Hacker News: robviren

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.

New comment by robviren in "Just the Browser"

robviren — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:56:02 +0000

I feel like wishing for UI innovation is using the Monkey's paw. My web experience feels far too innovative and not enough consistent. I go to the Internet to read and do business not explore the labyrinth of concepts UI designers feel I should want. Take me back to standards, shortcuts, and consistency.

New comment by robviren in "Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?"

robviren — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 12:44:59 +0000

I want to explore the space of audio encoding and GPT like understanding of audio. I'm so highly interested in how a simple 1d signal must go through so much processing to be understood by language models, and am curious what tradeoffs occur. Would also be fun to make a TTS Library and understand it.

New comment by robviren in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

robviren — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:16:42 +0000

I keep everything in my self hosted gitea. Just made it public.

https://gitter.swolereport.com/robviren/cspace

New comment by robviren in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

robviren — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 21:03:39 +0000

I'm trying to make a neural audio codec using a variety of misguided methods. One I am using ESNs wrong spreading leak rates in a logarithmic fashion acting like a digital cochlea. The other is trying to do the same with a complex mass-spring-damper system to simulate the various hairs of the cochlea as well. Both approaches make super interesting visuals and appear to cluster reasonably well, but I am still learning about RVQ and audio loss (involves GANs and spectral loss). I kinda wanna beat SNAC if I can.

New comment by robviren in "Show HN: I was reintroduced to computers: Raspberry Pi"

robviren — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 10:51:04 +0000

Love to see the Pi getting some rather creative use! The most use I got out of one was as a health check endpoint for power in my garage which was holding frozen milk for my newborn, but the circuit kept tripping. Had another server email me if it couldn't reach the Pi for some reason. Just used some real simple Go code. It was not production but it worked. Not everything needs to change the world, maybe just make your day easier.

New comment by robviren in "Programming peaked"

robviren — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 16:16:49 +0000

I just liked programming when it contained a comprehensible amount of abstraction. Stacks have become so tall it is not even feasible for a single human to comprehend what is occurring. I also liked when standards had less surface area. Working in healthcare it has become obvious standards only ever get added, never removed. Complexity is absurd now. I'm not championing that we all become experts in bare metal assembly, but I feel for OP and a desire to at least fundamentally understand what is happening on some level.

New comment by robviren in "CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution"

robviren — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 13:58:33 +0000

I have been unable to get anything other than Cachy to run Baldur's Gate 3 as well as Windows on my Lenovo Legion 2021. Best I have found for performance and so far stable on my relative new tower.

New comment by robviren in "A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool"

robviren — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:03:08 +0000

I found strong parallels between tech safety and nuclear safety.

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0534/ML053410342.pdf

NRC is a good place to start. They have been at trying to prevent tech from hurting people for awhile.

New comment by robviren in "A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool"

robviren — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 12:54:35 +0000

Totally valid perspective. I only became part of the industry after Fukushima. I only knew an industry by its disasters. I will say, having gone through the training programs we studied the nuclear incidents and spent a year in training before going to the plants. I just don't see parallel experiences looking back like that. The people in nuclear (at least from what I saw) want the industry to be safe and successful.

New comment by robviren in "A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool"

robviren — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 02:33:41 +0000

I greatly appreciate the nuclear industry. Nuclear field engineering was my first "real" job out of college and they really committ to safety. Transparency in this industry is inspiring because everyone involved knows that one screw up and that's the end of the US nuclear industry. Good luck getting oil and gas to be accountable and as transparent about incidents. I carry the culture into the rest of my work and appreciate being involved. Wish events like this didn't happen but it is not of significant danger and I find it great that they communicate even "smaller" issues.