AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

Top comment by xPaw

SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/

I've been running it for over 10 years now, it's a database of Steam games, their updates, price history, charts, and a lot more.

In the early days we took monetary donations but stopped a few years in. It costs less than 100$ a month to run. Cloudflare reports 552.2M requests in the past 30 days, and 6.09M unique visitors.

2. Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?

Top comment by nyxcharon

After working with the PETAL (Phoenix, Elixir, TailwindCSS, Alpine.Js, Liveview) stack at $JOB for a while now, I have to say I've never been more productive.

Early on I would still have to lean on Alpine heavily for various JS interactions but with all the features Liveview has been adding and improving on (Hello JS module!) I find myself needing it less and less. Liveview really has been a game changer for me. Tailwind has more or less fixed most of my frustrations with CSS and has worked itself nicely into the company design system resulting in nice re-usable components that can be easily customized for those one-offs. Elixir is a nice language to use and I find myself missing features of it when working with other languages. Phoenix is well structured for projects and the newer generators solve a lot of common issues/features in projects like user auth in a reasonable way.

Depending on the needs of the app I'd look into deploying to Fly.io otherwise I've been using Kubernetes with little issue. I've toyed with Nomad for orchestration but haven't used it enough to give an opinion. I do wander if it's a nice middle ground for those who don't need the full suite of what K8s offers.

3. Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

Top comment by noud

I think you're way off base. It's called rosy retrospection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection. As you already mentioned in your comments, you're judging the past disproportionately more positive that the present.

If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are with the current software, how much you pay to your landlords and subscriptions, how many mistakes the police makes, the weather, everything, ... After 5 years you'll have a good idea if things actually got worse than they are now. Sure, some things will get worse, but definitely not everything, and some things will even be better than they are now.

4. Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

Top comment by joshmn

During COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some calls to book.

Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.

I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).

Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.

5. Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

Top comment by ubermonkey

Well, this is far afield from the normal discussions here, but:

8 years ago, I had a pretty bad cycling crash and broke my hip -- which, if you're not aware, means I broke the "femoral neck", or the narrow bit of bone between the long part of the femur and the "ball" that goes into your pelvis.

Post-repair, my x-ray looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/gRqg50J.png

Anyway, with that much hardware in a repair, you're probably starting the clock on needing a full replacement. I think they were hoping for 10-15 years, but I got only 8 before joint pain and bone loss forced the issue.

Last Monday -- so, 15 days ago -- I went in at 5AM for a total hip replacement.

Which was done on an OUTPATIENT basis. I walked out of the hospital (with a walker, granted) on the new joint, and was at home in a lounge chair by 5PM. By the end of the week, I was off the walker entirely and using a cane. By day 9, I was routinely moving around the house without even the CANE, though I need it for any meaningful walk.

The main thing I'm supposed to be doing is walking. I could manage a half mile within a week. Last night I walked 1.2 miles at a 30% faster pace than my first half-mile walk. I should be shut of even the cane in another week or two.

To me, this kind of objectively major SKELETON EDIT being effectively banal from a medical POV is pretty surreal. I mean, it's not "put Luke in the bacta tank" surreal, but it's a whole lot closer to that I realized was realistic.

(Now: I'm completely willing to note that the ease I've had with this is tied to a number of factors, including probably first the fact that I live in a top-tier city for this kind of medical attention, and I have excellent health insurance. But still.)

6. Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

Top comment by stared

> There’s a never ending number of things I bookmark.

One of the key features of ADHD is a never-ending list of things to do. Edward M. Hallowell (who wrote "Driven to Distraction") remarks that perhaps it is the most characteristic feature of ADHD.

Previously, browser crashes saved my sanity— killing dozens of open tabs with fascinating articles.

Now I try to let it go. In a Zen/stoic way, knowing that nothing will happen if I don't read something. This list is an illusion, as there are orders of magnitude more exciting stuff on the Internet.

Another approach I use is "write it down". In this sense, I add to bookmarks (here I am a diehard fan of Pinboard), but NOT with the intention of "read it later", but "if I want to find it again, I know where it is". So I have a cake and eat it too - no "wall of links of shame", and no anxiety that I might have lost a life-changing link.

7. Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?

Top comment by kbyatnal

https://crowdview.ai - search engine for forums and discussion sites

Like many of you, I find Google results to be full of SEO spam and have resorted to adding "site:reddit.com" or "site:news.ycombinator.com" to all my queries (since 2015!). Otherwise, it's really hard to figure out "what does a genuine, real life human think about this thing?".

But limiting my results to just Reddit isn't ideal because so much great content exists elsewhere. Lots of great information and conversations have moved elsewhere, and niche forums are still alive on the web! But it's impossible to find these places because they rank so poorly on Google. So I built a search engine across a curated list of these, making sure to remove any kind of SEO junk (blog spam, listicles, etc).

There's also a chrome extension that surfaces these results alongside Google, so you don't have to remember to keep coming back.

Please try it out and share any feedback! (and if you're interested in this topic, join the Slack)

8. Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

Top comment by miedpo

Hey,

So I would probably avoid Amazon just because many of their services charge for data out. It isn't out, but it's a variable for you, and you probaly want something that's flat per month. Cheapest you are going to get with somewhat reliable service is either going to be Hetzner or BuyVM. Hetzner is better for someone who doesn't want to tinker, BuyVM for those who do (BuyVM is a little less reliable, but you can set it up cheaper if you are willing to do a little bit of manual work with shell commands).

Secondly, I'd suggest you host this through Cloudron. It helps you handle automatic security updates and backups. It's very nice, and worth paying for, although it's a little pricey for individuals.

Third, with email, you can host it yourself (in fact Cloudron has this built in), but I'm going to recommend against it, or at least recommend that you pipe important emails through another service like Fastmail. Let me explain why. There's going to be some point after hosting for 5 years, where your server is going to go down. Now email will be fine, it's built to deal with cases where servers go down, but... we rely so much on email right now, that it's going to really suck to have it down. So by all means, have your personal email come to the server, but keep anything that you can't do without running on a managed service. You can pipe it through your own domain, and set up automatic forwarding, but it's going to be a little better to run important stuff through someone else's server, imho.

Just my two (or three, I guess) cents.

9. Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?

Top comment by pronlover723

I don't think it will ever happen except for toy projects. If you're manipulating some small list of 10-20 objects and those object have some kind of useful visual representation then for some small use case you can possibly, maybe, design a system that could do what's shown in the demos. I'm skeptical that it scales to more complex problems with more complex data.

Bret Victor himself has made zero headway. And no, Dynamicland is not it. Dynamicland is still coded in text with no visual representation itself.

Other examples always show the simplest stuff. A flappy bird demo. A simple recursive tree. A few houses made of 2-3 rectangles and a triangle. Etc...

To be even more pessimistic, AFAICT, if you find a single example you'll find that even the creators of the example have abandoned it. They aren't using it in their own projects. They made it, made some simple demos, realized it didn't really fit anything except simple demos, and went back to coding in text.

I'm not trying to be dismissive. I'd love to be proven wrong. I too was inspired when I first read his articles. But, the more I thought about it the more futile it seemed. The stuff I work on has too many moving parts to display any kind of useful representation in a reasonable amount of time.

What I can imagine is better debuggers with plugins for visualizers and manipulators. C# shipped with its property control that you could point at a class and it would magically made it editable. You could then write a custom UI for any time and it would show up in the property control (for example a color editor). I'd like to see more of that in debuggers. Especially if one of the more popular languages made it a core feature of their most popular debugger so that it became common for library writers to include debug time visualizers

Even then though, it's not clear to me how often it would be useful.

10. Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

Top comment by dfabulich

I help run the Interactive Fiction Database. https://ifdb.org/

I think that our list of games ranked by review scores is certainly the finest repository of extraordinary text-based games in the world. https://ifdb.org/search?browse

Every game on that list is fantastic. For your reading convenience, the top ten are: Counterfeit Monkey, Anchorhead, Superluminal Vagrant Twin, 80 Days, Hadean Lands, Lost Pig, The Wizard Sniffer, Violet, and The Impossible Bottle.

You can click the "Play Online" button on almost any game in IFDB to play it right there in your browser, without downloading anything.

IFDB also includes all of the 20th century classics, including Infocom games, but IMO the modern games have long-since outclassed them.

If you're curious, here's our list of top-ranked Infocom games. https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=tag:infocom The top-ranked Infocom games are science-fiction games, topped by Trinity, Infocom's surreal "Alice in Wonderland" time-travel game, followed by Planetfall and A Mind Forever Voyaging.