Hacker News: skykooler

New comment by skykooler in "The "Crown of Nobles" Noble Gas Tube Display (2024)"

skykooler — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 07:26:14 +0000

It depends on the process. Argon/CO2 is used for MIG welding, while TIG generally uses pure argon. In some situations that justify the expense, helium is used instead as it allows deeper weld penetration.

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

skykooler — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:43:56 +0000

I'm working on Lightningbeam (https://lightningbeam.org), an integrated multimedia editor. It's inspired mainly by Macromedia Flash, Apple GarageBand, and Kdenlive. It combines animation, audio and video editing into a single timeline. It's cross-platform, running natively on Linux, macOS and Windows.

I'm currently rewriting the UI in Rust - previously it had a Rust backend and a JS frontend using Tauri, but I ran into bandwidth limitations which prevented it from being really usable as a video editor. It's currently in early alpha.

New comment by skykooler in "Voxtral Transcribe 2"

skykooler — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:24:04 +0000

Doesn't seem to work for me - tried in both Firefox and Chromium and I can see the waveform when I talk but the transcription just shows "Awaiting audio input".

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

skykooler — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:28:47 +0000

Location: New York Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, TypeScript/Javascript, Rust, Linux Resume: https://skyler.io/resume.pdf Email: skyler at skyler dot io

New comment by skykooler in "X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents"

skykooler — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 14:54:45 +0000

If so, then finding the redacted string would be similar to trying to brute-force a hash (though presumably slower, since text layout algorithms are probably more complex than a single hash invocation).

New comment by skykooler in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)"

skykooler — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:38:59 +0000

Location: New York Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, TypeScript/Javascript, Rust, Linux Resume: https://skyler.io/resume.pdf Email: skyler at skyler dot io

New comment by skykooler in "Show HN: Do you know RGB?"

skykooler — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 22:11:05 +0000

It would be nice if this told you upfront how many questions there were - after sixteen with nothing changing I figured it was probably endless but apparently there are twenty?

New comment by skykooler in "KiCad and Wayland Support"

skykooler — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 02:00:30 +0000

The only reason I use Wayland is display scaling - with a high DPI screen, many apps are blurry or inconsistently scaled under X11. Given the parade of other issues Wayland brings, I wish the development effort were instead spent on improving highDPI support in X11.

New comment by skykooler in "Jupiter was formerly twice its current size, had a much stronger magnetic field"

skykooler — Sun, 25 May 2025 05:48:09 +0000

Starting at an initial density of air, suppose you descend a distance D such that the air density doubles. Now your air is twice as dense, which doubles the pressure underneath it, meaning if you descend a further D the density will double again. Continue ad infinitum (or at least until the ideal gas law stops being a good approximation).

New comment by skykooler in "Jupiter was formerly twice its current size, had a much stronger magnetic field"

skykooler — Sat, 24 May 2025 17:14:46 +0000

Gravity changes little over that distance - it's more because of the compounding effect of atmospheric pressure (the deeper you go, the more air you have above you which raises the pressure, raising the density and meaning that pressure increases exponentially faster).

New comment by skykooler in "Reservoir Sampling"

skykooler — Fri, 09 May 2025 03:49:25 +0000

An interesting corollary of this is that if you only have a single sample, it reduces to indicating that your sample is the median value - i.e. if you see one item with serial number N, you can guess that there were roughly 2N produced.

New comment by skykooler in "What Is "Induced Atmospheric Vibration"?"

skykooler — Thu, 01 May 2025 02:14:49 +0000

My understanding is that coal/nuclear/gas plants provide a certain amount of stability thanks to the rotational inertia in the turbines. It seems like a relatively inexpensive way to retain that capacity would be to keep the old turbines to function essentially as flywheels, to stabilize the grid, after the plants powering them are shut down.

New comment by skykooler in "A unique sound alleviates motion sickness"

skykooler — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 17:07:54 +0000

It sounds like a pitch that you might hear from an airplane propeller, which leads to the question why airsickness exists if the antidote is ambiently present?

New comment by skykooler in "Stainless steel strengthened: Twisting creates submicron 'anti-crash wall'"

skykooler — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 01:47:28 +0000

Toughness is not the same as strength.

New comment by skykooler in "I ditched my laptop for a pocketable mini PC and a pair of AR glasses"

skykooler — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 08:15:03 +0000

They do have accelerometers as well as gyroscopes, so technically they could integrate acceleration twice to keep track of position...but in practice it's way more reliable to just keep it at a constant distance from the head.

New comment by skykooler in "Aptera's First Solar Road Trip. 300 Miles, One Charge"

skykooler — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 02:36:08 +0000

I guess it could be a family of four if you have two of them and both parents drive.

New comment by skykooler in "Aptera's First Solar Road Trip. 300 Miles, One Charge"

skykooler — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 06:00:27 +0000

The trunk in the Aptera is actually pretty huge, it's like six feet deep. What's mainly sacrificed is passenger capacity since it's only a 2-seater.

New comment by skykooler in "A steam locomotive from 1993 broke my yarn test"

skykooler — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 19:11:34 +0000

Theoretically you could do this in Linux by calling /usr/bin/sl or whatever - but since various distros put binaries in different places, that would probably cause more problems than it could solve.

New comment by skykooler in "Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon"

skykooler — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 22:08:33 +0000

That just makes it six times as important!

New comment by skykooler in "We're Charging Our Cars Wrong"

skykooler — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 05:37:56 +0000

A big issue I see with this is that it would necessitate a new fast charging standard, which (due to the extra ground connection) could not be backwards compatible with any existing fast charging standard - rendering it useless for the 40 million electric cars already on the roads worldwide.