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msencenb

Re:Launch HN: Manufact (YC S25) – MCP Cloud on Thursday July 02, 2026 @12:06PM (#48763576)
I am really impressed with your demo video, particularly the analytics, logs, and test suite features.

I'm a target customer where I have a few curious customers, but I'm not fully ready to roll it out yet across the customer base. One thing that's stopping me, what does credits mean on your pricing page? And what is the pay as you go price after you hit your limit? I would need to be able to budget this before I deploy.

The second piece - we already have a CLI, which is great for terminal based agents and what we will continue to recommend. What we really want, and I think is what you are offering, is basically an easier way to deploy a 'remote connector' to use Claude lingo so that normal users with the claude/chatgpt app can just use our MCP. Can you point me to guidelines or the right place in your open source templates to understand how I would best handle auth (or the tradeoffs in each) during the initial build phase of the MCP server?

Have you been able to nail down a loop where your tool can take an open pr, guess the code path and do some testing?

We use cypress heavily for our core flows which has a similar ai prompt thing but it’s not quite ad hoc enough for smaller fixes which is where the bottleneck still comes in for us.

First of all - totally agree. I work half-time so I get to spend extended time every day with the kids.

My post did not say anything about how I was going to use the computer, in fact we often do exactly what you said with his fake keyboard in between his other activities.

I also believe that it's my job to provide my children with the environment in which they can thrive and be independent. This post is asking for constructive guidance on how other people have navigated the transition into engaging with technology that all kids go through.

If you have any ideas, I'd be happy to hear them.

Ask HN: How have you shared computers with your young child (~3 to 5)

My kids are not quite screen time age, but at some point will be. I'd like to give them an interesting computer experience instead of just plopping them in front of an iPad with some media.When I was a kid I had fond memories of exploring the file system, figuring out how applications worked, playing with Kid Pix, Paint, and a few games (roughly Apple IIGS, Macintosh 2, through iMac + a Windows...

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Re:Ask HN: Recommended monitor for a small desk on Tuesday October 29, 2024 @05:51PM (#41989781)
Which dell did you end up going with?
Re:Ask HN: Recommended monitor for a small desk on Tuesday October 29, 2024 @05:34PM (#41989646)
Thank you, great resource
Re:Ask HN: Recommended monitor for a small desk on Tuesday October 29, 2024 @05:33PM (#41989645)
Thank you, this was the advice I was looking for!

Ask HN: Recommended monitor for a small desk

Most reviews I find are for massive monitors, but my desk doubles as my bedside table in our small house, so I'm looking for something that is compact but still lovely. I'll be using a newer MacBook Pro (M3/M4) on it, primarily for software engineering.Anyone in a similar situation that likes their current setup? At the moment I just prop the laptop up on a travel stand, but that's getting a...

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Ask HN: Those of you in M&A – is AI generated code a pencils down moment?

When we first started seeing Github CoPilot/ChatGPT there was a lot of concern from the legal standpoint of IP ownership and copyright issues.When you are evaluating a company for acquisition, what happens when you learn that the programmers have been using AI-generation? Is it pencils down? Change the valuation? Nothing?

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Re:JetBrains AI on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @11:54AM (#38546385)
Any details on IP indemnity?

I have not really used Github Copilot out of concerns with IP; however, they recently added an IP indemnity clause that might have me take the leap. I use Jetbrains products (RubyMine) and would love to give this a shot instead.

Thanks for the reply. We do plan on taking another pass at analytics in July or August. I'll give the system user_id a try, it's entirely possible that will work for us and I have simply not gotten to an aha moment yet with the product (we are starting from scratch, so no segment data to import).

> I'm not sure why this is completely blocking you, we have plenty of customers that just create a user with user_id "system" to track actions that aren't tied into a specific user in a company.

It was never a technical problem, but a cognitive dissonance between the marketing and implementation details. I'll do my best to narrate my internal dialogue as a potential buyer.

I come to the homepage and am intrigued by the words "focused on companies"—because that is absolutely what I want! I want company level metrics (sports teams in my case) to be the first class citizen. I actually do not care about user identification at all. There are a ton of products that already do that I can pick if I want. I assumed you might be able to drill down into user level metrics eventually, but I thought our v1 would not identify users at all.

Jumping over to the docs, I head to the tracking behavior section for companies. The user_id param being required does not fit with my idea of what June is at this point. Why would I need to identify a user, if this analytics is focused on companies?

To me, this data model suggests that this is a traditional analytics product that treats user + user events as first class, then rolls that up to do clever things at the analysis level for companies. I had expected company events to be the first class citizen and for the events to flow top down from there. Now I'm concerned that when I stick in a 'team' user_id the data is going to be muddied, because the product won't know that this hacked in ID is just a generic company thing. Does that mean my user based analytics are going to be off? What does that imply for the data/reports downstream?

> There isn't really any drawback to that approach as you can filter out the system user from every analysis that doesn't want to include them! Happy to support you on the implementation or answer any further doubts in our Intercom conversation thread :)

This comment highlights what I mean. If you are an analytics company focused on tracking companies, I expected it to just work that way out of the box. If I need to remember to filter out this user from a bunch of metrics or analyses, I am bound to forget at some point or bring on a teammate who doesn't know.

Anyways, thanks again for the reply and hope the feedback is helpful.

I heavily considered June recently for my b2b saas (they even offered my tiny bootstrapped startup a small discount for the first year, which I appreciate very much).

The thing that stopped me was that there was no way to track an event to only a company, it still had to be tied to a user with the identify call. Our most important metrics ($ processed per company) is not based on a user at all. I wish June let you do company only event tracking - I would have had to hack in a fake user to track against.

Lots of our other metrics are per user, so we did like that it was possible to tie it to users-just surprising that an analytics company focused on org level analytics required it.

Also on the wishlist - hubspot integration. I’ve been evaluating Hightouch to punch data from my app to hubspot and it’s probably going to work, but take more effort than I was hoping for.

Best of luck!

I think I’m in your target market-I own a small b2b saas that will be adding user generated automations to our product soon.

I love the UI and would use a UI only version of this. I pay for highcharts and pintura.

The backend stuff is not super helpful in my case because my app already has all those capabilities (email, SMS, etc) and it’s wrapped up in messaging within the app. I wouldn’t want to use an outside provider for that stuff. I also generally want custom automations - otherwise I would just be using Zapier - so while the example basic stuff is reasonable, I would be looking for a fully custom option for each building block.

Best of luck - seems like it has potential.

Re:Show HN: Build auto-updating dashboards in a spreadsheet on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @03:16PM (#34809938)
Any chance you are considering offering a white label solution for embedding in other SaaS products?

One of my big features this quarter is to get deep into dashboarding/reporting for my own saas and I am incredibly impressed with your UI/UX.

This reminds me a little of the cuban offline network (https://www.fastcompany.com/3048163/in-cuba-an-underground-n...)
Re:Giving a shit as a service on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @01:40PM (#32073347)
Everyone saying it doesn't scale is missing the point.

Scaling is a winner-take-all, venture capital mindset. The article is about service businesses, which do not need to hit web scale! We are talking about services here not your web startup.

Even beyond services, giving a shit and building saas is not impossible. In fact, I wish more tech companies started small and stayed small. I absolutely want to run a digital small business and I want to give a shit, it makes the building feel purposeful instead of this product-led growth at all costs bullshit.

I hope we see a software middle class grow in the next decade. Middle class tech companies are going to be coming from the bootstrapper + founder focused funds (TinySeed / Calm) and they are going to have a distinct advantage if they understand their strategy/context in their chosen verticals.

Re:Ask HN: Best SaaS Boilerplate? on Saturday March 26, 2022 @01:45PM (#30813778)
For payments specifically, Laravel Spark is worth checking out.
Re:Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs? on Monday March 07, 2022 @01:14PM (#30591288)
You sound like a really smart, engaged employee. I would absolutely not try to 'fix' this in yourself.

Advocating-for customers, fellow employees, technology to solve specific business problems—is the quickest way to progress to senior or staff level engineering positions. Sure you need the engineering chops, but my experience has been that applying those skills in the context of business goals is the quickest way to climb the ladder.

In your case it sounds like you need to be willing to engage with the founders on the field they care about, which is business goals. Their metric of success (downard trend of x) is a good focus for early stage startups. Over time, there will be other metrics that will become important and one of those is going to be customer acquisition channels.

The holy grail of acquisition channels is customer referrals. Do you have NPS surveys at your company (or some other proxy of 'I would love to refer you to other customers')? If you do, I would take a look at what those scores look like, which will help you engage your boss with something like:

- Our NPS score for key customer X is in the shitter, do you think that means we should focus more on bugs so that we don't get a bad reputation? How do we think about NPS vs feature count in a situation like this?

Or if NPS is still good, you have grounds to feel better about the bug situation. Sure it's not good, but you can feel good that you are spending your time in other impactful ways.

If NPS is not a thing yet, advocate for it. One way to do this might be to engage with your boss / founder. I would suggest simply asking how they know when you have met your goal of supporting x number of features. Or if they don't have an answer to that, how they think through when other metrics might become more important. If they go into customer acquisition, marketing, etc, it would be a natural and good time to advocate for NPS or some other form of engagement with your customers so you can discover how to harness them for future growth.

Sorry for the novel. This is basically a long winded way of saying it's not something that needs fixing in you. Business is a big chess game of strategy. If you want to feel better about it, the best way is to continue to engage your boss/founders on the business goals and to help them think more clearly about the tradeoffs you are making as a tech team.

Re:Ask HN: What is your Goodreads replacement? on Sunday February 13, 2022 @12:29AM (#30319517)
The StoryGraph

Ask HN: Stripe Connect Alternatives for Platforms?

I've been a heavy Stripe user since 2013 and as a developer, love them. My day job (roughly 4M a week in volume across the platofrm) and my own saas (targeted at wrestling clubs) both run through Stripe Connect.However, in the last six months or so I've been getting huge blow back from paying customers because of how badly their customer support is performing these days. So much blow back that...

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What is the event like as an attendee? Do you need to install an app or is it browser based?
Re:Stripe Payment Links on Tuesday May 25, 2021 @03:53PM (#27281750)
That would be awesome, thank you!
Re:Stripe Payment Links on Tuesday May 25, 2021 @03:46PM (#27281626)
Are we able to create these via the API (specifically through Connect)?

I'd love to dig a bit deeper into the docs on integrating with this, but haven't managed to find them yet.

Re:Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like? on Monday February 22, 2021 @02:42PM (#26229496)
At my day job we use Redshift + Metabase
Re:Losing faith in UX on Thursday January 28, 2021 @07:31PM (#25951812)
I put it poorly in my first comment.

I think it would be correct to say that receiving an education should teach you about ethics. Whether that should be strategic from the top down (you take specific classes about ethics) or embedded in each class is a question I don’t know the answer to.

In an individual class the amount of ethics varies. When I took d.school classes there certainly wasn’t a “market mover” mentality. We were genuinely interested in understanding people better so we could improve lives. But ethics certainly wasn’t explicitly on the agenda. We just didn’t have any assholes taking the course at that time.

This is part of the argument within the university for loosening credit requirements. When I was there, I took the HCI track. That track had the smallest credit requirement and also let you take a broader base of classes that counted towards the major, such as philosophy. That was a more rounded experience than some of my peers who took harder cs tracks like networking and systems.

Re:Losing faith in UX on Thursday January 28, 2021 @06:07PM (#25950841)
In defense of the d.school, what they teach are techniques and tools - not ethics.

UX broadly is in the same boat. UX is a tool. We can use it for good or for evil.

At the end of the day UX is only as valuable as how well individuals (or companies) can align their personal definition of 'good' with 'good' that the underlying company cares for.

Show HN: The 1.0 of my Slack app – Visual Office

Hi HN,I am happy to say the v1.0 of my Slack app, Visual Office, is ready today! https://www.visualoffice.app/My obsession with extending an office metaphor into Slack started last year, when I was managing a remote team of engineers at a company that is 75% remote. Despite loving my work from home days, I couldn't help but notice that I was closer to my co-workers I saw in person than the...

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Tell HN: Launching a side project? Remember to sanity check production

Major facepalm moment for me today.I launched https://www.visualoffice.app/ a few weeks ago, got a few trials coming through. I then was approved for the Slack app directory, after a brief rejection regarding oauth permissions, and then celebrated.Then crickets, despite my best efforts. No trials for 12 days, despite some traffic to the landing page. Today I decided to fully test the onboarding...

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If we transcend the holy war of dev vs ops, practically speaking this is likely a team culture and skill set question.

If you being a dev is worth more, the team either has the ops under control, or you need to demonstrate why you being closer to the ops provides business value.

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