Life and our eventual death is f-ing scary. Anything anyone wants to do to help cope with that, no matter how batshit crazy it is to other people, is fine by me (as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else).
30,161 karma · joined March 17, 2008
Working on sync engines, PGlite, and Tanstack DB at Neon/Databricks. Previously co-founder ElectricSQL (acquired by Databricks).
sam dot willis at gmail dot com
samwillis.co.uk
Twitter: @samwillis
I wander if as we all start to use chat based LLMs in our everyday lives similar "superstitions" and traditions may appear? People telling them the things that have happened in their lives...
On top of that SQLite is now viable in the browser with WASM and the "origin privet file system" api. And so people are increasing looking at moving more state and persistence to the browser with an eventually consistent sync. This is what the "Local First" movement, myself included, are excited about.
I would describe it as closer to an alternative to hand rolling js, using JQuery, or older templating libraries like Knockout.
Where its at its best is with server rendered frameworks like Django, Laravel, or plane old hand rolled CGI. You can sprinkle in some Alpine with no build steps. It works particularly well with HTMX.
I wouldn't call it a React alternative because there are places where React (or Vue, or Svelt...) are better placed. But there are places they are overkill and it slots in perfectly.
Alpine borrows quite heavily from Vue, it has a very similar template DSL, and uses its reactivity subsystem (I personally think this is very well designed and makes Vue 3 an incredibly good app platform).
I also believe the new Laravel Livewire just released is built on top of Alpine, they are from the same developer.
If I'm doing server side rendering and need to sprinkle in some client side interactivity Alpine is what I reach for.
(You could describe any client side templating system as a React alternative)
Also comparing trains to cars and busses as a positive competition is missing the point that our roads are over capacity. Moving more people off of the roads onto the train networks should be a priority.
However, the identity of the page, publishing under your own name is the thing that this post doesn't really cover. They mention not linking to their own old site as it has stuff that they did when they were a child. They really should have expanded on that.
Archive.org is both an incredible resource but also a risk to people publishing things that they later regret. We have a right to change our mind, grow up and become a different person. Under GDPR there is the "right to be forgotten", we are early in the societal development of such rights in relation to the internet, and they can be abused by people removing thing the public should have a right to know. However I believe this is an important right, and because of it I believe the right to publish online under a pseudonym is important.
So yes, almost everyone should have an online presence, and most do. But we should also have a right for it to disappear in time.
I write online for myself now and the communities I contribute to, not for my children or their theoretical children. Certainly not some random slooth in future.
Labybird/LibWeb is to Chrome/Blink as Saturn V is to SpaceX Starship...
Not sure where that puts Andreas, hence my hesitation.
Well worth a listen!
Slight aside, Andreas has had a bunch of donations and sponsors in the last month (over 300k), and just today announced he has hired a full time dev to help on the browser engin:
https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1676896595936198657
> Thrilled to announce that I've hired @KalenikW to work full time on @ladybirdbrowser
> Alex has been with the project since last year, and already done great work on CSS layout, testing infra, and more. Lately he's digging into JS performance and making great progress!
* massive understatement
We are too often religious about these things, and may not have visibility within the business to see why there isn't a case for it.
Having said that it can also be very hard to convince management of the business case. That may have had a bad experience of these tool and practices before and see them as a waste. Thay may also, in that specific case, be right.
It's an interesting strategy, the app on the Apple App Store is published by "Instagram Inc" rather than Meta, prominently named as "Threads, an Instagram App". They could have launched it as a completely separate brand, but that would have required marketing such as "the new app from Meta", and everyone more closely associates Meta with Facebook.
It's quite surprising they never launched a microblogging network before, but I suppose they have never really launched a new network, only ever acquired them... does that show that they feel threatened, have weakening market position, and need a new direction?
Amused by the nod to the Ladybird WASM idea at the end, I'm taking credit for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35521878. Good ideas spread. (Joe, apologies for not getting back to your email, it's been a rather busy few months)
On "actionable" news, the only thing that really impacts me is interest rates. But even then I'm three years out from having to consider that, so happily remaining as ignorant as possible - which I suppose isn't massively so due to the volume.
There is so much truth to "ignorance is bliss".
(That's not to say I like the decisions that are being made)
HN post titles have to (mostly) match the title of the page/article. Think carefully how you title your posts so that they are descriptive enough about the post. Short titles, like "why we are awesome", with no lead or indication of topic do very badly.
For GitHub repositories, include a description of the tool along with the name of it in the readme title.
Your page title is your HN post title.
Depending on time of day the your post will stay on page one of "new" for between 20-40 minutes. It needs about 4-6 upvotes in that time to drop onto the bottom of the homepage, and then with that a chance of more eyeballs. Some people skim page two and look for thing with a couple of votes for closer inspection, but the reality is you have that brief moment to catch attention of people who are interested in your topic.
The more high profile the item you're posting is the more likely it will catch the attention of people who are interested in the short window. More obscure topics are obviously harder to catch those initial votes.
The new page is very busy at some particular times of day. It can be a good idea to post more obscure topics in a "down time" period.
2-6pm UTC is by far the busiest time, you often see corporate posts aiming to land in new during this time, even to the point of scheduling their blog posts for this window. The payoff in traffic is worth the chance of a very brief period on page one of new.
The other thing to note is that HN is a different place at the weekend, interesting long reads do well then along with somewhat fun and silly side projects.
Also consider "Show HN" posts, they have a different ranking "gravity" and can be easer to get into the homepage, but don't necessarily stay there or as high for as long. If you are launching something, this is your best bet. They also hang around on the "show" page for days with a log tail of traffic.
Finally there is the "second chance pool" [0], I don't know the details of who or how, but some posts are flagged to be given a second chance on the bottom of the homepage. Sometimes hours or days later. A surprising proportion of top of homepage posts come from that pool - good things have a high chance of entering it.
Best advise, write what you're interested in and keep posting.
Other than that it's awesome. I've stuck to its native file format though as scanning SQLite is slower.
> We are looking into an incident where a malicious user took control over the Hub organizations of Meta/Facebook & Intel via reused employee passwords that were compromised in a data breach on another site. We will keep you updated
Also with no LLM or chat based ui it's a hard pass from me.
I'm not convinced that separating the two tools is best for usability, loose coupling sure. But some level of integration enables the reactive front end querying to swap between the front end copy and central source depending on if you have the data copied locally.
Also many of the mechanisms needed for reactive re-querying are also needed for two way syncing.
If I follow correctly, it's building the whole UI from images from the Figma file, so isn't using any native OS styling. Thats fine for demos and some simple apps.
It would be interesting if it was possible to combine this with BeeWhare [0] for mobile UIs, mobile is much more forgiving with none native style. I wander if it could be modified to output BeeWhare/Toga code.
Apple don't tend to make the same mistake twice, this time they created the new marketing category for that product. 99% of people who would have been in the "Pro" category are happy getting a "Studio", plus a bunch upgrading from an iMac.
The Studio is the new Pro to them, it's just for marketing they needed to change the name and have a "continuation line" for the old product. As you said it's here for the long haul but mostly has a legacy range.
They are specifically drawing attention to the fact that they are aiming to build a long term sustainable business, not grow quickly and exit. Thats likely to be important to their customers.
They needed some cash for investment, but didn't need to maximise investment to push for rapid growth.