New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?
Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?
66 by rvz | 47 comments on Hacker News.
What are your predictions for 2021? It's clear that 2020 was somewhat of a false start into this decade and has arguably completely changed everyone's lives for the long term. (If not permanently). This time, it seems that my crystal ball is lacking inspiration for 2021 due to the uncertainty caused by this year.

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?
Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?
17 by snowisgone | 6 comments on Hacker News.
For me a couple of interesting technology products that help me in my day-to-day job 1. Hasura 2. Strapi 3. Forest Admin (super interesting although I cannot ever get it to connect to a hasura backend on Heroku ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 4. Integromat 5. Appgyver There are many others that I have my eye on such as NodeRed[6], but have yet to use. I do realise that these are all low-code related, however, I would be super interested in being made aware of cool other cool & upcoming tech that is making waves. What's on your 'to watch' list? [1]https://hasura.io/ [2]https://strapi.io/ [3]https://ift.tt/2p6eimS [4]https://ift.tt/1N3LkvM [5]https://ift.tt/1T5iPym [6]https://nodered.org/

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: 02Books – An open source web app to teach kids to read

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: 02Books – An open source web app to teach kids to read
Show HN: 02Books – An open source web app to teach kids to read
7 by Hulless_Barley | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I wanted to share a project that I've been working on designed to help young kids go from reading single words to reading whole books. My husband and I started spending a lot of time teaching our 5-year-old (Alex) to read because our school district is exclusively doing remote learning and I was skeptical that he could learn to read over Zoom. We used flashcards (which Alex found boring) and then combined them into sentences (which Alex found interesting). But the sentence approach requires a lot of arranging pieces of paper and remembering which words you are working on. So I developed 02books for my family and decided to share. You can use it (no account required!) here: https://02books.app/ Github: https://ift.tt/37FO2Wp Thanks for letting me share - this my first real open source project! Regards, Sofya

Black and Armed

Black and Armed
The surge in Black gun-buying is a response to America’s failing to create a society where all citizens feel safe.

from NYT > Top Stories https://ift.tt/3mBBhAy

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
46 by sanity31415 | 22 comments on Hacker News.
Back in 2010 I had an idea for a service that would allow people to easily create semi-permanent email aliases so that they could give an email address to people and websites without revealing their real email address. These aliases will continue to work indefinitely unless you choose to block them. My brother and I spent a few months building the initial version and launched the website in July 2010. For the first year we had about 50 signups per month, by 2013 this had increased to 1500 and it's currently around 3500 per month. Similarly, our revenue grew consistently but slowly - doubling about every 18 months, reaching its current level of around $8k/mo. Over this time we redesigned the website, and found a company to create an explainer video for the service (both through 99Designs). We have not spent much on paid user acquisition, we experimented with it a bit a few years ago without positive results. I think the difficulty is that some user education is required for them to understand what the service does and the value of it. The website is called 33Mail (https://33mail.com/). My plan is to spend the next few weeks focussed on trying to accelerate 33Mail's growth, in particular I want to try Google and FB advertising, and we've also been thinking about setting up an affiliate program through something like Commission Junction. But before diving into that it would be really helpful to get some feedback and suggestions, it can sometimes feel like we're too close to it to see it objectively. I would be super grateful if you guys could take a look at it and see if any suggestions come to mind.