Hacker News: FiniteIntegral

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "PCB devboard the size of a USB-C plug"

FiniteIntegral — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 07:55:39 +0000

It's not that things get more expensive as they get smaller. As long as you're within reasonable tolerances it can be more cost effective. There is very little reason in a consumer-grade product, especially a devboard, to push any major fabs' tolerances. SMD components are grain-sized and you can make traces pretty thin.

For example, this project is a 2-layer PCB. Those are bog standard. With this small of a footprint it can be printed on a single surface and cut out. The schematic they posted keeps everything on a single surface for print. This is also an operation any fab can easily perform. If you order from China, even cheaper (even accounting for duty cost + S&H).

I'd be more concerned about the MCU and the components rather than the cost of a custom PCB.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "LLM Writing Tropes.md"

FiniteIntegral — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:18:11 +0000

A subtle tell for generated text is just how damn flat it is to read. Not that technical documentation require some form of grand prose, but how unspecific the text can truly get. Reading a high school persuasive essay can have more detail, and those are often just written for a grade.

I can understand someone needing help with writing but getting an agent to do the job for you feels like a personal defeat.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "Freemediaheckyeah – A collection of free stuff on the internet"

FiniteIntegral — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 06:33:29 +0000

I've used this site for years, I originally found it off their subreddit. When they finally moved to a dedicated site it really improved the whole user experience from whatever reddit CSS was doing.

The admins keep it consistently updated and remove problem sources on a regular basis.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents"

FiniteIntegral — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:55:34 +0000

Yet at the same time "towards" does not equate to "nearing". Relative terms for relative statements. Until there's a light at the end of the tunnel, we don't know how far we've got.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "GPT-5"

FiniteIntegral — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 19:03:25 +0000

I think part of this is due to the AI craze no longer being in the wildest west possible. Investors, or at least heads of companies believe in this as a viable economic engine so they are properly investing in what's there. Or at least, the hype hasn't slapped them in the face just yet.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "Critical vulnerability in AI coding platform Base44 allowing unauthorized access"

FiniteIntegral — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:00:38 +0000

Agreed. Security is a task that not even a group of humans can perform with upmost scrutiny or perfection. 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty' and such. People want to move fast and break things without the backing infrastructure/maintenance (like... actually checking what the AI wrote).

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "Why Japanese Developers Write Code Differently (& Why It Works Better"

FiniteIntegral — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 23:34:39 +0000

Agreed, it's cherry picked and strange since a lot of western developers already profess a lot of these practices -- especially the "extensive comments" and "descriptive naming" points.

It reminds me a lot about "innovative Japanese management solutions" which consists of MBAs learning what a bottleneck is and that DevOps is just sensible basic business practice.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "Show HN: Companies use AI to take your calls. I built AI to make them for you"

FiniteIntegral — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 23:23:58 +0000

I think you need to spend some more time testing this service if you are advertising this as a service that inherently interfaces with humans. I see that others in this thread like the applications for scambaiting, but I don't fully understand the use case you have here. If it's AI on both ends of the phone... whats the point of the call in the first place? It's not that hard to get a human on the other line who is able to help me far better than any robotic agent could.

If the agent has trouble solving "complex verification or (providing) documents" I doubt that a monthly fee for simple tasks doesn't sound like a viable and sustainable business model. It sounds like the anti-social bunch would like it but past that it's going to be hard drumming up a lot of support.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan"

FiniteIntegral — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 21:58:11 +0000

I think you underestimate the willingness of people to pay to troll, it may filter out people but an app that was (in theory) meant to be secure shouldn't think of a problem as filtering rather than securing. Admins knowing peoples' identities simply moves the weakest link in the chain to the admins. I think an app like this was doomed from the start and 4chan simply pulled the plug on an already leaking bathtub.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "Context Engineering for Agents"

FiniteIntegral — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 07:27:55 +0000

Apple released a paper showing the diminishing returns of "deep learning" specifically when it comes to math. For example, it has a hard time solving the Tower of Hanoi problem past 6-7 discs, and that's not even giving it the restriction of optimal solutions. The agents they tested would hallucinate steps and couldn't follow simple instructions.

On top of that -- rebranding "prompt engineering" as "context engineering" and pretending it's anything different is ignorant at best and destructively dumb at worst.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "The US dollar is on track for its worst year in modern history"

FiniteIntegral — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 07:21:42 +0000

It really says something when the instability of the dollar is (relatively) as bad as when Nixon took us off the Gold Standard in 1973. Trump's policies certainly have caused a large amount of instability.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit"

FiniteIntegral — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 20:00:58 +0000

It's not surprising that responses are anecdotal. An easy way to communicate a generic sentiment often requires being brief.

A majority of what makes a "better AI" can be condensed to how effective the slope-gradient algorithms are at getting the local maxima we want it to get to. Until a generative model shows actual progress of "making decisions" it will forever be seen as a glorified linear algebra solver. Generative machine learning is all about giving a pleasing answer to the end user, not about creating something that is on the level of human decision making.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "New funding to build towards AGI"

FiniteIntegral — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 05:03:58 +0000

SoftBank Group is not always known for the most sound funding, they did invest in the "Stargate" program that hasn't seen a whole lot of action.

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "Why is this site built with C"

FiniteIntegral — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:26:47 +0000

Even though I love 3rd party tools (SDL my beloved) I still find novel uses in the C library. Especially for string-related problems people say "just do it from first principles". Sometimes snprintf is enough for my debugging!

New comment by FiniteIntegral in "How to Vibecode Successfully"

FiniteIntegral — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:23:15 +0000

I understand why there's a want to move from boilerplate grunt work to big-picture project creation.. but there's a cost for abstraction that even the most good-faith implementation of AI generated code has to deal with. Not knowing (generally) how something happens and just wrangling the codebase in the right direction sounds more like parenting and less like programming.