News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pie6k

Re:Codables – Swift-inspired, declarative JSON serialization on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @08:34AM (#45810854)
Hey! Why yet another JSON serialization library? We already have SuperJSON, right?

Yes. And SuperJSON is great; I use it a lot. However, things got tricky for me when I had really complex data types, covered with many model classes, often deeply nested and referencing each other, where I needed to serialize it all from/to JSON and save it on the disk. I had to essentially maintain two formats of my data - "serializable data" and TypeScript classes matching this data. It was quite a pain.

I've tried to solve it with modern decorators, making the entire process more declarative and having way less boilerplate.

Happy to hear your feedback!

Interactive playground - https://codableslib.com/playground Github: https://github.com/pie6k/codables

Re:One line of code that did cost $8k on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @02:22AM (#35884270)
My previous comment was challenging and aggressive. I'm not sure if I regret it or not.

I believe there is a fundamental difference between working in a company and shipping products on your own as a solo person.

I did have 3 months of savings left and wanted to pursue my dream of creating a start-up.

I did create a fully working desktop app; I did create a high-quality design for it, a landing page, entire deployment infrastructure both for the website, uploading new version artifacts. While doing that, I was also taking care of all the marketing of this. And a lot of other shit I don't even remember. At the same time, you were working at a company where very likely there was at least 1 person working on each of those areas independently, and most of the people did not give a damn if there would be a month delay in some area. I did give a damn as I knew how much time I had.

On top of that, your comment just assumes tons of things as facts in quite an arrogant way, eg. you explain to me to compare version strings as if you've discovered a circle. It is a damn obvious thing, and it, of course, happens. The bug was all about restarting the updater state when your version string indicated there was a new version and checking it as if you never checked it before, even if the new version was ready to install already. I wonder if you ever think how would you feel if your co-worker writes a code review pointing obvious things you actually did, not related to the context of the PR at all and ending it with "Simple and light weight." punchline.

this is really annoying, and this triggered me to write my challenging question.

I really doubt you'd be so "mistakes-free" and "I know it all" if you switched roles with your CTO for a week while all devs will take a week-off. Maybe you should consider that or if you're not willing to do that, to fucking think twice before writing comments next time thinking you're a guru.

I'm not sure if there is any point in me writing all this as I believe if someone is not willing to listen and understand other perspectives truly, it is hard to change from the outside. Looking at the confidence you express your opinion (you actually don't express an opinion, you state your opinion as a fact), I believe there is no slightest thought like "maybe I miss something" or "maybe I'd also do exactly the same thing in this person shoes" and other shit like that.

I admire you for being careful and always thinking through all possible scenarios. On the other hand, I enjoy my life as a founder of a startup that has traction (and all its benefits of it), and I'll risk betting it is precisely because you likely never make such mistakes, and you look at people who do from a perspective of "I know it all, and I'll tell you what you should do." (note: it is possible you simply don't dream about founding a start-up which is totally fine. But even then, I believe it is a fundamental mistake to look at people who do create start-ups from the perspective of full-time-work with focused tasks and projecting your perspective on theirs)

Re:One line of code that did cost $8k on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @04:27PM (#35879956)
What's so big deal in all this 3h vs 24h? It is still downloading it only once anyway and if there is no update the network call it makes is really 300 times more lightweight than opening google.com. I really don't understand this.
Re:One line of code that did cost $8k on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @04:25PM (#35879933)
What products did you ship last year?
Re:One line of code that did cost $8k on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @11:00AM (#35875349)
Not much more I have to say about crying over 500 bytes json fetch request and policing others to make it at most once a day instead of every 3 hours.
Re:One line of code that did cost $8k on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @09:45AM (#35874216)
Shampoo
Re:One line of code that did cost $8k on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @09:03AM (#35873727)
https://screen.studio founder here:

Thanks for all the comments.

Why 5 minutes? Well I ask this question myself as well. I think it was bad and risky idea.

You create MVP and you make 20 decisions like this a day. I probably thought "why not" as it was stopping anyway and I released a few versions a day at times and wanted to get feedback and crash reports quickly.

I did change it now to 3 hours.

Why downloading it without user confirmation?

Well - because this is how Electron auto updater works under the hood (checking for update = downloading it) and it cannot be customized without implementing a lot of the logic by myself. I'll soon modify it and do exactly that, but I was creating MVP, got traction and as solo dev I had to carefully pick things to focus on. Electron auto updater works and is battle tested so I picked it knowing this limitation and suboptimal flow.

---

So I understand a lot of critique you're making and I agree with it. It's just I was making compromises, iterating quickly and making silly mistakes.

Re:I am done. I give up on Friday December 23, 2022 @02:00PM (#34109409)
We always only hear success stories. Its simply because no one writes or likes 'normal failure stories'. Once in a while we have such a beautiful story that goes viral, but for 99% of normal stories of 'it just failed' never see the light of the day.

I believe I found my success (screen.studio), but first I had to give up on it to start having a healthy relationship with my career. Only then I was able to look at myself being proud, even while seeing everyone tweet (remember, only successful people tweet - thus 'everyone' is a bit biased) about their success.

Good luck!

Interesting use case. Can you email me from the website? I'll think about this use case

Show HN: Screen Studio – Beautiful screen recordings in minutes

https://www.screen.studio/

Hey!I started working on this app 4 months ago.The idea is simple: automate creating promo quality videos that include screen recordings as much as possibleCurrently it makes cursor movement smooth, zooms in on clicks, adds background and frame around recorded window and adds cinematic motion blur.I plan to add selfie camera support, full text slides and multi-clip recordings.Works only on...

( Read More... | 10 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Thank you!
Currently it might not be great for that just because of performance issues it could have when auto generating 30 minutes long animation. Tho it is on my radar as it is relatively common use case
I created https://screen.studio and it made 30k in first month after releasing it.

It allows you to create beautiful screen recordings in minutes.

Idea: my own pain both individually and when working with team. When you create any kind of app you often need some video of it, either for promo, landing, social media posts, tutorials, etc.

It was always taking way too long and was quickly getting outdated as app UI changes quickly.

Then I have seen stripe profile on Twitter and their promo videos and thought "how much of this video could be done automatically basing only on mouse movement and clicks info" and boom.

As a good entrepreneur I started by getting a domain of course. I got a really good one - screen.studio so I had to instantly start working on MVP

Re:React: The Perils of Rehydration on Friday December 03, 2021 @01:25PM (#29433301)
Well I love hooks
ps. it's working on Chrome only.
Github source link - https://github.com/pie6k/motionblur

My conclusion - it might look sweet, but usability is poor (especially when scanning looking for something)

Timpler – simple way to organize and plan your to-dos and routines

My last year's goal was to finally release it and I did it on December 31st!Timpler helps you organize your tasks and routines.Besides being a regular to-dos app, it has a lot of smart scheduling features.- It automatically schedules your routines eg. "Read a book 3 times a week" - Timpler will pick the best dates for repetitions - It creates daily tasks suggestions basing on your current...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 4 points | on HN )
Seems like nice idea, good luck!