Hacker News: alephu5

New comment by alephu5 in "Solving Fine Grained Authorization with Incremental Computation"

alephu5 — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 09:04:12 +0000

I've been interested in this problem space for a couple of years, have tried a whole bunch of products but settled on using cedar policy engine[1] wrapped in some custom code and using the application database and static files to generate policies that can be concatenates to make decisions. A useful property is that they can be indexed based on the "subject verb object" triplet used to represent authorisation queries (e.g. Can "John" download "File 1"?)

Have tried a whole bunch of other FGA providers with their own storage and retrieval services, I think that fundamentally all the DSLs are just variants on prolog and can be quite easily transformed into one another. Another thing to consider is that authorisation is in the critical path of everything, so if you need to call out to an external service it's going to add latency and becomes a single point of failure. Not to mention that it creates an explosion of complexity by distributing the system more widely, so if you can leverage your existing database and file storage to manage policies it's probably easier to build and mange long-term.

Overall I think it's worthwhile using an FGA solution to separate authorisation from business logic, I expect this will become industry standard in the years to come.

[1] https://www.cedarpolicy.com/en

New comment by alephu5 in "Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds"

alephu5 — Fri, 05 May 2023 05:46:26 +0000

I imagine the people paying the most money have a high tolerance.

New comment by alephu5 in "The UK will spend £100M to develop its own 'sovereign' AI"

alephu5 — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 05:05:39 +0000

You'll also need to befriend some conservative politicians.

New comment by alephu5 in "Codeberg – Fast open source alternative to GitHub"

alephu5 — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 05:28:16 +0000

I pay $20 a year to develop private projects on source hut with CI and everything else included.

New comment by alephu5 in "Should We Automate the CEO?"

alephu5 — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 06:57:31 +0000

Maximise returns on investment?

New comment by alephu5 in "AWS Purity Test"

alephu5 — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 07:27:14 +0000

I got a 96 and am pleased with that. I have serious concerns about Amazon as a company, they're too big and predatory.

I've been using AWS at various companies and have tried to embrace its paradigms but I hate them.

New comment by alephu5 in "Don't Use Stripe"

alephu5 — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 08:51:10 +0000

The EU are working on something like this, it's like USDC but backed and exchanged by the European Central Bank.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

New comment by alephu5 in "How I got involved in the Rust community"

alephu5 — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 07:25:01 +0000

Grep is a performance sensitive program, it's not unusual to scan through thousands of files and millions of lines so small inefficiencies are noticeable.

If you tried this in python it would probably take hours to scan through something that ripgrep does in a few seconds

New comment by alephu5 in "How I got involved in the Rust community"

alephu5 — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 07:10:44 +0000

Go has these same properties

New comment by alephu5 in "The indie web is dead, long live the indie web (2019)"

alephu5 — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 08:07:23 +0000

My ISP gives a dedicated IPv4 to anyone that asks, everyone else goes on CGNAT. Hardly anyone asks so they don't mind.

New comment by alephu5 in "U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why"

alephu5 — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 06:54:24 +0000

Terminal user interface

New comment by alephu5 in "Google search is becoming one of those dying malls"

alephu5 — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 05:52:45 +0000

We're just more sensitive to these things, if the decline continues more people will notice.

New comment by alephu5 in "Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development"

alephu5 — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 07:11:18 +0000

Have you tried htmlx? It fits this gap quite nicely, it's lets you do AJAX with SSR.

New comment by alephu5 in "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger"

alephu5 — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 11:31:41 +0000

Did you add a typo as a joke?

New comment by alephu5 in "Outdated vs. Complete: In defense of apps that don’t need updates"

alephu5 — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 18:44:49 +0000

I wouldn't be surprised if most software in the world has been chugging along unchanged for decades. I suspect future historians in 1000 years will find pieces of ancient code copied around unchanged for centuries.

New comment by alephu5 in "Patagonia billionaire who gave up company skirts $700M tax hit"

alephu5 — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 04:42:01 +0000

On a moral level I think it's fair to give them a tax break on this, since they're effectively donating all future company profits to global society through the foundations.

New comment by alephu5 in "UK energy bills are soaring to record highs"

alephu5 — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 07:48:19 +0000

Insulation is your best bet

New comment by alephu5 in "Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing"

alephu5 — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 05:18:35 +0000

Sounds like an incentive to invest in R&D.

New comment by alephu5 in "Old towns eager for new blood sell Italy homes for $1"

alephu5 — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 20:57:02 +0000

What could justify citizenship beyond an accident of birth?

New comment by alephu5 in "55 GiB/s FizzBuzz"

alephu5 — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 05:57:31 +0000

Not lazy, sensible. The market has spoken and it wants bloated electron apps with rapid development, rather than performant C/assembly apps that hardly ever change.