Hacker News: roblh

New comment by roblh in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

roblh — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:45:29 +0000

For the love of god, yes. Slack is the worst for this with backticks. Editing the start/end points is a giant pain.

New comment by roblh in "My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary"

roblh — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:14:17 +0000

I feel like the stars are probably pretty easy to mask out since they’re very bright relative to the rest of the image. Once you have the mask, each one is small enough that you could probably fill it with the values from adjacent pixels. Kinda like sensor mapping to hide dead pixels. That’s just a guess though, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.

New comment by roblh in "Six ingenious ways how Canon DSLRs used to illuminate their autofocus points"

roblh — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:07:31 +0000

I haven't used all of them, but I have used both the 9 point and the 45 point types, and the difference is massive. The 45 point was far, far more tactile and responsive. I don't mean speed of autofocus, but the actual way that the points sit over top of the viewfinder and light up, it's hard to explain. I'm sure part of that is software, but owning an older model and then trying out a newer one in the camera store in like 2013 really was eye opening, it blew my mind. The 9 point feels like a toy.

New comment by roblh in "Nobody ever got fired for using a struct"

roblh — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 04:04:07 +0000

I kinda love this. That sounds like an incredibly entertaining place to work for between 1 and 2 years in your late 20s and not a second longer.

New comment by roblh in "MacBook Neo"

roblh — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:42:58 +0000

Yeah, not even having an upgrade to 16gb or more makes this dead on arrival for anyone doing real work. Bummer, since otherwise it looks great. I guess it'd be the same price as a macbook air after that upgrade anyways though, so it doesn't really matter.

New comment by roblh in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

roblh — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:13:12 +0000

Kinda funny that the top image is capture one when Apple literally owns Photomator and gives you the option of bundling it when you buy.

New comment by roblh in ""Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name"

roblh — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:45:34 +0000

It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is.

Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough that you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. That's about as close to a slot machine as I can imagine. Slot rewards are designed to keep you interested as long as possible, on the premise that you _might_ get what you want, the jackpot, if you play long enough.

Anthropic's game isn't limited to a single spin either. The small wins (small prompts with well defined answers) are support for the big losses (trying to one shot a whole production grade program).

New comment by roblh in "What functional programmers get wrong about systems"

roblh — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 06:09:38 +0000

My experience with elixir, as a scrub who spends every day at work writing javascript, is pretty in line with that. The language forces you to work that way, and you spend half your time just architecting your supervision tree. But the language itself is so easy to write business logic in that it takes half as long as it would in another language. So it works out to the same total time investment but the return is so much higher cause your program is better and more predictable and has scaling for free.

New comment by roblh in "HTTP Cats"

roblh — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:50:42 +0000

I unironically use this website everytime I forget a status code at work. The name is instantly memorable, it loads immediately, and I can ctrl-f it. It's basically muscle memory at this point.

New comment by roblh in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

roblh — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:15:52 +0000

Seriously, that’s a completely nonsense line.

New comment by roblh in "Dell UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor"

roblh — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 15:06:23 +0000

Is this some kind of OEM Apple display? Or did they just put all that effort into machine out those spheres in the back of it so it looks like one?

New comment by roblh in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

roblh — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:33:00 +0000

9 day old account talking about “the left”. Go back to Reddit.

New comment by roblh in "We can't have nice things because of AI scrapers"

roblh — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:03:49 +0000

There’s a lot of factors. Depends how well your content lends itself to being cached by a CDN, the tech you (or your predecessors) chose to build it with, and how many unique pages you have. Even with pretty aggressive caching, having a couple million pages indexed adds up real fast. Especially if you weren’t fortunate enough to inherit a project using a framework that makes server side rendering easy.

New comment by roblh in "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work"

roblh — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 17:05:28 +0000

I think they make good devs 2x more productive for the first month, which then slowly declines as that good dev spends less time actually writing and understanding and debugging code until it falls well below the 1x mark. It’s basically a high interest loan people take against their own skills. For some people that loan might be worth it. Maybe they’re trying to change their role in an organization and need the boost to start taking up new responsibilities they want to own. I think it’s temporary though. The slow shift into “skim mode”, where the authors just don’t quite put that same amount of effort into understanding what’s being churned out. I dunno, that’s just what I’ve seen.

New comment by roblh in "I couldn't find a logging library that worked for my library, so I made one"

roblh — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 23:48:41 +0000

This is so simple and makes so much sense. I’ve seen a couple libraries that do something similar, but I feel like this is obvious and useful enough that it should just be a stock pattern, and it clearly isn’t.

New comment by roblh in "A modern 35mm film scanner for home"

roblh — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 02:17:28 +0000

I got one of these from the latest batch last week and I’m not entirely convinced by it yet. I need to experiment some more but I went back and did a couple rolls from this summer and so far I think the cslite warm setting + negative lab pro results are better and more consistent. I’m still getting some wonky colour casts with it. It’s nice that the control app lets you change the power of each LED colour separately, so that’s the next thing I’m going to experiment with.

I’ll also note that negative lab pro hates negatives that are scanned with it. They don’t turn out at all. If you’re using it, you should expect to be inverting them manually, which is kind of a pain. I was quietly hoping (but not expecting) to still see some of the benefits of it when passing them through NLP.

New comment by roblh in "A modern 35mm film scanner for home"

roblh — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 02:08:11 +0000

All the current Nikon Z bodies (and probably other brands too) have different levels of pixel shift where it’ll take 4 or 8 images and basically cancel out that it’s a bayer sensor. The bayer array is a 4 pixel pattern, so it moves one pixel to the right then one down and then one back to capture all 3 channels for each individual pixel. For things like film scanning it works flawlessly, I use it all the time.

Then it’ll do a 16 or 32 shot stack in order to do the same thing but with more resolution.

New comment by roblh in "The Rapper 50 Cent, Adjusted for Inflation"

roblh — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 23:45:17 +0000

I would have gone the other way. He’s still 50 Cent today, but he’s less than a quarter 20 years ago.

New comment by roblh in "Svelte’s characteristics that likely contribute most to improved performance"

roblh — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 01:58:34 +0000

The router is really baffling, agreed. Magic file names make me so frustrated, and even more so when they all start with the same prefix so all my editor tabs look the same. I wish they’d just make a simple single file router that works the same as every other one. There are a lot of things that aren’t perfect in Vue, which I primarily work on, but the router isn’t one of the things that bothers me. It mostly just works.

New comment by roblh in "The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023)"

roblh — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 05:53:16 +0000

I’ve seen this one a few times and something about it doesn’t agree with my eye. It’s somehow in the weird awkward zone of not old enough to truly feel simple and functional, but not new enough to look modern minimal/clean. Might just be the font also, but I don’t find it very easy to read. Could just be me though.