aculver

Say less! Appreciate the recommendation and it's on its way!

Since we're talking about Kevin Mitnick on Hacker News, I have to mention:

I recently re-read "Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier". It was published in 1991 and the first third of the book provides an early contemporary account of Kevin Mitnick. It's a great book that I first read in my high school library in the 90s and it completely captured my imagination.

However, I had never connected the dots that the subject of the last third of the book was Robert Tappan Morris, creator of the Morris worm, who went on to cofound Y Combinator! Paul Graham is also quoted in the book.

The book has aged pretty great. They added an updated epilogue in 1995 in the early part of the Free Kevin era, but honestly re-listening to the book in 2025, I was wondering where the updated Y Combinator epilogue was!

Taylor's response to a similar thread on Reddit[1]:

Hey all! Kinda surprised this has "taken off" haha

It has nothing to do with raising money. It has everything to do with the fact that based on the data we have, there is a large increase in the number of people trying Laravel who haven't coded before or are getting deeper into web development for the first time. That is a good thing!

The previous guidelines would have potentially directed them to configure Nginx or FrankenPHP manually, and while that is certainly possible for experienced devs, it's not the path to success for someone new to the framework.

We want them to be able to get their projects online as smoothly as possible, so that hopefully they become a long-lasting member of our awesome community.

It is no secret that PHP has a "pipeline problem". If you look at the year-over-year data from GitHub, PHP developers only grew 5%, JavaScript + TypeScript grew almost 90%. We have to get more people into our community and enjoying what's possible here. Previously, learning PHP from scratch was a barrier, now, thanks to AI, it's not. This is a unique opportunity to dramatically expand who can bring their ideas to life using Laravel.

In fact, I already have friends in "real life" who are building Laravel apps. They have never coded before.

Does that mean Laravel is going to just cater to "vibe coders"? Absolutely not. We're still building deeply technical features and content for experienced devs who are operating at high scale. But, it is existentially important to the health of the ecosystem and PHP itself that we do a good job getting people up and running on Laravel. They aren't going to know as much as you guys - even Forge can be overwhelming to them. Cloud gives them a simple on-ramp to production that doesn't require much technical knowledge. This is there to facilitate that.

That being said, we've moved this guideline to a "deployment" guideline folder so it's easy to disable or modify or remove to have your own deployment recommendations built right into your Boost install. And, of course, Boost itself is not included with Laravel by default.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/laravel/comments/1sn70d7/laravel_ad...

Yes, exactly. The point I was trying to make is that with a black finish, exposing the original color of the aluminum would be even more striking.

Love this! I did this in 2020 and until today I hadn't seen anyone else who had done it. If anyone is tempted, I recommend finishing the job with Micro-Mesh. IIRC, I went up to 12,000 grit and it results in a nicely polished look that catches the light beautifully.[1] I bet it would look even more striking on the actual black MacBooks we have today.

[1] https://x.com/andrewculver/status/1297575768520716288/photo/...

I don't remember how common it was, but there are definitely examples of him being critical before, e.g. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standa...

Thank you for pointing this out! Fixing now!

Update on this: We do now include Turbo by default and the "Cable Collections" feature in the linked video has been completely reimplemented by the CableReady team in a feature called "Updatable", which we now use in Bullet Train. You can learn more about it at https://cableready.stimulusreflex.com/guide/updatable.html . Very grateful for the work they did on this and grateful to not have to maintain a proprietary reactivity library going forward!

Not at all! You can use Bullet Train and Avo together or you can use them independently. Avo is the recommended admin library to use with Bullet Train.

Thank you! This was the work of Tamik Soziev, who also created the original theme for Bullet Train itself. I'll make sure to pass on the note!

Check out https://usegravity.app/!

Yes, this is true that we lean heavily into Tailwind CSS by default. However, when I implemented our "new" component system in 2021, I designed it so that there was a path forward for Bullet Train on vanilla CSS or Bootstrap if anyone wanted to implement it. I don't have any plans to do it myself, but people (including Tamik, the original theme author for Bullet Train) have expressed an interest. I'd love to see it happen. You can get a sense for how this would be possible from our theme docs at https://bullettrain.co/docs/themes.

Wow, hi everyone! Was just about to walk over for the first day of RailsConf when a friend let me know we were #1 here! Honored!

I'm the original creator of Bullet Train, although a number of people now work on it. It's been a fun journey to this point!

When I first started building Bullet Train, it was a relatively unique offering. There weren't that many full-featured "SaaS starter kits" out there, although there was some prior art. The biggest inspiration for Bullet Train was what Laravel Spark was at the time. In fact, one of the guys who had got me into Rails in the first place had started building his next product on Laravel so they could take advantage of Spark!

These days there are an abundance of SaaS starter kits available in most ecosystems. I've had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with the authors of a bunch of high-quality starter kits built in different languages and frameworks and some of them have told me they were inspired in part by Bullet Train. I love that.

If you're interested in Rails and SaaS, we're running a conference in Athens, Greece on June 1–2 this year and we'd love to have you! https://railssaas.com

Happy to answer any questions anyone may have!

Yeah, you're not alone. Aaron posted a thread on Twitter that shares the inside skinny on what it took to ship this course (https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1638191349261377539) but I had an early peek into the work he was doing on this course, and there was a clear inflection point in the project when he joined Planetscale and had the benefit of being able to focus a substantial amount of his time on it in addition to all the work other members of the team there were able to contribute to it. Very grateful that Planetscale unlocked this so it's available as a free resource instead of having to be behind a paywall to support its creator.

1. Yes, it does. I use AdBlock Pro. 2. Yes, it does. I've been using Safari as my primary browser as a Rails developer for at least the past decade and have always found the developer tools at least adequate. I don't use the developer tools on other browsers heavily, so I don't know if I might be missing something.

Hey KRains, author of Bullet Train here! Congratulations on your launch and making the front page of HN! I know how great a feeling that is after all your hard work!

I disagree that Bullet Train is "really overpriced". The features it provides to customers can save them hundreds of hours of development time in total. There are individual features in Bullet Train (the teams functionality, the Stripe integration, outbound webhooks, scaffolding real-time chat conversation threads onto models and an inbox for all of them, Zapier integration, just to name a few) that would each save most development teams at least $1,450 in development costs, and that's before you take into account the power of Super Scaffolding for code generation.

Bullet Train will save most development teams months in effort right off the bat. That's well worth $1,450 to the customers who have been able to get to market faster with components they know are being used and maintained across many different products. Bullet Train is only two years old, and there are already folks running seven-figure businesses around products that cost five-figures to build using Bullet Train. I'm not trying to imply it's magic, I'm just trying to point out that there are situations where $1,450 can be a no-brainer.

I love that you're starting with an open source base. If I knew when I started what I now know after two years of selling Bullet Train, I would probably do something similar. But you will need (as I've needed and as others who are doing similar projects have needed) help along the way. (For example, you'll definitely want to get the support of a designer.) Unless you want to bring those people on as partners, that help will cost you money, sometimes lots of it, so make sure you're charging enough for your premium components to pay for the help you need to make the product a success and the best it can be.

Best of luck! Wishing you a lot of success!

Honestly, can you think of a smarter move on the part of Microsoft than making Nat Friedman (a veteran of the Open Source community) CEO of Github? I completely trust this guy to do as good a job as can be done of guiding Github forward as a product and a platform, now that the venture capitalists are no longer in the picture.

Hey Weston, with regard to servers and deployment, I think Heroku is a very turn-key solution. These days you can have a default `app.json` in your project and use it to click a button to deploy your app to a totally new development or production server including any databases and third-party add-ons you need provisioned for the app. It's pretty magical. For CI, I use Codeship. The combination of those two vastly minimizes my responsibility for infrastructure.

On the development side, I still think Rails is an excellent choice, but I also felt a lot of the same pain you're expressing, but instead of with server configuration, I started feeling it more specifically with the redundancy of putting together the same libraries over and over for each app.

To try to revive the joy of creating new projects, I created Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co), which I describe as "Rails on Rails". It's an app template with authentication (Devise), authorization (CanCanCan), subscriptions (Koudoku), teams, invitations, OAuth integrations, etc. all wrapped in a consistent theme with a full feature-level test suite.

It also has a powerful code generation/scaffolding engine for pumping out CRUD views and controllers for the web, API endpoints, API documentation, and soon it'll handle your Zapier integration as well. (Posted a demo video of this here at https://twitter.com/andrewculver/status/934251715175395328) It also has a thin layer of conventions on top of vanilla Rails, like namespacing the public vs. account sections of an app. It's stuff that most of us were doing previously, just slightly different from app to app, and this is an attempt to standardize so we can build other magic on top of it.

As a demo, a few months ago I used Bullet Train + Heroku to build and launch a simple Trello clone in two hours: https://bt-cardboard.herokuapp.com/ . It's limited, and I haven't come back to it since, but I thought the end result was a powerful example of what you can get done quickly when you're using the right tools. (I have a video recording of the entire process which I'll upload to YouTube if anyone is interested in seeing it.)

Anyway, I wouldn't normally peddle my wares on HN, but the whole point of Bullet Train is to try to achieve new levels of developer productivity and happiness, which seemed relevant to the question you were asking. There's nothing quite like this in the Python world (I'm frequently told by Python developers,) but there probably should be, and I imagine it's just a matter of time before there is.

Is anyone familiar with any other research that would allow us to compare this to other developed nations?

Thanks for providing such detailed and thoughtful feedback. I actually did build this app on top of https://bullettrain.co in less than two hours. I actually recorded the entire process and I'm happy to share the video privately. (You can DM me on Twitter or email me at andrew@bullettrain.co .) I'll post it publicly once someone is able to edit out the parts where I spend 10-15 minutes debugging really simple CSS issues, etc. I provided some more context on this project's purpose here: https://twitter.com/andrewculver/status/968215988436004864

Just watched the video on your site and this is by far my favorite Tiny House project I've seen yet. It's the first one I've seen that I felt like I could actually live in that with two kids. Great job! Thanks for taking the time to document the experience and share it with all of us!

For those of us who have no clue what you're talking about, could you please take the time to explain what you mean? For example, what are the better ways to manage front-end state? How does this project violate the single-responsibility and open/closed object-oriented design recommendations? Is there anything the author could do to address your concerns?

Hey all, this is me. This setup is a new MacBook Pro powering two 55" 4K displays. I bought my first 55" 4K display a few years ago and having so much screen real estate was a game changer for me.

One of my favorite things about having so much screen real estate is eliminating the need for overlapping windows, which is really great when you're developing and have a ton of different things going on.

The idea with this new setup isn't that you would use the desk display for stuff you're actively working on, (I think that would be terrible for your neck,) but instead just as a place to put things you glance at occasionally or receive notifications from.

I only just set this up today so the verdict is still out on this new setup with the desk display, but a few initial observations:

- The texture of the display is similar to an iPhone or iPad, and it's a really great feel for your arms.

- The display gives off a little bit of heat, which is actually nice for resting your arms on.

- Because of the back of this specific display (Samsung 8-series) there is a tiny bit of give (e.g. a little bounciness,) on the part of the display where I'm resting my hands and typing. It's a _huge_ improvement over a hard desk.

The image is obviously not going to be as great as when you're looking at one of these displays head on, but it's not horrible either on the higher end displays. I've set mine up on a bit of an incline, which both helps the viewing angle and actually feels really great for my arms as well, but I'm not sure whether this will come back to bite me at all ergonomically.

Curious if anyone else has done anything similar and how they felt it worked or didn't work.

This is insanely great reading. I love how old-school technical it is. I haven't finished reading yet, but my favorite quote so far:

"What advice would you give to hackers who are thinking about starting a company or making something on their own?"

"Wozniak: First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you're doing. Don't mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would."

Not at all. You'll be down voted because this comment doesn't substantiate your claim and doesn't add anything to the discussion.

Being a developer is a certified superpower, so it's fair to expect that some of the life hacks unlocked by being a developer are on a life changing scale. Here's my recommendation:

Build a machine that prints money.

Find a problem that regular business computer users are solving with some combination of raw effort and a spreadsheet to keep track. Write an app that accomplishes the same thing, but better, and in a mostly automated fashion, and charge them monthly for access to your tool.

It's a lot of work upfront, but the gains you make each month compound. Most of the customers you sign up this month will still be customers next month and you don't have to resell them. Instead you focus on selling new customers, who themselves will be around the month after that. Eventually, the amount of money the machine prints each month is greater than the effort you're putting into it each month, and you've freed yourself from exchanging time for money.

In terms of life hacks that are particularly attainable for developers specifically, I think starting a SaaS is near the top.

Hey David, I didn't expect to see your brain on the front page of HN. Can you confirm for us that everything is OK? :-)

I'm surprised no one on here has mentioned Minecraft yet.

One game that I was never able to get into before Oculus Rift was Minecraft. My kids have been begging me to play with them, but I really struggled to remain interested in the game. I could see why they loved it, but I didn't get into myself.

It bugged me that I was missing this opportunity to connect with my kids, especially with something computer-y, so over the holiday I spent a little time getting the Minecrift mod working.

Wow!

I now totally get it, and it seems to me that Minecraft will be at least one huge driver for the adoption of VR hardware amongst folks who are able to use it. (Recommended 13+.)

The low-resolution polygons in Minecraft really accentuate the 3D effect. When you're going up hills or looking at trees, the depth effect is crazily pronounced and amazing.

The basic graphics in Minecraft also have the benefit of rendering quite nicely even on incredibly limited hardware. For example, I spent hours playing on my 12" Retina MacBook, which I believe is the weakest hardware Apple ships. (Maybe it benefits from a GPU that powers a Retina display? I don't know.)

Getting attacked by creepers and zombies in the first-person was an insane experience. My heart rate was actually going up as I attempted to escape and ultimately failed.

And I was there. I grew personally attached to the cave I mined for myself where I hid to protect myself throughout the night, and felt a little sad when I accidentally let water flood in and destroy it. I was in that cave. Very cool.

I would frequently look down at my hands to remind myself of what weapon or tool I was holding and go through my hot keys until I saw the tool I wanted to use.

I'd spend a good deal of time just watching that big pixelated sun set over a landscape, and if I found a safe place, I'd sit around and watch the stars move through the night sky as the earth rotated. (Mostly I think this is when I became the most aware of the "screen door" effect.)

Anyway, if you've got DK2 hardware, I highly recommend trying it out with Minecraft if you haven't already. Microsoft announced they're planning official Oculus Rift support for Minecraft in the first half of next year, and judging from the way my son talks to his friends about it ("he's actually in Minecraft,") I think Minecraft will be a huge driver of sales of Oculus Rift.

Hey, I used to run a SaaS product that solved the failed payment problem very specifically (http://churnbuster.io) and I'd recommend you extend that 2 week period out to something like 4 to 6 weeks. Some of our most successful customers were sending out 7-8 emails over a 6 week period. Every business is different, so YMMV, but it might help. A bunch of other thoughts on the subject that may be helpful to you here: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-industry-average-rates-fo... .

Patrick, so many levels on which to thank you!

I still remember the day I walked into Brian Smith's office in late 2010, at what would be my last corporate job, and he started talking to me about how we needed to start working on our own passive-income businesses, "like this patio11 guy on Hacker News." Your openness and transparency empowered me to pursue the path that I began pursuing back then. Without your transparency, I can't imagine how I would have found my way from that corporate gig to where I find myself today.

Thanks also for your willingness to work with us early on when we had to do special feature development to support your use-case. Those features ended up being a differentiator for us and helped us snag some really valuable clients since, and I'm not sure those businesses would have been so patient waiting for us.

Thanks again!