Hacker News: Therenas

New comment by Therenas in "How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?"

Therenas — Sat, 02 May 2026 15:17:59 +0000

Well early iPhones did not have app multitasking, so that‘s quite the difference. Any app was killed when when closed.

New comment by Therenas in "ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips"

Therenas — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:04:00 +0000

Right but it still gets put into boxes and flown over by a 747. Of course it‘s more complicated than that, but most contenders for complex machines are much more built in-place, and not a complete 'product' being assembled.

New comment by Therenas in "ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips"

Therenas — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:25:48 +0000

I‘d probably call it the most complex commercially available machine. You can‘t buy a Space Shuttle, or an LHC. You can buy a TSMC lithography machine, and it‘ll be delivered to you in much the same way as other equipment.

Also, I think the axis it‘s probably most complex on is precision of individual parts and of their combination. Arguably chips themselves are more precise as their 'parts' are so small, but they are much more homogeneous compared to the EUV machine, where tons of different materials and part sizes need to combine.

New comment by Therenas in "Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening"

Therenas — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 18:43:11 +0000

I can‘t imagine Apple doesn‘t have capacity booked well in advance, and their suppliers aren‘t going to stiff them because they‘d lose those long-term contracts. Sure, if the shortage lasts a year or more, there‘ll be issues, but if it‘s short term they might be fine.

New comment by Therenas in "Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer"

Therenas — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 20:22:43 +0000

This isn‘t your main point, but the iPhone absolutely was the biggest revolution since the Internet. The world before it is wholly different to the world after it. AI looks to have a similar impact, but just like the iPhone it‘ll be a few years before everyone realizes the world has changed.

New comment by Therenas in "GPT-5"

Therenas — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 18:11:13 +0000

Too expensive maybe, or just not effective anymore as they used up any available training data. New data is generated slowly, and is massively poisoned with AI generated data, so it might be useless.

New comment by Therenas in "AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks"

Therenas — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 06:15:39 +0000

Okay, but when those sites go out of business, where does the AI get its information from? This is obviously not sustainable.

New comment by Therenas in "Do U.S. ports need more automation?"

Therenas — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:10:42 +0000

Wouldn‘t that be the opposite of aligning incentives? Unions want the workers to do well, stockholders want the company to do well. The company paying people less is better for stockholders, worse for employees obviously. So that seems like an awful idea.

New comment by Therenas in "Ask HN: How to finish last 30% of a side project?"

Therenas — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 20:41:54 +0000

Yeah this is exactly it, you might think you are close but you actually just started, and the actual work is still to come.

Whether you want to push through the initial honeymoon phase, where you are done with the fun part that you started the project for, and do all the rest around it that makes it an actual 'product', is up to you.

New comment by Therenas in "Docs as code (2017)"

Therenas — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 16:43:30 +0000

This is exactly what we do for the Factorio modding API docs. The docs are embedded inside the codebase, alongside the classes and methods that implement the functionality the docs describe.

So they are written and adjusted as the functionality is implemented, they can be reviwed alongside the code PRs. The CI builds the docs and makes sure there are no issues.

The format is a custom one, which is parsed and converted into JSON for language servers and into the API website. Not sure how you‘d test the docs content, but this parser is tested for sure.

Works great for us in general.

New comment by Therenas in "Bytecode Breakdown: Unraveling Factorio's Lua Security Flaws"

Therenas — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 17:08:21 +0000

I don‘t disagree.

New comment by Therenas in "Bytecode Breakdown: Unraveling Factorio's Lua Security Flaws"

Therenas — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 16:13:03 +0000

I work on the game. The debug library was disabled for other security holes that were brought to our attention, so it wouldn‘t be related to this, but I thought it was interesting to mention.

I believe the change was not mentioned in the changelog as an attempt at 'security through obscurity', trying to avoid people getting any ideas before the update is wide-spread. Not sure that helps any, but still.

New comment by Therenas in "Bytecode Breakdown: Unraveling Factorio's Lua Security Flaws"

Therenas — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 16:02:50 +0000

Factorio disabled bytecode loading in response to this. Bytecode did allow for some cool stuff like writing mods in a preprocessor language that spits out Lua bytecode, but ultimately the security issues were more important to address.

Almost all of the debug library was made unavailable to mods as well, for similar security reasons.

New comment by Therenas in "Factorio: Space Age"

Therenas — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 15:15:57 +0000

The source is not publicly available, no. It‘s still being actively developed and sold after all. There isn‘t really much of a barrier between engine and 'scripting', it‘s all custom and integrated. The reason there are so few bugs is that there is a ton of effort spent on squashing them! The approach is basically to fix any reported issue if in any way reasonable.

New comment by Therenas in "CWE Top Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses"

Therenas — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:23:37 +0000

What‘s the alternative though? For URLs for example, would you have to put a JSON structure into the browser? That‘s obviously not going to happen.

New comment by Therenas in "Claude 2"

Therenas — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 19:29:45 +0000

Interesting that is mentions the safety car making you need more fuel, when really you need less because of the reduced speed under it.

New comment by Therenas in "Factorio runs on Apple Silicon"

Therenas — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 16:01:38 +0000

No VC money, just three people developing a game they‘d like to play themselves, and it grew organically from there, financed by the money made from selling the game.

New comment by Therenas in "The journey to Nintendo Switch"

Therenas — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 20:29:43 +0000

I work on the game, and can confirm this technique is used wherever it makes sense!

New comment by Therenas in "Factorio Is the Best Technical Interview We Have (2021)"

Therenas — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 07:54:00 +0000

Well, there is always the Belt Overflow mod [0], but is is truly masochistic.

[0] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/belt-overflow