Hacker News: khedoros1

New comment by khedoros1 in "Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room"

khedoros1 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:40:51 +0000

Outer Wilds is exactly what came to mind for me, too. Made a jump...missed. Thrown into a decaying orbit around the black hole. Absolutely terrifying, and panicking didn't help in the least!

And getting close to the upper atmosphere of Giant's Deep for the first time, staring, thinking about the atmospheres of real-world gas giants, knowing that I need to take the plunge.

That game exposed some phobias that I'd only been vaguely aware of before.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Does average person understand that all disc media dies too?"

khedoros1 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 19:45:42 +0000

> They all have DRM which make it essentially encrypted with no decryption service available.

Not all do. Games for a lot of systems can be read directly from the storage media.

> Likewise, the game isn’t usually 100% contained on disc.

Only for the couple most-recent generations. But even virtually all of my PS4 games (not to mention earlier generations) are actually on the disc, playable without a download.

> So the question in my mind becomes, do game companies have an obligation to support games in perpetuity? I think when phrased that way, the answer is an obvious no.

Agreed, but I also think that if they don't have that obligation, then society doesn't have the obligation to provide copyright protection when they drop support.

New comment by khedoros1 in "DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots"

khedoros1 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 03:38:56 +0000

I had a few reasons, when I tried tackling RE of a DOS-era game a number of years ago. I wanted to document the file formats, look through the data and find unused media, identify and fix some of the more egregious bugs in the game, build modding tools for it, understand the techniques used to build something that was memorable from my childhood, reduce the friction of running it on a modern system, make available optional improvements like higher resolution, texture replacement, and so on.

It ended up being more than I had the patience to finish. It might be doable for me now.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why?"

khedoros1 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 03:04:55 +0000

A lot. Often a couple dozen for pages that are currently queued up to read, with pages further to the left being older and often forgotten (or they're pages that I would like to have read, but don't want to take the time to read, and I haven't accepted that distinction yet). Another window might have reference material for whatever I'm working on. If I've only got one page open there, it usually means that I'm not deep into the process.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Show HN: A game where you build a GPU"

khedoros1 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:27:51 +0000

The aspect that I especially like is covering the 3-state aspect of the logic. Studying CS, it was kind of vaguely mentioned, and we skipped over to doing logic diagrams with gates and the assumption of 2-state logic really quickly...and it seems like most games do that kind of skip too. Working at the transistor level grounds it better to the actual components.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Can a machine "understand" like a human? The Chinese room argument"

khedoros1 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:01:45 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139580 (2010) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10867791 (2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697789 (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19068962 (2019)

Here are a handful of past discussions that might be interesting.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?"

khedoros1 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:28:10 +0000

I went from a 19" CRT capable of 1600x1200@75Hz to a 17" LCD capable of 1280x1024@60Hz, basically because that CRT would've taken up a huge chunk of desk real estate in my dorm.

My first impressions were that the screen was bright as hell, sharp (but I was torn on whether that was good or bad, given the blockiness that it introduced), thin and light (awesome!), and sucked to run at anything but the native resolution. After a few hours, I realized that my eyes weren't getting tired looking at it, and that it was nice not to have the subtle hum around anymore.

The CRT was a decent screen (for 1999), and the LCD was a decent screen (for 2003). Of course, I just got used to the differences, since the LCD was much more practical in my life. I still have it in storage right now.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Amazon Employees Say AI Is Just Increasing Workload"

khedoros1 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:46:01 +0000

Probably because they're advertising their product, and the comment also sounds like it was written/edited by AI itself.

New comment by khedoros1 in "We All Have Steam Libraries. What Happens When They're Gone?"

khedoros1 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:05:26 +0000

I definitely only care about a handful. I've got categories like "beaten", "in-progress", "maybe someday", and "meh". You accumulate a lot of free stuff over the years, things you got because they were in a cheap bundle with what you wanted, the thing you bought to play with a friend and did exactly once, etc.

GOG's similar. I've got so many things that I bought for $0.80, got for free, or bought for the memories and haven't actually picked up.

That's just on PC. I have a lot of physical media for a lot of different game systems. I think I'd probably have enough games on hand for the rest of my life if Steam and GOG both disappeared tomorrow.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Before ChatGPT-HW debate there were other "If students use X to do HW" debates"

khedoros1 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 04:30:25 +0000

> ANYWAY, people have lost the ability to write in cursive, or even write in print neatly.

By 2nd grade, I had good, clean print handwriting. Third grade is when they started teaching (and requiring us to use) D'Nealian cursive. My cursive never has been attractive, but its influence crapped up my print too. I do my best to slow down just a bit if I think someone else will have to read it.

> a) Memorize Times Tables.

My kid was taught the tables last year. They went up to 12x12. They also did a bunch of multiplying numbers specifically by 2, but I'm not sure exactly how high. Maybe 2^15, or so?

New comment by khedoros1 in "Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage"

khedoros1 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:09:46 +0000

Wow. Your old PC is more powerful than any computer I own. Faster version of my CPU, double the RAM, newer generation GPU. A fraction of the storage, though. I built it in 2020 to replace the desktop that I built in 2008.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy"

khedoros1 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:18:14 +0000

There was one "Walking through the graveyard at midnight" ("stitching up some zombies" ?) or something, with a necromancer collecting zombie parts. To the tune of "walking in a winter wonderland".

Not what I was looking for, but I found these: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJtJNNXaEYrrZP99qBx-k...

From this guy's page: https://www.paperspencils.com/category/my-projects/dd-christ...

Ah! I think I found the ones that I was thinking of:

https://archive.org/stream/netbookofbardsongs/BardSongsNetBo...

Nothing about Jack Frost or "ripping", unfortunately.

New comment by khedoros1 in "My first experiences trying to participate on Reddit"

khedoros1 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:13:15 +0000

Since friction in creating a new account is so low, the only real signal about the controller of the account is their behavior on the platform. Bots trying to sell things are rampant. Advertising (including self-promotion) is seen as a kind of spam by most of Reddit.

That being said, anyone can start a subreddit. You start your own and post whatever you want, or you spend some time in the individual communities, learn their norms, learn what each one considers acceptable to post. Something completely normal in one subreddit will be completely unacceptable in another.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy"

khedoros1 — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:43:16 +0000

I think I found, and memorized, that about 25 years ago. There was a list of other songs in the file too.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Ultima VII Revisited"

khedoros1 — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 06:00:49 +0000

I remember getting "The Complete Ultima VII" on CD and never figuring out how to get it running. I think I've still got the box, but I think the disc has been missing for years. I bought it on GOG some time ago, though.

New comment by khedoros1 in "Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change"

khedoros1 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 20:30:56 +0000

I went from Ubuntu to Mint around the same time on my laptop. I took my desktop from Ubuntu to Fedora. A later laptop followed it, because I was tired of the little differences.

Ubuntu is completely off my radar too. So many dumb things that often lasted a few releases. Like ads for their cloud services, Unity for a while, window controls on the left for a while...

My biggest problem with Mint was that upgrading the OS became a hassle if I put it off for too long (which I started doing after a not-so-smooth upgrade experience, one release).

New comment by khedoros1 in "Ultima VII Revisited"

khedoros1 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:07:36 +0000

My first thought was "How is this different from Exult?" (which is a relatively vanilla reimplementation of the game).

Some of the video segments here make differences clearer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mbJcOEwKJ4

While Exult basically matches the graphics of the original game, this is closer to "3D Ultima VII", with rotatable views and more interactivity in the game. It gives it what looks like a kind of voxel-ish look, mixing in original sprites with newly-modeled 3D objects.

New comment by khedoros1 in "The x86 Interrupt List, aka “Ralf Brown's Interrupt List” (2018)"

khedoros1 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:37:41 +0000

I'm not quite old enough to have needed to use this while writing my own software. But I've come back to it repeatedly while learning enough about the operation of DOS PCs to try my hand at reverse-engineering some games. That was at least 10 years ago. (It became clear that I'd bitten off more than I could chew, so no full game RE, but I documented a couple more file formats, wrote some file viewers, and learned a lot).

New comment by khedoros1 in "Learning a Bit of VGA"

khedoros1 — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 22:27:39 +0000

"Video card" was the more general word. "VGA" is one of the IBM video cards for PCs that later became a de facto standard, as its behavior was cloned by other companies. It's sometimes used descriptively to talk about the 640x480 resolution, or the DE-15 connector that remained a standard connection for analog video output on personal computers for a long time.

New comment by khedoros1 in "How Long Will My MacBook Pro Last?"

khedoros1 — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:20:47 +0000

I've got a desktop that I built in 2008 that I only replaced in 2020 because I wanted to play newer games. That 2020 desktop is still going strong. My laptop was produced in 2016. I bought it for about $80 to replace my previous 2016-vintage laptop when its display started to fail. The last computer that I replaced due to performance in everyday tasks was a 2009 netbook.

In the 90s, it was easy to build/buy a machine that would be thoroughly limiting in its capabilities 2-3 years later. Now? I've got a 9-year-old laptop, 5-year-old desktop, and a 2-year-old workstation-class work laptop, and there's very little practical difference in power between them. The newer computer just has some conveniences like USB-C ports+charging.