Very very cool! Just signed up. Reminds me of Val Town which I'm a big fan of. Did you choose Lua because you love using it, or for some other pragmatic reasons?
Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea? Not in order to meet user demand but purely because I think it would "just" require running the program on the server using a different interpreter/compiler, assuming code sandboxing has been achieved to make the initial language work.
For example, I love the long list of languages supported by Code Golf: https://code.golf/wiki.
> Did you choose Lua because you love using it, or for some other pragmatic reasons?
A bit of both, though I'm literally drinking out of a coffee mug with the Lua logo on it that was given to me after playing a big part in making Lua a thing at a prevoius job. That might speak to my love of Lua.
> Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea?
From a technical perspective, it would be relatively easy to add support for other languages, the biggest problem would be UI and documentation complexity. Each added language would either require a completely seperate set of documentaion or would require the docs to describe everything one layer of abstraction removed from the code people would actually be writing. Both of which would be less than ideal for my goal of extreme simplicity.
I think it can be a good idea, but to support something like that _well_ would require a pretty large team of people.
I do plan to support some level of 'other languages' for libraries, at a minimum some subset of native Lua libraries (ie. libs written in C). That means it would be possible to find a way to use pretty much any other language interpreter. However, I'm not sure that will ever be a top level feature, there'll probably always be some level of Lua glue code holding everything together.
It's actually already using wasmtime as one layer in its sandbox. I just think that trying to support other languages, especially in a fully language agnostic way, would make things like documentation far more complex than I could handle and make the service complex enough that the only people who could understand it would be the type of person who don't really need a service like this in the first place.
They are similar except that Netlify's Form transforms your forms into its own thing. This makes it more difficult to customize the after actions because you don't control the final code. Note that Netlify does offer limited customization of the after actions as you can see here: https://docs.netlify.com/manage/forms/setup/#success-message...
Any alternative that is hosted or uses iframe will encounter this kind of frictions.
In comparison, with Wait, you'd just call `fetch(...)` and do whatever you need after `fetch(..)` succeeds or fails. For example, one landing page might say thank you afterward. Another landing might show the installation instructions after the user submits their emails. The whole code is controlled by you.
It's like you call your own backend except it's hosted in a different domain, and your landing page can be hosted as a static site with no backend.
If you are interested in trying it out, I'd love to work with you to make it successful for you. Thank you!
It's interesting but I don't think it belongs as a comment under this post. I can use LLMs to create something tangential for each project posted on HN, and so can everyone else. If we all started doing this then the comment section will quickly become useless and not on point.
Tangential would be “I wrote a Fibonacci function in this and it worked, just like it said on the tin!”
Compiling this to wasm and calling it from python as a sandboxed runtime isn’t tangential. I wouldn’t have know from reading the project’s readme that this was possible, and it’s a really interesting use case. We might as well get mad at simonw for using an IDE while he explored the limits of a new library.
but there is signal in what people are inspired to do upon seeing a new project-- why not simply evaluate the interestingness level of these sorts of mashups on their own terms? it actually feels very "hacker"-y to go out and show people possibilities like this. i have no particular comment on how "interesting" the derivative projects are in this case, but i have a feeling if his original post had been framed more like "i think it's super interesting how easy it is to use via FFI on various runtimes X & Y (oh btw in the spirit of full transparency: i used ai to help me. and you can see more details at <link>). especially because i think everyone who peruses HN with some regularity is likely to know of simon's work in at least some capacity, and i am-- speaking only for myself-- essentially always interested in any sort of project he embarks on, especially his llm-assisted experiments and stuff. but hey-- at the end of the day, all of this value judgment is realized as plainly as possible with +1 / -1 (up- and down-vote) and i guess it just is what it is. if number bad, HN no like. shrug.
I agree that there is signal, and that phrasing his original post as you pointed out would have been better.
My issue is that the cost, in terms of time, for these experiments have really gone down with LLMs. Earlier, if someone played around with the posted project, we knew they spent a reasonable amount of time on it, and thus care about the subject. With LLMs, this is not the case.
That’s true - the assumed time is different now. We have to judge it on the content/findings of the experiment, rather than the fact that someone experimented with it. I share your frustration with random GitHub repos though. Used to, if someone could create a new GitHub repository with a few commits, there was likely to be some intelligence or quality behind it, but I commonly stumble across vibe coded slop with AI-slop READMEs. So maybe you are describing a similar reaction here in HN posts.
Offtopic but I went to your website and saw that you created hackernews-mute and recently I was commenting about how one must have created such an extension and ranted about it. So kudos for you to have created it earlier on.
Have a nice day! Awesome stuff, would keep an eye on your blog, Does your blog/website use mataroa by any chance as there are some similarities even if they are both minimalist but overall nice!
Thank you! I don't use Mataroa but I can see the similarities. My current blog setup is a Python script that parses content written in markdown and emits HTML. The CSS is inspired by the other minimal blogs I see here.
Thanks a lot for checking out my blog/project. Have a great day!
The difference is restricting removal of the app. It takes away the user's choice. As far as I know all preloaded apps, at least on Android, can be disabled if not uninstalled.
> The November 28 order, seen by Reuters, gives major smartphone companies 90 days to ensure that the government's Sanchar Saathi app is pre-installed on new mobile phones, with a provision that users cannot disable it.
99.9% of the internet is closed source and we don't ask for it to be opened. From our ISPs, to Google, to the hyperscalers.
If anything, I think we should be asking those things to be open. If we're only asking the little guys, the big guys with trillion dollar market caps skate by. This is exactly how they want it. Fewer gradients for small players to grow.
I do ask for that and generally refuse to use closed source sw.
But... something being opensource doesnt always mean you can change stuff. Like signal-desktop that has build process so badly convoluted that even gentoo doesnt build it itself. (has it improved already?)
1) Modern 2010s era "OSI Approved open source" is a meme built by hyperscalers to get free work, poach the efforts of others (Amazon makes hundreds of millions on Redis, Elasticsearch, etc.) and eliminate the threat of smaller players.
There are great things like Linux and Blender and ffmpeg. But there is also a concerted battle waged by trillion dollar companies against us using "open" to salt the field of any kind of economic growth salient.
By being completely open and not keeping some leverage, you ensure you cannot make the same revenues the big companies can. And they will outspend and outgrow you. They will encircle and even find a way to grow off of your labor while you don't see so much as a dime.
2) You wouldn't be on the internet right now if you really refused to use closed source. The binary blobs in your hardware, your ISP, your wifi. Not even Stallman can do it.
I love open source. But I hate how difficult it is to make money. And I hate how the big players have used it to enrich and entrench themselves by making it just the crust of their closed source empires.
> From what I see of the pricing options in your business model, having your code released under a FOSS licence would make no difference to how you make money.
Except that making their client FOSS would help a lot to replicate the APIs and create a FOSS server, which would definitely make a difference on how they make money.
I created a RescueTime alternative for KDE Plasma. It runs in the background as a daemon and records time spent on each window in a SQLite database. Next step here would be to add a Firefox extension, since a lot of my time is spent browsing the web.
Tracking windows on Wayland is hard because the protocol doesn't support it. I hacked together a script using Claude Code that somehow works, but I barely understand how.
Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea? Not in order to meet user demand but purely because I think it would "just" require running the program on the server using a different interpreter/compiler, assuming code sandboxing has been achieved to make the initial language work.
For example, I love the long list of languages supported by Code Golf: https://code.golf/wiki.
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