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I am currently reading The Cauldron by Simon Sebag Montefiore

ermiron San Francisco institution 'heartbroken and furious' after erasure of public art

Quite a shame to lose art like this, but without a process to preserve, display, and maintain such artwork, (like a museum is equipped to do), this kind of destruction is inevitable. At the very least we can be grateful for all the years it was available, but such is the way of all things, nothing lasts forever, and I think the story of the end of such works of art is also part of the artwork as well.

ermiron Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2025)

Location: EU, Balkans (UTC+2)

    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: NodeJS (Typescript), .NET (C#), PHP, VueJS, React, PostgreSQL, Docker, WebRTC
    Résumé/CV: https://suldashi.com/cv.pdf
    Email: on my CV

Full-stack software engineer with over 10 years of experience creating solutions that help teams and businesses succeed. I enjoy jumping into both new projects and existing systems, learning as I go, and tackling whatever challenge the team may face, whether that’s coding, mentoring, or helping solve tricky problems. I thrive in research-heavy environments and my most unique project was building a large-scale audio streaming backend using WebRTC and custom servers.

ermiron Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently

It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.

ermiron Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

When I experimented with this a few years back a true NxN room would cap around 8 people when using PCs and 4 on mobile, the bottleneck is encoding/decoding of the video. For larger rooms you need a server to route the video to all recipients, this is called an SFU. With an SFU you can have hundreds of participants, but not everyone can speak or be seen at once.

For audio-only the sky is the limit. I used to work on a voice-based social media and you also need an SFU here as well, but I added a few mixing features so that multiple incoming audio streams would be mixed together into a single outgoing one. Was very fun (and scalable).

ermiron Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

I have way too many things that catch my interest, but right now I am designing a paper and aluminum foil based linear electric motor. The idea is to create an electromechanical display that pushes a colored piece of paper into place to create a pixel, and see if this can be done cheaply and at scale. The electronics that I have selected look very promising, all I have to do is test the idea and see if this is worth pursuing further.

ermiron AMD adds RF-sampling data converters to Versal adaptive SoCs (2024)

The primary use for these is implementing Software-Defined Radios and the primary user of these is the military. SDRs allow jamming resistance, operation in hostile radio zones, and flexible network topologies.

ermiron I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

Sounds like this guy did not even publish or finish the project, but only communicated his intent. The university is clearly persecuting him and he should absolutely talk to a lawyer.

ermiron Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer

A few things to consider:

- You don't have to worry too much about efficiency from the ground, since resources are plentiful unlike the sky where every gram counts. For example it would be completely fine to have a 20% efficiency from the ground to the sky (if we don't take into account the heating of the wire), for example spend 2kw to get 400w in the drone. Not ideal, but acceptable to many.

- Also, the efficiency can be greatly improved by using high voltage AC and a transformer on both ends. Very similar to how the power grid works, you can use thin cables to deliver a lot of power, I would not be surprised if 90% efficiency can be achieved. This field has been well researched, tethered drones can fly for hours, but the ranges that are useful in war (10+ km) are a novelty.

ermiron Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer

I've been thinking a lot about this setup, and it seems it's a major advantage if you can pull it off:

- The drone can send HD video with no interruptions through the fiber, shifting all the AI calculations to the backend, and you don't have to sacrifice your GPUs that you would otherwise add to the drone.

- The fiber drone can act as a radio relay, so you can have many other radio drones connected to it, making jamming much harder and also you can use it as a relay for ground forces as well.

- The fiber can potentially be replaced or augmented with copper, and you can then replace the battery with a transformer, and keep sending electricity from the base station. Such tethered drones already exist and can fly for hours, but maybe they have not been used in war before.

ermiron Mandatory speed limiters on EU cars from 2024

Well, why not have alcohol breath sensors in all cars? Why not have the car not start at all without the seatbelts being in place, and not just have the annoying alarm? Why not have the car stop going over 20 km/h if it's unregistered?

ermiron Mandatory speed limiters on EU cars from 2024

Sure I have, my objection is on the greater tendency for legislators to use technological means to constrain ordinary behavior. Today is a speed limiter, tomorrow is a embedded car snitch, or an automatic hate speech detector, or whatever else you can think of.

They understood this in the 90s, why not today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz4HEEiJuGo

ermiron Mandatory speed limiters on EU cars from 2024

Next step: have a speed tracker on the car that will report speeding straight to the cops, no need for them to see you with a radar or anything like that.

In general there's lots of politicians and "administrators" who salivate at tech like this that constrain people and make them manageable. I find these attempts very undignified and totalitarian.

ermiron Cycloidal marine propellers: Efficient thrust in any direction

So this is like a helicopter propeller system, but the individual blades point upwards.

ermiron Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

I personally think that the generated images should reflect reality as it is. I understand that many think this is philosophically impossible, and at the end of the day humans use judgement and context to solve these problems.

Philosophically you can dilute and destroy the meaning of terms, and AI that has no such judgement can't generate realistic images. If you ask for an image of "an American family" you can assault the meaning of "American" and "family" to such an extent that you can produce total nonsense. This is a major problems for humans as well, I don't expect AI to be able to solve this anytime soon.

ermiron Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

It's more accurate to say that it's designed to construct an ideal reality rather than represent the actually existing one. This is the root of many of the cultural issues that the West is currently facing.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. - Marx

ermiron Relativistic Spaceship

Normally the light of the big bang is too dim (frequency too low) to be seen, but if you travel really fast the blue shift effect will make it visible, and since this light is uniformly distributed in the sky, it will appear as while light everywhere.

ermiron Ask HN: Has the tech recession affected you?

Ideally you want to apply all the time, and not wait for the best time. Still, I am hoping that applicants will get some encouragement and try a bit harder in the next few weeks.

ermiron Ask HN: Has the tech recession affected you?

For anyone wondering about the best times to apply, conventional wisdom is that January is the best time, since it's planning season for the whole year, and then around August, to get some quick help to reach the end-of-year goals. Of course this is anecdotal and applies in normal circumstances, which I don't think the industry is at.

ermiron Ask HN: Has the tech recession affected you?

Struggling a lot with the response rate, once I could get one interview in three applications, now it's one in 50. I am hoping that it will pick up this January since everyone is making plans for the entire year. I was told by a manager in a large startup that they plan to complete hiring for the whole year by the end of February, and it might be the case for the entire industry.

ermiron Reflect – Multiplayer web app framework with game-style synchronization

WebRTC makes this possible, but server implementations are quite difficult to set up. I recommend you check out Pion (Golang) as a good implementation that's also easy to deploy and integrate with Node (presumably your game server is implemented in JS).

ermiron Daily energy expenditure through the human life course

This was completely expected, at the macro level this is easily observed by measuring the outputs of metabolism and bodily function, mainly heat and physical activity. All humans have a baseline bodily temperature, meaning that the inner metabolism also is the same across all humans.

ermiron Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?

I too once thought "Why don't girls like me for who I am, why do I have to dress nice and make myself presentable, this is just a façade and I want them to love me for who I am inside", but then I grew up and understood that appearances matter and there's no point in fighting people's feelings. You might say "don't worry buddy, my startup is really good and effective, don't mind the messy styling and presentation" but why place that hurdle on your business when just a tiny bit of effort can make a big difference.

There's no need to be pixel perfect, but some eye for colors and proportions goes a long way, just like there's no need to perfectly groom every single hair, but a nice shave and deodorant go a long way.

ermiron Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2023)

  Location: Kosovo
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: no
  Techologies: JavaScript of all kinds, React, Node.js, WebRTC, Web gaming, SQL(Postgres, MySQL), NoSQL (Mongo, Redis, DynamoDB), AWS.
  Résumé/CV: https://suldashi.com/cv.pdf
  Email: ermirsuldashi@gmail.com

I'm a senior full stack engineer with 8 years of experience, with a particular background in WebRTC. I focus on the JS stack but I'm willing to try out new things.

  My latest project: https://jsforgames.com
  Website: https://suldashi.com

ermiron Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2023)

SEEKING WORK | Remote

I'm a senior full stack engineer with 8 years of experience, with a particular background in WebRTC. I focus on the JS stack but I'm willing to try out new things.

- My latest project: https://jsforgames.com

- Website: https://suldashi.com

- Resume: https://suldashi.com/cv.pdf

- Email: ermirsuldashi@gmail.com

ermiron Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2023)

  Location: Kosovo
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Techonogies: WebRTC, JS, React, Node, AWS, lots of others I have tried or done minor projects on
  Résumé/CV: https://suldashi.com/cv.pdf
  Email: ermirsuldashi@gmail.com

ermiron Show HN: Socket web extension – free NPM supply chain protection

What would really integrate with the developer workflow would be some kind of npm command that can check the package.json or the lock file and generate instant output on the console. You can then have whitelists, integration with CI/CD, and lots of other neat stuff.

ermiron Iron fuel shows its mettle

Iron is not widely available in nature as a ready-to-use element, it must be processed into elemental iron, which takes a lot of energy as input. Therefore this can't be really considered as fuel, more like energy storage. You still need fossil fuels or nuclear power to turn iron ores into iron, then you have iron available for the process described in the article.

I'm not criticizing the process, but it's not accurate to call it "fuel" like it could be the solution to replacing fossil fuels.

ermiron New York Is Forcing Schools to Change How They Teach Children to Read

It’s because of the influence of the Marxist Paolo Freire whose techniques and outlook are the dominant ones in the teaching colleges. He specifically hated phonics since it’s only used for rote and mechanical reading, which is a tool to make the reader useful in capitalism. Instead, he advocated for political and revolutionary techniques to awaken “critical consciousness” or “conscientize” the reader into being a revolutionary.

ermiron The U.S. War on Yugoslavia [video]

If it was not for American intervention in Kosovo in 1999 my entire extended family would probably be refugees or dead. Fuck these leftist “anti-imperialists” that hate the west so much they resort to genocide apologia and love affairs with Milosevic and his type.