Hacker News: pedrosbmartins

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

pedrosbmartins — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 03:36:23 +0000

I've been working on a surfing game on my spare time for the past year. The idea is to keep it closer to the real sport, focusing on pumping, carving, nose-riding, etc. I shared a video of it on the Unity3D subreddit[1] and the feedback was quite positive, so planning on getting a demo ready as soon as possible!

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/s/mB2kn0BxIT

How the NYT Made Its Tiny, Animated Olympic Athletes

pedrosbmartins — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 11:53:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/insider/winter-olympics-little-athletes.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110289

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

pedrosbmartins — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:51:36 +0000

KSPS was my favourite surfing game growing up. What I dislike about it though is the infinite/perfect waves (always a truck-sized barrel opened, you can do tricks anywhere, almost no differentiation between waves) and the focus on impossible airs and tricks.

In my game the waves start, break and end, with different sessions and hollowness, so there's more wave reading involved. Also the focus is on being able to stay on the wave and generate speed, doing cutbacks, snaps, off the lips, etc.

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

pedrosbmartins — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:44:40 +0000

I believe realistic fluid dynamics in the scale of a full breaking wave is unheard of for real time graphics, there's just no way to do it in 30-60FPS (I could be wrong tho!)

What I do instead is to transform a procedural plane mesh into wave-like geometry. For added realism, I base this transformation on bathymetry data (ocean floor height), so you can get left/right breaking waves, different breaking sessions, etc, just by defining different heightmaps.

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

pedrosbmartins — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:41:27 +0000

I'm working on a (somewhat) realistic surfing game. Tired of arcade-style games, I decided to try my hand at something closer to the real sport, focusing on realistic breaking waves, speed generation and carving, rather than impossible air combos.

After one year of development, it's going better than I expected, so I'm considering building a demo to gather feedback and see if there's enough traction for working towards a Steam release.

Even if that's not the case though, it's been a blast learning about game dev in Unity/C#, as well as 3D modeling and animation in Blender!

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "Cosmic simulations that once needed supercomputers now run on a laptop"

pedrosbmartins — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 23:59:21 +0000

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Neutral networks are pretty good statistical learning tools, and in this kind of application you'll need some stochastic learning, regardless of using a laptop or a supercomputer. It's not like they used an LLM to predict the simulation steps. If you read the paper, they seem to use a simple fully-connected 5-layer neural network architecture, which is a completely different beast from, say, trillion parameters transformers used for LLMs.

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "Integer Programming (1977) [pdf]"

pedrosbmartins — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:55:52 +0000

First time I came across integer programming (and mathematical programming generally) was when studying hydroelectric power generation planning, for a masters I ended up not pursuing. Then, when selecting a masters in CS, I ended up working with an advisor who used mixed-integer programming applied to classic machine learning models (mainly optimal decision trees). A fascinating and widely applicable method, indeed!

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "‘No Other Land’ consultant Awdah Hathaleen killed by Israeli settler"

pedrosbmartins — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 17:40:27 +0000

what kind of sick, twisted, inhuman comment is that?

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "Coding Adventure: Ant and Slime Simulations (2021) [video]"

pedrosbmartins — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 13:41:27 +0000

Sebastian Lague is one of those content creators that show what a delight the internet can be when the content is high-quality. I particularly enjoy how he presents his implementation thought-process, eventual dead-ends, and possible future improvements. If anyone here has suggestions for similar content, I'd be more than interested!

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "I send myself automated emails to practice Dutch"

pedrosbmartins — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 13:36:46 +0000

cool project! E-mail seems like a good channel for small chunks of language-learning content + reminders.

If I may ask you, how do you plan on building vocabulary from these e-mails? Do you use anki or some other method?

KSA, the Kerbal Space Program Replacement from RocketWerkz

pedrosbmartins — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:12:01 +0000

Article URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1gg5106/ksa_the_ksp_replacement_from_rocketwerkz_seamless/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42012834

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "NASA's Europa Clipper Launch"

pedrosbmartins — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 16:16:34 +0000

Not this time, only the payload fairing.

Show HN: Bookmark Pruner – a low-effort extension for dealing with bookmarks

pedrosbmartins — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 08:18:50 +0000

Full-fledged solutions to bookmark and read-later management never quite worked for me, so I built this simple tool to help me prune and rediscover my bookmark collection.

It simply loads a random bookmark, displays its age in days, and lets you remove it or move on to the next random bookmark.

Sharing it here in case anyone finds it useful, too!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41807420

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Private space-junk probe snaps historic photo of discarded rocket in orbit

pedrosbmartins — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 15:31:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.space.com/astroscale-adras-j-space-junk-rendezvous-mission-photo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40180749

Points: 54

# Comments: 16

New comment by pedrosbmartins in "Joseph Priestley created revolutionary "maps" of time"

pedrosbmartins — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 18:53:59 +0000

Nicely done! I've been wanting to build something similar, but as a tool to assist in my history studies.

Oh, and if you are into timelines and their history, you might enjoy Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton. Very informative read!