Hacker News: thearn4

New comment by thearn4 in "I hate soldering"

thearn4 — Tue, 12 May 2026 10:49:08 +0000

I became significantly better at electronics soldering by learning to do glasswork (stain glass fixturing, etc). It wasn't intentional and it isn't even the same solder chemistry, but having to do broad asthetics on large pieces meant I "got it" better for the small scale electronics connections.

New comment by thearn4 in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

thearn4 — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:23:02 +0000

Good old fashioned machine learning (GOFML?) Using mixes of different sensor data from industrial 3d printing processes to production quality. Not as fashionable as LLMs at the moment but there's new innovations to make in the space, so it's honest work.

New comment by thearn4 in "If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?"

thearn4 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:59:06 +0000

Yeah I had the same question. I suppose you could put the project+plan text into the commit message?

New comment by thearn4 in "Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving"

thearn4 — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 15:07:11 +0000

12 years here, agree that this is one of the best communities still active. Thank you HN team!

New comment by thearn4 in "I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links"

thearn4 — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 15:44:52 +0000

I feel seen

> Your profile reads like a 'Hacker News Bingo' card: NASA, PhD, Python, 'Ask HN' about cheating, and a strong opinion on Reddit's community. The only thing missing is a post about your custom ergonomic keyboard made from recycled space shuttle parts.

New comment by thearn4 in "An autostereogram ("Magic Eye") solver"

thearn4 — Wed, 21 May 2025 20:44:45 +0000

I worked on this about a decade ago, but just updated it in order to learn to use Gradio and HF as a platform. Enjoy!

An autostereogram ("Magic Eye") solver

thearn4 — Wed, 21 May 2025 20:44:45 +0000

Article URL: https://huggingface.co/spaces/thearn/magiceye-solver

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44056142

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by thearn4 in "OpenAI Codex hands-on review"

thearn4 — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:10:47 +0000

I end up asking the same question when experimenting with tools like Cursor. When it can one-shot a small feature, it works like magic. When it struggles, and the context gets poisoned and I have to roll back commits and retry part of the way through something, it hits a point where it was probably easier for me to just write it. Or maybe template it and have it finish it. Or vice versa. I guess the point being that best practices have yet to truly be established, but totally hands-off uses have not worked well for me so far.

New comment by thearn4 in "I got fooled by AI-for-science hype–here's what it taught me"

thearn4 — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:39:30 +0000

Another reason why the idea of AI agents for science hasn't made much sense to me. Research is an extremely collaborative set of activities. How good would a researcher be who is very good at literature review, but never actually talks to anyone, goes to any conferences, etc?

New comment by thearn4 in "Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure"

thearn4 — Mon, 19 May 2025 16:08:28 +0000

Voynich is one of my favorite unsolved puzzles. This approach looks fascinating, so thanks for sharing your work here!

Show HN: Interactive Cellular Automata Demo

thearn4 — Fri, 02 May 2025 15:11:51 +0000

Going back to a very old school notion of "AI" : just updated a demo I did a few years back on efficiently computing cellular automata forward steps using convolution operations. Added a huggingface demo too. https://github.com/thearn/game-of-life

for fun, I let users swap rules dynamically in the app, try letting it run Conway for a short bit, pause the simulation, switch to Maze and start from there.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43870877

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thearn4 in "Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education"

thearn4 — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 14:48:42 +0000

You and I have matching stories, unfortunately. I've made a point of sending my sons to public school for this reason. Now, of course this also means that I shopped for a district that aligned with my expectations. But would never want a repeat of my own experience.

I think being accountable for your work to a person who isn't in your family is actually an important thing to learn. It also turns out, parents aren't really qualified to be teachers just because they believe that they are.

New comment by thearn4 in "Many Americans think NASA should prioritize asteroid hunting instead of moon"

thearn4 — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 15:21:28 +0000

This is still how the aeronautics portion of NASA operates. Though since it is the direct successor to NACA, I think its unsurprising.

New comment by thearn4 in "Fourier analysis may help to quickly train more accurate neural networks"

thearn4 — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 14:30:32 +0000

In my area, every controls engineer says "we can just use a PID".

99% of the time it seems they're not wrong, despite control engineering being a pretty large area of research.

New comment by thearn4 in "EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment"

thearn4 — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 20:50:40 +0000

I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event. The posts getting the most engagement/traction are convinced this is larger than Chernobyl. However, relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this.

But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.

New comment by thearn4 in "EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment"

thearn4 — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 20:42:58 +0000

I'm finding it difficult to find objective assessments of the impact of what has happened in East Palestine. It seems like there are interests in dismissing the impacts entirely, but there are others that seems to want to overstate the impacts significantly. Does anyone else feel this way?

New comment by thearn4 in "US Marines defeat DARPA robot by hiding under a cardboard box"

thearn4 — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 01:55:17 +0000

Interestingly, ChatGPT seems capable of predicting this approach:

https://imgur.com/a/okzZz7D

New comment by thearn4 in "Ask HN: Google spam filter getting worse?"

thearn4 — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 18:22:26 +0000

I absolutely had this issue most of last year, but the Gmail spam filter seems to be catching things more effectively for me in the last two months.

Are eVTOLs the “mother of all aerospace bubbles”?

thearn4 — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 22:11:19 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/evtol-aircraft

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30265546

Points: 17

# Comments: 12

New comment by thearn4 in "My MacBook Pro had over 10k USD in repairs"

thearn4 — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 18:46:18 +0000

My 2011 MBA needed a new battery a few years ago, but still works amazingly well as a daily-driver computer for my wife