Hacker News: shaggie76

New comment by shaggie76 in "GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2"

shaggie76 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:17:49 +0000

I can't help but feel disappointed that after 35 years the first thing they're talking about is an SVG logo. I mean, there's a certain novelty that it was made on a laptop running Hurd itself, but still I was left with a sense that progress is meandering and whimsical.

I remember being excited by Hurd's ambitions after studying Tanenbaum's OS book in university and drinking the microkernel kool-aid; now I'm too old and jaded to believe it'll be a viable alternative.

New comment by shaggie76 in "Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy"

shaggie76 — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 23:18:55 +0000

This post immediately reminded me of the Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff (a charming introduction to Taoism). I think it's one of the rare books I've read more than twice and I highly recommend it.

New comment by shaggie76 in "Almost Always Unsigned"

shaggie76 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:19:00 +0000

While I'm a fan of unsigned (size_t mostly) there have been a few times when the tax for converting them to float was shockingly high:

https://godbolt.org/z/96T4jTshc

1-2 instructions for signed vs 11 including a branch for unsigned.

(in times like these I found casting to signed first preferable)

New comment by shaggie76 in "What every coder should know about gamma (2016)"

shaggie76 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:26:39 +0000

ICC profiles present a similar problem and remarkably Instagram, ostensibly a photo-sharing web-site, does not respect them when scaling images (or at least it didn't a few years ago when I started posting photos to it from my PC); when I uploaded full-resolution SLR-resolution originals the skin-tones would get all screwed up. If I exported at the final resolution, even with the same ICC profile, they were fine.

New comment by shaggie76 in "The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon"

shaggie76 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:59:50 +0000

Not only is LEA more flexible I believe it's preferred to SHL even for simple operations because it doesn't modify the flags register which can make it easier to schedule.

New comment by shaggie76 in "Serious = Suspicious, Shooting with Phone vs. Shooting with Camera"

shaggie76 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:56:21 +0000

His point is well taken but I find the reverse helpful when you're shooting in some sort of official capacity: subjects are willing to put up with a lot more fuss and bother when staring down the barrel of a girthy lens.

Aspartame study suggests that current guidelines should be re-examined

shaggie76 — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:55:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332225010856

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361166

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by shaggie76 in "Ask HN: Which cloud provider do you like best and why?"

shaggie76 — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 01:00:58 +0000

We've quite enjoyed Linode (Akamai) for some custom servers (not http) over the last few years because they include DDOS scrubbing; it's not clear to what extent they'll defend us but our last partner would routinely null-route our servers when attacked and we haven't had any problems since we switched.

New comment by shaggie76 in "Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark"

shaggie76 — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 22:50:58 +0000

Evidently it's not all Steam Deck either; I checked our internal stats and on PC yesterday 1.24% of Warframe players were using WINE and another 0.76% were playing on Deck!

New comment by shaggie76 in "An ex-Intel CEO's mission to build a Christian AI: Hasten the return of Christ"

shaggie76 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:46:07 +0000

My first thought was this blog article I saw on HN a while back:

https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/should-we-use-llms-for-ch...

He argued, persuasively I thought, that "this is an area where truthfulness is of paramount importance" and consequently would be extremely ill-suited to AI.

New comment by shaggie76 in "AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline"

shaggie76 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 11:29:24 +0000

This reminds me of the PlayStation/2 developer manual which, when describing the complicated features of system, said something like "there is no profit in making it easy to extract the most performance from the system."

Silicone bakeware as source of human exposure to cyclic siloxanes

shaggie76 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 22:58:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304389425025105

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456588

Points: 39

# Comments: 23

New comment by shaggie76 in "Photography 'Rules' That Social Media Destroyed"

shaggie76 — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 01:18:00 +0000

When cameras became more affordable to the middle class did painters furrow their brows in disapproval at the unwashed masses breaking the rules with a carefree click of the shutter?

New comment by shaggie76 in "Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates into 2026"

shaggie76 — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 16:58:07 +0000

My Windows 7 laptop still seems to want security updates about once a week; maybe it's just Windows Defender and not kernel bugs but I find it interesting that MS still bothers.

Electrolysis with a cheap metal that can produce 10x more hydrogen

shaggie76 — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 23:23:36 +0000

Article URL: https://farmingdale-observer.com/2025/06/19/japan-has-found-the-holy-grail-of-electrolysis-a-cheap-metal-that-can-produce-1000-more-hydrogen/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44323421

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by shaggie76 in "How to post when no one is reading"

shaggie76 — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 10:48:05 +0000

I get just as many likes from spam bots than real people and it makes me wonder how the numbers would be skewed if the AI-scrapers dropped a like when they absorbed my content.

New comment by shaggie76 in "Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compilation"

shaggie76 — Mon, 19 May 2025 11:33:17 +0000

One alternative that many games choose is to do it on-demand which is felt as micro-stutters while you play but this is a poor choice for a competitive game like CoD.

We take a slightly different approach: we don't do any up-front in the launcher but do as much as possible on the level loading screen; it's not perfect though: due to the way some legacy code works we can't always anticipate all permutations ahead of time so you get the occasional micro-stutter as missing shaders are sent to the driver.

You can get away with being lazier with modern drivers because they will cache the compiled result for you (if you don't cache the pipeline state object yourself in DirectX 12) but on older DirectX drivers for Intel IGPs there wasn't a cache at all so the first 30 seconds after loading into a level would be very busy.

New comment by shaggie76 in "Nearly half of Steam's users are still using Windows 10"

shaggie76 — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 01:18:46 +0000

Our game (also on Steam) hasn't discontinued support for 7 yet and our usage stats from last Saturday Feb 8th 2025 are roughly:

  53.6% Windows 11
  43.8% Windows 10
   1.59% WINE
   0.79% Steamdeck
   0.13% Windows 7
   0.03% Windows 8

New comment by shaggie76 in "Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world"

shaggie76 — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 15:26:45 +0000

I was thinking how this article claims that people crave the authenticity of live music and that bullshit-generators will never be able to supply that. At first, I saw this as a reason for optimism, but then I got to thinking about evidence that people may not necessarily want authenticity after all.

Organic produce was the first metaphor the came to mind: it's probably more healthy for you even if it isn't as pretty, but many people aren't willing to pay a premium it and I suspect economics isn't often the reason. Is that a straw-man for live music? I don't know that it is because plenty of people are content to listen to recorded music -- sure, they might enjoy going to a live concert but they'll still listen to the radio on the drive to work.

Then I got to thinking about something more crass: while breast implants and other cosmetic body surgery may be as much for the benefit of the subject self-image I imagine there are plenty of people that find it very attractive despite what is often obviously fake.

So do we crave authenticity? I think I do but I'm not sure if that's a safe generalization to make.

New comment by shaggie76 in "No Man's Sky's update introduces billions of new stars, planets, and more"

shaggie76 — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:32:46 +0000

I started playing a week ago having letting it "cellar" for a few years; I was quite enjoying it but today, after downloading 20GB of free update, I reliably crash on boot :(

Edit: deleted C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man's Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS and I can boot again.

Edit 2: crashed again after playing for a bit; back in the cellar it goes -- needs a bit more time to mature I think.