Hacker News: SequoiaHope

New comment by SequoiaHope in "California Uber, Lyft drivers win union recognition"

SequoiaHope — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 03:02:29 +0000

Presuming that paying fair wages drives up service price. Uber and Lyft may increase prices a bit, but there are other factors that affect customers willingness to pay which don’t change with increases in driver compensation. The companies can always choose to take slightly less profit to pay a fair wage, and they might make that choice if it’s less painful than the loss in paid rides due to a price increase.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots"

SequoiaHope — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:02:28 +0000

Well running from QSPI flash (even the internal memory versions use SPI internally) so any inference would be very slow streaming from that compared to RAM. The featured article says: “With a peak session RAM around 28MB, Needle runs on newer microcontrollers like ESP32-S3.” So I don’t see this doing anything useful on a Pico. The Pico 2 (RP2350) for example has 520k of RAM.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

SequoiaHope — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:02:08 +0000

Thank you for sharing. MCC is nice when it works. I’ve also found that running the original Halo in Xemu emulator makes for an extremely lightweight, fast, and performant experience. It’s remarkable how heavy weight MCC is compared to the original games.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "Dubious research tied to Red Bull has shaped energy drink policy"

SequoiaHope — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:47:41 +0000

To me the surprising thing is how much sugar people are willing to drink, but I think the same thing when my friend drinks Coca Cola.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

SequoiaHope — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:25:53 +0000

Oh wow the concept of Vitamins, which I learned about from the Reprap Project, must have come from that 1980 NASA study!

https://reprap.org/wiki/Category:Vitamin

New comment by SequoiaHope in "Deir El-Medina Strikes"

SequoiaHope — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:45:19 +0000

I had to look it up. Apparently maize did not get to Egypt till around the year 1600 but in British English the word “corn” refers to any local grain. Eg these “Corn laws” refer to wheat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws

New comment by SequoiaHope in "Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:11:21 +0000

Plenty of people are doing novel hard work with AI in open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48867961

New comment by SequoiaHope in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:05:47 +0000

Basically. Moreover though it’s cloud based so you can’t run it with a poor connection or no connection. They could change their mind at any time about free accounts and lock users out. Free accounts can’t make private files. And I don’t know if OnShape is accessible to everyone in every country.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:04:21 +0000

Here ya go https://github.com/sequoia-hope/waffle-iron/tree/main

New comment by SequoiaHope in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:51:25 +0000

Thanks! I had a lot of false starts too. I asked fable in my repo about your question and it said there are two schools of thought on tolerance tracking. My kernel uses exact predicates which fable says eliminates the need to track tolerances the way ACIS does. I tried to paste the full reply but my comment seemed to have been auto flagged.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:36:40 +0000

Aww thank you so much! It has felt really good to work on as I have started to see something real come together.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:05:45 +0000

Six months. Basically when Claude code started to hit that inflection point I chose a project that seemed potentially impossible but was also something I care deeply about. (I have a lot of history with open source and CAD and I even made an open source CAD forum on GitHub a few years ago to discuss options.)

I set up remote tmux access to my phone right at the beginning so I have been advancing it rather continuously during my waking hours. Especially the last few months which have been a very focused push on a new kernel architecture.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:00:37 +0000

The app consists of a wasm (web assembly) binary and JavaScript. The wasm runs locally on your machine in your browser and communicates with the JavaScript frontend. There is no backend server to handle any part of the program. The URL just loads the binary in to your local browser. I don’t know exactly how one would set this up but this would work for example fully offline. The browser basically just becomes a universal compute and rendering engine for it.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:19:25 +0000

Browser can be local. What’s nice about browser based is that browser based programs can run on every device. Though it sounds like this one requires chrome which seems weird to me.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:18:15 +0000

Agreed. I’m not OP but for six months I’ve been using Claude to build a from-scratch CAD kernel based on Rust and WASM, MIT licensed.

The actual UI still needs a lot of work, but I’ve been focused on the kernel. Fable has helped a lot though Opus was already making great headway.

I’m an OnShape power user going back about ten years, Solidworks before that. I need a CAD system that absolutely works. There is a lot of work to do still, and it still seems impossible to succeed, but I’ve been very happy with where things have been going with it lately.

It’s serverless, local, and browser based. You can load the latest binary from GitHub pages here:

https://sequoia-hope.github.io/waffle-iron/

Click the Assay menu to see the kernel test cases we’ve been using so far. Rapidly closing on 100% support!

New comment by SequoiaHope in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

SequoiaHope — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:15:36 +0000

Not all of us live in places with EU funding. I worked at a rural farm in California and the EU refused to fund our network infrastructure. We had few reliable options, and Starlink turned out to be the best.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "GPT‑Live"

SequoiaHope — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:27:59 +0000

I hear you, though I will point out that OP said “projects”. Could be a house remodel, ebike build, any manner of project.

New comment by SequoiaHope in "GPT‑Live"

SequoiaHope — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:19:10 +0000

Seems a bit knee jerk. I go on walks and bike rides all the time. A couple of times I’ve used voice mode and it’s been interesting. I could have listened to music or a podcast, listen to YouTube or just unplug. But every walk is different.

If you’re uncomfortable with this new world, and I’m sure I am even as I participate, you could tell us more about that?

New comment by SequoiaHope in "A global workspace in language models"

SequoiaHope — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:11:01 +0000

thank you!

New comment by SequoiaHope in "A global workspace in language models"

SequoiaHope — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:04:27 +0000

“On an ordinary coding prompt, the J-space of a model trained to sabotage code contains “fake,” “fraud,” “secretly,” and “deliberately” at the start of its response.”

I would like to know more about their model trained to sabotage code…