mschrage

Honestly this is really useful feedback. I think the page might be broken on mobile. There should be a large video demonstrating the product at the top.(https://withfig.com/video/final.mp4)

You're exactly the type of person we're trying to help, so we clearly need to communicate our value prop better!

If you have some time to chat, I'd love to talk. My email is matt [at] withfig.com

When you know the commands by memory, the terminal is hands-down the fastest way of interfacing with a computer. The trouble is when you're using a new command or toolchain and don't know the commands by heart.

For instance, code signing and notarizing a Mac app is a huge pain. It's not the kind of thing I do all the time, but it took quite a while to figure it out. I spent a few hours piecing together StackOverflow answers, assorted blog posts, and the threads on Apple's Developer Forum before I got it to work. It would be great if this workflow could be encapsulated an app.

The value for me has been the ability to easily bounce back and forth between levels of abstraction. Sometimes you need the granularity the shell provides, but other times it's nice to lean back on a more opinionated workflow. Sort of like the difference between deploying with Heroku versus managing everything with Kubernetes.

Also, Fig is entirely extensible/customizable. This is probably the part I'm most excited about: anyone can build their own apps. All of the example apps on our site are written with the same API that is exposed to developers. (https://withfig.com/docs)

Thanks for posting this. I've been meaning to compress the mp4, but hadn't gotten around to it just yet.

Completely agree about Electron - it's really heavy. That's why we built Fig as a Swift app.

Also, just to clarify, Fig isn't a terminal emulator itself. It attaches to whichever one you currently use.

You're totally right. We're deleting it from our site now. Change should be pushed in a few minutes.

Hey HN! I'm Matt Schrage, one of the cofounders of Fig.

We were planning on launching on HN later on, so this caught us a bit off guard. (As someone noted, our 'Fig' icon is, in fact, an emoji pear). Still we're super excited to share what we've been working on.

Fig lets you connect web apps directly to your terminal. You can use Fig like a browser to get quick access to sites like Github, Stack Overflow, or Notion. You can also run apps built on the Fig.js runtime that integrate directly with your terminal. We want to be a low-cost abstraction. Use a Fig app when it's useful, drop back down to the shell when it's not.

I just wanted to respond to a couple of points.

The app is actually written in Swift: we're using a WKWebView under the hood but the majority of the codebase is native. Also because we aren't built on Electron, we don't need to bundle v8 and node along with the app, so the binary is pretty small (12mb).

Fig is extensible. The apps shown on the website (git, curl, and finder) are just a few examples of what is possible. You can check out the documentation at https://withfig.com/docs and build your own.

Fig works with the tools you already use - we integrate with any terminal emulator (iTerm, Terminal.app, Hyper, Alactritty, etc.). Previous attempts at building GUI terminals have required throwing away 50 years worth of tooling and transitioning to a new application entirely. Fig is built around the premise that in order to upgrade the terminal, changes must be backwards compatible.

Happy to answer any more questions and really appreciate the feedback we've gotten so far.

mitxela is one of the hidden gems of the internet. Another great project by him — there are so many! — are these earrings with an embedded ATtiny9. Really inspired me to get into hardware hacking.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzbg-BqIdJI Writeup: https://mitxela.com/projects/charliestar

I built this primarily because I was bored in a Zoom lecture and wanted to chat with other people in the class. There were a couple of small group chats that started spontaneously but I thought it would be more fun if the entire class could be involved. (It doesn't have to be anonymous but otherwise the professor or TFs could see who isn't paying attention in class!)

Oliver Sack's excellent book "Seeing Voices" seems to argue something slightly different:

"A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his ideas."

To defend the original metaphor: without language, a person might be akin to a Markov chain generated from the relatively small 'corpus' of individual experience.

While the 'well socialized' individual can draw on the vast range of human experiences shared in language. They have access to a much larger corpus.

Here are some examples of the offensive memes: https://thetab.com/us/2017/06/05/harvard-memes-rescinded-694...

Also reminiscent of OCaml, which is taught in the introductory sequence of CS classes at Harvard (CS51). Introducing CS students to functional programming early on is valuable for distancing Computer Science, the field, from the mechanics of programming.

Also pretty sure that the CS51 class is sponsored by Jane Street Capital (one of the few companies in the world that uses the language!).

source?

"The state makes war and war makes the state." - Charles Tilly

I'd agree that war is not progress, but war (at least a very specific type of war found in Pre-Westphalian Europe) created the conditions for progress. Tilly's predatory or bellicose theory of state building[1] asserts that war was crucial in spurring the development of modern nation-states. A stronger centralized state expanded the rule of law and reduced violence, providing a foundation for positive sum economic activity. Furthermore, this type of proto-state can, more or less, be viewed as a protection racket. The state could extract resources from those under its protection. This encouraged the state to incentive economic activity and innovation as the state captured some of the benefit through taxation.

Violence is present in all cultures. But the type of war that Tilly describes is somewhat unique to Europe. A confluence of geographic factors - arable land enabling higher population densities and a network of rivers that allowed for the projection of force - created the conditions for territorial war. If you look at South America or Africa there is much of a history of territorial wars because the area of these continents is so large that territory wasn't a limiting factor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-building#Application_of_...

The syntax for writing a content blocker is pretty simple [http://mschrage.com/content-blockers]

There is an in-app text editor where you can write the rules. Alternatively, you could write the code on a computer and copy it over.