Hacker News: fogleman

New comment by fogleman in "Beating myself at chess"

fogleman — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 22:55:33 +0000

I'm just here to comment on the CGA color palette on this website, lol.

I always hated that video mode, but it looks good here when the magenta and cyan are limited just to links and headers!

New comment by fogleman in "You can't design software you don't work on"

fogleman — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 16:55:28 +0000

> The kinds of topic being discussed are not "is DRY better than WET", but instead "could we put this new behavior in subsystem A? No, because it needs information B, which isn't available to that subsystem in context C, and we can't expose that without rewriting subsystem D, but if we split up subsystem E here and here..."

Hmm, sounds familiar...

Bingo knows everyone's name-o

Papaya & MBS generate session tokens

Wingman checks if users are ready to take it to the next level

Galactus, the all-knowing aggregator, demands a time range stretching to the end of the universe

EKS is deprecated, Omega Star still doesn't support ISO timestamps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

New comment by fogleman in "Scientists discover beer bottle in the Mariana Trench (2024)"

fogleman — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:50:58 +0000

Presumably it was open & empty, so it's just a piece of glass surviving...

New comment by fogleman in "Calendar"

fogleman — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:00:01 +0000

Probably depends on your printer. And you should be able to adjust margins in the print setup.

New comment by fogleman in "Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them"

fogleman — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 21:05:21 +0000

That's just what they call it in British English, and this is a BBC article.

New comment by fogleman in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

fogleman — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 16:17:02 +0000

I know it wasn't ill-intended, but my answer is largely the same. I like the idea of using SDFs to define models and this was just a fun little side project. And FWIW, my project predates build123d.

New comment by fogleman in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

fogleman — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 16:14:59 +0000

Indeed it does. Looks like their recent dev builds are way better. Good to know.

New comment by fogleman in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

fogleman — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:15:30 +0000

I see you still haven't read the README.

New comment by fogleman in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

fogleman — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:51:18 +0000

I just tried this in OpenSCAD and it crashed:

intersection() { import("3DBenchy.stl"); sphere(30); }

New comment by fogleman in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

fogleman — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:36:28 +0000

It's explained in the README. The SDF is evaluated on whole batches of points (32x32x32 tiles by default) using numpy. (And it's multithreaded.)

New comment by fogleman in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

fogleman — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 23:37:30 +0000

It seems like you already understand the differences. I wasn't aware of those other projects. build123d looks pretty neat.

Like most of my projects, this was just for fun and I mainly made it for myself. I'm a DIY kind of guy when it comes to software. I just throw things up on GitHub in case anyone else can get some use or inspiration out of it.

New comment by fogleman in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

fogleman — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 21:30:42 +0000

That feature requires getting pyopenvdb installed, which can be a headache, and I never really updated the README with examples, but it does work. There is one example script:

https://github.com/fogleman/sdf/blob/main/examples/mesh.py

You basically just say:

f = Mesh.from_file(path).sdf(voxel_size=0.25, half_width=1)

Then you can operate on `f`.

New comment by fogleman in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

fogleman — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 20:24:50 +0000

It is kinda neat, but OpenSCAD's limitations are the main thing that motivated me to write this Python library to generate 3D meshes used signed distance functions:

https://github.com/fogleman/sdf

One big plus to doing it this way is that it's "just" Python and you can use arbitrary logic to help construct your model.

You can even load an existing 3D mesh and operate on it as an SDF. Great for hollowing, chopping, eroding/dilating, etc. existing models.

I should probably do more with this project. I think there's a lot of interest in this space.

New comment by fogleman in "Ask HN: Who here is not working on web apps/server code?"

fogleman — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 21:03:21 +0000

I work on 3D printing algorithms at Formlabs. Lots of computational geometry.

New comment by fogleman in "How geometry is fundamental for chess"

fogleman — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:06:06 +0000

Kinda disappointing article. Not much substance regarding the link between geometry and chess, as suggested by the title.

> Shapes are hypothesized to be formed by a programming language in the brain.

And what does this even mean? What does it mean for there to be a "programming language" in the brain?

New comment by fogleman in "Most technical problems are people problems"

fogleman — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:16:51 +0000

Yes, you are describing a "people problem"...

New comment by fogleman in "Raycore: GPU accelerated and modular ray intersections"

fogleman — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 02:47:00 +0000

Any benchmarks against embree?

New comment by fogleman in "Marble Fountain"

fogleman — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 02:21:28 +0000

What did you not like about the SolidPython2 / OpenSCAD approach? What would you want from a different "3D engine" for this?

New comment by fogleman in "Vibe Coding in the 90s"

fogleman — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 01:53:20 +0000

This is so good, and based on some of these comments I don't think everyone is quite getting it.

New comment by fogleman in "Good Writing"

fogleman — Sat, 24 May 2025 16:27:06 +0000

Possible counterpoint: LLMs are notoriously good at writing plausible sounding ideas that are wrong.