Hacker News: kevingadd

New comment by kevingadd in "Teaching GPT-5 to Use a Computer"

kevingadd — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 21:28:54 +0000

One potential virtuous cycle here is that accessibility trees used by tools like screen readers are also a nice potential way for a model to consume information about what's on screen and how it can be interacted with. So it creates an additional incentive for improving the accessibility of new and existing software, because doing that lights up integration with future models.

New comment by kevingadd in "Good multipliers for congruential pseudorandom number generators"

kevingadd — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 12:57:16 +0000

Quoting the start of the paper:

> While MCGs and LCGs have some known defects, they can be used in combination with other pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) or passed through some output function that might lessen such defects. Due to their speed and simplicity, as well as a substantial accrued body of mathematical analysis, they have been for a long time the PRNGs of choice in programming languages.

EDIT: And going further, they call out Marsaglia's work in particular, it seems.

New comment by kevingadd in "What kids told us about how to get them off their phones"

kevingadd — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 14:08:06 +0000

> Since the 1980s, parents have grown more and more afraid that unsupervised time will expose their kids to physical or emotional harm. In another recent Harris Poll, we asked parents what they thought would happen if two 10-year-olds played in a local park without adults around. Sixty percent thought the children would likely get injured. Half thought they would likely get abducted.

> These intuitions don’t even begin to resemble reality. According to Warwick Cairns, the author of How to Live Dangerously, kidnapping in the United States is so rare that a child would have to be outside unsupervised for, on average, 750,000 years before being snatched by a stranger.

I wonder how we ended up in a situation where people think Stranger Danger is this bad. Is it just from TV and the internet inflating the danger to drive views/clicks?

In many areas crime has been trending down but people seem to think things are more dangerous than ever, in general. It baffles me.

Siggraph 2025 – Using the SDL GPU Graphics API in Education

kevingadd — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 13:43:40 +0000

Article URL: https://libsdl.org/siggraph2025/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44912327

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by kevingadd in "Meta appoints anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck as AI bias advisor"

kevingadd — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:57:14 +0000

Just to be clear you're literally repeating a conspiracy theory. The thing you described effectively does not happen. We can talk about whether it should be allowed to happen, but at present it doesn't. Policies followed by most medical professionals simply don't allow it.

New comment by kevingadd in "Funding Open Source like public infrastructure"

kevingadd — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 09:56:47 +0000

Where I live in Seattle we fund keeping the streets in good condition. I see city staff roaming around during the day from time to time wearing hi-vis, doing stuff like picking up trash or removing graffiti.

If trash is lying around only getting picked up by generous citizens in their spare time, what that implies is that the city/county have chosen not to invest in maintaining the streets, and the citizens have elected to throw trash everywhere. I don't think we should take either of those conditions as a given. Better things are possible.

New comment by kevingadd in "This website is for humans"

kevingadd — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 16:14:33 +0000

I see white on dark purple at a perfectly legible size using a regular font. Did an extension you have installed block loading of an image or style sheet?

New comment by kevingadd in "GitHub was having issues"

kevingadd — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 15:59:09 +0000

Had to buy an IPv4 address for a VPS the other day in order to clone some git repositories. Couldn't believe it. Costing their customers money when they should be able to support v6 by now.

New comment by kevingadd in "We keep reinventing CSS, but styling was never the problem"

kevingadd — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 14:01:59 +0000

Can't you already do this by creating a tree of invisible DOM elements with the right ARIA attributes?

New comment by kevingadd in "Australian court finds Apple, Google guilty of being anticompetitive"

kevingadd — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 14:00:34 +0000

> In a judgment that spanned 2000 pages, Australian Federal Court Justice Jonathan Beach, ruled that Apple had a substantial degree of market power. The Judge said both Apple and Google had breached Section 46 of Australia’s Competition Act. The companies had abused their market power to stifle the competition. But, it wasn't all in favor of Epic Games. Beach rejected the claim that Apple and Google had breached consumer law, he also said that the companies had not engaged in unconscionable conduct.

2000 pages! I can see why the case took something like 5 years.

It sounds like a mixed ruling so Epic didn't get everything they wanted here, but if they're able to launch the Epic Games Store on iOS in Australia that's a pretty big win by itself.

New comment by kevingadd in "Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens"

kevingadd — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 12:28:03 +0000

Typically when a human has a disorder or limitation they adapt to it by developing coping strategies or making use of tools and environmental changes to compensate. Maybe they expect a true reasoning model to be able to do the same thing?

New comment by kevingadd in "Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens"

kevingadd — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 12:24:50 +0000

Almost every mention I've seen of gpt-oss was a complaint that the training on synthetic datasets produced a model that's mostly good at benchmarks. Are benchmarks the great results you're referring to or are there a lot of satisfied users out there that just don't post here on HN? Genuinely curious.

I can see how performing well on benchmarks at the expense of everything else counts as great results if that's the point of the model.

New comment by kevingadd in "Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack"

kevingadd — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 12:22:46 +0000

Replies seem to be arguing that this wasn't a 51% attack and was something else. I don't know crypto well enough to verify their claims, though.

New comment by kevingadd in "U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China"

kevingadd — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 02:16:02 +0000

The country's money is his money. For example: That plane that got 'gifted' to him is getting expensive retrofits on the taxpayer's dime, and he gets to keep the plane after he leaves office.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/us/politics/air-force-one...

New comment by kevingadd in "Complex Iterators Are Slow"

kevingadd — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:53:10 +0000

Part of the complexity here is the temporary object allocation and the need to read properties out of it as you iterate. This is one of the things I tried to push back on but the spec people were in a hard spot, since JS doesn't have native multiple return values. I think in ideal circumstances the allocation can be optimized out by doing store-to-load forwarding on the properties, but in cases like the post here since inlining can't happen, no such luck. :(

New comment by kevingadd in "Breaking the sorting barrier for directed single-source shortest paths"

kevingadd — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 23:21:21 +0000

Depending on where you work they might not let you publish a paper about it. Certainly was the case at one game studio I worked for, very secretive.

New comment by kevingadd in "I'm Archiving Picocrypt"

kevingadd — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 10:51:23 +0000

If you're using a portable library that needs to render graphics on mac, it's probably using OpenGL to do it unless it has a platform-specific backend.

New comment by kevingadd in "Why there are so many more South Asian CEOs than East Asian CEOs in the US"

kevingadd — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 08:04:10 +0000

This article feels like it generalizes quite a lot about a very, very large population. I'm always wary of pieces that try to put the vast majority of people from a given territory into some broad buckets in order to draw conclusions about them. There are a grand total of two citations in the whole thing unless I missed some, and they're not supporting most of the generalities.

> Much of East Asian culture is rooted in the teachings of Confucius.

Really?

Interesting topic at the very least. Any time there's a big population disparity in selective groups it's usually worth investigating how that disparity came to be to see if we can learn something from it and potentially equalize it (if it exists for a bad reason).

New comment by kevingadd in "How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast"

kevingadd — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 18:45:33 +0000

It usually happens by accident. For example, let's say you have a class Person with two data members named firstName and lastName. We're already in trouble, but let's make it worse: It has a getter named fullName which returns $`{this.firstName} {this.lastName}`.

That getter looks inoffensive and will, depending on your requirements, work just fine. But it has side effects because the string interpolation allocates and could trigger a garbage collection.

Note that if you're using modern JS 'class' blocks a 'get x ()' will be ignored by JSON.stringify, so if you're aiming to reproduce this you have to use old-school Object.defineProperty instead.

New comment by kevingadd in "How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast"

kevingadd — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 22:36:47 +0000

Calling a property getter can have side effects, so if you serialize an object with a getter you have to be very cautious to make sure nothing weird happens underneath you during serialization.

People have exploited this sort of side effect to get bug bounties before via type confusion attacks, iirc.