What are you working on this week? \ stacker news ~builders

4051 sats \ 34 comments \ @sn 7 Feb builders

Calling all stackers!

Leave a comment below to let the SN community know what you're working on this week. It doesn't matter how big or small your project is, or how much progress you've made.

Just share what you're up to, and let the community know if you want any feedback or help.

If you missed last week's thread, here are the updates stackers shared from all their latest work projects.

view all related items

1189 sats \ 0 replies \ @johngribbin 7 Feb

We (Clams) are making good progress on an MVP that we hope will help bitcoiners visualize their sats flow across all of their wallets. See a short demo here https://github.com/PlebLab/Top-Builder/issues/16#issuecomment-1932049134

Would be cool to know what types of information folks would like to see on a sats flow dashboard. For example, we could show charts to track income over time. What else comes to mind that would be useful? In particular, I'd like to hear from anyone that is trying to run a Bitcoin business.

1152 sats \ 4 replies \ @hasherstacker 7 Feb

Gathering books with information about accepting Bitcoin in the remote areas of the global south.

432 sats \ 3 replies \ @SwearyDoctor 7 Feb

about technical ways to accept bitcoin? what are you looking for? (asking from the global south)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @hasherstacker 7 Feb

Particularly non-technical one. I'm working with an African community that is yet to embrace Bitcoin.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @hasherstacker 7 Feb

Both technical and non-technical. I'm working with an African community that is yet to embrace Bitcoin.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bitcoiner1 7 Feb

Maybe talking to @anita could be useful for your project.

1307 sats \ 1 reply \ @Alby 7 Feb

Pushing NWC app to Start9 and other environments! 💪

503 sats \ 0 replies \ @KLT 7 Feb

Amazing. I’m also looking forward to a Fedimint app on @start9

899 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheFish 7 Feb

Long term project of chronicling all parallels between the bible and Bitcoin to show that Bitcoin is a biblically inspired innovation.

899 sats \ 0 replies \ @thebullishbitcoiner 7 Feb

Tinkering with miners. Installed a Noctua fan on the FutureBit Apollo only to find out the 2000 RPM max doesn’t keep it cool enough (had to reinstall the stock fan with 4000 RPMs).

876 sats \ 0 replies \ @aljaz 7 Feb

decentralizing github and confidential computing research for practical implementation, which is kinda getting tracked (at least useful reading during research) at ungovernable.tech

762 sats \ 3 replies \ @Natalia 7 Feb

started to track my Bitcoin earnings to see how long it would flip my fiat ones.
writing down all the Turkish dishes I've learned and keep experimenting, and trying to crack its code: the base of most dishes are the same. 👀
admiring beauties and collecting inspirations, then integrate some of them into my life.

431 sats \ 2 replies \ @johngribbin 7 Feb

Hey Natalia, do you mind me asking if you are using any particular software to track your earnings?

531 sats \ 0 replies \ @Natalia 7 Feb

just a simple chart in Libreoffice 👀

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r 8 Feb

Someone shared GnuCash recently

482 sats \ 0 replies \ @Roll 7 Feb

Rebuilding my full node on my raspberry 4 after severals intent using Sdcard....

I m going to install the full node on a hard drive , now :)

1107 sats \ 0 replies \ @KLT 7 Feb

Just locked in 6 out of 9 meetings with movie studios next week to pitch our movie! Hoping to lock in the other 3 in the next few days.

1086 sats \ 1 reply \ @beorange 7 Feb

Brainstorming ideas for cool things and use cases for LN and Nostr (apps, services, bots, integrations, etc).

If you have any, please let me know. I'm looking for something to explore in the next few months.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @chris42 19 Feb

Same, get in touch if you wana work together

441 sats \ 0 replies \ @jowo 8 Feb

wiring up Nostr auth into zap.meme today :) the stacker.news codebase has been a really useful reference!

1944 sats \ 8 replies \ @k00b 7 Feb

Too much.

We are hiring and hiring is hard so we are doing a one month paid contract with five potential hires (aka The Trial). They'll get that paper, build an open source portfolio, and do real work for stackers. At the end, we'll extend full time offers where the fit is exceptional.

One of the unexpected benefits of The Trial so far: in prepping the github repo for it, I had an epiphany about how we can explicitly gamify paid FOSS contributions. Following The Trial, we'll set that up and I'm pretty excited about all The Trial members joining full time.

Otherwise, code reviews and lnd autowithdrawal. I'm hoping we can ship the new wallet stuff be EoW but stuff has been known to come up.

790 sats \ 7 replies \ @davidw 8 Feb

Congrats team, sounds like a win-win for all involved.

Was that always the intention or did you just find it impossible to pick during the process? Also is the people side & managing larger teams something new to you in startup land @k00b?

Hope all 5 give you a headache and keep their contracts rolling, rolling, rolling.

1844 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 8 Feb

I hate the traditional interview process. The hirer spends a lot of time, the candidate spends a lot time, and in the end you're left with a slightly better guess about the candidate's fit, yet no real work has been done and the candidate gets nothing if they don't get a job offer. Further, evaluating people through proxy measures forces you to over-index on shallow things like the schools they went to, the degrees they have, or the companies they've worked for. I've been on both sides and it's broken. We're also trying to find someone a bit abnormal. Someone like @ekzyis that at root isn't an assembly line worker. Someone that doesn't want it easy and predictable. Someone that wants to grow and push themselves.

A long time ago @MaxAWebster recommended to hire people on a trial basis once you decide to hire them. I liked this approach because I hate making sticky decisions with limited info but it still required a normal interview process to start.

So, as I hate traditional interview processes and feel most comfortable hiring after a trial, I began wondering if I could hire through trials exclusively. Being an impulsive person, I didn't wonder long before deciding to do it. It has all the trappings of a great experiment: I was excited to do it rather than dreading it, it's something we can uniquely do well given we're FOSS, and it's a win-win-win-win.

After The Trial, if my instincts around the gamification I plan to do on the repo prove out, we'll be running The Forever Trial where people self-select into a trial on an ongoing basis and we have a spring of potential hires at any given moment in addition to a strong supplemental engineering department that'll be like a melting pot of paid transient help.

706 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 8 Feb

Really love this idea.

Could you say more (or point me towards where you've already discussed it) how you're setting up for the trial? It sounds like you're curating a special repo? Did you have specific tasks in mind for them, or did they propose things that would take about a month and you accepted, or what?

Also would be curious what in your mind is different from a trial period vs full-time. In the limit case, isn't full-time just indefinite trials? Or does something change in how you expect to interact with the person?

Would be a great extended series of posts, also.

3869 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 8 Feb

Could you say more (or point me towards where you've already discussed it) how you're setting up for the trial?

Imagine the laziest scheme one could use for such a thing and that's what I've done. :)

We settle on an hourly rate, they work as much as they want on whatever they want, then send me their hours every week and I pay them. If they prove uneconomical in the first few weeks, we stop their contract, otherwise it continues until roughly a month has passed.

Did you have specific tasks in mind for them, or did they propose things that would take about a month and you accepted, or what?

On some level I'm evaluating how comfortable they are with extreme autonomy (among other things), because that's how we roll, so it's up to them to figure out what's worth working on and what they will work on. They can meet with any of us whenever they want to ask questions or get clarity on our priorities and things. We have a slack channel for all of them and they have triage permissions on repo.

It's all kind of thrown together in my usual minimally viable way.

It sounds like you're curating a special repo?

It's just the normal repo. They are working on the real deal from the jump.

I've been putting effort into tagging issues with difficulty levels and giving pointers on what tackling the issue will entail so they can pick the right porridge bowl if they don't want to make up their own.

Also would be curious what in your mind is different from a trial period vs full-time. In the limit case, isn't full-time just indefinite trials? Or does something change in how you expect to interact with the person?

It's a lot like a romantic fling, being a couple, and being married. Each implies a different commitment level and a set of expectations given the commitment level.

A FOSS contribution is like a romantic fling, a contract is like being a couple, and full-time employment is a marriage (it can end but it's ugly). I don't want to make someone full-time unless we're reasonably sure we're ride or die together (within reason).

The Trial as it currently is like a polyamorous couple. It's kind of confusing and it's not clear if the folks in your polycule are allies or enemies. The Forever Trial will hopefully incentivize an ongoing number of flings, FOSS contributions, instead and we'll be back in the familiar territory of fuck, marry, kill but with lots more fucking.

(I'll write up the rules of The Forever Trial soon. It involves some of the components of The Trial but I don't want to confuse anyone in the current experiment by publicizing the future one.)

3085 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 9 Feb

Thanks for the nice response.

I've been putting effort into tagging issues with difficulty levels and giving pointers on what tackling the issue will entail so they can pick the right porridge bowl if they don't want to make up their own.

This is tangentially related, maybe, but I'm very intrigued, in a systems-builder type of way, in how big undertakings (like your codebase) can be rendered maximally approachable to someone. Put another way: for whatever complicated system you inhabit, how can you lower the bar as much as possible for someone else to contribute to it meaningfully?

This extends to social systems, too. I may have posted about this before, but this example from Irina Krush during the Kasparov vs the world chess extravaganza is kind of my go to for what this means. Here's an excerpt from Michael Nielsen:

Unlike her expert peers, Krush focused considerable time and attention on the World Team’s game forum. Shrugging off flames and personal insults, she worked to extract the best ideas and analysis from the forum, as well as building up a network of strong chess-playing correspondents, including some of the grandmasters now offering advice.

Simultaneously, Krush built a publicly accessible analysis tree, showing possible moves and countermoves, and containing the best arguments and refutations for different lines of play, both from the game forum, and from her correspondence with others, including the GM school. This analysis tree enabled the World Team to focus its attention much more effectively, and served as a reference point for discussion, for further analysis, and for voting.

As the game went on, Krush’s role on the World Team gradually became more and more pivotal, despite the fact that according to their relative rankings, Kasparov would ordinarily have beaten Krush easily, unless he made a major blunder.

(Some similar examples come to mind from Audrey Tang, though I don't have any ready to hand. Similar energy in her activism, though.)

I'm obsessed with this idea in the btc ecosystem, which is why I'm such a snarky bitch sometimes. What would the Irina Krush / Audrey Tang of btc look like? If you're holding a billion dollar bag, is there a relatively low-cost but super high-leverage Irina Krush-style person who could fills all those invisible cracks and bridge the bridgeless gaps? It's fun to think about. I've written about it before but am too lazy to unearth any of it.

Anyhoo, your setup for the trial made me think of it. I bet the work you're doing now will add a ton of value outside of the value it adds in helping you hire someone. Innovating as per usual.

399 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 9 Feb

This is tangentially related, maybe, but I'm very intrigued, in a systems-builder type of way, in how big undertakings (like your codebase) can be rendered maximally approachable to someone.

We have a lot of work to do on this front.

It reminds me of @Michelson_Morley sharing his favorite contribution guide before he left us forever.

The Forever Trial will really only solve a piece of the approach - helping people pick what to work on and motivating them to do it and do it well. It's still too hard to get started contributing to SN. Most of our trial members suffered for a few days just getting setup.

Innovating as per usual.

It seems all this requires is energetically solving the problems created by one's own shortcomings. Krush is an excellent example. I wish I understood this earlier.

706 sats \ 1 reply \ @davidw 8 Feb

fuck, marry, kill but with lots more fucking.

Haha. 1st base, 2nd base, 3rd base - like it. It’s always bugged me with how much companies invest in the hiring process vs the actual work. Finding fake ways to simulate it early with coding challenges and the like. But this loose structure sounds way better.

Good to know you’re not overthinking it and incorporating the open and pow aspects of bitcoin/FOSS into recruitment.

Could probably write a book about it, if successful. The name reminds me of “The Knowledge” used for London taxi cabs. Except pretty much the opposite.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 8 Feb

We'll see! Economically it only needs to produce a single hire to make sense because recruiters will charge nearly as much as The Trial could cost us, but in addition to a hire we get 5 man-months of work (in the ideal case).

“The Knowledge” sounds so romantic. Effort like that became old fashioned fast. If we want to see what AI will do to certain workers, you probably couldn't find better examples than what computers did to memory-workers or arithmetic-workers.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kurszusz 8 Feb

We are on the "last 100 meters" with math preparation (the "challenge" will be next Friday) with my son. Interesting task, needs logical thinking more than math. Here is an exemple ;)

I will translate one for you...and waiting for the results ;)

a kid wrote down all of the the two-digit number in which the two numbers are the same. He chose two of these and added them up. How many total amounts could get? ;)

The second "task" for me for this week is to plan an air pollution reduction and energy recovery for industrial applications (not the principal planning is my task, "just" the review), because next month we need to go to France to install it... It will be hard, but not impossible! ;)

P.S. Waiting for your replies about the math solution :D

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TNStacker 8 Feb

Spreading the word!

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @DudeJLebowski 8 Feb

Continuing my quest to become the worlds most handsome python developer.

716 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 8 Feb

At this point, is the quest more about getting better at python or more handsome?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DudeJLebowski 9 Feb

I don't know any more.