Hacker News: samsullivan

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...

VIN: The 17-character code that runs the automotive world

samsullivan — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 01:26:14 +0000

Article URL: https://cardog.app/blog/whats-a-vin

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44819668

Points: 47

# Comments: 18

Show HN: I built the fastest VIN decoder

samsullivan — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 23:42:58 +0000

Decodes any VIN in ~20ms with zero network calls. I compressed the entire NHTSA vehicle database into a 21MB SQLite file that runs completely offline.

No API keys, no rate limits, no servers. Just download once and decode forever. Works in browsers, Node.js, Cloudflare Workers - anywhere SQLite runs.

Would love any feedback and to answer any questions about the implementation.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44792646

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by samsullivan in "Full-Breadth Developers"

samsullivan — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 23:35:44 +0000

"figure out how your employer makes money and position your ass directly in-between the corporate bank account and your customers' credit card information."

we're going to learn why companies were invented the hard way this decade aren't we

New comment by samsullivan in "Ask HN: What are some cool or underrated tech companies based in Canada?"

samsullivan — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 23:53:22 +0000

Im building https://cardog.app out of Toronto

Trying to make car research, buying and ownership easy