Hacker News: aduffy

New comment by aduffy in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

aduffy — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:55:59 +0000

I'm not sure how much of that converts to revenue. If it's free plan users, that's just cost. You can say what you want about "creating a training data moat" but that doesn't seem like it's prevented the other labs from putting out excellent models.

New comment by aduffy in "Show HN: Flight-Viz – 10K flights on a 3D globe in 3.5MB of Rust+WASM"

aduffy — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:46:28 +0000

There's something a little off about the projection logic when you drop into the Leaflet view, you'll notice that when you pan around after zooming the planes shift their location.

Very cool demo though!

How to Get to Tomorrow

aduffy — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:18:01 +0000

Article URL: https://campedersen.com/kardashev

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47605254

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Anthropic and The Pentagon

aduffy — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 13:32:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/anthropic-and-the-pentagon.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287488

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by aduffy in "Palantir and other tech companies are stocking offices with tobacco products"

aduffy — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:51:15 +0000

It's even funnier actually. Yes, Palantir does have free Zyn vending machines in every office, but the Zyn is only for visiting customers. Employees are explicitly prohibited from using the machines.

Just vice signaling all the way down.

New comment by aduffy in "Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs"

aduffy — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:48:35 +0000

They need to refund it *with interest*, according to filings cited in the article.

New comment by aduffy in "A distributed queue in a single JSON file on object storage"

aduffy — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:16:35 +0000

Yea, the group commit is the real insight here.

I read this blog post and to help wrap my head around it I put together a simple TCP-based KV store with group commit, helped make it click for me.

https://github.com/a10y/group-commit/

New comment by aduffy in "Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s"

aduffy — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:56:29 +0000

> - They assume their hard-to-program but faster architecture will get figured out by devs. It won't.

Or it will get figured out in the niche fields where people are willing to figure out really hard stuff to squeeze out max performance (PE, hedge funds, intelligence)

Either way agree, it's hard to get mass adoption without the software ecosystem feeding back in

New comment by aduffy in "US bars approvals of new models of DJI, all other foreign drones"

aduffy — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:36:40 +0000

They’ve left the consumer market and only do defense now

New comment by aduffy in "Zed is our office"

aduffy — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 21:00:20 +0000

…you’re free to use other editors? People like Zed. They like IntelliJ. They like VSCode. If you have an aesthetic preference against all professionally maintained IDEs, I think you’re in the minority.

New comment by aduffy in "The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'"

aduffy — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 19:24:19 +0000

I've had numerous encounters where doctors (and dentists) attempt to charge me for services they've already been reimbursed for from the insurance company.

It's only after hours of scouring my EOBs and being on the phone with my insurance that I then come back to the practice's office with evidence in hand, and they dismiss the charges.

I'm pretty sure this is just a racket because they expect most people not to put up a fight and just pay, or get sent to collections hell.

The amount of work you need to do as a patient in our health system is so dumb.

New comment by aduffy in "QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system"

aduffy — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 18:14:44 +0000

QGIS is the shit. I absolutely love it, great for visualizing GeoJSON, GeoTIFF files, open data feeds, etc. My one gripe is that their macOS installers have been out of date for ages now, the best way I've found is to actually install from Conda Forge directly:

> brew install micromamba

> mamba install qgis

It's really crazy the number of open geospatial data feeds that exist out there from NASA, NOAA, and ESA. If you're interested in checking any of this stuff out, I highly encourage following Mark Litwinchik's blog, this guy is a legend and he does most of his work with open tools like QGIS and DuckDB

https://tech.marksblogg.com/

New comment by aduffy in "Spiral"

aduffy — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 20:13:24 +0000

We don't get a tax write-off.

The motivation is to move the IP and trademark into a separate organization so it's no longer owned by Spiral. This means we can't re-license it later, we'd have to fork it, because the Vortex trademark and all that is controlled by LF.

New comment by aduffy in "Spiral"

aduffy — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 19:23:47 +0000

Believe it or not, this is how the Linux Foundation organizes itself. It's more legwork than something simpler like Apache Foundation.

Basically in the US you need a legally recognized entity to hold intellectual property. "Donating" the project involves setting up a "Series LLC" that is nested underneath the top-level Linux Foundation corporation, and donating the IP into it.

Checkout https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/lfx/project-control-center/... and ctrl-f "LF Projects, LLC"

New comment by aduffy in "Spiral"

aduffy — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 19:18:00 +0000

> The whole "donated by spiral" on the vortex.dev website also gives big tax write-off vibes.

Donated is the Linux Foundation terminology.

Sadly the last time I filed a tax return there was no way to itemize a Github repo. Alas.

New comment by aduffy in "Spiral"

aduffy — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 18:43:24 +0000

The AnyBlox paper has some very cool ideas, and the authors are friends.

In the paper you'll notice a large portion of it analyzes Vortex, both standalone and embedded. Definitely worth a read.

New comment by aduffy in "ICE is using fake cell towers to spy on people's phones"

aduffy — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:07:54 +0000

You’re welcome to read the code yourself once you check it out, it’s not very big. Supply chain attacks are a thing but I don’t think this is one.

New comment by aduffy in "ICE is using fake cell towers to spy on people's phones"

aduffy — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:01:06 +0000

There is nothing wrong with running a receive-only hotspot. Not sure what you’re implying here.

New comment by aduffy in "ICE is using fake cell towers to spy on people's phones"

aduffy — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:25:12 +0000

Just wanted to advertise that the EFF recently released an open source tool for detecting cell-site simulators. The hardware is like $20 and it's pretty easy to setup yourself. Worth having around to stay aware of what's out there, especially if you live in one of the places recently targeted by the administration.

https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter/

New comment by aduffy in "SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight"

aduffy — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 17:41:15 +0000

Sure, not directly. But most of that is imaging and communications payloads, and the vast majority there is being purchased by militaries and intelligence agencies.

Government still props up this whole market.