Hacker News: lisperforlife

New comment by lisperforlife in "You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML"

lisperforlife — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:19:36 +0000

I call this the bluebox problem. Back when I worked for SAP there used to be this control called the bluebox control that embedded a browser (shdocvw) into a C++/MFC app. Almost every single annoying UI bug came from that control. I see the same now in the other direction. Every 5 years we come up with the bright idea to use browser as a distribution engine for a UI surface that is rendered by a box. This has historically never worked. I just wanted to recount applets, activex controls, flash, flex (also flash), silverlight, flutter ... and now this. The issue is developer tooling, screen readers, browser extensions and all the other small things that are difficult to account for.

New comment by lisperforlife in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

lisperforlife — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:02:34 +0000

I am making it easy to embed coding mode AI agents into SaaS applications. We have a WinterTC compatible custom JS runtime that lets the agents write code to accomplish tasks and a SDK to embed agents into your SaaS apps. We help you write skill files on our coding agent against your API and use our frontend SDK to embed the agent into your app a.la Intercom. See https://uraiai.com/

New comment by lisperforlife in "Claude Fable 5"

lisperforlife — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:23:46 +0000

My guess is that it is a massive model similar to GPT 4.5 and $10/$50 pricing is for its output will discourage people from using it. I also read safety = nerfed.

New comment by lisperforlife in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"

lisperforlife — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:01:23 +0000

``` Location: Eastern Canada Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes to Toronto / GTA. Technologies: Rust, Go, Systems Design, Kuberenetes, vLLM, Inference APIs, Agentic systems, RAG, PostgreSQL, Typescript, React (and ecosystem), Linux, Firecracker, Docker Résumé/CV: https://vagmi.ca/resume Github: https://github.com/vagmi Email: vagmi@nirai.ca ```

New comment by lisperforlife in "Show HN: My Private GitHub on Postgres"

lisperforlife — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:08:18 +0000

This is really cool. PG has zlib compression on TOAST objects so this should still be okay even if you are not storing pack files. I am curious with your choice of hand-rolling pktline, upload-pack and receive pack implementations including rev-walking. Any particular reason you did not want to use libgit2 or something like the gitoxide implementation of pkt-line. Was it performance or is it because you wanted it to be in pure rust? Did you try running this on slightly heavier repository with a lot of commits, refs and objects?

New comment by lisperforlife in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"

lisperforlife — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:37:50 +0000

Location: Canada Remote: Yes (East coast timing) Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Rust, Go, Python, Typescript/React, Postgres, K8S, LLM APIs Résumé/CV: https://vagmi.ca/resume Email: vagmi@nirai.ca --- https://github.com/vagmi | https://linkedin.com/in/vagmi

24+ years of experience and a hands on builder, generalist. I like to pitch tent and dig deep into the problem. I am versatile enough to solve problems across tiers. I am looking for part time work as I continue pushing my startup forward.

Slow Down to Speed Up

lisperforlife — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:35:16 +0000

Article URL: https://dhruvasagar.dev/posts/slow-down-to-speed-up/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950774

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by lisperforlife in "Cal.com is going closed source"

lisperforlife — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:39:55 +0000

Exactly this! Classic open source bait and switch.

New comment by lisperforlife in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

lisperforlife — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:38:47 +0000

Recently the v8 rust library changed it from mutable handle scopes to pinned scopes. A fairly simple change that I even put in my CLAUDE.md file. But it still generates methods with HandleScope's and then says... oh I have a different scope and goes on a random walk refactoring completely unrelated parts of the code. All the while Opus 4.5 burns through tokens. Things work great as long as you are testing on the training set. But that said, it is absolutely brilliant with React and Typescript.

New comment by lisperforlife in "Replacing EBS and Rethinking Postgres Storage from First Principles"

lisperforlife — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:25:42 +0000

The 5ms write latency and 1ms write latency sounds like they are using S3 to store and retrieve data with some local cache. My guess is a S3 based block storage exposed as a network block device. S3 supports compare-and-swap operations (Put-If-Match), so you can do a copy-on-write scenario quite easily. May be somebody from TigerData can give a little bit more insight into this. I know slatedb supports S3 as a backend for their key-value store. We can build a block device abstraction using that.

New comment by lisperforlife in "Migrating from AWS to Hetzner"

lisperforlife — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 10:34:50 +0000

I think you can get much farther with dedicated servers. I run a couple of nodes on Hetzner. The performance you get from a dedicated machine even if it is a 3 year old machine that you can get on server auction is absolutely bonkers and cannot be compared to VMs. The thing is that most of the server hardware is focused towards high core count, low clock speed processors that optimize for I/O rather than compute. It is overprovisioned by all cloud providers. Even the I/O part of the disk is crazy. It uses all sorts of shenanigans to get a drive that sitting on a NAS and emulating a local disk. Most startups do not need the hyper virtualized, NAS based drive. You can go much farther and much more cost-effectively with dedicated server rentals from Hetzner. I would love to know if they are any north-american (particularly canadian) companies that can compete with price and the quality of service like Hetzner. I know of OVH but I would love to know others in the same space.

New comment by lisperforlife in "GPT-5"

lisperforlife — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 22:31:43 +0000

I don't think models are fundamentally getting better. What is happening is that we are increasing the training set, so when users use it, they are essentially testing on the training set and find that it fits their data and expectations really well. However, the moat is primarily the training data, and that is very hard to protect as the same data can be synthesized with these models. There is more innovation surrounding serving strategies and infrastructure than in the fundamental model architectures.

New comment by lisperforlife in "Containerization is a Swift package for running Linux containers on macOS"

lisperforlife — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 01:35:24 +0000

You can use libkrun to pretty much do the same thing.

New comment by lisperforlife in "How Does GPT-4o Encode Images?"

lisperforlife — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 15:27:08 +0000

Why is this not the top comment? FAIR published their C3MLeon paper about decoder-only autoregressive models that work with both text and image tokens. I believe GPT-4o's vocabulary has room for both image and audio tokens. For audio tokens, they probably trained an RVQ-VAE model like Encodec or Soundstream.

New comment by lisperforlife in "Stable Audio Open"

lisperforlife — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 22:17:42 +0000

I am curious about models like encodec or soundstream. They are essentially meant to be codecs informed by the music they are meant to compress to achieve insane compression ratios. The decompression process is indeed generative since a part of the information that is meant to be decoded is in the decoder weights. Does that pass the smell test from a copyright law's perspective? I believe such a decoder model is powering gpt-4o's audio decoding.

New comment by lisperforlife in "A CTO should be technical"

lisperforlife — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:29:17 +0000

I had written about it a few months back. https://blog.tarkalabs.com/what-does-a-cto-do-67c26d34ae7a

As I see it, CTOs are responsible for

- Making Build/Buy decisions

- Hiring

- Setting up a culture of learning

- Balancing tech and product priorities

- Setting up delivery processes that work for the team

- And finally for architecture and system design

I feel in that order of priority.

New comment by lisperforlife in "Ask HN: Do you use foreign keys in relational databases?"

lisperforlife — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 10:06:22 +0000

I tend to use foreign keys everywhere. The only time that I would skip it is when I do not need to cascade deletes. These are mostly metadata tables that will be archived on a periodical basis.

Airlines worldwide rush to change flights over U.S. 5G dispute

lisperforlife — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 21:29:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/5g-airlines-wireless-1.6319999

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30000429

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by lisperforlife in "Prince of Persia in JavaScript"

lisperforlife — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 10:43:05 +0000

This is awesome. Brings back so many memories as a kid. Thank you. This is built with phaser. I am not very good at this game but if you need to recover life mid game, you can use this.

Phaser.GAMES[0].state.getCurrentState().ui.player.addLife()

Is this open source?

New comment by lisperforlife in "PostgREST 9.0"

lisperforlife — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 17:45:02 +0000

We built an entire system using RLS and functions. Postgraphile is frankly amazing. You can also extend the schema using Typescript or SQL.