Hacker News: hcs

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

New comment by hcs in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

hcs — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:51:55 +0000

There's a restrictions on games with even simulated gambling

New comment by hcs in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

hcs — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:26:43 +0000

You are more quickly being carried by the ground further from where you would otherwise be. Hope that clears it up.

New comment by hcs in "The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon"

hcs — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:50:58 +0000

Not the same thing but I was reminded of a joke about the puzzle game Stephen's Sausage Roll:

> I have calculated the value of Pi on Sausage Island and found it to be 2.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240405034314/https://twitter.c...

New comment by hcs in "On The Need For Understanding"

hcs — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:58:44 +0000

As they say in a somewhat different context: worse is better

New comment by hcs in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

hcs — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:50:43 +0000

> But what if you could push?

There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this for software, I don't know how well any of them work.

New comment by hcs in "Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting"

hcs — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:53:02 +0000

Or grade accounts by the logarithm of how many accounts were registered before them, like Slashdot. (This is tongue in cheek as I assume yours was.)

New comment by hcs in "IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL"

hcs — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:12:07 +0000

> The "inability to act" which, as Forrester points out, "provided the incentive" to augment or replace the low-internal-speed human organizations with computers, might in some other historical situation have been an incentive for modifying the task to be accomplished, perhaps doing away with it altogether, or for restructuring the human organizations whose inherent limitations were, after all, seen as the root of the trouble. [...]

> Yes, the computer did arrive "just in time." But in time for what? In time to save--and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize--social and political structures that might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them.

- Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) pp 29-30

New comment by hcs in "IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL"

hcs — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 05:29:52 +0000

I imagine it's a case where you hire a dozen or so test attendants.