353 karma · joined May 14, 2025
Experience: Elixir/Phoenix, Typescript, .NET, Django/Flask, Svelte/Vue/Angular, Android (inc. Jetpack Compose), iOS (inc. SwiftUI), AWS, Cloud VPS, Terraform, Ansible
Fishing for Elixir development work. Working from UTC+10/11.
aeonfox@hackernews.life
A token misfired
Good thing they jumped on that as soon as they were profitable instead of burning cash. Oh wait...
I think a distinction to draw here is that Cloudflare had relatively large capital raises and were almost immediately profitable¹. They had the luxury of throwing away money. Judicious optimisation makes sense for scrappy start-ups, especially when trivial optimisations like these could easily be farmed off to an agent.
Minor nitpick: I believe Elixir and Erlang are strongly typed languages, but for a long time they have both been dynamically typed. With v1.20, Elixir is well on its way to transitioning to a gradually static typed language, and to-date has done so almost purely through inference (except for guards which can explicitly specify type information)
A truly stochastic method is more likely to hit against edge cases, rather than an agent that tends to towards idiomatic solutions and that is trained against a corpus of existing software, and burns millions of tokens/watts spinning its wheels.
^ There's plenty of business value to be found in agentic AI without reaching for it for every solution. I'd even posit agentic AI is even better when paired with focused old-fashioned squishy-brained software engineering in the loop.
> Sure enough, when he exposed volunteers to the equivalent of 30 minutes of summer sunlight without sunscreen, their nitric oxide levels went up and their blood pressure went down.
I can't find information on the methods for this particular study. So I'm curious if he just set up UV lights on a timer and sat his subjects under them. That's something anyone can set up in their home office if they live somewhere gloomy. Instead of taking a vitamin D pill, turn the timer switch on for 30 minutes of a properly calibrated and positioned low-dose UV light (and out of direct line of sight to anyone not under it)
Or just take a nitric oxide supplement :)
Nothing stopping turnkey OSS AI hardware being productised, including niceties like opt-in automated updates. If the trend continues of models becoming smaller and more capable for everyday use, it also derisks against obsolescence.
As an outsider, I'm curious on how?
Typing probably makes sense where memory-correctness needs to be enforced (e.g. Rust), and inferring those semantics require a much wider context. But memory-correctness isn't really something that afflicts BEAM languages.
He gives a lot more nuanced take than 'types are useless', which is more like 'types are less useful than people think in the context of Elixir development'. (Which makes sense because he's in the middle of implementing a type system for Elixir.)
Point-and-click adventure games and the golden age of Macromedia Flash might be before your time? This really reminds me of novelty sites built in Flash which was all point and click and vector animation. A lot of those sites are lost to time, or perhaps hidden in some deep crevice of the web archive.
> I particularly like the points where the mouse control is taken away from you
One thing Flash couldn't do. But it had plenty of RCE exploits, so maybe it could.
They do. But not in the way that you think.
I recently switched from Spotify (well known Electron-based app) to Apple Music (well known native app). The move was mostly an ethical one, but I must say, the UI functionality and app features are basically poverty in comparison. One tiny example, navigating from playlist entry to artist requires multiple interactions. This is just one of many frustrations I've had with the app. But hey, it has beautiful liquid glass effects!
In short: iteration time matters. Times from design to implementation, to internal review, to real user feedback, and back to design from each phase should be as fast as possible. You don't get the same velocity as you do in native. Add to that you have to design and implement in quadruplicate, iOS design for iOS, Android for Android, MacOS for Mac, Windows design for windows. All that is why people use Electon.
Yikes. I spent 15 years developing native on both mobile and desktop. If you think that native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS, you're objectively wrong.
By design, each operation system limits you to their particular design language, and styling of components is hidden by the API making forward-compatible customisation impossible. There's no escaping that. And if you acknowledge that fact, you can't then claim native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS. If you don't acknowledge that fact, you're unhinged from reality.
There's pros and cons to the two approaches, of course. But that's not what's being debated here.
Bold claim to say these challenges will never be surmounted. Either a more-economic technology would have to mature first, or civilisation halt progress for that to be true. If scientific advances could yield miniaturised photonics that offer a significant cost/benefit over any contemporary technology the concept will still be pursued. Unless you are suggesting that it is theoretically and physically impossible?
B) Power consumption and speed. Essentially chips are limited by the high resistance (hence heat loss) of the semiconductor. Photonics can encode multidimensionally, and data processing is as fast as the input light signal can be modulated and the output light signal can be interpreted. I guess this would favour heavy computations that require small inputs and outputs, because eventually you're bottlenecked by conventional chips.