Hacker News: ahefner

New comment by ahefner in "Write less code, be more responsible"

ahefner — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 01:05:05 +0000

But how much time per week does an SWE actually spend writing code?

New comment by ahefner in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

ahefner — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 05:20:51 +0000

Every government is an attacker.

New comment by ahefner in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)"

ahefner — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 05:14:41 +0000

This was really frustrating me. YT started recommending this channel and I could recognize the voice as an AI impersonation but had no way to know if it was at least reading something really written by Feynman. Eventually I concluded it wasn't, but there wasn't clear criteria under which I could report the channel. I'm not sure it's even against YT's TOS.

New comment by ahefner in "IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT"

ahefner — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 06:02:23 +0000

I think you're not technically wrong, but you're defining NAT differently than the majority of people you're arguing with (those who assume NAT also implies a firewall blocking inbound connections), and the remaining minority (the "on the WAN subnet" crowd) are dismissing outright the idea as a reasonable attack vector that an attacker close enough to be able to send packets destined for non-internet routable addresses to your router.

Is the latter something that was/is actively exploited?

New comment by ahefner in "Bindless Oriented Graphics Programming"

ahefner — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 13:29:22 +0000

It's there in the name - "Rust graphics community" as opposed to simply "the graphics community". Language fetishization above the end goal - or, rather, the language fetish is the real goal.

New comment by ahefner in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"

ahefner — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:11:03 +0000

Apple is already sending spam notifications for stupid bullshit like that F1 movie.

New comment by ahefner in "Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price"

ahefner — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 03:54:14 +0000

If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture.

You make a fair point about smart pointers, and median "modern C++" practices with STL data structures are unimpressive performance-wise compared to tuned custom data structures, but I can't imagine that idiomatic Java with GC overhead on top is any better.

New comment by ahefner in "End of an Era"

ahefner — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 09:36:17 +0000

He definitely made games. Chris Crawford was one of the first known names in game design, a few years ahead of contemporaries like Sid Meier whom I expect you'd still recognize. Crawford seemed to alternate between computer war games, with reliable prospects for commercial success in the 80s, and more experimental fare about managing nuclear reactors, geopolitics, and such - difference being he seemed to get bored by the whole thing and completely disembarked in pursuit of whatever it was he intended to achieve via Erasmatron, Storytron, etc. It's fascinating to read his writings over that period. It seemed a sort of tragic paradox overshadowing all of it that, if he was so bored of mechanistic, algorithmic, and predictable computer game mechanics, maybe stop pursuing computer games as your chosen medium? It may have been a blind alley in the end, but someone had to explore it.

Nevertheless, it is quite sad - however, it's difficult for me to relate to the experiences of someone who lived through that first wave of personal computing and played a notable part in it - perhaps through that lens, anything was possible.

New comment by ahefner in "Show HN: My self-written hobby OS is finally running on my vintage IBM ThinkPad"

ahefner — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 19:44:01 +0000

The 8x16 font from the Atari ST's hi-res mode is pretty slick if you like something bold and a little futuristic. https://github.com/ntwk/atarist-font (or rip it directly from the ROM)

Caves of Golorp, a Roguelike Game in Prolog

ahefner — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 02:55:36 +0000

Article URL: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/golorp.php

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43758689

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ahefner in "Why Every Programming Language Sucks at Error Handling"

ahefner — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 02:02:58 +0000

There's still a few Common Lisp features the mainstream would benefit from ripping off. Relevant here is the condition system. Conditions and restarts are still foreign enough that it's hard to explain to people why the "debugger" was a fundamental part of the lisp machine UI, and how much sense that made, and harder still to fathom how you'd adapt that to Unix, where it would morph into some kind of weird IPC tied into the command shell.

It's not just about being able to stop your program and hot-patch code to recover from errors - this should be trivial in any dynamic language. Rather, it's about being able to composably control how to recover from exception conditions (or, really, any branching behavior) both interactively and programmatically in a unified framework.

New comment by ahefner in "An invalid 68030 instruction accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to boot"

ahefner — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 14:59:42 +0000

Today by, way of your screenshot, I discover Asm-Pro. Just got into Amiga recently (by way of receiving one from my uncle's closet..) and have been meaning to backfill my shameful lack of 68k asm knowledge. Thanks!

New comment by ahefner in "iTerm2 critical security release"

ahefner — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 03:48:03 +0000

Probably true, but it still stings that this dubious piece of software (speaking as a former iTerm2 user still holding a grudge) had been spraying my passwords and random terminal activity all over the internet in the form of unencrypted DNS requests for who knows how long, deliberately, due to mindless opt-out featuritis on the part of the developer. In my mind this is one of the clearest violations of privacy and information security I've been directly subjected to, because the developer had some gee-whiz-neato idea of highlighting URLs in a terminal and making them clickable.

It pains me to think people are still exposing themselves to this class of risk because of whatever iTerm2's latest and greatest idea is.

New comment by ahefner in "Conscious unbossing"

ahefner — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 03:01:22 +0000

Oh, I don't know - in my (admittedly limited and very individual / company-specific) experience, the senior management was hard to relate to from the perspective of us rank and file, but clearly had the Sword of Damocles over their head at all times, and tended to get swept away arbitrarily every few years as the winds of corporate politics changes direction. It seemed to require some exceptional execution (or luck) to defer this cycle for even a year or two.

Depends what you mean by senior management, of course. I'm thinking mostly the "VP / SVP of Engineering" type role, and to a lesser degree, one hop down, the "Senior Director" folks, who seemed to be subject to the same phenomenon but on a slightly slower cycle.

New comment by ahefner in "In 2025, blogs will be the last bastion of the Good Internet"

ahefner — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 04:38:50 +0000

From my perspective (for me, personally), the closing of Google Reader killed blogs. That's when I largely stopped reading them. Other readers seemed not worth the trouble, for various reasons. Was this before or after the onslaught of SEO slop? Seems like this shouldn't have been an issue in the age of RSS readers - why would you subscribe to blogspam?

Briefly, Twitter was a useful alternative to promote blog posts (the set of people you follow on Twitter not necessarily being that different than who you'd subscribe to via RSS), but then the blog hosting platforms themselves seemed to age into irrelevance while things like Medium and Substack appeared (neither judging nor endorsing them) while Twitter degraded.

I suppose you're right about Twitter to some degree, though anything that could fit in 140 characters probably belonged better there anyway.

New comment by ahefner in "Fighting spam with Haskell at Meta (2015)"

ahefner — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 01:21:50 +0000

But that's like half of computing.. every new tool the world inflicts on you, configured in Jojo's Awesome Configuration Language, with some arbitrary made up grammar punctuated by Tourette outbursts of special character line-noise.

That, or YAML, then a tool to template and generate the YAML, and then a stack of tools wrapped around that, ad infinitum.

A little learning is the cost of not having to write the thing yourself. On the other hand, hell is the non-composable tower of babel that is computing. Total employment by exponentially compounding incidental complexity.

New comment by ahefner in "Boar's Head plant posed an 'imminent threat' years before listeria outbreak"

ahefner — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 01:40:44 +0000

Salmonella as a Service!

New comment by ahefner in "SDL3 new GPU API merged"

ahefner — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 05:00:07 +0000

SDL1 had no high-level graphics system - you either got a raw framebuffer, or an OpenGL context.

New comment by ahefner in "macOS Sequoia adds weekly permission promptfor screenshot, screen recording apps"

ahefner — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 04:04:14 +0000

There's some irony in this for me personally. My most recent major "I quit Apple" rage moment was trying to get Flameshot (which I use routinely on Linux) working on my Macbook, so I could more easily take screenshots, just to share something with a friend, because the built-in screenshot functionality in MacOS is so clunky. Between Gatekeeper and the XCode upgrade train, Mac OS's dogged insistence on not letting me run the software I wanted it to run worked me into a rage and I swear I'll never buy another Mac for casual daily computing again. They've really ruined the OS.

New comment by ahefner in "TPU transformation: A look back at 10 years of our AI-specialized chips"

ahefner — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 00:18:07 +0000

China, supposedly.