Hacker News: robviren

New comment by robviren in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"

robviren — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:14:46 +0000

Location: St. Paul Minnesota

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Gen AI, Healthcare, VLM, Document Parsing, Integrations FHIR, SMART, RPA, OCR, Computer Vision, Audio Agents, Data Processing, AI Model Training

Resume/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TrFOAvpNJloO77H_wL8FxIuXiXy...

Email: robviren@gmail.com

New comment by robviren in "Human Bottlenecks"

robviren — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:40:34 +0000

As a product manager I have found people's understanding of what they want to be tenuous at best. They know they want it to be easier, less frustrating, and do the darn thing they want. But collecting the input of all the people with the power to make choices, boiling that all down, and actually figuring out what will work is a total bottle neck. Technology and programming have hardly ever actually been a blocker. Legacy systems, conflicting requirements, and ever shifting choices represent a much harder problem.

New comment by robviren in "Valve raises Steam Deck prices"

robviren — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:34:12 +0000

Like high gas prices leading to sudden releases of fuel efficient vehicles in the 70s during the embargo. I love that most indie games I can find will run on a toaster.

New comment by robviren in "The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)"

robviren — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:50:13 +0000

I'd say the primary benefit of LAN parties now is how capable "old" hardware is. I have several laptops I configure with Linux and several games and environments loaded up. Smoke test the whole thing before anybody gets here. This year we played UT2004 with custom maps and characters. That game ran flawlessly on a 10 year old laptop with no dGPU. Emulation as well, but I actually still have most of those systems still.

New comment by robviren in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"

robviren — Wed, 20 May 2026 10:45:53 +0000

Long story short it is a compromise between the Mdewakanton Sioux, the state, and Canterbury to keep gambling exclusive to Mystic Lake Casino and Caterbury. The State flirted with the idea of expanding gambling and started moving in that direction, but Mystic basically now props up Canterbury, lets them have some amount of gambling on site, and the State did not expand gambling and generally is protective of Mystic. It's like a pressure release valve on gambling with some small kickbacks to the nearby legacy horse racing track. It's a strange local arrangement. Grew up in Prior Lake and had a few tribe members in school so this is just my bias on the arrangement.

New comment by robviren in "Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus"

robviren — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:19:43 +0000

Ex Vaddio PM here. Like 5 years ago all our firmware defaulted to requiring non-default passwords on setup. We also created a free windows application that can mass upgrade firmware and change auth if defaults were used. We tried!

Saw the Vaddio logo and had to chime in. Gotta stick up for my Minnesota devs.

New comment by robviren in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

robviren — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:55:11 +0000

So artificially productive you que up the crap you do and slowly release it?

New comment by robviren in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"

robviren — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:51:29 +0000

Location: St. Paul Minnesota

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Gen AI, Healthcare, VLM, Document Parsing, Integrations FHIR, SMART, RPA, OCR, Computer Vision, Audio Agents, Data Processing, AI Model Training

Resume/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TrFOAvpNJloO77H_wL8FxIuXiXy...

Email: robviren@gmail.com

New comment by robviren in "Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write"

robviren — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:19:32 +0000

I too have found the models do well with Go. I will say despite the backwards compatibility guarantee library API changes, what counts as "good" patterns, and new language additions do add some friction to the experience. Almost always works but it can be a bit inconsistent in how the code shows up.

New comment by robviren in "Show HN: Auto-Architecture: Karpathy's Loop, pointed at a CPU"

robviren — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:27:36 +0000

I love genetic algorithms and find using LLMs as part of them super compelling. I always find the fitness functions to be the most difficult part. The algorithm naturally tries to exploit any little gap you leave it in cheating. Best part is not needing back propagation in solving a problem. However that is also the worst part in all the solutions just being one level above a random walk. The LLM augmentation really helps to give it a gradient and intelligence beyond random chaos. Love the idea of it being applied to hardware.

New comment by robviren in "Wi-Fi That Can Withstand a Nuclear Reactor: This receiver chip can take it"

robviren — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:37:38 +0000

It was literally a guy's job on the floor to just replace modules and other electronics. The equipment itself would not become contaminated so it was safe to handle afterwards. It just got bombarded by radiation and became useless as a camera. Being hit by ionizing radiation does not mean you become radioactive. The main issue is if bits of contamination would stick to our fancy duct tape we had around the cameras.

As for why we needed them it's for a bunch of reasons. This is 30 meters down. You gotta inspect welds, replace jet pumps, pick crap up that people drop in, pull plugs, help guide CRD maintenance. Tons of stuff. You gotta see it all. Camera handlers are magical and learn to swim the cameras around using puppet like movements. You manipulate these duct taped to rope cameras using either the cable or the rope. Sometimes we would attach them to stupendously long poles we assemble which were also duct taped (this changed eventually). The issue is such a long pole is basically a pool noodle in terms of handling. Keeping stuff from getting stuck and having confidence in where you were was an art. I wish I could tell you nuclear inspection used fancy drones and super high tech robotics but a ton of the visual side is duct taped cameras and talented handlers. Ultrasonic inspection is where the robotics took over and where they earn their keep. Encoding the position is worth the effort. But for visual you can't really get a sub to do much better than a guy with a long pole. Haha

New comment by robviren in "Wi-Fi That Can Withstand a Nuclear Reactor: This receiver chip can take it"

robviren — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:32:07 +0000

For comparison the lifespan of a camera module was about 24-48 hours for work inside the water of the reactor near the "hot" fuel of the reactor. Fields around there were I believe on the order of 1000-5000 Rad/hr. Looked like the biggest confetti party you ever saw on the image. It was difficult for the encoder modules to keep up as well because they compressed so poorly and the reactor floors were usually hot and humid with the reactors open. I tried to make de-noising algorithms back in the day to help smooth out the noise in the reactor. Really hard to make electronics work in those places. Turns out constant bit flips and ionizing radiation is bad for hardware.

New comment by robviren in "Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'"

robviren — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:36:24 +0000

I find Claude code to be a token hog. No matter how confidently the papers say context rot is not an issue I find curating context to be highly important to output quality. Manually managing this in the Claude Webui has helped with my use cases more than freely tossing Claude code at it. Likely I am using both "wrong" but the way I use it is easier for me to reason about and minimize context rot.

New comment by robviren in "The Little Book of C"

robviren — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:43:16 +0000

I wish someone spoon fed me how to add path for C compilers in Windows back in the day. We lose a good 90% of people to installing C from ever learning C. Feel like godbolt or an online compiler might be a reasonable starting place these days. C is amazing but can be so punishing early on compared to stupid opening up any text editor on earth and writing an HTML file. Not advocating for more JS learning but it's hard to beat the getting started on that.

New comment by robviren in "A case for Go as the best language for AI agents"

robviren — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:20:49 +0000

For me it is an active question if coding training data "purity" matters. Python has Go on volume, but within that is a ton of API changes, language changes, etc. Is that free regularization or does it poison the dataset? As the author points out Go code is nominal because basically all published Go code looks the same and the library APIs are frozen in time to some degree.

I actually spent some time trying to get to the bottom of what a logical extension of this would be. An entirely made up language spec for an idealized language it never saw ever, and therefore had no bad examples of it. Go is likely the closest for the many reasons people call it boring.

New comment by robviren in "Farewell, Rust for web"

robviren — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:16:42 +0000

I find the dependency creep for both rust and node unfortunate. Almost anything I add explodes the deps and makes me sweat for maintenance, vulnerabilities, etc. I also feel perpetually behind, which I think is basically frontend default mode. Go does the one thing I wish Rust had more of which is a pretty darn great standard library with total backwards compatibility promises. There are awkward things with Go, but man, not needing to feel paranoid and how much can be built with so little feels good. But I totally understand just getting crap done and taking off the tin foil. Depends on what you prioritize. Solo devs don't have the luxury.

New comment by robviren in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

robviren — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:23:39 +0000

I have run into a surprising number of basic syntax errors on this one. At least in the few runs I have tried it's a swing and a miss. Wonder if the pressure of the Claude release is pushing these stop gap releases.

New comment by robviren in "Using go fix to modernize Go code"

robviren — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:42:43 +0000

I have run into that a lot which is annoying. Even though all the code compiles because go is backwards compatible it all looks so much different. Same issue for python but in that case the API changes lead to actual breakage. For this reason I find go to be fairly great for codegen as the stability of the language is hard to compete with and the standard lib a powerful enough tool to support many many use cases.

New comment by robviren in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

robviren — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 03:44:12 +0000

I find it fascinating to give the LLMs huge stacks of reflective context. It's incredible how good they are at feeling huge amounts of csv like data. I imagine they would be good at trimming their context down.

I did some experiments by exposing the raw latent states, using hooks, of a small 1B Gemma model to a large model as it processed data. I'm curious if it is possible for the large model to nudge the smaller model latents to get the outputs it wants. I desperately want to get thinking out of tokens and into latent space. Something I've been chasing for a bit.

New comment by robviren in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

robviren — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 03:36:19 +0000

Trying to use ESNs as a random projection for audio data and potentially rendered text data for some AI workflows. Seeing it I can use the echo states running both forward and backward through the data as a holographic representation which would act as a temporally dense token for potential use in LLM or audio encoder inputs.