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iffycan

427 karma · joined May 10, 2013

www.iffycan.com
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iffycan··on Show HN: I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses
You can record a macro to go download transactions from your bank.
iffycan··on Dyalog: Escrow
I'm not finding it on their website. Do they have a "release as open source" option?
iffycan··on Tauri 1.0 – Electron Alternative Powered by Rust
There's also more to it than just the webview windows:

- Cross-platform auto-updating

- Desktop tray features

- System notifications

- Menu stuff

These are some of the "extra" things that also made Electron nice.

You have a point about browser API compatibility, though. That's the big downside to using the system-provided webview widget.

iffycan··on Ask HN: Share your personal site
I used to work at a place whose webserver was in TCL (AOLServer). Once I figured out some of the gotchas, I learned to really like TCL.

Like you mention, it's used as glue in lots of places, for instance in my Electrical Engineering classes to glue together VHDL/Verilog and program FGPAs.

iffycan··on Joro spiders likely to spread beyond Georgia
They are beautiful, but they don't come one at a time. They make their thick webs _everywhere_ and in big groups. You can't escape them during spider season.
iffycan··on Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
It's Electron (for now)
iffycan··on Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?
I work on a desktop budgeting application. I love that it's desktop-only (and so do the users)! It doesn't earn a living (yet), but it makes more than enough to cover expenses.

[0] https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com

iffycan··on Consider SQLite
I've had great success using SQLite as both a desktop application file format and web server database. I'll mention just one thing I like about it in the desktop application realm: undo/redo is implemented entirely within SQLite using in-memory tables and triggers following this as a starting point: https://www.sqlite.org/undoredo.html

It's not perfect, but it fills the niche nicely.

iffycan··on Building a simple room-based chat application in Nim (using HTMX)
> but not so small that there are no useful libraries written...

Says the person responsible for a ton of really useful, well-done Nim libraries, such as this amazing Cairo/Skia-like library: https://github.com/treeform/pixie#readme

Thank you for all the things you've made for Nim!

iffycan··on Nim 1.6.2
Nim can walk: https://nim-lang.org/docs/os.html#walkDir.i%2Cstring
iffycan··on Nim 1.6
Nim has been such a fun language to use. I make a money-earning desktop application (Electron for the GUI and Nim for the core logic) and companion web service (fully Nim). It has been a pleasure using Nim to make these and other things.

Congrats, Nim team!

iffycan··on Nim 1.6
It has never caused a problem for me. I didn't even know it was a "feature" until I'd used Nim for a year. In theory it seems like a terrible idea. In practice, it has never caused any problems.
iffycan··on Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
When I first signed up with Stripe years ago, it was a breath of fresh air. Stripe did one thing exceedingly well, at an understandable price and took minutes to integrate with.

I could sell Stripe to my developer friends (and did, a lot!) in a single sentence: "You can add credit card charging to your site in about 15 minutes for 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction." I can't do that anymore. Stripe is no longer a single-sentence sell.

Stripe still does good work. But the air is getting murkier. I'll point to some objective changes, but mostly Stripe is just starting to feel different.

- Several years ago, when I saw announcements that Stripe started supporting ACH payments (and later international payments), I thought, "Great! This is Stripe! I'll just be able to flick a switch and turn those on." Not so. I understand that it's complicated from their end. It's just not the same "Stripe is so easy" experience. "Stripe is supposed to abstract away the complexity, not expose it to me."

- The pricing page is a big sign of the added complexity. There used to just be one or two numbers on that page [1]. Compare that with the current pricing page [2]

My suggestion to you, pc: Start a little company within Stripe to disrupt Stripe (i.e. re-simplify) in the same way Stripe disrupted the industry 10 years ago. Or keep getting bigger and become just as complex as the things Stripe replaced.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111216054911/https://stripe.co...

[2] https://stripe.com/pricing#pricing-details

iffycan··on Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
I've tracked my finances for as long as I can remember. It's become even more important since getting married.

We track every penny. About once a month we sit down and categorize every purchase we made the last month. We only keep receipts if the purchase was for a non-obvious category (e.g. buying both diapers and groceries at Target) so that we can split each transaction between categories.

For some banks, we manually download transaction data in whatever nice format they provide. For others, we use a syncing service that works with the app.

It's been so great throughout our marriage to know that we're both in charge of the money and make decisions together.

That said, I've talked with many people who don't like that level of detail. At first, it was baffling to me that people didn't know the details of their finances, but as I've grown, I've realized that there's plenty more than one good way to manage your money.

Full disclosure: I actively work on and sell budgeting software.

iffycan··on Nim 1.2
Among other great additions, I like the addition of compilesettings [1], which will give programs more visibility into how they were compiled.

[1] https://nim-lang.org/docs/compilesettings.html

iffycan··on Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
I am also running this command:

/remind me every day at 10am to remind Slack about the awful WYSIWYG input box

iffycan··on Nim: Scripting Ease in a Compiled Language
Yes! I use Nim on macOS to build a Windows exe for bootstrapping a Windows VM. A year ago, you had to dig a little to figure out the right command line incantation, but maybe it's better now.
iffycan··on Nim: Scripting Ease in a Compiled Language
I'm using Nim in production (combined with NodeJS) and I really like it. Cross-compiling is so easy. Testing is easy. Syntax is easy to read. I like it.

Edit: Email me if you'd like more info.

iffycan··on Peergos Alpha – A decentralized file storage and communication network
Or use Shamir's Secret Sharing to split your key/password up between friends at the outset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
iffycan··on Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016)
FWIW, I've made a very-early-alpha thing for making cross-platform apps with Nim: https://github.com/iffy/wiish
iffycan··on JSON with Sqlite
I'm using this for change tracking: https://blog.budgetwithbuckets.com/2018/08/27/sqlite-changel...
iffycan··on Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
Also, Electron provides things like single command building, automatic updates and menu bar support (which looks supported in DeskGap).
iffycan··on Nim in 2018: A short recap
Regarding just the last point, I also came across a case where Python (and Node) were outperforming my Nim code (just counting lines in a file). But I just happened to be using a slow line reading thing [1].

You should definitely give Nim another shot. It has been very pleasant to use.

[1] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/9026

iffycan··on Advent of Nim
I'm working on a library to do that right now [1]. Currently, it's alpha quality, but you can make OpenGL apps in both, SDL2 apps in iOS and Webview apps in both. Also check out nimx [2]

[1] https://github.com/iffy/wiish

[2] https://github.com/yglukhov/nimx

iffycan··on Show HN: Simple Budgeting
You might like Buckets: www.budgetwithbuckets.com (I'm the developer)
iffycan··on Nim 0.19
I've really been enjoying using Nim for one-off data processing projects here at work. I'm also excited to see where nimx [1] goes (a cross-platform UI library).

[1] https://github.com/yglukhov/nimx

iffycan··on JSON Changelog with SQLite
Thank you for posting this. A former version of my post included a reference to this because it's a great read, too.
iffycan··on Show HN: Ultralight – Lightweight, Pure-GPU HTML UI Renderer for C++
I should mention that my current favorite (still exploring) is Haxe/OpenFL
iffycan··on Show HN: Ultralight – Lightweight, Pure-GPU HTML UI Renderer for C++
> You can't beat the Electron ecosystem where any idiot can make a cross platform app.

As an idiot, I can attest to this. I'm constantly looking for lighter weight alternatives, but nothing so far has been nearly as simple as Electron. Here's the list of options I maintain: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dTZIp6z2J1IL7YgBlHG_...

iffycan··on Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform
As someone trying to make his first mobile app, I just ran through the Flutter getting started guide and it was a much better experience than getting a React-Native hello world going.

Just a couple pros I see:

* flutter doctor - what a helpful tool! * hot reload without losing state!?

If Dart can use my existing TypeScript code, I'll definitely use it.

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