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pea

704 karma · joined January 16, 2013

Kivo (YC S13), datapane.com
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pea··on What's in a PowerPoint File?
I had to build a diffing engine for PowerPoint files in my first start-up. I initially tried to do this at the OOXML level, and one the weirdest things I found about the format is that the GUIDs are mutated by PowerPoint even if there have been no changes. The serialized OOXML is not really canonical and constantly changes as clients open and save it.

The simplest solution ended up being rendering images of the slides (not easy) and doing it with a slider.

pea··on I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
That's a great idea with the e-reader.

I would love for someone to design a great case with a built in e-reader on the back. Most of the existing ones seem geared for displaying colour photos; I'd like one built for reading, powered by NFC. It should easily sync up with the phone itself to send over articles, books, etc. Bonus if I can write on it.

pea··on Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
I'm exactly the same. This one really give me the ick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYC_Z36rHw
pea··on Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
I was wondering the same for vega-lite, which is relatively high level, declarative, and looks similar to their syntax.
pea··on GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex
The shift may come when your blessed cloud platform provides competitive enterprise-ready hosting of the oss models
pea··on Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps
Looks cool but your home page heavily lags on my mbp m3 pro - you should maybe be lazy loading vs loading all your components upfront
pea··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
I agree with mostly everything you’re saying; but it’s not uncommon to be processed via your local consulate, even if you are already living in the US.

This is usually just for the final issuing of the GC, and where USCIS approval has already happened (for instance, on an EB1A).

People frequently do this so they don’t have the travel restriction. Source: I just did it.

pea··on Starfling: A one-tap endless orbital slingshot game in a single HTML file
Good fun! Spacebar should launch, r should reset, maybe I'm imagining it, but it's a lot slower and thus easier on my phone than my MBP.
pea··on Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
Oracle hire some extremely good people and pay very well
pea··on Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
The darkest UX pattern I have ever hit is trying to cancel Google Workspace; whereby they disable the scrollbar on the page so you cannot actually get to the cancel button.
pea··on Show HN: Clawe – open-source Trello for agent teams
Decapod
pea··on Ask HN: How do you use 5–10 minute gaps productively?
What sort of things do you notice?
pea··on Ask HN: How do you use 5–10 minute gaps productively?
Thank you!
pea··on Ask HN: How do you use 5–10 minute gaps productively?
maybe productive isn’t the right word - more like satisfying and constructive. Right now I might play blitz chess or end up checking the news or X. But when I’m in the middle of a good book or some long form content, I’ll use that time to read and it’s much more fulfilling.

And I think breathing meditation is an excellent idea! I didn’t only mean phone-specific activities at all! Thank you

pea··on Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
I think it makes sense given the following:

- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.

- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)

- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.

pea··on Show HN: Epstein's emails reconstructed in a message-style UI (OCR and LLMs)
This is really cool, I enjoyed going through them in this form. Thanks
pea··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
Didn't they also just shut down Vertex and Gemini APIs to launch a new unified API this week?
pea··on IBM to acquire Confluent
It’s a shame because people forget how good IBM research was back in the day. I do wonder if they still have great people in those r&d labs, or if they all left.
pea··on Tides are weirder than you think
We had one of these today in Sausalito!
pea··on I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it
The way Gemini (which is incredible) has been haphazardly shoved into gsuite products seems devoid of any kind of common sense. Even very basic obvious things via Gemini in Gmail fail. It’s ironic because it’s the one place I’d love a decent model.
pea··on Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync
I got a nasty one of these recently. Attacker had my wife’s CC, and made purchases they knew would flag our bank and look sus and pop up on the app. Then I get a call from my “bank”, correct number, I ask them to verify and they say look at the number. All they ask for is the customer support code in my banking app to cancel to fraudulent transactions. At that moment I insist on calling back and they hang up, but I was very close.
pea··on No adblocker detected
I wonder if you could spend a few million on promoting adblockers to justify a short position on Google or Meta.
pea··on I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
I feel like the opposite is also true. People view Java as enterprise Java from 2008; a clunky outdated language for bad, verbose spaghetti code.

In fact, a lot of the most interesting plt and compiler r&d going into real world applications is on the jvm (project loom, graal etc), and the features of modern Java (pattern matching, records, etc) make it a great choice for lots of projects that aren’t legacy enterprise apps.

pea··on Mechanical Watch: Exploded View
For something slightly more expensive check out NTH (now defunct micro brand but easy to find on eBay) or Squale.

For vintage (ignore their new stuff), Enicar, Eterna, Roamer, Rodania, Cortebert, Wakmann, Mido, Certina, early Girard Perregaux, etc. all can be had cheap. Bunch of excellent brands wiped out in quartz crisis that can be had for next to nothing.

pea··on uBlock Origin Lite Beta for Safari iOS
Thanks. I don’t have mullvad either - anyone can point their dns at their Adblock dns without paying for their VPN
pea··on uBlock Origin Lite Beta for Safari iOS
I’ve been using the mullvad adblock via pure dns on iOS and I haven’t seen an ad in years. Is there a reason others are installing a separate app?
pea··on The vocal effects of Daft Punk
Obligatory post of the legendary Bode Vocoder demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kc-bhOOLxE
pea··on Why I stopped angel investing after 15 years (and what I'm doing instead)
You can do a pay to play where anyone who can’t follow on at a certain price gets wiped out
pea··on London's National Gallery buys mysterious altarpiece for $20m
I worked at the British Museum and there were rooms upon rooms of priceless objects. I remember a golden Buddha with the tags and wrapping still on it from Sotheby’s in the 1920s.

At that time, you could also just check out a piece and leave a little card there saying you’d taken it.

pea··on Eurorack Knob Idea
I was wondering this - I'd buy this if I could just plug it into my existing sockets. I'm pretty sure you could get 50-100 hrs with a battery, but I wonder if you could have something that you wind-up like a mechanical watch.
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