Hacker News: ghusbands

New comment by ghusbands in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

ghusbands — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 11:44:36 +0000

Do you posit that there are enough examples of 30x8 ellipses encoded in braille online for ChatGPT to learn from but not 31x7 or 31x9 ellipses? That seems unlikely.

New comment by ghusbands in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

ghusbands — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:22:45 +0000

They lost me a little before then - Claude Code's regressions were so very obvious and there's no sign they've learned their lesson in this article or in the comments of those who work on Claude Code on HN. They'll continue to tweak and generally mess around with a product people are using, altering the behaviour without notice in ways that can severely impact use, for months! GPT5.4 has been remarkably consistent and capable, as a replacement. I've cancelled my max plan.

New comment by ghusbands in "MuJoCo – Advanced Physics Simulation"

ghusbands — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:52:48 +0000

In the video in question, he doesn't seem able to choose a good scoring function for the stochastic solver (even over multiple weeks), seemingly choosing a linear sum of distances (see 8:50) between simulation and reality. That's a mistake that not even an undergraduate should make. He needs some domain experts.

New comment by ghusbands in "A Python Interpreter Written in Python"

ghusbands — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:05:45 +0000

Partly, it's simply that words matter. An interpreter is not a compiler, even if partial evaluators and Futamura transforms are very cool. Posting about them in a context that isn't a confusion about what interpreters are may have been more fruitful.

New comment by ghusbands in "A Python Interpreter Written in Python"

ghusbands — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:28:41 +0000

Yes, that's another great example of the same kind of thing - creating a JIT from an interpreter. It remains true that interpreters do not directly generate machine code.

New comment by ghusbands in "A Python Interpreter Written in Python"

ghusbands — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:44:44 +0000

That's a partial evaluator, not an interpreter, and it converts an interpreter into compiler, which are different things.

New comment by ghusbands in "A Python Interpreter Written in Python"

ghusbands — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:42:09 +0000

This is still incorrect. A bytecode interpreter, as its name indicates, interprets a bytecode. Typically, compiling a bytecode to native machine code is the work of a JIT compiler.

New comment by ghusbands in "Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms – Moncef Abboud"

ghusbands — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:04:52 +0000

It has DEFLATE code, Snappy code, LZ4 code, ZSTD exploration, and describes many involved sub-algorithms, with diagrams - what more were you wanting?

New comment by ghusbands in "Servo is now available on crates.io"

ghusbands — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:38:43 +0000

I wonder why most of the "g" characters are cropped.

New comment by ghusbands in "Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)"

ghusbands — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:04:11 +0000

True, but that’s using “effects” in a broader sense than people seem to mean here. The discussion seems to be about the visible effects the audience experiences as effects, and whether those age well, not invisible digital cleanup, compositing, or set extension.

New comment by ghusbands in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

ghusbands — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:55:27 +0000

Even with high effort, the adaptive thinking can just choose no thinking. See bcherny's post they were replying to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668520

New comment by ghusbands in "A Recipe for Steganogravy"

ghusbands — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:14:30 +0000

Steganography is (hopefully invisibly) hiding information in an image, not creating an image that so obviously encodes information.

New comment by ghusbands in "The future of version control"

ghusbands — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:09:43 +0000

A common misconception is that git works with diffs as a primary representation of patches, and that's the implied reading of "stores diffs". Yes, git uses diffs as an optimisation for storage but the underlying model is always that of storing whole trees (DAGs of trees, even), so someone talking about it storing diffs is missing something fundamental. Even renames are rederived regularly and not stored as such.

However, context would matter and wasn't provided - without it, we're just guessing.

New comment by ghusbands in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ghusbands — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 07:19:58 +0000

Yes, once you use 'unsafe' to bypass the safety model, you don't get safety.

Edit: If you reply with a reply, rather than edits, you don't get such confusion.

New comment by ghusbands in "The first new compass since 1936"

ghusbands — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:32:01 +0000

The comments on this site (HN) may be what most people are talking about. Youtube comments are too easily censored, so they probably will never manage to stick around.

New comment by ghusbands in "OLED, Not for Me"

ghusbands — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:22:31 +0000

I would probably see text quality issues on that setup. It depends on how far away the monitor is. PPI on phone screens tends to be much higher than PPI on laptops which tends to be higher than PPI on monitors, because each is typically used at a different distance.

If you're not using text around 9 pixels tall, as in the article, you're probably going to be okay. On a 27 inch screen at a typical office screen distance, I'd probably want 6k, but 4k is pretty good and 1080p is terrible.

New comment by ghusbands in "OLED, Not for Me"

ghusbands — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:04:49 +0000

In my experience, it seems to. My astigmatism (or other eye stuff) seems to move different colours different amounts, leading to wider RGB pixels and making things like Cleartype so much worse. So people were enjoying Cleartype and I was hating the obvious colour-changes and fringes that somehow they weren't seeing. I assume some people are lucky enough to have aberrations that actually make cleartype more pleasant.

New comment by ghusbands in "OLED, Not for Me"

ghusbands — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 14:17:03 +0000

It's not like the Cleartype tuner actually does what the pages claim - you can go through and use the magnifier to choose the grayscale-only outcomes and still see Windows doing RGB stripe cleartype throughout. People literally have to install third-party tools like MacType or GDI-PlusPlus to get solid font rendering. So blaming users for using it wrong (especially when they're not even on Windows) is odd.

Also, many people can see and are bothered by particular non-rectangular pixel layouts - it doesn't require doing odd things.

New comment by ghusbands in "Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold hands-on"

ghusbands — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 14:04:43 +0000

I had the same experience (Z Fold 4, screen protector at hinge broke at the five month mark - I replaced it with a third-party one to avoid a long repair period and another such breakage - the screen itself is now faulty at just beyond the two year mark).

If anyone were to buy a modern Samsung folding phone, I'd suggest you make sure you get the two-year coverage for the screen and assume it will break soon after that, so treat it like you're going to buy one every 2-3 years. But remember that warranty repairs sometimes involve sending the phone away for weeks, and Android's phone transfer story is still incomplete. That's merely my experience, of course.

New comment by ghusbands in "The first new compass since 1936"

ghusbands — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:11:17 +0000

The inhibition of movement via eddy currents works best while the needle is moving fast, so you can still end up with smaller oscillations for a while - the apparent jump-cut to a stationary needle could be hiding that.

It's far easier to just use a compass with a needle brake - manually dampen the oscillation using the brake (and let go to ensure you aren't holding an incorrect reading) and you get a reading quickly.