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jacobn

1,876 karma · joined November 2, 2010

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jacobn··on Complain HN: Spammers and Content Length
Funny, I had just started noticing that too - it’s probably time we start hitting the “spam” button for such emails :-/
jacobn··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
The Wikipedia page says world coin was founded in 2019?
jacobn··on The Supreme Court's new ethics code is a joke
The relentless attacks from the far left on the court are far worse.

First off: they’re highly politically motivated with allegations that do not survive closer scrutiny.

Second: there’s a serious risk that Trump may not only be nominated, but also win 2024. If the court has by then been weakened, that’s a significant check-and-balance misbalance.

Stuffing the court (or wherever they’re going with these attacks) is the path to Latin American dysfunction.

I get that overturning Roe v Wade sucks. I’m pro choice. But the foundations of our system of government are way more important.

(And separately, the dems are crushing the reps on this issue - overturning Roe has given the dems a huge electoral advantage)

jacobn··on Google Adsense is transitioning to per-impression payments for publishers
Small claims court? May be too late now of course.
jacobn··on I Pushed ChatGPT to Build a Minimal HTTP Server with Virtual Threads in Java
Nice! Maybe put the conversation in the blog post instead of just linking it?
jacobn··on Ask HN: RFC for progress info in API calls? (tired of spinners)
Yeah, knowable and known are two different things for sure - I guess you could create some elaborate tracking system that would measure it (yes, I have done this in my own systems ;) but I realize that will be going quite a ways above and beyond for most situations.

Just having some breakdown of the task and some however crude percentage allocation to them would still be a huge improvement over the status quo.

jacobn··on Ask HN: RFC for progress info in API calls? (tired of spinners)
Well, it will depend on the specifics of the API. Sure, there will be degenerate cases where there's no meaningful progress that could be reported, but we throw in the towel without even trying?
jacobn··on Ask HN: RFC for progress info in API calls? (tired of spinners)
It doesn't have to be exact - if you know you're making 10 sub-calls, you can just make each 10% and call it a day. Still leaps and bounds better than a spinner.
jacobn··on Show HN: Vanilla CSS Tailwind alternative in 16 lines
I believe there’s a vote threshold where HN blocks resubmission.
jacobn··on Ask HN: How do I code offline for a week?
Starlink?

Not meant to be snarky, sorry I just don't have any idea how you'd get local setups and then have the relevant developer docs in an accessible manner. Maybe a locally running Llama model?

jacobn··on Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
You're probably contagious before symptom onset.
jacobn··on The Tyranny of the Marginal User
I've tried buying reddit ads. Maybe I was selling the wrong thing, or my ads sucked or whatever, but boy those ads didn't just not perform, they were just completely useless.
jacobn··on LogoScale – A method for vectorizing small, crappy logos
Looks great! Shameless plug: https://vectorizer.ai produces an actual vector image (I’m one of the developers of that site). Not free as in speech, but currently free as in beer.
jacobn··on Deep Learning Is Easy – Learn Something Harder
[2016]
jacobn··on Show HN: Day by Day – every day of my life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology

‘In his foreword to the 1967 edition of the book, C. P. Snow describes the Apology as "a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again".’

jacobn··on The Two Party System Sucks
I agree that the lack of nuance and effective choice sucks in politics, but the root of the issue is that inevitably each individual vote is all-or-nothing for that politician's or party's agenda.

In our everyday life we have plenty of options for most basic purchases, and can pick-and-choose whatever combination of goods/services we want (though there are of course market failures, but let's not get sidetracked).

Imagine if you could only pick either prepackaged life choices A or prepackaged life choices B? It would be a dystopian hell (and only marginally improved by additional packages).

Yet that's what we've got when it comes to politics.

jacobn··on Show HN: Cerelyze: Implement research papers into code 100x faster(Desktop only)
I thought show HNs were intended for when you have something to show, not just a “get in touch” button? What can I try without signing up?
jacobn··on Musk Foundation
Is this real?
jacobn··on Plane crash rates by model
My understanding was that there was a design issue that was supposed to be fixed by software, and that software in turn had a bug.
jacobn··on The Fastest Embedded Database in the World: CrossDB vs. SQLite3 Benchmark
Can you share some details as to why it’s allegedly so much faster?
jacobn··on Show HN: Turbo Base64 library. AVX512 Faster than memcpy and any other base64
Neat library, upvoted.

Question: does this business model work well? The GPL+commercial license on request?

I’m hoping the answer is yes, would be great with some nuance/details/exposition, thanks!

jacobn··on TransparentHMD: Revealing the HMD User’s Face to Bystanders (2017) [pdf]
It's one of those "small, low energy, bright, pick 1-2, definitely not 3" type situations.

Moore's law works great for semiconductors, but Maxwell doesn't negotiate ;)

jacobn··on Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
The API allows you to do that - just set the relevant parameters.

https://pixian.ai/api#remove-background

jacobn··on Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
Bonjour Matthieu, photoroom is offering precisely the type of pricing we're looking to disrupt ;)

Photoroom users: feel free to use https://pixian.ai/comparisons to compare the results.

(We haven't done a comparison with them so genuinely don't know if they're better or worse)

jacobn··on Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
We have published our intended pricing ( https://pixian.ai/#pricing ), which is pay-as-you-go "s3-style" pricing, not subscription based.

Yes, there's a lot more than 20 competitors. Our goal is to hit an attractive point on the quality-price pareto frontier that they just can't match.

That said, marketing will definitely be a challenge ;)

jacobn··on Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
Most images have excessive margins around the foreground. By allowing you to crop it instead of just shrinking it you get an effectively higher resolution result.

If you don't want to manually crop it, just press "ok".

That said we could probably improve the messaging in that dialog, thanks!

jacobn··on Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
remove.bg is great, and they handle hair really well. But so do we! Give us a shot next time ;)
jacobn··on Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
Absolutely, that was our original take on https://clippingmagic.com where the editor lets you easily make changes to the result.

But almost all API users and most regular users just want a result and to not have to futz with it, hence this offering.

jacobn··on Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
We'll likely add complementary AI models (e.g. super-resolution, stable diffusion, etc), with the broad bet being that businesses definitely don't want to run their own service, and would prefer off-the-shelf to custom models (for which there's a bunch of hosting options).

For background removal specifically, all models will inevitably have some failure rate. https://clippingmagic.com is the only one with a serious editor that enables you to get exactly the result you want on any image (it's our legacy service with "old-school" SaaS pricing).

jacobn··on Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
We got it from Bezos, but haven't worked at Amazon though both know people there and use AWS extensively (e.g. pixian.ai is hosted there).
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