Hacker News: kevindamm

New comment by kevindamm in "If you're a button, you have one job"

kevindamm — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 02:09:23 +0000

I get that's what you're suggesting. The locking per-axis or across all axes is fine but doesn't address the problem I'm talking about. In gimbal lock, which many graphics programmers first encounter by using only sequential rotations around the camera's axes, you can get into an orientation where you lose one of the three degrees of freedom.

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

New comment by kevindamm in "Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party"

kevindamm — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:12:27 +0000

I think they're referring to the Enterprise sales where people have felt pressured to sign six- or seven- figure contracts after usage goes above a certain point. However, all the articles I've read on it are from companies using Cloudflare to do suspicious things with rotating domains through IP addresses, or doing things to try and get around service costs. It also seems like they give you months of warning and will try to convince you to sign up for Enterprise, they don't just shut things off. But their sales team seems to portray themselves as legal, support, or compliance teams sometimes so not exactly forthcoming in their approach either.

I'm a happy user of Cloudflare, but if you're using it for domain registration and hosting infrastructure, you need to see it as a single point of failure. Any account issues and you won't be able to point your domain to an alternate host while you work things out. Any service outage in CF systems will similarly lock you out of routing around the failure. It's better to have DNS off of cloudflare if they're handling your hosting services also. Or host elsewhere and only handle domains on cloudflare. Their domain pricing doesn't add any costs over the base registrar cost, so the latter is a reasonable option.

New comment by kevindamm in "The Future Worth Building Is Human – Thinking Machines Lab"

kevindamm — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:33:25 +0000

It doesn't have to imply replacement. Do you stop thinking just because other humans can?

New comment by kevindamm in "If you're a button, you have one job"

kevindamm — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:09:27 +0000

If you're suggesting that the different columns of a comptometer would relate to different rotational axes of the ball, you will likely run into gimbal lock in 3D.

You could build an interface in 4D around quaternions but that is much more complicated than my suggestion (even including the part where you learn morse code).

The quoted part of my comment is in reference to the core topic of TFA where iOS and Nothing/Android photo apps handle the "pressed again during rotation" action differently. That "rotate the typewriter ball" interface runs against the same problem, by necessity of rotating a physical ball.

New comment by kevindamm in "If you're a button, you have one job"

kevindamm — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 04:41:44 +0000

Now remove the spacebar, combine the two buttons into a single one for "tone" and adapt it to morse code. All the buttons still do only one thing and now there's only one button!

And, you don't have to worry about what to do in the case that someone hits the "rotate ball" button while it's still rotating.

New comment by kevindamm in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

kevindamm — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:45:08 +0000

Why remove the code and binary artifacts, though? Don't you want to verify that the business logic is accurate and the processing is deterministic?

In some circumstances there is no substitute for something that you know will produce the same answer for a given input, consistently. And that's before even considering the watts per response.

New comment by kevindamm in "Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen"

kevindamm — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:29:28 +0000

ELI5: explain like I'm five,

ELIF: explain like I'm forty.

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.