mch82

Short-term: hire someone to keep the trees alive.

Longer-term: start reaching out to top agricultural programs for advice. Look for lists like this one & write to faculty: https://agronomag.com/best-schools-for-farmers-in-the-us/. You’ll probably be able to find people with expertise in coffee. I bet there are also conferences or industry associations that will help with networking. There are probably also government programs in your country.

What happens to the coffee today? Is 8000 trees a lot (sounds like it to me)?

Great to see this catalog! I’m extremely excited about the current wave of ZUI / infinite canvas apps & was surprised by how many apps there are. So far, my favorite infinite canvas apps have been InVision Freehand and Excalidraw.

This category of app might finally be the “killer app” that drives tablet adoption & moves digital collaboration ahead of the physical whiteboard.

Freehand has changed how I work with my team. It’s phenomenal for documenting workflows. It’s also better than PowerPoint at evolving a slide deck. Amazingly, it works well enough on a phone to reference on the go. Currently too expensive for large teams though.

“Zooming User Interface” article on Wikipedia is another overview of the history behind ZUI, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

To me, “full self driving” has always meant the car has a built-in cab driver so I can work while the car drives to my parents for dinner 6 hours away, then sleep while the car drives me home. I’m not sure how the phrase “full self-driving” could mean anything other than that.

Edit: When I pre-ordered a Model 3 Musk’s promise at that time was literally “press a button and your car will work as a taxi to earn money when you’re not using it”.

Alternate advice: practice skills of listening, observing, empathy, dialog, sharing, building. These are the skills you will need to deal with people.

People can have a difficult time talking about religion, politics, and programming languages because these issues affect their lives. When you say something that threatens another person’s life, expect a strong reaction to that threat. The key to having productive discussions about topics like these is to start with empathy, look for and diffuse threats, and seek a future state that creates space for the needs and goals of all stakeholders.

Edit: also, life is a lot more fun when approached with curiosity. Stay curious.

Correct. It’s a new medium for a new school of artist, not a replacement for artists. Very exciting!

“The Persuaders” by Anand Giridharadas https://thepersuadersbook.com/

How to open a door to more effective conversations with real people you care about and interact with in your communities.

Oh, here’s a prior discussion on HN that I missed…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33716429

Tweet by Automattic CEO in response to another tweet about complexity of running a Mastadon server…

> Come to @tumblr. We'll add activitypub for interconnect. Don't stress.

https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1594577983028740096?s=2...

If you feel there is a problem with unsubstantiated claims on the page, please edit the page and add “citation needed” tags to those claims. Here’s how to add them, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed

If the overall article needs more citations then you can edit the page and apply the “more citations needed” tag, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:More_citations_need...

Here’s an overview of Wikipedia’s approach to site reliability. Lots of tools to help flag content that needs verification and there are lists of volunteer opportunities to clean up content that had been flagged. Check it out, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Reliab....

> Why have we as consumers become to addicted and depended on brands?

Because we are poor and got addicted to getting apps for free.

We used to pay for services like email, messaging, and web hosting. Then advertising companies started giving us that software for “free”. But we didn’t know they were advertising companies then because (1) the companies hadn’t decided that yet and (2) they framed themselves as app companies.

Want ad free radio? Pay for audio books and music. Want ad free video? Pay for YouTube premium or HBO MAX. Want your personal website to be add free? Pay Wordpress. Want an add free smart TV? Pay a little extra and buy one.

The “Dot-com bubble” Wikipedia article is a great starting point, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble.

The “Video game crash of 1983” was a similar event that happened 30 years earlier, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983. Apple and Nintendo were the phoenix that rose from those ashes.

Robotics and factories.

Big tech happened because of open source and remote work (international collaboration on the internet). C, gcc, Linux, BSD, and publicly funded protocols like email and HTTP unlocked the last 20 years of growth. The next wave of open source is happening in robotics and manufacturing. We’re around 2005 right now in software terms. The iRobot, Nest, Oculus generation of companies was the first .com wave. Robotics and manufacturing teams are figuring out how to work remotely (accelerated by the pandemic).

This is not true. Why do you think this?

Edit: It’s very possible I’m understanding what you’re trying to say.

The world is run by people. Those people are no smarter than you (person reading this comment right now).

I believe this personally and I’m confident Steve Jobs meant this literally. The reason I’m confident is Jobs said this in 1994, when the conventional wisdom was that both he and Apple had failed. Toy Story wouldn’t be released until the next year. iPhone (the device that convinced people Apple was right about Human Centered Design) was 13 years away. NeXT was failing.

Here is the link to the original video posted by the Santa Clara Historical Society. https://youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw

Edit: fix video link

Don’t worry about all the people going negative and saying AI will replace you. Those people aren’t artists.

You can’t be blind to AI… it’s coming and you’d be foolish to ignore it. But, AI is like any other tool artists use. Great artists use new tools and methods to push their ideas & work forward. No one expects you to mix paint or make your own clay. Banksy isn’t making paint cans. No one cares about those skills because that’s not the cool part anymore. Stay focused on the cool part :-)

You are 20 and talking about a career change. You are going to do great!

I learned to program in art classes at USC and UCLA. While you may go analog, it’s likely your tech & art skills will blend somewhere down the line.

Check out UCLA MFA Design Media Arts program [1]. Casey Reas [2] teaches there. He co-created Processing at MIT [3]. Arduino programs are called “sketches” because the Arduino IDE derives from Processing [4]. Art & tech always push each other forward :-)

[1]: https://design.ucla.edu/programs/mfa

[2]: https://arts.ucla.edu/single/casey-reas/#!

[3]: https://medium.com/processing-foundation/a-modern-prometheus...

[4]: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/connecting-arduino-to-p...

Product overview: https://www.f4map.com/

Why is measuring productivity easier to do in the office? Don’t your coworkers have deliverables? How does being in the office make it easier to tell if those deliverables are complete?

I love that this comment defines productivity as lunches, jokes, playing board games, and going to the pub. Though, I agree all those things are more fun than sitting at a computer.

Yes, Wii had a web browser and a JavaScript API for the Wiimote. I prototyped a simple web game for my Wii at the time.

HeyLaughingBoy is right about patterns being built into frameworks we use today (can’t reply to that comment because it’s nested too deeply).

Rails is an example. I’ve seen a number of talks and articles by DHH that emphasize patterns and talking with people who wrote patterns. Rails built those in (like “model view controller”).

Libraries and frameworks weren’t publicly available 30 years ago. Certainly not for free. The patterns are still useful, it’s just that a library or framework is often more efficient than reimplementing a pattern from scratch.

You’re lucky to be programming now!

I’ve thought about this a lot because I grew up with an Apple IIc in my house, but didn’t learn to program C until 2001. My parents didn’t know how to program. We learned to use the computer for typing and desktop publishing. Programming books were expensive. Even the commercially used compilers and IDEs were expensive. Mac developers paid for CodeWarrior [1]. I don’t remember source code being available easily. Aside from “hackers” who have a knack for figuring out code, there wasn’t really a path for “read the docs” people to learn unless they lived near a place with lots of physically printed docs (a company, a university, a parent who programmed). Disk space was a constraint. Programs were split across multiple floppy disks. Computers would run out of space. The length of variable names & things like that mattered because shortening them let more code fit on a disk. I’m not old enough to know how much that affected full computers, but it made a huge difference on a TI-82 graphing calculator. That was the first thing I learned to program & cutting lines of code left room for games. I assume a lot of bad habits that make code hard to read came from that time. Oh… there was no source control. Revisions were just named differently or in a different directory, if they existed at all. And… grand finale… project plans included days or weeks to print disks and paper user manuals so apps could be sold in stores :-)

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior

It helps because apps are often used to view or edit files. By “files” I mean things like word doc files, photoshop files, Apple Keynote files. Many people like working with files and saving them locally, rather than on a server. With SQLite running in the browser, a file that is an SQLite database can be very easily read into memory, worked with, then saved back to disk. The page I linked explains this in detail. There are some examples of companies taking this approach at https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html. Hope this extra detail is helpful.

Edit: Additionally, I encourage you to experiment with this. If you haven’t already, you may be surprised at how efficient/compact SQLite files are. They’re significantly more compact that JSON or XML documents and can include binary files like images. It’s much simpler to use SQLite as a file format than to create a custom binary file format.

Check out “SQLite as an application file format”, https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

Browser support is currently limited to Chrome and Edge. Firefox and Safari don't support this yet. Source: https://web.dev/file-system-access/#browser-support

Here's a better overview of the sqlite3 WASM project: https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/trunk/index.md. Very excited to try this once support is added to Firefox and Safari!

Regarding technology as a savior—it isn’t, but it can help.

Steve Jobs described the computer as “a bicycle for the mind”. Bicycle technology allows a human to move faster than a cheetah (https://www.travelwriter.nl/english-blog-faster-than-a-cheet...). Computers help people think and compute faster than an organic brain. However, the human must *choose* to use the technology. That’s a social choice. Human problems are social problems. I do believe we have adequate technology to bring the world into an age of prosperity. But it will only happen if we choose, as a society, to do it.

For a variety of reasons, I don’t think giving up technology to pursue a low tech / no tech society would be helpful. Often, low tech solutions actually make things worse when applied at scale with as many people as we have.

GDP doesn’t need to grow indefinitely. It measures industrial output, but not wealth or prosperity. Here are economists whose perspectives you may find offer a way out of the trap it feels like we’re in:

Mariana Mazzucato (https://marianamazzucato.com) talks about the spectrum of models capitalism can take in this interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-prof-g-show-with-s....

“Betterness” by Umair Haque talks about the need for metrics that augment GDP by serving as indicators of wealth: https://store.hbr.org/product/betterness-economics-for-human... (also available on Amazon, iBooks, etc.).

The David Graeber Institute (https://davidgraeber.org/books/bullshit-jobs/) has done a lot of work to explore how we allocate labor to tasks. The book “Bullshit Jobs” is a worthwhile overview of the Institute’s research.

Edit: “Enlightenment Now” by Stephen Pinker (not an economist) is another look at progress. While Pinker acknowledges it’s possible to be born during a local minima, the book charts how things continue to improve for people across many metrics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now

Cool project! A true, open source alternative to Postman will be valuable. It seems like you’ve got the major elements in place.

Unsolicited UX notes…

I read Hacker News on mobile, so tried the app on mobile and ran into some challenges. In order to save space, eliminate the right click, and work on mobile please consider changing:

    You can right click here to create a new request or a new folder

To the following (illustrated using pseudo markdown):

    [Create request] or [Create a folder]

It would also be helpful to replace the GitHub star link with a link to your README. GitHub star links are problematic because they require a login that adds friction that prevents people from getting to your README page. People will login if they decide to star the project, but they might never get to your GitHub if they don’t have time to login or can’t easily login on the device where they’re reading.

What question is so urgent? What’s the consequence of waiting 30 minutes, or until tomorrow, for an answer?