Hacker News: shtack

New comment by shtack in "Gemma 4 on iPhone"

shtack — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 02:47:17 +0000

With reasoning on I found E4B to be solid, but E2B was completely unusable across several tests.

New comment by shtack in "LLM Year in Review"

shtack — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 02:00:22 +0000

Really easy: don't argue on the internet. The approach has many benefits.

New comment by shtack in "Is outbound going to die?"

shtack — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 21:51:43 +0000

Strong disagree. My personal number has also leaked and I get 5-10 cold calls per day. They call during important work meetings. They call during dinner with my family. They call when I'm away on vacation. I will never, ever willingly buy any product from these calls.

New comment by shtack in "In Defense of Y'All"

shtack — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 20:29:39 +0000

Canadian here using y'all every day. Might as well make it the formal English plural.

New comment by shtack in "Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess"

shtack — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 02:55:29 +0000

The instances of that happening are likely the LLM failing to call the engine for whatever reason and falling back to inference.

New comment by shtack in "Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess"

shtack — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 05:19:26 +0000

I’d bet it’s using function calling out to a real chess engine. It could probably be proven with a timing analysis to see how inference time changes/doesn’t with number of tokens or game complexity.

New comment by shtack in "Show HN: A real time AI video agent with under 1 second of latency"

shtack — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 12:16:16 +0000

With a dedicated GPU and some cleverness it can be relatively quick. I split the response on punctuation and generate smaller clips in a pipeline. I haven't taken the model apart to try streaming the frames coming out of ffmpeg yet, but that would probably help a lot.

New comment by shtack in "Show HN: A real time AI video agent with under 1 second of latency"

shtack — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 23:12:18 +0000

The model doing the heavy lifting is https://github.com/Rudrabha/Wav2Lip

Mic permissions on mobile are tricky, which might have been your issue? Note in this prototype you also need to hold the blue button down to speak.

New comment by shtack in "Show HN: A real time AI video agent with under 1 second of latency"

shtack — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:00:30 +0000

Cool, I built a prototype of something very similar (face+voice cloning, no video analysis) using openly available models/APIs: https://bslsk0.appspot.com/

The video latency is definitely the biggest hurdle. With dedicated a100s I can get it down <2s, but it's pricy.

New comment by shtack in "Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?"

shtack — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 16:55:43 +0000

This was my undergraduate "thesis" project. We built a GDB plugin that would generate a puredata audio structure to help with debugging. Eg. it would play snoring during a sleep() call, each breakpoint could be set to a different frequency, etc. It was actually pretty interesting for multi-threaded code, though pausing to play the audio could change the runtime profile.

New comment by shtack in "Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?"

shtack — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 14:38:50 +0000

I have a lot of examples but a funny one that comes to mind is: in the early 2000s when IM clients were all the rage, I wrote a VB6 application to go through my MSN Messenger logs and rank my friends by how much I talk to them. Kind of like a MySpace top 10 prior to MySpace.

I spent a decent amount of time tweaking the UI, improving performance, adding filters, providing different file output formats, etc. Never shared it with anyone.

New comment by shtack in "Beware of fake beaches (Pokémon Go)"

shtack — Wed, 01 May 2024 10:23:29 +0000

Also, at least the last time I checked, the Google Maps API was exorbitantly expensive. Niantic would likely get a discount, but avoiding this exploit doesn’t override all of the other benefits of OSM.

New comment by shtack in "The semiconductor industry hinges on a quartz factory in North Carolina"

shtack — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 12:51:35 +0000

Fair. At the current rate, the revenue takes two years to cover the original cost. The net profit takes 6. The margins are quite good due to consistent price increases.

New comment by shtack in "The semiconductor industry hinges on a quartz factory in North Carolina"

shtack — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 17:24:53 +0000

Similarly the Canadian province of Ontario leased it's only toll highway for 99 years to an international group, for an amount it currently earns in tolls every ~2 years. Fun.

New comment by shtack in "The Bulma CSS framework reaches 1.0"

shtack — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 15:06:16 +0000

In case the devs are reading, the documentation link from the Github description is broken (https://bulma.io/documentation/overview/start/), but https://bulma.io/documentation works

New comment by shtack in "In 2024, please switch to Firefox"

shtack — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 18:01:46 +0000

I tried so hard earlier this year to move back to FF from Chrome. I actually found the desktop experience great but the mobile app on iOS was so clunky, and I rely enough on sync, that I had to move back after a few months.

New comment by shtack in "Global CO2 Levels"

shtack — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 17:49:16 +0000

I think the misleading aspect in this case is that when looking at the 800k view, it seems that CO2 levels have doubled (or more) compared to previous peaks, whereas it's actually a ~30% increase. It's still a very significant increase, and should be shown accurately.

New comment by shtack in "Web3 game project allegedly hired actors to pose as execs in $1.6M exit scam"

shtack — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 01:02:33 +0000

I run/ran a website where you could shop on AliExpress using crypto and advertised it as the only legitimate crypto website around. I had universally positive reviews but made low 5 figures in profit over the course of ~4y (not terrible as passive income considering the operating costs were nearly zero) before the latest crash dropped usage to nothing and I let bit rot take over.

Unfortunately the vast majority of crypto adopters are just riding the bubble for investment and have no interest in any other use cases, which are admittedly limited.

New comment by shtack in "D1 receptors may be a more important target than D2 for antipsychotic drugs"

shtack — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 22:55:23 +0000

there’s a relevant xkcd, as usual: https://xkcd.com/2682/

New comment by shtack in "Rewriting the Messenger codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler messaging app (2020)"

shtack — Sat, 13 May 2023 03:10:31 +0000

“Consistent” UX is often one of the downsides of cross platform frameworks. Android and iOS have distinct UX details that users expect in their apps.