FirstToKnow: January 2025

Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
1114 by paraschopra | 164 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN, I'm Paras Chopra, founder of VWO. We're an A/B testing platform that was born here as a Show HN in 2009: https://ift.tt/yIvS3lD Today, I sold the company to a private equity firm for $200mn. It's covered on TechCrunch: https://ift.tt/QmJ5fgS... I was a 22 year old fresh graduate when I launched VWO on HN and got initial users. Feedback from people like @patio11 helped me get to PMF. And now, 15 years later, "site:ycombinator.com" is what I appended when I wanted to search for advice on what to keep in mind while selling my company. Thank you HN for sharing inspiration and wisdom all along. I honestly don't think I would have been an entrepreneur had it not been for hacker news. Every single day, HN is the first website I open! I'm feeling very grateful towards the community. Thanks @dang, and thank you Paul Graham for your essays and for creating this beautiful corner of the internet!

Show HN: Tetris in a PDF
976 by ThomasRinsma | 177 comments on Hacker News.
I realized that the PDF engines of modern desktop browsers (PDFium and PDF.js) support JavaScript with enough I/O primitives to make a basic game like Tetris. It was a bit tricky to find a union of features that work in both engines, but in the end it turns out that showing/hiding annotation "fields" works well to make monochrome pixels, and keyboard input can be achieved by typing in a text input box. All in all it's quite janky but a nice reminder of how general purpose PDF scripting can be. The linked PDF is all ASCII so you can just open it in a text editor, or have a look at the source code here: https://ift.tt/wxqidar

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