Hacker News: laydn

New comment by laydn in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

laydn — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:30:42 +0000

Hydrophonic farming at home. You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc), LED lighting (frequencies, intensity, etc), vision processing (maybe throw in some AI buzzword here) to keep track of your plants and do some decision making.

Bonus: You get to eat the stuff you grow :)

New comment by laydn in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

laydn — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:44:39 +0000

Trump ensured that there is absolutely no reason for any nation, not just Iran, to believe what USA says in the future. No agreements/treaties with the USA can be trusted. And not just with Trump administration, since he demonstrated clearly that he can tear any treaty/agreement that was made under different administrations as well. The United States demonstrated that it has very, very limited control over the actions of an elected president.

New comment by laydn in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

laydn — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:37:05 +0000

Next challange: Place a camera in front of the bike that scans approaching pedestrians. Calculate their head position and trajectory. Use directional speakers and focused sound beams to focus the ~780Hz sound towards the head(s) of the pedestrian(s). Now that you are not bothering the environment as much, you can increase the volume as well.

New comment by laydn in "Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history"

laydn — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 13:50:08 +0000

Terrible time management from Ding Liren in the most critical game of the match, leading to a very simple blunder. Painful to witness.

New comment by laydn in "The German problem? It's an analogue country in a digital world"

laydn — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 06:51:29 +0000

Seems like Germany is having this problem for the past 20 years... but here we are. Maybe accept the fact that they are a manufacturing powerhouse and will remain so in the foreseeable future?

New comment by laydn in "Is Tesla more valuable than Toyota?"

laydn — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 09:22:47 +0000

Isn't this a strange way to put Toyota to be "closer" to Tesla by "enterprise value"? I mean, if toyota had 1T USD debt, it's enterprise value would have been 1.25T, and it would have been more "valuable" than Tesla. But, how is that "better", if you want to invest in a company?

I'm surprised TSLA is in such a good shape, debt-wise.

New comment by laydn in "China is quietly reducing its reliance on foreign chip technology"

laydn — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 17:31:37 +0000

Sanctions by countries who developed a certain technology, appear to always result in the country which was sanctioned to develop that technology in some timeframe, depending on the complexity.

Was there any case of a "successful" sanction in history? Or is holding back a country for a few years (or decades depending on the tech) considered a success?

New comment by laydn in "Ask HN: Why is Bluetooth still so unreliable?"

laydn — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 15:03:54 +0000

My question isn't why BT is so unreliable, rather, despite all its problems, why is it still so ubiquitous?

New comment by laydn in "AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says"

laydn — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 06:20:29 +0000

The general consensus seems to be that low income and low skill workers will be affected real soon.

I don't know where we currently are in the hockey stick curve in ML/AI development, but if it keeps developing at this pace it will soon start hitting high-skill and high-income workers, and then we're going to have a huge economic problem.

New comment by laydn in "Airbus Shatters Record for Jet Orders as Demand Soars"

laydn — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 14:09:06 +0000

It is interesting to note that just 5 companies dominated the order book: (1223 total)

* 500 to Indigo (India)

* 250 to Air India.

* 220 to Turkish Airlines

* 153 to EasyJet

* 100 to Avolon.

New comment by laydn in "Factors that act(ed) as drag on the European tech/startup scene"

laydn — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 05:53:18 +0000

I've read all the comments and looks like no one has mentioned this, but as someone who worked a total of ~25 years, on both continents (10+15 years), I have the following observation, and it really is a simple one:

American hardware/software engineers work really, really hard, compared to their European counterparts.

Given identical goals, same level of funding, same underlying tech, and similar market size, a US startup will almost always be more successful then its European counterpart, simply because of the difference of total amount of work done in a given month/year.

I've worked with outstanding people in both continents. Top-notch, impressive engineers. I can easily say, the output of my US colleagues were significantly higher.

New comment by laydn in "A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32"

laydn — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:18:15 +0000

What's fascinating about airplane design for me is not the huge technical complexity, but rather, the way it is designed such that a lot of its subsystems are serviceable by technicians so quickly and reliably, not just in a fully controlled environment like a maintenance hangar, but right on the tarmac, waiting for takeoff.

New comment by laydn in "Analog Devices Apollo MxFE 0.5 to 55 GHz Ecosystem"

laydn — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 09:37:45 +0000

That's an incredible level of integration; having so many ADC's and DAC's with 20Gbps sampling rate all in a single package.

New comment by laydn in "Google Drive files suddenly disappeared"

laydn — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:35:13 +0000

Wow, we've come back full circle if we're backing up our cloud data to a local SSD :-)

New comment by laydn in "Forward Health launches CarePods, a self-contained, AI-powered doctor's office"

laydn — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 07:37:55 +0000

The article says "The new CarePod modules are being deployed in malls, gyms, and offices starting in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.", and yet the only video posted by the company is a 3D animation?

I'm confused, do these pods exists or not?

New comment by laydn in "USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)"

laydn — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 11:44:33 +0000

It just had to be non-symmetrical on the Z-axis, that's all. Like an HDMI connector.

New comment by laydn in "F-35A has flown from a highway for the first time"

laydn — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 09:14:52 +0000

Given sufficient road width, takeoff/landing length, and road "quality" (smoothness, etc), why wouldn't an aircraft be able to takeoff from and land on to a highway? I mean, what is the actual significance of this?

New comment by laydn in "MAC Address Vendor Lookup"

laydn — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 15:47:34 +0000

I wish this text file had a last-updated-date in it.

Just recently we had a OUI chip which was being used in one of our boards, which was throwing off our post-production automated tests. Turns out the vendor added a new OUI, but didn't update all the references to its datasheets on their website. Took us a while to figure out what the problem was.

New comment by laydn in "The 2002 Überlingen midair collision"

laydn — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 13:42:25 +0000

Anyone know why the TCAS only instructs the two approaching aircraft to change altitude only, but not heading?

New comment by laydn in "PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading"

laydn — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 17:51:06 +0000

It does say "edit PDF", but it doesn't really seem to allow editing any text on any PDF files.