Hacker News: pcherna

New comment by pcherna in "Chirp Pong – uses microphones and audio for networked game play"

pcherna — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:36:29 +0000

In the middle of playing my very first round with one of my adult children, the other adult child audio recorded part of our game and started replaying their recording to disrupt the rest of our game. All in good fun and we laughed pretty hard. Also, we had fun with the game.

New comment by pcherna in "Too much discussion of the XOR swap trick"

pcherna — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:46:05 +0000

On the Amiga, accessing the pulldown menus caused the display to be temporarily frozen, so that the menu panel could be rendered off screen and then swapped in using the blitter and the XOR trick. It wasn’t as fast as a straight copy, but it saved on precious memory, and it rendered very cleanly.

When you released to the menu button on the mouse, it did a similar swap to restore the screen contents. In version 2.0 I optimized it to do a simple copy of the offscreen rectangle back onto the screen because before it was wasting time in order to preserve the menu pixels that we’re going to be thrown away immediately.

New comment by pcherna in "Hedley Davis (Amiga 3000, 3DO, Xbox, UDel prof) has died"

pcherna — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 06:27:39 +0000

Hedley Davis, much loved hardware engineer who worked at Commodore (A1351 mouse, Amiga 3000, A2024 "Hedley Hires" monitor), 3DO, Microsoft (Xbox, Xbox 360) passed away on March 9th. If you didn't know him, here's a three minute look into what made him such a delight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AolGGPqcU-w

Condolences to his family. Miss you brother...

Hedley Davis (Amiga 3000, 3DO, Xbox, UDel prof) has died

pcherna — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 06:27:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.daniels-hutchison.com/obituaries/Hedley-Combs-Davis?obId=47519295

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361300

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by pcherna in "Bell Labs Scientists Accidentally Proved the Big Bang Theory"

pcherna — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:38:29 +0000

I believe cosmologists generally refer to the Big Bang theory as the progression from the hot dense state to the modern shape. This Hot Big Bang part is very well understood in theory and very well supported in observation, with the Cosmic Microwave Background being a pre-eminent discovery supporting that.

What preceded the hot dense soup involves conditions that are a problem for both theory and experiment. For theory, those conditions involve both quantum gravity and general relativity and we don't have any accepted way to resolve those yet. And, for experiment, the hot dense soup is opaque to our observations. There are educated guesses as to what might have come before, and one guess is that it leads back to a singularity, and the popular view of the Big Bang theory is often that singularity as the kickoff, but we don't have anything resembling evidence. And whether anything came "before" even that is super speculation, even the concept of "before" may not apply.

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” -- Douglas Adams

New comment by pcherna in "Gail Wellington, former Commodore executive, has died"

pcherna — Thu, 22 May 2025 02:40:51 +0000

We said goodbye to Gail today. She was a true pioneer and a fierce fighter for her team and for doing the right thing. Those of us who worked with her were truly blessed.

New comment by pcherna in "Clap to Find My Phone App"

pcherna — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 04:15:44 +0000

On iOS, “Hey Siri, where are you?” works nicely.

New comment by pcherna in "Ask HN: How to transcribe 1000s of handwritten notes"

pcherna — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 02:26:29 +0000

I have a hundred or so pages of handwritten letters in Hungarian, but got useless results from AWS Textract and from transkribus. However, I also have about the same number of pages (written by the same person) that I have already gotten hand-transcribed into Hungarian. How might I approach using the already-transcribed stuff to train some kind of AI model or text-recognition model to work on the rest?

New comment by pcherna in "Topaz Unicode"

pcherna — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 15:24:28 +0000

I think I'm blending two things then. I looked at a few old notes, and one of the devs replaced Topaz in Kickstart with what you see as the 1.4 font, as a way to kind of force the issue, since we hadn't really done any work to make or obtain a sans-serif font. Nobody wanted that font, which turned up the pressure.

I guess in addition to shaving the serifs off Topaz 9, I also did Topaz 8. And "Clean" was the source of the interim font, not of new Topaz. Memories fade, and thanks for the extra info.

New comment by pcherna in "Topaz Unicode"

pcherna — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 03:12:38 +0000

Hehe, thinking maybe the font we used was called "Clean", not "Clear".

New comment by pcherna in "Topaz Unicode"

pcherna — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 01:08:44 +0000

Nice. I worked at Commodore and was responsible (ish) for the new Topaz for OS 2.0. We had been told to replace Topaz with a sans-serif font, and we replaced it with a font originally called "Clear" that was on one of the Fred Fish disks.

There was a big argument over the lower-case L. It has a rightward curl at the base even though it's sans-serif. This is widely seen now, but we had a lot of pushback at the time.

Topaz shipped in an 8-point and 9-point version. As I mentioned, we used Clear, maybe with a few mods (ampersand maybe), but that only existed in 8-point. I drew Topaz 9 sans-serif by starting with Topaz 9, and shaving off the serifs, and making minor tweaks.