Hacker News: shdon

Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

shdon — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:06:14 +0000

Article URL: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_shareware_cd/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338328

Points: 477

# Comments: 212

New comment by shdon in "User Interfaces of the Demo Scene"

shdon — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:40:43 +0000

Completely off topic, but I love your username.

New comment by shdon in "DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots"

shdon — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 22:19:47 +0000

Cool video, though the AI voiceover is jarring.

New comment by shdon in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

shdon — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:37:59 +0000

Somebody obviously coined the word as a self-referential joke. And somehow it stuck. That makes it memorable.

Speaking of things that stick... arachibutyrophobia is the feat of getting peanut putter stuck to the roof of your mouth. (I admit I had to look that one up, as it's not nearly as memorable, though I knew the word existed).

New comment by shdon in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

shdon — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:52:44 +0000

I thought that one was pretty well known. But then, I can also rattle off Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch at will.

New comment by shdon in "Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis"

shdon — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:35:12 +0000

Bill Gates famously said something along the lines of "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight". Now we're measuring AI effectiveness by the number of tokens generated? Plus ça change...

And yeah, what is it with C level executives and AI? I'm pretty much getting it forced on me by the higher ups. Management has insisted all employees come up with ideas on how to "leverage AI most effectively for the business". And now we're hiring an AI expert... For the small internal IT team of a publishing company...

At one point, I spent so much time fixing the disastrous results of people using ChatGPT to generate oodles of CSS that they would put in the WordPress Customizer that I had to resort to disabling the custom CSS functionality entirely. All because they wanted a link to be a different colour.

New comment by shdon in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

shdon — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:51:47 +0000

I have been eaten by many of those.

New comment by shdon in "Adventure Game Studio: OSS software for creating adventure games"

shdon — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 18:56:42 +0000

I've created my own adventure game engine starting in the late 1990s. Only learned about the existence of AGS many years later. Although my own engine allows much more flexibility than AGS, there is no userfriendly IDE and besides the runtime, it's mostly just a bunch of separate tools. I have to applaud Chris Jones for going all the way, it's really quite impressive.

New comment by shdon in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

shdon — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 03:37:29 +0000

Thank you for reading it.

New comment by shdon in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

shdon — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:57:36 +0000

https://www.shdon.com/ I post infrequently, but have been maintaining a site for nearly 30 years now, 25 of which at this address. It contains random musings, some tech content, my game development efforts, and showcases some of my pixel art.

Eurofiber admits crooks swiped data from French unit after cyberattack

shdon — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 01:40:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/17/eurofiber_breach/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960448

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Rebecca Heineman has died

shdon — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 01:25:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/legendary-game-designer-programmer-space-invaders-champion-and-lgbtq-trailblazer-rebecca-heineman-has-died/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960368

Points: 980

# Comments: 193

New comment by shdon in "The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023)"

shdon — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:15:48 +0000

Because it would make scrolling more frequent? For multicolumn text to reduce scrolling, the column height would have to match the available viewport height. And if your text exceeds what can fit in multiple columns on a single screenful, scrolling also becomes awkward, because you'd have to scroll exactly to the next screenful to have any consistency. Multiple text columns only make sense on extremely restricted layouts, or where the volume are entirely independent instead of a single flowing piece of text, or where there is still a direct horizontal relationship (like annotations or translations beside the main text).

New comment by shdon in "More than two hard disks in DOS"

shdon — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 02:56:14 +0000

The third common CD-ROM interface that wasn't IDE was Mitsumi.

New comment by shdon in "“I noticed a clear violation of our contributing guidelines”"

shdon — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 13:39:38 +0000

I run several job boards, and though there hasn't yet been any postings requiring the candidate's using AI (also not all that likely in the particular field), I am noticing a definite increase in the number of lists with emoji preceding each bullet point, and the use of em dashes. Personally, if I were a job seeker, I'd find that off-putting just as much as if I were presented with the requirement to use AI in my job.

New comment by shdon in "Retro-gaming YouTuber PatmanQC has died, aged 53"

shdon — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:36:46 +0000

Post on his actual channel: https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxlxGXbAp493rLsgFSTZkLyuz_dEw...

Retro-gaming YouTuber PatmanQC has died, aged 53

shdon — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:07:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vanhoe.com/obituary/Patrick-Davis

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526725

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by shdon in "The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public"

shdon — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 17:21:40 +0000

How long before spam filtering is also done by an LLM and spammers or black hat hackers embed instructions into their spam mails to exploit flaws in the AI?

New comment by shdon in "A new pyramid-like shape always lands the same side up"

shdon — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 10:39:44 +0000

And for cows

New comment by shdon in "Demoting i686-PC-windows-gnu to Tier 2"

shdon — Mon, 26 May 2025 16:11:00 +0000

Technically there still is, for a few more months. There is a 32-bit version of Windows 10, and that won't end mainline support until October (and then a while of extended support, for those who wish to pay for such).