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erikig

2,014 karma · joined September 12, 2009

erikig [at] github/X/instagram/HN
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erikig··on CIA World Facebook Is Dead – Here Is an Attempt at Recreation
Thank you for including data sources as well as some basic data analysis. The scatter plots are quite helpful in analyzing some demographic assumptions that often arise when discussing economic and social development.

You’ve earned yourself a bookmark :)

erikig··on 2D Vehicles
The visualization of potential results is quite mesmerizing.
erikig··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
I believe the restriction is on charging devices out of sight (in luggage, seatback pockets etc).
erikig··on 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey
I'm inclined to think that this was art not documentary.
erikig··on Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library
Market-making in a market that is highly speculative and illiquid isn’t the same as market manipulation though.
erikig··on Give every AI project its own computer
Is this similar to Ampcode’s Orbs or am I misunderstanding the vision?
erikig··on Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode
"Turn your face to the sun and the shadows will fall behind you." Māori Proverb
erikig··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
I really like this although in my neighborhood it would just be lots of detailed reports of apathetic pigeons perching and pooping.
erikig··on Backpacks got worse on purpose
Unpopular take here but I'm really ok with this.

The sale of the high quality brand allows the original entrepreneurs to exit their business to someone that thinks they can run it more efficiently. The decline in quality allows for innovative upstarts to try new things.

erikig··on US banks' exposure to private credit hits $300B (2025)
Equity/net worth is not quite the same as the liquid capital needed to cover losses or service debt.
erikig··on Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game
On a good monitor, I got to 0.0032 and then it all fell apart.

Here's the related article on how much accuracy is really needed in CSS values. https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/too-much-color/

erikig··on Ask HN: How to be alone?
Yep, meetup.com, eventbrite.com and for the musically inclined residentadvisor.com and dice.fm.

The trick for me was to offer to help with the organization of the event, it is more rewarding and makes for more lasting connections.

erikig··on Show HN: Sprout, a fun-sized, developer-ready humanoid robot
Congrats on the launch. Hope you get a moment to answer the questions here.

Speaking of which, where can we preview the SDK and documentation? The site is a little light on development details.

erikig··on What Is Starlink Mesh? – Starlink Help Center
I was hoping they'd finally added a feature to their dishes to allow terrestrial interconnect.

So when my dish can't getting the best line-of-sight view to the satellites it can piggyback on my many neighbor's better connections to improve mine.

erikig··on London–Calcutta bus service
Exactly. For many, the idea of being able to see England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in one 50 day trip with many similar minded travelers who aren't in a rush is really quite appealing.

Also, with bus travel you could, if you felt like it, leave the trip to enjoy many more local attractions and resume your travels later in a way not afforded by airplane or rail travel.

erikig··on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows:

With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?

erikig··on Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]
It's been interesting to see how often Elon is chided (even by his supporters) because his reach always seems to somehow exceed his grasp knowing full well that this is by design and not by fault.
erikig··on Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest
I don't think I'm ready for this, I might never go back to "real" work.
erikig··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
Sting-ER could also work too
erikig··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
If you intersperse the music and fill in with articles from HN or your favorite subreddits it would be a fun listen.
erikig··on I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
The Indian-born textbook author mentioned (Malkiat Singh [0]) had an inordinate influence on many Kenyan students because his textbooks were the de-facto standard for years. Its interesting how this influence extends as his students get to curate the LLMs on which the world has come to rely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malkiat_Singh

erikig··on 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web
Soulseek is still going?

I discovered so many artists, international variations of albums, live sessions and bootlegs from that app, it changed my relationship with music.

I have to go back and check it out.

erikig··on My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)
Like most people I think, I prefer to prepend and add to the top of the txt file they are working on.
erikig··on McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash
Having spent enough time with marketing and PR folks, I really wouldn't be surprised if this supposed backlash is overhyped as a way to get more people interested in seeing the ad.
erikig··on The Big Vitamin D Mistake [pdf] (2017)
TLDR Unfortunately, medicine took a very long time to realize that vitamin D is not simply a vitamin that prevents rickets.

We know today that vitamin D is a powerful nuclear receptor-activating hormone of critical importance, especially to the immune system.

With the available data mentioned above, the proposed doses would probably suffice to maintain vitamin D levels around or over 75-100 nmol/L, with practically zero risk of toxicity.

erikig··on Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop
Hardware: MacBook Pro M4 Max, 128GB

Platform: LMStudio (primarily) & Ollama

Models:

- qwen/qwen3-coder-30b A3B Instruct 8-bit MLX

- mlx-community/gpt-oss-120b-MXFP4-Q8

For code generation especially for larger projects, these models aren't as good as the cutting edge foundation models. For summarizing local git repos/libraries, generating documentation and simple offline command-line tool-use they do a good job.

I find these communities quite vibrant and helpful too:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/

- https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

erikig··on Nvidia takes $1B stake in Nokia
More importantly than gaining a client for Nvidia's AI chips, this investment gives the company a solid foothold in a competitor to Broadcom in the wireless, datacenter and networking solutions space. I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia eventually scoops up all of Nokia.
erikig··on ChatGPT Atlas
It feels like a natural competitive extension to any company seriously trying to usurp Google's browser domination including but not limited to paying Apple to be the default search engine
erikig··on Jeep pushed software update that bricked all 2024 Wrangler 4xe models
This owner shared the experience on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neGY6JWhHiU

- Vehicle randomly stalls every couple of minutes requiring shutdown and restart

- Shifter doesn't switch out of Park

- Dashboard lights including check engine/drive to dealer etc

erikig··on I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
As far as alternatives go, there was an interesting post a few weeks ago on using Bluesky as a commenting platform. It improves discoverability and adds a social aspect to comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164

I’ve also found HN to be a great commenting platform too.

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