presentation

My experience though is that every homeschooled kid I met in university over a decade ago was very socially awkward. Not necessarily a problem I guess, they performed fine at academics.

When I was DJing locally in SF, that was exactly what we were doing.

It was almost a decade ago I was living in sf but I remember 1015 Folsom’s audio quality was terrible and they had a lot of basic mainstream acts. Maybe it’s improved since then though. Overall SF’s local artists have a cool style and some of the warehouse events can be cool, but the club scene was not my cup of tea.

Agreed, when i lived in SF it was my favorite venue. Big clubs are overrated.

Guess you came for the hot take without actually using the service or participating in any intelligent conversation. All the sibling comments observe that nothing you are talking about happened.

Snarky ignorant comments like yours ruin Hacker News and the internet as a whole. Please reconsider your mindset for the good of us all.

In my case we have a B2B SaaS where access patterns are occasional, revenue per customer is high, general server load is low. Cloud bills just don’t spike much. Labor is 100x the cost of our servers so saving a piddly amount of money on server costs while taking on even just a fraction of one technical employee’s worth of labor costs makes no sense.

Not sure I like the idea of this being powered by compiler magic using more string directives, but does look nice as an alternative to other similar products like Cloudflare/Upstash Workflows and Inngest (which I’ve used but is unfortunately not very reliable). Can’t find any details about pricing for the Vercel World implementation, though.

It looks like it can do potentially much more than Dia by automating your browser itself pretty autonomously based on the video.

As for how useful Dia has been, I think the most valuable thing for me has just been summarizing really long pages. Nothing else has really moved the needle for me.

Not every country in east Asia is Singapore, and the point I’m making is that the commenter thinking there is no way to reduce drug addiction besides extreme permissiveness has counterexamples here today. This is a failure of imagination.

Japan is prison usually around 2 years. But the bigger effect is probably cultural/indoctrination, less than the scale of punishment.

One data point, I live in East Asia, it’s very illegal, and vanishingly few people have drug problems (often they substitute for other problems that are less illegal, like gambling or sex).

Maybe can do basically the same thing with a dumb SMS/MMS-based interface actually, text-adventure style. Then could do it with a dumb phone.

Should have given him back his stapler

You don’t need some kind of “social score” to have the chilling effect, if anything I think people self censor more because of the fear of getting berated by others for their beliefs—both by those they know and don’t.

Interestingly I don’t think it’s really “cooling” that happened - if anything it’s been some people becoming extremely hot, and then the majority of people, myself included, are experiencing cooling.

Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off friends and family because they disagree on politics, which probably undermines the democratic ideals they think they’re defending. [1]

I consider myself overall more aligned with liberals, but as a recent example, it disheartens me to open Facebook after a long time and see so many people I knew from years past reveling in Charlie Kirk’s death as though that makes their cause more sympathetic to alienate anyone who might have agreed with things he said (even if I generally don’t). This just reinforces division and increases the social cooling effect.

[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/were-not-all-goi...

I think a major cause is how dependent the United States is on the courts to decide the law. China is a technocracy with strong central state control so they can sidestep that; Japan, on the other hand, has a strong bureaucracy that given a set of rules and processes, can execute them efficiently. On the other hand anything you do in the USA starts off in a gray zone and really is decided once you’ve gone to court, limiting risk taking to only those who are well capitalized and have a lot of time to burn.

Rightists are scared of energy sources beyond coal and oil; leftists are scared of information technology that could replace human workers; homeowners are scared to make any physical changes to their neighborhoods and cities because it would "change the neighborhood character"; legislators are scared/incapable of making any fundamental changes to governance because it would be difficult, and can't agree on anything; the president and the average American are scared of anyone and any ideas that don't come from within the country's borders; and for anyone who isn't scared, the cost of enacting change will be a realization that everyone who has skills have either retired or abandoned their trades to become software engineers optimizing ad revenue; and that the young are no longer interested in taking on these challenges because they're doomscrolling TikTok all day; and if they proceed, they will be mired in lawsuits for decades by naysayers; and the financial costs will be 10x the true value paid anywhere else in the world.

In the partition example isn’t the for loop condition a branch technically?

I live in Japan - when I see a package was sent to me with FedEx I feel a great sense of dread.

Part of it is that most of the libraries that came before we’re tightly coupled to a particular framework that itself went out of fashion, like Passport and Express, which is a problem because frameworks themselves have been moving in and out of fashion very rapidly; or are coupled with service offerings from vendors, like Auth0.

Auth.js is actually one of the first attempts that tries to be framework and vendor agnostic while still including a good deal of the batteries you need to make a full authentication system, which they only recently did, as they were originally tied to next JS like every other library in the graveyard of authentication libraries.

If you just want to specifically do an OAuth handshake or salt and hash a password or produce a JWT, those libraries are all rock solid. But a full batteries included framework and vendor agnostic solution hasn’t really existed until recently.

Sorry for being dismissive - but I think that’s just a failure of imagination.

Does every app using an adapter for Better Auth need to implement every plugin’s many thousands of operations, even if they’re only using basic functionality and a handful of operations?

Auth.js differed in that you could let them handle it if you’re doing your low impact side product, but once you did care you can opt out. You’re telling me that Better Auth knows better what you need than you do, and so giving you the option to opt out would just be too onerous for you to decide if you want to do it or not.

Why couldn’t Better Auth plugins individually declare what they need and let you implement those functions as you need them?

For what it’s worth my company also makes money in a sensitive industry, Auth.js did everything we need regarding authentication (and we just use other things entirely for billing/etc, which arguably is much more modular), and we only had to implement like 8 functions that took a day and has worked since we started a few years ago. Probably would take me an hour or two today thanks to AI.

Honestly I’m fine with Better Auth taking its stance, but basically saying “you should use Better Auth unless you have this one random fad technical issue, why would you need any alternative like Auth.js??” while saying that there will only be security patches; and no real probable alternative I can think of; and that stance is basically a non starter for what I believe to be a large set of use cases, rubbed me wrong.

I’ll take patches over nothing, but that doesn’t invalidate my feeling that auth in JS is in a sorry state and this isn’t making it better as far as my concerns go. Anyway who am I to talk, I’m not going to make an alternative regardless.

I guess what I’m saying is that I think the part about delegating databases to Better Auth relegates it to being only useful for throwaway projects and companies with low quality technical vision, and there is no actively developed alternative that can do any better.

Patches are better than nothing but I am disappointed with the state of auth in JS.

I am bummed by this, basically sounds like they’re sunsetting future development into Auth.js.

I tried Better Auth and it was not usable for what I wanted to do - I manage my own database schema and expose it through a permissioned GraphQL API. With Auth.js I just needed to implement a documented set of functions with specified input and output types, like creating users, storing tokens, etc. - however I wanted to - and then it all just worked with my own custom GraphQL API as the backend.

But with Better Auth it’s all insanely general, where the data types are “whatever a particular plugin wants” meaning the any type in TypeScript; and the only thing you can do is delegate responsibility for design of database schemas and execution of data migrations to whatever plugin developers decide you need for the particular authentication methods you support.

Way beyond the pale for an auth library in my opinion, I thought I was dumb and just didn’t understand the library but when I asked the community about it, they told me that’s by design - plugins determine their own data model. This isn’t a matter of me having a weird use case with the whole GraphQL thing, I can’t imagine anyone who takes their data modeling/security seriously would be fine with delegating that kind of control to plugin developers.

(Yes I know you can make your own adapters, but the interface for that is literally “implement a general purpose SQL-like query executor” where the models that you’re querying/mutating are arbitrary strings - so basically no control over your schema. It literally just takes in a code: string value for eval’ing your migrations! Insane! [1])

When I saw the announcements before about Better Auth, emphasizing not that it was innovative nor technically good in any way, but instead focusing on the fact that its developer was self-taught and has only been coding for a few years [2], I tried to restrain myself from assuming anything about how it might be designed, especially since it seems everyone was hyping it up… but I’m not so confident my prejudices were totally wrong.

I guess this is marginally better than the status quo where Auth.js was basically unmaintained and not being developed further at all. Which is to say, the state of open source auth libraries in JS is surprisingly poor.

[1] https://github.com/better-auth/better-auth/blob/f6cbdcc84ee5...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/25/this-self-taught-ethiopian...

As a Tokyo parent I don’t have to imagine because our family and friends do it and it works.

NYC is subpar too. The elevators never work, most stations don’t have escalators either, it’s filthy, taking your kids on the train will give them permanent hearing damage and large swaths of the city are completely unserviced.

Your feeling is the result of NYC and the entire USA being generally dysfunctional, not an inherent truth.

I live in Tokyo and have kids. Both cycling and transit are essential to most parents lives here. It is not that these are incompatible with family life, it’s that as it is implemented and maintained in the USA (read: badly), it is incompatible.

An example that’s minor for young singles but major for parents: train stations here pretty much all have elevators and they almost always are working. This alone changes the game.

For what it's worth looking at the resulting UI, both the before and after screenshots do not look visually attractive. Whether or not that's a problem for this product, I don't know.

They built a half baked version of it and then haven’t finished it for a while but maybe they’ll get back to it sometime.

Sounds like bike shedding to me

Are you paying for your browser?

There’s your answer.

Don’t need to do what China did, can use other countries with adequate housing as a different model, like where I live, Tokyo. Ample housing construction driven by the market not by central planning, paired with large amounts of fast public transportation to increase the amount of livable area near the city center; loose zoning requirements; simple and easily understood checklists evaluated by a fast and efficient civil service bureaucracy for permitting with minimal involvement of the courts (the opposite of the USA); convenient and self sustaining neighborhoods. You can still get small apartments within 15 mins of public transit commute distance to central Tokyo in nice neighborhoods for less than $400/mo; there’s a foreign speculation problem in the most central areas (likely to be clamped down soon) but by and large it’s affordable to live here.