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boxcarr commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
ttd · 2 months ago
I'm working on a new app for creating technical diagrams - https://vexlio.com. It's an area with some heavyweight incumbents (e.g. Visio, Lucid) but I think there's good opportunity here to differentiate in simplicity and overall experience. I'm still in the fairly early phase, and I suspect I haven't quite found the best match of features to customers yet.

From a dev perspective this area has a ton of super interesting algorithmic / math / data structure applications, and computational geometry has always been special to me. It's a lot of fun to work on.

If anyone here is interested in this as a user, I'd love for any feedback or comments, here or you can email me directly: tyler@vexlio.com.

Some pages the HN crowd might be interested in:

* https://vexlio.com/blog/making-diagrams-with-syntax-highligh... * https://vexlio.com/solutions/state-diagram-maker/ * https://vexlio.com/blog/speed-up-your-overleaf-workflow-fast...

boxcarr · 2 months ago
Looks pretty great! The free tier also looks reasonable. The pricing on the other tiers isn't outrageous either if you use it consistently. Unfortunately, I likely find myself in the big gap between the free tier and the Basic plan. I can't justify yet another subscription that I use only a couple of times a year. That said, I would happily pay the $6 on the months that I use the service. Given the churn issues, I'm surprised more SaaS offerings don't work that way.
boxcarr commented on DuckDB in Action   manning.com/books/duckdb-... · Posted by u/tosh
boxcarr · a year ago
Motherduck.com has a pop-up promotion to get the book for free.
boxcarr commented on Show HN: JobLens – AI-powered job search for 'Who Is Hiring'   kadoa.com/joblens... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
hubraumhugo · 2 years ago
Your project looks quite impressive as well, especially the extracted URLs to apply and the candidate profiles, didn't get that far yet :) Automating tedious work like data extraction and transformation is a great use case for LLMs.
boxcarr · 2 years ago
Not sure if you found this as well, but gpt-3.5-turbo-016 does a poor job following instructions other than parsing. So, to work around this, we prompt gpt-3.5-turbo with the rules we want applied say an extracted field and then go back to gpt-3.5-turbo-016 to parse with chatgpt functions.

Bottom line, every single post requires approximately 10 different prompts to refine the extraction.

boxcarr commented on Show HN: JobLens – AI-powered job search for 'Who Is Hiring'   kadoa.com/joblens... · Posted by u/hubraumhugo
boxcarr · 2 years ago
JobLens is cool! This past month we had the same idea -- it's been a fun project: https://hnjobs.u-turn.dev

ChatGPT does an incredible job parsing, but then lots of effort goes into normalizing and deduping each field. Long story short, your results look quite good to me!

boxcarr commented on FoundationDB: A Distributed Key-Value Store   cacm.acm.org/magazines/20... · Posted by u/eatonphil
boxcarr · 2 years ago
When I saw the post about Foundation DB, I remembered the exact same demo running on a cluster of Raspberry Pi instances! Sadly, no memory of it on YouTube.
boxcarr · 2 years ago
Wayback Machine partially to the rescue. Found the page (https://web.archive.org/web/20150325003301/https://foundatio...), but the Vimeo video was nuked when foundationdb.com shutdown. Here's the HN thread about that demo:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5739721

boxcarr commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2023)    · Posted by u/whoishiring
boxcarr · 2 years ago
Location: Seattle, WA

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: maybe

Technologies: Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Postgres, SQLite, SQL, PyTorch, FastAI, LLM, NextJS, React, GCP

Résumé/CV: https://u-turn.dev

Email: dudley@u-turn.dev

Product engineering leader helping build great teams. Twenty-plus years of software development. Over the past decade have helped turn around multiple products and teams in crisis.

Currently focusing on helping organizations apply deep learning and LLMs for information extraction from unstructured sources. A recent project in that vain: https://hnjobs.u-turn.dev

boxcarr commented on Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it   washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/pseudolus
boxcarr · 2 years ago
Goodreads seems to be the Craigslist of the book world: many attempts by others to make a better Goodreads, but none good enough to displace it.
boxcarr commented on FoundationDB: A Distributed Key-Value Store   cacm.acm.org/magazines/20... · Posted by u/eatonphil
romanhn · 2 years ago
Back in 2014 or so, I saw the FoundationDB team demo the product at a developer conference. They had the database running across a bunch of machines, with a visual showing their health and data distribution. One team member would then be turning machines on and off (or maybe unplugging them from the network) and you could see FDB effortlessly rebalancing the data across the available nodes. It was a very striking, impressive presentation (especially as we were dealing with the challenges of distributed Cassandra at the time).
boxcarr · 2 years ago
When I saw the post about Foundation DB, I remembered the exact same demo running on a cluster of Raspberry Pi instances! Sadly, no memory of it on YouTube.

Deleted Comment

u/boxcarr

KarmaCake day83May 12, 2014View Original