Hacker News: v7n

New comment by v7n in "Steam Machine launches today"

v7n — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:56:22 +0000

It seems to me like a social score system is a direct upgrade to this in certain ways: participating in undesired behaviour will cause you headaches you cannot really solve with money. Too bad it "naturally" slips into mass surveillance, but restricting privileges would be a great alternative to reducing the ability to take care of necessities for you and yours.

New comment by v7n in "Contact Lens Uses Microfluidics to Monitor and Treat Glaucoma"

v7n — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:58:32 +0000

Neat! I've occasionally looked into getting into DIY microfluidics, and one of the lowish-tech ideas I've seen is etching/engraving CD cases or other polystyrene sheets and baking them: this makes them shrink quite predictably, allowing for some really tiny channels. In arts & crafts they call them "Shrinky Dinks". PDMS is another interesting material, and could perhaps be somehow combined with 3D printing channels with alcohol-soluble polymers to print + dissolve the channels...

New comment by v7n in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

v7n — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 12:53:15 +0000

I'm sorry you feel that way. I'm not a native speaker but neither do I use any of those tools to write my comments here.

The community I have the privilege to be involved with in Kenya is facing many challenges when it comes to propagating access to solar energy, and one relatively small thing that can be done would be to service the lead-acid batteries most commonly used there: the environment is quite hostile to them as I understand it, and lead-acid is "the affordable chemistry" of choice. The problem is that there is a lack of knowledge and toxic waste (sulphuric acid, lead) handling capability. Otherwise topping up old batteries as a service is absolutely an achievable goal, much needed, and there is money to be made.

New comment by v7n in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

v7n — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:03:23 +0000

If you're talking about fairly modest sums ($10k to 100k) and Kenya in particular is on your radar, I think we should discuss this further. I'm not Kenyan myself (European), but I frequent the area and have a solid network and resources already in place to make things happen. How may I reach out?

New comment by v7n in "When is it better to think without words?"

v7n — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 06:01:00 +0000

Adding a data point here for posterity, in hopes that someone researches this topic deeper. I recognise myself from the above, apart from "intuitive feelings" as I don't quite get what shi.. the person meant by that. My mother noted that from a very young age I was fascinated by books and indeed did an unreasonable amount of reading growing up. My sibling thinks with words. Visualisation of real things is a challenge for me, but I think I'm reasonably adept at solving more abstract things (e.g. mechanical linkages) in a somewhat visual-adjacent way that I call my "imagination". This extends to memories, as if you were to task me to picture a dog, I would feel much more comfortable picking a non-existing, imagined dog than any the dogs that I've actually seen or met, such as family members' pets. I do some painting and could wireframe-sketch this imagined subject for you and "fill in the blanks", but trying to remember any actual moment spent with those beasts is laborious and results in something akin to one-frame flashes that are immediately gone and can't be recalled at will. Inadequate memory formation/recall have caused me grief, but I have no trouble remembering for example number sequences.

New comment by v7n in "Mathematicians have found a hidden 'reset button' for undoing rotation"

v7n — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 21:32:08 +0000

Always happy to share! I came across this while planning a 3D scanning (photogrammetry) rig. Perhaps you'll be the one to figure out gravity can be modelled as a rotation around an axis in a fourth dimension, wrapping clingy spacetime around itself? ;) I'm not clever enough for that.

New comment by v7n in "Mathematicians have found a hidden 'reset button' for undoing rotation"

v7n — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:12:13 +0000

I was immediately reminded of the anti-twist mechanism, perhaps unrelated but "reset rotation, twice/half" comes up there as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-twister_mechanism

New comment by v7n in "Claude Code Pro Limit? Hack It While You Sleep"

v7n — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 18:52:04 +0000

I think you might be aiming too low. Tasked with writing a "perfect and most useful program" this would surely yield something more than merely writing 42 to stdout.

New comment by v7n in "Tell HN: Meta developer account suspended"

v7n — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:01:45 +0000

WhatsApp has a critical advantage in Kenya from my experience: telecom operators such as Safaricom include quite generous WA bundles in their customers' subscriptions, allowing one to use it even though they would otherwise be out of credits. Being out of credits/airtime is not uncommon, since the economical bundles are sold as expiring in 24h/7d/30d.

New comment by v7n in "Detection of hidden cellular GPS vehicle trackers"

v7n — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:59:36 +0000

Since I'm not seeing any other references, here's a timestamp for a YouTube video where an ex-undercover op is interviewed and such thing is mentioned: How FBI Undercover Agents Actually Work | Authorized Account | Insider https://youtu.be/h6au3ppTm7g?t=1123

New comment by v7n in "Printing metal on glass with lasers [video]"

v7n — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:50:20 +0000

The remarks at the end about cover-flip-etch and controlling oxides with gases do make me wonder about applications in fabricating microfluidic chips with integrated catalysts and/or electrical leads &c. Cool stuff!

New comment by v7n in "The mysterious flow of fluid in the brain"

v7n — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:29:36 +0000

Since I was a child I have been very susceptible to exertion headaches and indeed coughing/sneezing can easily trigger this. They last from a couple of hours to the entire day, being gone when I wake up. The pain is not as bad if I lie down. I'm personally convinced it is directly linked to the pressure of my cerebrospinal fluid.

MRI has of course revealed nothing. Syringomyelia was not supposed to be hereditary (father) and nothing has been detected, but there is a chance that the cavity is so small/narrow that it blocks shut when I lie down: pain subsides, nothing is there to be seen when I'm in the machine. Vertical MRI, anyone?

The "valsalva maneuver" has a 100% success rate of triggering symptoms, and recently (some years) I have begun to observe a high-pitched sucking sound, consistent duration of about a second, originating from somewhere between my right ear lobe and spine. The sound is not uncomfortably loud but could be missed if I was listening to music or having a conversation. I think I have only ever observed the sound when in a sitting position. When detected, the sound might be accompanied with a physical sensation, but it is so minimal that I'm unsure if I'm imagining it.

It's just one of those things at this point.

New comment by v7n in "Ask HN: Real-time speech-to-speech translation"

v7n — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 06:58:02 +0000

It's not exactly what OP wants out-of-the-box, but if anyone is considering building one I suggest taking a look at this.¹ It is really easy to tinker with, can run both on devide or in a client-server model. It has the required speech-to-text and text-to-speech endpoints, with multiple options for each built-in. If you can make the LLM AI assistant part of the pipeline to perform translation to a degree you're comfortable with, this could be a solution.

¹ https://github.com/huggingface/speech-to-speech

New comment by v7n in "Moonshine, the new state of the art for speech to text"

v7n — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 16:00:15 +0000

I gave this a shot using speech-to-speech¹ modified so that it skips the LLM/AI assistant part and just repeats back what it thinks I said and displays the text.

For longer sentences my perception is that Moonshine performs at 80-90% of what Whisper² could do, while using considerably less resources. When trying shorter, two-word utterances it nosedived for some reason.

These numbers don't mean much, but when paired with MeloTTS, Moonshine and Whisper² ate up 1.2 and 2.5 GB of my GPU's memory, respectively.

¹ https://github.com/huggingface/speech-to-speech ² distil-whisper/distil-large-v3

New comment by v7n in "EU: Definition of "potential terrorists" opens door to broad information-sharing"

v7n — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 11:52:54 +0000

My understanding is that this has always been the intended purpose of this system and these guidelines are just about agreeing on a mutual interpretation of some dense legalese. If that's correct then I'm not too upset about this being handled in the Commission, but the issue remains important to me so I will partake in the outrage if I hear compelling enough arguments to do so.

New comment by v7n in "EU: Definition of "potential terrorists" opens door to broad information-sharing"

v7n — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 11:32:00 +0000

The headline got me worried, but after reading the article it became clear that was purposeful with weasel words like "states can now collect". There seem to be no new databases or new actual mechanisms in place, it's just about the clarification of which kind of potential threats are encouraged to be entered into the already existent system.

The criteria seems reasonable enough. If there is objective, verifiable information that an individual, who has been sharing terrorist content online, will commit a violent extremist offense in the future and that offense would be serious enough... I would hope that this data is shared between the Union members now and in the future.

New comment by v7n in "Kanban vs. Scrum: What's the difference?"

v7n — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 12:17:52 +0000

I'm an overpaid consultant and I think scrum is easier to sell because it can be appealing to management as a selling point per se. Personally I strongly prefer kanban though.

New comment by v7n in "The enduring mystery of how water freezes"

v7n — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 06:42:34 +0000

My father taught us this as a simple conjecture of sorts that somehow always stuck with me: "in a frozen lake the warmest layer of water is at the bottom and it's at 4°C". Now there might be a plethora of cases where this is not exactly true, as is often the case with simplified models, but this is how I would word it to my kids :)

New comment by v7n in "Discussion on why SQLite is gaining popularity [audio]"

v7n — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 11:28:40 +0000

In addition to paying attention to references, perhaps it makes sense to always keep e.g. player inventory state in there, but something that can change every frame, like player position data, should perhaps only be synced just prior to the snapshot if it would otherwise degrade performance too much. This is of course another layer of complexity (volatile vs non-volatile game state) to think about.

New comment by v7n in "Rejecting GMOs hinders human progress and keeps the poor hungry"

v7n — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 06:58:32 +0000

Distribution is in itself a problem, yes, but there's also the geopolitical angle of depending on foreign imports to feed a nation.