Hacker News: slongfield

New comment by slongfield in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

slongfield — Thu, 21 May 2026 18:25:01 +0000

As far as I can tell from these articles, driving into a flood has happened twice to Waymos, once in Texas and once in Atlanta? It does seem like it's pretty uncommon.

New comment by slongfield in "Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'"

slongfield — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:19:01 +0000

It used to stand for "[R]adeon [O]pen [C]o[m]pute", but since it's not affiliated with the Open Compute Project, they dropped the meaning of it a little while ago, and now it doesn't stand for anything.

New comment by slongfield in "An old photo of a large BBS"

slongfield — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:26:00 +0000

Looks like the shelves were custom-built for those machines. I wonder what the monitors were hooked up to, or if they were just spares.

My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly cared about the system they were running.

New comment by slongfield in "AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says"

slongfield — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:19:09 +0000

This isn't new.

"The Productivity Paradox" is what they called it when people were skeptical that computer would end up finding a place in the office. There are articles from the 90s complaining about how much people are spending on buying computers for no real impact on productivity https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/163298.163309

New comment by slongfield in "“Car Wash” test with 53 models"

slongfield — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:54:59 +0000

My favorite example of this was the Pew Research study: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/05/online-op...

They found that ~15% of US adults under 30 claim to have been trained to operate a nuclear submarine.

New comment by slongfield in "Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)"

slongfield — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:33:16 +0000

Procedural generation can use a fixed seed, it's not too uncommon. For instance, Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall's map was procedurally generated, but is the same for every player.

New comment by slongfield in "De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)"

slongfield — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 03:07:57 +0000

Computer hardware isn't trying to be currency. Bitcoin was supposed to be, but hardly anyone who uses Bitcoin these days is using it to buy things--it's used as a store of value or a speculative asset, not a means of transaction.

New comment by slongfield in "De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)"

slongfield — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:54:34 +0000

The other thing about Bitcoin is that it's deflationary, which leads to people holding the currency rather than spending it, as predicted by Econ 101.

New comment by slongfield in "Band of Holes"

slongfield — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 04:36:37 +0000

The satellite view shows this off much better than Wikipedia's ground-level picture. It Really is just a long band of holes dug into the side of a mountain.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/13%C2%B042'20.0%22S+75%C2%...

New comment by slongfield in "Webbol: A minimal static web server written in COBOL"

slongfield — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:30:59 +0000

The big problem with MUMPS is that as the "Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System", it does not work well for development in other states. There's been some experimentation with using it in Wisconson, but a W is not an M.

New comment by slongfield in "Sig Sauer citing national security to keep documents from public"

slongfield — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 20:05:18 +0000

Only going off when you want it to actually happens to also be requirements #1, #2, and #3 for grenades

New comment by slongfield in "Create personal illustrated storybooks in the Gemini app"

slongfield — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 22:44:00 +0000

I asked it to create the kind of storybook my toddler would have asked for ("create a storybook about a music truck and an ice cream truck and a mailman and a carwash", inspired by his request for a story last night), and the results were certainly... interesting.

Obviously Gemini doesn't know that "music truck" is another name for "ice cream truck", but more concerningly, the illustrations it made for the trucks were this kind of eldritch amalgamation of Cars-movie style cars and people driving cars. The story was just OK, I don't think it would have kept my toddler's attention for the whole ten pages. Plus, the mailman is barely involved.

New comment by slongfield in "TODOs aren't for doing"

slongfield — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:21:20 +0000

It has some ancient history as a morse code distress signal: https://regulatorylibrary.caa.co.uk/923-2012/Content/Regs/03...

And it shows up in some old BSD code: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2017-04-17-xxx-fixme/

But... I think repeated letters are just easier to type than any other string, and since X looks like the classic "marks the spot" logo, it's what people jump to.

New comment by slongfield in "The impact of file position on code review"

slongfield — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:52:47 +0000

I've recently started using Github code reviews for a lot of C++, and one thing that I wish it would do is show the header (.h) files before the implementation (.cc) files.

Small PRs help, but I often end up just opening a handful of windows to have everything open at once.

New comment by slongfield in "Gemini 2.5"

slongfield — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 18:21:56 +0000

For better or worse, Google gets more bad press when their models get things wrong compared to smaller AI labs.

New comment by slongfield in "Solitaire"

slongfield — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 18:23:19 +0000

People love to dunk on hacky looking gamedev code. Some of it is pretty ugly, e.g, VVVVVV's famous gigantic switch statement, but if it works and makes a fun game, that's the actually important part.

New comment by slongfield in "Bifurcation: The secret giant islands formed when rivers split"

slongfield — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 17:41:34 +0000

The parting of the waters in the USA is such an interesting landmark for just how uninteresting it actually is in person. Looks like any other split in a forest river, marked by a sign on a tree that you can only see after a long wilderness hike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parting_of_the_Waters

https://www.anotherlongwalk.com/2022/07/day-119-parting-of-w...

New comment by slongfield in "Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?"

slongfield — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 17:20:13 +0000

Yeah, YouTube's UI lets you set where the ads go. The creator tools let you set how many, and where midroll ads will play. However, most creators just click the "insert automatically" button.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006

New comment by slongfield in "The Video Game History Foundation library opens in early access"

slongfield — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:56:41 +0000

Non-centralization is enough for me (I love archive.org, but always worry about them flying too close to the sun one day and getting shut down), but this does also have a different UX, and has a more direct focus on videogame history, which should help them surface things in more interesting ways than a general purpose archive.

New comment by slongfield in "Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools"

slongfield — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 17:26:31 +0000

Personally, when I send an email, I feel less time pressure to respond, so I more carefully craft my responses. The metadata is similar enough, but the actual data in email/forums is usually better.