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https://davi.sh/blog -- Mostly technical content, but every once in a while I write about something else that grabs my attention.

I'm still trying to make writing regularly more of a habit. I don't have much of a backlog of topics, so trying to work on that a bit.


I moved from Emacs org-mode to Obsidian with the help of the obsidian-tasks plugin, which lets you write queries for tasks similarly to Dataview. I used a few of those queries to build up an Agenda view that matched my custom agenda buffer in org-mode. I put together a little write up here: https://davi.sh/blog/2022/01/obsidian-one/


Great!


Stripe was founded by Patrick and John Collison. I’m guessing you’re confusing it with Square, another payments company, which was co-founded and still run by Jack Dorsey.


Sorry. My mistake absolutely. Thanks for the correction. Not the first time I've accidentally mixed up the two finance companies named for common one-syllable words starting with s and ending with e. I'll be more careful next time.


I have done the same on many occasions myself. It's horrible branding by whomever came second.


Eh, Tumblr and Twitter are both social networks beginning with T and ending with r, but you wouldn't get them mixed up, right?

This seems like just the result of unfamiliarity with the payments domain to me, rather than "horrible" branding.


It doesn’t have to be. I’d never make that mistake. Not because of anything special by me. But just because I’m familiar with the names.

I’ve heard someone mix up Slack and Stripe. Doesn’t mean those two are bad branding. The person isn’t someone who cares about SV or startups.


I can’t reply to your dead reply to mine. quadrifoliate’s example illustrates things much better. Familiarity is important.


The closest I've found is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act

Not guaranteed "mutual defense" of any sort, but the US at least has committed itself to helping Taiwan protect itself with military aid. The section on "Military provisions" is probably most helpful.


I think we can look to mobile to see how feasible this might be: consistently over the past decade, iPhones have matched or exceeded Android performance with noticeably smaller capacity batteries. A-series chips and Qualcomm chips are both ARM. Apple's tight integration comes with a cost when it comes to flexibility, and, you can argue, developer experience, but it's clearly not just the silicon itself that leads to the performance we're seeing in the M1 Macs.


I think there are serious concerns about Qualcomm's commitment to competitive performance instead of just being a patent troll. I think if AWS Graviton is followed by Microsoft[0] and Google[1] also having their own custom ARM chips it will force Qualcomm to either innovate or die. And will make the ARM landscape quite competitive. M1 has shown what's possible. MS and Google (and Amazon) certainly have the $$ to match what Apple is doing.

0:https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-reporte... 1:https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/14/21221062/google-processor...


That's why they acquired Nuvia.


I wonder to what extent that's a consequence of Apple embracing reference counting (Swift/Objective C with ARC) while Google being stuck on GC (Java)?

I'm a huge fan of OCaml, Java and Python (RC but with cyclic garbage collection), and RC very likely incurs more developer headache and more bugs, but at the end of the day, that's just a question of upfront investment, and in the long run it seems to pay off - it's pretty hard for me to deny that pretty much all GC software is slow (or singlethreaded).


Java can be slow for many complex reasons, not just GC. Oracle are trying to address some of this with major proposals such as stack-allocated value types, sealed classes, vector intrinsics etc, but these are potentially years away and will likely never arrive for Android. However, a lot of Androids slowness is not due to Java but rather just bad/legacy architectural decisions. iOS is simply better engineered than Android and I say this as an Android user.


Not to mention it took Android about a decade longer than iPhone to finally get their animations silky smooth. I don't know if the occasional hung frames were the results of GC, but I suspect it.


I believe he's referring to this article[0] which was discussed on HN yesterday.

[0]: https://sahillavingia.com/work


The meme on Twitch started with Twitch Plays Pokemon[0], which went viral back in 2014.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon


I can’t believe that was 6 years ago already. Time flies.


This is the first one on twitch I remember as well


If you're used to SPA-style frontend development with React, Vue, or any similar framework, then yes, this will probably be a big mental/development shift.

Turbolinks (the project at Basecamp that Hotwire grew out of, now it seems it's called Turbo Drive) was a way to bring single-page style load times to traditional, server-rendered apps. Hotwire is the evolution of that: Turbo Frames let you dynamically replace certain parts of the page on the frontend, rather than having to throw the baby out with the bathwater on every page action. If you're used to developing server-rendered applications without much JavaScript using Ruby on Rails, Django, or a similar "batteries included" backend framework, then you'll be able to add a more dynamic feel to your web app without much of a mental shift: certain template partials (basically the components of your frontend) will be wrapped in this `turbo-frame` HTML tag, which will be slotted in to your page dynamically by Turbo.


Netlify CMS uses the GitHub (or bitbucket, etc) API to modify your repository with the new/updated content. You can self-host the entire system, or have netlify handle the GitHub auth while you self host your website.


But what happens after it's committed to git? What turns a git checkin into a CDN distribution?


You could use GitHub actions to do the build and send it off to some CDN to deploy, or if you were self-hosting the whole thing, you could have a Flask app listen for a webhook and re-build your site when that's received. Or simply pull in from the git origin and rebuild with a cron job.


I guess what I'm getting at is doing that would be a big patchwork of putting all that together. Not a unified system. I'd gladly make a one time payment for a unified piece of software that does everything (or of course gladly adopt something open source).

Also, to your specific example, does there exist a Flask app that runs on AWS lambda that can listen for a webhook and then build a static website?

Does there exist code that I can put into Github actions that builds a static website and uploads it to a CDN?

That's basically what I'm looking for.

Of course I could write my own solution or cobble it together with a bunch of moving parts, but my whole point is that I'm looking for an existing package that already does it.


If you use a tool like the Serverless Framework, you can "cobble together the moving parts" and store it into GitHub and make it easily deployable into the cloud. Putting together pieces is what software development is. If you are used to OOP this is even more relevant as the entire idea of OOP is to create discrete pieces of code and compile them together.

PHP for example used to be a "big patchwork" of seperate files working together, but the right tooling came along to think of it as "a unified system". Same thing with Serverless and the Serverless Framework


Just found this module as a GitHub action:

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/s3-sync

Shouldn't be too difficult to hook this up to a build command for hugo, jekyll, or whichever static site generator you'd prefer. But this gets away from the self-hosted part of what you were saying a bit.


I think it's difficult to say how many merchants went from hosting their own e-commerce site that engineers built for them from scratch, and transitioned to Etsy, Ebay, etc., laying off the developers they hired in the process. Without numbers to back myself up, I would say that there are certainly many more developers and engineers working on E-Commerce today than ten or twenty years ago. Services like Stripe certainly help businesses focus less on setting up common parts of a website or online business, but that just leaves people more time to focus on the "business logic" that is unique to them.

The "current stack" may certainly be ripe for disruption. But I'd predict that rather than put developers out of work, it will simply bring even more businesses into the fold who may not have had the resources for developing their own solutions beforehand. There will always be companies with the resources to demand custom solutions to fit their particular business needs.


>> it will simply bring even more businesses into the fold

When we look at various platforms, we see that big business and startups are extracting all of the repeatable, low-risk tasks of most businesses(supply chain, customer service(bots), manufacturing(on demand), design(partially automated design services) etc), leaving businesses to do mostly marketing and betting on products/services, and getting less of the rewards.

So what we end up seeing, is either less small businesses(i think kaufmann institute showed stats about that), or tiny companies with almost everything outsourced - and tiny companies usually require little custom internal software(they often use their supplier IT system).


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