Hacker News: valzevul

New comment by valzevul in "Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way"

valzevul — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 04:58:31 +0000

There are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it.

As someone who's never tried learning Japanese, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the deep dive and am now less afraid to check out some more serious tutorials (though I wish everyone put as much effort into explaining the system behind something so often dismissed as "just memorise it").

Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

valzevul — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 22:53:50 +0000

Article URL: https://underreacted.leaflet.pub/3mmevu6woys27

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48623419

Points: 160

# Comments: 268

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

valzevul — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:00:56 +0000

  Location: Vancouver, Canada
  Remote: Yes (worldwide)
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: iOS, Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, Swift Concurrency, TCA, Core ML/Vision, HealthKit, watchOS, BLE/NFC, Push Notifications, App Store Review, OWASP MASVS, visionOS
  Email: hn@drobinin.com

Résumé: https://drobinin.com/consulting

Senior iOS engineer / Apple-platform consultant with 12+ years of experience.

I build and fix iOS and Vision Pro apps from medical devices and high-traffic consumer apps to vibecoded startups. I also help teams get difficult apps approved: App Store rejection triage, reviewer-note/metadata fixes, and fractional senior iOS support for startups.

New comment by valzevul in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

valzevul — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:53:19 +0000

I wish I had kept my IRC logs but I am quite happy the ICQ logs are gone.

New comment by valzevul in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

valzevul — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:51:10 +0000

Hi, OP here. No idea how I did it ten years ago, but looking at the Dunbar layer contraction, my active network (e.g acquaintances) peaks at 275 in 2016 and gradually declines to about 60 by 2026, and the close friends layer drops from 9 in 2016 to 5 in 2026.

New comment by valzevul in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

valzevul — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:43:26 +0000

Hi, OP here!

TF-IDF was the first thing I tried - it works great for stopwords but it doesn't handle cross-language bleed of filler words well, and the short life-event messages ("he died", etc) use common words and get aggressively down-weighted.

I had some asymmetry analysis when looking at directional sentiment and per-person question rates - that's fun indeed!

I also went with the Jaccard convergence and the endearment categories instead of wordclouds, so that I could see how word choices are changing across time.

New comment by valzevul in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

valzevul — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:33:32 +0000

In the same app, if you go down Settings -> Advanced -> scroll to the bottom -> Export Telegram data, there is an option to export all chats at once, including some very handy controls like getting only your own messages for large group chats.

New comment by valzevul in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

valzevul — Thu, 28 May 2026 05:36:57 +0000

Do you keep separate notes for things like recommendations or addresses? I often dig through my chats to find them.

I analysed 20 years of my chats

valzevul — Wed, 27 May 2026 23:31:13 +0000

Article URL: https://drobinin.com/posts/am-i-a-bad-friend/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302220

Points: 255

# Comments: 156

New comment by valzevul in "Six years perfecting maps on watchOS"

valzevul — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:46:39 +0000

Generally it means that yes, the price will stay as-is. When the developer increases the price (versus introducing a different payment tier), they have two options: either keep all existing subscribers at the current price, or offer them to agree with the price bump (users can decline though). Reducing the price affects all existing users automatically.

Six years perfecting maps on watchOS

valzevul — Sat, 02 May 2026 21:14:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.david-smith.org/blog/2026/04/29/maps-on-watchos/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47990606

Points: 457

# Comments: 120

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

valzevul — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:00:19 +0000

Location: Vancouver, Canada Remote: Yes (worldwide) Willing to relocate: Yes (within Canada) Technologies: iOS, Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, Swift Concurrency, TCA, Core ML/Vision, Metal, OWASP MASVS, watchOS, iPadOS

CV: https://drobinin.com/consulting

Senior iOS engineer / consultant (12+ years). I build and fix iOS and Vision Pro apps from medical devices and high-traffic consumer apps to vibecoded startups struggling to pass App Store reviews.

New comment by valzevul in "My phone replaced a brass plug"

valzevul — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:36:29 +0000

There are a few outdoor ranges around Edinburgh but they focus on clay shooting and shotguns. I think there are one or two rifle ranges in town but they only accept students.

The one I went to is indoors, although not a tunnel but a Nissen hut [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_hut

New comment by valzevul in "My phone replaced a brass plug"

valzevul — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:29:34 +0000

It's not about submillimetre precision (OP here), it's about knowing if you can shoot well. The most common deer stalking certification in the UK (DSC1) involves three shooting tests from 20, 70, and 100m - if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres.

> every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting

I mention in the post that I had access to the range only 1-2 evenings a week, so there was no way I could improve my skills outside of these few hours.

New comment by valzevul in "My phone replaced a brass plug"

valzevul — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:23:03 +0000

No, that's fair (OP here) - I went to the range to learn how to hold the rifle in the first place, but indoor shooting with .22 from 25 yards in a stiff shooting jacket is as far from shooting a deer with .243 as it gets, so I stayed for the fun of it and the community around it.

I would definitely get to the point of stalking deer faster if I were to book a few 1-1 sessions at an outdoor range instead, but "faster" was never the point.

New comment by valzevul in "My phone replaced a brass plug"

valzevul — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:25:09 +0000

Aye, I think most people use something like .243 for stalking, but the closest range was indoors, so I didn’t have much choice.

My goal was to get a deer stalking certificate (e.g DSC1), which includes a shooting test: 2 chest shots at 100m from prone, 2 chest shots at 70m from standing/kneeling/sitting, and 2 head shots from 10-20m standing (they use cardboard deer targets, so not far from training at a range).

New comment by valzevul in "My phone replaced a brass plug"

valzevul — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:46:52 +0000

With all due respect, driving past Dundee every time I fancy a wee pasty is a bit too much (and they don't do doughnuts).

New comment by valzevul in "My phone replaced a brass plug"

valzevul — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:10:53 +0000

I think it depends on the discipline, NSRA .22 in the post uses the outermost edge, but ISSF (Olympic rifle/pistol, for example) uses the innermost edge.

New comment by valzevul in "My phone replaced a brass plug"

valzevul — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:58:02 +0000

Wow, I had no idea. The ones we had at the range were 0.22LR and the boxes are marked 5.7 mm which is also not precisely 0.22".

New comment by valzevul in "My phone replaced a brass plug"

valzevul — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:01:10 +0000

Counting rings is easy indeed, but scoring borderline shots without a scoring gauge is not, because the visible bullet hole is often smaller than the bullet itself.