Sunday, 31 July 2022

Saturday, 30 July 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Chunk – Code sandbox for back-end devs

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Chunk – Code sandbox for back-end devs

on 7/30/2022 01:28:00 am 0 Comment
Show HN: Chunk – Code sandbox for back-end devs
19 by theochampion | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Chunk co-founder here. We spent the last 2 weeks building this to scratch our own itch: As developers, we often have problems that could be solved just by running a few lines of code. Sometimes, running this code on your local machine is fine. But other time, the code need to run automatically reacting to external events or to run continuously, which means, it needs to run on a server somewhere. So now, you have to find a cloud provider, to package or build the code and finally to deploy it. All of that for what could be literally be 4 lines of code. We couldn’t find an easier way to do this, so we built it. Chunk is an all in one web editor (think of the codesandbox experience) that allows you to write, deploy and run a piece of code in the cloud from a variety of triggers: HTTP, WebHook, manual or scheduled (cron). No setup, no build, no deploy. Chunk makes you go from idea to code running in the cloud in seconds. Let me know what you guys think!

Friday, 29 July 2022

Thursday, 28 July 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Peerdiem — Discover and discuss one painting a day

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Peerdiem — Discover and discuss one painting a day

on 7/28/2022 12:28:00 am 0 Comment
Show HN: Peerdiem — Discover and discuss one painting a day
15 by afkqs | 6 comments on Hacker News.
Hi everyone, I made Peerdiem (a portmanteau word between Peer and Per Diem, which means Per Day in latin). The idea is very simple, a new painting or artwork to discover and discuss with your peers every day. Content is currently only fetched from Chicago Art Institute Free API [1] but I'm planning to add more sources in the short future. It was built with a couple of technologies I wanted to try for some time. Frontend is made with Preact and styled with Tailwindcss. Backend consists of an FastAPI app deployed in a Docker container. [1] https://ift.tt/JHlFtBu

Wednesday, 27 July 2022

Tuesday, 26 July 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid

on 7/26/2022 02:28:00 am 0 Comment
Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid
15 by gereleth | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So I did just that =). I find hexagonal pipes a bit more difficult than the square variant because there's a larger variety of possible tile shapes. For an extra challenge I implemented wrap mode where the board can connect to itself (right to left and top to bottom), so there are no convenient outer walls to start from. The site is made with Svelte Kit, its code is available on github at < https://github.com/gereleth/hexapipes >. Hope you enjoy playing =).

Monday, 25 July 2022

Sunday, 24 July 2022

Saturday, 23 July 2022

Friday, 22 July 2022

Thursday, 21 July 2022

Wednesday, 20 July 2022

Tuesday, 19 July 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Babble – Communicate privately on state-sponsored social media

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Babble – Communicate privately on state-sponsored social media

on 7/19/2022 12:28:00 am 0 Comment
Show HN: Babble – Communicate privately on state-sponsored social media
12 by yvbbrjdr | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Thanks for checking out Babble! You might wonder why this app is even useful and why not just use Signal/PGP. This app's target audience is actually ordinary people in China or similar countries who are under severe government surveillance and censorship, where access to Signal and similar E2EE messaging software is blocked by nationwide firewalls, such as the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Chinese people have been deprived of freedom of speech even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Li Wenliang, who was among the first to notice the spread of the virus and warned his colleagues about it in a private WeChat group, was admonished by the police for "spreading rumors"; his punishment was then aired on the national TV channel. After Wenliang passed away due to getting COVID-19 himself, discussions about it on China's public Internet were highly restricted; most discussions will be deleted upon being posted, which was done by some automatic keyword detection mechanism. Things got even worse over the years and especially during the Shanghai lockdown in early 2022. Everything related to questioning the public health policy is banned. Many people posted articles about how bad Shanghai's economic and social situation is on their WeChat public accounts. None of these articles, not even their accounts, can survive for longer than a few hours. Even articles crying for help, because people were starving, got deleted. A video called Voice from Shanghai Lockdown ( https://youtu.be/38_thLXNHY8 ), which contains audio recordings of desperate Shanghai people during the lockdown, went viral on Chinese social media at the end of this April. Unsurprisingly, this video was immediately censored. People got angry and tried to spread this video as much as possible by re-posting it again and again, racing against the detection algorithm. But it was futile. It's just like 1984, where the number of words available to say "legally" is decreasing. There are no tools available for people to speak out. Public social media and private messaging apps are all monitored by the government. Foreign tools such as Telegram, Signal, or anything similar are blocked by the GFW. PGP is too technical for normal people. The goal of Babble is to provide those people with a cryptographic and steganographic tool that's easy enough to use but secure enough against a censorship system. It's not perfect as of now, but we are making an effort to make it better. Yes, Babble might get removed from the App Store in China if the Chinese government asks, but it's fundamentally different from Signal being blocked - there are a considerable number of people in China who has an overseas Apple ID so that they can download apps not on Chinese App Store, but to use Signal, you have to bypass GFW, which fewer people know how to. One of the real challenges for this project though, is how to get people aware of the situation, because our education is brainwashing and people are starting to take surveillance and censorship for granted. And it's very hard for the app to reach its intended audience because the surveillance system is designed to prevent them from accessing this kind of tool.

Monday, 18 July 2022

Sunday, 17 July 2022

Saturday, 16 July 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Eesel – Federated search without API integrations

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Eesel – Federated search without API integrations

on 7/16/2022 03:28:00 am 0 Comment
Show HN: Eesel – Federated search without API integrations
5 by amoghs | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hey there! Amogh here from eesel ( https://eesel.app ). eesel filters your browser history to show the docs you need for work, right in your new tab. You can see recent docs, filter by app or search by title or content. We're trying to solve a pretty universal problem. Everyone's work is spread across apps - there's a project brief in Google Docs, issues in Jira, a mockup in Figma, PRs in GitHub - and with this kind of sprawl, it can be a game of trial and error to find the links we need to do our job. Trying keywords in the address bar only works if we remember the title and it's specific enough, search in apps can be slow and noisy, company "knowledge hubs" in Confluence or Google Drive are usually not up to date, and we ultimately just ping each other on Slack to find things. I was struggling with this acutely as a PM at Intercom, and it felt ridiculous that I could search the web faster than my company's docs. It was around this time that I also discovered an Effective Altruism blog post on Operations ( https://ift.tt/xoXZS5g ) and how "maximising the productivity of others in the organisation" can have this multiplier effect for your own impact. That's when it clicked - here's an "operations" problem that felt tractable for my skills and I could potentially multiply my impact by solving it. This is what gave the conviction to prototype something on the weekends, and things spun off from there. Let's talk about the solution more. The magical thing about eesel is that we don't use APIs. When it comes to "search across apps", integrating with different APIs is a pretty default way to approach things. That's how we started, but things felt uneasy - could we really build API integrations with _everything_? There's so much out there, and this list is pretty much always changing. If we really did want a search across all work apps, we'd have to play catch up with old and new APIs. You could argue that these were just the schleps ( https://ift.tt/aPjI7tF ) we had to overcome, but it was amidst this we realised that uh, the browser exists. We mostly work in the browser, and the great thing about it is that it's built on web standards. From HTTP and URLs to HTML and CSS, all apps in the browser follow the same predictable patterns: documents are accessed via URLs, content lives inside the HTML, there's a page title, there's a favicon, and so on. It's not a perfect replacement for APIs, but it felt good enough. We didn't need to manually integrate with each app, and could instead rely on existing web standards. And that's what we did. eesel works with any app in the browser, including apps without APIs (like that internal company tool), or apps that don't exist yet (the new Product Hunt hit). Not using APIs also meant that we could go an extra step with privacy - eesel works fully locally by default and you don't need to login to _anything_ (even eesel!). Simply install and it works. We want to keep building on this approach and improve how we work in the browser. For instance, eesel uses keywords to automatically organise pages into Folders, and there's Commands to take actions (spoiler: you can customise a JavaScript to inject on a page, like this script that goes to a Notion backlog and clicks the "New" button - https://ift.tt/2x3AfEB... ). Alright, that's a lot of writing from us. We have a bunch of ideas, and would love to hear about where you think we should take this next.

Friday, 15 July 2022

Thursday, 14 July 2022

Wednesday, 13 July 2022

Tuesday, 12 July 2022

Monday, 11 July 2022