signaleleven (u/signaleleven)

signaleleven commented on Free software hasn't won dorotac.eu/posts/fosswon/... · Posted by u/LorenDB

> try solving human problems by dealing with human’s

Welp. I actually tried it. Here's my experience.

I contacted my banks and got in touch with their managers and devs. They do have APIs. I wanted to use those to create my own software with read only access to my account. I didn't even want to transfer money anywhere, just get my transactions for accounting purposes. I was using ledger at the time and was getting tired of manually inputting everything into the journal.

I eventually discovered I would need to incorporate and beg the central bank for permission to touch the financial system.

signaleleven · 4 months ago

I left a startup around 6 months ago. We were around 30 employees and we had working software and were starting to get some users. We couldn't get the banks to work with us. We were able to get some access through third-party companies and it sucked.

I went to a meeting a few years ago with a big investment company. They had a team of 30 people trying to figure out how to reliably read financial documents to get people's financial information to serve it back to them. At this startup we spent a ton of time doing similar things, and paying another company to read our user's financial documents so we could get their info.

My point is, even if you incorporated and begged I'm not sure you'd have success.

signaleleven commented on macOS Tahoe apple.com/os/macos/... · Posted by u/Wingy

sgt · 5 months ago

I fully get that macOS is not perfect, but checking out "modern" Linux (like a customized Arch) is a bit underwhelming. It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago. And I started with Linux in the mid 90s. Not much has changed or improved on the pure fundamentals. I guess it's fine if all you do is sit doing CLI or spending your day in web browsers.

Day to day macOS driving to me is an absolute joy (granted, I'm still on Sonoma).

I do a lot of work in terminals but I also enjoy other apps, where that uniformity of Cocoa comes into play. And if you go deeper into Mach/Darwin, it's extremely powerful. On the userland .. from the launcher to dtrace and dynamic linker tricks and low level hooks. A lot of cool macOS APIs to experiment with, public or private. AppleScript/Automater, private frameworks like SkyLight (nifty!)

Oh and don't get me started on MLX...

To me, as a developer and as a power user, macOS delivers everything - and more.

signaleleven · 5 months ago

I love(d) Linux and I've used it a lot over the years, but I finally got fed up and bought a Macbook Pro a few weeks ago. I find myself fiddling with my Linux machine way more than I'd like. I'm sure whatever distro I was using (Ubuntu) will seem like the problem to someone who likes another distro, but that's just more fiddling to me. It took me a while to get to where Zoom video calls with screen sharing worked properly. The last straw was that my wifi card stopped working one day. Debugging OS issues with no internet is really hard.

I've got my dev environment set up on my new Macbook Pro and everything is working perfectly and I'm very happy.

signaleleven commented on Next.js is infuriating blog.meca.sh/3lxoty3shjc2... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

avdwrks · 5 months ago

My biggest problem with it now is the official React team pushes it as their framework of choice. Back when it used the Pages Router and wasn't trying to push everything into server components, etc., it wasn't terrible but I can't help but feel bad for any newcomers trying to learn web development.

I switched to Astro from Next for most projects and haven't looked back. It's such a breath of fresh air to use.

signaleleven · 5 months ago

Next.js was a godsend when it came out because of how easy it made SSR. Many React projects don't need SSR, but for those that do it was technically complicated and time-consuming to hand-roll it.

I was part of a successful large project where we did our own SSR implementation, and we were always tinkering with it. It wasted a lot of time. Next.js "just worked". I've used Next with the pages router on two significant and complex projects and it was a great choice. I have no regrets choosing it.

signaleleven commented on Code highlighting extension for Cursor AI used for $500k theft securelist.com/open-sourc... · Posted by u/Daviey

signaleleven · 7 months ago

Somewhat humorously, my company displayed an IT warning telling me that I can't visit the website in question because it's in Russia. I probably set off some kind of alarm somewhere.

I do use Cursor at work and I have various extensions installed.

signaleleven commented on Ask HN: How do I learn robotics in 2025? · Posted by u/srijansriv

korse · 8 months ago

I'm in the field and I disagree with the initial direction of this post. You aren't going to 'learn robotics' in a meaningful manner by checking the boxes in a online ROS2 course.

Robotics is a compound discipline which pairs mechanical and electrical engineering knowledge with mathematics and software development. In order to get meaningful practice in all of these areas, I would recommend re-implementing a robot vacuum from 'scratch'.

The actual vacuum part is non-essential, as you're really trying to implement the famous 'turtle' robot and experience all the design steps/compromises/challenges first hand. As a goal, aim for autonomous navigation around your home that works equivalently to a cheap 'throwaway' robo-vac.

Keep in mind you are surrounded by robotics. Most passenger vehicles, consumer drones, micro-mobility devices and modern construction equipment are 'robots in varying degrees of disguise'. Practical knowledge regarding any of these systems transfers well if you know where to apply it.

signaleleven · 8 months ago

I did a very basic version of this and it was a lot of fun. I bought a chassis online with tank treads that each had a motor. I used an Arduino to send the signal to each tread to turn and a distance sensor so it knew when it was arriving at an object. If it sensed that something was in front of it, it just turned 90 degrees and kept going.

Super simple but it felt like a big accomplishment to get that far.

signaleleven commented on Ask HN: So, what's up with Phoenix (web framework)? · Posted by u/jstummbillig

signaleleven · 3 years ago

I'm not as much of a fan of the Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView stack like many here, so I'd like to respectfully share my experience.

First off, Phoenix fixes pretty much everything I didn't like about Ruby on Rails and when I need to write an API for a weekend side project that I need to turn out quickly, I'll choose it without question. If you want to use a convention-based framework that includes support for migrations and instant DB mapping, it works well. The documentation is excellent.

I personally would not choose it for a large enterprise codebase, or for something with a rich Ux that you can't control the designs for (ie. you have a Ux team that calls all the shots).

LiveView is interesting. I have found certain things overly difficult to do that are easy in the js-based frameworks. For instance, a UI that has a list of children that you want to add and remove in memory and then save at the end. Obviously you can do this, and I've done it a lot, but there are quirks with the interaction of changesets, ecto, and your form that make it tricky for newcomers. I think the tight coupling between changesets and the form gets strange as soon as the page gets complicated. Schemaless changesets work well for this, but this is more to add to the learning curve.

Understanding the interaction between LiveComponents and function components will be tricky for newcomers as soon as you are past trivial implementations. Knowing where the memory is stored and what a genserver is is super important, but not intuitive. Targeting a specific LiveComponent to receive events if you have one that has another as a child isn't intuitive. Unit testing a LiveComponent and a function component is pretty sweet, but there's a learning curve there and I ran into a few frustrating bugs that didn't help (they were fixed after a few weeks).

There's a lot of these examples. The interaction with client-side js has evolved a lot this year, but it's tricky in my opinion.

I have personally witnessed experienced, talented and smart Elixir developers struggle with LiveView. The learning curve is real.

I know Elixir people love this stuff deeply, but I don't think LiveView will win in the marketplace of ideas, even if Elixir and Phoenix gain traction. People who aren't already bought in to this stack won't be willing to build complex websites this way. I know Chris and Jose are reading this thread, and I have deep respect for their accomplishment and talent, but LiveView isn't going to be for me.

signaleleven commented on Ask HN: So, what's up with Phoenix (web framework)? · Posted by u/jstummbillig

andy_ppp · 3 years ago

Ther weirdest thing about Elixir projects like Phoenix is that they don’t rewrite them changing things needlessly every generation, instead something about the language and decisions made causes things to be very stable. You might see this as a lack of activity but they really have worked on great new features with every release.

Phoenix is really lovely, I’ve been using Absinthe the GraphQL add on and it’s been awesome and for the first time I’m starting to play with channels and web sockets which are really so well done and so scalable. The only thing I’d really like is types and better introspection support in my editor but pattern matching often can be used to simulate runtime duck typing to a certain extent protecting you even if your program will still compile.

Maybe worth trying it out as Elixir and Phoenix are quite simple compared to a lot of magic you’ll see in OOP programming languages.

signaleleven · 3 years ago

LiveView, which of course isn’t exactly Phoenix but is closely related, changed a great deal late last year. These were welcome changes but they were significant.

signaleleven commented on Will Hare replace C? Or Rust? Or Zig? Or anything else? harelang.org/blog/2022-05... · Posted by u/wicket

capableweb · 4 years ago

In Hare's defense, not every programming language needs to target every runtime/OS/environment.

JavaScript only targets the browser. Shaders usually targets one graphic runtime. Maybe there is a space for a language that just targets a few OSes, or even just one? Remember that both C# and Swift initially just targeted one platform, so maybe it does makes sense to now have one OSS language for OSS nerds.

signaleleven · 4 years ago

While that was true for years, Node.js has made JavaScript viable on the server for quite a while. But I agree with your overall point. I think JS and C# are good examples of languages that were seen as valuable enough to start using in other environments. I love C#.