mherrmann

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43102477

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43099230

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097749

Ah and yes, I'm still getting a handful of fman sales per month. But nowhere near enough to justify any time investment.

Congratulations on your launch. I wish you more success than I've had. Failing that, I wish you that you will see earlier than I did when it is time to move on.

I once recorded a video about my experiences developing a file manager [2]. Maybe you'll also find some interesting bits and pieces on fman's blog [3]. Incidentally, an article there is what sparked my current venture, which is much more profitable: consulting services around automatic updates.

If you'd like to have a chat, feel free to reach out. My contact info is on my website. :-)

Good luck!

[1]: https://fman.io

[2]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I1K3IkOlaVw

[3]: https://fman.io/blog/

With uv, there is now one more.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Level 0: this is bad.

Level -1: The teaching methods need to change.

Level -2: It's a glimpse into all of our future, not just children.

Level -3: Who controls the AI controls the world.

So if your script really did write that string into a what it thinks is 'username' then that's arguably one more thing to debug when its wizardry goes awry in some unknown way

I tested my script. It writes into the correct field. The logic is not hard: "Find an element to the right of the given label." If there are multiple, then Helium uses the one that's closest to the last element it interacted with. That's just how a human would do it. It works surprisingly well. In many years of using Helium, I barely recall this causing problems once.

Try it before judging. You will be surprised by how well it works.

It makes 90+% of them go away. That's a big win. Try it.

Helium helps with maintaining automation tests as well. click("Compose") is infinitely more maintainable than document.getElementById("eIu7Db").click(). (I just took this example from Gmail's web interface.)

Yup, I would never do it in a .py file. But I do it all of the time in the interpreter, which is what the video shows.

This looks largely like common workarounds that most people will write using Python-based browser automation. Most of the time, we accept that those capabilities aren't there by default because they are not explicit enough and can result in bugs and undefined behavior even when the elements that we expect to be on the page are actually there.

It sounds like you haven't tried Helium yet. I think you should, and see for yourself whether the trade-off you talk about actually exists.

Given the adage "explicit is better than implicit", I worry that a layer like this might create more trouble than it's worth for the sake of readability.

You could make the same argument about using C / assembly instead of Python. I suggest you try Helium before making statements about the "trouble" it may create. I believe you will find that there is no trouble.

    from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
    playwright = sync_playwright().start()
    browser = playwright.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.goto('https://news.ycombinator.com/login?goto=news')
    page.get_by_label('username').fill('mherrmann')
    # playwright._impl._errors.TimeoutError: Locator.fill: Timeout 30000ms exceeded.

It does work with Helium:

    from helium import *
    start_chrome('https://news.ycombinator.com/login?goto=news')
    write('mherrmann', into='username')

A business contact of mine asked Cloudflare for a quote for setting up a CDN for 7B requests per month. They dragged him through five sales calls to eventually deliver an offer with request costs 30% above CloudFront's public pricing. He said the costs per GB were ok though.

The cheapest reliable CDN I've found is bunny.net. Unlike OP, who is selling a book about Cloudflare, I have no conflict of interest by recommending Bunny, other than being a customer. I serve around 100 TB per month through them, at $0.005/GB. You can put it in front of a bucket to have cheap (globally distributed) egress with all the benefits of your favorite object storage provider. In my case, the buckets lie on Linode/Akamai. Bunny uses CDN77's infrastructure, which I have also heard good things about.

I suspect you are being hammered with requests now. Because in both Brave and Chrome, there is about a .5 second delay until the new tab page appears. Until then, there is just a black screen.

I'm below average in a lot of programming languages and tools. Cursor is extremely useful there because I don't have to spend tens of minutes looking up APIs or language syntax.

On the other hand, in areas I know more about, I feel that I can still write better code than Cursor. This applies to general programming as well. So even if Cursor knows exactly how to write the syntax and which function to invoke, I often find the higher-level code structure it creates sub-optimal.

Overall, Cursor is an extremely useful tool. It will be interesting to see whether it will be able to crawl out of the primordial soup of averages.

> The problem with code re-use is that it gets in the way of changing your mind later on.

This is simply incorrect, especially in the generality in which it is stated. If you change your mind and the code was copy-pasted to ten places, then you have to change ten places. On the other hand, if the code is in a function, then you only need to change it once. And if you do find that one of the ten invocations should not be changed, then you can still copy-paste - or make the function more general.

Like crossing a street without looking, copy-pasting is almost always a bad idea.

One thing I find interesting is the growth chart: It's linear. But given that the app clearly has some traction, and is viral in nature, how come it isn't exponential?