Yet another Hacker News

693 points donohoe 2 days ago 205 comments

datas 2 days ago | parent

I like stuff like this. Have you considered real time collaboration? Your not to far off from this with something like web sockets.

Edit: realized it looks like the data is stored in the url, which is a neat approach but I guess its not really that close.

nine_k 2 days ago | parent

It's entirely possible to update the URL in browser without reloading the page.

Permalinks are needed to share documents, which would be something like a link shortener, with the target updating as the document is updated.

simonw 2 days ago | parent

Tell Claude or whatever to read https://tinylittleoffice.com/llms.txt and it will then be able to generate URLs that render documents.

Here's a deck I had it generate about how the URL format works: https://bit.ly/4yRBc1v

hmokiguess 2 days ago | parent

thank you, this explains much better, so it's kinda like https://bento.page/

redbell 2 days ago | parent

As seen on HN about three months ago, with +1000pts and +230cmnts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008211

monk_grilla 2 days ago | parent

Why not just get your agent to write LaTeX? Use the beamer template and get a much more professional, customisable, git-commitable and transferable presentation.

simonw 2 days ago | parent

You inspired me to knock together a LaTeX version of the same pattern - lets you drop LaTeX in the URL so you can link to the rendered version.

https://tools.simonwillison.net/latex

kasbah 2 days ago | parent

There is an issue with clipping off the context menu:

https://postimg.cc/0r4jrF59

monk_grilla 1 day ago | parent

Looks cool. I can see this being useful for sharing a single, tiny url rather than a full bulky pdf.

Personally I like to keep my LaTeX tooling local so it can integrate with everything I already use, and I own simple plaintext files.

groestl 2 days ago | parent

Or typst, did that with my CV.

gf000 2 days ago | parent

Then why not typst? Much faster to render and far more ergonomic/human-understandable when you eventually have to touch something inside.

akho 2 days ago | parent

typst is VC-funded, and its longevity is in doubt.

monk_grilla 1 day ago | parent

I prefer to get bleeding edge LLMs to use old, time-hardened technologies. They are more stable, I trust they're not going to change out from under me, and it is more transferable. The ergonomics of the actual markup don't matter to me, since I'm not writing it, so I'd rather the more powerful, more training data option.

Just one example: Every university and academic publication in the world give LaTeX formatting templates, examples courses etc.

gf000 1 day ago | parent

Ergonomics matter even for LLMs. Also, compile speed, quality of error messages, how easy it is to get something right (especially that LLMs are "blind" unless you want to burn a lots of tokens, so they sort of just reason without the visual output) absolutely matter and can turn a one-shot LLM prompt into a multi-turn agent churning wasting tokens for no good reason.

I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but typst is past the very early phase and LLMs are decent at generating it. Also, many formatting templates have been converted to typst as well.

albert_e 2 days ago | parent

This was super useful. Thanks.

That last slide with a QR code that purports to embed the entire document/deck is intriguing.

I presume there are practical limits to the file size here?

And images inside slides must be impossible to fit it right away?

oidar 2 days ago | parent

Is there no way to open saved documents? Like it won't open a .csv, .txt or .ics file for example?

pseudosavant 2 days ago | parent

That gap surprised me too. But I couldn't find any way to open a saved document. I think it is just based on the URL.

oidar 1 day ago | parent

After exploring it a bit more, I also found that there is no way to load a document that you ask the app to save to your browser IndexDB.

ArekDymalski 2 days ago | parent

Yeah, the concept and execution are really impressive but lack of any import is a real blocker I think. Especially in case of spreadsheets - quite often they are not started from scratch, but require previous data or data from other sources etc.

ent101 2 days ago | parent

can I do a PR for live collaboration? to be transparent, I'm going to use my own project puter.js for webrtc, but the project is open-source (https://github.com/HeyPuter/puter)

kulahan 2 days ago | parent

If you add a PDF annotation to this, it’d cover 100% of my (admittedly generic) needs. I know how big of an ask that can (used to?) be.

nine_k 2 days ago | parent

Putting a PDF into the URL is not entirely impossible, but comes with serious limitations %)

johschmitz 2 days ago | parent

I guess the PDF wouldn't have to be stored in the application/URL? Just a tool to load it, fill+annotate+sign it and export back to disk.

nine_k 2 days ago | parent

The specialty of all apps here is that the entire document is in the URL.

It's a great idea, but this limits the size of the serialized document to 2048 kiB for Chrome, and 64 kiB for Firefox.

alexpotato 2 days ago | parent

As a kid in the late 1980s, my dad got me a PC (an Olivetti IBM clone to be precise).

I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).

And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Graphics

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter

youngNed 2 days ago | parent

i mean... yeah.. but a bigger change, surely is that everything in this photo, of tech from the 80s, is currently in your pocket: https://twistedsifter.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/80s-sma...

yread 1 day ago | parent

You have over ear headphones in your pocket? And a set of stereo speakers?

youngNed 1 day ago | parent

No, nor do i have VHS tapes. Oh you got me good, well done you.

alexpotato 1 day ago | parent

"Gentlemen, please, there is no fighting in the HN comments"

bombcar 1 day ago | parent

Harvard Graphics was like a billion dollars if I recall, we only ever got a copy long after it wasn't state of the art.

mattoxic 2 days ago | parent

I was musing on something like this. There is non zero chance that some US administration disables GSuite / Office365 for all of us living in shithole countries.

bethekidyouwant 2 days ago | parent

What?

catlikesshrimp 2 days ago | parent

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/the-netherlands-is-rol...

bartvk 2 days ago | parent

There's always OpenOffice, LibreOffice and friends.

yellowapple 2 days ago | parent

FYI: OpenStreetMap seems to be blocking the site with a 403 error (suggesting maybe it's pulling too much data from OSM's servers?): https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Blocked_tiles

Gigachad 2 days ago | parent

Open street map servers aren't really meant to be used in end user applications. They are primarily to support the editing of the map data. Usage like this should be with a provider like Mapbox, or your own supplied tiles.

jdranczewski 2 days ago | parent

I've recently found out that this is not quite true - while the primary purpose of their tile servers is mapping and editing applications, they do allow third party apps to use the servers as long as they follow usage policies: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/

This recently came across my radar as Home Assistant has migrated to the vector tiles hosted directly by OSMF for all deployments: https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/pull/53816

For my own needs I usually just go for https://openfreemap.org/ though, I like the default style, and it feels maybe a little faster.

rsingel 2 days ago | parent

What was the recent site here on HN that let you do this but with signs and QR codes?

oijkuij 2 days ago | parent

If folks like this kind of thing, I discovered https://bento.page/ from a HN post and have been using it off and on for the past few months. It has a much larger featureset but is specifically focused on presentations (for now!). Unlike this project, the editor and content embed themselves in an html file, so you aren't dependent on the host site existing to serve the editor.

stackghost 2 days ago | parent

There’s also https://github.com/nathanvy/singlebook which looks like the same philosophy but for documents.

monk_grilla 2 days ago | parent

> https://bento.page/

Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.

I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.

NewsaHackO 2 days ago | parent

I agree with you, but it is so funny that three years ago, a website that look like this would probably make the front page for its excellent design alone. Now, it gives off similar energy to a wix website.

thih9 2 days ago | parent

You are right, then again: I think three years ago someone would have commented about the gloss in the background as well (saying that it’s unhelpful, distracting and resource intensive).

earthnail 2 days ago | parent

Landing pages are always a proxy for quality. Quality in implementation, quality in domain knowledge, in communication…

At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.

I find it completely logical.

huijzer 2 days ago | parent

> Landing pages are always a proxy for quality.

Always is a very strong claim.

Counterexample: highly skilled low level engineers would end up with a crappy front page most of the time, but still the compiler/system/kernel whatever could be high quality.

earthnail 1 day ago | parent

That depends on how you look at it. These front pages are made in a certain way that tells me "low level engineer".

I could make other examples: websites of online shops that have been around for a while and that are just medium-sized, local businesses, tend to look much worse than your average influencer webshop. But the medium-sized local business tends to have the much better value for money ratio, and I can tell it from their website.

Design says something. AI is trying to imitate that very thing that a specific design used to tell you, and that imitation annoys people, rightfully so. That has little to do with AI per se and everything with the immitation the human behind it does.

huijzer 1 day ago | parent

> AI is trying to imitate that very thing that a specific design used to tell you

Now I see your point. Fair enough

bombcar 1 day ago | parent

I liked it when kernel.org was just https://www.kernel.org/pub/

chii 1 day ago | parent

landing page is not proxy for quality, but proxy for how good at marketing your project is.

It could be the case that marketing is high quality, but the actual project low (tho, of course, this doesn't have to be the case).

And vice versa with low quality (looking) landing page.

troupo 2 days ago | parent

Three years ago it would probably be "ah yeah, the same corporate/bento box style page as literally every page out there".

alfirous 1 day ago | parent

I would not call that excellent, decent maybe. Maybe we have different standard or taste. I myself like collecting landing page that I think great.[1]

1. https://www.cosmos.so/alfirous/websites/landing

JMiao 2 days ago | parent

it's a fair criticism though. learning and eventually relying on new tools is an investment. it helps to know the developer is invested too, not just moonlighting.

altmanaltman 2 days ago | parent

Not only the design but the text. Like it says so much and so little at the same time and constantly repeats the same cliches like "the file is the app" or "the api is the x". Unmemorable, unfocused and boring is what it comes across. I know devs don't care about marketing copy but it does make a difference on how you're presenting your app to first time potential users.

phoghed 2 days ago | parent

The file is literally the app though. That’s the entire point of this thing.

aprilthird2021 2 days ago | parent

Unfortunately it's such an overused idiom in AI generated text that most people read it as a metaphor vs what is literally true about the app

mtford 2 days ago | parent

That and the "The boring deck is dead. One file killed it."

It makes me kinda tense up - I've become almost allergic to it. Kinda interesting really.

monk_grilla 1 day ago | parent

Yep absolutely. I've become so quick to recognise the pattern and it triggers some sort of mild disgust reflexively.

pndy 2 days ago | parent

We had few submissions and links in comments this week to some very "young" projects and their home pages looked like pressed from the same machine.

But if it works for people who just want to share their software and avoid working around the packaging and presentation, then I guess "it is what it is".

orphea 2 days ago | parent

Not a luddite, it's just allergy to slop, that's normal.

aprilthird2021 2 days ago | parent

I won't get over this prejudice and I don't have to frankly

TaLiTr 1 day ago | parent

> I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design.

My issue isn't cookie-cutter, but if by gloss you mean unnecessarily animated, then yeah. But I've had this issue for over a decade. AI without direction is just mimicking popular site designs that were doing this same crap before.

> At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.

How do you feel about WordPress / Hugo themes?

monk_grilla 1 day ago | parent

> How do you feel about WordPress / Hugo themes?

I knew a web dev who exclusively made WordPress websites for local small businesses. They always looked great. The themes were put together by hand with care from a designer, and the developer/end user filled them and tweaked them *purposefully*.

Sure if you have some web dev experience you start spotting them, but that never turned me off from a business in the same way that the above page does. I expected every business to have a website, but not for every business to commission a wholly bespoke design system. The themes available were numerous and of high enough quality that they were fit for purpose and didn't have this nauseating effect, at least for me.

TheJohnSmith1 23 hours ago | parent

That's just plain terrible graphic design.

mdrzn 2 days ago | parent

same, i've been using it extensively and it's very convenient having the ability to let Codex/ClaudeCode generate a whole deck, and then do the last edits myself in the browser.

altern8 2 days ago | parent

Way too complicated. Tiny Office is nice because it's minimalistic and intuitive. Bad comparison

aembleton 2 days ago | parent

That's amazing, thank you. I love that you can export JSON, edit it in your favourite text editor and then import it back. Its exactly what I want.

NikolaNovak 1 day ago | parent

Interesting, though on initial scan I could not easily determine who made it, why, what's the future for it, any terms or licenses, etc. With complex html and downloads, I have no idea what else may be sneaking in and/or phoning home :-/

TaLiTr 1 day ago | parent

Cool project. It reminds me of https://tiddlywiki.com/ for Powerpoints.

syngrog66 2 days ago | parent

so... the worst possible way to provide the functionality in question

and the functionality has been available already for decades. solved problems, kiddos

inatreecrown2 2 days ago | parent

The Animator app is nice and simple, I would like to have something like it as a standalone app.

eviks 2 days ago | parent

> free office suite where your document is inside the link and easy to share

How is it easy to share megabytes encoded in a link?

123uijndfv 2 days ago | parent

Plenty of websites do it. I never understood it. Mermaid (mermaid.live) does it too. Why - so confusing.

EGreg 2 days ago | parent

This is so well done!

The only bug I found is that the presentation previews in dark mode have the text as black on a dark background, when it should be white (matching the canvas text).

shevy-java 2 days ago | parent

I'd wish LibreOffice would have collab-editing by default for everything, as an option.

hollowonepl 2 days ago | parent

I’m waiting until somebody vibe code a proper desktop apps to provide more diversity than MS vs Open Office. just like I see options blossomed in the “Creative Suite” field.

But maybe I’m just one of those who don’t like web office apps and/or google docs related workflows.

mstkllah 2 days ago | parent

Here you go https://getartcraft.com/

mikepurvis 2 days ago | parent

I'm intrigued about the "Trip Planner" being a top-level app. Only tried it in a very surface level way, but the recent trips I've planned (Ottawa for 6 people, Cancun for ~20) have ended up as an ugly mishmash of spreadsheets + google maps saved locations list + random chatgpt sessions.

It feels like there's an unmet need there for managing something more flexible than a minute by minute itinerary, maybe like a list of must-do and want-do activities and dining options, with the system able to figure out what is open when and has other constraints like the weather, costs, what activities pair well together, which group members some things are more or less suited to, what the contact details are for things like a private tour, etc etc.

jll29 2 days ago | parent

Definitely there is a need, as you say, but the Internet lacks a cross-site (DB-like) transaction capability. Hotel bookings and flight leg bookings are interdependent, and you will want to lock them in (transaction "COMMIT") once the complete path has been validated as available; if, in contrast, one flight leg or one hotel night are unavailable, the whole plan path may have to be cancelled.

Such a tool would be enormously helpful even for individuals traveling (e.g. business people or scientists visiting customers or trade fairs), which is important as this massively increases market size/potential user base scale.

mikepurvis 1 day ago | parent

At least for myself, business travel remains relatively simple: go to Perk or whatever the business-supplied travel portal is, put in the dates, book whatever flight and hotel are in-policy, when I get there report to the conference/customer/whatever, and buy whatever food is available when I get hungry.

It's travel for pleasure (especially with groups) where all the complexity comes in: there's a lot more stuff to schedule, more slop in what exactly happens when, more competing preferences, more need to have multiple things on deck so you can react to changing energy levels, etc.

Not too hard to see why a lot of people just give up and book an all-inclusive where every day is the same and everyone can just "do whatever", but with better tools, maybe rolling your own vacation could be made more practical and coherent for a normal busy person to put together.

On the matter of transactions in particular, I think airlines largely solve this with 24hr no-questions refund periods. So, book your airfare, then your lodgings, and if there's some problem with the lodgings, then refund the airfare and start over.

rockostrich 1 day ago | parent

Holding flights and hotel bookings like that is possible although any kind of online travel agent doing it at scale will not last very long. Travel is still pretty relationship focused when it comes to inventory and if an OTA tries to do things that create churn on that inventory then it will get flagged pretty quickly.

An aggregator or AI assistant like Muse might have better luck although the mechanism for those will require charging whatever credit card you give it. For flights, it should work just fine in the US. There is a mandatory fully-refundable 24 hour cancellation period on all flights booked more than 7 days in advance through US point-of-sale, or they have to honor a 24 hour hold without payment but not both. Hotels get a bit dicier since the policy there will be dependent on each hotel.

Zm44 2 days ago | parent

This is really cool. I made a remix using semantic HTML https://hashpage.dev/#z.lVndj9y2EX_PXzHYAA1Q7K3OjhGktqzi7Nh1...

Woodi 2 days ago | parent

Do "office suite" really need to be http app ?? Such hackers friendly trend...

lossyalgo 2 days ago | parent

You would rather trust a package installer and/or binary executable that might inject malware like a keyboard logger, bitcoin miner, back orifice, etc?

Woodi 1 day ago | parent

I would prefer using sources and making that mandatory.

But I prefer trusted binaries over "private" web app in open internet. And even locally - html and all layers of http stack is inferior to pixels. Or vectors.

peter_retief 2 days ago | parent

this is really great, just went through the categories and it is really useful to someone who work like me

Mashimo 2 days ago | parent

The word processor is buggy. When switching between touch typing and swiping the cursor ends up in the middle of words.

ktzar 2 days ago | parent

You might be feeling the vibes...

danhite 2 days ago | parent

FYI, I see the story behind this is given by the co-founder at:

https://aboard.com/introducing-tinylittleoffice-com/

It seems they had the idea originally 6 years ago and did versions of it, but

> We moved on, and sadly, those sites fell off the web, and the old links all broke.

haisin5555 2 days ago | parent

To be honest, it looks amazing, but it would be great if there is a guide or like a "how to" cause I'm not sure how to use it.

self_awareness 2 days ago | parent

"Not sure how to use it"? What do you mean? Where's the complication? What are you having problems with?

kraf 2 days ago | parent

This is absolutely lovely, well done!

rezaprima 2 days ago | parent

reminds me to TiddlyWiki that saves to itself [0][1]

[0] https://tiddlywiki.com

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki

nearoh 2 days ago | parent

The advent of AI being able to reverse engineer anything will lead to an age of open source software being the expectation.

rullelito 2 days ago | parent

More like open prompts, so you don't have to trust "foreign" code.

oblio 2 days ago | parent

The problem with open prompts is:

If I ask 10 of the best developers on the planet to build me something and describe it in great detail, they will all build wildly different things unless I actually point them at the exact thing. And even then, the intent might be identical and the surface might be identical, but everything else in between will be different. Oh, and quality will still vary even in this best base scenario.

That's going to be even worse with LLMs. We would need the exact LLM model and its overall configuration (for open weights), the exact prompts and then the luck of the draw.

We should still encourage open prompts, but it's not a panacea.

mogoh 2 days ago | parent

This is vibecoded in three days. The chances that this is usable now or be around in a year are tiny. It looks good on the surface and I like to be proven wrong in a year.

PetriCasserole 2 days ago | parent

It's a File as a Software. Will it matter if it's wrong in a year? You're also witnessing people trying new things. File as a Software? I guess that was an eventuality since agents write, execute, and forget bits of code just for specific applications. Maybe AI is to code as Guttenberg was to the Bible? It just became available to the masses.

ktzar 2 days ago | parent

It's a shame the self-hosting route is mostly based on Cloudfare's cloud services and there's no documented way to set it up locally using Docker-compose and sqlite (or Postgres) for storage. Great tool, though!

plasticeagle 2 days ago | parent

"Encrypted here: the service holds only ciphertext, and only until then. Up to a hundred links a day from one address."

Random selection of one of the many, many pieces of text in the user interface for whatever this is. What does that mean? Does that mean anything?

polyterative 2 days ago | parent

My recent strategy to design presentations has been to record meetings, summarize them and dump it all in onn agent. It can create something that is pretty much perfect very quickly. It's all about context and giving to agents as much of it. Of course you need to prompt them a lot to focus on specific areas you want, but the extra raw context really does help.

rcarmo 2 days ago | parent

This is brilliant. Just brilliant.

liendolucas 2 days ago | parent

Is it? Or is it just more AI slop?

silon42 2 days ago | parent

Maybe it's slop now, but the idea should be packaged into client side applications.

self_awareness 2 days ago | parent

Why this is attractive? Honest question, I'd like to know but I can't figure out why. (Yes, I would be a horrible salesman)

Why someone spends time on making this, and why someone would want to spend time using this?

Much more advanced software is available for free for all platforms. Why not just go and install LibreOffice?

throwfaraway135 2 days ago | parent

> Made with respect in New York City

what does this even mean?

ape4 1 day ago | parent

Often pages say "made with love in <place>" which seems over the top to me.

poisonborz 2 days ago | parent

What I like is how most such vibed tools - self-aware how ubiquitous they are - don't try to capture audience or offer paid services. Everything is suddenly available without logins, share via a simple url, self-hosting is expected. While AI diminishes the power, influence and recognition of creators, I find it overall a great democratizing force in software.

thatsabadlook 2 days ago | parent

It's because the creators can't vouch for the work at all and it probably has whack issues. It could be a literal crime to charge for this kind of stuff.

cheschire 2 days ago | parent

Literal crime seems a bit exaggerated, no? It seems more like the epitome of “move fast, break things”. Folks are moving so fast now that they don’t even bother to try to recoup value for the effort they may have invested anymore.

If that’s a crime, there are a lot of companies that made a lot of money breaking that law.

thatsabadlook 2 days ago | parent

Your take is worth responding to. See my reply to the similar question. The gist is, move fast and violating patent law is not the same as breaking things. Also it can be illegal to sell products that are broken when there are claims of them... Not being broken. Depends on the situation.

f30e3dfed1c9 1 day ago | parent

"violating patent law" is not a "crime."

thatsabadlook 1 day ago | parent

Forgive me I am not a lawyer. Breaking the law isn't a crime? Whacky world...

lupire 1 day ago | parent

A crime is a violation of law that can result in prison time.

A civil violation can result in financial penalties but not criminal penalties (prison)

abtinf 1 day ago | parent

You might enjoy a 101-level business law class; there are lots of interesting whacky things.

Patent infringement is a tort, not a crime (in nearly all circumstances in nearly all countries).

thatsabadlook 1 day ago | parent

I will now say "might be a literal violation of law" thanks

pixelpoet 2 days ago | parent

Unfortunately "literal" has come to mean "metaphorical" and descriptivists bully everyone into accepting this (ironically its own form of prescriptivism).

ponow 1 day ago | parent

Upvote for prescription

IAmBroom 1 day ago | parent

A tragedy of the commons, then?

nonethewiser 2 days ago | parent

> It could be a literal crime to charge for this kind of stuff.

How so?

thatsabadlook 2 days ago | parent

It's a rip off of an office suite, the code for said office suite may or may not have came from derivatives of unpermissive licenses, or from patented work(msft has a portfolio of patents for their office products), depending on what the prompts/developer thinks it does and what it actually does could be false advertising or fraud, the list goes on and on. Also gdpr, pcidss. It's a lot safer to make things free when they can't be vouched for and someone's actual ass or reputation is on the line.

Spooky23 2 days ago | parent

I never thought I'd see the day where an HN commenter would be posting a lament about Microsoft potentially having patent rights violated.

thatsabadlook 1 day ago | parent

You are misreading my sentiment. I don't lament it. It is however a concern the average vibe coder should have but likely doesn't.

llm_nerd 2 days ago | parent

I feel like some people confront their internal dissonance on AI by constructing a fantasy past that never, ever existed.

Zero programmers have ever "vouched" for their work. Everything has bugs and faults and rough edges. Everyone is building stuff that in the end is overwhelmingly code that they didn't write and have never looked at (I mean...do you think that Python script you wrote is "your" code? 99.999% of the runtime is in code you have never looked at).

The "literal crime" just puts the hysterics of this to the next level.

People don't charge for this stuff because in the supply/demand equation, there is basically infinite supply to create fun little things in just a few prompts. Infinite supply means that the ability to charge disappears. This isn't super hard to understand.

And FWIW, infinite supply applies to more and more of the market. I mean, I'm sure people have seen the guy who cloned Photoshop via vibe coding. Again the dissonance there is amazing where people need to believe it's terrible, but as someone who used Photoshop for decades...it's astonishingly good given everything, and iterating rapidly. Similarly, charging to build websites and the like...well, a lot of the market has seen the pricing floor disappear.

maelito 2 days ago | parent

It also means you shouldn't bet on the tool to still be available next month.

muyuu 2 days ago | parent

i can bet on it if i can host it in my computer

mikae1 2 days ago | parent

And then you're also the maintainer of the software in charge of keeping it up-to-date with its dependencies etc.

master-lincoln 2 days ago | parent

No need for simple offline website stuff like shown here.

hk__2 2 days ago | parent

It’s not simple at all. Check the source: https://github.com/aboard-io/tinylittleoffice

bonoboTP 2 days ago | parent

Use AI to maintain it.

hk__2 2 days ago | parent

AI doesn’t magically maintain things, you still have some human overhead.

bonoboTP 1 day ago | parent

Less and less human overhead with each model release.

piloto_ciego 1 day ago | parent

You say that, and then here I am basically vibe coding SaaS for money right now lol

chii 1 day ago | parent

> keeping it up-to-date with its dependencies etc.

not if the software is functional today, and doesn't require interacting with third party systems (like this tinylittleoffice suite).

By the time the underlying infrastructure (like browser compatibility, or self-hosting OS becoming obsolete) fails, you're likely no longer using it anyway.

The "documents" seem exportable in text format, and in any case, potentially salvageable with another vibe-coded tool if such need arise.

Therefore, the original author is no required to maintain it.

ShinyLeftPad 1 day ago | parent

That's a rosy eyed view. users running outdated code not getting security fixes are sweet honeypots for modern automated llm-backed mass exploitation machine long before something obviously fails for you.

you'll be spending tokens on getting it maintained, and if you don't spend enough you get pwned by guys who do. who exactly is winning in this scenario?

"democratizing software"...

Tadpole9181 1 day ago | parent

You're just criticizing FOSS software in general now.

ShinyLeftPad 1 day ago | parent

> criticizing FOSS software in general now

you mean real oss maintained by professionals and security experts, as opposed to the cannibalized gpl-washed version llm spit out?

freeone3000 1 day ago | parent

OSS maintainedness should not at all be taken for granted. If you need something maintained by pros and security experts, that more accurately describes commercial software. FOSS as it stands, with the exception of some (but nowhere near all) major lynchpin projects, is done by volunteers in their spare time.

ShinyLeftPad 1 day ago | parent

A lot of OSS gets supported by foundations, selling consulting or additional services, donations, maintainer's dayjobs, and people's pride in their work and desire to help

wjnc 1 day ago | parent

I am placing your time of digital fruition in the 00’s or later? Not bashing, but we bought floppies in the 80s with software with no updates. Cool kids got their software from Oh No More Warez + keygen in the early 90s. That went online in the late 90s.

Always online, internet of shit and perma update crap came at that same time, first for the OS and later for everything. Oh, plus two decades of using shady Russian software for virus scanning. Shit went up, update everything became everywhere and everyday. Plus gigabyte frameworks for functionality that was kilobytes before.

My point in cursing too much? (Sorry, mentally screaming FUD here.) That tiny code projects, even without an active maintainer, in the LLM-era are probably a lot more secure when run by the people they target (we run containers, and sandboxes, the cool kids run immutable distros). This is democratizing software, and it has the great feel of old.

Please everyone, vibe code tiny project with tiny codebases everyday. Dump them on GitHub in a free tier. Make so many that the people have a free choice again! And go watch Cliff Stoll again for that hacker energy!

ShinyLeftPad 1 day ago | parent

> we run containers, and sandboxes, the cool kids run immutable distros

So just for select .1% of pros who know how to do that and the rest can get f#cked. "democratizing" software...

chii 1 day ago | parent

if you can't be bothered to learn skills (or even ask an AI to teach it to you for free), then you deserve to not be part of that democratization.

Breza 23 hours ago | parent

Wild how LLMs both weaken software security and supercharge the attackers at the same time

ShinyLeftPad 21 hours ago | parent

yep. casual vibe coders can't compete with whoever spends 10x tokens just on vuln discovery...

phs318u 17 hours ago | parent

Spending tokens to search for vulnerabilities in commonly used software makes sense because the payoff is large - hack once, exploit many.

However for unique, bespoke software (vibe-coded or not), the payoff is as small as a single endpoint. You’ve found an exploit in MikesOwnOfficeSuite and now have access to Mike’s PC. You’ve got to spend the same tokens again to find an exploit in SuesAwesomeOfficeApps. It still might be worth it in a spear-phishing scenario.

Security through obscurity is back!

ShinyLeftPad 7 hours ago | parent

if everyone vibe coded their own offices it would be a heaven for big tech llm operators lining up their pockets of course, but the idea was that Mike is using something vibe-coded by somebody else. just target TinyLittleOffice and get everyone using it

dormento 1 day ago | parent

This is the part managerial and marketing types don't understand. Their expectation is usually that "since its a computer system (sic) the tech team will support it from now on".

maxdo 1 day ago | parent

patching dependencies correctly was one of the first agentic coding tasks llm solved 100%. you will need to dedicate a session once a year to to such patches. Or community of vibe coders will do it for you .

camcil 1 day ago | parent

Vibe code it without dependencies?

soerxpso 1 day ago | parent

No I'm not, Claude is

ShinyLeftPad 1 day ago | parent

lol, paying a big tech company for tokens is not democratizing software

yitchelle 1 day ago | parent

but it is democratizing product creation.

fodkodrasz 1 day ago | parent

It is just like a power-tool. There are many vendors, interchangeable mostly. I'm democratized in drilling and screw driving.

Gareth321 1 day ago | parent

This is trivial now. It can even be automated. Literally just type “automatically monitor and maintain x” into Claude or Codex.

pyrale 2 days ago | parent

Yeah, but then toolchain security is yours to handle.

muyuu 1 day ago | parent

always has been

when the software is supposedly maintained, too

Zetaphor 1 day ago | parent

That has always been the case with anything self-hosted. Otherwise you're putting a lot of faith in an upstream maintainer to actually put in the effort which they may or may not be doing.

throwaway2037 1 day ago | parent

Bottom of the homepage has a link to the GitHub project: https://github.com/aboard-io/tinylittleoffice

The bottom of the README has instructions to run locally and self-host.

Looks good to me.

latexr 2 days ago | parent

> democratizing force

That word is so misused in this context, it is now bereft of meaning. “Democratisation” does not mean that a person without a skill can now achieve a result. A local pastry shop which makes cakes to order does not “democratise” baking. LLMs do not “democratise” software, anyone with access to a computer could already build and host any of these tools.

“Democratisation” is the word shady actors want to put in our heads to make us not think of the bad parts. Like how countries with “democratic” and “people's republic” in the name are the least democratic. If you have to keep repeating how democratising you are, you aren’t at all.

oidar 2 days ago | parent

Historically wrong. https://www.etymonline.com/word/democratize

> We teach the population at the cheapest possible rate; and the aim all the democratization (if we may use the word) of literature proposes to itself in this country, is to store the minds of the many, of the anonymous multitude, with a large portion of valuable, because practically useful, facts. [Meliora, vol. ii, no. 6, 1860]

latexr 2 days ago | parent

I’m not sure you understand that quote, or how it (doesn’t) relate to the point.

For one, it even has a parenthetical saying “if we may use the word” meaning the word isn’t being used in it’s proper sense, that’s the whole point of that expression. For another, the quote itself is referring to teaching, as in imparting a skill, and a central point of my comment is that having a skill and having a result done for you are not the same thing. Finally, if you have to go back two centuries to find an example… The countries that I mentioned didn’t even have those names yet, it is clear (if you engage in good faith) that the point regards the modern world and is not a criticism of societies since the dawn of men.

oidar 2 days ago | parent

My disagreement is about the usage of the word, not about whether marketers or politicians have used it for other purposes. Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force, but that sense has been attested since the late 1700s to the present. Prescriptively, you can argue it shouldn’t be used that way. Descriptively, it has been, for a long time.

latexr 1 day ago | parent

> My disagreement is about the usage of the word

So is mine.

> Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force

Making and distributing software was already “broadly accessible”. The people who could build and host software before (those with access to computing device) are the same who can do it now.

IAmBroom 1 day ago | parent

Wrongo. My bosses who couldn't write a line of code can now use AI to synthesize information from sources.

latexr 1 day ago | parent

> My bosses who couldn't write a line of code

Of course they could, don’t engage in bad faith and properly steel man the argument. They might not have known how but they could certainly learn and there was absolutely nothing stopping them to do so and crack on. All the resources were already ample and free. They just didn’t want to spend the time on it. Which is fine, not everyone should learn to code, but it’s absurd to claim they couldn’t do it before and can now.

Kiln6125 1 day ago | parent

Technically anyone could write a full book or transcribe them before the printing press came around, but it certainly was a democratizing force for publishing when it was invented. The democratization is in the scale and leverage available to the average person.

latexr 1 day ago | parent

> Technically anyone could write a full book or transcribe them before the printing press came around

No, no they could not. Access to books was very limited then and not that many could read and write. That comparison does not work in the slightest.

IAmBroom 1 day ago | parent

Define "not that many".

Warning: I study medieval writings, from fiction books to clerical notes on supplies. Don't give me that "everyone died at 25 and ate mud" BS.

latexr 1 day ago | parent

> Don't give me that "everyone died at 25 and ate mud" BS.

No one has said that. You’ve already demonstrated you are arguing in profound bad faith (in all three of your comments) so forgive me if I choose to not engage you any further in your quest for a “gotcha” moment. You can keep your internet points.

Kiln6125 1 day ago | parent

That's my point exactly. The average person could not take an idea from conception to a publishable program, and now they can. I'm actually surprised it fits as well as it does metaphors being imperfect and all that.

latexr 1 day ago | parent

> The average person could not take an idea from conception to a publishable program

Of course they could, they just had to learn how, and that’s the point. There was no “gatekeeping”¹ and there was nothing “undemocratic”² about it. The information was already ample and freely available to all. Those who had the means (a computing device) before have the means now and the opposite isn’t true (you still need access to a computing device to prompt and a server to host the things which need hosting).

¹ You didn’t use that word, but it’s a common argument in these conversations.

² For something to be “democratising”, what came before had to be undemocratic.

tvink 1 day ago | parent

Language evolves. What is certainly true is that the scribal class of people who could program has had its gates of entry almost deleted, and people, without sacrificing a meaningful part of their available time, can build tools to solve their problems.

To me, this is democratization.

Sure anyone could have, but that's always a scale.

latexr 1 day ago | parent

> Language evolves.

Of course. My objection is that the word democratisation was specifically chosen to manipulate us. That’s what bad actors do, they pick positive words to describe bad things so it’s hard to argue against them.

It’s fascinating how a community who can clearly see through “think of the children” as the ruse that it is¹ just gobbles up “democratisation” until they choke. Tech people love to believe they’re immune to manipulation, when doing so is the easiest trick in the book. All you have to do is make the problem interesting enough and the critical part of the brain shuts off.

¹ Because of course we should protect children, that’s positive. The issue becomes when bad actors use that as an excuse to promote actions which do not have protecting children as their true intent.

IAmBroom 1 day ago | parent

"Democratisation doesn't mean this, and it doesn't mean that...." but you never outline what it does mean, to you. It's a perfect foil to attack others while claiming moral superiority.

Also, I don't recognize your authority to gatekeep word definitions. Here in my little hovel, words mean whatever the general mass of readers think they do.

aprilthird2021 2 days ago | parent

I mean, for now it hasn't. Who knows? If it ever gets a serious user base, might easily sell ads or whatever else.

Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage

nater5000 2 days ago | parent

>If it ever gets a serious user base, might easily sell ads or whatever else.

It would need to offer some pretty valuable features, otherwise I'd just vibecode the same app but without ads lol. What's funny is that I have already vibecoded a similar app for my own usage. It's a bit more complex (integrates with a backend I own), but this is something even a free LLM could easily generate.

>Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage

This is a static app. It's free to host in a number of places. Odds are this is just a GitHub Page. I'd be willing to be the creator's only bill is the domain name.

aprilthird2021 1 day ago | parent

You would but not everyone would. Some people find it easier to just use what exists already

keybored 1 day ago | parent

> > > a great democratizing force

> > a great democratizing force

> a great democratizing force

Where have I heard this before? This will surely end well.

TheJohnSmith1 23 hours ago | parent

I think that there is something deeper about the disdain for AI than it's raw capitalist consequences. Perhaps it's that we are losing the quintessentially human act of creation to robots.

Is software a utility or an artistic outlet?

poisonborz 23 hours ago | parent

Was the art the act of typing out code? Everything else, the reasoning, remains in any depth you want. Since the same reasoning produces the sameish code I argue this is not the same as who holds the brush on the canvas.

christophilus 2 days ago | parent

> You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits.

I wonder how this would fare on a cheap VPS. Probably better, is my guess.

bombcar 2 days ago | parent

tinylittleplan

A single Linode VPS is $5 and includes a terabyte of transfer. Probably wouldn't fall over under slashdotting if you served static pages.

caaqil 2 days ago | parent

> A single Linode VPS is $5

Counting or not counting the time spent on babysitting the distro and all its shenanigans, including but not limited to systemd?

esskay 2 days ago | parent

if you're babysitting a modern server you're doing something very wrong, or more likely don't know what you're doing.

caaqil 2 days ago | parent

> you're doing something very wrong, or more likely don't know what you're doing.

That is probably it. Nothing to do with the ecosystem or convenience (an esoteric concept known as valuing your time, which is rarely appreciated here*). The only thing missing is "RTFM".

(*) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

christophilus 1 day ago | parent

It’s really not much harder than reading the docs on Workers or whatever proprietary platform you’re using. And LLMs are quite good at configuring servers. Took me maybe 5 minutes of my time the last time I set up a Rocky server, and it’s still chugging along with no effort from me for 6 months.

simondotau 2 days ago | parent

I have a cheap VPS. I somewhat know what I'm doing, but now I just get Grok Bot to babysit it for me and nothing's gone wrong yet. According to Grok Bot, anyway.

prmoustache 1 day ago | parent

Why do you need an llm bot for that? Every single distro has one or several autoupdate packaging tools that will update packages and reboot your vm automatically if needed.

simondotau 1 day ago | parent

Honestly, this has been one of my biggest AI life hacks.

While I'm nominally capable of maintaining a Linux box myself, it isn't my day job. This box is important but there's no revenue attached to it. Since I'm not super fluent with the commands and flags, fixing stuff when it goes wrong is frustrating and anxiety-inducing. And this is a totally one-off machine, so it's impractical to do a nice idempotent configuration with Terraform or whatever.

So I made a sysadmin bot, gave it my scratchpad of historical setup notes, gave it its own root SSH key, checked out my monorepo (with setup notes, config files, web roots), and it did everything else. And now I treat this Grok bot like a command-line interface with sane syntax.

"restart nginx now and confirm site works"

"pin mariadb to 12.3.*"

"any security best practices not implemented?"

"turn on firewall, allow ports 22, 80, 443 only, make sure ssh has fail2ban on and isn't accepting any passwords"

"add example.com to lets encrypt"

"run health checks every hour, confirm that example.com root page has the phrase `Products`, if it doesn't, log in and fix it"

"run updates on monday mornings at 6am, restart if needed, confirm that the site is online afterwards, you can roll back updates if necessary"

But honestly, the best part is that Grok Bot is also an app on my phone, so I can get it to fix pretty much any problem no matter where I am, even if it means troubleshooting and fixing site code bugs. The anxiety of being a sysadmin has completely disappeared. If I needed to spin up a completely different box from scratch on a completely different service with a completely different distro, it's no problem.

TaLiTr 1 day ago | parent

> including but not limited to systemd

As someone who admins several Linux boxes professionally and personally and has spent so little time working with systemd it's a rounding error, what are you talking about?

beklein 2 days ago | parent

While the page is rate limited due to probably HN's hug of death, I guess this is the relevant repo: https://github.com/aboard-io/tinylittleoffice

Most people will be able to host it locally and test it this way.

4ndrewl 2 days ago | parent

It looks like you can't host it locally as it relies on being hosted by Cloudflare.

beklein 2 days ago | parent

It worked well on my machine, git clone, install, start dev server... also it seems the worker is up and running again. I guess public sharing will only work to some extend when running the dev server for testing.

varispeed 2 days ago | parent

I opened Word Processor, wrote "here" as instructed and nothing was happening.

spankibalt 2 days ago | parent

Something like that is nice if it's got long-term support, works all in a single downloadable file (i. e. in a similar manner as TiddlyWiki), has good documentation, and isn't vibe-coded/written. As a nice part in a browser-based swiss army knife. Otherwise, no thanks.

ape4 1 day ago | parent

Anyone know what language or framework this was written in?

ninju 1 day ago | parent

Note the 'tiny' part is big constraint

The entire 'document' is encoded in the URL and so there a quick limit to document size

Text documents max out at about 2,000 characters or so

fedeb95 1 day ago | parent

cool. One thing, openstreetmap isn't rendered in the introductory presentation.

chrisguilbeau 1 day ago | parent

When I saw this I thought of the old PSION computer that would keep your state no matter where you were in the thing.

Go to contacts add a new item, type a few letters, Go to word processor, type a few letters, go back to contacts and it's right where you left it, go back to WP, same thing. I think this would be a great tool for that idea where every single things is sticky.

kadharmfn 21 hours ago | parent

https://tinylittleoffice.com/ is not reachable on my spectrum network. Possibly you would need request spectrum to remove blocked list.