Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#61

Post by asim » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

Kinrany wrote: post #39

asim wrote: post #28

The programmable web. A singular gateway to a programmatic way in which you not only consume data but also services. It doesn't exist. We have a very fragmented ecosystem of http based services mixed with html, APIs and everything requires an account or credit card. I'd kill for one way to access everything in a programmatic way through one gateway. Tried to approach this in numerous ways and continually failed. Edit…

Decentralized standards for authn, authz and payments are a prerequisite.

Yea you're right. Basically protocols or APIs for it.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#62

Post by jjj123 » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:08 PM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #50

miloignis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think local reproducible dev environments is a great and less-intense way to get into Nix (the package manager)! https://devenv.sh/ is built on top of Nix as well to make it more approachable and user friendly for exactly your use case.

I would note that while Nix is very well designed, and may be incredibly useful in untrusted dev environments, it should not be used to compile anything that touches production. Nix got where it is so quickly by mostly ignoring basic supply chain integrity like author package signing. It is always one compromised Github account or single dev workstation away from a massive supply chain attack. Nix, NPM, Brew, Pip, et…

As someone who knows nothing about package signing and security, are you saying that Nix is about as secure as NPM?

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#63

Post by l- » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

Regexstepper - takes an ordered list of regexs & repeatedly runs them against a corresponding ordered replacement list and ordered sample list until no further replacements are found. Used it to learn about stepping through PEMDAS simplification on various math iexpressions & attempts at combinatorial systems. Wrote it once years ago learning about PEMDAS then decided to delete it because JS cannot do at matching of arbitrary depth matching braces without parsing into an AST ala shunting yard, then learned about combinators & decided to try again to try and find systems that work without parentheses.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#64

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#65

Post by deckard1 » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:42 PM UTC

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #44

Deployment pipelines, CI/CD, (dev)ops. It's my biggest pet peeve ever that every company I have ever been to has written highly customised CI/CD/(dev)ops tooling that I had to fight with or adapt at some point. I don not understand why anything beyond heroku/dokku complexity is ever needed. The needs for teams to manage infrastructure is lunacy in this day and age.

I really don't understand what has happened in the last few years in this space. At my company we went from stable but boring Jenkins to this Github/K8S hell. Everything is broke all the time. Literally every single day. It blows my mind. We are at the point that people have forgotten that things used to just work. It's like back in the day Windows98 users know you have to reboot the PC once in awhile. Because they know of nothing else. They don't know the past and they can't imagine a better, more stable future.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#66

Post by nicolaslem » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

jjk166 wrote: post #53

Every couple of months I wind up making a quick s3 static site which isn't too difficult but doing it manually there are several steps spread out across many pages and it's easy to forget one if it's been a while. Every time I do it I wish I had written a script to automate it the last time.

Kind of related, I recently wondered why there is no such thing as a packaging format for static sites. It sounds trivial but hear me out.

There are many static site generators that spit out a directory with HTML files ready to be served. But getting that output in S3, netlify or your self hosted nginx is a very different process. Configuring things like cache-control, redirections, compression or error pages is done differently on all these platforms.

Wouldn't it be nice if it was possible to basically generate a tar.gz with some metadata that would automatically configure the web server and deploy the site? Kind of like a docker image but for static files?

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#67

Post by ankit219 » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

An internal fix for attribution. I have worked with three companies - all three consumer - and they required a reliable attribution mechanism they could rely on to know which channel is required for acquisition of their users, and which one for conversion. Usually it's a very similar product too. We use Branch or Appsflyer api (or Facebook, Google Ads if on website) and then use the JSON generated to map it to our users (in a postgres table) and then run queries by joining that with our internal DB tables.

I usually value two things: one, who first made the user aware about the product (could be organic, FB, SEM, Organic, Instagram, reddit, hacker news, product hunt, anything) and then which channel was responsible for final conversion event we want. Most products in the market only care about last. First touch is important to figure out where to get more users from at a lower cost. In the products, they tend to overwrite that and just use last touch. So, you store the JSON at the time of generation in your own database, map it to userid, and use it for internal calculation.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#68

Post by miloignis » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

agent281 wrote: post #41

miloignis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think local reproducible dev environments is a great and less-intense way to get into Nix (the package manager)! https://devenv.sh/ is built on top of Nix as well to make it more approachable and user friendly for exactly your use case.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using Nix for dev environments at work. What does devenv add on top of Nix? Edit: And if you know, how does it differ from devbox?

I haven't used devenv or devbox, I've taken the full Nix/NixOS plunge - sorry I can't be more helpful! I've just seen devenv on HN and glanced over its homepage and saw that it was based on Nix but supposed to be easier to use. If you want to jump straight to Nix itself, more power to you! There's a big learning curve, but I have found it very worth it.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#69

Post by khaledh » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

dmak wrote: post #16

khaledh wrote: post #8

A SaaS for managing personal documents. The closest I have right now (not SaaS) is paperless-ng[0], but I have to self-host it, unless I missed a really compelling solution. I have a sea of documents, both physical and electronic, and it's always a struggle to scan/organize/find them. I'd pay good money for a software/service that manages my documents, from scanning to archiving. [0] https://github.com/jonaswinkler/p…

Are you saying you would pay a service to host it all for you? or are you saying you want to just send all they physical documents to someone to scan and upload for you?

No, not to host paperless-ng for me. I also don't mean send them physical documents. I'll be scanning the documents myself of course. I mean a hosted service that I can use from my desktop or phone to upload documents quickly. It should also provide integration with my email with the ability to add rules regarding certain email senders and converting email content to PDF where possible (for the cases where the sender doesn't provide a PDF attachment already).

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#70

Post by nicolaslem » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #44

Deployment pipelines, CI/CD, (dev)ops. It's my biggest pet peeve ever that every company I have ever been to has written highly customised CI/CD/(dev)ops tooling that I had to fight with or adapt at some point. I don not understand why anything beyond heroku/dokku complexity is ever needed. The needs for teams to manage infrastructure is lunacy in this day and age.

Speaking of Dokku, I remember stumbling upon it a decade or so ago and dismissing it as a toy project that was unlikely to go anywhere.

Fast forward to the present, after noticing that the project is still going strong I did a deep dive in it and got really impressed. I think I will be moving my personal projects from the unmaintained Ansible mess I created to Dokku.