Hacker News: groos

New comment by groos in "Clean code in the age of coding agents"

groos — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:41:52 +0000

The high level language -> assembly seems like an apt analogy for using LLMs but I would like to argue that it is only a weak one. The reason in that, previously, both the high level language and the assembly language had well defined semantics and the transform was deterministic whereas now you are using English or other human language, with ambiguities and lacking well-defined semantics. The reason math symbolisms were invented in the first place is because human language did not have the required unambiguous precision, and if we encounter hurdles with LLMs, we may need to reinvent this once more.

New comment by groos in "Revealed: Face of 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from cave"

groos — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:09:29 +0000

I wonder have the reconstruction techniques been verified by a double-blind experiment to reconstruct the face of a homo sapiens from a skull with a known photograph. Otherwise, you're just wondering how much of it is just artistry and how much solid, verified technique.

New comment by groos in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

groos — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:40:48 +0000

Here's one way to do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORDIC

New comment by groos in "Tony Hoare has died"

groos — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:22:07 +0000

I've had the good fortune to attend two of his lectures in person. Each time, he effortlessly derived provably correct code from the conditions of the problem and made it seem all too easy. 10 minutes after leaving the lecture, my thought was "Wait, how did he do it again?".

RIP Sir Tony.

New comment by groos in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

groos — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:00:29 +0000

I have a strict policy of no Meta glasses for guests in my house. Socially, they're poison.

New comment by groos in "Topological Naming Problem"

groos — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:37:49 +0000

My statement was accurate as of _when_ I moved away from FreeCad. I'm happy they merged the RealThunder work. But they dilly-dallied for a long time while people were demanding a fix and one was available. Doesn't speak well of their org politics.

New comment by groos in "Topological Naming Problem"

groos — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:36:14 +0000

Glad to hear it as I moved away before 1.0 happened. RealThunder had other enhancements as well, if I remember correctly. I wonder if those were taken up as well.

New comment by groos in "Topological Naming Problem"

groos — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:59:32 +0000

It's what caused me to move away from FreeCad to OnShape. Never had an issue in OnShape but got hit with it every time in FreeCad. The sad thing is that there was a fork for a long time which had addressed this problem, and added other nice enhancements as well, but they never merged that work. I guess every org has political problems and FreeCad is no exception.

New comment by groos in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

groos — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:29:37 +0000

Because Tesla Clown-in-Chief asked if humans could drive with just visual input, why can't a Tesla? C-in-C conveniently ignored that, to begin with, humans have binocular vision, and his cars had none. Also conveniently ignored were the facts that human eyes have immense dynamic range, are self-cleaning, and can move to track objects of interest. On top of this, humans also have hearing, which helps gauge danger. Many of these things could be filled in by Lidar but since C-in-C apparently had a revelation from heaven, possibly caused by drugs, lidar had to go.

New comment by groos in "Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)"

groos — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:28:53 +0000

In university, one year, our building started smelling like there had been a sewage overflow. Pretty soon, everything around started smelling like this - the stores, restaurants, cinema, etc. in central campus was stinking. It was soon found out that the decorative Ginko trees planted in the central part of campus were fruiting (probably for the first time since planting) and the fruit was getting crushed underfoot and carried everywhere. The smell took a few weeks to go away.

New comment by groos in "-fbounds-safety: Enforcing bounds safety for C"

groos — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:33:54 +0000

Microsoft's SAL annotations are meant to inform the static analyzer how the parameters are meant to be used so any violations of the contract can be diagnosed at compile time. The LLVM proposal is different in that it is checked at run time and will stop your program before it makes an out of bounds access. Static analyzers can obviously use the information in the type to help diagnose a subset of such problems at compile time.

New comment by groos in "Intermittent fasting may make little difference to weight loss, review finds"

groos — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:35:36 +0000

In a couple of days ~2 billion people world-wide will begin intermittent fasting, done from dawn to sunset, for a month, which is one of the components of the month of Ramadan. Nobody does this to lose weight, or even changes their diet, yet everyone loses some weight. 5lb is typical. Most people who fast Ramadan also gain it back afterward because they didn't make any changes to their diet, which points to the effectiveness of intermittent fasting to lose weight.

There is one difference between Ramadan fasting and modern intermittent fasting: Ramadan fasts are 'dry' fasts no water is imbibed and the alimentary canal stays completely unstimulated for long periods of time.

New comment by groos in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

groos — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:30:19 +0000

My 8 yo M3 has radar and it still is active since the yellow radar symbols light up when passing by obstacles. It's also used to figure out obstacles in the front and back and if disabled, the relatively poor cameras on my car would not be able to figure out the distance to the next car in the front.

New comment by groos in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

groos — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 01:48:55 +0000

What a non sequitur.

New comment by groos in "Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring"

groos — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:34:23 +0000

Deflation is never going to be allowed to happen even if economic conditions allow it. The reason that the Federal Reserve wants inflation at ~2% is so that nobody hoards cash in their home and instead spends it before it loses value or puts it in a bank to lend to the economy or invests it. Deflation would mean that you could hoard cash and it would grow in value, leading to less money available for economic growth.

New comment by groos in "The Supply Chain Nightmare Before Deployment"

groos — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:54:14 +0000

Storm in a teacup - wait, is tea Canadian or British?

New comment by groos in "The tiniest yet real telescope I've built"

groos — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:51:58 +0000

I looked but AliExpress makes it impossible to locate even specific sellers, like BohrOptics, who I found to have consistently good quality (bought a beam splitter and fused silica ball lenses from them).

New comment by groos in "AI is wiping out entry-level tech jobs, leaving graduates stranded"

groos — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:30:22 +0000

The death, maybe, but not the lack of hiring. At $BIGCORP, where I work, I haven't seen an externally hired junior dev in at least 2 years in an extended team of ~100 people.

New comment by groos in "Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools"

groos — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 02:31:11 +0000

Short names are a figment of the age of teletypes when you had to repeatedly type things out. This hasn't been the case for at least 3 decades. Most good shell+terminal combinations will support autocomplete, even the verbose Powershell becomes fairly easy to use with shell history and autocomplete, which, incidentally, it does very well.

If you are repeatedly typing library names, something is wrong with your workflow.

Niklaus Wirth showed us a way out of the teletype world with the Oberon text/command interface, later aped clumsily by Plan 9, but we seem to be stuck firmly in the teletype world, mainly because of Un*x.

New comment by groos in "The tiniest yet real telescope I've built"

groos — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 22:31:37 +0000

Excellent. I might have a go at this myself. Was there a particular AliExpress seller that you got the mirror from?