topcat31

Oh so this is just a pdf with links embedded so you can jump around? That's pretty neat (and a very slick UI for creating and buying them!)

Lol yeah there's lots of ways to do this - and I'm sure I'm breaking a bunch of formal web design rules. But eh, this figma workflow is easy and fun :)

What about something like bindery.js?

https://bindery.info/

I love this writeup! I'm not a developer but am very interested in "small databases" on the web - there was a good discussion around my post on this on HN last week. The magic of small databases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558054

Hey OP here, just wanted to say thanks for all the comments (goats and all). There's lots I still need to learn about (actual) databases as a hobby developer...

In the meantime I've made a big update to the Airtable with links to tools, examples and further reading:

https://airtable.com/shrYY94GrqVB4HUsi/tblHPrdomiPbLpod6/viw...

Electric Tables V0.1 discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30089895

Electric Tables V0.2: https://tomcritchlow.com/2022/02/07/electric-tables-v2/

"We propose that web sites can be similarly augmented with other sophisticated data-centric functionality, giving users new benefits over the existing Web." - gonna check this paper out!

Reminds me also of this amazing project that also deals in structured data and tables: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/wildcard/

Some use cases that I'm already using it for even in the limited state:

* Making topic-focused lists of articles. e.g. researching a particular topic just grab a bunch of URLs and stick them in a table

* Real estate research - grabbing a bunch of locations and adding them to a table, but where price and image are auto- grabbed (and adding notes)

* Making a list of gift ideas

* Making a running list of music I want to check out

These are mostly simple bookmarking use cases.

What I *really* want to be able to do is publish these lists (either as HTML or as JSON endpoints) and collaborate on them with others! But that requires building a server and login etc that all feels a bit beyond my coding skills.....

The video I made with Tella: https://www.tella.tv/ - very neat

I'm not entirely sure that Electric Tables is quite so grandiose as all that but I appreciate the sentiment!

As for CSP - I'm not technical enough to really understand why it needs to exist or how it might be re-architected but as a hobby coder I love it when things are extensible / hackable and CSP seems to be a pain in the ass!

This was a real question FYI. I don't know what that means.

Googling "Making sure /usr/local/bin is in my $PATH" leads me here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19202007/making-sure-usr...

So I fire up the terminal and write echo $PATH and then go back to SO to see that it looks like it's all set up correctly. But why do I need to go to SO? Why do I need to fire up the terminal? It just feels too damn hard and too opaque.

I think defaults and documentation and onboarding matter. Not to mention a GUI :)

Mentioned Glitch and Replit in the article - they're great and I love them but there's still something missing about relying on these platforms imho. I think cementing a default coding environment right into the browser would make it a lot more accessible - and actually be much closer to real coding where you're manipulating files and running code.

Plus: glitch/replit are quite slow to do any real coding inside of vs developing locally.

But maybe the future really is in the browser in this way.

Yeah I love Replit and Glitch (not used the others) but I still think there's something missing. They don't feel like standards that are easy and simple to use. Two more points:

https://twitter.com/tomcritchlow/status/1349839954558427136

Firstly - good catch. I updated the link.

Secondly - I wish I could get ScrollToTextFragment to work reliably. I've tried integrating this into Quotebacks and every time it just works so sporadically that I roll it back. Somehow Google thinks this is robust and stable enough to put into production but my experience is very hit/miss.

You're right! Just fixed it. Good catch.

We're working on a FF version! Turns out porting the chrome one is fairly straightforward. Watch this space!

Also - thank you Github pages & Cloudflare for keeping my site up through a HN bump.

Author here - thanks for all the comments and feedback. Lovely surprise to wake up to this on the HN homepage.

Some light additional context - this is part of my ongoing series "The Strategic Independent" which will eventually become a book sometime next year. All the posts in that series are catalogued here: https://www.are.na/tom-critchlow/the-strategic-independent

This post (and the whole series) is designed for independent consultants, free-agents and freelancers who have to navigate entering and exiting client environments often faster than full-time employees. Hopefully there's something useful in that context but many of these ideas could be applicable beyond that also.

Anyway - thanks for the love. If you have topic suggestions for future posts in this series would love to hear them! Thanks, Tom.

Author here: yes I have an email list here (infrequent) that I'll post a message to once chapters 3 and 4 are ready: https://tinyletter.com/tomcritchlow

Author here - Yes I would definitely recommend reading Impro over reading my blog post.

The basic premise for this series is inspired by the book and I definitely borrow more directly and heavily for chapters 3 and 4 (which aren't quite ready to publish yet!).

Author here - yeah I hear you. I love the hypothesis interactions when they happen on my site but the UI is a little aggressive (especially on mobile). All about tradeoffs unfortunately.

FWIW I posted a little UX teardown of the different annotation platforms here if you're interested: https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/12/annotations/

Hi, I'm Tom the author of this piece (thanks gk1 for submitting!). I'd love to hear what others here at HN have struggled with regarding labels and identity. I imagine there's a huge spectrum of possible labels for developer-types from "freelance python developer" to "software architect" to "engineering consultant"...!

Nice idea! I imagine that 90% of your sales (if not more) will come from wholesale. I think I saw you were reaching out to co-working spaces and so on but I'd ensure you're speaking with conference organizers, hackathon organizers etc etc.

The biggest problem there is that they will likely want their sponsors on the stickers rather than your set of startups...

Maybe you flip the model on it's head - get the startups who are on your stickers to finance the stickers and then offer the package for free to consumers. It's basically free marketing for these startups - maybe you share the customer's email address with the startup too in return? Feels like a small investment from each of the companies but you might get more orders that way?

just some thoughts

Cool idea! A few random ideas and thoughts that may or may not be useful:

1) seems like a perfect complement to something like mattermatrk: http://mattermark.com/ perhaps try reaching out to those guys? They offer startup tracking so pairing it with this fantasy-investment style game could work well.

2) learning from fantasy football - perhaps you get people to sign up in groups and compete against each other with new money being released into the pool each month/quarter?

3) you could bring people back into the app when the startups they have invested in get in the news? This would involve building a lightweight RSS-scraper and some logic but might not be too hard and would add a nice feedback loop for the product.

4) maybe you let people use (small amounts of) real money to invest in the startups, and let people buy and sell their investments? Kind of like a second market platform? this would make it inherently more compelling for people to stick around but it's almost certainly a lot more work to build...

Sorry dan, I stepped away from my computer for a few mins (crucial mistake!) glad there's another thread going on. I'll up-bump!

Great! I love serendipity. As the other comment said - can you share early progress? Maybe HN can help! Or email me and I'll take a look :) Always happy to help out (also I used to live in London so might be able to connect you with folks)

Ha, yes indeed I wasn't quite expecting an international audience from HN to swing by when I wrote it! Local is indeed Brooklyn, NY.

Actually, a 3D fabricating shop that did custom framing is not at all a bad idea. It costs a lot of money to frame things well and if you can do custom dimensions using robots you might be on to a winner!

I agree - I'm very lucky to be on the homepage but a monthly HMO post would be a great idea.

I like this idea - explicitly trying to cross-pollinate ideas from programmers to arts folks etc etc.

Thanks dude! I'll reach out to them. Not sure if they'd look at us as competitors but I'll try and make an intro

That is exactly what I'm proposing :) but I'm also proposing that it's helpful to always have this list top of mind so if you meet someone IRL and they say "let me know how I can help" you can give them some specific ways they can help.

I find it really works for serendipity!