Hacker News: Nition

New comment by Nition in "You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow"

Nition — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:56:17 +0000

That exact sort of magic numbering is rife in games from what I've seen over the years, especially in stuff like an old RPG from 1994. Maybe you've seen better game code on average than me. But you don't even really need the "random numbers" - I'd expect a mistake like:

    GetItemChange(curVal, percentBoost) { return curVal * PERCENT_BOOST; }
    
    eqipVal = val + GetItemChange(val, percentBoost);
    // ... later...
    unequipVal = val - GetItemChange(val, percentBoost);

Edit: I see there's Realmz source code on GitHub.[1] Although I can't see anything that'd cause the specific bug PlunderBunny mentions (they did say 'early versions' so maybe it was fixed), this is the kind of thing I mean re old games and "random numbers". This is part of the Wear method for equipping items:

    if ((item.sp1 > 59) && (item.sp1 < 100))
      c[character].condition[item.sp2] = 0; /**** neutralize condition ***/
    if (item.sp1 == 122) /******** item adds attacks **********/
    {
      c[character].attackbonus += item.sp2;
    }

    if ((item.sp1 > 19) && (item.sp1 < 60)) /******* adds condition *****/
    {
      if (c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] > -1)
        c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] = 0;
      c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] += item.sp2; /**** make condition[sp1-20] = sp2 ***/
    }

    if (item.sp3) /******* adds special ability *****/
    {
      if (item.sp3 < 0)
        c[character].special[abs(item.sp3) - 1] += item.sp5;
      else if ((item.sp3 < 16) && (item.sp3 > 0))
        c[character].spec[item.sp3 - 1] += item.sp5;
      else
        partycondition[item.sp3 - 30] -= abs(item.sp5);
    }

    if (item.sp4) {
      if (item.sp4 < 0)
        c[character].special[abs(item.sp4) - 1] += item.sp5;
      else if ((item.sp4 < 16) && (item.sp4 > 0))
        c[character].spec[item.sp4 - 1] += item.sp5;
      else
        partycondition[item.sp4 - 30] -= abs(item.sp5);
    }
  }

[1] https://github.com/Realmz-Castle/realmz

New comment by Nition in "You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow"

Nition — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 04:52:25 +0000

I wonder if it was percentage based. That'd be one of the easiest mistakes to make.

- Player has a stat of 100

- Wears "+10%" helm

- Player has a stat of 110

- Removes helm, game subtracts 10%

- Player has a stat of 99

Actually, now that I think about it more, that wouldn't work as described above because once your stat got close to zero you'd enter a kind of Zeno's Paradox situation.

New comment by Nition in "We must pace the frontier"

Nition — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:22:02 +0000

For what it's worth, I didn't get AI-written vibes from it, and Pangram also flags it as 100% human-written.

New comment by Nition in "Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI"

Nition — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:35:24 +0000

You may recall though that whole problem with '42' as the answer was the lack of knowledge of the question. The Earth was created as an attempt to provide the question, but was unfortunately demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass just before the question was resolved.

New comment by Nition in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

Nition — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:08:01 +0000

This is fair criticism, I was being pretty harsh.

New comment by Nition in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

Nition — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 21:39:10 +0000

Did anyone else notice that all the use cases they show here are "use ChatGPT Images to imagine all the things you'd like to have, but don't"? For some, they then show the thing being done, since just imagining it is a bit sad. But ChatGPT Images can't help you with that part. At best, it's providing creative inspiration - but that's often the most rewarding part of the process for a human... None of the examples show things where you just need an image directly, e.g. product labels, signage, sprites, textures, images for websites etc. I guess aspirational stuff sells?

In order, there's:

- Imagine you had better decorations for your fish.

- Imagine you had a tattoo of your pet.

- Imagine you had a unique candle holder.

- Imagine you had a worse haircut.

- Imagine your flowers were arranged.

- Imagine your child had a suit.

- Imagine your dog had a costume.

- Imagine you owned a scanner.

- Imagine you could hang out with friends.

- Imagine your bed was made.

New comment by Nition in "LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices"

Nition — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:19:54 +0000

Did it ever turn itself off after you made those settings changes?

New comment by Nition in "Every novel is boring until it isn't"

Nition — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 01:18:09 +0000

The article focuses on novels, but of course many things in life are like this. Learning an instrument for example. It also brought to my mind that famous quote from Ira Glass about creative work.[1]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...

New comment by Nition in "Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board"

Nition — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:00:47 +0000

This is the marrow of web design, in the same way that Thoreau went to seek the marrow of life.

"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

New comment by Nition in ".name Termination"

Nition — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:36:55 +0000

I know, but what I mean is, if he's the only one that even owns anything at .fraser.name now, then it'd be easy to just automatically give him all of .fraser.name when that happens, and then he can recreate his subdomains without worrying about someone else snagging it first. But that doesn't work if someone else owns somethingelse.fraser.name, because you can't give it to both of them.

New comment by Nition in ".name Termination"

Nition — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 07:20:19 +0000

fraser.name does not seem to be currently registered, so it seems they could automatically give him that name, and hence solve the problem entirely.

But I wonder if there might be some competing names on the third level? Like, he's neil.fraser.name, but what if there's also bob.fraser.name and they'd both very much like to keep their domains?

The Last Interview

Nition — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 01:31:05 +0000

Article URL: https://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/p/the-last-interview

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49559427

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Nition in "GPT-6 Astra"

Nition — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:20:26 +0000

"Within a year" is a bit of an exaggeration but it's true that the pace of PC tech during the 90s was much, much faster than it is now. CPU power was doubling every two years, and today we're at roughly eight years. Add onto that the rise of video cards in the late 90s.

New comment by Nition in "Reasons robotics is hard"

Nition — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:21:45 +0000

Remember though, there is no food cloud really, just other people's fridges.

New comment by Nition in "I wanna live an NPC life"

Nition — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 02:09:45 +0000

I feel it necessary to make a slight pedantic correction here, since we're officially defining it. It's Non-Player Character.

New comment by Nition in "Exit the Cave"

Nition — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:26:04 +0000

It reminds me of an old series of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky[1] where he talked about how there's "doing your best" which is often more like just doing what's expected of you, and then there's really trying, like actually thinking hard about the best way to achieve something and carrying that out, and then even above that there are levels of effort that usually only come into play in extraordinary situations where you become willing to take desperate risks to achieve a goal.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/s/3szfzHZr7EYGSWt92

New comment by Nition in "FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses"

Nition — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:55:57 +0000

Yeah. It's a bit unfortunate that I seem to have the top comment in this thread now despite it probably being wrong, at least to some extent, but it's too late to edit it. I agree with your second point as well.

New comment by Nition in "FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses"

Nition — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:18 +0000

Good point, "we have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database". I missed that line on first read.

New comment by Nition in "FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses"

Nition — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 03:58:59 +0000

I mean, just because all your friends are jumping off a cliff...

New comment by Nition in "FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses"

Nition — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 03:51:29 +0000

The thing that really gets me about this one is that surely you can easily just delete the data after you've verified someone? But instead they decided to keep 153,347,439 of them.