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gbalduzzi

543 karma · joined April 5, 2022

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gbalduzzi··on Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
Does this only supports English?
gbalduzzi··on Ask HN: Where are the AI-driven profits or promotions?
I think that fast prototyping followed by a rewrite (in case the prototype confirmed the idea works) is the best use case for vibe coding.

A product person can quickly validate an idea and, once the project is a bit more concrete you can bring in the engineering team and start caring about security, maintenability, scaling and so. A rewrite is almost always the best thing, you can start with a solid foundation instead of spaghetti vibe coded stuff

gbalduzzi··on AI coding tools can reduce productivity
I don't think you are understanding how big 10x and 20x are.

It means you can replace a whole team of developers alone.

I can believe that some tasks are speed up by 10x or even 20x, but I find very hard to believe it's the average of your productivity (maintaining good code quality)

gbalduzzi··on Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"
Elon's tweets are not much interesting in this context.

The interesting part is that grok uses Elon's tweets as the source of truth for its opinions, and the prompt shows that

gbalduzzi··on Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
You don't have any complex interactivity than, and therefore this solutions does not apply to your use cases
gbalduzzi··on Show HN: Typeform was too expensive so I built my own forms
They are not libraries, they are form builders.

You create the form / survey without touching code and without provisioning or setup any infrastructure.

They are particular useful to companies wanting to do surveys without involving a development team

gbalduzzi··on Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
The main difference is as simple as modern web pages having on average far more interactivity.

More and more logic moved to the client (and JS) to handle the additional interactivity, creating new frameworks to solve the increasing problems.

At some point, the bottleneck became the context switching and data passing between the server and the client.

SPAs and tools like Astro propose themselves as a way to improve DX in this context, either by creating complete separation between the two words (SPAs) or by making it transparent (Astro)

gbalduzzi··on Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
Dysfunctional HTML in the sense that interactivity is disabled, but visually it is rendered and therefore you can see the proper webpage immediately.

Just compare the two cases, assuming 100ms for the initial HTML loading and 200ms for JS loading and processing.

With full JS, you don't see anything for 300ms, the form does not exists (300ms is a noticeable delay for the human eye).

With frameworks such as Astro, after 100ms you already see the form. By the time you move the mouse and/or start interacting with it, the JS will probably be ready (because 200ms is almost instant in the context of starting an interaction).

This is not new at all, old school server side processing always did this. The advantage is writing the component only once, in one framework (React/vue/whatev). The server-client passage is transparent for the developer, and that wasn't the case at all in old school frameworks.

Note that I'm not seeing this is good! but this is the value proposition of Astro and similar frameworks: transparent server-client context switching, with better performance perceived by the user.

gbalduzzi··on Apple executives have held internal talks about buying Perplexity
I don't think Apple has ever taken risks on new software.

MCP servers are very new, they may be starting to looking into it now (when it's clear that they are here to stay for a while and not just a buzz), no way they did it immediately

gbalduzzi··on No Hello
I think that for this kind of minor things it can just be a simple note in the company policy, without being too pedantic about it
gbalduzzi··on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
Exactly. I just never open that tab
gbalduzzi··on Working on databases from prison
I think it's reasonable to assume an additional risk for people in prison.

Even though the enrolled people are completely trustworthy, doing this prevents untrustworthy people to simulate interest in the program just to be able to contact the external world for illegal activities.

gbalduzzi··on Covert web-to-app tracking via localhost on Android
> Targeting by user doesn't work anyway.

How did you reach this conclusion? The main problem is that it works way better than traditional marketing medium.

It's the reason Google and Facebook are so massive, why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work?

gbalduzzi··on LiveStore: State management based on reactive SQLite and built-in sync engine
This looks very promising but I'm a bit cautious not to fall in an hype trap.

I was experimenting with something similar for a custom local-first app with multi device support.

Would it be possible to add optional E2E encryption to this? While reading the docs, by adding encryption to the event payload you would be almost there already, even though it would prevent log compaction on the server

gbalduzzi··on LumoSQL
JSON is just terrible size-wise, it can't efficiently store binary data
gbalduzzi··on A Research Preview of Codex
It sounds nice, but are product managers able to spot regressions or other potential issues (performance, data protection, legal, etc) in the codex result?
gbalduzzi··on The 'invisible crew' who have 35 seconds to prevent a Eurovision blunder
In Italian we don't have this distinction, when we use a collective noun we always treat it as singular (unless there are multiple collection, like multiple crews). Thank you for the explanation
gbalduzzi··on The 'invisible crew' who have 35 seconds to prevent a Eurovision blunder
I know this is not the right place for this but english is not my first language.

How is "have" the correct verb here? Shouldn't it be "has"? Like, the crew is the subject, and it has 35 seconds.

I'm trying to understand what I'm missing here, because I'm sure BBC did not make a mistake

gbalduzzi··on Dart added support for cross-compilation
Dart allows you to write compact and clean code, like GO. Dart properly supports classes and is feature-rich, like Java.

I think those are the main points for the above comment

gbalduzzi··on CSS Hell
It wasn't clear at all to me that the peg doesn't need to overlap the holes perfectly, I was almost ready to give up at lvl 2! Thank you for the solution
gbalduzzi··on Stop Syncing Everything
> just define the queries you want (no matter how complex) and the you'll get exactly the data you need to fulfill those queries, no more, no less

So GraphQL?

gbalduzzi··on A 2FA app that tells you when you get `314159` (2024)
Instagram reels.

There is a ton of content with dark jokes, black humor, very provocative content and even "nazi" memes and people send it to each other to laugh about it.

Those reels usually have very few likes / comments but A TON of sends. I personally am on multiple group chats where we only send each other those kind of memes.

The thing is, instagram being a huge echo chamber. Before you have no idea those exists, and once you are in you see a ton of those

gbalduzzi··on Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics
I don't know about Umami, Plausible describes how they solved this here: https://plausible.io/data-policy, under the section "How we count unique users without cookies"

TL;DR: They derive an identifier from IP address and User Agent using an hash, allowing them to have a tracking identifier without storing Personal identifiers (the IP address)

gbalduzzi··on Global variables are not the problem
Yeah in the example it was obvious.

Of course in a real life program, it may be lost in other code logic and, most importantly, the function performing the clone may not be so explicit about it (e.g. an "update" function that returns a different copy of the object).

gbalduzzi··on The Static Site Paradox
It always boils down to how many users you want to engage with your product.

The reality is that you can create a great product that engages with users, using transparent processes that can be tinkered by and with a ton of free customization features, you will lose a huge amount of market share to a competitor with a more simple interface (and probably a less efficient and more complex machinery behind it).

> As someone who is constantly learning new things to try and stay current, fights for the right to repair and uses FOSS whenever possible, I just can't get behind the thinking that brings is to the conclusion that marketers should be making these kinds of decisions based on convenience.

You and marketers have very different priorities and targets, of course they don't reach your same conclusion

gbalduzzi··on Do AI companies work?
While technically true, the difference is that we don't know in details how that process works and we can't predict it.

There is not much of a difference in considering it deterministic or not, because we can't determine it.

gbalduzzi··on Show HN: Skip – Build native iOS and Android apps from a single Swift codebase
I wanna expand by saying that is not even a full First-World perspective, but purely an US one.

In Europe iOS has a big market share, but Android is still the most used.

gbalduzzi··on Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?
Most business do not require on call for their internal tools
gbalduzzi··on WeTransfer Scooped Up by Filmic Pro's Parent Company Bending Spoons
Bending Spoons is buying everything.

After acquiring Evernote in 2023 and Filming in 2022, this year already acquired Issuu, StreamYard and was into talks about acquiring Vimeo

gbalduzzi··on Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub
Github also supports that if you reach out support directly
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