Hacker News: cgufus

New comment by cgufus in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

cgufus — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:41:51 +0000

I like the OP, very honest.

Here's my 2 cents: In life, like in economy, everything's about marginal utility. If you work 5 days a week and you reduce by one, you gain 50% (free/family/hobby) time, while reducing 20% of work time. In the lost 20% work time, would you have produced the corresponding amount of output? Or are you even more productive because you avoid unnecessary meetings etc.?

It's clear that being an involved parents doesn't allow you pulling all nighters all the time or work through weekends and doing additional sideprojects. Though I agree that without full involvement and ambition one will not achieve a top position or become a tennis superstar, I think a good mixture of all aspects (family/work/sports/friendships) makes everything much more worthwhile. And in my opinion, all involved parent parts should have their fair share of those aspects.

- Parent with partner both working part time, living in a country that allows for that, equally sharing child care for two that regularly make them crazy, but it's soo worth it.

New comment by cgufus in "LLMs reward expertise"

cgufus — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:28:26 +0000

This reminded me of Gaussian Processes. You start out with n-dimensional unconstrained (but strongly correlated) gaussians. As soon as constraints (data) are added (mathematically it's called conditioning), the thing goes more and more into shape.

Prompting feels a lot like this conditioning phase to me. You start with an LLM in unconstrained mode, basically just a "soup" of knowledge. If you prompt wisely, you immediately condition the LLM into "your space of (domain) knowledge".

What comes out is an extended version of your existing knowledge.

New comment by cgufus in "Online Spirograph Tool"

cgufus — Sat, 28 May 2022 12:11:09 +0000

Cool. Input to developer: offer gear numbers that are co-prime (or absolute primes) to each other. Results in maximum number of circles until you return to the original point.

New comment by cgufus in "[dead]"

cgufus — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 13:37:41 +0000

… and should be written in R due to conservation laws. :-)

New comment by cgufus in "A Computer Technique for Displaying N-Dimensional Hyperobjects (1967) [pdf]"

cgufus — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 09:07:57 +0000

Cool, Thanks. To me, 4-D rotation is completely “unpredictable” or “contraintuitive”, or both. I wonder, you as a developer of that visualization, did you get an intuition for it? do you know in advance how the projection changes when you apply one or the other rotation?

New comment by cgufus in "Boyfriend-alert – A light based alert system"

cgufus — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 13:51:45 +0000

Many many years ago I played a browser-based online game and I used curl and php for scripting the game. I eventually programmed an alert feature that woke me up (OS X: ‘say “Warning you are under attack”’) during the night when I was being attacked.

good old times :)

New comment by cgufus in "Using BeOS on a Power Mac (2001)"

cgufus — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 22:00:40 +0000

10.4 brought Spotlight 10.5 introduced Time Machine 10.6 cleaned everything up and added some stuff like Exchange Support. IMO the peak of Mac OS X. From then on, Focus was put on Social Media integration and data collecting services. Seems I‘m getting old an nostalgic.

New comment by cgufus in "Apple isn’t patching all the security holes in older versions of macOS"

cgufus — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 12:58:13 +0000

Even worse: Sierra. Ouch. 10 years ago I used to go for every upgrade immediately (even .0’s). IMO new versions since maybe 10.8 added mostly data collecting bloat. macOS moved far away from the OS I once loved (peaked at Snow Leopard IMO). Funnily, macOS became “free” after Snow Leopard, so you’ve probably paid with your data ever since.

New comment by cgufus in "I couldn't debug the code because of my name"

cgufus — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 05:18:32 +0000

hehe, did the same, although not with +, but using a catch-all feature of the provider. I still get a lot of spam and phishing attempts on my „dropbox@“ address. I faintly remember they (dropbox) had a breach some time in the past.

New comment by cgufus in "The First Rule of Machine Learning: Start Without Machine Learning"

cgufus — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 06:08:34 +0000

I fully agree with the article. One thing not mentioned, however probably assumed to be given: domain knowledge. A domain expert using simple methods will probably beat any decent ML model because they are able to define strong features.

New comment by cgufus in "BBEdit 14"

cgufus — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 20:51:26 +0000

I‘m reluctant to change over from TextWrangler to BBedit due to fear of loosing those unsaved „Untitled text 461“ documents.

Does anyone now if BBedit restores TextWrangler‘s untitled docs?

New comment by cgufus in "Why we're blind to the color blue"

cgufus — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 22:13:20 +0000

Interesting article and discussion.

I always wondered how the focusing actually works. It happens „automatically“, but what is involved? Are all cone types used for the focusing, or mostly the green-type ones? Or are there even special, dedicated cells for the focusing only? Does the control ober the muscle controlling the lens shape goes via the brain, or is there a more direct mechanism?

Is there an expert around to explain or give some links to explanations?

(as a side comment: as a teenager I learned to control the focus point to a certain degree. There were these pattern-3D images, „Magic Eye“, and since the perceived depth does not correspond to the actual distance of the image, they eye needs to correct. I guess the same applies to 3D cinema, and may well cause the eye strain reported by many)

New comment by cgufus in "Svgbob – Create a graphical representation of text diagrams"

cgufus — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 12:50:40 +0000

Has anyone tried to pipe ascii star wars through it?

New comment by cgufus in "Which Macs will be officially supported by macOS 12?"

cgufus — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 09:40:05 +0000

Do you have by chance instructions on how you put sierra in a VM? Which VM product do you use and how is the performance (especially GUI responsiveness)?

New comment by cgufus in "Windows 10 nagging users with Bing advertisements (push alerts)"

cgufus — Mon, 31 May 2021 09:49:29 +0000

Fully agree. And it still tells me that my iPhone setup is incomplete because I haven't set up Apple Pay yet.

New comment by cgufus in "Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)"

cgufus — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 14:41:19 +0000

When looking at the clustering, I'm asking myself if a density -based clustering algorithm (looking at you DB-Scan) would be also interesting. While loosing the "center color" information, the clusters could be used to replace the color with whatever color one wanted.

New comment by cgufus in "Linux, macOS, and Windows running simultaneously on a first gen Core i5"

cgufus — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 08:32:09 +0000

Do macOS guests also work on macOS hosts in QEMU/KVM? (e.g. run 10.12 Sierra inside qemu on a 10.14 Mojave host) if True: any Link to a tutorial? What about performance? Is it enough performant to run GUI Apps?

(I have tried Virtual Box but found it too slow for real work)

New comment by cgufus in "Zero click vulnerability in Apple’s macOS Mail"

cgufus — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 05:41:37 +0000

I can't find any information on the following questions:

Are all past versions of OS X / Apple Mail affected? For what OS X Version does Apple provide a security update regarding this issue? Has anyone found a fix that prevents auto-uncompression (such as a "defaults write com.apple.mail xyz False" command)?

Due to several reasons, I am also on an older Version of OS X and this issue makes me a bit nervous.

New comment by cgufus in "Numi – Calculator app for Mac"

cgufus — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:49:27 +0000

Cool. Has anyone tried to enter 1 barn-megaparsec [1] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_meas...

New comment by cgufus in "Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms: “This Destroys the RSA Cryptosystem.” [pdf]"

cgufus — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 08:12:28 +0000

"This Destroys the RSA Cryptosystem.” is a strong claim. I only have very base knowledge of RSA cryptosystems, integer factorization and the like. Especially I'm not into the math of pn-smooth integers etc. :-) Is there an expert here to comment on this, e.g. if this only applies to a subset of RSA parameters or if the the whole RSA-cryptosystem is affected?