Hacker News: salamanderman

New comment by salamanderman in "White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says "the memes will continue""

salamanderman — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 17:38:33 +0000

Hey fellow nerds, never forget that your inventions will be turned into a weapon. We must always consider how dangerous that weapon will be. And there you go, generative AI being used by an authoritarian government to slander and defame political opponents. It's not the first time, I'm sure, and they've been using it for propaganda memes and NFT trash for a while, but this is the most blatant I've seen. It's not obviously altered, it's very believable, and it's for a minor dissident, a protest organizer. I'm really scared.

New comment by salamanderman in "Draig, a Welsh Programming Language"

salamanderman — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 05:06:30 +0000

Da iawn!

New comment by salamanderman in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

salamanderman — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:01:41 +0000

"A 100% Rust kernel is now upstream in Linux 7.4" paired with "Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?" is great.

New comment by salamanderman in "These Men dove to the Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck decades ago. Their stories"

salamanderman — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 17:45:47 +0000

Yes, after the ship was already screwed, they moved the ship to the far side of a small island where the winds would be slowed and the waves would be smaller. Unfortunately, their depth maps were inaccurate and the water wasn't deep enough such that they bashed the hull. If it weren't for the extreme winds, they wouldn't have moved the ship to try to get out of them.

New comment by salamanderman in "Zig and the design choices within"

salamanderman — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 17:41:04 +0000

I think the post gives an answer to this with "due to Zig's fairly minimalistic nature; it lacks a lot of features that one would otherwise use to solve problems. Of course, this is the appeal for many, but still". I have a lot of C/C++ experience, and they're what I reach for, but I often want C to be a little more like C++, and I often want both to have slightly better memory management, and I've never liked the different syntax for the main language, templates, and pre compiler macros. I also agree with Zig's dogmatic stance on no hidden control flow; I have been bitten by "magic" too many times.

New comment by salamanderman in "These Men dove to the Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck decades ago. Their stories"

salamanderman — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 16:34:29 +0000

I assume you thought the "hurricane west wind" line from the song was exaggerated. The winds down the middle of the lake, in certain seasons, are 80mph.

New comment by salamanderman in "New lab-grown human embryo model produces blood cells"

salamanderman — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 19:29:31 +0000

I'm pretty certain I read of people doing this in cycling tournaments.

New comment by salamanderman in "I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens"

salamanderman — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 07:14:21 +0000

I've heard parents say they "got a 504 and then had to pay a lawyer to enforce it" so many times. I just hate the idea of being forced into such an adversarial relationship with the school. In my life, any time we start talking about needing a 504 I think "we might as well just say screw it, because what good will come of this?" Like, in your story, I assume that while they complied, the way they interacted with your kid was tainted in some other from that point forward because your kid got them in trouble. Hopefully I'm wrong, but it's that kind of thing that I worry about for my own situation.

New comment by salamanderman in "Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others"

salamanderman — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:29:47 +0000

Nice, I got my upside down penis fish past the filter! Although, once it was swimming it did look very much like a fancy guppy. I don't think anyone would recognize it, but I still feel smug about "beating" the machine.

New comment by salamanderman in "Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others"

salamanderman — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:13:28 +0000

As hard as I tried to add fish characteristics, it knew what I was doing.

New comment by salamanderman in "What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?"

salamanderman — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 16:44:14 +0000

Agreeing with you, and connecting it to the link, my parents talk about their childhood as basically being feral. You had multiple kids in the house who entertained/babysat each other (possibly by beating each other up, but whatever) and you also had streets filled with kids doing whatever (baseball in a dirt field, playing in traffic). The rule was to be home by the time the streetlights came on. Organizing and transporting to playdates etc. was not a thing.

New comment by salamanderman in "Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014)"

salamanderman — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 17:10:37 +0000

Breadth-first is a queue. Depth-first is a stack. A* is a priority queue.

New comment by salamanderman in "Show HN: MidWord – A Word-Guessing Game"

salamanderman — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 01:06:42 +0000

Bisection search the game, but honestly was fun to play with my partner multiple times.

New comment by salamanderman in "Push Ifs Up and Fors Down"

salamanderman — Sat, 17 May 2025 17:40:19 +0000

Moving preconditions up depends what the definition of precondition is. There's some open source code I've done a deep dive in (Open cascade) and at some point they had an algorithm that assumed the precondition that the input was sorted, and that precondition was pushed up. Later they swapped out the algorithm for one that performs significantly better on randomized input and can perform very poorly on certain sorted input. Since the precondition was pushed up, though, it seems they didn't know how the input was transformed between the initial entrance function and the final inner function. Edit - if the precondition is something that can be translated into a Type then absolutely move the precondition up and let the compiler can enforce.

New comment by salamanderman in "Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room"

salamanderman — Thu, 15 May 2025 22:16:59 +0000

UC Berkeley does this too. Nobody told us freshman, and in my very first class we were all dutifully early, wondering where the professor was, and at 8 minutes after the hour the whole lecture hall was wondering if we needed to bail. Then the lecturer came in and asked what we were all doing there, didn't we know classes don't start until 10 minutes after the listed time?

New comment by salamanderman in "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip"

salamanderman — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 21:13:57 +0000

If I were doing this, I would have the system generate the image, and then I would have it run a secondary estimate saying "probability that this is a picture of [list of characters that Disney has given us reference input for]". If the picture has a "looks like Spiderman" score greater than X, then block it. EDIT - To answer the question, I'm guessing Disney provided a reference set of copyrighted images and characters, and somehow forgot Indiana Jones.

New comment by salamanderman in "By the end of today, NASA's workforce will be about 10 percent smaller"

salamanderman — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 16:06:56 +0000

Well, the answers are simple. Congressmen and senators, and sometimes presidents (Orion was George W's baby), demand that NASA spend money on stupid shit that NASA doesn't actually want to spend money on, and also demands that NASA spend that money in specific districts around the country to maximize the dollars they claim they brought to their district while minimizing NASA's efficiency.

New comment by salamanderman in "Why Blog If Nobody Reads It?"

salamanderman — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 22:58:48 +0000

So, journaling, which is already known to be a healthy practice. It begs the question, though, why publish it if it's just for you? Just write it.

New comment by salamanderman in "Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today"

salamanderman — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:18:13 +0000

I can't tell for sure if the "ironically" refers to it feeling ironic that Facebook didn't collude, or that Pixar did collude. If it's the latter, it's because Jobs was CEO and primary shareholder of Pixar and orchestrated it's purchase by Disney to get himself a seat on the Disney board. Ironically, if I'm recalling the biography correctly, Jobs made significantly more money from Pixar than he did from his first phase at Apple.

New comment by salamanderman in "Business Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era"

salamanderman — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 20:45:58 +0000

Peter Pauper Press is my go to notebook. They aren't elegant in their simplicity like a Moleskin but they are lovely and very functional.