almost

Father of the web sure. But HTTP is not the Internet!

Also what I got. Then I tried changing "wash" to "repair" and "car wash" to "garage" and it's back to walking.

For me Northflank have filled this spot. Though by the time I switched I was already using Docker so can't speak directly to their Heroku Buildpack support.

I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a few years ago after Heroku got unreliable. Felt like an upgrade from Heroku and the support and reliability have been great.

The reason you heard that was probably because they were talking about a more specific circumstance. For example SQLite is often used as a database during development in Django projects but not usually in production (there are exceptions of course!). So you may have read when setting up Django, or a similar thing, that the SQLite option wasn't meant for production because usually you'd use a database like Postgres for that. Absolutely doesn't mean that SQLite isn't used in production, it's just used for different things.

From my experience though I often do make logical errors in my code but not in my tests and I do frequently catch errors because of this. I think thats a fairly normal experience with writing automated tests.

Would having someone else write the tests catch more logical errors? Very possibly, I haven't tried it but that sounds reasonable. It also does seem like that (and the other things it implies) would be a pretty extreme change in the speed of development. I can see it being worth it in some situations but honestly I don't see it as something practical for many types of projects.

What I don't understand is saying "well we can't do the really extremely hard version so let's not do the fairly easy version" which is how I took you original comment.

This sounds very "the perfect is the enemy of good". Tests don't need to be perfect, they don't need to be written by different people (!!!), they don't need to cover 100% of the code. As long as they're not flakey (tests which fail randomly really can he worse than nothing) it really helps in development and maintenence to have some tests. It's really nice when the (frequent) mistakes I make show up on my machine or on the CI server rather than in production, and my (very imperfect, not 100% "done properly") tests account for a lot of those catches.

Obviously pragmatism is always important and no advice applies to 100% of features/projects/people/companies. Sometimes the test is more trouble to write than it's worth and TDD never worked for me with the exception of specific types of work (good when writing parsers I find!).

When it's a library it's fairly important what it's written (or at least written for)

For something this simple that doesn't need to grow or interact with the rest of the system why would you need Backbone or React? And why would you expect any version to be shorter as it's mostly just the HTML and the data.

I remember writing Backbone applications with lots of deeply nested components. Trying to keep all the state in sync and reacting to events. It certainly wasn't simple and straightforward.

This just feels like a very silly article.

Wasting time is absolutely glorious. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't or shouldn't.

Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different"

(That being said if Tik Tok is making you sad delete that shit right away. Wasting time is glorious but feeling depressed sucks.)

Nostalgic! Who needs a colar display or even a monochrome display when you've got a high res (for the time) black and white screen :)

360 degrees in a circle predates Plato by quite a lot (2000 years I think!). It comes from the Summarians more than 4000 years ago. They used a method of counting on fingers that goes up to 12 on one hand and 60 using both hands, so their numbering system was based on 60. 360 is 6 * 60 and also roughly how many days in a year.

Later societies inherited that from them along with 60 minutes in and hour.

So it monkey-patches a set of common http libraries and then detects calls to AI APIs? Not obvious which APIs it would detect or in what situations it would miss them. Seems kind of dangeorus to rely on something like that. You install it and it might be doing nothing, You only find out after somethings gone wrong.

If I was using something like this I think I'd rather have it wrap the AI API clients. Then it can throw an error if it doesn't recongise the client library I'm using. This way it'll just silently fail to monitor if what I'm using isn't in its supported list (whatever that is!)

I do think the idea is good though, just needs to be obvious how it will work when used and how/when it will fail.

I haven't, but it sounds honestly really bad. Sounds like it sucks for everyone right now. I just think your product will make it worse, probably only very slightly worse but still worse.

Surely this now means now hiring managers (and people your code incorrectly identifies as hiring managers) now get spammed with loads of bullshit generated messages. Which obviously they'll ignore. But now you've made their jobs a bit harder by breaking a previously (maybe) working communication channel.

So you've put a effort in to build a product just to make the world slightly worse on net. Not hugely worse, but still it doesn't seem like the best way you could have spent your time.

Yes, but how likely were you to spend tens of thousands of dollars or more on software?

This sort of article seems perfectly poised to be useless to beginners (no context, doesn't tell you how to use the things) and experts (no nuance, just listing basic features) alike. Who is it for? Why does it exist? Why is it posted here?

There are a finite number of names, and an even smaller number of good names. But apparently an infinite number of hacker news posters who comment on every new project to complain that the name has been used before for something else.

And even the fact that this is a fork of an earlier project and the name comes from that doesn't stop it!

(I'm aware I have chosen a very weird thing to be getting annoyed at over my breakfast crumpets this morning)

Weird that a gambling app would take thename of a popular character from legend!

Or maybe not, try actually naming something sometime and you'll see. It's not easy to come up with something that fits all the requirements AND has never been used before.

And it's not like anyone is ever going to get confused and accidentally try and use Dropbox's internal load balancer to buy options on a stock or something. Or try and make a gambling app the star of their next hit movie for that matter.

Coins used to be largely worth what they were worth because of what they were made of. So cutting them in half would lead to two seperate halves of the value. I'm sure there's more nuance than that but broadly I think that's how it used to work.

Not your comment specifically, you're one of many saying FUD.

Honestly if you accept that the comment was talking about real tradeoffs then I'm a bit baffled that you though it was FUD. It seems like an important thing to be talking about when there's a post advocating moving away from PaaS and doing it all yourself. It's great if you already knew all about all that and didn't need to discuss it, but just stare into the abyss of the other comments and you'll see that others very much don't understand those tradeoffs at all.

I run a business that is a long long way from a stock exchange or a payment processor. And while a few minutes of downtime is fine 30 minutes or a few hours at the wrong time will really make my customers quite sad. I've been woken in the small hours with technical problems maybe a couple of times over the last 8 years of running it and am quite willing to pay more for my hosting to avoid that happening again.

Not for Heroku, they're absolute garbage these days, but definitely for a better run PaaS.

Plenty of situations where running it yourself makes sense of course. If you have the people and the skills available (and the cost tradeoffs make sense) or if downtime really doesn't matter much at all to you then go ahead and consider things like this (or possibly simpler self hosting options, it depdns).But no, "you gotta run kubernettes yourself unless you're a stock exchange" is not a sensible position.

You really think that, incredibly lukewarm, argument for Heroku is so extreme that it could only have been written by some kind of undercover shill?

The fact that HN seems to think this is "FUD" is absolutely wild. You just talked about (some of) the tradeoffs involved in running all this stuff yourself. Obviously for some people it'll be worth and for others not, but absolutely amazing that there are people who don't even seem to accept that those tradoffs exist!

If you find the idea of electromechanical arcade games delightful (and why wouldn’t you?) and you’re in London then I’d highly recommend visiting Tim Hunkin’s Novelty Automation Arcade (https://www.novelty-automation.com/). They’re all hand made with a satirical sense of humour, just so much fun to see and play with. And check out Tim Hunkin’s YouTube channel for his Secret Life Of Arcade Machines series where he shows you how they work (https://youtube.com/@timhunkin1?si=fwjrx87fUwNAFJ29). and while you’re there his Secret Life Of Components and his classic Secret Life of Machines (his BBC TV series from the late 80s) are worth a watch too.

evil-mode has existed for years ;)

If you’re somewhere with a tech scene then go to meet-ups. It’s so much easier to meet people and build a network in person. Don’t be the pushy guy looking for work, they will instantly turn people off and they’ll remember that about you. Just be friendly and get to know people and talk about technical stuff. You want to be the knowledgeable helpful person who is easy to get along with so that when someone is looking for help you’re a natural person to recommend.

I don’t know how it is these days but I used to get a huge amount of work through the monthly “seeking freelancers” threads. I’d just post my ad and get a bunch of enquires every month. You can probably find some of those ads if you look back through my post history.

Having a website can help especially if you do something that’s currently hot. I got loads of work by being on the first or second page of google (not even top of the page!) for “[technology] programmer in [town]”. React Native was definitely one of those technologies for a little bit around here, but that changes so it’ll be a little bit luck and a little bit judgement in making sure you describe your self the right way.

Even sites like upwork (rentacoder was the site that was current last time I did this) have worked for me in the past. My strategy then was to be amongst the most expensive for any project and wait for the people frustrated with low quality cheap workers wanting to try the other end.

Do keep in mind that a large part of the “job” of being a freelancer is networking and marketing yourself. It requires constant attention even when you do start to get work (a common pitfall is to get some work and stop looking, then it ends and your back to square one). If you’re not willing to make that as much a part of skill set as the stuff you’re hoping to get paid to do then I wouldn’t recommend freelancing. But if you are happy with that it can be fun and varied and not a bad way to work!

The solution to certain types of programs not being suitable to write in it is just… don’t.

I did various bits of freelance work on VVVV projects a while ago. Often writing C++ or C# code to interface with VVVV. Even when I was mostly stuck in the guts of the C++ bit having a test rig in VVVV was a lovely way to interact with and test code.

As far as I remember it’s absolutely simplicity to create a node that contains custom C# code (double click it and an editor window pops up). I definitely remember doing that for bits of logic that seemed easier to express that way.

I saw people build very cool stuff in it back then. If you’re building interactive visuals the “always live” way of working seems to allow some pretty fast iteration. Definitely saw things built in it that maybe would have been better built in other ways, but that’s just natural when you have people highly skilled in one tool or language.

I was a bit concerned about the cut-over from the old database on Heroku, really wanted to minimise downtime. So they helped me produce a step by step plan, test as much of it as possible, then had an engineer join me on Zoom while I made the switchover. They were even able to accomodate doing it in the early morning in my timezone to minimise the impact. Ended up with maybe 5 mins of downtime which I was very happy with.

My experience with going from Heroku Postgres to Crunchy Data (specific Crunchy Bridge) has been really good. Their product has been absolutely rock solid but what really made the difference was their support. They provided a huge amount of pre-sales support while I planned the move (and even suggested mitigations for the problems I was having with Heroku Postgres to make moving less urgent). Post-sales support has been just as good, though mostly I don’t even have to think about the database hosting anymore.

I also moved my app hosting to NorthFlank from Heroku and have been really happy with that as well. It’s got the features I always wanted on Heroku (simple things like grouping different types of instances together into projects really helps) plus again excellent responsive support.