Hacker News: samsullivan

New comment by samsullivan in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026)"

samsullivan — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 01:04:29 +0000

Cardog | Toronto, Canada or REMOTE | Full-time https://cardog.app/careers

We're the system of record for the Canadian vehicle: raw automotive data turned into facts that can be checked. Our open-source VIN decoder sits underneath a government vehicle registry.

Some of what's interesting:

- A government registry, a manufacturer's own filing, a listing site and an insurance record will describe the same truck four different ways, and nothing in any of those files says they're the same truck. Reconciling that, for every vehicle in the country, in a way that holds up when a regulator asks how you know, is most of the data work.

- Seventeen characters on a door frame encode manufacturer, plant, model year and build attributes — badly, inconsistently, and differently per manufacturer. Public reference data covers some of it. The rest gets worked out from filings, recall documents, and patterns inferred across millions of vehicles.

- We read vehicles directly over OBD-II now. Forty modules answered on a recent Hyundai, each reporting its own part number and installed software version. Nothing downstream of the VIN moves when a module is reflashed, so no registration, history report or dealer system knows what software is actually in a car.

Hiring: VIN Decode Engineer, Data Platform Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Founding Engineer (dealer platform). TypeScript, Postgres, Cloudflare Workers.

Full descriptions and apply: https://cardog.app/careers

New comment by samsullivan in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)"

samsullivan — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:18:55 +0000

Cardog | Toronto, ON | Remote/Hybrid (Canada) | Full-time AI-powered automotive platform — we’re building the infrastructure layer for vehicle data, from VIN decoding to market intelligence, powering government and public-sector vehicle programs.

Looking for: Automotive experience, Full-Stack, AI/ML, Data Engineers (public-sector/govtech experience a plus)

Stack: React Native/Expo, Next.js, Hono, Cloudflare Workers, PostgreSQL, TypeScript everywhere

https://cardog.app/careers

New comment by samsullivan in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)"

samsullivan — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:56:00 +0000

Cardog | Toronto, ON | Remote (Canada) | Full-time AI-powered automotive platform — we're building the infrastructure layer for vehicle data, from VIN decoding to market intelligence.

Looking for: Automotive experience, Full-Stack, AI/ML, Data Engineers

Stack: React Native/Expo, Next.js, Hono, Cloudflare Workers, PostgreSQL, TypeScript everywhere

https://cardog.app/careers

New comment by samsullivan in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)"

samsullivan — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:04:02 +0000

Cardog | Toronto, ON | Remote (Canada) | Full-time

AI-powered automotive platform — we're building the infrastructure layer for vehicle data, from VIN decoding to market intelligence.

Looking for: iOS/Mobile, Full-Stack, AI/ML, Data Engineers

Stack: React Native/Expo, Next.js, Hono, Cloudflare Workers, PostgreSQL, TypeScript everywhere

https://cardog.app/careers

New comment by samsullivan in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

samsullivan — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:56:45 +0000

not sure what PocketOS does or why your whole dataset would be a single volume without a clear separation between application and automotive data. how are you decoding VINs?

New comment by samsullivan in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)"

samsullivan — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:51:18 +0000

Cardog | Toronto | Full Stack Engineer | In-person

We build automotive software. We work with dealerships on ad-hoc projects, websites, and pricing tools. We also run consumer facing products - a web app for vehicle shopping, research and market data, and a mobile app.

Right now we're building EV battery health diagnostics - connecting to a car's BMS over CAN bus, pulling cell voltages and state of health, generating reports. Mix of hardware and software.

Small company with real clients and real revenue. One engineer. Looking for a second who wants to own things e2e.

hello[at]cardog{dot}app

New comment by samsullivan in "Disrupting the largest residential proxy network"

samsullivan — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:18:26 +0000

The need for proxies in any legitimate context became obsolete with starlink being so widespread. Throw up a few terminals and you have about 500-2k cgnat IP addresses to do whatever you like.

New comment by samsullivan in "ChatGPT's porn rollout raises concerns over safety and ethics"

samsullivan — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:16:25 +0000

why do we insist on bringing the worst tech from sci-fi to reality? is our collective intelligence still not enough to thwart the social and market dynamics?

New comment by samsullivan in "The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?"

samsullivan — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:49:02 +0000

all of these problems are better articulated at the level you just explained them. the code for these issues is convoluted and is only of use when an entity (human or not) can actually manipulate the symbolic text that achieves that task. a random oauth stub is of 0 use to the most skilled programmers without documentation as to what contracts and invariants are. bits in a file is just a means

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

samsullivan — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:41:59 +0000

Trying to make anything car related easier - Cardog.app

Buying, researching and analyzing automotive data is broken. Trying to fix that bit by bit

New comment by samsullivan in "Stop crawling my HTML – use the API"

samsullivan — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:39:04 +0000

Imagine a world where the code we write for humans would actually integrate with other computers

New comment by samsullivan in "EVs are depreciating faster than gas-powered cars"

samsullivan — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 16:20:39 +0000

The battery uncertainty is real, but I think the bigger issue is information asymmetry.

Looking at actual market data, the spread on used EVs is wild - a 2022 Tesla Model S ranges from $57 to $112k depending on trim/condition (https://cardog.app/tools/valuation/tesla/model_s/2022). That's a $60k spread on the same year vehicle. Compare that to ICE vehicles where the range is typically much tighter.

When buyers can't confidently price an asset, they discount heavily. The depreciation problem might actually be a data problem - we just don't have the standardized battery health reporting and historical comps that exist for ICE vehicles yet.

New comment by samsullivan in "I audited 47 failed startups' codebases"

samsullivan — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 01:11:12 +0000

this is a claude output verbatim, wonder what happens to reddit over the next 3-6 months, we really destroyed the commons.

Lobbying and Regulatory Strategies of US Autonomous Vehicles Companies

samsullivan — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 23:49:24 +0000

Article URL: https://cardog.app/blog/autonomous-vehicle-lobbying

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45256344

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

From Sears to Surveillance

samsullivan — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 03:27:32 +0000

Article URL: https://cardog.app/blog/sears-to-surveillance

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45245801

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Cardog Reports

samsullivan — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:36:57 +0000

Hi everyone, we built a vehicle history report offering that I wanted to share and get some feedback on.

It collects data from over 1,200 sources across North America and compiles to a single clean report like Carfax and Autocheck.

We would really value any feedback from anyone currently in the researching/buying/selling phase - what pieces of information are / were essential in your recent purchases?

Thank you!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45227063

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

We Built a Vehicle History Report from Scratch

samsullivan — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 21:42:25 +0000

Article URL: https://cardog.app/blog/reports-launch

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45204284

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Check Any Car's Recalls

samsullivan — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 23:20:46 +0000

Built a tool to help people check for recalls on their vehicles. Uses both transport canada and nhtsa data updated daily.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45020398

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by samsullivan in "GPT-5"

samsullivan — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 22:42:38 +0000

answering correctly is completely dependent on the attention blocks to somehow capture the single letter nuance given word tokenization constraints. does the attention block in kimi have a more receptive architecture to this?

New comment by samsullivan in "GPT-5"

samsullivan — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 22:35:29 +0000

Thats why they need to pay 300k for a slide designer https://openai.com/careers/creative-lead-presentation-design...