Hacker News: maliker

New comment by maliker in "Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas"

maliker — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:03:39 +0000

It might just be me, but this interface is the first time I felt the desire to interact with long-running agents even though I use chat interfaces all day long. Maybe it was the demo video on the landing page which was compelling with its examples. Maybe it was the feeling that I could see what was going on because I would be on a canvas. Nicely done!

Off to keep iterating on the prototype app I started...

New comment by maliker in "The window chrome of our discontent"

maliker — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:11:12 +0000

I'll play slight devil's advocate. The buttons in the toolbar are duplicative of the options in the menubar, and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. You can't turn off the menubar items, so I end up turning off the toolbar. So I don't care what that part of the UI looks like, and the sidebar for formatting they added, as pointed out in the article, uses the horizontal space on screens better than options stretched out over the full width of the menu.

Now the visibility of the liquid glass stuff, that is definitely a problem. Can't recognize a UI element if it's constantly rendered differently and with very little contrast with the background elements.

Well, I guess someone is going to vibecode a decent Linux GUI or fix the driver pains there or something and we'll be free of this. Because Microsoft/Apple and to a lesser extent Google have jumped the shark with their UI these days.

New comment by maliker in "I hate GitHub Actions with passion"

maliker — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:28:47 +0000

I wish I had the courage to run my own CI server. But yes, I think your approach is the best for serious teams that can manage more infrastructure.

New comment by maliker in "I hate GitHub Actions with passion"

maliker — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:11:10 +0000

I'm scared by all these references to nix in the replies here. Sounds like I'm going to have learn nix. Sounds hard.

New comment by maliker in "I hate GitHub Actions with passion"

maliker — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:17:11 +0000

I've standardized on getting github actions to create/pull a docker image and run build/test inside that. So if something goes wrong I have a decent live debug environment that's very similar to what github actions is running. For what it's worth.

New comment by maliker in "Leaving Intel"

maliker — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 03:51:00 +0000

Masterclass in turning a goodbye email into a hire me after my next gig ends. I’m not being sarcastic, this is a great example of highlighting the value they added.

New comment by maliker in "Nano Banana Pro"

maliker — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 15:23:39 +0000

I wonder how hard it is to remove that SynthID watermark...

Looks like: "When tested on images marked with Google’s SynthID, the technique used in the example images above, Kassis says that UnMarker successfully removed 79 percent of watermarks." From https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-watermark-remover

New comment by maliker in "Is your electric bill going up? AI is partly to blame"

maliker — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 23:08:32 +0000

Berkeley National Lab did a great study on this recently [0]. Short answer what's raised prices over the last 5 years, slide 22 in the linked doc: supply chain disruption increasing hardware prices, wildfires, and renewable policies (ahem, net metering) that over-reimburse asset owners.

I'd love to be able to point at something that implicates data centers, but first I'd need to see the data. So far, no evidence. Hint: it would show up in bulk system prices not consumer rates, which are dominated by wires costs.

[0] https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2025-10...

New comment by maliker in "Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26"

maliker — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 12:51:27 +0000

I can live with the different visual style but iOS 26 has cost about 30% of my battery even running all day on low power mode on an iPhone 14. It’s horrendous. Hard to even get through one day on a charge now.

New comment by maliker in "Solar becomes top source of electricity in California"

maliker — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 01:19:03 +0000

Yeah I’ve never understood this for lithium ion systems. Maybe some parallel or series the cells differently to get different total max power outputs? But I don’t expect that would affect cost either way.

With flow batteries there are definitely differences since the power and energy components of the system can each be scaled independently from each other. Ie need more total energy then just expand the amount of liquid electrolyte storage you have.

New comment by maliker in "HealthBench"

maliker — Mon, 12 May 2025 20:41:40 +0000

Might be worth trying again with Gemini 2.5. The reasoning models like that one are much better at health questions.

New comment by maliker in "HealthBench"

maliker — Mon, 12 May 2025 19:25:01 +0000

Interesting. What LLM model? 4o, o3, 3.5? I had horrible performance with earlier models, but o3 has helped me with health stuff (hearing issues).

New comment by maliker in "Show HN: WASM-powered codespaces for Python notebooks on GitHub"

maliker — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 16:58:40 +0000

This is an awesome, and as a bonus I learned about a mature reactive notebook for python. Great stuff.

The data sharing is awesome. I previously used Google Colab to share runnable code with non-dev coworkers, but their file support requires some kludges to get it working decently.

I know I should just RTFM, but are you all working on tools to embed/cross-compile/emulate non-python binaries in here? I know this is not a good approach, but as a researcher I would love to shut down my server infrastructure and just use 3-4 crusty old binaries I rely on directly in the browser.

New comment by maliker in "I will never need to buy a new computer again"

maliker — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 17:35:19 +0000

Looks like it's not supported in RustDesk or Parsec, but there are other tools that will do it [1].

[1] https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/6014

New comment by maliker in "I will never need to buy a new computer again"

maliker — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 17:16:07 +0000

Now that there is great GPU-accelerated remote desktop options, I mostly just remote into more powerful machines. Even a country away the on-screen performance is almost like sitting at the machine, and as a bonus I don't hear every fan on my laptop going crazy. I've been a happy Parsec.app user for a while, but there are many other options (e.g. RustDesk has this).

New comment by maliker in "AI Startup Anthropic Raising Funding Valuing It at $60B"

maliker — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 19:45:17 +0000

People can't get into the OpenAI round so they buy Anthropic maybe?

New comment by maliker in "OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles"

maliker — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 13:45:06 +0000

It's been fascinating to watch the open source community build out vector map tile capabilities. I was doing some web GIS work back in roughly 2018, and Google/Apple's streaming vector maps performed like magic and something we would have loved to use if we could afford it. Shortly thereafter the core tech was available in open source, and then there were even free hosted solutions. Now our leaflet maps have great vector layers for free. Thanks open source!

New comment by maliker in "Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they? Here's why they should"

maliker — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 19:32:24 +0000

It does a 3d scan of the face, so you can't crack it with an image or video.

New comment by maliker in "uv – Declaring Script Dependencies"

maliker — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 15:16:41 +0000

Please god, let uv be the final tweak of the python requirements best practices. I can't handle another easy_install -> requirements.txt/pip -> pyproject.toml. It will break me.

New comment by maliker in "TextBundle"

maliker — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:47:32 +0000

I spent a lot of time investigating all the editors on this list because I want a rich text editor that works with single files and is as clean powerful as VS Code (or sublime, emacs, whatever you prefer). Didn't end up using any of them since nobody else uses this format. Went back to .docx. Sad.