Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to React Code - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! We're Jared and Gabe (YC W18), the founders of Pagedraw (https://pagedraw.io). Pagedraw is a UI builder that turns mockups into React code.
Pagedraw lets you annotate mockups with extra information (like how to connect to the backend, resize for different screens, etc.) to get full, presentational, React Components. They're React Components just like any others, so they can be interleaved freely with handwritten ones. They don't require any new dependencies and work well with any existing JSX build system.
You can import the mockups from Sketch or Figma, or draw them from scratch in Pagedraw.
Working as full stack devs, we constantly had to do this translation by hand. It was our least favorite part of our jobs, since the creative work had already been done by the mockup designer. It's so repetitive and mechanical that we decided to stop hand-coding divs and css and write a program to do it instead.
There have been many attempts to automate this stuff in the past. For 20 years, people have been trying to solve the problem with tools like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and so on. Broadly speaking, they tended to fall into one of two buckets, each with their own problems.  In one corner are tools like Dreamweaver, which can produce correct code but have to expose some of the underlying HTML model, making their users play a puzzle game to do something as simple as move an object around. In the other corner are freeform design tools that generate position:absolute code.  That doesn't work if you care about working on different screen sizes, or reflowing the layout around variable-length content as simple as "hello <username>".
We think the problem is that you have to look at it like a compiler. Past tools never fully worked because they tried to unify two fundamentally different mental models: the designer's mental model of a free form canvas like Sketch or Photoshop, and the DOM's mental model of <div> followed by a <p> followed by an <img> and so on. What always happens is one of two things: either the computer's mental model is imposed on the designer, or the designer's mental model is imposed on the computer. The former results in a clunky design tool, and the latter results in position:absolute.
What we do instead is recognize that these are two fundamentally different models. Designers work with Sketch by saying "put this button at this pixel". We can let them do that and still generate flexbox code without positon:absolute, and let everything resize and reflow correctly. Pagedraw does it by inferring constraints from the relative geometries in the mockup. For example, if object A is to the right of object B, we infer it should always remain to the right, regardless of resizing or content reflowing. Sometimes, the developer does have to ask the designer about their intent regarding resizing, which is why Pagedraw also needs you to annotate that information.  We then compile those constraints, inferred and annotated, into HTML layout mechanisms like inline-block and flexbox.
It turns out that a lot of other nice things follow from a compiler-like architecture. For one, we separate codegen correctness from codegen prettiness by cleaning up the generated code in discrete optimization passes. Another is the ability to easily retarget for AngularJS, Backbone, React Native, and so on by just swapping the compiler backend. We even have some nice editor features that fell out from hacking a Lispy interpreter onto our internal representation.
We're excited to see what you all think and hear about your experiences in this area! You can try it at https://pagedraw.io/ <comment><USER2> I'm a designer, so definitely interested in this. But I got a 'Sorry, our editor is optimised for Chrome' message.

I'm using the latest version of Firefox... what features does Chrome have that FF hasn't?

I get it's early stage, so you might have just done a blanket 'If not Chrome show message' check.

If the latest version of FF can support, I would do a more fine grained check.

Will check with Chrome later...

<comment><AUTHOR> We had a good conversation about this before down at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468276).

tl;dr: would you like the Electron app instead? It's available at [https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/](https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/)

It was tough for us, because we're big believers in the standards-based web. We 100% promise that all the code we generate works across all browsers.

Our editor was almost electron-only, but felt it was better to launch with Chrome + Electron than just Electron. Our editor isn't a normal webpage; it's doing all kinds of crazy nonstandard things webpages shouldn't do. It's only in the browser at all so we can re-use a web engine as our editor's rendering engine, since we occasionally show you snippets of compiled code.

I'm personally really sorry as an engineer that we don't support Firefox, Safari, and other browsers yet. It's on our roadmap :)

<comment><USER3> Do you mind sharing some of the primary reasons this is required by your editor?

>all kinds of crazy nonstandard things webpages shouldn't do

<comment><AUTHOR> \- until recently, there wasn't a universal cross-browser API for pinch zoom support. Not sure if that's still the case.

\- we do a lot of work with the selection/focus browser API, which doesn't always work the same / have the same APIs

\- until recently, Firefox had a different opinion about where an outline should go wrt positon:absolute children

...and what seems like a million more little things. We decided it was more practical to do Chrome + Electron (basically the same) than try to cover every browser where the standards don't exist or aren't met, since we're touching a lot of surface area and weird corners of the browser.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I think it's a good decision, it seems like a classic example of needing to recognize sometimes going against conventional wisdom makes the most sense given particular circumstances, like gaining critical mass in a start up. As to where the right decision might be different for a later stage company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm absolutely a believer that some form of this app will be the future of programming, probably with a touch of Eve, some AI, etc.

I'm also looking at this problem, but coming to it from a different angle. I'm not a designer, and I'm not at home in Sketch. I'm looking at developers that can take a very well designed and coded HTML page, where the designer themselves has built the interaction design in whatever they feel comfortable in. I'm looking at a model of taking those pages and adapting them in a similar way, into React - or other framework - driven applications.

This comes later. I'm starting with a simple template language that can capture a component-driven design in quick to iterate, programming-in-the- large style. The compiler builds both a backend app which renders HTML that's ready to be infused with reactive goodness without an unsightly flash of re- rendered content.

I'm a one-person show, cranking out a playground site which is now open at [https://playground.isymtope.org](https://playground.isymtope.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Love the recursive self-hosting! Where can I read more?

<comment><USER4> I need to update the doc site, but the source is at [https://github.com/tmzt/isymtope](https://github.com/tmzt/isymtope)

You should have seen it when the iframes all tried to load in the nested view, I counted probably six deep! ;)

I wonder if there might be a good meta format for a reactive-component AST or intermediate language which could be target different frameworks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool! I particularly like the integration between the web app and the CLI. That seems like a clever way to solve the "browser sandbox border" problem between projects that are edited in the browser yet need to be represented in the file system constantly.

I've worked on React Studio ([https://reactstudio.com](https://reactstudio.com)), which is pretty similar. We also used the compiler metaphor to describe it. The original codegen targets were iOS + Obj-C and Android + Java, and later we built Tizen + C (at a customer's request on their bill) and then React + JS in an attempt to reach a larger audience through a free app. My regret is that we ended up with a sprawling native Mac codebase at a time when a lightweight cloud solution would be more suitable for the average interested potential customer. Oh well. It seemed like the right choice back when generating Xcode projects was the target...

If you don't mind the question, what's your monetization strategy? Right now Pagedraw looks to be completely free, and that's where we ended up with React Studio too. Business-wise, the only thing that's sort of worked for React Studio has been to make customized enterprise editions for large customers. I'm curious if you have something in mind that doesn't involve enterprise sales hell :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Have you fully consider the Designer's side of this? I feel that to be successful and bridge the gaps between those two mental models you also need to onboard the designers so they can help with generating the right type of mockup (or at least the kind that will help a developer using Pagedraw get the closest to a 1 to 1 code export).

The reason why I ask is that I tried importing several semi-complex but not uncommon (structure wise) files and I got an error saying that I should make sure that the file is correctly formed.

That right away is bad UX. If the designers need to reformat or change the behavior of their files, then they need to be part of the user journey. Right now there's nothing of that as far as I can tell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pagedraw doesn't impose any organizational requirements on your Sketch files! You're right that requiring certain structures is bad UX; we agree and care deeply about following that principle. The incorrect file formatting error means we don't recognize your upload as a Sketch file at all.

Probably a bug on our side. Could you try emailing the Sketch file to email@example.com and we'll see if we can debug it?

<comment><USER6> Cool. I can't really send it because I'll be violating the infosec policy of my company (I was already violating it trying to upload it, lol)...

I feel that eventually, you will need to set a certain standard. Not because is required on your side, but because this is how every designer/developer relationship should work. People just don't know how to do it because there's no standard or methodology. Think how horrible would be if developers didn't have Git to collaborate... Well, that's basically the state of developer- designer collaboration. I think with this product you guys are in a good position to help solve this problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is cool, but ultimately I think the dream of developing bespoke applications without having to code will be just that ... at least until the singularity occurs and artificial life forms take over the job of building APIs and presentation layers.

Having said that, this looks like it could provide a great starting point for development.

Do you see this product as a tool for developers or a tool for designers to publish their creations directly to the web?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I completely agree. Thanks for posting this, it needs to be brought up in any conversation about code-free tools.

Pagedraw is not a code free tool. It never will be. I don't think it's possible either.

Programming needs to happen in language. Even if you did something like Scratch, (to which I prefer typing,) you still need the arbitrary constructs of language in order to express whatever you want.

Pagedraw is not programming, which only works because we don't really think HTML and CSS are either.

You will absolutely still need to write code to make novel algorithms and custom business logic until the AGI revolution comes. Pagedraw is meant to be used side by side with code implementing the business logic, state management, and anything else novel about your app. Pagedraw will take over more and more of the non-turing complete parts.

Today, with Pagedraw you write state management and API code just like you did before.

> Do you see this product as a tool for developers or a tool for designers to > publish their creations directly to the web?

Yes. Both, eventually :) Today the product is a strict replacement for HTML and CSS, so it's something a developer would use to bring designs into production after the designer's done with them.

<comment><USER7> > Pagedraw is not programming, which only works because we don't really think > HTML and CSS are either.

I'd beg to differ; I don't think the scenario is as clear cut as you suggest, because there are a huge number of ways of developing FE for a design. Lots of compromises inevitably need to be made, and lots of choices need to be taken.

Humans are great at filtering and choosing based on experience, instinct and an understanding of industry norms / best practice .. and are able to continuously update their 'mental model' of the options available.

Having said that, tools that help to take the repetitive strain out of developing for FE are a great idea. I just wouldn't look to such a tool as a panacea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a UI/UX guy, ReactJS/JSX is a very high bar for us to cross. I have tonnes of Sketch/Figma files ready to be wired, as a JS newbie, JSX is too complicated for a Designer mind to understand :-) Any hopes for a beginner friendly language like VueJS or Webcomponents (AMP Pages/Polymer).

The tool has great potential, if u can address the UX market than the dev market. Devs have many many tools they wont give up, but we do not have any hybrid browser based tools which can take a Figma/Sketch and wire it with logic (maybe Ionic Creator)

<comment><USER9> Since you like the idea of wiring Sketch designs with logic, but you want a solution created for a UX designer, it sounds like you'd like Haiku. We're in the same YC batch as Pagedraw. [https://www.haiku.ai/](https://www.haiku.ai/)

Haiku focuses on connecting UX designers with developers through shared version histories (git & npm), on a foundation of animated & interactive code components. Haiku supports Vue, plus React, native iOS and native Android.

<comment><USER8> Oh yes, I signed up on day0 and finally scored an invite few weeks back. Coming from Adobe PPro/AE motiongraphics background, it was so exciting to see a timeline based tool.

But I primarily viewed it as micro-interaction & animation tool (like Lottie or Rubberhose) - didnt think of it as a UI interface builder. I didnt know it can do Vue. I'll fire it up again to see how I can use it as a lively UI/Interface Builder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I created a text field, deleted it, and added another ending up with a slightly mis-defined UI element.

The name in the UI is Text 4, the prop is text3 and the css class is text_4.

That said, I'm totally in love. Can I just ask for Typescript generation, please? (UPDATE: My god it's already there in the full version - Thank you!)

<comment><USER10> I've installed the pagedraw-cli app but am getting crashes because my project is on the D:/ drive and it's inheriting the drive specifier and looking for my C:/users folder under D:/users. Super excited to go deeper with this.

<comment><USER10> Thanks to PageDraw crew for helping with this... looks like it's a bug in the upstream netrc package used for persisting user credentials locally. Workaround for now is to copy your project to the C:/ when playing with the command-line version of pagedraw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really awesome idea! Excited to try this out.

> Working as full stack devs, we constantly had to do this translation by > hand. It was our least favorite part of our jobs, since the creative work > had already been done by the mockup designer. It's so repetitive and > mechanical that we decided to stop hand-coding divs and css and write a > program to do it instead

This is definitely repetitive and annoying, just to add another data point to your own. I think people fundamentally want excellent WYSIWYG tools, it's just that the implementation leaves a lot to be desired usually (e.g. Frontpage). Really glad to see someone take another swing at this.

Quick nitpick: One of the links on your homepage ("Learn more") is broken ([https://documentation.pagedraw.io/worfklow](https://documentation.pagedraw.io/worfklow), looks like it's missing a trailing slash)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Just fixed the link :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Sorry, our editor is optimized for Chrome

Internet Explorer all over again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey sorry about that! Could an Electron app work for you instead? We have some betas at [https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/](https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/)

<comment><USER13> My Mac won't open it, is it because I need to change some preference or because its an unregistered app?

<comment><USER14> You can open it by right-clicking and then clicking "Open" instead of the regular double click, because it's an unregistered app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A similar tool already exists for mobile native & JS: [https://www.yotako.io/](https://www.yotako.io/) It does the same without annotating designs, in fact you don't need the intermediate editor with Yotako...

</comment><comment><USER16> Why don't you support Firefox?

> You can import the mockups from Sketch or Figma

How do I import Figma designs? I tried the Sketch import, doesn't work through that.

Excited to use this. Congrats on your launch.

<comment><AUTHOR> We haven't launched the Figma integration yet, (it's behind a config flag,) but it's coming soon! Sketch should be working today. Could you email us at email@example.com if it's not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm really curious how accurate the tool generates responsive designs. I feel like, it would have it's limits.

It would be helpful to know what those limitations are before spending too much time and only to find out it won't work for us.

<comment><AUTHOR> For sure, thanks for pointing this out. We have [https://documentation.pagedraw.io/why- not/](https://documentation.pagedraw.io/why-not/), but we're trying to be clearer about how exactly our layout system works with [https://documentation.pagedraw.io/layout/](https://documentation.pagedraw.io/layout/).

We give you controls to annotate your design with layout behaviors. The css we generate is 100% accurate to the constraints you specify, but our constraint system doesn't capture 100% of desired layouts (yet!)

We have 2 ways for you to control responsiveness: A flexbox-y constraint system, and media queries (Screen Size Groups). They're roughly the same controls html/css give you, though hopefully presented in a cleaner manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really really like that you used VSCode's monaco editor.

Dunno how possible it is, but I would definitely pay for a vscode plugin to have a native app like experience.

Design -> Code is definitely a big problem. Creation time is one, but updating should be easy too.

Also I would love a reverse, code -> Design output as well, so it's a two way tweaking experience, where both design and code are always in sync. i.e React -> Sketch

<comment><USER14> All credit for the monaco editor to our awesome friends at Stackblitz (stackblitz.com). Gonna announce the depth of that partnership soon ;)

Native VS Code integration is already here! The "3 screens" you see (design, code, preview) are just there for the demo— only the design editor on top is part of Pagedraw. You get to use your regular text editor (VS Code included), and localhost env if you use the full version and install the CLI [https://documentation.pagedraw.io/cli/](https://documentation.pagedraw.io/cli/)

> Design -> Code is definitely a big problem. Creation time is one, but > updating should be easy too.

Updating is super easy if you do the updates in Pagedraw. Since everything is component based, you should never touch the generated code. All the code you write goes in adjacent components that import and are imported by Pagedrawn components. You never need to roundtrip, because you never need to edit the generated code

<comment><USER18> We have a ton of components. And our sketch files have slight mismatches. So I wondered if it could do a two sided sync.

Code accounts for so many states that sometimes design doesn't account for. Error, loading, empty, too many items, network disconnected etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I work at a shop that has to turn around a lot of simple SPAs very quickly, and a tool like this, if it works as advertised, could be a godsend. I will definitely be trying this out at some point in the next few days.

<comment><USER14> Awesome! Email us at email@example.com if you have any questions. Excited to see how it turns out for your SPAs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You talk a lot about the compiler backend. Suppose we use a different UI library other than the big ones like React and Angular. How can I plug in my custom backend ?

Do you have plans to open source the backend ? So devs over time can make it even smarter for all sorts of use cases ?

Open source and profitable are orthogonal things. You can still be profitable and build a solid product with a raving community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely! I'm glad to see this is on other people's minds :)

We're huge on backwards compatibility (and think everyone should be), which is why we don't want to expose something we haven't stabilized yet. We'll have a way to export our just-before-codegen internal representation (shame on me for forgetting the PL term) once it settles down a bit. It's very much like a DOM, so there's not too much craziness there.

We'll be launching a bunch more backends in the coming weeks, so there's a good chance we'll have first-party support for your favorite framework anyway :)

<comment><USER18> Will be definitely be looking out for it.

This is a great first minimum delightful product. Good job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does it work with incremental Sketch imports?

I often get a new version of a sketch file now and then and would need to import that new version while keeping/updating the old components I already have

<comment><AUTHOR> You can keep working on your Sketch file after importing it into Pagedraw. Subsequent uploads will merge your changes in Sketch with your edits in Pagedraw.

We're pretty proud of the mechanism (it fell out almost for free from our live collaboration mechanism!) and will almost certainly blog about it when we have time.

[https://documentation.pagedraw.io/sketch/#bring-in-future- in...](https://documentation.pagedraw.io/sketch/#bring-in-future-incremental- updates-from-the-same-sketch-file)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks really cool! If it actually generate nice code, it will be awesome! I'm gonna play with it this weekend!

How does it work with CSS?

<comment><AUTHOR> You never have to write CSS for a Pagedraw generated component. If you must use custom css, you can mark a block in Pagedraw as a handwritten component coming from a designated file. In that component (done entirely by hand, outside Pagedraw), you can of course use whatever CSS you want. Pagedrawn components and handwritten components play nicely together; the CSS we generate shouldn't interfere at all with the CSS you write by hand for non- Pagedraw components.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Doesn't work on Firefox

<comment><AUTHOR> This was tough for us, because we're big believers in the standards-based web. We 100% promise that all the code we generate works across all browsers.

Unfortunately, while most of the editor works in all browsers, getting full support is really hard. We're doing a lot of things that get pretty deep in the browser, so we wanted to lock things down as much as possible.

We almost were electron-only to ensure consistency, and can still give you the electron app today. We felt it was better to launch with Chrome + Electron than just Electron for an optional installation-free experience, which is why we only support Chrome.

I'm personally really sorry as an engineer that we don't support Firefox, Safari, and other browsers yet. It's on our roadmap :)

<comment><USER23> As a basically-everything-except-Chrome user, I'm increasingly skeptical of excuses this. There's almost certainly some feature(s) that you've spent a lot of time on that provide less value than having the app working in Firefox and Safari.

As soon as I saw it was Chrome only, I closed out.

<comment><USER24> On the other hand think of it from their perspective if you want your odds of success to be higher you have to focus on the biggest user base, simple 80/20\. I doubt that an additional feature vs friefox support is a fair comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> shawn-butler >> Another is the ability to easily retarget for AngularJS, Backbone, React Native, and so on by just swapping the compiler backend.

I couldn't find any reference to this in your documentation. Exactly how easy and/or do you have any samples projects I can check out? ReactNative would be my primary use and I assume alot of other potential users as well.

<comment><USER14> Right now our compiler has 4 different targets: JSX, CoffeeScript, Javascript (React.createElement), and Typescript. Support for React Native, Angular, and others is coming soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is awesome I hope a company like Webflow considers buying you out or building something similar.

</comment><comment><USER26> I design in code ... grab a bootstrap template and quickly design/code in the browser via Inspect element; save it as I go along.

What are front end devs so busy with nowadays that they dont have the time to code the UI?

<comment><USER27> Probably meant for designers, not so much devs.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's best for developers working together with designers. If you're a solo designer, you don't need to push an app to production (or I'd consider you a developer), so you're probably perfectly happy staying in Sketch or Figma. As a developer, I really don't like having to translate my designers' work into JSX and CSS, so Pagedraw can do it for me!

If you're doing both the code and the design, and you like to design via the inspect element tab, then Pagedraw may not be for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice work!

This is really promising for bridging UI/UX and programming.

The paradigm seems right to this javascript dinosaur.

Hopefully some day it can work like Visual Studio Design View where a non UI/UX programmer can produce a quick mockup and have it actually work without worrying about knowing intricacies of XAML.

Interesting bug/glitch: Just by clicking a few controls in MainScreen, the generated mainscreen.js code produced really deep nesting divs.

We are talking about divs like this:

when nothing really had changed on the screen.

</comment><comment><USER29> Congrats on the launch guys! Really excited to play around with this.

<comment><USER14> Cool! Let us know what you think =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Looks really nice.

Can I get this on my desktop? (In other words: Can I work on this from a plane?)

I don't see anything about pricing in there, so using a web service (and having to log in...) to use this, I'm not super happy about. Balsamiq has a good system: They have both a desktop and a web version, let you import/export between the two, and charge you for licenses and online storage.

[edit: And furthermore, if you do a desktop version, you can also do it as a vscode extension, that'd be super cool]

<comment><USER31> seems like you can get an electron app if you're on mac or linux: [https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/](https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The robo dog asking me if I know John Connor is giving me bad vibes. I do like what I see. I don't understand the demo though what am I supposed to do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah! I didn't even know we had Terminator quotes in there. Our adorable little Pagedog's inspired by a different... uh... buuuurp.. uh, high concept, sci-fi comedy universe ;)

Did you get to [https://pagedraw.io/tutorials/basics](https://pagedraw.io/tutorials/basics)? It's the button in the first section that says "Continue to demo"

<comment><USER32> Yeah I did. I like it. I just can't afford the 2k a month price :( I wish there was a yearly individual license for say 75$/month

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is very cool and a very tricky problem to solve. Will you support webcomponents one day? Also, please hire a designer :)

</comment><comment><USER20> React-Native-Web plz :D

<comment><AUTHOR> coming soon! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am impressed, but it really needs to be portable across all major browsers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds phenomenal - hopefully you can spin up a few more servers so the home page will load under all this interest :)

UPDATE: the tutorials just loaded... looks AMAZING!

</comment><comment><USER35> This looks cool! Have you thought about pricing yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We'll always be free for students and for making projects that are open source, and we'll have a subscription plan for teams at companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't see a "add yourself to a mailing list" form on the home page.

You should definitely have one so I can follow up with updates on the product.

<comment><USER14> You can just sign in and you'll be automatically added to our mailing list. Of course you can also unsubscribe at any time if you want!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Tough question: How will this get distribution? How would I find out about it without reading Hacker News?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sign up and tell your friends about it! We'll email you product updates :)

We haven't thought too far beyond HN + word of mouth. How would you do distribution?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Amazing product. We've been using at Qulture.Rocks and it's helping us a lot.

</comment><comment><USER10> Typescript support? (Please)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's there! The main demo link goes to a simplified version of Pagedraw for the walkthrough, but if you sign in and use the full version from [https://documentation.pagedraw.io/install/](https://documentation.pagedraw.io/install/), you can choose between JSX, CoffeeScript, Javascript (React.createElement), and Typescript!

It's the same mechanism we'll use later to let you choose between React, Angular, React Native, ERB, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is Vue support planned?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, depending on demand. Get your friends / coworkers to message us if they need it too

<comment><USER39> I second this, mainly because the Angular to Vue transition is more straightforward than going completely to React, so would be of more immediate help to more people.

Also I think that Vue is arguably more straightforward than React in the minimal model-view one-way binding use case. Whereas React is a subset of the more general functional reactive programming model and will probably be outpaced at some point with something language-agnostic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm a Pagedraw customer, and I'm really excited to see their HN launch! Congratulations, team! :)

</comment><comment><USER41> Awesome project!</comment>


SmartWatcher – the ultimate personal safety app - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartwatcher.com <comment><AUTHOR> Imagine being able to call for help by pressing a button on your watch. That is the basic premise of SmartWatcher. "The beauty of our solution is you don't need special hardware - just an app for your smartwatch or phone" says CEO Morgan Cohen, a Dubliner who founded the Zurich-based company. Cohen studied computer science in Dublin before moving to Silicon Valley to join his first startup, and now lives in Switzerland with his family. Apple Watches are selling very well, and it's likely they appearing under many Christmas trees this year. But a lot of people are unconvinced as to why one of these newfangled watches would actually be useful! One genuine use is personal safety: a smartwatch has the perfect form factor since it's always there on your wrist and is quickly reachable. Someone experiencing a medical emergency such as a heart-attack usually does not have the presence of mind to make a phone call, or even be physically able to do so. However the same person could probably manage to press their watch. In the case of domestic violence, or teenage bullying, the SmartWatcher solution has another advantage - discretion. Triggering an alert can be done without anyone noticing. But the system is more than a sophisticated panic button. Smartwatcher Technologies has developed Continuous Safety Monitoring. Once activated, the app periodically asks you to confirm that you're safe. In case you don't confirm yoursafety, the members of yoursafety network will automatically be alerted. Continuous Safety Monitoring is perfect for walking home or exercising at night, visiting dangerous parts of town, or whenever you feel unsafe. SmartWatcher is available in app stores, and the main capabilities are free of charge. Those wishing to avail of advanced features like Continuous Safety Monitoring pay a small fee via an in-app purchase.</comment>


Weight as Main Measure of Health May Be Misguided - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/health/19well.html?em

<comment><USER2> This article is so ridiculous: _"Why is it such a stretch of the imagination", he said, "to consider that someone overweight or obese might actually be healthy and fit?"_ You're not going to be maximally fit if you're obese, I think everyone knows that.

Summary: BMI sucks when measuring overall healthiness. A jacked-up bodybuilder could have 6% body-fat but be labeled "obese" under BMI standards.

Also, this treadmill test they're doing is a classic method used to measure someone's Vo2-Max, except for Vo2-Max you're hooked up to an apparatus and get pushed until you fail. So it's at least a pretty decent indicator of overall fitness.</comment>


PipelineDB v0.9.9 – One More Release Until PipelineDB Is a PostgreSQL Extension - <AUTHOR> https://www.pipelinedb.com/blog/pipelinedb-0-9-9-one-more-release-until-pipelinedb-is-a-postgresql-extension <comment><USER2> PipelineDB is pretty interesting for time-series data. It takes an approach to processing the data as it comes in, and storing aggregates or pre-aggregates over time series. I haven't followed the latest, but as of a few years ago much of the approach was similar to some research out of UC Berkeley from about 10 years ago. You can find the paper that talks about that work (TelegraphCQ CQ for continuous query) at [http://db.csail.mit.edu/madden/html/TCQcidr03.pdf](http://db.csail.mit.edu/madden/html/TCQcidr03.pdf). Definitely an interesting read if you're into technical papers and databases.

<comment><USER3> Druid also does this, with pre-aggregation of streaming data along predefined dimensions for very fast cube-based analytics. It's not a relational database though and is just now getting a SQL interface through Apache Calcite. [http://druid.io/](http://druid.io/)

Imply is a startup with a modern cloud/on-prem distribution of Druid with a built-in visualization and querying tool: [https://imply.io/](https://imply.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't know the product at all, at a glance this looks amazing to be for BI/alerting on streaming time series data.

Anyone who wants to chime in on whether this has fit your requirements for time series data processing? Thanks!

<comment><USER5> If it's a Postgres extension for time-series data, I wonder how it compares to TimescaleDB, which I recently discovered and have been evaluating.

<comment><USER6> I don't know TimescaleDB but PipelineDB is more about real time constant aggregation. You can do like a rolling sum that's has many inserts a second for a very long time, and the speed of retrieving the sum and inserts remain pretty constant.

<comment><USER7> Hi there! I'm one of the PipelineDB founders. This description is correct. The unique thing about PipelineDB is that it doesn't store granular data. Once all aggregates are incrementally updated, the raw input rows as discarded and only aggregate output is stored.

This approach dramatically limits disk IO and long-term storage requirements, and enables super high performance in most cases on modest hardware.

PipelineDB has been used in production for nearly four years now and is used by Fortune 100 companies.

<comment><USER8> So once you make it as an extension, any chance to mix PipelineDB with Citus in one cluster?

My hunch says that it's possible as far as there is some additional computation done with the future aggregate query on the coordinator in Citus.

PPDB looks interesting, but we also need to keep the underlying raw data and multiple clusters require more complex pipeline.

<comment><USER7> We haven't looked too far into integrations with any existing systems at this point, but if there was significant user demand for it on both ends we'd definitely be open to it.

One thing I will mention here is that we do have plans to add support for persistent streams [0] after version 1.0.0 is released. We've learned a lot over the years about how our users/customers interact with streams in production and persistent streams will be built atop that foundation of understanding.

Please feel free to comment on that issue with your use case, requirements, etc. and we'll see what we can do!

[0] [https://github.com/pipelinedb/pipelinedb/issues/1463](https://github.com/pipelinedb/pipelinedb/issues/1463)

<comment><USER8> Persistent streams are interesting, but we spent years refining our ETL and building it around Citus, that it would be very complicated to separate those two. I will wait for the extension and do some testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This would be absolutely perfect for the job I had in Sales Intelligence a few years ago... except we were locked into SQL Server and there was no way the powers that be would ever let us switch over to PostgreSQL.

<comment><USER3> SQL Server 2017 has in-memory (hekaton) storage engine and columnstore indexes. Combine them both and you can do the same thing with real-time queries over the entire dataset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is storage model compared to timescaledb [0]

[0] [https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb](https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb)

<comment><AUTHOR> The storage engine for PipelineDB is PostgreSQL and the output of continuous SQL queries (continuous views in PipelineDB) is stored in what are essentially incrementally updated, realtime tables. You can think of PipelineDB as very high throughput, incrementally updated materialized views, also.

see: [http://docs.pipelinedb.com/continuous- views.html](http://docs.pipelinedb.com/continuous-views.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Correct me if I'm wrong, but PipelineDB gives effective access to data in commit order right?

</comment><comment><USER12> can't wait for support on RDS!

<comment><USER13> FWIW, AWS has a whitelist of Postgres extensions you can use in RDS so that'll probably take more time, if it ever happens.</comment></comment>


A brief history of manned spaceflight - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/04/human_spaceflight?fsrc=rss <comment><USER2> <http://www.thespacereview.com/article/184/1></comment>


Tardigrades are so tough, they can survive outer space - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth <comment><USER2> I found a tardigrade while using my microscope to look at pond water. Man, they look funny and dopey and move around very clumsily. Not exactly what you'd think would be the toughest animal around. I would have put my money on rotifers.

<comment><USER3> Your comment made me understand that I've never seen them moving.

I've found this video [https://youtu.be/F5fg64rmFHE?t=15m19s](https://youtu.be/F5fg64rmFHE?t=15m19s) that shows them.

My mind is so blown. They are so small but so animal like... !

<comment><USER4> Nitpick: Tardigrades _are_ animals.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, meant mammals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just the other day I read a fascinating (to me) Quora reply to the question "What can happen if a human eats a water bear (the most resistant living organism), or gets a water bear in their blood stream?"

Short answer: it gets dissolved in the stomach acid and dies.

Long answer here: [http://www.quora.com/What-can-happen-if-a-human-eats-a- water...](http://www.quora.com/What-can-happen-if-a-human-eats-a-water-bear- the-most-resistant-living-organism-or-gets-a-water-bear-in-their-blood-stream)

<comment><USER6> Off topic question: What kind of nutrients does a _spoonful_ of tardigrades provide? Would water bear farming be useful or just silly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "They are never more than 1.5 mm long, and can only be seen with a microscope"

Confused - I can see things that are 1.5mm long. Some sort of editing mistake here, I think.

<comment><USER8> The average individual is usually 0.3 to 0.5mm, 1.5mm are giants. And though they're described as barrel-shaped, they're not as wide as they're long.

The main problem is they're close to translucent, so bigger individuals can be visible with good vision and the right light, but it's not exactly trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks cool, but the page seems to freeze Chrome within a second or two. Chrome could learn a thing or two from Tardigrades.

<comment><USER10> Put some water on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So this is interesting:

        It's not just the harsh environs of outer space that
        tardigrades can survive in. The little critters seem adept
        at living in some of the harshest regions of Earth. They
        have been discovered 5546m (18,196ft) up a mountain in the
        Himalayas, in Japanese hot springs, at the bottom of the
        ocean and in Antarctica. They can withstand huge amounts
        of radiation, being heated to 150 °C, and being frozen
        almost to absolute zero.

I'm having a hard time seeing how the ability to survive in such high and low temperatures arose via natural selection, especially the ability to survive at near absolute zero while in the tun state. Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could not have arisen via environmental pressures, at least not directly.

<comment><USER12> > Such a condition obviously does not exist on Earth, so this feature could > not have arisen via environmental pressures, at least not directly.

Doesn't need to arise directly, it may be that the adaptations that allow you to survive -50C are the same ones that allow you to survive -200C.

Also there is Exaptation where one trait for one set of circumstances later adapts to serve another set of circumstances - the classic been feathers, they evolved as a method of keeping warm and later where later co-opted for flight.

<comment><USER11> This seems the most likely explanation, but it is still extraordinary. Being able to survive in cold is one thing. But being able to survive being placed in liquid nitrogen for an extended period of time? That's incredible.

<comment><USER13> I dunno, have you looked into the human suspended animation with sulphur? A layperson could say: "wow, it's amazing the humans adapted to go into suspended animation when exposed to the cold and an atmosphere of sulphur!" It's not really something we adapted to, it's just another accident of our biology. [https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation](https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation)

All life is a hack! All organisms are just pushing the minimum code change to get a leg up on everything else. Loopholes are everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The tardigrade image in the banner at the top is... freaky. Like a Monsters Inc. monster wearing one of those HAZMAT suits they have to wear in case of child contamination.

<comment><USER15> This is who I think of:

[https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2665/4048198665_d9b03610c4.jpg](https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2665/4048198665_d9b03610c4.jpg)

Which is Heimlich, the caterpillar, voiced by Joe Ranft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cryptobiosis (the long-fangled scientific term for what these things do) is something I've been fascinated by ever since I heard about Water Bears on one of those weird little nature shows ten years ago. Most of the organisms that can do it are understandably "simple", but it is truly fascinating.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptobiosis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptobiosis)

</comment><comment><USER17> I just read that "Tardigrades (water bears) are so tough, they can SURVIVE outer space" and they need WATER from decade to decade to survive and they also live on earth for 500 million years. Then I read "Suddenly, It Seems, Water Is Everywhere in Solar System".

So wouldn't be fun to have a probe (on Philae for example) called "Bearfinder"? Shouldn't our friends live (sleep) in worst case scenario (if earth would be their birthplace) on the moon, mars, or comet 67P. Or best scenario rather everywhere?

<comment><USER6> This is actually a very interesting idea! We could also seed other planets with our water bears.

<comment><USER18> Could have potentially disastrous repercussions on alien ecosystems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Someone could probably spin a great science fiction story around the idea that tardigrades are an advance team for exploration by extraterrestrials.

<comment><USER20> Or distant relatives of the advanced nanotechnology brought here by aliens who seeded life on this planet.

<comment><USER21> I was thinking why we don't include these in the mars rovers and other space probes, see how they do on other planets. Is there some ethical problem with that? Like the prime directive.

<comment><USER20> As far as I know, such missions go to great lengths to ensure this does _not_ happen. There are two main reasons for that: 1) if you're searching for traces of life on another world, you don't want to discover bacteria you brought from Earth, and 2) you definitely don't want to unintentionally contaminate said world with terrestial life that would start to alter the planet, because you'll lose valuable research data.

See: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Data. We can use them to store data. Not your average cat picture storage but maybe DNA data of plant seeds and such.

<comment><USER23> Well, but how? Tattoo them with a nano-needle?

<comment><USER22> Or inject them with nano-fibre(?) Use them as a container.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I learned about tardigrades from an episode of last year's remake of Cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson said tardigrades survived all five of earth's mass extinctions.

<comment><USER25> Not only did they survive, massive asteroid impacts could their means of propagation.

[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425093/earth-ejecta- cou...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425093/earth-ejecta-could-have- seeded-life-on-europa/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> In the Bayesian sense, I must now update my priors regarding life coming to Earth from another planet. I always gave that theory a very low probability, but now that its been demonstrated that some life can survive in space, I must admit the theory is somewhat more possible than I previously believed.

Also, does anyone know what "mm" stands for when they say these creatures are a maximum of 1.5mm long? I thought "millimeter" but that doesn't make sense in the context:

"They are never more than 1.5 mm long, and can only be seen with a microscope."

I can see things that are 1 millimeter with my own eyes, so what does "1.5 mm" mean? Could "nm" would have been nanometer, but that would be far too small, much smaller than a virus. I'm thinking they meant millionth of a meter?

<comment><USER27> Copied from below:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)

"The biggest adults may reach a body length of 1.5 mm (0.059 in), the smallest below 0.1 mm. Newly hatched tardigrades may be smaller than 0.05 mm."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> some may also like to read about single-cell wasps:

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/3...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/30/how- fairy-wasps-cope-with-being-smaller-than-amoebas/)

<comment><USER29> Thanks for the link but the author, Ed Yong, [http://edyong.flavors.me](http://edyong.flavors.me), is wrong. That wasp has probably 10(0) 000's of tiny cells and is as big as some large single-cell creatures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can someone explain why something up to 1.5mm long can "can only be seen with a microscope?" That would make sense if the other dimensions were small. But from the pictures, it appears that this is not the case; tardigrades are approximately oval shaped, not much narrower than they are long. I have a circuit board on my desk here where some surface-mount components are about millimeter-something long, and less than a mm wide. I can plainly see them.

<comment><USER31> The Almighty Wiki says 'Usually, tardigrades are about 0.5 mm (0.020 in) long when they are fully grown'.

Following the reference, we find that they're almost translucent, but can be seen in the right light [1].

1: [http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2011/5/tardigrad...](http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2011/5/tardigrades/1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Some scifi (e.g. Simmons's _Hyperion_ series) posits that the way for humans to survive near-light-speed travel is for the body to be basically destroyed by acceleration, and then rebuilt on arrival. If that ever happens, perhaps tardigrades will inspire the techniques used in the process.

<comment><USER33> I enjoyed reading it, but Hyperion struck me as having a great many fantasy elements. It has both time travel and FTL (both of which are nonsense given current physics, there is no reasoned framework to explain them in). Also, symbiotic life extension technology.

I also crankily believe that unobtanium is also a fantasy element (sorry Larry, scrith too), so maybe I shouldn't bother having the conversation. But why is a magic wand 'a stupid plot device', but an inexplicable technology is 'a reasoned exploration'?

Or is that not what hard sci fi means? Because fantasy often focuses on the social implications of magic, which is at least a similar sort of activity as imagining how big you can make something if you can adjust the laws of physics.

<comment><USER34> All valid but the caveat 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. The line between what is science fiction and what is fantasy in a future setting can be very thin.

<comment><USER33> I'm basically arguing that any such line is arbitrary.

The distinction between science fiction and fantasy is probably a useful one for helping readers find books they like. Going further than that seems like it is going to almost always involve a lot of personal preference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _If Rahm is to be believed, tardigrades can survive even higher temperatures._

If there is a question about this, one would have expected 90 years to be enough time for someone to arrange a follow-up study.

</comment><comment><USER35> Water Bears! My daughter is both amazed by and terrified by these.

<comment><USER36> Tell her that it is her spirit animal. A pretty cool list of features to have for your spirit animal!

<comment><USER37> Or a Dæmon from _His Dark Materials_ :

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A6mon_%28His_Dark_Material...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A6mon_%28His_Dark_Materials%29)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Rotifers support a billion dollar's human industries currently.

They are _the_ preys for breeding the tiny larvae of marine fishes in our future spacial stations so don't go out your planet without some of them.

You don't want just to put some humans in mars. You'll need to move entire reliable trophic chains, and humans are only the cherry at the top. So take with you some rotifers, some Chlorella also and... well, maybe a big bag of dehydrated eggs of desert pupfishes.

</comment><comment><USER39> What is the chance that these creatures didn't evolve on earth but on some other planet and comet and instead got transported here on a meteor. That would explain a lot of things as to why they evolved to stand 6 times the maximum pressure, temperature colder than ever recorded on earth, and their other attributes which are too extreme for even the most hostile environment on earth.

</comment><comment><USER40> Are tardigrades conscious?

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't know if you know this but 'Tardigrades' are the only living beings that survived all the four ice ages. This any many more amazing stories around it can be seen in an amazing TV documentary series 'Cosmos: A space Odyssey' presented by by Neil deGrasse Tyson

</comment><comment><USER42> As I pointed out way back when,[1] Mark Shuttleworth really missed the opportunity to name an Ubuntu release the Tenacious Tardigrade.

[1] [http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1295#comment-403210](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1295#comment-403210)

</comment><comment><USER43> There is an educational game, MetaBlast ([http://metnet- mbl.gdcb.iastate.edu/](http://metnet-mbl.gdcb.iastate.edu/)), where Tardigrades are creatures you can encounter (and interact with). Even one appearing on the screenshot.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think they come up in one of Cosmos episodes. Actually very interesting to see how they go around almost everywhere.

Edit : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I-PQxuPkjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I-PQxuPkjA)

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anybody else feel sorry for them, you look like a turd with legs, your mouth looks like an anus, and you can't die easily. Maybe some sort of reincarnation hell?

<comment> Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 That description could apply equally well to a lot of humans who would choose immortality if given the choice. Hell is us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> How do these critters handle bleach?

</comment><comment><USER46> Who would win in a longevity contest between a Tardigrade and a Rotifer?

</comment><comment><USER47> I can't stop laughing at the first line of this article "If you go into outer space without protection, you'll die.".

Its like the journalist really took to heart what she learned in her early writing classes about using an attention grabber.

</comment><comment><USER48> the previous title, "tardigrades, toughest 1mm-long animal on earth" didn't get those page views rolling in...</comment>


Who is making money from struggling U.S. malls? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-malls-investment/who-is-making-money-from-struggling-u-s-malls-idUSKBN1JM17V <comment><USER2> Startup idea: lease retail space at the mall for $2000 a month from these low cost mall owners, but in reality turn the space into a mini WeWork offering high speed access and ammenities and desks and so on.

Live in the back office. Congrats, youre a landlord!</comment>


MIT OCW Courses: Nuclear Engineering - <AUTHOR> http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/nuclear-engineering/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm finding the Nuclear Reactor Safety course interesting -- lecture notes and slides are available.</comment>


Coursera did studies to show that Coursera is useful. LOL - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coursera.org/post/129636349192/coursera-study-shows-positive-career-and <comment><USER2> It breaks HN's rules to editorialize submission titles, so please don't do that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why LOL?</comment>


The Feminisation of the Web (why more women are neeeded in tech) - <AUTHOR> http://broadstuff.com/archives/1006-The-Feminisation-of-the-Web.html

<comment><USER2> My favorite quote (because it's true): "given that they control more household spend than men."

Hard to accept cries of "discrimination" when all indications are that women already control more than their share (of wealth, power, whatever measure you would like). There's probably only 20% women engineers because any obviously competent woman immediately gets promoted to management.

</comment><comment><USER3> This suggests that there are fundamental differences between men and women, and that to get some particular behavior or result you'll do better with women.

Yet that same argument, when used to advocate using men for one or another tasks, is usually ridiculed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Straw man. The fact that some people choose to deny the differences between men and women has no bearing on the argument made here.

<comment><USER3> My point is that people can safely say that women have skills often less seen in men, but not the reverse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Based on what the article describes, it seems useful to have more female UI designers, not necessarily more female engineers.

</comment><comment><USER2> So, bitch warning ahead...

the karma barrier is really high here. I posted the parent link that this blog entry is based on, it's still in not-front-page-purgatory. And it has exactly one point less, and I've been hanging around for a while here, don't have much less karma than the poster of this story. And the exact same number of comments.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210812></comment>


Ask HN: If you hate email (email itself not email clients). Why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> \- E-mail can be spoofed (authenticity not guaranteed) and lacks other elements of security such as a widely-supported encryption method.

\- The only thing you need in order to spam somebody is their address, and there is no real defense aside from performing server-melting numbers of computations to analyze E-mails. The lack of authenticity (above) is also a factor.

\- E-mail was never really designed for many of the things it is now used for, requiring a lot of tricks for it to work at all. This also contributes to inefficiencies in processing E-mail data that a different protocol/format would avoid.

\- These deficiencies have led in part to a lot of centralization that is not desirable. For instance, it would be preferable if people could easily run their own E-mail servers but due to the chances of spam, etc. a lot of E-mail will _not_ be routed correctly if you do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do I hate it? Let me count the ways: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/3905805/19746](http://stackoverflow.com/a/3905805/19746)

And then multiply it by two, because the woes of email from the _user_ side are just as horrible as what I've written from the _developer_ perspective.</comment>


Those Apple Cards are looking pretty busted just six months later - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/apple-card-looks-busted/ <comment><USER2> [https://in.mashable.com/tech/11062/those-apple-cards-are- loo...](https://in.mashable.com/tech/11062/those-apple-cards-are-looking- pretty-busted-just-six-months-later)</comment>


AWS Media Services – Process, Store, and Monetize Cloud-Based Video - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-media-services-process-store-and-monetize-cloud-based-video/ <comment><USER2> From the announcement, you have:

      AWS Elemental MediaConvert
      AWS Elemental MediaLive
      AWS Elemental MediaPackage
      AWS Elemental MediaStore
      AWS Elemental MediaTailor

When put together, the combined scope of it seems to be a _" backend services of Youtube"_ type of product. Youtube-as-a-Service: create a similar Youtube website without reinventing the wheel -- just use AWS Media Services.

The market positioning of this is interesting. Instead of creating a "DroneFlying" channel on Youtube.com and attempt to monetize there, you create a _url_ www.DroneFlying.com with AWS Media Services to serve the videos. I would expect some folks to come up with spreadsheets to compare the two strategies.

(Another commenter mentioned it's a clone of Microsoft Azure Media Services. I looked at Azure and it seems to missing the backend services for _ad monetization_. That seems to a big differentiator with AWS Media Services and it makes it more like a Youtube-as-a-Service rather than an Azure Media clone.)

The current offerings seem to favor some types of video sites but not others. For example, the AWS Media Services seems to be turnkey for a clone of Youtube or possibly Twitch.tv.

However, it doesn't seem to be a good fit for replicating elearning sites like Pluralsight.com, Lynda.com, Coursera, Craftsy, etc. Training videos need chapters, timeline bookmarks, student commenting, chats, student & teacher interaction, etc. The AWS Media Services doesn't have the metadata infrastructure for that. You'd have to custom build a lot of extra code on top of it for a video training website.

<comment><USER3> >"Instead of creating a "DroneFlying" channel on Youtube.com and attempt to monetize there, you create a url www.DroneFlying.com with AWS Media Services to serve the videos. I would expect some folks to come up with spreadsheets to compare the two strategies."

One major factor to consider is what the value of Youtube becomes here. In this case it is free HD video hosting and a built-in social network and platform for getting organic and paid exposure to your brand. Simply creating droneflying.com and posting some videos there won't get you any eyeballs.

<comment><USER4> Anecdotally I discover about half of the youtube videos I watch through youtube's search (for things like tutorials), but the other big chunk is from other social media platforms like reddit, twitter and facebook (i.e. other people linking me videos). A really small portion of the videos I watch are from suggested videos on their site.

A far cry from the early days of youtube where I would spend hours just flipping from suggested video to suggested video.

I'm not one who tunes in regularly to someone's content either, but I imagine that people who do follow several youtubers would probably still watch their favorite people on another service.

Twitch has also already proved that the Let's Play genre was ripe for the taking by another platform and they built their own discovery model around it.

Not disagreeing with your comment just sharing some of my own observations. If someone wanted to be the "youtube of droneflying" and there was an audience for it, they could probably plug this service into their own social media platform and make it happen (again, if there's the audience).

<comment><USER5> > "A really small portion of the videos I watch are from suggested videos on > their site."

That was me as well until about a year ago. I got a Chromecast, and more importantly, the YouTube app on my mobile device (iPhone specifically). There's something about the presentation/interface and recommendation engine there which has helped turn me into a YouTube addict, unlike the website itself or the apps on other devices such as Apple TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty nice, the tool choices were pretty limited. (nginx-rtmp, red5, and another one that I can't remember.)

It still doesn't fix the main problem for me: content delivery and its price.

For a 60 minute-long 720p@30fps (~2500 kbps) stream with 1000 viewers, you have to push a total of 1TB of data.

Using Amazon CloudFront, it would cost you $0.085*1000GB = 85$. For one stream. Of one hour. Of mid-tier quality. You would need three dedicated servers to push that data (You need ~3GBPS to replace that CDN) and it would cost 85$ per MONTH. Not per stream.

I know, building a CDN isn't simple, but when I tried to build my own platform, it wasn't about building something about video streaming. It was about creating my own CDN to lower the costs. I don't think I'm alone with that problem.

<comment><USER7> I have the same problem. I found that building a platform is not an issue. It's always the price.

> I know, building a CDN isn't simple, but when I tried to build my own > platform, it wasn't about building something about video streaming. It was > about creating my own CDN to lower the costs. I don't think I'm alone with > that problem.

Were you successful in starting something?

Did you end up creating your own CDN?

Lets say someone had a platform, servers and were ready to rock:

\- How do they implement that CDN?

\- Could it be a case of getting hosting providers who offer Nth percentile or unlimited bandwidth (to a point)? I've seen these packages on webhostingtalk.com

\- What are the costs associated with that?

\- What are the gotchas with maintenance and running costs?

Would love to know your thoughts.

<comment><USER6> I've been working on that video platform as a hobby - a twitch clone, or more accurately a clone of Mixer (formerly beam.pro). I've abandoned it, even though it probably still works at a low scale.

I was still a student at the time (2 years ago), that definitely was a big issue for me so I tried to build my own CDN. There are many things that pushed me to abandon the idea: pricing, lack of time, lack of knowledge about DevOps and/or lack of tools. I've learned a lot since then.

I had a few problems with managing the total available bandwidth as well as the monthly data cap (1TB on the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet), this could be resolved if you already have the servers running, managed and updated, but it won't resolve the scaling problem unless you possess a datacenter.

It would be pretty simple to setup a CDN with that solved: \- Have your ingest servers make the files available somehow (scalable/shared filesystem? NoSQL? or just a webservice?) \- Make your viewers ping your cache servers (Varnish), and if the file isn't cached, then fetch it from the ingest server. \- Put a layer 4 load-balancer (also known as Direct Server Return) in front of those cache servers, and adjust the weight of each cache server since the network throughput will probably not be the same for all of the servers. \- Automatize all of this so the cache servers know about the new ingest servers, same thing for the load-balancer about the new cache servers. Done!

Once all of this is set up, this is just a matter of starting new servers and doing maintenance on the other ones while keeping everything available. After that, you can focus on the second point: using the ads the finance your service and keep it running.

"I wanted to build a video platform, not a CDN! And now, I have build an advertising platform?" \- I must have told myself that a thousand times back then!

<comment><USER8> This is a really amazing insight and something that gets glossed over a lot in the "we need an open competitor to YouTube" comments. $85 for 60,000 minutes watched, thats about thats a cost of $0.001 per minute (or 8.5 cents per hour watched).

For comparison a fairly large YouTube channel makes $0.0005 per minute (or 3 cents per hour watched) just on YouTube generated revenue. Granted YouTube is taking a 50% cut (so they are really generating 6 cents per hour), but in your naive example, even if you had a completely mature programmatic ad platform, you would still be losing 2.5cents per hour streamed.

Video distribution is costly and is likely what is preventing other players from entering into the space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been researching VOD infrastructure for a while now. So far, most services are either too expensive, too isolated or too rigid on how they are available to developers. Then there are the wistias, the vimeos, the vidyards which are too user centric and are more focussed on marketing and analytics.

AWS Media services seems exciting other than the cloudflare one that popped up back in September. Can't wait to try both.

Ideally, I would love something like the following:

1\. Ability to upload video and transcode for cheap. Most services charge based on per minute of transcoding and get real expensive if you plan to process tons of videos. Not to mention, they charge additional for HD minutes. I have looked at amazon elastic transcoder, zencoder, encoding.com, coconut.co etc. Thinking of building my own using a decent VPS and slapping ffmpeg on top of it. Any suggestions ?

2\. Video delivery and player for things such as HLS, Dash etc. So far, I have found shaka player from google to be a good one. There is even a videojs integration for it which seems to work well.

3\. Video distribution/CDN. This one is still tricky for me. Some CDNs are not good with videos and some are too generic. Evaluated maxcdn/stackpath, keycdn, fastly and now looking at cdn77

So yea, this is a tough problem. I hope someone does it in a way that it is easy for developers to build their own using the infrastructure. Right now, it is all fragmented.

<comment><USER10> I can speak to 1.) a bit as I have done just that for a client of mine. By default, they're using Zencoder/Rackspace to encode/store their videos and usually get one-off videos from their customers. However, sometimes there are requests to encode 2.000+ videos at once which gets prohibitively expensive in their constellation.

So we basically started out with a very naive solution: A Docker image with ffmpeg and access to a shared Redis DB used for job coordination running on a somewhat beefy server from Hetzner (beefy compared to regular VPS offerings, something in the 40€ range with 16 or 32gb of RAM I think). This turned out to work surprisingly well so we built a small API around that mirroring parts of Zencoder's API. This way, we can switch between both services on a per-job- basis and only need to change the encoding service's endpoint URL.

The main thing that will get you (if you do input validations) are the video formats. I've tried to get an authoritative list of valid MIME types beforehand, but still people managed to somehow send us videos with weird encodings that I'd never heard of before. Other than that, the usual caveats regarding self-hosted services (availability, failover, backups, etc.) apply but have so far not been much of a problem to us (especially since we can just go back to Zencoder when something breaks and needs to be done fast).

Feel free to drop me a message (mail is in my profile) if you have any questions.

<comment><USER9> Would love to chat but I don't see your email in profile. Put it in your profile description as emails are not shown publicly or email me if don't mind (in my profile)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the difference between MediaConvert and Amazon Elastic Transcoder ([https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/](https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/))?

They seem to overlap heavily or am I missing something?

<comment><USER12> Elastic Transcoder could not handle 4K video, and only worked with static files stored in S3 - it wasn't designed for streaming content.

AWS purchased Elemental in 2015. There is some overlap but Elemental Media* services are more flexible and provide JIT encoding and dynamic ad insertion, to serve a broader market than ET did.

Disclaimer: AWS employee.

<comment><USER13> Instead of fixing Elastic Transcoder, there's yet another and better way of doing the old thing. Much similar to what happened with SimpleDB, OpsWorks, etc.

<comment><USER14> The alternative is shutting down your 1.0 when you release your 2.0. Keeping the 1.0 service running in maintenance mode seems pretty helpful to me.

<comment><USER13> No, the alternative is a design pattern called Façade, i.e. having the new backend support the old API via a translation layer either in the SDKs or in the infrastructure layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sadly, it requires RTMP to push input, so the sources either need totally custom software such as OBS or Flash installed in the browser; in 2017 I was sort of hoping to see WebRTC as one of the ingestion protocols (with an API that let you just get an offer plus candidate set for a new stream and another couple APIs for setting the answer and adding candidates as they stream back).

<comment><USER16> I think this is designed for OTT video broadcasting and not so much video conferencing. RTMP remains the defacto standard for push ingest, although that it changing with the wider adoption of HEVC, which RTMP can't carry.

<comment><USER15> FWIW, maybe I am just on the leading edge of the "changing", but I am specifically excited about WebRTC for video _broadcasting_ due to not only how devices now have hardware support for HEVC but also for the lower latency and lower barrier to entry afforded by WebRTC. WebRTC is a protocol with a widely deployed implementation that is already tied to people's cameras, not a use case, and has absolutely no ties to video conferencing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Competitor to Cloudflare - [https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing- cloudflare-stream/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare- stream/)

<comment><AUTHOR> More likely it is a competitor to Azure Media Services, as they had a lot of the same type of services already. This is really AWS catching up.

<comment><USER18> This is my take as well. The announcement, features, and marketing material are clearly geared towards larger media companies and broadcasters. Which is where Elemental was strong, and a big part of why AWS bought Elemental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This looks like a pretty comprehensive package for live and VOD workflows. In my experience the devil is in the details with these kind of services so I'm guessing we'll be doing a fairly deep dive into this at my workplace to see if any of the services are applicable to what we do.

Makes me consider setting up a consultancy helping companies stitch these services together. Up until now it has been a pain doing many of these things yourself.

<comment><USER20> Yeah that's a good idea, I am sure there is a very good business model in sorting out the details, but the pain point has been that you have had to run these things yourself or pay a decent amount to get someone to run it for you. (See BBC outsourcing their technology to Siemens just over 10 years ago for approx $3.6BN)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So in our app, we need to post process .webm and .opus files to create a single mp4 video file. I think this can be done with " AWS Elemental MediaConvert"

Then we need to stream the .mp4 files from Amazon S3 to user's browsers when they start playing. I guess 'AWS Elemental MediaLive' solves that streaming problem for us.

Can someone confirm if this is right? Or AWS Elemental is too much for above kind of tasks. Thanks.

<comment><USER22> Media live is for live video. You have video on demand it seems. Slightly different. S3 or MediaStore + CDN. MediaConvert sounds right tho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What do people use nowadays to BUILD live video streaming whether it is one- to-many (twitch.tv, younow.com, Instagram live) or more like small group (8 person max) video stream (Hangout, Houseparty, Facetime, etc )

Is there any PaaS for that? or need to chain multis blocks/open source projects together to "make it work"?

<comment><USER24> In my opinion, that's one of the goals for AWS Media Services.

You could think of them as Lego bricks, combine a couple of them together and you could easily have a "broadcast grade" workflow for your content.

But back to your original question, currently MediaLive does not say it supports RTMP outputs (make sure to request it as a feature!) so using it as a "one-to-many" would require another lego brick to convert UDP to RTMP.

However, once support has been added for RTMP outputs, you could live stream to any platform (Twitch, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram) that supports the RTMP protocol.

The neat thing about MediaLive is that it allows you to use audio, video, or caption tracks. So for example, if you had a single source that had platform- specific tracks, you could create outputs for each platform and use the corresponding track to create curated content.

But, that's just one example of hundreds that is possible with AWS Media Services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Cloudinary's new Video feature is actually really, really good: [https://davidwalsh.name/cloudinary-video- player](https://davidwalsh.name/cloudinary-video-player)

</comment><comment><USER26> Now I won't have to use Fastly and Wowza anymore. I'm more than happy.

<comment><USER27> Could you elaborate? I often considered that setup but never put anything live.

<comment><USER26> I manage a website which streams live videos and VOD. The VOD part is videos which are resized automatically and then Fastly provides on the fly packaging (OTFP) which allows any device to stream the files which reside on S3. Wowza is a software which allow you to setup a complete live streaming solution which scales easily for cheaper than LiveStream, Akamai, etc.... The downside is that Wowza requires a lot of sysadmin to keep it working. It seems like MediaLive is really really similar to what Wowza does, in a better package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Netflix-in-a-box. Or really it's a competitor to BAMTech.

<comment><USER29> This is not what I would call "in-a-box". That'd be for something like Vimeo OTT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> These products seem to be aimed at syndication services like Cisco's Infinite Video, Comcast's Xfinity, and Ericsson MediaFirst. Missing are some frontend niceties, but that wouldn't be hard for someone to come in and offer something in front of that.

</comment><comment><USER31> Interesting. It seems you should be able to use this to stream user generated content live from Flash at least.

Not sure if it would support WebRTC as well though. I do see RTP support but not sure WebRTC can push to that out of the box.

<comment><USER32> WebRTC is more for two way VC / web browsers. The new elemental stuff is for on demand and linear / event live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How does Elemental compare to the existing options on the market? (e.g. something like this [https://mux.com/video](https://mux.com/video))

<comment><USER32> Elemental has a decade of video processing products on the market. Mux is a startup that currently offers video analytics (which Elemental does not). They have announced some a coon new service it seems that far more "easy" focused rather than "all the knobs ever" focused like Elemental stuff.

I've used elemental for nearly a decade, and I love this stuff. However they were stagnating (likely their focus was their transition into AWS). I'm excited to see how that evolves. Sadly right now the UIs for the products they just launched have a lot of issues, so it's not quite for fiddling around yet. It also requires a good amount of video knowledge to not dig yourself a hole ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder why they announce it the week of AWS conference reinvent? Shouldn't they wait two days and do it during keynote?

Or they just run out of space during keynote?

<comment><USER35> AWS makes announcements like these pretty much every 1-4 weeks as-is; they're _always_ innovating - not just releasing for their big conference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> For AWS Elemental MediaLive there is no MPEG-DASH output. It's also limited to Ireland, Singapore, Virginia and Oregon.

<comment><USER36> Ah, actually the packager supports MPEG-DASH as output.</comment></comment>


Tim O'Reilly Explains the Internet of Things - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqLB99dA48k&feature=player_embedded

<comment><USER2> Anyone have linkage for the Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Other "Who Owns What" matrix? Seems not to have come online yet.

Nat's Truly Open Data is here: <http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/truly-open- data.html>

<comment><USER3> I got a paper copy of the report while at RailsConf, so I took a picture of the chart for all to see (no scanner, sorry!).

[http://nbrochu.posterous.com/the-state-of-the-internet- opera...](http://nbrochu.posterous.com/the-state-of-the-internet-operating- system-wh)</comment></comment>


Read a VC's Process from Start-To-Finish (CRV Invests in Sudden Coffee) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CharlesRiverVentures/crv-invests-in-sudden-coffee-read-a-vcs-process-from-start-to-finish-bc4fe07bf129#.2pl380j98 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm sticking around for the next hour and happy to answer questions related to the investment/decision making process for a venture capitalist (or from the perspective of an angel investor or founder CEO, which I've also been)</comment>


Tell ZM: Create a Zoom social network - <AUTHOR> Facebook has been stifling innovation for the last decade by simply copying features and creating a graveyard. Today they passed the line after they proposed copying your product-innovation after you proved market fit.<p>It is of no use to pursue an anti-trust garbage approach. Create your own social network and the masses will stand by you... <comment><USER2> Honestly if this was a company other then zoom that was being stifled, I would agree. But come on a chinese owned mafia company which routes all of your video through chinese servers so that xi the mad man can create a profile of all americans!! That kind of innovation I want stifled.

<comment><USER3> can you give a citation for this or is it just sinophobia

<comment><USER4> (spoiler: it's just sinophobia)</comment></comment></comment>


Groupon Set to Price Its IPO Tomorrow, Go Public Friday - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20111102/groupon-set-to-price-its-ipo-tomorrow-go-public-friday/

<comment><USER2> Looks like that's a day old; Groupon's already priced it at $20 a share ([http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/groupon-prices-i- p-o-...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/groupon-prices-i-p-o- at-20-a-share/)).</comment>


Ask HN:What is the future of Detroit? - <AUTHOR>

Every now and again I get this feeling that something that is pretty universally "not worth anyone's time" has become so uncool, that it just sort of feels cool. I'll never forget the first time I got this feeling. I was in high school, and despite the fact that everyone I knew was wearing super baggy jeans, I felt like it might be interesting to try slim fitting ones. Needless to say, times have changed.
I realize that's somewhat of an unrelated circumstance, but it's the same exact feeling I got when I decided to buy an apple computer in 2005 (I took some heat for that one at the time), and the same feeling that provoked me to buy into Facebook when all the journalists were hating on it ($19, woo!).
Now I'm getting that feeling about Detroit. I'm hearing bits and pieces about artists moving there, which is always the first sign of gentrification, and it's just sort of made me curious as to how everyone else feels about the future city.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> we're here, artists and all. drop by any time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Random question I know, but I've never been to Detroit so everything I know about it is hearsay. Can I ask what part you live in, and what it's like?

<comment><USER2> I do not live in the city, my father was born there and lived within city limits until the 70's. I am located ~25 minutes west, just about where the sidewalk ends, though I have both worked and played downtown for years.

Biggest little city in the US... a lot of sprawl (we might have invented it alongside the automobile & the 80 hour work week) that makes the city seem to go on forever. Infrastructure has been failing for a long time, city government rarely makes any progress, more often they succeed at hampering one another's attempts to do so. City lighting is constantly busted, leaving large areas poorly lit at night, either because of actual failures, or because of rolling blackouts instituted to save money. Roads and bridges are crumbling, and there are many, many vacant properties, everywhere you look. The police are underfunded, corruption within the force is a known problem. FIrefighters are underfunded and of late, shot at regularly. The city has no grocery store - yep - not one, but we have a killer open air market which many of the city's residents and business owners rely on for fresh produce etc. What else... we have a high school here with a football field that is less than 100 yards simply because no one bothered to properly plan for it... yet there are entire elementary school buildings that are vacant less than two miles away... I'd be happy to chat about the city, the people, etc any time.</comment></comment></comment>


MANA M285 opensource based long-range quadcopter drone - <AUTHOR> https://dronegarageblog.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/m285-affordable-inmersionrc-vortex-quadcopter-clone-running-open-source/ <comment><USER2> I have the smaller Wizard 220, comes in at $180 complete with controller. HD Camera would be extra, but not much more.

You can get 1k in range with the antenna upgrade. There are also many other neat upgrades like GPS positioning.

Buy spare motors and clips, or a 3d printer. Having some guards while you work on flight algos will be helpful.</comment>


The Importance of a Dedicated Office when Working from Home - <AUTHOR> http://blog.toggl.com/2013/07/the-importance-of-a-dedicated-office-when-working-from-home/

<comment><USER2> Couldn't agree more. I also built my own 'garden' office (in the non-urban- center US we don't have gardens...we have back yards...).

[http://imgur.com/tI4z1Ar](http://imgur.com/tI4z1Ar)

Looking to build a new one soon, without making all the mistakes I made building this one :-)</comment>


Joe Biden's mysteriously disappearing "Dislikes" on YouTube - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvnNUZjRO0 <comment><USER2> Should point out that Wric Schmidt worked for the Clinton 2016 campaign as sourced here: [https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role- in-...](https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-team- hillarys-election-tech/)

It wouldn't surprise me if this was coordinated behind the scenes.

</comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't constitute actual evidence.

<comment><USER4> and UFOs don't exist, correct? If the video shows and numerous search results of Google corroborate, then it is most certainly evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It may be some anti bots/brigade protection or just Google supporting Biden, or something in between. We will never know.

</comment><comment><USER6> What a shame, to be forced to choose between a moron and a demented.

<comment><USER7> I mean, both of those qualities describe the current President, so at least it's clear which is the lesser evil.

<comment><USER4> I'll take a moron/demented over a pedophile/demented any day!

<comment><USER7> Please post credible evidence that Joe Biden is a pedophile. As far as I know, the closest thing the Trump camp has are some videos or photos where he's said to "act creepy" around children, but that's just baseless stereotyping typical of the QAnon party.

Show me formal accusations, complaints, arrests or investigations that implicate Joe Biden in any sexual crimes against children.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has partied with Jeffrey Epstein, is on tape bragging about how easily he can get away with sexual assault, and has an entire Wikipedia page[0] dedicated to the sexual assault charges against him.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations)

<comment><USER4> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leQPtaKwJcU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leQPtaKwJcU) Disclaimer: This evidence is NOT for the blind.

<comment><USER7> Seriously? A Youtube video isn't credible evidence. I asked for "formal accusations, complaints, arrests or investigations that implicate Joe Biden in any sexual crimes against children." In other words, evidence of the kind that exists against Trump.

Literally all you have is memes. "This evidence is NOT for the blind?" Is that some kind of QAnon dogwhistle bullshit?

Oh God, he kissed a little girl on the head, what a monster!

We're done.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ninja Would Like to Get Some More Sleep - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/sports/ninja-fortnite.html <comment><USER2> What does the article say?</comment>


Ask HN: What is your preferred tech stack for web apps? - <AUTHOR> Some information why you chose particular stack would be interesting as well. <comment><USER2> I like them boring: php mvc backend with an sql database like MySQL. HAProxy does TLS termination and failover/loadbalancing. Varnish does response caching/esi processing.

Responses are rendered according to accept header in the request, so the "api" is also the web application (with a different view renderer basically).

For the web view, traditional links/forms as much as possible. Those things can always be upgraded to do XHR loads as a progressive enhancement.

I'm sure none of these concepts are popular with the HN crowd.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on needs. I used CherryPy with MongoDB for my first project at my current job. Have used ASP .NET Core but I'm all favoring Python recently. Once the Rust ecosystem becomes fully batteries included I may consider them though I'm leaning towards Django and itching to build something with it recently. Python lets you write a lot of code quicker and find libraries that solve your issues quicker.

</comment><comment> a-saleh Disclaimer, I mostly do internal tooling, and the honest answer would be Jenkins+Groovy scripts. I am not sure it counts for the purposes of this question :-)

Seems like any time I need to do some actual web-page, somebody else might need to look at, I settle at:

* Vue.js

* Node.js backend

* PouchDB as database

I have million unfinished projects in more esoteric stuff, such as purescript/elm/clojure. Purescript seems to be winning over on that front.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google Cloud and Firebase. Free tiers available for experimenting ;)

Caddy is very versatile as web server, proxy, load balancer, etc. And plays well with gRPC.

For middleware, golang is enough. Gorilla and go-kit add useful helpers.

As far as frontend, I've used Bootstrap, Foundation, etc. But prefer building custom solutions with things like D3.JS and Babylon.JS. Stripe Elements is also really nice.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Rails, Postgres, pure JS frontend. You can go from zero to MVP for 90 percent of projects in 6 weeks or less.

</comment><comment><USER6> meteor.com, it's all-in-one and works out of the box. For example, no need to install/configure DB to get started(it spins up configured one locally for you). If you want to go live to production, it's single command to deploy and they offer hosting service that's reasonably priced.

</comment><comment><USER7> Elm + Elixir/Phoenix + Postgres</comment>


Show HN: A prototype of a new visual web scraper project - <AUTHOR> https://scrapy.apki.io/ <comment><USER2> There might be potential issue with the name as there is a library "scrapy" with the same name.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've noticed it after releasing the screencast. Maybe I'll consider renaming but looking at their license you cannot use a similar name only if you use their lib, and I don't

<comment><USER3> I think most anyone on HN associates "scrapy" with the python library that performs a similar-ish function. I would highly suggest renaming, for many reasons, but other than the reason above, also googleability

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks good. Got few questions:-

How you are going to copy the style ( css ) ?

Are you showing elements in iframe?

<comment><USER4> BTW I have build something related, try it here:- [http://motyar.info/webscrapemaster/try/?url=https://scrapy.a...](http://motyar.info/webscrapemaster/try/?url=https://scrapy.apki.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's meta :p</comment></comment></comment>