Hacker News: tanvach

New comment by tanvach in "How to turn anything into a router"

tanvach — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:39:46 +0000

Super interesting, thanks for sharing

New comment by tanvach in "How to turn anything into a router"

tanvach — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:19:08 +0000

Anyone has done mesh WiFi (ideally triband) using off the shelf parts and Linux?

I have an Orbi AX system which works reliably, but now I want to upgrade the radio to WiFi 7 and that means I need to upgrade all the hardware.

Hoping to move to using off the shelf parts so in the future I can just change the radio (ideally bunch of USB sticks).

I understand this is not strictly just the router. I can (and used to have) a router as separate device, but any mesh WiFi right now that I can find need a pricy router that acts as the coordinator, essentially negates the economic benefits.

New comment by tanvach in "Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock"

tanvach — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:49:57 +0000

That distinction is obviously quite apparently from the context. I’m using atomic clock to be consistent with what these radio clocks are marketed as.

New comment by tanvach in "Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock"

tanvach — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 02:22:34 +0000

That’s a very good point but the transmission power is extremely weak and won’t propagate more than 1m.

New comment by tanvach in "Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock"

tanvach — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 22:23:16 +0000

Related - we have an atomic Seiko wall clock expecting to have the time automatically adjusted by the WWVB LF atomic clock broadcast. Turns out, the signal is very weak where we now live. Manually setting the time on these atomic clocks is a HUGE pain (beware!).

Turns out it's possible to emulate the atomic clock signal quite easily with a Raspberry Pi, or in my case I put together Arduino code that can emulate atomic clock broadcasts from around the world using an ESP32 module using NTP servers: https://github.com/tanvach/clocksync

The history of these atomic clock broadcast signals and their differences in different countries is quite fascinating.

New comment by tanvach in "Post-a-molt: Post to Moltbook directly using the public REST API"

tanvach — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 02:02:02 +0000

Long computing embedded in confusing texts should be sufficient.

New comment by tanvach in "Ask HN: Why don't winter gloves have mechanical fingers?"

tanvach — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:45:10 +0000

It might work for crude actions, but my take is that touch signal is nuanced and won't get transmitted via mechanical linkage well. Love to see it prototyped though.

New comment by tanvach in "Will AI Pet My Dog for Me"

tanvach — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:44:25 +0000

Before, I was humbled, learned and mastered.

Now I feel frustrated and numb.

I’m not an AI skeptic, but more and more I feel the joy has been sucked out of doing anything that AI has touched.

New comment by tanvach in "Start your meetings at 5 minutes past"

tanvach — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:34:12 +0000

Indeed :) Ah yes I agree! That was awful to everyone (and to analyze!).

New comment by tanvach in "Start your meetings at 5 minutes past"

tanvach — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 06:18:08 +0000

During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour.

Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db.

I was serendipitously the lead DS for analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘starting 5 minutes past’. After joining and cleaning a lot of the data, the data showed:

1) at the start of the trial, meetings ended on time. Then after few weeks it slip to ending late, negating the usefulness. Other orgs did not see meetings running late. 2) ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time. 3) if I remember right, we had a survey data that showed pretty clearly that managers prefer the ‘starting 5 minutes past’ while ICs do not care or have negative sentiment.

The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.

In the end we reverted back to normal schedule. It was just easier for busy people to bounce early.

New comment by tanvach in "Show HN: Watch LLMs play 21,000 hands of Poker"

tanvach — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 20:56:45 +0000

People looking into this a little too much, looks to me like random walk. You should try reinitiating the trial (or have multiple running) and see if the ranking is robust.

New comment by tanvach in "Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams"

tanvach — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:37:13 +0000

Coincidentally we were on the Robotaxi during the black out (didn’t know about it, we were going to Japan town from the Mission). Noticed that it navigated through the non-working traffic lights fine, treated it like a stop sign junction. One advantage of building unsupervised system from public version that had to deal with these edge cases all around the country.

Though the safety driver disengaged twice to let emergency vehicles pass safely.

New comment by tanvach in "R packages for data science"

tanvach — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 21:33:07 +0000

A plug for tidyverse adjacent data.table - really should be combined someday :)

New comment by tanvach in "Codex, Opus, Gemini try to build Counter Strike"

tanvach — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:11:10 +0000

A little meaningless with one-shot, should try recreating a few times per model and see what the variance looks like.

New comment by tanvach in "FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs"

tanvach — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 20:39:38 +0000

If you really care, I would suggest helping with documenting how the process should work for others to reference going forward.

New comment by tanvach in "GLP-1 therapeutics: Their emerging role in alcohol and substance use disorders"

tanvach — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 09:58:37 +0000

How so? Can you describe more of your experience if you don't mind sharing?

New comment by tanvach in "Are hard drives getting better?"

tanvach — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 21:59:28 +0000

I find it more straight forward to just model the failure rate with the variables directly, and look metrics like AUC for out of sample data.

New comment by tanvach in "Are hard drives getting better?"

tanvach — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 21:50:06 +0000

Agreed, these type of analyses benefit from grouping by cohort years. Standard practice in analytics.

New comment by tanvach in "[dead]"

tanvach — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 01:04:53 +0000

The abstract reads legitimately bonkers

New comment by tanvach in "Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by manufacturing them in the U.S."

tanvach — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 07:21:46 +0000

Many moons ago, we looked into doing molds for injection molding in US and China for a simple plastic part. The US based companies quoted 10x more expensive, while the Chinese company we ended up with offered more features (over molding with TPU) at cheaper initial and unit prices, and really great customer service walking through optimizing the part design with us. We were very happy with them. It made it possible to get our product to be economical.

Might be worth doing a test and order from your Chinese competitor to see how things look from your customers perspective.