matt2000

I never really understood why MSFT didn't start a clean slate rewrite of Windows about a decade ago. Imagine how much simpler and more reliable it could be, and you could run Windows 7 in an emulation layer if you had older apps you depended on.

Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of reliability but still include features for advanced users like developers and business analytics.

Definitely feels like a missed opportunity, especially with growing discontent among developers with the Mac hardware line.

I'm having the same experience: high CPU usage, slow typing response and big battery usage. Will see if 61.0 helps at all.

I had some similar experiences with multiline text controls in the summer of last year, but it seemed to improve by around the fall. Not quite sure of the current state but it seemed to be improving.

(Overall it was still super worth it to use flutter at the time)

Dokku is _preeeeeetty_ good but you kind of end up messing around on the server eventually to get things working, or fix things, etc.

If you're into that, or have CPU/RAM requirements that would be prohibitively expensive on Heroku then give it a try (I run it for a couple things on a cheap but powerful dedicated machine). If you're just doing something simple it's probably not worth it, just get a hobby dyno and go that route.

I'm guessing he means "$2 more than a $5 droplet that you maintain yourself."

I hear this a lot about Go, but doesn't the webserver handle concurrency for you in most cases? I don't do a whole lot of explicit threading work when I write webservers in Java for example. Or is there something I'm missing that you use the Go primitives for in these cases?

The thing that sometimes gets lost in the debate around Tesla autopilot (IMO), is that it's possible for self driving cars to be theoretically better than human drivers, AND that Tesla's implementation of that concept to be overall worse.

From the recent accidents it seems clear that Tesla autopilot is just not that great in it's current form. Even if it's following a line that it mistakes for a lane marker, how is it ok that it can't stop for a large obstacle in front of the car when given plenty of distance before a crash? How is this not a totally unacceptable type of failure for a system like this?

Same here, it's so weird. Most services are dying to get you to sign up for autorenewal, these guys don't even allow it.

I use a bunch of IDEs from https://www.jetbrains.com/ (mainly Idea) and it is hands down the most important thing for my productivity. Been using them for over 10 years, super worth it.

I agree. It seems very clear that code readability is reduced by var-like type hiding. When I'm doing code review and I see "var address = contract.getAddress();" what is the type of that variable? I have no idea.

It's probably not a great fit for making games, a lot of the benefits are in quickly generating and updating more standard UIs, not 100% custom drawing like games usually require (although you can do custom drawing of course).

I would recommend checking out Unity if you're into making games.

Yeah I hear you, I’m just missing the stuff I used to find here - little cool libraries, new ways of doing things, stuff people made.

So much of what’s upvoted now are just the contents of the business section of any major newspaper.

"Hacker News" this is not. I hate to be the guy saying "why is this article on here" but I do miss the stuff that used to be on this site :(

I define weak spots in terms of things I'm trying to accomplish. If I'm weak in areas I'll never need, then who cares? When trying to accomplish something you'll find out pretty quickly the things you need to improve and be dragged towards improving them fairly naturally.

Among all the other things mentioned in the comments, AFAIK this is the rendering engine for https://flutter.io/ too

Does anyone know what would have happened if the battery wasn't available? Some sort of brown out?

Sounds very promising, I will give it a try. Thanks!

Can anyone using this give us a report on the developer experience? Even simple quality of life stuff is useful like how easy is it to see logs for running containers, how fast are the deploys, etc.

Thanks!

Were you running a docker image on custom VMs on app engine? Just wondering how easy the transition was. Are you still running on Google cloud instances via nanobox?

Add my vote for this one. I'm running a dokku server right now for this reason but would rather not.

This article is from 2014 so I thought it would be interesting to see how things are going.

It's hard to tell whether the subject of the article, Protean, is having success with the in-wheel motor. Their website is vague about who their customers are: http://www.proteanelectric.com/about-us/

At the end of the article they mention that China set a goal of 500,000 non-fossil fuel cars on the road by 2015, it looks like they probably got there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country#/m...

They also stated the goal is to have 5M on the road by 2020, which also looks like they'll get close since there were 352,000 sold in 2016: https://qz.com/972897/china-is-selling-more-electric-vehicle... and what looks like a 72% growth rate over 2015. That would mean (if the 72% growth holds, it could even increase):

Current: ~600K 2017: 600K sold 2018: 1M sold 2019: 1.72M sold

Total: ~4M

Will SSDs become cheaper per megabyte than magnetic platters at some point?

Is this the kind of thing that makes Google's Spanner database possible?

It’s much much better than Xcode for autocomplete, code highlighting and refactoring. It’s just a better swift editor than Xcode basically.

Disclaimer: I’m a long time IntelliJ user so I find the environment more comfortable in general, not sure if that’s the case for long time Xcode users.

I’ve been writing a new project in Flutter and so far it’s been dramatically faster than writing an app with either of the native SDKs. The issue you mention here is the key downside though. For example, as far as I know there is no map component or video player. I don’t happen to need those, but if you did it’d be a deal breaker probably.

Great list. The only thing that I might take issue with is #5: "5. Every decision must be made extremely carefully. Bad decisions cost money."

Taking too much time on decisions is a good way to kill a new company. Many, if not most wrong decisions you can recover from, and it's very difficult to know what the right decision is beforehand. So a lot of the time the "right" decision is just to do _something_ to learn what the real right decision is and then do that.

I agree with everything you said, except for the part where you said JavaScript was "designed".

As I get older it gets much much harder to feel stupid at something new when you know what it feels like to be very good at something else. This I feel is the key reason people stop picking up new skills, it feels miserable to be back at a beginner level and so much more satisfying to do something you’re proficient at.

However, if you can recognize this and reset your expectations then you will probably find you have extensive general skills to bring to bear around learning and self discipline. Those skills will make the actual learning process overall much quicker compared to learning your first few major skills, it just might not feel like it.

I have been trying out Flutter over the past week or so and so far it really has delivered on high speed build-edit loops. I've already gotten in the habit of improving layouts while the app is running, it's really a great experience.

Android build times have improved a lot over the past few years but this is a whole next level experience.

Perhaps I can give you some perspective from... the future. I've been doing what you're doing for about 20 years now, and have worked on (mainly with one other partner) probably 100 things? Some were full blown companies, some were just fun side projects, some were apps that made pretty good money, etc. Perhaps some things I've realized recently will be useful to you:

* It took us around 6-8 years before we made any money at all on anything we did. The thing that ended up making money wasn't even a sure thing, it just happened to work out. For a good part of those 6-8 years we thought we sucked because things never quite worked out. It turned out we were learning a bunch of stuff that turned out to be very useful for a whole new thing that came along (phone apps).

* Making money wasn't the most important thing for me in these projects, but once we started making money we could quit our jobs and do our own stuff full time. That turned out to be super important, and is the most important part of making money on your projects probably.

* Making technology and making a business are two pretty different things, and it's pretty rare that someone is really into both of them. That's probably ok! There are a bunch of businesses that naturally develop out of good technology, so you can probably just work on things that make sense given your strengths.

* Jumping around and doing lots of different things is one of my traits as well, and for a while I thought it was a big weakness. It can be. Sometimes an idea needs a few years of consistent effort to see results. Other times though, you were right to give up as it wasn't going anywhere. For me, what helped was to think of what I'm working on as the collection of ALL of the projects that I've done. Then I am making progress no matter which ones fail. Then jumping around doesn't feel as bad. That all being said, there are boring and discouraging times in every project and it can be important that you see things through beyond where you're simply interested intellectually.

I'm sure there are a bunch more things that might be helpful that I can't quite think of now, I'll add them as I think of them.

Bottom line, what you can do is surprisingly rare (it just doesn't feel that way on HN). It's ok to take some time to develop these skills, one of which is filtering ideas to work on. If you spend enough years working at it then you might even end up an overnight success :)