Hacker News: mabster

New comment by mabster in "The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew"

mabster — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:35:07 +0000

It's always the kitchen for me across food places (in Australia). Ending up with pickles when I removed them. Ending up with coke zero instead of coke. But the worst is ending up with anything mock meat!

New comment by mabster in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

mabster — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:01:03 +0000

It's been mixed moving to normal code: I haven't had to low-level optimise for ages now (man I miss that). But performance in the O() sense has been the same.

Game engine development is very much about processing of data. The pipeline is long and the tree is wide. Being able to reason about complicated data processing topologies mapped very easily across.

New comment by mabster in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

mabster — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:49:58 +0000

I haven't watched his videos on his language for ages, but this was a big thing he wanted in his language: being able to swap between array-of-structs and struct-of-array quickly and easily.

New comment by mabster in "Chuck Klosterman on why we've never actually seen a real football game"

mabster — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:33:22 +0000

Unless LA stood for Latin America haha.

New comment by mabster in "Chuck Klosterman on why we've never actually seen a real football game"

mabster — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:29:33 +0000

I guessed American when it was compared to Hockey, Baseball and Basketball.

In Melbourne, Australia, Football is again another sport (but it not being called Footy gives it a way).

New comment by mabster in "The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]"

mabster — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 05:14:56 +0000

I flew Scoot airlines recently and my 13” MacBook Air was too big to have on my lap even though the seat in front was not reclined.

There's also something about those seats where you get back pain when you try to sleep with your own seat reclined.

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

mabster — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:57:16 +0000

Memories shattered. Yeah, you're right and I would have watched interlaced broadcast content.

I saw interlaced NTSC video in the digital days where the combing was much more obvious and always assumed it was only an NTSC thing!

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

mabster — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:11:03 +0000

I'm guessing you're talking about interlacing?

I've never really experienced it because I've always watched PAL which doesn't have that.

But I would have thought it would be perceived as flashing at 60 Hz with a darker image?

New comment by mabster in "Control structures in programming languages: from goto to algebraic effects"

mabster — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 11:51:57 +0000

You nailed it - that's my criticism :)

I've worked with a lot of code like this (particularly C libraries and litanies of return codes), and it's fine... But I prefer something like Java-style exceptions. And with Java lambdas or Kotlin the trend is unfortunately away from checked exceptions these days...

I too am interested in your other reasons!

New comment by mabster in "Control structures in programming languages: from goto to algebraic effects"

mabster — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 04:49:08 +0000

I'm the opposite - I really like checked exceptions in Java because it's very easy to see how developers are handling errors and they also form part of the function signature.

Most functions will just pass on exceptions verbatim so it's better than error return values because with them the entire codebase has to be littered with error handling, compared to fewer try catch blocks.

setjmp, etc. are like unchecked exceptions, so I'm also not a fan, but I use this occasionally in C anyway.

New comment by mabster in "Analysis indicates that the universe’s expansion is not accelerating"

mabster — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 01:37:45 +0000

I just pictured someone getting a message to check which model was right from an ancestor 20 giga generations ago!

New comment by mabster in "An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x throughput (hist)"

mabster — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 21:38:38 +0000

Or the timeline just doesn't have capacity for experimentation so the expectations are clear right from the start!

New comment by mabster in "An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x throughput (hist)"

mabster — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 21:37:28 +0000

In context most of the major optimisation work was on the engine. The game code can be and usually is slow but we do try to tame things in an O() sense.

I worked licensed titles for a while and that area the quality of a title and whether it sells were largely uncorrelated haha!

New comment by mabster in "An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x throughput (hist)"

mabster — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 07:04:37 +0000

I've written this kind of function so many times it's not funny. I usually want something that is fed from an iterator, removes duplicates, and yields values as soon as possible.

New comment by mabster in "An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x throughput (hist)"

mabster — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 07:01:54 +0000

We had similar thoughts about "premature optimisation" in the games industry. That is it's better to have prematurely optimised things than finding "everything is slow". But I guess in that context there are many many "inner-most loops" to optimise.

New comment by mabster in "PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021)"

mabster — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 05:44:23 +0000

I can't remember the details because we coded the SPU in C, but the PS3 SPUs had odd and even cycles with different access properties too.

New comment by mabster in "I am a programmer, not a rubber-stamp that approves Copilot generated code"

mabster — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 06:40:14 +0000

I worked with a developer that copied and pasted A LOT and would keep his fingers on the old copy and paste buttons (Ctrl-Ins, etc.). I've even seen him copy and paste single letters. He's one of the most productive developers I've ever worked with.

New comment by mabster in "Show HN: I've built a tiny hand-held keyboard"

mabster — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 23:10:36 +0000

In my setup I use Colemak DH mod which loses the Vim arrows but I added a modifier where the 'a' key (left pinky on home row) when held down switches the right home row to arrow keys. Hasn't been an issue.

New comment by mabster in "A safe, non-owning C++ pointer class"

mabster — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:43:53 +0000

We purposefully didn't use shared_ptr and hence weak_ptr. With these, it is all too easy to construct the "bad" version which has the stub reference count and pointer stored far away in memory from the object itself requiring a double dereference to access the object which is bad for cache performance. Instead we derived off a shareable class that has the reference count to make sure it is close in memory.

We were happy to use unique_ptr, however.

New comment by mabster in "Easy Forth (2015)"

mabster — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:03:04 +0000

Was also gonna jump in with the old way of doing circle boundaries, which can be done all integer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm