Hacker News: jheitmann

Reversing Factorio's RNG

jheitmann — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 17:02:19 +0000

Article URL: https://gegell.github.io/posts/factorio-rng/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49674451

Points: 217

# Comments: 39

New comment by jheitmann in "Separating signal from noise in coding evaluations"

jheitmann — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:56:38 +0000

It reads to me like "We did all the work you'd do to figure out how to fix the benchmark, then we decided to throw out the benchmark". Is there some reason the underlying data is so golden that it can't be patched? At the end they argue for a slightly more curated approach to benchmark generation, but my gut is that using messy ill-specified tests taken from real world data and patching them into fairness would be a pretty solid path to take.

New comment by jheitmann in "Random Attractors – Found using Lyapunov Exponents (2001)"

jheitmann — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 18:54:58 +0000

There's a book covering this and more from 1993 called "Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos" by Julian C. Sprott that's freely available here: https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/SA.HTM

It's fun (errr... for me at least) to translate the ancient basic code into a modern implementation and play around.

The article mentions that it's interesting how the 2d functions can look 3d. That's definitely true. But, there's also no reason why you can't just add on however many dimensions you want and get real many-dimensioned structures with which you can noodle around with visualizations and animations.

New comment by jheitmann in "The elegance of movement in Silksong"

jheitmann — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:48:42 +0000

Sibling comments are giving good answers about Silksong in particular. But, a more general point to keep in mind is that gaming by revenue is an order of magnitude larger than movies. In that light it's a little strange that gaming news/events don't hit the general attention sphere more than they do.

New comment by jheitmann in "The Math Is Haunted"

jheitmann — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 02:05:21 +0000

Check out the game Bombe [1]. It's a minesweeper variant where instead of directly flagging or uncovering cells, you define rules for when cells can be flagged. As it gets more advanced you end up building lemmas that implicitly chain off each other. Then as _you_ get more advanced (and the game removes some arbitrary restrictions around your toolset) you can generalize your rules and golf down what you've already constructed.

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/2262930

New comment by jheitmann in "Batteries as a Military Enabler"

jheitmann — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 19:06:58 +0000

Also, China's battery production is described as a "battery complex" while US battery production is described as a "battery industry" or "battery industrial base".

New comment by jheitmann in "The Glitch That Broke Link's Cel Shading [video]"

jheitmann — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:27:15 +0000

The video meanders for a bit at the start, but about a third of the way through turns into a pretty interesting breakdown of how deferred rendering works in general, and then specifically Breath of the Wild's deferred rendering passes.

The Glitch That Broke Link's Cel Shading [video]

jheitmann — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:23:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By7qcgaqGI4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36530476

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by jheitmann in "Vice is said to be headed for bankruptcy"

jheitmann — Mon, 01 May 2023 23:26:04 +0000

Waypoint was lost. Good gaming media is like a big water droplet that keeps on getting smushed by a the big dumb thumb of capitalism. It still shifts to a new spot, but ever diminishing. One of the rare ones that even made money. Still, gone.

New comment by jheitmann in "Zendesk created a fake band “Zendesk Alternative” that ranks first in SEO"

jheitmann — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 04:57:16 +0000

Looking forward to the competitive video game Zendesk VS.

New comment by jheitmann in "Debugging Architects"

jheitmann — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:38:04 +0000

Should thinkers read? As a thinker, I thought I'd venture here to the reading room to see if I could glean any data-driven insights. What I found was a new form of Readable Thinking Words (aka "writing") called a blog. After a moments perusal I realized this was a kind of web log, something I'd come across in my last reading room excursion 20 years ago. Despite my ignorance, I knew I'd be able to leverage my thinkability into something positive for the readers, so I decided to leave this enriching comment. What a huge improvement for you all! Thinkers really should read every now and then.

New comment by jheitmann in "I changed my mind about nuclear waste"

jheitmann — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 19:39:19 +0000

> Less than 1% is radioactive for 10,000 years. This portion can be easily isolated and shielded

How would this work? My assumption was that the pellets are fairly homogeneous. Does the decay happen faster in exterior of the pellet? Or is there some process to concentrate the radiation?

New comment by jheitmann in "It’s time to leave the leap second in the past"

jheitmann — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 16:56:18 +0000

Why does ntpd lose the smear on a restart? I would have thought that the current smear could be calculated purely based off current non-smear time, plus the config to say when to smear, which is presumably available upon restart.

Also, why were non-linear smears thought to be desirable? Googling just turns up hand-wavy phrases like "easier on clients".

New comment by jheitmann in "More Fakery"

jheitmann — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 01:53:48 +0000

This feed has been working for me: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/feed

New comment by jheitmann in "Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)"

jheitmann — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 04:31:00 +0000

36 comments in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18559477

19 comments in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10105437

New comment by jheitmann in "Former Uber executive charged with paying 'hush money' to conceal breach"

jheitmann — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 01:27:47 +0000

I haven't had to deal with PII issues for a few years now so I might be a bit rusty but: Regardless of how driver's license ids are created, they are global identifiers of a specific person. If company A knows a person's driver's license number, and company B knows that same person's driver's license number, the two companies can be certain they're talking about the same person.

That those ids are often formed from a transparent function of other PII only makes the issue more extreme. It's like PII^2.

New comment by jheitmann in "Freedom of Speech: A Right for Everybody, or Only for Like-Minded People?"

jheitmann — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 16:52:30 +0000

The speech that should absolutely be abridged is using the phrase "Freedom of Speech: A Right" seemingly without referring to the U.S. constitutional right, and also without defining what you mean otherwise. The penalty for violating this law shall be that you have to read every single forum comment about your abstract.

Overwatch's latency compensation techniques

jheitmann — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 16:49:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTH2ZPgYujQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11439961

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jheitmann in "Clifford Attractors"

jheitmann — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 23:48:00 +0000

Julien C. Sprott has a very fun, approachable, and free book on generating various kinds of strange attractor visualizations:

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/sa.htm

It has 1993-era code, which paradoxically might make it good for a coding beginner since you'd have to work a bit to figure out a basic syntactic translation, but the high level idea is already there. You get immediate visual results, and there is a lot of room to experiment and play.

New comment by jheitmann in "Reassessing Airport Security"

jheitmann — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 20:35:23 +0000

You can do that today. Just freeze it: https://apps.tsa.dhs.gov/mytsa/cib_results.aspx?search=gel%2...

I learned that from one of the TSA line prep barkers. They were putting such a jolly spin on their spiel and it sounded so ridiculous that I assumed it was a joke. But, both happily and sadly, nope.