Hacker News: ctkhn

New comment by ctkhn in "NYC Apartment Aquaponics"

ctkhn — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:06:04 +0000

It's very fun as a process and it's cool to be surrounded by things you made. We're so disconnected with where things come from (food, clothes, etc) that for me and people I know it's interesting to be involved and see how the process goes even to produce a token amount of whatever it is. I grow my own herbs and cherry tomatoes in homemade cedar planter boxes, sewed my own kindle cover, am sewing replacement covers for my very old patio furniture cushions that I got used, my fiancee knit me some socks and has made sweaters for herself and a few family members, another of our friends sewed an outfit for herself, etc and it really is just fun to do. It also is nice to be a little more self sufficient, not just in a prepper way, but in the sense of not having to get ripped off by some corporation or feeling bad having to buy something new (ie replacing my cushion covers myself instead of buying fully new cushions)

New comment by ctkhn in "The Zen of Parallel Programming"

ctkhn — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:19:07 +0000

I wonder how much a good process of meetings, tickets or whatever sort of documents etc for handling new ideas and features would speed this up or bring it back to linear. I've been in some orgs where good organization at the level above me can make the required communication between me and other dev teams lower and let us live in "good" silos

New comment by ctkhn in "The state of open source AI"

ctkhn — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:44:45 +0000

There are corporations like Blackwater and CoreCivic that subcontract both of these for the US government today or Wagner (RIP) in Russia. The pinkertons and the US state have also both taken on the role of corporate muscle in the past when workers went on strike

New comment by ctkhn in "The state of open source AI"

ctkhn — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:39:37 +0000

Source: I imagined it

New comment by ctkhn in "NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook"

ctkhn — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:21:19 +0000

I never got into the podcasts side but it was good for synthesizing multiple documents in a way chatgpt or google's ai overview couldn't, but now I will just dump a couple PDFs into a new chat in Ollama and then ask it questions about the content. Is there another killer app for notebookLM out there?

New comment by ctkhn in "After wearing the Pebble Time 2 for two weeks, I'll never buy another smartwatch"

ctkhn — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:11:33 +0000

Yeah I love my forerunner 945. Got it used in 2020 and when it died in 2023 Garmin replaced it for $150 including tax and shipping. Couple friends have got the new fancier touchscreen models but I like the simplicity of my watch. I blocked most texts from coming through as a buzz except immediate family or 2FA but it would be nice if Apple's focus modes worked better with it automatically. Been wondering if Pebble would be a good move to get even further away from proprietary software though as someone who runs or hits the gym monday through saturday

New comment by ctkhn in "The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway"

ctkhn — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:02:33 +0000

Coming from legacy enterprise I am using claude to do exactly this for some of my team's more bizarre and poorly documented "inventions" that started out as their pet project and then became part of our official workflow.

New comment by ctkhn in "The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway"

ctkhn — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:00:52 +0000

> You also have to consider the Amdahl's law: a 10x speedup on 10% of the project is just a 9% speedup overall.

This is totally true for me. I'm working on more features/bugs at work and getting the coding done faster with claude but the coding part is at maximum half of the process and usually less. The rest of it is clarifying the requirements from our product team or given that we're a very legacy place, what the existing state of our infrastructure and other systems are for the new changes to fit in to, etc.

New comment by ctkhn in "How we can reduce traffic congestion"

ctkhn — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 02:35:28 +0000

Depending on where you are, there are nice middle class apartments that can be family friendly. I have friends not in tech in my same neighborhood with a three bedroom place for 1500. Granted this is the midwest and not SF but their place is near the train to get downtown for work and surrounded with a lot of parks for baseball, soccer etc for kids

New comment by ctkhn in "How we can reduce traffic congestion"

ctkhn — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 02:22:02 +0000

It looks like a lot of neighborhoods in American cities that are adjacent or outside the downtown business district or even suburbs on the commuter rail lines. A main commercial street surrounded by 1900-1950s houses and apartments, probably with new built mixed use buildings too. Most smaller cities and even big towns have neighborhoods like this based on my last 10 years of road trips across the US so it's not just NY SF etc where this is possible. This is for the the largest cities like NY DC Chicago etc or even smaller ones like Sacramento or Louisville. Not sure we can work out housing policy to be blacksmith friendly and it seems like a pain even out in the suburbs

New comment by ctkhn in "Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts"

ctkhn — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:11:10 +0000

I thought tweaking was his highest calling

New comment by ctkhn in "How we can reduce traffic congestion"

ctkhn — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:06:35 +0000

Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car

New comment by ctkhn in "How to read more books"

ctkhn — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:56:54 +0000

Great note about how public transit gives us time back from the commute. When I moved to the city after college I first lived a 12 minute train ride from the office and tried reading but the trip was too short to make much new progress in my books. Now that it's a 40-minute trip I have plenty of time to read, follow up on texts, and do my crossword.

New comment by ctkhn in "Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective"

ctkhn — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:54:27 +0000

True, it is pretty bad at getting right to what I want. A genuinely useful integration of AI would be to process and classify listings on upload so that I can have more filters on attributes of items for sale. I'm not holding my breath for that though

New comment by ctkhn in "Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected"

ctkhn — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:47:30 +0000

People like Zuck are incredible outliers when it comes to wealth and most people are basically underwater financially. A lot of us do send some money to the food bank or the local arts initiative but the amount left after the bills for living a regular life come due is a lot less for me than a guy with over $200b and no good ideas. That's a crazy order of magnitude difference, a thousand times a thousand times 200k which most people aren't even making. For all of the pretty gross stuff it seems Bill Gates has been up to, at least he did spend a lot on stuff like mosquito nets and AIDS prevention.

New comment by ctkhn in "Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective"

ctkhn — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:38:51 +0000

It feels like the only thing it's really big in now in the states for is facebook marketplace, which is just a slightly higher trust (but still scam and flake prone) version of craigslist using the existing user base. Feels like all his big swings have been strikes

New comment by ctkhn in "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"

ctkhn — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:46:03 +0000

I got around 50-60 on my m3 max so 100tps seems very realistic for 2 gens later of chip and double the ram

New comment by ctkhn in "The Return of Aspect Oriented Programming"

ctkhn — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:41:49 +0000

I think that's a good point, never thought about it like that. I like the abstraction level that Spring Boot brings, but working with a principal engineer who was very into AOP on my previous team was a huge pain. Like you and GP said, AOP absolutely destroys readability. Current team has code split into a million xyz-common libraries, which isn't my preference, but I can still click through to see the source of the library. I will never get what AOP truly improves on

New comment by ctkhn in "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"

ctkhn — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:36:26 +0000

I don't even travel a ton but portability is huge. It's not a flex, it's a functional thing that lets me move around within my house or work while I'm at my parents or traveling or anywhere else. Other than my media collection that lives on my home server, I want most of my files to come with me on my laptop.

New comment by ctkhn in "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"

ctkhn — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:20:58 +0000

I have been running qwen 3.6 35b a3b with opencode on my macbook pro 16" with m3 max and 64gb ram, and it's been great for local planning and coding. To be honest I have been on and off wishing I had future proofed with the 128gb after seeing how powerful 64gb is. On the other hand, I also haven't run up against a wall with a model that is just slightly larger than qwen.