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soci

430 karma · joined October 26, 2010

Marc M.

current: Product & Engineering

past: VP Eng & Product @ Softnc co-founder @ JobFluent.com Founder @ JobsBCN.com Founder @ KiteBit.com Founder @ Panoramer.net

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soci··on Decapitating a MacBook (2025)
Why dumping the excess is needed?
soci··on I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
Back in the day I was a hardcore Mac nerd and became a professional at it too. My best reverse-engineering trophy was building one of the first "iOS" apps when there was not an official appstore for the iPhone.

But man, this is way ahead of what I could do. What this dude accomplished blew my mind. Not only the output (running MacOS on a Wii), but the detailed post itself. A-MA-ZING.

soci··on Lunar Flyby
We already have images from the far side of the moon since the 2009's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter [1].

In theory, LRO is currently flying at lower orbit than Artemis I mission [2]. Shouldn't the LRO images be better? Maybe NASA has not disclosed all images?

Honest question: why the hype with these pictures?

[1] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4109

[2] Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) -> ~50 km vs. Artemis I -> ~129 km

soci··on Practical Guide to Bare Metal C++
Why is this comment downvoted? I mean, is it downvoted because Rust is bad for embeded systems?
soci··on Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986
Reading between the lines, the game logic itself hasn’t been reverse engineered yet, so adding, changing, or fixing logic still means working with the original code that only Michael Jenkins understands to this day. In any case: massive props to Ben. This feels like a strong foundation, and I’m excited to see him continue evolving the game.
soci··on John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
Thank you. You are right, most likely the ones working in the field haven't switched. But the truth is that big bucks are in pretrained technologies. As Carmack himself said, "there are plenty of people advancing the state of the art there".
soci··on John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
> Fundamentally, I believe in the importance of learning from a stream of interactive experience, as humans and animals do, which is quite different from the throw-everything-in-a-blender approach of pretraining an LLM. The blender approach can still be world-changingly valuable, but there are plenty of people advancing the state of the art there.

It's a shame that pretrained approach leads to such good enough result. The learning-from-experience, or what should be the "right" approach, will stagnate. I might be wrong, but it seems that aside from Carmack and a small team, "the world" is just not looking/investing on that side of the AI anymore.

However, I find it funny that Carmack is now researching for such approach. At the end of the day, he was the one who invented Portals, an algorithm to circumvent the need to reproduce the whole 3D world and therefore making 3D games computationally possible.

As a side note, I wonder what models are to come once we see the latest state of the art AI Video training technologies, in synch with the joystick movements from a real player. Maybe the results are so astonishing that even Carmack changes his mind on the subject.

EDIT::grammar & typos

soci··on Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
MasMovil / Orange. Yesterday connection went on and off while the router powered by and UPS. But since last night, the fiber does not sync with the GPON anymore.
soci··on Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
I'm from Spain, electricity is almost fully restored in my area. But my fiber network is still down, same with the buildin elevators. People do not realise that when the backup supplies (batteries, diesel, whatever...) get drained, a cold start of non electric infrastructure could also be needed because syncornizing a mesh of unstable IT systems is tricky by itself, in some cases needing physical access.

EDIT:: typos

soci··on macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)
> Open/Save Dialogs

> Drag a file or folder from Finder into an open/save dialog to jump directly to that file.

Doesn't work consistently anymore (Sequoia 15.2). Instead of focusing on the file, it moves the file you selected from Finder to the folder shown in the save dialog. It completely breaks the workflow.

Surprisingly, it works as expected one out of ten times. It seems to depend on where on the save dialog you drag the file from Finder. Extremely frustrating!

soci··on Hotline for modern Apple systems
I owned a Hotline server back in the day. Fun times! I ran it for three full years from my student shell account at my college’s HP-UX server. It was a T3 connection so it was faaaast as hell. It got completely unnoticed by the sysadmins… until it didn’t! They got so mad when finding out that I got my account suspended for months.
soci··on Show HN: Documind – Open-source AI tool to turn documents into structured data
agreed, extracting tables in pdfs using any of the available openAI models has been a waste of prompting time here too.
soci··on Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling
> the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.

AFAIK, it's impossible to resell flight tickets in EU, they are attached to real names that are checked upon boarding time. If wonder how did Booking manage to resell Ryanair tickets at scale?

soci··on Gpu.cpp: A lightweight library for portable low-level GPU computation
I watched the video mentioned in the post [1], but now I’m more confused than before…

What are the benefits, if any, of using gpu.cpp instead of just webgpu.h (webgpu native) directly? Maybe each is tailored for different use cases?

[1] https://youtu.be/qHrx41aOTUQ?si=CehJnYQWCg3XklHj

soci··on Batteries: How cheap can they get?
in Spain we call them “chispas”, which literally means sparks. An electrician is someone who knows the home electrical wiring stuff, while a chispas is someone who is skilled in repairing home appliances.
soci··on Llama-agents: an async-first framework for building production ready agents
or a stack!
soci··on Show HN: The Tomb of Nefertari [QV 66] Guided Virtual Tour
Amazing, thanks for helping anyone in the world explore Nefertari's tomb. The rest of the site is also amazing!

For Nefertari's, did you just use a camera and tripod to scanned the tomb you have a sort of 3d map of the tomb ? If so, what equipment did you use?

In case it helps the author, it crashes in Safari et when at some point (random) during the visit (v. 17.2.1 on a M1 Pro MBPro). Works perfect on Brave

soci··on Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'
What’s most surprising is how the ad went live without nobody pressing the ”Retry” button to build a new ad idea, neither in the chain of command at Apple nor at the creative agency, if any. It’s like everybody everybody, one after the other in the chain of decisions, eluded their responsability. Why?
soci··on Show HN: I made an app that helps you find where to stream movies and TV shows
hmm, I don’t share the same experience. Works flawless in EU.
soci··on Show HN: I made an app that helps you find where to stream movies and TV shows
At first, I thought you built a justwatch.com clone. But, after a quick inspection I realized you solve a related but different use-case where the user already paid for the streaming service holding the rights to the media, but not necessarily match the user’s country location. By enabling the user to check in what countries the media is available you also unlock a new business model based on VPN affiliation programs (brilliant!) instead of streaming service affiliation programs like justwatch does. I wonder if both revenues models are complementary in the long run.

It’s nuts that watching media from another country for a streaming service I pay for is as easy as changing my IP to the desired country. Does it really work in this way?

Also, I hope you can provide some light on whether you are gaining any traction and unlocking vpn subcriptions revenue.

Suggestion: let the user select from what country it connects And/or automatically detect it. I’m in Europe and it’s confusing it offers me to stream from my own country using a vpn.

soci··on Equinox.space
I tried to open another door with Restricted title in it and didn't open. I assumed all "restricted" doors would have the same fate.
soci··on Equinox.space
Thank you. While I really want to check your hint, I won't. Since there's no way to save progress this would be my fourth attempt to play the game from the start [1]. Maybe saving status would have it make it different for me. Please, don't take me wrong, the game looks amazing, reminds me of the old times of Mac Classic gaming, but I'm no gamer.

[1] I'm on an iphone, and I always tapped back to get to HN again so I lost progress every time I tried your game.

soci··on Equinox.space
awesome piece of work. ai can’t find the cockpit though.
soci··on Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
I wish I had read your comment 5 years ago when my son wanted to build a utterly complex game in Scratch. I ended “coding” the game, almost on my own, because it was boring for him, and the result did not resemble what my toddler wanted/imagined. Of course he was imagining an AAA game built in Scratch… If anything good, the learning for him was building games is hard, and lost interest trying further. Great advise!
soci··on We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
The Technologyreview article mentioned in the parent’s first paragraph is the most insightful piece of content I’ve read about the tensions inside OpenAI.
soci··on Control Center on macOS is always re-rendering its SwiftUI causing 1% CPU load
For electron-based tools that were designed as web-first apps, I agree with you that it's better to have them in a browser tab than as standalone apps.

However, for real desktop tools that utilize the operating system's bells and whistles, which truly make an app a desktop app—like Sublime—I'd never use an alternative in the browser.

soci··on Engraving
I've been purchasing small intaglio prints almost every summer for many years. However, it wasn't until today that I truly understood the complexity of this art technique.

I acquire these small prints at an annual exhibition [1] that's part of a competition featuring artists from around the world. This event takes place at Taller Fort in the quaint village of Cadaqués (Catalunya, Spain), which is well worth a visit if you're an art enthusiast.

[1] https://miniprint.org/?lang=en

soci··on Show HN: Finarky – Portfolio Tracker with Personal Rate of Return
Why is that IRR (or PRR for the matter) is not calculated in most investment tracking apps ?
soci··on Photomator for Mac
I always get redirected to the Apple Appstore when trying to buy Pixelmator or Photomator from their website. Business wise, why is that when Apple is taking a 20% toll? Couldn’t it just be a license purchase in pixelmator website? For subscription / in-app purchase model, I get it, but for life-time licences I don’t, and I’d really would like them to take that 20% extra…
soci··on New details on commercial spyware vendor Variston
"Variston IT" EBITDA was between 6M to 15M € in 2021 [1][2]. Interesting numbers from a completely unknown tech company in Barcelona whatsoever.

[1] https://www.iberinform.es/empresa/8097556/variston-informati....

[2] P&L and Balances are public data in Spain, but usually behind paywalls. Sometimes the financial data without the paywall just shows the order of magnitude, like in this specific case.

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