Hacker News: kriro

New comment by kriro in "So you think you could be an electrician?"

kriro — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 10:52:14 +0000

When I was young, I thought I could be an electrician. But I couldn't because I'm red-green colorblind and at the time wasn't allowed to go down that path (I think this is still the case in Germany but not in other countries). Interestingly I also couldn't apply to the police for the same reason. For electrician it makes sense to me as there is a certain risk, same for flight-controllers (another job I am banned from) but for police it never made any sense to me.

New comment by kriro in "Startup Nights 2026 is comming up on 5-6 Nov. in Switzerland"

kriro — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:05:09 +0000

Seems pretty ignorant. If you take a historic perspective, the WWW and things like HTML, HTTP, URLs etc. are technically from a British guy working in Switzerland (CERN) but I suppose crediting it to any country is kind of pointless. These days a lot of it runs on machines that run on a Linux kernel, also technically from Europe. Python/C++/PHP/Erlang/Prolog/Pascal and many others I'm probably forgetting on the programming language front.

If you're talking about current VC-backed hyper accelerators...there's probably also plenty. I think there's also a lot going on in the non-IT sectors (medicine, pharma, genetics, energy etc.)

But the bigger question is...does it really matter which country innovation comes from these days? As an end-user/customer I certainly don't care too much.

New comment by kriro in "Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent"

kriro — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:23:36 +0000

Nvidia is being smart. They see that AI-paddlers are currently in a strange our-doomsday-is-the-worst race and offer to sell an anti-doomsday chip. Clever play.

New comment by kriro in "Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over"

kriro — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:15:37 +0000

Spoken like someone with no friends or relatives that live far away. Screens can also be extremely connecting. They are a tool and as such value neutral. Is it evil that I can have a weekly video-call with family members on another continent when the alternative would be...simply no contact at all, super expensive phone calls or letters. I don't think so.

New comment by kriro in "Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]"

kriro — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:22:25 +0000

Get more people to turn on telemetry.

New comment by kriro in "Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits"

kriro — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:31:46 +0000

Seems a bit too dogmatic. I can nudge someone into intrinsic motivation with extrinsic incentives. It's hard to discover something you're not really looking for but if some other incentive lets you discover it then bingo.

Some examples from my own life: Paying someone's first climbing session -> lifelong climbers. Offering 5$ if you can beat this bot in chess -> obsessed with chess. Etc.

New comment by kriro in "Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits"

kriro — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:21:17 +0000

Interesting. Singapore certainly tries many things to nudge their citizens to a better life. I also recall from a documentary I watched that they have a system where you get shopping vouchers for logging certain sports activities and similar things (I think there was also some incentive system for healthy food).

New comment by kriro in "Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA"

kriro — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:27:49 +0000

This is really cool at first glance and very HN worthy. I've bookmarked it and will look into it deeper. Recreates roughly my first PC setup though I think I had a Matrox Mystique so that makes it even more interesting. And I've been looking for a "I build something cool with an FPGA" kind of project to look into for a while now.

New comment by kriro in "Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?"

kriro — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:00:29 +0000

Maybe send this question to the Anthropic legal team. I'd be curious if you get an answer and what it'll be.

New comment by kriro in "44% on ARC-AGI-1 in 67 cents"

kriro — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:21:37 +0000

Thanks for motivating me to work a bit on non-LLM things again :)

New comment by kriro in "My hobby of building miniatures and taking pretty pictures"

kriro — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:39:47 +0000

Pretty cool. Would love for her to somehow work with the people who make the Mausritter RPG :D

New comment by kriro in "My hobby of building miniatures and taking pretty pictures"

kriro — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:37:13 +0000

Very nice. I love the "mirror shot" and the one with the two stools in the foreground. Very fair prices for the coffee :D

My personal litmus test is a pourover not an americano because I usually don't go for the espresso-based drinks.

New comment by kriro in "Software engineering is about managing complexity"

kriro — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:10:26 +0000

Higher level languages are still formal languages. I think there's a conceptual difference between moving from one formal language to another (machine instructions to asm or asm to C) and moving from a formal language to natural language. So yes, developing, looking at and understanding a formal description of your system has benefits for an engineer compared to handing off this step completely.

New comment by kriro in "To become a better writer, read as much as you can"

kriro — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:06:02 +0000

As someone who also dabbles in writing fiction (unpublished) I'm less pessimistic. I keep hearing less people read and the end of long form writing is near. To me this signals a great time to write and publish because the smaller the niche, the happier the people who get quality stuff in it.

The "book bubble" of avid readers is the most anti-AI community I am a member of which is a very interesting perspective (I do research in AI as my main job). I don't touch AI for writing/editing etc. because I see it as a creative endeavor and enjoy spending time with a blank piece of paper or an empty latex file :D

New comment by kriro in "Mathematics in the age of AI"

kriro — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:37:48 +0000

The counterpoint to this comes from chess. High level engines "prove" certain lines correct (not in the mathematical sense) but those "engine lines" are really hard to explain to humans, even by GMs. They can sort of explain that something is a good line but not why. Engines crush GMs and are considered ground truth even if noone really understands what is happening. Would it be a nightmare if math was the same, not sure. Especially for counterexamples LLM solutions seem fine. They stop humans from wasting time on pointless things. For proofs it gets more hairy but I think if it is formally verified a proof is a proof. Attribution is a problem (should the person who wrangled the answer out of an LLM get the credit, I guess so).

I think these are non-trivial epistemology and science theory problems.

New comment by kriro in "Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full"

kriro — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:58:13 +0000

This was me as well. +HCU and searchlores.org were so much fun. The coolest thing I remember was the hash-maze but I couldn't find it again. I saw Fravia live in 1999 :D

Switching 0x74 to 0x75 and vise versa lead to me ordering the free Intel books and diving into assembly and osdev for a while. There was something zen-like wading through disassembled code with a complete beginner mind and looking for patterns. This and reading Phrack around the "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" times are probably my favorite memories related to computing because I only had a very vague understanding of what was going on mixed with a sense of "wait you can do this" and a lack of readily available information.

New comment by kriro in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

kriro — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:09:30 +0000

Where does this supposed saying come from? All I hear is PostgreSQL is the database intelligent people use, Git or GTFO and I don't even know what a closed source programming language is. Apache and nginx, Linux, DNS infrastructure.

In an agentic world, why do I want closed source software that my agent can't adjust and adapt to my needs for...anything?

New comment by kriro in "Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage"

kriro — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:28:41 +0000

Ok, I'm a dummy: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust

"pi_agent_rust is a from-scratch Rust port of Pi Agent by Mario Zechner (made with his blessing!)."

It's pi, not pi.dev

New comment by kriro in "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't"

kriro — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 07:13:36 +0000

Agreed. The author in question (Linnaeus) was from Sweden and professor at a Swedish university (Uppsala). Latin was used across the board in "traditional" sciences in northern Europe at that time and in fact the distinction of disciplines was not as clear as it is today. Linnaeus was a professor of medicine formally but focused on botany. He traveled a lot and had many international "contacts", especially in the Netherlands. His correspondence was usually a mix of Swedish and Latin (which I find interesting because I assume Swedish was not widely studied at the time) but his professional publications were in Latin.

But it was an interesting time as slowly native languages became more common. The chair for economic sciences at Uppsala was specifically to be taught in Swedish (1741).

Southern and central Europe were ahead of the curve a bit and it was more common to see French, English and German for example (French and English scientific journals date back to the 1660s).

For more information, I can recommend "Languages of science in the eighteenth century" by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson which specifically focuses on Linnaeus. It's Open Access: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/97831102...

New comment by kriro in "Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage"

kriro — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:01:20 +0000

Philosophically, pi.dev is exactly what I'm looking for. Minimalist and explicit (YOLO by default, we know it can be trouble but we tell you so).

Anyone here using the Rust rewrite of pi.dev as their daily driver? It's endorsed by the author of pi.dev and looks pretty attractive to me being both minimalist and not having npm attached. Any info "from the trenches" are appreciated (setup with sandboxing, extra niceties etc).