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joshdavhamon Show HN: Firenook – Firebase emulators in Rust: 40× faster writes, 10× less RAM

Looks nice!

Somewhat off topic question though: if you guys are such skilled developers to be building something as involved as this, why not just use something other than Firebase? I used Firebase mainly as a crutch when I was first getting into web dev, but feel that I’ve sorta outgrown it. Do you feel Firebase still serves developers like you well or are you developing this moreso for people like my old self?

Again, nice work!

joshdavhamon Curiosity Traps

My brain also immediately went there when he was talking about the T-shirts :)

joshdavhamon Curiosity Traps

I'll often reach out to bloggers / open source devs via their email if I have feedback, a question or just otherwise want to compliment them on their work.

If you feel like you have something worth saying, even if just a compliment, it's often worth the email.

(I will say please don't ask to set up vague meetings, or create stupid github issues, however haha)

joshdavhamon Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise

Are there any associated benchmarks with this? Like how accurate is this technology for different types of facial structures, sentences or languages?

joshdavhamon Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise

+1 to this

joshdavhamon With 86% of the words, you might understand only 38% of an anime's lines

Reminds me of an analysis I did a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349332

I didn’t include it in my analysis, but I’ve been thinking about “sentence coverage” vs “word coverage” for a number of years now. In an extreme case, you could imagine a transcript with only i+1/1T sentences and you’d be left with totally incomprehensible input.

joshdavhamon Canadians are running out of time to oppose Bill C-22

Be the change you want to see in the world! If you disagree with this bill don’t sit idle!

joshdavhamon Canadians are running out of time to oppose Bill C-22

I’m also Canadian and I don’t share your pessimism at all.

The people I know are not apathetic and I’m sorry that things don’t go your way politically, but that’s life. For example, the recent Vancouver election didn’t go my way - big whoop.

joshdavhamon How Protein Took over the World

I’m pretty puzzled honestly at how many people are fiber deficient.

I once did the calculation for my daily fiber intake and it was well beyond the daily recommended minimum.

What are people eating (or not eating) that leads to a fiber deficiency?

joshdavhamon Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program

The only people I know working in FAANG up here in Canada are all at Amazon and AWS. They have a fairly large presence here in Vancouver.

Some are Canadian, born and raised, but many are immigrants to Canada. If you were to ask most of them, I think they'd say that they'd prefer to stay in Vancouver, despite the lower salaries. The alternative for them would be Seattle.

I've never lived in Seattle personally, but the tech workers I know who've lived in both Seattle and Vancouver have all said they prefer the lifestyle in Vancouver.

joshdavhamon Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program

This seems to be the case.

I live in Vancouver Canada so just north of Seattle.

Just recently another building downtown got a big Microsoft logo slapped on it. A colleague of mine said that it’s because of “Microsoft refugees”.

joshdavhamon Jonathan Haidt: AI Is the 'Neutron Bomb for Education' [video]

This video is 40 minutes. Could someone summarize Haidt’s view?

Haidt generally has very interesting opinions but I don’t have time to listen to this this morning unfortunately.

joshdavhamon Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died

Interesting! I actually work at Autodesk and my job is mainly to help users of acquired product A move over to (also) acquired product B (product B was previously a competitor of product A). I guess this acquisition culture must’ve been around long before me!

joshdavhamon We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

> You can't easily estimate how much an operation is going to cost before you kick off that operation

I recently had a debate with a colleague on this topic but concerning estimating the costs of AI agent work. For example, if you prompt an AI to refactor your codebase, the final cost can't be estimated perfectly, but I'm sure it can at least be estimated with some amount of precision! Like simply knowing that it will cost < $100 is actually great information even if the final work only ends up costing $5.

I think there actually might be a business opportunity (or at least the opportunity to build something cool here) if anyone wants to work in the AI cost estimation space. It's not exactly an idea I want to pursue, but just thought I'd put it out there. AI cost estimation (even with wide confidence bands) would be very useful to a lot of people.

joshdavhamon We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

It’s incredible that in 2026, AWS and GCP are only just now introducing this. It’s possibly one of the most obviously needed features for a cloud provider.

Also, does anyone know why it’s taken this long? I suspect it’s a technical reason. While one could be cynical, I doubt it’s an intentional business/product decision. Hard spending caps are both excellent product differentiators and could possibly save these providers money as they don’t have to forgive their users when they accidentally over-use a service.

joshdavhamon "The only intuitive interface is the nipple" (2012)

But what about male nipples?

joshdavhamon Explaining to business people why building software is still hard

This is definitely getting my favorite. I’m also going to shamelessly steal this house analogy.

Thanks for writing this!

joshdavhamon In the Age of AI, Some in China Wonder If Learning English Is Worth the Trouble

What’s English class like anyways in China?

Is it the traditional grammar-translation method? Or have they moved on to modern immersion / comprehensible input methods?

joshdavhamon Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

Oh no I’m aware that that’s a bit of a reduction of Google. I’m a GCP user and am even wearing a fit bit while writing this comment :)

joshdavhamon Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

It’s crazy that Google and TikTok, which mainly produce consumer software to serve ads, have grown to the scale where they literally need to set up data centres in northern countries while getting their power from nuclear power plants.

joshdavhamon Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

Thanks for making this! This was super fascinating and the type of thing I love seeing on HN!

joshdavhamon Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

Regardless of the outcome, I’m very thankful for xcancel and all the excellent work they’ve done.

I wish them the best in the legal fight!

joshdavhamon Anger, Anxiety and Agency

Great article, but it doesn't really go into where he disagrees with Sean Goedecke's post.

After reading both posts, I find myself still wholeheartedly agreeing with both of them.

joshdavhamon Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down

In the last Canadian election, I actually largely liked what I was seeing from our two major parties. It fortunately didn't feel like the choice between two lesser evils, but rather a choice between two greater goods.

(I don't say this arrogantly, I actually did like both candidates and platforms).

With that being said, I do lament that we Canadians and Americans live in two-party states, which is terrifyingly close imo to a sort of one-party state.

joshdavhamon Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down

> The Democratic Party is identical to the Republican Party for anything that matters.

Well they're at least not identical when it comes to tariffing your friends!

joshdavhamon Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down

Appreciated!

But please get out and vote! And please convince all of your sensible friends, family and neighbours to do the same!

joshdavhamon Rewriting in Rust

I’ve been using cursor mainly (so sorta vscode in a way). I just use IntelliJ for unit tests and the debugger mainly.

joshdavhamon Rewriting in Rust

I would love it if jetbrains were to speed up IntelliJ. I started a new job writing Java professionally last year and, up that point, I had no idea that IDE's could actually be that slow.

My company gave me a brand new, beefy Macbook pro and that thing can barely handle IntelliJ sometimes...

joshdavhamon Being ambitious and being a dad

> Having grown up in a large family within a religious subculture full of other large families, the amount of time and attention children consume was crystal clear

Similar experience here growing up Mennonite (they’re sorta like the Amish but more moderate).

I’m one of the only remaining men in my family without kids, but those that do have kids (and there’s a lot of them) are super busy. This is at least partially offset by their wives who are more on the traditional side.

They all do seem very fulfilled however :)