Hacker News: vgalin

New comment by vgalin in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

vgalin — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:13:27 +0000

The introductory video is a bit... daring. Generating tattoos that clearly look AI-generated is not one of the use-cases I'd try to sell.

New comment by vgalin in "Google says criminal hackers used AI to find a major software flaw"

vgalin — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:46:12 +0000

The company doing the actual ID verification (KYC) is probably the last company I'd trust with this kind of data.

To circumvent conversations being flagged as "cybersecurity bad!!!" I often have to use previous models (5.3 for example, and sometimes using them through subagents is enough). And when this method no longer works, local models will be good enough for it to not be a problem (for my use case, at least).

New comment by vgalin in "Google releases Gemma 4 open models"

vgalin — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:50:05 +0000

I ran gemma4:26b without any tooling access and it gave me the correct answer in a few minutes only (definitely less than 8 minutes, but I didn't timed it).

Specs : RX 9070 XT (24GB VRAM) + 16 GB RAM

gist : https://gist.github.com/vgalin/a9c852605f39ab503f167c9708a46...

(I gave it another go and it found the correct result in about a minute, see the comment on the gist)

New comment by vgalin in "Switch to Claude without starting over"

vgalin — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:10:26 +0000

> And that is shared with chat too.

Huh, I didn't know about that. I'm trying Claude Pro for the first time while comparing it against ChatGPT and I'm (sadly) not impressed at the moment.

When I asked both Codex and Claude Code to "look into" an issue of medium-to-high-complexity in a code base, Codex went with the fix I had in mind and directly and made code changes without being asked or at least asking for permission. It only used a few percents of its 5-hour limits to do it, on `High`.

Claude in the meanwhile misdiagnosed the core of the issue on its first pass (even on Opus 4.6 + Thinking). I had to guide it in the right direction and despite being given the 'answer', it was quite a long process compared to Codex' one-shot. And it hit the 5h limit before being able to finish solving the issue.

New comment by vgalin in "Pyxel: A retro game engine for Python"

vgalin — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 07:55:09 +0000

Python library with Rust backend*

New comment by vgalin in "I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews"

vgalin — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 12:02:44 +0000

But the older you are, the more likely it is that you have built a family and have children and responsibilities outside of work. You cannot necessarily afford to spend time studying (problems untied to the real world) as much as someone younger I guess.

New comment by vgalin in "Making USB devices – end to end guide to your first gadget"

vgalin — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 07:05:26 +0000

I didn't used a kit, but bought the components separately (microcontroller, key caps, switches, wires). It runs custom code as it was sufficient to fit my use case, though QMK may be possible? The keys are mapped from F13 to F22 and can be use in some software that allow custom keybinds.

New comment by vgalin in "Making USB devices – end to end guide to your first gadget"

vgalin — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 11:34:31 +0000

I recently built a small hand-wired macro pad using an Arduino Pro Micro equipped with ATmega32U4, it's apparently quite popular amongst hobbyists building custom keyboards. Quick and fun project for a beginner, the most tedious part of this project was to carve the wooden case.

New comment by vgalin in "Colab notebook to create Magic cards from image with Claude"

vgalin — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 21:36:23 +0000

(Disclaimer, I'm the maintainer of this package, but this kind of use is exactly why I created it at the beginning)

If you know how to use HTML+CSS and would like to generate full-fledged cards, you could use a package such as html2image [0] to combine the text, the image and a card-template image into one final image. Chrome/Chromium has to be available on Colab Notebooks though, that's the only requirement. Using basic SVG without this package could also do the trick.

[0] https://github.com/vgalin/html2image

New comment by vgalin in "Algorithms for Modern Hardware"

vgalin — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 14:24:16 +0000

People are now boycotting knowledge?

New comment by vgalin in "Thanks FedEx, this is why we keep getting phished"

vgalin — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 12:10:06 +0000

(translation provided by ChatGPT)

> Terms and Conditions, Price and Service List, Conditions.

> Dear customer,

> our price and service list, our terms and conditions, as well as further conditions which will come into effect on May 1, 2024, can be found on the USB stick.

> With kind regards,

> The Sparkasse Bremen AG

New comment by vgalin in "Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?"

vgalin — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 13:41:19 +0000

I wrote a Python package [1] that does something similar! It allows the generation of images from HTML+CSS strings or files (or even other files like SVGs) and could probably handle PDF generation too. It uses the headless version of Chrome/Chromium or Edge behind the scenes.

Writing this package made me realize that even big projects (such as Chromium) sometimes have features that just don't work. Edge headless wouldn't let you take screenshots up until recently, and I still encountered issues with Firefox last time I tried to add support for it in the package. I also stumbled upon weird behaviors of Chrome CDP when trying to implement an alternative to using the headless mode, and these issues eventually fixed themselves after some Chrome updates.

[1] https://github.com/vgalin/html2image

New comment by vgalin in "How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?"

vgalin — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 12:29:31 +0000

For further nitpicking: "etc." shall also end with '.' as it is the abbreviated form of "et cetera/caetera". Also, when used in an enumeration, it shall be preceded by a comma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_cetera

New comment by vgalin in "Harvard ethics professor allegedly fabricated multiple studies"

vgalin — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:05:21 +0000

If this is an established fact, where could one learn more about this?

New comment by vgalin in "Bark: A transformer based text to audio system"

vgalin — Mon, 15 May 2023 09:50:57 +0000

The french example sounds off in my opinion, it seems to mix up its consonants/ vowels.

The "OU" sound from "nous" sounds like "EU", or like if the sound was skipped. The "OH" sound from "sommes" sounds like "EU" (again, but less pronounced). The "T" sound from "trop" becames "P" ("pro").

New comment by vgalin in "Ask HN: Where to Feature Startup on Spanish, Portuguese, German, French?"

vgalin — Fri, 12 May 2023 13:54:42 +0000

It appears to be invite-only (even though you can request an invite). I'm not sure about what drove them to do so, but that may be why there is not much activity on the website.

New comment by vgalin in "On Having Enough Socks (2019)"

vgalin — Fri, 05 May 2023 13:40:25 +0000

Interestingly, they have a "barcode" system that allow them (and allow us) to know the age of a given sock.

"Blacksocks knows the age of all socks" https://www.blacksocks.com/en/ageofthesocksen

New comment by vgalin in "Show HN: GPT-4-powered web searches for developers"

vgalin — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 08:31:35 +0000

This peculiar tool seems to be aimed at developers, so I don't find it surprising.

New comment by vgalin in "Attacker with access to XML config can trigger keepass.exe to obtain passwords"

vgalin — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 13:51:33 +0000

If 'someone' (an attacker), introduced themselves physically in your house or workplace (thus obtaining a high level of access) to place hidden cameras and to record you typing your master passwords. And if that someone later retrieved the footage and a copy of your password manager database... Would you blame your password manager for being insecure?

New comment by vgalin in "Attacker with access to XML config can trigger keepass.exe to obtain passwords"

vgalin — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 13:33:31 +0000

Then it would be an attack vector of course, but whether it is a vulnerability of the password manager itself would be debatable.