Hacker News

My son might be blind. He is only a few months old but things are concerning. I'm looking for resources, books, websites, etc to learn how to best support a blind baby, toddler, and beyond. Any help would be appreciated.

Not quite production ready, yet.

Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.

I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.

I'm Gabriel, CEO and co-founder of Meticulous, https://meticulous.ai/?utm_source=hn.

Backed by YC, Coatue, the CTO of GitHub, CEO of Vercel, CPO of Adobe and others, https://meticulous.ai?utm_source=hn monitors how developers interact with your app and automatically generates and maintains test coverage nearing 100%. Even for the most complex applications. All without needing to write or maintain a single test.

Our customers find it increases their end-to-end frontend development velocity by over 20%. If you’ve ever had the rare chance of working on a project where you can have near 100% confidence in your changes before you hit merge you’ll understand this immediately: programming feels completely different in that environment. Every dev can refactor with complete confidence and speed. And so they do, keeping the code fresh & nimble. Our customers’s developers have been able to move faster than they’ve often ever experienced before.

We’re growing rapidly, and want to provide this experience to every software company in the world — while freeing them of the burden of writing or maintaining tests. We’ve built a team of exclusively world-class software engineers (“One of the strongest teams that I have seen” - Jared Friedman, Partner at Y Combinator).

If you join us we’ll promise you’ll learn faster than you ever have in your career, and will be able to fundamentally change how the world develops software.

## How does Meticulous work?

You add a script tag on localhost and internal stacks, and Meticulous records all the development teams daily interactions with the app as they develop features. Meticulous understands every line of code, component and route executed by each flow and uses this to maintain a visual snapshot test suite that covers close to 100% of your code. This suite tests your apps UI, user flows and logic at all layers, across all edge cases, all branches, all feature flags. As your app evolves, your test suite evolves.

The tests are executed in an environment that ensures full determinism from the lowest level, right down to how the browsers’ macro & micro-tasks are scheduled — so no flakes. This bedrock of determinism is what makes the full system possible.

You can watch a 60 second demo at https://meticulous.ai?utm_source=hn.

## What’s our team like?

We are a London-based YC company. Our engineering team previously worked at Dropbox, Opendoor, Palantir, GitHub and Google, and have previously led 100+ engineer organizations at these companies. We are backed by some of the best founders and technical leaders in Silicon Valley, including Guillermo Rauch (founder Vercel, author next.js), Jason Warner (CTO GitHub), Scott Belsky (CPO Adobe), Calvin French-Owen (founder Segment), Jared Friedman (YC partner and former CTO of Scribd) and a bunch of other incredible folks.

Catching visual regressions is just the start. There is an entire category of products to build on top of replay. This ranges from catching exceptions to revealing the performance impact of frontend code.

We want to change the way the world develops software, and influence software approaches for decades to come.

We are seeding a London office and hiring an onsite founding engineer to join our team of six. We sponsor visas.

You will have autonomy in building out this technology, but here are a few problems you might work on:

- Build a distributed system to concurrently replay thousands of sessions, such that a developer gets a result in seconds. - Speed up the replay of sessions in a way that retains determinism. - Derive algorithms to detect sessions that cover differing code paths and edge cases, and ignore sessions that are too similar. - Help build out a team of world-class, highly collaborative, software engineers.

As founding engineer, you get to shape the company, and build the culture and technology from the ground up.

What we look for:

In a sentence: Technically brilliant, delightful to work with, combined with a self-awareness and strong desire to improve. We also want to make sure everyone is highly supportive of each other; we win as a team.

We're currently only looking to bring on folks with senior level skill sets and 5+ years of industry experience. You should have strong web fundamentals and a deep love for software engineering. Maybe you enjoy programming books like Clean Code, Designing Data Intensive Applications, Pragmatic Programmer etc. or enjoy hacking on interesting side projects. You value transparency and candid feedback, and are motivated by a strong desire to become the best engineer you can be.

You can read about our values here https://ruby-wish-a8f.notion.site/Mission-Values-979c32ec58e...

You will be given the space and time to up-level yourself as an engineer in terms of conferences, reading, or whatever you think will be most valuable. We will also set you up with mentorship, if you desire it, from top engineering leaders (folks running 100-engineer organizations at the world's leading tech companies).

You’ll get to work alongside some of the best engineers there are, break new ground solving truly novel CS problems and deliver something that transforms how software is built.

If this sounds interesting, please reach out to me at gabe [at] meticulous [dot] ai with “HN” in the subject line and 2-3 sentences about what you find interesting about Meticulous and your resume/LinkedIn/GitHub.

https://www.crowdwave.com here!

- crowdwave works best on your phone - unless you've got your headset and microphone plugged in to your desktop, in which case desktop works great too.

Here's the story:

So about six months ago I saw this post on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119

https://afterthebeep.tel is really cool - it's an anonymous voicemail box - you call the provided phone the number and leave a message. Blaine - the guy who runs the site (eventually) listens to and approves your message and writes a headline. It was fun, and I found I kept going back to it and listening to the messages. I left a message once and several weeks later it appeared on the site. Blaine, from comments I read, didn't seem in a hurry to take the site much further, which got me thinking...

And I simply could not get one question out of my head - "what would happen if users could just hit record on their phone, instead of having to dial a phone number?".

When I get a software idea I get pretty obsessive and that question just kept gnawing at me.

So, like the any reasonable programmer would, I stopped working on the project I had been working on for literally YEARS and took a detour. Because that's what you do isn't it - you just drop those multiple years of work and pick up the shiny new thing.

I saw that afterthebeep is open source and I loved the UI design - the Windows 3.1 aesthetic really appealed to me - it seems perfect for voicemail, so I grabbed the open source code and started development. I couldn't make much sense of the code - it was using tech I'm not familiar with, so I ditched it all except the layout and the graphics.

Fortunately, the project I had been working on for YEARS is basically a Twitter/Reddit clone, so I ripped the UI out of the afterthebeep open source project and did open heart surgery until like some bizarre Frankenstein's monster I had put the afterthebeep open source UI onto my code.

And I added in the functionality that I craved so much - a "record" button. Sigh.... relief. It was incredibly satisfying to hit record and see a message appear almost immediately. Nerd craving fulfilled.

But my satisfaction did not last long. I REALLY HAD TO fix that problem of getting the posts approved and headlines written. So I made a back end audio processing pipeline and fed the messages into an LLM, which ripped the text from the speech and I then shoved it into OpenAI and asked it to make nice headlines. And it worked beautifully - now you only have to wait 30 seconds to see your message with a nice headline! Ahhhh..... sigh, satisfaction... (it wouldn't be 2024 without an AI twist, would it now?).

But hang on! It would be SO much better if there was some sort of category system almost like subreddits - then people could post their messages into areas of interest. So I built the channel system and sat back.... job done.

Looking at the calendar, dreading to see..... I've dropped into obsessive coding mode and and I've been down this rabbit hole full time for MONTHS. I'm getting wary - and I'm also getting tired and sick of the effort - when's this going to end?

But wait, another idea! How much more cool would it be if you could have your own user account, and follow and like and subscribe! I've just GOT TO make that. AND surely it has to be multi language doesn't it? I mean Germans like talking too don't they? And user profile pics, and channel banner images, and options and settings. And if you don't put in terms and conditions and privacy and a cookie message then won't the Eurpoeans turn up and arrest me? At this stage I'm like a drunken junkie wanting just one more thing, one more thing...... scope ain't just creeping, the scope is up and racing away faster than Usain Bolt.

I'm now like nearly five months into this and packing all this functionality into a UI that both make sense and fits onto a tiny phone screen is becoming a huge challenge - a challenge I don't know if I can actually solve - and if I can't make the UI make sense then the whole thing will be unusable. The UI MUST be minimal and yet still reveal to the user pretty much everything within fewer than five pages in total. The UI had to work BEST on a phone. That was a HUGE challenge, and I really didn't know until the end of the project if I could do it at all. But finally the UI seemed to come together and it was a tight squeeze but fit onto the limited screen resolution of even my old iPhone 6s (yes it's my main phone).

Then, a few days ago, after many months of grueling grind, there was nothing left on the todo list. crowdwave was done! All the features were done and I'd finally chased down that scope creep.

Which brings us to today. Give https://www.crowdwave.com a go on your phone or desktop if you have microphone. It's brand new so there WILL be bugs - hopefully not too severe. Thanks to Blaine at https://blaines.world/ for the inspiration!

Selectric is a free MacOS app and currently supports Gmail, Outlook, Drive, Dropbox and Slack. The app is completely private. We index and store all data on your Mac. We also run AI models locally so no data ever needs to leave your computer.

I'd love for the HN community to try us out and share feedback!

- Choose which transformations you want (break on pipe, args, redirect, whatever)

- "Peeks" into stringified commands (think xargs, parallel) and formats those, too

- Auto-breaks at a given width (e.g., 80 characters)

- Shows you non-standard aliases, functions, files, etc. that you might not have in your shell environment

- Breaks up long jq lines with jqfmt because—let's be honest—they're getting out of hand

As a security researcher and tool developer, I often encounter (or create) long pipelined Bash commands. While quick and powerful, they can be a nightmare to read or debug. I created sol to make it easier to understand and share these commands with others.

There are some similar tools but they are focused on "detecting" rather than "removing" so I've built one myself. I wanted a solution that's as minimal as possible; config files to specify the files in your project shouldn't be necessary because that info should be already configured in tsconfig.json. All you need to do is to specify your entrypoint file.

Feedback is much appreciated!