Hacker News: dxuh

New comment by dxuh in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"

dxuh — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:05:37 +0000

Location: Essen, Germany

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: C++, Linux, Python, Lua

Email: mail AT joelschumacher.de

I like systems programming work of all kinds. I have worked in telecommunications, interfacing with programmable logic controls and now work in shared web hosting infrastructure. In my free time I usually develop games and game technology. I would love to work on game technology professionally. Please have a look at my portfolio: https://joelschumacher.de/projects.

New comment by dxuh in "How kernel anti-cheats work"

dxuh — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:23:30 +0000

I feel like this whole problem is just made up. Back in the day, when I played lots of Counter Strike, we had community servers. If a cheater joined, some admin was already online and kicked them right away. I'm sure we hit some people that were not actually cheaters, but they would just go to another server. And since there was no rank, no league, no rewards (like skins, drops, etc.), there was no external reward for cheating. It annoys me that cheating in competitive video games seems like a bigger problem than it has been in the past for no good reason.

New comment by dxuh in "How kernel anti-cheats work"

dxuh — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:20:48 +0000

Counter-Strike has been doing this for years. It's called "Overwatch" (even before Blizzards Overwatch came out). And believe it or not it failed to reliably catch actual cheaters AND got non-cheaters in trouble (both repeatedly). A very good player is indistinguishable from a cheater with a good cheat. Sometimes people just get super lucky for a few rounds and you might get judged based on that.

New comment by dxuh in "Avoiding Trigonometry (2013)"

dxuh — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:59:13 +0000

I agree that use of trigonometry is almost always a smell, but e.g. in games there are so many cases where angles are just more useful and intuitive. I just grep-ed for "angle" in a game of mine and I find it for orienting billboard particles (esp. for particles a single angle is much better than a quat for example). Also for an FPS camera controller. It's much simpler to just store a pitch and a yaw and change that with mouse movement, than storing a quat. You can't really look at a quat and know what kind of rotation it represents without opening a calculator. And I also use it for angle "fudging" so if you want to interact with something if you are roughly looking at it, you need to configure an angle range that should be allowed. It just makes sense to configure this as an angle, because we have some intuition for angles. So I guess for computations angles are probably usually wrong, but they are great for intuition (they are low-dimensional and linear in amount of rotation). That makes them a better human interface for rotations. And as soon as you computations start with angles, of course they find their way into the rest of the code.

New comment by dxuh in "Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)"

dxuh — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:56:13 +0000

But CMake only reruns, when CMakeLists.txt has changed. That doesn't happen a lot after the core of the project has been set up for me. Especially not when I am tweaking a game mechanic or something.

Also if you want your project to compile with Ninja on Linux, but also with MSVC and you want cross-compilation (on Linux for Windows) and an Emscripten build (I do want all of those), then rebuilding CMake is quite a lot of work.

New comment by dxuh in "Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)"

dxuh — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:37:08 +0000

I think the standard library is good, but if you pull in ANY of it's headers you add a couple hundred milliseconds to every translation unit. So when making games (and only then), I avoid the standard library.

What I do like and use is overloading, references, templates, concepts, lambdas, enum classes, user defined literals, constexpr, operator overloading for math (!), little syntax stuff like structured binding declarations, "auto" and range based for. I also made my own little fmt (like https://riki.house/fmt). C++ is a much nicer language than C imo, even without the standard library.

New comment by dxuh in "Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)"

dxuh — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:49:07 +0000

I quite like modern C++, so I really tried to make it work for gamedev, but I think you can't really do it. You can use all the modern C++ features that are not in the standard library though! I am working on a little game the last few months and after a while I just decided to not use any of the C++ standard library (I just use a few C headers) and make my own Vector, Array, Span, String, FlatMap. And using those the game compiles really fast. If I touch a header that is included almost everywhere (the big game state struct), I can compile and link (mold) in ~300ms. If I touch player.cpp I compile in 250ms. That is mostly good enough for me, but I am thinking about the "game code as dynamic library" thing myself.

I always thought CMake was good enough. I use FetchContent for all external dependencies and git submodules + add_directory for all internal dependencies. It took me a while to figure out that this was the simplest thing that works reliably though. I have used vcpkg and conan extensively and have completely given up on them.

I don't use C++ modules, because afaik they are still mostly broken. Without modules clangd works wonderfully and has been working wonderfully for a few years. I really, really like it. I think it can be done! I am missing reflection though, but if I would really want to use it, I'd probably just use clang -ast-dump instead of the new reflection functionality.

New comment by dxuh in "Cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower anger and anxiety"

dxuh — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 07:10:16 +0000

I loved the gym and it did help my psyche. That is very clear to me. But now I don't go to the gym anymore, because I have a very stubborn radial tunnel syndrome in my right arm and my knee osteoarthritis is worse than ever. Of course both of those things make me angry and anxious. While I am absolutely positive that exercise helps your psyche, I would not be surprised if the majority of this correlation is actually from a common cause (it might also be stress in general - i.e. no time for exercise), lack of financial resources or just a bad place of living, etc.

New comment by dxuh in "Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority""

dxuh — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:07:29 +0000

I feel like this is ultimately uninteresting. This doesn't change anyone's image of these companies. We know they are evil. They have done worse and they will do worse. They never got a meaningful punishment and I have no reason to believe they will. All they get is outrage on the internet, which is effectively meaningless to them.

The files being examined right now shows me that there is nothing bad enough to actually make anything happen, no matter how absurdly evil it is. Are we too easily distracted? Or are we too used to inhumanity now? Or are the powerful simply more powerful than most of the rest of the planet?

New comment by dxuh in "Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)"

dxuh — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:38:32 +0000

I am sort of questioning my use of LLMs again after, first reluctantly, starting to use them multiple times a day. This story seems like it was intended to be an allegory for LLM-use though I know it couldn't have been.

New comment by dxuh in "Unauthenticated remote code execution in OpenCode"

dxuh — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:04:44 +0000

I liked aider initially, but I keep running into problems, as the project seems largely unmaintained. I wanted to install OpenCode yesterday, but this somewhat turns me off. Are there any good model-agnostic alternatives? I am somewhat shocked there is not a lot of good open source CLI LLM code assistants going around.

New comment by dxuh in "ChatGPT Health"

dxuh — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 13:18:57 +0000

I've had serious trouble with my knee and elbow for years and ChatGPT helped me immensely after a good couple dozen of doctors just told me to take Ibuprofen and rest and never talked to me for longer than 3 minutes. I feel like as with most things LLM there are many opponents that say "if you do what an LLM says you will die", which is correct, while most people that look positively towards using LLMs for health advice report that they used ChatGPT to diagnose something. Having a conversation with ChatGPT based on reports and scans and figuring out what follow-up tests to recommend or questions to ask a doctor makes sense for many people. Just like asking an LLM to review your code is awesome and helpful and asking LLM to write your code is an invitation for trouble.

New comment by dxuh in "A string formatting library in 65 lines of C++"

dxuh — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 12:19:23 +0000

I have recently started re-implementing parts of the standard library myself just to improve compile times (and I did - massively!), but I purposely kept {fmt} around, because I think it's a great library and I thought it would be as fast to compile as you could possibly make it (it likely still is considering what it can do). Also because the dev put a lot of effort into optimizing compile times [1] and seems to be much smarter than me. So I made benchmark to prove you wrong and show you it's not that easy. But it turns out formatting a couple of numbers and strings is much faster with your basic formatting library [2] [3].

Comparing using `hyperfine --warmup 3 "g++ FILE.cpp"` (and some flags for fmt) I get 72ms vs 198ms. So I changed my mind and might take a crack at replacing {fmt} as well. Cool stuff! Thank you.

[1] https://vitaut.net/posts/2024/faster-cpp-compile-times/

[2] https://godbolt.org/z/3YaovhrjP bench-fmt.cpp

[3] https://godbolt.org/z/qMfM39P3q bench-rikifmt.cpp

New comment by dxuh in "Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions"

dxuh — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 06:54:21 +0000

I find this argument hard to agree with. We are seeing unprecedented levels of buffoonery in many governments of the world and people enthusiastically agreeing with (objectively) idiots. Before anyone that does not know how to understand a statement as we are talking about, they will understand it the wrong way, tell everyone they know, create social media content and form organizations that oppose vaccines. I would say that this is more likely to happen many times over than them actually learning how to understand a statement like OPs properly. So as sad as it is, I think you are wrong.

New comment by dxuh in "Rendering Crispy Text on the GPU"

dxuh — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 05:54:51 +0000

GPUs are very fast, but not quite infinite. If you spend your GPU time on text, you can't spend it on something else. And almost always you would like to spend it on something else. Also the more GPU time you require, the faster the minimum required hardware needs to be. Text is cool and important, but maybe not important enough to lose users or customers.

New comment by dxuh in "A thought on JavaScript "proof of work" anti-scraper systems"

dxuh — Wed, 28 May 2025 11:02:38 +0000

I always thought that JavaScript cryptomining is a better alternative to ads for monetizing websites (as long as people don't depend on those websites and website owners don't take it too far). I'd much rather give you a second of my CPU instead of space in my brain. Why is this so frowned upon? And in the same way I thought Anubis should just mine crypto instead of wasting power.

New comment by dxuh in "The recently lost file upload feature in the Nextcloud app for Android"

dxuh — Thu, 15 May 2025 05:44:28 +0000

> As others have also observed, permissions such as MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE have been rampantly abused in the past, often in horrific ways.

I understand that great care should be taken when this permission is granted to new apps, but NextCloud is well known and on top of that it is a file management app. If anything, apps like that should have this permission.

If you plan to phase it out completely, then the alternatives have to be good enough, which judging from some of the child comments, they are not. I have never developed for Android (and likely never will, because of stuff like this), so I cannot judge properly.

It's also my understanding that the Google Drive App is just some UI over cloud storage. All the interesting bits like Backup are not handled through it and Google Drive gets preferential treatment for this. Additional permissions are required to emulate such functionality.

New comment by dxuh in "The recently lost file upload feature in the Nextcloud app for Android"

dxuh — Thu, 15 May 2025 05:28:38 +0000

Isn't the submission about this being a monopolized market, because options are being removed (NextCloud - a popular option).

New comment by dxuh in "Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal"

dxuh — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 09:16:19 +0000

I tried to make something like this (not power specifically) for a game jam once: https://pfirsich.itch.io/arbitrary-complexity

I took down the servers though, so you probably can't easily try it. I don't know if I added a way to configure the lobby server. I should have! It's open source though. And there is a video about that thing on my YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TPgfa7LbiI

The game is bad and nothing of what we planned on doing actually made it into the game. The video is long and boring too. But maybe someone finds this cool and is inspired by this and makes a game like this.

The first 15 minutes of the game were actually about getting the ship moving, first by reading the manuals of half a dozen different ship systems and then following some procedure outlined in those manuals (parts of which were simply incorrect), maybe having to do some things in sync with your other players and stuff like that. I think it would have been cool to add multiple reactors and start them up in sync and stuff. The different ship systems were actually Lua programs that interacted via a message bus. So kind of a unknown computer architecture?

New comment by dxuh in "Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss"

dxuh — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 08:53:33 +0000

Have you actually lost weight like that? I think exercise is a huge trap for weight loss. Cardio exercise makes you healthy, but it will also make you hungry. Especially if you are not used to it. Overweight people are usually already overeating. They can't deal with hunger and cravings well. If you make them do cardio, they will likely eat back whatever they burned and most likely much more. And even if they don't, they were already overeating, so chances are high you are not in a caloric deficit still. I have lost a lot of weight (30kg) three times now (gained some of it back every time unfortunately) and I think there is much truth to "You don’t lose weight at the gym, you lose weight in the kitchen.".