Hacker News: orthoxerox

New comment by orthoxerox in "World Capitals Voronoi"

orthoxerox — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:25:56 +0000

Well, it has claims on all of China in reality, being the rump state.

New comment by orthoxerox in "DiffusionGemma: 4x Faster Text Generation"

orthoxerox — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:36:55 +0000

It's nice that Unsloth has already published the model on HF, but it requires a fork of llama.cpp to run at the moment.

New comment by orthoxerox in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

orthoxerox — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:54:29 +0000

We had keyboards like this in several labs in the uni! Except they were even worse, and these three keys were shaped like regular keys. When I accidentally powered down my PC the third time in a row, losing all progress on my assignment, I popped the key out of the keyboard.

New comment by orthoxerox in "Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]"

orthoxerox — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:01:41 +0000

Russia already has its own root CA, the issue is that state-owned root CAs are by definition not safe from MITM attacks by the same government.

New comment by orthoxerox in "Spherical Voronoi Diagram"

orthoxerox — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:41:37 +0000

Yeah, but that's basically projecting 3D geometry back onto the sphere (which is also what I ultimately did). There's a faster algorithm that does it "on the sphere", which I thought I used, but turns out I was wrong.

I think it was this one: https://www.math.kent.edu/~zheng/papers/voronoi_paper_update... or this one http://nautilus.fc.ul.pt/jd/jd10sphere.pdf

New comment by orthoxerox in "Spherical Voronoi Diagram"

orthoxerox — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:50:34 +0000

There's an algorithm that does it. I wrote a hobby implementation ten years ago. Basically, it's a modification of the sweeping line algorithm that sweeps the sphere from pole to pole.

edit: Found the code. Looks like I instead ended up simply building a convex hull (which is the Delaunay triangulation) and deriving the Voronoi diagram from it.

New comment by orthoxerox in "QBE – Compiler Backend – 1.3"

orthoxerox — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:19:03 +0000

Yeah, I tried my hand at adding amd64_win support to QBE, but going through the very dense code was a slog. I kept refactoring and commenting it just to make heads or tails of it, but ultimately realized I would never be able to minify it back to something upstreamable. I applaud Scott Graham's perseverance and tenacity.

New comment by orthoxerox in "Blorp Language"

orthoxerox — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:18:57 +0000

No, I meant the idea that guard clauses are antipatterns and your subroutine should have a single implicit return.

New comment by orthoxerox in "Blorp Language"

orthoxerox — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:06:22 +0000

> ergonomics of not having an early return

I wonder who came up with this idea first. I find obvious early returns incredibly ergonomic.

New comment by orthoxerox in "Nvidia RTX Spark"

orthoxerox — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:35:32 +0000

Well, it was only a matter of time, since both AMD and now Intel are now switching to APUs. Nvidia could either cede the desktop GPU market to them, going all-in into AI datacenter chips, or it could challenge them.

Maybe the Nth time's the charm and Microsoft+Nvidia will manage to make Windows on ARM a viable platform.

New comment by orthoxerox in "The dead economy theory"

orthoxerox — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:32:02 +0000

I've been thinking about this recently as well. Market economy is simply a way for the humans to efficiently produce (via specialization) and redistribute (via trading) goods and services. There were other economies that lost to it (palace, planned...). If it no longer serves its purpose (because the goods it's producing are no longer reaching people), then it should be replaced with a new system.

But if it (including the small selection of humans that still benefit from it) can defend itself (by producing murderdrone swarms, for example), then we humans are screwed.

New comment by orthoxerox in "The dead economy theory"

orthoxerox — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:15:38 +0000

How many of these top 10% of households will have their breadwinners be replaced with AI? The LLM boom is aimed at them, professionals, knowledge workers, not at landscapers and plumbers.

New comment by orthoxerox in "Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter"

orthoxerox — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:27:01 +0000

In my school we had a Logo-like PL where you controlled a kangaroo and a more complex one where you сontrolled a robot arm with an internal stack that worked on a rectangular array of items. I remember the robot blowing up when you triggered a logical error like going out of bounds or a stack over/underflow.

UPD: The PLs were called "Roo&Robby" and written by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sapir before he emigrated to the US.

New comment by orthoxerox in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

orthoxerox — Sun, 24 May 2026 13:27:16 +0000

I know VB used -1 as the truth value, not sure about other languages.

New comment by orthoxerox in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

orthoxerox — Sun, 24 May 2026 10:05:14 +0000

-1 means every single bit is 1, the truest possible value.

New comment by orthoxerox in "Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines"

orthoxerox — Fri, 22 May 2026 09:38:03 +0000

At the very least Python could quit on `quit` instead of saying that it knows what I want, but won't do it.

New comment by orthoxerox in "A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide"

orthoxerox — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:04:44 +0000

> I hate the red light and speeding cameras because they catch normal people who don’t bother hiding their license plates (or have license plates at all).

The same cameras could also alert the police down the road about a car with unreadable or missing license plates.

New comment by orthoxerox in "No way to parse integers in C (2022)"

orthoxerox — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:02:16 +0000

I wasn't in this class myself, but one prof at my alma mater started his "Programming 201" class with the simplest assignment: write a C program that accepts two integers from the user and prints their sum. It actually was the only assignment for the rest of the semester, since he has a test suite that would humiliate the students gently at first, but would ultimately pipe a billion nines into stdin as the first argument.

New comment by orthoxerox in "New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing"

orthoxerox — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:44:22 +0000

Why pay for Plex when Jellyfin exists?

New comment by orthoxerox in "Linux security mailing list 'almost unmanageable'"

orthoxerox — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:01:30 +0000

AI can amplify your intelligence just as easily as it can amplify your stupidity. All while telling you how smart and brilliant you are.