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fernandohur's comments

fernandohur | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

https://synthql.dev: An alternative to PostgREST focused on the React-Node-PG stack. Main advantage right now is it gives you end to end type safety: you can write type-safe queries straight from your component that directly access your database.

Why SynthQL? My experience working for +10 years on enterprise SaaS is that a quite often you just want a database and a way to fetch data from it. Backends will quite often get in the way adding abstractions and layers upon layers of transformation between DB objects to domain objects to DTOs.

If you ever feel like you just want to talk to the database directly, give SynthQL a try :)

fernandohur | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?

An open-source, type-safe http client to your postgresql database. It let's you access your database directly from your react components. It's fast, safe and performant. Think Graphql but you don't need to implement resolvers, it's all generated from your database schema.

If this sounds interesting to you, ping me (email on my profile) :)

fernandohur | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you approach a problem you are not sure has a solution?

Assuming the context is for solving real-world problems, not textbook problems:

1. Try to solve the smallest (but similar) problem you can think of. You'll learn a lot along the way and might figure out if it is doable or not. As a reminder, just because a problem is solvable doesn't mean it's solvable at an acceptable level of cost/time/effort. Solving a similar, but smaller problem will help you estimate the feasibility of the larger problem.

2. If the problem is worth solving, it's probably affecting people who in turn have tried to solve it before and are using either approximations or imperfect solutions. Talk to them, understand what they've tried, what works and what doesn't. If the problem affects enough people It's very likely that a solution exists already, it just hasn't been generalised, productised, or automated yet.

fernandohur | 3 years ago | on: Why Not Mars

Moving to Mars is analogous to a full app re-write.

Instead of dealing with the "technical debt" that we've built on earth over the past couple thousand years, the proposal is that we start off with a clean slate.

I'm not saying it can't work, but if software engineering has thought us anything at all it's that full app re-writes are generally a terrible idea. The sheer complexity and vast amount of unknown unknowns is what generally kills these projects and what would also kill any attempt at re-building civilisation in a foreign planet.

Don't re-write, refactor and fix the bugs on earth.

fernandohur | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?

There's a difference between not drinking and not being a drinker. If you are able to create an association in your mind between "me" and "not a drinker" it will make it easier over time to reject a drink, either when your friends or colleagues offer one or when you yourself offer one to you.

Do you want a drink? No, I'm not someone who drinks.

This technique is not specific to alcohol, I used it to stop smoking many years ago. I believe it has roots in Buddhism. The idea is to dissociate the "I" with the habit that you want to get rid of.

fernandohur | 3 years ago | on: Knowledge is like a house of cards

Nassim Taleb's Black Swan is also a great read on the instability (or in his words, fragility) of knowledge. A single observation is quite often enough to break what has been considered solid knowledge for years.

fernandohur | 3 years ago | on: Knowledge is like a house of cards

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I've just setup the site so I think it's more likely the error is on my end. Can't say I know the answer but I'll try to figure it out :) and again, thanks for sharing the screenshot!

fernandohur | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Darklang

Thanks for the quick reply :)

A few more questions

# Maintenance costs & agility

You're not just building a programming language, you're also building an IDE, and now a version management system (through feature flags).

Each of these tasks are hard problems individually, what gives you the confidence that a small startup can build all of them? All of this while trying to make your company profitable.

# Ecosystem

If your language is not hosted, how do you plan on building an eco-system around it. (I know you come from a Clojure background so you've probably seen the wonders of being able to re-use Java's ecosystem).

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