Hacker News: seidleroni

New comment by seidleroni in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

seidleroni — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:04:25 +0000

Curious who you ended up using and if you recommend them.

New comment by seidleroni in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

seidleroni — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:33:54 +0000

The tool I'm most proud of is "Hex Flex" (https://seidleroni.github.io/Hex-Flex-Web/). It is a tool to view and compare the contents of Intel Hex files. Should be useful to other people who work in the firmware field.

Not exactly a tool, but I also made pelohard.com which ranks the most recent Peloton classes by difficulty. Updated twice daily.

New comment by seidleroni in "Claude Opus 4.8"

seidleroni — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:28:46 +0000

I am absolutely gobsmacked how good the game is! I didn't complete the level fully but I completed all but one of the tasks. This is both smooth and fun and I'm surprised that a modern LLM can do something this well, let alone in a single file. It makes me realize how much the goalposts have been moved. A few years ago (ChatGPT 2? 2.5?) wasn't even able to implement a small Python script I would expect a junior engineer to be capable of producing. Now we're getting the tools to do something like this. You should think about how to "rate" the outputs or at least provide your own rankings.

New comment by seidleroni in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

seidleroni — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:57:22 +0000

Also, I just listened to the latest Volts podcast and they make the claim that data centers will actually lower the cost of electricity fairly soon (~2030). Very counterintuitive but it does make sense. We'll find out soon enough.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity

New comment by seidleroni in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

seidleroni — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:50:25 +0000

Noah Smith had a good article about this in 2024 for those interested in reading more: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/six-ideas-for-poland

New comment by seidleroni in "I Used Claude to File My Taxes for Free"

seidleroni — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:42:10 +0000

I can't imagine doing something like this anytime soon, but I will probably follow the advice around having AI check the return against all my forms and previous years return before submitting.

New comment by seidleroni in "Men in their 50s may be aging faster due to toxic 'forever chemicals'"

seidleroni — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:31:15 +0000

I was explaining this to my elementary school aged kids just a few days ago. We were eating in a restaurant and I told them that when I was their age most restaurants had a smoking and non-smoking section. Of course the smoke did not respect the invisible barrier. The idea that people could just smoke indoors and it was normal really blew their minds.

New comment by seidleroni in "SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation"

seidleroni — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:48:44 +0000

I suspect they made this public because many customers will notice that they are no longer carrying Adafruit products. I respect both companies greatly and have purchased from them in the past. It will be interesting to see what happened, if that is made public.

New comment by seidleroni in "Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear"

seidleroni — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 20:17:24 +0000

This is really cool! As someone who has basically no piano training, this is fun! Perhaps there could be some super-easy mode where you actually highlight the keys while you're playing the sounds (in simon mode) to help the super noobs train their ears.

New comment by seidleroni in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

seidleroni — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:36:31 +0000

I think there is also some FOMO involved. Once people started saying how AI was helping them be more productive, a lot of folks felt that if they didn't do the same, they were lagging behind.

New comment by seidleroni in "The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition"

seidleroni — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:39:24 +0000

interesting... I'll give that a shot

New comment by seidleroni in "The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition"

seidleroni — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 16:51:41 +0000

Is there any way to do this with the frontier LLM's?

New comment by seidleroni in "Qwen3-VL can scan two-hour videos and pinpoint nearly every detail"

seidleroni — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 16:13:42 +0000

I don't believe that it just analyzes the transcription. I asked Gemini to look at the youtube video referenced on the site below and "build" something that duplicates that device. It did a pretty good approximation that it could not have done without going through the full video.

https://bitsnpieces.dev/posts/a-synth-for-my-daughter/

New comment by seidleroni in "Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3"

seidleroni — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 13:09:26 +0000

The author actually discusses the results of the paper. He's not some rando but a Wharton Professor and when he is comparing the results to a grad student, it is with some authority.

"So is this a PhD-level intelligence? In some ways, yes, if you define a PhD level intelligence as doing the work of a competent grad student at a research university. But it also had some of the weaknesses of a grad student. The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems..."

New comment by seidleroni in "Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race"

seidleroni — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 13:44:45 +0000

100%. I have known a couple of people that did some form of "medical tourism", mostly for expensive dental work. In both cases they did some form of tech contract work as a sole proprietorship and bought their own health insurance (not through a partner). The overlap of people who can save up thousands of dollars for treatment abroad and have poor health insurance is probably not too large.

New comment by seidleroni in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

seidleroni — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:53:07 +0000

As someone who works with firmware, it is funny how different our definitions of "bare metal" is.

New comment by seidleroni in "Immunotherapy drug clinical trial results: half of tumors shrink or disappear"

seidleroni — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 13:40:10 +0000

Having lost my mother to melanoma over 20 years ago, it is very encouraging to see the progress that has been made against this terrible disease. Very sorry for your loss.

New comment by seidleroni in "Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator"

seidleroni — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:10:31 +0000

I'm not sure if this applies to all carriers but with many carriers if you are on wifi you can send/receive text messages and sometimes even make calls. Certainly you could use WhatsApp or similar in that case.

New comment by seidleroni in "Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?"

seidleroni — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 13:25:57 +0000

That's a valid point. What I originally meant to convey is that when issues arise, people often assign blame and point fingers without any evidence, just based on their own feelings. It is important to gather objective evidence to support any claims. Sounds somewhat obvious but in my career I have found that people are very quick to blame issues on others when 15 minutes of testing would have gotten to the truth.

New comment by seidleroni in "Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?"

seidleroni — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 12:19:06 +0000

I work in embedded systems, and the best advice I can offer is: resist the urge to speculate when problems arise. Stay quiet, grab an oscilloscope, and start probing the problem area. Objective measurements beat conjecture every time. It's hard to argue with scope captures that clearly show what's happening. As Jack Ganssle says, "One test is worth a thousand opinions."