longrod

Not to crash the party or anything. Supabase is great and all (congratulations BTW on such a huge series B!) but in terms of feature completeness and getting actual products built, it doesn't come close to Parse[0].

Same with Appwrite. Both of these are very popular but they either lack essential features or have them behind a subscription wall. For example, the OSS version of Supabase (last I checked) doesn't include the edge functions which are really important for easily computing stuff on the server side. Parse on the other hand is 100% open source and has a huge feature set. It's older than all of these lo-code tools and actually helps solve the issues one comes across when using such tools.

Another thing is extending these tools which is a pain. For example, Parse supports multiple databases by default (postgres & MongoDB) and the ability to write a custom adapter if you need something else. Similarly, if you at any point need to go 100% custom it also makes that possible so you are never locked in. These tools however don't have that level of low-level control and are general all or nothing kind of tools best for small-to-medium sized problems which don't have a lot of room to grow.

But both of these (Appwrite & Supabase) are super markety. Appwrite is all over the place with their ads, Supabase got a huge trend when it launched etc. Parse on the other hand is not too good at marketing their product being fully community run which is one reason not many know of it. Another is their not-so-fancy docs.

I have no stake in any of these products: just my conclusion after having tried all of these.

[0] https://parseplatform.org/

Windows is the only OS that needs a debloater. Sometimes Windows seems like it's a Chinese OS.

Finally! Amazon should have done this long ago. ePub v3 supports everything MOBI does and it has really extensive support across platforms. This is HUGE for people with a big eBook collection.

That's how discussions are. They move from thing to thing which is what makes them so interesting. If HN always stayed focused strictly on a single topic, you'd only find replies like "yes, I agree."

The fact that people come out and take time to share their own experience is very valuable. There are not many places like HN. Most of the rest of the internet is filled with trolls, maybe that's what people prefer?

I don't get your signal/noise ratio statement. Comments are not only for you. They aren't a blog post. They are opinions, thoughts, experiences, of a lot of people. You can't apply such a thing as signal/noise because what to you seems as noise might be very valuable for someone else.

Not sure why the author is complaining. Commenting on a blog and writing a blog have never been confused. No one has ever compared commenting to writing a blog.

Commenting has it's own place. If you don't like the comments, maybe you shouldn't post on HN. I don't know how ignorant you have to be to literally pass by the very purpose of a site like HN. It's literally built to hold discussions. Commenting is the _only_ thing you do here. There's no chat, no fancy reactions, no groups, no "pages", nothing. Just an input box and a button to express your opinion.

The UX could be better but that's an excuse for the lazy. You don't want to scroll? That's on you, not the website. You wrote a very long blog and I can't scroll past the first paragraph. Is the fault yours or mine?

With that said, not every link gets 3000 comments. The example given is an exception. Most of the time the comments stick to the point with a lot of constructive opinions in them. You can't silence the crowd, you can't control the crowd, and you certainly can't own the crowd. So just let the crowd be. If you don't like that, refrain from posting stuff here.

Technically speaking, how is signing up with a Tutanota email different than signing up with another email? What does an email address actually reveal to Microsoft which they can use for tracking users?

I would like to remind you that US is the ONLY country that actually has decimated 2 (not 1) cities using nuclear warheads. So saying that Russia has that capability while America doesn't is simply false.

Did not America threaten to use nuclear warheads in Afghanistan? It literally went into Iraq after the made-up threat of nuclear weapons in Iraq.

I don't think the West ever spoke out against America when it waged all those wars. Oh it does now but now it has become political. The wars have been waged, cities have been destroyed, civilians are dead, and so these wars become unpopular. No one stood up to stop those wars and I bet no one will stand up again.

So no, Russia-Ukraine war is not different because Russian has nuclear warheads. It's wrong. It's bad. It's consequences will be horrifying. All true. But in this instance, nothing puts it apart from all the other wars.

There's a difference between being anti-war and being silent. Silence is acceptance. And the world remained silent when people were dying in all those war-stricken countries.

Just to put things into perspective: America went into Afghanistan and stayed there for 20 years. 20 years long invasion. How long in Iraq? How long in Vietnam? Now Russia opens a front against Ukraine and suddenly everyone thinks it's different. It's not. It's the same thing in a different country. Big oppressing small. Sending a message etc etc.

Wars have always been horrifying. This war is no exception. The only difference now vs then is that the general public has Internet & social media. The terrors are now 100 times magnified.

In truth this war is not special in any way. It isn't even the first war of this century (Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Palestine etc). Perhaps the horrors seem more real now because it's at Europe's doorstep but the rest of the world never really experienced peace.

So when I read something like this I am sickened by the one-sided biased view as if the rest of the world hasn't been waging war amongst themselves, as if Russia broke a century long peace. Look at the state of all the war-stricken cities and you'll see the consequences. Why did no one say "We need to talk" then?

The author posted this in a recent discussion on GitHub [0]. Thought I'd share it to get more opinions on the matter.

Personally speaking it irks me a little when different terms are made ownership by someone. OSI is doing great work but is it considered an authority when it comes to defining what open source is? In other words, can open source exist without OSI? I certainly think so.

For example, what does it mean when Sentry says their licensing scheme is not acceptable by OSI [1]? Does it change the meaning of open source?

It's really confusing.

[0] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook/discussions/747#d...

[1] https://open.sentry.io/licensing/

Found this gem while searching for a lightweight HTML renderer for screenshotting really basic HTML pages without requiring a whole browser engine. Do note that this isn't at the render stage yet and doesn't seem to be very actively developed now but it's a cool idea. The basic execution seems to be done really well.

I wonder if this can be taken and further extended to build something akin to lite-html.

> When billing is complex (lots of fees, different billing cycles, usage based consumption)

So does Lago have a template for all these use cases? What happens when a new unique case comes up? Is Lago flexible enough to handle all the cases? Current and future ones? How is that different than having a flexible template? What actually is the problem with that?

Not sure this actually solves a real problem. A lot of the questions/problems mentioned in the article are already things being addressed by any service worth using.

At the end of the day, you just need to generate a PDF from a template. The template is a solved problem. Invoices generally do not have that huge amount of variability in terms of layout.

I have been using microinvoice (https://github.com/baptistejamin/node-microinvoice) for the past couple of months and it's been a breeze. It uses PDFKit underneathe and has been working really well. I don't think PDF generation is a task that should require using Chromium. There's pandoc & other libraries that can easily do this at a much lower cost to both resources and finance.

The blog posts sounds like its solving a problem that doesn't exist. Generating invoices _at scale_? Is scalibility really a problem here? Generating a PDF takes a couple of milliseconds. Rent a $5 VPS and it can generate all sorts of PDFs for you without an issue for a long time before you'd start worrying about scalability. Heck this sort of thing doesn't even need to be a dedicated service.

Not to downplay anyone's hard work but Lago just doesn't sound like it's solving a real problem.

I have been using Notesnook[0] for over a year (mostly because its encrypted and private) and it has helped me tremendously. Obsidian is too text-editor-esque for me. I haven't tried Logseq or Dendron though.

I actually like how Notesnook forces you to keep your organization at 2 levels. Restricting at first it helped me simplify my workflow a lot and finding things is a breeze since I know it can't be more than 2 levels deep. For some reason I can't wrap my head around interlinking; hierarchy based organization is good enough for me.

Taking notes doesn't need anything else.

Aside: the recent news about Notesnook going open source[1] has gotten me really excited. This might actually turn out to be a notes app I stick to. Let's see where the winds blow...

[0] https://notesnook.com/

[1] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook

Let's just get rid of user accounts altogether. We started wanting to get rid of emails then got insecure about our passwords...all in the quest of anonymity and security.

99% of us don't get hacked. 99% of us are ignored by everyone in the world. But we care about our privacy nonetheless. And we care because all these services are after data they don't need at all.

It's so annoying when during sign up for a service you are asked to provide company name, country, phone number, email, full name, date of birth, password etc. Does a reality exist where I just won't have to sign up at all?

Accounts are portals into the always connected digital world. In effect their only use is to connect a piece of information to you. Is it impossible to do that in a completely anonymous way?

Found this comparison while researching OCR. It doesn't have the latest libraries like PaddleOCR but the performance of different OCR libraries is still quite apparent.

I like the idea behind the implementation. The implementation as it stands would kill OSS because majority of the user base of OSS libraries are in no position to pay for every package they install into their fun side projects. This would take away the whole fun point from OSS.

That being said the idea to use package managers as funding channels is not an altogether bad idea. We all use package managers daily and if there were a way to support OSS maintainers through it without any enforcement, it would be huge.

Suppose you install a package for almost every side project. The PM could connect with your Stripe account and allow (not enforce or badger) you to pay directly to the package maintainer. I think one of the most discouraging part of donations to OSS is the recurrent subscription model. If I want to appreciate someone, I'd be open to donating once or twice on my own terms when I like it but these donation platforms force you.

Secondly as a developer I am much more comfortable in my work environment and if donations are integrated into it, I might donate more. Who doesn't like ease?

A huge part of open source is open community, open to feedback, open to suggestions, feature requests and contributions. Obviously there's no entitlement but it's one of the few actual benefits of open sourcing.

Edit: I know about "open source but not open contribution" thing which is quite rare (esbuild for one). I don't think that's a good idea for the health of the project.

I know not everyone has the mental strength to run and moderate a community but in the software world, a community is akin to being a celebrity. People follow you, wait on you, listen to you, value you, troll you, throw insults at you, shout at you, and show attitude to you when you don't owe them anything. The best part is that someone somewhere knows you. Fame is a huge motivator.

If all of the open source projects had huge communities and no funding, there'd be more actively maintained projects than there are now with very few communities. I might even say that a few dollars here and there might not even make a huge difference compared to a few people making issues, taking interest and contributing.

Now I know not everyone is like that or should be like that. I am not generalizing here but come on. When you put your effort out there, it is quite reasonable to expect some form of compensation or appreciation.

If all the open source projects just put the code out there and called it a day, that'd be a huge disservice to the world. Open source is the birthing ground for a lot of software engineers and all their learning is due to them being a part of a community and contributing.

And as to be expected the bad comes with the good. That's alright. If you take the decision to run a community, don't worry about a few bad apples here and there. It's a part of the deal.

The benefits of being open community far outweigh the cons. It's no obligation but it sure is a good thing.

Going through the article I realized this attitude is what eventually kills some really good software. If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad?

Live and let live, I say. Not everyone is running a charity and Feedly is nowhere even near the top of the list of software ripping off their users or selling their data to make money.

What the author labels as "cluttered" is really not that cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty list in the alternative they prefer. But that's just UI.

I am not saying don't move to another alternative. I am just saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense.

True but OSX & Microsoft didn't have to deal with the massive amount of fragmentation that exists in Linux. Moving to a better standard is no issue but when everyone is building their own ship at their own cost & labour, it's not such a great idea.

Soon enough all the Linux forums will be filled with workarounds to get X or Y or Z app to work on Wayland or X or something else. The result? Nothing will work as expected for a long time (until everyone has forgotten X).

You are right but mind that you also can't compete on Google's scale. Linux Desktop is mostly volunteer work which means the risk of breaking the same things is higher because a) it'll take much longer to build something better b) you'll run out of resources/motivation c) you'll get distracted d) you won't be able to test it as rigorously.

I don't think it was a bad decision to go the Wayland way at all. But it accumulates because Linux is so fragmented. There's multiple distros, each with their own toolkits, own package managers, own cores etc. And then someone comes along and fragments it at an ever lower level by proposing Wayland. I am sure it fixed a bunch of core issues but look at the cost it will incur:

1. All GUI toolkits will have to support Wayland across the board. Some stuff will break, some stuff will have to be abandoned.

2. After that they'll have to maintain both because it'll take at least a decade or two for everyone to reasonably migrate.

3. The app developers will have to upgrade to this new version of the toolkit. Which they might not be able to do because the changes are too many and too big.

4. The toolkits might even have to backport the Wayland related stuff a few versions. Which would require insane amount of resources.

Is the end result worth it? I bet for a long while we'll be having a way poorer experience due to Wayland. The worst case would be developers ditching X too early when Wayland isn't properly stable. Oh man, it's a recipe for disaster.

Just use Xorg if you want 1:1 compatibility. For Wayland to be 1:1 compatible it'd have to bend over backwards and do some ninja turtles kind of moves to create a mess nobody wants. The whole point is to be better and better is mostly always incompatible. Although Wayland isn't completely incompatible either but that difference doesn't matter.

However...

I am still shocked at the wonder Linux Desktop is. The world has entered into VR/AR, AI, and completely stupifying marvels of engineering but we still haven't gotten the Linux Desktop right. It's a downright fragmented mess. And if that wasn't enough, we had to build another windowing server! Now there's more fragmentation and apps that barely got the funding to work on X or get ported there will never see daylight on Wayland. Yay! Hurrah! We did it! Not to be so condescending but it's truly terrifying how horribly amateurish Linux Desktop is when the underlying system is so amazing.

It's almost like JavaScript developers got together and decided to build the desktop part of Linux. Every week they deprecated/overhauled/threw away last weeks changes and started a new in the name of engineering. The result? Nothing ever works predictably on anything. You open one app in X and the same app on Wayland...and there's no surety it'll work the same way on both. Now open the same app on Gnome and KDE (although that difference has slowly been fixed so it's now much better).

A lot of things don't work in Linux as they are supposed to. You have to tinker the guts out of them sometimes. Sometimes you may even have to recompile. Props to the way Linux is designed that makes all this possible and not locked down but..man it gets annoying sometimes.

I hope one day we'll have some solidity and stability in Linux with everyone building upon an agreed set of foundations so we can actually move forward instead of rebuilding the same wall over and over again.

I find it very strange that the same HN crowd that loves open source and wouldn't touch anything proprietary with a 10 foot pole has so many reservations against moving off of GitHub. I am not generalizing here, just surprised. According to what I have seen in my short experience, HN should have ditched GitHub long since.

Anyway...

I have always been curious as to why the largest hosting for OSS isn't open source itself. Maybe I am not intelligent enough to realize the reasoning behind this. Imagine if git wasn't open source! That's like an OS that only runs open source software but isn't open source itself. It just doesn't make sense for people to trust such an obviously flawed service...and yet they do.

And if that wasn't enough when GitHub got acquired by Microsoft very few people thought it amiss. Indeed, even now a lot of people are happy that Microsoft is running their digital homes. I think if GitHub was measured on the FOSS scale it would fall short on every measure.

Co-pilot isn't even that big of a deal. That's just the icing on the top. GitHub is untrustworthy top-to-bottom even before there was Co-pilot.

But I suppose convenience always trumps openness and freedom. It's especially sad because the whole point behind FOSS was this. Is the whole FOSS idea getting old?

The worst thing is that GitHub has monopolized the open source world. We can't even think of moving off of GitHub because of what we'll lose. But how about we do this:

We create a dummy repo on GitHub for our project that has all the fancy README, releases, issues, actions etc. but we keep the actual code out of GitHub on an open source service. Would that work? Is that feasible?

Basically, we use GitHub's wide adoption for what it's meant to be used: to market/share your project but keep the source code on a separate platform. This would create a new host of problems but I think it can actually work.

Phones were here way before 2FA and Internet. The technology is poorly designed for modern attack vectors but it's so widespread it's crazy. Every single person out there has a phone number - one of the primary reasons it is still offered as a 2FA option.

Not to mention how widespread the coverage is. There are many places around the world where you have cell connectivity but no Internet.

In short, you can't get rid of it short of throwing away the SIM. Is it possible to have SMS v2 that's safer like we went from 2G to 5G?

Go is a compiled language with comparable performance to Zig/Rust/C in a lot of use cases. It's heavily ergonomic for network/server side programming, it's safe, easy to use with a tiny footprint.

Rust is not only or even primarily used in embedded or driver programming. Indeed, I see more user space software built in rust than in embedded nowadays. As for Zig, it's so new and alpha that it didn't even find a niche yet. Rust also hasn't yet found a specific niche. It's all over the place in GUI, networking, embedded etc. which isn't a bad thing, to be clear.

It might be harder to do embedded in Go but that's not the point here, is it? It's about safety. Go has a special place in that it is compiled, easy to learn, quite performant for most tasks, and safe to boot.

> I can believe that abstractions prevent errors, but can't a language allow footguns but have syntax that makes them easy to detect?

What would be the point though? If a language can detect footguns, it's time to prevent them which is what Rust does, essentially. Footguns are rarely useful and there's always an alternative way. For these rare cases, Rust includes the unsafe escape hatch but then all bets are off. Don't expect the compiler to help you if you are intent on going down that road.

I think Zig has a lot more footguns due to it's explicit nature. When you don't hide away the details from the human, you are increasing the risk of writing bad code and it becomes increasingly harder to make the compiler detect each potentially bad decision.

Rust did it but they had to rethink the whole problem from the ground up. Rust is safe but that safety had quite the learning cost as compared to, say, Zig or Go. The good thing about this is that you can't use many of the bad practices from other languages that have become habits.

But Zig is still in beta/alpha stage so let's see how they increase the overall safety in the coming months/years. My experience with Zig has left me quite satisfied, especially the comptime features but the explicitness sometimes gets in the way of readability.

Web browsers have become huge monolithic applications we all nowadays preach against. So much so that other monoliths get built on top of them. (I am taking the dictionary definition of monolith here: a massive structure).

Many of the solutions given in this thread are similar to ones we give to someone who wants to escape from the monolith mess. Namely, move towards a very slim core, make everything as modular as possible etc etc. And the problems towards such an approach are the same as well i.e., what do we do about the legacy stuff?

The important question here is: what can be done better if we start from scratch? The main issue I see with browsers is that they have become so big that building a new one in a reasonable amount of time is next to impossible. This makes all the open standards pointless because no one can do anything with them except the few already established browsers.

Unfortunately there's no clean way out of this.

I have had a lot more success with Tabnine. One, it runs offline as well as online so the performance difference with/without internet is unnoticeable. Two, it understands context much better. I was prototyping in Python with Tabnine turned on without the LSP and I felt no need to install one. It spits out uncannily good suggestions if you are using a popular library like Beautifulsoup etc.

Copilot is marketed as a pair programmer but the code quality is often times just wrong, not just bad. It thinks it understands what I want based on the function name and parameters but the generated output is no where close to what I want.

Multiline AI generated suggestions are not a good idea anyway (not yet at least). AI based LSP/auto completer would be much better at this stage with a lot faster DX.

For me context is very important. Separating out the sentences, although makes them stand on their own, often sounds discontinuous and jarring like a too long pause. Not to mention how awkward it looks on the page (if double spaced which I prefer).

That's not to say it's a bad technique. It might work for some, not for others. For me it doesn't.

I have found writing to be much like coding where if you think through the idea properly, writing to the end is not such a big problem. The main hurdles is getting stuck which is often an indicator of a poorly thoughtout idea.

The other thing that helps me escape the over-editting issue is putting my words down with as much brevity is possible. The more fluff there is, the harder it is to change. Simpler to read, simpler to edit.

I never understood the motivations behind V. It's clearly not a hobby project started out by a developer who is genuinely experimenting with PLs and want to put out something unique. It feels more like a stunt or a flair to either extort money or become famous. All that would be perfectly okay if V did what it claims to do but the author fanatically makes exciting claims but implements only fluff to hide the underlying broken machinery.

I tried V when it first got popular (about 3 years ago). I am no expert on languages but the way it was ductaped (AST-less compiler for "performance", a "graphic library" when even basic things don't work etc etc) made me eventually lose interest.

3 years later V is still mostly where I left it. If the V author focused on the stabilizing the compiler instead of starting off shoot projects like vui, vdb etc. it might actually work.

The technical aspect of a startup hardly even matters as long as you get the job done. The first thing to understand before you start a startup is that it doesn't matter how much you love programming. It doesn't matter how beautiful your code is or how much time you spent writing it.

What matters is marketing. You can use Rust or JavaScript or whatever language you want but if you want to be successful, you will spend more time thinking about how to market. Customers don't care what language a product is written in (unless it's a developer facing product). Customers care about getting the job done.

I know the argument here is that Rust offers long term stability but if you are a startup, you will be changing the product so rapidly and adding more and more features, the sheer level of growth will make your product unstable.

I am not against someone using Rust for their new startup IF they are already comfortable in it and know the ins and outs of Rust. Rust is way more complex than JS. The learning curve is considerably steeper. And that matters because if you use a great language and write it poorly, no matter what guarantees it offers, you won't get a better product than if you wrote it in a language you understood well.

So if you are a startup, don't think about the language. Think about what will sell, how you will sell etc. If you can't sell it, it doesn't matter if you wrote it in a particular fancy language. The technical aspects of a product are rarely a sales increasing factor.