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nreeceon Are no-code website builders worth it?

Imo, it depends on the nature of the app you're trying to build. It can be a good early-stage approach to build a simple prototype or MVP using no-code builders (combo of Glide and Make is great for CRUD apps with low-complexity workflows).

Spend as little as two weeks to build the prototype or MVP, and start showing it to potential users/customers. If it solves a real problem for them, they use it daily and commit to pay for it, then you can think about enhancing the no-code app or moving to a hybrid or all-code approach.

Test the idea first with least time and effort, which is surely possible using no-code builders.

nreeceon RSS Feed Organization Strategies and New Feed Cost

>> I'd love a RSS reader that groups items on the same topic.

We had the same concern with everyday industry news, and so did some of our customers, so we built it a while back!

Our Newsroom feed reader uses NLP and ML to group similar articles for low-noise research/reading:

https://newsloth.com/#features

Currently, it detects and groups articles from a few hundred popular global news sites, and gradually growing to cover more sources.

We also have a feed builder/generator that turns unstructured public webpages into structured RSS feeds, to make it a flexible and unified feeds platform:

https://newsloth.com/product/feed-builder

nreeceon Show HN: Extract an RSS feed from almost anything

Nice, but this seems to only detect some existing RSS feeds on a given website.

* Shameless plug * Our feed generator can detect existing RSS feeds, and combines a scraper and data transformer to help create custom RSS feeds for any public webpage.

https://newsloth.com/product/feed-builder

nreeceon How to own your own Docker Registry address

You don't need a separate one-click app for a Docker Registry. CapRover can create a managed registry (see under Cluster menu option).

https://caprover.com/docs/app-scaling-and-cluster.html#setup...

nreeceon How to own your own Docker Registry address

Been a fan of CapRover for its ability to create a self-hosted private registry (HTTPS) at the click of a button, besides swarm/cluster support, and multiple deployment methods.

https://caprover.com

nreeceon Ask HN: What's a natural sounding text to speech system with an API?

I've used Google Cloud Text-to-Speech before, and some (if not all) of the voices sounded pretty natural/real. They have a demo on the main page. Try it out to see if it fits your need.

https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech

nreeceon Microsoft Clipchamp

There's also a nice and light video editor built-into Windows Photos app (which is now prompting to install Clipchamp). It's pretty good for short clips.

nreeceon Ask HN: What are the best tools for web scraping in 2022?

* Shameless plug *: our super-easy feed builder at New Sloth (formerly Feedity) - https://newsloth.com combines a scraper and data transformer, which helps create custom RSS feeds for any public webpage. Our API can auto-magically detect relevant articles in most cases. The platform includes an integrated feed reader and clusterer/deduplicator, specially aimed for knowledge workers with hundreds and thousands of feeds to monitor daily.

nreeceon Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it

Here's one from Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder):

"If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing."

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-minute-hack-insta...

nreeceon Ask HN: Cheapest and simplest solution for a daily email alert to myself?

Imo, Google Apps Script is the simplest (fully hosted/serverless, JavaScript SDK, integrated scheduler and mailer, Google Sheets integration) that I've come across so far for building low-code scripted tools, and cheapest too (free).

https://developers.google.com/apps-script

nreeceon Ask HN: Cheap VPS with 1TB HDD?

RamNode has a KVM VPS range with 1 TB HDD storage for $15/month.

I've used their VPSs many years ago, and they were excellent in terms of performance and support. Nick, the owner, has sold the company since then, and I haven't used them lately, so I'm not sure about their current standing, but worth giving them a try.

The other option can be to store the text files as objects on Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2 for cheap.

nreeceon Mustache – Logic-Less Templates

Is the Mustache library still being maintained and updated? I thought Handlebars.js became the worthy successor.

nreeceon When will Apple ship other M2 Macs?

Undoubtedly a solid chip, specially for its performance per watt, but Intel's new i7-1280P performed better in comparison[1]. It'll be interesting in the coming months to see fresher benchmarks of M2 vs Intel 12th-gen vs AMD Ryzen.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-Plus-with-i7-1280P...

nreeceon Adminer: Database management in a single PHP file

Looks like a good alternative to phpMiniAdmin (http://phpminiadmin.sourceforge.net), which hasn't been updated since 2017.

nreeceon Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

Is there a public page/link which mentions that they're not removing V2 support? Please share. Thanks.

All I can find is:

We have not yet set a deprecation date for Manifest v2 but expect it to be supported for at least one year after Manifest v3 becomes stable in the release channel.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

So they will eventually remove it sooner than later.

nreeceon Storing State in the URL

>> Store serialized state

Learnt recently that Base64 encoding and decoding in JS doesn't quite handle Unicode strings. One solution[1] is to URI encode/decode the text (e.g. JSON):

  base64 = btoa(encodeURIComponent( str ))

  str = decodeURIComponent(atob( base64 ))

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Base64#the...

nreeceon Ask HN: What's the modern alternative to WordPress for a non-technical weblog?

Moved my decade old personal blog running on slow and bloated WP to a fast and light-weight Ghost (self-hosted). It's so much better, and a delight to write in its clean and simple editor.

nreeceon Ask HN: Heavy Metal Music for Programming?

Ditto. I prefer progressive rock or classical music while doing deep-work. Instrumental, specially ambient or Middle-Eastern, is nice too.

English vocals are distracting during work, but strangely I don't mind any other language (Turkish for example), because my brain cannot fathom it, and remains focused.

nreeceon Ask HN: Which small video editor do you use?

+1 Windows' Video Editor works well, although the good old Windows Movie Maker was great.

nreeceon NASA Sees ‘Otherworldly’ Wreckage on Mars with Ingenuity Helicopter

>> the wreckage is the work of NASA, a component called a backshell that detached during the landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of the red planet in February 2021.

So, not really "Otherworldly."

Misleading headline by NY Times.

nreeceon Show HN: Caddy v2.5.0

I like the idea behind Caddy, but concerned about performance compared to nginx. Anyone got any real-world production benchmarks?

One I found from 2020 shows nginx can handle more RPS in less time for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3: https://caddy.community/t/caddy-v2-http-2-http-3-benchmarks/...

A proxy benchmark from 2021 also shows nginx perform better than Caddy: https://github.com/NickMRamirez/Proxy-Benchmarks

nreeceon Tabler Icons – Free vector icons for web design

Someone posted https://tablericons.com a while ago, which has the same name (Tabler) but a different domain and website. Are these two icon sites related?

nreeceon Ask HN: Where to deploy a Docker container easily?

It's usually just one command:

  gcloud run deploy

See 'Deploying to Cloud Run from source': https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/quickstarts/build-and-depl...

I also like deploying to Cloud Run right from Cloud Shell Editor (their web IDE, viz like VS Code in the browser): https://shell.cloud.google.com

nreeceon Ask HN: Where to deploy a Docker container easily?

Its pricing is pay-per-use (request or event processing), so there's no monthly minimum. They also offer a decent free tier.

An API we migrated handles millions of transactions, and costs less than $3/month to run, even cheaper than their Cloud Functions product.

nreeceon Ask HN: Where to deploy a Docker container easily?

I highly recommend Google Cloud Run: https://cloud.google.com/run

nreeceon Ask HN: Solo bootstrapped founders, how did you scale?

Different strategies work for different founders.

Some of the successful indie solo founders I know do one-two weeks of coding and then one-two weeks of marketing, until they had enough revenue and "busy-ness" to offload one of those two things. It's wise to offload to freelancers/contractors initially (upwork.com and weworkremotely.com are good for that).

Hiring the first full-time employee, again deriving from what you want to offload, and slowly growing the team from there depends on market demand and whether you're bootstrapping (slow but steady) or funded (fast but risky) as well as your own vision.

Essentially, what-ever scale you have in mind, the idea of running a business is to offload/delegate as much of regular tasks to specialized individuals, who are ideally better at that work than you, so that you have more time and energy at hand to think, plan, and enjoy the rewards of money and freedom.

nreeceon Ask HN: What excites you about web development at the moment?

I hear you. Been doing webdev for over two decades, and I feel the exhaustion of modern tooling, most of which seems overly-complicated for the time involved and learning curve.

But, there are plenty of cool web things exciting me these days:

* FaaS and Serverless Computing - Cloudflare Workers/KV and Google Cloud Run in particular

* Cloud IDEs - Google Cloud Shell Editor (deploys straight to Cloud Run), Cloudflare Workers editor, Replit

* Site Builders - Carrd and Webflow in particular

* Focused libs - Handlebars.js and htmx in particular

* Simpler DevOps tools - WordOps in particular

* Languages - primarily C# .NET, but also using a ton of Node.js; did some Python recently; hoping to learn a little Go and Rust sometime.

Starting, and then launching, tiny side-projects and utilities that I need myself helps keep the fire going.

nreeceon WeekToDo – Free Minimalist Weekly Planner App

Nice!

I made something similar (although web based) but much simpler years ago to suit my planning, which is still in use by many others.

Weekis: https://weekis.com

nreeceon Show HN: A mastermind-like version of Wordle

Nice, I've also been enjoying Word Master, another Mastermind/Wordle-like word guessing game: https://octokatherine.github.io/word-master/

Repo: https://github.com/octokatherine/word-master

nreeceon “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

RSS may be obsolete from a marketing perspective (i.e. lack of visible RoI), but its growing in other areas like media monitoring, podcast delivery, RSS-to-newsletter etc.

* Shameless plug *: our super-easy feed builder at New Sloth (formerly Feedity) - https://newsloth.com, helps create custom feeds for any public webpage. Our API can auto-magically detect relevant articles in most cases. The platform includes an integrated simple feed reader and clusterer/deduplicator, specially aimed for knowledge workers with hundreds and thousands of feeds to monitor daily.