Hacker News: mbo

New comment by mbo in "Nebula Sans"

mbo — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:05:06 +0000

you should have seen the reaction when Are.na collaborated with Dinamo on a new version of Arial (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012995) - like, are we not allowed to make art for arts' sake?

New comment by mbo in "New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it"

mbo — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:41:29 +0000

reminds me of https://nyc-noise.com/

New comment by mbo in "Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones"

mbo — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:53:53 +0000

Love it!

I was looking at this a little while ago, and used some of The Pudding's data on makeup/foundation shades (https://pudding.cool/2018/06/makeup-shades/) and plotted it into the Oklab colorspace (https://observablehq.com/@55th/foundation-shades). The shades form themselves into that same crescent as seen in the article.

New comment by mbo in "Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark"

mbo — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:59:57 +0000

Same for Bazel. It has historically been a very difficult to understand/adopt/rollout tool for a lot of engineering orgs but is going swimmingly for the organization I currently work for.

New comment by mbo in "Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)"

mbo — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:08:35 +0000

> I will say that I find even in games that do pay some lip-service to the continued existence of subordinated peoples within large empires – I think particularly of Europa Universalis, Stellaris and Imperator – the mechanics and dynamics for managing those populations in a polyethnic, polylinguistic society are often sharply underdeveloped. In many games that don’t simply erase those populations, they are instead represented by a simple malus (e.g. “Non-primary culture, -x% production/stability/manpower/whatever).

Is this addressed in EU5 with its new population/culture system https://eu5.paradoxwikis.com/Population / https://eu5.paradoxwikis.com/Culture? I have not played it yet.

New comment by mbo in "Billion Dollar PDFs"

mbo — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:05:07 +0000

Given that the stock market completely crashed upon the release of DeepSeek-R1 it's fair to say that it was a negative billion dollar PDF.

New comment by mbo in "Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata"

mbo — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:36:44 +0000

the show source toggle is using https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-hig... (and the author is infact the creator of it)

New comment by mbo in "The bottleneck might be the air in the room"

mbo — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 13:33:35 +0000

I'm not sure this is a helpful comment. This is a common story with many medications, where someone notices their feelings are off and suddenly remembers that there is a probable root cause. It's why medications list side effects.

New comment by mbo in "Mistral OCR 4"

mbo — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:59:42 +0000

Another company like this is Blackmagic Design. Despite being overwhelmingly based in Australia, you'd think it was an American company based on office listing ordering on https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/company/offices and /company page.

New comment by mbo in "Want your images back? That'll be $5"

mbo — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:02:24 +0000

It is a win-win for Photobucket users who have their images (which OP is NOT a cohort of) preserved long term and the startup who snapped up Photobucket's data and liabilities. It is fair to say that OP experienced a win-loss in this specific situation.

I did not assume that OP got the images. That's why I explicitly called it out. In my first sentence. And again in my second last sentence. Jesus.

New comment by mbo in "Want your images back? That'll be $5"

mbo — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:30:48 +0000

Yes that's exactly why I mentioned that in the first line of my comment. I quote directly:

> (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)

New comment by mbo in "Want your images back? That'll be $5"

mbo — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:00:55 +0000

Why are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing? (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)

Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize, and was sold to Fox and then offloaded to some no-name startup called Ontela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket). The service could have been shutdown completely and the harddrives fed into the shredder. Instead some former PE vulture did the math and figured out that preservation might make some money. You _can_ access old Photobucket images (when it works) that would otherwise get a median of 0 hits a month, while the rest of the internet succumbs to linkrot. Seems like a win-win for everyone involved.

New comment by mbo in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

mbo — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:05:29 +0000

Yes confirmed, I did not author the DALL-E paper lmao

New comment by mbo in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

mbo — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:20:49 +0000

Look, not to brag but DALL-E's "armchair in the shape of an avocado" was mine (https://openai.com/index/dall-e/). I remember trying to convey the gravity of this capability to my friends at the time, who I guess were not as impressed as me.

New comment by mbo in "Magnifica Humanitas"

mbo — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:26:56 +0000

I just messaged a few of my friends who I know are devoutly Catholic (and also happen to work in AI): 3 out of 4 are currently reading it this morning for their Memorial Day.

New comment by mbo in "Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend"

mbo — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:52:05 +0000

It's not. 100% on Pangram.

New comment by mbo in "Is my blue your blue?"

mbo — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:59:17 +0000

I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.

New comment by mbo in "Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals"

mbo — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:55:05 +0000

Could this support a native datetime type? I shipped a much worse of this for managing repeated events and schedules.

New comment by mbo in "Let's talk space toilets"

mbo — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:17:02 +0000

A commonly trotted out argument for continued investment in manned space flight is technological spillover: that all the money we give to NASA generates positive benefits in other sectors of the economy. I'm not so sure space toilets are generating that spillover. This seems like a uniquely expensive humans-in-space engineering problem. I echo the sentiments of Why Not Mars (https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm):

> The web of Rube Goldberg devices that recycles floating animal waste on the space station has already cost twice its weight in gold and there is little appetite for it here on Earth, where plants do a better job for free. [...] I would compare keeping primates alive in spacecraft to trying to build a jet engine out of raisins. Both are colossal engineering problems, possibly the hardest ever attempted, but it does not follow that they are problems worth solving. [...] Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it.

Why are we doing human spaceflight again?

New comment by mbo in "Hegel, a universal property-based testing protocol and family of PBT libraries"

mbo — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:04:29 +0000

Given some system under test (SUT) with inputs (T, G...) and expected outputs derived from the inputs T', G' etc., a property based testing framework attempts to exercise the entire domain of values assignable to T, G, etc. against the SUT.

The generators of T, typically called an Arbitrary can be constrained, e.g Arbitrary could generate any float or just non-negative integers. Ideally we would define an Arbitrary or Arbitrary.

A sufficiently expressive type system makes it easier to narrow the gap between what is generated and what is assignable to type T, making it clearer what the valid input domain to the SUT is.