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davidsojevic

Re:Ask HN: What is the most obscure book you own? on Monday October 12, 2026 @07:30AM (#50054816)
It'll either be my copy of "The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest" or my copy of "Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?"
Re:Any nerds out there who've read a lot of research papers? on Thursday September 24, 2026 @09:41PM (#49839245)
I’m in the same boat that I don’t think the abstract itself of any I’ve read has been memorable in the slightest, but they usually serve to give me a tiny glimpse of whether or not I might find the underlying content interesting.

For example, I quite enjoyed the paper “Web Browser Fingerprinting Using Only Cascading Style Sheets,” but its abstract isn’t anything overly exciting. The title itself conveyed enough information for me to gather my interest, its attract just confirmed it was probably worth reading it.

I was actually eyeing off a few pre-1990 domains, including sesqui.net, earlier this evening -- I generally use the service "ExpiredDomains.net" for searching and sorting by "Whois Birth Year" to find the old ones. Despite it's name, it's actually incredibly useful just to search across various domain marketplaces regardless of if they're expiring or not.

(Un)fortunately most of the super cool ones are way outside of what I budget for my "cool things to have (that don't take up any physical space)" spend.

I have a problem with buying domains that just seem fun or cool to me. For example, I bought `sysalt.com` -- why? because it was registered in 1992 and that seemed cool to me.

What have I done with it? Nothing. What do I plan to do with it? Nothing yet either! Do I still want to get a domain that was registered earlier than 1992 just because it's cool? You know it!

Re:Lucasart's Afterlife on Thursday September 17, 2026 @05:38AM (#49738385)
I bought a copy of Afterlife from one of the Scholastic catalogues when I was in primary school after already having had a blast with Sim City 2000.

I absolutely loved the graphics and the theme and everything, but as it turns out, I had absolutely no idea how to play it and never got far enough into it to really appreciate its gameplay.

I should probably give it another go as an adult who has a bit more patience for reading through instructions than I did as a kid.

Re:Aphantasia Beginner's Guide on Thursday August 27, 2026 @11:18AM (#49466259)
I could answer "the ball probably rolls off the table" and to everything else; I had no answer and would have to choose after the fact if pushed for an answer.
Re:Aphantasia Beginner's Guide on Thursday August 27, 2026 @10:59AM (#49465984)
I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier.

I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"

When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.

Re:Clerky Is Joining Stripe on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @07:04PM (#49457123)
Congratulations to Darby, Chris, and the team!

Clerky is an absolutely amazing product and the team there are equally as amazing.

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026) on Sunday August 09, 2026 @02:20PM (#49234050)
Working on a web-based image editor with plenty of customisation and support for most Photoshop features.

Built overwhelmingly in vanilla JS with a couple of WASM modules for it.

It’s generally very performant across the app so far, but there’s still a handful of features that are functional but subpar in terms of performance that I need to address.

Re:Ask HN: What are your personal websites? on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @01:16AM (#48916549)
https://david.sojevic.com/

It's currently just where I'm posting miscellaneous experiments I've tinkered with (mainly just about trying to abuse CSS at this stage)

The most comprehensive tool I've built so far was a JSONPath playground [0] when I was working on a game where I found myself writing a fair bit of JSONPath (well, JSONPath Plus specifically) expressions by hand and wanted to be able to test them out in the same way that I would on regex101 when writing regular expressions.

I realistically probably would have only saved myself less than an hour of crafting those expressions if the tool had already existed (with this level of detail, there are lots of many simpler ones already for it), but I would have spent a solid 40-50 hours of bouncing between manually crafting and writing detailed instructions to direct the agents to get this tool there.

[0] https://jsonpath101.com/

This is actually a very well-polished game and I think you've definitely got that core gacha distillation down pat!

I love that you can solve math problems to unlock more rolls and that you can buy packs and then the "slicing" of the packs is very satisfying too.

Show HN: CSS-Only 3D/2D 1D Chess

https://david.sojevic.com/projects/css-only-1d-chess/

After seeing the 1D-Chess project on the Hacker News front page somewhat recently, the idea came to me to try and make a CSS-only version of 1D chess because it seemed like it might be a good candidate for it.There is absolutely no JS used for the interactivity or game state for this variant; it's all pure HTML + CSS, and I've added a few fun things along the way just to exercise those...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
I work at SerpApi [0], and we offer a free tier that may serve your needs if you're just looking to do programmatic searches periodically.

Much of the reason people go with a service like ours is because of the difficulty with rolling your own reliable solution. Happy to answer any questions you might have as well!

[0]: https://serpapi.com/

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @07:44PM (#47745734)
The most recent project I’ve been working through has been a tool for JSON query evaluation and debugging [0] inspired by how easy regex101 is to use.

I couldn’t find any that were as nice or as powerful to use for writing JSONPath queries, so instead of spending an hour crafting and testing them manually, I spent >40 hours building this tool to save myself half an hour.

[0]: https://jsonpath101.com/

Re:Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related? on Thursday April 09, 2026 @06:34AM (#47701813)
I've got a few things on my plate that I bounce between building for fun:

1. A point-and-click adventure game: making it with incredibly heavy technical constraints "just because"

2. A coding puzzle game of rapidly escalating difficulty

3. Part of #2 had me needing to craft some JSON Path queries and I felt like there wasn't anything nice to build and test them with, so I built this tool for it (inspired by the amazing regex101): https://jsonpath101.com/

4. A website where I write about text-based browser games

Re:LLM scraper bots are overloading acme.com's HTTPS server on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @01:45AM (#47685823)
I don't mean that users are following the links to `acme.com` and `demo.com` type domains in documentation; I mean that bots are likely finding and following many links to them because of their widespread use in documentation.

If you search for `site:github.com "acme.com"` in Google, you'll find numerous instances of the domain being used in contrived links in documentation as an example of how URLs might be structured on an arbitrary domain and also in issues to demonstrate a fully qualified URL without giving away the actual domain people were using.

This means that numerous links are pointing to non-existent paths on `acme.com` because of the nature of how people are using them in documentation and examples.

I suspect part of the issue is that people are still using things like `acme.com` and `demo.com` as an example domain in their documentation and tests instead of relying on `example.com` which is reserved exactly for this purpose [0]

[0]: https://www.iana.org/domains/reserved

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025) on Monday December 08, 2025 @06:18AM (#46191004)
SerpApi | https://serpapi.com | Junior to Senior Fullstack Engineer multiple positions | Customer Success Engineer | Hiring Coordinator | Python/Ruby/PHP/Js/Rust/Cotlin/C#/Crystal/Nim/Elixir Developer Advocate positions | Based in Austin, TX but remote-first structure | Full-time | ONSITE or FULLY REMOTE | $150K - 180K a year 1099 for US or local avg + 20% for outside the US SerpApi is the leading API to scrape and parse search engine results. We deeply support Google, Google Maps, Google Images, Bing, Baidu, and a lot more.

Our current stack is Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, and React.JS. We are looking for more Junior and Senior FullStack Engineers. We have an awesome work environment: We are a remote first company (before Covid!). We do continuous integration, continuous deployments, code reviews, code pairings, profit sharing, and most of communication is async via GitHub.

We value super strongly transparency, do open books, have a public roadmap, and contribute to the EFF.

Apply at: https://serpapi.com/careers

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025) on Thursday November 06, 2025 @07:38AM (#45834556)
SerpApi | https://serpapi.com | Junior to Senior Fullstack Engineer multiple positions | Customer Success Engineer | Hiring Coordinator | Python/Ruby/PHP/Js/Rust/Cotlin/C#/Crystal/Nim/Elixir Developer Advocate positions | Based in Austin, TX but remote-first structure | Full-time | ONSITE or FULLY REMOTE | $150K - 180K a year 1099 for US or local avg + 20% for outside the US SerpApi is the leading API to scrape and parse search engine results. We deeply support Google, Google Maps, Google Images, Bing, Baidu, and a lot more.

Our current stack is Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, and React.JS. We are looking for more Junior and Senior FullStack Engineers. We have an awesome work environment: We are a remote first company (before Covid!). We do continuous integration, continuous deployments, code reviews, code pairings, profit sharing, and most of communication is async via GitHub.

We value super strongly transparency, do open books, have a public roadmap, and contribute to the EFF.

Apply at: https://serpapi.com/careers

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025) on Monday September 01, 2025 @07:48PM (#45097648)
SerpApi | https://serpapi.com | Junior to Senior Fullstack Engineer multiple positions | Customer Success Engineer | Hiring Coordinator | Python/Ruby/PHP/Js/Rust/Cotlin/C#/Crystal/Nim/Elixir Developer Advocate positions | Based in Austin, TX but remote-first structure | Full-time | ONSITE or FULLY REMOTE | $150K - 180K a year 1099 for US or local avg + 20% for outside the US SerpApi is the leading API to scrape and parse search engine results. We deeply support Google, Google Maps, Google Images, Bing, Baidu, and a lot more.

Our current stack is Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, and React.JS. We are looking for more Junior and Senior FullStack Engineers.

We have an awesome work environment: We are a remote first company (before Covid!). We do continuous integration, continuous deployments, code reviews, code pairings, profit sharing, and most of communication is async via GitHub.

We value super strongly transparency, do open books, have a public roadmap, and contribute to the EFF.

Apply at: https://serpapi.com/careers

You can contact me at david at serpapi.com if it's been a few days and you think your application may have fallen through the cracks.

Re:Show HN: Whittle – A Shrinking Word Game on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @08:30PM (#44806268)
I like the idea of it; though I think the latest update (around puzzle solveability?) may have broken the game as I'm unable to begin in any browser I've tried:

    Uncaught TypeError: can't access property "puzzleLog", G is null
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) on Monday July 28, 2025 @12:21AM (#44707215)
If you're interested in giving the tool a shot, feel free to shoot me an email (take my username and insert an @ after david and a .com at the end) and I'll happily give you access after I get it up somewhere publicly accessible -- possibly in the next couple of weeks.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) on Monday July 28, 2025 @12:18AM (#44707203)
We have ASIC (Australian Securities & Investments Commission) that handles company registrations, notices, etc. and they maintain a register of insolvency notices and liquidations.

This can be a reasonable place to go to look for distressed businesses/assets too and I've considered using them as a source with my aggregation/search engine, though they don't really have the same type of information as a business for sale listing so they fall somewhat outside of the main type of results that I otherwise display.

Other reasonable places I've seen too, though in incredibly low volumes (think 0-3 listings a month), are commercial auction houses/sites where they'll list a business for sale or the full assets of a business. The main issue with that it is that they're so low volume that I'm not sure it's worth spending the time ingesting them this early on while there's still many other larger listing sources.

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) on Sunday July 27, 2025 @08:58PM (#44706152)
In Australia, brokers need to be licenced real estate agents (even as a buyers agent in many states), so I suspect there's a relatively decent culture of people who are serious about selling their business going through brokers and resulting in listings on at least one of the major platforms.

There's just shy of 90,000 unique listings I'm tracking (i.e. after de-duplication) on these platforms.

On the traditional classifieds sites and things like Facebook groups focusing on these, there's a significantly smaller number of listings/ads for business sales (e.g. a couple of thousand).

I think where there are definitely hidden gems is where there are many small business owners at or close to retirement age where they haven't planned for a sale at all. For example, a family member nearing retirement age has a small business they're just intending to shut down because they "couldn't be bothered" selling it. I've heard people have had reasonable success just approaching local businesses like this that have older owners OR asking accountants if they have any clients that are thinking of selling.

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) on Sunday July 27, 2025 @07:17PM (#44705591)
I've been working on a "businesses for sale" aggregation/search engine that sources data from all of the major "business for sale" type platforms in Australia and de-duplicates listings, extracts data like revenue/profit/etc, and normalises it all for quick browsing.

I have a couple of family members and friends who are looking to buy businesses (separately), and it's been much more time-consuming than you'd expect just to browse through listings to determine if they're relevant to you or not.

The platforms seem to mostly follow the same format as real estate listings (as the brokers seemingly rely on the same software/data formats), with one big blob of freeform text that contains the various information that you'd ideally just be reading at a glance.

Add to the fact that there are over 15 "business for sale" type platforms in Australia where they have a minimum of 1,000 listings and at least 10 platforms with between 100-1,000 listings, you can easily burn hours looking through them individually.

I'm currently covering 12 of the top 15 (ranked by number of listings they contain) platforms and I just tinker away once or twice a month, adding support for new platforms.

I should probably release it and get some feedback at some point, but I suffer a bit from "it needs more polish before I let people other than my family and friends use it"

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025) on Monday June 30, 2025 @10:11AM (#44423531)
I've been working on and off on a client-side* SERP rank tracker: https://serpowl.com/

I wanted a simpler alternative to the self-hosted SerpBear tool that I could use and share, so this is the result.

It uses SerpApi (where I work) as the data source for what actually executes the SERP scraping because it's much too complex to have purely client-side, but 100% of the rank tracking portion is client-side.

It's not fully complete and there's definitely rough edges with it, but because of the data source, it supports a large number of search engines right off the bat.

I work at SerpApi and we offer a Bing Search API[0] that is very easy to integrate with.

[0] https://serpapi.com/bing-search-api

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @07:02PM (#43864315)
SerpApi | https://serpapi.com | Junior to Senior Fullstack Engineer positions | Customer Success Engineer | and more... | Based in Austin, TX but remote-first structure | Full-time | FULLY REMOTE or ONSITE | $150K - 180K a year 1099 for US or local avg + 20% for outside the US

SerpApi is the leading API to scrape and parse search engine results. We deeply support Google, Google Maps, Google Images, Bing, Baidu, and a lot more.

We are still hiring - we have so much work and we're after great people to help out! I only started at SerpApi late last year myself and can't recommend it enough.

We do continuous integration, continuous deployments, code reviews, code pairings, profit sharing, and most of communication is async via GitHub.

Our current stack is Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, and React.JS. We are looking for more Junior and Senior FullStack Engineers. We have an awesome work environment: We are a remote first company (before Covid!).

We very strongly value transparency, do open books, have a public roadmap, and contribute to the EFF.

When you apply, please mention that you saw David's post on HackerNews.

Apply at: https://serpapi.com/careers

If you've previously applied and didn't make it through, please feel free to reapply if it's been a while and you think you would make a better fit than previously.

You can contact me at david at serpapi.com if it's been a few days and you think your application may have fallen through the cracks.

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