jamest

Alex (the OpenRouter founder) and I went for walks to Sightglass coffee on Divisadero St during our weekly office hours @ HF0 in the Fall of '23.

On one walk I asked 'why are you doing another startup?'

For context, his last one, OpenSea, was valued well into the billions, so it wasn't for money.

His reply: "I just love solving all the puzzles."

It's incredibly hard to compete with someone who is playing the game for the love of the game.

Kudos on playing well, Alex.

I’ve been using this local debugger for the last ~week.

Seeing traces in real-time (and Claude seeing them too) is so so good. The velocity speed up is hard to understate.

Request for the Raindrop team: I wish your eval support was better. It’s not great having it completely disconnected from my CI system.

They actually deliver on the promise of "relational queries && real-time," which is no small feat.

Though, their console feels like it didn't get the love that the rest of the infra / website did.

Congrats on the 1.0 launch! I'm excited to keep building with Instant.

Add a list of people (PMs) who have added feature requests. Have their username be "<username> (<Full Name>) - <karma points>" and then I can click through to see their bio.

It was not on my bingo card to see the Shell Grotto on HN.

I loved this place as a kid and would marvel at the patterns.

The air of mystery around who made it and why invites some fun speculation.

I don't trust an AI model to operate my computer, but giving me my own VM that AIs can use on my behalf is a brilliant way to do this.

Kudos Tasklet.

Genie 3 is super impressive -- but you can't manipulate it programmatically like Minecraft.

We've built our infra so that we can plug in any simulation environment. If an AI-generated world starts being programmatically modifiable (and has really solid object permanance :) then we'd happily use it!

Hi HN -

Minecraft has a DSL that lets you manipulate the world. We've piggy-backed on that, along with a K8s infra to run N worlds in parallel, to let you create simulations of arbitrary complexity.

We think simulations are the best way to test frontier AIs due to their degrees of freedom and expressivity.

AMA!

I don't have the prompts, but here you go:

  - https://the-inference.vercel.app
  - https://github.com/jamestamplin/instant-test

I built an app (HN Clone, of course) with Instant's MCP hooked up to Claude Code.

The experience was brilliant.

Pros:

+ Fast

+ Easy

+ "Vibe coding on steroids" basically

+ The sense of 'wow' that comes very rarely with new tech

Cons:

- It used Instant as the database/backend, but I wasn't sure what it had done / how exactly it worked and had to spend a bunch of time asking Claude + reading the code to get it. It seemed reasonable, but if I were doing a prod system vs a PoC, this is where the time would be spent. ("Vibe coding lets you create tech debt 10x faster")

Net-net: This is the way for prototyping / validating. This is probably the way for production systems in N months too once the toolchain + agents get better.

+1 to Shortwave being great

[Firebase founder] The thing I'm excited about w/Instant is the quad-fecta of offline + real-time + relational queries + open source. The amount of requests we had for relational queries was off-the-charts (and is a hard engineering problem), and, while the Firebase clients are OSS, I failed to open source a reference backend (a longer story).

Good luck, Joe, Stopa and team!

We were talking to (and using the sites) of all our customers of any reasonable size. This was one of them.

The satire in the title is reminiscent of how Firebase was born.

We were previously working on a chat system called Envolve (https://www.envolve.com), that was 'Facebook Chat for any website'. A game that was using us for in-game chat created channels, used display: none on them, and passed game state through the chat.

We scratched our head, asked them why, and learned they wanted to focus on the frontend, not to deal with realtime message passing.

This led us to create a 'headless version' of our chat infra (re-written in Scala) that became the Firebase Realtime Database.

Related, but different, & if there's someone at Google looking at this:

There was a Titan Bluetooth Key (for 2FA) Vulnerability, you've said you'll replace the affected keys[1], but you're no longer doing so. Which is frustrating.

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/titan-keys-update.ht...

Fun fact: the original App Engine datastore evolved into Firestore (which now powers Snapchat and many others).

Thanks, fixed!

[Firebase founder]

I no longer work at Firebase / Google, but two points:

1. There may be issues with the GCP integrations & UX/DX, but GCP integration is good for many customers and necessary for the future of the business.

One of the common failure modes for the 2011-2014 crop of Backend-as-a-Service offerings was their inability to technically support large customers. The economics of developer tooling are a super-power-law. So, if you hope to pay your employees you'll need to grow with your biggest customers.

Eventually, as they become TheNextBigThing, your biggest customers end up wanting the bells and whistles that only a Big Cloud Platform provide.

This was a part of the reason we chose to join Google, and why the Firebase team really really really pushed hard to integrate with GCP at a project, billing, and product level (philosophy: Firebase exposed the product from the client, GCP from the server) despite all the organizational/political overhead.

2. I'm excited to see the current crop of app platforms emerge. It has been 10 years since we launched (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877) and there are now some great innovations in the space. I like the way Supabase (https://supabase.com/) has exposed Postgres and InstantDB (https://www.instantdb.com) graphdb+realtime is really promising.

Those words are far too kind!

Most of the credit goes to my co-founder, Andrew, and the whole team who gave nothing short of everything to build it.

This over-dramatizes a bit. For example some of the “deaths” were consolidations that’s were well implemented:

Eg. Fabric’s products were rolled into Firebase with continuity for developers. AngularJS was replaced by Angular.

Yes, this falls in the bucket of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) [1]

Yes, there's a trend of investors seeking to deploy capital towards ESG (thankfully!)

No, this isn't going to gussy up pure-tech with the 'climate' label. I say this as former-USV founder who is now a USV LP. I can also attest to how solid the humans at USV are.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-an...

Thank you for everything you do, Dan. Many of us spend our precious time here because of you. It is deeply appreciated.