Hacker News: PetitPrince

New comment by PetitPrince in "The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing a Small Canadian Town"

PetitPrince — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:51:11 +0000

Because people like the fish flavor ?

Same reason we use tomato paste instead of a MSG + food coloring or parmesan instead of MSG + some protein I would say.

New comment by PetitPrince in "Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap"

PetitPrince — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:44:32 +0000

Are you describing what Mapillary is doing ? It's a crowdsourced street level imagery provider (owned by Facebook since 2020, but still contributing to OSM), but they do auto-detection of feature (you can see that in the online OSM editor: Map Data > Photo Overlays > Mapillary > Map Features).

I vaguely remember a blog post about doing photogrammetry out of their images, but I'm not entirely sure about it.

New comment by PetitPrince in "'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling"

PetitPrince — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:43:44 +0000

Meta: your first paragraph could really use a quotation indicator / mark. I suspect it was intentional: the ragebait was very effective on me before reading the rest of your comment (I was ready for defend my usage of tailscale to access my iot stuff).

New comment by PetitPrince in "Garzed – my garden waters itself off soil-moisture sensors"

PetitPrince — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:54:28 +0000

I guess a good amount of the HN crowd would say that this can be replicated from within Home Assistant (probably with some LLM help) with the added benefit of even better hardware freedom (from cheap Aliexpress soil sensor and/or sprinker or drip system to brand-name ones) and total control of data.

Still, the same thing was said about Dropbox; hopefully there's enough people willing to pay for the convenience to sustain this business.

New comment by PetitPrince in "My quest to see all of Tetris"

PetitPrince — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:25:26 +0000

NES Tetris have memory système that tries to repetition. As per Tetris wiki:

> The randomizer features a slight protection against direct repetition. The first roll generates a value 0-7 and will accept and deal on any value other than the previous piece dealt or the dummy value of 7. The piece history is initially empty. If the first roll fails, it progresses to a second roll that generates a value 0-6 and deals that piece.

Later games would evolve into a more ambitious history system like in Tetris the Grand Master, or a "bag" (Fisher Yates) system.

From a game design point of view, this avoids repetition in the distribution which generally suuuucks while playing.

New comment by PetitPrince in "Blogging can just be stating the obvious"

PetitPrince — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:06:47 +0000

Yes, for instance science communication is a whole field. Otherwise we wouldn't hold Carl Sagan et al. in such high regard.

New comment by PetitPrince in "Help I accidentally a wigglegram"

PetitPrince — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:27:03 +0000

My pedant self stands corrected. I wonder if some crazy people made a reverse praxinoscope now.

New comment by PetitPrince in "Help I accidentally a wigglegram"

PetitPrince — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:23:57 +0000

My constraint was a tongue-and-cheek "use as little technology as possible" (like what was available in 1999). I think nowaydays it's still more economical to do one pass of photogrammetry on your talent then do a mocap and actor replacement ?

New comment by PetitPrince in "Help I accidentally a wigglegram"

PetitPrince — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:18:35 +0000

To add to the other comments if you have the idea to use multiple camera to make the same effect but at a higher quality (and if you somehow sort how the synchronisation problem), then congrats ! You have invented bullet time, as demonstrated 27 years ago* in the Matrix.

*ouch, I feel old

New comment by PetitPrince in "How I play video games with spinal muscular atrophy"

PetitPrince — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:42:41 +0000

That's cool !

Kind reminder that you can be disabled and still kick ass in videogames. I have in mind Brolylegs (RIP) [1] who ranked very well in competitive Street Fighter 4, despite having to play with his literal face.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrolyLegs

New comment by PetitPrince in "USB Power Delivery: Plugging into the Benefits"

PetitPrince — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:58:28 +0000

Yeah it uses a tiny ceramic heating element to heat the bite area up to uncomfortable temperature. It's supposed to denature the toxin and/or counter inflammation. Either way it does reduce moskito itchiness with me.

New comment by PetitPrince in "MapComplete: Maps about various topics which you can contribute to"

PetitPrince — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:41:46 +0000

Streetcomplete can filter the map with a variety of filters for features you can edit or complete(Street lighting, Surfaces, Sidewalks, Bike paths, Street parking, Addresses, Places, Things, Buildings). Plus there's some specific "quests" where you can complete information for specific POI ("Does this bench have a backrest? Yes|No", "Where does this fire hydrant lies? On the grass | On the roadway | On a walkway | On a parking).

Mapcomplete also offers filling info about existing POI, but you can filter on specific theme (Drinking water, sports) or very specific theme (etymology) or even your own. There's also an UI to add new POIs; I don't think it's possible with StreetComplete.

Either way both are great.

New comment by PetitPrince in "Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles"

PetitPrince — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:08:10 +0000

As mentioned with other comment, web browsers on console were often a popular and easy way to jailbreak your console and install custom firmwares, etc. The 3DS one was bonkers, and I think you could directly download games from Nintendo servers without verification?

New comment by PetitPrince in "Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones"

PetitPrince — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:01:05 +0000

Yes, there other mobile editor that are arguably more featured (EveryDoor, OSM Go, OsmAnd), but StreetComplete has a nice gamification / simplification of UI that makes editing a breeze.

MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/

New comment by PetitPrince in "Apple WWDC 2026"

PetitPrince — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:10:21 +0000

As other comment suggested, the way I see it Americans are addicted to hyperbolas. Instead of "Thank you" it's "Thank you so much". So when you genuinely want to thank someone because that person went above and beyond (saved your life, avoided you a substantial hassle, etc.) then it's difficult to convey that.

New comment by PetitPrince in "Webcam head tracking, webcam to control in‑game FOV"

PetitPrince — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:25:00 +0000

And even with milsim FPS, as those blog posts from more than 10 years ago shows: https://dslyecxi.com/category/trackir/

New comment by PetitPrince in "Cate v1.0 is out: The Infinite canvas workspace for developers"

PetitPrince — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:03:46 +0000

I conceptually agree that managing windows should be the task of... the window manager, but at the same time it's easier and lower friction to both develop inside of an app and get some user to test new features

New comment by PetitPrince in "Why most product tours get skipped"

PetitPrince — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:51:20 +0000

> * Videogames (i.e. the tutorial). For very similar reasons to the above ;)

Oftentimes it's less jarring to have an invisible tutorial though (a level made to exploit the new gameplay element / feature). But it depends on what you want the user to learn and the type of videogame; I don't mind a guided tour in more strategic games (RTS, turn by turn RPG, ...).

New comment by PetitPrince in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

PetitPrince — Wed, 06 May 2026 07:39:38 +0000

Not OP but I think you have the right intuition in making a difference between using the app / contribute to the app. You may want to read https://diataxis.fr/ which elaborate on this idea and add another dimension (action / cognition) to this.

New comment by PetitPrince in "Show HN: How LLMs Work – Interactive visual guide based on Karpathy's lecture"

PetitPrince — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:03:35 +0000

Have you reread what was produced by Claude Code before publishing ? This thing in one of the first paragraph jumps out:

> you end up with about 44 terabytes — roughly what fits on a single hard drive

No normal person would think that 44 TB is a usual hard drive size (I don't think it even exists ? 32TB seems the max in my retailer of choice). I don't think it's wrong per se to use LLM to produce cool visualization, but this lack of proof reading doesn't inspire confidence (especially since the 44TB is displayed proheminently with a different color).