Hacker News: dewitt

New comment by dewitt in "A silly diffuse shading model"

dewitt — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:19:02 +0000

The art style under "A Sillier Solution" [1] reminds me very much of the cover of Dragon Magazine #100, August 1985 [2].

[1] https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/media/a-silly-diffuse-shadin...

[2] https://archive.org/details/DragonMagazine260_201801/DragonM...

New comment by dewitt in "Apps SDK"

dewitt — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 19:13:02 +0000

> This means OAI won't need ads. Just rev share

If OpenAI thinks there’s sweet, sweet revenue in email and calendar apps, just waiting to be shared, their investors are in for a big surprise.

New comment by dewitt in "Zoox robotaxi launches in Las Vegas"

dewitt — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:54:38 +0000

> robotaxis are just electric bikes and scooters of 2025

Ubiquitous, and life changing for the millions of people who use them daily?

New comment by dewitt in "In the future all food will be cooked in a microwave"

dewitt — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 22:14:15 +0000

The microwave oven is a strange choice of metaphor here, considering that even now microwaves sell 100's of millions of units every year, are nearly ubiquitous in households in the western world, are present in nearly every commercial restaurant and kitchen outside fine dining, and reached $5m/year in sales in their first decade, $30m/yr in their second, and doubling basically every decade since, before finally reaching near 100% market penetration and plateauing around $15b year ever since.

I mean, I get the author's point not to over-hype AI, but the microwave oven is one of the most successful inventions in the past 100 years.

How about ... the Segway? I hear whole cities will be designed around them.

New comment by dewitt in "Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin"

dewitt — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 16:51:04 +0000

> Can use rust, go, or whatever compiled language you want and it'll probably be much more performant starting up than any interpreted language.

One additional bit of context is the person you’re replying to, simonw, is also the creator of Django, which at the time was the world’s defacto standard Python web framework, and was created at a time (2005) that long predates either Go (2009) or Rust (2012).

New comment by dewitt in "FDA Approves drug to treat pain without opioid effects"

dewitt — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 01:32:34 +0000

> "There's no reason for this to be a NYT link."

I respectfully disagree. The NYT paid the author, Gina Kolata, to research and write the story, which contains more details than just the press release alone, then used their platform to made the news widely available and thus helped people like me discover it.

As cynical as one may be about the state of contemporary journalism, I'd say that short articles like this are still something good that comes out of newspapers in 2025, and I hope it doesn't go away just yet.

New comment by dewitt in "How I program with LLMs"

dewitt — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 03:55:42 +0000

One interesting bit of context is that the author of this post is a legit world-class software engineer already (though probably too modest to admit it). Former staff engineer at Google and co-founder / CTO of Tailscale. He doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally.

His post reminds me of an old idea I had of a language where all you wrote was function signatures and high-level control flow, and maybe some conformance tests around them. The language was designed around filling in the implementations for you. 20 years ago that would have been from a live online database, with implementations vying for popularity on the basis of speed or correctness. Nowadays LLMs would generate most of it on the fly, presumably.

Most ideas are unoriginal, so I wouldn't be surprised if this has been tried already.

New comment by dewitt in "OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’"

dewitt — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 05:36:54 +0000

> “Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was.”

Not to take away from the rest of your points, but I thought Amazon only raised $8m in 1995 before their IPO in 1997. Very little venture capital by today’s standard.

New comment by dewitt in "Doctor Who theme: Ron Grainer (composer) Delia Derbyshire (musician, arranger)"

dewitt — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 18:28:29 +0000

It may please and amuse you that this fellow child of the 70's, growing up across the pond in Boston, could have written that exact same comment, nearly word for word. The impact of Doctor Who was truly global, and for many of us Americans, our first introduction to the BBC (as rebroadcast via PBS affiliates in the States) and to British culture in general.

New comment by dewitt in "Keras Core: Keras for TensorFlow, Jax, and PyTorch"

dewitt — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:43:05 +0000

From the announcement:

"We're excited to share with you a new library called Keras Core, a preview version of the future of Keras. In Fall 2023, this library will become Keras 3.0. Keras Core is a full rewrite of the Keras codebase that rebases it on top of a modular backend architecture. It makes it possible to run Keras workflows on top of arbitrary frameworks — starting with TensorFlow, JAX, and PyTorch."

Excited about this one. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Keras Core: Keras for TensorFlow, Jax, and PyTorch

dewitt — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:02:04 +0000

Article URL: https://keras.io/keras_core/announcement/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36682008

Points: 191

# Comments: 69

New comment by dewitt in "Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit"

dewitt — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 23:52:29 +0000

> "$25,000 was not enough money to retire on for sure, even in 1996."

$25,000 in 1996 is $42,000 in 2021.

Seems like a modest incentive for top tech talent, even back then.

* To respond to the comment below, the author had been working as a hardware systems engineer at headquarters for 10 years by 1996.

New comment by dewitt in "OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana"

dewitt — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 21:43:48 +0000

I’m the co-author and maintainer of the OpenSearch syndication protocol and I posted in support of reusing the name here: https://groups.google.com/g/opensearch/c/gi-iVJZgfdA

New comment by dewitt in "OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities"

dewitt — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 21:55:49 +0000

"Road directionality" being only 98.9% accurate seems to be a huge problem for a navigation app!

New comment by dewitt in "The Phrase “Kilroy Was Here” (2017)"

dewitt — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 01:28:23 +0000

Not Vonnegut to my knowledge, but Pynchon in _V_.

New comment by dewitt in "Expanding Fuchsia's open source model"

dewitt — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 19:47:50 +0000

Yay! Welcome back!

New comment by dewitt in "EXoDOS: Collecting every game developed for DOS from original media"

dewitt — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 23:27:50 +0000

Public libraries have been a thing since the 1800's, which are equally amazing in terms of bringing tremendous impact to millions of people who wouldn't have otherwise had that benefit.

The key different of course is that mid-80's DOS software is more-or-less obsolete and abandoned for a reason (the computer history community notwithstanding, of which I'm a part), whereas public libraries are filled with books that still retain almost as much value as they day they were written.

New comment by dewitt in "House Hunting in France: A Once-in-a-Millennium Castle for $3.3M"

dewitt — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 23:30:19 +0000

14-bedroom, 11,000 sq. ft castle on 94 acres. Not too bad.

By way of comparison, this is what $3.3M buys you in SF: https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/2070-Beach-St-94123/...

New comment by dewitt in "Original Soviet Tetris on Big Iron How To (2017)"

dewitt — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 14:47:12 +0000

Neat project, unexpected title. I thought the PDP-11 (and the PDP line in general) was designed as an explicit alternative to "Big Iron", i.e. a minicomputer.

http://www.wolfgang-houben.de/faqpdp11.htm

New comment by dewitt in "Easy-wg-quick – Creates WireGuard configuration for hub and peers with ease"

dewitt — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 21:13:46 +0000

For those that find this interesting, I highly recommend Tailscale (https://tailscale.com).