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Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix
Hey HN,<p>I'm Ron Efroni, CEO at Flox, and today we are releasing version 1.0 of our open source CLI, helping folks manage development environments everywhere.My own experience with development environments began with air-gapped systems, having to actually burn software to a CD to iterate over a very slow and expensive development cycle, sometimes reaching the server rack and realizing I have the wrong disk.... Fast forward to today and there are countless alternatives available backed by incredible compute resources, yet we somehow still find ourselves paying the price of long development cycles. That's why I've been working for over a decade to simplify the development stack so we can spend more time on making 1's and 0's do magical things, and why my co-founder Michael and I started Flox to bring you the solution based on Nix. Today is just the first step on that journey. We hope you'll take a peek at our new release, and very much look forward to continuing the journey with you from here together!<p>Introducing Flox 1.0<p>Flox is a platform that lets developers and operators focus on building fast with reproducible environments that span the enterprise SDLC. Using a declarative framework based on Nix, a package management and configuration tool, Flox allows developers to create environments that contain everything they need to build software.<p>Why Flox?<p>Flox behaves a lot like your favorite and familiar package manager, but it allows you to create as many environments as you want on your machine. Each one can contain a different combination of packages.<p>Environments are portable by default. If you install a package inside one that isn't cross-platform, it's easy to carve out exceptions. It's also easy to write hooks and populate your environment with variables - we designed it to be hackable.<p>Flox environments run in user-space, like, where you are. When you type `ls` after activating a Flox environment you will see the same stuff because you're in the same place - even with all those new packages available. No mounting volumes, no proxying ports. No breaking into the toolset you just conjured.<p>Getting Started: No sign-ups, just one install away. Dive into our GitHub repository (<a href="https://github.com/flox/flox">https://github.com/flox/flox</a>) and start exploring<p>I’m around all day to answer questions, talk Nix, or just reminisce about simpler times ;).<p>Lots of open source love, Ron
How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s
How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s
Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies
JIT WireGuard
A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments
A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments
Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
Show HN: Comma Separated Values (CSV) to Unicode Separated Values (USV)
OpenAI – transformer debugger release
Weather forecasts have become more accurate
Weather forecasts have become more accurate
Cloning a Laptop over NVMe TCP
Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
Trangram is a free one-stop platform to create, and share motion graphics and svg animations with a free built-in powerful editor which is a fusion of Adobe Illustrator and animation tools.
Devin: AI Software Engineer
Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure
Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure
Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU
Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
Hey HN, we’re the co-founders of Onedoc (<a href="https://www.onedoclabs.com/">https://www.onedoclabs.com/</a> ), and the original contributors to the open-source library react-print-pdf (<a href="https://github.com/OnedocLabs/react-print-pdf">https://github.com/OnedocLabs/react-print-pdf</a> ) which lets developers design and generate PDF documents automatically. Here’s a demo video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgfCyOyckQU&t=3s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgfCyOyckQU&t=3s</a><p>Billions of PDFs are generated daily: invoices, contracts, receipts, reports, you name it. Developer time gets wasted producing these basic documents because there are no good-enough tools to design and generate PDFs.<p>We previously worked at giant firms, where documents (especially PDFs) were central to most workflows. We got asked to generate automated trade confirmations for our customer’s counterparties. We could not find any tool other than outdated libraries offering poor control over layout and the generation process. In the end, we just created our own—basically bringing web technologies to PDFs. That was the genesis of Onedoc.<p>PDF creation has two phases: design (specifying content and layout) and generation (producing the actual PDF file). Onedoc lets you do both simply and automatically.<p><i>Design</i>: we have an open-source library called "react-print-pdf" (<a href="https://github.com/OnedocLabs/react-print-pdf">https://github.com/OnedocLabs/react-print-pdf</a> ) that allows you to design a document the same way you would design a website. It supports Tailwind CSS components, Chakra UI components, and recently also built LaTeX and Markdown components. The latter let you write text in Markdown style, and include formulas using LaTeX syntax, directly within a React component.<p><i>Generation</i>: we have an API (<a href="https://docs.onedoclabs.com/api-reference/introduction">https://docs.onedoclabs.com/api-reference/introduction</a> ) and Node.js SDK (<a href="https://docs.onedoclabs.com/quickstart/nodejs">https://docs.onedoclabs.com/quickstart/nodejs</a> ) that render your designs into PDFs.<p>The choice of renderer significantly affects the accuracy of the resulting PDF. For example, exporting a webpage into PDF will often result in a layout that differs from the original webpage. We ensure that what you designed is what you get, and therefore you have 100% control over the entire layout of your document including margin, style, etc. We can do that because we built the react-print-pdf library to match the HTML/CSS to PDF rendering tool we have.<p>Once you have generated your document, you can either store it on your local system or, if you want, use our platform (<a href="https://app.onedoclabs.com/">https://app.onedoclabs.com/</a> ) to host your document online. If you use us, you’ll also get analytics over your documents.<p>Our main product is an API, but you can try it on our website directly (<a href="https://www.onedoclabs.com/">https://www.onedoclabs.com/</a>) using our playground without any installation or sign-up. Our pricing is usage-based: per document generated. The pricing is degressive: the more documents you generate, the less you pay per document. If you don’t want to pay for PDF generation, you can still generate as many documents as you want, but with a watermark on the margin.<p>It’s been fun to see what our users are building with our open-source library (components, templates, etc.) and our API. We have a website (<a href="https://react-print.onedoclabs.com/">https://react-print.onedoclabs.com/</a>) dedicated to the open-source library where we post the templates submitted by the community. Some early power users built simple web apps (CV/Resume generator, NDA and Invoice generator). We are excited to show our product to the HN community and look forward to your feedback!