Hacker News: programd

New comment by programd in "I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy"

programd — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:34:24 +0000

The hardware is a helmet with a buch of sensors and IR LEDs on the inside. There's a writeup of the process and a picture of the outside here:

https://condu.it/thought/10k-hours

Their data acquisition routine was driven by Claude and they were recruiting random people off Craigslist pretty aggressively a few months back. I know a couple of folks who responded out of curiosity and described a very janky setup in the rented basements of a couple of residential houses in SF. From what I heard about the setup the data they got must have been incredibly noisy.

To the people who are sceptical here, I wouldn't count them out yet. They almost certainly can get funding with what they captured, which would get them better hardware. And given the state of brain scanning - people have captured images from scanned brain activity some years ago as I recall - I'd say they have a good shot. But yeah, it's not telepathy.

Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195109

New comment by programd in "Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work"

programd — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:17:39 +0000

Also worth reading is the blog post by the Cloudflare CIO Sam Rhea on how they are actually using it internally, with some examples.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-use-ai-with-cloudflare-os...

New comment by programd in "Cyberpunk Video Games"

programd — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:46:00 +0000

Cloudpunk and its sequel City of Ghosts should be on the list. Very laid back games heavy on charming atmosphere with a great soundtrack. The voxel city design is excellent.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/

New comment by programd in "The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup"

programd — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:33:29 +0000

The feedback from the VC crowd is that the historical 5 year startup timeline is down to 18 months these days. That means finding PMF, funding rounds, hiring and scaling to $25 mil/year. That's the VC playbook changer which has them all worried about businesses which don't go all in for AI.

New comment by programd in "OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool"

programd — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:40:35 +0000

Define easily. There is an approach that apparently works and is based on spectral analysis of the images.

https://github.com/aloshdenny/reverse-SynthID

New comment by programd in "Peter G. Neumann, Who Warned of Computer Security Risks, Dies at 93"

programd — Mon, 18 May 2026 00:57:17 +0000

His RISKS Digest should be required reading for anybody studying computer and software engineering. RIP Peter.

Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World

programd — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:03:51 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16705

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041023

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by programd in "The new Apple begins to emerge"

programd — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:36:41 +0000

It's partly the weight that made the 11" MacBook Air great:

  MacBook Air: 1.08 kg (2.38 lbs)
  MacBook Neo: 1.23 kg (2.70 lbs)

New comment by programd in "The Lighthouse: How extreme isolation transforms the body and mind (2020)"

programd — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:45:42 +0000

Thomas Wake: "Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til' ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!"

Ephraim Winslow: "Alright, have it your way. I like your cookin'."

New comment by programd in "Proof of Corn"

programd — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:27:51 +0000

See also: Clarkson's Farm [0], for some of the messy reality of running an actual modern farm in England (though edited for entertainment value). I suspect the current AIs are not quite up to doing this - but I firmly beleive it's only a matter of time.

[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10541088/

New comment by programd in "We put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon"

programd — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 20:20:15 +0000

You could mod the game with more varied events, which were of course AI generated to begin with. Bit of an inception scenario where AI plays an AI modded game.

The other option is to have an AI play another AI which is working as an antagonist, trying to make the player fail. More global plagues! More scheming underlings! More questionable choices for relaxation! Bit of an arms race there.

Honestly I prefer Crusader Kings II if for no other reason that the UI is just so brilliantly insanely obtuse while also being very good looking.

Gnome calculator pings the International Monetary Fund website

programd — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:49:13 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/discussions/1283

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46502922

Points: 16

# Comments: 5

The Ridiculous Engineering of the Most Important Machine [video]

programd — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 03:31:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46451047

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by programd in "Perl's decline was cultural"

programd — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 22:58:22 +0000

I'll go further. Ignore the Perl specific bits and Conway's "Perl Best Practices" is one of the best general programming books ever written.

It has so many great pieces of advice that apply to any programming task, everything from naming variables, to testing, error handling, code organization, documentation, etc, etc. Ultimately, for timeless advice on programming as a profession the language is immaterial.

New comment by programd in "Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025"

programd — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 18:51:32 +0000

Global rollout of security code on a timeframe of seconds is part of Cloudflare's value proposition.

In this case they got unlucky with an incident before they finished work on planned changes from the last incident.

The Continuous Tensor Abstraction: Where Indices Are Real

programd — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:15:24 +0000

Article URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3763146

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46109142

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by programd in "Gemini 3"

programd — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 22:53:32 +0000

My armchair is equally comfy, and I have an actual paper to point to:

Jaxley: Differentiable simulation enables large-scale training of detailed biophysical models of neural dynamics [1]

They basically created sofware to simulate real neurons and ran some realistic models to replicate typical AI learning tasks:

"The model had nine different channels in the apical and basal dendrite, the soma, and the axon [39], with a total of 19 free parameters, including maximal channel conductances and dynamics of the calcium pumps."

So yeah, real neurons are a bit more complex then ReLU or Sigmoid.

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.21.608979v2....

New comment by programd in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?"

programd — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 20:57:13 +0000

SEEKING WORK | Remote | Onsite San Francisco Bay Area |

Versatile back end code and infrastructure development services. Typical deliverables are Dockerized microservices specified by OpenAPI, written in Go or Python, with a REST/JSON API and backed by PostgresDB or MySQL. CI/CD pipelines included and deplyment on any of the major cloud vendors. And of course your custom business logic.

If you have more complex needs, e.g. project or team management please reach out as I have extensive career experience in all aspects of of technology development and management in startups and large enterprises. Need a contract manager or CTO perhaps?

At minimum I can help you develop your back end infrastructure from the ground up. Basically I offer development of back-end componenets you can slot into your Kubernetes or Docker environment from day one.

On the business side, you get a fractional developer for a no-haggling fixed monthly rate, corp-to-corp billing, long term support for your code, careful vetting of dependencies for licensing and security, and a professional approach to your technical needs.

Contact: contact@nulladmin.com

Website: https://nulladmin.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abnulladmin/

New comment by programd in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2025)"

programd — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 20:56:09 +0000

  Location: SF Bay Area
  Remote: Yes - or hybrid/in-office, I'm flexible
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Go, C/C++, Python, Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL/MySQL, ML/LLM, and many others
  Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/abnulladmin
  Email: contact@nulladmin.com

I'm an engineer with many years of experience in Silicon Valley, working in management roles, engineering, and consulting. My expertise is mostly in back end systems, working in the modern Go/Docker/Kubernetes ecosystem. In addition to working directly on large and complex code projects I also managed and grew engineering teams at various companies.

If you need help with specific technical projects, or are looking for management roles please feel free to reach out. I'm very familiar with both the unique challenges of scaling up startups as well as working to innovate in large enterprise companies.

Specifically if you need help productizing and scaling out various AI/Machine Learning/LLM systems this would be a good fit. I know there is quite a bit of demand in this area and a limited supply of qualified candidates.

New comment by programd in "I built ChatGPT with Minecraft redstone [video]"

programd — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:45:42 +0000

I'll second that recommendation. One of the more interesting videos is AI creating utopian and dystopian worlds in Minecraft

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCnQvdypW_I

Invokes shades of Iain M. Banks' "Surface Detail" Culture novel, where virtual Hells are a major plot point.