An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#241

Post by apitman » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 1:22 AM UTC

jessekv wrote: post #209

darkhorse222 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where a pi web server along with cloudflare tunnel and a website really shine. You don't need to ask anyone to run that service. I'm running a custom todo app off my pi without exposing my router. It's incredibly freeing.

Another way could be host it on a Tailscale network, then it can only be accessed by your own devices.

We need something that goes one level beyond Tailscale. It should be built on a simple open OAuth2 protocol for establishing tunnels/VPNs so you can choose different providers. Then developers can implement tunneled networking directly into their apps.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#242

Post by dang » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 1:36 AM UTC

Discussed at the time:

An app can be a home-cooked meal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 - Feb 2020 (130 comments)

Also:

An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856985 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)

An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800518 - Sept 2022 (51 comments)

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#243

Post by apitman » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 1:39 AM UTC

apwell23 wrote: post #89

selestify wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like cooking now requires commercial quality equipment only available to the Michelin star restaurants. Why does AI make you feel this way? It feels the opposite to me — like meals that formerly required a master chef to make, but soon anyone can make for themselves at an acceptable level of quality with meal prep kits

My feeling is that only big tech can now create any good apps since they all require massive compute now. Yes writing a todo list app is now faster with copilot and stuff but thats now what i meant.

Interesting, I actually feel the opposite. The scale at which big tech apps have to operate leads to a lot of bad UX and more bugs due to complexity. For example you can typically get much lower latency hosting a web app at or near your home than Google can provide.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#244

Post by vineyardmike » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 2:54 AM UTC

supertron wrote: post #36

caipira wrote: post #19

This is poetry. I have been working on a personal project for the last 10 years that replaces every other app I used to use - E-mail, calendar, and all the others we all use on a daily basis - and every time someone sees me using it they ask "Wow, this is amazing, how do I download it!?", and the answer is always the same: you don't. There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no…

> There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. 100%, I'm following a similar approach to you with yet another notes app solely for my own use. Have you written more about your personal project anywhere? One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool. This seems obvi…

> For me, my notes app is now used as my personal knowledge base, project management tool, todo list, daily planning tool and for journalling. Because I built it, I'm extremely effective at using it - and it's lean and fast - only with the features that I know I need.

Hey same!

What inspired you? Anything you would be willing to share about it?

For me, I used a different notes app which I liked, and wanted to learn a new language/framework so I wrote a new backend for mine, and it just kinda spiraled.

The next thing I wanna do is add a CalDav interface so I can store events in it, and interact with them constantly with everything else I do.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#245

Post by sanroot99 » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 3:24 AM UTC

I think this kind taste towards developing your own tools forshadow how programming will look like near future. There won't be dozens of abstraction to develop application and there won't be a playstore to hold millions of apps, there would be just a declarative language or Ai that takes human natural language and convert it to it and a black box that takes that declarative recipe and create the precise app according to user need. Instead Programmers there would be just a logicans and blackbox(AI system) that created most optimal way to accomplish the requirements. Creating application will be a end to end experience.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#246

Post by Cyphase » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 4:27 AM UTC

rthomas6 wrote: post #174

bberenberg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what you would need to do different in terms of dev? The only thing I would do differently in this scenario would be to ensure no secrets or anything gets into the code which is a minor lift but also probably for the best.

In python I do horrible things like the following when nobody else is going to see it: [[[foo(x) for x in y] for y in bar_vec if baz(y)] for bar_vec in bar_mat if bar_vec != []]

Side note, you don't need `if bar_vec != []`. Trying to loop over an empty iterable (e.g. a list) just doesn't loop, since there's nothing there.

Also, another way to write this (which results in a flattened list) is:

  [foo(x) for bar_vec in bar_mat for y in bar_vec if baz(y) for x in y]

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#247

Post by Tcepsa » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 4:27 AM UTC

broscillator wrote: post #173

caipira wrote: post #19

This is poetry. I have been working on a personal project for the last 10 years that replaces every other app I used to use - E-mail, calendar, and all the others we all use on a daily basis - and every time someone sees me using it they ask "Wow, this is amazing, how do I download it!?", and the answer is always the same: you don't. There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no…

Not an app, but this is how I customize my OS and workflow in general, and think Linux for making it possible and even easy at times.

I've been using i3wm for years and have recently started doing deeper dives into the sorts of things that you can do with what's either already installed or easy to add (e.g. rofi for input, conky for display) [edit to complete the thought:] I really love how flexible and relatively straightforward it is to script up simple applications that have a fairly significant impact on my "quality of life"!

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#248

Post by zzo38computer » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

caipira wrote: post #19

This is poetry. I have been working on a personal project for the last 10 years that replaces every other app I used to use - E-mail, calendar, and all the others we all use on a daily basis - and every time someone sees me using it they ask "Wow, this is amazing, how do I download it!?", and the answer is always the same: you don't. There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no…

I write programs mainly for myself but also usually (not always) make them available for other people to use too in case they find it useful (or want to modify it, use a part of the code, criticize it, make backup copies, or anything else they might want to do with it). If I am annoyed by something someone else writes about it, I can just ignore it; it doesn't affect how I will use it for myself, and other people can still do what they want. (And, if someone does not want to allow others to criticize it and submit patches and bug reports and stuff like that, then you can still make the file available without allowing comments to be written about it, without discussion forums, without issues and pull requests in GitHub or similar, etc.)

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#249

Post by zzo38computer » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 4:37 AM UTC

HKH2 wrote: post #52

factorialboy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be open to sharing screenshots? I'm curious about the mental-sanity claim, do you not have your email + calendar setup on your phone?

Not OP, but how often do you have an app that is exactly how you want it? You might just shrug off the small annoyances, but you could fix them and make the app something that becomes second nature. The UI won't suddenly change, so you won't have to relearn how to use the app, just like you don't have to relearn physical interfaces.

It is only very rarely exactly how I want it. Often, I cannot even find software that is half of how I want it (and is sometimes difficult to change). So, sometimes I will write them by myself to work differently. But, other times another program can be modified as needed, but that is less common, to me.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#250

Post by psalminen » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 6:10 AM UTC

caipira wrote: post #19

This is poetry. I have been working on a personal project for the last 10 years that replaces every other app I used to use - E-mail, calendar, and all the others we all use on a daily basis - and every time someone sees me using it they ask "Wow, this is amazing, how do I download it!?", and the answer is always the same: you don't. There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no…

For my job, I've created a python ask and CLI that meets the exact needs of how I need to communicate with our API. It's leaps and bounds better than any postman collection my employees use

The code is a mess so I haven't shared, but it is something that makes me more productive every day.