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Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#681

Post by parasti »

gamedever wrote: post #247
mavamaarten wrote: post #81

I live next to a school, so there's a low speed limit (30 km/h). Still, people drive like race drivers and the city hasn't ever responded to the residents' hopes of introducing a speed camera. I wanted to have some data on how many people speed, the max speed recorded, that sort of thing. Things the city should be doing after many complaints of dangerous driving and people being almost killed on zebra crossings. I ha…

The guy at Not Just Bikes will tell you that enforcement will never work nor happen and that the only way to get people to slow down is to design the road so it doesn't feel safe to drive fast. The road next to my house has a speed limit of 20mph but most cars go 45mph because it's a straight road 4 lanes but space for 6. No bumps, no curves, wide. Effectively it feels like you should be driving fast. If I go the spe…

Speed bumps are a crazy invention because they tell you what humanity is like. Let's make this road worse for driving because many drivers don't care about safety but do care about damaging their cars. I am reminded of this every time I see a speed bump.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#682

Post by cmdtab »

p0deje wrote: post #535
cmdtab wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty cool. I built my own framework to do something similar very recently. Microsoft omni parser and claude computer use alone can take you very far in testing almost anything.

I experimented with Computer Use and even though it's pretty cool, I ended up not using it for 2 main reasons: 1. It's unreasonably expensive. A single test "2+2=4" for a web calculator costs around $0.15. I run roughly 1k tests per month on CI and I don't want to spend $150 on those. The approach I took with Alumnium costs me $4 per month for the same amount of tests. 2. It tries too hard to make the test pass even…

For the 1st point, I generate a script with hashed check points so next run is automated unless something changes in the UI to invoke AI. I make this possible by proxy wrapping playwright library so I can take over every method. Users use playwright like they always have but with one extra method called act.

Omini parser lets you split section of the UI to hash and watch for changes that are relevant.

For 2, can you give some examples?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#683

Post by dm03514 »

arcbyte wrote: post #650
dm03514 wrote: post #628

I'm building a stream processing framework using DuckDB. https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow The goal is to create a stream processing framework that supports SQL jobs. Apache Flink supports this but is very heavy-weight overall. I work with cost constrained companies that just can't run Flink but still want access to high performance streaming primitives. We are taking a slightly different approach from other co…

Interesting project. I'm working on a side project that is sort of adjacent but the user cases I'm targeting are fundamentally different from yours. I professionally have some projects where we are doing custom CDC from kafka -> dbms. In that context, we're just using spring boot apps. How is the troubleshooting/recovery story for sqlflow?

Very Cool! Which use cases are you targeting?

I'm surprised at the relatively sparse state of streaming. I feel like there are:

- Flink - Spark - ~Benthos - Arroyo - Then mostly custom / bespoke frameworks

Maybe there just isn't that much money in it? But I think there's still lots of opportunity to improve the Dev/UX over the JVM and the enterprise solutions.

-----

I would say recovery is achieved through kafka consumer groups right now, which results in at least once processing semantics.

We also support websocket input for the bluesky firehose but that is completely ephemeral. I have a story in the backlog to write ahead to disk which should allow for tolerating process crash/failure.

The tumbling windows stores state using duckdb. The end user can configure a disk-based duckdb databases which achieves durability as well.

The troubleshooting was actually pretty funky, i didn't realize how tricky it could be with stateful stream processing. I certainly don't have a good story for it, but what I did was added a sql debug HTTP handler. When this is enabled it exposes the duckdb execution context over HTTP. This was how I debugged the tumbling window logic during development. I would start SQLFlow, query to make sure the windows were empty, send some known messages, query the windows to make sure they were aggregated correctly, wait for the windows to close and flush, query the tumbling window state, etc.

For troubleshooting it also supports prometheus metrics oriented towards stream processing, # of messages, processing duration, success/failures, etc.

SQLFlow also ships with a dev framework, this allows you to execute your sqlflow pipeline against a json input file to make sure the sql processing logic is correct. I wanted to give the ability to decouple testing the logic, from actually having to stream data.

I would love to know about more what you're hacking on!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#684

Post by id00 »

npodbielski wrote: post #635
id00 wrote: post #17

Working on my mobile semi-idle MMORPG for parents like myself. With the artstyle of 1980s/syntwave/cassette-futurism. Just finished the website over the weekend: https://afterglow-game.com/

Why for parents

Well... in general for busy people who don't have much free time anymore. Not strictly for parents

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#685

Post by xerox13ster »

thebytefairy wrote: post #606
xerox13ster wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colored it a corporate beige. Who the heck is so brain broken as to talk about their grandchild as a startup project and their family as a frigging team. I have to almost need to see this as AI in order to maintain sanity because there’s no way an actual human being talked about a child—their human grandchild like he was a product.

It's clearly a joke. You've never heard people make corporate inspired comments about normal activities? Never had friends talk about sending them a calendar invite for dinner?

I don't talk about spending time with my children, friends, and family like they're a job, no.

Is it that much work in your mind to be social with the people you care about or are you just unable to drop the corpo think at home?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#686

Post by rozap »

jtwaleson wrote: post #642
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a smaller scale it reminds me of the original concept of Light Table, which let go of the abstraction of individual files in favor of editing your code in a tree like structure. It's a shame this concept seems to have died out, I'd be curious about alternatives to plain file based UX.

Cool. My long-term vision for software development would be to make a new programming environment that structures code in ASTs and stores it in a database rather than file based. However, that will have to come later. First this :)

a friend/old coworker of mine played with that idea in datalog and wrote about it. https://petevilter.me/post/datalog-typechecking/ it had some pretty cool implications.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#687

Post by xerox13ster »

grayhatter wrote: post #561
xerox13ster wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colored it a corporate beige. Who the heck is so brain broken as to talk about their grandchild as a startup project and their family as a frigging team. I have to almost need to see this as AI in order to maintain sanity because there’s no way an actual human being talked about a child—their human grandchild like he was a product.

you're telling on yourself, highlighting that you're so humorless that you couldn't tell it was an intentional parody of corporate double speak, contrasting one of the most human experiences with one of the least human. It's ironic that you tried to call him brain broken lol

You're telling on yourself by admitting to, apparently, not considering that I COULD tell it was intentional parody, found the ironic humor in it, and STILL found it tasteless enough to call them out for talking about a child like they're a product.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#688

Post by WillAdams »

jtwaleson wrote: post #165

I'm creating an infinite canvas that has all your organization's code and documentation on it. If you zoom in, you can see the code, if you zoom out you see the big picture. By giving everything a place on the map, it becomes easier to figure out your way through the landscape and understand the systems. Different modes can you show you different things: code age, authorship (bus-factor, is the person still with the…

How do you label blocks/sections?

I've wanted to work with code thus, but it becomes a problem in that things are only really readable/relatable in single-screen chunks, and when one tries to show more than is accurately related on a single screen it becomes an unreadable, confusing, blurry mess.

Screengrab?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#690

Post by jay-barronville »

AJRF wrote: post #555
jay-barronville wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can you make it detect the device somehow, maybe with some additional permissions, instead of user selecting from a dropdown? Detecting CPU and GPU specs browser-side is almost impossible to do reliably (even if relying on advanced fingerprinting and certain heuristics). For GPU’s, it may be possible to use (1) WebGL’s `WEBGL_debug_renderer_info` extension [0][0] or (2) WebGPU’s `GPUAdapter#info` [1][1], but I woul…

Jay you seem knowledgeable on this - thanks for answering - I have a question I did look at auto-detecting before, but it seems like you can only really tell the features of a GPU, not so much the good info (VRAM amount and bus speed) - is that the case? I looked at the GPUAdapter docs, and all it told me was: - device maker (amd) - architecture (rdna-3) and that was it. Is there a way to poke for bus speed and vram…

> Is there a way to poke for bus speed and vram amount?

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any way to reliably get this type of information browser-side.

If you really want to see how far you can get, your best bet would be via fingerprinting, which would require some upfront work using a combination of the manual input you already have now and running some stuff in the background to collect data (especially timing-related data). With enough users manually inputting their specs and enough independently collected data, you’d probably be surprised at how accurate you can get via fingerprinting.

That said, please do NOT go the fingerprinting route, because (1) a lot of users (including myself) hate being fingerprinted (especially if done covertly), (2) you need quite a lot of data before you can do anything useful, and (3) it’s obviously not worth the effort for what you’re building.

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