ashryan

My 8yo discovered my Playdate about 6 months ago and she loves it. She did crack the handle off of the crank though, so fragility might be a consideration...

We love our Playdate. Admittedly, when I first got the Playdate, it was a bit of a flash in the pan for me, possibly due in part to not having many games to try while Season 1 was trickling out. But since then, my daughter has reached the age (8) where she can really enjoy it, and that has pulled me back into it as another thing we can share together.

The achilles heel of the Playdate is screen brightness. There's an awkward sweet spot where you need to pour light onto the screen for it to be viewable but simultaneously avoid reflection from the light source. I guess for younger eyes that's less of a problem. But for me, I've had plenty of scenarios where I considered playing and then realized it was going to be impossible to comfortably set up a lighting environment.

I have clip-on lights for books. Maybe I should get one for the Playdate. Has anyone had success with that?

Thumbs up for Wispr Flow. Their iOS app was just released last week, and is an interesting addition to the product.

I needed to do an inventory of stuff in our house over the weekend, and I used Wispr Flow on iOS to take a very very long and rambly note in their app. Then the transcription text appeared on their Mac app, ready to be pasted into ChatGPT for parsing.

Wispr Flow handles languages switches quite well in my experience using it in both English and Japanese.

Woah!

- Manual option for max heart rate

- Manual zone bound settings

Really excited for these.

I’m realizing that this app prescribes HR zones that are quite a bit different than what Apple Fitness has for me.

Instead of a calc, I’d like to be able to manually set the zones so I can match them with the zones I’m used to working with.

This is a really cool idea.

You mention it being scriptable, which makes sense as a CLI. Do you have any personal examples of using Lexy in a script? I'm curious about use cases outside of reading.

Excited to try this! I just started zone training a couple of weeks ago as a way to target VO2 Max increases. I’ve indeed found it hard to track time in zone across a week.

Thanks for building this!

More of this kind of thing please.

Also... this put PostHog in front of me right as I'm looking for a few things they seem to offer. The marketing-gimmick-to-thing-you-need flow was so on point it's kind of suspect.

What's the general consensus on them? Any PostHog users here that can share their impressions?

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"Congrats - you've made it into Forbes 30 under 30. You scored 5 / 8."

As is evidenced by my score, you can't just select the tech bro each time and win.

Mermaid is fantastic as a portable I/O format for LLM context. I spent some time discussing entity relationships with an LLM recently, and had it produce a Mermaid diagram to wrap up the conversation.

Once you have the diagram code, you can use that as an artifact for new LLM chats related to databases, APIs, etc.

I'm not sure what the history of mermaidchart.com specifically is, but I'm guessing it's new since the ER diagram docs are marked as "coming soon":

https://docs.mermaidchart.com/mermaid/er/syntax

I'm curious how this plugin compares to Markdown Preview Mermaid Support: https://marketplace.cursorapi.com/items?itemName=bierner.mar...

Congrats Kilian!

Polypane made a massive difference in getting our startup's website shipped a few months ago. I highly recommend it for entrepreneur-devs.

I've been organizing a weekly morning coffee session in Astoria, Queens for the last 2 (or 3?) years. The morning coffees are connected to our local tech community's series of meetups, but they aren't hyper-focused on tech and they don't have an agenda. Just a chance to meet neighbors.

It's really been beneficial for me and my family, who aren't from here, to get to know more people in the neighborhood. These days I feel like it's a rarity to go outside without bumping into someone we know.

It's also been awesome to see friendships and even collaborations form among people in the group.

I recommend people give it a shot wherever they live. And if you're in NYC, come visit!

I'm going through the process of unpacking a prototype into a product roadmap. We just came out of a meeting to kick off architecture discussions/decisions when I saw your post.

A couple of questions:

- Do you have anything online that shows what Accord ADRs look and feel like?

- How are you thinking that Accord will plug into tools and workflows a team might already be using in the PDLC/SDLC?

Love all of these RSS resources. Thanks for sharing!

Last week, I spent a couple of hours at a local hack event putting an RSS aggregator[1] together for our community. Just something fun to do.

One thing I realized when I deployed is that Substack gives a 403 if you try to read their RSS feeds from a GitHub Action. The only obvious workaround to me is to pull the content on local periodically, commit it, and then deploy. But I'd much rather have this site updating itself via GitHub Action and cron.

Have you run into this situation before?

[1] https://github.com/astoria-tech/subcurrent-astro/

I'm not sure if I understand the question, but I tend to refer to these kinds of services as either:

- Value-added hosting providers

- Value-added infrastructure providers.

My personal mental model for them is that they take lower level cloud offerings and build on top an opinionated on-rails experience for common stacks.

So their services come with a higher price tag, but with a streamlined developer experience.

It's really going to depend on what you want to host and how you want to interact with it as an admin.

For Node app hosting, I've been enjoying Render over the past year or so. But it seems like opinions on them are mixed among the HN audience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42832696

If you look at that thread, you'll see comparable services mentioned as well, like Fly.io, Vercel, etc.

But if what you want to host is a WordPress site or just a Linux server, the options to consider are going to be different.

Bookmarked. I came here to see if DSL was on the list. :)

There are always exceptions, if building this software has some competitive advantage, go ahead.

Good callout. There are no hard rules but it's nice to have this sort of sanity check to anchor the conversation in "why", which should tie closely to:

Generally, developers at small to midsize SaaS companies shouldn’t build any software that doesn’t directly help them deliver a service to their customers.

My understanding is that these aren't really intended for much more beyond prototyping/MVP'ing.

I can't speak on the others, but I've used v0 a fair amount over the last year and have been happy with it as a prototyping tool. But the delta between the kind of UI it seems designed to generate and what, say, a designer working from user-centric first principles might come up with is huge.

I actually went through such an exercise where I prototyped something with v0 as part of an internal pitch. The prototype was super helpful in getting stakeholders engaged. Once I got a UX designer on board, they designed the concept from the ground up, and we tossed the v0 design and code completely.

This was the process working as intended. The prototype played an important role in getting something good shipped; it was not itself the end product.

At least today, I imagine v0 could be great for internal tools that would otherwise not get any UX love at all. But as far as shipping an app to external customers, I haven't been in a situation where I saw that as a viable path.

I'd rather something like this either:

1. Work outside of the browser altogether (i.e., be built as an app for the OS), or 2. Integrate directly into the service it is targeting (i.e., G Suite add-ons, etc.)

I may be in the minority.

1. Install Amurex from the Chrome Web Store

Wishing the project well, but this is where it stops for me unfortunately.

Are there any similar tools that aren't browser dependent?

npm download numbers are always exceptionally inflated. I'm sure that number serves some purpose, but I've never found them to be a useful metric when I've worked on public packages.

An ancient post [1] for the defunct npm blog offers some details:

So the count of “downloads” is much larger than the number of people who typed “npm install yourpackage” on any given day.

I'm sure the particulars have changed over time, but directionally, npm download numbers aren't a proxy for "# of developers using my package".

[1] https://blog.npmjs.org/post/92574016600/numeric-precision-ma...

The lack of control I would have over the data trail is why I've never used any of these services. Since I've never used them, I'm not really sure what's under the hood in terms of user experience and underlying technology.

So here's an uninformed question:

Is there a hope in hell we could ever have "air-gapped" genetic testing at home?

This is so pushing happy buttons for me.

Not that this is novel in any way, but I just started a repo call Subcurrent yesterday for the Astoria Tech Meetup in NYC at our Saturday hack session. Subcurrent aims to provide a feed aggregator page made of our community members' feeds. https://github.com/astoria-tech/subcurrent

I did not know that Meetup.com exposes RSS feeds at all, so I will be adding that to our Subcurrent instance since our group keeps events on Meetup.com.

I had never heard of Kill the Newsletter, but I'm a fan sight-unseen. Substack at least has feeds. You can append `/feed` to the newsletter's URL.

Thanks for writing this!

In my NYC neighborhood, we seem to be going through a whole slew of businesses closing shop within the last year and change.

One obvious reason is rent hikes.

But as one of my favorite local bars was closing, one of the staff mentioned that insurance was really starting to kill them.

We don't live in a flood-prone part of NYC, so I'm curious: is insurance for retail space really going up dramatically across the board in NYC, or was this a single, subjective understanding of a situation?

Counterpoint: finding things in System Preferences has never been a good experience. This isn't new at all, so I don't understand what "become" is attempting to imply here.

That doesn't in any way justify the poor state of searching through the settings, but it feels like this tweet is the result of pent up frustration.

On one hand, I hardly touch a search engine any more. On the other, it's still a fairly common occurrence that I can give someone out in the world their ChatGPT experience.

I'm super curious to see how this ("the end of internet search as we know it") plays out with non-techy users. I strongly suspect that Google is "search" to many non-techy users the way that Internet Explorer was "the internet" to that same group.

Which I suppose leads to an obvious answer: device defaults will absolutely dictate what ends up being the go-to.

I just came across American Experience for the first time over the last week. What I've seen so far is incredible.

This is their YouTube profile: https://www.youtube.com/@AmericanExperiencePBS/featured

Unfortunately, the doc you mention isn't on there. They do have the transcript on their site tho: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/chicago/

I'd love to hear about what tools you're using to accomplish these outcomes :)

This is fun!

I don't have a Remarkable so it's not clear to me how the file gets to your server. Are you sending it directly from the Remarkable or connecting a Remarkable cloud account?

Currently hugged so I can't read the article, but I can only wonder how this compares to the batting average of any given R&D effort. 20% of projects succeeding on a cutting edge technology might be pretty good, no?

It’s an interesting thought experiment. For some reason, phone use in the gym just doesn’t bother me as much as it does some other people.

The trouble with an anything device is that it’s often hard to tell from across the room what the device is being used for. And there are certainly legitimate use cases in a gym.

Thinking through mine, the hardest ones to give up would be:

- Workout tracking: eventually this has to happen in an app because my trainer reviews the data async. I could carry pen and paper and transfer later, but I would lose the benefit of 1) easily browsing my history and 2) having handy weight conversions of my history when I travel.

- Communicating with my trainer when one of us is late. I realize this wouldn’t be necessary in an ideal world, but in reality it’s pretty important.