panphora

I'm interested in following your progress on this. I have a 2 year old who I want to show computers/computational systems to as early as possible.

I followed you on Twitter... but is there somewhere I can subscribe to hear more about this project in particular?

This is the same reporter who warned investors about Alameda/FTX right before they collapsed. [0] [1]

They also brought attention to Celsius two months ahead of their collapse. [2]

A lot of crypto ponzi schemes have been covered up with "Oh, that was just us doing arbitrage."

Celsius founder in 2020:

"We lend financial assets to players that can transact and generate income for themselves through arbitrage, market making or shorting certain stocks or digital assets."

Almost every brilliant arbitrage has blown up in the faces of high-risk entities or never happened to begin with (SBF's Japanese arbitrage trade looking pretty suspicious right now, with a $9B hole in his balance sheet).

The confidence of your remarks also strikes me as strange, seeing as we've now experienced one domino after another of "we're perfectly solvent and not doing anything bad" to "we're closing withdrawals and all the money's gone" (LUNA/UST, Celsius, 3AC, Voyager Digital, BlockFi, Genesis, FTX... all just in the last year.)

How can you have so much confidence these trades aren't suspicious?

[0] https://dirtybubblemedia.substack.com/p/ftxed-the-tangled-ti... [1] https://dirtybubblemedia.substack.com/p/is-alameda-research-... [2] https://dirtybubblemedia.substack.com/p/celsius-networks-uns...

The problem with suspending withdrawals for crypto firms is the market interprets it as your exchange is insolvent (as that has usually been the case so far).

This will crash markets (lowering your liquidity even more) and make people want to withdraw even more once you reopen.

The situation is made worse because a lot of exchanges issue their own token: CRO in Crypto.com's case. This token provides extra liquidity to your exchange, sometimes in the billions (on paper at least), that you can borrow against. The moment you mention pausing withdrawals, your custom token will crash to the ground and you'll lose a lot of potential liquidity (See Terra/LUNA & FTC/FTT).

A lot of users on Twitter and Reddit are reporting delays of 6-8 hours when processing withdrawals. But it looks like some/most? are eventually processed.

The CEO of Crypto.com has been doing damage control all day on Twitter. He's doing a livestream AMA on Youtube at 2AM EST.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQeqdR_nbNY

After lots of meditation, I realized that what pained me about certain fearful/angry/hateful/shameful thoughts I had was not the mere fact that I had them, but my attachment to them.

That is, the thought only caused me significant pain if I honestly thought it was true -- a part of who I am, a part of my story, a part of my life in some way.

The most I practice mindfulness, the more I'm able to be mindful to my attachment to certain thoughts in the moment. As soon as I see this attachment as it is, the power it holds over me dissolves a bit and the pain I feel around it almost magically slips away.

You can use privacy-focused drop-in alternatives to Google Analytics and Google Fonts:

• https://www.growthfyi.com/custom-ga

• https://fonts.bunny.net/

I personally choose to use Plausible Analytics with a custom domain [0] and the default "System Font Stack" [1], which means my sites load fast, don't have a flash of unstyled text, and my analytics script doesn't get blocked by ad blockers.

[0] https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction

[1] https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/system-font-stack/

I'll be bold and say it: it's stupid that the web has 3 main front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, and JS)

There's state, visual representation, and behavior. Why can't all of those be contained in one language?

Sure, let proficient programmers override defaults and break out of the 1 language model, but 99% of apps/website look & behave the same anyways, why can't we have nice defaults?

I'm concerned because I have a 1.5 year old son and I plan to introduce him to the internet (this wonderful, globally distributed, infinite potential platform that anyone can contribute to) as soon as I can.

But it's absurd to me that computers haven't been optimized well for his mind yet, but instead he'll have to spend years of his life optimizing his mind to understand and work with them.

I wish I could show him the magic & power of putting something app-like on the internet faster than that.

This project helps move in the direction of optimizing computers for human minds and I'm 100% excited about that.

I disagree. As a non-lawyer, non-financier, I found the deep & well-thought-out explanation fascinating. This is one of the best articles I've read this year.

I'm a dev/designer who's been building early stage startups from the ground up for 14 years. I'm very experienced at market & usability research and helping companies find product/market fit.

I'm looking for a role at a post Series C startup or established & profitable business, ideally as a solo MVP product builder, but I'd also be open to a Senior UX Designer role where I work with a team (this is where most of my professional experience lies).

    Location: Somerville, MA, USA
    Remote: Exclusively
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: JS (proficient), Node.js, CSS (expert), Figma, Sketch, Vue.js/React
    Résumé/CV: https://standardresume.co/r/ADPlySIEQNWkoBZM_h7NL
    Email: david@remaketheweb.com
    Twitter: @panphora
    Website: https://davidmiranda.info/

Ideally, I want to build a new side project for your business every 4-6 months and use its launch to promote your main product, explore new markets, convert new customer segments, and improve your SEO performance.

I've built a lot MVP products in public on Twitter, a few of which have reached the front page of HN and PH.

Tether was invented because crypto couldn't find legitimate outflows through traditional banking institutions. So, converting to fiat was impossible.

Tether and other stable coins came along and said: we'll keep $1 USD for every token we have, so you don't need to cash out your crypto as fiat to see how much it's worth — just trade it for a stable coin!

So, Bitcoin isn't actually worth $30k+, it's worth $30k+ in stable coins because that's what it's traded in. It's only connection to fiat is stable coins.

    if ($1 !== $1) // i.e. Tether is a scam that's not fully backed
        All crypto will experience a MASSIVE crash

The first wave of the massive crash will be due to a loss of confidence in stable coins, the second wave will be a massive panic at not being able to get out of the market fast enough because there's not enough liquidity, and the third wave will be structural problems revealing themselves because most crypto platforms/ecosystems are codependent on each other (massive cross-investments, promissory notes, shared accounts, weird accounting practices, and tons of leveraged bets).

When the fiat inflows stop and instead try to reverse, it's going to be wild.

Also, a lot of banks wouldn't work with crypto companies to provide them liquidity. So, stablecoins came in and said: "we'll be your liquidity!"

It only works if the stablecoins can get you your USD back at the end of the day though, which is what's being tested right now.

I think popups on page load are more of a symptom of short-term, myopic thinking than anything else. This type of thinking is strongly encouraged by always trying to live up to quarterly projections - "Did Sales meet their targets?"

Popups exchange long-term trust in your brand for short-term profits. Of course it's the case that if you pop a modal in front of everyone, your conversion stats will go up. But potential life-time customers who have faith in your brand and believe in your mission will lose trust in you quickly and probably never sign up in the first place.

For me, it always comes down to the primary rule of UX: if you wouldn't do it IRL, don't do it online.

You can ask for someone's email if they look like they're interested in something you're selling, but don't ask for it the moment they enter your store!

I've spent years building an open-source framework for building CRUD apps [0]

I made it because I was tired of spending months designing beautiful interfaces, only to realize I was only 30% done with building a full app -- it was exhausting.

So I thought of a simpler way to create a dynamic app: treat HTML as a data structure.

---

Here's how to use it:

Tag your HTML elements as editable and/or containing data.

The syntax for this is simple:

    <div object key:page-title="@innerText" edit:page-title>I am an editable page title</div>

This gets converted into:

    { "pageTitle": "I am an editable page title" }

---

Based on just some HTML templates marked up in this way, you'll get a full application with user accounts baked in -- where each user can edit their own copy of the HTML templates you made, filling it with their own data.

It's a super-fast way of building an application with multiple users, when all you have is some HTML and CSS. And it only requires learning ~8 custom attributes to build some pretty powerful apps [1]

---

Here's how it works behind the scenes:

1. The framework scans through the page, converting nested HTML into nested JSON data

2. The framework saves this JSON data to the current user's account

Pretty simple, right? I've spent years improving the syntax and behavior to make it really easy to use. I'd love your feedback.

I even made a client-side-only version, so you can test it out without installing anything [2]

---

[0] https://remaketheweb.com/

[1] https://recipes.remaketheweb.com/

[2] https://codepen.io/panphora/pen/rNMVYZz

The web has gotten boring.

I'm starting a static web host where every page is remixable by default.

One click and you have a copy of any web page hosted on the platform.

Not only that, but the front-end code (HTML, CSS, JS) is treated as the source of truth. Whatever changes the owner makes to a page (through DevTools, some custom JS, or clicking a button that does something) is saved permanently to the DB.

This makes it possible for front-end devs to create interactive applications just by adding a JS plugin to the page.

I'm hoping projects like this idea will lead to a renaissance of blogs, personal websites, and remixable apps that push our normal conception of what a website is to the breaking point.

(Email in my profile if you want to discuss. This is a new project I haven't started yet.)

This would be a fun way to:

* Create homework at the end of a programming lesson (before unlocking the next step)

* Link to a job posting from a company website (if you don't mind coming off as slightly evil)

* Hide a link to a StackOverflow answer from a friend

Should be fixed now. I think it was caused by having flexible SSL enabled in Cloudflare.

This sounds like a great real-time teaching style.

Can you point us to the videos you're talking about?

Yes, that's next on the list.

Just trying to get a proof-of-concept out with this first version.

Btw, if anyone knows of a good way to stitch together two images into a gif by passing in coordinates (even a paid API for this), I'd love to know about it.

What animation options (other than GIF export) are you craving? I've heard pausing, deleting frames, and rotating so far.

I'll probably work on the GIF export next, but I'm low on time this month since I'm trying to get 31 projects out the door [0].

[0] https://31launches.com

Seeing this project get some traction has made me hopeful about its future, so I might just do that!

Finding an intuitive interface for adding advanced features should be interesting, for sure.

I did.

It's been one of my better decisions. I have so many projects that are 80% complete that I've just been too embarrassed to post.

31 launches is meant to help me get past that fear/hesitation.

But creating Animatize took 18 hours of my week last week and just completely wore me out. I had to take 5 days off just to recuperate and get back on track.

I dream of a day when my day-to-day tools feel more like the tools in that video.

I have some hope VR will bring us closer.

That's how I generated the red dots in the demo at the top of the page actually! I rendered one dot for every 10 movements and then ran some JS that would delete any element I clicked on.

I never though of that as a way to edit the underlying animation though... that's smart! The dots would be pretty close together though, so you might need a zoom control too.

Very cool idea, thank you! I'm gonna think more about this.

Hi HN,

This idea has been a dream of mine for years [0]. As a web developer, I never learned After Effects or any other complex animation software.

But I've always dreamed of creating interactive demos and animations just by using my natural mouse movements. It just feels right.

So last week I took a few days off from my main project to create Animatize [1], a proof-of-concept showing off the idea of using natural movement to create an animation.

I'd love to know what you think.

[0] http://motioncomicbuilder.storylog.com/

[1] https://github.com/panphora/animatize

I’m beyond frustrated with modern web development. It feels hyper-inefficient when it could be streamlined.

We currently use tools built by the biggest companies on earth (whose main preoccupation is solving scalability problems) to build the most basic applications. We’ve got infinitely nested component with jumbles of state being passed around, new build tools and framework versions being released every week, and we're tasked with orchestrating 12+ disparate tools just to make a basic app work.

The context switching is getting painful and the rabbit holes seem to go on forever.

There should be a simpler way for product-focused founders (who want to solve user-facing problems instead of deep tech-stack problems) to build stuff that works.

I propose a solution: the concept of a “web app object." A dynamic object that looks like HTML but contains all the web app capabilities you need across the stack collapsed into a single node.

Think of this:

  <my-note></my-note>

It might look like a simple web component. But, what if unlike a web components, it worked across the stack.

It shouldn't have to be pre-defined with front-end JS to have some basic functionality.

For example: it can determine its own namespace on the backend with its actual name, it can get new capabilities (on both the front-end and backend) just by adding a single attribute to it, and (this is the killer feature for me) its place within the data in the database can be determined by its relative position in the DOM (i.e. we convert a page's HTML into a live database that we can style with CSS).

  <personal-notes>
    <my-note editable>Hello, world!</my-note>
    <create-new my-note>Add Note</create-new>
  </personal-notes>

⬆ Here’s a more robust example.

This example code would be enough to tell an opinionated web app framework everything it needs to know about the structure of the user’s data and the behavior of the page, including that notes are editable by users with access, the default text should be “Hello, world!”, and users can create new notes by clicking a button.

Browsers have nothing like this concept of a "web app object", even though web apps have been around for decades. Instead, we get a bunch of disconnected pieces of the stack that we have to tie together ourselves...

We have the front-end (html + css), the backend of the front-end (build tools + our SPA framework of choice), the front-end of the backend (API layer + controller logic), the backend of the backend (business logic + database schema), and then DevOps (pipelines + deployments + security).

It's like we have to know how to do our own plumbing just to take a drink of water…

I wrote out this idea on HN a little while ago and it seemed to resonate [0]. I also see other promising approaches of merging the front-end and the backend into one primitive coming along (Imba, Phoenix LiveView, Blitz, InertiaJS).

I’m working on the early stages of this idea as an open-source framework [1].

I've been developing it in my spare time for the last few years and I've built a full proof-of-concept with some major help from contributors.

It'd be excellent to get some help from you all with this since it's something I believe in strongly and I think the world needs it. I'm a front-end developer and designer with not a lot of experience building a modern JS framework, so that's where I could use the most help.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29053536 [1] https://remaketheweb.com

As mostly tech workers, HN readers are woefully disconnected from the lives of everyday people who have been promised a path to if not wealth, at least some kind of comfortable lifestyle by working really hard.

And then the 2008 housing crisis happened. A massive betrayal by the government against its own people. Many people lost their houses, their retirement savings, and their investments. And who did the government bail out and prop up? The bankers, the elite, and the stock market. And this happens over and over again in countless banana republics across the world — the elite propping up the systems that support themselves and not really caring about anyone else.

So now, you have this massive movement against wall street (r/wallstreetbets & GME/AMC), the elite (Trumpism), centralized financial institutions (Bitcoin & DeFi), and the upper class of tech workers (web3). And you wonder why? People were promised a path towards wealth and have had it stolen away from them countless times. Now they are rebelling.

It doesn't matter if — technically & logically — Bitcoin, DeFi, and Web 3 aren't everything they're promising to be... People still need a place to turn to put their hopes that isn't the current system. They've just been burned too many times by it.

But none of this is going to work out in the long run... It'll be just like every other mania throughout history. Tons of investment, tons of apparent growth fueled by FOMO, and then a massive collapse when people realize no one actually cares about this stuff for its intrinsic value... But enough effort & pain & money will have gone into it by then that it will have created a nascent industry that will maybe, one day 10-20 years from now, take over the world and become the new normal.

TLDR: DeFi & Web 3 is an emotional reaction to a system that just doesn't work for most people, not the logical next step towards a better version of the status quo.

Why is it bad advice? Genuinely interested.

I'm interested in what's worked better for you and why you think no-code is a bad choice.

Use no-code

Hear me out.

The #1 problem you have as developers is marketing.

The #2 problem you have is validating demand from customers.

So force yourself to do the uncomfortable steps ASAP, while also making it easy to pivot by launching with the smallest possible stack.

If you can launch with something like Airtable + Webflow + Zapier + Typeform, you can get something out there in weeks instead of months/years. It will be relatively easy since your team is technical.

Then release it to the market and see if it sticks.

The power of a lightweight stack is NOT the ability to find Product-Market fit instantly.

The true power comes from making the 20-30 iterations it will take to actually find Product-Market fit less painful than if you had to rebuild from scratch every time you had a new idea.

I didn't say it was harder today, I asked: "why isn't it easier today?"

I would think with improvements in tech, things would actually become simpler.

Wow, beautiful find. This should be upvoted more! The hypocrisy is rich.