Hacker News: thomas536

New comment by thomas536 in "Can a MUD evaluate LLMs? A $99 proof of concept"

thomas536 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:07:03 +0000

+1 to using MUD as a learning tool. Learn about agent loops, prompting iteration, etc.

I vibe coded a few room proof of concept MUD. I added a tools called `oracle` (aka me) that it could ask me questions to help along its way; and the ability to interject in the loop with a hint. Just as I might want an llm to stop to ask me for help instead of plodding along...

Interesting to limit the number of turns and see where it gets stuck or how quickly it can finish.

New comment by thomas536 in "Car touchscreens are cheap, not good"

thomas536 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:14:17 +0000

I refuse to believe this is the only way to make it cheaper. Standardization and modular components could help. Might not be cheap enough. But surely we can be more imaginative!

New comment by thomas536 in "Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers"

thomas536 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:26:15 +0000

My intuition is that a small radio from the 80s is sufficient. Has relatively small size and passive speaker. Small passive speaker and small enclosure are cheap aka not 100+ USD. A tonie box sounds fine. Can I diy reproduce one similar at low cost (less than buying 50 USD)?

New comment by thomas536 in "Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers"

thomas536 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:30:18 +0000

I've spent countless hours searching for a small, good quality passive speaker. In a roughly 4 inch cube size. That comes with an good (acoustically) box/enclosure. Plenty exist in various forms (kits) but I never know if they sound as good as even laptop or phone speakers. Which is a low bar, but still can't find good reviews.

New comment by thomas536 in "Texas county pauses data center construction in rural areas"

thomas536 — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:49:09 +0000

I wonder where the water is coming from for these sites

New comment by thomas536 in "Pinboard vs. Raindrop"

thomas536 — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 02:33:50 +0000

Did they publish that fact anywhere?

New comment by thomas536 in "Linux Kernel MultiPath TCP Project"

thomas536 — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 13:45:11 +0000

Is anyone using this on Android?

New comment by thomas536 in "A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later"

thomas536 — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 23:17:18 +0000

Perhaps? I remember the article arguing more comprehensively why a different order would be beneficial, but maybe I am just misremembering

New comment by thomas536 in "A Critique of SQL, 40 Years Later"

thomas536 — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 15:23:05 +0000

I once read an article about SQL and how reordering the sections of a query would make it more ergonomic for users (iirc things like specifying what you want first and then how to present it last, more like a pipeline). I searched many times over the years but have not been able to find it again.

New comment by thomas536 in "Stress hormone reduces altruistic behavior in empathetic people"

thomas536 — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 19:18:17 +0000

Re hydration

Do you have any good reading on that link? Searched just now and there's a lot to wade through to find a good article

New comment by thomas536 in "Show HN: Voiceliner – Capture structured braindumps on the go"

thomas536 — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 23:12:46 +0000

What's your favorite PTT mic? I'm always on the lookout for great device recommendations!

Ask HN: Learning Reimplementation of Make

thomas536 — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 16:43:05 +0000

Looking for short toy impls

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28471669

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thomas536 in "TinyPICO – tiny fully-featured ESP32 board"

thomas536 — Sat, 17 Jul 2021 14:44:53 +0000

Ah finally found one! Looks great!

A faster multi-way merge algorithm interchangeable with heapq.merge

thomas536 — Sat, 17 Jul 2021 14:44:11 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/sweeneyde/multimerge

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27866136

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by thomas536 in "Beating TimSort at Merging"

thomas536 — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 17:41:47 +0000

Are there similar relatively simple methods or simd tricks for multi-way merges?

New comment by thomas536 in "TinyPICO – tiny fully-featured ESP32 board"

thomas536 — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 03:48:08 +0000

Still looking for a microcontroller that can fit on my wrist [watch-like form factor] with built in microphone, deep sleep, quick wake, and quick push audio to wifi or BLE...

New comment by thomas536 in "Precursor – A mobile, open source electronics platform"

thomas536 — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 22:58:06 +0000

A recently launched pi tablet hits a couple of the requirements but definitely not all

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/745629624/cutiepi-raspb...

New comment by thomas536 in "Alert: Twitter 2FA is broken again and there is no ETA"

thomas536 — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 19:46:43 +0000

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/129400382869048524...

New comment by thomas536 in "Ask HN: Best way to publish a free book online?"

thomas536 — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 19:30:31 +0000

I ran across this person's blog, who seems like they have some different slants on publishing that might interesting to you:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/6-lessons-learned-self-pub...

New comment by thomas536 in "Tired of note-taking apps"

thomas536 — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 23:49:44 +0000

Sorry to hijack this thread, but too curious if you made any headway from your "Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?" post? Sounded like an interesting use-case.

tia