<h1>Hacker News, sans AI</h1>
<p>I like Hacker News, but I do not love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI. So, I have created my own version.
A version of Hacker News, without AI.</p>
<p><a href="/hnsansai">HNSansAI</a> pulls from the official Hacker News API, looks through the content of each article, and discards any that mention a term related to "AI". That includes stuff like:</p>
<ul>
<li>"OpenAI"</li>
<li>"Anthropic"</li>
<li>"Copilot"</li>
<li>"LLM"</li>
<li>…and many more.</li>
</ul>

I like HackerNews, but I don't love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI. This is a version of HackerNews, filtered to remove any article focusing on __AI__. Refreshes about every ten minutes.

<p>I like HackerNews, but I don't love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI. This is a version of HackerNews, filtered to remove any article focusing on <strong>AI</strong>. Refreshes about every ten minutes.</p>

Hacker News sans AI

Back in my day, we used math for autocomplete.

<p>Back in my day, we used math for autocomplete.</p>

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

<h1>Local-First Software is Easier to Scale</h1>
<img src="/images/flatirons.webp" alt="The Flatirons">
<p>The title of this post is somewhat misleading. Local-first software rarely needs to be scaled at all.</p>
<p><a href="https://writewithharper.com">Harper</a> recently received a massive increase in both traffic and user count.
How?
By making it to the front page of Hacker News.
If you couldn't tell by the extent to which I talk about this, I'm thrilled.
This amounted to a tremendous amount of free advertising, if nothing else.</p>
<p>I've been thinking a lot about the wondrous benefits of working at the edge.
That's just one term of many that people use to describe Harper: "edge-first".
Others include "local-first" or simply "on-device".
They are all just jargon for a simple idea: We run all the relevant grammar checking code as physically close to the users as possible.
That way, we can serve up suggestions faster than anyone else.
To achieve our goal, we make sure that everything is well-optimized and lean.
Harper barely uses any CPU or memory at all.</p>
<p>What does all this mean in the context of the recent uptick in user acquisition? Imagine, for a moment, we are LanguageTool.
Our software is written in Java, with questionable attendance to the efficiency of our code.
Since our software requires a big server to run, we have a certain number of servers on standby to handle a certain amount of expected load.</p>
<p>If suddenly the number of requests we received were to double (as it did for the Chrome extension), we would be big trouble.
To avoid increasing the latency on requests (or dropping requests all together), we would need to scale up the number of running servers.
This not only takes hiring an expert in cloud architecture, but also additional funding to pay the AWS (or whatever) bill at the end of the month.</p>
<p>Because Harper runs at the edge (no server required), we don't have to worry about that.
In fact, I only noticed that our user count had spiked after I visited Hacker News the morning after.
No hiccups at all.</p>
<p>Lots of cloud providers like to brag about being able to scale with their users. I like to brag about not having to scale at all.</p>

The title of this post is somewhat misleading. Local-first software rarely needs to be scaled at all.

<p>The title of this post is somewhat misleading. Local-first software rarely needs to be scaled at all.</p>

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale

<h1>On Linkarzu's YouTube</h1>
<p>I consider myself an avid member of the Neovim community.
As a whole, they have a great pulse on what a good writing experience feels like.
Over time, this community has grown into a real force in the software engineering field.</p>
<p>Linkarzu has been a constant presence in this ecosystem for a while, giving a voice to the hidden
maintainers that make Neovim great.
I am honored to be counted among the guests he has hosted on his channel.</p>
<p>We talked at length about <a href="https://writewithharper.com">Harper</a>, open source maintenance, and the tooling we use in our development workflows.</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="400" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/l9D7M1gIY8I?si=dXhZKospDwyb6zmU" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I was honored to be a guest on Linkarzu's YouTube series.

<p>I was honored to be a guest on Linkarzu's YouTube series.</p>

Elijah Potter

On Linkarzu's YouTube

Comments

Other Stuff

Hacker News sans AI

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale