Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flowhub is now in Public Beta

flowhub.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 59 posts

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#11

Post by Mithaldu »

bergie wrote: post #6
politician wrote: post #5

"This program requests read and write access to all of your public repos". Can this be scoped better? I'm willing to give access to one public repo.

Not to my understanding. You either get access to all public repos, or all public/private repos. If somebody knows a way to make more limited permission requests, please let me know! I'd be more than happy to make that more granular. https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes

At least advise people to create github accounts for their flowhub activity which they add as collaborators to their projects.

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#12

Post by bergie »

Mithaldu wrote: post #11
bergie wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to my understanding. You either get access to all public repos, or all public/private repos. If somebody knows a way to make more limited permission requests, please let me know! I'd be more than happy to make that more granular. https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes

At least advise people to create github accounts for their flowhub activity which they add as collaborators to their projects.

Interesting idea, even if it means having to jump through a bit more hoops than would be ideal.

I could maybe add that to http://flowhub.io/documentation/flowhub-faq/

Edit: here we go http://flowhub.io/documentation/flowhub-faq/#why-does-flowhu...

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#13

Post by thefreeman »

Morgawr wrote: post #8
bergie wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, that is related to GSS stylesheets on the site making use of the matrix3d part of CSS. Unfortunately lots of (expecially Linux) 3D drivers are not exactly up to the task. Edit: as for required login, that isn't needed to play with just the examples. Photo booth: http://app.flowhub.io/#example/7804187 Animated clock: http://app.flowhub.io/#example/7135158 Canvas pattern generator: http://app.flowhub.io/#example/1…

I can play 3D videogames with lots of advanced shaders and even develop my own, perform very demanding computations on my 8-core machine and watch HD movies and stream from the web, yet I can't easily view a simple home page from the internet? Is this the state of technology in 2014?

If you are indeed on Linux, you may have to enable hardware acceleration at chrome://gpu . Last time I checked it was not enabled by default on Linux.

edit: Ack, sorry, just re-read parent and you are using Firefox. I do not know whether they have similar issues with 3D acceleration on linux.

Also I am not saying the website couldn't perform better, you have a valid point there.

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#14

Post by ericingram »

I need a better introduction to understand how flow programming works, and how I might use it. Instead I see a (seemingly) complex graph which I understand represents a program, but it's not clear how this really works in relation to text programming. I could spend hours and hours digging to figure it out, but that could be a waste of time, so I won't do it.

I get text based programming. Find a way to quickly connect that experience with flow programming, and conversion rate on this site will improve.

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#15

Post by bergie »

ericingram wrote: post #14

I need a better introduction to understand how flow programming works, and how I might use it. Instead I see a (seemingly) complex graph which I understand represents a program, but it's not clear how this really works in relation to text programming. I could spend hours and hours digging to figure it out, but that could be a waste of time, so I won't do it. I get text based programming. Find a way to quickly connect…

This is still beta, so we're mostly trying to reach people who already are doing flow-based or other dataflow programming.

But agreed that we could probably explain things better! Does the description of the concept at http://noflojs.org/ work for you?

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#16

Post by xanderstrike »

mikeryan wrote: post #7

I can not, for the life of me, tell what this is from the website. The video seems like a parody from the HBO's Silicon Valley show. I even clicked through to the app http://app.flowhub.io/ which wants me to log in and then clicked on the "Docs" Button and finally got to this: Flowhub is a web-based IDE for flow-based programming. It is built on NoFlo.js for both client and server. It can connect to any language or e…

Not to mention the app itself seems very broken. I think they're in much to early a stage to launch a public "beta."

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#17

Post by danso »

I think well-structured and designed landing pages are too infrequent, so I like the OP on that alone...and being an optimist, I'm always a little excited when I hear of a new paradigm, or an iteration of it...because that means that there is a (slightly) new way of thinking about and doing things...maybe even better than my own. Either way, I like that the opportunity exists (even if I never get around to thoroughly investigate it).

And I know a lot of this is promo-copy, but this kind of stuck out to me:

> Focus on the right areas without fear of constant conflicts, code reviews and lengthy onboarding processes.

Again, I'm not experienced in the flow-paradigm...but I just have to guess that the need for code reviews is not because traditional code is not visual enough. In fact, I'd argue quite the opposite... a visual diagram offers some great big-picture benefits, but at the loss of granularity...if anything, I'd think a flow-based paradigm would require as much code review as before, but perhaps with a different mindset.

I also think the background image for "Drag, Drop, Connect, Build" is...not inspiring to me. I mean, it's useful in some respects for overview of dependencies, maybe...but dragging-dropping and interpretation of visual symbols is not always more efficient than pure textual concepts. In fact, I'd argue that it can be even less efficient. How easy is it to examine the underlying abstractions behind connecting one pipe from one icon to another?

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#18

Post by Theodores »

I am elderly enough to remember IRIS Explorer on SGI Workstations way back in the 1990's, when having a 2Gb hard drive was just about unimaginable.

Here is a quickly Googled screenshot:

http://wwwasdoc.web.cern.ch/wwwasdoc/lhcpp/irisexplorer.gif

IRIS Explorer was awesome, but hardware was not really up to the job in those days. There was also a rich market in GIS and other applications that did what you needed so there was no way you were going to roll your own with IRIS Explorer.

However, the scope and ambition to do stuff with it was incredible. It was far beyond the flat (as in non-3D) internet we have ended up with.

IRIS Explorer was 'flow programming'. You did not have to use it to overlay a vegetation map over a terrain map to render it in 3D and step through the seasons, with widgets to control al aspects of the show, you could use it to render something lame if you wanted to.

Despite the awesome-ness of IRIS Explorer it failed in the marketplace. This was not because of hardware or that there weren't milliions of code modules to casually wire up. For me, trying to do things with it, the problem was because of the 'black boxes'. Sure they had pretty controls on them and you could pump your data in and out of them with a few mouse clicks. However, at some stage you had to go inside those black boxes and work out what was going on. A box could have '2 + 2 = 4' inside it but there was all kinds of toolkit code to take the inputs and set the outputs. A couple of lines of code would do, but those black boxes had a lot of cruft with them. All very off-putting. So, if 'flow programming' with flowhub is to get anywhere, there needs to be an easy gradient between the 'as per the video' way it works and the reality, i.e. inside the black boxes.

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#19

Post by gtaylor »

mikeryan wrote: post #7

I can not, for the life of me, tell what this is from the website. The video seems like a parody from the HBO's Silicon Valley show. I even clicked through to the app http://app.flowhub.io/ which wants me to log in and then clicked on the "Docs" Button and finally got to this: Flowhub is a web-based IDE for flow-based programming. It is built on NoFlo.js for both client and server. It can connect to any language or e…

> I can not, for the life of me, tell what this is from the website.

This makes me feel a little better. I couldn't tell what this is, either.

I scrolled all the way down and eventually found a FAQ link that helps: http://flowhub.io/documentation/flowhub-faq/

May be worth putting that somewhere more prominent.

Re: Flowhub is now in Public Beta

#20

Post by bergie »

xanderstrike wrote: post #16
mikeryan wrote: post #7

I can not, for the life of me, tell what this is from the website. The video seems like a parody from the HBO's Silicon Valley show. I even clicked through to the app http://app.flowhub.io/ which wants me to log in and then clicked on the "Docs" Button and finally got to this: Flowhub is a web-based IDE for flow-based programming. It is built on NoFlo.js for both client and server. It can connect to any language or e…

Not to mention the app itself seems very broken. I think they're in much to early a stage to launch a public "beta."

We built on Polymer, so that imposes quite strict browser requirements. See http://flowhub.io/documentation/flowhub-faq/#browser-require...

However, if you're having one of the supported browsers and still have problems, we'd love a ticket at https://github.com/noflo/noflo-ui/issues

Post reply on HN