autoconfig

Congratulations on the launch! I realize this is not the main value prop, but as a beginner writer I really like the idea of trying this out as a tool to improve my writing skills. I'm excited to give it a spin.

Hey thanks for checking it out. Anki is in many ways a great tool and one that I’ve used extensively myself in the past. I felt that the UI could be improved however and that certain features were lacking. One high-level goal was to build an application with a simpler and more modern user experience. On top of that there were features, small and large, that I wanted and felt could only be realized with a new product. Here are some examples:

- Simplified navigation when browsing your content.

- A rich card editor that behaves more like one you’d find in a modern note taking application.

- Search as a first class citizen.

- Dedicated functionality for creating language cards.

- Proper code blocks for people learning software development.

- A way to easily study all my pending items across all folders.

- Improved/seamless synchronization (I’d sometimes get sync failures when using Anki on my phone and on the desktop)

With that said, the application is still very much in its early stages and there are a lot more features that will be arriving over the coming months.

> Active Recall looks compelling but it makes me uncomfortable that it says "try for free" but there's no mention of pricing that I could find. What's the planned business model? As a user of Anki for multiple years now, longevity with these products is pretty important to me.

Hey! This will turn into a subscription service at some point but I’m still working out the exact pricing model. Any data that you put into the system however will always be available to you and exportable regardless of if you decide to pay or not. This is mentioned in an email when you sign up but I realize that the communication could be better around this.

> Separately, it's pretty surprising to me to see the very first review by the "VP of Engineering at Shopify" without mentioning the fact that they are an investor in Active Recall. [0] Feels like this is counter to the FTC's rules on endorsements.

Dion was using the product long before he invested and it’s not something that we’ve been trying to explicitly hide (as you saw on his LinkedIn profile). I have updated the review to state that he’s an investor. Thank you for calling this out.

Hey! As many have already mentioned in this thread, you might want to look into spaced repetition if you haven’t already. To summarize, it’s a simple algorithm that forces you to recall something at an increasing interval until it is committed to long term memory.

Anki is a popular app that uses spaced repetition. I personally wasn’t quite satisfied with any of the options out there so I decided to build a new app to solve this problem. Feel free to check it out: https://activerecall.com/ It allows you to create flashcards using a rich text editor with support for things such as code and latex blocks. I’m using it daily both to learn new software development concepts and for general knowledge.

Even with a spaced repetition-tool however there is a lot of nuance that goes into the process of acquiring new knowledge. A couple of pointers here:

1. It’s important to distinguish the learning step and the act of remembering what you’ve learned. Learning for example means using a new programming concept to the point where you understand it. Now that you have that context, you can encode it in the form of question and answer in a spaced repetition based system to ensure that you will remember what you’ve learned.

2. Some things that you want to remember are purely factual, while some require deeper understanding. In the latter case, you’ll want to structure your flashcards in a way that you’re solving a problem when answering it rather than just stating facts. This ensures that you’re actually remembering how to solve something rather than simply stating what the solution is.

3. Some things that seem like they are worth remembering when you first put them into your system will later turn out to be time sinks. Don’t be afraid to just get rid of them or keep them for reference (in my app you can “suspend” cards so that you can still search for them etc, essentially turning them into notes).

If you end up trying Active Recall out please feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat more about learning!

The capacitive touch screen was necessary but alone wouldn’t have meant much without the revolutionizing software stack. You may think “revolutionizing” seems hyperbolic here but a lot of people forget or don't realize how truly far behind the competition was.

Software keyboards were considered a complete no-go, even by folks within Apple (Ken Kocienda's “Creative Selection” is a great read on the development of the keyboard). Dragging / flinging / pinch to zoom didn’t exist anywhere else or if it did, only in prototype or proof-of-concept form. The capacitive screen unlocked these features but no one else knew how to build them.

I was working at Sony Ericsson when the first iPhone was released. I distinctly remember holding it in my hand and using mobile Safari for the first time and thinking... “we’re fucked”. The company simply didn’t have the engineering chops needed to catch up. Later on Android would provide a possible solution but we managed to screw things up even with a full OS handed to us.

1passwords upgrade strategy is the worst. They have continuously pushed releases over the years that have made zero improvements to the core use cases yet causes headaches because of changing UIs, multiple plugins with differing feature sets, desync between plugin and native app etc.

There's nothing I'm doing in 1password now that I couldn't do 5 years ago. Yet I've had multiple cycles of pain and had to pay for upgrades I didn't want.

DDIA = Designing Data Intensive Applications

Working on a consumer SaaS startup and I strongly disagree. A virtual machine on something like DigitalOcean does not provide any of the nice abstractions that something like a Google Cloud Run (or similar on AWS/Azure) provides. The amount of time a cloud provider can save you administratively is difficult to exaggerate. That is from day 1. Should your startup succeed, and you need to scale, the real savings start to kick in since scaling to a large degree is handled for you. Good luck re-architecting your app into a kubernetes cluster and handling load balancing manually while your competition gets all that with almost no effort.

Completely agree regarding dense cities. Just to add to this, I recently moved to NYC from the west coast at the ripe age of 40. I decided to join a co-working space so I could meet new people (I did not know anyone here). It has been surprisingly easy to meet new friends, something I was worried about when thinking about moving. I'm not an extrovert person by any means and still in the span of 4-5 months I've met enough people that I have no problems finding someone I like to hang out with on a regular basis.

A lot of people seem to consider this meaningless and a waste of time. If we disregard the the problems with the patches reaching stable branches for a second (which clearly is problematic), what is the difference between this and companies conducting red team exercises? It seems to me a potentially real and dangerous attack vector has been put under the spotlight here. Increasing awareness around this can't be all bad, particularly in a time where state sponsored cyber attacks are getting ever more severe.

Figma has become an incredibly popular tool for UI/UX design, beating both Photoshop and sketch (for that use case), and it runs in a browser.

Thank you for the response. I didn't realize there was a different version of the chrome plugin. Will give it a try!

Hey Ben, I'm not the person you're replying to but I'm a long time paying customer and I have observed the same problem. See this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26799379 below that explains the issue in detail. Creating new login items is a needlessly complex multi-step process that involves converting a password item to a login item and manually filling in your username.

It's really hard for me to understand how you can have an otherwise great product but are failing at what I would argue is one out of the two most important features (creating logins and autofilling).

They weren't too far off. According to this BBC article _half_ of the reef is gone since 1995: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54533971

This is the beauty of cloud run. There is literally no difference in how you build your application. I can run my codebase locally using docker with no changes and no dependencies on the type of external libraries you'd need for AWS lambda or cloud functions.

This is an awesome initiative! I'm using slate to build a web based flash card application that I'm hoping to release soon. It's been an absolute breeze to use as far as editor frameworks goes. I played around with a few others (draft, prosemirror) and while they have great out of the box experiences I found it very hard to incorporate a custom format and custom elements. Right now lack of android support is the only serious downside IMO. I will definitely be donating. Hope this goes well!

See point 3.

> I'll ignore the "obnoxious" and "Get off your high horse" comments. Despite your tone I think you have a good point that's worth addressing.

You just blatantly declared a large number of developers as unethical for a technology choice so maybe learn to take it if you're gonna dish it out.

> That's a sum total of 687.1MB for a chat client.

I'll admit I was entirely wrong on the amount of memory here. Taking the renderers into account it's a lot more like you say. However the base footprint of Electron is less than 100 and the amount that gets used depends heavily on implementation details regardless of underlying framework.

> So why should I be happy with 687.1MB of _my_ memory used by a chat client, when a competent development team writing a native app could use a fraction of that and give me a better native user experience?

The fact that there is currently no other chat application implemented natively that brings you the same set of functionality should tell you something. This is the problem with reducing technology choices down to this narrow idea that only one thing matters. In reality there are many factors that comes into play such as the core competency of the employees you have at hand, team scalability, maintainability, time to market, etc. Slack may never have existed for all we know if they had to build it natively. You don't need to be happy about their product but you seem to be blindly assuming something better can be created with native technology when there is no evidence to support this case. Yes it can in theory, but in reality there are practical constraints.

> One point you may not have realised is that yes, memory has grown and is cheap, but the advantage of having more resources is to do more.

I'd argue we ARE doing more. That's the problem right there. People get so wound up about something like memory consumption that they forget the innovation that some of these apps have brought that perhaps justifies the extra cost. VS Code has IMO taken the place as the number 1 IDE. Would it have had the same improvement rate and rich ecosystem of add-ons if it wasn't using web tech? Probably not. Slack was a groundbreaking product when it came out. There has never been a product that offered the same feature set. Discord is another amazing piece of technology (I'd argue outperforms Slack). Again, you can claim all day long that these products would be better if they had UIs implemented from ground up in C++ or Objective-C but until someone actually does that the onus is on you to prove that it in practice can be done.

Nowhere did I mention upgrading. The example was meant to give a general estimation of how much RAM costs and establish a frame of reference for statements like "huge memory impact". If RAM still cost say $100 per GB the situation would be entirely different.

> Electron is the solution when a developer values themselves over their customers. Now, you can make an argument for that, such as getting your minimum viable product out to market quickly. Over time, as the app develops, the attitude of happily giving your user lower UX quality and wasteful applications is harder and harder to justify ethically, though I admit that's only true if predicated on a foundation that you should respect your customer or have pride in your work.

You're entitled to hold this opinion but preaching it as if it is an objective truth and thereby disrespecting other developers is just obnoxious. Luckily the users can decide for themselves what is unethical or not. I have 5 electron apps open right now (Spotify, Slack, Figma, VS Code and Notion) and I find it absolutely absurd calling the devs unethical because of their choice. They have provided me with some fantastic value. Is it great that they take up ~100MB of memory each? No but it's not even close to as big of a problem as some devs try to make it out to be. 8 gigs of RAM is around 30 bucks. Get off your high horse.

There are studies that show that masks (surgical and n95) can help prevent healthy people from getting infected [1][2]. Everyone I've seen claiming the opposite (including supposed experts being interviewed) usually do it without any significant data to back it up (just some high level theorizing). I also rarely see anyone discussing the nuances of efficacy against airborne vs droplet spread viruses. Using just a minimum amount of reasoning it would seem very plausible that masks would be effective against droplets but less effective against airborne diseases.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3692-face-masks-are-b... [2] https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/744899/facemasks-hand-hyg...

I wouldn't be surprised at all if there is a genetic component but that's why I mentioned that these attributes have been replicated in his students. But then again the fact that your body can acclimatize to cold or heat is not exactly groundbreaking news. We've known that for a long time.

You won't die even in those temperatures if you take the time to build up tolerance. That's key. Wim Hof has trained his body to survive longer than one hour with his entire body submerged in ice. Similar feats have been replicated by people using his method of cold therapy to build resistance. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/science-explai...

I think this is a really elitist and unsympathetic statement. It completely ignores the fact that there are people out there whose only realistic option if they want to release on multiple platforms is to use something like electron. You can preach native all day long but the reality is that some people simply do not have the time (i.e. money) to learn, build and maintain three completely different systems and architectures and at the same time and also build a product. Are you saying that these people should simply give up because you consider it a "shortcut solution"?

Yes electron comes with some overhead. But what you get from paying that price are products that otherwise likely wouldn't exist. Some of these are bad indeed, but some of them are also really good and provide real value.

> If types are really that big a deal that you have a hard time writing an application without a compiler checking your types, you should reevaluate what you're doing.

Speaking of software snobbery, what does this statement reek of? This attitude is just as condescending and utterly non-constructive as the fanboyism you're describing.

I'm currently building a fairly large application using TypeScript both on the front end and backend specifically because I "have a hard time writing an application without a compiler checking your types". It's working great but according to you this is a valid reason to reevaluate what I'm doing?

Whenever the topic of Facebook gets brought up I see a lot of comments on how "the news feed sucks". That it's filled with hateful comments. Leaving facebook is great because it takes toxic people out of your lives! What seems to be missing from the conversation is that Facebook to a large extent is what you make it to be. _You_ decide who to follow, who to keep as your friend, whose post you want to see. There is nothing stopping you from simply removing everyone except your family members and your good friends in which case I'd argue it actually becomes a great tool and a net positive.

Your argument is still not making much sense. I don't see how the power efficiency of the APIs is relevant. The point is that they currently allow tons of applications (E.g. Candy Crush) that drains the battery. What's the reason for making the browser a special case? It's just rendering to the screen like any other application.

One argument I could see being made is that the browser is used more than others and thus warrants tighter control. But even that is weak. People are draining their batteries all day long playing games as it is.

Sources for these claims on what the vast majority of people want?

Either way this is a terrible excuse. It implies that you necessarily have to sacrifice good list support in order to promote discovery and other features. They are not mutually exclusive. As a consumer I don't think it's too much to expect a good playlist UI in a major product like this, especially coming from a company that prides itself in delivering good user interaction.

Your comment would be more useful if you actually addressed the "pedantic" things. Have you even read the post?

- Can't delete multiple items or move multiple items to another list

- "three dots" AND right click shows different contextual menus

- 4 clicks to delete items from the "My music" menu.

While I don't think the article is especially balanced, these items are far from pedantic.