Hacker News: 40four

New comment by 40four in "Our AI Midwife"

40four — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:23:12 +0000

The human medical system drops the ball all the time unfortunately. What I don’t understand is how they didn’t see that giant fibroid from ultrasound alone. An MRI shouldn’t have been needed. Then the doctor trying to talk them out of the MRI, I hope they were embarrassed after. So upsetting. My wife’s friend had something similar happen after 2-3 years of unsuccessful fertility treatment, then they finally realized she had endometriosis. Seems like that should have been looked into sooner.

New comment by 40four in " prevents me from logging into Vanguard"

40four — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:05:01 +0000

Interesting, I didn’t know that. My knowledge of cryptography is admittedly not great. 20 characters limit is pretty aggressive though.

New comment by 40four in "Hole Punch: Sling your spaceship around gravitational fields"

40four — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 19:25:31 +0000

The ability to subtract mass is definitely needed. All you can do is click “undo” and try again. You can drag the holes around too. Still pretty fun, I played 5 or 6 levels

New comment by 40four in " prevents me from logging into Vanguard"

40four — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 01:58:56 +0000

I’ve ran into this same issue numerous times on different platforms. They silently enforce a max length, unannounced to you, then you can’t log in later until you figure out the correct length.

I guess I don’t really understand the reasons any engineering team would limit password length, but at least implement in a way that is apparent to the user. Successfully saving a password that is different than the user expects is wild.

Moreover, in the case of a financial institution like Vanguard, limiting password length feels particularly offensive.

New comment by 40four in "A Privacy Analysis of Web and Mobile Conversational AI Agents [pdf]"

40four — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:31:56 +0000

It certainly doesn’t expose it to anyone else besides you (when you are logged in), unless you explicitly select the share option.

New comment by 40four in "Show HN: Koi.rest – watch some fish and regain your balance"

40four — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 01:20:58 +0000

I haven’t tried it on desktop, but it’s running silky smooth for me on iPhone. No lag at all. I see some others complaining of that too so not sure what the issue is.

New comment by 40four in "Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain"

40four — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:44:34 +0000

They didn’t claim the EU regulations forced Meta to ban anything. They claimed Meta decided “the juice is not worth the squeeze” when it comes to compliance. I don’t know who’s right to be fair, but I haven’t heard about any other instances of this with Meta, have you? What is it about this particular case? Never heard of this happening in the US. Possibly just an isolated incident blown out of proportion?

New comment by 40four in "Flet 1.0 – Build cross-platform apps in Python"

40four — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 02:25:50 +0000

I built a few Kivy apps years ago at an old job. It was a little clunky, but it got the job done. Haven’t heard of this framework yet, I wonder how compares in developer experience? Anyone have any experience with it?

The problem is I don’t want to use Python for everything that bad. If I’m going to reach for a cross platform toolkit these days, I’m personally going to reach for Tauri. Could be useful if you’re really married to Python I suppose.

New comment by 40four in "Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations"

40four — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:02:37 +0000

Incorrect. As others have pointed out, BirdNet is a “traditional” neural network. The amount of compute needed to train something like this is many orders of magnitude less than an LLM. Something like this could be trained on local hardware with enough juice, or by renting a handful of GPU’s

New comment by 40four in "Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit"

40four — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 01:12:39 +0000

Oh thanks for the explanation. Shows you how much I know about law!

New comment by 40four in "Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit"

40four — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:58:51 +0000

Your feeling turned it to be correct. Amazon lost the case in the appellate court.

New comment by 40four in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

40four — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:49:53 +0000

I don’t see why the two are mutually exclusive to be honest. I’m not a mathematician, but I’m a software engineer and whether I like it or not, AI has changed my field dramatically forever. I understand the distaste for the way AI might be affecting the field of mathematics, but the genie is out of the bottle, and it will never be the same. It just took a little longer for it to hit the math community. Software engineers have been debating and coming to terms with the new reality for a few years now.

New comment by 40four in "New York thoracic surgeon: "For many patients 9/11 is not over""

40four — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:30:07 +0000

Reader mode circumvents the pay wall on many news sites, including this one :)

New comment by 40four in "iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max"

40four — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:10:07 +0000

Nothing. I’m going to run my 13 Pro Max into the ground. I do find the “Reference images” interesting, but not so much in going to run out and buy one. Other than than it’s the same old “everything is better” marketing shtick

New comment by 40four in "iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max"

40four — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:03:25 +0000

The only thing that’s interesting to me about this release are the “Reference Images”. Seems like it could be a genuinely useful feature, especially in a world of AI generated content. I wonder if a similar system exists in other cameras?

New comment by 40four in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

40four — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:16:50 +0000

Not with current technology. That was kind of the physics “trick” in the book ‘Project Hail Mary’, where the astrophage provided enough energy and propulsion to be able to sustain 1G of acceleration.

New comment by 40four in "Shopify acquires Tailwind"

40four — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:11:14 +0000

Shopify is a publicly traded company, and they own a significant share of the whole e-commerce market, they aren’t going anywhere lol :)

New comment by 40four in "Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days"

40four — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:45:10 +0000

I grew up in prime N64 era, and played countless hours on the console. But I definitely never played, let alone even heard of the Snowboard Kids title. How did I miss this game? Am I the only one?

New comment by 40four in "AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint"

40four — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:38:16 +0000

Don’t apologize. This was a very fascinating read, and a good technical write up, especially for you first even HN post. It’s not your fault others didn’t look at the username :)

New comment by 40four in "AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint"

40four — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:36:11 +0000

No you are talking to the actual author of the article. It’s not weird for the author to comment on their own article