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No Code

132 pointsby severinealmost 5 years ago

20 comments

kleibaalmost 5 years ago
The second sentence ("First, you work all month, and then you give half of the money to those who didn't work.") is already so blatantly wrong and reactionary that I almost have to force myself to read on - after all, if the premise is already flawed what good can come of it?
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perl4everalmost 5 years ago
I&#x27;ve gotten sucked into this in the form of MS Power Automate, and it just seems to make everything more complicated and confusing. I spend most of my time looking for workarounds to try to get back the ability to do stuff that any programming language allows. I only learned Access and VBA about a year ago, but I tend to agree with the people who say Microsoft has broken up parts of the functionality of this reasonably useful workhorse into various products, all with their own learning curve and without caring much about covering all that you could previously do.<p>I&#x27;m beginning to think it&#x27;s just a scam, where Microsoft and others sell a vision to people who can&#x27;t judge it because they don&#x27;t know what programming is...and the point is to have an incredibly convoluted and random licensing system where every little thing requires paying more money. It feels as calculated and predatory as a casino.<p>What &quot;no code&quot; boils down to, it appears to me thus far, is you don&#x27;t have the version control, the refactoring ability, the ability to reuse code, the ability to see a reasonable amount of logic at once, the ability to easily copy and paste, the security of an editor that won&#x27;t randomly mangle your code (sorry, it isn&#x27;t code, it&#x27;s...uh...JSON) it&#x27;s just on and on, things you can&#x27;t do, and nothing added in exchange except the label of &quot;no code&quot;. And I don&#x27;t see how anything complex can be maintained; it merely has the political advantage that you don&#x27;t have to <i>designate</i> a developer to maintain it...but in reality, it&#x27;s if anything harder to understand.
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s17nalmost 5 years ago
What &quot;no code&quot; is really about is &quot;no figuring out the toolchain, deployment, integration with third parties, etc&quot;. For actually writing business logic, replacing code with drag and drop logic blocks is... not really helpful to anybody. But with all the crap that programmers actually spend our days dealing with removed from the picture, anybody can write their own business logic, even if they have to do it in <i>gasp</i> code.
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marcus_holmesalmost 5 years ago
It&#x27;s not &quot;no code&quot; it&#x27;s &quot;code later&quot;. It doesn&#x27;t prevent the effort of coding the solution, just moves it down the line and makes it harder.<p>The good part is that (as the article) says, you only need to write the code when you know the code will be used.<p>The bad part is that the no-code solution will break at some point. Usually because some part of the chain introduced a breaking change, or the process its modelling needs to change in a way that the solution can&#x27;t handle. Then you need to replace the no-code with actual code, while under time pressure because the business is broken waiting for the new solution.<p>He&#x27;s right - this is a useful tool, and sitting in the middle is the best place. But there are lots of people who will read this and create something completely with no-code and with no intention of replacing it with code, until it breaks and then they&#x27;re in a painful place.
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jl2718almost 5 years ago
I haven’t been following the no-code “movement”, but it seems to me that this is really a revolt against abusive software development practices justified by UI&#x2F;UX and of course data lock-in. It seems that people really want editable, transparent, and composable pipelines for common tasks. This is the GNU philosophy for the command line.<p>Little story: I did a lot of work with Army grunts trying to avoid getting blown up. The main tool was excel. Software shops kept delivering junk that nobody used. The acquisitions guys loved a slick demo and that’s pretty much all it did. They’d come in and install a new server cluster, which means a bigger server room, which means more cooling, which means a bigger generator, which means more diesel trucks, which means more convoys on the road, which means more getting blown up. New grunts would tool around on it for a month and then get a novel task they had to use excel for, and never go back. The acq guys had such disdain for the ‘users’ that they couldn’t imagine that they actually knew WTF they were doing. The slick demo went on to win the DCGS contract, and now they’re stuck with ‘easy’ where they need flexible, customizable, fast, simple (all the way down the stack).<p>So yeah, now I get it. It’s more like, no-UI than no-code.
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phnofivealmost 5 years ago
From Not Invented Here to Exclusively External Dependencies.<p>Took me down a fun rabbit hole of German tax deductions for expenses - especially the fact that you can deduct a few thousand euros without evidence:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelocal.de&#x2F;20180509&#x2F;german-tax-return-know-your-tax-deductible-expenses-wundertax-tlccu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelocal.de&#x2F;20180509&#x2F;german-tax-return-know-your...</a>
jamexcbalmost 5 years ago
In Portugal we just give our NIF (fiscal number - VAT Number) every time you buy something. All invoices will have your NIF. And all invoices are communicated to the government by the software that make your invoice. All invoicing software need to me certified by the government. This is mandatory. When you need to make your taxes they are already filled in. And business can&#x27;t avoid taxes because they are communicated to the government.
reeeeeealmost 5 years ago
Soooooo, the author moved away from waveapps because the system did no allow him to link multiple pictures to 1 receipt. So he started implementing his own no-code solution which... also doesn&#x27;t allow him to link multiple pictures to 1 receipt...
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totetsualmost 5 years ago
I am trying to read this article, but it has a lot of money bumps..
voltagex_almost 5 years ago
What do you do when Integromat shuts down?
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pjc50almost 5 years ago
Is &quot;Scanner Pro&quot; good enough to be able to:<p>- take a photo of a supermarket receipt and OCR <i>all</i> the items<p>- get that at least 95% correct<p>- output that in a document with correct horizontal grouping?<p>If not, can someone recommend me an Android app for this?
avmichalmost 5 years ago
vas3k is a wonderful blogger, glad his page made it to HN. He has technical stories on the site, but it&#x27;s non-technical ones which I consider real gifts to his readers.
jgarzonalmost 5 years ago
For me the worst part is that I can use a keyboard to write code but only use a single pointer from my mouse to move stuff. It’s so much slower
mikecolesalmost 5 years ago
I saw no-code and poor eyesight picked out what looked like an amateur 2x2 callsign so I thought this was about licensing and morse code.<p>Cool workflow he has developed. It seems taxes are too crazy everywhere.
ykevinatoralmost 5 years ago
What does the auto segmentation and ocr?
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klingonoperaalmost 5 years ago
Wow. That seems like a lot of work.<p>I just use GnuCash, a scanner, some good old Samba file-hosting on a local Debian server running 24&#x2F;7, and WOL and VNC (or just SSH and SCP) if I need to access anything from not at home.
p2t2palmost 5 years ago
It is me or “no code” is just “Unix way” of cloud world?
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patchtopicalmost 5 years ago
&quot;First, you work all month, and then you give half of the money to those who couldn&#x27;t work.&quot;<p>fixed the wording for you.
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terakualmost 5 years ago
This reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1425&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1425&#x2F;</a>
peace2allalmost 5 years ago
TL;DR: He relies on 3 different online services to scan business receipts and track expenses. None are needed.<p>He spends hours (days) trying to automate what he himself claims is only a few expenses per month (and shows a photo of a very thin folder of receipts).<p>I can’t imagine his business will be ever very successful. He wastes too much time toying with simple things.<p>But aside from that, if one wants a “no code” solution to tracking expenses, along with imaged receipts in case later proof is needed here you go:<p>1. Take pic of receipt. If you need multiple pics per image, you can combine images post de facto via something like Apple’s Preview app (save as PDF), or you can use Apple Notes to do for you. I assume other competing platforms have similar options. Worst case scenario: simply add “page-2”, “page-3”, in the file name.<p>2. Save image file in a directory called “business-receipts”.<p>3. Name file with receipt date, vendor, amount, and maybe description or anything else. Date comes first for easy finding later. “2020-06-15 ATT 63-00 USD Monthly business cell bill.pdf”<p>4. Enter transaction into appropriate tab of business finances spreadsheet (cash, bank, credit card, etc.)<p>5. Add a category for the expense, if you want.<p>6. Get back to work.<p>Benefits?<p>1. No code necessary (unless you count your initial spreadsheet setup and the use of VLOOKUP for reporting). Call me crazy but if you’ve been going through all the gyrations outlined in the article, I assume you’ve mastered VLOOKUP or can do so in 10 minutes and that you’ve also graduated Junior High school.<p>2. No trusting OCR “auto-populate”. Most of us can type faster than these things can think. Also, if you trust those (without verifying each time), I have some perfectly safe driverless cars to sell you.<p>3. Almost no technical debt. No API depreciation. No risk of anyone being bought out.<p>4. Offline. Works without the internet. As did most all business processes 25 years ago on PCs. Amazing. No clunky browser needed either.<p>5. Secure. Your data is kept Local First. If you choose to backup online, so be it. Encrypt and Backup. But all your prior processing between multiple “services” (with your unencrypted data being manipulated on their ends) is no longer necessary.<p>Counter-Arguments:<p>1. Excel is now also a “service”: True but it’s more popular and has more staying power than any of the ones you’re using. If you really think you don’t want to pay monthly for Excel (not sure what business can avoid this), there are plenty of free options. And for the purposes of this method, at least, you could do this on Excel 97 (buy once, use ‘forever’).<p>2. Still have to deal with online storage: Well, no you don’t, but let’s pretend that you only trust hard drives in the cloud and not the $100 4Tb one you can get at Walmart. So what? Encrypt and send it on up. If you use Macs or Office365, you likely have plenty of room already. Why involve another third-party? But anyway, this is a part of the “no code” process you added as if it was unique only to that process. It’s a bigger part of a different decision on how you store, encrypt, and&#x2F;or backup your business data. A single line CRON job would take care of this, unless you count that as “code” since it involves typing a line of text instead of 47 mouse clicks.<p>3. This isn’t multi-user: True. Based on the 2 receipts per month statement, and the thin Lemonade Stand folder of receipts, it didn’t seem worthy of that functionality. If multi-user is needed, and the free WaveApp is costing you sleep, Quickbooks is your solution. Welcome to the world of Big Boy Businesses where the owners work hard and underlings do data entry into complex software.
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