Hacker News: tomtom1337

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Full Spectrum and Infrared Photography"

tomtom1337 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:02:49 +0000

You could probably use just an X-scanner, and instead of a CCD line sensor, use a regular 2D image sensor if you used a "1 pixel wide" slit aperture to crop the image perpendicularly to the direction that the prism disperses the light. So instead of a single pixel being dispersed, you disperse a line.

You would reduce the time required by the root of the number of pixels you want (assuming a square image).

(This is what we do in momentum-resolved electron energy loss spectroscopy. In that situation we have electromagnetic lenses that focus the electrons that have been dispersed, so we don't have as bad a chromatic aberration problem as the other response mentions).

I would love to see e.g. a butterfly image with a slider that I could drag to choose the wavelength shown!!

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Full Spectrum and Infrared Photography"

tomtom1337 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:52:16 +0000

This is called chromatic aberration, for those who are intrigued.

Given that regular phone cameras have sensors that detect RGB, I wonder if one could notice improved image sharpness if one had three camera lenses (and used single-color sensors) next to one another laterally, with a color filter for R, G and B for each one respectively. So that the camera could focus perfectly for each wavelength.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Agents that run while I sleep"

tomtom1337 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:42:09 +0000

This is very interesting, but like sibling comments, I'm very curious as to how you run this in practice. Do you just tell Claude/Copilot to do what you describe?

And do you have any prompts to share?

New comment by tomtom1337 in "QGIS 4.0"

tomtom1337 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:48:32 +0000

I used it to map out storage locations and refill stations at our online grocery picking stations, then export it to read in using geopandas in order to calculate the shortest distances between all locations!

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Show HN: Effective Git"

tomtom1337 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 08:18:22 +0000

I get it but I think you're essentially saying "I learnt it this way and it's hard to change once I learnt it that way". My argument is that "when teaching others, it's better to teach them to use switch and restore rather than checkout".

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Show HN: Effective Git"

tomtom1337 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:33:22 +0000

I'd recommend using git switch instead of checkout, since the checkout command is so overloaded. And restore instead of checkout for restoring changes.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Parse, Don't Validate (2019)"

tomtom1337 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:35:08 +0000

Definitely do not parse each row into eg pydantic models. You lose the entire performance benefit of pandas / polars by doing this.

If you need it, use a dataframe validation library to ensure that values are within certain ranges.

There are not yet good, fast implementations of proper types in Python dataframes (or databases for that matter) that I am aware of.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Selection rather than prediction"

tomtom1337 — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:55:18 +0000

Any suggestions for «orchestrating» this type of experiment?

And how does one compare the results in a way that is easy to parse? 7 models producing 1 PR each is one way, but it doesn’t feel very easy to compare such.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Show HN: Ferrite – Markdown editor in Rust with native Mermaid diagram rendering"

tomtom1337 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 08:48:54 +0000

You need something "more" on the website before you ask people to create an account. "Team workspace that stays fast" isn’t clear enough for me, at least. What is a workspace? What does the interface look like? Is it in the browser? Is it an app?

People will go "what is this?", "huh, I’m not gonna make a user for this, can’t tell what it is". Those are my 2 cents.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Pokémon Team Optimization"

tomtom1337 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:05:21 +0000

Haha, I started reading this, got interrupted, came back and got confused by the graph. Then came to the comments, saw your comment, reloaded the post and voila!

Thank you for a lovely post!

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster"

tomtom1337 — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 16:45:18 +0000

They mean «this kind of demand/leadership» no longer exists. Not the particular feature of the wake up time.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "The Connectivity Standards Alliance Announces Zigbee 4.0 and Suzi"

tomtom1337 — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 10:03:41 +0000

Oooh, thank you for sharing! New product lineup looks interesting, but I echo other concerns here about it thread maybe eventually requiring internet.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "The Connectivity Standards Alliance Announces Zigbee 4.0 and Suzi"

tomtom1337 — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:37:36 +0000

Are the ikea zigbee devices going to stop being sold? Massive shame if so, they are extremely reliable and easy to use.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Show HN: Parqeye – A CLI tool to visualize and inspect Parquet files"

tomtom1337 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 09:58:59 +0000

Super quick feedback - opening that link on my phone shows me two options next to each other, seemingly with the same name / description (followed by …) and same pricetag. I had to turn my phone sideways to see that there is a windows and a Mac version.

I think you can afford the extra characters to show the whole page in portrait mode. (iPhone 16 pro Safari)

https://imgur.com/a/aTxO3sp

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Ohm Editor"

tomtom1337 — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 11:17:17 +0000

Could you provide a bit more context here? I’m looking at the math example (https://github.com/ohmjs/ohm/blob/main/examples/math/index.h...) and would like to learn a bit more.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Lenses in Julia"

tomtom1337 — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 05:14:32 +0000

If you’re young, new to data science and hoping to get a job in it after some time, then I absolutely recommend learning Python instead of Julia.

But if you are just interested in learning a new language and trying it in data science OR are not currently looking to enter the data science job market, then by all means: Julia is great and in many ways superior to Python for data science.

It’s just that «everyone» is doing data science in Python, and if you’re new to DS, then you should also know Python (but by all means learn Julia too!).

New comment by tomtom1337 in "SedonaDB: A new geospatial DataFrame library written in Rust"

tomtom1337 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 16:41:14 +0000

Look, this article is absolutely excellent, and answers your questions. Please read the article before commenting this sort of thing.

As someone who has had to use geopandas a lot, having something which is up to an order of magnitude faster is a real dream come true.

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available"

tomtom1337 — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 16:01:54 +0000

Ah, of course. Slightly ambiguous English tricked me there. Thank you Ritchie!

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available"

tomtom1337 — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 13:54:08 +0000

Out of curiosity, what makes a rust library easier to use? Could you expand on that?

New comment by tomtom1337 in "Use Your Type System"

tomtom1337 — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 20:58:29 +0000

Why would it be difficult to monitor the slowness? Wouldn’t a million function calls to the from_F_to_K function be very noticeable when profiling?

On your case about swapping between image representations: let’s say you’re doing a FFT to transform between real and reciprocal representations of an image - you probably have to do that transformation in order to do the the work you need doing on reciprocal space. There’s no getting around it. Or am I misunderstanding?

Please don’t take my response as criticism, I’m genuinely interested here, and enjoying the discussion.