Hacker News: crispweed

New comment by crispweed in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

crispweed — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:23:32 +0000

I'm working on a collection of networked games, around the central theme of a lockstep deterministic network model with 'delay frames' (between acting directly on user input and progressing actual shared network state).

You can try this here: https://locksteparcade.com/Client

Games included in the arcade, currently:

- Neon Swarm, a take on the classic lemmings game, with multiplayer versus and coop modes

- Serpents, a snake game (where you eat food, grow a tail and need to avoid this growing tail), with inertial movement and multiplayer

- Spirits, an homage to N++, where you work together to get someone to the exit, while avoiding enemies, figuring out how to open doors, and so on

- Pilots, a multiplayer asteroids battle with homing missiles

Each game solves the network delay problem (the problem of providing immediate feedback to user input and hiding the fact that actual changes to shared state are delayed) differently, and it has been very interesting to work through a bunch of different approaches to this.

If anyone else here is working on multiplayer network games, I'm very interested in setting up a regular "play each other's games" session.

The idea is that regularly playing with other game developers will help develop a kind of 'scene' (where you get a group of people together who make work in public but really aimed at each other, pushing and unblocking one another to become bolder and better at an accelerating rate, as described here: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/scene-creation-engines ).

If you are interested, let me know!

New comment by crispweed in "Show HN: The HN Arcade"

crispweed — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 11:44:22 +0000

I'm working on a game arcade thing as a hobby project, themed around lockstep networking.

There's a website for this here: https://locksteparcade.com/

It's still very much a work in progress, with just two games. One is a version of the classic game "Lemmings". The other is a very minimal asteroids style inertial ship duel.

The games both use deterministic execution in lockstep across network participants, and provide interactive gameplay and smooth execution even if situations with up to quarter or half second lag times, and the methods used for this are then perhaps one interesting aspect of the project.

In each game, the local player sees their own controlled entities at current positions, and other player entities at historical positions.

In the lemmings game, the complication is that lemmings depend on their own world changes (e.g. they need to stand on a bridge piece they just built). So there is a kind of fork and merge mechanism that enables local and remote world changes to be eventually consistent.

In the inertial duel game, homing missiles have a deploy phase in which they transition between different update time frames, with exactly the same sequence of updates applied on each machine, but with these updates accelerated or slowed down to achieve the time frame synchronisation.

There is an offline part with a tutorial to go through for the lemmings clone, which gives a flavour of the thing. The networking part uses a dedicated server and is currently invite only, but if anyone is interested in trying this then please shout and I can send out server credentials..

New comment by crispweed in "The Alignment Trap: AI Safety as Path to Power"

crispweed — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 18:22:57 +0000

Recent discussions about artificial intelligence safety have focused heavily on ensuring AI systems remain under human control. While this goal seems laudable on its surface, we should carefully examine whether some proposed safety measures could paradoxically enable rather than prevent dangerous concentrations of power.

The Alignment Trap: AI Safety as Path to Power

crispweed — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 18:22:57 +0000

Article URL: https://upcoder.com/22/the-alignment-trap-ai-safety-as-path-to-power/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41987748

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Is There a Power Play Overhang?

crispweed — Wed, 08 May 2024 10:56:21 +0000

Article URL: https://upcoder.com/21/is-there-a-power-play-overhang

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40296529

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by crispweed in "Show HN: A new daily word puzzle"

crispweed — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 14:13:23 +0000

The text you get when you click share should indicate which puzzle you solved, in some way (e.g. like the number in "Wordle 247 3/6").

Having some kind of graphic in this sharing text would feel nicer, I think, as well, somehow. (Could be just sequences of green blocks for each word, basically just showing how long the words you made are.)

New comment by crispweed in "Breathing and Exercise: Strength Training for Your Diaphragm (2018)"

crispweed — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 08:19:36 +0000

Right, this seems like an interesting subject, but not a lot of information there. Can anyone suggest better sources?

Any comments on the following: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662071

How to Breathe Properly – A (Surprisingly Important) Complete Guide

crispweed — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 08:15:18 +0000

Article URL: https://patrikedblad.com/habits/how-to-breathe/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662071

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Targeting open source contributions to support science for COVID19

crispweed — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 09:26:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fb9tx0/targeting_open_source_contributions_to_support/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22449792

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: Targeting open source contributions to help respond to covid-19

crispweed — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 14:21:00 +0000

What open source contributions can I make, with the goal of assisting in some way with scientists responding to the new coronavirus?

What I'd like, ideally, is a prioritised set of feature or change requests for open source projects, from scientists who are actually using them for covid-19 related work.

Links to forums through which I could reach these scientists, and other related resources, would also be nice.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22433455

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: What can remote IT workers do to help scientists respond to COVID-19?

crispweed — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 11:17:48 +0000

It would be really cool to be able to get suggestions directly from scientists working in this area, but links to other resources that can help answer this question would also be great.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22390438

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Booking Tickets – Michael McIntyre

crispweed — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 12:38:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5FeZti1cjs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22347248

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by crispweed in "New airplane seat design to make it easier to sleep in economy"

crispweed — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 08:51:40 +0000

How about something like this: https://www.asailorslifeforme.org/educator/primary/PS-Plan-o... ?

New comment by crispweed in "Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?"

crispweed — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 14:10:08 +0000

The concept of diminishing returns, perhaps, together with the corollary, by which I mean the fact that you can often get easier profits or make progress a lot more easily by switching to some less explored avenue.

New comment by crispweed in ""Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it""

crispweed — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 16:04:59 +0000

When considering selling points, everyone seems to be focusing on the advantages of being able to run traditional games without console hardware or delays for installation, but no-one seems to be talking about how something like this could fundamentally change the constraints on multiplayer game design. I wonder what the server side looks like, and whether anyone is working on MMO type products that are designed specifically for this setup..

New comment by crispweed in "The Titanic Was on Fire for Days Before the Iceberg Hit"

crispweed — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 16:50:33 +0000

How do you think the unthinkable?

With a great big itheberg.

New comment by crispweed in "Remote Code Execution in Alpine Linux"

crispweed — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 08:33:41 +0000

I don't know exactly how that bug bounty program works, but it feels like there may be some fundamental issues with bug bounties in the context of open source projects.

For example, what is there to prevent someone from introducing a bug into an open source project, first of all, and then subsequently claiming a bounty for identifying and/fixing it?

(Maybe this can end up by forcing more careful pull request auditing for security critical projects, but that seems like a big ask..)

Automatic Object Linkage with Include Graphs:sharing code without static libs

crispweed — Thu, 31 May 2018 14:36:11 +0000

Article URL: http://upcoder.com/19/automatic-object-linkage-with-include-graphs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17196603

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by crispweed in "Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely"

crispweed — Thu, 10 May 2018 08:33:05 +0000

As other posters have said, it seems like it can be tricky to incentivise cattle owners to add algae to their feed, check this has actually been added, in proportions that have the desired effect, and so on.

But how about if governments provide subsidised feed centrally, instead, with the algae added?

New comment by crispweed in "When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves"

crispweed — Sun, 22 Apr 2018 07:31:36 +0000

Perhaps that is not a performance, in the same sense as other stuff. e.g. do you get a bit of adrenaline kick in, are you motivated to impress them with your keyboard skills, etc?