Hacker News: nsedlet

New comment by nsedlet in "Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard"

nsedlet — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:21:41 +0000

I also attempted to do real-time audio visualizations with LED strips. What was unsatisfying is that the net effect always seemed to be: the thing would light up with heavy beats and general volume. But otherwise the visual didn't FEEL like the music. This is the same issue I always had with the Winamp visualizations back in the day.

To solve this I tried pre-processing the audio, which only works with recordings obviously. I extract the beats and the chords (using Chordify). I made a basic animation and pulsed the lights to the beat, and mapped the chords to different color palettes.

Some friends and I rushed it to put it together as a Burning Man art project and it wasn't perfect, but by the time we launched it felt a lot closer to what I'd imagined. Here's a grainy video of it working at Burning Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXVZhv_Xi0I

It works pretty well with most songs that you pick. Just saying there's another way to go somewhere between (1) fully reactive to live audio, and (2) hand designed animations.

I don't think there's an easy bridge to make it work with live audio though unfortunately.

New comment by nsedlet in "When does MCP make sense vs CLI?"

nsedlet — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:31:30 +0000

Yes, exactly. Not only can you not run CLIs in Chat interfaces, the services that non devs use often don’t even have CLIs to begin with.

Developers have a rich set of CLIs because they live in the terminal and built those tools for themselves.

OpenClaw bot writes blog post shaming maintainer after rejected PR

nsedlet — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 03:12:53 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/callebtc/status/2022046669710491991

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998500

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

The Resonant Computing Manifesto

nsedlet — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:48:30 +0000

Article URL: https://resonantcomputing.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46244642

Points: 10

# Comments: 2

New comment by nsedlet in "Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now"

nsedlet — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 15:30:49 +0000

Agreed. As engineers we build context every time we interact with the codebase. LLMs don't do that.

A good senior engineer has a ton in their head after 6+ months in a codebase. You can spend a lot of time trying to equip Claude Code with the equivalent in the form of CLAUDE.MD, references to docs, etc., but it's a lot of work, and it's not clear that the agents even use it well (yet).

New comment by nsedlet in "How to be a leader when the vibes are off"

nsedlet — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 18:03:10 +0000

Another factor with the vibes being off (at least in the US): mass outsourcing of jobs thanks to remote work. You used to have to be a multinational company with global entities and offices. Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people outside the country.

When the world went remote many folks were happy with the better work-life balance. But it means that we compete in a ruthless global labor market.

That's why companies rejecting remote work is good for the American worker in some ways.

Class-action suit claims Otter AI records private work conversations

nsedlet — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 13:47:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/15/g-s1-83087/otter-ai-transcription-class-action-lawsuit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940554

Points: 144

# Comments: 48

New comment by nsedlet in "LLM Daydreaming"

nsedlet — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:21:46 +0000

I believe an important reason for why there are no LLM breakthroughs is that humans make progress in their thinking through experimentation, i.e. collecting targeted data, which requires exerting agency on the real world. This isn't just observation, it's the creation of data not already in the training set.

New comment by nsedlet in "We in-housed our data labelling"

nsedlet — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 19:52:21 +0000

Data labeling has been moving to onshore / higher paid work. There's still a lot offshore, but for LLMs in particular and various specialized models, there's a massive trend toward hiring highly educated, highly paid specialists in the US.

But as other commenters have warned: beware of labor laws, especially in CA/NY/MA.

I've had a front-row seat to this...our company hires + employs contract W2 and 1099 workers for the tech industry. Two years ago we started to get a ton of demand from data labeling companies and more recently foundation model cos who are doing DIY data labeling. Companies are converting 1099 workforces to W2 to avoid misclassification. Or they're trying to button up their use of 1099 to avoid being offside.

New comment by nsedlet in "Solarpunk"

nsedlet — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 01:59:49 +0000

This 1967 poem is often mentioned in the context of Solarpunk as having a similar vision https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving...

New comment by nsedlet in "Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley"

nsedlet — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 14:40:14 +0000

I do agree. But the thing I would add though is that at least when I was there (W2012 - we were in the same batch!) YC and PG in particular were vocal about principles they believed in, especially the idea that naive young founders get kicked around in Silicon Valley and ought to be treated fairly. PG talked about this constantly and of course it’s a big theme of his essays. I remember one particular instance where a potential investor was behaving questionably and PG offered to step in and talk to them if they crossed a certain line (which they did not in the end). He was clear about what he concerned acceptable and unacceptable and why. And we were nowhere near the cool end of the batch.

Yes YC acts in its interests but in my experience they live by good principles and that makes all the difference. The Chaos Monkeys anecdote is an example of that. So I don’t agree with the article’s framing that they throw their weight around to simply exercise whatever power they have over others for financial gain.

New comment by nsedlet in "VC Fund gives money back, says the market for mature startups is too weak"

nsedlet — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 15:39:08 +0000

Maybe this is a dumb question but I thought valuations had fallen a bunch since mid 2022 and now lots of VC firms are struggling with companies (especially mid-to-late stage) who raised at much higher valuations than they can now get in the market. But this firm is saying that current valuations are too high to make new investments. Would it not be a good time to invest in later stage startups? Or is the issue that the forward growth potential of these companies is lower now for some reason.

New comment by nsedlet in "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth"

nsedlet — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 14:40:34 +0000

I was part of the W12 batch of YC (which was a lot smaller, ~60 companies, back when Paul Graham was still leading YC).

YC funds a lot of companies and has always had super high variance in the companies it funds. Entrepreneurs are a wild bunch of people. There have always been companies where the founders turned out to be BS artists or sociopaths. Companies that folded immediately after the program started. Companies with messy cofounder breakups already brewing at the beginning of the batch. Companies that turned out to be slightly scammy. Some of the founders that were in those companies pivoted and became successful.

Picking on Pear AI (which I don't know anything about) as evidence of YC failing is silly. It's also a super early stage company and you really have no idea what they will do.

The test of YC to me is, can they keep attracting and picking some of the best founders (which you can't really tell for years). And providing the inspiring, warm, but pushy environment that best sets up founders for success, and in turn keeps them coming to YC. I'd apply to YC again in a heartbeat if I were ever starting another company.

New comment by nsedlet in "Y Combinator is predicated on startups that require low capitalization"

nsedlet — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 01:48:10 +0000

It takes time to build a company to significant revenue. I'd be curious to rule that out as the primary explanation before reading too much else into this.

Man Called Fran

nsedlet — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 14:21:03 +0000

Article URL: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/man-called-fran/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41435252

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by nsedlet in "A Slower Speed of Light (2012)"

nsedlet — Mon, 13 May 2024 18:25:04 +0000

I've been curious what a version of this based on general relativity would be like and whether that would be interesting.

A Zero-Gravity Omega Watch Repair Revolutionized NASA’s Space Station Fixes

nsedlet — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 22:11:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/omega-watch-repair-nasa-iss-don-pettit/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37784924

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by nsedlet in "The Fill and Flush deplaning method"

nsedlet — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 15:29:31 +0000

This is great. This is mentioned in the discussion topics section ("modeling randomness in gathering belongings"). But I wonder what the distribution of baggage-gathering time looks like? I'd guess pretty positively skewed, i.e. most people are pretty quick but then a few people take a long time or a really long time. The speed of the flush stage of a particular wave is capped at the slowest person in that wave.

New comment by nsedlet in "Ask HN: Will AI result in mass silo-ing of new knowledge?"

nsedlet — Fri, 19 May 2023 16:53:55 +0000

Yeah it feels like there should be a legally enforceable ai.txt

New comment by nsedlet in "Ask HN: Will AI result in mass silo-ing of new knowledge?"

nsedlet — Fri, 19 May 2023 16:39:55 +0000

I do think there will/should be a reckoning about the how training data is acquired and attributed. For example, LLMs could attempt to cite sources, or share ad revenue fractionally with all the sources of that inform the response they're presenting.

I think that as the magic wears off it's becoming clearer that LLMs are more like fancy search engine UIs than intelligent agents. They surface, remix, and mash up content that everyone else created, without the permission of the creators.

That doesn't mean there won't be economic fallout. Spotify may have figured out legal streaming - but the music industry is still much smaller than it was in the 90s