Hacker News: bernds74

New comment by bernds74 in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

bernds74 — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:24:12 +0000

I had a chemistry teacher who told us that hydrogen reacts violently with oxygen, and this is how the hydrogen bomb works.

New comment by bernds74 in "Ghosts'n Goblins – “Worse danger is ahead”"

bernds74 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:29:07 +0000

A brand new pair of brogues, rattlin' o'er the bogs...

New comment by bernds74 in "Microsoft makes Zork open-source"

bernds74 — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 21:21:11 +0000

There's this: https://www.ifwiki.org/ZILF https://zilf.io/

Although I haven't played with it and can't tell you whether it can compile the open source Zork.

New comment by bernds74 in "When O3 is 2x slower than O2"

bernds74 — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:10:13 +0000

"if let" just breaks my brain, it feels backwards to me and takes me a minute each time to work out what's going on. In 40 years of programming I've never seen a syntactic construct that I found less intuitive. And it would probably be easily fixable, if it was more along the lines of "if x matches Some(let z)".

New comment by bernds74 in "The elegance of movement in Silksong"

bernds74 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:35:52 +0000

Same here. Hollow Knight was simply wonderful - the graphics, the music, the characters, the boss fight designs, the melancholic feeling of the world. It's hard to say whether it was my best gaming experience ever because there's stiff competition, but it's definitely in the nominees. And I only heard about it way after the Kickstarter campaign.

New comment by bernds74 in "The elegance of movement in Silksong"

bernds74 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:25:09 +0000

It is that bad, at least for me. I enjoyed the first 8 hours of Silksong, but it turned very quickly after that because the punishments were just completely outweighing the rewards. No health upgrade in that time, no meaningful combat upgrade, and just an endless amount of bullshit.

Like those birds that will always mirror your movement to stay just out of reach, move erratically otherwise so you're guaranteed not to get a hit in (forget about hitting them with your spear when they're in the air), and just when you managed to get under them where you might be able to land a hit they'll drop down on you to deal contact damage and flutter away again.

10 hours in, and I've not even started the game since Saturday afternoon, when I was expecting not to be able to drag myself away from it (being a huge fan of the first Hollow Knight).

New comment by bernds74 in "The elegance of movement in Silksong"

bernds74 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:04:42 +0000

With everything doing 2 points of damage, including environmental hazards, the player is at effectively 2.5 hitpoints for a large majority of Act 1, as opposed to 5 in Hollow Knight. This changes the feeling of the game from "oh, a challenge, let's see what will happen and I'll learn" to "shit, a new room, I don't want to explore because I'll just get killed, where was the last bench, can I even get back here?"

New comment by bernds74 in "SpaceX Starship 36 Anomaly"

bernds74 — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 13:42:37 +0000

It was slightly more fiery than a mere "observation", hence "anomaly".

New comment by bernds74 in "Medieval Africans had a unique process for purifying gold with glass (2019)"

bernds74 — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 11:19:12 +0000

Some guy once famously noted that wealth is not measured in gold or silver, but in goods and services. Mansa Musa didn't have a Ferrari F40, or an RTX4090, or air conditioning. He couldn't buy a trip to low earth orbit or get cancer treatment if he needed it. Many people in this day and age are vastly more wealthy than he was.

New comment by bernds74 in "Planetfall"

bernds74 — Thu, 22 May 2025 14:45:44 +0000

Perhaps this is a good place to mention that someone is working on remaking the SMAC engine, the project is called "glsmac" on github. Unit graphics seem to be one of the major sticking points since the game used some kind of ancient forgotten voxel format.

New comment by bernds74 in "Planetfall"

bernds74 — Thu, 22 May 2025 11:31:11 +0000

For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems. Nobody ever brings up Turrican anymore when discussing game soundtracks...

New comment by bernds74 in "Planetfall"

bernds74 — Thu, 22 May 2025 10:02:07 +0000

Well, clicked on it thinking it might be about an old favourite Infocom game, but apparently it appears to be about an old favourite Firaxis game...

Are you the author of the web site? Please make sure the PgDn key works for scrolling through the page. At the moment it switches images which are just barely on the screen.

New comment by bernds74 in "The Awful German Language (1880)"

bernds74 — Fri, 16 May 2025 10:23:34 +0000

Actually it means "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll".

New comment by bernds74 in "Kylie Minogue song about a typeface"

bernds74 — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 17:46:21 +0000

You should be so lucky.

New comment by bernds74 in "Waterfox: Fast and Private Web Browser"

bernds74 — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 14:22:07 +0000

How do we actually know these browser forks don't contain malware of their own? If you can hide something in a tiny package like xz-utils... and a browser would seem to be a very juicy target.

New comment by bernds74 in "Darcs, Friendly Version Control"

bernds74 — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 19:41:49 +0000

To me this has always sounded like the kind of error-prone excessive cleverness that I wouldn't want anywhere near my version control system.

New comment by bernds74 in "Advent of Code 2024"

bernds74 — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 09:58:48 +0000

Nice to see that traditions are upheld, such as the unreadable font and colors.

New comment by bernds74 in "Mercedes spends $8bn/year on R&D"

bernds74 — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 19:33:14 +0000

Mercedes have figured those out already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e21ZjwZGjiQ

New comment by bernds74 in "The Rise and Fall of Matchbox's Toy-Car Empire"

bernds74 — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 14:26:20 +0000

Donald could be pretty dense at times.

New comment by bernds74 in "Getting into way too much detail with the Z80 netlist simulation (2021)"

bernds74 — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 12:23:33 +0000

I first opened it in Firefox on Linux. I think whatever subpixel rendering it's trying to do doesn't work with light fonts on dark background, there is blurriness and colour fringes. It seems to look a little better in Chromium. Just adding some weight to the font would already help.

Another thing that's hurting readability is monospace.