Hacker News: nizmow

New comment by nizmow in "ao486: x86-compatible Verilog core implementing all features of a 486 SX (2014)"

nizmow — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:01:37 +0000

It’s a neat core, but z386 is where the action is right now (https://github.com/nand2mario/z386_MiSTer). Interestingly this core doesn’t output a proper analogue signal. I always wondered why until I recently tried to implement a real EGA pixel clock on the PCXT EGA core. Basically, video cards with dual (or more) pixel clocks are not realistic on MiSTer. The PLLs are there, but once you get too many clock sources the routing becomes quickly impossible. MiSTer framework’s pipeline also forces pixel clocks tied directly to video output (for good reason) and switching that clock at runtime gets very tricky.

New comment by nizmow in "Quake – 30th Anniversary Update"

nizmow — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:58:35 +0000

Quake was a DOS game.

New comment by nizmow in "Quake – 30th Anniversary Update"

nizmow — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:57:01 +0000

This was actually just how CDDA music tracks worked in almost all CD games in the late 90s. :)

New comment by nizmow in "“Gravity is worth asking about”"

nizmow — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:30:09 +0000

The context for that is in Gruber’s original post, I believe.

New comment by nizmow in "Starlink from 1984"

nizmow — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:36:20 +0000

Kind of a pointless nitpick, but you’d have been very lucky to own a 386 in 87-88, the 486 wouldn’t be mainstream until 1992 or so.

New comment by nizmow in "IBM Intellistation 185 AIX workstation (2016)"

nizmow — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 10:11:51 +0000

A TNT was from the late 90s. In 2006 512MB consumer GPUs were common.

New comment by nizmow in "Show HN: QuickTunes: Apple Music player for Mac with iPod vibes"

nizmow — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 03:04:29 +0000

Who hurt you?

New comment by nizmow in "Amazon Tells Employees to Relocate or Resign"

nizmow — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 02:30:12 +0000

I suspect this will become increasingly common with companies that allow remote work. Atlassian is a large Australian tech employer that is full remote, and this is definitely the case there - performance reviews twice yearly and a very high attrition rate.

New comment by nizmow in "Protocol Wars"

nizmow — Thu, 11 May 2023 11:59:45 +0000

Doom didn’t even use the Windows networking stack. You just chose IPX from the multiplayer setup menu.

New comment by nizmow in "5G Rollout Disappointments"

nizmow — Sun, 07 May 2023 07:45:07 +0000

Anecdata: in Sydney, Australia, 5G on Telstra is incredibly fast (I get more than 1 gigabit at my apartment, but more typical / busier cells seem to be between 300-500Mb), and my experience using it mostly just for web browsing is it’s streets ahead of 4G.

New comment by nizmow in "The Case for C# and .NET"

nizmow — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 05:01:21 +0000

You're wrong. Everywhere I've worked the general pattern is to build using Windows/Linux and deploy entirely on Linux (or Docker).

New comment by nizmow in "Average home prices in New Zealand reaches 8.8 times average household income"

nizmow — Fri, 06 May 2022 09:50:40 +0000

Quite unnecessary. I’d almost suspect you’re not actually European.

New comment by nizmow in "Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector"

nizmow — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 11:13:02 +0000

What on earth do people do besides eating at home from a rotating set of straightforward recipes? Honestly curious. I’m the main cook in my home and we do eat out every other week, but who has time for that much experimentation?

New comment by nizmow in "How Does FaceTime Work?"

nizmow — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 13:30:17 +0000

FaceTime is also free, and Telegram’s audio and video quality is vastly inferior.

New comment by nizmow in "AIX Running on Apple's M1"

nizmow — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 11:26:39 +0000

On the other hand, the only real reason you’d want to run AIX is because you had to, because you had the hardware and there was no other option.

New comment by nizmow in ".NET for Beginners (2020)"

nizmow — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 07:00:17 +0000

How do you install Java? First thing you'd do is download the JDK. Is the JDK a language? No, it's not.

New comment by nizmow in ".NET for Beginners (2020)"

nizmow — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 06:57:52 +0000

This is probably more of a Windows problem than a .NET/C# problem, but it's a very real problem.

New comment by nizmow in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

nizmow — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 10:40:52 +0000

Typically though, FAANGs still solve their problems with boring technologies.

New comment by nizmow in "Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia"

nizmow — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 21:46:01 +0000

Murdoch’s News Corp.

New comment by nizmow in "Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989)"

nizmow — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 23:37:28 +0000

I've recently started a job in a very complex business domain, but sadly they're using NoSQL for everything. I've known for a while about the technical tradeoffs of NoSQL, but until now I'd never experienced that the lack of expressiveness in the data store is a major obstacle to understanding what kind of data the code deals with and how it's related. The data's all there, but exploring it without a real schema is much more difficult.