Hacker News: FormFollowsFunc

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Waymo sues Santa Monica, and the city sues right back: Court fight ahead"

FormFollowsFunc — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 23:27:35 +0000

The arrogance of tech companies is unbelievable. How dare ordinary people get in our way. We don’t care if we are causing a nuisance to residents - we’re a $100 billion company don’t you know.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Frank Gehry has died"

FormFollowsFunc — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 09:43:20 +0000

By that stage the firm was a big user of Catia especially on the production side of things. They probably used Rhino at the design stage.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Frank Gehry has died"

FormFollowsFunc — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 08:07:49 +0000

I was big into Gehry as an architectural student. His work was so different and exciting compared to other architects. He was the "father" of what was called the Santa Monica school. There was a good few architects in LA doing interesting stuff. I travelled from Europe to LA to try and work for him but never got past the reception. I prefer his earlier work in the 70s and 80s and less of a fan of his later work after Bilbao when he got more mainstream fame. I attended a talk of his at USC in the 90s and he was really funny, he was like a stand-up comedian.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1 (2022)"

FormFollowsFunc — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:25:27 +0000

I agree it’s very difficult to debug them. I sometimes rewrite my shaders in Vex and debug them in that. It’s a shader language that runs on the CPU in Houdini. You can output a value at each pixel which is useful for values outside the range of 0 to 1 or you can use printf(). I’m still looking for something that will transpile shaders into JavaScript.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Gen X may be the first to need a UBI after late-career job loss"

FormFollowsFunc — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 13:28:14 +0000

You’re right, it’s not universal. It would be more about extending unemployment benefits beyond the current 6 months in the US until you qualify for a pension.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Visa and Mastercard near deal with merchants that would change rewards landscape"

FormFollowsFunc — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 09:36:41 +0000

It’s kind of how it should be. Otherwise people not paying by credit card are subsidising people who do. It might encourage the card companies to lower their fees.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Parametric Modeling with Grasshopper"

FormFollowsFunc — Thu, 08 May 2025 03:18:05 +0000

Am I wrong in thinking that Grasshopper is procedural modeling and not parametric modeling? Parametric modeing is used in software like Solid Works where you don’t have nodes but have parameters, a constraint system and construction history. Solid Works was developed in the 90s while Grasshopper came out in 2007. Another is example is Pro/Engineer from Parametric Technology Company (PTC) which came out in 1988. Patrik Schumacher, an architect coined the term parametricism in 2008. His employees created node graphs in Grasshopper while he just tweaked the parameters. I wonder if that’s why he came up with the term. Grasshopper has parameters but what makes it different from industrial design CAD is that you construct geometry with a series of nodes i.e. a procedure.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Fifty and out: How Gen X became the biggest work losers"

FormFollowsFunc — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:46:36 +0000

That may be true but the latest media to be hit by the internet is film and TV. YouTube and TikTok are eating their lunch and streaming isn't making up for it. The same happened to music with the rise of streaming but it occurred a little earlier. AI generally isn't the cause of their demise but I suppose the fear is that AI will just make things worse when it's more broadly adopted. The internet has mostly destroyed media jobs and the only people making money from it nowadays are the platform companies.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Want to book a Ryanair flight? Prepare for a face scan"

FormFollowsFunc — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 12:45:18 +0000

They have always treated their customers like crap and in the past it hasn’t hurt their sales. Though recently they have had to sell tickets lower than they would have liked to boost sales. They would like to give the impression that they are always the cheapest option but it’s not always the case and customers are too lazy to shop around. Other airlines have copied their tactics so the alternative isn’t always that much better.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Ask HN: Do you believe we are in a particularly chaotic time period?"

FormFollowsFunc — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 06:02:05 +0000

Yes. It’s the end of zero interest rates after 23 years because the baby boomers are retiring and drawing down their savings and has caused a white collar recession. The world is de-globalising - trade wars between the US and China. Climate change is hitting us. Birth rates are declining in Europe and Asia which causes all sorts of problems.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Ask HN: What are the benefits of using Tailwind if you know CSS/SASS well?"

FormFollowsFunc — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 11:16:02 +0000

Would implementing the utility first approach of Tailwind in Sass be better i.e. a Sass interpretation of their @apply directive? Packing a bunch of class names into HTML doesn't seem like a great developer experience.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Ryanair – when every page is a dark pattern"

FormFollowsFunc — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 12:56:53 +0000

I think it's related to the business culture in Ireland. Interacting with local businesses here, they don't seem to have any problems with ripping you off. Irish people don't complain enough. Also there's no enforcement of the law. Ryanair gets brought to account by the British CAA (civil aviation authority) now and again because of it's dodgy practices never by the Irish one. Government has told it's regulators to have a soft touch on businesses so that the country is attractive to foreign companies.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "What we talk about when we talk about impostor syndrome"

FormFollowsFunc — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 14:24:21 +0000

I wonder if imposter syndrome is due to the expanding work developers are expected to do while management and business types don’t get their hands dirty because they can use the excuse that they don’t know how to code.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Why is my dryer radioactive?"

FormFollowsFunc — Fri, 19 May 2023 07:41:46 +0000

According to another article the glass wall of the vial stops the radiation.

https://www.argonelectronics.com/blog/litvinenko-and-the-per...

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Apple’s new headset meets reality"

FormFollowsFunc — Thu, 18 May 2023 17:36:33 +0000

One thing that VR gives you that a monitor doesn’t is 1:1 scale. It’s so easy to get that wrong when working on a scaled down version of the model. Though you can just place people in your scene for reference.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Google will soon let Pixel phones double as dashcams"

FormFollowsFunc — Wed, 17 May 2023 06:59:24 +0000

Or buy a white case. That’s what I did and it seemed to work, as a Sat Nav device at least. Not sure about recording video which will produce more heat.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Pirated books thrive on Amazon"

FormFollowsFunc — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 21:18:37 +0000

Some companies provide free non-commercial versions for learning e.g. Houdini and Nuke. I wish more companies would do it.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Ask HN: why does Apple always have better animations?"

FormFollowsFunc — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 21:18:57 +0000

They’re doing them on the GPU using Core Animation framework. The iPhone has used the GPU for smooth animations since the start while GPU usage on Android depends on whether the device has one.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Apple delays its mixed reality headset by two months, to debut at WWDC this June"

FormFollowsFunc — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 21:40:32 +0000

Hopefully they have been working away on RealityKit. The current version seems to be far from complete.

New comment by FormFollowsFunc in "Ask HN: How do Layoffs happen under “for-cause” employment laws?"

FormFollowsFunc — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 10:31:39 +0000

In places like Ireland companies like Twitter have flouted the law for things like lack of consultation but the government probably won’t punish them because the tech companies are such a big employer there.