Hacker News: Hortinstein

New comment by Hortinstein in "Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)"

Hortinstein — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:20:49 +0000

One of the sequels "Maelstrom" has some incredibly prescient descriptions of the Internet as this overwhelming useless medium that was taken over by bots and ai...back when llms started to take off and post everywhere I'd always think back to this book. Great author

New comment by Hortinstein in "Heartbeats in Distributed Systems"

Hortinstein — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 23:52:00 +0000

Always thought Riak was a really cool database, distributed by default kinda blew my mind at the time! Would love to hear more about basho

New comment by Hortinstein in "Games That Weren't: Preserving Cancelled and Unreleased Video Game History"

Hortinstein — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 11:27:12 +0000

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Fantasy_Live_Online this is probably the one I still think about the most. I was huge into Phantasy Star Online and a true console MMO was so appealing at the time.

New comment by Hortinstein in "Show HN: Claude Code Usage Monitor – real-time tracker to dodge usage cut-offs"

Hortinstein — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:50:51 +0000

Is there anyway to ensure these logs are output in a current project folder? Would like to store a copy in git for reference

New comment by Hortinstein in "Mikeal Rogers has died"

Hortinstein — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 23:50:42 +0000

Loved the node up podcast, especially the episode on databases. He was always a great presence on there. Played a big roll in getting me back into hobby programming after I finished my undergrad

New comment by Hortinstein in "Station of despair: What to do if you get stuck at end of Tokyo Chuo Rapid Line"

Hortinstein — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 02:21:57 +0000

Hahaha I thought of this immediately when I saw the article title. I fell asleep on the train a few times and ended up in Ome or Okutama when I was living in Tokyo after a long night out. Ironically Okutama was/is still one of the most beautiful areas I have ever been, did a ton of drives out to that area to go explore the mountains

New comment by Hortinstein in "The Deck: An open-source cross-platform multiplayer card game engine in Flutter"

Hortinstein — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 19:12:23 +0000

I thought this was an incredible well executed/engineered art/commentary on using an incredible amount of technology to create a similar....likely sub par experience to getting a deck of cards for <10 dollars

I love it!

New comment by Hortinstein in "You're Breathtaking [Godot #100000]"

Hortinstein — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 12:47:53 +0000

Godot is an amazing project and when learning it from an excellent Udemy course (below if interested) I was shocked at how often I was impressed with the design/consistency and vertical integration of the development experience. Truly an amazing artifact of the open source world. Looking forward to seeing continued adoption, the third party plugin landscape is getting interesting and I think there will be a lot of exciting development closing the gap between unreal/unity for 3d games. https://www.udemy.com/course/create-a-complete-2d-arena-surv...

New comment by Hortinstein in "Accelerando (2005)"

Hortinstein — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 11:38:19 +0000

I remember this being an incredible book when I read it back on my moto droid phone in 2009ish on Kindle app...time to listen to it on audible. The biggest thing I remember is it invoked some deep thoughts from me on what is conscious and whether transferring consciousness to another medium would still the same person. Seemed (and still seems) to me that continuity would be broken...but isn't that true when we go to sleep and wake up? I loved this book because it provoked a lot of questions like this. Been meaning to revisit it for years.

New comment by Hortinstein in "Speeding up ELF relocations for store-based systems"

Hortinstein — Tue, 07 May 2024 01:10:49 +0000

Hahaha funny seeing you @fzakaria here, knew I recognized that name! We worked on a hypemachine scraper a long time ago 12 or 13 years ago, glad to see you are still around writing great software and interesting articles!

New comment by Hortinstein in "Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?"

Hortinstein — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 11:47:36 +0000

I don't think there has been a ton of iteration on it, but did you run into any specific problems or bugs or is this lack of recommendation based off caution against adopting something that is not being iterated on? Just asking because while I haven't used it in years, it's been my go-to for small projects in the past, it seemed to do what it advertised very well. I hope that someone picks up the swarm torch, I really liked the abstractions and workflow it enabled. K8s was always too heavy for me and introduced too much complexity I was uncomfortable with

New comment by Hortinstein in "Creating an autopilot in X-Plane using Python"

Hortinstein — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 10:40:43 +0000

Thank you this looks like a great place to start!

New comment by Hortinstein in "Creating an autopilot in X-Plane using Python"

Hortinstein — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 14:23:03 +0000

I have been wanting to play around with drone swarm simulated behavior, does anyone know of a sim that would let me do something like this with 10 or so drones?

New comment by Hortinstein in "Vernor Vinge has died"

Hortinstein — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 22:59:49 +0000

Came here to post almost this exact sentiment. I am not sure why but in college I checked out the Peace War and I largely credit that book and a few others for getting me back into reading. A couple years ago I decided to order a first edition and it's sitting on my shelf. The deepness books were great as well. "Software archaeologists" was a fantastic concept, I felt like that today digger through excel VBA

Additionally I think he was the first sci Fi author I found who was a computer science practitioner/professor. This led me to discover other great authors like Greg Egan.

New comment by Hortinstein in "One of world’s smallest fish found to make sound as loud as a gunshot"

Hortinstein — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:16:26 +0000

I came here hoping someone would mention this, it's really strange and for a while I had just attributed it to the Air Force base traffic or Tampa International nearby, but it keeps coming up. Always interesting to learn more

New comment by Hortinstein in "Mindustry: Open-source automation tower defense game"

Hortinstein — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 20:14:52 +0000

I just dove into this the last few months working through a Udemy course on building a vampire survivors clone in Godot 4....highly recommend (here is the author talking about it https://youtu.be/Yd-sndQnWIo?si=yWU9WJ2roSVlMzDE). I was amazed by the tooling and had a blast doing it. I'm primarily a backend dev and this scratched a different itch. There appear to be some RTS courses but I can't vouch for them. I would find one that looks interesting and dive in. I typed out all the code and did the steps as he did and feel like I learned a ton. I am still looking to learn more about multiplayer in Godot 4, but I found a few YouTube videos and it doesn't look super complicated, especially if you are not concerned off the bat about cheaters. Additionally I have been following this project (Godot 4 MMO), the code is organized pretty well: https://jdungeon.org/ but very early in development

New comment by Hortinstein in "Beeper – Moving Forward"

Hortinstein — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 21:47:41 +0000

Does anyone have a consolidated timeline of the counters by Apple and patches by beeper with technical details? It would be fascinating to read

New comment by Hortinstein in "Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes"

Hortinstein — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 11:40:09 +0000

Just signed up this seems like it will replace some docker containers I have running on a free tier of fly.io dumping into a supabase free tier. Very cool thank you for sharing!

New comment by Hortinstein in "Blindsight by Peter Watts (full novel)"

Hortinstein — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 23:34:29 +0000

This book is great...I am a big fan of the rifters trilogy also by Watts.

They have some great fictional speculation on the Internet and how it's chaotic mix of automated agents tearing at each other that really reminds me of what could be possible with the content creation of LLMs.

"In Peter Watts's Rifters Trilogy, which includes "Starfish", "Maelstrom", and "ßehemoth", the internet is a significant theme, especially in its altered, chaotic state. It is described as no longer trustworthy, having been overwhelmed by self-evolving viruses and the descendants of self-evolving anti-viruses that spiraled out of control. In this futuristic setting, the internet has been renamed "Maelstrom" to reflect its chaotic and unpredictable nature, becoming a space that is both electronic and ecological, complete with its own digital ecosystem" - synopsis I ironically used chat gpt to write

New comment by Hortinstein in "Videos of Godotcon 2023"

Hortinstein — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 17:18:43 +0000

Do you have any good resources on how to make consistent characters or art styles? I have been meaning to dig into it for a while. I'm sure it's a combination of prompts and image2image training....been thinking about building a workflow tool for this for a while but haven't had time to dedicate to it.

Even my naive prompts are getting impressive results with midjourney and dalle3...I imagine waiting a few months to a year this problem will be solved in a much better fashion than I would be able to hack together