/Uses: A list of /uses pages detailing developer setups, gear, software, configs | Hacker News Reader

uses pages detailing developer setups, gear, software, configs

uses.tech

183 pointspetecooper77 comments

Ahhh… lovely serveless cloud SPA crashing in your freaking face with a stack trace.

We’re being so cheated with all this marketing bullshit.

Had you used a decent web framework you’d at least show a proper error page and get sent a notification about the problem.

You can also show a proper error page (or continue) through edge functions[1]. They just didn't set any up. So the chances of them also doing so in another framework and caring about being notified is slim.

1. https://docs.netlify.com/edge-functions/optional-configurati...

Not everything needs to be a serverless SPA, that's the point.

Nobody is saying everything needs to be serverless. I'm addressing the point that going the traditional route doesn't negate the work required to implement a custom error page and handle rewrites on error.

Yes they are and the promise cited as a justification is always "automatic scalability", "increased reliability", "decreased downtime".

This is from the first google result on "Why move to cloud":

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/03/12/wh...

I think a lot of people do advocate that everything be serverless, but at the very least the industry as a whole defaults to that. You now need a good reason not to deploy bleeding-edge $FRAMEWORK SPAs to serverless edge cloud functions or whatever they're called this month, rather than only using them when it makes sense.

yeah there's a lot of fashion trends that this industry follows and it drives me insane.

by "fashion" I mean new, hot frameworks, architectures, providers, or anything which is chosen because it looks fun or might allow some resumes to be meatier. no one makes solutions for their problems anymore, they make problems for their currently-favorite solution.

I've been guilty of it myself in the past but I'm increasingly getting to a point, especially for side projects that I intend to make a few dollars off of, where I just want to deploy a compiled-language site to a VM and point a domain at it.

You can do everything. Even if just using assembler.

Popular web frameworks such as Laravel, rails or Django do this by default, and a ton other “small things”.

That’s the point.

When I visited just now, I saw a message saying the edge function has crashed.

There's actually quite a few ways to prevent this without breaking the bank.

alternatively, see https://usesthis.com/ - "a collection of nerdy interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done" ongoing since january 2009

some somewhat notable interviews have been submitted before: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=usesthis.com

e.g., aaron swartz[1]: https://usesthis.com/interviews/aaron.swartz/

1: his reference of using the MPW 9 font led me towards the discovery of the monaco 9pt bitmap font - curious if it's still around

I had a period where I read every interview there, it was so cool to read about peoples tech stacks. I kind of fell off as it seemed like it ended up being more interviews with non-tech people than tech-people which removed some of the interest and utility for me. Got to revisit that site.

i tend to find the non-tech interviews the most interesting for the remoteness of the tools so to speak, e.g., coming across tools like https://www.wonderdraft.net/, a fantasy map creation tool, and thinking it's rather neat

I find them interesting too because tech people tend to just all have the latest and greatest hardware, while a lot of non-tech people are getting by on bizarre clunkers and set-ups which have more novelty value.

I did one a few years ago. https://usesthis.com/interviews/matt.lee/

Glad to see they’re still doing them. My stack has completely changed since.

You should consider asking if they'd like an update! I'm sure they'd love to see how things have changed in the past ~6 years, and readers would enjoy it too :)

Good idea! I’ll reach out

Another one is https://workspaces.xyz , although it's more interesting to see the actual spaces where some people work. Some are hilariously clean and staged, while others look like they were taken mid escape with a go-bag. Unfortunately they're becoming more like a way of marketing tbh, but the sheer amount of posts on it are interesting nonetheless. (The number of people working in crypto is also hilarious.)

I compared some all-time favorite programming fonts last week; you might enjoy that write-up :) ( I tried not to be too biased towards Fira Code as well as JetBrains and Julia Mono )

https://jdsalaro.com/blog/best-programming-fonts/

I also got quite a few suggestions on Mastodon and Tildes, which were added retroactively.

This is really fascinating.

Mostly because I never heard of the "/uses" convention. Unfortunately it's impossible to google to learn about it. Does anyone know where "/uses" originated?

Same here. I know people have posted about their setups but didn't know `/uses` was a thing.

Found this:

https://dev.to/nickytonline/do-you-have-a-uses-page-5b82

and

https://dev.to/nikoheikkila/show-your-own-uses-page-160j

and

https://github.com/wesbos/awesome-uses

and

https://heyfirst.co/blog/lets-share-your-setup-in-uses-page/

Not a lot of history that I see at first blush, but I didn't look terribly hard. FWIW, Google "uses page" turns up a few other results as well.

i thought this was some kind of API where you could share your uses tags in a standardized way like other distributed social features so that other sites can aggregate them and show them like uses.tech does.

but this is just a static site that will accumulate a lot of stale data once people lose interest to maintain their entries.

it would not be so hard. a uses.txt on your website listing tag and description.

and a curated list of urls to all these uses.txt files that are periodically scanned for updates.

I'm pretty sure it originates with wes bos (wesbos.com) , the person that also created uses.tech

You may also be interested in the /now convention:

https://sive.rs/now3

https://nownownow.com

this is cool (person/now, person/uses); it's like a standard reporting API for people

I bit like a modern version of the .plan file displayed when the user is fingered.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html

“when the user is fingered” ?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

The Internet was more innocent back then :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

Don't forget Finger's more modern cousin, WebFinger![1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger

Was it? We used to giggle about "fingering each other" way back in the early 90's, ask the Internet Oracle filthy questions, and compare notes on the Purity Test while we waited for all the uuencoded parts of our dirty pictures to download off the local Usenet server.

at the time we used to giggle, now we complain about it being obscene.

I'm not complaining, I want to go back to the internet being a silly place, instead of an increasingly hostile and damaging to mental health (and sometimes lives).

BUT that ship has sailed.

And check the latest update of the IRC Sex Chart. Can't forget that!

We were harder to get offended, not more innocent.

You mean "more willing to ostracize and marginalize those who point out obnoxious or harmful behavior", I think. Now everyone who can't read a room has an entire infrastructure helping convince them they're a martyr if someone points out they're acting like an asshole.

from tfl: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/finger.html

To solidify a sale, find and push a customer’s hot buttons.

https://plan.cat/

Oh wow, you just got me hooked on a rabbit hole that i can't get out of - but in a good way! :-)

I love these sorts of easter egg-like things! I mean, they're not really easter eggs. But this /uses page, the /now pages, the humans.txt file that someone else mentioned (which i also use on my personal website), and other similar "info broadcast" mechanisms are always so much fun...Because they provide a little trail of breadcrumbs of discovery about people in a neat, old school sort of way. I miss the internet/web of old, and this sort of thing brings all that fun back! Thanks for sharing!

This edge function has crashed An unhandled error in the function code triggered the following message:

The deployment failed while serving the request. Connection details Netlify internal ID: 01H4NGBNZ4NDV642KSK4XW6Y1Q

It looks like this site is experiencing issues, but I believe this is the same data: https://github.com/wesbos/awesome-uses

Edge functions for hobby projects are awesome, until your project gets featured on HN's front page. I'd love to see a postmortem about the cloud costs.

I'm guessing he'll (Wes Bos) bring it up on Syntax.fm, the podcast he does with Scott Tolinski. They've talked about this site before and I would be surprised if they don't bring this up and discuss how/why it failed and any plans for changes to avoid it in the future. As it's a little hobby site for him, not sure how much in the way of resources or money he really throws at it.

I have this vague memory of a website where people could upload their bash scripts and more importantly a sort of primary setup script if you were booting up a fresh install.

The idea being after installing your distro, you could

> curl -sSL <script_url> | bash

It was somewhat of a social network. (10-20 years ago)

Am I taking crazy peoples or was this something...

running arbitrary code from the internet, what could go wrong?

From description I understood it as a site for people how know what particular script does

Application Error

This guy uses stacktraces.

Could you disable the favicon changing all the time? It's crazy annoying

Crashed, but serverless!

"This edge function has crashed"

I like https://hackerstations.com/.

Unfortunately, the link is currently unavailable, but from the title, it sounds similar to Uses This (https://usesthis.com/), which I find to be an interesting way of learning what tools people are using in different industries.

How do I stop the animated icon in the chrome tab? It's cool, but very distracting to keep the tab open.

What does this offer that isn't already well-established at https://usesthis.com ? -- aside from /Uses having a hideous design, that is...

I extracted all the external links in each of the /uses pages and there are about 3,200 unique external links in total. I also checked each domain whether it's alive or not (expired) and surprisingly only 2 domains were expired - that's a pretty good result.

As far as the site itself goes, it's too impractical the way it is made now. It would work way better if people formatted their /uses page in a specific format that could then be pulled by this site and viewed directly. Otherwise, it's a link farm that you'll get bored of browsing very quickly.

Agreed, I was hoping for structured data layout but instead I gotta click through to personal blogs and extract the information I need from prose. Should give me the structured data and append a link to the website but I guess that means less free hits for the participants.

Looks like this site needs to /use a more scalable backend...

Live site's down for me. Use this instead:

https://archive.ph/51fPZ

Is this meant to be a directory of people who are looking for work? If so, that's fine, I guess. If not, be aware that it feels like one.

If I made one of these for myself, it would be completely out of date in a year. It's almost like setups, gear, software, and configs are ephemeral and don't describe a person very well.

It's geek code in the cloud!

https://web.archive.org/web/20090220181018/http://geekcode.c...

I like the idea, but I'm a proponent of humans.txt [1] as an analog to robots.txt. I put one on my own sites.

[1]: https://humanstxt.org/

Question as a non-dev: many devs there seem to use only laptops and often even relatively old ones; no desktop workstations or high power servers in sight. Is that common? Or is that selection bias of that website?

No powerful workstations or server under the table? That's pretty common.

Unless you're training an AI model or compiling Chromium all the time, there's very little need for a super powerful computer (by today's standards).

You could have many VMs and whatnot, but that's not common.

Thanks for the answer. I had somehow thought that compiling and rapid iteration requires high power or that devs would be heavily into home servers, smart home stuff etc.. But I guess you are right and that only applies in some cases. Hm, then who is supposed to be the target audience for maxed out "pro" devices?

If there's a real need for a high powered computer, most people will just connect to a server or whatnot to do the calculation there.

But that server would be built by someone else? My thinking was that cloud servers, google colab etc. are cost effective for sporadic use, but that "devs" could justify needing this power often and locally.

The people listed there mostly appear to be some kind of pink-haired gender-fluids.

Doesn't really look representative of nerds at large.

Hugged :-(

Hmm, clicking on the buttons doesn't seem to do anything?

Edit: oh, I see, the changes happen off-screen, "below the fold".

Maybe they need a setup that works themselves

Anyone who is, or knows, a guitarist will recognise the pointlessnes of this fetish for "gear used".

It can nice to hear about ideas which are practical improvements, and which others can benefit by.

e.g. I don't think trackballs are anywhere near as popular as they deserve to be. (Albeit, with trackballs, showing off is pretty much limited to 'look I have a good one').

nobody asked but here is mine! https://www.swyx.io/new-mac-setup maybe i should switch it to a /uses URL

This is great site!

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