Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | brachkow's commentslogin

One of the most frustrating experiences building my app was that search engine discovery doesn't work by itself.

My expectation was that I would make an SSR-rendered website, with sane content and meta tags, and my app would appear at least on the 1-3 page of search, because clever search engines would parse it.

In reality, I need to do all the JSON-LD, landings proposed not for sales but for SEO, fighting with Google Search Console, getting proper backlinks, etc.

And only after that could I hope that my project would appear at least somewhere.


It is interesting to know how it compares in terms of performance to 500$ Mac Mini with Crossover?

Of course Crossover support is worse than Proton, so it will not be viable alternative in real gaming scenarios. But Proton is made by Crossover team.

And Apple hardware is 2x cheaper.


Due to the memory and storage crisis, you actually cannot buy the $500 mac mini anymore. It starts at $799

Just checked what your claim, and... its even worse – 1000$ in my part of EU (m4 + 16gb, aka base configuration)

Too bad there's no Proton for Mac. Ironically the Windows Steam itself is the hardest thing to run in plain Wine on Mac. There are lots of games that work fine in Wine by themselves, but just getting Steam to launch them is a mess.

The fact that my Mac can run any games at all is just a happy accident. That's not what I got it for.


Your mileage may vary, but I've never gotten reasonable performance out of Crossover. I have a decked out Mac for development and most of the games I've tried in Crossover still need you to turn the settings to damn near lowest possible.

If Mac Minis were viable for gaming, everyone would get one. Unfortunately, Crossover has very spotty support and GPTK starts fraying at the seams on CPU-heavy titles.

The upcoming Steam Frame will be the real make-or-break moment for ARM PC gaming. Up until now, nobody has seriously attempted to make ARM work for the "Steam Deck" segment of users.


The biggest effect of AirPods was that people stopped asking you to pull out the earphones when they talk to you.

At early college age I was dealing with stress that I for some reason had in a crowded city, and my main help was listening to rhythmic music all the time.

What annoyed me a lot that people from a coffee shop workers to beggars were making me more stressed by insisting that I must get my headphones out before the conversation began.

With release of wireless Apple EarPods this behavior completely disappeared in a following year.


> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes

Like everything else in finance...

Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy.

Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.


I'm continuing my work on https://thingstohave.app – a flexible and social wishlist app.

Usually, I barely report on this thread once every few months, but this month was highly productive:

1. I changed how lists appeared in the UI to fix a very annoying pattern where users were confusing lists and things. 2. I finished adding image uploads. Now you can add and view image attachments.

This was quite a challenging task because there are a lot of security implications, and Cloudflare Workers don't support sharp. So I was implementing all the pixel bomb detection, optimizations, and other stuff by myself. Also, self hosted https://imgproxy.net came in handy as a price-efficient image processing solution.

While images are seen in List view (with a layout I'm very proud about!), gallery view is still under testing, as I'm still not completely happy with how it integrates with previous UI decisions. 3. I developed, and delivered ton of small QoL features and bugfixes. Also a few bigger features are in testing. 4. Generally, the app is close to being feature-complete for V1, so I'm slowly starting to work on marketing. It is way less entertaining than reiterating on the same for 2 years straight:(


I don't understand the whole Framework thing (not 12, but in general):

1. For why would everyone want to use their laptop longer than MacBook lifespan? I'm typing this on a 5+ year old MacBook, which I expect will work for 3 more years. At this lifespan, it will be outdated by all means. I can replace it with a new one at the cost of $1-1.5k. If I had a Framework, I would gradually replace this with new parts? Well, only the mainboard takes a huge portion, or even more, of that. Screens became outdated too, by the way!

2. Repairability. Apple has bad repairability, in terms it glues the laptop from three parts. That means you can't do anything by yourself, but you can get a repair in a day or two in any point of the world. Can you fix your Framework in Tbilisi, Georgia? Last time I replaced the screen on a Mac, it cost me $300 including human work, the same as a Framework display costs.

3. MacBooks are just better in terms of performance and battery life per buck. They also tend to have the best screens, sound, and input. All of these are quite important for a laptop.

I like the Framework premise; I would like to own a Framework as a Linux machine. But we should remember that these are hobbyist laptops with a product/cost ratio, and gimmicky features.

All this discussion, amplified by voices of Apple-quarreled people like DHH, is stupid and kind of harmful – unexperienced people are ending up with expensive enthusiast devices (...or worse, with Dell XPS, you know).

P.S. Please don't bring "computer ideology" into this – there is no walled garden on MacBooks like on other Apple devices. There are no services actively sold to you. I don't know where this argument is coming from. It is just a Unix-based computer, with good hardware and a nice-looking GUI.

That said, I would definitely like to see comments of peope who actually used a MacBook and switched to Framework.


Funny that my app already uses custom feature flag solution built on... Cloudlfare Workers


Here are the things I don't like in React. Keep in mind that React is a framework to draw interactive HTML on screen, not for some crazy programming.

1. Over-reliance on complex concepts and terminology. Let's compare with Vue: `useEffect` vs `watch`, `useMemo` vs `computed`.

2. This useless "clever" stuff also slips beyond terminology: many years ago, Redux was considered the go-to state manager, and it required writing a lot of code across multiple files even for incrementing a number, because its author liked a lot of clever CS concepts. VueX at the same time allowed just to increment that number. Thankfully, nowadays, the React ecosystem is full of sane state managers.

3. React ships without any tools to work with CSS. That said there is no chance you would use React without CSS.

4. React doesn't bother optimizing anything for you. You need to know how and when to properly use or not use these clever `useEffect` and `useMemo`. There is a lot of stuff to know, and there are a lot of folk legends about optimizing React. This is while rerendering is its main purpose. In Vue, the framework makes you always use its tools, and does most of the optimizations inside them. I never thought about manually optimizing a Vue app.

5. The folk legends. React API and the "correct way" to write React radically changed so many times, so it is very hard to understand what is still true today and what is not.

All of that can be summarized into one – React is overly focused on ideas, computer science, and being high-level. And not very focused on actually making drawing interactive HTML on screen simple.

I do write a lot of React, Vue, and Svelte. And when I write React I always need to think about stuff, of which I never would think about with Vue and Svelte, because they already took care about it. And performance wise they are on par.

btw, I wrote a related post some time ago https://www.brachkow.com/notes/what-i-like-in-vue/


I'm working on requested features for my social wishlist app https://thingstohave.app: image uploading, passkeys and more clear list organization UI. Everything is in polishing stage, and I hope to release these before June.

Big thing I made recently is moving it from SvelteKit to Hono + Inertia + Vue.

I like SvelteKit, but I was struggling with stability in active development periods, and writing proper tests was very hard due to mocking all the magic, especially outside trivial testing tools.

Now the whole app is straightforward Hono MVC with Vue powered UI. Logic is easy to test, and all UI states exposed in Storybook.

I wrote a custom adapter that makes Inertia run on Hono, and coincidentally same thing was released by Hono author itself as official module, which is great sign for adoption!

So, try Inertia – it is a best of both worlds. You write MVC backend as you like, and use modern JS frameworks for templates.

https://inertiajs.com/docs/v3/getting-started/index


I believe it is common for governments to do wiki editing as PR strategy.

I actively browse Wikipedia in English, Polish and Russian, and see a lot of traces of government efforts.

For example in Poland related topics:

- Russian articles usually have negative stance, and articles have a lot of very strange quotes like wiki editor interviewed some person from 1920 in a bar with a drink. Most of these quotes are either folk anecdotes or made up by author.

Not related to Polish topic – Russian editors are also dominating Russian Wikipedia, and significantly affect important articles for other russian-spoken countries like Belarus, Ukraine and countries of post-soviet east.

- English articles about PLC are actively edited by Lithuanian editors. Polish nobles are renamed into Lithuanian manner, despite they definitely didn't knew Lithuanian and had absolutely slavic names, only by the fact they had any position on territory of modern Lithuanian or participated on event that considered "good" by Lithuanian historicans

While I annoyed by these events, I think it's big win for a country if it can do that. Being able to shape opinions via "neutral" source is a big PR win. And country PR is very important – just look at "nice" Switzerland or Japan, catastrophic PR failure of Israel in recent years, or what oil-rich Arabic world does right now.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: