Hacker News: alstonite

New comment by alstonite in "World Happiness Report 2026"

alstonite — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:17:59 +0000

It’s interesting to see a country’s internal rank of its own happiness against how I would rank them using my worldview.

Israel for example seems like a place that would be fairly unhappy right now given world events, but they rank quite highly.

Saudi Arabia also sticks out as unexpected. It seems in the media I hear about their government being quite oppressive (especially against women), so seeing them just above the US is surprising.

New comment by alstonite in "Show HN: Hacker News archive (47M+ items, 11.6GB) as Parquet, updated every 5m"

alstonite — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:52:42 +0000

What happened between 2023 and 2024 to cause the usage dropoff?

New comment by alstonite in "AirPods Max 2"

alstonite — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:53:26 +0000

Yeah. My bone grew around the two plastic pieces of the band because the mesh in the middle lost all of its springiness.

One day I felt my head and decided that I was switching as soon as a competitor refreshed.

New comment by alstonite in "AirPods Max 2"

alstonite — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:39:07 +0000

My AirPods Max 1 left a headband dent in my skull from how poor the quality of the headband was after more than a year of daily use. They also are super heavy and don't travel well at all.

Apple deciding that, on their 2nd refresh of these (after usb-c), they still aren't going to fix those fundamental issues is very frustrating for what feels like a very disproportionately expensive product (even by Apple standards).

I'm now a very happy QC Ultra 2 user. Can't recommend enough.

New comment by alstonite in "How kernel anti-cheats work"

alstonite — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:39:58 +0000

It’s crazy to me how hard people work to effectively ruin a game for themselves… Imagine putting in this much effort to play Minecraft survival but on creative mode. It just doesn’t sound fun

New comment by alstonite in "AI safety leader says 'world is in peril' and quits to study poetry"

alstonite — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:56:47 +0000

https://www.mrinanksharma.net/poetry

He’s published a book on poetry. So he does write it as well as study it.

New comment by alstonite in "The history of Casio watches"

alstonite — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:30:13 +0000

Calling out the Apple Watch for lack of customization while using 3 different watches seems a bit ironic.

New comment by alstonite in "Game design is simple"

alstonite — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 22:54:24 +0000

This feels like a classic example of the concept that simple ≠ easy

New comment by alstonite in "Show HN: Browser AI agent platform designed for reliability"

alstonite — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 22:14:54 +0000

How well does it handle captchas?

New comment by alstonite in "Show HN: AI game animation sprite generator"

alstonite — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 13:22:54 +0000

Does this have plans or support for Aseprite? The workflow of uploading an aseprite file, adding an animation, and getting it back would be incredible.

New comment by alstonite in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)"

alstonite — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 16:03:21 +0000

Working on an FPS aim trainer that has a heavy focus on tracking performance data over time.

I love how MonkeyType lets you see exactly how much you’ve improved over time at typing and it’s inspired me to take a similar approach to this hobby of mine as well

New comment by alstonite in "Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat"

alstonite — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 22:59:31 +0000

So I just checked the player count of Counter-Strike 2. It's at 936,330 players. At 10 players per match, that's a requirement of 93,633 game moderators...

Trying to also account for total players in every other competitive game seems like an impossible ask.

Ask HN: How to check who the black bar is honoring?

alstonite — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:32:15 +0000

I noticed the black bar is up today and I don't see any death posts. Is there an easy way to see who this is honoring? It would be nice to have a feature that on hover said who it was or something of the like.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42151976

Points: 65

# Comments: 25

New comment by alstonite in "My first game with Carimbo, my homemade engine"

alstonite — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 20:03:44 +0000

I pretty wholeheartedly disagree with this entire sentiment. For some people making a game engine isn't a monumental task, but implying that it's easy seems like an out-of-touch sentiment. There are many people who love making games but who aren't software devs that are enabled to make whatever they dream up via by the plug and play nature of game engines.

New comment by alstonite in "UltimateAntiCheat"

alstonite — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 20:54:53 +0000

Essentially the keyboards have software that will allow the user to override keypresses at inhuman speeds. This allows users to switch left/right direction extremely fast, which is very relevant in CS2 due to peeking mechanics.

Specifically, if I'm holding A (moving right) then I press D (move left), in most games in I would stop since I now have both keys down. These keyboards automatically raise the A key even if you're still holding it, allowing an immediate swap of momentum.

New comment by alstonite in "Show HN: Stipple Effect – a scriptable pixel art editor to make game art faster"

alstonite — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 19:38:06 +0000

Out of curiosity, is there any workflow that exists for easy imports into Godot? I personally find that Asesprite Wizard (https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/713) has been incredible for easy animation transfer. I'd happily swap to Stipple if something like it exists.

New comment by alstonite in "Microsoft says it needs games like Hi-Fi Rush the day after killing its studio"

alstonite — Thu, 09 May 2024 16:05:25 +0000

I wonder if there's room for some kind of 'video game YC', where a company would shotgun invest in a bunch of promising indie titles in the hopes of finding the next Stardew Valley / Factorio?

New comment by alstonite in "The Reddits"

alstonite — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 03:56:19 +0000

I think that while Reddit's primary use is link aggregation, there's a secondary use for getting really niche questions answered by members of niche communities.For example, I have questions and answers on subs like r/powershell & r/xcode that still get replies years later because they solve a very specific problem.

A lot of communities are choosing Discord for their homebase location rather than Reddit, which really bums me out because I'm not a huge fan of public Discord servers and I miss seeing the posts from all the niche communities I'm in aggregated somewhere.

New comment by alstonite in "Show HN: Domino Fit – Domino Tiling Puzzle"

alstonite — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 22:49:55 +0000

Today I got "wizard" on one of the levels! What does it mean?

My entire friend group and I love the game, thank you for making it <3

New comment by alstonite in "Casino-like apps have drained people of millions"

alstonite — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 17:28:29 +0000

In my experience most free-to-plays just use a battlepass nowadays and don’t rely on whales (though obviously all games have them)

Gambling based games like cs:go and genshin absolutely apply to what you’re saying though