Hacker News: alexthehurst

New comment by alexthehurst in "Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?"

alexthehurst — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:33:20 +0000

It’s not hard for a visual model to score the quality of that output though, which would be a pretty good fitness function.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Show HN: Treeline – beautiful, powerful wilderness topo maps for iOS"

alexthehurst — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:01:08 +0000

This is impressively full-featured for a new app. I tried it out for some route-planning and tracking a hike and kept finding the features I was looking for. Can you share anything about your development approach?

I tested it out for route planning and it seems very nice. I’ll be following along!

Feedback:

- Bug report: on my phone, the “measure distance” tool sets the marker far away from the crosshairs, about halfway to the top of the screen. This makes it impossible to set the first point accurately. - bug report: in an area near me, the base map contains two separate overlapping (slightly differing) sets of contour lines. - feature request: when planning a route, it would be big to be able to drag the route anchors and add/remove anchors, rather than just removing the latest anchor.

Thanks for this app!

New comment by alexthehurst in "Report on an Unidentified Space Station"

alexthehurst — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:27:20 +0000

Yes. Even standing outside a straight-through tunnel, you can get some echo back to you off the walls.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Tell HN: OpenAI silently removed Study Mode from ChatGPT"

alexthehurst — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:32:11 +0000

It’s still there, but the builder is only in the web UI.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Build Your Own Forth Interpreter"

alexthehurst — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:27:43 +0000

I’ve been working on a homemade CPU (in simulator) and I’m in the middle of implementing an ISA and assembler as a bug step up from working in machine code to working in assembly. I’ve been looking at Forth as a good option for a next-level-up language which is relatively easy to implement and easy to script with.

New comment by alexthehurst in "ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests"

alexthehurst — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 16:25:59 +0000

Look into keyboard macro programs for a much easier way to do this. I use Espanso and have it set up to paste the time anywhere I type `;tm`.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Around The World, Part 27: Planting trees"

alexthehurst — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:00:05 +0000

Representative line from a previous post:

> You probably don’t remember from a post almost two years ago, but I already implemented generation of temperature, wind and precipitation patterns, and inferred the local climate from those. That was still in C# on a spherical world though, so I dutifully started porting it all to Rust on a flat world.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Around The World, Part 27: Planting trees"

alexthehurst — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 14:58:03 +0000

I absolutely loved FrozenFractal’s Around the World hackathon pixel art game. It has really good gameplay and I find it pretty satisfying and absorbing for such a simple game.

I’ve been enjoying the blog posts about development of the larger Around the World; but it seems like the absolute opposite of a hackathon project. And that’s okay. But based on the pace of development it seems like there’s still plenty of time to wait for something playable.

New comment by alexthehurst in "The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years"

alexthehurst — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 02:45:51 +0000

But aren’t toasts fundamentally different by being intentionally designed not to block your work?

New comment by alexthehurst in "How to increase your surface area for luck"

alexthehurst — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 16:31:03 +0000

How can this be true? If my parents and spouse and friends were all hairdressers, I definitely would never pay for a haircut.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos"

alexthehurst — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 16:58:50 +0000

Still a supported feature! You can find it if you dig around in the menus long enough.

New comment by alexthehurst in "My 16-month theanine self-experiment"

alexthehurst — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 09:47:45 +0000

This would work! QR codes would be even more opaque.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Slack Is Down"

alexthehurst — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 01:07:42 +0000

Their status updates look clearly like AI-generated blurbs saying the same thing with varied phrasing, hour after hour. Thanks for the slop? I know writing status page updates is annoying, but “a human is paying attention to this” is the specific thing that status updates are trying to convey, so trying to get info from this page felt dispiriting today.

Edit: this would also explain why some details of the updates were nonsensical.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?"

alexthehurst — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:06:51 +0000

A “fifth” of alcohol is a 750ml bottle (about a fifth of a gallon). So someone drinking a fifth is drinking more like 15 shots.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon"

alexthehurst — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 01:13:20 +0000

> are people not taught this in school?

I agree about standardization, but I think this framing comes off as lacking empathy. Plenty of folks either

- Avoided the topic in school or put all their effort into other subjects

- Didn’t learn this in school—there are a wide variety of education systems across all the decades and distances that folks on this site may have grown up in

- Learned this in school, but a lifetime ago, and haven’t had a reason to revisit it. At a certain distance, your life experience and work experience massively overshadow what you learned in school.

Forgive the inference, but based on your recall of specific grading policies I would guess that your time in school is still near to you, or at least very important. It’s not that way for everyone.

(I am of course doggedly accurate with my unit abbreviations.)

[edit: list formatting]

New comment by alexthehurst in "A brief interview with Awk creator Dr. Brian Kernighan (2022)"

alexthehurst — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 21:21:15 +0000

This seems like a rather large claim that would benefit from some kind of supporting argument.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Start presentations on the second slide"

alexthehurst — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 15:32:44 +0000

Those execs sound like terrible communicators. It’s hard for me to imagine a colleague acting this way in real life.

New comment by alexthehurst in "The most backdoor-looking bug I've ever seen (2021)"

alexthehurst — Fri, 10 May 2024 13:41:14 +0000

Agreed entirely. The substitution in the article didn’t cause much inconvenience to the readers, even if it was new to them (it was new to me). But people sure seem to have an appetite for complaining about it rather than the substance of the article.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?"

alexthehurst — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 21:28:40 +0000

I recently got into it with my son. I bought an arena starter kit from Amazon and it came with two 60-card decks, which seemed to work pretty well in play against each other. I bought another one long – same result. No focus on the commander format at all. I would suggest that route.

New comment by alexthehurst in "Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere"

alexthehurst — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 23:32:39 +0000

Isn’t that the point of the parking requirement? If you don’t have room for enough parking to support the Thing, then you don’t have room to add the Thing to the neighborhood. Seems like the intended outcome.