Hacker News: nsilvestri

New comment by nsilvestri in "Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub"

nsilvestri — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:37:49 +0000

Community focused organizations like this are hard to run without governance transitions. I think Anki brings value to the world and anyone willing to take on a leadership role in keeping it going should be given trust and grace to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have. I wish them luck.

New comment by nsilvestri in "Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds"

nsilvestri — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:01:55 +0000

The bottleneck for games of any size is always whether they are good. There are plenty of small indies which do not put out good games. I don't see world models improving game design or fun factors.

If I am wrong, then the huge supply of fun games will completely saturate demand and be no easier for indie game devs to stand out.

New comment by nsilvestri in "Noclip.website – A digital museum of video game levels"

nsilvestri — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 05:36:07 +0000

In a similar vein, but for Old School RuneScape, is https://osrs.world/

This one is kept up-to-date with the state of the game world. Even includes full NPC locations and animations.

New comment by nsilvestri in "Roblox is a problem but it's a symptom of something worse"

nsilvestri — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:59:19 +0000

How dare this child be excited for a special event in his game!

New comment by nsilvestri in "Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room"

nsilvestri — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:31:13 +0000

"Fairly unprofitable [if you ignore all the parts that generate revenue.]"

I will admit that gambling $0.16 in skins on pro matches when I was 15 was a lot of fun. Maybe I'm lucky to have gotten away (relatively) unscathed, but I do have a little nostalgia for those days.

New comment by nsilvestri in "OpenAI Announces SearchGPT"

nsilvestri — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 18:27:17 +0000

I have never felt like my searches in other engines have been helped by AI. I hope SearchGPT changes that. My expectations are low.

New comment by nsilvestri in "FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't"

nsilvestri — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 21:59:34 +0000

As someone who can't eat gluten, we look for that label because gluten isn't included as one of the mandatory allergens in the US. I would prefer if things were simply labelled as "contains gluten" because instead I have to evaluate the ingredients of things without a GF label to see if it's suitable.

New comment by nsilvestri in "Mitsubishi robot solves Rubik's Cube in 0.305s"

nsilvestri — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 06:09:03 +0000

Computers can generate optimal solutions to arbitrary positions. There's no need to apply the human-optimized ergonomic algorithms or methods that human use to speedsolve.

New comment by nsilvestri in "Ten years of improvements in PostgreSQL's optimizer"

nsilvestri — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 04:26:54 +0000

Proebsting's Law comes to mind: https://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html

Quantum Soccer (2009)

nsilvestri — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 17:44:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gregegan.net/BORDER/Soccer/Soccer.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39682492

Points: 72

# Comments: 4

New comment by nsilvestri in "Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate"

nsilvestri — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 21:28:47 +0000

This URL is a stub, and the full article can be read at https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/W...

New comment by nsilvestri in "CUBOTino: A small, simple, 3D printed, inexpensive Rubik's Cube solver robot"

nsilvestri — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 11:34:19 +0000

WCA Delegate here. The limiting factor generally isn't cost, but the need to handle cubes of various sizes and other puzzles entirely. Having a robot that can only scramble a 3x3 isn't useful for the majority of competitions.

New comment by nsilvestri in "My speed cubing page"

nsilvestri — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 16:56:58 +0000

Ah, whoops, the 2020, not the 2021! Should only be $9 at the right place. In my opinion, the extra couple dollars are worth it :)

New comment by nsilvestri in "My speed cubing page"

nsilvestri — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 14:59:34 +0000

MoYu RS3M 2021 is considered a better budget cube nowadays. Many people use it as their main, which is not something that can be said about the YLM.

New comment by nsilvestri in "Re: I Don't Use Copilot"

nsilvestri — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 19:28:23 +0000

For $10 a month, all Copilot has to do is save me a handful of minutes each month for it to be worth it.

Most of my current work is creating new React components. In these tasks, Copilot probably saves me 20 or 30 minutes a day on average. Often more. It's not always right, but often close enough, and I'm not committing my code without testing it anyway.

New comment by nsilvestri in "Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news"

nsilvestri — Thu, 11 May 2023 18:05:37 +0000

I disagree, as I think this would be useful to people with anxiety disorders who don't want to entirely disconnect from the news. Just because they may be able to logically identify articles and headlines as "sensationalist" doesn't mean their brain won't still kick off some uncomfortable physiological responses.

New comment by nsilvestri in "How Postgres Triggers Can Simplify Your Back End Development"

nsilvestri — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 15:28:11 +0000

The article mentions it at the very bottom, but I almost never reach for triggers because they are obscure places to put application logic. On more than one occasion I've been burned by not realizing that the code in the backend did not represent the whole picture of business logic. It's more complexity, requiring more documentation, adding another point of failure that probably isn't necessary.

Quantum Soccer (2009)

nsilvestri — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 16:34:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gregegan.net/BORDER/Soccer/Soccer.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34869730

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by nsilvestri in "NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Is a Smashing Success"

nsilvestri — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:06:03 +0000

You can derive it yourself. Dimorphos's orbital eccentricity is pretty low, meaning you can use:

mean_orbital_velocity = 2 * pi * semimajor_axis / period

As for the orbit around the sun, the parent body Didymos is about 100x more massive, so any change in the center of mass from this impact will have, in the short term, negligible effects on their orbit around the sun.

New comment by nsilvestri in "Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?"

nsilvestri — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 03:30:50 +0000

I love the form factor, but the battery is my second biggest gripe with my Framework (after fractional scaling still not supported by many apps). Even after tweaking settings ad nauseam, I cannot get the suspend battery life to last more than 12-16 hours.