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Extramaze: Using Racket, PostgreSQL, AWS, but no ads or JavaScript (2018)
- tomcam 8y agoI would love to see as a sample a two week-old version of the deals so I could understand what I am paying for.
- vezycash 8y agoArticle says registered users get deals that are at least a day old for free. Registered users get faster deals and saved searches - i.e. alerts.
- tomcam 8y agoI missed that, thanks. A service like this could definitely be worth the money. I used to watch sales at Musician's Friend and got things like harmonicas for $2, gig bags for $2, and Fender Custom Shop picks 6 boxes for $24.
- samteeeee 8y agoI run similar services covering the Vans shoes (https://vaultexplorer.com/ https://vaultexplorer.com/) and "parts to build drones with" niches (https://rotorratings.com/ https://rotorratings.com/). I run them on $5 Digital Ocean droplets.
- throwaway427 8y agoWhat kind of revenue you make on that? More than just beer money?
- samteeeee 8y agoNot enough for a single beer yet, but ive only just begun. Adding features for paid users only soon.
- mark_l_watson 8y agoNice writeup, thanks! I saved the link in my 'cool Racket' list. I am also using Racket for a side project (Racket for the top level and 'business logic' with some Python/Keras stuff wrapped as services). Racket is very nice, and it is "weaning" me off of Common Lisp (which I have used heavily since the 1980s). The Racket ecosystem just keeps getting better. (I still love Common Lisp though)
- equalunique 8y agoThere have been some other exciting posts about Racket over the past few days[0][1], so I feel confident that my decision to soon get started with DrRacket is a good one. Question for you: Do you use any services, tools, or methodology to organize your bookmarks? Personally it's an interesting challenge for me because of the myriad of devices, browsers, and platforms I use. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19027400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19027400 [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043816 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19044409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19044409
- aeontech 8y agoYeah, this link was mentioned in the comments on Racket 7.2 announcement thread and I thought it was interesting enough to deserve a submission. Apparently HN agrees :D (this being my first submission to reach front page in quite a while). I keep coming back to Racket, thinking it would be awesome to learn it properly and use it for a real project, then forgetting about it again due to busyness with existing projects... it's quite a cursed circle.
- mark_l_watson 8y agoI keep org mode files for general interests of mine and put links in ‘resource’ sections. I also use browser bookmarks but I frequently get rid of older bookmarks, using bookmarks as todo reading.
- _bxg1 8y agoIt'd be cool to see a revival in niche, honest software. The thing about tech conglomerates is while they do a bunch of things efficiently, they also do most of those things badly. If a single person can build something that's useful to herself and to those like her, it seems like it can be enough to make a living. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/amazon-made-online-commerce-bewildering/580660/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/amazo...
- rhacker 8y agoI think they do things both inefficiently and badly. They only get ahead because of their sales teams.
- _bxg1 8y agoI meant the implementation is efficient, not the user experience. Amazon sure does benefit from consolidating all of its services into a single infrastructure, and from being able to bootstrap a whole new "store" just by adding a product category. It just lacks the ability to tune in to any particular user segment's needs.
- tzs 8y agoNote that this was written in May 2018, and the author is probably in the US in the state of Massachusetts. I'm guessing the location based on a statement on the site that MA residents will be charged sales tax. The next month, a major legal change took place for such sites when the Supreme Court ruled that states can force out of state online vendors to collect sales tax. At least half the states now have such requirements, and most of the rest are in the process of getting it in place. This made doing a "get paid directly by the end user" site a lot more complicated, both legally and technically. If you don't have sufficient sales into a state, you don't have to collect tax, but unfortunately most states seem to be going with a threshold of 200 transactions a year or sales of $100k or $200k or some similar high number. That "or" is the killer. If you are selling items that individually are cheap it is not hard to reach a state's "must collect and file" threshold by transaction count even if you have very little income from the state. You could easily lose all your profit and more in such a state to tax report filing fees.
- hippich 8y agoI am not a member of this organization (yet?) - but they are fighting (right now mostly focus in CA in regards to Amazon's third party sellers) for straightforward legislations around sales taxes - https://onlinemerchantsguild.org/ https://onlinemerchantsguild.org/
- Twirrim 8y agoThere has been efforts for more than a decade to introduce a streamlined tax system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project), a framework that all states could adopt for their tax purposes. The intent was to make it easy for states to tax as desired, while using a simple framework that would make it easier for companies choosing to do inter-state business, and easier for online companies to implement. A number of the larger companies had expressed a willingness over the years of implementing a sales tax, provided the states could clean up their tax codes to make it straightforward. A number of the states have tax codes that are so insanely complex for companies operating outside of the state that it becomes a near nightmare to correctly turn in to a computer program, for example Hawaii which doesn't have a sales tax but has a General Excise Tax. Getting states to be willing to completely overhaul their tax system is an extremely hard battle. edit: added link to the SST Project wiki page.
- Roboprog 8y agoI love how that platform puts SQL into s expressions, with all the capabilities this implies. Not that I’ve actually touched any Lisp since the 80s. Back to work in Java / Hibernate hell...
- outworlder 8y agoIt is amazing how elegant s-expressions are. And just how much pain that could have been avoided by using them. Markup languages, configuration files, you name it. Sometimes there are advantages for alternate notations, but most are quite niche. Now, if just all the lisp dialects would stop bikeshedding...
- Barrin92 8y agoIf you want to get back into a lisp give Clojure a try.
- pwaivers 8y agoNoooo. I was excited to look at the site, but it is not up: http://extramaze.com/ http://extramaze.com/
- ylesaout 8y agoThe article points to the actual website https://deals.extramaze.com/ https://deals.extramaze.com/
- equalunique 8y ago>Markdown edited with GNU Emacs. Site built using Frog, the frozen blog generator, and Twitter Bootstrap. I was looking at Frog[0] yesterday and found myself in want of an example website. Today I found one, thanks to OP. :) [0] https://github.com/greghendershott/frog https://github.com/greghendershott/frog
- jessaustin 8y agoIt looks like it's the same person... also it does look very cool.
- xrayspec 8y agoAlso https://blog.racket-lang.org/ https://blog.racket-lang.org/
- IBCNU 8y agoGreg made CakeWalk, one of the first and best music programs of it's day.
- MisterOctober 8y agoI bet more '90s-early 2000s demos were cut with Cakewalk than with Logic, Performer, and ProTools combined. Absolutely classic software; I'm amazed that it was put together by just one guy.
- aeontech 8y agoOh my god. I recognized the name, but I didn't realize he was talking about _that_ CakeWalk.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- armandososa 8y agoWow. The author started Cakewalk all by himself in 1987. Now I'm feeling really bad about pirating his software when I was 19. I'm very sorry Mr Hendershott, these days I pay for all the software I use.
- black-tea 8y agoCould you afford Cakewalk when you were 19? What damage did you do?
- toothbrush 8y agoI've recently started a blog with a similar ethos: static hosting (for now it's on S3) with no Javascript or ads. However, i'd like to know who is visiting / whether my various publicity stunts are successful. I could self-host something like Piwik, but the maintenance headache and security/PII responsibility doesn't appeal to me. What would other ethical webmasters here do? Only use HTTP access logs? EDIT: to be clear: i could also write a bunch of tooling myself to parse access logs or report events to a backend, but that feels like a lot of work + reinventing the wheel + maintenance/security scare.
- y4mi 8y ago> Only use HTTP access logs? what else do you need, honestly? you could set a cookie on initial page load with a uuid and identify unique users from that (you can log cookies with nginx/apache). just push the resulting log to Loki [1] (as an example) and you're done. [1] https://grafana.com/loki https://grafana.com/loki