Hacker News: kevindamm

New comment by kevindamm in "On Labubu and the Hyperreal"

kevindamm — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:59:18 +0000

key chain furby lootboxes

New comment by kevindamm in "The Waymo World Model"

kevindamm — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:19:34 +0000

Actually the reason people experience vection in VR is not focal depth but the dissonance between what their eyes are telling them and what their inner ear and tactile senses are telling them.

It's possible they get headaches from the focal length issues but that's different.

New comment by kevindamm in "Extremophile molds are invading art museums"

kevindamm — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 02:56:43 +0000

Would a high enough dose of UV also work? I suppose it would ruin most pigmentation too, though.

New comment by kevindamm in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

kevindamm — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:25:12 +0000

Pure functional programming and lazy evaluation.. sure, you could create classes and a meta-function that selectively eval's thunks at a time, but the call site of that kind of library would look atrocious..

You might be able to hack on some of the datatype semantics into JS prototype-based inheritance (I'd rather start with TypeScript at that point, but then we're back at the "why isn't it a library" debate) to keep those ontologies from being semantically separate, but that's an uphill battle with some of JS's implicit value conversions.

I consider Logic Programming languages to be the go-to counterargument to TFA but yeah, anything with lazy eval and a mature type system are strong counterexamples too.

New comment by kevindamm in "Hash tables in Go and advantage of self-hosted compilers"

kevindamm — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 14:34:04 +0000

Almost made it into 1.18 but looks like it doesn't add enough value and has some open questions like what to use for a backing data type and what complexity promises to make.

https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/47331

New comment by kevindamm in "“Are you the one?” is free money"

kevindamm — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:54:51 +0000

It's not a yes/no per contestent, it's per edge between contestants. There are n(n-1)/2 of these.

A true answer for a potential match is actually a state update for all of the (n-1) edges connecting either contestant, that's 2(n-2) edges that can be updated to be false. Some of these may already be known from previous rounds' matchups but that's still more than a single binary.

New comment by kevindamm in "I tried Gleam for Advent of Code"

kevindamm — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 21:16:13 +0000

I think that LLMs will be complemented best with a declarative language, as inserting new conditions/effects in them can be done without modifying much (if any!) of the existing code. Especially if the declarative language is a logic and/or constraint-based language.

We're still in early days with LLMs! I don't think we're anywhere near the global optimum yet.

New comment by kevindamm in "Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration"

kevindamm — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:05:17 +0000

Broccoli Man! classic

https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI (2010)

To be fair, a lot of this changed after that video became a meme.. but I'd bet that the broccoli man template is still trending on memegen

New comment by kevindamm in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

kevindamm — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:10:28 +0000

Have we abandoned the term "generate" already?

New comment by kevindamm in "HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)"

kevindamm — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 17:19:30 +0000

and you could shim these gaps with custom components, hypothetically

New comment by kevindamm in "Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months"

kevindamm — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:19:40 +0000

You can go one step further than that and calculate a fairness measure using something like the Gini coefficient (*) and analyze how much it has changed over time.

[*] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

New comment by kevindamm in "Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?"

kevindamm — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 16:54:05 +0000

replace the scope with a dimmable light and we might have a better solution than low-decibel audio hum

or perhaps live wire into the seat, tied into a transistor on this signal, so if performance drops enough you're sure to be alerted to it

New comment by kevindamm in "Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?"

kevindamm — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:53:06 +0000

The source is electrical noise, but the solution of isolating the audio chain from the computer's USB means that in the future you might not notice when you've introduced another GPU memory bandwidth hog into your rendering loop.

Good story, though.

New comment by kevindamm in "Paged Out"

kevindamm — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 23:28:42 +0000

Is it ironic that they publish it as a PDF? I get that it's the easiest way to control the print layout and also nicely self-contained... but how many of us are opening it in a sandbox as we should?

New comment by kevindamm in "When did people favor composition over inheritance?"

kevindamm — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 01:39:28 +0000

And python didn't get it right the first time either. It wasn't until python 2.3 when method resolution order was decided by C3 linearization that the inheritance in python became sane.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029...

New comment by kevindamm in "The Useful Personal Computer"

kevindamm — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:48:44 +0000

It really was way ahead of its time. I remember the handwriting recognition being excellent for the time, too. Meanwhile Palm forced its users to write each letter one at a time in a tiny box and requiring specific sequencing of each stroke too.

Newton had a modem module you could plug in and third parties had written web browsers for it, it basically was the first smart phone just without the phone.

Trying to imagine that level of innovation, but starting from present day tech, is very interesting.

New comment by kevindamm in "The Useful Personal Computer"

kevindamm — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:19:09 +0000

I still have my Newton but I wasn't, nor am I, elite.

I didn't store recipes on it, though.

New comment by kevindamm in "Study finds memory decline surge in young people"

kevindamm — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:22:05 +0000

We're told not to feed the wildlife at parks and beaches because of the dangers when they become dependent on visitors for their food source. It changes their natural behavior to the extent that it becomes difficult to revert to natural food sources in the absence of visitors.

(there are other behavioral and disease-related dangers but they're not as appropriate to this metaphor)

I think the more alarmed voices in this comment thread are not reacting to the change or "exponential progress" but are instead concerned about the impact of becoming reliant on something else to do our remembering.

This last part is anecdata (but no worse than the survey data in TFA), I think smartphone users have not really lost the ability to memorize, in general, but that the things being memorized are different. If the memory test (mentioned in a cousin-comment) had a set of 20 memes instead of 20 words, I expect most study participants would be a lot better at recall.

I suppose the question of "is this like junk food, though?" may be relevant.

New comment by kevindamm in "OpenAI probably can't make ends meet. That's where you come in"

kevindamm — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 17:53:25 +0000

which is a real problem if a significant part of being in the population of whale or addict involves AI psychosis

New comment by kevindamm in "I want a good parallel language [video]"

kevindamm — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 17:35:50 +0000

This was, I think, the greatest strength of MapReduce. If you could write a basic program you could understand the map, combine, shuffle and reduce operations. MR and Hadoop etc. would take care of recovering from operational failures like disk or network outages by idempotencies in the workings behind the scenes, and programmers could focus on how data was being transformed, joined, serialized, etc.

To your point, we also didn't need a new language to adopt this paradigm. A library and a running system were enough (though, semantically, it did offer unique language-like characteristics).

Sure, it's a bit antiquated now that we have more sophisticated iterations for the subdomains it was most commonly used for, but it hit a kind of sweet spot between parallelism utility and complexity of knowledge or reasoning required of its users.