Hacker News: pipes

New comment by pipes in "Space Cadet Pinball on Linux"

pipes — Sun, 10 May 2026 15:19:12 +0000

https://www.pcgamer.com/take-two-dismisses-lawsuit-against-g...

I didn't know about this. Not sure if the developers settled or take two gave up. I would guess the latter as the decompilation / port scene seems to be going strong. Though I don't follow it that closely.

New comment by pipes in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

pipes — Sat, 09 May 2026 06:06:45 +0000

I'm Irish. Well northern Irish. The Republic Ireland seems a lot richer than when I was growing up in n. Ireland. Ireland is the second biggest exporter of software in the world now. I'm pretty certain the tax paid by both corporations and their well paid staff definitely translate to something for the average Irish man. Even if he thinks it doesn't.

New comment by pipes in "PC Engine CPU"

pipes — Fri, 08 May 2026 21:58:38 +0000

Presumably you were in the USA? We had grey imports in the UK too, but it was prohibitively expensive. My family was relatively well off, but no way I'd have been able to wangle an expensive import super famicom.

Even worse when the snes did finally arrive we were stuck with pal 50hz squished slow versions, especially noticeable in street fighter 2.

New comment by pipes in "PC Engine CPU"

pipes — Fri, 08 May 2026 21:54:38 +0000

All ports by capcom are good :) which means all console ports (apart from the sega master system port, which is impressive just not by capcom). The Amiga, spectrum etc etc ports were god awful.

Though apparently the super street fighter port on the Amiga is rather decent.

I'd love to read something in depth about the capcom console ports. The snes, magadrive and pc engine ports all look like some minor miracles! I remember an interview with a snes developer at rare were he said sf2 is the most impressive game on the snes. (Think I read that in retro gamer UK mag in the last decade or so).

New comment by pipes in "The Upper Middle Class Trap"

pipes — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:54:19 +0000

Yes, UK terminology is confusing. Easier just to say state and private, and I think more and more do say this.

New comment by pipes in "The Upper Middle Class Trap"

pipes — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:36:06 +0000

And a UK thing, well not so much northern Ireland, but the rest of the UK uses catchment areas and I'm experiencing this now.

New comment by pipes in "Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)"

pipes — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:02:10 +0000

Thank you. So windows historically has been careful to ensure that it's abi is stable where as Linux relies more on users recompiling against binaries, which is a problem if you are shipping binaries rather than source code? Presumably package managers try to handle this by ensuring you dependencies are up to date?

New comment by pipes in "Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)"

pipes — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:13:28 +0000

I'm eternally confused by what an ABI actually is. Especially now that people say the win 32 api is the stable Linux ABI. Genuine question, what is the difference as they both seem to be conflated.

New comment by pipes in "The smelly baby problem"

pipes — Sat, 02 May 2026 09:50:19 +0000

My second child's terrible 2s is approximately 600x worse than her sisters.

Joking aside, it's actually surprisingly way way tougher.

New comment by pipes in "Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)"

pipes — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:26:42 +0000

Google says sdram in 1997 was 7 to 10 dollars per megabyte. So 384 would be 3840 not 40,000 am I missing something here?

New comment by pipes in "The Super Nintendo Cartridges (2024)"

pipes — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:01:46 +0000

I bought a DC on launch week, it's one of my favourite consoles of all time. I still own one. But what has bleemcast got to do with what the parent said?

New comment by pipes in "Norway Set to Become Latest Country to Ban Social Media for Under 16s"

pipes — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:35:17 +0000

My main worry is this is just another step towards government controlling discourse online. Once implemented it will become difficult to be anonymous on social media.

Some one in the UK civil service was quoted in the Times, they stated that the online safety act is not about protecting children. It is about controlling the discourse.

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

pipes — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:10:41 +0000

Covid. The ex head of the bank of England said as much.

New comment by pipes in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

pipes — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:18:22 +0000

I see it money as a wall. Without it, me and my family are defenceless. My goal is keeping us safe.

New comment by pipes in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

pipes — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:16:30 +0000

And yet people risk their lives to get to the USA. They vote with their feet. It isn't perfect but declaring "it isn't working", my response "compared to what".

I'm from the UK, it isn't in great shape. And the EU isn't either. The west in general has problems, just no where on the scale of every other country.

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

pipes — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:08:36 +0000

The raising interest rates right now makes no sense to me. Energy prices and layoffs will kill spending power. I think the central banks will overcompensate because they got inflation so wrong the last time.

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

pipes — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:03:26 +0000

Are you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?

New comment by pipes in "Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution"

pipes — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:26:34 +0000

That is sort of my point, I can't think of a developed country that hasn't westernised to some extent.

New comment by pipes in "Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution"

pipes — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:03:21 +0000

Which other developed countries do you mean? The only ones I can think of, have westernised on purpose. E.g. Singapore and Japan.

New comment by pipes in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

pipes — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:09:51 +0000

I was going to say "why on earth are you making them use a line editor there is probably a vscode plugin for the assembler with syntax highlighting" then I got to your point about it being in their head instead. This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why.

As a sort of an adjacent point, I worked through a book that is used on a course often called "from nand to Tetris". It is probably the best thing I've done, in terms of understanding how computers, assemblers and compilers work

https://amzn.eu/d/07pszOEy