s1mon
s1mon on Hacker News
At a former employer, a voluntary buyout resulted in many of the best people leaving. Better people are more likely to find new work elsewhere and also they are better at recognizing the disfunction which produced the situation in the first place.
In this case it sounds like they are offering it to lower ranked employees (its own dystopian situation), but within that range of people, I still expect that Microsoft will lose more of the better ones.
Onshape, like Shapr3D, is based on Parasolid and works on desktop and mobile. They added MCP support a few months ago and there’s a lot of people who use it professionally for cabinetry etc. Even before they added MCP support, the way everything can be customized through the FeatureScript language has led to libraries of custom features for woodworking. If everything you’re working on is for fun (non-commercial), your Onshape license is free.
I almost always watch things on 2x.
Many things I knew, and a bunch I didn't. Thanks for that.
I wish he'd spent a little more time on the fundamental issue of CR vs CR/LF vs LF. That's been a "plain" text nightmare since before Unicode and many of the other complexities existed.
Yo dawg, I heard you liked layers inside your layers.
I love when people complain about X being in their feed on social media, and I see none of X. Do they not understand the basics of the algorithms? The more you engage with X, the more they show it to you.
That said, there's an insane amount of garbage self promotion on LinkedIn for individuals and companies which amount to your mom putting up your messy crayon drawing of you pet cat on the refrigerator as a kid. It's only impressive to you and your family, and it's not a remotely accurate picture of your cat.
I’m excited to see this, but switching many of the examples from “dark” to “light” or “print” theme leaves the boxes black and the text unreadable.
I hope this works out. It seems helpful but we can’t even get a lot of web sites to format their user/password fields or address fields to work correctly with password managers and autofill. This has to be more complicated than that.
I get some useful industry news, and info about what colleagues are up to there. There's a lot of noise - and that noise is getting more and more cringe - but there's a certain amount of signal that makes it worth it.
Any workspace, real or virtual, descends into messy chaos without someone actively organizing or cleaning things up. It's bad enough by yourself, but the minute it's shared with others, it will devolve quickly. Think about any shared file system, data library, workshop, kitchen, etc...
This is why librarians, janitors, lab managers, document controllers etc. are essential to make spaces functional and organized.
Why not just use Google Docs? The history is recorded. There are even plug ins which will play it back so you can see it.
It's always entertaining to try to understand these things from first principles. Color and skin color in particular are very complex things to measure and model. It's not just a physical quantity, it's also a matter of human perception based on lighting and a host of factors.
It seems like some work was done to research existing approaches, but I don't see any reference to Pantone Skin Tones [0]. Without intending to, I've worked on 3 different projects which involved measuring skin tones for makeup applications. The Pantone range is not 100% perfect, but it's pretty well done and easy to understand. There are two axes: a light/dark one, and red-yellow one [1].
[0] https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/skintone
[1] https://cosmeticsbusiness.com/pantone-skintone-guide-80945
Yep. On mobile it was basically impossible to read. 2/3 of the page was covered in ads and pop ups. I figure if they don’t care about the readers’ experience then I don’t care to try to read their content.
One key turning point in my life was approaching Red Whittaker, the head of the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon. I knew who he was and had met him briefly before, but this was pretty much a “cold call” even if happened to be in person. I was finishing up my degree at CMU and felt like if was going to stay in Pittsburgh, I wanted to work somewhere that was working on really cool projects. My degree was a BFA in sculpture, but I guess my enthusiasm and interest in novel mechanisms was enough for him to take a chance and make a position for me. I learned a lot from (and with) the team of PhD students and staff. The job had me starting to use parametric CAD at very early point (Pro/E 6.0). After a few years I moved on and eventually left Pittsburgh for SF, but without taking that chance, I really don’t know what path my life would have taken.
Onshape is free in the browser as long as you are not doing commercial work. It’s a professional system from the founders of Solidworks that competes with all the top CAD tools.
I'm old enough and lucky enough to have had my first computing experiences (1978-80) be on a teletype in our elementary school which was connected to a minicomputer that the town owned. The connection was an acoustically coupled modem/analog phone line that ran at 300 baud. The exciting thing was to write very basic BASIC programs and see results on the printout. There was no CRT, everything was via the literal teletype - a keyboard and a clunky printer.
I'm very used to tools which keep track of connections to documents based on internal IDs, not folder structure. It seems primitive to be so brittle.
It seems even more stupid that it was so hard to get Codex to fix this for me. I managed to get it to solve the problem, but not before it got itself in this crazy loop of restarting the app, wanting to quit, quitting even if I canceled the quit dialog, and restarting over and over. I was able to reboot my machine and it had sorted out the missing references to most of the projects, but wow.
I've been using the Codex app for a while (a few months) for a few types of coding projects, and then slowly using it for random organizational/productivity things with local folders on my Mac. Most of that has been successful and very satisfying, however...
Codex is still far from ready for regular people. Simply moving a folder that Codex has been working on confuses the hell out of it. I can't figure out how to fix "Current working directory missing. This chat's working directory no longer exists". I've tried asking it to fix the problem and it tries lots of terminal commands and screws around with SQLite. Something this brittle is not for non-developers.
So is it going to be cool again to wear Allbirds, in an ironic way? Or do I need to burn mine?
This is an amazing deep dive into color difference measurements and how sensitive the math is. The idea that we really need to save characters - bytes - in CSS when we have so many web sites chewing through 49 MB with the enshitification of the web is hard to reconcile.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945
I've been using Codex (GPT-5.4 extra high) to code custom FeatureScript in Onshape (3D mechanical CAD software). It's challenging to get it to do TDD that involves any visual reasoning. At the moment I've got tooling through Google Chrome Devtools MCP and Playwright to extract things and control the browser and I use some custom features which help with formatting and controlling debugging outputs (text and visual overlays). Mostly the text debugging outputs are very helpful to Codex. It will often add debugging payloads when we're focused on a particular issue. I do occasionally take screenshots and paste them into Codex and explain the issue that I'm seeing. It seems to understand a certain amount, especially if the issue can be seen in orthogonal views.
Yes. Sarcasm.
I have a pair of the first generation AirPods Max. They leave dents in my scalp if I wear them for any real amount of time. I've been an Apple person since the 1980s. This is one of the most disappointing Apple products for me ever, and I really don't want to know how much $$$$$ lifetime customer value I've contributed to Apple's bottom line.
Might as well be 3862 grams considering how much they hurt to wear for any length of time. I was also hoping this update would improve the ergonomics, but no. Still too heavy and no mention of any improvements to the headband.