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lajr

23 karma · joined April 4, 2019

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lajr··on Launch HN: Pulse (YC S24) – Production-grade unstructured document extraction
Hey, congratulations on the launch. Just noticed a discrepancy in the financial 10K example:

There is a section near the start where there are 4 options: Large accelerated filer, Non-accelerated filer, Accelerated filer, or Smaller reporting company.

In this option, "Large accelerated filer" is checked on the PDF, but "Non-accelerated filer" is checked on the Markdown.

lajr··on What's New in C# 14: Null-Conditional Assignments
Strange that they chose to make it `a?["b"] = c;` rather than to use the same syntax as TypeScript (`a?.["b"] = c;`).

Honestly I like the C# better, and I was initially not super thrilled about the choice to include the period in the TS case, but since there is some overlap between the language design teams I assumed they would be the same.

lajr··on Harmony: OpenAI's response format for its open-weight model series
This format, or similar formats, seem to be the standard now, I was just reading the "Lessons from Building Manus"[1] post and they discuss the Hermes Format[2] which seems similar in terms of being pseudo-xml.

My initial thought was how hacky the whole thing feels, but then the fact that it works and gives rise to complex behaviour (like coercing specific tool selection in the Manus post) is quite simple and elegant.

Also as an aside, it is good that it appears that each standard tag is a single token in the OpenAI repo.

[1] https://manus.im/blog/Context-Engineering-for-AI-Agents-Less... [2] https://github.com/NousResearch/Hermes-Function-Calling

lajr··on Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
This looks promising! One of the important aspects of protocol buffers, avro etc is how they deal with evolving schemas and backwards/forward compatibility. I don't see anything in the docs addressing that. Is it possible for old services to handle new payloads / new services to handle old payloads or do senders and receivers need to be rewritten each time the schema changes?
lajr··on Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate
I wonder if their introspection is good enough to have our population on a Grafana dashboard somewhere
lajr··on Launch HN: Rownd (YC W22) – Add authentication and accounts to any website
Quick question: the NextJS demo seems to be doing auth on the client side which would result in a flicker on page load while it waits to see if the user is authenticated. Do you have a server friendly component in the react library? Other libraries (ex: auth0) have a special function which is deployed as a getServerSideProps function on each page, as well as an API route that handles auth requests.
lajr··on Cities Experiment with Remedy for Poverty: Cash, No Strings Attached
Why isn't the conversation more focused on Universal Basic Services than Universal Basic Income? I feel like it deincentivises inflation due to UBI, and incentivizes governmental optimization (if the goal is to provide everyone with food and housing, then you can optimize it, whereas just giving out money doesn't cause any optimizations to the services they will purchase).

A great book that touches on this distinction is Fully Automated Luxury Communism (https://www.versobooks.com/books/3156-fully-automated-luxury...). Basically it argues that it is more beneficial and less expensive to provide UBS.

lajr··on Isoflow – Infrastructure Diagrams
Hey congratulations, I love the ease of use and the aesthetic of this app! A few suggestions to improve quality of life:

1. Add hotkeys for each tool

2. Make delete actually delete things rather than going "back" in the browser

3. Make escape return the user to the "move" tool

4. When you use the "add" tool and add something, the menu closes but the tool stays selected at which point clicking it again deselects it rather than reopening the menu

5. Don't export the "cursor" square when you export the diagram. Perhaps also an export to image rather than svg would be valuable for the kinds of purposes people would use this tool for

At the moment the tool looks great and gets the job done, but I find myself hitting a wall in terms of what I can do with it (mainly around those points I've mentioned).

lajr··on Left wing journalists outnumber right wing by 13:1. media bias is never good
Additionally, America's "left" is very much the same as Europe or Canada's center/right. The argument could be made that there is probably a more even distribution if you don't use America's right-weighted scale.
lajr··on Ink 3 – Build CLI apps with React
Wow, I was skeptical reading that title (and I'm a front end dev so I can only imagine what the usual React bashers would think), but this is really cool. It simplifies so many aspects of creating CLI apps by leveraging React's architecture.
lajr··on Show HN: UI Playbook – A documented collection of UI components
This is a website detailing various UI components whereas storybook is a development tool where you can manipulate and view components you are building locally (although some people end up hosting a static version of their storybook somewhere).
lajr··on Don't write documentation in Markdown
I think the limitations of markdown make it great for README documentation. It allows uniform, easy-to-parse instructions on how to use any repository. I don't even necessarily agree in terms of full documentation sites. Services like Gitbook or libraries like Gatsby allow you to set up great documentation sites using markdown. The points made about each unique syntax requiring it's own parser doesn't seem like a significant obstacle to me.
lajr··on Apple Music Web Client
What extension is this?
lajr··on Ask HN: Is web programming viable choice in 2019?
JavaScript is being incorporated across so many areas now (web, back-end with Node.js, mobile with React Native + others) that learning web development should allow you to branch into other areas as well. Echoing what others have said though, it requires a greater breadth of knowledge than any time in the past as the field continues to expand and more management is moved into the client side.