Hacker News: mikeponders

New comment by mikeponders in "PureBasic: The Quiet Survivor"

mikeponders — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:20:07 +0000

If you think about it, Godot fits very well and is very, very cross-platform. It brings somewhat more but you can strip it down to only the necessary, throwing away the 3D stuff and keeping only what you use. It includes a scripting language and the GUI stuff. Someone could actually build a specific solution with it!

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/engine_details/develo...

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/editor/usin...

New comment by mikeponders in "Noclip.website – A digital museum of video game levels"

mikeponders — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:37:27 +0000

If I saw these levels loading in the browser as a teenager I would freak out! GTA? NFS? Very cool!

New comment by mikeponders in "Show HN: Chawan TUI web browser"

mikeponders — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 22:57:08 +0000

Gotta love Nim

New comment by mikeponders in "Show HN: I wrote a BitTorrent Client from scratch"

mikeponders — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 22:21:56 +0000

It's a great kind of project to try! I did something similar and I was humbled when looking at other people's bencode encoders/decoders. It's also a great way to check out language features! Of course it is quite futile to try to match all the features of large libraries, and I believe the compatibility between clients is already lacking...

New comment by mikeponders in "CSS Minecraft"

mikeponders — Tue, 27 May 2025 21:11:51 +0000

Wild, got me hooked!

New comment by mikeponders in "Ventoy"

mikeponders — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 22:57:06 +0000

Very practical for IT work or if you just want to put all of your useful ISOs somewhere like a large USB stick. You can have your Win/AV/Rescue/Linux/Memory testing and other tools together and just boot whatever you need without struggling with writing images and repeating the boot process while smashing your keys. The only machines that this didn't work for me were from the Windows XP era. Didn't have any compatibility issues with ISOs!

New comment by mikeponders in "Intel mulls cutting 16 and 32-bit support, booting straight into 64-bit mode"

mikeponders — Thu, 25 May 2023 18:55:29 +0000

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-2/#io

Essentially the thicc PS2s include the PS1 chip and normally use it for IO and also for PS1 compatibility.

New comment by mikeponders in "Show HN: Regex.ai – AI-powered regular expression generator"

mikeponders — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 11:58:10 +0000

I tried it with the default example, and it couldn't match only the street names. How does this work under the hood?

New comment by mikeponders in "An ancient Indian Buddhist monk buried in Athens"

mikeponders — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 11:41:13 +0000

Funnily, few Athenians know about this, but if you ask them if they know about an "Indian Tomb", they will most probably know the nickname of Panathinaikos basketball indoor arena: https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Κλειστό_Γυμναστήριο_Παύλος_Για...

New comment by mikeponders in "An ancient Indian Buddhist monk buried in Athens"

mikeponders — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 11:30:30 +0000

It seems we know of the inscription from other texts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarmanochegas

New comment by mikeponders in "Plankalkül"

mikeponders — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 17:43:18 +0000

I saw Zuse's Z1 computer on the Museum of Technology of Berlin and I was astonished. Truly a work of art. He was the real world equivalent of WWII scientist characters that you find in comics.

New comment by mikeponders in "I'm a very slow thinker (2016)"

mikeponders — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 14:00:39 +0000

There is nothing wrong with taking a few seconds to answer something. As Sivers notes, sometimes not every question needs an answer, sometimes you need time and courage to just admit you don't know something concretely. If the other person is

- so impatient that they cannot wait some seconds for your answer

- not having a minimum attention span

- interrupting out of awkwardness or entitlement

you should rethink why you are allowing this.

I understand there are some situations and certain jobs that really require quick thinking (more like automatically recalling from their memory) under pressure and people are trained to behave in that manner, such as military and emergency services. Not every situation is like this and you cannot be possibly be prepared for every situation.

I remember something that my uncle (a doctor) said to me while telling me stories from his education and medical practice. "When you are unsure of something you should always ask/consult someone. It is wiser to admit you do not know something rather than give a wrong [and potentially lethal] answer."

New comment by mikeponders in "Bizarre and unusual uses of DNS"

mikeponders — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 12:15:47 +0000

As another replier noted, you might evade detection. But the reason I mentioned it is that captive portals (before authenticating) may not allow you at all to do DNS queries... except, for their own whitelisted domains. Depending on how they do it and how they wrote their rules, if they allow example.com you could potentially query example.com.mydomain.com

New comment by mikeponders in "Bizarre and unusual uses of DNS"

mikeponders — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 21:34:46 +0000

You can bypass captive portals by using some of the ideas displayed in this presentation, but you will probably also need to have a server with a good unmetered connection and a cleverly named (sub)domain.

New comment by mikeponders in "Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams"

mikeponders — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 22:27:59 +0000

They actually have the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant but I think it is not completed yet. However it was very close to the areas affected.

New comment by mikeponders in "Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes"

mikeponders — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 15:46:41 +0000

Good work! I'm trying this out. It seems it tries somehow to match keys tempos and percussion characteristics.

Some suggestions:

- Have a relevant/irrelevant button, so users can tag useful music and suggestions that were irrelevant. Save that data and use it to make your model better, either in realtime or incrementally.

- Allow some other options for sorting tracks also. Have the most relevant but also the most popular (as in charting) on top. Or maybe sort by the user rankings (how relevant they think a track is).

New comment by mikeponders in "Japanese manhole mass production process [video]"

mikeponders — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 11:02:54 +0000

I have to say this is a very clean process. You can watch any video of a person trying sand casting and see how they fail most of the time trying to get it right. These guys do it brilliantly and with very few hands touching the product. Not many facilities have this much attention to their process, especially when they produce something as crude as a manhole cover.