eshnil's comments

eshnil | 2 years ago | 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 | 2 years ago | 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 | 2 years ago | 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 | 2 years ago | 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 | 2 years ago | on: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

They're transferring the user's assets, the domains, and killing the product (Google Domains).

eshnil | 2 years ago | 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 | 2 years ago | 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 | 2 years ago | 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 | 2 years ago | 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 | 2 years ago | 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 | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: AI Playground by Vercel Labs

There's https://github.com/nat/openplayground and https://github.com/ztjhz/BetterChatGPT among others.

eshnil | 3 years ago | 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 | 3 years ago | 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 | 3 years ago | 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 | 3 years ago | 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 | 3 years ago | 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 | 3 years ago | 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 | 3 years ago | 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 | 3 years ago | 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 | 3 years ago | 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.