Hacker News: gdubs

New comment by gdubs in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

gdubs — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:39:57 +0000

As an American, I just want to say that I'm very dismayed by the discourse around this topic over the past 24 hours in particular. The polarization of politics has become so intense, that the bipartisan mainstream position of just a couple of decades ago – that immigrants are a net positive to this country – feels like a distant dream.

We've gone from perpetually punting the football on comprehensive immigration reform, to people saying, "Good, go back home, we don't want you here."

The same people who want to paint the Statue of Liberty gold seem to have no clue what it represents.

Apple Design Awards – 2026 Finalists

gdubs — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:40:36 +0000

Article URL: https://developer.apple.com/design/awards/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182790

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by gdubs in "HantaWatch Real time hantavirus outbreak tracker"

gdubs — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:57:22 +0000

Because absent more evidence we don't yet know if this is a different variant of the Andes virus than the one people have had experience with. A lot hinges on whether this flight attendant is hospitalized out of an abundance of caution, or something entirely unrelated. But given that they came into relatively brief contact with an infected person, it would be significant if somehow she contracted it. A lot of people disembarked and went to various parts of the world. Combined with a long incubation period, that's a lot of guessing.

New comment by gdubs in "HantaWatch Real time hantavirus outbreak tracker"

gdubs — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:54:26 +0000

Most of the public messaging I see is basically "please don't stop shopping, flying, or going to restaurants."

New comment by gdubs in "WTF Are Metaballs?"

gdubs — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:52:17 +0000

Oh that's interesting because I would have assumed the demoscene stuff would have done some kind of direct signed distance field rendering and skipped the marching cubes part.

And yea I remember the patent being in effect for so many years. The Spore creators got around it by using the "ear clipping" algorithm.

Negative Metaballs are really fun — included them in our app I mentioned at the end of the video. But they date all the way back to Blinn's paper!

New comment by gdubs in "WTF Are Metaballs?"

gdubs — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 06:45:35 +0000

Ah, this is amazing thank you. I had dug and dug for some demoscene examples for the video. It turned out to be quite difficult to find many of these sources, especially the early Japanese stuff.

Despite having recently done a video on The Connection Machine, the Links-1 was new to me – and I basically did a double take to learn that they had this parallel ray-tracing super computer back then. Sadly, there's not a ton of documentation beyond a couple of brief papers.

Thanks for watching!

WTF Are Metaballs?

gdubs — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 06:22:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW03EEKjy9o

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907873

Points: 2

# Comments: 5

The Forest Service–A Force Across Rural America–"Reorganizes" Under Trump

gdubs — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:21:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-forest-service-a-force-across-rural-america-reorganizes-under-trump

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706461

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

New comment by gdubs in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

gdubs — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:11:25 +0000

Uploading 15 minute videos to YouTube, downloading hundreds of gigabytes of 3D assets, updating large applications, streaming movies for a 4k projector, frequently downloading beta OS updates, etc, etc, etc.

New comment by gdubs in "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

gdubs — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:47:20 +0000

Congrats, you've killed the idea in its infancy because you demanded answers to questions before it could even walk.

Ideas need time to be explored, and given a chance.

New comment by gdubs in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

gdubs — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:19:17 +0000

I really enjoyed it! Actually read it to my kids as a bedtime book, and although it was pretty advanced for them, they really stayed with it. Really too bad he's not around anymore.

New comment by gdubs in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

gdubs — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:27:07 +0000

Thanks! My primary source for this was Carl Sagan's book "A Pale Blue Dot" IIRC — don't have the folder in front of me to double check, but fairly certain.

Edit: found it!

Here's the excerpt. According to Sagan they sent these instructions up. Given his details on what had to be done to boost the signal upload, it sounds like this really did happen:

"...while taking a photograph of a street scene from a moving car. This may sound easy, but it's not: You have to neutralize the most innocent of motions. At zero gravity, the mere start and stop of the on-board tape recorder can jiggle the spacecraft enough to smear the picture.

This problem was solved by sending up commands to the spacecraft's little rocket engines (called thrusters), machines of exquisite sensitivity. With a little puff of gas at the start and stop of each data-taking sequence, the thrusters compensated for the tape-recorder jiggle by turning the entire spacecraft just a little.

To deal with the low radio power received at Earth, the engineers devised a new and more efficient way to record and transmit the data, and the radio telescopes on Earth were electronically linked together with others to increase their sensitivity. Overall, the imaging system worked, by many criteria, better at Uranus..."

New comment by gdubs in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

gdubs — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:20:26 +0000

One of my favorite stories about the Voyager mission was how they wanted to grab photos of the outer planets but the click of the tape drive was enough to ruin the long exposures. I made a YouTube short about it a while back:

https://youtube.com/shorts/fssIy-wQisA?si=_HM1fgZKGFfaxWhc

New comment by gdubs in "This AI Supercomputer was 30 years too early [video]"

gdubs — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:19:34 +0000

Thank you so much! Even though I knew a bunch about the Connection Machine when I started making this, I learned so many new details doing the research for it.

"Surely you're Joking, Mr Feynman" was a great read.

This AI Supercomputer was 30 years too early [video]

gdubs — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 01:07:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaNuVR75cwY

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497414

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

See around you: panoramic videos using Apple's QuickTime VR (1995)

gdubs — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:49:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.halfhill.com/byte/1995-5_see-you.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298781

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by gdubs in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

gdubs — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:06:13 +0000

The annoying thing about corporate hiring practices is – speaking from experience – some of us would have loved your answer. But then it goes to committee and someone's like, "this iOS engineer doesn't know any javascript, and I'm an expert in javascript, so I'm a 'no'."

New comment by gdubs in "MacBook Neo"

gdubs — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:56:27 +0000

As I see my kids bring home Chromebooks from school, it has made me recently nostalgic for the Apple of the 90s in terms of their presence in education. Using my Science teacher's Performa to play Sim Ant after we finished our assignments, (or Oregon Trail before that on the lab of Apple IIs) – not to mention HyperCard, etc.

Anyway, updating my priors a bit with this Neo laptop. This feels like it could maybe spark some renewed excitement over Apple as a student / classroom device. If nothing else, the price makes it more of an option.

New comment by gdubs in "GPT‑5.3 Instant"

gdubs — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:21:57 +0000

The quote in this case is because "cringe" is what many online have been calling it. So, they're actually quoting a very common critique.

New comment by gdubs in "Don't become an engineering manager"

gdubs — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:19:10 +0000

There's a wide variance, but there's been a lot of 'title inflation' over the past decade that has more to do, I think, with giving people incentives when they don't want to stretch the equity package any further.