Hacker News: badpun

New comment by badpun in "Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior"

badpun — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:43:52 +0000

That's income, not wealth though. Some wealthy people don't have very high incomes.

New comment by badpun in "Sony makes bold claim about game ownership"

badpun — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:06:08 +0000

Pirating is basically unlicensed use.

New comment by badpun in "Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI"

badpun — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:23:34 +0000

> The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.

Is there any evidence of this claim being true?

New comment by badpun in "Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI"

badpun — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:20:32 +0000

Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.

New comment by badpun in "Ask HN: Why is AI civil tech and not military first?"

badpun — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:47:13 +0000

> Military technology will produce innovation in wartime but in peacetime it is a backwater.

The Internet and GPS were directly invented as a military technology with civilian usage allowed only much later. Integrated circuits's invention and development was largely done on military's dime as well.

New comment by badpun in "Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future"

badpun — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:48:32 +0000

Machiabelli was a big Florence patriot and was writing his advice specifically to help a prince better govern Florence and hence increase the chance that Florence will not be annihilated in the constant wars that raged on the Italian Peninsula at the time.

New comment by badpun in "And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway"

badpun — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:58:42 +0000

Maybe they must be so loud because people wear hearing protection?

New comment by badpun in "The Two Factions of C++ (2024)"

badpun — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:47:06 +0000

Lack of support for type-safe containers (need to be hack toghether via macros) and overreliance on macros in general (which are not IDE and debugger friendly) are two aspects of C that are off-putting for majority of people in 2026. That's even assuming you're willing to forego pointer/memory safety.

New comment by badpun in "The American sports plutocracy"

badpun — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:30:35 +0000

What's the shakedown?

New comment by badpun in "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't"

badpun — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:59:17 +0000

> I thought that was really interesting (and obviously wouldn't work in other countries).

I don't know about other countries, but in Poland you're just not required to cut down your lawn at all, unless it's a fire hazard (you have a lot of dead and dried up plants).

New comment by badpun in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

badpun — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:03:06 +0000

There's plenty of people for whom handling a PC is difficult. E.g. various popups (windows update, antivirus, microsoft nagging about microsoft account, printer nagging, "disk almost full" nagging, OneDrive file sync nagging etc.) alone are too much for my Mom, whereas she's handling her iPad (for example) just fine. Also, there are issues specific to gaming on PC - every time there's a technical issue with a game (which in itself is never a thing on consoles), the forum recommend installing different version of the video driver. It may or may not work, but it leaves you with an evening of technical troubleshooting instead of gaming.

Not to mention that games on Steam do break, esp. older ones which are no longer actively maintained [1]. I haven't heard of such fails on consoles, probably because they're a much more stable platform.

[1] E.g. Steam's Civ 5 has been breaking for a couple years now, going into low-res video settings and refusing to bring them back up. Why? Who knows! The only thing that seems to work is using "repair files" option in Steam every time that happens.

New comment by badpun in "IRGC claims it destroyed Amazon's Bahrain data center"

badpun — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:04:43 +0000

That's why I'd limit "meddling" to trying to inform and educate the local population. They don't have access to news (due to state censorship, the people are few propagandistic lies instead), at the very least foreign power can try and provide that, like they did with "Radio Free Europe" during the Cold War.

New comment by badpun in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

badpun — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:01:16 +0000

In 2026 a console is a streamlined PC that can't be used for anything else but games - but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating.

New comment by badpun in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"

badpun — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:55:12 +0000

They could be shared, and work practically non-stop (minus nights, as that would wake people up). That'd bring the per-consumer cost down by a large fraction. The sharing would likely be organized by a commercial third-party, but still, it could be much cheaper than human cleaners.

Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much sooner.

New comment by badpun in "IRGC claims it destroyed Amazon's Bahrain data center"

badpun — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:29:39 +0000

If I were living in brutal dictatorship that has majority support (that’s today Russia) I’d really want foreign powers to „meddle”. But an average Russian likes the current state and hence hates any foreign attempts at influence.

New comment by badpun in "IRGC claims it destroyed Amazon's Bahrain data center"

badpun — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:48:22 +0000

If you overthrow one autocrat and the society is not ready to self-govern, you'll just have another one taking his place. The best you can do is to fund some kind of democratic opposition on the ground and in exile, hoping to grow a political class mature enough that they will take over after autocrat loses power one way or another.

New comment by badpun in "Ask HN: Why are US tech workers so pro open borders?"

badpun — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:15:52 +0000

How many people do think would move into the US within the next couple of years if the country opened its borders to everyone? I think it's somewhere between a hundred million and a billion people. There are billions of people on Earth for whom having a crappy job in the US is a dream scenario compare to their current circumstances. Many of them would move if they could. Hell, millions of people are already literally walking through Central America jungles and deserts to live in the US illegally - that shows you how attractive it is, even if at risk of being deported at any moment.

New comment by badpun in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

badpun — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:11:58 +0000

The bankrupcy was over foreign debt in foreign currencies, obviously you can't print those. The government borrowed those monies in the first place a decade ago to buy some technologies (patents, licences etc.) from Western companies in an attempt to modernize the economy.

New comment by badpun in "Perlin's Noise Algorithm"

badpun — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:58:59 +0000

Yes, that's what I did and what I reffered to in my post (I forgot that it gave you C(2) and not just C(1), it's been a couple of months since I worked on this). There are still visual artifacts, they're just smaller. Even Perlin's paper on this showed a picture of the artifacts that the 5th degree polynomial still generates.

New comment by badpun in "Perlin's Noise Algorithm"

badpun — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:15:37 +0000

I've implemented 3D perlin noise recently and was surprised that the lighting was always off on the created model around the grid lattice (the model itself was continuous there, just the light was not correct). After a delightful couple of days debugging it, I finally learned that Perlin noise's derivative is not continuous around grid lattice, which makes normals not continous there (as normals are orthogonal to a tangent, and tangent is based on derivative). It's possible to improve it by cleverly changing Perlin's wavelet function, which makes the noise C(1) (derivative is continuous, second derivative is not) - this makes the visual artifacts smaller, but they don't go away.