Hacker News: npsomaratna

New comment by npsomaratna in "AI may be making us think and write more alike"

npsomaratna — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:26:21 +0000

Somehow made me think of Warhammer 40k (maybe pre men of iron?)

New comment by npsomaratna in "Building a TUI is easy now"

npsomaratna — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 03:40:19 +0000

I owned a C64. Remember how buttery smooth the interfaces of those '80s computers were?

New comment by npsomaratna in "Adventure Game Studio: OSS software for creating adventure games"

npsomaratna — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 14:42:23 +0000

Didn't they remake Quest for Glory II and a couple of the Kings Quest games in this? Fun times.

New comment by npsomaratna in "Doom has been ported to an earbud"

npsomaratna — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 15:59:24 +0000

On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to rely on other folks contributions as well (this was in an interview after the release of Doom 3).

I wonder what his feelings are in this age of AI.

New comment by npsomaratna in "Electronic nose for indoor mold detection and identification"

npsomaratna — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 10:44:04 +0000

Why is there a significant time lag? Is it because monitoring is done via cultures?

New comment by npsomaratna in "Perl's decline was cultural"

npsomaratna — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 08:58:18 +0000

That makes a lot of sense. After 30+ years of programming, I still have to do a search (or use an LLM) to do anything useful with sed, xargs, etc. Perl never really clicked with me either.

On the other hand, I was able to easily pick up just about any "tradional" language I tried--from Basic and C in the 80s all the way to Dart and Go more recently.

New comment by npsomaratna in "Ultima VII Revisited"

npsomaratna — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:44:56 +0000

I remember playing Ultima VII back in '94 (or was it '95?). When the game started up, I could only feel wonder. It was so far ahead of the competition at the time.

The only other instance where I got the same "this game is way ahead of everyone else" feel was when I first played Morrowind.

New comment by npsomaratna in "Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'"

npsomaratna — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 04:10:21 +0000

Same here. Had a 7 for years. Upgraded to a 13. So far not felt the need to upgrade.

I compare this to when I had an 3G and the 4 came out. The gap between the two was so huge that I upgraded quickly. Reminded me of how quickly PCs evolved in the 90s.

New comment by npsomaratna in "Open-source communications by bouncing signals off the Moon"

npsomaratna — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 13:24:51 +0000

I have no understanding of the physics involved, but could the broadcast location be reverse engineered? (With triangulation and clever math?)

New comment by npsomaratna in "Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend"

npsomaratna — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:37:11 +0000

On the topic of professions: Joseph Lister was a surgeon. Modern surgery (which I define as surgery aided by anesthesia) is a relatively recent discipline dating to the early 19th century. The introduction of anesthesia made lengthy and intricate operations possible but also ushered in novel problems and complications. Surgery as a field had to learn tough lessons over time.

New comment by npsomaratna in "Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?"

npsomaratna — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 11:17:20 +0000

Programmer from DOS times here. I've ingrained pressing CTRL + S every few seconds as a reflex. That has saved my bacon more than a few times.

New comment by npsomaratna in "Diff Algorithms"

npsomaratna — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 03:17:38 +0000

Out of curiosity, are there any algorithms faster than BLAST? (For DNA search).

New comment by npsomaratna in "Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT"

npsomaratna — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 05:14:29 +0000

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that folks who learned typing in the 80s and earlier use two dashes '--' instead of the em-dash (although modern word processors seem to replace this combination with the em-dash). Something else I've noticed is their tendency to use two blank spaces between sentences.

I'm a self-taught typist, with all the quirks that comes with (can type programming stuff very accurately at a 100+ WPM; can type normal stuff at a high WPM as well, but the error rate goes up).

New comment by npsomaratna in "Cerebras launches Qwen3-235B, achieving 1.5k tokens per second"

npsomaratna — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 15:43:06 +0000

Are you the CEO of Cerebras? (Guessing from the handle)

New comment by npsomaratna in "“Dynamic programming” is not referring to “computer programming”"

npsomaratna — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 11:24:44 +0000

Wasn't this for one of the questions on the second day? Where you had to submit a series of outputs, but these were trivial to generate once you cracked the problem.

I remember getting an "aha" moment, writing a program, and then submitting (scored 100% too!). Then, I met a guy who also cracked the problem and realized that he just needed to paste the test data into a spreadsheet, do some basic sorting there, and then paste the output into a text file; no coding necessary.

I felt pretty stupid afterwards.

New comment by npsomaratna in "“Dynamic programming” is not referring to “computer programming”"

npsomaratna — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 09:17:54 +0000

That's my impression as well.

I think it's because access to knowledge has become a lot easier, so contestants know more; plus, the competitions themselves have become more organized.

For example, last I checked, the IOI had a syllabus outlining the various algorithms contestants needed to know. During my time, it was more of a wild west.

New comment by npsomaratna in "“Dynamic programming” is not referring to “computer programming”"

npsomaratna — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:59:23 +0000

Nice! I guess you must know Bruce Merry. Once, when practicing, I kept on hitting my head on a problem. On the spur of the moment, I decided to fire off an email to Bruce (given his track record, I was like "if anyone can figure this out, he can"). I was shocked (and very pleased) to get a reply a few days later outlining his thought process and how he went around solving the problem.

I used to know the ZA team leaders as well (after competing, I was a team leader for several more years).

New comment by npsomaratna in "“Dynamic programming” is not referring to “computer programming”"

npsomaratna — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:43:59 +0000

No, sorry. I vaguely remember compile time limits, but they were high enough (30 seconds, I think?) that I didn't bother worrying about them (at least, that's my memory).

New comment by npsomaratna in "“Dynamic programming” is not referring to “computer programming”"

npsomaratna — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 05:34:38 +0000

Sri Lankan here. I used to compete in the IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics), back in the '90s.

I aced the competition in Sri Lanka, but I failed to win a medal the first time I competed internationally. I solved several problems with recursion, but these failed to complete within the strict time limits allowed.

One of the contestants from another country told me: "You needed dynamic programming to solve problems 1 and 5." I then spent the next year trying to figure out what dynamic programming was. The folks over here weren't familiar with the term. In fact, I was often asked "did you mean dynamic memory allocation?"

After a while, I managed to find a book that talked about dynamic programming, and I was like "Oh, it's recursion + storing results" and "Ah, you can also do this iteratively in certain circumstances"

Bottom line, armed with this new knowledge, I ended up winning a gold medal at IOI 2001. Fun times.

New comment by npsomaratna in "Will the Fear of Being Confused for AI Mean That We Will Now Write Differently?"

npsomaratna — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 11:46:27 +0000

Em-dash fan here as well. I've been watering down my use of the em-dash, because I don't want folk to think that my (always self-written) business emails, etc are a chatGPT job.