Hacker News: khalilravanna

New comment by khalilravanna in "The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300"

khalilravanna — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:52:07 +0000

Such a cool piece of technology. I will say though I enjoyed our 200 lb monster CRT of yore I’m thankful we have Mike Chi and the RetroTINK 4K now. Being able to play any old console on any modern TV while still having it look accurate it is a dream.

New comment by khalilravanna in "EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners"

khalilravanna — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 15:17:09 +0000

Take a company already known for its cynical “value extraction” approach to games, barely fostering enough life within its doors to squeeze out acceptable versions of games that used to be truly Great from among their vast hoard of IP—take that company and add 20 billion dollars of debt and private equity overlords and I can only assume we get something akin to the blood orgy from Event Horizon but in game company form.

New comment by khalilravanna in "The cultural decline of literary fiction"

khalilravanna — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 02:56:15 +0000

I have to disagree. Evidence for this being wrong is right on many games websites a la Backloggd with plenty of people rating older games very highly, more than many new releases. More evidence: numerous games being re-released with mainly surface-level changes (older Final Fantasy’s, arguably Oblivion Remastered).

While I absolutely agree some games age like milk (IMO Persona 3 FES/Portable mechanically play like garbage and P4 ain’t much better) there are many games that were either the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there’s a bunch of PS1/PS2 era games having a big second life with the younger generation.

New comment by khalilravanna in "The 20 year old PSP can now connect to WPA2 WiFi Networks"

khalilravanna — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 06:25:24 +0000

Same. Mine had expanded so much it almost popped the battery panel off. Thankfully replacements are quite cheap! I went through and replaced old ones on my PSPs, DSs, etc and now keep em all charged (with a mess of cables) to hopefully keep em semi healthy and not cause a bonfire in my closet.

New comment by khalilravanna in ""We ran out of columns""

khalilravanna — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 20:59:58 +0000

This reminds me of my first software job, an internship in college in 2012 building an application from scratch to facilitate evaluating teachers. It was basically an app to allow people to create a form for their school’s evaluation criteria and then submit those forms. Sounds super straightforward, right? It was. The catch was our team was 2 CS undergrad, a masters CS student, and a high school student. All with no professional experience. We knew nothing. Well kind of but more on that in a second. Our manager was absolutely non technical. In fact they were the second highest person in the company (fairly small company) and were managing our project and a bunch of other stuff at the company. And somehow with almost 0 oversight we built a functional Django application that the business was able to sell and make money from. My favorite highlights were 1) the codebase was initially shared over FTP (“Hey you’re not editing file X, right? Oh you are? Ah woops I just overwrote all your changes.”) till someone intelligently suggested “Uhhh Git?” 2) the actual best programmer amongst us was the high schooler. They suggested Django, picked the DB, they suggested using Celery to speed up async work, Redis for caching, and yes, “Uhh Git?” In retrospect the only reason we succeeded was because of them. They were like top 5 on the stack overflow Code Golf site IIRC. 3) My interview was basically showing my aforementioned manager who had never coded in his life a project I worked on at school and him being like “Yeah looks good. You’re hired.”

With 10 years of hindsight, I cringe thinking back to all the bad decisions I pushed for and the no-doubt terrible code I wrote. But I also marvel and look back fondly at being given a shot and being in an environment where I could just build something from the ground up and learn everything soup to nuts on the job. God bless whoever inherited that codebase.

New comment by khalilravanna in "Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?"

khalilravanna — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 12:52:27 +0000

This is incorrect information. Check out levels.fyi. The average stock grant for Meta E6 is well over $1M/4years. Just one example. Plenty of data on other companies offers there.

New comment by khalilravanna in "Rabbit failed to properly reset keys: emails can be sent from rabbit.tech domain"

khalilravanna — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:33:44 +0000

Never heard of this. So I went to the website to find out what it is. "Your pocket companion" the top of the website reads. Ok, don't know what that means. Scroll down "push to talk button", "conversational interface", and some other hardware features. Still no idea what it's for. They have a keynote video. I press play. It starts with them showing a bunch of press coverage and social media. Still no description of what it is. Not even a demo of what it does. I got several minutes into the video and it's all acting like I already know what it is. I've completely lost interest. Mystifyingly bad marketing.

New comment by khalilravanna in "AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's infamous Cell processor"

khalilravanna — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 17:59:15 +0000

My biggest lament with the PS3 is the forward incompatibility making many great games locked to the platform (MGS4, Demon’s Souls, etc.). Meanwhile in Xbox land there are *633* 360 games you can play on any new Xbox by just slipping the disc in. Now some of this is no doubt due to differing approaches to business by the corporate masters but from what I’ve read a lot of it is the unique and befuddling architecture of the PS3.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_...

New comment by khalilravanna in "Cybertruck Owner Breaks His Finger Trying to Show Vehicle Is Safe"

khalilravanna — Tue, 07 May 2024 14:00:29 +0000

I wonder if the engineer working on this thought “I wonder if someone on YouTube will use this to try and become famous by breaking their finger? Surely not…”

An algorithm that closes the door harder if it meets resistance seems a bit insane, right? What if there’s something fragile? Is this how these auto closing doors normally work? God I’m happy I drive a dumb manual car with no real electronics other than a radio.

New comment by khalilravanna in "How Hertz’s bet on Teslas went sideways"

khalilravanna — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 18:23:38 +0000

Similar experience.

- Rented Model Y. Show up and no Model Y. “We got a 3”. I’m driving to Vermont with snow but no choice now. “Ok sounds great.”

- Have to stop every couple hours to charge.

- Multiple times the GPS plotted us a route which would have battery hit 0% before arriving to charger. Nerve wracking.

- Most of the full speed charging stations had lines and if we did the slow speed ones our entire weekend trip would be spent charging.

- Regenerative braking is cool till you’re going down hill in snow with all season tires. Then it’s a great way to lock up and slide. Thankfully I’m not a noob. (Also not that I expected winter tires from a rental, even in Boston, but cmon Hertz.)

My biggest takeaway is that if where we stayed had a charger for overnight charging it would have been fine. Without that it was undeniably worse than renting a gas car. We basically had to plan our days around the rental which is a bit insane. I don’t doubt that having one to whip around local with a charger at home would rule but for anything more than short drives I don’t think a rental electric makes sense.

New comment by khalilravanna in "I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind"

khalilravanna — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 23:17:44 +0000

This sounds like it mirrors my usage. Basically treat it like pairing with a really junior dev: assume everything it writes will be wrong and then go from there. If you do that then best case it speeds you up and worst case you waste a little time reading what it wrote that was wrong and ignoring the suggestion and moving on.

New comment by khalilravanna in "Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat"

khalilravanna — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 14:20:40 +0000

There was an automated tool like this someone built at Twitter. At first it was cool just to see who the most tenured people were. Then the layoffs happened and it became essential due to the absolute 0 communication happening thanks to the Cool New Management. I remember we used the count of people in one of the default Slack channels to keep track of how many people got the axe. Woof.

New comment by khalilravanna in "How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace (2023)"

khalilravanna — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 19:48:20 +0000

Same. Only time I ever dealt with shipping on FB marketplace was the time I was selling my Steam Deck and some guy didn’t want to drive. So I said “How about I list it on eBay so we’re both protected, send you the link, and you buy it there”. He was on board and it worked well. Of course I had to eat eBay’s fee but better than getting scammed.

New comment by khalilravanna in "Playstation is erasing seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries"

khalilravanna — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 17:51:46 +0000

Ah good to know. I also forgot the obvious case where a game’s disc only contains a subset of the content on it and a download is required for the rest. It’s not really a day one patch but just the game is too large to fit on a disc.

New comment by khalilravanna in "Playstation is erasing seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries"

khalilravanna — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 19:39:49 +0000

Is this actually true? I don’t think I’ve ever been fully blocked from anything because you can always just turn off the internet and then boot the game to bypass these things (Switch for example). The only way then is the game itself would have to block you (conceivable but I don’t recall seeing it). Some specific examples would be helpful.

New comment by khalilravanna in "Git rebase, what can go wrong"

khalilravanna — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 18:22:41 +0000

I think if the definition of a “good history” is “clean and not messy”, then yes I agree that’s pointless. If the definition is “a clear ability to see what changes were made, by who, and most importantly why” I think that’s incredibly necessary and would even go so far as to say it’s naive at best to not support.

The amount of time that has been saved in my life by someone leaving an explanation in their commit (for some weird edge case or context I’d have no way of gleaning because they’ve since left the company) is SO much more than the extra time I’ve put in to make sure the history has this extra info in it.

New comment by khalilravanna in "How Netflix uses Java"

khalilravanna — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 20:54:36 +0000

I’m sure that’s some part of it. I think another part, kind of similar, is acronyms being used as a form of in-group/out-group behavior. “I know the lingo so I’m in the club. You don’t so you aren’t”

New comment by khalilravanna in "How Netflix uses Java"

khalilravanna — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 19:59:26 +0000

Another reminder that acronyms are pretty terrible for communication. Every time I onboard with a new org there’s a whole new set of acronyms to learn that’s barely faster than typing out the unabbreviated version. Nice to save a couple seconds when the cost is only a bunch of people not able to follow along when people are communicating.

To be clear: not ragging on OP in particular at all but more at the widespread practice at a company level.

New comment by khalilravanna in "The Frustration Loop"

khalilravanna — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 14:26:47 +0000

I think at least initially TikTok would push traffic to new accounts. My first few videos got a bunch of likes/views even though I had 0 followers. And then I noticed it started to trickle down video after video even though (subjectively) the content remained largely the same. It’s a clever mechanism to increase stickiness for new users as well as detect early on if a new content producer has that Good Shit that will do mega views.

New comment by khalilravanna in "He created the Katamari games, but they’re rolling on without him"

khalilravanna — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 04:10:47 +0000

I listen to a frightening amount of video game music and the Katamari and Etrian Odyssey series are the ones with the most consistently stellar music out there. Katamari is especially good because of how, like you mentioned, eclectic it is. The sequels endlessly remix the original songs and add new ones and you end up with a collection of music that ranges from jazz, to rock, to house, to latin music, pop and everything in between. It astounds me how good it is. I have all of it on my dropbox and come back to year after year after year.

You really can’t go with a bad recommendation (OP’s is excellent) but my one (at least today) would be: Katamari On The Funk https://youtu.be/9EQnzIT5STM?si=Okj0Wub6JVUNafWi