Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?
For me a couple of interesting technology products that help me in my day-to-day job
1. Hasura 2. Strapi 3. Forest Admin (super interesting although I cannot ever get it to connect to a hasura backend on Heroku ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 4. Integromat 5. Appgyver
There are many others that I have my eye on such as NodeRed[6], but have yet to use. I do realise that these are all low-code related, however, I would be super interested in being made aware of cool other cool & upcoming tech that is making waves.
What's on your 'to watch' list?
[3]https://www.forestadmin.com/
256 comments
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https://strapi.io/ - Open source Node.js Headless CMS
https://www.forestadmin.com/ - Forest Admin does all the heavy lifting of building the admin panel of your web application and provides an API-based framework to implement all your specific business processes.
https://www.appgyver.com/ - The world's first professional no-code platform, enabling you to build apps for all form factors, including mobile, desktop, browser, TV and others.
https://www.integromat.com/en - Integromat is the most advanced online automation platform
https://nodered.org/ - Low-code programming for event-driven applications
Interesting to me that I've never heard of any of these. Thanks for sharing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
On a more philosophical note, I think it is better to have lived and died than to not have ever existed. Given very few cattle and sheep would be born if it wasn’t for meat/dairy production then a case can be made that meat eating is the more ethical option. I do admit that this view is incompatible with my first opinion as there would be many more animals born if I adopted a vegetarian diet.
When everyone stops eating meat and turns to "healthy" meals like corn based vegetarian burgers I think we are all worse off.
Variety, locally grown produce, locally raised animals is the best way to keep diversity and quality. The vegetarian food available now is good because it's not as mass produced.
It's also not the point of ecological vegetarianism: it's preserving the diversity of natural ecosystems, as opposed to food farms.
While I don't have the numbers, I strongly suspect there's not enough grass to feed all the humans the amount of meat they would like to eat right now. At least based on observing the prices of intensive vs grass fed, or watching the numbers for intensive production alone.
So if we want grass fed as the new normal, we're either going to have to intensify it back again, or we'll end up eating respectively less meat. That's near-vegetarianism or bust.
The solutions to let the market solve the problem - if there was only grass fed meat available the cost would be very high and meat would become a luxury again.
The gotcha is mainly that one can support the welfare of animals but also be ok with their systematic extinction. I don't know which outcome is worse.
Each person has their own beliefs that govern their ethics. As long as we all find a way to live peacefully together there is nothing wrong with that.
I saw a quora answer which says we simply don’t know enough about the science behind food but to me it implies that maybe some day our knowledge will get there?
People laugh but the idea of “bachelor chow” from futurama makes sense to me.
I don’t know enough about the topic of ethical vegetarianism to criticize it. I eat meat. In fact, I had fish for dinner last night. I just don’t think about the ethics of it.
Now I may sound hypocritical when I say this because I’m against policy action through taxation (make taxes as simple as possible by eliminating all income tax credits and deductions). However, I know I’ll continue to eat meat (including milk, eggs, chicken, pork) unless it is either too impractical or too expensive.
I want to believe that if push comes to shove I’ll be able to adjust my eating habits and that my current eating habits are not a part of my identity.
I don’t really have a point to make here except that something like soylent would go a long way toward making me vegetarian at least for the meals I eat alone.
The taste/quality/mouthfeel definitely went up since v1.
In addition to that, every step up the food chain requires 10x the amount of energy so for every kg of beef produced you need equivalent of 10kg plants just to raise the cows. It's not like the cows feed freely in the grass and carefully avoid stomping on insects all the time, this is often also harvested with machines killing rodents exactly the same way, just multiplied by 10x.
Meat eater myself here, occasionally and in moderation, but at least i'm not making up nonsense about rodents to feel better for myself.
Edit: To add some data into the discussion, see https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2vx78/the... for example. It shows more than 10x land usage for cattle and even more for water and energy, sources and their bias discussed in the comments over there. There is also some interesting links stating that purely grass fed beef can only provide half the cattle on same unit of land.
Not many insects are killed by cattle stomping on them out on some grassland compared to how many are killed by insecticides sprayed on crop land.
I don’t think this is a very good reason to eat or not eat meat.
Would that not lead to a desire to create as many "lives" as possible? I don't think I've met many people optimising for that, although I won't rule it out.
I wouldn't call myself an "pesca-pescatarian" but it sure sounds fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC-ZBJ-Kw2E
Ethical vegetarians are vegetarians for primarily ethical reasons. For example, they may think meat-eating causes excessive suffering (I fall into this category). Most Western vegetarians are ethical vegetarians, but some people are vegetarian for medical or religious reasons.
I gave up meat at 17 on the basis of no reason whatsoever, I was just a contrary teen who liked giving things up.
Down the line a few years I find so many compelling reasons to not eat meat. Each individually may be argued out of the room but collectively it's pretty compelling.
Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.
Environmentally: a hundred reasons to choose a plant based diet, all of which have been cycled here a million times so won't go back through it but we all know it's true.
Health: again, see pretty much all the research ever. Eating a plant based diet is so much better for weight, health, BMI, etc etc etc
Taste: this is the kicker imo. If you'd asked me 15 years ago when the vegetarian alternative was a crappy pasta with tomato sauce, I'd have been more tempted to chomp my way into a steak. Nowadays? There is SO much good vegetarian food. Loads of choice, huge range of flavours and in many places it's the vegetarian food that gets the chef's attention, rather than falling back on the Default Meat.
I totally support anyone making whatever decision they like about eating meat, but I'm completely unable to agree that it's a good idea.
Cultured meat in this context is a difficult one to parse. For people like me there's literally no point. I'm just not interested in eating steak, whether it's killed or grown. For your hardcore fleshy, a bloody slab of meat is all that's going to satiate them, so it misses that market too. I guess there's maybe a middle ground of people who could be convinced to stop eating killed meat if they see an alternative?
It'll be interesting to see where this one goes and how it is marketed...
I like the idea of lab grown as it is a promising way to increase our food production. If it costs the same that indicates it's no more efficient than growing animals for food.
> Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.
Ultimately every animal is going to die. If the moral hangup for you is the certainty of death, then wouldn't you consider any form of reproduction immoral? 'However good and rewarding their life may be, children are still going to die eventually, ergo noone should reproduce'.
Unless it's the act of killing with the intention to consume that's the issue?
The hangup for me isn't the certainty of death ("relax, you're going to die" is a credo I try hard to live by - even though I fail much of the time and worry about death as much as the next person...). It's just something about breeding a thing to kill it.
There is also something in there about the distance and hypocrisy of many meat eaters when it comes to facing up to what they are putting in their mouths. The thing you see at a supermarket is a million miles away from a hanging carcass; I know a whole bunch of people who don't even tell their young children that the thing they have on their plate is that thing walking around in the field over there - and that seems to me to also be quite disingenuous.
I'm failing to make a good point. But the broader thing for me is as I said - I'm genuinely not a rabid vegetarian (I used to get drunk at uni and sometimes end the night eating kebab along with everyone else...) - is that I'm interested in the combination of reasons which for me have built up into a fairly compelling case over the years. I should say as well - I actually do quite like the taste of meat even though it's been a long, long time - but I have no intention of going back, which is what interests me.
Fair enough. I don't necessarily fully agree with that specific argument but I can certainly understand where you're coming from. It's one of those head vs heart things: the cold hard logic that all other things being equal, a life followed by death is equivalent to any other, vs the vague moral sense that life should have purpose, and the discomfort when that purpose is 'to be foodstuff'.
That said, I wasn't really arguing for meat consumption generally, I was more just pointing out -- nitpicking might be another word -- a flaw in OPs justification.
I'm in the process of reducing my meat consumption considerably (to 'a couple of times a week') and restricting it to be local and free range. Maybe in a year I'll be full vego, who knows.
Interesting point you raise about a willing blindness of some carnivores. I'm not sure I've really encountered the level of denial that you mention myself, possibly because of the semi-rural area I grew up in, but I don't doubt that it exists. Humans are highly skilled at avoiding the uncomfortable and maintaining delusions.
Well over 95% of meat is factory farmed[2], and animals that are raised in factory farms do not live pleasant lives, to put it lightly.[3] This is coming from someone who grew up on a farm, and whose parents are still farmers.
[0] People think that buying from their local butcher or local farm must make their meat ethical. In fact, small abbatoirs often have very shoddy killing protocols compared to the large ones. You end up with farmers clubbing animals to death, or putting 5 bullets into a pig's head before it dies: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-14/tasmanian-abattoir-ac...
[1] Hunting isn't an ethical source of meat. Even professional hunters (e.g. those who kill kangaroos for farmers in AU) will let ~1 in 20 get away with a bullet in them. That could mean suffering for hours or even days if it clots but then dies due to internal bleeding or infection. I used to hunt and I would go to sleep thinking about the animals that got away wounded that day. Still, it took me far too long to realise that there is no need to eat animals.
[2] https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
Ethical: cruelty is bad, so responsible production of meat is preferred but there’s no reason why killing animal for food should be bad, such that same argument can’t be applied to veggie production.
Environmental: grass fed meat is very much preferred to monoculturing the crap out of our planet. Animas are part of life cycle of the environment.
Health: crappy grains have done way more health damage than crappy meats. Also focusing on meat exclusively, skipping organs is unhealthy. Saturated fats aren’t as bad as you’re told (only in combination with sugars). Red meat doesn’t cause cancer (smoked foods do). Lots of myths around nutrition.
Taste: highly subjective.
> Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.
No, there are a lot of arguing about this. There is no ethical consensus on "killing animals" being the "wrong" thing. Hell there is not even consensus on whether an objective ethics is possible.
Organisms consume other organisms. This is part of the cycle of life. Declaring this objectively wrong without exceptions just because you feel bad for the poor animals is a weak argument at its best.
You can talk about the perils of the modern day animal farming which involves treating animals like vegetables and "growing" them in conditions indistinguishable from torture; but that doesn't have to mean "killing animals" is bad per se.
> Environmentally: a hundred reasons to choose a plant based diet, all of which have been cycled here a million times so won't go back through it but we all know it's true.
Yes, but there is research supporting that grain and vegetable farming has a lot of problems as well. Farming in scale in general is a problematic thing. Some even go as far as to state that animal farming can be even less harmful environmentally, when done right. What I'm trying to say is that, this claim hasn't been proven yet. If you want to see counter arguments and relevant research, try following a couple of carnivore diet advocates on social media. I don't have any links to share off the top of my head at the moment and I'm sorry about it. But there is no real consensus here, not so easy.
> Health: again, see pretty much all the research ever. Eating a plant based diet is so much better for weight, health, BMI, etc etc etc
Yes, there are a lot past research about this. But as we can see today there are a lot of problems with those researches as well. A lot of them are being challenged today. Ketogenic and carnivore diets are on the rise and for good reason. USDA's food pyramid is reversed. Fat, eggs and animal protein are no longer the enemy according to many new researches. I suggest you to keep up with the new research as well.
> Taste: this is the kicker imo. If you'd asked me 15 years ago when the vegetarian alternative was a crappy pasta with tomato sauce, I'd have been more tempted to chomp my way into a steak. Nowadays? There is SO much good vegetarian food. Loads of choice, huge range of flavours and in many places it's the vegetarian food that gets the chef's attention, rather than falling back on the Default Meat.
Yes, this may be the kicker for you. For many, animal based foods are still irreplaceable. Not much point talking about this as it's fairly subjective.
It took me 5 minutes of Googling to find articles that refute this from all kinds of credible sources.
Going vegetarian might be a step up from the average Americans diet, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find any research that demonstrates plant-based diets are any better than a balanced diet that includes meat protein.
But once again may I stress that for me it's a whole range of factors that make this compelling, not just one.
Most Asian/plant based diet population: quite healthy, live longer, less pill popping and more homeopathic traditional meds.
Forget googling studies. Read about the China Study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study
Even without studies, ask yourself why you most likely have a relative or know someone who's died from heart disease or a cancer and that likelihood plummets when looking at those that eat less or no meat? Then look at populations where meat consumption has gone up in the past few decades and certain cancers and cardiovascular diseases have gone up in tandem?
Buuuuuut can't let anyone stand in between you and your Whopper®, right?!
I'm not American, so who cares. But some of the highest life expectancy in the world are European countries. I certainly don't see "Asia" (lol) as a standout.
>Even without studies, ask yourself...
Not interested in anecdata or hocus pocus.
>Buuuuuut can't let anyone stand in between you and your Whopper®, right?!
See, the difference between you and me is that I don't care what you choose to eat. Meanwhile, you feel the need to shame and lie and impose your preferences on others. It's why "annoying vegetarian" is a meme.
> homeopathic traditional meds
That said, if you think that lower meat consumption isn't correlated with increased life expectancy, then you should read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Longevity
You can control for a bunch of lifestyle factors like smoking and exercise level, and the correlation still exists. It uncontroversial at this point - which is why every major national dietetics association (don't confuse them with "nutritionists") has a position statement on plant-based diets saying that they're as healthy or healthier than regular diets.
And with UFC fighters[0], NBA planers, national weightlifting champtions[1], world-record-holding powerlifters[2], and so on eating plant-based diets, it's getting harder to make the "okay, sure you live longer, but you probably sacrifice strength/vigor/etc throughout your life" claim.
[0] https://www.mensjournal.com/sports/nate-diaz-and-other-vegan...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendrick_Farris
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrik_Baboumian
My comment re: homeopathy/traditional meds was an attempt to contrast the wild wild west dumpster fire that is Big Pharma with traditional meds. Pill popping countries have an opioid crisis whilst less meat eating populations aren't heavily reliant on the pharmaceutical industry because they have far less diet related health issues. In hindsight, I could have phrased that better. Then again, you could have parsed what I was trying to get across.
The rest of this must be directed at OP because I too know and believe a plant based diet carries longer life expectancy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of the provided links [1], [2] and [3], two of them show Honk Kong, Japan, Macau, Singapore and South Korea in the top 10. Europe gets 3 with Israel and Australia rounding out the 10. You're not incorrect by saying * some * but with Asian countries outnumbering European, lol at how wrong I am.
Your condescending tone is merely a eurocentric insecurity of the decline in your population. With birth rates plummeting, centuries, if not decades, from now, Europe won't be as white, as homogenous as it is (or was) so I understand your response of lashing out instead of accepting Asian countries might lead in anything of consequence.
I'll concede that what I meant by continent, I was actually referring to (specific) Asian countries, not the continent as a whole. Due to lifestyle and diet, Asian countries are more homogenous than other continents hence my lumping them together.
> Not interested in anecdata or hocus pocus.
Meat loving countries have higher obesity rates thus poorer health outcomes. No hocus pocus re: this observation. For someone not interested in anecdata, you miserably failed to do a simple query: https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=life+expectancy+by+continent
> See, the difference between you and me is that I don't care what you choose to eat. Meanwhile, you feel the need to shame and lie and impose your preferences on others. It's why "annoying vegetarian" is a meme.
Neither do I. I'm shaming Americans and any person who thinks it's okay to eat meat without acknowledging the consequences it has on our environment. Basically what I take issue with is how your diet affects climate change which affects all of us!
PS: I eat meat regularly. I could quit given the need to but don't see myself consuming 'meat' grown artificially.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/270861/life-expectancy-b...
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
> homeopathic traditional meds
Jesus. Really?
The is no evidence that homeopathy is effective at treating anything. On the other hand there's a mountain of evidence that people who eat no meat, or less than once per week live significantly longer. See citations on this[0] wiki page. The studies control for a bunch of different lifestyle factors including smoking, exercise level, and so on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Longevity
I think you're really painting people who don't follow your thinking with a pretty aggressively negative stereotype here.
I love a good steak. The fact that it came from a cow is irrelevant to me - I like it for taste/texture/etc. If you can give me the exact same product from a lab, I'll 100% buy it (especially if it's cheaper). This is how most people are (and not just about meat) - they care about the end product they're consuming, not its origins or how it got to them (otherwise, y'know, we'd be thinking about where our iPhones came from and whatnot). Give them the identical product they have now that's better along some line that matters to them (like cost) and they'll happily switch.
Most of the world does not have the culture of offering vegetarian/vegan meals. And if they did, living that lifestyle can be prohibitively expensive.
I think it's ethical to kill living beings you can get away with. You may choose to limit it to plants. Some of us don't like to put fake limits on to ourselves like that.
Even if I took the vegan position to show pretend virtue in front of people I wish to impress or annoy, I would still:
- kill an animal to protect my child
- pay to abort my unwanted child to protect myself from future obligations as a parent and a partner
- kill humans who pose a threat to my life or that of a loved one
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://tronical.github.io/femtovg/examples/index.html
But I feel there is still something lacking and there is definitely scope for a lot of improvement to make these type of software more useful. Still love the direction in which this is headed and it feels more in-sync than keeping a folder full of text files.
Also, the “daily notes” feature in Roam is really useful, it’s a small UI thing but it gives me a nudge to make a daily note when I do any thinking, rather than having to file it manually in Obsidian.
Obsidian has most of the core stuff that Roam does though.
Can you share a link to the source? I didn't see a link on obsidian.md
https://github.com/foambubble/foam
There are systems that work on mainframes, but the only realistic (in my opinion) option coming down the pike for the rest of us is from
http://genode.org
(from https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index)
== Mastering complexity through application-specific trusted computing bases
> Because software complexity correlates with the likelihood for bugs, having security-sensitive functionality depending on high-complexity software is risky. The term trusted_computing_base (TCB) was coined to describe the amount of code that must not be compromised to uphold security. In addition to the code of the sensitive application, the TCB comprises each system component that has direct or indirect control over the execution of the application (affecting availability and integrity) or that can access the processed information (affecting confidentiality and integrity). On monolithic OSes, the TCB complexity can be regarded as a global system property because it is dominated by the complexity of the kernel and the privileged processes, which are essentially the same for each concurrently executed application. On Genode, the amount of security-critical code can largely differ for each application depending on the position of the application within Genode's process tree and the used services. To illustrate the difference, an email-signing application executed on Linux has to rely on a TCB complexity of millions of lines of code (LOC). Most of the code, however, does not provide functionality required to perform the actual cryptographic function of the signing application. Still, the credentials of the user are exposed to an overly complex TCB including the network stack, device drivers, and file systems. In contrast, Genode allows the cryptographic function to be executed with a specific TCB that consists only of components that are needed to perform the signing function. For the signing application, the TCB would contain the microkernel (20 KLOC), the Genode OS framework (10 KLOC), a minimally-complex GUI (2 KLOC), and the signing application (15 KLOC). These components stack up to a complexity of less than 50,000 LOC.
> Genode tailors the trusted computing base for each application individually. The figure on the right illustrates the TCB of the yellow marked process. Naturally, it contains the hierarchy of parents and those processes that provide services used by the application (the left component at the third level).
Qubes-OS is a tool for letting you run your digital life in a series of boxes which are separate from each other. So, if one gets infected, the others aren't. It is similar to the trend of using Virtual Machines to separate areas of concern to try to limit the damage of a rogue process.
Genode takes a different approach entirely. Instead of dividing your computer into a few boxes, each of which is subject to any rogue process, it gives each and every process NO access to anything else, except for those things explicitly provided.
The analogy I like to use is that of a wallet.
The Windows, MacOS, Unix, Linux, etc.. approach is to hand over the users wallet to any program that is running, and hope the program doesn't misuse it. Anything in the wallet (your system) is at risk.
The Qubes-OS approach is to do the above, but to have the ability to have more than one wallet, to divide up the risk a tiny bit.
The Genode approach is much like a human uses a wallet, you decide what resources are required, and ONLY those resources are at risk.
The ease of use is that it is effectively impossible to limit the resources a process can access in other systems, whereas in Genode, it is almost drag and drop.
> Assuming a 100% efficient laser, that is one watt-hour (3.6 kJ) of energy consumption for a maximum 0.5 Mbits of data storage.
Is not good
I also think we'll see much more fun ARM based SBC going forward. The raspberry pi 4 was already powerful enough to be useful & it's only going to get better.
I would love a large screen version of it with an array of cameras that would allow people to communicate in some sort of futuristic FaceTime experience.
Having a real-life videogame HUD with a blue marker showing my next destination sounds fantastic.
I hope it stays an assistive niche technology for people with disabilities and gamers. People wearing this in a pub or on the streets hopefully continue to get ridiculed (e.g. they were called "glassholes" for good reason).
When they say that if a person loses one of their senses then the other senses become heightened, it's interesting to note that this does the opposite by attempting to heighten (augment) several senses. The net benefit is not just poor but negative since it just is one more way to overload our cognitive abilities. In other words who cares about the additional things (data points) we see when it makes us miss others (since it's still a distortion)
Personally I'm not interested. I have no need to be connected all the time.
I feel like react native is more prominent, but also it could be just the people I interact with.
https://www.draftbit.com
I’m one of the founders, would love to know what you think!
Having a DS background, I love what SQL-orchestration tool dbt (and peers) have enabled: data consumers to rapidly create our own safe data pipelines. There's easily a 10x productivity improvement for most of my transformation pipelines vs. when I write them in Python or PySpark.
But batch ML and SQL are not that friendly (even BigQuery ML is too limiting). I end up butchering dbt's value (simplicity and iteration speed), splitting the DAG into pieces and orchestrating them with Airflow so that I can wedge in other non-dbt parts (like feature engineering, inference, logging, detecting stale models, ...). This isn't what the future looks like.
I've tried switching to Databricks, but do not see this as the path forward for unioning the warehouse + batch ML.
Hopefully Snowpark is a step forward :)
-------------------
Separately, https://materialize.com/ is something I'm paying attention to! Being able to implement all of my SQL-based pipelines as materialized views would be immensely valuable. They recently raised capital and they could become huge.
Remember that "data is a team sport". Together, we try and make better decisions (in manual or automated ways). A DE can produce great data but it's only useful if it helps the DA/DS. There's a lot of friction there.
Most of that friction disappears with SQL-based orchestration tools (I mean specifically dbt here, but there are others). Suddenly the analyst can create the data they need! With minimal guidance from a DE.
That can be with Spark SQL (+ DeltaLake / Iceberg), or some warehouse. That's not the issue.
The issue is around keeping orchestration simple when you're not just doing simple stuff anymore. Keeping that DAG logical, clear, and smooth is difficult once you include non-SQL items.
This isn't solved by Spark UDFs unfortunately :)
I love their Prisma 2 product.
And it lives up to the hype, it is indeed a next generation ORM. Very useful when you're rushing to iterate.
[1] https://www.prisma.io/blog/prisma-migrate-preview-b5eno5g08d...
It would be great to hear another perspective.
It’s not a difficult task, but when discussing viability with the APIs team, the general consensus was that you don’t want your API coupled to your data. Most of the time, you don’t want to expose everything.
Of course, you can start describing what to omit, but now you’re just writing an API design by omission.
Building good APIs is hard, so you want to build the right abstraction - which is not always the easiest one.
[1] https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm [2] https://github.com/graphql-python/graphene
When you're operating a CNC machine, as an operator, do you need mess around with internal wiring, schematic, motor controllers? No. You just need a control panel, with DRO and a bunch of buttons, a joystick for manual override, e-stop and a keypad. You're not dealing with the exposed wiring and internals of the machine. Nor do you care (except if you're a hacker, more on this below).
APIs are all things the user needs to do and we allow them specific endpoints to do those things. A lot of modern GraphQL methods allow you to become a "hacker" and get access to what you want. But, after you're done hacking, you want a proper control panel with steel panels and a version number. You, as a user, are guaranteed that interface and you're going to build your world around it. Check out Shopify, Stripe or Dropbox APIs. See what they allow you to do and what they don't.
Here are some reasons why we want an API:
- Decoupling internal resources from the user (user can still be an internal service). We want to be able to change the database, swap it with anything else we want, completely change the schema, whatever... without affecting the user.
- We might require processing/handling of the data, sometimes with help from other microservices before serving.
- We might want to cache read access, although I am sure this is possible with these automation tools.
- We want stability over expediency (although, this is ok to forego initially).
- We want a singular point of entry, aka entrypoint and be able to control it.
- We might want to asychorniously process the request. "Hey, I got your request and I am processing, here is the processing ID" and respond with status code 202.
All these automation tools are great to get a product running quickly. Personally, I would just use straight SQL for prototyping. If you're working on UIs and don't have access to the server, you can just use https://postgrest.org/ and get an API running. However, after you're product has reached maturity, tighten up those endpoints.
The endpoint design is your control panel. Make it look tidy, checkout how others build this panel, engineer it well and your users will thank you.
Your comment was very insightful. I used to think somewhat along those lines when it came to designing an API. My thought was that and endpoint was to represent an action the user could perform, and it was none of their business how that was implemented. But I've recently been enlisted in a project to rewrite a whole API (admittedly not a good one at all) where it was decided to use GraphQL. The rationale was "some of our endpoints return enormous objects. Not all of the data is needed every time the client calls that endpoint. Let's implement a way to let the client only ask for the data it needs". It sounded great, but I'm thinking now it might not be all gold as it was presented to me.
This might be hard/tiresome when you're hand writing SQL queries but this is where query builders and ORMs really shine.
IMO I wouldn't reach for graphQL unless I have a lot of entities and a lot of nested relationships (or an actual graph), it can get either very tiresome to add or overly complex or tightly couples your DB layer when you have deeper nested relationships
https://temporal.io/ - is the new kid on the block of state-dependent service-orchestrated application development platforms.
https://workos.com/ - is building enterprise-readiness as a service, enabling new companies to start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code.
https://www.around.co/ - provides an AI-based camera framing designed for high-impact video calls. It helps users take video meetings less intrusive and less clunky.
Age of Empires IV (https://www.ageofempires.com/games/age-of-empires-iv/) - The next chapter in the Age of Empires series that will take us back to the Middle Ages
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFlVNtGJVDU
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/hf1da1/1st_attempt_at...
Check out Paradox Interactive's games, they have one for most interesting time periods and are pretty entertaining.
I find it funny that it's now considered a promising alternative approach; conceptually this is very similar to AJAX, which was the standard way to make pages dynamic ten years ago.
But point taken, I recall using similar techniques a long time ago. I think the pendulum is swinging because front-end development has gone down such a rabbit hole with state management that people are wondering if they can remove all the overhead of redux, translating JSON, client side routing, etc. In most cases, they probably can I reckon.
You can get a lot done on the free tier (full disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders; please let me know if you have any questions)
[1] https://materialize.com/
Zinc Gluconate 15mg + Selenium + Quercetin 200mg (zinc ionosphere): For years I ignored the advice of knowledgeofhealth.com when it came to zinc and quercetin. I finally used it this year and it got rid of my cold in less than 48 hours with no side-effects. This has never happened to me before. Zinc-based supplements get rave reviews on Amazon and they seem legit. Google: selenium virus mutations. (I also took a new Vitamin C formula, Formula 216).
https://aureon.ca/ - Safire Project. Some claim it's a fraud, but I'm hoping something good will come out of it. They are using a different model of stars/suns to generate energy and other benefits. There's always molten salt reactors in case this one doesn't pan out.
2. Treatments that reverse aging in tissues and organisms.
Expect major breakthroughs in these areas in a decade or two with direct implications for human health and lifespan.
1) Remote controlled orgasmic neural implants
2) Bangfit
- https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/ - https://materialize.com/