Hacker News: blt

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?

New comment by blt in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

blt — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:36:31 +0000

Routing games like Mini Metro/Motorways, Freeways, and Fly Corp are not quite puzzle games in the traditional sense, but I'd definitely encourage any puzzle fans to try them.

New comment by blt in "The purist's guide to phở in Hanoi"

blt — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:19:27 +0000

I knew that adding sriracha and hoisin was considered somewhat gauche / insulting to the chef. But I was surprised to see no mention of Basil, since every pho shop in the USA provides it. Is that also nontraditional? I really like it...

New comment by blt in "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"

blt — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:14:12 +0000

In the dev branch now! https://asahilinux.org/2026/02/progress-report-6-19/

I will attempt to use Asahi as my daily driver once this is officially released.

New comment by blt in "State of Kdenlive"

blt — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:59:03 +0000

The title creator is bad... as a total amateur who needs to edit a video every now and then, it hurt me.

New comment by blt in "Python: The Optimization Ladder"

blt — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:45:16 +0000

yes of course, in my field the arrays are large and we're doing nontrivial work per element.

New comment by blt in "Python: The Optimization Ladder"

blt — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 15:07:02 +0000

Surprised Python is only 21x slower than C for tree traversal stuff. In my experience that's one of the most painful places to use Python. But maybe that's because I use numpy automatically when simple arrays are involved, and there's no easy path for trees.

New comment by blt in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

blt — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 14:59:38 +0000

For me it was worse, the headphone port on my phones always eventually failed. Maybe these rich people replace phones too quickly to experience that.

I use wired at home, where I'm not cycling the connection very much.

New comment by blt in "Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]"

blt — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:57:27 +0000

What makes this different from linking to a random zip file somewhere?

New comment by blt in "GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics"

blt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:50:32 +0000

And their predictions about Go were wrong, because they thought the algorithm would forever be α-β pruning with a weak value heuristic

New comment by blt in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

blt — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 21:34:08 +0000

An underrated aspect of Matlab is its call-by-value semantics. Function arguments are copied by default. Python+NumPy is call-by-reference; mutations to array arguments are visible to the caller. This creates a big class of bugs that is hard for non-programmers to understand.

New comment by blt in "Open-source Zig book"

blt — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 10:43:20 +0000

Clarity in writing comes mostly from the logical structure of ideas presented. Writing can have grammar/style errors but still be clear. If the structure is bad after translation, then it was bad before translation too.

New comment by blt in "I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it"

blt — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 01:25:06 +0000

Yes. Generative AI is bad. Most of the general population already realizes it. Only the tech and computer science bubble remains optimistic.

New comment by blt in "A visual introduction to big O notation"

blt — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 23:44:19 +0000

This needs to be refined: f(x) is O(g(x)) if there exists some X >= 0 such that f(x)/g(x) is bounded for all x > X.

Otherwise, we cannot say that 1 is O(x), for example.

New comment by blt in "A visual introduction to big O notation"

blt — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 18:33:15 +0000

The definition of big O notation is pure math - there is nothing specific to analysis of algorithms.

For example: "the function x^2 is O(x^3)" is a valid sentence in big-O notation, and is true.

Big O is commonly used in other places besides analysis of algorithms, such as when truncating the higher-order terms in a Taylor series approximation.

Another example is in statistics and learning theory, where we see claims like "if we fit the model with N samples from the population, then the expected error is O(1/sqrt(N))." Notice the word expected - this is an average-case, not worst-case, analysis.

New comment by blt in "Who Invented Backpropagation?"

blt — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 20:57:57 +0000

Yes, in most cases the reduction of supervised learning to optimal control is not interesting.

We can also reduce supervised learning to reinforcement learning, but that doesn't mean we should use RL algorithms to do supervised learning.

We can also reduce sorting a list of integers to SAT, but that doesn't mean we should use a SAT solver to sort lists of integers.

New comment by blt in "Honda conducts successful launch and landing of experimental reusable rocket"

blt — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 03:54:35 +0000

Awaiting the rocket engine equivalent of the K20.

New comment by blt in "Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination"

blt — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 07:01:47 +0000

tangentially, does anyone know a good way to limit web searches to the "low-background" era that integrates with address bar, OS right-click menus, etc? I often add a pre-2022 filter on searches manually in reaction to LLM junk results, but I'd prefer to have it on every search by default.