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iansinnott

850 karma · joined June 11, 2013

GH: https://github.com/iansinnott

YT: https://www.youtube.com/@iansinnott

Blog: https://notes.iansinnott.com

Feel free to message me via the above links or at ian@<my domain>.

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iansinnott··on Ask HN: How does one stay motivated to grind through LeetCode?
Based on my recent job search: Don't focus on grinding leetcode, it's not worth your time unless you're applying to Meta/Google/MSFT etc.

- give yourself a concrete algorithm practice goal, such as "get through Blind 75" (it's a list of 75 questions you can find online).

- practice using data structures and also implementing whatever your language doesn't provide

For context, I just spent most of the last two months doing a job search in the Bay Area. Did final round interviews at several companies ranging in size from a few people to a few thousand.

I encountered exactly 1 (one!) direct leetcode problem during my interviews.

iansinnott··on Gemini in Chrome
Hopefully this will not affect other browser that are downstream of Chromium.
iansinnott··on Gemini in Chrome
Likely depends on whether or not its opt-in. If Gemini only gets page content when you ask it to then that's fine.

Of course, it should also be possible to completely disable Gemini so as to avoid accidentally sending it private browsing content.

iansinnott··on Behind the scenes of Bun Install
Indeed! also as a test runner/lib if you're not doing browser automation. bun definitely has benefits even if not used as a runtime.
iansinnott··on PKM apps need to get better at resurfacing information
The author's wishlist for an Obsidian homepage could be done with a custom plugin. That's the beauty of Obsidian, you don't have to wait, you can extend the software yourself.

The LLMs are quite good at writing one-off Obsidian plugins, in my experience.

iansinnott··on VibeVoice: A Frontier Open-Source Text-to-Speech Model
The English/Mandarin section was VERY impressive. The accents of both the woman speaking English and the man speaking Chinese were spot on. Both sound very convincingly like they are speaking a second language, which anyone here can hear from the Chinese woman speaking English voice. I'd like to add that the foreigner speaking Chinese was also spot on.
iansinnott··on Ask HN: What software subscriptions are worth paying for?
That was my experience as well, but I pay for it.

I think the family plan has great value if you have family members that wouldn't otherwise pay for it. Gifting others with less ads in their lives is a significant win.

iansinnott··on Knowledge Management in the Age of AI
The author of that post also addresses this question in another: https://stephango.com/file-over-app

> The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last.

iansinnott··on Cerebras achieves 2,500T/s on Llama 4 Maverick (400B)
Although not obvious, you _can_ pay them per token. You have to use OpenRouter or Huggingface as the inference API provider.

https://cerebras-inference.help.usepylon.com/articles/192554...

iansinnott··on Sync Engines Are the Future
Have been using Instant for a few side projects recently and it has been a phenomenal experience. 10/10, would build with it again. I suspect this is also at least partially true of client-server sync engines in general.
iansinnott··on Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown
Linear itself has a workflow for Github: https://linear.app/docs/github
iansinnott··on Tailwind CSS v4.0
Migration guide, if anyone is wondering: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/upgrade-guide

Some breaking changes in there. May want to hold off on upgrading until LLMs come around to writing v4 code with ease.

iansinnott··on Claude for Desktop
There are a ton of alternatives if you search around. I created my own because I wanted something keyboard centric, and use OpenRouter with it: https://github.com/iansinnott/prompta. They all accomplish roughly the same thing though.
iansinnott··on Show HN: Donobu – Mac App for Web Automation and Testing
You can also request the model list to check the validity of a key. No tokens needed.
iansinnott··on Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations
In short: Don't use HTML endpoints, use APIs.

This is not always possible, but if the product in question has a mobile app or a wearable talking to a server, you might be able to utilize the same API it's using:

- intercept requests from the device - find relevant auth headers/cookies/params - use that auth to access the API

iansinnott··on iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
Curious to see if the apple LLM can interact with any messaging apps other than iMessage. Even amongst my American friends i only have a lone contact that I keep in touch with using iMessage.
iansinnott··on Avante.nvim: Use Your Neovim Like Using Cursor AI IDE
- copilot would only predict after the cursor, whereas Cursor predicts nearby edits, which is quite helpful

- copilot-chat was just a chat sidebar last time I used it, you still had to manually apply any code suggestions. cursor will apply changes for you. It's very helpful to have a diff of what the AI wants to change.

It's been a while since i've used copilot though, so copilot chat might be more advanced then i'm remembering.

edit: formatting

iansinnott··on Avante.nvim: Use Your Neovim Like Using Cursor AI IDE
What alternative open source solutions are currently competing with it?
iansinnott··on SQLite FTS5 Extension
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I didn't realize you could use search features when streaming the db over a network.
iansinnott··on SQLite FTS5 Extension
It's a very useful feature of sqlite and it also works great in-browser using wa-sqlite[0]. Example, if anyone's curious [1].

[0]: https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite [1]: https://github.com/iansinnott/prompta/blob/master/src/lib/mi...

iansinnott··on Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript
Seconded again. While tsx usually just works ts-node almost never just works. tsx is perhaps unfortunately named though so it may confuse people at first since it has nothing to do with jsx syntax.
iansinnott··on Show HN: I built a full-text search for your browsing history
it does not. i did look into it though [1] and at the time didn't find a good client side vector search lib. i wanted to avoid in-memory vector search since the size of the data can be significant depending on browsing habits. It is definitely possible though. I got a proof of concept working with victor [2] and client-side embeddings but it wasn't good enough IMO to ship.

[1]: https://github.com/iansinnott/full-text-tabs-forever/issues/... [2]: https://github.com/not-pizza/victor

iansinnott··on Group chats rule the world
I think the sentiment you describe has more to do with alignment of interests: Starbucks wants to sell you coffee, free online services on the other hand want to sell access-to-you to some third party.

There also aren't the same network effects. No one feels obligated to visit Starbucks even though they dislike it due to all their friends/family only conversing at Starbucks.

iansinnott··on Japan enacts law to promote competition in smartphone app stores
Also wondering, since to be truly competitive (on iOS) developers would need access to APIs they can't currently use.
iansinnott··on Japan enacts law to promote competition in smartphone app stores
I don't see why granting access to an app would grant full access to the whole thing. I.e. similar to how apps don't get full filesystem access. I also know nothing about how it's implemented though.
iansinnott··on Discussion on why SQLite is gaining popularity [audio]
Not strictly related to the podcast, but if you'd like to have a local-first browser application running sqlite check out wa-sqlite. It can use both IndexedDB and OPFS as a backend filesystem.

[1]: https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite

iansinnott··on Discussion on why SQLite is gaining popularity [audio]
It's too bad WebSQL never took off, as that was sqlite built in to the browser.

From memory the wasm binary of wa-sqlite is ~1mb, which is certainly not nothing but is an acceptable one-time download size for many web apps. I've seen websites with single image files larger than that. Not an advocating for more bloated web apps, but a sqlite download might not be a deal breaker.

iansinnott··on Jank's new persistent string is fast (2023)
Great to see this project is still going! I was fairly excited for Jank when working with Clojure regularly. Looks like the project is quite active.
iansinnott··on Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024
I suspect you won't be satisfied with Apple's offering if you enjoy stable software, unfortunately.

I agree regarding 1pass, but at least it's still firmly trying to solve the password management problem. Apple is trying to solve the vendor lock-in problem (i.e. how can they lock more users in to their platform).

iansinnott··on Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac
Indeed. I suppose they are hoping people will associate the two letters with their thing rather than the original acronym.
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