Hacker News: AidenVennis

New comment by AidenVennis in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

AidenVennis — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 06:43:59 +0000

Personally I do this as well now with a lot of stuff. I've recently had a lot of issues with my knee, which was operated on about 20 years ago because of a torn cruciate ligament, and now it was acting up again. The specialized doctor did a x-ray (which I thought was pointless because I was sure it was not bones related). Long story short, my left knee is 20 years older then me because of increased knee wear and tear. I don't have a doubt the doctor is right, but I did doubt I memorized everything correctly, and later on I had some more low effort questions I didn't want to bother them with like what movements should I prevent and specifically what training I should be doing at the gym.

Thankfully I got a pretty detailed report that I couldn't read because of all the medical terms. I've fed this to Claude and asked for a human readable conclusion and it repeated pretty much everything the doctor told me, which was great, I now have a readable report for future reference. Secondly I asked it questions about what movements I should and shouldn't do, and it eventually I made a gym plan to improve stability and prevent any more wear and tear in my knee. Lastly I validated this with the assigned physiotherapist, and the plan I created with Claude was perfect!

I probably won't ever use AI as a second opinion, but I would definitely use it to ask numerous silly questions that would help me in day to day life.

New comment by AidenVennis in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

AidenVennis — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:53:29 +0000

Working on a flight tracking tool that records the landing and takeoff actions of a local airfield to get insights in how they determine on which runway a takeoff or landing is assigned. Problem is that all the free aircraft api's don't register a landing or takeoff act and also not on which runway.

The airport in question has just one runway and is situated in a dense population area. Both sides of the runway are used (officially noted as two runways) for takeoff and landing causing noise complaints in the neighborhood. The airfield says it assigns a runway based on wind direction and speed, and when there is much traffic they relieve one of the two directions to prevent going over a threshold. My goals is to check if they follow their own rules and just to have a insight if my annoyance over why there are so many aircraft over my house and not on the other side is justified or not.

As a frontender this is quite challenging. I'm using Express with typescript to write the backend. Usually I get bored quite quickly because progress is not going fast enough, so I'm using a lot of AI to speed things up.

I'm checking for aircraft in a 5km circle every 30 seconds. If a aircraft is below and above x feet than I'm going to track it every 5 seconds. Between each entry I'm checking the coordinates and altitude to determine which runway (direction) is used and if it's taking off or landing. I'm also using another API to get weather data like wind speed and wind direction. Finally this is saved in a JSON file (for now) and loaded into the frontend to be displayed in a table.

I do have a working prototype, and removing a few bugs. At the moment it's checking the logs after a day of collecting to check for errors, fixing those errors and validating the fix the next day. When it's done I'm planning to open source it so that anyone can use it if needed.

New comment by AidenVennis in "Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns"

AidenVennis — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:28:20 +0000

The website is missing information on which languages it supports. I was hoping for Typescript, but after registering I see that it's only Python at the moment and it seems Java and C++ are coming soon...

New comment by AidenVennis in "Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts"

AidenVennis — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 09:06:40 +0000

Not sure if this is the same for the USA, but worker shortage is the main reason why self-checkout became popular here in Europe at least. Aging population, very low birthrate and higher educated people all contributed to this problem (although not for all countries in the EU).

New comment by AidenVennis in "I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper"

AidenVennis — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 07:49:20 +0000

At least in The Netherlands, about 15 years ago when I was in high school, timetables where set for a whole semester, but absent teachers where quite normal meaning some lessons where canceled. Replacements where not always available and where usually only deployed when it was known a teacher was absent for extended time.

As a teen this was great because sometimes you could stay in bed longer, be out earlier and not having to carry the extra books (not sure if that still is a problem now).

edit: I just remember we even had call trees to call your classmates in the morning if classes got canceled. This was before the internet, making it not 15 years ago but at least 20, probably more. I'm getting old...

New comment by AidenVennis in "Replace Philips Hue Automation with Home Assistant's"

AidenVennis — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 10:21:55 +0000

I actually have both IKEA bulbs and Hue bulbs, but the appliance is different for both. I use the Hue bulbs where I want high quality lightning like the living room, kitchen, bathroom and office. I use the IKEA bulbs in places where I don't really care how good the lightning is; the hallways, toilet, garage etc. Automations for IKEA bulbs are in Home Assistant and for Hue they are in the Hue app.

IMO Home Assistant doesn't really do a good job with controlling the lights. It doesn't have the creative abilities to create or choose predefined "cool" scenes. Besides I don't want to know how much work I need to do in Home Assistant to re-configure the smart switches from Hue and their features.

In the end I can still control the Hue bulbs with Home Assistant if I want to. The Hue app doesn't prevent you from controlling the Hue bulbs from Home Assistant

New comment by AidenVennis in "Spray-foam insulation makes homes unable to be mortgaged"

AidenVennis — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 13:38:55 +0000

This is why you don't lease anything for your house. For example in The Netherlands you can lease a central heating boiler. I even have a friend that leased a couch once. It's always more expensive and you will have problems with your house when you want or need to sell it (except for the couch of course, that's just stupid...).

New comment by AidenVennis in "Cities need more trees"

AidenVennis — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 09:52:11 +0000

Streetview shows this very nicely for Mexico City. I wonder if having so many trees in the city would make chopping down of few trees for some new public development less frowned upon by residents?

New comment by AidenVennis in "Haier Europe Eases Off on Legal Threat and Seeks Dialogue"

AidenVennis — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 13:01:07 +0000

This is another amazing story (after MyQ) to follow where public support is the main driver. I love seeing this support in times where the internet primary existence seems to be monetization lately. I do hope Andre wins this and continues this effort, I would even be pretty sure he could open a successful crowd funding action for legal fees if it needs to come to this.

New comment by AidenVennis in "Coffee grounds make concrete 30% stronger"

AidenVennis — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 12:55:21 +0000

I think in this case the win is that you would need less of the other resources to make the same amount of concrete.

New comment by AidenVennis in "3M reaches $10.3B settlement over PFAS contamination of water systems"

AidenVennis — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 12:50:09 +0000

Last week a Dutch research channel made an episode out of the PFAS coverup by a former Dupont factory in The Netherlands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3kzHc-eV88 It's a good video in English with some subtitled Dutch interviews containing a lot of official memo's and internal documents from Dupont and 3M. Funny thing is that they already started installing ground water cleaning installations in the 90's because they measured very high levels of PFAS in the ground, even larger than their factories in the US.

New comment by AidenVennis in "The Dutch benefits scandal: a cautionary tale for algorithmic enforcement"

AidenVennis — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 10:14:42 +0000

> Taxes are very hard for non-natives

Oh, taxes are very hard for natives as well. The whole tax system doesn't make any sense at all and several elected governments have promised to make it simpler for a long time now.

New comment by AidenVennis in "Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?"

AidenVennis — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 16:15:41 +0000

I'm having the exact same thing right now. If I reflect on what happend last year I think I burned out after a particular hard issue with my last employee; I had no help from my co-workers and was doing it all by myself. The client was constantly breathing down my neck to ask when it's done and why it's taking so long and eventually I finished it, reduced the bundle size of the website by almost 2/3 and was really happy with the result. The client tho wasn't happy because a performance number from Pagespeed didn't increase as much as they hoped and they where unhappy because it cost soo much time and money. I was done with this shit and left seeking happiness elsewhere.

Started at a new company almost half a year ago thinking a smaller company without clients, without time registration and with a single application to focus on would fix all my problems. It did for the first few months, but now I'm having the exact same issue where I really don't have the motivation to do stuff... I do have to say I also moved in to another home a few months ago and spend a lot of time fixing stuff in our new home, maybe overdoing it a bit there, so it can also be that I'm just a bit exhausted right now. Also, I notice that winter time here in Western Europe is a bitch, so getting longer days again would do my mood a lot of good.

I think I have had these moments in the past as well and I think eventually they will pass again. I'm going to take a bit more care of myself by doing some more physical training, eating healthier and seeing friends more. It just sucks for now...

New comment by AidenVennis in "Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)"

AidenVennis — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 13:34:55 +0000

First I thought the article (or maybe promotion) didn't gave an answer to the topic question, but it actually did; the need to sanitizing inputs destroyed what myspace enabled. The need for security is bigger than the need for customisation nowadays, you can't have a social network that has a big security flaw because users could edit the code on their pages. The product this article promotes isn't a solution, you still need developers to create the components users want, and users are not going to send requests to add something they think would be "fun" or "weird".