Hacker News Reader

Comment by EspressoGPT | Hacker News Reader

> Forget editing /etc/hosts or typing 192.168.0.12!

Instead, pay $19 (instead of $29!) excl. VAT for a service that does this for you! God damn, I hate this industry.

And sometimes I hate the HN comment section.

Obviously you’re not paying $19 for hosts file editing. Obviously! SSL cert generation is a pain in the ass, a tool that automates all of that for you is a valid tool. And I find the mDNS stuff really interesting, I do a lot of testing on mobile devices and connecting to my dev server from a phone can be really annoying.

If you don’t like the price that’s fine: don’t pay it. The market will decide whether this price is appropriate or not. An independent developer has made a tool that scratches their personal itch and made it available for others to use for a fee. And gets heaped with scorn for it. This place is an absolute cesspit sometimes.

Start your app, put Caddy issuing TLS certs in front of it, put your PC's IP behind some name on your router (maybe using something like Zeroconf), and spend the $19 buying some flowers for your partner.

$19 would be a business expense so I don’t think buying my partner flowers with it would go down well.

In a professional context time is money. Setting up everything you’re discussing takes time and would need tweaking every time my network changes (not to mention require router access). $19 a year is a rounding error in terms of developer expenses. It’s entirely legitimate to pay for a tool to just do it for you.

mDNS is proper standards name for what used to be called Zeroconf. This app is doing the same thing you'd do by hand, it's just saving you time by automating it. If it only takes you an hour to setup by hand, is your time less valuable than $19/hour?

  pip install https.server
  python -m https.server <port>

I guess you must have just omitted the line where the SSL certs are generated and the mDNS is handled?

Smart Alec replies are one thing but badly thought out Smart Alec replies contribute so very little.

SSL cert is generated (untrusted)

mDNS is a QoL feature I am not sure is that useful.

What could you possibly hate about this?

$19 is only a couple minutes worth of engineering labour.

This is actually useful if you're running multiple servers on your network and don't want to remember the IPs of every single one of them. And not having to set up HTTPS for every single one of them is a plus.

Which programmers are paid $570 per hour?

If you don't take couple to mean literally two and instead use the colloquial definition of 'a handful', say 10, then you'll find there are many devs making $120 an hour.

Also you pay this once, this isn't some recurring charge every 10 minutes.

Well, it does a little more than that. You can type yourservice.local instead of 192.168.0.12:1234.

I don't know that I'd buy this if I still had a mac, but I do think that paying for quality of life improvements can be worthwhile. For example, I do pay for a license of IntelliJ idea, even though VSCode costs $0, and I'm not even a full-time software dev.

Sure, but there are also excellent FOSS solutions for this, such as https://github.com/peterldowns/localias which has the benefit of being cross-platform.

Multiple, different solutions to the same problem, some paid, others free and/or open source? Inconceivable!

I do have a MacBook and I do have a JetBrains All-Products license, yet I'm not going to pay for a service that does something existing tools can do for free today (see Puma, Caddy etc.) – and that $19 isn't even a one-time purchase since you'll only get updates for a year.

When I read this comment I knew it must be targeting MacOS users. The only reason I clicked the link is to confirm my assumption.

Edit: I'm not trying to shame MacOS users. I'm just saying that Linux and MacOS users (Windows users don't use /etc/hosts so out of discussion) have very different behaviour regarding paying for software.

I mean, the creator's personal website exactly looks like the Apple website and he's selling clones of Apple wallpapers, too.

Why are you trying to dismiss this guy? I don't understand it. If you don't like the product or feel that $19 is too much money, then move along. God forbid someone tries to make a living by selling software.

I've personally struggled to test https locally [1], and I'm sure others have too. The next time I have the problem, though, I'll save myself the configuration and spend $19.

[1] https://www.louzell.com/notes/serve_https_on_localhost.html

There is an /etc/hosts on Windows, just fyi.

Yep...in strange directory

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

I'm not justifying the price, but it looks more complicated than editing host files, which wouldn't just be hard but sometimes impossible on devices without access to `/etc/hosts`. Is an mDNS broadcaster worth $20? Apparently 250 people think so according to their marketing. I'm not sure I agree either.

hate? for something that saves more than it costs?

Well, it targets Mac users ;) So, you know...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com