Hacker News: erikw

New comment by erikw in "RTS for Agents"

erikw — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:50:22 +0000

I don't know about this... I think that the "expert" AIs on RTS games just get more resources (not compute resources, but in-game resources) so they can create more units. I'd love to play against an AI component that has the same resource collection speed as the human player.

New comment by erikw in "US to suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 nations, State Department says"

erikw — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:13:44 +0000

I'm surprised that you can get non-attendant citizenship in Canada. They don't even give automatic citizenship to children of Canadian parents born outside of Canada (maybe if both parents are Canadian they do, but my experience is with one Canadian and one American). US citizenship for a child born outside of the US to US parents is as simple as bringing their birth certificate to the consulate. And if you marry a Canadian, they won't give you residency unless you physically reside in Canada.

New comment by erikw in "US to suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 nations, State Department says"

erikw — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:40:13 +0000

Saint Kitts and Nevis sells passports, so I imagine that is the rationale. I see some other microstates on the list that fit that pattern as well.

New comment by erikw in "Xfce is great"

erikw — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 05:46:16 +0000

My reflexive response was "xfce is ugly, and that's by design", but actually, this looks pretty slick: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/13k5p5o/xfce_my_x...

New comment by erikw in "Quill OS: An open-source OS for Kobo's eReaders"

erikw — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:13:48 +0000

Love Plato- it’s so performant! I’ve always wondered why Kobo doesn’t just throw out what they’ve got and fork it.

New comment by erikw in "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost"

erikw — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:38:20 +0000

Have you verified that these "academic bureaucracy roadblocks" exist? Surprisingly, I was able to pick my studies back up after almost 20 years, and not only were all of my existing credits counted, but they also exempted me from new requirements that had been added in the subsequent 20 years.

New comment by erikw in "Microsoft and Google overstate job creation at Chile data centers"

erikw — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 02:25:46 +0000

When I was last working in Chile on a SaaS product for use in Chile, we deployed everything to US-EAST. We still had local CDN caching, but it is always nice to be closer to your hardware. I can't tell from the article what types of datacenters these are, but if these are new Azure and Google Cloud availability zones, this will be a great for latency.

Edit: It looks like all the major cloud providers have Chile AZs except Amazon, which has one planned: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-aws-south-ameri...

New comment by erikw in "KDE launches its own distribution"

erikw — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 23:44:35 +0000

I don't know that that will happen- not even Windows is as smooth as MacOS. But that's because Microsoft and Linux developers are tackling a more difficult problem- getting an OS to work with effectively infinite hardware permutations. Apple has given themselves an easier problem to solve, with just a handful of hardware SKUs and a few external busses.

That said, Android is pretty stable, because a given Android distro typically only targets a small hardware subset. But I don't think that's the kind of Linux distro that most people contributing to FOSS want to work on.

New comment by erikw in "Apple Debuts iPhone 17"

erikw — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:49:42 +0000

I'd be curious to understand their rationale for not making a small, reasonably priced phone like the iPhone SE used to be. I probably will be leaving the iPhone ecosystem the next time I have to buy a smartphone (even though I use a Mac, iPad, and Airpods, which all work together really well) because I'm uninterested in using a large phone.

Thinking through my own use case, I just use my phone for messaging, maps, and the occasional app, so I'm not going to need a big screen for consuming content. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on a phone, since I don't need any fancy features. So perhaps that intersection of use cases doesn't make much sense to target?

New comment by erikw in "I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead"

erikw — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 20:11:04 +0000

I'm so tempted to try improving my language skills with Anki, both for my native language and my daily use language. But the commitment feels so daunting- I've barely missed a day in my reviews for the last two years, and only have 28,000 reviews total. I'm very impressed by your 98,000!

I guess the best way to start is just to create a new deck in it with one card and then go from there. I already have a daily review habit, which is the most important part.

New comment by erikw in "I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead"

erikw — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 19:04:12 +0000

I think that the author was using Anki incorrectly, and that led them to the spurious conclusion that "Anki is dead". I also have attempted to use Anki this way- using someone else's deck to try to force myself to learn something new. But that doesn't work, because it is just memorizing random symbols, as they noted in the article ("The enemy is the static card"). For example in maths learning, memorizing arbitrary terms, symbols, etc is useless. However, once I am introduced to a concept for the first time, then I add it to my Anki deck so I can make sure I remember it. The key is the context, and writing terms / definitions etc that speak specifically to me. I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.

I haven't used Anki for language learning, but I imagine that if I did, it would be to add some new vocabulary I had just learned from a book, conversation, film, etc. I don't think it would help me learn a language from zero though- that would require practicing it.

In summary, Anki is great for reinforcing something you've just learned, but you can't reinforce your way into the context that is necessary to truly understand something.

Brave1 Market – Ukraine's New Online Marketplace for Drones, Kit and Equipment [video]

erikw — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 20:46:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vURzYBhnQ6Q

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44459037

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by erikw in "OpenAI o3 and o4-mini"

erikw — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 19:12:53 +0000

What language / framework are you using? I ask because in a Node / Typescript / React project I experience the opposite- Claude 3.7 usually solves my query on the first try, and seems to understand the project's context, ie the file structure, packages, coding guidelines, tests, etc, while Gemini 2.5 seems to install packages willy-nilly, duplicate existing tests, create duplicate components, etc.

New comment by erikw in "OpenAI o3 and o4-mini"

erikw — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 19:06:15 +0000

Interesting... I asked o3 for help writing a flake so I could install the latest Webstorm on NixOS (since the one in the package repo is several months old), and it looks like it actually spun up a NixOS VM, downloaded the Webstorm package, wrote the Flake, calculated the SHA hash that NixOS needs, and wrote a test suite. The test suite indicates that it even did GUI testing- not sure whether that is a hallucination or not though. Nevertheless, it one-shotted the installation instructions for me, and I don't see how it could have calculated the package hash without downloading, so I think this indicates some very interesting new capabilities. Highly impressive.

Exploring RF Beamforming: A Practical Hardware Approach

erikw — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 04:58:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bqsyF1zhR8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42959250

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by erikw in "Show HN: Web app that shows how good the air quality is in Chile"

erikw — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 21:27:52 +0000

Will be interesting to see what this looks like in the cooler seasons. Temuco and Santiago especially are in bowls, and with lots of diesel vehicles and woodburning stoves, these cities are very smoggy in the winter.

New comment by erikw in "Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction"

erikw — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 14:49:46 +0000

All West Coast states have free healthcare (medicaid) available if your income is below a certain threshold. And there is no time limit on that. It won’t help with rent, but at least these folks won’t be completely without healthcare access.

New comment by erikw in "What purpose did the lower-right Enter key serve on original Mac 128k keyboard?"

erikw — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 22:15:37 +0000

That never occurred to me, but sounds wonderful! I wonder if modern interfaces would have ended up more navigable if there had been the expectation of these dedicated keys on every keyboard?

Light Communication on CH32V003 [video]

erikw — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 21:28:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD3ji-F600

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123643

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by erikw in "The price of gold – how bad do you want it? (2016)"

erikw — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 11:32:24 +0000

In one of my friend groups (consisting of folks in their 20s-30s and including both university students and professionals, mostly in the US) I’ve noticed a cultish obsession with the idea that the “system” is stacked, success is due solely to luck or unfair advantage, there are very limited resources, etc. Alluding to these themes seems to be a significant part of group identity. People even talk about how they actively sabotage their employer’s strategic and tactical goals, and I observe them receiving supportive feedback on this from other folks.

From my perspective, I think that one of the difficulties of being young is not yet knowing what exactly you should be working hard at. And in the knowledge economy where many of us must make significant career changes every few years, kicking off that new trajectory is somewhat analogous to youth. If you are working hard at the wrong thing, it will certainly feel like everything is stacked against you. I see some of my friends doing just this- trying to become something that just isn’t a good fit for them. How do you provide mentorship for people to help them identify what’s the best area to apply their efforts to?