Hacker News: gmiller123456

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Rendering the Sky, Sunsets, and Planets"

gmiller123456 — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:02:09 +0000

I'm not sure if it was a deliberate omission or not, but it's worth pointing out in the Sunset model that the sky should not go black as soon as the Sun goes below the horizon as it does in the demo. The Sun will still be shining on the atmosphere above you, and in areas above your horizon for a considerable time after Sunset. There will still be a noticeable twilight (in Earth's atmosphere) until the Sun is 18 degrees below the horizon. It's probably not practical to implement using ray tracing, but there are common algorithms to model it.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms – Moncef Abboud"

gmiller123456 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:48:36 +0000

[Deleted]

New comment by gmiller123456 in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

gmiller123456 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:28:51 +0000

Appeals court decisions generally only apply to their own jurisdiction. But they obviously hold a lot of weight when cited in others.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "RSA and Python"

gmiller123456 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:08:33 +0000

One of the bigger hurdles in implementing RSA is having an algorithm which can multiply the large numbers in real time. If you try a niave multiplication algorithm, you might find you'll never get an answer. A lot of hardware now comes with special instructions which implement efficient algorithms for doing this.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Dune3d: A parametric 3D CAD application"

gmiller123456 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:03:13 +0000

I gave build123d a try about a year ago. I really wanted it to work, but it has a lot of issues, mainly in documentation. I'm going off memory here, and it's been a while, so maybe some of these have been fixed. One of the biggest issues is one of the fundamental classes (I want to say "Part") is not documented at all. And it's essentially the most important class. I tried enumerating all of the methods on the class, but didn't make much progress. Fillets were promising, but it seems once you've got a complex edge from a few operations it quits working, or at least did for my part. You're supposed to be able to do something like b=Box(10,10,10), then access the width as b.width, but all of those properties were always zero.

OpenSCAD supposedly supports Python now (https://pythonscad.org/), but I was not able to get it to work at all. I've fallen back to just OpenSCAD, even though it has limitations, at least I'm familiar with them. I'm mostly just waiting for improvements to anything that'll make it better than OpenSCAD.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Every single board computer I tested in 2025"

gmiller123456 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:11:08 +0000

Budget boards start at $42? Not really sure what the criteria was for being included, but it looks like you can still get a RPi 2B for $25. And Orange Pis are available for under $20.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Graphics Programming Resources"

gmiller123456 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:09:30 +0000

No. With the old style you had to draw every pixel, and you'd have to develop primitives for drawing a point, a line, or a triangle. With a GPU you essentially give the GPU a bunch of data and tell it to draw points, lines, or triangles for you. You then create "shaders" which are functions that the GPU calls to ask where to position a vertex, or what color to make a pixel, with some "magic" that passes data between the two. It's best understood by looking at the code for the almighty gradient triangle: https://webgpufundamentals.org/webgpu/lessons/webgpu-inter-s...

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Graphics Programming Resources"

gmiller123456 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:43:34 +0000

"Basic" is a relative term. Modern graphics GPUs do not work the same way memory mapped graphics do, and working with them is different at a fundamental level.

You are probably better off searching for old graphics programming books from the 90s. The code they have likely won't work, the the algorithms should be what you're looking for, and shouldn't be hard to adapt.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google"

gmiller123456 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:17:39 +0000

Sounds like great news. Users will eventually figure out other search engines produce more relevant results and Google's dominance will fade. Hopefully they never "fix" it.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines"

gmiller123456 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 20:19:37 +0000

The Mythbusters also tried it in the "Free Energy" episode. They pretty much said extracting any useful amount of energy is not worth the effort.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)"

gmiller123456 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:50:02 +0000

> Width and height are meaningless for inline elements

Really not sure what you're trying to get at there, obviously any element that displays will have a width and height. Maybe you meant a user specified width/height, but the entire point of my post is an inline-block is an inline element with a specifiable width and height. And we've always had the IMG tag, which is also an inline element with a specifiable width and height. The obvious and intuitive choice would have been to not put artificial limits on inline elements.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)"

gmiller123456 — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:23:36 +0000

What ever that "certain way" it's supposed to act, someone obviously wants it to act different if they set a height and width. Having to redefine the display time is a needless extra step that the user has to "just know" when the intention could easily be inferred.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)"

gmiller123456 — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:19:37 +0000

No, we don't learn CSS because it sucks. I have given up on the idea that I will ever be able to remember all of the rules and exceptions.

Just one example most people already know. If I set a height or width on an inline element, it's ignored. So, obviously there is a limitation in the renderer that can't do it. But wait, make it inline-block and suddenly it works! So why the f*k didn't it just honor the width and height to begin with? It's quite literally a rule for the sake of having a rule.

I don't doubt there is some deep dark reason for why it is the way it is, like optimizations, or backwards compatability, but it doesn't matter to the end user. It's an implementation detail they shouldn't have to bother with.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "One Formula That Demystifies 3D Graphics"

gmiller123456 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 18:08:08 +0000

It's a lot less about being discovered, or invented, and a lot more about the idea of using it at all. The Renaissance was a massive change in culture. Before that, art was a tool used in rituals or storytelling rather than something to be enjoyed on its own. There was more emphasis on reproducing things as they actually were than how they looked from a particular vantage point.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

gmiller123456 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 16:13:21 +0000

I really wish OpenSCAD had objects, so you could use something like box1.width rather than having to declare variables for such things.

I tried using Build123d, a Python library that lets you use all of the features of Python. And it's supposed to allow specifically things like box1.width, but it's always 0. Lots of other issues/bugs too, and severely lacking in ddocumentation.Maybe it'll get there some day.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

gmiller123456 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 16:07:12 +0000

Not sure about SDFs, but ray casting/tracing goes back a long way being used to design sundials thousands of years ago. A method of ray casting was published in the 1600s to show how to trace out the outline of the Moon on the Earth during a solar eclipse.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues"

gmiller123456 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:33:24 +0000

Don't forget the CloudStrike outage: One company had a bug that brought down almost everything. Who would have thought there are so many single points of failure across the entire Internet.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces"

gmiller123456 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:31:33 +0000

Too bad you're getting down voted because you're correct that congress is where the problem is. They could stop most of what he's doing, but choose not to.

But "Every check and balance is working" is clearly wrong.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press"

gmiller123456 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:21:05 +0000

Youtube pays them per (ad) view, and also recommends the video to more people based on how many people click on it. So giving people another way to watch it will decrease their revenue and audience.

New comment by gmiller123456 in "Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio (2024)"

gmiller123456 — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 15:40:17 +0000

I depends on the orbit. The low Earth ones would usually be de-orbited and fall back to Earth. The geosychronous ones are usually just moved to a parking orbit out of the way to make room for more. If it's in a high but not very crowded orbit, they might just stop using it.