Hacker News: choonway

New comment by choonway in "Show HN: Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks"

choonway — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:50:48 +0000

no different from how the mcdonalds system can turn any random person on the street to a smiling cog in the machine.

New comment by choonway in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

choonway — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:20:29 +0000

as a lifelong chopstick user, this article is for one of those fault finding crazies.

hold the chopstick however you like. so long as you don’t drop things unintentionally it’s fine.

New comment by choonway in "System76 on Age Verification Laws"

choonway — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:11:54 +0000

this is how and adult sounds like in a room full of children.

New comment by choonway in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

choonway — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:26:29 +0000

the lesson to learn is - don't let the conversation die off. think of all the weird scenarios that wouldn't make google sheets work.

e.g. no access to internet (or at least VPN access via completely locked down devices) / internal email server / only open source etc.

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

choonway — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:16:35 +0000

if something doesn’t exist in this world, no amount of money will guarantee that you will get it.

if it exists in abundance like the air that we breathe no amount of conspiracy will be able to monopolize it.

finance only works in a very narrow band of environmental conditions. we are very well past that.

New comment by choonway in "In the AI gold rush, tech firms are embracing 72-hour weeks"

choonway — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:00:56 +0000

employers that demand long hours do so because they have no other way to appraise employee ability.

they cannot judge a brilliant insight from a slacker that would have saved thousands of man-hours rushing the wrong way.

do you really want to work for such a company?

New comment by choonway in "I'm addicted to being useful"

choonway — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 20:38:14 +0000

I have purposely omitted the specifics as I also have given up trying to convince others interested in my worthwhile problem. If interests align, we will naturally meet.

I usually tell them it is more important that they should take some time (6 months - 1 year) to reflect in isolation to find their own worthwhile problems, and not get distracted by fads and drama.

New comment by choonway in "I'm addicted to being useful"

choonway — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 14:21:53 +0000

I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems.

So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.

New comment by choonway in "Global Village Construction Set"

choonway — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:55:40 +0000

I’m from the self-replicating self-reconfigurable systems side.

The problem with this is not about making the machines but the human intervention to make use of them effectively. You really need end-to-end automation to solve this.

If i don’t remember wrongly all this started due to john deere implementing DRM in their equipment. this is a political problem because the issue can be resolved by just buying chinese equivalents and changing patent/ip law.

New comment by choonway in "Build Your Own Minisforum N5 Inspired Mini NAS"

choonway — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 13:31:25 +0000

it's already obsolete.

for USD699 (no ram and no storage) you can get this

6 SATA, 5 NVME drives, OCUlink and much more.

https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-wtr-max-amd-r7-pro-8845...

New comment by choonway in "Why does a fire truck cost $2m"

choonway — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 02:09:10 +0000

even at 100% tarriffs US is still not competitive.

New comment by choonway in "Why you can't color calibrate deep space photos"

choonway — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 01:58:58 +0000

probably will come out within the next 5 iphone generations.

POC already out...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8404918/

New comment by choonway in "U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites"

choonway — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 07:16:20 +0000

NK is more of a russian client state, not chinese.

New comment by choonway in "Infinite Grid of Resistors"

choonway — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:53:38 +0000

There are two parts to education. One is to impart knowledge, the other is to filter the students.

New comment by choonway in "The Alabama Landline That Keeps Ringing"

choonway — Sun, 04 May 2025 12:36:52 +0000

how far is the deep learning stack close to replacing them?

New comment by choonway in "What the hell is an elliptic curve?"

choonway — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 11:08:34 +0000

my favorite application of elliptic curves is this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/puzzles/comments/azf0zo/im_stuck_on...

New comment by choonway in "The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine"

choonway — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 08:05:52 +0000

If you don't allow them to publish research work, your greatest talents will leave.

I used to work in such a restrictive environment. Nobody worth their salt stayed long.

New comment by choonway in "Learning Theory from First Principles [pdf]"

choonway — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:46:40 +0000

That's not strange. There are many people who can ace exams but are not competent in applying it in their workplace.

New comment by choonway in "Learning Theory from First Principles [pdf]"

choonway — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 01:09:49 +0000

This book is not for you.

Teaching others how to replicate solutions is very different from guiding people how to solve yet unsolved problems in the field.

This book is for the latter. For the former, you might want to look out for one in the "for dummies" series.

New comment by choonway in "[dead]"

choonway — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:38:57 +0000

money isn't a map. it's a form of risk/benefit management. and USD is managed very differently from RMB.

why introduce capitalism and communism? it's like trying to use religious texts to explain astrophysics. just use science...