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victorbuilds

271 karma · joined November 29, 2025

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victorbuilds··on Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era?
Over 40 here, and I’m having the opposite experience. Honestly, I think experience is part of why. Years of projects teach you what to ignore: which generated code actually needs a careful review, which decisions matter, and when to stop. I don’t run many things in parallel. I’d rather do one thing well than babysit five agents.

It also helps that a lot of my AI use is on my own side projects, where I set the pace. That makes it fun instead of draining. Maybe the tiredness has less to do with AI itself and more to do with being pushed to maximize throughput?

victorbuilds··on Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case
$25B penalty that’s like a month of their revenue. This is like me paying a month’s salary as penalty - it’s not pleasant but it would definitely not impact my life style.
victorbuilds··on Show HN: Tapelark – Record what your Mac plays, from songs to window video
Thank you! I will consider a Windows version in the future, I started with a Mac app because it's less crowded and because I love Macs.
victorbuilds··on Grok 4.5
Grok 4.5 is not yet available in the EU in any SpaceXAI products or the API console. EU availability is expected in mid-July.
victorbuilds··on OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
[flagged]
victorbuilds··on Show HN: NC Web – Norton Commander for the web, built with vanilla JavaScript
Thanks. All 73 tests pass across 12 suites.
victorbuilds··on Show HN: PianoFun – Browser piano learning game with MIDI (vanilla JavaScript)
The inspiration was this post by @RG_Leachman on X: https://x.com/RG_Leachman/status/2035537289812816128

They vibe-coded a piano app for their daughter, and since my daughter is also learning piano I figured I'd give it a shot. The whole thing came together in minutes with Claude Code. My daughter immediately started giving feedback — she's basically the product manager now.

Full story on my blog: https://victorantos.com/posts/hold-my-beer-i-vibe-coded-a-pi...

victorbuilds··on LLM Year in Review
Notable omission: 2025 is also when the ghosts started haunting the training data. Half of X replies are now LLMs responding to LLMs. The call is coming from inside the dataset.
victorbuilds··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
First time I see such a simple but attractive puzzle. I had to try to reproduce it using my Codorex tool, it's semi-functional needs a few more iterations:

https://codorex.com/shared/zIe6BrLCVfaPt1DuWm1DeyoMIIeTPyed

Congrats on the traction!

victorbuilds··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
Codorex (https://codorex.com) - Kids describe games in plain English, AI generates playable HTML5/Canvas code in seconds.

Built it for my 10yo. Solo dev, .NET + Claude Haiku. Free to try, no signup.

victorbuilds··on A wireless subdural-contained brain–computer interface with 65,536 electrodes
The device (BISC) is a single CMOS chip, thinned down to 50 μm, that slides into the subdural space (between skull and brain).

The specs are pretty wild:

Form Factor: It rests on the brain "like a piece of wet tissue paper."

Resolution: 65,536 electrodes with 1,024 simultaneous recording channels.

Bandwidth: 100 Mbps wireless link (custom ultra-wideband radio).

Power: Fully wireless via an external relay station.

The differentiator here seems to be the non-penetrating approach. Unlike Utah arrays or Neuralink threads that penetrate the cortex, this sits on top, which theoretically minimizes tissue scarring/reaction while maintaining high data throughput (100x current wireless BCIs).

Paper: Stable, chronic in-vivo recordings from a fully wireless subdural-contained 65,536-electrode brain-computer interface device

victorbuilds··on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
Actually, here's a relevant example - had Claude generate an interactive solar system with circular orbits and moons: https://codorex.com/shared/yeABdJWvRHAKqHs2kxpRnZNZPWmqWSu9

Interesting that it handles this fine (functional orbital mechanics, animation) but would probably struggle to recreate the exact pixel positions of the Space Jam layout. Confirms the pattern: good at "make something like X" but bad at "recreate X exactly."

victorbuilds··on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
Building something similar - using Claude API to generate mini games from text descriptions (https://codorex.com, still pretty rough).

Can confirm: Claude is weirdly good at generating functional game logic from vague prompts, but spatial precision is a constant battle. Anything involving exact pixel positions needs validation/correction layers on top.

The suggestion upthread about having it write its own measurement tools seems promising - haven't tried that approach yet.

victorbuilds··on Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
“It’s been wild to read endless online complaints from so-called ‘technical’ RPi users for the last 13 years about SD card wear and tear…”

A lot of the SD-card wear issues come from people running “normal PC workflows” on a storage medium that was never designed for that pattern.

Something I’ve seen help many newcomers is simply enabling an overlay filesystem or tmpfs-based writes. It’s basically the middle ground between a full RAM-boot distro (piCore, Alpine diskless, NetBSD) and a standard SD-based Raspberry Pi OS.

You still get the normal ecosystem and docs, but almost no writes hit the card unless you explicitly commit them.

For anyone stuck between “I want something simple” and “I don’t want my SD to die,” overlays are the easiest win.

victorbuilds··on Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad Demo 1963 [video]
At 5:38 he describes "gravity fields" that snap your cursor to lines and endpoints - letting you "be sloppy while drawing and get a precision drawing at the same time."

Every design tool today (Figma, Illustrator, CAD) still uses this exact UX pattern. Sutherland nailed it 62 years ago with a light pen and an oscilloscope.

victorbuilds··on [dead]
Claude Code connects directly to Anthropic's API (api.anthropic.com), which runs on different infrastructure than the web properties (claude.ai, console.anthropic.com).
victorbuilds··on Why WinQuake exists and how it works
The detail that -wavonly (falling back to the older WinMM API instead of DirectSound) actually gave the highest frame rate is a perfect example of a lesson that keeps reappearing in systems programming: "more direct" doesn't always mean faster when you're CPU-bound. DirectSound's lower latency came at the cost of more CPU cycles that could otherwise go to rendering.
victorbuilds··on [dead]
The platform that fired 80% of its engineers continues to have reliability issues. Shocking.
victorbuilds··on GPT-5.1 Apply_patch.py Implementation
LLMs are terrible at tracking exact line numbers. This format uses context matching instead - it finds where to apply changes by matching surrounding text, not by trusting line numbers. The find_context_core() function searches for matching lines rather than jumping to line N.
victorbuilds··on Anthropic acquires Bun
I use Claude Code CLI daily - it's genuinely changed how I work. The $1B number sounds crazy but honestly tracks with how good the tool is. Curious how Bun integration will show up in practice beyond the native installer.
victorbuilds··on YesNotice
The "yes/no" framing is a nice constraint that makes this actually useful vs generic "page changed" monitors. Do you rate-limit the checks to avoid hammering sources?
victorbuilds··on DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning
Ah, missed that one. Thanks for the link.
victorbuilds··on DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning
Notable: they open-sourced the weights under Apache 2.0, unlike OpenAI and DeepMind whose IMO gold models are still proprietary.
victorbuilds··on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive
It handles DevOps tasks way faster than I would - setting up infra, writing migrations, config changes, etc. Project is still early stage so speed and quick iterations matter more than perfect process right now. Once there's real traffic and a team I'll tighten things up.
victorbuilds··on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive
I keep them in env variables rather than files. Not 100% secure - technically Claude Code could still run printenv - but it's never tried. The main thing is it won't stumble into them while reading config files or grepping around.
victorbuilds··on Writing a good Claude.md
Learned this the hard way. Asked Claude Code to run a database migration. It deleted my production database instead, then immediately apologised and started panicking trying to restore it.

Thankfully Azure keeps deleted SQL databases recoverable, so I got it back in under an hour. But yeah - no amount of CLAUDE.md instructions would have prevented that. It no longer gets prod credentials.

victorbuilds··on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive
Different service, same cold sweat moment. Asked Claude Code to run a database migration last week. It deleted my production database instead, then immediately said "sorry" and started panicking trying to restore it.

Had to intervene manually. Thankfully Azure keeps deleted SQL databases recoverable for a window so I got it back in under an hour. Still way too long. Got lucky it was low traffic and most anonymous user flows hit AI APIs directly rather than the DB.

Anyway, AI coding assistants no longer get prod credentials on my projects.

victorbuilds··on Be Like Clippy
Building an AI product for kids taught me a lot about this. The assistant can't be annoying or condescending. Kids will just ignore it. But they love it when it feels like a collaborator, not a helper. Clippy failed because it interrupted. Good AI assists without getting in the way.
victorbuilds··on All it takes is for one to work out
Needed to read this. 20 years building software for other people, finally launched my own thing a few weeks ago. Most days feel like nothing is working. But you only need one thing to click.
victorbuilds··on Show HN: Boing
Recreated a kids version on Codorex:

https://codorex.com/shared/Ko4qJfnIKEjxDwqN2NAGueqWxYJFiz1F

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