Hacker News: bbsimonbb

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

bbsimonbb — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 22:26:20 +0000

If anyone's tempted to visit, the home page is in French. Click on "Chiffrer un produit" and you're into the configurator which has English translation (top right). All the magic is on the third screen, after selecting a category and a product. The disposition of options and choices, plus prices for all choices, plus the 3d rendering, plus all the totals, all recalculate in the browser with zero latency, based on previous choices.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

bbsimonbb — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 22:04:10 +0000

https://simplyfirst.fr.

We're off and running, making the world's best configurators for complex products. Our first clients love us. Our configurators implement some very personal ideas about front-end state management, and it's really a thrill to see it all working with real products, 3d rendering and zero latency.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Boeing chief must have engineering background, Emirates boss says"

bbsimonbb — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:41:29 +0000

This is worth meditating! The American empire, like the British before it and the other european while we're at it, are flashes in the pan compared to the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans. It could be that hypocrisy, racism and just wanting the oil/diamonds/gold/consumers is not a formula for lasting success.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 00:48:58 +0000

Good suggestion.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 00:37:15 +0000

I like and use MobX. I "come from" Vue, and I like mutability (though I concede its dangers). For my needs, the limitation was reactions. In mobx, reactions shouldn't update other observables. In Octopus, chaining is the whole point. Nodes can be stacked to n depth. There is no distinction between state and computed. Computed just generates more observable state.

Then, in Octopus you also get reporting nodes and visualisation, which, once tasted, no return.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 17:13:29 +0000

So xstate implements state machines. This is quite a different concept from DAGs, though there may be a DAG underneath. This isn't mentionned anywhere though. The concepts you work with are state machine concepts.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 14:05:51 +0000

I looked at and rejected state machines, because I didn't like/understand the need for the formalism of defining every possible state.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 11:27:59 +0000

That looks really remarkable.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 11:08:15 +0000

I'm not doing this for fun. Especially since I'm fundamentally lazy (and more of a practitioner than a comp-sci person). I'm looking at custom configurators for complex made-to-measure products with dozens of options, with many interdependencies between options.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 11:01:34 +0000

Are you talking about this? https://patents.google.com/patent/US7865872B2/en

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 10:55:14 +0000

I put a concrete example in the sample app. "pizza" depends on "size" and "base". So a DAG, as you point out, is less constraining than a tree. When you shoehorn your state and orchestration into react components, not only do you have to fit them into a tree, it's fundamentally the wrong tree.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 05:35:33 +0000

That sounds very cool indeed.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:34:15 +0000

No. Signals work with a weak map of references, not a graph. So in my Pizza example, when pizza changes, totalPrice would recalculate twice: once on a signal from pizza, once on a signal from tip. Explicitly constructing the graph dramatically reduces needless recalculation in bigger systems.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:26:26 +0000

That looks interesting, and totally new to me. Thanks.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:19:19 +0000

Have a look at the node code. It's biblically simple. I would say it's much simpler than any comparable solution. You can forget about reducers, thunks, computed, even useState, useContext, useEffect and props are rare. I've stuck with graph terminology: nodes, predecessors etc, but you don't need to grok that stuff to use this. Once you've understood that a node is a value, some methods and a reup() function, that's it.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:30 +0000

The graph framing is essential. I use typescript graph libraries for the topological sort and for the visualization. I did much less work than either of those two libraries !

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 23:59:10 +0000

As I've just written above, React components form a tree that mirrors the DOM. A graph is a much better fit. Nodes in my DAG ressemble "computed" in Vue, where they watch a value and recalculate when it changes, but... in Vue the watched value needs to exist, ie you're responsible for constructing the graph and ensuring no cycles, and the computed value is only available locally, to be used in the template. In my DAG, you just name the thing you want to watch, octopus checks for cycles. Plus you get the visualization.

The closest thing I'm aware of is Jotai. Atoms in jotai can take dependencies on other atoms, so forming a graph.

Reporting nodes in Octopus are, I believe, completely new. You can create nodes that select their predecessors with a filter function. So the "totalPrice" node takes a dependency on any node with a price property, and recalculates when anything with a price changes.

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

bbsimonbb — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 23:43:08 +0000

It's very different. Your react components are organized in a tree that mirrors your DOM. If you're using React without an additional state management package, you need to hoist your shared state to a common ancestor, then prop drill it down to where it's needed. Nightmare. I'm advocating a graph that mirrors your subject domain, unconstricted by your DOM. Also, my graph is constructed from below, which feels very intuitive. Nodes specify who they want to read. You make no change to the node being read.

Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development

bbsimonbb — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 18:36:12 +0000

Directed acyclic graphs are muched discussed in comp-sci, but octopus appears to be the first reusable, turnkey, ready-to-wear, off-the-shelf implementation of a DAG for application development, in any language, that I'm aware of.

This is remarkable because DAGs hit a sweet spot in the middle of the three common programming paradigms (OO, event-driven, functional). Let's have a DAG as the top-level structure of our applications. Data-fetching and onChange handlers live in DAG nodes, next to the data they act on. The UI flows out from the DAG with fine-grained reactivity. Our app state is effortlessly consistent, because any outside change (user action, api result) unleashes a graph traversal. Our UI components become much simpler, because they just need to dumbly reflect values in the graph.

I'm putting this up for a second time. Absolutely no-one bit the first time, which can't be right :-)

Hacker News: bbsimonbb

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Boeing chief must have engineering background, Emirates boss says"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

New comment by bbsimonbb in "Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development"

Show HN: Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development

New comment by bbsimonbb in "You Don't Batch Cook When You're Suicidal (2020)"