Hacker News: mackwell

New comment by mackwell in "Ask HN: Where are the good search engines for mathematical formulas?"

mackwell — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:43:05 +0000

Perhaps not quite what you're looking for but related - I recently made this modernized Rust / WASM version of RIES, which finds algebraic equations from their solutions: https://maxwellsantoro.com/projects/ries-rs/

New comment by mackwell in "Ask HN: Why hasn't someone built a decentralized compute network?"

mackwell — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:50:08 +0000

They have, it’s just difficult to have it catch on. Bitcoin being the prime example… but the compute is basically burned for no useful purpose beyond security of the network itself. Because that is the main concern - security of the blockchain. Many have tried to use that same shape and instead have the compute be directed at something useful, with varying levels of success but nothing at that scale. There are however very successful long running projects like folding@home or the Mersenne prime search which have lots of people running a program locally that directs idle compute power on volunteers PCs to work on scientific pursuits.

There’s lots of cool examples of interesting things people have tried, (training models, etc) but it’s not easy to get traction.

Something like vast.ai is much easier to make fly because people who offer their resources for rent get directly paid by time used.

In short, it’s a cool idea that lots of people want but it’s hard to make fly.

Edit: also I guess we could consider malware / botnets successful implementations as well - for nefarious purposes.

New comment by mackwell in "Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies"

mackwell — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:55:21 +0000

100 tapes is quite a mountain to climb. I would consider finding a discount code for a service like southtree (or similar) and sending at least some of them to be processed that way. I did most of mine manually but had to throw in the towel for some tapes and send them in and I found that they often had like 50% off promotions and discounts for higher scales.

If you are down for the challenge / 100 hours of capture, go for it but just wanted to throw that out there because I hate to see media be lost to the sands of time.

New comment by mackwell in "Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies"

mackwell — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:50:25 +0000

That’s the biggest issue with trying to deal with dv tapes - the hardware is simply not very robust. Most cameras will either start ejecting tapes, eating them, or get filthy and start reading poorly with dropouts or damage the next tapes… it’s the kind of task that just keeps having new roadblocks and gets harder with scale (unless you are able to repair the decks yourself or willing to just keep buying them - but they’re eventually going to become scarce as well). The software side is relatively simple but can also be complicated by dropouts / overzealous scene detection in some software for capturing - so sometimes you have to just let it happen and run a script to stitch all the files back together into one to maintain sanity.

Sorry I am now ranting, because I had a huge box of them to deal with containing a lot of memories and projects that were valuable to me personally, and I procrastinated for years but finally got it done. Glad I did and those tapes are long gone.

VHS / analog tapes have similar issues but the solutions are easier to acquire (millions of cheap vcr’s everywhere), and you can tap directly into the signal so it’s actually a rich and interesting community and challenge to improve it. MiniDV is just pain for those of us whose prime years shooting footage happened to be during its reign.

New comment by mackwell in "Ask HN: How do I sell unique training data?"

mackwell — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 16:18:53 +0000

The articles covering this topic have shown deals where various forms of media were purchased at surprising rates.

I’m not looking to start a company around this, my source of media and data are essentially a byproduct of my actual business. Ideally I’d like to find a broker or marketplace that I can feed it to.

New comment by mackwell in "Ask HN: How do I sell unique training data?"

mackwell — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 16:14:51 +0000

Thanks, seeing this before is actually what reminded me to make this post.

Ask HN: How do I sell unique training data?

mackwell — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 15:00:27 +0000

We have all seen the recent large deals made by tech companies to purchase access to various types of data for training their models (or Reddit, Photobucket). I have also seen some articles about the industry’s ever growing need for unique media and data that seem to suggest the existence of a market and brokers in need of new sources that are not online. They seem willing to pay, but I don’t see an obvious way to sell.

I believe I have access to troves that have never and will never be online. Some quick research has not turned up any obvious marketplace online or who to talk to.

Is anyone here in this business or have any advice or resources for people like me who want to explore offering training data for sale or license?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41626892

Points: 5

# Comments: 6

New comment by mackwell in "The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300"

mackwell — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 15:24:07 +0000

I had a Gateway Destination 36” monitor that I somehow acquired at a garage sale in my room as a teenager. Getting it into my upstairs room required my friends and I to all risk our lives but it was well worth it.

New comment by mackwell in "Copying Angry Birds with nothing but AI"

mackwell — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 23:18:57 +0000

I have an account and half the time when I follow a link from HN to Twitter / X it just throws an error that something went wrong / can't load the tweet. And video content works even less often than that. The site seems like it barely works at this point and is rapidly becoming a ghost town. What a waste.

New comment by mackwell in "Unity's oldest community announces dissolution"

mackwell — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 21:06:08 +0000

Let’s not forget Reddit

New comment by mackwell in "Linear Book Scanner – Open-source automatic book scanner (2014)"

mackwell — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 14:09:22 +0000

It definitely would. And probably some that are not damaged when something gets jammed or the environmental conditions change and react with the paper. But if you’ve got a mountain of books to scan and you can do the bulk of them with a machine like this and then use a more careful approach for the special cases, that’s a win.

New comment by mackwell in "Hate baggage fees? Wear a fishing vest on the plane"

mackwell — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 15:02:39 +0000

Probably true for many. But there can also be the other side of things where you just need to fly a lot and you want to keep those costs from adding up over time. For instance, needing to fly back and forth from home where you work to visit an ill relative. There are probably many situations where there is reasonable value to be had from a strategy like this.

Plus, you get the benefit of looking like an extremely cool dude!

New comment by mackwell in "Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer"

mackwell — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 23:45:28 +0000

I’m pretty sure that Mac sales have been doing just fine since the release of the M1.

New comment by mackwell in "Linux vs. Mac"

mackwell — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 22:00:35 +0000

Crash every 30 minutes on a clean install sounds like a hardware issue. In my experience an Ubuntu install is able to run continuously for long stretches without issue.

Whether you enjoy switching to Mac OS is going to depend on what you use your machine for. In general, for my main work machine I use Mac and I have very little to no downtime ever. However, much of the benefit of going Mac is gained if you go all in on the ecosystem across devices.

New comment by mackwell in "France's Bogdanoff Twins Die Days Apart"

mackwell — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 15:51:59 +0000

I wish it worked that way too, and we could all just care about ourselves. But others refusal to vaccinate / take precautions when necessary allows it to continue to spread (killing innocent immunosuppressed people along the way) and ultimately mutate into new variations, beginning the cycle of isolation and fear all over again. It’s a catch 22 unfortunately. We can’t ever get to 100% vaccination / precautionary isolation in order to eradicate the disease, and we also can’t stop caring or trying to because if we don’t it will never end and we will continue to need to develop new vaccines (if possible) trying to catch up to new variants. It seems we just have to play this game until the dominant variant(s) really are as weak as the flu, and just hope it doesn’t mutate the other direction into a more deadly strain that sends us back to square one repeatedly (or into mass extinction). Man this blows.

If anyone wants to prove me wrong please do, I find my view of this extremely depressing.

New comment by mackwell in "Cocaine Paraphernalia Ads in the 70s"

mackwell — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 14:30:16 +0000

My Dad invented one of the products advertised in these. Imagine my surprise the first time I saw a collection like this pop up.

New comment by mackwell in "Capturing and Archiving MiniDV Tapes on macOS"

mackwell — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 16:05:06 +0000

Great work and a good reference. I wish I had this to read when I went through a similar process after growing tired of storing a couple hundred miniDV tapes I had recorded as a teenager. Unfortunately I was not yet skilled enough to dive into the command line and so was using premiere pro and Lifeflix with great frustration. The endless problems (scene detection splitting clips on every glitch, wearing out player heads in multiple miniDV cameras and having to buy more, the ridiculous amount of time required capturing at 1x and being unable to really do it passively because of these issues) caused me to give up and send the whole lot into a digitizing service. For a few hundred bucks I got back DVDs and downloadable files of each tape and was done. I didn’t have as much granular control over the capturing method or codec used etc, but honestly it was a major weight off my shoulders that I had been continuously starting and then putting off for a decade so I consider it money extremely well spent.

New comment by mackwell in "Covid Is a Social Construct"

mackwell — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 22:29:13 +0000

Never have I read so many words and taken away so very little useful knowledge.

New comment by mackwell in "Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”"

mackwell — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 02:11:02 +0000

Why?

New comment by mackwell in "SQLite is 35% Faster Than The Filesystem (2017)"

mackwell — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 19:33:54 +0000

I think for the purpose of this discussion, explorer IS Windows. It is the UI that we all wish didn’t have these issues. I like using the command line / powershell when I’m on Windows for large file operations, but sometimes I still go to drag files around out of habit and quickly remember I have made a huge mistake as everything grinds to a halt / takes forever. On Linux and MacOS GUI file operations most of the time seem like they are just a visual way to call the same operations you’d be using on the command line.