Hacker News: BretonForearm

New comment by BretonForearm in "Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland"

BretonForearm — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:29:04 +0000

Bad website. No photo, only a video, and that wants to start with an ad.

New comment by BretonForearm in "Fable created novel 4D splat format"

BretonForearm — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 23:44:57 +0000

spatiotemporal data

New comment by BretonForearm in "Can you build a recognizable World Map in under 500 bytes?"

BretonForearm — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 23:39:01 +0000

Going from "SVG/Canvas is wasteful" to a tile based approach is a giant leap. Wouldn't AI suggest delta encoding of polyline coordinates and discretization of deltas as small, maybe just 2-4 bit integers? Storing the X and Y delta vectors separately, rather than interleaved, could lead to a further increase to the compression ratio.

What was asked of Claude? The article is very sparse on this.

New comment by BretonForearm in "Exapunks (2018)"

BretonForearm — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:50:06 +0000

If I was Notch I'd send a meagre 10 million or so Zach's way out of gratitude. Karma is a thing.

New comment by BretonForearm in "Show HN: Metiq: a real time 3D globe for 100 public datasets"

BretonForearm — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:34:48 +0000

Cool project!

> The coastlines and borders come from free geo data files

Please consider another data source, or fixing this one. Crimea is part of Ukraine. Only Belarus, North Korea and of course the invading Russia think there's an international border there. I reject promoting that camp.

New comment by BretonForearm in "Show HN: Metiq: a real time 3D globe for 100 public datasets"

BretonForearm — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:23:56 +0000

There should be no line between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine. Crimea is an internationally recognized part of Ukraine, not some other country.

New comment by BretonForearm in "DuckDB Internals Part 1"

BretonForearm — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 02:19:50 +0000

> DuckDB effectively appeared on the scene two years ago

I don't think so.

New comment by BretonForearm in "Amateur may have cracked Linear A"

BretonForearm — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:48:29 +0000

So Claude Code was used to generate software that ran simulations? I don't think LLMs in and of themselves can execute simulations, esp. a specific, non-single digit count like 100k.

New comment by BretonForearm in "Taxonomy of the Occlupanida (parasitoids on bread bag tags)"

BretonForearm — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 01:48:24 +0000

It's the only correct take, since the title atop literally says "parasitoids on bread bag tags".

New comment by BretonForearm in "Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts"

BretonForearm — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:33:41 +0000

> "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature [...]

I bet the first viewers of VHS were busier with marveling at color, compactness and convenience instead of thinking of the new medium as something ugly and nasty. New technology that gets very popular usually starts as state of the art and impressive, and it's only in retrospect that people think of it in condescending way.

New comment by BretonForearm in "Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions"

BretonForearm — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:57:44 +0000

Out of curiosity, why wouldn't it work?

New comment by BretonForearm in "First tunnel element of the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel immersed"

BretonForearm — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:31:49 +0000

That horrible website overrides web page scrolling and disables pinch zoom. Bad!

New comment by BretonForearm in "Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML"

BretonForearm — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:12:38 +0000

Yes, I meant internal docs, in line with the topic at hand.

New comment by BretonForearm in "Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML"

BretonForearm — Sat, 09 May 2026 05:27:36 +0000

Many of us had CC routinely generate HTML ever since it became available. Surprised that it's presented as some kind of novelty.

New comment by BretonForearm in "A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC"

BretonForearm — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:06:59 +0000

You may find Jenő Bory's castle interesting too: https://bory-var.hu/en

New comment by BretonForearm in "Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse"

BretonForearm — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:56:18 +0000

Besides what others said. The "The Numbers" section is a dead giveaway. LLM likes to generate random summary stats in a metrics grid without any prompting.