Hacker News: jtolmar

New comment by jtolmar in "LÖVE: 2D Game Framework for Lua"

jtolmar — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:01:15 +0000

Yeah, Love2d is a great option for gamedev. It doesn't have the same built-in tools as Godot so you'll need something else for putting together maps (use Tiled [1]), and you'll need to write your own main/render loops (these are just two for loops, nothing fancy).

[1] https://www.mapeditor.org/

New comment by jtolmar in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

jtolmar — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 04:30:22 +0000

I watch things from unknown-to-me creators in a private window, then copy the URL over to logged in window if it's any good. Same idea, might be an easier workflow.

Absurd that we have these sorts of workarounds, but of course the view numbers are better if it keeps fishing for just the right kind of clickbait trash that you'll wolf it down endlessly.

New comment by jtolmar in "Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass"

jtolmar — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 02:34:13 +0000

When I was a kid, we'd host the pics we want to post on forums on geocities and rename the file extensions to .txt to get past its "no hotlinking images" policy. So it's not like much has changed.

There are a lot of barriers between kids and better solutions, one of which is that anything needs a domain and a server, and that means a credit card.

New comment by jtolmar in "They lied to you. Building software is hard"

jtolmar — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:51:49 +0000

Modern AAA games take tons of people because of ballooning scope and graphical fidelity expectations. Games like Super Mario World have went from highly technical team efforts to something a person with no training can accomplish solo. (However, 3D tools have lagged behind dramatically. Solo dev Mario 64 is possible but needs way more specialized knowledge.)

New comment by jtolmar in "Maze Algorithms (2017)"

jtolmar — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 19:52:12 +0000

Lovely page. Reminds me of the venerable Think Labyrinth (https://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/algrithm.htm) page, but the live demos add a lot.

My favorite maze algorithm is a variant of the growing tree algorithm - each time you carve a cell, add it to a random one of N lists. When choosing a cell to visit, pop the last cell off the first non-empty list. It's considerably faster than the standard tree algorithm, but more importantly, changing N has a dramatic impact on the texture of the maze (compare 1 2 4 8 etc on a decently large maze).

New comment by jtolmar in "Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video"

jtolmar — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 19:28:32 +0000

Dang, it's been cool watching gaussian splats go from tech demo to real workflow.

New comment by jtolmar in "The 'Toy Story' You Remember"

jtolmar — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 04:54:30 +0000

Is it possible to replicate the digital->film transition with tone mapping? (I assume the answer is yes, but what is the actual mapping?)

New comment by jtolmar in "Macro Splats 2025"

jtolmar — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 16:01:58 +0000

People are working on recovering PBR properties, rigging, and editing. I think those are all solveable over time. I wouldn't start a big project with it today, but maybe in a couple years.

If you want a real cursed problem for Gaussian splats though: global illumination. People have decomposed splat models into separate global and PBR colors, but I have no clue how you'd figure out where that global illumination came from, let alone recompute it for a new lighting situation.

New comment by jtolmar in "Nicu's test website made with SVG (2007)"

jtolmar — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 17:31:06 +0000

If you want that 2000s feel for your own sites: Gradient background, drop shadows, and side bar nav.

New comment by jtolmar in "The future of 32-bit support in the kernel"

jtolmar — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 16:33:46 +0000

From the article:

> The kernel is still adding support for some 32-bit boards, he said, but at least ten new 64-bit boards gain support for each 32-bit one.

And

> To summarize, he said, the kernel will have to retain support for armv7 systems for at least another ten years. Boards are still being produced with these CPUs, so even ten years may be optimistic for removal. Everything else, he said, will probably fade away sooner than that.

So, no, he does not think that at all.

New comment by jtolmar in "Drunken Bishop (2023)"

jtolmar — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 05:45:54 +0000

Punctuation characters tend to be pretty consistent; there's a few lineages of roguelikes that copy them from each other, and only a handful of things a given mark can mean. ! means potion

Letters are almost always monsters, but which monsters are in which game is anyone's guess.

New comment by jtolmar in "Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI"

jtolmar — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:10:17 +0000

Caves Of Qud uses Markov chain generated text to great effect in some places. I think something light that's still more competent than Markov chains has a lot of potential.

New comment by jtolmar in "What the Fuck Python"

jtolmar — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 20:48:22 +0000

I don't think either reach the real wtfs of their language. id() does some weird things with string interring, javascript coerces cross-type arithmetic into weird nonsense instead of throwing a type error. Whatever, neither of these come up in the real world.

Builds so messy that you need to resort to venv, every second DOM API being someFunc(thirdMostImportantArgument, { mostImportantArgument: val }), these are the real wtfs.

New comment by jtolmar in "Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers"

jtolmar — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 16:55:20 +0000

The stories I've heard have been mostly about scraper bots finding APIs like "get all posts in date range" and then hammering that with every combo of start/end date.

New comment by jtolmar in "Triangle splatting: radiance fields represented by triangles"

jtolmar — Fri, 30 May 2025 17:37:31 +0000

Gaussian splatting models the scene as a bunch of normal distributions (fuzzy squished spheres) instead of triangles, then renders those with billboarded triangles. It has advantages (simpler representation, easy to automatically capture from a scan) and disadvantages (not what the hardware is designed for, not watertight). The biggest disadvantage is that most graphics techniques need to be reinvented for it, and it's not clear what the full list of advantages and disadvantages will be until people have done all of those. But that big disadvantage is also a great reason to make tons of papers.

New comment by jtolmar in "Anatomy of a SQL Engine"

jtolmar — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:01:43 +0000

I prefer "ess queue ell" these days, but the first DBA I ever worked with pronounced it "squirrel".

New comment by jtolmar in "Show HN: SuperSplat – open-source 3D Gaussian Splat Editor"

jtolmar — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 19:37:29 +0000

I don't really think this is true. Gaussian splats certainly came from a context where an opaque representation is expected and normal, but they ended up being an entirely comprehensible format. They're not as simple to operate on as an SDF or voxel representation, but I think they're on par with triangle mesh geometry. A transformed fuzzy sphere is about as complex as a triangle, and spherical harmonic colors, while more conceptually difficult than textures, have fewer moving parts.

New comment by jtolmar in "Proposal: JavaScript Structs"

jtolmar — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 21:04:56 +0000

I agree; the point of a struct type would be to allow a compact memory representation, and you're not going to get it if your constructor can do if(someArg) { a = 1; } else { a = 1; b = 2; }.

You don't strictly need known/consistent types, but it sure helps, since otherwise everything needs to be 8 bytes.

I don't think a way to read into and out of ArrayBuffers is possible, since these can have pointers in them. I think it needs a StructArray class instead, so there's a way to actually make a compact memory array out of all of this.

New comment by jtolmar in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

jtolmar — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 02:20:17 +0000

I can't say whether Java as a whole will ever become the next COBOL, but Java 8 already is well on the way there.

New comment by jtolmar in "The Monospace Web"

jtolmar — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:33:06 +0000

That's called bricktext[0], it used to be a thing you'd occasionally see on usenet and places like GameFAQs.

[0] http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html (Also wow Google has completely erased this concept from its search results.)