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dvaun

864 karma · joined November 1, 2017

Current reading list: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/80295967?shelf=currently-reading

Starting a software and design agency on the side: https://www.divinatetech.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dvaun; my proof: https://keybase.io/dvaun/sigs/tie0f3kfd1UDK4GPzJuCyCeEkBjCXlewSc8aBrJsKns ]

meet.hn/city/35.3738712,-119.019463/Bakersfield

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dvaun··on Show HN: HN Hall of Fame – browse 3,100 legendary Hacker News links
I was initially skeptical, but after looking through it I see some articles that I distinctly remember (eg Gervais Principle) and blogs like SSC which led me down rabbitholes.

Lots of good things come from the orange site. I’m sure myself and others will dig through these to find those hidden gems that we missed :)

dvaun··on War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history
Yes, definitely. Claude and other models might produce minor differences in design outputs, but overall they apply similar principles. This has been harped on in many threads over the past several months.
dvaun··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
That is awesome. I gave it a brief readthrough last night on my phone, but will give it a closer look this week.
dvaun··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
This is interesting. I’ve been working with ONNX models and compiling custom WASM runtime builds based on the model operators, cutting down on edge deployments.

Do you have any benchmarks?

dvaun··on Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs: Inside an AI-Powered Private School
Public education caters to the common denominator…the public. If you want higher rigor and standards set for your children, then you will need to find alternatives - which, in some areas, are no better than the public schools.

I wouldn’t blame the system for poor standards. Their standards are actually decent for most children. The problem is that teachers are forced to spend a significant portion of time and energy on classroom management.

Couple that with the fact that most parents aren’t reading to their children at night, so those kids grow up falling behind the curve. Reading comprehension drops -> other subjects follow suit. Rinse and repeat each year, and you eventually end up with high-school seniors reading far below their grade level.

The teachers now have to scaffold all of their content. The kids who didn’t fall behind? They receive no attention from the teacher who is instead focused on helping the kid with a 3rd grade reading ability to try to understand the content.

An indirect tragedy of the commons, where parents are relying on public education to raise and teach children with no input of their own.

dvaun··on State of Show HN: 2025
Fair point. Rose-tinted glasses and all.
dvaun··on State of Show HN: 2025
Pre-2020 had far more informative posts and discussions. While we still have decent conversations post-covid, the quality has slid downhill somewhat.
dvaun··on Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files
This reads like notes taken on a presentation.
dvaun··on Tell HN: HN was down
Will we get a post mortem?
dvaun··on Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months
What a ridiculous statement. We have a massive number of people in the USA relying on financial support for purchasing food. Not every single American is fat, especially those who literally can’t afford to eat.
dvaun··on Mapping the off-target effects of every FDA-approved drug in existence
Steroid abuse indicates body dysmorphia. There isn’t an addictive property like other abused drugs, unless you’re considering it addictive via its effects on dopamine production.

Your body doesn’t become addicted, though. The potential for harm is real if you are not taking it under medical supervision or without proper knowledge of usage, like any other drugs.

dvaun··on The Rise of Whatever
All we are is dust in the wind.
dvaun··on AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
A charitable view is that they intended "ideas that I had germinating for decades" to be from their own perspective, and not necessarily spurred inside Google by their initiative. I think that what they stated prior to this conflated the two, so it may come across as bragging. I don't think they were trying to brag.
dvaun··on Our narrative prison
Maybe it's a universal abstraction describing any type of change?

Consider it in another frame:

Beginning state -> Catalyst -> Mutation -> New state -> Reaction -> Outcome

or:

Pre-process -> Event -> Logic -> Result -> Post-process -> Deliverable

dvaun··on So Much Blood
Fun reference (I had to look up what you meant).

For anyone reading: Donar is "Old High German" for Thor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor#Post-Roman_era

dvaun··on Playing in the Creek
Have you considered socratic questioning and other forms of conversation, in order to affect more change?

See https://www.streetepistemology.com/ for content about this. It is possible to guide discussions in a healthy manner and with positive goals in mind.

dvaun··on Fire-Flyer File System from DeepSeek
Can you expand on this?
dvaun··on Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox
Sounds like a license to train on your data.
dvaun··on Ask HN: Former devs who can't get a job, what did you end up doing for work?
Ditto. This isn’t exclusive to programming. Everyone that I know who has worked in any office environment has downtime.
dvaun··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)
You’re calling someone “brain broken” for writing a comment in a cute manner to make it sound like product development. It’s time to take a step back and relax.
dvaun··on Show HN: ArXivTok
Might as well throw together HackerTok.
dvaun··on String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
I especially enjoy how the author from the substack series described the singularity as “The Rapture of the Nerds”.
dvaun··on Show HN: Vogent – Better Building Blocks for Voice AI
I keep seeing similar aesthetics for landing pages and startup sites. Is there some common template that’s become popular for this purpose?
dvaun··on Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers
Depending on the LLM it may refuse based on adherence to ethics.
dvaun··on A feature-rich Hacker News client
Been using Hack for years. The dev is responsive if you have questions.
dvaun··on Show HN: FastGraphRAG – Better RAG using good old PageRank
It’s the standard practice of noting internal/implementation details. Users should stick with the public api exported in __init__.
dvaun··on Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?
> People are trying to posture and prove all kinds of things.

I would hope that it’s a mixture of personalities posting here, rather than a subset of people who are following some personal agenda.

This crowd is hopefully mature enough to avoid this type of behavior.

dvaun··on Show HN: A CLI tool I made to self-host any app with two commands on a VPS
Awesome! Love that it's written in Go—I've recently tested the language for some use cases at work and find it great. I'll dive into your repo to see if I can learn anything new :)
dvaun··on Eyechat
Your browser has developer tools which provide views into transmitted files, network requests, etc. You poke around and see how it is implemented using the tools.
dvaun··on Mathematical Optimization for Cargo Ships
How does one end up in this space of work?
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