Hacker News: SOLAR_FIELDS

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:09:15 +0000

Also grew up in suburban Texas, saw similar freak outs, and can tell you it's thinly veiled racism and distaste towards being forced to be around people who are part of perceived lower socioeconomic classes.

The threat model is "been indoctrinated by years of propaganda to be fearful of a vague nebulous threat of being around people who don't look and act like me"

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 18:58:13 +0000

Not even two years ago writing your own BREP kernel was considered to be out of reach for even the most determined dedicated hardcore engineering teams that weren't extremely well funded. Now, it seems tractable and may finally get us out of the dependence on proprietary kernels that has plagued this industry for decades.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 23:05:46 +0000

We have the same auditors in the states, except that the auditors in the states who do this are often detained illegally by the police, then sue and win, and get paid out of taxpayer dollars with no repercussions for the police whatsoever who acted illegally. One guy in particular I know who used to do this went by TheBattousai or similar name and I believe went through this cycle 2 or 3 times with various police agencies. Not exactly hilarity here

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:44:01 +0000

Did they ever have meaning? It's always been a nebulous feels term

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Linux containers in 500 lines of code (2016)"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 23:11:19 +0000

The principle of defense in depth is built around the idea that with enough time, any system can likely be compromised, but the chance of compromising the system before being detected in your attempts to do so is lower the more safeguards you put into place

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Incident with Actions"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:56:16 +0000

It should be possible to wire another event dispatcher to ARC instead of relying on actions webhooks. That’s the only part that is a true dependency, it should be possible to basically decouple ARC

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Incident with Actions"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:54:10 +0000

Set of fat buildkit instances per build shape served on a spot instances autoscaled down to 0 with KEDA and Karpenter is pretty close to as optimal of a setup as one can get

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Incident with Actions"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:51:45 +0000

Ive been spending a lot of time recently across all my projects optimizing ci because with this latest wave of models I can confidently make a lot more changes faster, and even if the pipelines are kinda optimized (I have rules like every pipeline fails if it exceeds 12 minute wall clock) the sheer amount of changes hitting ci is overloading it

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Newgrounds.com – A community of games, music, and art"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 23:21:17 +0000

Unless you are dealing with data at true scale, and not many people are, often the imperfections are hidden because they run fast, even if they are quadratic. I'm more referring to being actually forced to sit down and write out your own algorithm in a novel way.

Yes, during my BigCorp tenure I had to think about complexity all the time, but 99 times out of 100 there was an off the shelf tool available for my specific data structure and I didn't have to think about the algorithm at all beyond "oh there's a library that solves this for my specific data structure, and it's O(N)log n that will be fast enough". Whereas so much attention in interviewing traditionally was based on these "write a bubble sort algorithm from scratch" type questions which your average engineer basically never has to do on the job unless they are operating in a very high performance/scaling type of role.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Newgrounds.com – A community of games, music, and art"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:43:50 +0000

I worked at bigcorp for half a decade before all of the LLM stuff and there was exactly one time I really had to give a shit about algorithmic complexity in that entire tenure. Obviously some developers needed to care more than others, but the vast, vast majority of work and roles just didn’t really need to care about this. 9 times out of 10 you’re using the off the shelf library that already has the optimized bubble sort of whatever for your job

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "An Update on Orion for Linux and Windows"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 11:08:58 +0000

I’ve been using it on iOS since it’s near inception and I can report that it is much more stable now than it was since its original release. I tried to live on the desktop browser, however, and eventually had to declare it unusable and switch back to Firefox. Mostly around things like 1Password and similar extensions being pretty broken in the Orion desktop browser.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Things that apparently cause cancer"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:31:22 +0000

Any criticism of the reproduction of the paper’s methodology should go right back to the original author, because the original author of the paper did not adequately document the methodology used. Then when asked directly to provide the methodology, the authors did not provide the methodology.

A cornerstone of valid science is reproducibility. Even if the original author’s methodology is sound, we cannot know because we cannot reproduce it, ergo, it’s basically bunk science.

When we take out all of the “both sides” political motivations driving a lot of the discussion in this thread, the glaring lack of scientific rigor falls squarely on the original authors, regardless of the topic. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it’s the responsibility of the original authors to provide that evidence, not the people providing the takedown.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:45:23 +0000

Early on their software was like this, the original ChatGPT desktop app was basically unusable and full of memory leaks that would tank the software. They’ve long since fixed that though

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 17:14:37 +0000

Yeah this the thing that grinds my gears about Apple too. These fools will argue in court out of one side of their mouth that the cut is used to police the store etc and do reviews then out of the other side of their mouth they just don’t do it or give the most mediocre half assed attempts and collect the revenue. Which is it? You shouldn’t be able to charge people and not provide the service your charging them for

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Jevmem – automatic project memory for Claude Code, built on Jev"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:46:13 +0000

The big tell for me is assuming the reader has context straight out the gate. "What is automatic and what depends on the agent" assumes the reader, like the LLM at the time it wrote that sentence, has all of this pre-context available. That sentence makes more sense as an h3 header further down in some detailed list where the human has all of the knowledge of how the system works. Whereas a human obviously does not, so they lead with the important context of why you give a shit

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 07:45:14 +0000

I finally quit because of COVID. I got long COVID so bad and my lungs were so messed up that every time I tried to smoke it was a horrible experience. 6 months later when I finally felt good enough to try again the desire was pretty much gone. I genuinely tried to re addict myself and couldn’t do it

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 07:42:07 +0000

The cravings do go away entirely eventually. It took me probably 2-3 years after I quit before the random cravings stopped, I used to want make the smoking motion with my hand and that finally went away as well. It’s a fairly linear drop off I think, you just get them with less and less frequency as time goes on.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Claude Opus 5.5"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:14:31 +0000

If a well funded incumbent with a much better model can just crush you instantly because you don't have access to it, is it really an opportunity?

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Claude Status – Elevated errors for multiple models"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 02:19:04 +0000

I started using Pi with Astra on a whim after really enjoying Astra and reading somewhere that you get close to identical results as with the codex harness but for a significant hunk less token usage.

Coming from mostly using Claude models, the terse factual statements coming from Astra via the Pi harness are a breath of fresh air over having to wade through the flowery verbose nonsense that Claude constantly outputs

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 02:46:23 +0000

I do love how the software world has the caricature of a comic book villain in Larry Ellison