HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

quaxar

33 karma · joined December 22, 2022

submissionscomments
quaxar··on Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine
Great site. Having built a search engine that needed to handle product data on a similar scale, it's not an easy thing to manage.

Some observations:

- Don't use infinite scrolling, it's an outdated UI practice that leads to bad user experience. It also makes the footer entirely unviewable.

- Clicking on a product card image does not reliably open up the product. I have to randomly click on it a few times (Chrome, Brave)

- Clicking on product card image and title leads to different actions, this is a bit unexpected, should show some hint of the difference.

- The product page pop up will reset the search list when closed, this messes up my search navigation, breaks the flow of browsing.

quaxar··on Free and open source software projects are in transition
More fundamentally opensource software essentially demolishes capturable value on the OS/stack/browser layers and prevents new challengers to the space from challenging the incumbents, who rose to the top in the age of proprietary software.

On the flip side the basic software stack is now absurdly cheap and available for startups to play ontop of. This is where the feeling of "looting" came from, the capturable value is not in the OSS layer, but on the addons.

A similar dynamic is happening now on the AI side with LLMs.

quaxar··on Ask HN: Have you fined-tuned any GPT models?
What kind of spec is your rig?
quaxar··on Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives
I'm a knife collector, so this site seems cool.

One thing that can be improved is how the knives are displayed. The white aliased border around the thumbnails looks really really bad, and really turns me off from staying on the site.

One major reason why people like knives is that they look beautiful. The image thumbnail does the complete opposite.

Please use 24bit PNG with proper alpha, on a lighter background, so blade shape and colors can be more beautifully represented.

quaxar··on Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?
you should promote it.

Payment should be for other benefits such as low friction, support, and community membership.

Technical people will always pirate software, use it to your benefit.

quaxar··on Are super-rich people just better at making money?
The thought process of blaming all social problems on random outcomes, and marginalize the individual's volition, itself is a fallacy.