Hacker News: bane

My understanding is that Poland is also seeking smart win-win arrangements with some of these foreign sources. For example, Poland has initiated several big equipment buys from South Korean military suppliers on the condition that most of the manufacturing is done in Poland and that there is technical sharing for future self-sustainment.

It's basically importing expensive R&D for "free" while helping establish a heavy industrial base (which has also proven very fruitful for South Koreans). I'm sure there are other examples like this. You also get a better trained workforce, and then the import of the technical knowledge later where it is slower to digest but with the ability now to turn that knowledge into working production.

Upscaling classic Sierra adventure games

bane — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:24:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Yp9S23ICo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030592

Points: 7

# Comments: 2

New comment by bane in "Show HN: Turning a Gaussian Splat into a videogame"

bane — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:19:59 +0000

Question for those making Splats...how do you get such large environments? I've been playing around with them a bit and I'm finding I'm running out of memory with surprisingly little built even on an RTX6000. Any tips or ideas would be awesome!

The Moon Caused This Bridge to Be Built Wrong [video]

bane — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 04:16:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cATbD1_6d9o

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788596

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bane in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

bane — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:43:50 +0000

The demoscene, while not unknown, is still quite niche amongst technologists and digital artists in the most of the world. It has a pretty thriving scene with dozens of get togethers worldwide (mostly in Europe) each year, is creative, communal, artistic, competitive, multidisciplinary, highly influential, and has a near infinite number of ways to engage with it. It has a long running internal culture, but is welcoming of outsiders willing to learn, and is kind of a "third way" to think about software and technology that can often radically change how you think about computing.

It's also a recognized UNESCO recognized intangible cultural heritage in at least half a dozen countries.

https://www.demoparty.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

New comment by bane in "$3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year"

bane — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:01:28 +0000

There's a mistake I see in the comments here that "non-profit" = "charity". There are a large collection of non/not for-profits that are not even remotely in the charity business. Some of these companies have long legacies that stretch back to academic labs spun out of major U.S. educational institutions.

I've worked for two such companies in my career (and partnered with a few others) and both of them were really just normal businesses that used their non-profit status as part of their business model. They used that status to position themselves as an objective second party to various governments and businesses and signal trust. They also internally represent themselves as something different from commercial businesses, just with a weird way of mopping up profit at the end of the fiscal year. At one I was a researcher and the other a low-level executive.

At the working level, both paid slightly under comparable jobs in the private sector, were often very top heavy, and spent lavishly on facilities and had large internal R&D programs that often went nowhere but acted like overamped hands-on training programs that expressed themselves in additional expertise they could offer their clients without having to turnover staff.

I often had multiple personal offices, subsidized mid-level restaurant quality lunches, laboratories, assistants, and research budgets stretching into the low millions of dollars. This was in addition to the regular work we were contracted out to do, which was often either direct work on fairly cutting-edge S&T like programs or providing special advisory and expertise services to those same customers.

All of the companies I know in this space are also fairly top-heavy with, executive and administrative pay helps sop up any profit.

The law requires these companies to report quite a bit of information about their financials into the public space every year [1]. Some of the executives make quite extraordinary pay.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

Iran's Cryptic Shortwave Messages [video]

bane — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 02:25:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErmbTpxAM7Q

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47227149

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by bane in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

bane — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 03:42:51 +0000

It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.

Totally worth a watch.

New comment by bane in "Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems"

bane — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:36:29 +0000

The blockchain hype bubble should probably be pretty near in memory for most people I would suspect. I thought that was a wild, useless ride until Ai took it over.

Making Catacomb 3-D [video]

bane — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:39:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcUqwMf01pI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46851001

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Pushing Simulation to the Limit to Find Order in Chaos [video]

bane — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:09:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jVogdTJESw

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850327

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bane in "The Science of Fermentation [audio]"

bane — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:18:46 +0000

The fermentation traditions around soybeans are particularly interesting. The starting point is called meju [1] which are blocks of open air fermented soybeans in blocks.

From there you can continue to process and ferment them to produce a variety of sauces, pastes, soup bases, and so on - soy sauce is the most famous in the west, but the rest of the products have honestly mind-blowing, highly complex, tastes.

There's also a broad tradition of preserving and fermenting various seafoods, from the corvina to fermented skate (hongeo) [2].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meju

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongeo-hoe

New comment by bane in "The Science of Fermentation [audio]"

bane — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 04:19:27 +0000

Oh whew, when I finally learned how Chocolate is made....mind blown.

The Western 19th and 20th centuries's approach to foods have been an incredible disservice to culinary and health history and modernist trends.

New comment by bane in "The Science of Fermentation [audio]"

bane — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 03:01:03 +0000

Some anecdotes:

- My wife is Korean, and a lot of Korean food is fermented, preserved, or otherwise kept using a traditional pre-refrigeration method. There are a number of really beautiful traditions that come from the logistics of keeping stuff around for months, or even years. The idea of things being diverted off at various stages of fermentation for different uses was a massive revelation to my American mind.

- That being said, my Korean relatives are completely blown away by some old Western methods of fermentation especially around land mammal meats -- various sausages, smoked meats, salted meats -- and fermented milk products like cheeses.

- The best restaurant in the world, I think in Norway, featured a dedicated fermentation R&D lab as part of their core restaurant menu development process.

- The global trade in alcoholic drinks in based on truly beautiful and sophisticated battles between various micro-organisms.

- My friends in the bio-world recently (in the last few years) have taken an interest in fermentation as part of the thinking on long-term food sources for space habitability. Nothing produces the incredible complexity in microbiology, specifically ones good for food sources for humans, creates anything close to the complexity of fermentation. The thought it using stages of fermentation to produce all of the feed material needed for complete human nutrition. But it's perpetual.

Bonus - you might also divert some parts of the process into fuel, air, and other required processes. It's incredibly compelling, highly technical (informed by modern AI models) research.