News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jopizio

jopizio on Hacker News

Ask HN: What are you reading to your kids?

Posted by jopizio on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @05:44AM
from the ask-hn dept.

I was inspired by the other thread I saw today about books for adults. For those with young children, what are you reading to them these days? Any good science and technology books appropriate for age 5 or 6? Or other non-fiction?I can strongly recommend "Mushrooms and Company" (https://greystonebooks.com/products/mushrooms-and-company). My five year old daughter and I really enjoyed it, and...

( Read More... | 32 comments | 3 points | on HN )

Ask HN: How are you using LLMs for research on a library of journal articles?

Posted by jopizio on Wednesday May 21, 2025 @12:14PM
from the ask-hn dept.

Does anyone have a nice setup for using LLMs to perform queries on their personal library of papers? It seems there are countless ways to do this sort of thing nowadays, but I can imagine that some approaches are far superior in terms of cost, speed, accuracy, etc. Are you using any of the proprietary solutions and getting nice results? Any ways to minimize privacy concerns while keeping things...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )

Ask HN: How are you using LLMs for research on a library of journal articles?

Posted by jopizio on Wednesday May 21, 2025 @03:18AM
from the ask-hn dept.

Does anyone have a nice setup for using LLMs to perform queries on their personal library of papers? It seems there are countless ways to do this sort of thing nowadays, but I can imagine that some approaches are far superior in terms of cost, speed, accuracy, etc. Are you using any of the proprietary solutions and getting nice results? Any ways to minimize privacy concerns while keeping things...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:Show HN: How I wrote a LaTeX paper without writing any LaTeX on Wednesday July 31, 2024 @06:36AM (#41117920)
I'm mostly interested in general use annotations. Basically, I want the ability to quickly circle a feature in a plot and point to it with an arrow associated with a text box with some explanation. I think the mini, floating blocks as you described could work well as long as they can be grouped and "locked" in place so they don't accidently get pushed away. OneNote has the ability to add such general annotations very easily, but there's no ability to lock the positions, and so as a result notebooks can easily become a jumbled mess.
Re:Show HN: How I wrote a LaTeX paper without writing any LaTeX on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @03:47PM (#41113393)
Very nice work. I'll definitely play around with it. For the use case of a digital lab notebook, it would be nice to be able to annotate (superimpose drawings, highlight, etc.) images and pdfs directly in the editor. This would be even more powerful if such annotations could be grouped or locked, so that their position relative to the annotated image remains fixed. This is something that all other note taking apps either miss entirely or implement poorly (or maybe there's something else out there that does this well?). Is this possible in Stempad, or are you considering adding such functionality?
Re:PID Controller Explainer (2022) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @12:22PM (#39953449)
I've used this successfully for some hardware projects: https://pidtuner.com/#/
Re:Ask HN: How do you document your hardware projects? on Thursday January 11, 2024 @03:54PM (#38958903)
This feature to add annotations directly onto the canvas is the main reason I've continued to use OneNote (despite its limitations like lacking the ability to 'group' items). I tried to mimic this functionality with various plugins in Obsidian in the past, but it didn't really work. I'll have to give it another look.
Re:Ask HN: How do you document your hardware projects? on Thursday January 11, 2024 @12:11PM (#38955166)
I'm curious to know how you're using Mermaid diagrams for hardware. Can you give an example?

Ask HN: How do you document your hardware projects?

Posted by jopizio on Thursday January 11, 2024 @08:53AM
from the ask-hn dept.

I'm curious to learn how others are documenting their hardware projects? I tend to use a combination of OneNote and Google drive, but I think there must be better alternatives. I've seen a number of others documenting their hardware projects with GitHub, and it would be interesting to learn if people have had a good experience and if they have guidelines/workflows to share.

( Read More... | 41 comments | 27 points | on HN )