Hacker News: primitivesuave

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:42:56 +0000

Thank you!!

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:42:36 +0000

Thank you for the link! I love Observable notebooks.

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:45:22 +0000

Thank you! Very honored to be considered an educational gem :)

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:43:49 +0000

This is such a great idea. I didn't know about WebXR before reading your comment, and was delighted to see that this is a relatively easy thing to implement. I need to find some VR goggles to borrow so I can test this out, but I'll optimistically push out an update within the next day with the WebXR update.

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:41:24 +0000

Thank you!! I was also hitting performance issues, especially on mobile - I think the latest version has gotten it a bit closer to a smoother experience, but there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit on making this more fluid (especially the step transitions).

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:22:39 +0000

Yours is amazing work, and certainly a higher degree of fidelity than I was able to achieve with AI assistance. The initial motivation behind this was largely driven by curiosity around the rotor motion (the ratchet and pawl assembly), and then into how the wiring actually works. For my brain, I needed to press the keys a hundred times and watch the current flow before it started making sense.

I'm curious about how you worked out the inner dimensions and part placements so accurately. Thank you for providing this marvelous free resource!

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:27:23 +0000

I revamped the mobile experience last night, let me know what you think!

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:39:28 +0000

Thank you! My dream is to have a working Bombe [1] which can decrypt the Enigma traffic in your browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:44:33 +0000

Thank you for the kind words! As mentioned in the other comment below, I'll open-source it very soon and update the site with a GitHub link.

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:43:42 +0000

Thank you for the suggestion and the kind words! Completely agree that the navigation is a bit unintuitive, will work on fixing that tonight :)

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:41:55 +0000

I will open-source it very soon! I was a bit nervous about putting it out there before I'm sure that the machines are absolutely accurate, especially the more niche ones where I had to make some inferences about the wiring. Will add the GitHub link to the site when I've had a chance to review everything for accuracy, and will probably end up moving some of my "educated guesses" off the main branch.

New comment by primitivesuave in "Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine"

primitivesuave — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:37:17 +0000

Thank you for the tip about mobile performance, my apologies for neglecting it and I'm working on fixing it right now!

Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine

primitivesuave — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:15:56 +0000

I watched the excellent Veritasium video [1] on the Enigma machine, and watched the full animation by Jared Owen [2], but was still a bit confused on how the inner mechanics of an Enigma machine work. I used Astra to build out the inner components through a combination of reference images, writing out hundreds of extremely detailed prompts, and building my own inspection tools to ensure that every part is sized and positioned in a historically accurate way.

It's still a work in progress, but would love any feedback on the experience so far!

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybkkiGtJmkM

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49896757

Points: 118

# Comments: 40

New comment by primitivesuave in "'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees"

primitivesuave — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:34:52 +0000

The recent Epic vs Health Gorilla lawsuit is an example of how your medical records have almost certainly made it to the hands of many people you will never know about.

New comment by primitivesuave in "It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta"

primitivesuave — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:59:48 +0000

Rather than investigate all the things where investigative journalism could potentially make a difference to real human beings' lives, the Guardian has chosen to pursue a plea for the majority owner of Meta's voting shares (61%) to step down from his position of power. Let us politely ask Sisyphus to stop pushing the boulder instead.

Show HN: Searching for optimal strategies in a puzzle game with chance (Drop7)

primitivesuave — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:17:50 +0000

Sixteen years ago, I wrote a Java program which tried to pick the ideal move in a puzzle game called Drop7. On each turn, the player only has seven choices for their next move, but there is also an element of chance which turns this simple game into a surprisingly difficult problem involving search, hidden information, long-term planning, and chance.

I renewed my investigation this weekend, into whether there is an autonomous strategy that averages more than one million points per game. An experienced human player can score a million points with long-term strategic thinking, but the best automated strategies I could come up with are currently averaging around 300k-400k points. One of the easiest ways to contribute to advancing this research is to compete on the global leaderboard and submit your human strategy - https://drop7.dev/compete.

This project has also been an enlightening experiment into using agents as research collaborators and evidence collectors.

Repository: https://github.com/keshavsaharia/drop7-bench

I’d especially appreciate feedback from people who are knowledgeable in game theory, stochastic planning, learned value functions, or heavy-tailed evaluation. How would you approach long-horizon action ranking here? I’d also love to hear whether the research makes sense to someone encountering the project for the first time.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49436512

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by primitivesuave in "Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory"

primitivesuave — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:26:42 +0000

I've been meaning to write something about how I did it, and have been putting it off for a long time. I wrote all the tools myself - by that, I mean that everything was a web app running in my browser.

My advice would be to first set up an automation for yt-dlp to pull the media, then use Whisper to build a transcription pipeline. Chunk the transcript based on desired result granularity, then store embeddings in local Qdrant. It helps to use an orchestrator to handle all of this - my current recommendation is Dagster (dagster.io).

New comment by primitivesuave in "Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory"

primitivesuave — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:19:56 +0000

Excellent guess, and the documentary All The Queen's Horses does a much better job explaining that story than I ever could!

This one is about Dolton, IL - the series is called "Dolton Documentaries" on YouTube.

New comment by primitivesuave in "Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory"

primitivesuave — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:18:59 +0000

Honored by your interested :) It is called "Dolton Documentaries".

New comment by primitivesuave in "Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory"

primitivesuave — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:51:33 +0000

My favorite real-world example that I worked on: I created a YouTube documentary series about corruption in a small town in Illinois. This required downloading thousands of hours of government meeting videos from YouTube, transcribing + chunking + embedding, summarizing meeting segments, running a couple passes of validation, then searching for interesting storylines. I also scraped thousands of public documents which exposed campaign finance violations and some truly nefarious stuff going on behind the scenes.

I did 90-95% of the work on this with a local GPU. I still ran Claude and Codex, but they were just writing code to orchestrate API calls against local models, local Whisper, etc. Doing the same with the public cloud would have cost thousands of dollars, instead it cost a few hundred dollars for a frontier lab subscription and tens of dollars for electricity.

I recently got into the DGX Spark and just a month ago, got an AMD Ryzen developer platform. Both are incredibly useful tools for some upcoming projects I'm working on (also related to government corruption), but in my limited experience of trying to run opencode on them, the "good models" are still completely unusable because the system prompt alone requires a minute of thinking.