Hacker News: hcs

New comment by hcs in "The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing"

hcs — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:19:18 +0000

I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.

New comment by hcs in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

hcs — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:31:02 +0000

Events of Back to the Future II (2015-10-21)

New comment by hcs in "Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)"

hcs — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:26:29 +0000

Same, seeing the title and having not read Bradbury for a long time I was thinking either The Veldt or that one (The Long Rain). I did remember it on reading, though, and it's an unsettling feeling.

New comment by hcs in "Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers"

hcs — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:12:55 +0000

Maybe I'm not communicating the point clearly. In order to use a table to do the whole multiplication it has to be much larger than the largest number you would want to multiply with it. A lot of the analysis of algorithms, especially multiplication as discussed here, is about astronomically large numbers, so you don't want the existence of an even more astronomically large table as a prerequisite.

New comment by hcs in "Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers"

hcs — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:22:36 +0000

Well, yes, which is why they don't measure it your way, as it doesn't lead to discovering anything interesting about computation to have a shortcut like that. Or if they do it's part of a larger analysis, called an oracle machine.

New comment by hcs in "Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers"

hcs — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:19:58 +0000

An algorithm is a finite sequence of instructions, and so can't include an infinite table. More generally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_method

New comment by hcs in "Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing"

hcs — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:09:28 +0000

> If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust.

Or count the fingers, I guess. It's all fun and games until someone looses AI.

New comment by hcs in "An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time"

hcs — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:18:44 +0000

Though the ancients did recognize as occult forces magnetism (Thales, according to Aristotle, gave the motive power of magnets as an example that even apparently inanimate objects have souls) and electricity (from triboelectic effects with amber, whence comes the name, and which Thales discussed as induced magnetism, also Plato mentions the stunning caused by electric rays), though it would be a while before the connection was made between these phenomena.

New comment by hcs in "The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)"

hcs — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:38:09 +0000

Pitch is the offset between the start of consecutive rows of pixels in the image, used to convert y coordinates into the start of any given row, so you access a pixel as buffer[y*pitch+x]. Often this is the image width, but can be greater depending on required alignment.

New comment by hcs in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

hcs — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:56:17 +0000

If we're collecting anecdotes, it happened for me in more of my office jobs than not. Might have been relevant that these were smaller offices.

New comment by hcs in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

hcs — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:06:41 +0000

I liked it, still find good answers, and it was gratifying to provide answers when I could.

New comment by hcs in "A case against Boolean logic"

hcs — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:26:19 +0000

    enum Bool
    { 
        True, 
        False, 
        FileNotFound 
    };

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_

New comment by hcs in "dBase: 1979-2026"

hcs — Mon, 11 May 2026 05:12:49 +0000

Some of my earliest programming exposure was a dBASE IV book my dad had for work, though it was some time before I put any of it into action. At that time I was reading manuals like fiction, only slowly realizing that I could actually use some of it with our computer.

New comment by hcs in "The fun has been optimized out of the Internet"

hcs — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:17:18 +0000

> millenials got the birth of social media

..and a lot of us weren't thrilled about it.

New comment by hcs in "I accidentally made law enforcement shut down their fake honeypot"

hcs — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:33:33 +0000

It's a honeypot for pedants

New comment by hcs in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

hcs — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:49:06 +0000

> Or you do not consider MUL/DIV "arithmetic", or something.

Multiplier and divider are usually not considered part of the ALU, yes. Not uncommon for those to be shared between execution threads while there's an ALU for each.

New comment by hcs in "The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes"

hcs — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 05:15:22 +0000

I phrased that badly, Dragon's Lair was the example of low process intensity.

New comment by hcs in "The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes"

hcs — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:01:06 +0000

Even on NES a lot of games use CHR-RAM so arbitrary bitmaps are at least possible, though only a small part of the screen is unique without some rarely used mapper hardware. Zelda and Metroid mostly just use this to compress the graphics in ROM, Qix is a simple example with line drawing, Elite is an extreme one.

I made a demo of the Mystify screensaver using the typical 8KB CHR-RAM. Even with a lot of compromises it has pretty large borders to avoid running out of unique tiles. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1_MymcLeew8

New comment by hcs in "The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes"

hcs — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:30:59 +0000

Chris Crawford called this "process intensity", he noted it at least back to 1983 with Dragon's Lair, discussed in this 1987 article https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...

New comment by hcs in "Some Unusual Trees"

hcs — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:09:46 +0000

Or you can just hit the Random button https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random