Hacker News: h317

New comment by h317 in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

h317 — Sat, 16 May 2026 19:06:57 +0000

The only way something like this would work is through "networking", and trust that you are capable of delivering.

New comment by h317 in "OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it"

h317 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:44:01 +0000

I cannot wait for the day when tech companies become players in the construction industry because it looks like it is the only way forward to make a change.

To think that everything has been digitalized a long time ago, yet contract law cannot properly deal with delineating responsibilities between GC and Architects, who are still sending 2D drawings to each other.

Imagine, all this information about quantities and door types (and everything else) is already available and produced by the architect's team, BUT they cannot share it! Because if they do, they are responsible for the numbers in case something is wrong.

So now there is this circus of: Arch technologist making the base drawing with doors. GC receives documents, counts doors for verification, and sends them to the sub. Subcontractor looks at these drawings, counts them again, and sends data to the supplier. Guess what, the supplier also looks, counts, confirms, and back we go.

Though I think robotics will change all of that. And when we have some sort of bot assistance, big tech players will have a bigger leverage in this, which will lead to the proper change management architecture.

Anyway, cool product. Anything to help with estimation. Really hope it gets traction.

New comment by h317 in "Ask HN: Resources to get better at outbound sales?"

h317 — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 06:12:47 +0000

It is way easier to fix a specific problem than to find one and sell solution for it.

For example, Hi I’m John and my accounting software can increase your profits by 10% by reducing time spent doing billing.

Hi I’m John, we do custom software and we can do an app for you in accounting for example, but also a crypto wallet or a booking website.

If you are in the second route, there is no mass outreach strategy because you are not offering anything specific your customer is anyone and your solution is anything. The outreach works for the first category, because spam or not, if someone is offering to fix a problem I have I’m ready to listen. Hence the relationship advice, if you provide services, people around you need to know that you “do apps and stuff”, and if you do products you can throw 1,000 emails fixing one thing with some level of certainty that someone within the ICP will give you a chance.

New comment by h317 in "Is outbound going to die?"

h317 — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 21:14:42 +0000

Just to share a counterpoint: I think it’s impossible to get a product market fit without active outbound verification. If it’s a brand new project, balancing development commitment and GTM hours is crucial. If I understand your comment correctly, the brand marketing approach you are talking about works for products that verified their need, but if this is a brand new idea/demos committing to GTM instead of active outbound/ emails/ calls/ in person sales may be too costly.

Did you have a chance working on small / startup projects; how you balance development commitment?

New comment by h317 in "Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell"

h317 — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 21:32:04 +0000

I was tired of coming home after networking events and shift through pile of business cards, so I made an app to just scan cards and export them to csv. Pretty much just for fun app for myself, friends, and friends of friends, but other people started using it too.

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/krane-build-relationships/id67...

New comment by h317 in "Show HN: Open-source private home security camera system (end-to-end encryption)"

h317 — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 06:42:08 +0000

If you need an open-source hardware+fw design for a camera with a motion sensor:

https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-pcb

or can be purchased at:

https://www.mouser.ca/ProductDetail/Maxlab/TOKAY-LITE-01?qs=...

New comment by h317 in "Ask HN: Should I try to manufacture toasters?"

h317 — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 02:31:02 +0000

About a month ago, I bought a toaster for Christmas, and, while walking in the alley and checking prices offline and online, I was mesmerized by the price strategies. With quantities that toasters operate in, their production cost is around a few dollars, and I bought one for $50 without any digital features.

If you are planning to build one in the USA, you will probably need to tell yourself what "build in the USA" means. Is it PCB printing, PCB assembly, plastic production, mold production, cool design features, coil design, final assembly, or some combination of the above? You will be surprised to find some of the requirements to put "made in the X country."

I do product development professionally, so take the comment as my bias, but it is a light project to start with as there are minimum components, you can build the entire thing in the garage, and it is something that everyone around you can give feedback on. Almost like an art project.

Anyway, I would love to share any info you may find useful to start. Email in the profile, if you are interested.

Telling ChatGPT it does well increases performance

h317 — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 17:19:55 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38266289

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by h317 in "What we learned making a plastic injection mold with a Chinese mold maker"

h317 — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 08:15:23 +0000

You are right, it is faster,cheaper and absolutely possible to take the existing enclosure and modify it. OEM enclosure suppliers will gladly add or remove a few openings on their design for a few thousand. They will modify or build a new mould just for your new product, and it works just fine as long as PCB can be designed around their enclosure.

New comment by h317 in "What we learned making a plastic injection mold with a Chinese mold maker"

h317 — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 08:11:22 +0000

Not the topic poster, but speaking from the similar experience, the cost can be as low as $4,000 in China for the size of these parts. In USA/Canada it would start with a $60k minimum, and with a 6 month timeline instead of 1. And 9 times out of ten, the local fab is making their moulds in China anyway.

New comment by h317 in "OpenIPC: Alternative open firmware for your IP camera"

h317 — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 05:27:34 +0000

In case some other folks who are in need, we have a side-project dedicated to the completely open source camera: hardware: https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-pcb firmware and software layer: https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-sdk

And we will eventually ship them form here Crowd Supply at: https://www.crowdsupply.com/maxlab/tokay-lite

New comment by h317 in "Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?"

h317 — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:38:51 +0000

By "AI" here I mean cameras that support running machine vision models directly on the device. We provide the device and firmware, and then on the application and model level it is up to the user.

New comment by h317 in "Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?"

h317 — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 17:12:24 +0000

We make edge AI cameras. After focusing on services for a while, it has been a different type of journey to switch to the product. We did an open source pilot product on esp32, and got surprisingly more interest than we thought, so now we are working on a high performance (4k, 60fps, AI chip) device.

Lite-esp32 camera https://www.crowdsupply.com/maxlab/tokay-lite Source-code: https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-pcb

Pro camera updats will be posted here: https://maxlab.io/store/tokay-riscv-camera/

New comment by h317 in "Open-source camera devkit to test AI models"

h317 — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 16:17:09 +0000

Hi everyone, we made an open source camera for developers. There are some models we already tested (face, parking spot recognition, animal detection,) but this is mostly a hardware project, so there are no custom AI models. Here is a GitHub links for the designs:

hardware: https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-pcb software: https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-sdk

Open-source camera devkit to test AI models

h317 — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 16:01:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.crowdsupply.com/maxlab/tokay-lite

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36342454

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Show HN: Open-Source ESP32 Camera

h317 — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 14:06:20 +0000

Hi all. We are finally at the project wrap up for the edge computing camera design based on esp32. It is fully open sourced (hardware and software) under permissible license.

The project is also posted on CrowdSupply.com, in case you would like to support https://www.crowdsupply.com/maxlab/tokay-lite.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36326176

Points: 1

# Comments: 0