Hacker News: mwambua

New comment by mwambua in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

mwambua — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:19:35 +0000

Wouldn’t cheaper memory make it easier to bring compute out of data centers and onto consumer hardware?

New comment by mwambua in "Anger, Anxiety and Agency"

mwambua — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:21:19 +0000

Agreed! At the moment I have all the tech I really need. I could think up a million interesting side-projects that AI might help come to fruition. However, in reality I have much more banal concerns - like whether I'll still be able to make a decent living using my skills; and whether I'll ever be able to start a family and own a home.

Perhaps this would be far more exciting if I were younger. But right now I'm just trying to figure out if I can survive.

New comment by mwambua in "Ultraviolet Bird Photography"

mwambua — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:23:07 +0000

If you want a nice take on what that would be like for humans - Greg Egan has an interesting short story called “Seventh Sight” about people bio hacking themselves to gain expanded spectral perception. It’s in his Instantiation Anthology.

New comment by mwambua in "US hires over 2k video gamers as air traffic controllers"

mwambua — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:39:39 +0000

Not sure - but I know there's a really serious community of folks who do ATC virtually on VATSIM: https://vatsim.net

I feel like those folks would already have been candidates for air traffic controller jobs though.

New comment by mwambua in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

mwambua — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:49:47 +0000

It's certainly interesting that someone who founded Onavo would be made VP of "Trust & Safety"

New comment by mwambua in "Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink"

mwambua — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:57:30 +0000

Bloomberg's podcast "The Big Take" has been running an interesting series on Chinese industrial espionage called "The Sixth Bureau". Here's a link to the Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38L5UzLwt-s&list=PLe4PRejZgr...

New comment by mwambua in "Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash"

mwambua — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 02:11:50 +0000

Do you have evidence of that?

New comment by mwambua in "What an unprocessed photo looks like"

mwambua — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 05:42:03 +0000

> The human eye is most sensitive to green light, so that channel effectively carries the majority of the luminance (brightness/detail) data

How does this affect luminance perception for deuteranopes? (Since their color blindness is caused by a deficiency of the cones that detect green wavelengths)

New comment by mwambua in "Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon"

mwambua — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:02:58 +0000

Does this mean that we'll start to see SATA replaced with faster interfaces in the future? Something like U.2/U.3 that's currently available to the enterprise?

New comment by mwambua in "A Cozy Mk IV light aircraft crashed after 3D-printed part was weakened by heat"

mwambua — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:07:31 +0000

In the report they tested samples of the part and found that they actually had glass transition temperatures of 52.8°C, and 54.0°C... so sounds like the owner fell victim to false advertising.

New comment by mwambua in "Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker"

mwambua — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 18:55:34 +0000

There's also Actual Budget (https://actualbudget.com) which you can self-host.

New comment by mwambua in "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"

mwambua — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 19:27:43 +0000

Oh, nice! Thanks! This reminds me of the unofficial yahoo finance api.

New comment by mwambua in "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"

mwambua — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:34:48 +0000

Tangential question. What do people use for search? What search engines provide the best quality to cost ratios?

Also are there good solutions for searching through a local collection of documents?

New comment by mwambua in "Vitamin D reduces incidence and duration of colds in those with low levels"

mwambua — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 20:18:48 +0000

I’m painfully aware of that being dark skinned myself. That doesn’t mean that Minnesota is inhospitable though (or that it would be criminal to send me there). It just means that they’d need to know that they need vitamin D supplements and perhaps regular blood screens. Idk if that happens though.

New comment by mwambua in "Vitamin D reduces incidence and duration of colds in those with low levels"

mwambua — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 19:49:37 +0000

It's only criminal if they aren't provided with the education/information they need to live healthy lives (which is possible with the right diet/supplements).

New comment by mwambua in "OpenBSD 7.8"

mwambua — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 02:40:00 +0000

Ooh, looks like the Raspberry Pi 5 is now supported!

New comment by mwambua in "Building the heap: racking 30 petabytes of hard drives for pretraining"

mwambua — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 19:06:19 +0000

How did you arrive at the decision of not putting the GPU machines in the colo? Were the power costs going to be too high? Or do you just expect to need more physical access to the GPU machines vs the storage ones?

New comment by mwambua in "Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan"

mwambua — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 22:54:17 +0000

The ethical stand serves the dual purpose of: a) trying to make sure the company does the right thing, and b) avoiding liability.

Seems like Engineer-1 failed at stopping her, but managed to avoid taking any blame at the end of the day.

New comment by mwambua in "In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs"

mwambua — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:15:17 +0000

I'm not justifying the crimes and I think people should pay for the consequences of their actions, but I don't think it's that simple.

I think some people just haven't been exposed to the benefits of taking a path to life that doesn't involve crime. Some people also need to be convinced that there are viable alternatives to crime. And as someone else said, society needs to give them the chance to redeem themselves and pursue those alternate paths.

New comment by mwambua in "Apple Watch Ultra 3"

mwambua — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:23:59 +0000

I personally wouldn't rely on my phone/watch if I'm headed anywhere remote without cell service & electricity. With Garmin inReach you don't just get better battery life - you also get the Iridium satellite network and a team that's more experienced at search and rescue.

That being said, I do think that these new emergency SOS features will come in handy for people who don't know what they're getting themselves into, or who just run into unexpected bad luck on what was supposed to be a quick day trip.