Hacker News: randito

New comment by randito in "Google Plans to Invest Up to $40B in Anthropic"

randito — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:54:12 +0000

> antitrust laws. Even more so since they’re bundling their AI products with their search monopoly.

couldn't this just be framed / spun as just using search data as training? i don't seem being bundled enough to run afoul with anti-trust.

New comment by randito in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

randito — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:13:26 +0000

(McKenna tangent). I like this version of that talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL0yfxDe6jE. It's about 12 minutes and animated with some hand-drawn whiteboard drawings. Good stuff.

New comment by randito in "Writing code is cheap now"

randito — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:51:30 +0000

> In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work.

I think this is very telling. Unless you have a good manager who is paying attention, a lot of them are clueless and just see the hype of 10x ing your developers and don't care about the nuance of (as they say) all the surrounding bits to writing code. And unfortunately, they just repeat this to the people above them, who also read the hype and just see $$ of reducing headcount. (sorry, venting a little)

New comment by randito in "Small Kafka: Tansu and SQLite on a free t3.micro"

randito — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 20:39:55 +0000

Great link. I've always been drawn to sqlite3 just from a simplicity and operational point of view. And with tools like "make it easy to replcate" Litestream and "make it easy to use" sqlite-utils, it just becomes easier.

And one of the first patterns I wanted to use was this. Just a read-only event log that's replicated, that is very easy to understand and operate. Kafka is a beast to manage and run. We picked it at my last company -- and it was a mistake, when a simple DB would have sufficed.

https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils https://litestream.io/

New comment by randito in "Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday"

randito — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:56:32 +0000

I've been through a Vista Equity acquisition. It was not pretty -- they slashed, consolidated and basically ran their one-size-fits-all playbook. The brought in their crew -- which is totally expected -- and then bought other companies in the same vertical. Of course, they all had different tech stacks.

(like ya said, operators is the right word. it felt icky)

At least for the first year, the acquired teams were able to run more or less the same but with new hyped-up-overly-aggressive Vista hotshot managers and then the sh*t-from-above just started raining down.

Also, they hired the worst sw architect / person I've ever had to work with. He wasted so much time and money.

New comment by randito in "Design and Implementation of Sprites"

randito — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:24:41 +0000

Thanks for the reply. Summary: Here's this really cool thing we're doing! Oh, are you wrote something exotic for it? Nope, just regular Erlang goodness that's been around 20 years.

New comment by randito in "Design and Implementation of Sprites"

randito — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 01:23:35 +0000

(Disclaimer: Newbie checking but still curious).

Are you using libluster or Distributed Erlang to reach the clusters? Or just simple networking over the Fly network.

> That will find or place an Elixir process on the cluster and rpc the target node with our code.

Is this similar to what you did with Flame? Or just a refinement of that idea.

New comment by randito in "Show HN: Webctl – Browser automation for agents based on CLI instead of MCP"

randito — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:28:14 +0000

If you look at Elixir keynote for Phoenix.new -- a cool agentic coding tool -- you'll see some hints about a browser control using a API tool call. It's called "web" in the video.

Video: https://youtu.be/ojL_VHc4gLk?t=2132

More discussion: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/23/phoenix-new/

New comment by randito in "LiveVue v1.0"

randito — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:46:53 +0000

Interesting project. I'm glad Vue is getting the same attention as the Svelte one. And props for digging in to optimize the payloads, and making it diff-able.

Can you just drop existing Vue components in there? Or are their LiveVue specific things you need to add?

New comment by randito in "Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix"

randito — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 15:58:33 +0000

Would love to read about some of the techniques for how you accomplished this.

New comment by randito in "How I program with agents"

randito — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:34:39 +0000

> a consistent path to interacting with the world e.g sms, mail, weather, social, etc.

Here's an interesting toy-project where someone hooked up agents to calendars, weather, etc and made a little game interface for it. https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-...

New comment by randito in "Show HN: Visual flow-based programming for Erlang, inspired by Node-RED"

randito — Fri, 16 May 2025 18:44:58 +0000

You may want to consider Elixir instead. It has an easier syntax and is (don't quote me on this) equivalent in function and purpose with Erlang. Plus you get lots of other goodies like LiveView (notebooks) and a good web stack (Phoenix).

New comment by randito in "Gmail to SQLite"

randito — Sat, 10 May 2025 19:34:59 +0000

What a great timely tip. Was just looking for good direction on how to do this. Thanks!

New comment by randito in "The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything"

randito — Tue, 06 May 2025 20:31:02 +0000

For people wanting to dig into this idea some more, I'd recommend the book by Austin Kleon called "Steal Like An Artist." Also, there is some nuance in the book about copying and stealing, without being a thief.

New comment by randito in "The Board Game Industry Is Burning – and It's Their Own Fault"

randito — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 14:40:44 +0000

If you want a better discussion about tariffs and their impact on the Boardgame Industry:

https://stonemaiergames.com/the-math-of-tariffs/

As others have said, avoid this article. It doesn't add anything meaningful to the discussion.

New comment by randito in "Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week"

randito — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 22:47:10 +0000

To state the obvious (again), it's shocking the rate of progress is with these tools. If this is 2 years of progress, what does 10-20 look like?

New comment by randito in "Computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku"

randito — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 17:39:39 +0000

Totally agree. A general-purpose solution that ties together different messy interfaces will win in the long run -- i.e the IP protocol, copy-paste, browsers. In these cases, they provide a single-way for different aspects of computing to collaborate. As mentioned before, semantic web initiatives did not succeed and I think there's an important lesson there.

New comment by randito in "Notion's mid-life crisis"

randito — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 20:45:57 +0000

My experience with Notion keyboard use is different. It's not 100% VIM hands-on-keyboard mouse-free but it's getting there. If there was only a "insert after this block" shortcut.

My favorite is to type something then /turnh3 where /turn let's you turn the block into something else.

New comment by randito in "Giving T cells extra batteries supercharges them against cancer"

randito — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 14:33:08 +0000

For people who want to learn biochemsistry and subsequently be in awe and the complexity and mechanisms, there's a great beginner book, The Machinery of Life. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6601267-the-machinery-of...

I found my way there after an Alan Kay video -- OPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasnt happened yet: https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=1787

On the subject of awe, here's another from Kurszsegat - The Most Complex Language in the World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYPFenJQciw

New comment by randito in "Libations: Tailscale on the Rocks"

randito — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 16:58:48 +0000

(newbie checking) tsnet is a really interested idea -- that an application can act like a device with networking baked in. that applicatin access can be controlled at the network level via the tailescale ACLs.

are there any equivalents in other languages?