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rootlocus

3,279 karma · joined July 1, 2013

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rootlocus··on Show HN: I made a 3D pose maker for artists
Imagine placing the feet on the ground at some location and then pinning them there. Now you can move the hips and the upper and lower legs as well as the knee orientations change to keep the feet planted in the same position.
rootlocus··on Using AI for just 10 minutes might make you lazy and dumb
Isn't that a strawman? There's a significant difference between "using AI" and "wholesale giving over your thinking to an AI". You won't find anyone arguing against the second.
rootlocus··on Using AI for just 10 minutes might make you lazy and dumb
For subjects I care about, I will hammer the AI with questions, ask for references, proofs, explanations, code samples, book recommendations until I'm satisfied with the answer and I can explain it myself.

For things I don't care about.. meh. I wouldn't have done any research without AI anyway and I'm probably getting a better nuanced or grounded answer than whatever someone who thinks they know might confidently explain me.

I'd argue getting your answers from social media is orders of magnitude worse, and the time to teach critical thinking skills was a few decades ago.

rootlocus··on Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision...
We have a dedicated snowflake id generator service that returns batch ids. It's also distributed, each service adds its own instance number to the id. When it overflows it just blocks for the next ms. For our traffic, it's never a bottleneck.
rootlocus··on New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag
The one he's carrying.
rootlocus··on Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores
The store could make it mandatory to swipe your fidelity care before calculating your prices. They already do something similar with specialized promotions.
rootlocus··on Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their
With all due respect to the guidelines that requires assuming good faith, this sounds like the beginning of a nirvana fallacy.

You don't have to provide a perfect solution to point out something is wrong. People who don't care about the people they lead don't make good leaders. I'd rather have leaders who hurt others by accident than on purpose.

rootlocus··on Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data
So I'm free to murder, I'm just not free from the consequences of murder?
rootlocus··on Is Germany's gold safe in New York ?
> I can't see Trump or anyone else willingly misusing that trust.

I don't think many people share this sentiment.

rootlocus··on “Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server
You can right click and uncheck "Lock the taskbar" and then drag it to the left side. Or am I misunderstanding your problem?

I'm on Windows 10 btw, no idea if it still works on 11.

rootlocus··on 65 Lines of Markdown, a Claude Code Sensation
I found that "Make no mistakes, or you go to jail" improves claude-code's performance by about 43%
rootlocus··on CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
TruthSocial is the largest distributor of propaganda and fake news. That's pretty hypocritic.
rootlocus··on Break Me If You Can: Exploiting PKO and Relay Attacks in 3DES/AES NFC
Sorry for being off-topic but I find it so refreshing that people can still engage in arguments in good faith, without resorting to personal attacks.

Thank you!

rootlocus··on Show HN: macOS menu bar app to track Claude usage in real time
"Follow me on X"

Why... just why? Why do people keep insisting on using it?

rootlocus··on Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg
> Tests are specifications: they define behavior, set boundaries, and keep the inevitable growth of complexity under control.

I set boundaries during design where I choose responsibilities, interfaces and names. Red Green Refactor is very useful for beginners who would otherwise define boundaries that are difficult to test and maintain.

I design components that are small and focused so their APIs are simple and unit tests are incredibly easy to define and implement, usually parametrized. Unit tests don't keep me "sane", they keep me sleeping well at night because designing doesn't drive me mad. They don't define how the "program" is supposed to work, they define how the unit is supposed to work. The smaller the unit the simpler the test. I hope you agree: simple is better than complex. And no, I don't subscribe to "you only need integration tests".

Otherwise, nice battery of ad hominems you managed to slip in: my understanding of quality software is lacking, my problem is my approach to engineering and I'm an immature developer. All that from "LLMs can automate most of the boring stuff, including unit tests with 100% coverage." because you can't fathom how someone can design quality software without TDD, and you can't steelman my argument (even though it's recommended in the guidelines [1]). I do review and correct the LLM output. I almost always ask it for specific test cases to be implemented. I also enjoy seeing most basic test cases and most edge cases covered. And no, I don't particularly enjoy writing factories, setups, and asserts. I'm pretty happy to review them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

rootlocus··on Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg
I feel like the distinction is equivalent to

    LLMs can make mistakes. Humans can't.
Humans can and do make mistakes all the time. LLMs can automate most of the boring stuff, including unit tests with 100% coverage. They can cover edge cases you ask them to and they can even come up with edge cases you may not have thought about. This leaves you to do the review.

I think think the underlying problem people have is they don't trust themselves to review code written by others as much as they trust themselves to implement the code from scratch. Realistically, a very small subset of developers do actual "engineering" to the level of NASA / aerospace. Most of us just have inflated egos.

I see no problem modelling the problem, defining the components, interfaces, APIs, data structures, algorithms and letting the LLM fill in the implementation and the testing. Well designed interfaces are easy to test anyway and you can tell at a glance if it covered the important cases. It can make mistakes, but so would I. I may overlook something when reviewing, but the same thing often happens when people work together. Personally I'd rather do architecture and review at a significantly improved speed than gloat I handcrafted each loop and branch as if that somehow makes the result safer or faster (exceptions apply, ymmv).

rootlocus··on S&box is now an open source game engine
Oooo, I remember Garry Newman! I found his UI library GWEN (GUI Without Extravagant Nonsense) when I was still in uni and working on my game engine. It's been abandoned for 9 years now, nice to see he's still working on cool tech.

[1] https://github.com/garrynewman/GWEN

rootlocus··on Original Superman comic becomes the highest-priced comic book ever sold
I assume the content isn't as important as the fact the object itself is the original. Original paper, original ink, original release date. The object itself comes from the original factory, survived through time etc. I would expect some tests will verify it uses the correct paper, has the signs of age, etc.

Even if you could duplicate it down to the molecule I would assume it wouldn't hold the same value since it doesn't have the same history. Assuming you'd want to sell it in good faith as a replica.

rootlocus··on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash
It also had the absolute worse monetization scheme in history with the general sentiment being they abused every dark pattern and made the experience horrible.
rootlocus··on Open-source Zig book
Presumably the "subject matter expert" will review the output of the LLM, just like a reviewer. I think it's disingenuous to assume that just because someone used AI they didn't look at or reviewed the output.
rootlocus··on Time to start de-Appling
> Who better understands where capital restrictions should be applied

Should be applied for what purpose? What's the purpose of the government and what's the purpose of a corporation? When the latter is strongly influencing the former, why is it difficult to entertain the idea that their purpose and interests align?

> Why would we not seek input from the industries requiring regulation?

There's a difference between seeking and weighing input, and simply passing along legislature proposals without even looking at it. This is a strawman.

> Yet this is a golden age by every measure.

This isn't guaranteed to improve or even remain forever. And it really depends where you look. Plenty of war, misery and suffering to go around. And even in safe countries the lack of education, healthcare, financial stability is causing enough stress that people start favoring authoritarian options. That's not a great sign for the future. Just because most of us are doing better than our ancestors, doesn't mean we're going in the right direction or that we're doing the best we can. No progress is achieved by being content with the status quo, and the present is pretty miserable for a lot of people. Should we wait until a terrible war wipes out half the planet before we consider maybe changing things?

But I think that's beside the point. The argument being discussed is whether corporate entities parabolically "are" the government.

rootlocus··on Time to start de-Appling
I fail to see the point you're trying to make or the argumentative process by which you're trying to make it.

Consider this: the current administration has received gifts from private corporations in return for more lenient tariffs. Or consider the amount of law projects passed through congress directly from large corporations with their logo still on the paper. And this is just the blatant tip of the iceberg the current administration is brazen enough to show publicly.

> absolutely baffling to you and which probably makes a hundred obvious counter-arguments pop up in your head.

I can probably find a hundred obvious examples of conflict of interests, quid-pro-quos, or otherwise pro-corporation anti-consumer for any administration in history. But in the end, the proof is in the pudding. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, while the government is issuing gold cards with the president's face on them for multi-millionaires to bring their business.

I'd be glad to hear a few of those hundred obvious counter-arguments.

rootlocus··on OpenAI asks U.S. for loan guarantees to fund $1T AI expansion
Indeed a world in which you can't tell truth from lies and proof from ai generated videos suits this administration perfectly. Masked men with no identification kidnap people off the streets and you can't tell if it's real or fake. No wonder the government loves openai. Just look at how happy they are to use it on truth social.
rootlocus··on Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not
Actions speak to the character of a person. And some actions have long lasting consequences.
rootlocus··on WorldGrow: Generating Infinite 3D World
Or at least coherent.
rootlocus··on Advent of Code 2025: Number of puzzles reduce from 25 to 12 for the first time
> If the were released every other day, people who wanted to do them for 12 straight days could not.

If they instead waited 12 days, they could start with the 6 puzzles already released, and then have enough puzzles to solve once a day for the next 12 days.

rootlocus··on K8s with 1M nodes
You're not the first one to think that k9 is a good name for a kubernetes related technology https://k9scli.io
rootlocus··on Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client
Funny enough, having close to zero experience with Rust and wanting to build an iced-rs application with Claude Code, I asked it to search github for large projects using iced-rs to use as a reference and Halloy ones one of the top 3.
rootlocus··on Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?
Here's how Claude Code does this:

> Find all java files with more than 100 lines.

● I'll search for all Java files with more than 100 lines in the codebase.

● Bash(find . -name "*.java" -type f -exec wc -l {} + | awk '$1 > 100' | sort -nr)

...

● I found 5 Java files with more than 100 lines:

  1. File1.java - 315 lines
  2. File2.java - 156 lines
  3. File3.java - 154 lines
  4. File4.java - 130 lines
  5. File5.java - 117 lines

  The largest file is File1.java with 315 lines.
Or, if you want to count lines:

> How many lines don't start with `import` in File1.java?

● Bash(grep -cv "^import " ./File1.java) ⎿ 287

● There are 287 lines that don't start with import in File1.java.

rootlocus··on FyneDesk: A full desktop environment for Linux written in Go
Nobody asked anyone anything. It's a post with people sharing thoughts. You don't even know if the maintainer is the same person as the author. As far as feedback goes, if the comment gets enough upvotes it shows a significant number of people share the sentiment, and would be something for the maintainer to consider if he wants a broader audience. Nobody expects the maintainer to respond or care though.
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