Hacker News: redrobein

New comment by redrobein in "Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable"

redrobein — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:44:05 +0000

While I agree that it isn't revolutionary that it could implement this from a single prompt, what's surprising to see is how well done this one is compared to the other tries. The controls and movement are smooth, the animations aren't jittery, the ui makes sense, there's a clear progression in difficulty. This model clearly "understands" the implementation of this game far better than the others did.

New comment by redrobein in "OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system"

redrobein — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:11:01 +0000

Does anyone know what's up with ocaml on windows? I haven't used it in a while. Trying to install utop on 5.x compiler and quite a few packages need a downgrade to 4.x? I've tried with both mingw and system-msvc. Same behavior.

New comment by redrobein in "Thinking in an array language (2022)"

redrobein — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:05:11 +0000

They are far from regexes. I feel like you're equating something you don't understand to something else you find difficult. It's a language like any other. Infact it's far less verbose and shorter to read. If you've spent enough time with an arraylang you start to recognize "words" or sequences of glyphs as some complex function[1].

You might have a better time trying something like Uiua[2] or BQN.

[1] https://aplcart.info/

[2] https://www.uiua.org/tour

New comment by redrobein in "We are retiring our bug bounty program"

redrobein — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:10:59 +0000

It's alright as a dropin sqlite replacement. I ran into a bunch of problems with libsql on windows a year or two ago when I tried it but I'd assume it's fixed now. They also offer turso db as service with a very generous free plan which was my main reason to try it.

New comment by redrobein in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

redrobein — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:35:20 +0000

What do you mean? It has to mirror the behavior of the hardware pretty closely otherwise... well... the games don't run.

New comment by redrobein in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

redrobein — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:29:59 +0000

F# is a good language, but I feel like it's forever stuck in C#'s shadow. A lot of the library code is C# and .NET handmedowns. Not interfaces or libraries crafted with F# in mind, often having no explicit documentation for use with F# either.

New comment by redrobein in "A perfectable programming language"

redrobein — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:09:22 +0000

was LeanB4

New comment by redrobein in "Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes"

redrobein — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:03:29 +0000

Are there any plans to add syntax sugar for interacting with vtables?

New comment by redrobein in "Helix: A post-modern text editor"

redrobein — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:58:46 +0000

People really need to stop making analogies and saying what things really are.

New comment by redrobein in "Tixl: Open-source realtime motion graphics"

redrobein — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 10:35:03 +0000

After effects is usually used for compositing and also supports some vfx, but isn't meant for realtime use. This would be similar to vvvv or touchdesigner, used for audio reactive visuals (VJing), interactive art exhibits, etc.

New comment by redrobein in "Unusual Raku Features"

redrobein — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 07:41:37 +0000

I think it has to do more with familiarity than complexity. You could have a good understanding of features like the ones showcased in the blogpost, but it could take you a minute of staring at a line to parse it if someone uses it in a way you're unfamiliar with. Doing that for potentially hours on end would be a pain.

It's definitely something I'd write for fun/personal projects but can't imagine working with other people in. On a side note, I believe this is where go's philosophy of having a dead simple single way of doing things is effective for working with large teams.

New comment by redrobein in "We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready"

redrobein — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:47:59 +0000

Seems like this is a paid product meant for enterprise use.

New comment by redrobein in "Is My Blue Your Blue?"

redrobein — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 10:34:38 +0000

Interesting. Does anyone else see a band of green in their blue? My boundary is at 170. Greener than 85% of the population. This point looks like the transition between blue and green to me, to the right I can see the gradient go to blue then to green again, then back to blue. So there's a green band in the middle of my screen.

New comment by redrobein in "Firedancer: Language for 2D shmups bullet-hell patterns"

redrobein — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 06:24:20 +0000

Can you add a little player box and make this playable with touhou style controls. For testing purposes ofcourse.

Ah. I thought the script was being compiled inbrowser. These are prerendered.

New comment by redrobein in "Musical Notation for Modular Synthesizers"

redrobein — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 17:46:04 +0000

Interesting problem to think about. The beauty of modular for me has always been that you can take voltage from literally anywhere and use it for CV. Modern modules also have an insane variety in controls and control surfaces, even for standard things like VCOs you have a ton of variety and featuresets. Saving the patch state is one thing but actually notating is crazy. Like I can't imagine someone being able to read this notation and play it accurately like someone sight reading a piano piece. You'd surely require familiarity with the setup ahead of time. As for recording it for posterity, being verbose and describing what you're doing in full works, I guess.

New comment by redrobein in "Solving Path of Exile Item Crafting with Reinforcement Learning"

redrobein — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 16:14:17 +0000

I think most experienced players are already pretty optimal at crafting. There might be some rare case where it might save you a couple div at best. It's usually obvious by design how to achieve something. Of course there is a market because some part of the playerbase can't do this (which might become lower) and some part of the playerbase still sees it as time efficient to just buy it precrafted. Likely there's less incentive to craft in bulk, large bulk currency trades become more expensive, making the crafted items more expensive for the unkowing new player who doesn't use this tool. Personally, I don't think it would change the economy that much.

New comment by redrobein in "Solving Path of Exile Item Crafting with Reinforcement Learning"

redrobein — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 11:42:39 +0000

The more I think about this the more I feel you went really overkill on this. The complexity is several orderers of magnitude lower than what you claim. Like try crafting stuff on the emulator and see how easily you can narrow it down to usually 2 or 3 choices at most steps. There should be really easy heuristics to invalidate most branches. I've also used the COE simulator a ton and never had to model something that's on the order of 50+ states even.

New comment by redrobein in "Solving Path of Exile Item Crafting with Reinforcement Learning"

redrobein — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 11:27:27 +0000

I think the heuristic approach is not as bad as you think. Human crafters, and the current crafting techniques we have are pretty efficient. You don't need to explore the full graph of random states because the mod weights themselves are a representation of those states. As a human I can't think of any crafting item (alt and chaos spamming aside) where the probability isn't a simple to understand number. You think you can use something like modweight x currency cost (x some time modifier for acquisition and use of currency) for scoring. This is how craftofexile does it.

New comment by redrobein in "Solving Path of Exile Item Crafting with Reinforcement Learning"

redrobein — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 11:09:23 +0000

Wait a couple weeks until I'm done with the league before you destroy the economy.

New comment by redrobein in "APL Demonstration (1975) [video]"

redrobein — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 15:10:14 +0000

Hate to quote theprimeagen on this but people have to stop mixing up readability with familiarity.