newswangerd

Buf is well established and maintains a lot of protobuf packages for many languages, including the YAML implementation for go.

This is incredible news! I’ve used protobuf in Python, Go, Kotlin and Dart and the Python implementation is totally unusable. I don’t know what black magic Google uses for the Python implementation, but the classes it generates are totally opaque and impossible to inspect. I’ve been waiting for a proper python implementation for years now!

Using AI to inform architecture doesn’t seem so different from googling architecture in this case. Architectural patterns are mostly well understood and well documented these days and are something that you could piece together via Google search pre AI. The thing that AI brings to the table that wasn’t google able in the past is code generation. Previously you had to understand the architecture patterns to implement them yourself, but now the AI can just do it for you.

All so that they can lose this accumulated knowledge during the next round of layoffs.

Good gravy... I hadn't even considered that.

I assume end to end encryption would help mitigate this. Breaking E2E encryption would require a client side update that could be hard to implement if the company has already gone belly up.

I admit that vibe coding was kind of a clickbaity way to frame this, but I couldn't think of a better way to describe it. That might just underscore my ignorance in this domain.

One problem I personally have here is that I write code as a way to reason through and think about a problem. It's hard for me to grasp the best solution in a space until I try some things out first.

Here’s another question. Has anyone been able to get an agent to produce reliable high quality code?

My first experience with it was a year ago and the tests it produced were so horrendously hard to maintain that I kinda gave up, but I imagine that things have gotten a lot better in the last year.

I'm still trucking away on Digital Carrot (https://www.digitalcarrot.app/)

It's a cross platform productivity app that lets you block apps, websites and games until you reach a set of verifiable goals such as walking 10,000 steps, physically going to the gym or finishing all your tasks on your to-do list.

I just finished the Android version a few weeks ago!

There was a project at Ansible that aimed to address this kinda thing when I worked there. The idea was to write policy as code definitions that would prevent users (or AI) from running certain types of automation. I don’t know where that project ended up but reading about this makes me think that they were on to something.

I was thinking about ways for the app to receive webhooks, but being able to send webhooks is an even better idea! I'm going to start writing down some thoughts for creating generic webhook triggers. That should also work for zapier (and possibly IFTTT) as well.

How do home assistant sensors work? I've thought about adding a webhook capability. Would it be something like that?

I would also love to hear what kinds of plugins the HN Community would like to see. At the moment I'm thinking about the following:

- Github: this would allow you to set goals based on reviewing PRs, closing tickets, reading GH notifications etc.

- Homelab/Zapier/IFTTT: this would allow some kind of funny things like turning off lights or locking locks if you don't complete your goals. I don't have any smarthome stuff, so this would be hard for me to personally build.

- Notion/Obsidian/Jira/Trello

- Google/Apple Calendar: this could help people focus on meetings instead of (for example) scrolling HN

I'm working on something like this for Android. My goal is to build a system where plugins can selectively block parts of apps based on a set of rules. I can't promise that this will end up making it into the final version because the Android documentation states that the accessibility APIs may only be used for accessibility tools, but it's what all of the other app blockers on android do so fingers crossed they let me do it as well.

This would also be possible for desktop, since I'm using browser plugins to block websites on Desktop at the moment. I don't think that this is possible on iOS, but there may be APIs that could enable something like it that I'm not aware of. As much as I like Apple's commitment to privacy, the way that they've locked down a lot of their APIs has been a real thorn in my side for enabling some of these more advanced use cases.

At the moment pretty much everything automatically resets at midnight, including any timers. It's not an issue for me since I rarely stay up past midnight, but I did notice one problem where my step goal reset on New Years eve and I wasn't able to watch my sleep videos on youtube because of it, so I'd like to find a way to make this more configurable.

I would LOVE to be able to open source this project at some point, but I also want to be able to make a living off of maintaining it. I've been reading up on some source available licenses such as Polyform, which can contain clauses that trigger the code to go open source at some point. If I get some traction, I'd really like to make a similar commitment where we will open source this in X months/years. Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing? Is this a good idea?

I'm a former Red Hatter, so I'm all too familiar with the revenue hits a product can take when they go open source, but I have no ambition to turn this into a big business, so I think that should be acceptable (unless revenue dips to zero).

Western auto makers are getting slaughtered by Chinese competition outside of the US (and maybe the EU? I don't know what the EU tariff situation is). I have a Chinese EV. It was half the price of an equivalent Tesla and better in every single way. Build quality and reliability have been excellent. I've driven 60,000 km with zero battery degradation.

It's just sort of amazing how badly the west dropped the ball on green tech. We're also working on importing an off grid solar system from china that will easily be a third of the price that we'd get from a US supplier.

One interesting thing that people don't realize with regards to the US tariffs is that a lot of goods flow through the US on their way to international markets. For a long time it has been easiest for us to buy stuff made in china from vendors such as Amazon in the US and have it shipped internationally from the US. Now with all of the tariffs we end up getting double tariffed for doing this (once when the goods enter the US and a second time when they ship to my country). As a result I'm seeing more and more people looking for ways to buy from China directly.

Yeah, I'm implementing a couple of things to make my life easier in the future. I don't use any github APIs and I'm setting up my clients to load the plugin repo URLs from my server so I can change them later if I need to. I want all of the resources my clients need to come from my domain name so I can move it around if I need to.

It’s always humbling when you go on the front page of HN and see an article titled “the thing you’re doing right now is a bad idea and here’s why”

This has happened to me a few times now. The last one was a fantastic article about how PG Notify locks the whole database.

In this particular case it just doesn’t make a ton of sense to change course. Im a solo dev building a thing that may never take off, so using git for plug-in distribution is just a no brainer right now. That said, I’ll hold on to this article in case I’m lucky enough to be in a position where scale becomes an issue for me.

As someone who has been stuck with an email address I created when I was 13, this would certainly be a welcome change!

I’m curious about this too. I’d worry about a local burglar having this information, but what can a Chinese tech company do with this data that I should be concerned about?

I was counting the ESTA. I don’t have any experience with it, so you’ll have to pardon my ignorance.

Canada, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau. A very weird assortment of countries, aside from Canada.

https://www.passportindex.org/comparebyDestination.php?p1=us...

I’ve always argued that the US is the most powerful passport despite not granting access to the most countries for one simple reason: it’s one of only half a dozen passports that lets you visit the US visa free.

I'm so impressed by how quickly this team can ship new features. It seems like every few weeks there's a new major update!

The funny thing is that I would be totally willing to pay for a license if in exchange for no ads and no needing a Microsoft account.

Huh, I submitted this article last week when it came out and it didn’t get any attention at all.

This demo is super cool! I’ve been dreaming about a game with an engine like this for the last 5 years. Super happy to see people experimenting with it!

Would it be possible to do both on a single panel? In other words, put photovoltaic cells on the sunny side and thermoelectric generators on the shady side.

This is very cool! I'm going to take a look at your code.

I've been playing with the idea of creating a "protobuf db" library that would allow you define schemas in protobuf and then query them with something akin to an ORM. It wouldn't make any sense for large databases, but for embedded applications that only need to store a few MB of data, it would be perfect.

I've never heard of ConnectRPC before! Will check it out.

Yeah! I'm using a gRPC daemon on PC and go mobile bindings on mobile.