Hacker News Reader

superasnon Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)

These are nice wallpapers. I hope this works with the Variety wallpaper manager.

superasnon Migrating Uber's ledger data from DynamoDB to LedgerStore

I asked chatgpt for a headline based on your prompt and it gave me this:

HaystackDB: Swift Searches, Massive Savings - Index Billions, Store Smartly, Query in a Flash!”

superasnon Migrating Uber's ledger data from DynamoDB to LedgerStore

One observation I have regarding your homepage is that the message isn't very clear. The headline doesn't mention any benefits I get from using your software.

I think you should invest some time into improving your landing page and maybe you may see some traction. A good resource for this which I've bookmarked is here(1). Hope that helps.

(1) https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-step-by-step-guide-to-l...

superasnon Show HN: Scenestamps – A website for sharing movie scenes with timestamps

Nice idea for a very niche audience.

I was wondering Since all movies have subtitles, can't this be done if you give gpt4/chatgpt the whole subtitles and ask it to identify identify the start and stop time in the above subtitles where "The President of the United States meets the X-Men, as they try to convince him to work together against the growing mutant threat". Just a thought.

superasnon The Great Oxygenation Event

relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30253799

superasnon Ask HN: Why do recommender systems not seem good?

I think a lot of recommendation system take only the positive signals into account but don't take the negative signals that seriously.

So If I like and disliked 10 movies just don't show me movies from users who also liked these. First, filter or downgrade all users who liked what I disliked and then create my recommendations.

superasnon Show HN: Real-time image generation with SDXL Lightning

What would be the cost per month to host the same demo yourself?

superasnon Oink: An API for PHP in a single file

I think this is the reason why PHP is still so popular. Even with the latest 8.3 version these things still work - even though everyone else has moved to frameworks like laravel or fully OO code.

Sometimes you just want to get shit done for your personal weekend hobby projects and little things like this can be a tremendous help to make your MVP. Sometimes these MVPs can be super practical in real-life as well (1)

Writing code this way can sometimes be liberating and more fun like freestyle swimming. I still miss the days of writing native SQL queries instead of using the ORM for everything nowadays.

(1) https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1381709793769979906?lang...

superasnon Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

Also for me it's far more customisable. Want to watch a video at 2x speed, want to add audio normalizer, want to tweak the gamma, etc. Yes vlc does all that and more. Their crummy app won't even play the video with proper scrubbing.

It's like the app vs browser thing for videos too, where you are restricted by the app's player vs using players like vlc that are just awesome!

superasnon Google search drops cache link from search results

Yes instead of making improvements to their product like removing spam sites like Pinterest, etc - they are actually killing the good features which gives Google edge over chatgpt. Not sure what the gameplan is here.

superasnon Ask HN: Does airport fingerprinting compromise my biometric security?

Well if you have a Google pixel you have nothing to worry as it won't recognise legit fingerprint 9 out of 10 times.

superasnon The Everything NPM Package

I've seen a lot of people criticise npm and their policies but I've never come across a solution. Npm has its flaws and while there are such abuses like everything package, is-odd, left-pad, etc there are also many useful packages like vue, sortable, etc without which development will be a huge pain.

So not asking rhetorically, if we had all the insight and knowledge we have now, how would you make it different?

superasnon Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives

It's almost as if a competing browser co is paying majority of their salaries and lobbying the CEO to kill the only remaining competition by slowly stopping all development.

superasnon Curl on 100 Operating Systems

Related reading: On how curl was born and its history (1)

(1) https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/03/20/twenty-five-years-of-...

superasnon The coolest robot I've ever built [video]

The title is verbatim.

I have nothing to do with this channel, but the final product is really cool.

superasnon Why Is the Front End Stack So Complicated?

Well most of it is for backward compatibility I guess so your newest frontend can still run in a browser as old as internet explorer by changing a few Babel settings.

Some of it is to optimize the code delivery so you're sending just the bare minimum source code and not wasting user's bandwidth.

Of course if you had just one newest browser then you could do away with most of it but at the end of the day you have to make sure your frontend can run everywhere including mobile devices, hence the complexity.

The amazing part is ever since vite has been on the scene a lot of it has been abstracted away. There is no need to even compile anything during dev which has been a game changer.

superasnon Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

I think these companies need good engineers more than good engineers need these companies.

And at least in the company my brother works (a big tech co but not FAANG) almost 20% of the staff resigned when it was made mandatory for employees to come to office. So I think that is gonna be a huge factor for a lot of these companies.

superasnon 1919 cartoon depicting the use of a ‘pocket telephone’

A little trick that has made my life extremely simple is that I've set my ringtone to none. No vibration, no sound.

Then I've manually assigned ringtones to only 10 contacts who are really important to me.

So now my phone hardly ever disturbs or annoys me on anyone around me. Because the people without the ringtone can always wait.

P.s. also found a wonderful app called ringtone keeper that allows you to backup/restore this. It's discontinued now but I managed to save its apk.

superasnon Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on

https://www.bootstrapsite.com

I've been working on a landing page builder for sometime now (mostly just weekends though).

It's written in vue 3 and laravel. The usp is that once you enter the page data you can try on hundreds of designs and style and customise the components without ever touching the data.

My plan is it make it open source but just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Here is one YouTube video I made explaining it

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cN7E6REY7TM

Would love to get some feedback too.

superasnon Show HN: LLMs can generate valid JSON 100% of the time

That returns broken JSON a lot of the times too

superasnon A glitch in the SEO matrix

Interesting concept. Thanks for sharing!

superasnon A glitch in the SEO matrix

This is such short term thinking imo but then what do i know. People who are paid millions of dollars are making these decisions at Google so maybe that's how the game is played. I still think treating your customers like the way they're doing it now eventually never always works out.

superasnon A glitch in the SEO matrix

It's so weird that Google still hasn't created the ability to block spam domains.

I don't think it's a technical difficulty but rather a management decision to allow spam as long as they have their adsense ads and it baffles me they just don't care about their end users at all.

I think being a monopoly with most competitors lagging a lap behind can make you this way, but with chatgpt catching up quick, Google better start thinking about their users now as it's a growing sentiment that their quality is totally bad nowadays and their uncaring attitude towards spam domains like Pinterest and spam search results where sites are creating hundreds of pages with same content and different heading is just not gonna cut it anymore.

superasnon Styling Flowcharts Using CSS

I love your landing page by the way. It explains the app while giving a playground/demo at the same time. This is a very cool way to showcase your site. Well done!

superasnon Rich text editors and rendering engines

And every time you use something custom, you end up breaking things for users you can't even imagine. Even when you think you have all the edge case covered.

Like I use a custom DefaultKeyBinding.dict for my laptop using which I've defined some shortcuts for text editing. It works with Textarea but not for GDocs. Which makes editing so cumbersome for me.

I've always wondered why this was the issue until I read this article. Now I see why it's broken.

superasnon Google search's death by a thousand cuts

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google.

Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google would show me the actual domain registrars instead (like chatgpt does when i ask it). Google has been gamed so badly and they have been doing nothing about it just because the spam blog posts contains their ads.

There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. There is only so much an adblocker can do to fix search. And right now all the useful content is getting blocked while the spam content is not only allowed but ranking on top of everything.

superasnon Is ORM still an anti-pattern?

You can always insert into blah set A=a, B=b, .. in SQL too

superasnon Show HN: Mofi – Content-aware fill for audio to change a song to any duration

This will be great for my programming music.

Though it's just anecdotal but I have seen that the quickest way to enter into the zone is to play repeating loops at 140 bpm.

Unfortunately I haven't really found many of these as most of the tracks I love are non looping. I think this can take care of it. Kudos on making this!

superasnon Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

I think you're right but almost every other operating system natively supports it including Windows 10 and Linux mint.

superasnon Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

Can anyone also tell me how to get the dock on all my 4 monitors together? The best I can do is get it on the bottom 2 monitors using the mouse hover features.

But is there a way to get it to show on all 4 monitors all the time? If it could show the open windows on each monitor (like windows taskbar) that would be even more amazing! Please this has been bugging me for so long and any help is appreciated.

P.S. There is a software called ubar but that only works for bottom 2 monitors :/