Hacker News: sephoric

Show HN: Open-sourced high quality automation API and IDE for Mac

sephoric — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 23:31:13 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/apandhi/Autumn

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19559562

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by sephoric in "Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore"

sephoric — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 19:01:35 +0000

I had room fulls of boxes of things that I thought might one day be important, or significant to someone. Then I realized, when I die, all those things are just going to be thrown away or donated to a thrift store, and it's highly unlikely that anyone who buys any of that will find the same value in it that I thought it had. If I have created anything truly timeless and worthwhile, then it had better be something I created for a client and got paid for making, otherwise it's just going to probably end up in a garbage heap. So I made a decision to get rid of all of it. Time is too short to be held down by the (truly) endless possibilities of "what if" this or that thing ends up being useful to someone in the future.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 18:56:08 +0000

Aside from my other answer, the local library has internet access, so I'm able to use AWS as needed.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 18:51:37 +0000

You'd be surprised how much documentation you can download. And the ones that are hosted on sites, those sites are often just git repos that you can clone. A few of them (like webpack.org) are trickier because you have to build the static site while online, but then you can run it offline (via python -m SimpleHTTPServer). There's tons of little tricks like this you can use to get documentation for pretty much anything you need. Not to mention Zeal (open source Dash clone) for tons of other things, Win32 API has a CHM file, and actual books at the library work great like for Python or C++, which often have the whole standard library in them, or at least most of it. And it's always a pleasant surprise when an NPM module bundled its thorough README.md file right into the package file (and often even more docs than that), and sometimes even the original source code, so that all I have to do is run `code node_modules/webpack-dev-server` and press Cmd-Shift-V (to preview .md file as Markdown in VS Code) and then it's as if I'm right there on their GitHub page. Also Safari has an amazingly useful feature of saving a page exactly as-is into a single file that can be opened in Safari, instead of saving all the external files into a sibling folder like Chrome does.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 18:43:04 +0000

It's self sufficiency I want for our family, and those features discourage that. My kids' schools don't teach them many things anymore, including reading an analog clock. I'd rather my children know how to buy a map at a gas station and read it to get where they want to go, or do most simple math in their head instead of using a calculator. Alarms are built into most clocks made today, even (perfectly good) ones you can buy for $3 at a thrift store, and most microwaves have timer features. Using an app for ride sharing discourages phone (or text) conversations that are naturally able to lead to many unexpected places.

At the end of the day, I look at it this way: I'm able to live a full and happy life without a smart phone, the only thing I'm missing is the ability to call someone. That's where a phone comes in handy.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 18:37:00 +0000

Or they try to not use those features but get sucked back into it, like I did the many times I tried exactly that. I wonder how many people there are who wanted to live a life like this but because such a phone doesn't exist, they keep getting pulled back in and have to abandon having a phone altogether.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 18:35:22 +0000

It is a lifestyle I'm forcing on my kids, and that's intentional. Kids don't always know what's good for them, and confuse wants and needs. It's a parent's job to create a safe and healthy environment where their kids can grow and thrive. We used to live the kind of life where video games and TV were "bonding experiences" and it just created all sorts of problems inside them. With this lifestyle, I see those problems vanishing one by one. And they all see it too and are happier now.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 21:40:35 +0000

Which model did you buy? Does it have an internet browser or apps?

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 21:33:01 +0000

It looks like you mean the M5 phone, which from what I researched, used 2G towers and thus no longer works since those have all been decommissioned. It also seems to be cheaply made and commonly have a ton of problems.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 21:25:13 +0000

I have that exact phone and it has a browser built in. It's lower quality than usual but it's good enough to waste a few hours with.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 21:24:15 +0000

I have seen those at Best Buy, the most popular is called the Jitterbug, which does come with a browser.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 21:19:26 +0000

That looks over engineered and still not as simple as it could be. Think of those cell phones in the 90s that had a single line (or two) of spaces for text, and they had no features but calling and texting. That's perfect, it has literally already been invented, it just needs to be resold, and perhaps put in a pretty package again, but not like this. Not like this.

New comment by sephoric in "Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?"

sephoric — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 21:12:15 +0000

I'm at my local public library which has wifi. It's also how I download new NPM modules, email my client, deliver my work to him, etc. But I do 90% of my work offline at home.

Request HN: Can Someone Make a Dumb Phone for USA?

sephoric — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 20:56:02 +0000

Last year I shut down all our internet services for everyone in my home (me, my wife and our kids), so that all we have now are a landline and radio, no internet or television or texting or TV or anything. Our lives have become significantly happier since then. We have so much more time to do anything we want, we feel so much less overwhelmed and distracted, and we're starting to live full, active and fulfilling lives.

But we would like to text and make phone calls while on the go, without the constant temptation to be connected to emails, Facebook, and browsers all the time. So I have been searching the web for a month looking for a "dumb phone", a phone that doesn't have anything but text and phone, not even a "home screen". Something like you would see in the 90s. But it just doesn't exist.

Maybe there's no market for it, but maybe there will be one if you make it and market it well. And that's what you guys are good at.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548128

Points: 30

# Comments: 37

New comment by sephoric in "Show HN: Autumn (macOS window manager) is going open source"

sephoric — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 15:42:59 +0000

If anyone takes this over, here's a patch of what I was working on last: https://sephware.com/autumn/innertabs.patch.txt

Show HN: Autumn (macOS window manager) is going open source

sephoric — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 15:09:52 +0000

Article URL: https://sephware.com/blog/2019-03-25-autumn-macos-window-manager-now-open-source.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19483138

Points: 13

# Comments: 2

New comment by sephoric in "Sway 1.0"

sephoric — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 22:27:04 +0000

I fell into this same trap with Autumn (https://sephware.com/autumn) because it's such an abstract concept that it's hard to explain all that it can do. First of all the term "window manager" is overloaded and many people thought it was just like i3 or dwm but for Mac, but it was actually a lot like Slate or Hammerspoon. But also, just like Hammerspoon, it's incredibly versatile and allows you to do a whole lot more than "manage windows". I tried to use visuals to fix this problem, namely a video and a lot of screenshots, but I don't think it helped. The fact is that I'm terrible at marketing (despite decades of trying to get better), and I just have to admit that. Well that and the fact that apparently nobody ever wanted or needed a "window manager with an IDE built in" product, and so I also suck at being a PM apparently.

New comment by sephoric in "Notepad++ drops code signing for its releases"

sephoric — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 17:33:09 +0000

The days of custom software are over in general. Every major niche has at least one major player that offers its services for free, selling your data (or ads, etc) in exchange. I'm not sure Sublime Text gets any money anymore now that VS Code does all the same things and more. Custom music players have been dead since Winamp 3. The 1990s and 2000s were like the Wild West for software, now it's like California, fully settled and complete with monopolies.

New comment by sephoric in "Why 80s BASIC still matters"

sephoric — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 19:16:57 +0000

I can tell you from experience, PICO-8 has enthralled all my children, especially my oldest, with how little is required to make a really cool game like Jelpi. Every time we realize yet another cool thing you can do with just cos, sin, and atan2, we're always floored. Maybe we're simpler people, but my children were aware of modern video games and web apps, and somehow they still are fascinated by it and the oldest one has mastered it by now.

New comment by sephoric in "Alternatives to JSX"

sephoric — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 15:43:58 +0000

The project "create-react-app" is a good mixture of #2 and #3 that I have been using for almost a year with almost no issues, it's just a generally great way to use React. The only issue I had is that, even though all your configuration is "for free", you don't really get new features right when they come out. But you get them after their configuration has been polished up, so that you don't have to shave all the yaks yourself.