Hacker News: boscillator

New comment by boscillator in "Emacs Is a Lispboard"

boscillator — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:39:37 +0000

> Suppose I want to work in a single place for all my contexts, both personal and professional.

This has always been my problem with adopting Emacs or Obsidian or any other app that purports to do this. Who are y'all working for that you can bring professional stuff onto the same system as personal stuff? I don't want my personal emails on my work computer, and my boss would be rather upset if I brought work emails onto my personal computer. I'd love one of these do everything apps that lets me tag and sync just stuff that ought to be synced.

New comment by boscillator in "DOGE is done. What happened to its records?"

boscillator — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:52:04 +0000

Oops, thanks. Stupid dyslexia.

Yah, the government has a big problem with trying to do big upgrades when a ship-of-theseus would work. I suspect this can be traced all the way up to how congressional appropriations work and the acquisitions/sustainment distinction, in addition to usual resume-engineering and second-system-syndrome.

New comment by boscillator in "DOGE is done. What happened to its records?"

boscillator — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:53:20 +0000

Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term.

*edit: spelling

New comment by boscillator in "TLS certificates for internal services done right"

boscillator — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:02:47 +0000

The real answer here is that configuring HTTPS clients to trust a self-signed cert (or signed by an internal CA) shouldn't be as difficult as it is. I find it extremely annoying that every programming language has it's own idea of where certificates should live instead of just checking the os trust store.

New comment by boscillator in "Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck"

boscillator — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:55:55 +0000

> detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.

Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes. I suppose this could be an AI or automated response, but it's just as likely it's someone following the letter of the law without using any critical thought.

New comment by boscillator in "The Coming Loop"

boscillator — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:20:21 +0000

> the right fix is not "handle every malformed case." ... [LLMs] will still attempt to handle now impossible errors.

This is the number one code smell from LLMs and I don't know why they are so obsessed with it. In python, it often comes as `hasattr` checks on types that are defined to have that attribute, in a code base that is fully type-checked.

Why do they do that? Is it from pre-training or re-enforcement? If that latter, can the labs please fix this?

New comment by boscillator in "Show HN: Modeloop – From visual algorithms to microcontroller C code"

boscillator — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:24:28 +0000

Mostly unrelated, but what is going on with the "I specifically approve section ... of the terms and conditions" when you sign in without an account. Is this a new requirement somewhere?

Other than that, seems interesting! Simulink could always do with a competitor, although I'm always saying Simulink needs a text-based interface. Same signal flow programming model that supports scopes and continues time integrators, just with text instead of drag-and-drop.

New comment by boscillator in "RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon"

boscillator — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:58:34 +0000

> A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. - Akin's 20th law of spacecraft design

I always really enjoyed making a slick presentation. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to scope the hardest problem you are sure you can finish in 24hr while still having time to polish your presentation and make the app look good. I find picking a problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.

New comment by boscillator in "Dopamine Fracking"

boscillator — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:41:57 +0000

Huh, I've been to plenty of places were you could order it for an up charge and it came in it's own little bottle.

New comment by boscillator in "Security Envelope Pattern collection – S.E.C.R.E.T"

boscillator — Sun, 31 May 2026 13:52:51 +0000

Tomas Pynchon has much to say about this in The Crying of Lot 49.

New comment by boscillator in "GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation"

boscillator — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:05:58 +0000

They show up as the #2 ad spot when you search "register a domain" and most people don't know any better.

AI Follows the 80/20 Rule

boscillator — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:53:31 +0000

Article URL: https://buchanan.one/blog/ai-pareto-principal/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945861

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by boscillator in "Notice of collective action lawsuit against Workday, Inc."

boscillator — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:39:10 +0000

It will be fascinating to see the facts of this case, but if it is proven their algorithms are discriminatory, even by accident, I hope workday is held accountable. Making sure your AI doesn't violate obvious discrimination laws should be basic engineering practice, and the courts should help remind people of that.

Mistakes Programers Make with Euler Angles

boscillator — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:04:19 +0000

Article URL: https://buchanan.one/blog/rotations/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46718171

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Five Mistakes I've Made with Euler Angles

boscillator — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:25:34 +0000

Article URL: https://buchanan.one/blog/rotations/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707851

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by boscillator in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

boscillator — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:06:12 +0000

https://buchanan.one

New comment by boscillator in "Show HN: Play poker with LLMs, or watch them play against each other"

boscillator — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 23:32:03 +0000

No, I'm not super certain, but I believe most solvers are trained to be game theory optimal (GTO), which means they assume every other player is also playing GTO. This means there is no strategy which beats them in the long run, but they may not be playing the absolute best strategy.

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

boscillator — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:21:18 +0000

I wouldn't be so sure that writing those toolboxes is cheap. You need an aerospace engineer to write the aero toolbox, or you are going to miss subtleties. I assume you need a biologist to write the biology toolboxes. All of these domain experts are really expensive, and I would not trust a toolbox that hadn't been review by them.

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

boscillator — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 20:07:43 +0000

It doesn't seem to be the example here, but I know that X.transpose() does not work if X is a (3,) and not a (3,1), which is the common way to present vectors in numpy. MATLAB forcing everything to be at least rank-2 solves a bunch of these headaches.

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

boscillator — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:59:51 +0000

Interesting... I wrote a similar post about MATLAB's syntax a while ago, and I still think MATLAB is one of the best calculators on the market.

RunMat is an interesting idea, but a lot of MATLAB's utility comes from the toolboxes, and unless RunMat supports every single toolbox I need, I'm going to be reaching for that expensive MATLAB license over and over again.