Hacker News: nisalperi

New comment by nisalperi in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

nisalperi — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 04:48:19 +0000

We are building a live knowledge graph of all political players in the South Asian Region. Essentially mapping out entities, relationships, and events with data from the last 30 years or so.

New comment by nisalperi in "Mapping Protests in Iran"

nisalperi — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:10:02 +0000

We did something similar during the 2022 Sri Lankan protests: https://protests.watchdog.team/heatmap

New comment by nisalperi in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

nisalperi — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 05:41:25 +0000

I'm working on Watermark'd. We want to give businesses a verified digital identity that works across the globe starting with businesses registered in South Asia (DUNS number that works for the 21st century).

What we do is quite simple 1. Verify the business is registered in the claimed jurisdiction. 2. Verify if individuals have the authority to act on behalf of that business. 3. Provide sharable credentials.

New comment by nisalperi in "GraphQL: The enterprise honeymoon is over"

nisalperi — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 18:46:00 +0000

My hot take is that if you’re using GraphQL without Relay, you’re probably not using it to its full potential. I’ve used both Relay and Apollo Client on production, and the difference is stark when the app grows!

New comment by nisalperi in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

nisalperi — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 18:16:05 +0000

I wrote about my experience from the last year. Hope you find this helpful

https://open.substack.com/pub/sleuthdiaries/p/guide-to-effec...

A guide to effective "vibe" coding

nisalperi — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 07:38:32 +0000

Article URL: https://sleuthdiaries.substack.com/p/guide-to-effective-vibe-coding

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46202284

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by nisalperi in "Show HN: TypeLeap: LLM Powered Reactive Intent UI/UX"

nisalperi — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 03:52:30 +0000

Cool demo and a neat write-up! I've been experimenting with similar patterns to differentiate between search queries/question answering and presenting specific outputs to the user.

Thanks for taking your time to write this up

New comment by nisalperi in "Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think"

nisalperi — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 18:50:34 +0000

I disabled my YouTube watch history and installed Unhook. Combined, this essentially hides all recommendations, shorts, etc. I had tried blocking YouTube completely in the past, but it's a genuinely useful tool for learning and work. The new approach still lets me pull information while shielding me from the endless rabbitholes and passive consumption.

I feel so much freer!

New comment by nisalperi in "Gambling on papal conclaves"

nisalperi — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 04:26:53 +0000

I remember The Bugle podcast doing a bit about this back in 2013. Didn’t realize this was an actual thing.

New comment by nisalperi in "Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M"

nisalperi — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 14:51:26 +0000

Truly the dumbest timeline

New comment by nisalperi in "Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage"

nisalperi — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 06:26:41 +0000

As a local, Sri Lanka turning into Bali is one of my biggest anxieties at the moment. I've grown up around the hospitality industry all my life, it's not a good outcome for locals. Tourism should be considered an auxiliary industry not the primary industry.

The Unwalkable City

nisalperi — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 07:34:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.climatealmanac.org/pub/ugm8chay/release/2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39024488

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by nisalperi in "Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?"

nisalperi — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 04:37:57 +0000

I built a writing/formatting product now used by 60k+ indie authors. One of the requirements was to format PDFs for print publishing with different themes and configurable layouts. Instead of building a custom PDF rendering engine, I decided to use Puppeteer to generate the PDFs.

But there were a bunch of issues we had to deal with:

- To render the gutter (margin in the middle) you had to know which side of the book each page would fall on.

- To generate the headers and footers, you had to know the exact page number for each of the pages.

- You had to know how many pages the table of contents would take up, but you couldn't know the page numbers for each chapter until the book was fully generated.

What I ended up doing was to generate multiple PDFs for each chapter, header, footer, and table of contents separately, then stitching them together very carefully to build the final export. Super hacky, but it ain't stupid if it works!