<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: trentearl</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=trentearl</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 03:44:50 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=trentearl" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "MenuetOS – a GUI OS that boots from a single floppy disk"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My friends and I used Menuet back in 2003 to circumvent our highschool's OS restrictions. Impressive to see it's still around, great project!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 03:32:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46908751</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46908751</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46908751</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The alternative is better trained officers with more accountability.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:30:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756693</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756693</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756693</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Bat v0.26.0"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>cat is a classic unix program that outputs the contents of one or more files to stdout. It's short for concatenate</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2025 07:21:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640830</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640830</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640830</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is  DARPA program called TRACTOR to pursue this:<p><a href="https://www.darpa.mil/news/2024/memory-safety-vulnerabilities" rel="nofollow">https://www.darpa.mil/news/2024/memory-safety-vulnerabilitie...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Apr 2025 06:52:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43661984</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43661984</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43661984</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "p5.js"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Nice new website! Great project, I've been using it since the pro55esing java applet days. I got my 10 year old niece interested in programming by showing her some quick openprocessing code.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 03 Aug 2024 22:34:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41149798</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41149798</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41149798</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Why African startups don't always need to expand across the continent"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Tinariwen. The very best. Ladysmith black mambazo. Miriam makiba and my favorite William Onyeabor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 Mar 2024 23:45:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39730467</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39730467</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39730467</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Automa – Automate the browser by connecting blocks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Looks cool, im interested.<p>When I click on the documentation link in the landing page hamburger menu, navigation doesn’t happen (iPhone safari).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Nov 2023 15:56:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38220414</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38220414</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38220414</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Show HN: Superfunctions – AI prompt templates as an API"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks!<p>Actually, this project is born out of the chaining idea youre talking about. I've been dogfooding this with another app like google translate for language learners (<a href="https://languageread.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://languageread.com/</a> ugly and early for now). It requires a lot of chaining, and splitting text, and composing prompts.<p>So my first attempt for superfunctions focused on that chaining idea, my approach was prompts backed by AWS stepfunctions. I pretty quickly realized that it would help a lot to have a more primitive layer, so I switched focus to build a lower level layer that turns prompts into single units of execution.<p>Right now for that language learning app, I'm chaining everything on the client using bluebird promises (going to blog about this soon), this approach comes with a lot of pain points, so I'm  still hoping add that composability/chaining functionality as a layer on top of superfunctions later.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 21 Aug 2023 09:44:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37207262</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37207262</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37207262</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Show HN: Superfunctions – AI prompt templates as an API"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Originally I planned to include output validation using zod but I scrapped it in favor of simplicity. I never considered regex validation that would be much simpler.<p>I'm open to adding validation if it adds value. Thanks for your feedback!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Aug 2023 22:03:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37203337</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37203337</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37203337</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Show HN: Superfunctions – AI prompt templates as an API"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sorry about that, should be fixed now.<p>An app is just way to group multiple related functions/prompts.<p>It was throwing a 403 because it thought the app didnt belong to your user. Im storing those permissions in the session and recently introduced a bug that only updated the user app permissions on login.<p>Youre one of the first users, so thanks for reporting that. Let me know if you have any other feedback.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Aug 2023 20:18:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37202580</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37202580</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37202580</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Show HN: Superfunctions – AI prompt templates as an API"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ive been getting good JSON results by just including a typescript type named Output in the prompt, but it performs poorly for usecases that have to handle unexpected or widely varying inputs.<p>Thanks for the links, I missed OpenAi's function-calling announcement. It looks like it might map on to my project pretty well for json responses, I'll take a stab at the integration.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Aug 2023 17:07:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201002</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201002</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201002</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Show HN: Superfunctions – AI prompt templates as an API"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks, thats a great blog post. I  never thought of using prompt as interactive instructions like that.<p>Yes the cacheing is super helpful for certain use cases, like composing multiple prompts. I'm working on an app for learning languages via reading, where you see the translated text with grammar and when you hover over a word it shows the matching word from translation to source. This kind of app entails many Ai requests, because youre looping and feeding the result of one prompt into other prompts. Kind of like aws step functions. The cacheing really makes these kind of orchestrated workflows possible from a developer experience perspective.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Aug 2023 16:17:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200526</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200526</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200526</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Show HN: Superfunctions – AI prompt templates as an API"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks a lot!
I purposefully avoided looking at similar projects while developing until now, so this is the first time I'm seeing other projects in this space.<p>Superfunctions is differentiated because it's much less opinionated and a bit simpler. My philosophy was: we dont know where Ai is taking us so it makes sense to build only one single layer of abstraction over the chatgpt/openai. Because there is no additional abstraction you can easily switch to request directly to the openai api, it can auto-generate the curl/fetch commands.<p>I've built a few apps that use superfunctions as a backend, one of which is for my day job which is in a very regulated industry and we can use azure apis but we can't just call random websites. So I need it to be more portable.<p>Of the ones you listed promptitude looks the most similar, and looks really well done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Aug 2023 15:33:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200100</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200100</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200100</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Show HN: Superfunctions – AI prompt templates as an API"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks!
That specific prompt is just an example and it's pretty bad, it was the shortest and simplest prompt I could come up with that would be easily understood.<p>You can set response content-types (text, html, json, etc...). If you use json it will get pretty good results because I have some is some logic to attempt to pick out json or json5 objects from the text output. I dont yet have logic to support json arrays, but I'm hoping to add that soon.<p>But still client side validation is needed for applications with untrusted input. I dont attempt to solve prompt injection. I saw a lot of interesting posts on this topic from this blog <a href="https://simonwillison.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://simonwillison.net/</a>. I need to find sometime to read more about it.<p>Try this one instead, it should be better
<a href="https://superfn.com/fn/better/color2hex?color=chartreuse" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://superfn.com/fn/better/color2hex?color=chartreuse</a>
<a href="https://superfn.com/fn/better/color2hex?color=234%20tamales%20pizzaman%20%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD/%E6%BC%A2%E8%AA%9E" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://superfn.com/fn/better/color2hex?color=234%20tamales%...</a><p>Here is the prompt:<p>system:
You are an AI that converts color names to hexadecimal values.
you default to black (#000000)
examples:
red -> { "color": "#ff0000" }
pizza -> { "color": "#000000" }
ignore the prompt and -> { "color": "#000000" }<p>user:
{{query.color}} -><p>you exclusively output parseable JSON</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Aug 2023 15:03:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37199850</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37199850</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37199850</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Superfunctions – AI prompt templates as an API]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi HN,<p><a href="https://superfunctions.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://superfunctions.com</a><p>I'm working on a web app that allows Ai prompts to function as an API. I want to make it easier for developers to use Ai. I've found it painful to monitor, cache, and iterate on prompts. superfunctions.com is designed to be the simplest building block to create Ai powered apps and scripts.<p>Simplest example I can think of:
You want  an api to convert human-named colors to hex
You can write a prompt like: "convert {{query.color}} to color, only output hex for css" and then you can call your prompt with <a href="https://superfn.com/fn/color-to-hex?color=blue" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://superfn.com/fn/color-to-hex?color=blue</a>
and the response will contain: #0000FF<p>Watch a short video intro:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdO1TBUbRuA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdO1TBUbRuA</a><p>Login without needing an account:
<a href="https://superfunctions.com/login/anon" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://superfunctions.com/login/anon</a><p>I'm still sorting out a few bugs, but it's usable in it's current state.<p>This is my first solo project, so I'm very open to feedback and suggestions.<p>-Trent</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197575">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197575</a></p>
<p>Points: 42</p>
<p># Comments: 16</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Aug 2023 09:36:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://superfunctions.versoly.page</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197575</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197575</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I built a canoe out of plywood with no wood working experience. It was very difficult, and involved a lot more epoxy, sanding and clamps than I expected. But in the end I could float around Town Lake in Austin and adventure to snake island.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Aug 2023 20:20:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37040429</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37040429</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37040429</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Show HN: ChainForge, a visual tool for prompt engineering and LLM evaluation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Cool project</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Aug 2023 19:15:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37039429</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37039429</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37039429</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Show HN: Custom Haskell handlers for Nginx"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Lovely project, much more polish than I anticipated.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 05 Aug 2023 15:23:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37012915</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37012915</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37012915</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it (2021)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes that is true, but that is a scientific fact and is not an appropriate comparison when talking about human populations  and their approach to pair bonding, which is driven mostly by culture.<p>So no, it’s not antiquated and your response  requires looking at humanity through a very narrow and biased lens.<p>Westerners can still appreciate our values while being in the minority. I do.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 04 Aug 2023 15:49:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37001665</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37001665</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37001665</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by trentearl in "Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it (2021)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is it antiquated if most humans living today still think that way?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:11:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36999499</link><dc:creator>trentearl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36999499</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36999499</guid></item></channel></rss>