Hacker News Reader

bribrion Simplify your code: Functional core, imperative shell

I agree. They could have picked a better example. Just db.getUsers() alone should set off alarm bells as soon as you see it.

bribrion Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)

I've been vibe coding small apps for fun

I just made a Cuckoo Clock productivity timer. A 3D borderless widget that appears at set intervals. Using Tauri and threejs. https://cuckootimer.com/

And a conversation starter card game on web.

https://convo.cards/

bribrion We switched from Next.js to Astro (and why it might interest you)

I love Astro and I’ve tried every SSG. I use it for my personal site.

bribrion There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)

I got into SCP from playing Remedy’s Control game which is based on the lore. Highly recommend the game since the vibe is perfect and visuals are beautiful.

bribrion Talk-Llama

Elevenlabs voice is amazing but it's so expensive. You can easily spend $20 on a single conversation.

bribrion Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://briansunter.com

Writing about coding projects and things I’ve learned. Programming, AWS, AI, devops, web development , and notetaking.

bribrion Ask HN: Can you log in to Twitter?

nope

bribrion Show HN: Readwise Reader, an all-in-one reading app

Please make it work with saving hackernews comment threads!

bribrion Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

Seems like the fairest option. GPA, essays, and extracurriculars are BS and even worse.

bribrion Getting Out of a Rut

Try waking up at as early and walking a few miles each morning. Has improved my mental health a ton.

lifting is great but walking is so easy to get started and be consistent

bribrion Nearly Half of San Franciscans Have Been Victims of Theft, New Poll Says

bumped into someone holding a giant knife while opening the door to leave my apartment in soma.

Bike stolen in locked garage in locked bike cage with u lock. Usually take it in my apt, but stolen the one time I left it overnight.

Saw techies get shoved into fences on embarcadero

Wine bottle thrown across the store in Safeway. Saw things being stolen from Safeway ~25% the time I went shopping. Mentally Ill people perpetually wandering the store.

Saw many physical altercations between security guards in Walgreens many times. Saw someone being tackled then spitting in the Gaurd’s face while trying to be held down.

People following me while my parents were visiting shouting profanities

Seeing car break ins in the middle of the day.

Many scary situations

Lived there 9 years. Can confirm it got much worse in the past few years.

bribrion Logseq: Privacy-First, Joyful Platform for Knowledge Management

Yes, you can write plugins in typescript to create very powerful integrations like VSCode.

I wrote a plugin for openai gpt3 https://github.com/briansunter/logseq-plugin-gpt3-openai

bribrion Logseq: Privacy-First, Joyful Platform for Knowledge Management

You can visually hide the bullets btw (Document view).

bribrion Logseq: Privacy-First, Joyful Platform for Knowledge Management

Logseq is fantastic. Highly recommended.

I publish my logseq graph online here https://briansunter.com/graph

bribrion How do you break into a career in machine learning? (2020)

I used gpt-3 to make a machine learning curriculum and study guide

https://twitter.com/bsunter/status/1535730704138444801?s=21&...

bribrion Productivity porn

The attitude of dissing people trying to improve themselves is depressing.

bribrion Productivity porn

> Productivity porn is anything that after having been consumed makes you feel like you were productive when in reality you didn’t actually do anything.

I disagree with the line of thinking that all research which isn't immediately useful is unproductive. It just needs to be limited. Set a time limit of 30 minutes per day for researching and improving your meta process.

Those articles on AI you read on hackernews might be planting the seeds for your next career change. It's impossible to know ahead of time.

I think the ideal breakdown is 20% research, 70% action and 10% reflection.

bribrion Productivity porn

It's a healthy balance.

Watching Ali Abdaal and dissing all productivity techniques is like watching a Crossfitter and dissing all forms of physical exercise. Yes, some people take exercise too far, but most people do nothing and that's a much bigger problem.

I see him as trying to push the envelope and give you a wide range of ideas. I don't try to copy everything he does, but he puts out a lot of ideas and usually some idea will stick.

I do believe there's always a better way of doing something. I especially believe in the productivity techniques to increase self reflection and "leverage" like the "daily highlight" and "five minute journal". It doesn't matter how productive you are if you haven't sorted out your priorities.

bribrion After Obsidian and Logseq, I give Dendron a try

I held off taking notes for many years because of this line of thinking.

Now I view taking notes as active learning. Highly recommend the book “how to take smart notes”

bribrion After Obsidian and Logseq, I give Dendron a try

Clojure, dart, and firebase.

bribrion After Obsidian and Logseq, I give Dendron a try

Logseq is the one.

I consider it the spiritual successor to emacs org-mode.

- outliner

- open source and free

- 100% offline (good for notes at bigcorp)

- flat files + git

- plugin marketplace (like vscode)

- Good Mobile App

Only current downside is some issues with cross device syncing, but that’s coming out soon.

You need a commercial license to use obsidian at work FYI.

bribrion Using GPT-3 to explain how code works

I've been doing a lot of experiments with gpt-3 on twitter.

Works with mermaid js

https://twitter.com/Bsunter/status/1535062559069376512

Great for making study guides

https://twitter.com/Bsunter/status/1535730704138444801

I also wrote a plugin to interact with gpt3 in the logseq text editor and some examples here.

https://github.com/briansunter/logseq-plugin-gpt3-openai

I have a few posts on my blog

https://briansunter.com/blog/gtp3-openai-logseq-notetaking/

https://briansunter.com/graph/#/page/how%20to%20use%20gpt3%2...

bribrion Meta is inviting researchers to pick apart the flaws in its version of GPT-3

So happy more stuff like this is open. Kudos to Meta

bribrion Ask HN: GPT-3 reveals my full name – can I do anything?

It knows who I am. My username isn't that obscure though. It told me it found me on reddit and stackoverflow when I asked.

Who owns the username bsunter?""

The user name "bsunter" is most likely owned by a person named Brian Sunter.

https://twitter.com/Bsunter/status/1541106363576659968?s=20&...

bribrion Publish your Second Brain online with Logseq for free, forever

I feel the exact same way. The built in publishing feature is a little rough and not optimized at all. I get the impression that logseq is investing a lot more energy on their own hosted solution than the self hosted publishing right now.

Despite the downsides, as someone who spent way too much time tweaking their own static site, it's really nice to be able to write and organize all the public pages along with my personal stuff inside logseq. I just tag a few notes as public and push them at the end of the day. I was spending way too much time configuring and polishing the static site instead of just getting the notes out there. Seems like a decent option for someone nontechnical to make a site too.

Since Logseq handles everything with plain text, some people are just generating a static site from those files directly, but you lose some of the advanced logseq features. There's also a plugin to export your notes as a hugo static site. https://github.com/sawhney17/logseq-schrodinger

I'm looking into doing this to make a "light" version of the notes as a static html site at some point, but I'll reevaluate when logseq reaches 1.0 and they solidify their roadmap more.

Your list of issues with the existing system is really nice. I'll link to that in this post when I push my next batch of updates so people are aware of some of those sharp edges.

bribrion Ask HN: Does anybody still use bookmarking services?

I use the open source omnivore app which syncs all my articles and highlights to logseq https://briansunter.com/graph/#/page/omnivore-logseq-guide

bribrion Speeding up this site by 50x (2014)

Yeah I appreciate what he’s trying to do with the minimal brutalist web design but I need a Reader view to make it through the content.

bribrion Let's build a decentralized social network together with Logseq

Hey Chris! It's definitely an area I'm interested in. The super decentralized IPFS blocks is a little bit of a pipe dream, but it seems like it could work in theory.

I like logseq because the "primitive" where they store/organize the data called a "block" which is pretty well thought out. It's just an object with content and a pointer to a parent. Seems like you could content hash it and store it on ipfs forever. Haven't fully thought out what that would look like yet though. It could be developed as a plugin for logseq. Seems like it could scale, lots of other problems like search though.

    {:block/uuid #uuid "62a8318e-ff36-4f97-9ef5-f19c3f3041bf",
     :block/left {:db/id 67152},
     :block/format :markdown,
     :block/content
 "Users create a bio under a page called `[[logseq-social/profile]]`",
     :db/id 67144,
     :block/path-refs [{:db/id 20}],
     :block/parent {:db/id 67160},
     :block/unordered true, 
     :block/page {:db/id 20}}

https://github.com/logseq/logseq/blob/d0755ef161eb826e452b92...

The other dapp "primitive" I'm interested in is dChat. Seems like there could be some overlap between blocks and chat built on the same primitive.

For now, I'm mostly focused on getting technical users to just make their own personal sites since it's really easy with logseq and netlify.

I'm not a dapp expert at all (though I do host my traditional static site on ipfs https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmRDPhzAjBdBovPhhPKt4tanFp...)

Happy to hear from you and I'll definitely look into the lens protocol!

bribrion Let's build a decentralized social network together with Logseq

I'm also tweeting my logseq graph pages here https://twitter.com/Bsunter and curating those tweets in a newsletter here, if anyone is interested in following my "feed" of my public logseq learning experiments https://www.getrevue.co/profile/bsunter/issues/weekly-newsle...

If anyone sets this up definitely contact me on twitter so I can add you to my following list.

bribrion Let's build a decentralized social network together with Logseq

Yup its easy to add an image in the logseq editor, and have the image included in the bundle where you self host it.