Hacker News: HexDecOctBin

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE"

HexDecOctBin — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:04:29 +0000

Yeah, but then I'll have to deal with Embarcadero.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE"

HexDecOctBin — Fri, 08 May 2026 08:29:15 +0000

Does this support declaring variables anywhere (as opposed to only in the beginning of a function)? That was my primary complaint when using Lazarus.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "The USB Situation"

HexDecOctBin — Sun, 03 May 2026 03:52:30 +0000

How do people find Lightning cables robust? Every single one I got from Apple failed around the one year mark. So much so that I finally started buying cheap knockoffs that only lasted 6 months but cost a tenth of official ones. To compare, I haven't seen a single Micro-USB or USB-C cable fail on me whether expensive or cheap. Am I simply uniquely unlucky in the matters of Lightning cables?

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Panipat: The rise of the Mughals"

HexDecOctBin — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:08:34 +0000

> "Abrahamic bad", "Eastern good"

Is that what you read in my comment? Because that is not what I wrote. People sympathise with those who are similar to them. Europeans sympathise with Ukrainians, Muslims with Palestinians, Abrahamics with other Abrahamics. How you got from that to your "Abrahamic bad", I can't even fathom.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Panipat: The rise of the Mughals"

HexDecOctBin — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:08:26 +0000

Abrahamic societies will naturally be sympathetic to the acts of other Abrahamic peoples and antagonistic to pagan and polytheistic cultures, especially if the non-Abrahamic culture rejects the Abrahamic proselytising that purports to "civilise the heathens" as many Indic societies did. To expect anything else under some expectation of fairness or empathy is nothing but childish naïveté.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be"

HexDecOctBin — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 06:30:26 +0000

iPads have M-series chips in them that support hardware virtualisation. But Apple goes out of its way to disable the hypervisor for its iOS/iPadOS builds[1]. All they have to do is stop doing that and allow apps to make use of the virtualisation APIs. UTM hypervisor already exists in App Store, so Apple is clearly not against the principle of it. As soon as that happens, running macOS (or Linux) will become elementary.

[1] https://x.com/utmapp/status/1708907045314035986

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Pijul a FOSS distributed version control system"

HexDecOctBin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 01:58:41 +0000

Is Pijul implemented in form of a library (a la libgit2)?

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Computational Physics (2nd Edition) (2025)"

HexDecOctBin — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:51:48 +0000

What physics do I need to know to follow this book?

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it"

HexDecOctBin — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:39:33 +0000

I was attacked in this way a couple of months back. I use a different email address for each account (of the pattern product@example.com), and use a separate address for Git commits (like git@example.com). It was this second one that was attacked and I ended up with some 500 emails within 12 hours. Fortunately, since I don't expect anyone to actually email me on the Git address, I just put up a filter to send them all to a separate folder to go over at my leisure.

After 12 hours, the pace of emails came to a halt, and then I started receiving emails to made up addresses of a American political nature on the same domain (I have wildcard alias enabled), suggesting that someone was perhaps trying to vent some frustration. This only lasted for about half an hour before the attacker seems to have given up and stopped.

Strangely, I didn't receive any email during the attack which the attacker might have been trying to hide. Which has left me confused at to the purpose of this attack in the first place.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "A single-file C allocator with explicit heaps and tuning knobs"

HexDecOctBin — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:15:37 +0000

The classic Doug Lee's memory allocator[1] has explicit heaps by the name of mspaces. OP, were you aware of that; and if yes, what does your solution do better or different than dlmalloc's mspaces?

[1] https://gee.cs.oswego.edu/pub/misc/?C=N;O=D

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Common Lisp Development Tooling"

HexDecOctBin — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 06:36:47 +0000

> will improve

If only I was capable of such divination.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Common Lisp Development Tooling"

HexDecOctBin — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 06:12:26 +0000

When I read an article, I am expecting to read the author's own experiences and insights they gained from them. Not the regurgitation of an industrial scale word generator.

> She still needed to know what questions to ask and prompts to give

Then publish the prompts. Let me enter them in an LLM of my choosing and see what bullshit it hallucinates and diff it against the 'article'.

> hopefully steered it right when it made up falsehoods.

"Hopefully"? Publishing something a stochastic parrot dreamed up under your name is ghost writing at best and spreading misinformation at worst.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer"

HexDecOctBin — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:44:48 +0000

If someone from Teardown dev team is here, did you guys ever tried to do the physics in voxel space? If I understand correctly, Teardown convert each physics chunk into a mesh and feeds all the meshes into a traditional physics engine. But this means that the voxel models remain constrained to the voxel grid only locally but not globally.

I have been trying to figure out a way to do physics completely in voxel space to ensure a global grid. But I have not been able to find any theory of Newtonian Mechanics that would work in discretised space (Movable Cellular Automata was the closest). I wonder if anyone in the Teardown dev team tried to solve this problem?

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "SBCL Fibers – Lightweight Cooperative Threads"

HexDecOctBin — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 02:59:50 +0000

Is there a similar document for the memory arena feature? I tried searching the official documentation, but found scant references and no instructions on how and when to use it.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Julia Snail – An Emacs Development Environment for Julia Like Clojure's Cider"

HexDecOctBin — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 06:30:46 +0000

You can't scroll without moving the cursor.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "The hidden compile-time cost of C++26 reflection"

HexDecOctBin — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:29:57 +0000

> Language features like templates are not the issue – the Standard Library is.

What sins does STL commits that make it slow if templates themselves are not slow, and what kind of template code doesn't bloat compile times? In my experience, C++ libraries are usually one order of magnitude or more slower to compile than equivalent C ones, and I always chalked it upto the language.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Emacs internals: Deconstructing Lisp_Object in C (Part 2)"

HexDecOctBin — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:34:11 +0000

Why do they use the bottom bit for tag and not the top bit?

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language"

HexDecOctBin — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:26:50 +0000

Teardown calculates collision meshes and does physics on those. Not on voxels directly, and definitely on in voxel space.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language"

HexDecOctBin — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:42:52 +0000

So how would you do destruction physics on voxels without meshing? This is how even Teardown does it, and it uses raymarching.

New comment by HexDecOctBin in "Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language"

HexDecOctBin — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 03:10:59 +0000

One issue with Voxel-based physics destruction games is that the physics happens in continuous space (as opposed to voxel space). This means that the moment you break off a chunk of geometry, it has to be converted into a mesh and simulated like any other mesh-based model will. This makes voxels seem like more complicated Voronoi-noise based fractures. If you want the modelling workflow or the looks of voxels, it's fine. But assuming that voxels will somehow help with the destruction physics seems not to be a valid assumption.

Ideally, we would be able to do physics in voxel space itself (sort of like a cellular automata based classical mechanics), but that doesn't seem to be possible.