callmevlad

A little over 3 years ago, my brother and I posted a Show HN about Webflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499), which was just a proof-of-concept / experiment.

At the time, we had been working on Webflow day and night for 6 months with no other income coming in, we had gotten rejected from YC a few months before, I was over $50K in credit (and medical) debt, and the Show HN was our last-ditch effort to get some traction before going back to our jobs.

The post did really well - we had the #1 position for most of the day, got over 500 upvotes, and in the resulting days over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list. This gave us the confidence to keep going and helped us get into YC for the next batch.

Since then, Webflow (https://webflow.com/) has grown into a profitable business with 400K+ users all over the world, billions of website requests served, and 25 employees (also all over the world). I'm not sure any of this would have happened if the Show HN would not have taken off the way it did.

TLDR: A+, would post again ;)

Working on it :)

Yep, more background here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9325796

(We're working around this soon though by moving away from native scrollbars, since it's very unlikely that Firefox will fix this anytime soon.)

I think the majority of this (counter)claim is that Jeremy provided critical IP to the company as consideration for (promised) equity. That makes the issue more complicated, unless Cruise can prove that they threw out 100% of the intellectual property he brought in during his short tenure.

We've been advocating moving our visual implementation (or something similar) to dev tools in both FF and Chrome. Here are some before/after examples to show you how a more abstract input method can really speed up development: http://things-that-web-inspectors-should-have.webflow.io/

Hey Kev, we actually worked with Tom Park (the creator of Flexbox Froggy) to apply the same exact concept to a more visual paradigm - so they're meant to serve the same purpose, but the visual version is meant to be more approachable to people who don't have as much experience with raw CSS. I hope that makes sense.

One of the creators here.

94% of browsers now support [1] the CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1 (Flexbox for short), yet only 3% of all sites use this new technology [2]. We decided to create a visual UI around flexbox to mimic the Illustrator/Sketch alignment and distribution tools, and hopefully get this into the hands of a lot more people - even those who don't write code.

Best of all, we no longer need entire blog posts on how to vertically center something in CSS :)

For some ideas how this can be applied in real-world scenarios, you can see some practical layouts and video tutorials on how to reproduce them here: https://flexbox.webflow.com/

[1] http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox

[2] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...

Given the conversation in yesterday's thread [1], I think a known (and personally identified) non-malicious person defensively reserving these packages is less dangerous than some unknown entity taking over these packages later.

I personally think the best course of action would have been for the NPM team to immediately blacklist these names (aside from left-pad, that's a separate conversation) after the entire list of unpublished packages was shared, and then make them available on a case-by-case basis.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510

Yes, as far as I've heard, this was done defensively to prevent malicious actors from claiming these packages.

Also, relevant conversation here in yesterday's thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510

Looks like the npm team will not be removing the ability to unpublish packages - see reply by core committer "othiym23" on https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/12017

You're right, I added an edit to my comment.

Yes, but I can publish an evil left-pad@0.0.10, and if you're not shrinkwrapping or any sub-dependency has left-pad: "^0.0.3", it will pull in the evil 0.0.10 version.

EDIT: I stand corrected. See below, looks that's not the case specifically for "0.0.x" versions, but gets progressively more relaxed if there's a non-zero minor version specified. However, many of the unpublished packages had varying major and minor versions, which would have the more loose caret range behavior.

The fact that this is possible with NPM seems really dangerous. The author unpublished (erm, "liberated") over 250 NPM modules, making those global names (e.g. "map", "alert", "iframe", "subscription", etc) available for anyone to register and replace with any code they wish.

Since these libs are now baked into various package.json configuration files (some with 10s of thousands of installs per month, "left-pad" with 2.5M/month), meaning a malicious actor could publish a new patch version bump (for every major and minor version combination) of these libs and ship whatever they want to future npm builds. Because most package.json configs use the "^1.0.1" caret convention (and npm --save defaults to this mode), the vast majority of future installs could grab the malicious version.

@seldo Is there a plan to address this? If I'm understanding this right, it seems pretty scary :|

[1] https://medium.com/@azerbike/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules-...

Yep, even the status page is down: https://status.github.com/ (Edit: Looks like it's back up.)

No updates yet on their Twitter status account: https://twitter.com/@githubstatus

Edit: 10:21 PDT Error rates are subsiding. (And github.com no longer showing unicorn for me.)

Good morning HN! My brother Sergie and I posted on Show HN [1] exactly 1000 days ago with our first prototype of a CSS authoring tool, and ever since then we've wanted to create a tool to make complex 3D interactions possible without spending a ton of time debugging CSS.

Well, browser support has finally caught up [2] just enough that a tool like this becomes possible (with some odd exceptions in IE9-11, which will hopefully soon be displaced by the awesome Edge browser). And today we're releasing it for you to play with and give us feedback :)

We're trying to abstract away the complexity behind CSS and make it accessible to more people (without dumbing it down), and we'd love to hear your thoughts on our first stab at solving this problem for 3D transforms.

Also, a heartfelt thank you to this community for helping us take a tiny little prototype and turn it into a (tiny little) company.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499

[2] http://caniuse.com/#feat=transforms3d

The article makes it very clear that they are not yet profitable, and won't be for at least a year. Even if they're burning $100M a year, they've raised almost 5 times that amount - so they can sustain losses for a long time.

Dear HN,

A bit over two years ago, this community helped my brother and I take little more than a dream and a barely-working prototype [1] and turn it into a fledgling product that we were able to launch that same summer.

From Day 1, we wanted to empower designers to build complex database-driven websites visually, but it took us another 18 months of engineering to make this work the way we envisioned. We're incredibly proud to start rolling it out today, and would love to hear your feedback!

Cheers, Vlad

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499

Hey @ipselon - I'd love to get in touch and chat about this. I can't find your email in your HN profile; any chance you can contact me via vlad [at] webflow [dot] com? Thanks!

> CMS as a whole is bad. Why has no one built a better one?

In the next few months that's going to change dramatically. Shoot me an email to vlad@webflow.com for a demo if you're curious.

It seems like using a tree-index based path, this serialization format would only work with purely static content. If you have a change to the underlying content (e.g. adding a new paragraph before a selection), there doesn't seem to be enough information in the serialized path to select the right part of the page.

Hey Pasha, thanks for your pioneering work!

We (Webflow) are actually considering building a Pipes alternative in the near future, and I'd love to sit down with you and brainstorm some ideas. If you'd be willing to make some time to see a very rough demo, I'd love to get in touch - my email is in my profile.

Please take a look at the screenshot I posted: https://cloudup.com/c8K9RMqPeDn

Assuming you were using Firefox, what would you think about those two white scrollbars that stick out like a sore thumb in a dark interface?

Actually, that would not solve the issue that led me to offer the bounty.

Check out the difference between the scrollbars in Webflow rendered across Webkit (Safari, Chrome, Opera) and Firefox: https://cloudup.com/c8K9RMqPeDn

Note that not only does Webkit give you control over colors, it gives you control over the width/height of the scrollbar - which for us is critically important.

Honest question: How would you solve this stark difference in UIs if you're building an in-browser application? https://cloudup.com/c8K9RMqPeDn

Disclaimer: I'm the guy who submitted the bounty :)

I'm the guy who offered the bounty, and for us (webflow.com) it's not about styling scrollbars on ordinary websites - it's about making sure application user interfaces are consistent across browsers.

Take a look at this comparison between Chrome and Firefox: https://cloudup.com/c8K9RMqPeDn

Webkit's ability to style scrollbars gives app developers a ton more control over a user interface. Some advantages of Webkit over Firefox here:

* Custom styling without hacky JavaScript "fake scroll" scripts

* Control over the width of a scrollbar

* Better usability for certain use cases by enabling Up and Down buttons

* Scrollbars actually look like they belong inside the application

* Doesn't remind users that they're in a web browser

In my 15+ years of building websites, I never wanted to change the color of the browser scroll bar either. But now I'm building a website that builds websites, so it's a whole 'nother ball game :)

Hey Eric, just wanted to say that Makemake.io is really cool!

https://webflow.com (YC S13) - San Francisco, CA - VISA OK, REMOTE could be an option. Salaries range from $70K to $140K depending on experience and location.

At Webflow, we're building software to give superpowers to the 99.75% of the world that doesn't know how to code. We push the boundaries of what's possible in a browser-based app, and have tons of interesting (and hard!) engineering and design challenges yet to solve.

We're hiring exceptional people across the board, including front-end engineers, back-end engineers, product designers, devops, sales, and customer success.

Our hiring process is super simple and fast - Skype chat with the CEO, then set up a short-term (2-4 days) paid contract at a fair hourly rate to work on a real project that you ship to production, then we fly you out to meet the team, and make a decision right away.

If you like what we're doing at Webflow, and you can see clearly see yourself contributing in a meaningful way, please shoot me an email to vlad@webflow.com so we can get started! Instead of the usual resume/CV application rigamarole, let's just start with a Skype chat instead :)

You're right, editing the title now.

There was another app from another YC company that _used_ to be online at one point (I believe it was called "PG Bot"), but had been taken down when we needed it. So we wrote something from scratch, but very similar.

http://screenhero.com/ is perfect for this, soon to be integrated natively into Slack.