Hacker News: seydar

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

seydar — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:52:31 +0000

Acoustic diagnosis of electrical problems on the electric grid!

I'm building a tool that allows you to determine the health of an electric transformer from only your phone. It tells you:

    - the loading
    - the health of the windings and core
    - and whether the phases are unbalanced

I used to be a submariner, so my professional background is in power plants and sonar analysis, so I'm getting to combine the two in this.

Acoustic diagnosis of electric issues is FASCINATING, and it feels like there hasn't been a lot of research into this, so I have been slowly chasing down various acoustic patterns I find and try to derive them from first principles of physics.

I'm making an iPhone app for it, and Xcode has been truly awful: non-deterministic, crashing all the time, and error messages that tell me absolutely nothing. I would like to use xtool, but it doesn't have the preview, which I need for debugging.

New comment by seydar in "$5 whale listening hydrophone making workshop"

seydar — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:37:32 +0000

I used to be a submariner and now work in an unrelated acoustic space (acoustic analysis of the electric grid), but I'd love to learn more about the DAS world — my email is in my profile.

New comment by seydar in "The effects of algorithms on the public discourse"

seydar — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 02:59:07 +0000

I'd love to know more, do you have any that you'd recommend?

New comment by seydar in "Weathering Software Winter (2022)"

seydar — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 14:05:56 +0000

This reminds me of _why's final writing, where he discusses leaving his public persona in programming. He specifically cites the preservability of code as a reason for his disillusionment.

https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE

Beautiful piece of writing, very weird, very excellent.

New comment by seydar in "The Average American Spent 2.5 Months on Their Phone in 2024"

seydar — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 14:40:52 +0000

Sounds like you have a good list — can you share some of it?

New comment by seydar in "Galois Theory of Algorithms (2018) [pdf]"

seydar — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 17:13:34 +0000

Galois theory investigates the way a subobject sits inside an object. This paper examines the way different programs sit inside the same algorithm, and the way different algorithms (mergesort, quicksort, etc.) sit inside the same class (sorting algorithm).

Galois Theory of Algorithms (2018) [pdf]

seydar — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 17:13:34 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.0014

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41258241

Points: 20

# Comments: 3

New comment by seydar in "Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner"

seydar — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 14:18:35 +0000

What are some alternatives that you'd recommend people look at?

I'm keen for any potential successor, but a lot things come back to effectively text, and anything we could build on top of it. Binary object formats seem like an alternative for faster parsing of structured data, so while that ability has always been it, it's a matter of people actually sticking to it. Maybe some coordination between the program and the shell?

New comment by seydar in "Physics for Mathematicians – Introduction"

seydar — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 21:11:47 +0000

> The presence of the negative signs in (1) may seem surprising at first, but this is due to the fact that (1) is describing the effect of a passive change of units rather than an active change of the object {x}.

This is where the limits of my brain were reached. Is there a translation of this into category theory terms? Is this where category theory could help formalize units in physics?

However, his paragraph after that is pretty interesting, which I read as sort of treating units as variables since you couldn't combine them, and he only has length, mass, and time for these examples. But then there's an exponent piece? Okay now I'm lost again.

New comment by seydar in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2024)"

seydar — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 23:01:57 +0000

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