Hacker News: chuckledog

New comment by chuckledog in "The Cartesian Hand: In-Hand Manipulation with All-Linear Fingers"

chuckledog — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:25:35 +0000

Reminds me a bit of the TARS robot from Interstellar. It was portrayed as a highly capable robot with limited articulation. (CASE too) https://interstellarfilm.fandom.com/wiki/Robot

New comment by chuckledog in "Historic Photos of NASA's Cavernous Wind Tunnels"

chuckledog — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:40:44 +0000

Some of this is still visible: https://maps.app.goo.gl/de6StyBysTMH2Xon8?g_st=ic

Nice website with Ames Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel history: https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-ames-unitary-plan-wind-tunnel/

New comment by chuckledog in "Rendezvous with Rama"

chuckledog — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:18:37 +0000

Anyone play the Apple II video game by Telerium? Slow, but it did evoke that sense of wonder https://youtu.be/ITxhoiXiXRY?si=n21imKGMjqyjmQld

New comment by chuckledog in "C –> Java != Java –> LLM"

chuckledog — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 05:50:32 +0000

> “As an aside, I think there may be an increased reason to use dynamic interpreted languages for the intermediate product. I think it will likely become mainstream in future LLM programming systems to make live changes to a running interpreted program based on prompts.”

Curious whether the author is envisioning changing configuration of running code on the fly (which shouldn’t require an interpreted language)? Or whether they are referring to changing behavior on the fly?

Assuming the latter, and maybe setting the LLM aspect aside: is there any standard safe programming paradigm that would enable this? I’m aware of Erlang (message passing) and actor pattern systems, but interpreted languages like Python don’t seem to be ideal for these sorts of systems. I could be totally wrong here, just trying to imagine what the author is envisioning.

New comment by chuckledog in "Selling numbered rocks, you get whatever's next in sequence"

chuckledog — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 03:39:35 +0000

What stack are you running? How do you guarantee sequential consistency of order numbers across your app server regions, cache layers and data lakehouse?

New comment by chuckledog in "Feasibility study of a mission to Sedna – Nuclear propulsion and solar sailing"

chuckledog — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:54:57 +0000

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_(dwarf_planet)

New comment by chuckledog in "PyTorch Internals: Ezyang's Blog"

chuckledog — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 15:59:16 +0000

Great article, thanks for posting. Here’s a nice summary of automatic differentiation, mentioned in the article and core to how NN’s are implemented: https://medium.com/@rhome/automatic-differentiation-26d5a993...

New comment by chuckledog in "Gleam, Coming from Erlang"

chuckledog — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 07:51:12 +0000

Compelling video!

New comment by chuckledog in "Distributed Systems Programming Has Stalled"

chuckledog — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 17:10:12 +0000

Great point. Erlang is still going strong, in fact WhatsApp is implemented in Erlang

New comment by chuckledog in "Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems"

chuckledog — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 06:56:54 +0000

Yes StarCon2 / Masters of Urquan also hold up really well

Ask HN: What are you running for .windsurfrules?

chuckledog — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 15:53:39 +0000

Adding the following .windsurfrules file has saved me alot of frustration and time. I'm interested to hear what other Windsurf users are running:

  Use uv for package management instead of pip.
  When tests pass, and there are significant changes to the codebase, commit changes to git.
  Save each user prompt to a file in the prompts directory.

What is .windsurfrules? I got tired of yelling at my Windsurf prompt to "git commit your changes" (like I yell at my kids to brush their teeth each night). Didn't realize my previous prompt fell out of the context window every few code exchanges. It (the AI) calmly informed me that what "Memories" are for. They can alternately be stored in global_rules.md.

What is Windsurf? It's a code assistant similar to Cursor and Devin, available as a VSCode fork for a monthly fee. More info (and a couple of prompts): https://github.com/ichoosetoaccept/awesome-windsurf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026575

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by chuckledog in "Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024"

chuckledog — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 15:16:20 +0000

This. My new Samsung T7 SSD overheated and took 4T of kinda priceless family photos with it. Thank you Backblaze for storing those backups for us! I missed the return window on the SSD so now have a little fan running to keep the thing from overheating again

New comment by chuckledog in "Show HN: Asterogue, my sci-fi roguelike, is now playable on the web"

chuckledog — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 15:20:46 +0000

You have to go into your inventory to use/consume the items. It’s very nicely done.

New comment by chuckledog in "Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid"

chuckledog — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 16:07:42 +0000

Just another plus one for cast-iron pans and wooden spatulas. We’ve been using those for over a decade, 20 bucks each, never needs replacing, works for everything.

We switched from gas stove to induction and now they work even better since the handle doesn’t get as hot and it’s easier to control the temperature.

The whole seasoning thing is extra credit, the only failure mode I’ve seen is trying to fry an egg on a completely unseasoned pan, which just means some extra soaking and scrubbing is needed. The pan seasons itself after a few uses. Hand wash the pan instead of sticking it in the dishwasher, done.

New comment by chuckledog in "One Square Minesweeper"

chuckledog — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 04:46:21 +0000

Finally a game superior to Flappy Bird. Bravo!

New comment by chuckledog in "Cell-Based Architecture Enhances Modern Distributed Systems"

chuckledog — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 04:48:06 +0000

According to Alan Kays 1971 description of Smalltalk:

“An object is a little computer that has its own memory, you send messages to it in order to tell it to do something. It can interact with other objects through messages in order to get that task done.”

Smalltalk concepts heavily informed the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) tenets, e.g.

1. Services are autonomous - Cohesive single responsibility.

2. Services have explicit boundaries - Loosely coupled, owns its data and business rules.

Choosing good service boundaries is really crucial for a successful, resilient, maintainable system.

There’s a nice synopsis at https://hemantkumar.net/services-microservices-bounded-conte... (2015)

“Cells” seems like the same thing but it’s IMO a nicer word for it.

New comment by chuckledog in "It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word"

chuckledog — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 16:32:15 +0000

GitHub, especially filtered by starred repos, is a pretty high quality dataset.

New comment by chuckledog in "Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models"

chuckledog — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 03:20:37 +0000

Ada Lovelace is my grandma

New comment by chuckledog in "Radar evidence of accessible Moon cave conduit below Mare Tranquillitatis pit"

chuckledog — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 04:53:47 +0000

Interesting deck that shows moon caves are not a new concept at all. I’m surprised this hasn’t shown up in more sci-fi movies by now… slides 11 and 16 are quite compelling!

Now how do we know there isn’t anyone there already… ;)

New comment by chuckledog in "Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out"

chuckledog — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 03:17:23 +0000

We (the tech community) have spent 10+ years “growth hacking” entire populations, scaling up the web backends and personal devices capable of connecting that relentless growth into “users’ attention”. All that attention has to come from somewhere. There are only so many hours in a day; more virtual = less RL, human attention is a zero sum game.