Hacker News: amatecha

New comment by amatecha in "Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app"

amatecha — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:57:04 +0000

Mastodon isn't trying to compete anyway, it's not a Product(tm) driven by desire for profits, so the people who use it don't care if it "wins" or becomes more popular than whatever other platform. We're all just hanging out socializing and stuff, sharing neat things and discussing things like communities do. It's not easy to accurately estimate active Mastodon/Fediverse users, but then again, I'm not sure anyone really cares either way? lol

New comment by amatecha in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

amatecha — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:22:55 +0000

The deal will be great for now, while they lure you in and get you to drop the competition -- then they will raise prices later.

New comment by amatecha in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

amatecha — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:19:47 +0000

Yeah, there are times where DDG has like, literally three results. Yet, I know for an absolute fact, there are hundreds of pages on the web that contain the terms I specified. Web search is becoming utter garbage.

New comment by amatecha in "Quake – 30th Anniversary Update"

amatecha — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:18:10 +0000

I think this was the one we were playing: https://archive.org/details/qtest Good times :D

New comment by amatecha in "Apps for Kobo"

amatecha — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:36:38 +0000

K what I actually had no clue about the "single config line change to sync from my own server", that's awesome. I have a Clara BW and I really like it. Super affordable (got it on sale too) and "it just works".

New comment by amatecha in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

amatecha — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:35:05 +0000

Yeah, I used also used a Voodoo2 in my Mac (PowerComputing PowerTower Pro), but it was from a PC. The driver for it was very crash-prone, BUT, Unreal Tournament and Quake looked freakin' amazing! Good times :D

New comment by amatecha in "Quake – 30th Anniversary Update"

amatecha — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:27:55 +0000

hell yeah, my first real LAN game experience on Windows was the Quake test/alpha that preceded the release of the game (IIRC?), when I was at a local tech school for a class. We weren't technically allowed to load the game on the uni PC's but like.. yeah... it happened. And we did zero work for that day (or days). (Prior LAN experience was Marathon and Bolo in the Mac lab which was insanely awesome too, and a year earlier lol)

New comment by amatecha in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

amatecha — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:40:39 +0000

Well, yeah as much as we missed out on so many games, the ones we did get were often better quality .. I still have this distinct memory of visiting my friend who ran DOS, and his version of Command & Conquer was hilariously pixelated. Turns out the DOS version ran in 320x240? I was so used to my 640x480 Mac version and I was blown away that he had to suffer with this inferior version lol ... There was also the games with high-fidelity CD audio (Descent anyone?) compared to the weaksauce MIDI stuff the other guys got.

The other crazy "Mac vs. DOS/Win gamer" moment was when my buddy got a sound card for his birthday in 1994, maybe 1995. I remember being shocked about this -- "what the hell were you using before, then?", I wondered. This was when I learned about PC speaker audio. Wow. I had been getting nice 22khz (maybe even 44khz) stereo audio for years before my friend had anything better than a PC speaker. This particular moment made me especially wonder why anyone ever made fun of me for being a Mac owner, because they had literally nothing to be smug about except a broader selection of games.

New comment by amatecha in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

amatecha — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:31:10 +0000

Just adding a post to correlate with what VonGuard wrote (but for some reason got downvoted into oblivion) , apparently there was a Mac port of Half-life nearly completed but canceled in late 1999: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/06/25/half-life-for-the... This is especially surprising since I was saying "if someone had spent the time to port it" -- apparently someone DID, but the project was simply canceled! Brutal!

New comment by amatecha in "Amiga Graphics Archive"

amatecha — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:40:07 +0000

Oh dang, I never played that game but that looks amazing. Especially for .. 1986?! Wow. I never had an Amiga growing up so I missed out on all those classics, and even trying to catch up later I keep discovering more awesome gems like this.

New comment by amatecha in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

amatecha — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:57:49 +0000

Oh yeah, I remember being blown away any time I found a Mac game in a store. Usually they just had some edutainment/shovelware stuff at best, though.

New comment by amatecha in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

amatecha — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:56:53 +0000

Yeah, I pretty often think of how much we're using today that totally could have been done in the 90's (or earlier), just in a slightly more primitive form (which in many cases would have been a lot better, considering how bloated and ad/surveillance-laden modern tech is)...

New comment by amatecha in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

amatecha — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:54:22 +0000

Ah yeah, the same kind of thing happened to me. I saved up enough money to buy WarCraft 1 from the store, only to find out it required a 640x480 monitor -- I had a Macintosh LC with the standard 12" 512x384 display. Luckily my parents let me play the game on their IIci (or whatever it was they had at the time) with a nice large display. Phew!

That's pretty lucky about the 68k code still being available in the binary! I can just imagine someone on the dev team going "ehh we aren't officially supposed to support it, but someone will be really glad we did even if it doesn't play as well as the PPC version"

New comment by amatecha in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

amatecha — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:57:37 +0000

Nice, I'm surprised it took this long! My first experience of playing Quake 1 in my home was an unauthorized source port which ran in System 7, I believe was called "HackQuake", ported from stolen source code from CrackDotCom apparently[0][1] .. For me as a kid getting insanely impatient to play Quake, this was a godsend! Even if the performance was brutal and firing a rocket caused the framerate to halve. Played it at 320x200 pixel-doubled just to eke out that extra little bit of performance. Anyway, the point is that HL probably could have been running on Mac since day one, if someone had spent the time to port it!

[0] https://www.wired.com/1997/01/hackers-hack-crack-steal-quake...

[1] https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive/blob/...

New comment by amatecha in "An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk"

amatecha — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:12:53 +0000

Looks pretty cool, though kinda "cheating" by pulling from adsb.fi - though I think you'd need something a lot more powerful than an ESP32 to receive and decode ADS-B ;)

New comment by amatecha in "Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers"

amatecha — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:09:18 +0000

Try using Firefox with "resist fingerprinting" enabled, on OpenBSD, if you want an idea of how insidious Cloudflare's increasing prevalence is for the openness of the web. Inexplicable 403 responses for entire domains for no apparent reason, no "captcha", just blocked outright. Heck, it happens on Linux too, and even without "resist fingerprinting" enabled.

New comment by amatecha in "Couple pay >$800k for a gene-editing therapy for their daughter. She died."

amatecha — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:19:28 +0000

> Why would a surgeon know anything about anesthesia risk?

Idunno, maybe because their entire career is performing surgeries which include anaesthesia and they have worked for potentially decades alongside anaesthesiologists? For instance, I've worked in the same type of role (programmer) for my entire career and I somehow know a ton about the disciplines adjacent or closely related to mine, especially because I work with them every day.

New comment by amatecha in "The first UL 3700-compliant plug-in solar microinverter is now available in US"

amatecha — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:16:18 +0000

There's also APsystems EZ1, not sure when that was released, but seemingly recently: https://usa.apsystems.com/ez1-consumers/

New comment by amatecha in "Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works"

amatecha — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:35:52 +0000

Nice. The only opening line I remember offhand is from Neuromancer (which I'm glad to see is included in the site!)

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

New comment by amatecha in "The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally"

amatecha — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:18:09 +0000

Amazon URL contains "tag=aphackernews-20" query param after following the shortened URL... does Hacker News rewrite Amazon links to include a Hacker News referral tag?! Here's the URL without all the extraneous stuff added (though maybe it will just get auto-rewritten, time to find out I guess) https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...

No, now I understand what "aphackernews" is, it's "ap" short for "alexpotato".