Hacker News: jamesu

New comment by jamesu in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"

jamesu — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:12:13 +0000

The current pricing model (for plus) feels deliberately confusing to me, I can never really tell if I'm nearing any kind of limit with my account since nothing really seems to tell me.

New comment by jamesu in "gRPC: From service definition to wire format"

jamesu — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 01:29:26 +0000

Using connectrpc was a pretty refreshing experience for me. Implementing a client for the HTTP stuff at least is pretty easy! I was able to implement a basic runner for forgejo using the protobuf spec for the runner + libcurl within a few days.

New comment by jamesu in "Resurrecting Crimsonland – Decompiling and preserving a cult 2003 classic game"

jamesu — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:19:55 +0000

Bumped into your project a while back - pretty impressive. I was a little disappointed it seemed to just convert the resources rather than use the original runtime formats (since there are a features that don't directly translate to gltf), but for a viewer it's perfectly reasonable. Are you planning on supporting tribes 1 maps at all? Theres still quite a surprising interest in reverse engineering and extending the life of torque games. I'm hoping on publicly releasing a refresh of the original torque codebase this year which improves support for modern platforms including wasm. It's amazingly easy these days to reverse engineer stuff and revive old codebases!

New comment by jamesu in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

jamesu — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:39:06 +0000

I really wanted to like it but the UI always put me off. Also tending to prefer a more open development model these days. Thankfully at least for dev gitea and forgejo have both come a long way and the CI is pretty decent now (though they still dont have a gui workflow builder!).

New comment by jamesu in "Serflings is a remake of The Settlers 1"

jamesu — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:32:26 +0000

The Settlers 2 was one of my favorite games growing up - really felt like they polished up the mechanics of the first game and made the UI more tolerable. If anyone is looking for a more modern 3d equivalent but in a slightly different setting, I'd recommend The Colonists.

New comment by jamesu in "FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter"

jamesu — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 11:47:05 +0000

A few months ago I used ChatGPT to rewrite a bison based parser to recursive descent and was pretty surprised how well it held up - though I still needed to keep prompting the AI to fix things or add elements it skipped, and in the end I probably rewrote 20% of it because I wasn't happy with its strange use of C++ features making certain parts hard to follow.

New comment by jamesu in "Silverbullet: Personal productivity platform built with Markdown and Lua"

jamesu — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:12:08 +0000

Back when this was first announced it was pretty neat, but I don't think it passes the long term reliability test for me. Last time I tried it I somehow managed to erase all the notes and the site broke - didn't exactly instil much confidence.

New comment by jamesu in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

jamesu — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 10:38:23 +0000

Lazarus is nice but both its apis and the ui feel like they're still stuck in the early 00's. It's not enough to look like VB6 / Delphi these days; you've got to keep up with what kinds of conventions we expect now.

New comment by jamesu in "Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs"

jamesu — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 09:20:23 +0000

Also switched to a UGREEN, in this case the DXP4800 Plus. Truenas runs pretty nicely on it! One critique I'd have of this setup is it's a lot noisier than my older Synology setup, but I think that's more to do with the HDDs than the case.

New comment by jamesu in "Windows 3.1 in a Windows 95 Virtual Machine (2022)"

jamesu — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 22:19:49 +0000

A while back I recall watching a video about this very feature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC3TVvtuNqs

New comment by jamesu in "Doing Rails Wrong"

jamesu — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 18:07:06 +0000

I find you get a lot of utility, but long-term you need to keep updating your codebase and follow whatever trend rails is currently on.

New comment by jamesu in "OneDev – Self-hosted Git server with CI/CD, Kanban, and packages"

jamesu — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 21:05:56 +0000

For me the bus factor was a bit of a red flag, plus I prefer the layout in forgejo/gitea. Also didn't like that there wasn't really any obvious way to link in an external CI, and of course it's written in java so had that to factor in too.

New comment by jamesu in "WASM 3.0 Completed"

jamesu — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 19:50:45 +0000

Having wasm 3.0 and a project named wasm3 which doesn't seem to support wasm 3.0 is sure going to get confusing!

New comment by jamesu in "Exploring the tragedy of the Counter-Strike 2 server browser"

jamesu — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 01:27:08 +0000

I play SvenCoop a lot and mostly just stick to a handful of servers. The amount of servers is such that discovering new ones is pretty easy. However it also makes it a bit vulnerable to your favourite server getting hit by a DDOS attack or protocol exploit (thankfully that one was eventually patched!). So there are problems at both extremes.

New comment by jamesu in "A compact bitset implementation used in Ocarina of Time save files"

jamesu — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 17:30:00 +0000

Reminds me of the extensive use of bitsets in Starfox Adventures. Not only was object spawning tied to flags, many dynamic effects were too so if you prodded the flags in memory often a lot of funky things would happen like explosions getting triggered and cutscenes.

New comment by jamesu in "The Pain That Is GitHub Actions"

jamesu — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 05:03:31 +0000

One thing I found useful was writing a runner for giteas actions CI which is similar to GHA. When you dig down and ask "what is ACTUALLY happening to run this job" then a lot of things such as the docker entrypoint not being modifiable make perfect sense.

New comment by jamesu in "Salty game dev comments, easier mods are in Command and Conquer's source code"

jamesu — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 15:00:11 +0000

Can at least concur with C&C/RA being difficult to compile; There are several missing sources and the build environment feels like its one grand 90's hack.

New comment by jamesu in "What happens to your online accounts when you die?"

jamesu — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 02:21:46 +0000

Not having a proper account deletion method for deceased persons was one of my big pet peeves when sorting out accounts of a family member.

New comment by jamesu in "QEMU with VirtIO GPU Vulkan Support"

jamesu — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 22:38:05 +0000

It's nice to see support for vulkan in qemu actually getting somewhere, being able to run modern accelerated workloads inside a vm (without dealing with sr-iov) is pretty cool and definitely has some use cases.

New comment by jamesu in "UK bans daytime TV ads for cereals, muffins and burgers"

jamesu — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 23:32:36 +0000

One thing I noticed is during UK Daytime TV is there are a comical amount of funeral and life insurance ads, it's incredibly depressing.