Hacker News: viggity

New comment by viggity in "Suburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency"

viggity — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 15:30:41 +0000

I am suggesting that the major causative factor for life outcomes is genetics. Not "racist" property tax funding models. You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl.

New comment by viggity in "Suburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency"

viggity — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:52:49 +0000

The difference in outcomes isn't from funding/resources. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/26/why-do-the...

New comment by viggity in "The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)"

viggity — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:56:48 +0000

I took 3 years of Japanese in HS (96-99). About 2 years ago I was doing a lot of work with genai and japanese typefaces. It was wild digging into how different the japanese web is. Back in like 2005, it was common to stylize english text by embedding it in an image and then applying drop shadows, etc. By 2022 everyone does the vast majority of that within CSS. Not in Japan though, I couldn't believe how much text content is still in image form.

New comment by viggity in "Why Some People See Collapse Earlier"

viggity — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:19:32 +0000

I have always been kind of hyper aware of . My wife and I only dated for 6 months before we got married in sept 2019 (second marriage for both of us, we knew what we each wanted). But I definitely felt a bit awkward telling her about what I thought was coming with covid in late dec 2019. She was a bit suspect at first but polite and just went along with it because we were newlyweds and she loved me and gave me the benefit of the doubt. Holy shit, most everything went how I said it was going to at least through June 2020. AFAICT, she's still convinced I'm from the future.

New comment by viggity in "The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up"

viggity — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:57:25 +0000

Kinda like when someone said that instead of running for mayor, Bloomberg could have given everyone in the country $1M. A guest said it on NBC and Bryan Williams, nor the pundit had any intuition that it seemed grossly wrong. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-...

New comment by viggity in "Show HN: A Daily Bible Game"

viggity — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:07:58 +0000

Nice work! Out of curiosity, how are you deciding what the verse of the day is? i.e. is randomness weighted somehow? There are are ~31k verses in the bible, 23k in old testament, 8k in new testament. Is it 2.5 times more likely to be an old testament verse? Or, perhaps you're picking a testament at random, then a random book, then a random verse. Lots of ways to skin the proverbial cat.

New comment by viggity in "TOON – Token Oriented Object Notation"

viggity — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:38:56 +0000

Since the whole point of this is to limit LLM token consumption, it'd be interesting to see the results of prompts that use it.

I've seen a ton of people who just paste a CSV into a prompt and expect it to work well because they don't know any better, but the results are typically hot garbage. It's too repetitive, it can't memorize and/or process such a big chunk of data. Asking an LLM to use pandas to iteratively analyze some CSV works great, though.

New comment by viggity in "10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea"

viggity — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:01:43 +0000

These kinds of results seem all too common. Like, why? Are companies just too used to using their general business attorneys for it, and those attorneys are just ignorant? Hungry for extra billable hours?

New comment by viggity in "Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond"

viggity — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 18:43:43 +0000

I worked for a PoE lighting company for a couple of years. Yes, the ability to program your lights based on time of day, occupancy sensors etc was all nice for the end consumers. But the big advantage was that since it didn't use mains power, the owner of the building didn't have to hire a union electrician at eleventy gillion an hour to move some light panels around in a drop ceiling.

New comment by viggity in "That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus"

viggity — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 17:15:55 +0000

Does the second amendment apply to non-citizens?

I'm against the government jailing a visa holder for their speech, but revoking their visa is not jail.

New comment by viggity in "Lidar, optical distance and time of flight sensors"

viggity — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 15:44:52 +0000

In general, no. And to be clear, this is my general understanding and I don't have the time to look up the specifics, but I'm pretty sure lidar uses a "carrier wave" in much the same way old telephone modems did, or your IR remote for your TV. The carrier wave is how these sensors don't get confused. If you've ever been in traffic, and you get a stray, one off "YOURE TOO CLOSE TO SOMETHING" when you in fact aren't, it is because a carrier wave from another car happens to line up and you have a collision (pun intended).

two seconds of googling: https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/tutorials/2021/understandin...

New comment by viggity in "UK, Canada and Australia formally recognise Palestinian state"

viggity — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 14:36:33 +0000

1948 vs 2025 Jewish Population:

Algeria: 140,000 -> ~0

Morocco: 250,000 -> ~0

Yemen: 550,000 -> ~300

Iraq: 135,000 -> ~0

Lebanon: 20,000 -> ~40

Iran: 135,000 -> ~0

New comment by viggity in "AI tools are making the world look weird"

viggity — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:58:31 +0000

The book suggests two main reasons for this.

1. The reformation increased literacy/education in the populace to a greater extent in protestant areas, because you no longer needed clergy to talk to God, or understand the bible. Protestant countries have had better education for longer and it has a compounding effect.

2. The "Marriage and Family Program" (the "MFP")... protestant areas discouraged cousin marriage and levirate marriage much earlier than catholic countries, and it is still very common in the rest of the world. Consanguineous marriage is ludicrously prevalent in the middle east, it makes most of the rest of the world more tribal and you end up with compounding genetic defects. By making cousin marriage taboo, it encouraged children to move to a different town and made people less clannish.

New comment by viggity in "AI tools are making the world look weird"

viggity — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:46:10 +0000

The book examines this in multiple different ways, not just at the national level, but even within countries (provinces that are more catholic vs more protestant, and even within Germany, how far the city was from Wittenberg), as well as comparing third world countries that encountered catholic missionaries vs protestant missionaries.

New comment by viggity in "When Your Father Is a Magician, What Do You Believe?"

viggity — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 12:02:01 +0000

My dad is a tax attorney/cpa, but is also a magician. My birthday parties were dope. It certainly wasn't a full time job, but he made enough money from corporate parties doing walk around magic to fund his habit, and magic is expensive (most videos teaching the trick are ~$100 or more). He has a magic library that if I had to guess is worth 6 figures.

I've tried getting into the craft many times, and if I had to boil down the essence of nearly every trick (especially for slight of hand, not necessarily stage magic)... Imagine the stupidest, dumbest, simplest explanation of the trick that you write off as "well certainly they're not doing _that_", and that is what is happening. The real art is that doing that simple thing is hard AF, they have to practice it a thousand times to make it look convincing. I never really got into it because it required too much dedication. And if anything, that makes it more special than something more cerebral.

New comment by viggity in "VibeVoice: A Frontier Open-Source Text-to-Speech Model"

viggity — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:30:28 +0000

I feel like this is a step in the right direction, but a lot of emotive text-to-speech models are only changing the duration and loudness of each word, the timing/pauses are better too.

I would love to have a model that can make sense of things like stressing particular syllables or phonemes to make a point.

New comment by viggity in "Launch HN: Reality Defender (YC W22) – API for Deepfake and GenAI Detection"

viggity — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 16:05:59 +0000

I find that most companies find that to be a feature, not a bug. People are more likely to hit accept if they can only see a small chunk of the content.

New comment by viggity in "Bezier-rs – algorithms for Bézier segments and shapes"

viggity — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 14:40:37 +0000

Anytime béziers are mentioned on HN, I feel compelled to share these absolutely incredible videos from Freya Holmér

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds (73 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwxzDHniEw (24 minutes)

New comment by viggity in "You wouldn't steal a font"

viggity — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:50:01 +0000

I work in this industry, relatively new to it. There is a mind numbing amount of work that goes into font engineering.

New comment by viggity in "Instant SQL for results as you type in DuckDB UI"

viggity — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 19:21:29 +0000

it makes intellisense/autocomplete work a hell of a lot easier. LINQ in dotnet does the same thing.