, an open source, cloud-native SIEM: https://ift.tt/3akamns Panther is the culmination of our team’s experience building security tools at scale, including StreamAlert at Airbnb and critical internal monitoring systems at Amazon. Panther runs entirely on serverless to enable small teams to detect threats at scale. Our backend is Golang and our frontend is React/Typescript. Panther is also self-hosted and uses Python3 for flexible detections. At a high level: - Panther receives security logs - Panther baseline scans cloud infra and determines security posture - All data is saved to your data warehouse (powered by Athena/Glue/S3) - Alerts are dispatched to your team via Slack, PagerDuty, etc - Automatic remediations can also be applied to fix infrastructure Panther v1.0 includes support for: - Analyzing logs from AWS, OSS tools such as Osquery, OSSEC, Suricata, and more - Threat hunting on all your security data with standardized fields (IPs, domains, etc) - Real-time cloud configuration monitoring - 150+ built-in detections - A UI for creating, updating and tuning detections To get started: - Quick-start: https://ift.tt/2ybIrbf - Read our v1.0 announcement: https://ift.tt/2QMywPB - Register for our webinar tomorrow: https://ift.tt/2QLVIh0 You can also find us on Slack (https://ift.tt/2wFfofs), Twitter (@panther__labs), and Github (github.com/panther-labs/panther). We’re happy to answer your questions. Just drop a message here. Thanks! We also send our best wishes to those affected by COVID-19

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Continue reading Tanner Foust jumps and drifts his VW race cars in 'Quantum Drift 2'

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Launch HN: Riot (YC W20) – Phishing training for your team
14 by BenjaminN | 8 comments on Hacker News.
Ahoy Hacker News! I'm Ben, founder of Riot ( https://tryriot.com ), a tool that sends phishing emails to your team to get them ready for real attacks. It's like a fire drill, but for cybersecurity. Prior to Riot, I was the co-founder and CTO of a fintech company operating hundred of millions of euros of transactions every year. We were under attack continuously. I was doing an hour-long security training once a year, but was always curious if my team was really ready for an attack. In fact, it kept me up at night thinking we were spending a lot of money on protecting our app, but none on preparing the employees for social engineering. So I started a side project at that previous company to test this out. On the first run, 9% of all the employees got scammed. I was pissed, but it convinced me we needed a better way to train employees for cybersecurity attacks. This is what grew into Riot. For now we are only training for phishing, but our intention is to grow this into a tool that will continuously prepare your team for good practices (don't reuse passwords for example) and upcoming attacks (CEO fraud is next), in a smart way. Your questions, feedback, and ideas are most welcome. Would love to hear your war stories on phishing scams, and how you train your teams!

Show HN: Self-Published Book – Health Data Privacy, HIPAA, and COVID-19
5 by anconia | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I just self-published a book that is a brief guide to health information data privacy, the HIPAA Privacy Rule, and COVID-19. I'm an attorney and web developer and hope you find this helpful. Here are some links: - Sample Excerpt (PDF): https://ift.tt/33IGnD3 - Paperback (on Amazon.com): https://ift.tt/39gHjzV - Kindle (on Amazon.com): https://ift.tt/2UugCSO Please let me know of any feedback. If you buy the book, please know that 100% of the profits will be donated to restaurant workers furloughed without pay during this time. (I once worked at Domino's Pizza before law school.)

Launch HN: Taiv (YC W20) – Replace TV commercials with content people care about
7 by npalansky | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! We’re Noah, Avi, and Jordan from Taiv ( https://www.taiv.tv ). We make a box that lets sports bars and other businesses replace live TV commercials with content their customers actually care about. A year and a half ago, I was sitting in a local bar and saw a commercial showing that the same beer I was drinking was cheaper across the street. The place I was in had other drinks on specials for way cheaper and great happy hour food, but they didn’t have an effective way to tell me about it. I ended up walking away feeling ripped off when I could have left a happy customer if they had been able to more effectively make me aware of their specials. It got me investigating how businesses communicate with their customers. I found out that half of all restaurants close within a year and that one of the most common reasons they fail is because they’re unable to educate their customers about everything they offer and what events they have coming up. We built Taiv to give business owners a way to communicate with their customers, by showing content during commercial breaks on the TVs people are already watching. Taiv uses custom hardware that lets us analyze the cable box’s video output in real-time. It also lets us switch between passing the content through, or showing videos from another input. But it turns out that a harder part of the problem is the analysis for classifying video. We compute a bunch of different heuristics and use the combination of their outputs to classify video as either a commercial or content. For example, one of our heuristics looks at average color balance over small periods of time. When the color balance shifts significantly, it indicates that a scene has changed. We use a bunch of other similar heuristics, which in combination, allow us to classify the stream with high accuracy. Some of our customers have increased their sales by thousands of dollars a month. It also makes the experience a lot better for their customers. TV commercials are annoying and loud, and we replace that with relevant and non-intrusive content and music. Some of our customers even use the commercial breaks to show funny videos without any advertising at all. Not all of our customers are restaurants. We also work with car dealerships, car washes, hotels, and gyms to give them control over what they show and help them educate their customers. One of the biggest challenges we’re facing is that we’re getting the most traction from larger enterprises, but are having trouble really connecting with smaller businesses. We think the product could be really valuable for them, especially since they don't usually have as much marketing reach. But we’re having trouble portraying the value of the system when they can’t track how it affects their revenue nearly as accurately. We’d love to hear the community’s experience and ideas in this area, as well as any questions or feedback!

Show HN: Pfelk, a highly customizable pfSense/OPNsense firewall visualization
5 by uaas | 0 comments on Hacker News.
PFELK is a pfSense/OPNsense firewall traffic visualization solution based on ELK stack. It is a highly customizable tool that let’s you have extensive insight into your network traffic. Key points: - pfSense/OPNsense support - openVPN support - pfSense/Suricata/Snort dashboards with interactive Maps support (MaxMind GeoIp fields, src -> dest locations, Heatmap, etc.) - deploy with ansible-playbook, docker or script. https://ift.tt/3dnC3gP

Show HN: RudderStack, open-source CDI (a.k.a. open-source Segment)
2 by soumyadeb | 0 comments on Hacker News.
GitHub: https://ift.tt/2WCbGxI === Firstly, a big thanks to the HN community for showing us love and support in our previous HN post (https://ift.tt/2nmniFw). At that point, we had just open-sourced the repo and were not fully prepared for a Show HN. We wanted to share updates since then and also do our official Show HN. Updates since Sept 2019 1. Changed the name from Rudder to RudderStack :) 2. API compatibility with Segment 3. Open-source control plane so no dependency on the hosted control plane for open-source users. (https://ift.tt/2TLLIpY) 4. Multiple hosting options: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Native. 5. ~30 integrations (https://ift.tt/3alYmkZ) including cloud mode and device mode 6. Support all the popular data-warehouses & lakes - RedShift, Snowflake, BigQuery, S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage 7. Detailed documentation - https://ift.tt/2vp1z4s 8. Multiple production deployments including few really large ones (our largest deployment is sending a peak of ~40K events/sec, ~300M events/day) 9. Switched license from SSPL to AGPLv3 (after long discussions internally as well as on HN) 10. Built some interesting Analytics & ML use cases 11. Launched our “paid plans” (primarily around managed hosting) Wishing everyone best wishes for staying safe from COVID-19

Launch HN: Nextmv (YC W20) – Developer-friendly logistics algorithms
10 by mooneyc6 | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! We're Carolyn and Ryan, founders of nextmv ( https://nextmv.io/ ). We help developers build and test logistics algorithms faster. These are things like routing delivery vehicles, assigning nurses to patients, and managing supply chains. We used to work in systems engineering and operations research on big government projects, including missile simulations and airport runway management. A few years ago, we pivoted to working on food delivery at Zoomer (YC S14) and later Grubhub. It turned out that making on-demand pizza and taco delivery efficient and reliable required the same optimization and simulation techniques, but in real time. Real-time routing and assignment problems have a number of interesting characteristics that make them challenging. For example, they follow business rules such as pickups preceding deliveries, time windows for deliveries which may or may not be violated, and driver capacities. Their inputs are constantly changing. They can get very large (1000s of orders, 100s of drivers). And they require high-quality solutions in seconds. People usually think of NP-hard problems like the Traveling Salesman when routing and dispatch optimization is mentioned, and we do have to solve those. But the biggest challenges turn out to be ones that are more familiar to the software engineering community. There is no easy equivalent to the software unit test for techniques such as Integer Programming and Constraint Programming. And integration into modern software stacks is nontrivial. In the end, we had to build new tools so we could work faster. Traditional dispatch and scheduling algorithms take months to develop, integrate, and test. That is a problem when businesses change rapidly. This is happening in delivery, which has exploded over the last few years and is likely to only get bigger. Existing tools require domain experts to translate business rules into models. This makes organizations unable to keep pace with change. During our research into appropriate techniques, we learned about Decision Diagrams ( https://ift.tt/2WDVOev ). DDs represent optimization problems as the search for a shortest (or longest) path over a layered, directed, graph. They are state-based, have few restrictions on problem representation, and can outperform other techniques (depending, of course, on the model). We find them particularly attractive for getting started with simple models and integrating them into software stacks. Since there weren't any industrial-grade DD solvers, we built one. And we started nextmv to give companies the modeling, optimization, and simulation tools we wish we'd had. Our tools are for software developers with deadlines. They let you flexibly model nearly any business rules, easily integrate models into software stacks, and test them so you know they're behaving as you expect. What can you do with them? Dynamically route buses based on passenger requests. Minimize shipping cost for packages. Schedule workers based on demand forecasts. Hop (our optimizer) lets you model decision problems as state machines. Dash (our simulator) is also state-based, so you can optimize and simulate using the same code. We've prioritized making things developer-friendly. You can write and test models like any other software. Larger, more complex models can be composed out of smaller, simpler ones. Optimization and simulation models are built from Go source into simple binary artifacts. (We think of this as Docker for decision science.) They come with pre-built runners that make going from development to testing in CI to production deployment trivial. They have JSON I/O for easy integration, and run in a CLI, over HTTP, or in Lambda. Not all operational decisions need complex optimization, but they all benefit from simple automation and integration, fast iteration cycles, and continual visibility. We give you this from the beginning, then let you layer in fancier optimization stuff if you need it later. Here's a screen cast showing a simple routing model in Lambda: https://ift.tt/3dfLtv2 . We've seen developers without optimization backgrounds create models to minimize delivery time and deploy them to Lambda in less than 24 hours. We're eager to hear about your experiences in this area and/or ideas on faster ways to get automation into production. We would love any and all feedback that this community can offer, so don't hold back!

Show HN: Remotework.com – not JUST another remote jobs site
3 by jlbbellefeuille | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hello Hacker News! This is James from RemoteWork.com (https://remotework.com/) I am building a marketplace for the remote worker community, and to connect remote jobs to remote workers. I hope for this not to become just another jobs board. I am much more interested in helping remote workers solve for loneliness and build community, shift skilled work away from the coastal cities and other "soft" benefits of remote work. Like many other readers here on Hacker News I am following the Shelter-in-Place order in the bay area due to COVID-19. I have been sitting on RemoteWork.com as a concept since before 2017. I was originally inspired by Greg Caplan and his Remote Year (RemoteYear.com) project, I looked up LeapYear.com and stumbled upon Venture.com, they happened to have RemoteWork.com available & I have always had it on my shortlist of domains to use for a future concept. Then around NYE of 2020, as everyone was making predictions about what the next decade held, a consistent theme was that a shift towards remote work would become one of the big shifts of the 2020s. Who could have guessed it would happen so fast? I secured a lease with Venture.com shortly after Jan 1st. I setup a no-code MVP using Sharetribe Go. I have been working remotely or part of a remote team for the past 5 years & am familiar with the challenges it presents to the individual and to the organization. Personally, I really wanted to solve for the community and educational side of people beginning to work remotely. Working remotely may not be for everyone, but I think it could be a benefit for most people who are able to perform their jobs without being in an office, if given the right tools and guidelines outlining best practices. This is just the beginning. I hope we can start a movement that benefits both workers and employers. A movement that can reduce traffic congestion and improve overall job satisfaction thru work/life balance. Join us. Join the movement. Join RemoteWork.com

Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users
23 by mrkurt | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hello Hacker News! We're Kurt, Jerome, and Michael from fly.io ( https://fly.io/ ). We're building a platform to run Docker applications close to end users. It's kind of like a content delivery network, but for backend servers. I helped build Ars Technica and spent the majority of my time trying to make the site fast. We used a content delivery network to cache static content close to anonymous readers and it worked very well for them. But the most valuable readers were not these, but the ones who paid for subscriptions. They wanted personalized content and features for interacting with the community – and we couldn't make those fast. Content delivery networks don't work for Ars Technica's best customers. Running Docker apps close to users helps get past the "slow" speed of light. Most interactions with an app server seem slow because of latency between the hardware it's running on (frequently in Virginia) and the end user (frequently not in Virginia). Moving server apps close to users is a simple way to decrease latency, sometimes by 80% or more. fly.io is really a way to run Docker images on servers in different cities and a global router to connect users to the nearest avaible instance. We convert your Docker image into a root filesystem, boot tiny VMs using a project called Firecracker (recently discussed here: https://ift.tt/32XLUFu ) and then proxy connections to it. As your app gets more traffic, we add VMs in the most popular locations. We wrote a Rust based router to distribute incoming connections from end users. The router terminates TLS when necessary (some customers handle their own TLS) and then hands the connection off to the best available Firecracker VM, which is frequently in a different city. Networking took us a lot of time to get right. Applications get dedicated IP addresses from an Anycast block. Anycast is an internet routing feature that lets us "announce" from multiple datacenters, and then core routers pick the destination with the shortest route (mostly). We run a mesh Wireguard network for backhaul, so in flight data is encrypted all the way into a user application. This is the same kind of network infrastructure the good content delivery networks use. We got a handful of enterprise companies to pay for this, and spent almost a year making it simple to use — it takes 3 commands to deploy a Docker image and have it running in 17 cities: https://ift.tt/2wlngCT . We also built "Turboku" to speed up Heroku apps. Pick a Heroku app and we deploy the slug on our infrastructure .. typical Heroku apps are 800ms faster on fly.io: https://fly.io/turboku/ We've also built some features based on Hacker News comments. When people launch container hosting on Hacker News, there's almost always a comment asking for: 1. gRPC support: apps deployed to fly.io can accept any kind of TCP connection. We kept seeing people say "hey I want to run gRPC servers on this shiney container runtime". So you can! You can specify if you want us to do TLS or HTTP for an app, or just do everything yourself. 2. Max monthly spend: unexpected traffic spikes happen, and the thought of spending an unbounded amount of money in a month is really uncomfortable. You can configure fly.io apps with a max monthly budget, we'll suspend them when they hit that budget, and then re-enable them at the beginning of the next month. One of the best parts of building this has been seeing the problems that developers are trying to solve, often problems we didn't know about beforehand. My favorite is a project to re-encode MP3s at variable speeds for specific users (apparently the Apple Audiobook player has no option for playback speed). Another is "TensorFlow at the edge" — they trained a TensorFlow model to detect bots and run predictions before handling requests. We're really happy we get to show this to you all, thank you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments.

MKRdezign

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