Hacker News: bschwindHN

New comment by bschwindHN in "Swift at Apple: Migrating the TrueType hinting interpreter"

bschwindHN — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:19:29 +0000

I'm a high DPI snob so I haven't used a low res monitor for work in forever, but isn't the entire point of font hinting to make the text more legible at smaller pixel grid sizes? Yes, of course the shapes are more consistent since the hinter isn't touching them, but isn't the end result just less legible text?

New comment by bschwindHN in "How we made hit video game Prince of Persia"

bschwindHN — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:07:44 +0000

Such an absolute classic. My brothers and friends and I played this so much when we were kids that we had a notebook written up to overcome the game's "DRM", which required you to find a letter in a particular page/paragraph/sentence in the game's manual. You then drank the potion with the right letter floating over it. If you got the wrong one, you died and had to restart the game, but this was only at the end of level 1 so that wasn't a huge setback. Theoretically you didn't have this manual if you pirated it, but kids have nothing but time so our notebook ended up quite complete.

The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. And my god, the vertical chopping blades you have to carefully jump through...those things are brutal.

New comment by bschwindHN in "Device Clock Generation"

bschwindHN — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:55:21 +0000

I'm only halfway through but it's refreshing to see such technical articles on HN. Can't claim I'm very knowledgeable in hardware description languages either, but I do light embedded work sometimes and it's really interesting to see how the nitty gritty hardware peripherals and their clocks actually get implemented.

New comment by bschwindHN in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

bschwindHN — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:32:28 +0000

> Isn't that something you just open a devtools for and have fixed in like 2 minutes?

Not if you're an LLM influencer! Gotta keep up with the downpour of blog links or you'll look like you're falling behind on the latest and greatest.

New comment by bschwindHN in "Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles"

bschwindHN — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:45:01 +0000

Yep, I remember a brief period of time where I would play Flash games on the Wii browser, I think there were indeed some that were explicitly made for the Wii browser. Fun times!

New comment by bschwindHN in "Who Runs Your Rust Future? Hands-On Intro to Async Rust"

bschwindHN — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:09:44 +0000

Async Rust can be nice, especially when juggling multiple tasks and composing them with timeouts and such.

Async in an embedded context is actually really nice, too. You can have high level "send this thing over SPI, receive this data from USB" futures and they will run (ideally via DMA) and your CPU can go to sleep, only waking up when interrupts fire from the hardware peripherals you were using.

New comment by bschwindHN in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

bschwindHN — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:06:47 +0000

Yep. People are creating garbage with AI that looks passable at first glance, or maybe acceptable if you have no taste. This is the kind of software we can expect to receive in the next few years.

New comment by bschwindHN in "macOS Container Machines"

bschwindHN — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:08:59 +0000

> It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS

I know I'm basically taking the bait, but I guess I've not been "seriously" developing stuff for the past decade or two, which is news to me!

New comment by bschwindHN in "macOS Container Machines"

bschwindHN — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:06:07 +0000

We should be using the baguette emoji for path separators for cross-platform compatibility.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/96ufiz/pro...

New comment by bschwindHN in "A Matter Wi-Fi Light Bulb in Rust on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W"

bschwindHN — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:50:00 +0000

Here are the line counts:

    rust-rpico2-embassy-examples $ tokei .                    
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
     Language              Files        Lines         Code     Comments       Blanks
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
     Alex                      2          330          280            0           50
     Shell                     1           25           13            3            9
     TOML                      2           76           58            7           11
    ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
     Markdown                  1          254            0          181           73
     |- BASH                   1            8            8            0            0
     |- Shell                  1            1            1            0            0
     (Total)                              263            9          181           73
    ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
     Rust                     10         1256          937           86          233
     |- Markdown              10          340            8          263           69
     (Total)                             1596          945          349          302
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
     Total                    16         2290         1305          540          445
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

I guess "Alex" would be the linker scripts ending in .x?

New comment by bschwindHN in "Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to Its New AI Assistant"

bschwindHN — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:11:02 +0000

"We're all trying to find the guy who did this"

New comment by bschwindHN in "ESP32-S31"

bschwindHN — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:50:52 +0000

I have a (WIP) project that transfers audio over ESP-NOW. I haven't touched it in forever, but I remember it did work decently. I had to bring the audio sample rate down to 16kHz though, and it was just sending uncompressed audio. I probably could have dug more into configuring the radios for better throughput, or adding some basic compression to relax the bandwidth requirements.

Code is here:

https://github.com/bschwind/walkie-talkie

New comment by bschwindHN in "Chipotlai Max"

bschwindHN — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:15:13 +0000

Oops, I left out the context of "the gemini button in google maps", sorry. It appeared one day and I didn't want to press it while driving and screw up my route. It's supposed to assist you with route-related things, but yeah it's of course still a general purpose LLM backing it.

New comment by bschwindHN in "Chipotlai Max"

bschwindHN — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:07:52 +0000

I was once driving and knew where I was going, so I decided to press the gemini button to see what it does. I was able to eventually convince it to write me a Rust function that calculates prime numbers, and demanded that it read out the entire function to me line by line. Fun to mess with these systems.

New comment by bschwindHN in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

bschwindHN — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:05:31 +0000

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but what exactly is your vision of HN "without politics"? It's very hard to avoid because so many technical things have overlap with politics, and lots of technical decisions have political implications. HN currently loves talking about all things AI, and that's probably one of the biggest political topics out there.

New comment by bschwindHN in "New Beam Spring Keyboards"

bschwindHN — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 02:08:09 +0000

I have loud keyboards for selfish fun typing when no one is around, and a silent one for working near others.

I use a switch called Akko Penguins, but there are tons of silent switches out there that people like. Topre keyboards also have a strong following and I think are pretty quiet.

New comment by bschwindHN in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

bschwindHN — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 02:00:49 +0000

People will always reframe their request numbers to avoid stating their pitiful requests per second numbers, it's hilarious. "This thing is handling hundreds of thousands of requests per day!" Like cool, you're barely making it double digit requests per second.

New comment by bschwindHN in "Is this sustainable?"

bschwindHN — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:46:17 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by bschwindHN in "News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development"

bschwindHN — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:08:20 +0000

While we're at it, their reference board also doesn't have a reset button, it just has one for boot. It's perhaps one of the most inconvenient official dev boards I've ever used in modern times.

New comment by bschwindHN in "News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development"

bschwindHN — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:04:44 +0000

They probably just bought a shit ton of micro USB connectors back in the day and want to use them up, or something silly like that. It would be funny if the EU forced them to switch to USB-C.