Hacker News: david_rugaex

New comment by david_rugaex in "Can AI design circuit boards yet?"

david_rugaex — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:53:11 +0000

In July I was struggling with writing DIY Rust firmware for an e-ink screen. I mistakenly thought I'd ordered an Inkplate 6 ED060SC7 and actually had the later version, which confounded my efforts. I was also mistaken about the pixel resolution.

The way I found this out is I propped it up next to a webcam so it was more or less full frame, and I had the (then new) Fable write a python script to bezier warp the camera capture to a flat projection of the screen. At that point I couldn't address the whole screen. Once I'd guided the capture script I just left the LLM overnight with the instruction to get full control confirmed by a capture round trip, and it was meaningfully finished in a couple of hours. I don't really have the skills to attempt that myself in a reasonable time frame.

Show HN: Explore 251 Bevy crates as an interactive constellation

david_rugaex — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:33:40 +0000

My page shows what crates people are using, and in what combinations, across different versions of the Bevy game engine in Rust. It scrapes project data daily to stay up to date. It also links back to the repos so you can find code demonstrating how pairs of crates are used together.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993673

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by david_rugaex in "Show HN: Explore 6048 YC companies as an interactive galaxy"

david_rugaex — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:25:46 +0000

Is there an underlying logic to the spatial layout? I made something similar for charting out the Bevy ecosystem recently, where my layout is driven by co-use of crates in projects scraped from GitHub. I'm afraid I didn't use an agent swarm though, and it's merely self hosted, not deployed in a single command. https://crates.rugaex.com/

New comment by david_rugaex in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

david_rugaex — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:09:05 +0000

I'm in the same boat! It's a reasonable stance but the specific examples aren't air tight. I'm a Mathematician and I can't do long division, I could probably work it out? Like you say, long division was part of a journey that made me very mathematically capable, even if it's no longer an active contributor. My capacity for pencil and paper calculus is undoubtably many many fold worse than my peak around undergraduate studies!

New comment by david_rugaex in "Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15"

david_rugaex — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:31:23 +0000

Obviously open source is a significant virtue. Mathematica has some strength in closed source, I doubt it could be as self consistent and backwards compatible if people could depend on the implementation as the use contract as opposed to the documentation. It would obviously have had more features earlier, but would that have made the perpetual support, cointegration, or documentation suffer? I'm not blind to the downsides, but I do perceive upsides, and those may contribute to Mathematica's niche.

New comment by david_rugaex in "Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15"

david_rugaex — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:26:05 +0000

I work in quantitative finance. I do the vast vast majority of my algebra and stochastic calculus in Mathematica, and lots of ad hoc data visualization.

New comment by david_rugaex in "How to earn a billion dollars"

david_rugaex — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:36:46 +0000

In my earning life, contrast my prior student life, buying groceries and cooking good food is my greatest pleasure.

That's maybe a 30% growth across the last ten years? It's reasonable to expect that in 2040 I'll be eating eighty meals a day and be happier and healthier in similar proportion.

New comment by david_rugaex in "Car Seats as Contraception"

david_rugaex — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:36:37 +0000

I don't want to put words in your mouth etamponi, but if we take the trolley problem to classically mean choosing between different numbers of deaths; then I wouldn't describe it as a trolley problem.

I imagine the typical car accident in which three 'car seat age' children are involved, and at least one is killed. Then I imagine the typical event where a family decide against a third child. I feel quite a substantial qualitative difference! I certainly wouldn't claim one offsets the other.

Personally I don't know if there's any multiplier I'd accept. I find reduction of suffering and trauma much more important to me than offset creation of life and opportunity.