Hacker News: mackman

New comment by mackman in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

mackman — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:11:46 +0000

You are comparing orbiting earth in a shuttle to a lunar flyby in a pod. Very different risk profiles.

New comment by mackman in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

mackman — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:55:30 +0000

Messaging platforms where people receive and promptly respond to messages are more successful in the long run. That's why SMS overtook email. If you own a messaging platform there isn't anything inherently nefarious about pushing people to enable notifications.

New comment by mackman in "Hackers (1995) Animated Experience"

mackman — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:41:36 +0000

OK who is gonna turn this into a functional terminal emulator for me?

New comment by mackman in "United States Antarctic Program Field Manual (2024) [pdf]"

mackman — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 02:44:20 +0000

I was down there recently on a helicopter-based expedition and they set up a forward base of operations with a few days of emergency rations in case of unexpected weather that prevents you from returning to ship. I asked them what happens if the blizzard lasts more than a couple of days. Someone somewhere has a recipe book for penguins.

New comment by mackman in "The last European train that travels by sea"

mackman — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 10:35:14 +0000

The transit version of a turducken.

New comment by mackman in "Users only care about 20% of your application"

mackman — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 13:50:09 +0000

As best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.

New comment by mackman in "Shared_ptr: the (not always) atomic reference counted smart pointer (2019)"

mackman — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 11:57:25 +0000

> It is possible to create threads by using the OS syscalls bypassing completely the requirement of pthead. (Un)fortunately, I couldn’t find any popular libraries that implement the functionality by using the syscall interface instead of relying on pthread.

I have tried and failed to do this for a C++ program because the amount of C++ runtime static init/shutdown stuff you would need to deal with isn't practical to implement yourself.

New comment by mackman in "Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation"

mackman — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:23:50 +0000

Is this just a case of waiting to stay private while still giving current employees some liquidity?

New comment by mackman in "The iPhone 15 Pro’s Depth Maps"

mackman — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 19:32:08 +0000

Yeah I thought LIDAR was used for actual focus and depth map was then computed from the multi-camera parallax.

New comment by mackman in "Why Does My eBPF Program Work on One Kernel but Fail on Another?"

mackman — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:35:05 +0000

CORE only works on kernels that support BTF. This post introduces one workaround which is to generate BTF data for kernels without it. That's still only half the problem though. You also need to write your eBPF program so every kernel verifier passes it, even though every kernel's eBPF verifier has different bugs, capabilities, and complexity limits. I maintain a large eBPF program that supports 4.14 through 6.14. We implemented our own version of CORE before CORE really existed. In reality, it's a lot more work than "compile once run everywhere."

New comment by mackman in "But good sir, what is electricity?"

mackman — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 14:43:01 +0000

As someone who studied physics and electronics for many years, I still appreciate an article like this for reminding me how profoundly weird science is. Working day to day with the equations and practical applications of electricity gives you a false sense of confidence that we actually have any fucking clue what’s going on.

New comment by mackman in "Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say"

mackman — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 01:36:14 +0000

GitHub pissed me off recently by giving us a one month reminder of our renewal, but having required two months notice to reduce our number of seats. As a result, we are ending up paying for twice as many seats as we currently need.

New comment by mackman in "The richest people borrow against their stock (2021)"

mackman — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 10:17:34 +0000

If you exceed the inheritance tax exemption then you are taxed on the $10k so LTCG would be double taxing. You could argue that the inheritance tax should have a much lower exemption but double taxation is harder to justify.

New comment by mackman in "Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)"

mackman — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 10:45:11 +0000

Listen. If it’s never supposed to happen then you definitely want a customer to tell you if it happens. Best way to make sure that happens is to insult their mum. It’s just good engineering discipline.

New comment by mackman in "Determinism in League of Legends: Implementation (2017)"

mackman — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 18:49:54 +0000

The physics game sim step had to be hardcoded but you could vary the graphics rendering independently. That did mean you needed to use a different RNG for sim objects and graphics-only particle effects.

I worked on the deterministic instant-replay system for a racing sim on PS3. The most interesting thing was that on PS3 we had main processor cores (PPU) and helper cores (SPU) which had their own instruction set. Our physics sim could distribute work across both, but the thread assignment had to be deterministic because PPU and SPU got marginally different floating point results for the same instructuion and inputs. That was a fun one to figure out!

New comment by mackman in "Determinism in League of Legends: Implementation (2017)"

mackman — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 18:47:15 +0000

I implemented a debug replay system for an American Football game when I worked at Sony. The AI hierarchy and all animation and physics state was recorded and game could be rewound to figure out why an NPC made a poor decision. Only needed to track state for the duration of a single play. This was on PS2 which I think had 32MB of memory but the dev systems had an extra 96MB which we could use for this sort of thing.

New comment by mackman in "Nvidia Announces Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal 2025"

mackman — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 20:32:09 +0000

"Smallest earnings beat"

New comment by mackman in "Ask HN: How are you finding the job market in July 2024?"

mackman — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 14:36:49 +0000

What industries/verticals are you looking in?

New comment by mackman in "Ask HN: How are you finding the job market in July 2024?"

mackman — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 14:35:34 +0000

> The Fed is independent of the Executive in the United States.

That was high on Trump's list of things to change.

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

mackman — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 03:43:20 +0000

Yep, all valid. When I started on it we had to do everything ourselves. But by the time I did serious dev on it our engine team had already build vector/matrix libraries that worked on both ppu and spu and had a dispatcher that took care of all the double buffering for me.