Hacker News: wcrossbow

New comment by wcrossbow in "A web-based RDP client built with Go WebAssembly and grdp"

wcrossbow — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:53:31 +0000

Im not a big fan of Windows but copy pasting a file across 3 nested RDP sessions feels magical every time

New comment by wcrossbow in "How to get better at guitar"

wcrossbow — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:44:53 +0000

I would assume it's grating for anybody to hear their mother tongue butchered. More so when both sides know they could just switch English and have an adult conversation instead of struggling to buy a loaf of broad and a bottle of water. I always feel the urge to switch and have to remind myself that the other person is making a big effort on their side and that should be appreciated and respected.

P.S. My mother tongue is Spanish and it's many accents are anything but standardized.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

wcrossbow — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:46:56 +0000

If it’s good enough it’s good enough, but just like there are many more options than going full blown LLM or just use a regex there are more options than transpile a massive Python stack to TS or give up.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Self Driving Car Insurance"

wcrossbow — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:28:22 +0000

Kids will randomly run into the road. They might run behind a ball or a dog so that it doesn’t end up on the other side or runned over or are simply too excited to remember your stern road safety talk.

The first thing I was taught when I picked up a car was: if you see a ball on the road you stop immediately. This valuable lesson has saved one kid (and my sanity) with me on the wheel.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]"

wcrossbow — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:58:32 +0000

The last and most important slide is missing.

"Ignore all the advise above and do the right thing Subtext: This will take multiple lifetimes to accomplish"

This is particularly important considering that some of the advice is at odds with each other and engineering is an unending juggling of tradeoffs. It's also by far the hardest to achieve both technically and socially but worth striving for.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Making tiny 0.1cc two stroke engine from scratch"

wcrossbow — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 08:59:58 +0000

That’s true! Sorry for not mentioning that.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Making tiny 0.1cc two stroke engine from scratch"

wcrossbow — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 08:07:19 +0000

This is great. If you enjoyed it you should check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IEGmD_aV3w . Next to that it’s child’s play. That’s a whole trasatlantic’s engine room from scratch.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator"

wcrossbow — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:05:21 +0000

They might have been using the fast multipole expansion method

New comment by wcrossbow in "A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad"

wcrossbow — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:09:03 +0000

I'm not a go developer and this kind of thing is far from my area of expertise. Do you mind giving some examples?

As far as I can tell skimming the code, and as I said, without knowledge of Go or the domain, the "shape" of the code isn't bad. If I got any vibes (:))from it, it was lack of error handling and over reliance on exactly matching strings. Generally speaking, it looks quite fragile.

FWIW I don't think the conclusion is wrong. With limited knowledge he managed to build a useful program for himself to solve a problem he had. Without AI tools that wouldn't have happened.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Alterego: Thought to Text"

wcrossbow — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 07:10:01 +0000

This is the stuff nightmares are made of. We already live in a you have nothing to hide society. Now imagine one where mega corps and the government have access to every thought you have. No worries, you got nothing to hide right? What would that do to our thought process and how we articulate our inner selfs? What do we allow ourselves to even think? At some point it will not even matter because we will have trained ourselves to suppress any deviant thought. I'd rather not keep on going because the ramifications of this technology make me truly sick in the stomach.

New comment by wcrossbow in "I'm switching to Python and actually liking it"

wcrossbow — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 15:54:20 +0000

Even better is to try to fetch all the env variables and then report on all of the missing ones.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres"

wcrossbow — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 08:05:16 +0000

Another good one is pgqueuer https://github.com/janbjorge/pgqueuer

New comment by wcrossbow in "Revenge of the GPT Wrappers: Defensibility in a world of commoditized AI models"

wcrossbow — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:04:36 +0000

I read this and of course couldn't believe it. Isn't 14.7B enough to be considered extremely rich these days[1]? In the the Forbes real-time billionaires list is quite easy to find _many_ such examples.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/profile/sarath-ratanavadi/?list=rtb/

New comment by wcrossbow in "Moon"

wcrossbow — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 19:38:08 +0000

At my current employer, Kuva Space, I'm among other things responsible for the commisioning and in orbit calibration of the payload. The Moon is a major calibration target for us, and between waxing and waining crescents I spent a lot of time analyzing Moon shots to perform radiometric calibration and camera parameter optimizations. The Moon doesn't know about weekends and images are not always downlinked at the most convenient times so that makes my life a bit more hectic.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Moon"

wcrossbow — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 17:48:14 +0000

The Moon also plays currently a very special role in my life and my work days are dictated to a large extent by the current Moon phase :)

It's not discussed in the article but we have detailed models (ROLO[0] and LIME[1]) for how much light is reflected from the Moon and can be captured by a telescope. Like this one can radiometrically calibrate a telescope, that is, find a mapping between the digital numbers coming out from the sensor and actual radiance values.

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/media/files/rolo-lunar-model-and-databa... [1] https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/24/3649/2024/

New comment by wcrossbow in "A visual proof that a^2 – b^2 = (a + b)(a – b)"

wcrossbow — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 19:20:40 +0000

This is not what I meant. What is being proved is: a^2-b^2 - (a+b)(a-b) = 0. If you swap a and b you end up with a sign switch on the lhs which is inconsequential.

New comment by wcrossbow in "A visual proof that a^2 – b^2 = (a + b)(a – b)"

wcrossbow — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 14:32:25 +0000

Just rename a to b and b to a.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Unexpected Keyboard"

wcrossbow — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 15:45:43 +0000

That's a gross underestimation. At current world population levels that comes out to be 8000 people. The QMK github repo alone has over 18k stars and almost 40k forks. So yeah very popular!

New comment by wcrossbow in "Unexpected Keyboard"

wcrossbow — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 10:39:29 +0000

> is that you can swipe left and right on the space bar to quickly and accurately scroll left and right in a text field. I find this about as fast as tapping at a position in a text field, but much more accurate

I recently learned about a hidden iphone feature. If you hold the spacebar for about halve a second you can move freely the cursor around any text field.

New comment by wcrossbow in "Unexpected Keyboard"

wcrossbow — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 10:35:36 +0000

You can flash your own firmware which you can inspect. QMK and ZMK are two very popular options.