Hacker News: boscillator

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.

New comment by boscillator in "It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts"

boscillator — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:41:12 +0000

Yah, it is very strange to equivocate using AI as a spell checker and a whole AI written article. Being charitable, they meant asking the AI re-write your whole post, rather than just using it to suggest comma placement, but as written the article seems to suggest a blog post with grammar errors is more Human™ than one without.

Using domain inspired ML for embedded DSP

boscillator — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 14:21:12 +0000

Article URL: https://buchanan.one/blog/micro-ml-transient-detector/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45158361

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by boscillator in "Uncertain"

boscillator — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 18:32:34 +0000

Does this handle covariance between different variables? For example, the location of the object your measuring your distance to presumably also has some error in it's position, which may be correlated with your position (if, for example, if it comes from another GPS operating at a similar time).

Certainly a univarient model in the type system could be useful, but it would be extra powerful (and more correct) if it could handle covariance.

New comment by boscillator in "We shouldn't have needed lockfiles"

boscillator — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:01:25 +0000

Ok, but what happens when lib-a depends on lib-x:0.1.4 and lib-b depends on lib-x:0.1.5, even though it could have worked with any lib-x:0.1.*? Are these libraries just incompatible now? Lockfiles don't guarantee that new versions are compatible, but it guarantees that if your code works in development, it will work in production (at least in terms of dependencies).

I assume java gets around this by bundling libraries into the deployed .jar file. That this is better than a lock file, but doesn't make sense for scripting languages that don't have a build stage. (You won't have trouble convincing me that every language should have a proper build stage, but you might have trouble convincing the millions of lines of code already written in languages that don't.)

New comment by boscillator in "The new literalism plaguing today’s movies"

boscillator — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 16:52:52 +0000

I'm glad you bring up Kojima, because I think he's a master of this New Literalism. I just watched my partner play Death Stranding 2, and it feels like every other cut-scene has an NPC turn to camera and explain the themes of the game. And I love it! And it doesn't detract from the games ability to express those themes through metaphor and game-play.

Obviously subtlety is good, but choosing to be very literal can be an interesting artistic take. I don't think Kojima was thinking about how to dumb-down his message for audiences. I think its a genuine artistic choice rooted in his style. While I didn't like it for other reasons, I think the same can be said for Megalopolis. I loved the scene were it's just a full screen interview with Catiline, even if it was kinda dumb.

There's probably something interesting about how both the ten thousandth grey-CGI marvel movie and these more experimental artists are drawn to hyper-literalism in the now, probably with some thoughts about the social internet thrown in. I'll have to think about it.

New comment by boscillator in "Show HN: TechBro Generator – Generate Satirical TechBro Posts"

boscillator — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 14:44:23 +0000

Ah, I thought they were a little too funny to be computer generated. Makes sense.

New comment by boscillator in "Teenage Engineering lets you pick what you want to pay for an OP-1 Field"

boscillator — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 17:52:00 +0000

Teenage Engineering has some really obnoxious marketing, but it seems to work. I mean, we're talking about then. Roland or Korg never make hacker news.

When Matlab Is Better

boscillator — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:03:19 +0000

Article URL: https://buchanan.one/blog/on-matlab/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43632953

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by boscillator in "Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI"

boscillator — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 16:47:21 +0000

I'm still mad at IBM for giving me one of those tests for an internship after 4 years. It required a lot of fast mental arithmetic, which is, medically speaking, not my strong suit. I thought the job was programming computers, not being the computer, but the test suggests otherwise.

I probably should have figured out how to request an ADA accommodation... oh well.