It didn't work for me, and if you reading this, it probably won't work for you either.

It did­n’t work for me, and if you read­ing this, it prob­a­bly won’t work for you ei­ther.

Do Not Type Your Notes

<h1>Hacker News, sans AI</h1>
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.
<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:
<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.

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.

Hacker News sans AI

<h1>Local-First Software is Easier to Scale</h1>
<img src="/images/flatirons.webp" alt="The Flatirons">
The ti­tle of this post is some­what mis­lead­ing. Local-ﬁrst soft­ware rarely needs to be scaled at all.
<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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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

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

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale

<h1>Trying out the Helium Browser</h1>
<img src="/images/helium_website.png" alt="The Helium Website">
I’ve de­cided to give the <a href="https://helium.computer/">Helium browser</a> a shot.
So far, I’m im­pressed!
For con­text, I’ve been an <code>ungoogled-chromium</code> user for the past 4-ish years.
Why? I like the pri­vacy guar­an­tees. Plus, I pre­fer to use the same browser en­gine as <a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/private-grammar-checker-h/lodbfhdipoipcjmlebjbgmmgekckhpfb">my users</a>.
When I heard about Helium, I was in­trigued.
From what I can tell, it’s es­sen­tially a fork of <code>ungoogled-chromium</code>, with some bonus perks.
It ships UBlock Origin out-of-the-box, which means I can keep us­ing the same great ad blocker that Google re­cently killed in its browser.
It looks great, and mi­grat­ing from Chromium was su­per easy.

I've decided to give the Helium browser a shot. So far, I'm impressed!

I’ve de­cided to give the Helium browser a shot. So far, I’m im­pressed!

Elijah Potter

Trying out the Helium Browser

Comments

Other Stuff

Do Not Type Your Notes

Hacker News sans AI

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale