Hacker News: sly010

New comment by sly010 in "More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams"

sly010 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:33:28 +0000

Then of course there is the whole fractal nature of software. As you add more detail, the arrows can flip flop around. Polling in a lower level of a stack can very much be used as a push mechanism. (e.g. USB interrupts are in fact the host polling the device)

This is why communicating architecture is often as hard if not harder than implementing it.

New comment by sly010 in "More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams"

sly010 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:20:20 +0000

There is in fact a 3rd: build time dependencies.

Control: Object/module/function A calls object/module/function B.

Data: The call can either push or pull data.

Build dependency: The call can be direct (A depends on B) or indirect through an interface/callback/etc (both A and B depends on the interface).

Ideally every design document includes all 3 as separate diagrams.

New comment by sly010 in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

sly010 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:43:08 +0000

... or the WM loads the compositor, or the WM links to a compositor library (i.e. wlroots). The point is there are options...

Honestly, every time this topic comes up, I feel like the person complaining just doesn't want to put in the work and they are angry that they don't get an easy win. And maybe that's a good thing. Do we really need more half baked WMs?

New comment by sly010 in "A Programmer's Loss of Identity"

sly010 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:03:09 +0000

> chosen to use fear and intimidation to help sell the agenda of the big tech CEOs who, in turn, have somehow managed to use coal-fired GPUs to capture society’s output and sell it back to us, while converting a significant portion of the economy into an expanding envelope of hot gas

I work for a very big tech company and I have no one to share this with.

New comment by sly010 in "Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use"

sly010 — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:55:14 +0000

There is a 3rd party Android app that uses the accessibility APIs to (supposedly) track and limit my short video use. However, it's broken, so I can't watch short videos at all :)

New comment by sly010 in "An engineer's perspective on hiring"

sly010 — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 15:30:05 +0000

We get it. You are a manager.

New comment by sly010 in "Vibe Coding Gone Wrong: 5 Rules for Safely Using AI"

sly010 — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 23:53:54 +0000

I've seen this image generated by meta AI. The prompt was something like: think of a room, make it look like anything you like, but do not in any circumstance put a clown in it. Guess what...

I think Jason has a "do not think of an elephant" problem.

New comment by sly010 in "Rethinking CLI interfaces for AI"

sly010 — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 21:39:53 +0000

Sorry for the snark, but we couldn't even do this for humans, but let's do it for poor poor LLMs? It's kind of ironic that NOW is the time we worry about usability. What happened to RTFM?

New comment by sly010 in "Is Gemini 2.5 good at bounding boxes?"

sly010 — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:21:03 +0000

Genuine question: How does this work? How does an LLM do object detection? Or more generally, how does an LLM do anything that is not text? I always thought tasks like this are usually just handed to an other (i.e. vision) model, but the post talks about it as if it's the _same_ model doing both text generation and vision. It doesn't make sense to me why would Gemini 2 and 2.5 would have different vision capabilities, shouldn't they both have access to the same, purpose trained state of the art vision model?

New comment by sly010 in "Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet"

sly010 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 05:48:09 +0000

Nah. You misunderstood. "They" don't make money on human time wasted. They make money on ads served. They don't particularly care if the ads were served to humans or agents, they get paid either way. Bot-traffic is actually good for tech companies because it inflates numbers. Capthas are not there to waste our time, but are there to improve their credibility ("We are certain those ad-clicks were real humans because the captha said so").

New comment by sly010 in "Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet"

sly010 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 05:22:37 +0000

First off, I always thought the type of things described (tracking mouse movements, keypress jitter, etc) are already done by ReCacpha to decide when to present the user with a captcha. I am surprised they are not already doing this.

Second, I am surprised AI agents are this naive. I thought they would emulate human behavior better.

In fact, just based on this article, very little effort has been put into this race on either side.

So I wonder if is has to do with the fact that if companies like google reliably filtered out bot traffic, they would loose 90% of their AD revenue. This way they have plausible deniability.

New comment by sly010 in "A new pyramid-like shape always lands the same side up"

sly010 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 01:09:05 +0000

Math has a PR problem. The weight being non-uniform makes this a little unsurprising to a non-mathematician, it's a bit like a wire "sphere" with a weight attached on one side, but a low poly version. Giving it a "skin" would make this look more impressive.

New comment by sly010 in "LLM-powered tools amplify developer capabilities rather than replacing them"

sly010 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:46:35 +0000

And just like optimizing compilers LLMs also emit code that is difficult to verify and no-one really understands, so when the shit hits the fan you have no idea what's going on.

New comment by sly010 in "A flowing WebGL gradient, deconstructed"

sly010 — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 23:44:14 +0000

Very cool, but by css-rotating (skewY(-6deg)) the canvas at the last moment, you introduced aliasing on the border between the canvas and the rest of the page which kills the vibe. The browser can't automatically blend the canvas with the rest of the page. It's noticeable even on a brand new retina display. Maybe you could keep your canvas square and introduce the skew in the shader.

New comment by sly010 in "Apple Exclaves"

sly010 — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 02:49:32 +0000

Isn't that just true for vulnerabilities in general? Trust Zone is not a security mechanism, it's an isolation mechanism.

New comment by sly010 in "Distributed systems programming has stalled"

sly010 — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 01:28:51 +0000

I don't disagree, but funny that I recently made a point to someone that modern consumer embedded systems (with multiple MCUs connected with buses and sometimes shared memory) are basically small distributed systems, because partial restarts are common and the start/restart order of the MCUs is not very well defined. At least in the space I am working in. (Needless to say we use C, not rust)

New comment by sly010 in "Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?"

sly010 — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 22:43:27 +0000

> The goal of programming is not to write code (however much I enjoy that part), it is to solve problems.

Right, which is exactly why autocomplete is not a huge help.

New comment by sly010 in "Why is printer ink so expensive?"

sly010 — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 15:54:45 +0000

FWIW ink is not expensive, but traditionally the nozzles and electronics and the printhead are all bundled with the cartridge, making it expensive. The big companies now offer inkjet printers with ink and print head separate (eg Canon pixma) and for those printers the ink (in a literal bottle) is priced much more reasonably.

There are other issues of course, I am not trying to give them slack here. If you don't use self cleaning once a week, the printer head clogs and you have to replace it anyway. If you use self cleaning too much, the waste ink reservoir fills up and your whole printer is toast unless you reset the firmware somehow. But there is a whole community for those kind of things.

New comment by sly010 in "UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan"

sly010 — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 15:48:52 +0000

Or you could say let's not normalize broken AI in health care related systems, but potato potato I guess.

New comment by sly010 in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

sly010 — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 04:20:11 +0000

> I'm sure somebody has written a book already about how ostensibly wealthy societies can fail at basic infrastructure that they previously mastered, driven by greed and complacency and other socioeconomic factors.

How about Foundation by Isaac Asimov.