venkii

Related thread I wrote a bit ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lighting/comments/1po7sxb/are_there...

I do think it's actually quite hard to beat the Brighter lamp on all of: Lumens, $, QoL (ie: Google Home integration + temp control), Form Factor (ie: not looking ugly), CRI.

I personally noticed issues w/ CRI & Form Factor quite a lot with my previous options.

OP here. I read a lot of Wuxia novels, some of them are well translated, and I usually end up giving up on the poorly translated ones.

I tried a few models (Gemini-2.5, Gemini-3.0-pro, Claude Opus 4.5), and found that they all improved the quality quite noticeably, even without being provided the source. The trick was mostly asking them to be super conservative in the changes they made.

Here's a diff if you're curious: https://www.diffchecker.com/DKgmzLdM/

You might enjoy Asara's Personality Basins, it's on a similar vibe: https://near.blog/personality-basins/

One of my all-time favorite essays, pairs very well with pg's Cities And Ambition (https://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html), as I wonder about what forms of transcendence various cities encourage you to aim towards.

Thanks! I'll look into adding custom palettes & the heightmap method. Might not get to it tbh - but I'll take a look.

Mmm interesting.

I'm not sure if it's possible in pure CSS, maybe it is? It relies on creating new SVG elements.

I think including the SVG in whatever website would usually be the simplest way to use it and it's super lightweight.

Feel free to take a look at the SVG generation function here [1] and lmk if you have any ideas to make it happen in pure CSS.

[1] https://github.com/venkr/gradient-gen/blob/main/src/EllipseG...

Done - thanks :)

Hey HN!

Check out this fun tool I built to make cover images for my blog. The main goal: interesting looking random gradients, that all draw from a single color palette.

I stumbled upon this post from Justin Jay Wang [1], who designed for OpenAI - describing methods for random gradients, including the one that shipped on OpenAI’s homepage from 2020-2022.

Since the post included ~10 SVGs, I was able to reverse engineer the SVG parameters, and decided to put up a generator. You can see the exact deets in my Github README [2].

I also use it to generate cover images for my Substack [3] - if you want to see what using a bunch of images generated by it looks like.

[1] https://justinjay.wang/methods-for-random-gradients/

[2] https://github.com/venkr/gradient-gen

[3] https://venkii.substack.com/

Really like the thesis implied by the title - kinda unfortunate the post tangents & doesn’t spend more time on that explicit claim.

I’ve briefly written about issues in the past: https://venki.dev/notes/google-gemini-is-bad

My first thought would be, re:

>It’s baffling that a tech giant like Google can’t seem to deliver the same level of reliability

It’s actually not that baffling to me! Shipping simple features gets harder and harder as scale, esp as the features must interact well with more and more existing features + get through bureaucracy.

For example, the regions bit you mention: Anthropic/DeepSeek can just pool all their regions together into a single API and mostly vibe it. But since Google already offers their regular compute by region, it’d be a little weird to not do that for LLMs only.

GCP probably just has a lot of complexity due to being enterprise-oriented, and unfortunately this carries over. Unencumbered startups get to start from a blank state though.

Any sense if applying later will be detrimental?

The main reason to delay: I've started writing relatively recently, and expect I might have more posts I'd showcase in my application by then.

Ooh very cool - I've been looking for something like this.

Top feature I'd care about before using this would be the ability to read the actual 10K inline and jump to sources, perhaps as an iframe or so.

Kinda the opposite - Firestore documents don't inherently have a userId of the owner. Rather, they just have arbitrary fields.

Making all your documents have a `owner_uid` or `userId` field is just a convention they recommend, because it helps you write rules.

So rather: they have no default system for handling documents that can only be accessed by a given user, but rather you have to construct it using `firestore.rules`, and you end up with something oddly default-insecure.

It does at least look like their docs for the equivalent policy are not vulnerable to this attack though

https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/postgres/row-level...

ie: The "Update Policies" DSL ensures that the user does not change the user id of a row

My 2c:

- 8% or higher for a non-cofounder is very unusual. It’s typically 1-3%. Your CEO is flying in the face of conventional wisdom - but that’s not always a bad thing.

- re: the sales guy making more - I think you just need to make peace with it. People often make more doing less, or doing less technical work. Companies certainly often have initial employees that are as crucial as co-founders but are compensated with 10x less equity.

Yes, correct the 100MB is being downloaded on every boot!

I tested it initially because it’s the naivest implementation. The right implementation would bundle it in.

But I ended up primarily reporting timings that stop counting up as soon as control is handed over to user generated code - since that’s the number you care about the most.

Change my mind - this is my best understanding for why public tech companies do, and ought to do significant equity comp, other than the fact that it's a norm now.

I'd love to see any alternate posts / expositions on this. Google seems to only provide me with unhelpful FAQs by lawyers etc.

Huh, I've generally seen smaller referral bonuses (<$5k). I referred someone I knew from college at my last role, and got a $5k bonus.

If you're able to consistently source great candidates, you might want to lead a team instead where you'll be better evaluated / rewarded on that though ;)