Hacker News: efromvt

New comment by efromvt in "Show HN: Strata – an expressive semantic layer that can say no to your LLM"

efromvt — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:17:17 +0000

I think a service that simplifies things enough can get people to pay for it, but semantic layer is tough because you often also do want to encode sensitive information, you need to minimize latency, and it’s in the critical path of a bunch of other stuff. You’d need to differentiate quite a bit vs a local hosted option with more flexibility. That’s why semantic layer vendors are often semantic layer ++ ; you want to hook into an ecosystem to get sticky. Doesn’t mean it won’t work!

New comment by efromvt in "Show HN: Strata – an expressive semantic layer that can say no to your LLM"

efromvt — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:59:12 +0000

I’m a big fan of the strict naming as an abstraction above tables and reuse as blend key approach, it also greatly simplifies aggregate resolution like you have. (Landed on the same abstraction level when building a semantic model personally).

Lots of 404s on the docs pages - might be worth an audit of links?

New comment by efromvt in "Show HN: Real-time Solar System with 526k asteroids and all tracked satellites"

efromvt — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:20:29 +0000

Data is the remaining moat! (Though I LOVE the amount of accessible public data and WASM has really lowered the barrier to performant data driven UIs (webgl here though? Maybe it’s just agents), so not advocating for more moats, enjoying all the cool products )

New comment by efromvt in "NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart"

efromvt — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:23:33 +0000

I actually agree with your point overall, but Falcon 9 uses the Merlin, not the newer raptor 3 for starship which is more 3d printing and has had some teething issues (no definite causation, and I expect they’ll get it sorted).

New comment by efromvt in "You Said No MCP"

efromvt — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:02:52 +0000

I mean it was a pretty classic hype cycle - MCP was massively inflated, the blowback was also inflated, and now we're in the happy state where there are same cases where it's genuinely better and differentiated and everyone will keep iterating on it. (statelessness was a big step forward).

New comment by efromvt in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

efromvt — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:11:56 +0000

I went into that blind and quite enjoyed it! The surrounding world building is quite sophisticated without being overwhelming. (and somewhat bleak).

New comment by efromvt in "Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests"

efromvt — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 01:59:45 +0000

it's a little funny to see just how much astroturfing there is for some software, and how creatively it can be worked into some posts.

New comment by efromvt in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)"

efromvt — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:47:05 +0000

Continued on my urban tree mapping kick from the last few months - it's continued to be a good way to stress test other projects of mine [3]. I've given it a new shiny landing page [1] so I can work on SEO a bit, I'll need to do a facelift on the data explorer to bring it in line stylistically.

I'm pivoting from adding more sources to data quality - as I've tried to vet some of the city sources I'm finding fun things (Cambridge, MA, USA merges in trees from Harvard, and some are straight duplicates with slight offsets, lots of places have trees in the middle of the road, many locations are address level instead of tree level). Now trying to leverage aerial photography to drive some QA, which has been a fun area to explore!

[1]: https://arborary.world/ [2]: https://greenmtnboy.github.io/tree_reporting [3]: https://github.com/trilogy-data/pytrilogy

New comment by efromvt in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)"

efromvt — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:16:06 +0000

Love the ID/adoption - what's the gamification angle here? What does trading the cards mean in this context and how do you expect people to use that?

New comment by efromvt in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)"

efromvt — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:49:48 +0000

Love seeing data collection and aggregation used for good!

New comment by efromvt in "Pre-Release of Polars 2.0"

efromvt — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:25:20 +0000

As a huge duckdb fan, I'd love to see chDB to get proper windows support - that would make it real competition (having WASM coverage is already a big step) which would be good for the space as a whole.

New comment by efromvt in "Google Antigravity introduces Boost deep reasoning (/boost)"

efromvt — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:20:32 +0000

Am also curious on this! Though if it’s great now I’d need a sustained period of consistency (let’s say six months) before I try it again - the rollercoaster of getting a new randomized feature and quality experience every week got old pretty quick. (And I felt bad for recommending it to a few people at the time based on a good week)

New comment by efromvt in "EVE Online moves to Python 3"

efromvt — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:57:06 +0000

I enjoyed off world trading company but it’s a very different kind of economic simulator- much shorter and gamified loops - which isn’t a criticism, just not exactly the same itch.

New comment by efromvt in "EVE Online moves to Python 3"

efromvt — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 14:12:21 +0000

Yeah if I ever have the need to occupy an inordinate number of hours of my life again I’ll log back in, the temptation to dust of the account(s) arises sometimes. Think I managed to log off in lowsec but who knows!

New comment by efromvt in "MySQL CDC to BigQuery: what periodic syncs miss, and how binlog avoids it"

efromvt — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:38:34 +0000

Outbox events are my strict preference over CDC, but CDC was often easier. (Deal with the business logic downstream and all)

New comment by efromvt in "Sol loves to cheat"

efromvt — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:48:39 +0000

for a certain moral definition, seems perfectly solvable? If we wanted to define 'cheating' as 'if you know it is an eval, use only the specified tools and give up if the eval is clearly unfair' (ignore Kobayashi Maru) why couldn't we fine-tune towards this objective function?

(curious what the side effects would be)

New comment by efromvt in "No, local models will not win"

efromvt — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:05:56 +0000

I think there is some justification for it if we look at the distribution of token spend - there is a strong "follow the frontier" majority. (We can certainly expect more "good enough" tiers to shake out over time, but in what time period while that be the majority?)

New comment by efromvt in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

efromvt — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:49:15 +0000

I think the context here is that em dashes are usually generated verbatim from LLMs? I haven't seen them generate a lot of double hyphens; I suppose the post could be laundering them to double dashes, but if you're gonna try to hide LLM prose just drop them entirely? [please correct me if I'm wrong and double dashes are also an LLM tell - genuinely don't know]

New comment by efromvt in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

efromvt — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:10:48 +0000

I finished wiring up the backend data merge so user(s) (aka me, really) can record trees as they walk and have those merged into the general city data on my urban tree map app[1]. There's some very cool trees in the neighborhood I'm excited to have recorded.

Which leads me to trying to get the processing off github actions (it's all duckdb pipelines), which has led me to improve the orchestration implementation of my 'better sql' [2] to optimize the asset based refresh flow. I'm now wiring that up in a general cloud service to give me the data orchestration platform I've always wanted. Building a multi-tenant cloud experience has been interesting!

[1]: https://greenmtnboy.github.io/sf_tree_reporting [2]: https://github.com/trilogy-data/pytrilogy

New comment by efromvt in "No one can afford to make Myst games anymore"

efromvt — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:57:44 +0000

They actually touch on Blue Prince in the article; it is interesting that Expedition 33 isn't driving investment in similar sized games. But the thesis seems to be that Blue Prince like (smaller budget) is the preferred direction; more attempts at the upside of a runaway hit. Medium budget games give you less shots on goal and no corresponding payout increase.