Hacker News: mdouglass

New comment by mdouglass in "Board: New game console recognizes physical pieces, with an open SDK"

mdouglass — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:24:30 +0000

I am one of those DMs and I've thought before about trying to build a system like this. The main problem for me with the screen is that it is hard from my position to tell exactly what square any particular mini is in. It would be great for me if my laptop's view of the map showed where minis were and where they were moving to.

I agree that I wouldn't want new area of the map to be automatically revealed, but detecting where they were and giving me a one-click option to reveal X squares around the mini would definitely save me time at the time.

That being said, this screen is a non-starter for me because it is just too small. We use a 40+ inch screen and I'd love to go even bigger than that. Definitely not down to a (maybe) 23x13 square screen.

New comment by mdouglass in "Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji"

mdouglass — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 23:37:22 +0000

vscode's "Unicode Highlight: Non-basic ASCII" causes the character to get highlighted. Sadly, the more appropriate "Unicode Highlight: Invisible Characters" setting does not reveal them.

New comment by mdouglass in "L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure"

mdouglass — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 22:23:39 +0000

I'm not seeing anything in the protocol that stops the first human from paying for the resource and then sharing their macaroon+preimage with everyone else. Normally, I'd account for that by associating the preimage with a specific human (account) but this seems to be intended for use without accounts?

New comment by mdouglass in "A suicide crisis among veterinarians"

mdouglass — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 17:40:09 +0000

That's way better than anything I've seen. I get a 79.50$/mo quote with a $1000 deductible from Trupanion for my 2yr old dog. Which is why we've never picked it up.

The $250 deductible version is a crazy $184.55/mo.

New comment by mdouglass in "ASCII protocol buffers as config files"

mdouglass — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 22:41:29 +0000

I’m not clear why this recommends using required on everything - I though protobuf v3 had removed that and made everything default to 0 (or equivalent) if not present on the wire.

New comment by mdouglass in "Why does 0.1 and 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?"

mdouglass — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 16:52:31 +0000

Thanks for the encouragement to look up lisp's numeric tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_tower), that was interesting to compare to the languages I'm more familiar with.

New comment by mdouglass in "Git archive checksums may change"

mdouglass — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 23:32:07 +0000

That's what I thought, but I assumed with the rollback an hour plus ago, it wouldn't still be happening. That was off a build just a few minutes ago (actually repeated it in between the time I posted my original message and this reply and it happened again).

New comment by mdouglass in "Git archive checksums may change"

mdouglass — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 23:23:15 +0000

We are seeing an npm install failure inside our docker builds pointing at a github URL with a SHA change. Is this possibly related?

  #15 [dev-builder 4/7] RUN --mount=type=secret,id=npm,dst=/root/.npmrc npm ci
  #0 4.743 npm WARN deprecated querystring@0.2.0: The querystring API is considered Legacy. new code should use the URLSearchParams API instead.
  #0 8.119 npm WARN tarball tarball data for http2@https://github.com/node-apn/node-http2/archive/apn-2.1.4.tar.gz (sha512-ad4u4I88X9AcUgxCRW3RLnbh7xHWQ1f5HbrXa7gEy2x4Xgq+rq+auGx5I+nUDE2YYuqteGIlbxrwQXkIaYTfnQ==) seems to be corrupted. Trying again.
  #0 8.164 npm ERR! code EINTEGRITY
  #0 8.169 npm ERR! sha512-ad4u4I88X9AcUgxCRW3RLnbh7xHWQ1f5HbrXa7gEy2x4Xgq+rq+auGx5I+nUDE2YYuqteGIlbxrwQXkIaYTfnQ== integrity checksum failed when using sha512: wanted sha512-ad4u4I88X9AcUgxCRW3RLnbh7xHWQ1f5HbrXa7gEy2x4Xgq+rq+auGx5I+nUDE2YYuqteGIlbxrwQXkIaYTfnQ== but got sha512-GWBlkDNYgpkQElS+zGyIe1CN/XJxdEFuguLHOEGLZOIoDiH4cC9chggBwZsPK/Ls9nPikTzMuRDWfLzoGlKiRw==. (72989 bytes)
  #0 8.176 
  #0 8.177 npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
  #0 8.177 npm ERR!     /root/.npm/_logs/2023-01-30T23_19_36_986Z-debug-0.log
  #15 ERROR: process "/bin/sh -c npm ci" did not complete successfully: exit code: 1

This was working earlier today and the docker build/package.json haven't changed.

New comment by mdouglass in "The state finally letting teens sleep in"

mdouglass — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 20:16:09 +0000

re: your PS - it will depend on the school district, but my daughter’s high school is significantly extending their day. They were allowed to leave this year at 225 (with an optional 7th period that went to 310). Next year, they end at 329. And she gains no benefit in the morning because they already started first period at 830.

New comment by mdouglass in "The state finally letting teens sleep in"

mdouglass — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 20:12:07 +0000

The law does actually - you can have zero period but it can’t count towards the instructional time required for students.

It’s actually deeply annoying for my daughter’s high school. It already started 1st period at 830, but since 0 period no longer “counts”, the day is getting extended by almost an hour for all students.

This is from an email from our district earlier in the year:

The exceptions to this are zero period classes. Since zero period classes are optional and not required, these classes may begin before 8:30 AM; they just cannot be used to meet the instructional minute's requirements of 64,800 annual schoolwide instructional minutes

New comment by mdouglass in "Launch HN: Axolo (YC W21) – Faster pull requests and code reviews"

mdouglass — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 06:08:02 +0000

Do you have an example of what that looks like? The video posted above doesn't have any conversation happening in the slack channel and doesn't close the PR.

New comment by mdouglass in "It is high time we let go of the Mersenne Twister (2019)"

mdouglass — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 05:13:53 +0000

In games it is definitely nice to have. I’ve built multiple online trading/collectible card games and it’s a necessity for those. Don’t want your players predicting what cards will be drawn/in what order.

New comment by mdouglass in "Local area network push notifications"

mdouglass — Fri, 03 Jul 2020 06:04:43 +0000

It does say that it has to be in code, but then it goes on to talk about copying in an ssid at runtime and commenting on typing in an ssid even in the last sentence.

I was hoping to make it clear that it is not actually in code (ie swift or objectives), it is an entitlements file which is a block of unchangeable data created at dev time and signed by Apple before it goes on the App Store.

New comment by mdouglass in "Local area network push notifications"

mdouglass — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 06:02:53 +0000

I believe this is misunderstanding how the entitlement works. My belief is that you submit the list of SSIDs to Apple at the time of app review and it can only be changed with an update. I don’t think there’s any support for a dynamic list.

New comment by mdouglass in "Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs"

mdouglass — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:58:00 +0000

You can find links at https://developer.apple.com/programs/universal/

New comment by mdouglass in "In memory Key/Value store in go using gRPC"

mdouglass — Thu, 21 May 2020 02:27:11 +0000

Why is that?

My google-fu only turns up references to invalid utf-8 data, but that didn’t sound like what you were referring to.

New comment by mdouglass in "Why Is This Website Port Scanning Me?"

mdouglass — Wed, 20 May 2020 20:19:31 +0000

It probably fires as an async error, I'd expect this would log it (if inserted at the end of the try block):

    socket.onerror = (...args) => console.log('async error', ...args)

New comment by mdouglass in "iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max"

mdouglass — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 22:12:07 +0000

I think they meant 11 Pro compared to the XS.

New comment by mdouglass in "Google Warns Developers That All New Android Apps Require 3 Days for Approval"

mdouglass — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 00:12:50 +0000

No because the average user doesn’t know they care. They’ll just blindly install whatever and I lose the protection and safety that Apple provide.

New comment by mdouglass in "Google Warns Developers That All New Android Apps Require 3 Days for Approval"

mdouglass — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 22:40:51 +0000

As a user and a mobile game developer, please no.

I want the safety and uniformity of knowing that have gone through the review process. If it not mandatory, no one will do it and I will lose the protection I have now.