ishanr

Everything about the book publishing industry is antiquated.

I wish Amazon focused on books instead of ecommerce.

The real disruption of books haven't really happened.

I thought eBooks and digital books would get us there, but it simply hasn't changed anything.

The Steam (valve software) of books hasn't happened yet.

Seeing that aqua scrollbar fills me with such joy. This is when tech was joyful and fun. I think what happened to the scrollbar is such a reflection of our industry as a whole. A microcosm.

I want to try this, but unfortunately there are just too many Electron applications on my computer now.

I literally cannot run anymore without slowing everything down.

This is something which other software makers need to start considering.

There's actually limited RAM now on machines.

Codex and Claude Desktop both are gigantic memory hogs. And they leak memory all the time, but they provide value which is quite high.

Add in a couple of editors and the GitHub app. And then the actual browsers. And it actually stops me from downloading any more electron apps.

Could this be made into a native application?

I am working on a ebook reader which uses AI to make reading easier and has a built in book club to talk about the book as you read it and once you are done.

Basically I am building it for myself as some books are hard to read, and if I can substitute a paragraph or some sections with an ELI5 version that would get me through a lot more books and may it so much fun.

And I love chatting about books and that is half of the fun for me, so I am building it in the app itself.

Using Tauri and Rust for all of this because I don't like slow apps.

Will also build mobile apps next once I am done with the desktop versions as I like syncing where I read etc.

If you think Canada is the answer then let me stop you right there. Canada's problems are only increasing and while there are no school shootings there are stabbings and homeless problems are increasing everyday along with not a lot of competition so high prices for everything, rising house prices, rising grocery prices and lastly, healthcare is completely falling apart with no access to healthcare for months or years unless it is a complete emergency.

The delivery piece can be email for sure but the discovery / browsing piece is harder to do through email.

I use supabase as our backend for https://sudopad.com and recently crossed 1000 shared links. Has been pretty stable for me. The only thing I am waiting for is the ability to call a subabase function on db change.

I use RLS quite heavily for my app Sudopad (https://sudopad.com) and it has been working quite well so far.

One gotcha specific to Supabase (where I run the backend) is because there is no anonymous login in Supabase, turning on RLS and using database functions marked as security definers are the way to go. Otherwise there is no easy way of stopping a 'select * from x' since some rows might not have a user_id if they are anonymous and I still want people to access the row if they know a specific primary key uuid.

Thank you. I'll add the edit functionality shortly. I'm glad simple bookmark sharing is something that you like. After building it for just my friend, I see more and more use cases for it. Someone is already using it to share links with their classes.

Yes adding it would be trivial. Right now I just add the new link with a note. Would it help your usecase?

You could. Maybe not slack but google doc you can. But it just feels not built for this purpose. Along with the extension I'm developing this would let you share with 1 click and get notified in realtime if you want etc. It's a more purpose built app I guess.

Pad url aliases would be nice to have. But I would have to gate it behind a login so that there are no clashes. Would you be ok signing up with a magic link for such a feature? Then you could name your pad with however short of a name you want. Without a login, even a short UUID would be random characters and hard to speak over the phone.

Well why not. I can definitely see it can be useful. I just added it. Should be live. It's text field. So you can also write long notes if you want. It's up to you.

Oh that is actually shynet self hosted analytics which is privacy friendly. https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

But I think I'll just remove it for now.

Update: removed

Interesting. Can you kindly let me know your browser and os?

Huh. That is so strange. Your ideas about the browser extension is exactly what I have in mind. Ill post a link on sudopad once it is ready. I was going to build a Firefox extension first since that's what I use. Does that work for you?

Ya that's a nice side effect I didn't think of. Thanks. I also use browser bookmarks a lot so I just bookmark one board for a friend and another for family.

Yes exactly. Our company works remotely so often times I want to share something that I have read with my friends and talk about it later.

Do you see yourself using sudopad then?

Anything which would make it even better?

Aah yes that is pretty cool. Puts the link in the body and the title in the subject.

Well should have used that more!

I do like a board which I can search later though and also multiple boards for different friends and family etc.

share via the browser itself to your email client

How do you do that?

Thank you.

Imba is a real pleasure to work with. I have only good things to say about it. It brought back the joy in web programming for me.

There were a few places where the compiled down JS to Imba was a bit hard. But when it got tricky I could just compile that single file and see the results. Overall it was pretty straight forward but also my app is pretty simple.

And here is one of the components:

import supabase, { UNIQUE_VIOLATION_CODE } from '../constants' import normalizeUrl from 'normalize-url' import './links-list'

tag pad-page

  loading = false
  links
  err\string
  newUrl\string

  def routed
    fetchLinks!


  def fetchLinks
    loading = true

    let {data, error} = await supabase.rpc('select_links_from_pad', { pad_id_input: route.params.id })
      .order('created_at', {ascending: false})

    loading = false

    if error
      log error.message
      return

    links = data
    imba.commit!

  def addLink
    if newUrl
      const {data, error} = await supabase.rpc('insert_link_into_pad', {
        pad_id_input: route.params.id,
        url_input: normalizeUrl(newUrl, {defaultProtocol: 'https:'})
      })

      if error..code == UNIQUE_VIOLATION_CODE
        err = 'link already added'
        setTimeout(&, 3000) do
          err = ''
          imba.commit!
      elif error
        return

      newUrl = ''
      links.unshift(data)

  <self>
    <div[mt:5]>
      <label[mr:3]> 'add a link'
      <input
        [bg:red4 c:white]=err
        type='url'
        bind=newUrl
        @keydown.enter=addLink
      >
      <button[ml:1] @click=addLink> 'Add'
      if err
        <p[c:red5]> err

    <links-list loading=loading links=links>

Hi HN,

My closest friend only uses email and over the years I have grown tired of writing a heading and a body every time to share something with him.

So I built this very simple link sharing board which generates boards with uuids and as long as you know the uuid, you can see the links on the page and add new links.

It is built with Imba (which was fantastic) and Supabase as the DB. Deployed on Netlify.

Sharing in case there is someone else who might find this useful.

Try https://notik.app. It merges a project overview and a very simple and easy to use project management model. Also if you email me at contact@notik.app I can personally help you get started.

Hi all,

This format of a 1-pager is quick and easy to write. I went through a few versions of successful versions at my previous company.

It is completely free, you can bookmark the page and print whenever you want.

That is why I am building notik.app. Having worked at big tech, I have taken the essence of scrum: single person responsible for a project, weekly updates, clear success metrics and delivering incremental value, and removed the bs which surrounds it.

Oh and tie it with lessons learnt from other projects and suddenly you're in magical territory.

That's great advice. I am going to create a dummy account so that it clarifies the tools main features.

Hey HN! I am the creator of Notik.

It is a lightweight project overview app. It helps with breaking knowledge silos in your organization and cross pollination of ideas and solutions.

I built it using the most common things which actually matter across all of the successful projects I have ever been a part of.

If you have a lot of silos in your org where different teams are repeating the same mistakes across space or time, this will solve it better than any other tool in the market.

That's why I created https://megatorium.com/

YouTube is too random and uncontrollable.

I am pivoting https://megatorium.com/ from a wide open Youtube competitor to a niche and nerdy video site.

The kind of videos people have uploaded already:

1. Old playstation gameplay and tweaks 2. Insane workflowy productivity sequences and hacks 3. Music production done with off the beaten track equipments.

These are the kind of videos I love to watch and luckily these are the kind of videos which have a hard time finding traction on Youtube these days.

Also switched to Linode and Dokku instead of Heroku and deploying with Github actions.

Still transcoding the videos manually with FFMpeg so that I can play around with the sizes and make sure it looks good instead of building something at this stage.