Hacker News: JRandomHacker42

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis"

JRandomHacker42 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:46:59 +0000

> Being a programmer does not make one knowledgeable about other specialized fields

If I could make every HN user read this before commenting on literally any article...

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "Someone used my open source project to phish people"

JRandomHacker42 — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:34:38 +0000

> There was no exploit. No vulnerability disclosure. No CVE for me to write.

was a dead giveaway in my mind when I read it.

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "United Wizards of the Coast"

JRandomHacker42 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:23:00 +0000

I'm specifically talking about the use case of "can we use natural-language tools to parse oracle text and produce functioning game objects in Arena". For that use case, it's completely sensible to look at the actual rules text and not reminder text.

Looking back further, there was confusion during preview season when people were looking at "fake/leaked" mockups that had incorrect text on them, but this also isn't a problem for the issue of "WotC themselves writing systems that can parse card text".

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "United Wizards of the Coast"

JRandomHacker42 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:59:23 +0000

I'm a judge and have seen barely any discussion around Prepared (mostly just clarification around the interaction with.

Rule 722 is the rule for "Preparation Cards", so I fail to see how it could not be relevant.

The text "its spell" only occur in reminder text, which is not rules text and would not be included in template language.

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "United Wizards of the Coast"

JRandomHacker42 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:22:24 +0000

I don't think Prepared is ambiguous at all. It has its meaning defined in the CR (722) and every card that uses it has either a clear trigger condition or the "enters prepared" replacement effect. It's just a new designation and there are plenty of those already, including ones that are 10+ years old (Renowned, Monstrous, Level Up).

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "United Wizards of the Coast"

JRandomHacker42 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:24:47 +0000

The Arena card engine is based on CLIPS [1] and not modern LLM-based tools. Magic cards are written in a very constrained language (usually called "card templating") that lends itself very well to machine-parseability.

[1]: https://www.clipsrules.net/

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "Rethinking School Design"

JRandomHacker42 — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 18:30:50 +0000

Jacob Geller did a really interesting video essay [1] about the parallels that can be drawn between modern school architecture and maps from shooter games - on top of whatever other context or functionality they provide, they are fundamentally spaces that are designed around the question "what happens if violence occurs here?"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usSfgHGEGxQ

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "Tour of CLIPS (2022)"

JRandomHacker42 — Wed, 01 May 2024 15:25:43 +0000

The source for them using CLIPS is a conversation I had with Arena team lead Ian Adams in a Magic-community Discord.

The source for the bug is a video WotC did that I can't find right now that featured the Arena team talking about developing Kaldheim - the bug came from the card Alrund, God of the Cosmos.

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "Tour of CLIPS (2022)"

JRandomHacker42 — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:54:00 +0000

MTG Arena, the new digital client for the Magic the Gathering trading-card game, uses CLIPS to implement the actual game-rules based on the English text of the cards. Magic cards are written using a very standardized language (look at custom-card communities and discussions around "templating"), but the fact that they've had such success with this approach is incredibly impressive to me.

It also leads to some really funny bugs that arise from grammar ambiguities - things like a card that says "[...] then put them into your hand" and the game losing track of what "them" refers to and putting _all_ the cards into your hand.

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "Universal Paperclips"

JRandomHacker42 — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 18:01:06 +0000

https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "The apps that Americans search to “delete” the most"

JRandomHacker42 — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 21:46:43 +0000

> They say it's the 'me' generation. It's not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It's self-conscious. That's what it is. It's conscious of self. Social media - it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said, here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time, for no reason. It's prison - it's horrific. It's performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.

Bo Burnham, from Make Happy

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "80/20 Aluminum T-slot Building Systems – Build your Idea"

JRandomHacker42 — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 15:14:40 +0000

I've used 8020 to custom-fab my Perfect Monitor Stand: it holds either three widescreen or two ultra-wide displays, has two attachment points to the desk, and has the minimum possible depth to keep the monitors as far as possible towards the back of the desk. It wasn't cheap, but it's solved basically all of my monitor layout issues.

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "Restoring a Vintage Rolex GMT"

JRandomHacker42 — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 19:22:45 +0000

I'm always amused at how little cross-promotion Marshall does - he has decently large followings in two completely different contexts and most of them are completely unaware of each other.

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "Ask HN: Experienced devs, what language would you learn today?"

JRandomHacker42 — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 15:51:07 +0000

Seeing "Java/C#" makes me think that you might not have taken a look at C# in a while

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "OpenAI API pricing update FAQ"

JRandomHacker42 — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 19:19:29 +0000

One of my former colleagues who was always in charge of publishing our team's performance testing results was a complete hardass on the rest of us for using proper language around multipliers and superlatives. It's well worth the clarity to avoid precisely this situation.

New comment by JRandomHacker42 in "Hikaru Nakamura's Forbidden Platform"

JRandomHacker42 — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 13:59:43 +0000

A lot of athletic contracts would forbid athletes from playing other sports or doing certain other strenuous activities - they were designed partially to try to avoid players injuring themselves doing something other than their contracted sport, and partially to prevent players earning money off their image outside of their team.

Jordan had a clause specifically exempting him from any restrictions around playing basketball - by his contract, he could play basketball in any league, or even any scrimmage, exhibition, or pickup game.