Hacker News: hackingonempty

New comment by hackingonempty in "Introduction to spherical harmonics for graphics programmers"

hackingonempty — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:45:40 +0000

A single Ambisonic B-format recording can be shipped and at runtime decoded into any coincident or near-coincident stereo pair pointing in any direction or into any surround sound format. It is a universal format that encodes the direction and intensity of arriving sound over a full sphere.

New comment by hackingonempty in "Amazon worker dies on warehouse floor. Workers told to keep going"

hackingonempty — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:25:08 +0000

When I saw the article I recalled a doctor who worked at the sports stadium. Probably every stadium has a doctor on duty because there are medical emergencies any time you get 50,000 people together. Sometimes people die while they are still on the premises.

So I wanted to know how approximately how many people you would expect die of natural causes per day in a group of people as large as Amazon warehouse workers.

If you expect people to die every day while working in an Amazon warehouse and there was no cause of death disclosed for the unfortunate person referenced in TFA then the fact that he died is not news.

New comment by hackingonempty in "Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds"

hackingonempty — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 03:53:58 +0000

The artists think it is fair that they are now getting some of that money that used to go to scalpers. Very few are opting out of the dynamic pricing and "Platinum" tickets that are driving prices up.

New comment by hackingonempty in "Introduction to spherical harmonics for graphics programmers"

hackingonempty — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 03:44:55 +0000

That fact is betrayed by the the similarity of the shapes of atomic orbitals and the sensitivity patterns of Abisonic B-format channels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics#Higher-order_ambiso...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital#Orbitals_table

...and the same patterns appear on the unit disk with the Zernike polynomials, used to describe optical aberrations and more.

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

New comment by hackingonempty in "Amazon worker dies on warehouse floor. Workers told to keep going"

hackingonempty — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 03:15:01 +0000

You are correct that it is a rough estimate but my point stands. While most of us will never experience the shock of someone dying at work, it is an every day occurrence at the scale of Amazon.

New comment by hackingonempty in "Amazon worker dies on warehouse floor. Workers told to keep going"

hackingonempty — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:49:08 +0000

Amazon employs around 900,000 people in logistics. The crude annual mortality rate in the USA is around 911/100,000. If there are 900,000 employees working eight hours a day then around seven people a day are dying of natural causes on their shift. This is without considering that they are being worked to the bone.

>>> .00911 * (8 / (24 * 365)) * 900000 = 7.487671232876712

New comment by hackingonempty in "Kalshi CEO expects US DOJ to prosecute insider trading cases"

hackingonempty — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:24:32 +0000

Ex Parte Garland was decided in 1866

“The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.”

Nobody is going to waste their time investigating crimes that can't be prosecuted.

New comment by hackingonempty in "Introduction to spherical harmonics for graphics programmers"

hackingonempty — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:52:07 +0000

> spherical harmonics can have uses beyond lighting

This math is also used in Ambisonic surround sound though newer techniques use planewave expansion.

For games, the full-sphere encoding of Ambisonic B-format can be decoded for arbitrary speaker locations and the soundfield rotated around any axis. I'm not sure if its ever been used for a game though.

New comment by hackingonempty in "Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0"

hackingonempty — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:29:20 +0000

How does this compare to G-Stack?

New comment by hackingonempty in "Kalshi CEO expects US DOJ to prosecute insider trading cases"

hackingonempty — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:01:00 +0000

The President's pardon power is enumerated in the Constitution and has been litigated extensively.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...

New comment by hackingonempty in "Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds"

hackingonempty — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 20:55:50 +0000

> It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once

Oh they did something about it. The ticket brokers can't scoop up all the tickets because many of the best ones are now only released as "Platinum" tickets at 2-5 times the price.

New comment by hackingonempty in "Kalshi CEO expects US DOJ to prosecute insider trading cases"

hackingonempty — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 20:26:44 +0000

> A reasonable opposition party would declare the pardons invalid. Is that a valid interpretation of pardon power, does that undermine the legitimacy of our laws?

No, in the USA the pardon power belongs to the President. Only a constitutional amendment could invalidate pardons.

New comment by hackingonempty in "Kalshi CEO expects US DOJ to prosecute insider trading cases"

hackingonempty — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:53:34 +0000

> one could be forgiven for assuming federal crimes committed by this administration will not be prosecuted while this administration is in power.

Nobody in this administration is going to be prosecuted no matter who is in power.

https://archive.is/TpLqO

New comment by hackingonempty in "Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds"

hackingonempty — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:24:41 +0000

from the NYT: > The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.

I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.

New comment by hackingonempty in "Do you even need a database?"

hackingonempty — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:03:59 +0000

Probably more like a low-quality, poorly-tested reinvention of BerkeleyDB.

New comment by hackingonempty in "The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Worse Than You Thought"

hackingonempty — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:53:21 +0000

> the previous generation (I include myself here) have lost the plot raising/educating children and are breeding just absolute disrespectful, egotistical, attention seeking assholes as younger generations.

In other words, people are raising winners and winners get to do what they want, like Ricky Bobby and Donald Trump.

Talladega Nights (2006) exposed this change in US culture twenty years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY5VNDvea1M&t=189s

New comment by hackingonempty in "If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true"

hackingonempty — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:37:02 +0000

Have you ever sweat bullets at 3 a.m.? While Claude spins in circles unable to fix production without breaking five other things?

You will!

New comment by hackingonempty in "If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true"

hackingonempty — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:47:31 +0000

You jest but I searched "Uber for laundry" and found services partnering with both Uber and Doordash for transportation.

New comment by hackingonempty in "High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain"

hackingonempty — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:18:19 +0000

Not good ones, and Scala devs are keenly aware they have been going in the wrong direction compared to Go/Rust, in part because of articles like this.

RedMonk shows Scala is comparable to Go and Rust [0] You can see in this chart which plots the number of projects on Github and tags on StackOverflow (ha ha.)

The upper right most cluster has the most popular languages (C++, Java, Python, JS, PHP, TypeScript) then the next cluster has Scala with Rust, Go, Kotlin, R, Swift, etc... That cluster is clearly separate from the next less popular one which has Haskell, Lua, Ocaml, Groovy, Erlang, Fortran, etc... and then you can see the long tail is a big cluster covering the entire lower left half of the chat with a clear gap between it and the upper right half.

I don't think it is a "very, very wrong" statement.

[0] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2025/06/lang.rank_.125.wm_... which comes from https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...

New comment by hackingonempty in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

hackingonempty — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:06:31 +0000

> The enterprise mindset dictates that you need an out-of-process database server. But the truth is, a local SQLite file communicating over the C-interface or memory is orders of magnitude faster than making a TCP network hop to a remote Postgres server.

I don't want to diss SQLite because it is awesome and more than adequate for many/most web apps but you can connect to Postgres (or any DB really) on localhost over a Unix domain socket and avoid nearly all of the overhead.

It's not much harder to use than SQLite, you get all of the Postgres features, it's easier to run reports or whatever on the live db from a different box, and much easier if it comes time to setup a read replica, HA, or run the DB on a different box from the app.

I don't think running Postgres on the same box as your app is the same class of optimistic over provisioning as setting up a kubernetes cluster.