Hacker News Reader

dcanelhason Halfspace experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields

Seems like he got around to making a spiritual successor to antimony which was also a really cool piece of software. This made my day.

dcanelhason The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

On the "Stop saying please" part. I personally like to use polite language, as an exercise. According to this one paper on arxiv, toxic behavior gets better accuracy

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950

It was published a while ago. But I wonder if it still holds true today.

dcanelhason Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

I don't know how other people experience it, but it's not like a full-blown hallucination as the exercise would imply. Personally I experience it as something in between the concept of an object and the perception of an instance of one.

If someone says they're looking for a purse I would still have some ambiguity, visually represented, about the material, color, texture, shape and size, type of clasp, if it has a strap or a chain attached to it, if it was new or showed wear, if it appeared to be ful or empty and flat...

dcanelhason Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

I find it harder to conjure up the sensory experience of scents and flavors, is that something other people can do instinctively?

Is there an equivalent to perfect pitch smelling out there?

dcanelhason ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs

There was 13th lab, acquired by oculus years ago. Wouldn't surprise me if there are a bunch of first, second, third labs too

dcanelhason Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

For me that step-size only works to affect the jumps given by the mouse scroll wheel. The keyboard arrow keys (Left and Down) also seem to do some scrolling after you have selected the number line. However, both arrows produce steps in the decreasing direction.

The difference between two successive steps by pressing a key seems to be 86504006548979

dcanelhason Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

This is a nice visualization. Are there any keyboard keys to just advance one position along the line? I tried the arrow keys but they jumped quite far.

I don't know how this was generated (BFS and flattening?) it seems adjacent indices aren't just one move apart ... but they could be!

There is a Hamiltonian circuit for Rubik's cube: https://bruce.cubing.net/ham333/rubikhamiltonexplanation.htm...

Following the circuit would be like Gray codes instead of binary digits. You only flip one bit at a time when going to the next number.

dcanelhason US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide

The suicide rate isn't uniformly distributed given gender. There are likely screenings (previous mental health history) and rejection of the most affected age group (70+) that should lead the baseline to be even lower. Meaning 18x is probably on the low end.

dcanelhason Canceling "Hey"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Facts alone won't get you to answers about what you should do about something.

Whether your personal view is that the solution to low income migrants entering your country should be outright genocide, deportation, societal integration, welfare, or something else - it's not going to be based on a statement of fact.

A fact is that the elderly who have retired from the workfrorce are no longer contributing to the national wealth, they're also using the public health system more than any other demographic. Clearly we should...

dcanelhason Electric motors with no rare earths

Clearly making a motor with induced magnetic fields both for the stator and rotor isn't the innovation here, since a large fraction of industrial motors do not have permanent magnets.

I would assume the innovation here would need to be making it small and efficient for any meaningful torque output? Usually when you see claims of a 93% efficient electrical motor its the result of taking an absolute beast of a 2kW machine and operating it at 400W. Does anyone have insights into what Renault are doing here?

dcanelhason Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused

KeePass is just an encrypted database file with UI around it for usability. You can keep the db on a USB drive, sync it through a cloud storage, e-mail it to yourself, whatever ... It's really not that complicated. BitWarden is the above as a service, I reckon.

Nb. The above refers to KeePassX. No idea what the KeePass without the x is about. Naming things. So hard.

dcanelhason 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens

I figured 2x4 would be the theoretical minimum since ascii characters are 1 byte each (without extensions). 1x5 with color is impressive, even if it is sort of like a faux 3x5

dcanelhason Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

After the transition to digital TV our broadcasted signals mostly look like noise, though. Maybe an outside observer would assume that our civilization ended sometime in 2010.

dcanelhason CERN uses ultra-compact AI models on FPGAs for real-time LHC data filtering

I'm half expecting to see "AI model" appearing as stand-in for "linear regression" at this point in the cycle.

dcanelhason You can use newline characters in URLs

Wait, does that mean that you could make an ASCII representation of a QR code that points to the URL that the QR code was made of?

dcanelhason Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

How shocking!

dcanelhason Cistercian Numbers

Shouldn't 523 in that list of "other numbers" actually be 522?

dcanelhason The mathematical mystery inside the legendary '90s shooter Quake 3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root for those who just want the info without AI filler

dcanelhason I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

> I wrote my first line of code in 1983. I was seven years old, typing BASIC into a machine that had less processing power than the chip in your washing machine

I think there may be a counterpoint hiding in plain sight here: back in 1983 the washing machine didn't have a chip in it. Now there are more low-level embedded CPUs and microcontrollers to develop for than before, but maybe it's all the same now. Unfathomable levels of abstraction, uniformly applied by language models?

dcanelhason xAI joins SpaceX

The opposite of down is up, so it wouldn't be completely illogical.

dcanelhason Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

Indeed, 15 or 25 mph (24 or 40 km/h) are the speed limits in school zones (when in effect) in CA, for reference. But depending on the general movement and density and category of pedestrians around the road it could be practically reckless to drive that fast (or slow).

dcanelhason Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

It does sound like a good outcome for automation. Though I suppose an investigation into the matter would arguably have to look at whether a competent human driver would be driving at 17mph (27km/h) under those circumstances to begin with, rather than just comparing the relative reaction speeds, taking the hazardous situation for granted.

What I would like to see is a full-scale vehicle simulator where humans are tested against virtual scenarios that faithfully recreate autonomous driving accidents to see how "most people" would have acted in the minutes leading up to the event as well as the accident itself

dcanelhason “Fluid gears” invention offers promise for improving mechanical devices

Indeed, then this design will truly have come full circle.

dcanelhason In Defense of Matlab Code

I remember the pitch for Julia early on being matlab-like syntax, C-like performance. When I've heard Julia mentioned more recently, the main feature that gets highlighted is multiple-dispatch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc9HwsxE1OY

I think it seems pretty interesting.

dcanelhason I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

Even with text, parsing content in 2D seems to be a challenge for every LLM I have interacted with. Try getting a chatbot to make an ascii-art circle with a specific radius and you'll see what I mean.

dcanelhason Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop

I think the selfishness here is related to being fine with generating a pile of electronic waste that becomes a problem for everyone else, as long as he can avoid carrying a few ounces extra.

It's hard to recycle electronics, because separating materials that are chemically bonded together is very labor intensive and isn't worth it from the price of aluminum, copper, lithium, etc alone.

It would have to cost more to dispose of a laptop for this to work out financially.

dcanelhason Testing shows automotive glassbreakers can't break modern automotive glass

In 15 years: Testing shows that automotive shaped charge glassbreakers can't penetrate the armor on most modern automotive glass.

Was drone-proofing civilian cars a mistake?

dcanelhason Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

I wish there was an active dev community that could patch win10 going forward, but without access to source code for the kernel, perhaps that isn't really viable.

Ideally I would want to use Linux but I also want to play games that are only supported on windows.

Does using WSL help or is an outdated windows base still going to be the weakest link in the security onion?

dcanelhason It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead

It's an interesting read. I guess the difference between this situation and the ideal case is that he would have been admitted for observation as a precaution in a world where there was plenty of room and staff to take care of even the less obvious emergency cases.

Even in a very well functioning system similar cases might happen eventually, anyway (but at a much lower frequency). ROC plots come to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...

dcanelhason Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

I wonder what the prognosis was right after the operation. The article makes it sound a bit like this outcome was totally unexpected.

Insulin from pigs can be used by humans, right? But maybe there's more to diabetes than just a new pancreas. Interesting development, in any case. Thanks for sharing.