Hacker News: nrjames

New comment by nrjames in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

nrjames — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:43:24 +0000

Ha! I did the exact same thing about 2 months ago. It saved me a lot of headache and research.

New comment by nrjames in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

nrjames — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:41:16 +0000

We were experiencing abnormally high electrical bills and I could not figure out what was happening, so I downloaded the granular usage data (15 min increments) from Duke Energy, explained what we had in our house and when we typically used those items (washer/dryer, EVs, etc), provided a rundown of our energy usage plan, then asked Claude to build me a Streamlit dashboard that would help us understand what was going on and predict what was going to happen over the next months. The dashboard had a few simple toggles a levers. Claude was basically able to one-shot this, knew how to manage the XML from Duke Energy, etc... In about 20 minutes of prompting, I had a very comprehensive dashboard that was extremely helpful not only in diagnosing that specific issue but also in helping us understand how to further lower our electrical bills.

New comment by nrjames in "AI is wiping out entry-level jobs"

nrjames — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:55:53 +0000

Kids go through changes in how they perceive their engagement with activities. At a very young age, they have little self-consciousness and will happily spend lots of time engaging with things they cannot do well. As they get older, frustration sets in sometimes when they cannot do something perfectly the first time they try it. I think some of the music programs, like Suzuki, try to take advantage of this by getting kids up-to-speed on the violin (or whatever) before they enter the phase where frustration dulls their interest. No parent really wants their kid to enter the cycle of repeatedly trying and quitting activities because of frustration. It eventually leads to a sort of apathy and lack of willingness to engage with things they perceive might be frustrating. This is a hard line to walk sometimes. I guess I'm just saying that you sometimes need to "push" them to remain engaged so that they can work past the frustration. It is a skill to learn that you have the ability to overcome the difficult initial learning curve of a lot of activities, sports, etc. If you can help imbue them with that skill, it can lead them to have a love for learning -- or a least not a fear of trying new things, which ultimately is the skill that can enable them to "flourish broadly," in my opinion.

New comment by nrjames in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

nrjames — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:46:41 +0000

Paris is working on some type of underground cooled-water network for AC in industrial settings.

https://56paris.com/en/cooling-paris-from-below-the-city-s-u...

Ask HN: Experience with Odd-Shaped Monitors?

nrjames — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:52:13 +0000

I have an idea for a hobby project to build a cocktail-table style curling video game for my local curling club.

The official dimensions of a curling sheet are approximately 150 feet long and 15 feet wide for a 10:1 ratio. Assuming padding on the sides for some UI, an aspect ratio of 5:1 or 4:1 probably would work. Ultra widescreen monitors come in at around 32:9 or ~3.6:1, so that's also probably workable.

However, I'd like the controls to be touchscreen and the largest 32:9 touchscreen I can find is the Asus ProArt pa147cdv, which is 14".

Looking around, there are some displays made for advertising that are larger but not touchscreen. Samsung has some interesting alternatives, such as the SH37R. I also see the Canlarriz "48.5-inch Ultra-Wide Bar Digital Signage Display" available. The best I've seen might be the "Litemax SSD5846-I 58.4″ Stretch Digital Display", but at 1400 nits, I'm concerned it would blind people.

To make this work, I'd probably need to put PCAP film on the back of tempered glass for the cabinet top, designed in a way that spilled drinks can't get into the electronics.

I have a few questions here and I'm open to any ideas or advice.

- If you have worked with these odd-shaped displays, such as the Litemax, are there peculiarities regarding them that are not immediately obvious? For example, would I have thermal issues with it mounted horizontally?

- Do you have a 'favorite' wide display that would work for this use case? If so, which is it and why is it your favorite?

- Have you used PCAP film to turn a display into something touchscreen? Was it multitouch?

- This seems similar to work done for some larger digital displays at museums. Any resources you could recommend for working with this type of technology? Are there companies that do the tempered glass with PCAP film commercially?

- I would build the game in Godot Engine. Any reason why you think that might not work?

Thanks for your input!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100504

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nrjames in "Talking to 35 Strangers at the Gym"

nrjames — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:13:33 +0000

OP, if you're up for trying something different, curling is an extremely social sport that welcomes newcomers. There's a very active club in Utica. https://sites.google.com/uticacurlingclub.org/uticacurlingcl...

New comment by nrjames in "Distributed DuckDB Instance"

nrjames — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:14:21 +0000

My employer is in the midst of migrating petabytes of data from Snowflake to DataBricks. They’re sold on the “all in one” nature of the platform and believe they’ll save significant money through a contract locking them into DataBricks running on Azure. It is a wildly disruptive process in an environment where the “Snowflake police” (as we call them) have been hounding everybody to reduce credit usage. Now the IT platform team is trying to explain units of work to non-technical VPs, for example, and there’s mass confusion. All signs point to them ending up in the same situation with expensive DataBricks bills, vendor lock in, and a future migration to try to reduce costs.

I guess what I was trying to say is that DuckLake isn’t even a blip on their radar. Should it be? Could you explain it to a non-technical marketing VP as part of a cost savings measure? What’s the DuckLake equivalent to a Unit of Work on DataBricks or a Snowflake Warehouse? If I needed to join multiple tables with billions of rows, where does the compute happen in DuckLake? Can you run your own cluster like with Clickhouse or StarRocks? How does it scale horizontally with storage and compute? How do I update it? What if there’s a security flaw? How well does it stand up to 500 people querying it simultaneously and what type of setup would I need to achieve that?

The PMs that manage the IT platform team aren’t necessarily deeply familiar with all of the technical details. A compelling introduction to DuckLake would provide the answer to some of these questions in a way that the VPs or PMs could digest it easily while providing the technical details the data workers require. For better or worse, “data lakehouse” and data warehouse and data lake all are industry jargon that is pretty impenetrable to people who don’t spend a lot of time working with the tools but who cut checks and make decisions.

New comment by nrjames in "Distributed DuckDB Instance"

nrjames — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:37:27 +0000

Regarding documentation, I think the DuckLake docs would benefit from a relatively simple “When should I consider using DuckLake?” type FAQ entry. You have sections for what, how, and why, essentially, and a few simple use cases and/or case studies could help provide the aha moment to people in data jobs who are inundated with marketing from other companies. It would help folks like me understand under which circumstances I would stand to benefit most from using DuckLake.

New comment by nrjames in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

nrjames — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:24:22 +0000

> ... they failed to keep the momentum and stopped taking risks.

This is a problem that infects all of the large studios now, from Epic to EA, Ubisoft, etc. My read on it is that it feels less risky to double-down on an exiting successful live service game like Fortnite or Rainbow Six Siege. That's probably true for ~5 years. After those ~5 years, it's far riskier to continue investing in the game than it is to start winding it down into maintenance mode while working on new titles or IP. The related risk is assuming that since the one title was huge that players are going to crave other titles in the same brand or franchise. For example, Ubisoft's assumption that Rainbow Six Extraction would naturally follow the success of Rainbow Six Siege.

These companies get addicted to the recurring revenue stream and pivot their businesses under the incorrect assumption they will last forever, at the expense of new projects.

New comment by nrjames in "Show HN: Beehive – Multi-Workspace Agent Orchestrator"

nrjames — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:30:31 +0000

It's a shame they didn't pick a name different from Apache Superset https://superset.apache.org

New comment by nrjames in "LED lighting undermines visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra"

nrjames — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:02:32 +0000

I’ve always been mildly bothered by the LED lighting in my home, as if it’s simultaneously bright but not illuminating. In simple consumer terms, if I wanted to shop for a variant that more closely replicated incandescent lighting, what exactly am I looking for on the packaging? Or does this not exist?

New comment by nrjames in "East Germany balloon escape"

nrjames — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:48:29 +0000

Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774

New comment by nrjames in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

nrjames — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:33:37 +0000

I always wonder why people settle on a number like 49,000 when 50,000 is sitting right there, looking you in the face.

New comment by nrjames in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

nrjames — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 12:43:38 +0000

It must be about oil.

New comment by nrjames in "Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free"

nrjames — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:45:40 +0000

“Buy the rumors and sell the news.” Just typical market stuff.

New comment by nrjames in "Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?"

nrjames — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 12:48:22 +0000

As a parent with two kids that used Scratch during 2020 or so… be cautious. The web community was an unregulated social network with follows, likes, comments, and a wide age range (apparently) of people interacting. Around that time, there was a lot of inappropriate content, some bullying, sketches about self-harm, sex, etc. Perhaps they’ve fixed the issue. If not, I would try to install it locally and keep them away from the official website.

Incidentally, I later came to believe that the visual coding impeded their ability to learn text-based coding. That was just my experience and I don’t have formal research to back it up, but I still wonder about it.

New comment by nrjames in "Leaving Meta and PyTorch"

nrjames — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 12:17:52 +0000

If you can afford to support yourself, which I’m sure he can, there’s a serenity to working on small projects that are nothin the public eye. It may simply be that he craves some quiet time that enables him to focus on his family and himself.

New comment by nrjames in "Studio Ghibli, Bandai Namco, Square Enix Demand OpenAI to Stop Using Their IP"

nrjames — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:49:55 +0000

In the world of tattooing, it’s frowned upon for a tattoo artist to take another tattoo artist’s original work and replicate it without permission, yet it’s common practice to take well known IP (Pokémon, Studio Ghibli, etc) and tattoo that on a client. The ethical boundary seems to be between whether the source artwork was created by an individual vs. a corporation.

New comment by nrjames in "HyperRogue – A non-Euclidean roguelike"

nrjames — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 13:03:57 +0000

Brogue (Community Edition) also is awesome!

https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE

New comment by nrjames in "Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock"

nrjames — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 13:56:09 +0000

No, it enabled them to find him quickly. There was other evidence, but with no previously know connection to the victim and the perpetrator having no prior criminal record, I was told it was unlikely they would have found him otherwise.