Hacker News: theresistor

New comment by theresistor in "Backtrack-Free Cursive"

theresistor — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:31:27 +0000

> Isn't that what everyone is doing, or are we Frenchmen the exception? > For reference if the author reads this, we write the latin x exactly like the cyrillic х, i.e. reverse c, bottom-left to top-right diagonal, normal c.

I was taught script in the US and Italy as a child, and never learned it like this.

New comment by theresistor in "98% Isn't Much"

theresistor — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:34:45 +0000

I had this argument with people working on VR headsets, where a physical parameter was designed to cover the 5th to 95th percentile. I had to point out that flat-out excluding 10% of the population is a pretty crappy starting point...

New comment by theresistor in "Telescope Ranchers"

theresistor — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:13:48 +0000

In most amateur imaging you can trade time for quality. By stacking enough images, satellite trails get averaged out of the final image.

Very high end amateurs get pissy about it because they paid a lot of money for high end equipment to minimize imaging times, but for the rest of us it’s not a huge impediment as we already needed lots of subframes to get high SNR anyways.

New comment by theresistor in "Telescope Ranchers"

theresistor — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:34:09 +0000

You’d be amazed what even a small smart telescope can see even in Bortle 9 urban skies.

I have one of the mentioned SeeStar smart telescopes, and have been quite successful in taking photos of both galaxies and nebulas from the rooftop of my apartment building in the middle of a city.

Sure, it takes time. Sure, it would be faster/better under darker skies. But it’s not impossible!

New comment by theresistor in "Telescope Ranchers"

theresistor — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:16:41 +0000

iTelescope does exactly what you’re outlining. There used to be a few others but I think they have mostly died out. I assume the economics don’t really work out.

New comment by theresistor in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

theresistor — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:44:02 +0000

Also also, AMD’s play has always been to produce HW that offers good performance/$, with the downside of having much weaker SW offerings to go with it.

Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.

Message from Pope Leo XIV on the 60th World Day of Social Communications

theresistor — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:30:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/communications/documents/20260124-messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850067

Points: 45

# Comments: 9

New comment by theresistor in "LLVM: The bad parts"

theresistor — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:48:03 +0000

> It might be that regalloc needs to be taught to rematerialize

It knows how to rematerialize, and has for a long time, but the backend is generally more local/has less visibility than the optimizer. This causes it to struggle to consistently undo bad decisions LICM may have made.

New comment by theresistor in "The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void"

theresistor — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:05 +0000

I say and hear it all the time in the US...

New comment by theresistor in "The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void"

theresistor — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 23:57:03 +0000

Really? I read the same sentence (as an American) and immediately thought that they must be referring to British English. Certainly nobody says brilliant as an affirmation here.

And "no problem" and "not bad" are both common colloquial statements in American English.

New comment by theresistor in "Cassette tapes are making a comeback?"

theresistor — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:07:55 +0000

As far as I know Apple will still sell you individual tracks (DRM free, I think?), though it’s a bit hidden.

New comment by theresistor in "Using LLMs at Oxide"

theresistor — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 07:52:25 +0000

A very recent example: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369

New comment by theresistor in "Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025"

theresistor — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:31:06 +0000

This is a pretty standard topic, and not really a compiler optimization. It's usually called a unity build.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_build

AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

theresistor — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 21:03:22 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274

Points: 438

# Comments: 306

The Tree That Owns Itself

theresistor — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:28:27 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882715

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by theresistor in "Starfront Observatories"

theresistor — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 04:29:39 +0000

https://www.itelescope.net/

New comment by theresistor in "An engineering history of the Manhattan Project"

theresistor — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:10:40 +0000

My grandfather also worked on it, as a technician in Los Alamos.

He had previously been working for a scientific supplies company in Chicago that was (unbeknownst to him) providing supplies to the Manhattan Project. Apparently his boss was aware of it, and when my grandfather's draft was called a letter from his boss convinced the draft board to assign him to Los Alamos instead. He was eventually able to get my grandmother, a secretary and typist, a job as a secretary in Los Alamos as well so that she could join him. She teased him the rest of their lives, because as the secretary to someone more important than a lowly technician, she had technically had a higher security clearance than he ever did!

The Atomic Heritage Foundation collects records about people who were affiliated with the Manhattan Project, as well as oral histories. Perhaps they have more information about your grandfather's work? See here: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/bios/

New comment by theresistor in "Mac Themes Garden"

theresistor — Thu, 08 May 2025 01:45:28 +0000

Kid me absolutely ran The Bug on an old PowerMac G3: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8191e1471dc9-the-bug/

New comment by theresistor in "Should managers still code?"

theresistor — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 22:10:05 +0000

> I tend to agree but, playing devil's advocate, is this true for other roles? Does a movie director need to know how to build sets? How to sew costumes? How to use Blender/Maya/Houdini?

I don't know that much about movie making, but my understanding is that there would be managers and/or leads within each specialty, who are (among other things) managing the interaction between their specialty and the director / producers.

That seems pretty comparable to what's being discussed here.

New comment by theresistor in "Affixes: The Building Blocks of English"

theresistor — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 08:48:09 +0000

My father was a Classics professor, and one of the most popular classes he taught was "Latin Terminology for Medicine and Law".