Hacker News: mellinoe

New comment by mellinoe in "A WebGPU implementation of Augmented Vertex Block Descent"

mellinoe — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:32:45 +0000

Other than the fact that WebGPU sucks compared to modern Vulkan + extensions, there’s nothing stopping you from just using webgpu even in a native-only project, with no further abstraction

New comment by mellinoe in "Why Is SQLite Coded In C"

mellinoe — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 23:55:09 +0000

You can expose a C interface from many languages (C++, Rust, C# to name a few that I've personally used). Instead of introducing a new language entirely, it's probably better to write the library in one of the languages you already use.

New comment by mellinoe in "OpenGL: Mesh shaders in the current year"

mellinoe — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:23:56 +0000

Presumably because Minecraft is the only application which still uses OpenGL but would use the extension

New comment by mellinoe in "Claude 4"

mellinoe — Fri, 23 May 2025 00:20:28 +0000

Not sure about gpt3.5, but this sort of thing is not new. Quite amusing, this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42331013

New comment by mellinoe in "From scratch OpenGL and shaders with raw Xlib"

mellinoe — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 22:24:28 +0000

If your goal is to learn Metal, then just start with Metal. It's a significantly better-designed API. On top of that, if you're developing on an Apple device then you'll have a decent debugging experience with Metal, as opposed to OpenGL where you'll get... nothing last I checked (but it's been a while).

New comment by mellinoe in "Why choose async/await over threads?"

mellinoe — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 13:06:29 +0000

> .NET OTOH is working on its own project to massively reduce async overhead

Where can I read more about that?

New comment by mellinoe in "A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments"

mellinoe — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 07:55:47 +0000

IIRC the couriers were invulnerable, making the strategy even stronger as you couldn't kill them to stop the flow of consumables.

Also, according to this Q&A post on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/bf49yk) the consumable purchasing logic was scripted, not learned.

New comment by mellinoe in "Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice"

mellinoe — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 21:25:51 +0000

Even most technically-minded people still use QWERTY on full-size computer keyboards despite it being a terrible layout for a number of reasons. I really doubt a new, nonstandard keyboard would get much if any traction on phones.

New comment by mellinoe in "Until the 14th century women dominated the field of beer brewing"

mellinoe — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 16:37:01 +0000

> The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil water after all.

Was this widely known?

New comment by mellinoe in "Unciv"

mellinoe — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 05:17:55 +0000

Shattered Pixel Dungeon is incredible, but dangerously addictive. It's the perfect game for a 4-5 hour plane ride -- speaking from experience over the recent holidays.

New comment by mellinoe in "Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts"

mellinoe — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 20:23:06 +0000

This is true, but you do have to enroll by day 60 as far as I know. It’s also a royal pain to get hospitals to readjust billing if you retroactively purchase COBRA coverage after receiving care.

New comment by mellinoe in "New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text"

mellinoe — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 07:01:30 +0000

Source on that?

New comment by mellinoe in "Drone footage of Tesla factory"

mellinoe — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 02:40:44 +0000

The existence of individual vehicles with very high mileage doesn't feel like a good signal for overall reliability or maintenance req's over a lifespan. I did some brief searches and it seems there's a lot of "record-holding" gas vehicles with several million miles on them, some even claiming to be using original engines. Again though, I'm not sure this is a good representation of how reliable the vehicles are in aggregate.

New comment by mellinoe in "The decline and fall of Java on the desktop"

mellinoe — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 23:06:39 +0000

Chrome the browser is a desktop application, websites you visit in it are not.

New comment by mellinoe in "Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions"

mellinoe — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 21:05:09 +0000

I've used Colemak primarily for the past 5 or so years. However, the benefit is primarily in typing comfort and hand strain, not quite as much in speed, although it is probably marginally faster at its limits. I'm still fluent in QWERTY (I'm typing this message with qwerty to make sure it still works :)), so I can switch if needed, or if I'm using an unfamiliar computer (or a phone, etc). Moving to Colemak completely solved the frequent wrist and hand pain I got while typing using QWERTY. Others have had the same experience.

New comment by mellinoe in "Some thoughts on microservices"

mellinoe — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 20:29:57 +0000

This is ignoring the fundamentally-different issue that was raised, which is that the service boundary introduces a new failure point that doesn't exist in a function call. What you're describing could just as easily happen in a service call, IN ADDITION to the service just not being reachable.

New comment by mellinoe in "Immediate Mode GUI"

mellinoe — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 03:39:57 +0000

> For the probably best known example, Unity used to have an IMGUI [1] but they've actively moved away from it. It's still there in vestigial form, the API is not removed, but game developers don't really use it.

It's true that the newer retained mode GUI has supplanted the older IMGUI for "game UI" (e.g. what users interact with when playing an actual game built with Unity). On the other hand, the Unity editor itself is still built entirely with their immediate-mode GUI library, and I haven't heard of any plan to move away from that. Building "editor-like" tools (including custom user tools) is still significantly easier to accomplish using immediate-mode libraries.

New comment by mellinoe in "OpenAI Five: Goals and Progress"

mellinoe — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:13:00 +0000

> OpenAI has a list of something like 7 restrictions.

Some of those are very major, though, and I think the word "restriction" is a bit misleading. Having 5 invulnerable couriers is not really a "restriction" in that it limits or simplifies parts of the game -- it's just a fundamentally different mechanic that changes the way the game can be played.

> DotA players are probably the worst to ask, because the AI is already stronger than they are at a subset of the game and they have no insight into how quickly that subset could be generalised into other aspects.

I think that's a little unfair. Most folks have been pointing out that OpenAI's current momentum-based "deathball" strategy seems to fall apart without infinite regen and a limited hero pool, both facilitated by the current set of restrictions.

I'd agree that nobody really knows how well OpenAI will adapt to the full game, but I disagree that the criticisms I've seen are meritless. OpenAI's current level of play is definitely impressive, but I think there's still room for skepticism given the current restrictions. I (and I think a lot of others) would be pretty disappointed if the TI showmatch happened with the turbo mode couriers still enabled.

New comment by mellinoe in "OpenAI bots competing against Humans right now"

mellinoe — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 20:42:36 +0000

Indeed. And to explain further: not all hero combinations are equal. Meaning: you cannot select any arbitrary set of 5 heroes and expect them to perform well. Different heroes have different strengths and synergies that make them stronger or weaker depending on the specific teammates and opponents that are present. This is why drafting is considered such an important (and difficult) portion of the game. In match 3, a purposefully-bad team was selected. It would have been VERY impressive if it was able to win.

New comment by mellinoe in "Java's Magic Sauce"

mellinoe — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 04:43:19 +0000

There are a lot of very successful indie games written in C# (entirely, not just in a scripting layer). It is very popular for game development.