Hacker News: neurocline

New comment by neurocline in "Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game"

neurocline — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:54:24 +0000

Wow, I loved DeBabelizer Pro. Got a lot of use out of it when porting games.

New comment by neurocline in "FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX"

neurocline — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:26:38 +0000

Once I saw “James Comer” I knew I could ignore this.

New comment by neurocline in "Chuck Norris has died"

neurocline — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:28:37 +0000

Chuck Norris dominated WoW Barrens chat back in the day. It was kind of weird and amazing at the same time.

New comment by neurocline in "The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines"

neurocline — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:54:04 +0000

I have to imagine the poster was referring to Dora the Explorer, a popular and charming cartoon from the start of this century.

New comment by neurocline in "Living in your programming environment [pdf]"

neurocline — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 21:16:38 +0000

Every time I look at one of their demos, I want to cry and say "I want this to be real". And then years pass, and there's another demo, and I'm re-reminded. This is more than vaporware, to be sure. But it's still nothing I can use in my day-to-day. Yes, it's research. It still makes me sad to see a possible future but no clear idea as to when it could become real.

New comment by neurocline in "Show HN: Resurrecting a dead Dune RTS game"

neurocline — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 17:37:21 +0000

Small nit, but my understanding is that Herzog Zwei was the first RTS, although I agree that Dune II popularized the genre.

New comment by neurocline in "Shelf life: novelist Hanya Yanagihara on living with 12,000 books (2017)"

neurocline — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 16:16:22 +0000

The novelist might very well have 12,000 books (I have about 7,500), but the double sided bookshelf in the picture would need to be between 50 to 100 feet long in order to hold that many books.

New comment by neurocline in "Saving Lives (2004)"

neurocline — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 17:29:54 +0000

I must have heard this story and forgot it, because I used this argument on my team when I ran the group at Blizzard that did installing and downloading and patching. “We have 10 million people downloading and installing this patch, so every minute extra we take is another fraction of a human life we’re spending”. Sure, overly dramatic, and corny, but helped drive improvements.

The other more important metric I pushed was “speed of light”. When installing from a DVD (yeah, olden times), the “speed of light” there was the rotational speed of the disc and so we should install as close to that speed as possible. Keep improving speed of operations until you butt up against whatever physical limits exist. Time is precious, you don’t get more of it.

New comment by neurocline in "MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names"

neurocline — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 05:59:44 +0000

It was mostly on purpose, that Blizzard games worked well in Wine. We even fixed a few things in our code from time to time that accidentally made Wine emulation hard.

New comment by neurocline in "California moves to silence Stanford researchers who got data to study education"

neurocline — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 16:31:38 +0000

I’d love to hire people that can work 900 hours in a single month. Just tell me where to find them. Or, wait, maybe they work in higher dimensions. Drat.

New comment by neurocline in "Why I'm using Fossil SCM instead of other source control systems (2016)"

neurocline — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 06:14:30 +0000

It’s not binary files per se, it’s size. Checkout sizes are in the 50 GB and up range. Also, unmergeable files are common, so there’s a strong desire for exclusive checkout. This is why game teams either split source and data (awkward to impossible depending on the game), or use Perforce.

New comment by neurocline in "The Linux kernel has surpassed one million git commits"

neurocline — Sun, 02 May 2021 15:25:05 +0000

Epic’s Unreal Perforce repo is >1.5 million at this point.

New comment by neurocline in "Zellij – A Terminal Workspace and Multiplexer"

neurocline — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 18:30:25 +0000

Wouldn't the word "passthrough" be the right word for this feature?

New comment by neurocline in "Hubble Telescope Captures a Rare Asteroid Worth 70k Times the Global Economy"

neurocline — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 17:32:13 +0000

To put this into context, this is enough to build dozens of Death Stars.

New comment by neurocline in "How does your programming language handle “minus zero” (-0.0)?"

neurocline — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 16:59:30 +0000

Starcraft II uses floats, but for the game simulation portion it uses an internal software floating-point library to ensure consistency.

New comment by neurocline in "Bill and Melinda Gates: America’s Top Farmland Owner"

neurocline — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 21:24:27 +0000

Per US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. 2.2 billion acres of land in the US. 900 million of that is marked as "farmland". 400 million of that is marked as "cropland", and 300 million of that is "harvested cropland". There's also 400 million acres of "pastureland", and 75 million acres of "woodland".

I couldn't tell what kind of land Bill Gates owns. It does matter, but not all that much, because however you slice it, it's a pretty small amount of the total.

New comment by neurocline in "The Story Behind Markdown"

neurocline — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 05:18:26 +0000

Not to mention Setext, 1991.

New comment by neurocline in "Marpa will parse anything that can be written in BNF"

neurocline — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 03:45:58 +0000

I've been aware of Marpa since about 2010. Every once in a while I read whatever Kegler has written, and I come away from it each time unconvinced that I should put in the effort to use it (which, for the most part, means first porting it to another language). On the plus side, he does acknowledge some of the prior art in the field. But on the flip side, he makes expansive claims, and there has been essentially zero uptake of Marpa or even its ideas, as far as I am aware.

Does Marpa live up to its advertising? Is it more generally useful than GLR or GLL (which, despite having some flurry of effort in the past decade, themselves have not set the parsing world on fire). It's frustrating, because the parsing world has gone around in circles for many years now (PEG being a great example). It would be nice to have algorithms with superior parsing power that are at least as fast as the less powerful ones used by virtually everyone today.

New comment by neurocline in "Best Package Manager for C"

neurocline — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 20:04:46 +0000

There is a certain irony in the source code for a package manager expecting the key package needed to build that package manager to have been installed by some other package manager.

New comment by neurocline in "Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?"

neurocline — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 04:26:33 +0000

I went through my recent-books shelves and found a few shorter books that are well worth reading. Short books for developers are rare these days.

Algorithms Unlocked, Thomas Cormen, 212 pages

The Art of Readable Code, Dustin Boswell & Trevor Foucher, 180 pages

How To Take Smart Notes, Sonke Ahrens, 151 pages

How to Write a Thesis, Umberto Eco, 223 pages

How Charts Lie, Alberto Cairo, 193 pages