Hacker News: shdon

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).

New comment by shdon in "What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?"

shdon — Fri, 16 May 2025 17:24:55 +0000

These were existing MS-DOS programmes that had already shipped. They wouldn't have shipped with a Windows icon as they were made before that Windows version existed (or at least shipped) and weren't even intended to run on that platform. Once Windows had shipped, and software vendors started making software for it, they will of course have included their own icons. The "why" is simply Microsoft wanting to make Windows play nice with users' existing software, and thus enhancing the user experience.

New comment by shdon in "Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life"

shdon — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:54:01 +0000

Surely that's Doom8088 rather than the original version if this thing truly emulates an XT level machine (or rather an 80186 CPU)?

New comment by shdon in "RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023)"

shdon — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 12:19:08 +0000

I do indeed check against both DNT and Sec-GPC (and navigator.doNotTrack and navigator.globalPrivacyControl in JS) basically treating them identically. GPC is ostensibly not about tracking itself, but about sharing data, though I just figured that data that isn't recorded can't be shared either.

New comment by shdon in "RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023)"

shdon — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 06:21:15 +0000

I wonder how many web developers actually honour Do Not Track. I do, in all the websites I've made for my employer too, but I think I'm only getting away with it because my employer doesn't know. I've even made it so that browsing with Do-Not-Track enabled also skips the cookie consent banner and just assume the user wants no cookies other than the strictly necessary ones (like their session/login cookie), and doesn't include Google Analytics, instead just upping a single view counter on the page, with no PII in there.

New comment by shdon in "A BBC navigation bar component broke depending on the external monitor"

shdon — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 17:08:24 +0000

Then it would make a lot more sense to check event.pointerType == 'mouse' vs event.pointerType == '' (for keyboard)

New comment by shdon in "Voice acting in Space Quest V"

shdon — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 22:58:10 +0000

The CD-ROM version of SQ4 was especially insidious. It has many timing issues that the floppy version just plain didn't have (including the one you mention). Also, the scan quality of the VGA backgrounds was just better in the floppy version, with a much better gamma curve, the CD version looking rather more washed out.

It's assume that the CD version was developed alongside the floppy version and that the code forked at some point. The floppy version got the fixes, whereas the CD version didn't.

Somebody in the retro adventure gaming community with the handle NewRisingSun made a patch that used the floppy disk background images and has patched script resources to solve the myriad timing issues, whilst integrating seamlessly with the speech of the CD version.