HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

hulium

212 karma · joined November 6, 2023

submissionscomments
hulium··on Show HN: A CSS-Only Terrain Generator
The biome button graphics are taken from the OpenTTD main menu.
hulium··on The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge
Other laptops have this too. Linux has a driver for it.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Hinge-Driver-Linux-5.12

The sensor angle would be in a file like `/sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device*/in_angl0_raw` (device number can vary). At least I have this in a config file and remember it working (maybe on a different computer?). I cannot get it to work anymore on my laptop.

hulium··on Video Game Blurs (and how the best one works)
The part about low-pass filtering using FFT ends with the conclusion that it is fundamentally a different thing from a gaussian blur ("Low Pass Filter ≠ Low Pass Filter"). However: A convolution in image space is just a multiplication in fourier space. If you multiplied with a gaussian in fourier space you should get a gaussian blur. It's just not necessarily the fastest option.
hulium··on Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
I am not surprised that the sentence existed once. But "Wikipedia once said this during the time August 2024-Februrary 2025" is not the same as "Source: Wikipedia" because of the way Wikipedia evolves. It's especially bad if you disregard the entire much more nuanced discussion in the remaining article.
hulium··on Finnish City Inaugurates 1 MW/100 MWh Sand Battery
I think Finland just has a large enough extent from south to north that solar might be starting to become viable in the south but not in the north. While Iceland already produces more electricity per capita than any other country, using only hydro and geothermal, so solar is pretty much non-existent.

Comparison of solar share:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-share-energy?tab=li...

Solar potential:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Iceland#/media/File:...

hulium··on Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
That's a fake Wikipedia screenshot! That line doesn't exist in the actual article and didn't at the time when that tweet was written, and does not even fit in the context. To me, this is at best an example for how much higher the quality is on Wikipedia than in average social media like X.
hulium··on Finnish City Inaugurates 1 MW/100 MWh Sand Battery
Certainly not the only country. Iceland is even more extreme in this regard and unlike Finland it is powered by 100% renewables, hydro and geothermal energy. In Finland the only good renewable alternative is wood/biomass.
hulium··on 'World Models,' an old idea in AI, mount a comeback
During play, yes, obviously you need an implementation of the game to play it. But in its planning tree, no:

> MuZero only masks legal actions at the root of the search tree where the environment can be queried, but does not perform any masking within the search tree. This is possible because the network rapidly learns not to predict actions that never occur in the trajectories it is trained on.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08265

hulium··on "None of These Books Are Obscene": Judge Strikes Down Much of FL's Book Ban Bill
It was essentially banned via copyright for a long time. The only reason that it is available now is that 70 years have passed since the authors death.
hulium··on One Million Screenshots
It seems like the screenshots are clustered in some way. That is especially visible when you zoom out.
hulium··on I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models
Seems more like it should stop the AI from e.g. summarizing news and emails about death, not for a chat filter.
hulium··on Show HN: Controlling 3D models with voice and hand gestures
See also Webcam Mania: https://webcam.sulat.net/

It uses a bit simpler approach, only detecting movement, but it works good enough for such games.

hulium··on The longest train journey is epic – but nobody's ever taken it
Before 2022, I once noticed that the Deutsche Bahn app for German trains let me put Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, as destination. The app is good at finding international connections, but it only shows stations that are actually reachable from Germany. After some research, I found it was indeed possible to find a connection from Europe to Pyongyang via Vladivostok once per month. Not anymore though, they removed the Russian train network from their system.
hulium··on Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
That's the point, the linked system prompt explicitly tells it that Trump was elected.
hulium··on Pixel is a unit of length and area
The users may have 1080p monitors, but even Windows does not do subpixel antialiasing in its new apps (UWP/WinUI) anymore. On Linux, GTK4 does not do subpixel antialiasing anymore.

The reason is mostly that it is too hard to make it work under transformations and compositing, while higher resolution screens are a better solution for anyone who cares enough.

hulium··on Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language (1981) [pdf]
I think almost all of those criticisms are solved in newer versions of Pascal.
hulium··on Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
The first line is already nonsense. The answer is obviously not "room".

Getting the correct final answer tells you nothing about the reasoning. The LLM will solve the puzzle even if you only pass it the sentence "the [] de Milo is discovered by a Greek []".

hulium··on Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)
He has written a program:

https://github.com/brunopostle/piranesi

The problem is that it is a method for projecting a rectangle, not a full 3D scene. I can imagine though that it could be extended to a full projection if you specify a central axis along which the perspective trick happens.

hulium··on German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
> Turns out all available versions (gesetze-im-internet, dejure.org, buzer.de) had at least a couple of small mistakes.

Can you say more about what these small mistakes were? Would they affect the interpretation of the law?

hulium··on DNA evidence says first Americans came from Asia
> by that logic everyone is native african

No that does not follow, but the very first individuals who migrated to America (the humans this discussion is about) obviously were not born in America. By my logic there were no native Americans that came from Asia to America, but their descendants became native.

Yes I know, very pedantic. I don't think there is anything wrong with the title.

hulium··on DNA evidence says first Americans came from Asia
Maybe their point is that they were native Asians and not native Americans.
hulium··on AlgoMIDI – A Mathematical 'Music Studio'
Some things in the interface are white-on-white if viewed in light mode. It only looks correct if the browser is in dark mode.
hulium··on European word translator: an interactive map
The fine-print at the bottom of the page says "The translations were retrieved around 2014". Machine translation has come a long way since then.
hulium··on I do not want AI to "polish" me
Even though I am not a fan of it, I can see how some people might want to use AI to improve their grammar, maybe because they are afraid to leave a bad impression.

But why would anyone put AI generated images into an Email?

hulium··on Hacking Subaru: Tracking and controlling cars via the admin panel
> All cars in Europe must be connected to the internet at all times by law, to determine their location

The source you link very explicitly contradicts that:

> Your eCall system is only activated if your vehicle is involved in a serious accident. The rest of the time the system remains inactive. This means that when you are simply driving your vehicle, no tracking (registering your car's position or monitoring your driving) or transmission of data takes place.

hulium··on The Illustrated Guide to a PhD
Beneficial to humanity does not mean "increasing the GDP". Humans are not machines; there are things that are valuable that is not technology. Just from the title of the thesis I would not judge its value. Analyzing culture and writing about your own ideas can be a good thing.

More important to me is whether it was written because someone really cared about the topic, or wrote 100s of pages of nothing to have a title.

But I also want to comment on your idea that researching AI is superior to researching dancing because it is more beneficial for humanity. I am myself in AI adjacent research, but I still disagree. Dancing is a deeply human thing, and we should care about it. And I believe that many people (especially outside of this bubble) will think that many parts of currently hyped AI research has very questionable "benefit for humanity", such as AI image generators.

hulium··on Who Can Understand the Proof? A Window on Formalized Mathematics
Technically, his axiom is the definition for what the operator is. Any set together with an operator "•" that satisfies this law is a boolean algebra. Binary logic where •=NAND is one such example because it satisfies the axiom.
hulium··on Numbers Are Leaves
These are just binomial trees, which might be familiar to those who know their classic data structures.

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

hulium··on Don't Get Distracted (2017)
The question then is not about the CEO but the people working in that dog adoption agency, is their work unethical?
hulium··on A liar who always lies says "All my hats are green."
> it doesn't matter because we don't get any additional information about whether our original choice was correct

That's the missing assumption. I would say assuming that people are perfectly random falls into the "standardized test" category.

> you won't get information, and you should still always switch and win 2/3 of the time.

You always get some information, the set of possible results becomes narrower, so saying the probabilities don't change is not sufficient. Not a good idea to discuss the problem in informal language though.

Page 1 of 3Next →