Hacker News: pan69

New comment by pan69 in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

pan69 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:32:50 +0000

I think GP is referring to EGA which also used address 0xA0000 but you had to program it in it a planer mode of 16 colors out of a palette of 64. VGA provided backward compatibility with this but introduced the 256 color modes with mode 13h being the linear addressable 320x200 res mode, however this mode sacrificed 3/4 of the video memory. This mode was also referred to as "chained" mode as it chained all 4 bitplanes together for convenient linear addressing. There was also unchained mode, sometimes referred to as mode-x which allowed you to access all 256kb of video memory, resize the virtual screen, page flipping, etc. at the cost of compute overhead. Lots of tradeoffs to be made in those days. Some amazing looking 16 colors VGA games were produced in the early 90s, one that comes to mind is Gods by Bitmap Brothers.

New comment by pan69 in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

pan69 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:17:30 +0000

It's certainly the most rudimentary. Small optimisation on the inner-loop would be to pre-calculate the scanline offset before going into the pixel loop:

    int s = y*screenRect.w;
    
    for (int x = 0; x < screenRect.w; x++) {
       pixels[s + x] = argb(255, frame>>3, y+frame, x+frame);
    }

New comment by pan69 in "Let's celebrate work that is 100% human-made"

pan69 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 01:28:24 +0000

I suppose the argument being made is more about the meaning of human made rather than GenAI.

New comment by pan69 in "EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada"

pan69 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:32:51 +0000

Israel?

New comment by pan69 in "Angular v22"

pan69 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:45:49 +0000

   import {signal} from "@angular/core"
   import {form} from "@angular/forms/signals"

So, signal comes out of core and form comes out of forms/signals. This must be a terminology thing I don't get.

Other than that. Looking forward to try Angular again after a decade of absence. I think it looks pretty good.

New comment by pan69 in "Ask HN: What Is the State of App Development in 2026?"

pan69 — Sat, 30 May 2026 21:05:32 +0000

If not an abstraction, how would you describe it then?

New comment by pan69 in "Thiel moves family to Milei's libertarian Argentina"

pan69 — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:57:26 +0000

> so that we have escape hatches

From what? Those 3 things you point out above?

New comment by pan69 in "The worst job interview I ever had"

pan69 — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:13:59 +0000

I wouldn't work at Google either.

If you can't trust the people you have hired to hire people then you shouldn't have hired them.

New comment by pan69 in "The worst job interview I ever had"

pan69 — Wed, 27 May 2026 02:23:17 +0000

> just a formality and a friendly chat

That was not the case in this scenario. I was told I would be offered the role if I came out favorable with the CEO (did he like me or not? did I jump when the said "jump"?). To me this meant that the CEO doesn't trust the people he hires. He clearly didn't trust the hiring manager's jugement and/or respected their position. The CEO delegated a task and responsibility but then felt to have to authority to override that, which maybe he does. However, that's not a culture in which I want to operate. If I was wrong, so be it, but I saw a red flag and I made a choice.

New comment by pan69 in "The worst job interview I ever had"

pan69 — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:28:22 +0000

I had something similar years ago. I applied for a job at a company, size around 150 people. Did two rounds of interviews which were great. They wanted me to offer the role. However, as a third round, I was going to do a meet and greet with the CEO and he was going to yay or nay me. At point I dropped out. If a CEO can't trust his delegate managers to hire the people they see fit for a role, then thanks but no thanks. That's not a company culture I want to spend most of my waking hours in.

New comment by pan69 in "Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk used AI while writing her latest novel"

pan69 — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:28:07 +0000

Author writes book using search engine.

Author writes book using word processor.

Author writes book using typewriter.

Author writes book using ...

New comment by pan69 in "Aperio Lang"

pan69 — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:33:17 +0000

There recently was a change to VSCode where commits are being co-authored even if AI wasn't used. Not saying that AI wasn't used in this case, but it could be ambigious.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1t1sj98/copilot_is_...

New comment by pan69 in "The Rise of the Bullshittery"

pan69 — Tue, 12 May 2026 23:20:43 +0000

> ...comes out of rear ends

Instead we know it literally comes out of the ground and the market doesn't plummet.

New comment by pan69 in "Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder)"

pan69 — Sun, 10 May 2026 03:51:13 +0000

I learned to do this about 2 years ago (pre LLM). I have been developing software for ~30 years and somehow doing something like this was a major mental obstacle, mostly created by the perception of "the dragon book", as in this topic being full of mystical unobtainable incantations, so I never even dared venture into this space. Silly, I know. However, after diving into this and learning to write a recursive descent parser for a DSL I wanted to write, it felt like I'd acquired a superpower. Totally understand that there is many more layers to all of this, layer that can get very complex, but just learning that first bit...

New comment by pan69 in "I built GitHub Store to 12,500 stars in 6 months – I started at 16"

pan69 — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:01:43 +0000

A similar thing happens with npmjs downloads. Some people actually judge the quality of a npm package by how many automated build pipelines are pulling a certain package daily.

New comment by pan69 in "Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision..."

pan69 — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:39:16 +0000

> but why not append the date

And use uuid v5 to hash it :)

New comment by pan69 in "The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced"

pan69 — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:48:09 +0000

I remember watching the weekly x-files episode. My and my colleagues would discuss it the next day at work with great enthusiasm. In those days you had time to absorb tv shows like this, something that doesn't really seem to exist anymore today. The 90s where a great time.

New comment by pan69 in "Sloppy Copies"

pan69 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:15:25 +0000

> I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of for-sale software.

We're seeing the end of "simple" for-sale software. Like OPs CRUD app, a UI front-end on-top of a database, of which there are a gazillion examples so some AI can easily synthesize some approximation of whatever requested variation.

The selling of software was always in the "moat", not how fast you were able to churn out CRUD apps. We used offshore that to a more viable economy, but now we're offshoring that to an automated process.

We're not seeing the end of for-sale software, we're seeing the beginning of the end-to-end solo founder.

New comment by pan69 in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

pan69 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:43:20 +0000

Elections for executive leadership doesn't sound all that crazy to me. With 30+ years in the business I have witnessed my fair share of executive whackos that wouldn't have passed a basic sniff test if they had convince workers that they should be the one leading them.

New comment by pan69 in "Building a SaaS in 2026 Using Only EU Infrastructure"

pan69 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:39:39 +0000

This is actually important to understand. What are the dependencies of your dependencies? I.e. if your goal is to be sovereign than knowing how far the turtles go, and who the turtles are, is quite important.