Hacker News: paulhilbert

New comment by paulhilbert in "Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative"

paulhilbert — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 12:08:37 +0000

No, it's not. It sounds exactly like Tim Pritlove when he speaks German. Not everyone is a native speaker, you know?

In one of his recent podcasts he explained that he wanted to create a mixture of Google Earth and a libray. So "Library" is specifically meant as a name for the mixed data source aggregation.

To be clear: The entire software is vibecoded in a language Pritlove doesn't even have worked with prior to that. But when it comes to talking about his ideas Pritlove surely does not need a LLM. This guy basically started the German podcast scene and has been talking about software for at least 30 years.

New comment by paulhilbert in "Open source AI is the path forward"

paulhilbert — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 16:10:07 +0000

No, I would argue that from the three main ingredients - training data, model source code and weights - weights are the furthest away from something akin to source code.

They're more like obfuscated binaries. When it comes to fine-tuning only however things shift a little bit, yes.

New comment by paulhilbert in "Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout"

paulhilbert — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 15:47:45 +0000

That is an orthogonal discussion.

I need masonry layouts a lot and tend to be on the "we don't need another display class" side in this debate. But that's unrelated to my "rant".

New comment by paulhilbert in "Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout"

paulhilbert — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 15:42:46 +0000

I mean the actual point of the article is to ask everyone, not just "well-known" examples.

So it seems there were some reasonably forces in the discussion that align with my stance without the unnecessarily antagonistic (and rhetoric) primer I should've probably left out.

Seems like a good approach to widen the discussion and improve the design.

New comment by paulhilbert in "Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout"

paulhilbert — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 15:38:59 +0000

Again: when did "well-known websites use this" become the motivating factor behind standard design?

The blink tag was used by well-known website and it's universally recognized as a bad decision.

New comment by paulhilbert in "Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout"

paulhilbert — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 15:35:43 +0000

Where is the connection to "well-known websites"?

New comment by paulhilbert in "Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout"

paulhilbert — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 15:33:11 +0000

I totally get that. But for me there is a fundamental difference between "big enough need" and "well known websites need this".

How are potentially thousands of niche websites less of an argument than "instagram and co don't need it"?

New comment by paulhilbert in "Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout"

paulhilbert — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:34:07 +0000

"Others are questioning whether or not this kind of layout is needed on the web at all — they aren’t sure that well-known websites will use it."

Would it instead be possible to exclude anyone with that attitude from a discussion about an open standard? I know this sounds toxic, but I would argue that approaching public design this way is ultimately more toxic wrt the outcome and those affected by it.

Or maybe I misunderstood that part since everyone seems to not be bothered by it at all here...

New comment by paulhilbert in "Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix"

paulhilbert — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 20:22:50 +0000

"Flox began its life during the deployment of Nix at the D. E. Shaw group, where it quickly proved invaluable by making Nix easier for newcomers".

Is that the line you are referring to? Sounds like the opposite of what you suggests it says.

New comment by paulhilbert in "Draft of German copyright reform proposes memes should only be up to 128 pixels"

paulhilbert — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 15:40:08 +0000

Not at all. In fact I would call doing that the most German thing you can do.

New comment by paulhilbert in "At Tech’s Leading Edge, Worry About a Concentration of Power"

paulhilbert — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 12:45:12 +0000

"Having a few hundred consumer GPUs or a few dozen "datacenter" GPUs should be within the reach of any University department"

That was funny - however not even close to reality. I have to work on a GTX 1080 (not TI)...

New comment by paulhilbert in "Uncap - Map Caps Lock to Escape on Windows, Linux, and macOS"

paulhilbert — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 11:15:19 +0000

Try pressing esc every few seconds for 8-12hrs a day like a vim developer does and you'll know.

New comment by paulhilbert in "Atlantropa"

paulhilbert — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 09:18:24 +0000

Seems like something there should be a 99pi episode about (maybe there is?)...

New comment by paulhilbert in "Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal"

paulhilbert — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 08:43:47 +0000

Is there any way I can see the name of attached files?

New comment by paulhilbert in "Bounty Hunt Announced on Swiss eVoting System"

paulhilbert — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 14:14:44 +0000

This exactly - complete recountability and the fact that there actually are independent volunteers recounting are the only assurances of a transparent, legitimate voting system. Black boxes (and computer systems by their nature are black boxes) introduced into this system will always void its transparency.

New comment by paulhilbert in "Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters"

paulhilbert — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 11:12:58 +0000

Obligatory 99% invisible reference: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/oyster-tecture/

New comment by paulhilbert in "Path Tracing vs. Ray Tracing (2016)"

paulhilbert — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 09:33:45 +0000

AFAIK current state-of-the-art in pathtracing are still metropolis light transport methods. Seems like current research is mostly focussed on denoising - which makes sense, since a good denoising provides a valuable shortcut for quicker results.

While I only occasionally glance at new results in this area it seems that CNN-based denoising techniques look quite promising, possibly getting us close to viable real-time pathtracing at least for "suitable" scenes. I am more confident than ever that a shift to traced renderers could be next - this has nothing to do with RTX and the buzz around it though...

New comment by paulhilbert in "NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)"

paulhilbert — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 09:20:57 +0000

I wonder why this gets downvoted - seems pretty reasonable to me...

New comment by paulhilbert in "C++17 constexpr Compile-time Ray Tracer (2017)"

paulhilbert — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 12:17:38 +0000

So this is basically misusing the compiler as an impractial script interpreter?

New comment by paulhilbert in "With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux"

paulhilbert — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 10:04:29 +0000

Too bad Linux still has no proper mouse support... I would be glad if even the games that are Linux native would be playable...