Hacker News: percentcer

New comment by percentcer in "Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived"

percentcer — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:04:35 +0000

"The IDE, on Visual FoxPro's own sample projects. Every picture is a real session." starting to have involuntary revulsive twitches from Claude prose

New comment by percentcer in "GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher"

percentcer — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 23:12:39 +0000

opsec is when you summarize the contents of a document into a word and then use that word as the encryption key for that same document

New comment by percentcer in "Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?"

percentcer — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:41:02 +0000

Nobody wants to work anymore!

New comment by percentcer in "iPhone Duo"

percentcer — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:20:36 +0000

Despite what the marketing material would have you believe you can always see the fold. Even when it's fully open. Folding screens have been a solution in search of problem for like a decade now

New comment by percentcer in "OpenAI's new reasoning technique alarms AI safety experts"

percentcer — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:12:12 +0000

Relying on CoT (and, similarly, asking the model to explain its actions) for analysis has always seemed pretty silly (naive?) to me, but maybe I'm missing something. Why do are we so committed to preserving it? And do non-textual models provide some similar form of tracing?

New comment by percentcer in "2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up"

percentcer — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 02:46:11 +0000

I don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!

New comment by percentcer in "Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis"

percentcer — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:22:03 +0000

This whole article is just (barely) rephrasing a few popular twitter threads from the past week.

New comment by percentcer in "Apple unveils new accessibility features"

percentcer — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:24:58 +0000

Unfortunate thumbnail on that embedded video

New comment by percentcer in "Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale"

percentcer — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:21:01 +0000

what is the Decimation thing?

New comment by percentcer in "Riding the D in Los Angeles: city hopes new subway stations will be game changer"

percentcer — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:47:47 +0000

Los Angeles just needs buses that come through frequently enough to obviate the need to check the schedule. Also dynamic bus routing, which would reduce the total number of buses required for this.

New comment by percentcer in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

percentcer — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:23:29 +0000

I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.

New comment by percentcer in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

percentcer — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:53:06 +0000

it's not a bad trade!

New comment by percentcer in "Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments"

percentcer — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:25:44 +0000

This is one of those things that seems like a nerd snipe but would be more easily accomplished through brute forcing it. Just get 76 people to manually type out one page each, you'd be done before the blog post was written.

New comment by percentcer in "Here is the 15 sec coding test I used to instantly filter out most applicants"

percentcer — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 22:23:33 +0000

Why wouldn't a qualified developer just run the code? Takes two seconds instead of ... whatever you're going for here.

New comment by percentcer in "HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)"

percentcer — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 20:06:46 +0000

Dumb question but what stops browsers from rendering TeX directly (aside from the work to implement it)? I assume it's more than just the rendering

New comment by percentcer in "High-performance 2D graphics rendering on the CPU using sparse strips [pdf]"

percentcer — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:51:50 +0000

This was the original goal of the Cornell box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_box, i.e. carefully measure the radiosity of a simple, real-world scene and then see how closely you can come to simulating it).

For realtime rendering a common thing to do is to benchmark against a known-good offline renderer (e.g. Arnold, Octane)

New comment by percentcer in "Matrices can be your friends (2002)"

percentcer — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 22:10:15 +0000

The only thing that ever made this click for me was that the columns can be interpreted as the values for the new, post-transform basis vectors

New comment by percentcer in "Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated"

percentcer — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:29:13 +0000

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

New comment by percentcer in "John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta"

percentcer — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 02:43:53 +0000

Not quite the same but check out A Canticle for Leibowitz

New comment by percentcer in "A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers"

percentcer — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 20:45:06 +0000

I like programming. It's fun, and sometimes it even requires creativity. There are plenty of times when it's not that fun, and doesn't require any creativity (because whatever it is has been done by someone else a thousand times over), and you just want a result. Vibecoding is great for _that_ stuff (think little throw-away scripts, shell one liners, tool plugins, etc)

I generally don't get great results from LLM code because most of my work is in C++ (which I'm guessing is underrepresented in the training data?), but when I point it towards some well-worn javascript thing I've had real successes! Most recent example is this little chrome plugin I had it whip up in one shot (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/favicon-tab-grouper...) because I couldn't find the exact functionality I needed in other plugins.

Works perfectly for my needs, took less than five minutes to spin up, and I use it all the time. If you're looking to get started with vibecoding stuff, try making plugins that provide niche functionality for your hyper-specific workflows.