Hacker News: erikig

New comment by erikig in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"

erikig — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:06:20 +0000

Unpopular take here but I'm really ok with this.

The sale of the high quality brand allows the original entrepreneurs to exit their business to someone that thinks they can run it more efficiently. The decline in quality allows for innovative upstarts to try new things.

New comment by erikig in "US banks' exposure to private credit hits $300B (2025)"

erikig — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:30:03 +0000

Equity/net worth is not quite the same as the liquid capital needed to cover losses or service debt.

New comment by erikig in "Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game"

erikig — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:39:09 +0000

On a good monitor, I got to 0.0032 and then it all fell apart.

Here's the related article on how much accuracy is really needed in CSS values. https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/too-much-color/

New comment by erikig in "Ask HN: How to be alone?"

erikig — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:35:25 +0000

Yep, meetup.com, eventbrite.com and for the musically inclined residentadvisor.com and dice.fm.

The trick for me was to offer to help with the organization of the event, it is more rewarding and makes for more lasting connections.

New comment by erikig in "Show HN: Sprout, a fun-sized, developer-ready humanoid robot"

erikig — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:00:35 +0000

Congrats on the launch. Hope you get a moment to answer the questions here.

Speaking of which, where can we preview the SDK and documentation? The site is a little light on development details.

New comment by erikig in "What Is Starlink Mesh? – Starlink Help Center"

erikig — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:45:14 +0000

I was hoping they'd finally added a feature to their dishes to allow terrestrial interconnect.

So when my dish can't getting the best line-of-sight view to the satellites it can piggyback on my many neighbor's better connections to improve mine.

New comment by erikig in "London–Calcutta bus service"

erikig — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 20:48:34 +0000

Exactly. For many, the idea of being able to see England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in one 50 day trip with many similar minded travelers who aren't in a rush is really quite appealing.

Also, with bus travel you could, if you felt like it, leave the trip to enjoy many more local attractions and resume your travels later in a way not afforded by airplane or rail travel.

New comment by erikig in "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"

erikig — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 01:10:17 +0000

The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows:

With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?

New comment by erikig in "Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]"

erikig — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:31:33 +0000

It's been interesting to see how often Elon is chided (even by his supporters) because his reach always seems to somehow exceed his grasp knowing full well that this is by design and not by fault.

New comment by erikig in "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest"

erikig — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:02:07 +0000

I don't think I'm ready for this, I might never go back to "real" work.

New comment by erikig in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

erikig — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:37:06 +0000

Sting-ER could also work too

New comment by erikig in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

erikig — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:13:50 +0000

If you intersperse the music and fill in with articles from HN or your favorite subreddits it would be a fun listen.

New comment by erikig in "I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me"

erikig — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 20:09:54 +0000

The Indian-born textbook author mentioned (Malkiat Singh [0]) had an inordinate influence on many Kenyan students because his textbooks were the de-facto standard for years. Its interesting how this influence extends as his students get to curate the LLMs on which the world has come to rely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malkiat_Singh

New comment by erikig in "2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web"

erikig — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:56:15 +0000

Soulseek is still going?

I discovered so many artists, international variations of albums, live sessions and bootlegs from that app, it changed my relationship with music.

I have to go back and check it out.

New comment by erikig in "My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)"

erikig — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:24:16 +0000

Like most people I think, I prefer to prepend and add to the top of the txt file they are working on.

New comment by erikig in "McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash"

erikig — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:36:12 +0000

Having spent enough time with marketing and PR folks, I really wouldn't be surprised if this supposed backlash is overhyped as a way to get more people interested in seeing the ad.

New comment by erikig in "The Big Vitamin D Mistake [pdf] (2017)"

erikig — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:17:44 +0000

TLDR Unfortunately, medicine took a very long time to realize that vitamin D is not simply a vitamin that prevents rickets.

We know today that vitamin D is a powerful nuclear receptor-activating hormone of critical importance, especially to the immune system.

With the available data mentioned above, the proposed doses would probably suffice to maintain vitamin D levels around or over 75-100 nmol/L, with practically zero risk of toxicity.

Popup Trombone

erikig — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:50:05 +0000

Article URL: https://matthew.rayfield.world/goodies/popup-trombone/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930383

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Love thy robot – Reflections on morals and modern AI companions

erikig — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:27:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.learningfromexamples.com/p/love-thy-robot

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45868367

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by erikig in "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"

erikig — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:46:29 +0000

Hardware: MacBook Pro M4 Max, 128GB

Platform: LMStudio (primarily) & Ollama

Models:

- qwen/qwen3-coder-30b A3B Instruct 8-bit MLX

- mlx-community/gpt-oss-120b-MXFP4-Q8

For code generation especially for larger projects, these models aren't as good as the cutting edge foundation models. For summarizing local git repos/libraries, generating documentation and simple offline command-line tool-use they do a good job.

I find these communities quite vibrant and helpful too:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/

- https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/