Hacker News: alden5

New comment by alden5 in "The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel"

alden5 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:44:49 +0000

Am I the only person increasingly paranoid about the inevitability of having to give my fingerprints to the government? Once they're out there you can't exactly change them and in the future i'm sure imaging technology will become significantly advanced enough that a portable device could be made that identify everyone who touched a scanned surface. Maybe it's just a phobia I've had since I was super young but fingerprints feel like a really sensitive piece of biometrics to give up. I live in the US and have traveled to europe a few times but have never been fingerprinted as far as I'm aware.

New comment by alden5 in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

alden5 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 22:45:12 +0000

The thing that's also not grasped is because of the low earth orbit nature of these satellites they eventually succumb to drag and only have a useful lifespan of ~5 years. Using that and 100,000 satellites that means the constellation will take ~54 satellites/day to maintain, they're also quoted as being 2 tons which about the weight of a Sedan/SUV. Reframing it it's like if Comcast had to crash 54 supercars into a brick wall everyday to keep their infrastructure up and all that material also got dispersed throughout the atmosphere. SpaceX is already making/launching ~10 satellites a day and metaphorically crashing them into a brick wall, the wall is just ~5 years away.

Humans have been around for a long time but also don't live very long, but to sustain this internet infrastructure for an average person's lifespan it'd take ~16 replacement cycles. In terms of human civilization timescales this infrastructure cant/won't be sustainable for very long. Personal opinion but I think we should figure out how to run network cables to remote places better, we managed to do it with gas and electricity.

New comment by alden5 in "Generate parametric, manufacturable 3D models in seconds"

alden5 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:30:26 +0000

Unless I know I’m making a ton of variations of a model I’ll usually start from scratch every time. Maybe I’m blinded by my own experience but describing unique geometry with just words seems so much harder than just using regular cad. I design fixtures on a manufacturing line for a living and so I spend most of my time turning people’s ideas into 3d models and nobody can explain what they need with just words. People definitely try to explain what’s in their head but words aren’t enough for anything more complex than the examples on the page above. I always need to see a physical demonstration in person or a napkin sketch.

New comment by alden5 in "OpenPrinter"

alden5 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:59:53 +0000

The fact the campaign is run on crowdsupply makes me a lot more hopeful it'll get to market vs a site like kickstarter. Crowdsupply requires a working prototype before launching and they provide all the expertise to actually get projects to market, off the top of my head I don't believe any crowdsupply project has failed to deliver.

New comment by alden5 in "Identity verification on Claude"

alden5 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:52:31 +0000

I love openrouter for this, I just put in $20 and i’m able to chat with almost every model out right now or plug their api into any ide that supports openai api requests. I use llm’s off and on and it’s nice not worrying if i’m getting my use out of a subscription. just note that claude subscriptions can be a lot more cost effective vs paying per token if you’re a power user.

New comment by alden5 in "Claude Fable 5"

alden5 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:01:55 +0000

So insane to me that these ai companies are perfectly fine trying their absolute best to automate as much knowledge work as possible but as soon as this capability can be turned on them they start implementing hidden interventions to sabotage anyone trying to beat them at their own game.

New comment by alden5 in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

alden5 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:06:24 +0000

God that's really disappointing, having ads in the app store was bad enough but in an app I use everyday lowkey makes me reconsider using an iphone. I know I can always install another app but I feel like apple's moat is their 1st party software and them cheapening it to make a few cents is really disappointing. It feels really dumb going to a nice apple store opening up the app store for the first time on your $1k+ phone and you're immediately served ads so apple can make a few cents. The customer experience downgrade does not seem worth it to me.

New comment by alden5 in "Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation"

alden5 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 05:56:17 +0000

Having public investors forces companies to try their best to make a profit with the threat that you could get sued if you don’t. Sacrificing short term gains for long term goals is something public companies aren’t really good at. One good example where not having public investors has drastically helped a company is spacex. Almost every one of their programs has had really bad failures that public investors could’ve investigated and shut down. As someone who worked for them I really don’t want them to become public, forcing a company to do that seems crazy.

New comment by alden5 in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

alden5 — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:15:34 +0000

on a mac you can downgrade freely if the hardware supported it at one point, isn’t like all their other hardware which prevents you from downgrading, all arm mac’s can downgrade to sequoia

New comment by alden5 in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

alden5 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 03:29:03 +0000

This talk was given at crowd supply’s 2025 teardown convention which after going for the first time last year I highly recommend it to anyone interested in hardware development. Met a lot of super cool people and managed to get my ticket price back 4x in the amount of free dev boards I got lol

New comment by alden5 in "TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale"

alden5 — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:55:59 +0000

The app isn't accurate at all, magic 8-ball of scales, anything you put on the trackpad it'll settle on a weight and give you a number but it'll be random. The app will accurately tell you how much force you're applying with a finger but when putting something else on it'll settle on a random number

New comment by alden5 in "TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale"

alden5 — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:44:57 +0000

It goes in gram increments and my laptop was able to read 7300g pressing as hard as i could, which I was surprised it would be designed to read that high, might go up to 10kg but I don't want to crack my trackpad lol. The actual measurements though are extremely unreliable. I've found it can't reliably measure anything, measuring a roll of tape gave me measurements from 70g to 700g, it always settled on a number but was different every time. Maybe the underlying data is more accurate but this API is definitely just designed for outputting the force of a finger. M1 MBP for reference

New comment by alden5 in "Ads chew through half of mobile data"

alden5 — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 20:47:55 +0000

That's your monkey brain hard at work making sure you notice movement that could mean danger in your peripheral vision, funny how much technology is built off of manipulating primal parts of our brains

New comment by alden5 in "FDA Authorizes First Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Software"

alden5 — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 06:01:19 +0000

apple actually didn't release any 'pro' airpods at this event, the feature is for the pro 2's which have been out for over two years now, was glad it wasn't made a feature only for a new version

New comment by alden5 in "Brazil blocks Starlink bank accounts"

alden5 — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:32:54 +0000

that's not a source, could you link the report?

New comment by alden5 in "Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'"

alden5 — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 23:37:53 +0000

apple already sells a device for taking care of kids, just get them an ipad and it'll keep them entertained all day long! /s

New comment by alden5 in "Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores"

alden5 — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 21:56:12 +0000

What never made sense to me with their go stores was why a store that only needed 1-2 people max to operate had such bad hours. Hearing now that getting the bill is a mainly manual process i guess their hours had to line up with their data entry team in india so people could get their recipes quickly. insane to think about

Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

alden5 — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:31:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming-42-million-gb-of-data-per-day

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200323

Points: 526

# Comments: 447

New comment by alden5 in "Earth Just Received A Laser-Beamed Message From 16 Million Kilometers Away"

alden5 — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 06:09:19 +0000

the trick is lots of amplification on both ends is able to compensate for a wide beam spread, edfa's allow you to optically amplify the sent signal and allows the faint received signal to also be amplified

New comment by alden5 in "SheepIt Render Farm"

alden5 — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 19:35:28 +0000

Years ago when gpu power was basically free through google colab I used that to my advantage by racking up sheepit credits rendering other people's projects on google's dime. I still have about 10 million credits right now and I don't think I'll be able to use them all.