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fxtentacle

22,067 karma · joined January 10, 2013

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fxtentacle··on AI changes the economics of software rewrites
Humans will typically learn after you have forced them to apologise for the same mistake for 20 times in a row.

AI won’t.

fxtentacle··on AI changes the economics of software rewrites
Fully agree. I tried to refactor parts of a large code base with Fable+ultracode and it just keeps accidentally merging distinct concepts and making up explanations/reasonings that the code base did not contain.

For example, the code base contains a physical controller. It’s closed loop in that it can react in realtime to changes. But it’s a slightly untypical implementation because this one can even look into the future through simulations. But Fable does not understand that. Instead, I need to remind it every 30 minutes that this is closed loop. It keeps wrongly claiming that the controller was open loop and then based upon that it will make up constraints that don’t actually exist.

fxtentacle··on Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD
Congratulations on the launch. The propeller demo looks good :) BTW, customising gears (which are then laser cut from sheet metal) is also a common request from untechnical people who need CAD help.

How do you differentiate from other open source AI CAD solutions? I’ve also had a good experience with Claude Code and CadQuery, which is a Python toolkit for generating CAD designs based on OpenCascade. I.e. what’s your moat?

And given that you’re YC funded .. what’s your plan for millions in MRR?

I’m asking because I would like to launch some useful open source tools myself (but for PIM, not CAD) and I just can’t figure out how to make open source sustainable, let alone profitable enough for hockey stick revenue growth. Any tips? Book recommendations?

fxtentacle··on The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate
The grab app shows un-skippable ads. And some taxis even have ads "based on your interests" playing on a TV in front of your seat. I found their "no marketing" ;) to be almost too much.
fxtentacle··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies. That’s why the prohibition was so crippling for Anthropic.

And, btw, the bang per buck that I got from OVH was better than EC2.

fxtentacle··on Finding Optimal Tokenizers
This is an interesting approach with integer programming and then using an explicit solver. It’s probably very slow, but you only have to run this once and it produces the mathematically perfect result.

In the past, I got good results with trying to reduce the variance in entropy in-between tokens, which you can implement very easily by starting with each single character as its own token and then doing a greedy merge of the most numerous outlier token pairs in a loop until you reach your desired token count. https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12693

fxtentacle··on If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
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fxtentacle··on If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
“ and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.”
fxtentacle··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (June 2026)
SEEKING WORK: Fractional CTO as Freelancer (Kiel, northern Germany, own company => 100% remote & easy to hire).

I built 3 products from idea to paying customers. So I can help your startup with architecture, implementation plans, and writing specs that you need to keep vibecoding sane. Depending on whether I get into YC (or most likely not, applied with just an idea), I might have free time coming up in the upcoming months.

https://hajo.me/cv/

fxtentacle··on We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
Me, too. I love that they have tables with return and warranty percentages so you can see which products other people kept and which products only keep breaking.
fxtentacle··on Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
The last 2 LAN parties we didn’t play anything that didn’t work extremely well on my AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU Pop!OS Linux workstation.

And I didn’t expect: VR streaming works flawless, too. I just had to buy a WiFi 6 usb dongle.

fxtentacle··on I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
"Maybe one day they will get around to unsuspending my account." is increasingly how support feels with all big cloud companies.
fxtentacle··on Write some software, give it away for free
I got burned with an attitude like this: unexpectedly, people who had downloaded my open source tool for free started expecting support. Some of them sent pretty unfriendly emails.
fxtentacle··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
This is going to save a lot of money ... until someone loots their vault and they go bankrupt. "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" is the last thing you want to hear from your bank.
fxtentacle··on Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
I think this is going to be wonderful. I'll have my offensive AI call their support AI and prompt-inject my way to a rebate tier that nobody knew existed and nobody can cancel it because all the remaining humans have been reduced to phone-to-screen input machinery.
fxtentacle··on Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
Yes and that’s why I can charge premium rates for debugging. Most people cannot read a stack trace anymore.
fxtentacle··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)
Location: Kronshagen, DE (Kiel / Hamburg area)

Remote: Yes (working EU+US remotely since 2014)

Willing to relocate: No, but I travel for kickoffs and on-site work

Technologies:

  AI / ML - PyTorch, TensorFlow, custom C++ inference, RL, speech, computer vision
  Systems - C++ (NEON / AVX), Python, CUDA, kernel drivers (Win / Mac / Linux)
  Distributed - Ansible, Docker, PostgreSQL
  Real-time - DSP, vectorized audio, low-latency pipelines
  Hardware - PCB design (KiCad / Altium), firmware, FPGA, USB3
Résumé / CV: https://hajo.me/downloads/Krabbenhoeft%20Hajo%20CV.pdf

GitHub: https://github.com/fxtentacle

Email: hn (at) hajo (dot) me

Hi, I'm Hajo. 20+ years shipping production systems, 12+ as CTO. I'm a fractional CTO and I offer AI R&D, performance optimization, and due diligence as freelance consulting services. You might know me from:

ImageRights: sole architect, 10+ years in prod. Web crawling stack (5000+ concurrent tasks via Ansible), distributed C++ content-based image retrieval database scaling to billions of web images, all internal AI filters, plus workflow automation. Still running today.

Spatial Audio Designer: sole developer. 500+ channels real-time on 2013 hardware. NEON / AVX-vectorized DSP, plugins for VST / RTAS / AU / AAX, kernel drivers for virtual sound cards on Mac and Windows, ARM port for embedded and VR. Still in use by famous Hollywood studios.

And yesterday, I figured out how to make MSFS2024 run with multi-camera and instrument pop-outs in Proton 11. Understanding the root cause required tracing the full stack from inside the game, through vkd3d, Proton, the host Linux OS, down to the GPU driver.

Ideally, I'm looking for 5-10 days per month part-time projects. Plus I'd love to work on applied AI / robotics.

fxtentacle··on Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
This is content marketing executed perfectly :) Reading it, I learned something new and interesting and they had an opportunity to show off one of their differentiators against the competition (low leakage flow due to tighter tolerances) and then at the end they casually mention the new product that has just opened for pre-orders.
fxtentacle··on The cost math behind routing Claude Code through Ollama (~90% cut)
Ugh. This is peak AI influencer. It’s a 21 page AI-generated presentation and an AI prompt for:

npm i -g @musistudio/claude-code-router

So it looks like the person who set up this GitHub repository didn’t even make the software that does all the actual work. They also never mention the original author in the README. But, of course, their AI prompt includes instructions to open their homepage, so this is effectively using the AI prompt for indirect advertisement. The HN submission title is also misleading. I didn’t see any maths in the repo.

EDIT: the underlying tool was discussed here on HN 9 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705958

fxtentacle··on The cost math behind routing Claude Code through Ollama (~90% cut)
AI beginners use Opus as a replacement for grep/sed.

Mediocre programmers use AI to write sed one-liners for them and then brag about AI productivity boosts.

And experts just use sed directly and then they wonder why everyone else is raving about AI.

fxtentacle··on Google banks on AI edge to catch up to cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft
I feel like those articles all look at the wrong aspect: once AI companies are forced to compete on price (i.e. in 6 months), then Google’s TPU is going to be a massive advantage that’s almost impossible for Amazon or Microsoft to replace.
fxtentacle··on AI can cost more than human workers now
“When AI labs raise prices, big spending on AI could shift from a flex to a liability.”

because companies will need

“proof of productivity gains or metrics that show a clear return for all this AI investment.”

which in my opinion is simply not true. I haven’t seen any good study that showed AI to actually improve productivity overall. It massively helps in some areas, but then promptly gets stuck in others. So you still need an expert to guide it.

fxtentacle··on AI can cost more than human workers now
https://archive.ph/2PsPD
fxtentacle··on Clay PCB Tutorial
If the goal is to decouple feminism from feminine identities, which by definition means it then also needs to apply to masculine identities, then I think they need a new name.

Also, it appears that >99% of feminism researchers are publishing their scientific papers with a feminine name. I can easily understand why the general public might confuse the 2 groups with each other.

Which brings me back to the question: what do you think the authors hope to gain by invoking this association? Especially now that we have established that their word choice is highly likely to be misunderstood?

fxtentacle··on Clay PCB Tutorial
I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.

“FEMINIST HACKING: BUILDING CIRCUITS AS AN ARTISTIC PRACTICE – an international art-based research project financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)”

Doesn’t that kind of invite the worst type of trolls? They seem to imply that feminist = artistically produced, as opposed to professionally produced PCBs. So masculine = professional? But clearly that wasn’t their intention?

fxtentacle··on The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
West: We need profits and then we’ll try to build something useful.

China: We need to build this useful thing and then later let’s try to make profits, too.

fxtentacle··on Peter Thiel Flees to Argentina
TLDR

Thiel lacks confidence in the Trump regime and is fleeing from the US.

fxtentacle··on Anker made its own chip to bring AI to all its products
If you look into ProTools hardware accelerator cards from 20 years ago, they were shock full with Sharc DSP chips, which are optimized for convolution and multiply add.

Technically, AI Lora is surprisingly similar to how fake echo based on reverb IRs works in real time audio processing.

fxtentacle··on Used La Marzocco machines are coveted by cafe owners and collectors
The Dedelonri I bought in Vietnam for $20. It’s a Chinese fake of a budget machine. But it has insanely high pressure and produces way better coffee than anyone finds reasonable.

But secretly, I think it’s all just the super fresh high quality beans that you can buy in Vietnam. They cultivate a regional variant of arabica in their highlands. And even using a standard Bialetti Moca cup produces exceptional results with that coffee.

fxtentacle··on Less human AI agents, please
"changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware"

JetBrains has a deterministic non-AI function for that refactoring. It'll usually finish before your AI has finished parsing your request and reading the files.

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