Hacker News: robbles

New comment by robbles in "Show HN: Spegel, a Terminal Browser That Uses LLMs to Rewrite Webpages"

robbles — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 03:37:42 +0000

I'm curious whether anyone has run into hallucinations with this kind of use of an LLM.

They are pretty great at converting data between formats, but I always worry there's a small chance it changes the actual data in the output in some small but misleading way.

New comment by robbles in "Show HN: I built an under-the-door fan duct to lower bedroom CO2"

robbles — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:07:14 +0000

I've used OpenSCAD for a few small projects. The main draw for me is avoiding all the "fiddly mouse stuff". I figure it's a trade-off between simple stuff being more complicated, and complicated stuff being easier to bulk edit and organize.

New comment by robbles in "Cap: Lightweight, modern open-source CAPTCHA alternative using proof-of-work"

robbles — Fri, 30 May 2025 17:33:45 +0000

This is a neat idea.

I don't know enough about the underlying proof-of-work stuff to comment on how effective this could be, but I think it's pretty funny that the UI examples say "I'm a human".

I guess "there's only a few of me at most" or "I could allocate enough computation to this that I'm probably not up to no good" don't read as clearly.

New comment by robbles in "Long live American Science and Surplus"

robbles — Thu, 29 May 2025 05:19:40 +0000

Good to know, thanks for the explanation!

New comment by robbles in "Long live American Science and Surplus"

robbles — Thu, 29 May 2025 03:41:13 +0000

It's a pity they don't ship to other countries than the US. I looked through their website and saw some fun stuff, but no international shipping.

New comment by robbles in "Terminator: Hasta La Vista, Shell"

robbles — Sat, 24 May 2025 16:03:17 +0000

I'm probably just not thinking through the problem fully, but: Wouldn't this be better solved inside the coding assistants? They're the parent process and should be able to tell when a sub command has hung.

New comment by robbles in "Show HN: Roons – Mechanical Computer Kit"

robbles — Fri, 02 May 2025 17:59:58 +0000

This is incredible, love how much further you've taken it than just the proof of concept as well.

This is probably just my opinion, but I kept thinking that a better word for "drive" given the domain would be "clock". It's basically a binary clock signal driving these, right? Maybe "clock drive"?

New comment by robbles in "Show HN: Rabbit Holes"

robbles — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 14:39:57 +0000

I opened this on a mobile device, and it only shows the top and bottom topic buttons. I was pretty confused until I tried turning on "desktop site" in Chrome and saw the left/right buttons. Having only a linear track of topics kind of undermines the overall idea!

New comment by robbles in "The effect of daily usage of Mouthwash on the oropharyngeal microbiome"

robbles — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 13:02:57 +0000

What brand of toothpaste do you use for this? I often struggle to find a toothpaste that's SLS-free but still has fluoride.

New comment by robbles in "Optimizing the Lichess Tablebase Server"

robbles — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 14:01:00 +0000

> here are the empirical distribution functions (ECDFs) with 30ms added to each response time

> The added constant seems artificial, but it's just viewing the results from the point of view of a client with 30ms ping time. Otherwise the log scaled x-axis would overemphasize the importance of a few milliseconds at the low end.

I thought this was interesting - maybe it's a standard practice I was just unaware of but it seems like a smart trick.

New comment by robbles in "Circos – Circular Visualization"

robbles — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 21:09:20 +0000

Doesn't this suffer from similar issues to a pie chart?

e.g. https://scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/resources/data-visualisation-a...

I'm kinda suspicious that any data visualization that uses a circle is going to be hard to draw meaning from.

New comment by robbles in "Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta"

robbles — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 03:32:26 +0000

> The drones can be configured to scatter seed, spray pesticide, or spread fertilizer.

It's right there in the article.

New comment by robbles in "Macaroons Escalated Quickly"

robbles — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:06:55 +0000

That's a great explanation, and pretty much exactly what I'd love to see instead of the original slightly mysterious comment :)

New comment by robbles in "Macaroons Escalated Quickly"

robbles — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:03:35 +0000

It's a statement that won't make sense to someone who's new to the topic.

I don't think it's related to virtue signalling at all, the two just share the word "signalling".

New comment by robbles in "Macaroons Escalated Quickly"

robbles — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 17:36:10 +0000

The tone is entertaining, but some of the snarkiness around the code is bit frustrating at times. e.g.

> # do i really need to say I'm not serious about this?

Can you just come out and say what you mean here? Like, presumably it's bad, insecure code, but can't you just spell it out for the benefit of your audience?

I'm probably being really picky here - just find this kind of developer in-crowd signalling to be really irritating and counterproductive.

New comment by robbles in "Donkey code"

robbles — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 15:36:37 +0000

I once inherited a codebase that did this, and it was a nightmare to learn. All the classes were named after types of alcohol for some reason. Naming things clearly is really hard, but this approach is just giving up completely.

New comment by robbles in "Serverless at Scale: Lessons from 200M Lambda Invocations"

robbles — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 15:10:57 +0000

> 10GB is hardly enough. Once you import Pandas you’re on the limit. You can forget Pandas and scipy at the same Lambda.

This sounds way off to me. 10 GB to install a Python library?

New comment by robbles in "Privacy friendly ESP32 smart doorbell with Home Assistant local integration"

robbles — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 18:29:18 +0000

Not quite to your specs, but have you tried https://www.room-assistant.io/?

New comment by robbles in "Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)"

robbles — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 03:09:22 +0000

Interesting that most of the top comments here seem to be about the day to day process of estimation itself, when the linked article is about how poorly the research on estimation has been done to date. Did any of you actually read the article?

New comment by robbles in "Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS"

robbles — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 15:15:36 +0000

This is a really nice one! What did you use for the board itself? Is it 3D printed?