Show HN: Marple – Interactive time series visualization for engineers
6 by NeroVanbierv | 0 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN, excited to share the project I have been working on for the past two years. Marple was created by engineers for engineers. Marple helps them organize and analyze their sensor data in a more user-friendly way. We’ve all been there: measurement data from an experiment or test needs to be analyzed but the only thing you have is a few data files flying around. You do not have a clue how to open or read the data. So what you do next is open your Python/Matlab/Jupyter Notebook/… and start coding in order to make some sense of the data. We didn’t like that process, so we started Marple to solve this issue. Engineers tend to log data at frequencies from 1Hz to 10kHz and usually log hundreds of sensors at the same time. Data sets usually contain millions of data points. In order to make our web-based data visualization responsive, we had some technical challenges to tackle. We developed our own visualization engine based on PostgreSQL that is able to visualize millions of data points pretty much instantly. This allows us to create an interactive visualization environment which is perfect for data exploration, even for large data sets! This is the second time we show Marple to HackerNews, but since then we made some big steps. We made a pivot to a cloud product and now offer a free version of Marple. Feel free to head over to our website and give it a go. Let us know what you think of it!
My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas
13 by prasenjit_pro | 1 comments on Hacker News. After having failed with more than seven startups and finally achieved some success with my latest one Proxies API, here are a bunch of criteria I follow when picking a startup idea to bootstrap from the website 1. I am a bootstrapper, so I am interested in making recurring revenue and build an asset. So it has to be a SAAS idea. No consumer internet. 2. It has to have a competition. Again, I want to make money, not be a pioneer. 3. It need not be a multi-million dollar potential startup. I prefer it if it’s possible never exceeds a million dollars at its peak. It is because I don’t want to offer a platform, but a small subset of features that people find useful and the big guys find too small a market niche to address. 4. I prefer it if it does not need any design skills. With Proxies API, it is all about technology and how it works. I am in my element when I can run with just code and not have to pause for ‘prettifying stuff.’ 5. I want a self-serve model. It is because I want to acquire customers by marketing rather than by sales. I have nothing against sales. I prefer this as I like to code, and I am a bit shy and introverted. I can write, in any case. 6. I want a field where I can write a lot about it. Just by looking at the area, I should be able to imagine what my first ten blog posts will be. If I can’t write, I can’t market. So I would slightly not touch it as I am not good at the rest of them. 7. The product should not be commoditized. It’s happening in almost any market after about five years. Social media tools are an example. They were selling at $100 pm a few years back now people are offering it free. 8. The technology should provide a moat against every amateur trying to start a company. That’s why there are a million to-do list apps. That’s practically the first thing they teach in any course. 9. I want to identify the primary keyword that drives traffic and search for that keyword on Google Trends. Google Trends should show the keyword gaining in popularity ideally, or at least it should be a flat line for the last five years. I will stay away from anything that is on its way out. 10. I want the users to get the AHA moment in one line or one image and not in multiple steps or after they “add 18 friends and two monkeys” rubbish. Just one look and the value prop is right there. With Proxies API, it was always this image and line. In essence, it immediately drove home this visceral power of using a single API call to solve an entire gamut of problem-related to scaling web crawling. The author is the founder of Proxies API the rotating proxies service. This article originally appeared here: https://ift.tt/IbNk8Td
Show HN: PubKey – Communicate Privately in Anonymous Public Spaces
10 by popcalc | 4 comments on Hacker News. A little while back I remember seeing a user on a certain anonymous imageboard asking for an invite to a selective email host. Only after a few minutes did the guy realize the perplexity of the situation. How do you insure against a race condition in a public forum with no way to direct message? Luckily, he nabbed the invite code, but it got me thinking about using PGP to provide a solution. This is meant to be a rough PoC and the UX is definitely not ready for the average Joe, but the functionality I'd like to think is there. What catbox.moe is to dropbox is what I'd like this to eventually be to keybase. Btw, "this page uses NO SERVER" just means it's static. I'm not trying to fool anyone lol. Edit: Source Code: https://ift.tt/7X1E2hb