Hacker News: daeken

New comment by daeken in "Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting"

daeken — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:42:33 +0000

> I certainly do find new slang introduced by gen Z like "he got the riz!" to be quite cringey

This is interesting to me, if only because it's such a natural bit of slang. Given that it's a shortened form of "charisma", this one just Makes Sense to me! I figure it'd be incredibly cringe for me to use at my age, but it's a good term IMO.

New comment by daeken in "The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up"

daeken — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:11:40 +0000

This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after release.

New comment by daeken in "JRR Tolkien reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)"

daeken — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 13:00:06 +0000

Some people just prefer to listen. I read well and I read quite quickly -- I don't know how many books I've physically read, but it's gotta be in the high hundreds at least -- but over the past ~10 years I've switched primarily to audiobooks. Rather than being something that I enjoy while I'm doing something else, I typically do something mindless with my hands (weave chainmail, cross stitch, sew) in order to give my full attention to the book.

New comment by daeken in "NASA announces unprecedented return of sick ISS astronaut and crew"

daeken — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 14:41:21 +0000

The astronaut in question may choose to disclose that they had the medical emergency and possibly its nature, but it seems wholly reasonable to not single them out (when it affects the whole mission) or disclose their medical status.

New comment by daeken in "Nightshade: Make images unsuitable for model training"

daeken — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 19:56:00 +0000

I've been working in security for more than 20 years and have seen the deleterious effects of security through obscurity first-hand. Why does "adversarial engineering" rely on obscurity?

New comment by daeken in "Nightshade: Make images unsuitable for model training"

daeken — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 15:02:18 +0000

> Real security systems don't publicize how they work.

175 years of history would disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

New comment by daeken in "Comptime – C# meta-programming with compile-time code generation and evaluation"

daeken — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 19:09:22 +0000

Yeah, I went with that approach for most of the code generation in the emulator I'm currently working on. Source generators handle a few core things, but more advanced compilation tasks went to just ahead of time generation; couldn't get my parser combinator library to play nicely with .NET Standard, so that was just a dead-end.

New comment by daeken in "Comptime – C# meta-programming with compile-time code generation and evaluation"

daeken — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 04:51:22 +0000

I love (and heavily use) source generators, but the development experience is godawful. Working with the raw Roslyn types is painful at best and this is compounded by them having to be written against .NET Standard, severely limiting the use of newer .NET functionality.

Eventually I want to write a good baseline library to use for my source generators -- simplifying finding definitions with attributes, mapping types to System.Type, adding some basic pattern matching for structures -- but haven't found a way to do it that's general enough while being very useful.

New comment by daeken in "Comptime – C# meta-programming with compile-time code generation and evaluation"

daeken — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:14:17 +0000

Boo and Nemerle both were really showing what was possible in .NET back in the early days. I still miss the metaprogramming they had, not to mention their pattern matching (which C# has closed the gap on, but is still way, way short.)

New comment by daeken in "Why xor eax, eax?"

daeken — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 13:16:56 +0000

Back in 2005 or 2006, I was working at a little startup with "DVD Jon" Johansen and we'd have Quake 3 tournaments to break up the monotony of reverse-engineering and juggling storage infrastructure. His name was always "xor eax,eax" and I always just had to laugh at the idea of getting zeroed out by someone with that name. (Which happened a lot -- I was good, but he was much better!)

New comment by daeken in "S&box is now an open source game engine"

daeken — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 13:28:33 +0000

The vast majority of non-text editing in game development isn't done in modeling or image manipulation apps, it's done via the game engine's editor. That's true whether you're using Unity, Unreal, Godot, or a homebrew engine.

There are the rare engines with no editor to speak of -- where things are either done programmatically or other textual definitions -- but they're very very very few and far between.

The engine itself doesn't have a UI, but working with any major engine without using their editor is functionally impossible.

New comment by daeken in "Building a Minimal Viable Armv7 Emulator from Scratch"

daeken — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 18:33:56 +0000

So, it is possible to use the machine consumable forms of the ISA, but realistically you'll spend way longer fighting it than finding other strategies.

Years ago, I ended up creating my own aarch64 definition, which I use to generate disassemblers, interpreters, and recompilers (dynamic and static) automatically: https://github.com/daeken/SharpRetro/blob/main/Aarch64Genera...

It doesn't have perfect support, but it has served as an incredibly useful resource. I've since generalized it to work for other architectures, and that same repo has definitions for MIPS (specifically the PSX CPU), DMG, and the groundwork for an x86 core. The goal is to be able to define these once, then generate any future targets automatically.

New comment by daeken in "Apple Mini Apps Partner Program"

daeken — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 01:10:08 +0000

> A qualifying mini app within the Mini Apps Partner Program is one that’s put out by a person or entity that’s not directly or indirectly controlled by you, nor under common control with you.

I don't understand; if it's put out by someone else, how do I participate?

New comment by daeken in "Ventoy: Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI Files"

daeken — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:54:38 +0000

Ventoy is a lifesaver. I dropped a 2TB NVMe drive into a USB-C enclosure and put it on there, along with all the OS installers, distros, and test utilities I commonly use. Probably used it a few dozen times since then and it's well and truly paid for itself!

New comment by daeken in "Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died"

daeken — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:04:48 +0000

I've become an unironic proponent of HE, the Human Era. For CE dates, we just add 10000 (I'm writing this from 12025). But for BCE dates, they're subtracted and it makes things so much clearer when it comes to telling how long ago something was. E.g. the sundial was invented around 6000 HE, steel was developed around 9000 HE.

Kurtzgesagt has a really great video about the subject: https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs

There's also a timeline in HE that covers many major historical events: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/71a711_295e365a6ec64d6ca7f87e...

New comment by daeken in "Space Elevator"

daeken — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:59:25 +0000

Bolos are used for spin gravity in the first part, but that's very different from the rotovators used in the second part. Both in concept and design. The key point with the rotovator is that the tip is moving at ~0m/s relative to the body it's orbiting when it's at its nadir, allowing you to just hop/grab on.

New comment by daeken in "AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025"

daeken — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 12:47:38 +0000

Back in ~2004, I worked on a project to define a codec virtual machine, with the goal of each file being able to reference the standard it was encoded against, along with a link to a reference decoder built for that VM. My thought was that you could compile that codec for the system you were running on and decode in software, or if a sufficient DSP or FPGA was available, target that.

While it worked, I don't think it ever left my machine. Never moved past software decoding -- I was a broke teen with no access to non-standard hardware. But the idea has stuck with me and feels more relevant than ever, with the proliferation of codecs we're seeing now.

It has the Sufficiently Smart Compiler problem baked in, but I tried to define things to be SIMD-native from the start (which could be split however it needed to be for the hardware) and I suspect it could work. Somehow.

New comment by daeken in "Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps"

daeken — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 11:03:04 +0000

I mean, that seems ugly to me, but... Makes intuitive sense and is fine actually? Is HTML a rich language in which to embed stuff like this? No. Does this clearly get the point across? Yes.

[Edit: this should've actually been attached to the GP comment. I agree with the parent.]

New comment by daeken in "Nearly half of drivers killed in (Ohio County) crashes had THC in their blood"

daeken — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 18:59:07 +0000

According to this, 16.5% of Ohio residents used a marijuana product in the last year in 2023: https://www.statista.com/statistics/723822/cannabis-use-with...

Hard to argue that's a small percentage.

New comment by daeken in "A platform-jumping prince – History of Prince of Persia's 1990s Ports"

daeken — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:11:47 +0000

Not quite a cassette anymore, but in 2013 I was in the studio with some friends and we'd do initial downmixes to MP3 and bring them to the car. World of difference, just getting the less-ideal and more realistic listening experience.