Hacker News: sestep

New comment by sestep in "An Update on Orion for Linux and Windows"

sestep — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:21:23 +0000

But it's not browser diversity in the sense people usually mean when they talk about IE and Chrome. It uses the same WebKit engine Safari uses.

New comment by sestep in "An Update on Orion for Linux and Windows"

sestep — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:02:29 +0000

For me the answer is quite simple: it's the only browser on iOS that lets you run Chrome extensions and Firefox add-ons.

New comment by sestep in "Satin: Dark mode PDF reader via affine mapping on Oklab lightness dimension"

sestep — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:15:02 +0000

Currently I remap all backgrounds, text, and vector graphics, and I leave raster images alone. This works great for documents whose only raster images are photographs; some documents do have other raster images that might even have white backgrounds instead of transparent, so that's not ideal, but it seems to work decently well in practice.

Satin: Dark mode PDF reader via affine mapping on Oklab lightness dimension

sestep — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:49:21 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/samestep/satin

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49843911

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by sestep in "Silicon Valley sees AI as the solution – for everyone else"

sestep — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:20:59 +0000

Full title: "Silicon Valley sees AI as the solution – for everyone else, it’s the problem"

New comment by sestep in "Better Models: Worse Tools"

sestep — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 21:59:05 +0000

> In case you are curious about Fable: I intentionally did not test it because I was not sure if the classifiers they are running might downgrade me to Opus silently.

Is this still a thing? I thought Anthropic walked back the silent downgrades so now all the different domains downgrade non-silently.

New comment by sestep in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

sestep — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 23:20:31 +0000

> The famous E=mc^2 it's just the first term of a Taylor expansion.

Is this actually true? My understanding was that E=mc^2 is exact for a particle at rest.

New comment by sestep in "Ported my C game to WASM, here's every bug that I hit"

sestep — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:07:29 +0000

It's slower. Wasm32 can just reserve 8 GiB (32-bit pointer + 32-bit offset) of the virtual address space from the OS for each memory, so checking for out-of-bounds memory accesses imposes no performance penalty. Wasm64 can't do that, so each memory access is a bit slower.

New comment by sestep in "Shall we play a game? – LLMs use tactical nukes in 95% of simulations"

sestep — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:19:10 +0000

This is just false. The article links to the 46-page paper [1] which lists full prompts in section E.2.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14740

New comment by sestep in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

sestep — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:21:17 +0000

I've seen various posts about Elixir's gradual type system pop up on HN, but haven't been following too closely. Does anyone know whether this particular gradual type system can change the asymptotics of programs vs untyped code? As far as I'm aware, most gradual type systems (e.g. Racket) can make programs run asymptotically slower, although there are some exceptions [1].

[1] https://doi.org/10.1145/3314221.3314627

New comment by sestep in "Stop Advertising in Your Commits"

sestep — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:41:27 +0000

For sure, and in the PR description for the Nixpkgs AI policy, they explicitly mentioned this as a "brown M&M test" [1]. I read the blog post as being against including this information in commit messages at all, not just about tools adding it automatically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen_test

New comment by sestep in "Stop Advertising in Your Commits"

sestep — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:29:21 +0000

I mean, sure, except that many large open-source projects (e.g. Linux [1], Nixpkgs [2], etc) require this as part of their AI policy. Omit attribution in your own projects if you want, but the maintainers of these projects are owed at least that level of transparency for contributions.

[1] https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html

[2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/d18b8f3238abdb2cd878...

New comment by sestep in "Squares in Squares"

sestep — Tue, 26 May 2026 02:26:15 +0000

The triangular table view is fascinating. It looks like the periodic table. I wonder if there are number-theoretic lemmas (or at least conjectures?) about what "family" the optimal packing for a given number falls into (like diamond, diagonal strip, two blobs, etc). I didn't see anything when skimming the survey paper linked at the bottom of the site, but I'm sure there's a lot more literature here.

All one-byte program names in Nixpkgs

sestep — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:28:33 +0000

Article URL: https://gist.github.com/samestep/2365535dc9afd10458b918919d7c2383

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042121

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by sestep in "A Simpler Parametrization for Modern Optimizers"

sestep — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:43:57 +0000

All I see is "Sorry, we've misplaced that URL or it's pointing to something that doesn't exist."

New comment by sestep in "Whohas – Command-line utility for cross-distro, cross-repository package search"

sestep — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:20:22 +0000

Another great tool, built on top of nix-locate, is comma. So for any program foo, if you have foo installed, you can run it like this:

foo

And if you don't have it installed, you can run it (without installing!) like this:

  , foo

And if multiple different packages provide a program named bin/foo then comma lets you interactively choose the one you want, and remembers your choice so you don't have to specify again unless you choose to via the -d flag.

New comment by sestep in "Highlights from Git 2.54"

sestep — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:17:55 +0000

I agree with the other replies saying to just run the checks in CI and have the CI error message mention how to install the pre-commit hook.

I'm glad cloning a repo doesn't automatically install hooks since I strongly dislike them: I often use Git commands in the terminal but sometimes I use the VS Code UI to commit, and it's extremely frustrating when simply creating a commit runs for several seconds because of some pre-commit hook.

New comment by sestep in "Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image"

sestep — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:42:02 +0000

Are you referring to how the nixpkgs-unstable branch hasn't been updated in the past five days? Or do you have some specific software in mind? (not arguing, just curious)

New comment by sestep in "A Case Against Currying"

sestep — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:25:51 +0000

This is an issue in Python but less so in languages like JavaScript that support "field name punning", where you pass named arguments via lightweight record construction syntax, and you don't need to duplicate a field name if it's the same as the local variable name you're using for that field's value.

Newcomb's Paradox Needs a Demon

sestep — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:46:45 +0000

Article URL: https://samestep.com/blog/newcombs-paradox/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317811

Points: 15

# Comments: 41