Hacker News: alexyoung

New comment by alexyoung in "Fastpotify"

alexyoung — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:03:48 +0000

I realise I’m pissing into the wind here, but I find the LLM text on the homepage and docs quite funny/ awkward.

> “Ctrl+M turns it into a tiny player that wears any classic Winamp 2 skin, spectrum analyser, equalizer, and playlist included. 2000s vibes, pixel for pixel.”

Everything is said with too much intensity, and phrasing that sounds impressive but doesn’t really mean that much. Like “wears any classic Winamp 2 skin” feels so awkward, what’s “wears”? You mean it can use it?

I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product. Otherwise how can I trust running it on my computer? Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?

New comment by alexyoung in "Magical Realism: “Northern Exposure” 25 Years Later (2015)"

alexyoung — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:36:08 +0000

Funnily enough there's a Northern Exposure episode with a brief Twin Peaks parody. I think it was Russian Flu in season one. Joel and Elaine are on a trip, and they're shown around an area with a waterfall and viewing platform, like The Great Northern Hotel/White Tail Falls.

The scene is a pretty funny Twin Peaks parody, with music and visuals inspired by Twin Peaks, and includes a joke about seeing a woman holding a log... :)

New comment by alexyoung in "Magical Realism: “Northern Exposure” 25 Years Later (2015)"

alexyoung — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:30:56 +0000

There's a conversation Chris has in an episode called Heal Thyself, I think, where Maggie buys a washer dryer and won't need to go to the laundromat anymore.

Chris reflects that in the future we won't need a lot of things that are part of society, due to technology like fibre optics. We'll watch cinema at home, and he wonders what will happen to these accidental social moments we have in places like cinemas and laundromats.

It was prescient, but the other part of Northern Exposure that sticks with me is the viewer is expected to sit through Chris's other conversations on the radio about Whitman, Jung, mythology, the nature of death, and other philosophical and artistic references.

I enjoy rewatching Northern Exposure, but it's sometimes disturbing how alien it feels today.

New comment by alexyoung in "PC Engine CPU"

alexyoung — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:26:53 +0000

I restored a PC Engine a year or two ago and I also became fascinated by the hardware. The HuC6270 VDC/HuC6260 VCE graphics system is actually very flexible for the kinds of games the system was designed to play. If I remember correctly, it has background tilemaps, sprites, scrolling, 64kb video RAM, and a 512 colour palette. The hardware sprites/scrolling is what makes it feel more arcadey a lot of the time.

Given the 8-bit CPU it feels a lot more like a 16-bit system to me. The dedicated sprites/scrolling hardware instead of a more bitmap/framebuffer focused design meant things like shooters and platform games played amazingly well.

Soldier Blade, R-Type, Air Zonk, Bonk, etc felt amazing. Given the formfactor and the cool card cartridge format I can see why it was so popular in Japan.

New comment by alexyoung in "AI (2014)"

alexyoung — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:42:09 +0000

Well he is called Sam _Alt_man, not Sam Shiftman

MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA

alexyoung — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:58:51 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18721594

Points: 161

# Comments: 30

New comment by alexyoung in "Buying an Amiga 30 years later"

alexyoung — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 10:20:39 +0000

I'd like to do something similar but with a Mister FPGA as the computer, although I'm not sure it'd fit in the repro A1200 cases

New comment by alexyoung in "Memory transfer between snails challenges view of how brain remembers"

alexyoung — Tue, 15 May 2018 09:43:18 +0000

Take a look at "Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_i...) and at research into how epigenetic inheritance is cited as a mechanism for passing down trauma between generations. I read about malnutrition in world war II affecting several generations but I don't remember the source, and the Wikipedia article mentions the Dutch famine

New comment by alexyoung in "Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based text editor"

alexyoung — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 09:50:05 +0000

It's got better recently. I'm using https://github.com/autozimu/LanguageClient-neovim for work without any obvious issues, but https://github.com/natebosch/vim-lsc is also good

New comment by alexyoung in "Transparency effects in SNES and Genesis games via composite video artifacts"

alexyoung — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 09:36:49 +0000

I prefer the crisp output of RGB because it's how the better arcades looked to me in the late 80s and early 90s. High quality upscaling with scanline emulation is about as close as that as I can get at home.

New comment by alexyoung in "Dear MongoDB users, we welcome you in Azure DocumentDB"

alexyoung — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 11:28:03 +0000

As someone that almost got bitten by MongoDB's lax auth defaults, I was happy to read that DocumentDB has enabled access control out of the box and no default username/password.

Also, there's a query playground if you want to try it out quickly: https://www.documentdb.com/sql/demo

The History of Banning Books in America

alexyoung — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 14:22:42 +0000

Article URL: http://lithub.com/the-history-and-present-of-banning-books-in-america/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556957

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by alexyoung in "Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App"

alexyoung — Fri, 15 May 2015 11:07:06 +0000

I like the app: the UI is amazing! I hope to see some technical posts about Swift on the Snappymob blog.

I have a small suggestion. I think the homepage copy would work better if you edited some of the clichés: "Make the app your own" and "Let Your Voice Be Heard" could be improved, for example.