Hacker News: ckemere

New comment by ckemere in "AI-assisted PCB design for KiCad 10"

ckemere — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:47:52 +0000

I’ve had really good results recently with Fable 5.1. The typical process that it uses for routing is to pin a few key traces (using the kicad python api) and then use freerouting for the others. I’ve also noticed that if I push hard for “carefully designed” routes, eg for a 38 pin connector, it will write code and make much better looking results.

I’d say that at the moment it still requires you to look at its results and point out their weaknesses and/or route a couple of traces yourself and then hand it back.

This project from a couple of weeks ago is a great example. I’m new to ST MCUs: in addition to the PCB, Claude brought up the firmware and driver. https://github.com/ckemere/hub-imu

New comment by ckemere in "2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Deisseroth, Hegemann, Nagel"

ckemere — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 14:08:38 +0000

I’ve always been impressed with Deisseroth. Since the early optogenetics days he always was excited to share materials. (I have fond memories of driving back from a visit to Stanford with vectors plucked from their freezer, what MTA!?) And he was eager to promote young scientists not only in his own lab but also in others (like myself) that were innovating in these spaces. And in every talk I’ve heard, he’s shared credit really openly.

There’s a big contrast there to how some scientists operate - hoarding ideas, being cautious in collaboration, demanding credit. I’m so pleased for him!

New comment by ckemere in "Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city"

ckemere — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:23:55 +0000

I suspect some people would still focus more of their time on winning the superbowl.

New comment by ckemere in "Allegations of US interference in Quebec election"

ckemere — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 02:32:40 +0000

Can we call these the “Make America Better” faction? Or just “Make America Great”?

New comment by ckemere in "The NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return mission has been canceled"

ckemere — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:56:31 +0000

Any news since January???

New comment by ckemere in "The NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return mission has been canceled"

ckemere — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:51:14 +0000

Has anyone seen broader reporting on the rest of the science budget?

New comment by ckemere in "Landsat 9 pass captured the effects of yesterday's catastrophic glacier collapse"

ckemere — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:18:55 +0000

Please post - I’d like to upvote a twitter alternative

New comment by ckemere in "Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis"

ckemere — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:10:34 +0000

And extra extra credit for NGOs (and startups) that openly advertise "competitors".

New comment by ckemere in "Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis"

ckemere — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:09:52 +0000

"The river interceptor design was clearly based on existing solutions" like Mr. Trash Wheel, Dr. Richards says. "Rather than work with the organizations who had successfully been removing trash from rivers for years, they ‘reinvented’ a similar design, at a much higher cost, and claimed to be innovators."

This is a great summary of lots of flashy commercial and non-profit work. Proposal for a product: AI-assisted "Who is already doing this?" database. Extra credit for linking to audited annual reports.

New comment by ckemere in "Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample"

ckemere — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:50:59 +0000

But what about the later "Repeat previous question" prompts???

New comment by ckemere in "Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?"

ckemere — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 19:01:42 +0000

Perhaps a huge tell about national strategy is the fact that the owner has $10s of millions to loan to the company? US economic structure in post WWII era has increasingly focused on return on capital (and value extraction). How can that compete in long term with an economy which prioritizes reinvestment *in industry*?

New comment by ckemere in "Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI"

ckemere — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:14:50 +0000

Voice of American *capitalists* used to the idea of investing capital to generate rent. Maybe AI can rebalance the market of capital and individual labor.

New comment by ckemere in "Instead of banning AI, I made a classroom contract with my students"

ckemere — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:00:34 +0000

I found this article frustrating. In my experience, the students who participate in the “co-creation of a contract” would likely also have done their best to comply with Professor induced rules. The challenge is the 10-20% who, stressed and overworked, will be just as likely to ignore this contract as any other. I would have liked to understand how the situation is changed compared to no rules at all…

New comment by ckemere in "Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV"

ckemere — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:38:32 +0000

Comparing with China, I’d be curious about whether their companies face the same return-on-capital forces that US (and to a lesser extent western) companies do. So when we outsource to them, it’s to a vendor who is not needing to promised 10%+ returns. As I understand it, this is because the central government exerts pressure on banks to make loans at low rates, so that capital can be raised more easily for targeted industries.

I agree that onshoring is likely impossible without some sort of contextual reimagining of US industry.

New comment by ckemere in "Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics"

ckemere — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:50:38 +0000

Amazon warehouses still have a huge number of ununionized workers doing manual labor

New comment by ckemere in "Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics"

ckemere — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:47:50 +0000

Training data of task completion. See, e.g., robots doing backflips. Presumably there’s an optimal robot for gymnastics but if you start with humanoid form you can train based on many videos of human movement. The alternative - world model sim with physics and loss functions- perhaps ends up being too unconstrained when you add in optimization of the robot form…

New comment by ckemere in "Modos Color Monitor Pushes E-Paper Displays Further"

ckemere — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:23:27 +0000

Upvoted them both. I’m an ECE prof, and the video summed up why working with students is so rewarding.

New comment by ckemere in "Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda"

ckemere — Sat, 23 May 2026 04:21:16 +0000

Lots of complaints about corruption. It’s worth imagining how you would run a very low income developing country. Remittances and tariffs are the easiest items to tax for revenue. I’d love suggestions for better alternatives…

New comment by ckemere in "Flipper One – we need your help"

ckemere — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:41:56 +0000

Curious about the design choice. Why not use the TI parts with integrated microcontrollers rather than two separate chips? Or even a FPGA with integrated ARM9 like the Zynq family?

New comment by ckemere in "Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing"

ckemere — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:05:24 +0000

The obvious question I would have asked: given the concern that this may not be ethical if the brains are still “alive” AND the concern that a brain separated from the body probably doesn’t function these same, why wouldn’t we test things in living monkeys (instead of mice)???

It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???