Hacker News Reader

geuison How many of the 170k English words do you know?

Not sure what this is measuring. I did 30-40 words and got bored because the words are really basic. There's no challenge here. Not even a fun 5 minute game. These are basic English words, nothing extraordinarily hard to understand.

geuison Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

Been deep diving into visual model architectures. Currently running some small evaluations on an idea around unlabeled mask segmentation that will run efficiently on mobile phone hardware. Looking promising so far!

geuison Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

I still remember when Netscape had outdated ssl for a few years because more advanced cryptography was classified by the US gov as armaments or something. Basically used export restrictions to prevent better security technology from being adopted into commercial products.

geuison Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

For me it wasn't "oh shit" per say, but "oh wow".

Some time in 2024 at a company get together, we had an afternoon hackathon. There was a feature in our iOS app that was missing (ability to mute autoplaying game trailers). This annoyed me a lot, because I frequently have music on when working and anytime I needed to open a test build it would kill my music. It had been an open ticket for a while but had low priority for the iOS team.

I had probably written a hundred lines of Swift in my career up to that point. Not expecting anything to come from it, I had Cursor examine the iOS codebase and told it I wanted to add a mute button under a certain area of the app settings.

Blew my mind when after only 10 minutes or so, the model had quickly found where to add the feature. Took a little back and forth, but then it added a fully functioning mute option in settings that mostly worked across the app. A little more back and forth, and those issues were settled. Maybe an hour overall of time spent that afternoon.

I pinged one of the iOS engineers about it later and he said to push it up for review. There were a few things that needed to be updated to get it inline with the rest of the codebase, but nothing substantial. Feature got merged a week or two later.

Now I'm way more productive than I have been in years. I've been getting a lot of enjoyment out of being able to prototype rapidly and experiment on features rather than getting bogged down in the process of scaffold work. Able to knock out issues much quicker.

That's all been positive, but it hasn't taken away my actual core responsibility. The LLMs can give you great advice and write code quickly. But they still don't always do well at broad thinking.

Current case in point: I've been working on an iOS app that uses vision models to do work on photos and videos that the user has taken. I've built text-based semantic search systems before, and there's a lot of cross over with vision models, but its been an interesting journey so far learning about the different types of vision models and what they're good at. Lots of testing so far and educating myself on the topic to get the user-level features I want. Claude code has been invaluable in this, as its great at writing the Swift code while I'm able to focus on the results of what is being done.

Where Claude is still not good is being able to reason at a higher level about different strategies on using vision model outputs to achieve the stated goals. Its not an issue of me not clearly defining the specifics of a feature and then letting Claude run off burning tokens to figure it out. For example, just late last night I was deep diving into some core segmentation code and having Claude explain what everything was doing line by line so that I could get a better understanding of the mechanics of the vision model.

A side effect was that I realized the vision model was outputting tons of nearly identical segments that were overlapping. This was something Claude had completely missed, and because I didn't know that's something this particular vision model did I had no prior way to know to catch it.

Bottom line is that understanding the mechanics of your application is still very much a requirement for the engineer. In this case, once I learned what was happening it completely changed my approach on how to achieve my feature goal. The code runs hundreds of times faster now and the segmentation is much, much better.

The new wave of coding models is disruptive, but its letting me be a much better engineer and get things done faster and with more assurance that the code being written is solid. I still have to spend the same amount of time thinking and learning about a problem, and probably more time verifying what's being output, but a lot of the drudgery is also being taken away.

geuison CSS-Native Parallax Effect

Using css perspective for parallax has been around for years and is much simpler code.

geuison Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)

  Location: San Francisco
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
  Résumé/CV: on request
  Email: charles@geuis.com

geuison Math-to-Manim

Entire article reads as output from a well structured prompt. It's almost point for point style-wise when I ask for a summary for current repo changes before deciding to do the commit.

geuison Building Pi with Pi

Honestly, that's a weird reaction. I don't follow modern programmer slang but even I caught onto "clanker" as meaning "old clanky robot/automaton thing". It has absolutely no relations to negative verbiage about different kinds of people.

I hate to say "check yourself", but this time maybe. Maybe with a lot of ...

geuison GenCAD

Yah. But for YouTube I use Vinegar. I don't use the YouTube app, prefer the mobile website.

geuison GenCAD

I use 2 and they work very well. No options for auto playing videos though.

1Blocker and AdGuard.

For 1Blocker I have everything enabled except adult content and scripts. AdGuard has everything turned off except for General.

These are just the free versions too.

I've been using this setup for a few years and it works close to 100% of the time.

geuison GenCAD

To the author if they happen to see this. Please kill the auto playing video. If someone is listening to something else on their phone this always takes over and interrupts.

geuison Y Combinator's Stake in OpenAI (0.6%?)

Could someone (non-AI) summarize this? I'm sorry but I just literally don't have time to even read long posts from very reputable sources. I know I need the info but time just isn't there in my life right now.

geuison Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

Doesn't this then open a market for "vpn style" apps that make everyone look broke? Get the lowest prices (ie market/baseline) on every interaction from food delivery to airplane tickets?

geuison Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)

  Location: San Francisco
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
  Résumé/CV: on request
  Email: charles@geuis.com

geuison Claude Opus 4.7

I don't really understand Anthropic's pricing model.

https://claude.com/pricing

They have individual, enterprise, and API tiers. Some are subscriptions like Pro and Max, others require buying credits.

Say for my use-case I wanted to use Opus or Sonnet with vscode. What plan would I even look at using?

geuison Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2026)

  Location: San Francisco
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
  Résumé/CV: on request
  Email: charles@geuis.com

geuison Hundreds of Millions of iPhones Can Be Hacked With a New Tool Found in the Wild

I'd like a security patch for 18. I have no desire to upgrade to iOS Vista or whatever it is we're calling it

geuison Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

I really hate to say it, but this article in particular needs a tldr. The author does a web recipe take. Don't put the actual factual info upfront and require parsing through everything to find anything important.

Kinda done with this.

If you have something important to say, say it up front and back it up with literature later.

geuison Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)

  Location: San Francisco
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
  Résumé/CV: on request
  Email: charles@geuis.com

geuison How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?

Ok.

I completely support the sentiment of what you wrote. But it doesn't directly seem relevant to the parent question.

geuison Colorado proposal moves age checks from websites to operating systems

Query: Are there any current legal challenges to this rapid spread of age verification that have a chance of hitting the Supreme Court?

From my admittedly poor understand of legal stuff, these are largely proactive measures happening at company and state level. Congress nor Supreme Court have issued any rulings around this yet.

geuison OpenScan

Love the idea. But it's not terribly useful. At least on mobile, there's no way to click into individual models. My expectation is that about be a feature so I can zoom and scan more closely on the models.

Again, just mobile experience, there's no way to download the models. That's fine if there are licensing issues. But the text needs to indicated this.

geuison xAI joins SpaceX

Of course it isn't "too big to fail". Even banks aren't. Despite recent history large banks have failed often throughout history. There's no such thing. It may take down the supporting sovereign government (Dutch East Indies) but life goes on and new political orgs appear. People be people.

Too big to fail is a very recent modern myth. Go back 100+ years and lots of banks failed leading into the Great Depression.

Every system has a break point.

geuison My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs

Not obvious. Astronomers are actively looking for signatures of exomoons around exoplanets. So "sun plus moon" could mean that too.

geuison The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)

Just a guess. But after the first couple of paragraphs I realized it was a tree. Kept reading. Yup. Tree.

The rain would move branches out of the way.

This is why experience helps. Good life and professional experience helps to short circuit many problems.

geuison Ask HN: Notification Overload

Have dealt with the same issue.

Prefer mobile web over specific apps.

On your phone, turn on contacts-only for calls. Should also work for regular text messages.

If also using apps like WhatsApp there may be a similar app-level setting.

Get a couple of well reviewed ad blockers for your browser. I'm still astounded when I see people on their phones and dealing with ads. Especially YouTube. There are browser blockers that work for YouTube.

Adding to the previous point, never install/use a company's native app. You have NO control over that. Use their web version.

Addding to the previous point, iOS safari has an option to view any website in desktop mode. I imagine Android has something like that but I dunno. If a particular site has an annoying mobile web interface, try the desktop web version. If they don't allow that, use a different product. One case in point: I use Reddit heavily. I use old Reddit on web. Their app and mobile website are complete garbage.

Some ad blockers may help with the "accept cookies? Gdpr bullshit". I don't personally bother. They're fairly innocuous and the sites are collecting all cookies anyway so it doesn't matter.

The reason I'm not mentioning the specific web extensions I use is because despite being common and easy to find, I'm EXTREMELY hesitant to provide a curated list in a public forum that will get vacuumed up and probably lead to circumventions within a few weeks to months. This stuff is easy to find, is completely available in the platform-relevant app stores and only takes a little extra effort to customize after a couple of weeks of running into minor inconveniences. This isn't a "compile Linux from scratch" kind of problem.

geuison Proof of Corn

That game is entirely too addictive especially at 3am.

geuison Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

Sounds like you could use some resume review help. And I'm not talking about bs AI linkedin level "resume review". I mean some review from someone who's been in the industry for a while. There's a way to contact me via my profile. If you can find that I'll try to help you out.

geuison Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

Screws weren't standardized until ww2. And even then, they really haven't been.

Related video for those curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKNB04slCUA&t=3s

geuison Ask HN: How are you doing RAG locally?

I don't. I actually write code.

To answer the question more directly, I've spent the last couple of years with a few different quant models mostly running on llama.cpp and ollama, depending. The results are way slower than the paid token api versions, but they are completely free of external influence and cost.

However the models I've tests generally turn out to be pretty dumb at the quant level I'm running to be relatively fast. And their code generation capabilities are just a mess not to be dealt with.