Hacker News: NavinF

New comment by NavinF in "Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats"

NavinF — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 07:44:02 +0000

"less inflated" = slightly overvalued

In reality it was free money because the IPO was oversubscribed.

New comment by NavinF in "Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats"

NavinF — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:15:21 +0000

I recall the thread did have a single opinion and the only quarrel was between people who thought it was slightly overvalued vs incredibly overvalued. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604155

New comment by NavinF in "Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats"

NavinF — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:01:36 +0000

> trade and literal war, 10-year yields are back over 5%, oil and diesel are going sky high

So I should short atoms and go long on bits right? Everything you listed is horrible for hardtech, but has minimal impact on software.

Reminds me of the spacex IPO. HN claimed it would crash, but I noticed that nobody on HN used prediction markets to short it the day before IPO. Meanwhile I bought in and sold some after the 20% pop. I should start a reverse-HN fund

New comment by NavinF in "Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine"

NavinF — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:32:00 +0000

Does anyone use it though? Apparently ANEForge got 16.8 tok/s of Qwen3-8B + 0.6B draft using private APIs. Not big enough

New comment by NavinF in "Creepy Crawlies"

NavinF — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 02:49:30 +0000

Oh I did. They're complaining about literally 14 cores across all of git.kernel.org. Definitely not in the "people who can get law enforcement to take them seriously" group.

New comment by NavinF in "Creepy Crawlies"

NavinF — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:00:00 +0000

turns out the overlap between "people who can't configure their webserver to serve at wire speed" and "people who can get law enforcement to take them seriously" is the empty set

New comment by NavinF in "Everything I own, owned"

NavinF — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:08:58 +0000

Naw the LED stays on a little longer after you stop capturing image data. They either have burned in firmware or a simple circuit (RC and comparator) that stops your attack.

New comment by NavinF in "Everything I own, owned"

NavinF — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 01:12:39 +0000

>I had Claude write a tool to patch out the table entry for camera activity, fix up the integrity hash, and flash it to the camera. A quick test showed that the green LED that normally illuminates while recording no longer turned on. Horrifying!

Oof. Apple claims this is not possible for macbook cameras because the LED can't be controlled from software. Wish more manufacturers would do the same.

New comment by NavinF in "Everything I own, owned"

NavinF — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 01:04:23 +0000

WebUSB has been live in Chrome for 9 years and nothing happened. Compare to all the features that result in people getting hacked every day. Your threat model is ridiculous.

New comment by NavinF in "The price of a Costco hot dog has gone up"

NavinF — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:25:12 +0000

A 20oz/medium coke/pepsi is $2 (McDonald's) to $3 (Wendy's, KFC, Burger King, etc). The majority of people buy one with an entree at all those places. Revealed preference vs you living in a bubble.

New comment by NavinF in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

NavinF — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:54:01 +0000

lawsuits for what? AFAIK you have no right to privacy in this sense

New comment by NavinF in "Plug-in solar is coming. Plug-in batteries should follow"

NavinF — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:27:12 +0000

My point about PDUs is that "people don't tend to have one just free" is irrelevant. It's easy to split a 240V outlet into multiple outlets. One of them can be used to inject power. The copper doesn't care which way the electrons go.

Heat pumps and baseboard heaters are pretty uncommon in the US. Natgas furnaces are nearly 100% efficient so I don't expect that to change any time soon

New comment by NavinF in "Plug-in solar is coming. Plug-in batteries should follow"

NavinF — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:30:15 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141066

New comment by NavinF in "Plug-in solar is coming. Plug-in batteries should follow"

NavinF — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:20:25 +0000

What percentage of buyers do you imagine are gonna buy a battery big enough to saturate 15A*120V=1800W for long? The average home uses 30 kWh per day = 1250W. Batteries don't need to handle peak load. Approximately nobody has a whole home UPS.

Also 240V power strips are fairly common in my circles because GPU server PSUs tend to be more efficient at 240V. They're marketed as PDUs, not strips. You're not gonna install a new outlet for every server. One dryer outlet in the garage is enough for most people

New comment by NavinF in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

NavinF — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 01:49:01 +0000

FreeCAD on desktop is much the same in my experience. If LLMs were mainstream a few years ago I would have assumed the UI was 100% AI generated with zero human input besides a oneshot prompt.

New comment by NavinF in "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter"

NavinF — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:31:48 +0000

Not aware of any price drop. Walmart always sold dirt cheap insulin and it was never $250. You’re thinking of brand name insulin.

New comment by NavinF in "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter"

NavinF — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:10:49 +0000

Insulin is $25 at Walmart for a vial that lasts a month. 2 vials if you’re fat. Find out where you read about “astronomically high insulin prices” and consider what else that author lied about

New comment by NavinF in "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter"

NavinF — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 08:34:05 +0000

A locked account on twitter. locked = only people who follow him can read his tweets and there's no way to follow until he unlocks. The book is Hyperion.

New comment by NavinF in "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter"

NavinF — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:25:26 +0000

"one of my favorite conceits is from the novel [redacted] where they spend the entire book talking about the threat of the space hun invader barbarian belters and how backwards but feral they are and then when you finally meet them they're sophisticated egalitarian transhumanists and all the characters you've been following have been living in space north korea, functionally enslaved and living out their lives blithely consuming copium state propaganda

the 'torment nexus' is what you'd call heaven if we built it and you weren't in it"

New comment by NavinF in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

NavinF — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:17:42 +0000

No it's not. There's an Amazon truck on my street every day. Adding one more package to that truck costs ~nothing. That's why free shipping is free.