HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ozten

2,568 karma · joined February 23, 2007

Cantrip.ai You built it, now get users. 20+ years in big tech and startups, 4 years ans an indie entrepreneur.
submissionscomments
ozten··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
I had vivid visual dreams as a child. Now my dreams are very abstract, but I think they sometimes include a visually striking element. I'm torn and not 100% sure. I don't remember my dreams as well as I did as a child.
ozten··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
If you look at proper drawing instruction books from the 1940s, they show you all of the 3D rendering techniques later adopted by our modern CGI pipelines. To draw a head, you follow a pattern: draw a cube, carve it up into parts of the head and neck, carve that up into eyes, nose, ears, etc, establish a 3-point lighting system, and render materials. It is very time-intensive and analytical, and required if you didn't shoot a reference photo back then. This is needed for folks who can't visualize, like myself.
ozten··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
Yes, of course. I was a visual artist for a decade before falling down the software hole.
ozten··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.

I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.

Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.

ozten··on A decades-old bug in Knuth's long division (TAOCP Vol II, Algorithm 4.3.1D)
Given enough tokens, all bugs are shallow.
ozten··on Don't use your phone while you poop
From an evolutionary perspective, this is a super vulnerable moment and are in a state of hyper vigilance.
ozten··on GPT‑Live
Cool it sounds like they have improved. This the first time I tried back in the day voice chats were different and you could not get the transcript after the fact.
ozten··on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Video Lectures (1986)
I worked through these videos and the full book. Via news groups I organized an in-person study group. What a blast and a big unlock for me. The study group started having attrition about halfway through the book.
ozten··on My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable
+1

And we don't know yet, but I am hoping for reliability. My gaming PC is a nightmare. Sometimes it works great. Other times, I have to sacrifice a goat to get the thing to work.

ozten··on Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
Yes, for client projects where privacy and security is important, but no enterprise contract:

Open code against Infomaniak hosted OSS models: Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-FP8, Kimi-K2.6.

I use API keys for billing. It performs like Dec 2025 in terms of my productivity back then.

ozten··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
There were two paid features of CapCut that I vibe-coded using Remotion as the basis.

1) Automatically editing out pauses 2) Making those TikTok-like captions

ozten··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
Too many to mention. Daily drivers: replacements for CapCut, Granola.

A remote image viewer to see screenshots in VMs.

A simple agent harness to drive spec to verification.

A YouTube video summarizer.

https://github.com/ozten - some public repos, but the majority are private repos

ozten··on Bun support is now limited and deprecated
There is an implicit assumption that the other supported runtimes aren't being vibe-coded. Looking at commit metadata tells a different story.
ozten··on Google's Antigravity bait and switch
For me it is their personable account reps and customer service. It’s the human touch we’ve come to associate with the “Don’t be Evil” brand.
ozten··on The quiet renovation at Bitwarden
Interesting! I've been a LastPass and then 1Password user since 2009ish.

I left LastPass because of UX paper-cuts, but I've never lost passwords on either of them.

Honestly, it's something I don't want to think about and just need it to work on mobile and desktop, so the switching friction is very high for me. I'm not going to shop around and try different password managers.

Is "rug pull" a cost thing? I'm generally frugal, but pay for a family plan and don't think twice.

ozten··on The quiet renovation at Bitwarden
How were you screwed over by these products?
ozten··on My graduation cap runs Rust
There is a joke around ownership or borrowing that I'm going to take the high road and not make.
ozten··on US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos
It's becoming clear that the true legacy of this administration is peddling files.
ozten··on Is my blue your blue?
Showing the completion screen and giving the ability to use a slider to pick the center might be more useful.
ozten··on FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX
Napkin Math by Sabine Hossenfelder:

- people working in space top secret research 20,000 (conservative estimate, probably much smaller)

- adult disappearances 1/50k to 1/100k per year

- demographics are stable, high earners, so more like 1/100k per year or less

- so for the pool of 20k, then 0.2 per year on average

- these disappearances are a 1:10,000 to 1:20,000 probability

- homicides made this situation even more unlikely 1:100,000

Conclusions: A conspiracy is highly unlikely, but the situation is very unlikely. Shrug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEnvorobhEE

ozten··on FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX
> the concentration of deaths and disappearances within such a small, specialized field as defying ordinary probability.

The best conspiracy theory I've seen online is that top-secret energy/weapons plans were sold by a traitor, and these scientists were kidnapped to be the worker bees.

Terribly dark and implausible, but also, we are living through a storyline that writers wouldn't even consider a draft because it's too on-the-nose.

ozten··on PostgreSQL production incident caused by transaction ID wraparound
Many SEV-1s are “obvious”. Still feels like a kick in the stomach if your the one that was response LOLz.
ozten··on Claude Design
Every day is Christmas. Not enough time to play with our new toys before the next batch drops. Insane.
ozten··on Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
You have deterministic malware at home
ozten··on Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
HN to be renamed Flex Social. Damn.
ozten··on Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
Thank you!

Reasoning: They have the chops to create the world's first system where consensus, scarcity, and ownership exist without a central authority... But, they also lack the ability to write a Perl script to "Send Later". Checks out.

ozten··on Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
Does Carreyrou give reasons for eliminating Hal Finney from being (part or all of) Satoshi?
ozten··on Apple Just Lost Me
I have been an active user for almost 30 years. You can tell by my comment.
ozten··on Apple Just Lost Me
Luckily, the author will face no frustrations with Ubuntu or whatever Linux OS they migrate to. Flawless UX. Zero compromises.
ozten··on I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job
But you can onshore pests... wait, Nutria pest control and generate demand by ... introducing Nutria to untapped markets!
Page 1 of 24Next →