Hacker News: materialpoint

New comment by materialpoint in "Free the Icons"

materialpoint — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 03:36:30 +0000

You seem to conflate different facts that have nothing to do with each other to arrive at a conclusion: There is nothing preventing Apple from not using said click masks while icons retain their distinct shapes. iOS is for mobile, its lessons don't transfer to desktop, and this was proven by Windows 8. That "squircles aren't ugly because they are functional" - how on Earth can those be mutually exclusive even in recognition? Functional very often is at the cost of making things ugly, the history lesson is that Apple more often than others managed to be both functional and beautiful. You also conflate convex pixel area with visual weight, but that is false too.

New comment by materialpoint in "AI is a technology not a product"

materialpoint — Mon, 18 May 2026 03:25:46 +0000

That's just asinine. You understood the point perfectly.

New comment by materialpoint in "OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens"

materialpoint — Mon, 18 May 2026 03:24:49 +0000

A company could get more profits from formally teaching employees the function of the Fn key on their laptops. It is staggering how most people, even among developers, don't know what it's for, and consequently, nearly everybody suffers from not being able to turn volume up or down, or accidentally disconnect from meetings by having turned on airplane mode.

New comment by materialpoint in "AI is a technology not a product"

materialpoint — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:02:43 +0000

AI harbours evil, because unskilled people tend to trust it blindly. People have already been evicted, arrested and harassed by police simply because they choose to trust technology that flags or "recognizes" them, with no proof that they can trust it. This happens automatically. Thus, AI should be treated as potentially malicious, especially when it is sold as neutral.

New comment by materialpoint in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

materialpoint — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:54:19 +0000

Did you compare AI companies to parents and engineers actually delivering value to toddlers? AI companies cannot, in any capacity, be regarded as caretakers.

New comment by materialpoint in "More Americans are breaking into the upper middle class"

materialpoint — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:14:02 +0000

"For the first decade of his career, he lived in an apartment and worried about paying for vacations. Then, in his early 30s (...)" ... here is America, without paid vacation guaranteed by law since the government does not truly care about the middle or working class. It's amazing how serious media can write articles about economy, while the blatant obvious deficits slip right by their nose..

New comment by materialpoint in "Microsoft blocks trick to unlock native NVMe driver, but workarounds still exist"

materialpoint — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 07:40:50 +0000

If AI was truly profitable Microsoft wouldn't need to cover their expenses at every other corner.

New comment by materialpoint in "FSF statement on copyright infringement lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic"

materialpoint — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:29:26 +0000

This means that you can ignore any part of licenses you don't want to and just copy any software you want, non-free software included.

New comment by materialpoint in "What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic (1991) [pdf]"

materialpoint — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:00:47 +0000

Well, there are many legitimate cases for using the equality operator. Insisting someone is doing something wrong is downright wrong and you shouldn't be teaching floating-point numbers. A few use cases are: Floating-points differing from default or initial values and carrying meaning, e.g. 0 or 1 translates to omitting entire operations. Then there is also the case for measuring the tinyest possible variation when using relative tolerances are not what you want. Not exhaustive. If you use == with fp, it only means you should've thought about it thoroughly.

New comment by materialpoint in "Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition"

materialpoint — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:05:33 +0000

See, AI was used to accelerate arrest and jailing, but not to follow through. It was not used to ensure her well being. Clearly this demonstrates that AI contributes to treating humans inhumanely, and demonstrably AI is not used to improve anyones quality of life. Stop making excuses for "AI not at fault here".

New comment by materialpoint in "Stop using icons in data tables"

materialpoint — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 11:10:33 +0000

It doesn't matter if the icon is ever so slightly ambigious compared to other systems, the label text next to it removes any ambiguity and makes the message perfectly clear, as long as it is consistent within a product. To any newcomer to a new system, most icons don't make sense, so the text next to it is an invaluable hidden tutorial. OP didn't stop to see that the circled checkmarks look like clocks, so it just highly opinionated.

New comment by materialpoint in "Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings"

materialpoint — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:42:28 +0000

This should be compulsory for pitching architects and entrepreneurs. Prove that your design can withstand real weather and the washed out decay of time. Classical architecture withstands weathering and littering remarkably better. Architects are even using corrugated steel sheets intended for ugly shacks as the fascade of new buildings intended for people to live in. It couldn't be worse.

New comment by materialpoint in "There is an AI code review bubble"

materialpoint — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 06:53:12 +0000

How is that different from today's SA, like CodeQL and SonarQube? Most of the feedback is just sh*t and drives programmers towards making senseless perfections that just double the amount of work had to be done later to toggle or tune behaviour, because the configurable variables are gone due to bad static code analysis. Clearly present intent and convience like: Making a method virtual, adding a public method, not making a method static when it is likely to use instance fields in the future --- these good practices are shunned in all SA just because the rules are opportunistic, not real.

New comment by materialpoint in "Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops"

materialpoint — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:21:50 +0000

The "Microsoft gave" framing is the exact right wording!, because Microsoft should never have had these keys in the first place. This is a compromise on security that sidesteps back doors on the low level and essentially transforms all Windows installations into Clipper-chip products.

New comment by materialpoint in "PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch"

materialpoint — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 15:06:05 +0000

It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it. What still shocks me is that the current developers and management on the Windows teams are so extremely bad at everything they do. It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow. It's not like they couldn't make Explorer use less memory and start faster, even with preloading, which was introduced in Vista, opening Explorer remains painfully slow.

New comment by materialpoint in "Show HN: Junior devs don't know red flags we spot instantly & we never tell them"

materialpoint — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:45:00 +0000

Well, we sorely need something better than the current static code analysis tools, like sub-par products SonarQube and CodeQL that see massive overuse, because these tools do not understand that living and evolving code needs imperfections and that _most_ programmers have already thought through their code and made decisions that can't align with poor text book examples of "correct code".

New comment by materialpoint in "Provenance Is the New Version Control"

materialpoint — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 07:55:57 +0000

So you missed the point too. The post depends on versioning being diffs only.

New comment by materialpoint in "Provenance Is the New Version Control"

materialpoint — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 07:48:14 +0000

Who's gonna tell the author that Git doesn't do diffs, but snapshots?

Deltas are just an implementation detail, and thinking of Git as diffing is specifically shunned in introductions to Git versioning.

New comment by materialpoint in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

materialpoint — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 08:53:58 +0000

Apple has had 30 years to make UI focus and input stable, and not let something invisible steal input focus. Fortunately for mac, this is much worse on Windows.

New comment by materialpoint in "Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux"

materialpoint — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 15:35:29 +0000

The problem with Windows after Windows 7 isn't really ads, it's the blatant stupid use of web view to do the most mundane things and hog hundreds of MB or even GBs for silly features, that are still present in enterprise versions.