Hacker News: robhlt

New comment by robhlt in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

robhlt — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:19:28 +0000

Thankfully the Great Lakes Compact prohibits water from being diverted outside the great lakes drainage basin, with very limited exceptions.

https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/program-areas/water-diver...

New comment by robhlt in "To Protect and Swerve: NYPD Cop Has 547 Speeding Tickets"

robhlt — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:48:49 +0000

The Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program was meant to deal with drivers like this, but it was allowed to expire in 2023 after the NYC DOT failed to actually implement it.

The program allowed the DOT to make drivers with more than 15 speed camera or 5 red light camera tickets in a year to take a safe driving course or have their car siezed. The DOT only took action against a small fraction of eligible offenders however.

More: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/09/22/analysis-dangerous-ve...

New comment by robhlt in "Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music"

robhlt — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:00:56 +0000

The timer on copyright starts once a work is published, not when the work is first started. So works that spend a decade or more in development would be unaffected by this.

New comment by robhlt in "US national debt surges past $39 Trillion"

robhlt — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:42:38 +0000

What leads you to believe $12B includes normal things that would be spent regardless? The source of that quote makes no such claim. They have every incentive to quote as low a price as they can reasonably defend, and it would be very easy to defend a quote that only includes new and additional expenses that are directly attributed to the war.

New comment by robhlt in "Meta and TikTok let harmful content rise to drove engagement, say whistleblowers"

robhlt — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:03:50 +0000

I don't think we even need to go that far. Just remove protection for paid advertisements. It's absurd that Meta cannot be held liable for the ads they promote when a newspaper can be held liable if they were to publish the same ad.

New comment by robhlt in "The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product"

robhlt — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:35:07 +0000

How does that test suite get built and validated? A comprehensive and high quality test suite is usually much larger than the codebase it tests. For example, the sqlite test suite is 590x [1] the size of the library itself

1. https://sqlite.org/testing.html

New comment by robhlt in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

robhlt — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:15:06 +0000

More like signaling that a specific human wrote it themselves instead of one of their human assistants. The article is mostly about emails from the Epstein files so non-human authorship wasn't really a possibility at the time they were written.

New comment by robhlt in "Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US"

robhlt — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:47:29 +0000

The legal standard that must be met for this kind of discrimination is called "Bona fide occupational qualification" [1]

Generally customer demand is not enough use this defense. Airlines tried using it to defend hiring only female flight attendants and lost.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...

New comment by robhlt in "Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts"

robhlt — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:54:05 +0000

All that Corporate IT stuff can work on Linux, we just have to start demanding Linux for them to put in the effort. Macs used to be in the same position, Corporate IT only knew how to manage Windows so that's what everyone got. Eventually the ability to use a Mac became enough of a recruitment draw that they had to make it work. The same thing can happen with Linux.

New comment by robhlt in "Are compilers deterministic?"

robhlt — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 16:35:09 +0000

GCC's build process does this. GCC is built 3 separate times, starting with the host compiler, then with the compiler from the previous step. If the output of stage 2 and 3 do not match the build fails.

Valve Wins 'Patent Troll' Trial

robhlt — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:02:57 +0000

Article URL: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/steam-game-developer-wins-patent-troll-trial-against-inventor

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064027

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by robhlt in "Tesla Sales Down 55% UK, 58% Spain, 59% Germany, 81% Netherlands, 93% Norway"

robhlt — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:27:17 +0000

Waymo can go camera-only in the future too by training a camera-only model alongside their camera+lidar model.

They'll probably get there faster too because the decisions the camera+lidar model makes can be used to automatically evaluate the camera-only model.

New comment by robhlt in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

robhlt — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:49:17 +0000

I'm (mostly) a believer too, and I think AI makes using and improving these existing frameworks and libraries even easier.

You mentioned matplotlib, why does it make sense to pay for a bunch of AI agents to re-invent what matplotlib does and fix bugs that matplotlib has already fixed, instead of just having AI agents write code that uses it.

New comment by robhlt in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

robhlt — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:17:26 +0000

It's nice that AI can fix bugs fast, but it's better to not even have bugs in the first place. By using someone else's battle tested code (like a framework) you can at least avoid the bugs they've already encountered and fixed.

New comment by robhlt in "NIMBYs aren't just shutting down housing"

robhlt — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 05:50:33 +0000

Municipal bonds are meant to address this. The city can borrow against that future tax revenue to build infrastructure today.

New comment by robhlt in "Minneapolis driver shot and killed by ICE"

robhlt — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:45:01 +0000

Shooting the driver of a car that's driving at you is not self defense. Cars don't instantly stop if the driver is incapacitated. You'll likely make the situation even worse because the incapacitated driver's foot will press the accelerator down (exactly what happened here). If your actual intent is to defend yourself the only move that makes any sense is to get out of the way.

New comment by robhlt in "KDE onboarding is good now"

robhlt — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 16:12:17 +0000

From the outside, as a user, this last year has been incredible for KDE Plasma, in terms of new features and stability. So whatever they're doing internally is absolutely working from my perspective.

New comment by robhlt in "Linux is good now"

robhlt — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 19:06:54 +0000

I don't think the Interstellar Blu-ray has Dolby Vision (or Dolby Atmos), just regular HDR10. If the TV/AVR says it's Dolby Vision something in your setup might be doing some kind of upconversion.

New comment by robhlt in "Linux is good now"

robhlt — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 18:49:09 +0000

Desktop/Laptop Linux is improving pretty fast, but by using an LTS distro like Debian you miss out on a lot of that.

I had to run Ubuntu 22.04 on a laptop for a while and encountered similar monitor switching and bluetooth issues. Eventually I figured out I could get the latest version of most desktop packages from the KDE Neon repos since they were also based on 22.04 at the time.

Running the latest KDE Plasma desktop with the latest mesa and pipewire made a huge difference. Monitor switching now works every time, all the bluetooth features worked, battery life improved, and Firefox stopped crashing when using webgl.

I'm not saying it'll fix all your problems, but most of these problems are being actively worked on and I think its worth trying a distro that actually keeps up with the pace of that work.

New comment by robhlt in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

robhlt — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:38:36 +0000

"Filmmaker mode" is a trademark of the UHD Alliance, so if TV makers want to deviate from the spec they can't call it "Filmmaker mode" anymore. There's a few different TV makers in the UHD Alliance so there's an incentive for the spec to not have wiggle room that one member could exploit to the determent of the others.