Hacker News: pxx

New comment by pxx in "Return of the Obra Dinn: spherical mapped dithering for a 1bpp first-person game"

pxx — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:48:01 +0000

I've never gotten motion sickness playing a video game before Return of the Obra Dinn. it's sad because I hear it's a good game but it's absolutely unplayable for me

New comment by pxx in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

pxx — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 14:57:32 +0000

ugh the most annoying thing about the conversation clash latency is that the person causing the issue just thinks others are being weirdly rude.

wireless headphones externalize the cost of latency to other conference participants. if you think your airbuds are "perfectly fine" it's because you're not the one paying the cost.

New comment by pxx in "Recoverable and Irrecoverable Decisions"

pxx — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:46:09 +0000

what? this article is making a different point if you read past the title.

> Conventional leadership advice suggests looking at decisions as reversible or non-reversible. Many important, non-reversible, decisions are recoverable, though.

New comment by pxx in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

pxx — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:18:01 +0000

reliable message delivery, lol. slack drops messages silently. it is not fit for purpose.

New comment by pxx in "Meta made scam ads harder to find instead of removing them"

pxx — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:48:00 +0000

is this still really the case? I feel like Facebook Marketplace has been significantly more dead than even last year. and it definitely seems completely dead for things like rental listings.

New comment by pxx in "Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM"

pxx — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 16:54:37 +0000

latency is absolute killer. then there's also the fact that splitting the output is difficult, pairing (especially multi-pairing) is finicky

but the real response is "what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter"

New comment by pxx in "Exe.dev"

pxx — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 16:52:44 +0000

tbh maybe this service doesn't want you as a customer if you can't figure this out. it seems like you'd be an above-average support burden

New comment by pxx in "Exe.dev"

pxx — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 16:50:22 +0000

you don't need to register the key. just have some sort of key.

New comment by pxx in "Log level 'error' should mean that something needs to be fixed"

pxx — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 14:43:19 +0000

c++20 offers `consteval` to make this clear, but you can do some simple macro wizardry in c++11 to do this:

    #define foo(x) ( \
        (void)std::integral_constant::value, \
        foo_impl(x) \
    )

(the re-evaluation of x doesn't matter if it compiles). You can also use a user-defined literal which has a different ergonomic problem.

New comment by pxx in "The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?"

pxx — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:23:02 +0000

no the point is that there should be _more_ shovelware like your app. the fact you were able to publish shovelware doesn't mean that there's a "revolution"; the number of apps published per time doesn't seem to be going up.

New comment by pxx in "Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon"

pxx — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 21:45:11 +0000

It's still there. Check the pg_dump command.

New comment by pxx in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

pxx — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 21:32:16 +0000

You can give your postal carrier a gift card but they're not allowed to accept cash or a prepaid card. https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2012/pb22349/html/cov...

New comment by pxx in "Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards"

pxx — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 15:49:11 +0000

Yeah, this concept is interesting but the fact that the simplest test case gives what's fundamentally a surprising result is very annoying.

It also doesn't help that in the example, the expected outcome of 53.3333/46.6667 isn't even considered.

New comment by pxx in "Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z"

pxx — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 20:23:07 +0000

phantom drive B is explicitly mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment#Order_...

the linked source checks out. diskcopy will also do this for you if you give it source = dest.

New comment by pxx in "Advent of Code 2025"

pxx — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:57:16 +0000

I don't know how much they "stand out" because their frequency makes it so that the optimal global leaderboard strat is often to just try something dumb and see if you win input roulette.

if we just look at the last three puzzles: day 23 last year, for example, admitted the greedy solution but only for some inputs. greedy clearly shouldn't work (shuffling the vertices in a file that admits it causes it to fail).

New comment by pxx in "Advent of Code 2025"

pxx — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:51:02 +0000

It's only a small selection of inputs.

I have a solve group that calls it "Advent of Input Roulette" because (back when there was a global leaderboard) you can definitely get a better expected score by just assuming your input is weak in structural ways.

New comment by pxx in "The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia"

pxx — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:53:33 +0000

Nobody wants 10 months in a year. What we want is 13 28-day months a year plus one or two intercalary days. But organized religion gets in the way.

New comment by pxx in "My fan worked fine, so I gave it WiFi"

pxx — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:18:51 +0000

I saw the diagram in the original blogpost, laughed, but after a bit of sketching it out I think we're both wrong. R/2R ladders are useful in DACs (and are really cool there) but don't look like they're used in digipot applications.

It seems like actual digipot ICs use the "2^n discrete resistors" approach. The IC used in this project is a MCP4141 which explicitly states in section 5.1 of its datasheet that for 7-bit (8-bit) devices there are 128 (256) resistors in a string between the terminals.

I'm a bit surprised this seems to be the best approach, but with IC manufacturing the joint problems of "a bunch of identical components" and "wiring it all up" are much less of a problem than if you were to wire this up by hand.

New comment by pxx in "SATisfying Solutions to Difficult Problems"

pxx — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:06:38 +0000

"All" isn't right.

You can only encode decision problems in NP into a SAT instance of polynomially-balanced size. Sure, that's a lot of things, but there are things provably not in this set.

New comment by pxx in ""Fuck You" Companies"

pxx — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:01:21 +0000

Is that actually the story of Uber? They didn't start with "let a random person drive you around"; they did licensed-limousine-by-app (which is the incremental "boring" improvement this post hates) until Lyft came around. They quickly copied the model (Lyft launched in May; "Uber X" in July 2012 [0]) but that's something to be said for agility and not necessarily getting the right idea at first.

[0] here's a launch announcement with Lyft being listed as already being operational https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/01/uber-opens-up-platform-to-...