Hacker News: vrc

New comment by vrc in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

vrc — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:14:55 +0000

Of the examples you listed, politicians are the only ones you directly fund and supposedly work for you. Your lawyers and doctors aren’t your employees, and they also don’t work on your property (though lawyers might handle your documents). The biggest thing this points to is that the mask is almost entirely off between employee-employer relationships in the US, and it looks like by ensuring everyone depended on employment for insurance before turning this corner, there’s not much resistance left.

New comment by vrc in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

vrc — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:06:00 +0000

Depends on if you believe it will ever become cheaper. Either hardware, inspiring more efficient smaller models, or energy itself. The techno optimist believes that that is the inevitable and investable future. But on what horizon and will it get “zip drived” before then?

New comment by vrc in "Mistral OCR 3"

vrc — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 03:21:30 +0000

I did the opposite. Tesseract to get bboxes, words, and chars and then mistral on the clips with some reasonable reflow to preserve geometry. Paddle wasn’t working on my local machine (until I found RapidOCR). Surya was also very good but because you can’t really tweak any knobs, when it failed it just kinda failed. But Surya > Rapid w/ Paddle > DocTr > Tesseract while the latter gave me the most granularity when I needed it.

Edit: Gemini 2.0 was good enough for VLM cleanup, and now 2.5 or above with structured output make reconstruction even easier.

New comment by vrc in "AI can code, but it can't build software"

vrc — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 03:17:08 +0000

I’m a PM and I’ve been able to do a lot of very interesting near production ready bits of coding recently with an LLM. I say near production ready because I specifically only build functional data processing stuff that I intentionally build with clean I/O requirements to hand to the real engineers on the team to slot in. They still have to fix some things to meet our standards, but I’m basically a “researcher” level coder. Which makes sense — I do have an undergrad and MS in CS, and did a lot of mathy algo stuff. For the last 15+ years I could never use anything in my brain to help the team solve things I was best suited to solve. I am now, and that’s nice.

The one key point is that I am keenly aware of what I can and cannot do. With these new superpowers, I often catch myself doing too much, and I end up doing a lot more rewrites than a real engineer would. But I can see Dunning Kruger playing out everywhere when people say they can vibe code an entire product.

New comment by vrc in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

vrc — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 10:58:23 +0000

Well technically AWS has never failed in wartime.

New comment by vrc in "A built-in 'off switch' to stop persistent pain"

vrc — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:04:46 +0000

Goblet? Or is this something new? Deep goblets are great for opening the ankles and hips/SI area in ways that have helped my back. Some combination of improving mobility in other reasons prevents my back from overcompensating I guess

New comment by vrc in "GLP-1s are breaking life insurance"

vrc — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 21:05:53 +0000

Yes. For very high risk patients, payers do want this. I’ve even heard of some paying pharmacies $100/fill if done on time for select people.

The problem is, prediabetic and folks who may have crossed 7.0 A1C once, and just overweight folks with docs who are willing to play fast and loose are demanding it. Skipping metformin and other first line treatment options that are way cheaper. For those folks, complications might be the next guys problem.

New comment by vrc in "The death of partying in the USA"

vrc — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 22:53:17 +0000

I was going to disagree but then realized I now shell out at least $100 when two families and their kids show up for 3-4 pizzas with toppings and chips and dip and some juices.

And god forbid I try and provide fresh fruit and beverages on that budget…

New comment by vrc in "Why English doesn't use accents"

vrc — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 11:32:21 +0000

Wait til you get a load of Tamil/Malayalam transliterations’ use of “zh”. It was proposed by some German linguist to represent a really retroflex “r” and now makes outsiders pronounce kozhikode as “cozy-code” instead a closer “korikode”

New comment by vrc in "Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to matter. Why?"

vrc — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 12:52:40 +0000

Counterpoints: the detractors of this purported loop would likely neither fund the vast amounts of research they’d demand be done nor believe the results if they conflicted with their anecdata. I have yet to see a good faith argument against evidence based method that provides an effective and realistic alternative. Because that would take evidence.

New comment by vrc in "The scientific “unit” we call the decibel"

vrc — Thu, 22 May 2025 11:48:57 +0000

4:3 only makes sense to you because you know which is length and width a priori. I for example, always have to recheck that. So if it was written as 1.33 or 4/3 it makes the same difference to me, and is similar in that way to dB

New comment by vrc in "Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri"

vrc — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 01:32:19 +0000

Satya had been at the company for quite a while himself. Perhaps not as long as others, but he was a well known veteran within the company

New comment by vrc in "My Time at MIT"

vrc — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:54:50 +0000

Locu. Acquired by GoDaddy. Morphed into a Yext competitor called GetFound.

New comment by vrc in "Ask HN: Is Godaddy Running a Scam?"

vrc — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 02:29:06 +0000

It started as Jomax Technologies, I believe.

New comment by vrc in "Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs"

vrc — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 12:03:59 +0000

Historically in the US, Indian and Arab people were classified as “Caucasian”. In fact, it was marked on my relatives first speeding ticket in 1972.

New comment by vrc in "Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs"

vrc — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:19:42 +0000

There are more brown people than Indians… Usually these initiatives push for underrepresented brown people, ie Hispanic/Latino Americans.

Most diversity programs actively harm Indians as over represented, as they fall under the broad “Asian” category (see Harvard).

But I guess Indians are easy pickings these days.

New comment by vrc in "Ads chew through half of mobile data"

vrc — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 18:39:39 +0000

This is the #1 reason for ad blocking in Eastern Europe and Asia (eg dolphin browser). It’s also why the current “solutions” big tech is providing viz. privacy and non-annoying ads doesn’t move the needle there.

New comment by vrc in "Training myself to run farther with Strava's API and an IoT dog feeder of M&Ms"

vrc — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 23:19:49 +0000

Also, they program stuff like high rep clean and jerks and snatches along with high intensity cardio and gymnastic movements. Never a great idea to train high power, highly technical movements with fatiguing exercises and time pressure, let alone with poor form. I did a few classes in SF coming from a background in Olympic lifting and strength sports and I really found maintaining form and safety was quite hard.

New comment by vrc in "First new asthma attack treatment in 50 years"

vrc — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 18:32:10 +0000

I believe it’s because a doctor doesn’t prescribe cigarettes to you. So the only liability is your own.

It’s a weak line of reasoning to _allow_ cigarettes, but I’m not convinced it’s so bad to _disallow_ novel therapeutic uses that are understudied.

New comment by vrc in "FDA proposes ending use of oral phenylephrine as OTC nasal decongestant"

vrc — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:25:53 +0000

Yes but then you’d have to carry that for domestic travel.