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chabad360

500 karma · joined October 7, 2019

I'm a software engineer by day, and in bed by night.

[Verifying my OpenPGP key: openpgp4fpr:4BCF3BA4BE9FC8194C6FF7BC0A6BE3C9CD4A46F4]

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chabad360··on PlayBook: A Programmable Paper Notebook [video]
Iirc there was a link posted at the end of the talk?

Edit: I just realized I was thinking of the patchwork demo.

Either way, after using a Remarkable for years, I've wanted something that actually tried to make use of the "digital" part of digital paper. When I came across you guys a few years ago, I was hooked (tbh, would love to work for you guys). So seeing the playbook demo was very exciting.

chabad360··on PlayBook: A Programmable Paper Notebook [video]
One of the coolest demos I've seen out of Ink N' Switch in while (tbh, it's seemed like they were really cooking for the year or so).

Unfortunately, it seems they live demo they published is missing a number of the demos they featured in the talk (and its unclear how to do your own things), so it's a little hard to evaluate this more deeply.

chabad360··on De-Brainrot Vacations
I find staycations to be the same thing as a vacation but at home. Especially if you liv in more touristy places (NYC for instance), there's plenty of vacationy things you can take while not leaving more than 10 miles from your house. I like going to the beach or to my parents or what not (even going on trips), but I still need something to keep my mind busy. I hope that sums up the difference well.
chabad360··on De-Brainrot Vacations
Yes. This is my favorite way to vacation, and I'm glad someone has found a better name for it. I do not enjoy simply sitting around idle and occasionally going on a trip, I end my time off feeling drained and need a vacation from my vacation. One year, I had an itch to try my hand at Godot and game programming, and I saved it for my next vacation. I'd never felt more relaxed after a vacation, it's the same as what the author describes: I like being intellectually stimulated, I just needed a break from work, not from trying new things.

This article has helped me figure out some of what made that work, and has given me some ideas of how to try to capture that again.

chabad360··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
Learning Rust and writing userland drivers for my audio interface's built-in DSP.
chabad360··on Obviously, DOGE Did Not Save Money
Link to the GAO report that actually analyzes the spending: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108615
chabad360··on G#: A modern .NET language with Go, Kotlin, and Swift ergonomics
While the language itself doesn't seem very interesting (which is perhaps the point). The idea of building a new language on top of the CLR runtime feels very wise. Instead of a new language suffering from a lack of ecosystem, you get everything else that's already built, even in other (CLR-based) languages. This does leave me wondering what the trade off is. Do you sacrifice any potential language features for CLR compatibility? Or provided you can get it compile, it will run?

Also, are there other language ecosystems with a similar capability?

chabad360··on Write for One Person
While I think this is good advice, I do think one can make the given writing more accessible by adding small details, like expanding acronyms the first time you use them. Or providing a link to introductory reading for a given topic, or just explain yourself. I've found that sometimes I was being too terse when describing something, and it made it hard for everyone to understand, not just beginners. But it took my less-technically-inclined friends to point it out because they were unable to understand it at all, as opposed to those who could understand it a little.
chabad360··on Inkstravaganza
This post appears to be a newsletter with links to some of their recent posts. Admittedly nothing super interesting stood out to me this time. But I am still waiting very impatiently to hear more about PlayBook, which is supposed to be their ultimate interactive paper product with all the learnings from their previous experiments and research.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
Widgets are possible to do with Flutter, but you have to implement them natively and do a bunch of FFI for passing data. I went cross-platform from the start because I have only so much time, and it's much easier to write 95% of the code once instead of twice.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
I would like to offer that as a feature. There are some companies that sell access to connected car APIs, so I would probably go through that route.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
This is very true, speeding tickets and parking tickets become very annoying to trackdown otherwise.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
Funny story, I actually used a very AI-generated Astro template made by someone else, and it's gotten me annoyed enough that I'm now making my own from scratch. So perhaps there will be a writeup about that.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
Hahaha. I hear you. Despite the complaining (I actually forgot to talk about the week long pain that was figuring out why tracing and telemetry would break the build), this project was a lot of fun. I went with flutter (and making a whole app) very much because I wanted something that was smoother than a PWA in actual use. I think that the feeling I was able to get the app to, was much more comfortable than what is possible to do with web apps. Perhaps next time tho I'll try something else.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
Hi HN! OP here. This is my first post and I'm very grateful to see it on the front page. This app was a lot of fun to build, and I really enjoyed putting together the writeup. I've been very inspired by the other stories shared here to write my own, so seeing the comments has been very validating.

I guess I'll be around answering questions and comments as I see them. Thanks for reading and responding.

chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
I totally agree. Don't get me wrong, LLMs helped a lot here, Copilot has been my trusty tool from the day it hit the market, But agents were not really a thing then. In general, my policy is to do it myself until it stops being fun, so as long as stuff doesn't feel like a slog, I'm still pretty productive all on my own.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
Agreed. Perhaps I'll write a follow up that talks about the actual technical details more. I didn't want to lose sight of the story by getting bogged down in the technical details too much, but there are so many good little technical bits to share.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
It's not a bad idea, but everything I know about those days they are not fun to work with, and I didn't have one anyway.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
Haha, that's certainly one way to see it. I really enjoyed making the app, so it was less about laziness more about an itchy trigger finger.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
Glad to hear. Hey, if you want to use/try out the app, hit me up: my username @ Gmail.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
I don't strictly disagree, but as I mentioned in the article, those weren't really an option at the time. Claude code was nascent and not very reliable, and I actually like writing code sometimes, heck, I'm currently rewriting this site by hand.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
I agree with you that at a large scale this is a problem. The one thing I decided very early on (when thinking about if/how I would grow this app beyond my family), is that this is for people who trust each other. If you don't trust the other people in your group to be responsible with the vehicle, then this app isn't gonna help. I'm trying to make the experience more smooth, not necessarily completely painless.

Regarding automatic tracking tho, the easiest option is Bluetooth based, the app knows the identity of the car, when the phone connects, it knows you're probably starting a trip. And the same goes for connected car APIs, those can much easier take the place of an OBD-II reader.

chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
That's actually not a bad idea, if I pick this up again, I will definitely try that. Thanks.
chabad360··on OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
Heh, this is indeed rather unfortunate. Right as I finally got the look and feel to a relatively polished point, Liquid Glass dropped, making it rather obsolete. But to be honest, the app doesn't feel that out of place anyway. I don't know if that says something about me or about Liquid Glass, but it does say something.
chabad360··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
Finally starting a blog.
chabad360··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
Starting a blog
chabad360··on Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
This seems really cool, I've used Pocketbase before for similar purposes, the only thing it doesn't offer is local-first (which is a bit of a bummer). But one very valuable feature it has is server extensibility. You can write server hooks in JS and Go (it's embeddable as a Go module) to add features you need. For example, in a previous project, I added functionality to send push notifications based on certain user actions. Is this kind of thing possible in InstantDB? Or, would I need to build a worker that listens for those events and fires off the notification on its own?

Also, are there plans to release SDKs in other languages (namely, Dart)?

chabad360··on Show HN: A reputation index from mitchellh's Vouch trust files
I will admit that while I think the idea of Vouch is nice, I'm not a huge fan. But that is not really an issue here, the issue is that this seems to be very exploitable. There's nothing to counteract someone creating a bunch of repos just to farm some score (this gets worse once you add in star farming).

For the same price, what is a reasonable score to auto-accept? If I make a small contribution to a large project, I'd automatically get a much larger score out of the gate, vs. if I contribute to a much smaller project. That would incentivize contributions to larger projects, and disincentivize contributing to smaller projects, that doesn't seem good for the ecosystem either.

I'm not sure why a more page-rank style system wasn't used. Effectively, rank users based on the diversity of the projects they're vouched in. That would avoid the problem of people being able to farm, and encourage contributions across the OS ecosystem.

chabad360··on Clicks Communicator
This is very exciting to me, I have been reluctant to upgrade from my Pixel 4a because I've been looking for a small form factor phone, and those seem to have gone extinct. Now here comes a product that both provides a small form factor, and even better, is aimed at reducing distractions and provides features to that effect.

It's running regular Android with a custom version of Niagara launcher (which it seems I need to try), and seems like it's a product built by people who want to use it. Which makes me hopeful that a lot of care was put into designing it. It seems like they're aiming it towards people that want a second device for work, which -in my mind- means there might be some compromises, so I'll be waiting for reviews to decide if it can hold up as a daily driver or not.

It should be noted, they claim that the keyboard is touch sensitive and can be used for scrolling, so it might actually solve some of the usability issues that immediately come to mind.

TBH, I'm a little surprised by all the hate. This might not be a product for you, or it might not speak to you for other reasons. The fact is that this company has seen success with their phone cases (I don't get it either), and has now announced two new products that should reach more of the market (the other is a magsafe slide out keyboard, it's very cool). If you don't like it, fair enough, but that doesn't mean it's a bad product.

chabad360··on Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
I'm working on a project in a very similar space, and we decided to add gamification. We don't want to harass our users or annoy them into using the app, and therefore our notifications will be easily manageable. But we believe that gamification is very helpful for encouraging users to learn consistently, and so we will include it. But at the same time, we are putting a lot of intention into it not being a distraction (both within the app, and outside it).
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