Hacker News: blt

New comment by blt in "Show HN: 18 Words"

blt — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:25:56 +0000

UI does not register quick taps on iphone 15p duckduckgo browser

New comment by blt in "Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents"

blt — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:15:46 +0000

Seaborn is already a nice high level semantic plotting interface. I suppose it doesn't target HTML output in a web app, but its main API is very declarative, one big function call with detailed kwargs. A port to JS seems possible

New comment by blt in "Drone Physics"

blt — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 22:14:08 +0000

One can predict forces involved in landing for specific hardware using machine learning, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.08027.

New comment by blt in "There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days"

blt — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:11:13 +0000

They both work great. The MUSIC in Facing Worlds is amazing! I wasn't old enough to fully appreciate good electronic music back then :)

New comment by blt in "There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days"

blt — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:14:15 +0000

There was a spirited debate about Quake III Arena versus Unreal Tournament. Both were praised, but UT had more creativity in game modes (Assault, Domination) and weapons, better bot AI, and more polished sound/art assets. Reading the Gamespot reviews (below) is fun.

Each had standout maps that made you want to own both, such as Q3A's Longest Yard and UT's Facing Worlds. I ended up playing more hours of UT because I had slow internet and its bots were better.

Point being: Q3A was great, but in 1999 it became clear that id Software had lost their head start over other FPS developers. They were still elite, but in the early-mid 90s they were alone at the top.

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/quake-iii-arena-review/1900...

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/unreal-tournament-review/19...

New comment by blt in "Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk"

blt — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 05:56:10 +0000

ROS sucks, good move. Too complicated

New comment by blt in "Kirkland Roundabouts"

blt — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:12:57 +0000

I have a conspiracy theory that these unnecessary projects to replace intersections with roundabouts in small/midsize towns are driven by kickbacks from the contractor to the city council.

New comment by blt in "GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis"

blt — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:48:42 +0000

There's only one GLM in my heart: the one that includes vec3.hpp

New comment by blt in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

blt — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 23:57:34 +0000

Not relative to its available resources. For example, there's still no option to penalize intersections. I'm still getting absurd side-street routes and unprotected lefts/crossings to save 1 minute on a 20-minute trip.

New comment by blt in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

blt — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:27:16 +0000

For me, it's hard to imagine him giving up the printed newspaper strip's connection to the physical world. Calvin and Hobbes is filled with references to the basic elements of physical reality: dirt, rocks, water, snow, speed, collisions, temperature, light, sound. Webcomics exist in a world of pure information.

New comment by blt in "What every coder should know about Gamma Correction"

blt — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:40:20 +0000

I wonder why we use something polynomial-based instead of something exponential-based like the decibel scale?

Ask HN: Did your (non-AI) research field get less fun after commercialization?

blt — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:42:27 +0000

I've been in AI research since the mid-2010s. Post-AlexNet, but to me the field still felt fun and exciting. Nobody knew if what we were attempting was even possible.

After ChatGPT, many "could be impossible" problems have been solved. I should be happy! But I feel the fun has been sucked out of AI research. Everything is about economic impact. Academic labs can't afford GPUs. Big companies are pushing my field's output on people who don't want it.

My question is: If you worked in a different field that transitioned from blue-sky to commercial, did you also feel this? Why or why not?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48544651

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by blt in "Zig Structs of Arrays (2024)"

blt — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:11:13 +0000

After that build-up, I was hoping to see a toy implementation of a method or two for `MultiArrayList`.

New comment by blt in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

blt — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:19:08 +0000

My interpretation leans towards: Gmail Thinks I'm Lazy.

LLMs have made one thing clear: intellectual laziness is even more pervasive than we previously thought, even among "knowledge workers".

New comment by blt in "Stop Ruining It"

blt — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:15:42 +0000

Sound systems do have an omnipresent "only as good as your weakest link" feeling.

A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.

New comment by blt in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

blt — Sat, 30 May 2026 01:51:55 +0000

California is among the US states with the highest income inequality.

New comment by blt in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

blt — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:56:49 +0000

All technology, no matter how undesirable it once felt, eventually becomes nostalgic for somebody.

New comment by blt in "Gemini Omni"

blt — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:52:32 +0000

It's funny how they specifically use the phrase "output that follows real-world physics" to describe the marble rolling video. At the end of the zigzag track, the marble jumps up for no reason. In a couple of other places it speeds up with no apparent energy source. It's still an amazing result, but they could have picked a better example for this claim!

New comment by blt in "California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy"

blt — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:03:58 +0000

Agree. California peaches are horrible. Southern peaches (Georgia, Carolinas) are indescribably better.

I love California, but it's funny/sad the extent to which many Californians deny that other parts of the USA have us beat in some regards.

New comment by blt in ""Parse, don't validate" through the years with C++"

blt — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:47:53 +0000

I'm not a Haskell programmer, but from my limited awareness: Wouldn't they want to encode the restriction that April 31 doesn't exist directly in the type system instead of using raw integers for the underlying struct?