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eshnil

110 karma · joined February 8, 2023

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eshnil··on Android 14 adds support for using your smartphone as a webcam
> eventually built in webcams will be cheap and good enough

We've been waiting what, 15 years for this to happen?

eshnil··on DevToys – A Swiss army knife for developers
Last year, I started building a similar desktop tool in Flutter: https://github.com/PolyglotNetwork/devtoolbox

I wanted to include offline CyberChef within this app in a webview but it turned out, Flutter still doesn't support WebViews on non-mobile platforms. I wonder if that has changed.

eshnil··on Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.
eshnil··on Case study: Algorithmic trading with Go
Why not switch to Mojo lang for this? It's Python-compatible with Golang like performance from what I hear.
eshnil··on Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace
They're transferring the user's assets, the domains, and killing the product (Google Domains).
eshnil··on Total recall: the people who never forget (2017)
I'm reminded of Sachin Tendulkar being able to recall every single dismissal in his 20+ yrs of cricket career: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRofNOkZg0M

No relation with this particular condition though.

eshnil··on Show HN: HNRelevant – Show related HN submissions in an integrated sidebar
FF is my primary browser too, but with the user base down to 3%, it's not exactly relevant any more.
eshnil··on Unnatural Keys – Nature doesn’t come with identifiers
I ran into the same problem while building https://learnawesome.org/ . Forget the broad class of "learning resources", even the "books" category doesn't have a usable unique ID. Not everything gets an ISBN for example. There's also the ambiguity between a "work" and an "edition" of a work.

This is probably why OpenLibrary supports mapping of books with 40+ identifiers: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/blob/master/o...

eshnil··on Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan
But technology can empower individuals to change the balance of political power. See printing press, cryptography/encryption, social media etc.
eshnil··on A visual book recommender
> Only include reviews which came from users who had at least 10 reviews.

Not sure if that's a good idea. It shrinks the set of genuine readers and overweights the set of professional spammers.

eshnil··on Show HN: AI Playground by Vercel Labs
There's https://github.com/nat/openplayground and https://github.com/ztjhz/BetterChatGPT among others.
eshnil··on SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ and Replaced It with a Postgres Queue
There's an extension for this: https://github.com/darold/pgtt
eshnil··on Build your own agents which are controlled by LLMs
I built this puppeteer-based agent to do online tasks in browser, described in natural language: https://github.com/aicombinator/bot
eshnil··on Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
Snap language by SAP (snap.berkeley.edu) would be a better stepping stone rather than directly going to industrial languages. It's got first-class functions, first-class lists, object-oriented programming, APL-style vector operations which are very handy for media processing, machine learning etc, continuations, ability to make HTTP calls etc - while keeping the same playful environment as scratch.

Features like this enable serious study of computer science possible with Snap: https://emu-online.de/ComputerScienceWithSnap_2.pdf

There's even a variation for 3D geometries: beetleblocks.com

Scratch is immensely popular but with lack of reporter blocks and lack of first-class lists, it encourages many bad programming habits (global state, no datas tructures like stack/queue/tree/graph etc. The one advantage it has over SnapLang is that it has better performance for building intensive games etc.

eshnil··on TaxyAI: Open-source browser automation with GPT-4
More like the death of APIs. If bots can handle UI designed for humans, there's no reason to build and deploy APIs.
eshnil··on Bicycle
Another great interactive explanation.

I wish physics teachers start using geometric product of vectors, instead of the cross product. This allows forces and torques to be combined into a single concept "Forque". Really, translations are just rotations around infinity and rotations are just composition of two reflections. If we allow the algebra to take care of rotations, physics becomes a lot simpler.

eshnil··on Firefox 111.0 enabled Origin private file system access
I actually implemented it recently in one of my open-source apps. It's 6 lines of Javascript: Create an <a> element, set the data in its href with:

element.setAttribute("href","data:text/plain;charset=utf-8," +encodeURIComponent(content))

and element.click() followed by document.body.removeChild(element);

This works perfectly fine for saving single files. FileSystem access API is useful when entire directory needs to be stored and perhaps without the standard SaveAs.. UI.

eshnil··on Firefox 111.0 enabled Origin private file system access
Saving a file is easily implementable without a Filesystem access API. See https://draw.io/ as an example.
eshnil··on Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC
They don't need to do extra due diligence. Just buy insurance for the excess amount above the FDIC limit. After all, they do benefit from the upside like cheaper mortgages for execs.
eshnil··on Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC
Every bank account holder was made to pay insurance premium for those with more than $250K in a couple of banks. And this was done AFTER the risky event the insurance covers has already happened. This absolutely is socialization of losses, while privatization of profits goes on as usual. Good reason to be upset, IMHO.
eshnil··on Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC
"KYB" now means "Know Your Bank". :-D

More seriously, you don't need to do extra due diligence. Just buy insurance for your funds above $250K. Or use standard treasury methods like using institutional insured liquid deposits or sweep accounts.

eshnil··on Show HN: Screenshot.Rocks: Open-source browser and mobile screenshot mockup tool
It would be great to be able to navigate the page to a certain scroll location or a specific state if it's a single page app and THEN take a screenshot. I don't know how you would achieve that though. Easier for the user to upload an image.