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RileyJames

1,769 karma · joined June 17, 2012

hn@username.co
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RileyJames··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Absolutely. The mac spotlight search / bar was one of my favourite features, maybe 10 years ago? But now it’s useless.

It also has some strange behaviour when it’s not in focus, but hasn’t been closed.

I just leave every application open and command tab to them now.

RileyJames··on Keep Our Servers Running
What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?
RileyJames··on Show HN: KidScreen, a finite YouTube shelf chosen by parents
I’d be in the market for this, but didn’t get enough info to sign up.

My first questions were: - do I need a YouTube account? - do I need a premium YouTube account? - can I use it on my tv? - and more generally, how does it work? (Which should answer all above)

Current solution is: download YouTube videos my son is interested in to Plex, watch them on the tv (or iPad)

I also have YouTube premium, but barely use it.

RileyJames··on LLMs reward expertise
> Honestly it should have stayed as a prototype that then gets rebuilt from the ground up.

And that’s a natural process for many products. In the journey from discovery to prototype to MVP to product, it should be rebuilt multiple times.

Particularly with LLM’s to assist, the process of rebuilding from a new context and understanding of the desired goal requires even less effort.

The hardest part is managing any real users, their expectations, and any data / workflows they’ve come to require from what came before.

RileyJames··on LLMs reward expertise
I’ve been curious on how to close this loop between engineering and design/product.

We don’t use react, which Claude design seems to trend towards. We use Phoenix / liveview.

We have a shared design system, which keeps the visual elements in line. And then just prototype on design, collab, discuss and arrive at what we want to ship. And then engineering take over and rebuild via hand / claude code.

But the tools aren’t directly connected.

The value has been in the separation. In iterating on the prototype without impacting the codebase, dev cycle, etc. And solving problems/unknowns earlier.

There were always tools for this, but Claude design just feels more accessible and therefore gets used more immediately.

And the fidelity of the outcome (and the assumptions it’s forced the make) are more valuable and faster to achieve than Figma.

RileyJames··on LLMs reward expertise
Interesting.

I often ask it export a single html file, for an external collaborator or simpler sharing. But I wouldn’t deploy that to production.

I wonder if they asked it to deploy a html file.

But this is exactly the kind of hidden domain knowledge / expertise that changes how you use the tool.

RileyJames··on LLMs reward expertise
I’d love to see this experiment executed with Claude design.

Particularly with something static, I don’t think they’d fail to get a result.

But without domain knowledge I think they’d misunderstand prototype with finished product.

Without knowing what it’s doing, it’s hard to know what it’s not doing.

RileyJames··on Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
Awesome.

Everything you're stating sounds alot like Tixel in Australia.

Tho I'm not sure they manage the venue / original ticket sale. More of a scalp free marketplace.

Only place I will buy or sell tickets.

RileyJames··on Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem
It one-shotted what exactly?

Because LatencyKills is clearly describing a broader set of requirements related to their solution.

RileyJames··on iPhone 17e
I’m still running an SE2020. I was expecting the latest update (with liquid) to be the death of it. But performance has actually improved significantly! Very unexpected.

It’s been a great phone!

RileyJames··on Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund
Consumer banking: agree.

Corporate banking, I’ve seen exactly this. Asked to send PII docs via email to open accounts and do background checks.

Big 4 Australian bank.

Or I could go into a branch… but all they were going to do was email the copies to the same email address.

RileyJames··on 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
I’ve been buying vinyl for the sake of collecting it, with limited intention to ever play it.

And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD? (And I own more cassette players than the zero vinyl players)

I recently found out that some of my favourite vinyls, that I’ve been collecting, ONLY include the art/lyrics booklet in the CD version. These are from the early 2000’s (peak cd?).

I reckon I’d buy an art / lyrics booklet over a physical medium of the music itself. Particularly if it included flac download of the music.

RileyJames··on Ask HN: Could Microsoft replace its CEO with ChatGPT?
> 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc?

I’ve only seen this referred to as a strategic failure. You seem to be declaring otherwise. What’s the upside for Microsoft?

RileyJames··on uBlock Origin Lite in Apple App Store
I couldn’t agree more.

I find gmail to be the absolute worst offender in this category.

1. They dark pattern you into downloading their browser (they give three options, two of which are chrome)

2. In not launching iOS, I’m not logged into the session I may already have open in safari. Which is incredibly painful for any product that sends notifications via email, which id like to action.

And if I do login, and it asks for an email verification code… fail. I can’t access it in gmail without closing the browser…

3. Their in app browser (or the way they re-write links?) doesn’t seem to play nice with opening the corresponding app. Never seems to work.

Incredibly user hostile.

Is there a better alternative mail client I can use with gsuite?

RileyJames··on I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery
+1 for a yoto.

It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech.

My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.

I bought one the next week without doing any further research.

When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.

I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.

Obviously wrong in hindsight.

Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec & Physical medium.

But portable cassette recorders still exist…

RileyJames··on Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation
Do you live in Auckland?

It sounds similar to the system I encountered there. I don’t remember all the details, I was only renting for a year.

It didn’t sound like it was NZ wide.

RileyJames··on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
This message reminded me to email a few people. Thanks.
RileyJames··on Show HN: AnydocAI – Every file exists as all file types
It’s an interesting idea.

I’ve definitely felt the pain of file formats in some unexpected ways recently.

Like airdropping a photo from iPhone only to discover a .HEIC file, which nothing will accept.

I’ve previously used “what ever turns up first on google”, but I now won’t for anything of significance (privacy)

I’ve recently discovered Automator (on Mac) and the quick actions menu. Which can achieve a lot of image and pdf related conversions, but takes some setup (not a mass market solution)

I like the idea of this product. But I think the challenge will be: - reaching the user at the moment they have this problem

- making your solution frictionless to solve their immediate problem, while also bootstrapping to solve it next time around (without them forgetting it exists)

If you can nail that experience for a single use case, I think this will be a winner.

RileyJames··on Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge
You lost me at ‘single model of 300km/h train that can make it here’

Meanwhile here in Australia our “fast rail” trains go 160km/h. Unless it’s over 32 degrees, then they slow down. And if it hits 36 degrees they slow down even more (90km/h)

And it gets that hot here a lot…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V/Line_VLocity

https://www.vline.com.au/heat

RileyJames··on Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
Built xonboard, employee onboarding tool for Xero: https://www.xonboard.com.au/

Got our first 100 users through the Xero App Store.

Now getting well over 100 per month via that channel. No longer our biggest channel, but it was until we started actively marketing our product.

The App Store model can work just fine, if you have a compelling value proposition that genuinely adds value to the users of that product.

There’s always the threat of being copied, but that’s everywhere.

Look at what larger products you could complement via integration. Make sure they have a channel for you (some are useless, Xero is great)

Xero App Store: https://apps.xero.com/au/app/xonboard

RileyJames··on Show HN: VaporVibe – auto-generate video demos for vibe-coded projects
It was a public repo.

These were the inputs:

https://github.com/Rodeoclash/vodon-pro

https://vodon-pro-website.vercel.app/

RileyJames··on Show HN: VaporVibe – auto-generate video demos for vibe-coded projects
Getting a 400 on generate.

Is this a joke? Or should it generate something?

RileyJames··on Facebook Marketplace is keeping young people on the platform
100%. I refuse to have an account, which means I need to use my partners to access marketplace, and a few landcruiser groups (which is mostly buying and selling parts, or advice)

It pains me that car forums and classifieds have succumbed to Facebook. I have no other need for Facebook, but on those fronts, Facebook is king.

IH8MUD is really the king for advice. But for 2nd hand parts, or 2nd hand vehicles, in Australia, it’s Facebook groups.

I suspect this is quite popular behaviour, as I recently saw that groups can enable anonymous posts (obviously still need an account). Which I prefer to catfishing people who are genuinely helping out, and who I feel a sense of community with. I just refuse to consent to Facebook being part of that relationship.

RileyJames··on Show HN: Printercow – Turn any thermal printer into an API endpoint
I know nothing about thermal printing.

Does it cost more to print more black? Or is the cost of printing baked into the paper?

In standard printing white is free. Is the opposite (or cost neutral) true for thermal printing?

RileyJames··on Used Meta AI, now Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me
I’m sure the advertising industry has a specific term and definition for this type of ad.

On that basis, I think it falls squarely in the advertising category.

I’m sure someone that works in that industry can drop their knowledge on it.

RileyJames··on Memos – An open source Rewinds / Recall
I deleted Rewinds over the weekend, after I noticed it had eaten 20gb of storage.

I hadn’t used it since installing it. So that came as a surprise.

I then tried using it, and couldn’t get it to find things I knew were in my history. (Basic keywords match)

So I deleted it.

I like the idea of this app. It ticks all the boxes. But I haven’t found any value on this category of app yet.

RileyJames··on Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls
Very cool. I’ve sent to our CTO.

I’d like to test this out for sales, via the website. As a more frictionless way of capturing inbound interest and fielding questions.

I’d also like to see how we can capture product feedback / issues via our product.

Questions:

- can the link be cnamed so I can use our own domain, rather than ‘OnAir.io’

- are there any docs / demo of how the widget can be customised?

I see your demo. It looks like it also captures the name / email of the customer.

1. That’s a value prop on the sales side, and except for the demo, that wasn’t clear to me.

2. Can we prefill those? (Again wasn’t clear) This would be valuable in the support / feedback use case, as we know who the user is.

RileyJames··on How the First GPU Leveled Up Gaming and Ignited the AI Era
Yea I definitely remember voodoo before all this. Tho I misremembered it as an nvidia product.

Looks like nvidia eventually acquired the bankrupt 3dfx.

RileyJames··on AIHawk: AI bot to automatically apply for jobs
I hate that ‘it’s ai’ is a justification for spam.

I’m receiving 10 applications a week from LoopCV. Their all powerful ai is sending applications for a job at a completely different company.

I feel sorry for the applicants who are putting some faith in their service, and it’s simply yeeting their resumes into the void.

RileyJames··on Google Cloud now has a dedicated cluster of Nvidia GPUs for YC startups
Our experience exactly. AWS credits are advertised everywhere, but seem difficult to utilise.
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