Hacker News: accurrent

New comment by accurrent in "Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma"

accurrent — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 02:30:35 +0000

Im an oss maintainer and recently the slop Ive had to deal with is excruciating. Theres nothing wrong with using AI for code, but generating 10prs that are all broken cause you have no idea what youre doing and hoping to get into GSoC is nonsense.

New comment by accurrent in "Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma"

accurrent — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:17:02 +0000

I use kde connect with my android for my htpc. Works nicely enough on stoxk kde.

New comment by accurrent in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

accurrent — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:49:08 +0000

This assumes citizens actually putp a lions share of their money into more risky investmemt vehicles. For reference, this may not be the case with a large swathes of our older population. Bank rates, t bills and bonds here are generally lower than cpf. If you are a high income earner the contribution is capped and combined with low taxes this is not a bad thing.

New comment by accurrent in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

accurrent — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:29:22 +0000

Very few locals pay rent here. Most people buy houses. Its kindof forced thanks to the system, but its designed in a way that unless you are a decimillionaire housing is expensive, but attainable. This is done by splitting the housing market into private and public housing. Is this perfect? No.

And yes it does drive inflation of house prices.

New comment by accurrent in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

accurrent — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:17:04 +0000

"Indonesian and Malaysian workers". Sounds like you never actually visited construction sites. Most of the workers ive come accross are from Bangladesh, India and China. Malaysian and indonesian immigrants tend to be better off than them.

New comment by accurrent in "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning"

accurrent — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:21:59 +0000

What about hardware projects without a code base? Those are fun too and deserve front page

I suspect automating "code base over time" metric is tricky. Not everyone will be using git or a vcs and somethings dont need a codebase to be shared.

New comment by accurrent in "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning"

accurrent — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:34:04 +0000

Eh IMO any metric like this can be gamed. My project that reached hn front page was coded in a short time (and yes some ai was used), but otoh I think it was something that showed hey you can do this really interesting thing (in my case vlm based indoor location).

Also its not uncommon for weekend projects to be done in a shprt span with just a "first commit" message dump even pre-AI.

New comment by accurrent in "SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image"

accurrent — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 12:01:48 +0000

With research like this you need to start somewhere. The fact we can get 3d information helps. There are people looking into making splats capture collision information [1].

I have worked on simulation and in my day job do a lot of simulation. While physics is oftem hard and expensive you only need to write the code once.

Assets? You need to comission 3d artists and then spend hours wrangling file formats. Its extremely tedious. If we could take a photo and extract meshes Im sure we'd have a much easier time.

[1] https://trianglesplatting.github.io/

New comment by accurrent in "SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image"

accurrent — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 05:21:34 +0000

Simulation. It takes a lot of effort today to bring up simulations in various fields. 3 D programming is very nontrivial and asset development is extremely expensive. If I have a workspace I can take a photo of and just use it to generate a 3d scene I can then use it in simulations to test ideas out. This is particularly useful in robotics and industrial automation already.

New comment by accurrent in "Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break"

accurrent — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 01:25:41 +0000

Im not American so can't comment on the US situation. However, where I live, CS grads are facing the same problem. However, switching to trades is not an option - the salaries of trade workers are not enough to pay for housing.

I've been working for 5 solid years now at my current company, Im still the youngest hire. While my company continues to compensate me really well, I think that the new grad situation is terrible.

New comment by accurrent in "New lab-grown human embryo model produces blood cells"

accurrent — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 21:24:01 +0000

I find it ironic that thats the first thing that comes to mind. I know people with rare blood groups, I think this could be huge for them.

New comment by accurrent in "It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead"

accurrent — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 11:16:58 +0000

While true, it's also true that scaling medical school is not like a CS situation. My school quadrupled the number of CS seats to meet demands over 4 years. I can't see this happening with medical schools. My brother who is currently in a medical school regularly says how hard it is for the faculty to find teachers simply because there aren't enough. To add to it there are bottlenecks like not having enough cadavers.

Medical education is very hands on unlike engineering where we just throw people in the deep end at work. This is with good reason.

I'm absolutely for having more doctors and medical school seats but I think it's important to acknowledge that it maynot be as simple as increasing seats. There needs to be more fundamental reforms. That being said yes there are completely pricks of doctors who enter politics.

New comment by accurrent in "It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead"

accurrent — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:53:18 +0000

My understanding is that in many countries the biggest blocker to increasing number of doctors is the fact that there aren't enough doctors to teach. Unlike CS where we can simply increase the number of seats in. A course with medical school there are real bottlenecks on things like cadavers and mentors.

New comment by accurrent in "Queueing to publish in AI and CS"

accurrent — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 09:45:31 +0000

My general experience as a PhD student makes me feel that we probably should look at the system as a whole. I get the feeling most universities are abusing publications as a way of assessing their own students. It means people will tend to publish slop for the sake of publication instead of genuinely tackling hard problems. I personally have seen my university get away with forming defence committees with 0 knowledge of the field they're assessing. If the university can't assess its students work then they should not be teaching.

I think both conferences and journals are broken in this regard. It doesn't help that professors primary jobs these days is to be a social media influencer and attract funding. How the funding is used doesn't seem to matter or impact their careers. What we need is more accountability from senior researchers. They should be at the very least assessing their own students work before stamping their name on the work.

On the flip side it isn't untrue that there are major breakthroughs happening daily at this point in many fields. We just don't have the bandwidth to handle all the information overload.

New comment by accurrent in "Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android"

accurrent — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 01:07:41 +0000

I knew this was coming thanks to the nincompoops bankers and IMDA together with horny uncles who fall for love/job scams here in Singapore. The reason I use android over iOS is that I can load apps for personal automation. I think the current scenario where bank apps refuse to run on phones with sideloaded apps is far more acceptable. Im not sure scammers will not find a way around this. I can still be able pin web apps.

FWIW I'd rather not use my phone for critical transactions its making authorities lazy. The number of times Ive had to fight thanks to "buggy" payment code that deducts money is not funny and banks are getting worse at customer support day by day.

Also what the fuck are the governments doing with tax payer money, instead of going after criminals, we go after citizens.

New comment by accurrent in "Show HN: From Photos to Positions: Prototyping VLM-Based Indoor Maps"

accurrent — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 13:51:39 +0000

Yep I've seen the NVidia research stuff. It's pretty cool.

Show HN: From Photos to Positions: Prototyping VLM-Based Indoor Maps

accurrent — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 23:19:28 +0000

Just a fun hack I did while bored over the weekend. My wife was busy shopping, it got me thinking that can VLMs solve the indoor location problem in a mall? Can I just show a VLM a map and an image and have it doa good enough job locating me? I hacked this P.O.C and it seems to work.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44476339

Points: 55

# Comments: 2

New comment by accurrent in "Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots"

accurrent — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 23:43:44 +0000

How do you plan on competing with existing Chinese manufacturers. Unitree for instance sells there robots at a reasonable price and already has walking working.

New comment by accurrent in "US Defense Department will stop providing satellite weather data"

accurrent — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 01:48:23 +0000

As a non-American who's life has been previously saved by knowing that a typhoon would strike my home this has me wondering how we will be affected. A lot of smaller countries don't have the infrastructure/man power to maintain a space program. To what extent is the rest of the world reliant on this data and what does this mean for us? Will we still have predictions? How does international collaboration on meteorology generally work? Do Europeans/Chinese/Indians/Russians also share data about weather?

New comment by accurrent in "Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration"

accurrent — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:52:15 +0000

I feel like we bolt anti-trust after a market has developed. For instance, we go after big tech once it has entrenched itself. Whatabout taking pro-active action. For instance, in the ML market we should be sponsoring a gajillion companies to take on chip design so that we don't end up with a future where NVidia is the sole provider of AI chips. We should foster open standards and penalize companies for not adopting/hijacking them where possible. Similarly we need to make sure the zoo of ML model providers survives rather than consolidateing to a few. I think there may be ways to do this without being adverserial about it.