Hacker News: heikkilevanto

New comment by heikkilevanto in "Legal experts warn Meta's new terms still grant broad scraping permissions"

heikkilevanto — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 21:08:07 +0000

Glad I never signed up on any of their "services", and never accepted any of their terms.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "Wiki Deep dive into Standard diving dress"

heikkilevanto — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:47:40 +0000

I misread it as "driving" dress, and wondered what that could have been... The diving stuff was quite interesting too

New comment by heikkilevanto in "I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband"

heikkilevanto — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 18:26:59 +0000

Living in Copenhagen, I do not recognize that. I live in a city apartment on Vesterbro. We have maybe a hundred bikes parked in the backyard, nobody I know brings his bike home for the night, unless it is a really fancy racing bike. But yes, I do lock my bike when ever I really away from it.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "Ask A Monk – A digital wilderness for thoughts with no immediate answer"

heikkilevanto — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:49:14 +0000

Maybe the system itself is not using AI to create answers, but most lazy users probably will ask a LLM and post the result as their answers. So we get AI slop anyway.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice"

heikkilevanto — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:40:30 +0000

Interesting article. Pity it was so full of human factors, and so low on actual mathematics.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+"

heikkilevanto — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:44:44 +0000

Happy FairPhone 4 user here. Running 3+ years, only replaced the battery once. Aim to keep it 7-10 years, barring unforeseen events like theft. Not going to replace it just because a newer model is released.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush"

heikkilevanto — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:05:23 +0000

Clever solution, but I am not sure I can see a matching problem

New comment by heikkilevanto in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

heikkilevanto — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:51:46 +0000

Keyboard driven is fine, when you have a keyboard. But many users are now on phones or tablets, with a severely limited keyboard that takes a big part of the screen. But they have a variety of gestures that regular desktop machines don't have. A good UI should happily handle both of these extremes, and everything in between.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "How Universities Should Prepare Founders"

heikkilevanto — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 05:53:25 +0000

99% of university students will never start a company. 99% of those who do will close down without making any measurable difference to the world. I think the world would be better off if the universities actively discouraged the idea of starting companies. Those few who really burn for the idea might do it anyway, and might be more likely to succeed.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "Show HN: I trained a 125M model to autocomplete piano on-device"

heikkilevanto — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:15:56 +0000

I would love something like that, except that I play the melody, and it produces proper 3-4 part accompaniment, preferably in good baroque style. Extra bonus if it could also write it into a file in a format suitable for music editing programs.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible?"

heikkilevanto — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:18:49 +0000

Most comments here point to the owner of operator of the LLM. I tend to agree. But on the other hand, if you drive on the highway and the steering wheel falls off and your car glides to the left and his an oncoming car, it can be argued that it is true producer of the car, or the mechanic who didn't tighten the bolts...

New comment by heikkilevanto in "OpenLogi"

heikkilevanto — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:10:04 +0000

Shocking that in this time and age, a simple peripheral like a mouse still needs a dedicated piece of software to be installed. In my Linux boxes, I just plug in a standard mouse and get the standard functions. I think the device driver should know about the low-level interface to the mouse: know how it points, what buttons, scroll wheels, and other inputs it may have, etc. Then the OS would process it like any mouse. If you need to connect some buttons to specific actions, that could be handled by a user-level program running on the machine that could know how to do those actions. But that level should be far removed from knowing what brand (or type) of input device you are using.

Of course producers like Logitech want you to install their own thing, so as to make it harder for you to switch to other brands of hardware, but an open system like Linux should not play along with that.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?"

heikkilevanto — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:53:27 +0000

I keep an old phone in the bathroom, and every morning I use it to file my weight and my peak flow (for asthma tracking) on a web page I host on my home server. The server just appends the numbers into two text files, and plots some nice curves. In case of errors or other problems, I can just go and edit those files. The basic tracker took about an afternoon to code, by hand, long before we had LLMs. I have a more advanced tracker system to remember all the craft beers I drink, that one has recently migrated to a sqlite backend, and the LLMs have helped me to add many more features. Some of my friends have wanted to use it too, one lasted a couple of months, the rest gave up within a week - it requires discipline which most people don't have - I wouldn't either, but being my own system I am more inclined to keep using it, and adding features.

My advice would be to find a way that minimizes the friction, and get it into your (morning?) routine. And keep the system simple to begin with.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later"

heikkilevanto — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:06:38 +0000

But can you make a mere user read and understand that specification?

New comment by heikkilevanto in "Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users"

heikkilevanto — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:20:22 +0000

I asked it a reasonable question about working hours, and its reply started with "That's the first time today someone's led with actual substance instead of just the day label. I appreciate that." I guess the poor bot will have to deal with a lot of nonsense. As you would expect from a chat window open to the wide internet. Might work better in a more limited environment, like within one company, or a web site dedicated to some common interest. Still, I like the idea.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "The weekend is 100 years old"

heikkilevanto — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:06:16 +0000

I remember seeing a calendar on my first school year, 1971 in Finland, that marked which Saturdays were school days and which were off. Around the same time, I saw a cartoon about the future labor congress, where a dissatisfied worker asks "Mr President, do we have to every Wednesday?"

New comment by heikkilevanto in "Ethical Cold Outreach"

heikkilevanto — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:23:11 +0000

That is the law here in EU. Unsolicited commercial email is forbidden. Even if I have done business with you in the past, you are not allowed to contact me about something else. Unless I have explicitly and freely given my consent, and you can document that. That is a good law, and keeps the amount of spam somewhat down.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "The Cold Email"

heikkilevanto — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:21:59 +0000

No, just a retired programmer, and sick and tired of all the spam I keep receiving. Don't have "fantastic opportunities" and am not looking for any.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "The Cold Email"

heikkilevanto — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:48:52 +0000

Send me a "cold email" or any other sort of spam, and I will never see anything more from you, as your address will be blocked. Spamming is against the law here in EU, and for a good reason.

New comment by heikkilevanto in "Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID"

heikkilevanto — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:25:34 +0000

I don't like the idea of a persistent id for my machine. Would there be any harm in rewriting the machine-id at every boot? Or just deleting it as part of the shutdown sequence?