Hacker News: patja

New comment by patja in "Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI"

patja — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 18:30:43 +0000

"real coding" carries a lot of the weight in that comment.

Seems like if you ask 5 different people what "real coding" means you might get 5 different answers.

Not everyone is building the next framework or compiler.

Self-hosted Qwen 3.8 @Q4 on my RTX 3090 can produce beautiful functional CRUD pages and apps all day long. And that is 90% of the "real coding" being done in corporate settings.

The quote in the article about Mazda vs. Maserati captures this. Many might want the Maserati and drool over its specs and capabilities, but balk at the cost and how often are they really going to run it up to full performance limits on their daily commute to their cubicle?

New comment by patja in "Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history"

patja — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:43:31 +0000

Seems like this could be categorized as yet another reason why software developers are not engineers.

New comment by patja in "Valve open-source the Steam Machine e-ink screen so you can make your own"

patja — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 01:05:09 +0000

It seems like one of the design goals was separation/independence. It also doesn't need a battery if it is meant to be tightly coupled with the Steam Machine. Which is nice for opening it up to many alternate uses.

New comment by patja in "Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers"

patja — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:29:03 +0000

Squeezelite-ESP32 is a solution that is sort of aligned with this scenario. No airplay and you would need an amp module to get to 50w.

New comment by patja in "Steam Machine launches today"

patja — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:01:20 +0000

I am guessing the BMI would track. Unless they make unlikely changes including spending more time away from that couch, these two are looking at health consequences that will probably make them a burden on society by the time they hit middle age.

New comment by patja in "Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD"

patja — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:27:37 +0000

It did a great job with this prompt. Got it done in about the time it would take me to login and load Fusion. I forgot to include the wire diameter but it made a reasonable assumption and included it in the params for edits

"Make a grommet seal for a hole in an aluminum pipe where a cable goes through. The hole is 0.48 inches in diameter. The wall of the pipe is .25 inches thick. Make the seal split so it can be installed with the cable in place. Make a circular cover lip that is .2 inches across on the outside, and an inner lip to secure it that is smaller. It will be printed in flexible tpu"

New comment by patja in "Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD"

patja — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:24:22 +0000

Gridfinity is a bit of a tool organization rabbit hole verging on a cult in 3d printing circles.

New comment by patja in "The Future of Email"

patja — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:10:28 +0000

Apple is a problematic email service provider. They don't even send DMARC reports.

New comment by patja in "A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)"

patja — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:04:21 +0000

I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about statements like these which seem to assume the reader is incredibly uninformed and naive, to the point of condescension.

"sends the information to a central storing place (called a database)" TIL what the word database means?

"Amazon can use your purchases to know more about you using patterns." Is this news to someone? Condescending.

"It might be connected to a network (via Internet or radio frequency)" Radio frequency and Internet are not really directly comparable

Also don't like that the site hijacks the appearance of my mouse pointer, which feels similarly disrespectful of the reader.

New comment by patja in "Accenture to acquire Ookla"

patja — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:27:15 +0000

The opposite can also be true. T-Mobile throttles Netflix and fast.com on my 5g mobile plan to be less than 5Mbps where Speedtest shows > 200Mbps.

New comment by patja in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

patja — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:07:01 +0000

Similar experience here. I worked on an ERP system for a chemical distributor that ran on 5 Honeywell Ultimate systems distributed across the US. General ledger, order management, warehouse order pick lists, chemical recipes, MSDS data, inventory, etc. We synced database updates every night, and once a month someone had to spend the night in the datacenter swapping 9 track tapes for backups.

I loved working in Pick BASIC on those systems. So much you could do with "dict items"

New comment by patja in "Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s"

patja — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:29:14 +0000

We already have COPPA. The result of which I have seen in my child's classroom when the teacher instructs the class "enter a different birth date to get around this restriction so we can use this website for our class activity"

New comment by patja in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

patja — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:45:52 +0000

I recently migrated off of my legacy "Google Apps for Your Domain" (now Workspace) account to a mix of self hosting and a regular old vanilla gmail account.

It was a real eye opener to experience how challenging it was to move my data from one Google account to another. Takeout is nice in theory, but there is no equivalent "Takein" service that accepts the data form import to another Google account in the format produced by Takeout! I naively assumed "Export Google calendar from here, import same files to there" but nope, that did not work at all. Maps data was even worse.

New comment by patja in "We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees"

patja — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:26:59 +0000

I've been running my own MX for my business for a couple decades. I've never had trouble with Google. Apple on the other hand...as expected are not accommodating to anyone operating outside of the Apple garden. They don't even do DMARC reports, and just point you at their policy page with no indication of why they reject some mail to icloud addresses but not others. I will say I have received specific feedback from a human at Apple after submitting an email and waiting about a month for a response. But it was shocking in how braindead and years-out-of-date their reason was for blocking some (not all!) emails from our domain.

Actually the absolute worst are the rinky dink "free email" hosting that is bundled with some cheap web hosting services, where they use the UCEPROTECT block lists. UCEPROTECT is basically a protection racket where they expect you to pay to be removed from their blocklists, and they are often the one and only blocklist a domain or IP will appear on (which indicates it is likely a false positive money grab)

New comment by patja in "Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS"

patja — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:47:37 +0000

Fair enough for GPU-intensive stuff like running Qwen locally. But do you really need a GPU for decent local TTS? I run parakeet just on CPU.

New comment by patja in "Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS"

patja — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:44:40 +0000

I've been using Chirp which uses parakeet on Windows. Learned about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930659

Works great for me!

New comment by patja in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

patja — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:17:28 +0000

491 Oracle jobs cut in Washington State isn't nothing

New comment by patja in "What your Bluetooth devices reveal"

patja — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:31:12 +0000

Wow that is wild. Thanks for explaining.

I've never seen a prompt like that on my phone and would not have guessed this.

New comment by patja in "What your Bluetooth devices reveal"

patja — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:13:41 +0000

How did this play out? Were the ads from an app from the store that you had installed? Or did they spam you over SMS because they associated your bluetooth info with an account you have with the store, or contact info they bought from a third party?

New comment by patja in "How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?"

patja — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:28:01 +0000

A colonoscopy has the risk of going very wrong due to a puncture.