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 :).
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.
Please contact me. My Background: founder of successful VC backed company with a successful exit. Professor of Practice at University of Wyoming (now) retiring at the end of this semester. I teach full stack development and database. My product company was a database performance tuning and storage management tool. pschlump@gmail.com
I'm curious about this. What if you could pay for a stack overflow bounty? I'm sure there's folks who would happily earn a side hustle answering questions there at $50-$100/ea
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.
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.
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.
The individual used a male name, so it’s reasonable to make that assumption in common speech.
In terms of individual vs group, it seems unlikely that a group would have the discipline to not do anything with billions of dollars or expose the individual with control of the same.
Right. I’ve never experienced dialog or writing where somebody elects a gendered pronoun based on the pseudonymous handle used to reference the antecedent when their gender is either irrelevant, unspecified, or unknown. I’m curious which communities practice this colloquially?
If someone chooses a male pseudonym, is it sensible for everyone to individually decide what pronouns to use? This strikes me as opposed to similar etiquette.
"The singular they emerged by the 14th century,[3] about a century after the plural they. It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since then and has gained currency in official contexts. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who considered it an error."
There is nothing woke about this. Trust me I am not a fan of useless woke constructs that exist to signal virtue. I’m sure we agree on that. This is not one of those things. When you are referring to some entity with unknown gender, you use “they” and “their” so as not to lead the reader or the person you're speaking towards any assumptions and just because it’s the clearly correct way to convey the state of affairs to your audience (this matters to pedantic people). To someone who practices this in their own communication, it conveys a real signal that others pick up on. Pseudonyms generally aren’t referred to by the gender of the chosen name/handle but rather act as a proxy for the person who uses them, therefore you wouldn't refer to Satoshi as “he/him” but as the gender of the user of the pseudonym which is unknown, hence they/them. The author, while making the case that Len may be Satoshi, never asserts as much to be true. So I also read the usage of they/them as a reminder that they are presenting an argument/case not declaring fact.
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.
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?
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.
The norm is follow the gender assumption based on the pseudonym. If the person picked a female name, everyone would happily call the person “she”, as it should be. It has nothing to do with the real person’s gender.
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.
I don't believe this to be generally true but would believe that you have experienced communities that practice this convention. For the curious, in which communities do you find this to be the norm?
It is not the norm no, as multiple people have pointed out to you. The norm is to use they when uncertain. You’ve been given plenty of examples but persist in your denial. I wonder why you want to police how other people speak and connect this with some bizarre right wing conspiracy (wokeness)?
If you read the replies to your other comments before writing this you would know that “they as singular” has centuries of use (which is besides the point as language is a living thing).
No. The norm is follow the gender assumption based on the pseudonym. If the person picked a female name, everyone would happily call the person “she”, as it should be.
However, in an article in which you speculate about the real identity behind a pseudonym, suggesting any possible gender or plurality, you should use /they/, this being the whole point of what your doing.
Can you link a style guide that captures this norm? I usually consider pseudonyms to function like a pointer to the real person when the real person is in scope. If my HN handle was JaneAustism and I was being referenced in a discussion about things pertaining to my meatspace identity and I was a male, I would expect to be described with masculine pronouns. If the discussion was not related to my meatspace identity, I would, in a pseudonymous context, not expect to be referred to as she/her just because my handle contains a female name. My gender is likely irrelevant (or at least unknown) in that context and I would expect they/them.
It’s only inconsistent to you because your understanding of english language usage seems to also be inconsistent (at least with mine, others’ commenting on this thread, and the author’s of the linked article). I find this interesting in the abstract.
I think that would be a more appropriate theory if we were talking about all the silly pronoun fields every site feels the need to add so that everyone and their mother can virtue signal to infinity and beyond as if they were a good/correct UX or as if they enriched the content of the site or something unfounded. But we're talking about something that predates any sort of culture war of the last 20 years (which I do not deny exists, I just don't see it being waged here).
>The only harm happening here is people like you overstepping bounds and ultimately trashing actually correct usage of the language because you are operating under some pretext that there's a woke conspiracy to remove all gendered pronouns from colloquial usage.
So it seems like you agree with me. The sensitivity and derision of the (more or less) correct usage of a pronoun indicates culture war malarky here.
No, I’m a pedantic grammar nazi. I’m responding to people overcorrecting and suggesting incorrect language usage because of the perception that there’s a culture war to fight. I just want people to use language correctly and with precision because it soothes my OCD.
The only harm happening here is people like you overstepping bounds and ultimately trashing actually correct usage of the language because you are operating under some pretext that there's a woke conspiracy to remove all gendered pronouns from colloquial usage. This conspiracy may well exist, but it simply does not apply to this situation. As multiple people have explained and linked, the singular "they" is used to refer to an antecedent of unknown or unspecified gender or when gender is simply irrelevant. "They" is not being used because "satoshi could be trans let's not hurt zer feelings". It's because we literally don't know. You're barking up the wrong tree here. I care because I cringe every time someone says "We were just at Mary and I's house baking cookies." which is so obviously incorrect it drives me up a wall. I guess that makes me a grammar nazi.
I'm not being an anti-trans culture warrior with this argument. My point is that this post is made less clear and harder to read by referring to Satoshi as 'they' whenever possible. I am being anti-political-correctness because it's ruining written and spoken English.
Satoshi is a masculine name, so it's reasonable to expect the author to use masculine singular pronouns. Even if Satoshi is a woman or a group of people, we can still refer to the pseudonym construct as 'he' because the construct is masculine.
It's needlessly confusing to use the singular 'they' in reference to a specific individual with a gendered name, especially when the whole point of the article is that Satoshi is this one man. And most other writing I find on Satoshi refers to him as a 'he' without a problem.
> I am being anti-political-correctness because it's ruining written and spoken English.
You incessantly continue to miss the point. People have explained multiple times that this isn't about political correctness. You are seriously missing the point.
It doesn't matter what you think about whether it's politically correct or not to assume Satoshi's gender. And it doesn't matter what I think either. And it doesn't matter whether either of us even give a shit.
What matters is that it is objectively correct, colloquial, and precise to wield the singular `they` when discussing an unknown person. It doesn't matter whether they've picked Mary or Satoshi as their pseudonymous handle.
> we can still refer to the pseudonym construct as 'he' because the construct is masculine.
I'd love to be introduced to a group or style guide that has adopted this style. I have never encountered it. The closest I've encountered is just a default "use he/him because most people just assume male without really thinking about it when online". I would never, as a pedant, use a masculine pronoun to describe e.g. a forum user of unknown meatspace characteristics irrespective of the gender of their handle unless there was a pretext of role playing. If I'm Jisoo on waffles.fm I don't expect to be referred to as "she".
Even if you're correct (and I think you are) that it can be considered correct to use a gendered pronoun when a pseudonym is clearly masculine or feminine and you're strictly referring to the pseudonym, the author of the essay is simply making a style choice and I'm perplexed how you consider his correct usage of the english language (as it's been used since the 14th century) to be ruining the english language. EDIT: also I actually think the author is not referring to the "pseudonym construct" in the essay, I think the author is deliberately referring to the unknown entity that goes by satoshi rather than satoshi full stop (but I may be wrong).
Now if the author said something along the lines of "Satoshi and I's shared understanding of the cypherpunk ... ... " I'd pull out the pitchfork immediately.
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.
I get the temptation to write it off (I don't personally use TikTok daily), but to me this take feels similar to people who used to assume Twitter is just for people reporting what they ate for lunch. That might have been the case at the start but TikTok has _plenty_ of niche content, some vapid, some productive, which frankly depends on the media you engage with.
Indeed, every time I see a post on HN/reddit assuming TikTok is just people doing dances and other vapid content, it's almost from people who have never actually used TikTok.
As a non-user, I am genuinely curious about what are some concrete examples of productive contents?
From my understanding, the only format of communication on TikTok is videos with a short time limit. I'd imagine it is hard to convey much to be considered productive.
> I'd imagine it is hard to convey much to be considered productive.
This is actually one of the most refreshing things about TikTok. Content density. What YouTubers take 10 minutes to do, a competent TikToker gets across in 30 seconds.
The platform itself encourages a maximization of information density.
I went through some TikTok accounts that aim to be informational. Even for the basic type of people talking to the camera, the content density is indeed higher than some YouTube counterparts.
The problem I see is that there's an upper limit to the quantity of information even with this higher density. And that's a hard limit on the range of topics that this format can cover.
Furthermore, I don't think this can be solved by simply increase the time limit as well, since people can't maintain the same level of attention for a long period of time. Say the content needs 60s with max density. It usually needs to spread out to 120s with lower density for it to be understood better.
For the informational content I consume on YouTube, in a 10min video, the parts that can be removed are usually 30s of opening and 30s of closing. For the rest, though it has lower density than TikTok, I don't think it's possible to compress that much and the low density is in some sense necessary.
Of course, this is specific to how people use YouTube and TikTok. And though I am unlikely to use TikTok from this experience, I still appreciate your input.
>>>What YouTubers take 10 minutes to do, a competent TikToker gets across in 30 seconds. The platform itself encourages a maximization of information density.
I'm struggling to comprehend how German artillery tactics in WW2 can be competently covered in 30 seconds: https://youtu.be/3VY10gfnrTQ
> I'd imagine it is hard to convey much to be considered productive.
I have found some great TikTok tutorials on iPhone photo techniques. For example, hold the phone upside down and on the ground, pour water in front of it, and you get an amazing PoV / reflection shot. The clips that demo'd this were all less than 30 seconds long. There are other tutorials on tool use and knots, by way of example, from which I have learned useful things.
These short-form tutorials are a breath of fresh air compared with bloated YouTube equivalents and their tedious intros. And you can save them to your camera roll.
There are a lot of tech-related accounts. There is also a lot of marketing, ux-design. Some examples :
- @therubberduckiee
- @loewhaley
- @tony.aube
- @cassidoo
- @systems_analyst
There is also urban design tiktok with @mrbarricade.
Let's also be clear that the goal of the app is to entertain and I think it does this really well and cheaply. Then sometimes you learn something that you might use in your work or personal life.
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.
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.
There have also been documented cases where delivery drivers for 3rd parties will eat part of your meal. There are many potential nodes of failure throughout this entire chain.
I imagine stapled bags are a fairly standard practice.
And if a driver is willing to eat people’s food, I wouldn’t put it past them to buy a staple remover and stapler and purposely target those orders for the plausible deniability
It's upsetting to see Lambda making so many negative headlines because it truly is in a position to do the most Good and provide the most value (especially after Dev Bootcamp and Hack Reactor were acquired).
I attended Dev Bootcamp in early 2013, when bootcamps were still largely unknown, and had a transformative time. Just stellar teachers all around that compensated for any perceived weakness in curriculum. The industry business model hasn't changed much, so this implies to me that a bootcamp is really only as good as its instructors and the amount they care.
At this point I have to believe there is a financial bottleneck limiting their growth. As you said, they’re i a prime position to shake up the industry with world class education under a new business model. They’ve had a staggering amount of positive press in the past few years.
Yet time and time again we hear about they’re using this opportunity to basically test how much they can get away with in terms of educational quality.
The optimistic take is that they’re bootstrapping their way into being able to afford top quality instructors after the cash flow is established.
The cynical take is that they’re getting hooked on the easy boot camp cash while the market is hot and they’d rather expand as fast as possible than invest in quality education.
I just hope they don’t sour the business model before someone figures it out.
Having researched and hired people from bootcamps Dev Bootcamp did seem to be one of the best. I was sad when it folded. It seems they were pushed out by lower quality companies with better marketing (eg Lambda).
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 :).