Hacker News: skelpmargyar

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C"

skelpmargyar — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 19:19:56 +0000

Why should we wait for LLMs to become good enough to spoon feed the end result when we can do it ourselves?

These are beautiful, collaborative efforts and require members to constantly improve their learning, communication, patience, and technical skills. These are skills that transfer to other parts of life, same as other hobbies like sports and martial arts. It's an incredible manifestation of the hacker spirit. Do we as a community not enjoy tinkering anymore?

This isn't a consumable product. We aren't selling anything here trying to make a quick buck. There's no "rush to market" pressure to finish these projects.

The perspective I see creeping up in many engineering areas of "wait for AI to automate everything in life" seems to value the end product more than the means.

It's a valid question. The short answer to the question is counterproductive in my opinion.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C"

skelpmargyar — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 19:00:52 +0000

Can you please elaborate on why distributing decompiled source code is violating copyright? And Nintendo is litigious, if it was black and white surely they would have taken down everything by now? How do you know the major LLMs are not trained on these decomp projects and/or leaks already?

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Dav2d"

skelpmargyar — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:14:26 +0000

Of course any random C file is going to have pointers. Where can anything in the linked code be exploited? It seems like they're testing for bad input data with asserts to catch bugs in some functions, and properly validating bad inputs in others. Just because they're writing C doesn't mean it's vulnerable.

How can you claim nobody cares about 5%? A 5% performance increase is significant. And video decoding is not always for playback, where 5% may not matter as much.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "C++26 is done: ISO C++ standards meeting Trip Report"

skelpmargyar — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:32:30 +0000

On the main page, it took me a minute after laughing at "std::byte arithmetic" to realize it was April 1st. All of those C++29 "features" are on point, very funny. Though surely there's somewhere SFINAE can be mentioned...

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Ask HN: How to Learn C++ in 2026?"

skelpmargyar — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 02:11:23 +0000

This website https://www.learncpp.com/, while it may look like other half-baked tutorial websites, is excellent is filled with up to date nuanced information. It covers basically everything you will need. It's extremely high quality.

Even if you don't follow it step by step sequentially, it's an excellent reference if learning from another resource.

This + actually working on a small project you want to accomplish is probably the best way to learn.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Emuko: Fast RISC-V emulator written in Rust, boots Linux"

skelpmargyar — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 06:43:08 +0000

RISC-V is supported on QEMU. The available devices don't have a ton of peripherals compared to aarch64, but it exists. Even FreeRTOS has a QEMU virt port for RISC-V. And if you have unit tests QEMU could easily run those accurately.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "More random home lab things I've recently learned"

skelpmargyar — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 20:11:35 +0000

Proxmox is awesome! I've been running it for ~5 years and it's been absolutely stable and pleasant to run services on.

The Proxmox Backup Server is the killer feature for me. Incremental and encrypted backups with seamless restoration for LXC and VMs has been amazing.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "LosslessCut: The Swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing"

skelpmargyar — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 20:58:27 +0000

Avidemux is also great, but I've had some issues with running it under Wayland. LosslessCut works excellent on every platform I've tried with no issues. It also has a much better UI for cutting multiple segments, IMO.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "They make USB-C cables with displays now"

skelpmargyar — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 19:25:35 +0000

Just wondering, do you know of a better alternative? I've pretty much only bought Anker recently because they haven't failed me yet. Trying to determine what is quality online now is very difficult.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "RLHF a LLM in <50 lines of Python"

skelpmargyar — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 20:32:15 +0000

Importing a library is not abstraction any more than closing your eyes is abstracting the world to black.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "WebP is so great except it's not (2021)"

skelpmargyar — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 02:53:07 +0000

You also can't write software bad enough that you're forced to upgrade your monitor due to poor performance.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Raspberry Pi 5"

skelpmargyar — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 21:41:02 +0000

What is the advantage of that RPi setup over some cheap Android phone?

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Game Development Post-Unity"

skelpmargyar — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 05:31:43 +0000

That's not true. Wild Rift, Hearthstone, Genshin Impact, and more are made in Unity. Asset flip and low quality games are a meme, which used to be synonymous with Unity games, but the few AAA games made in Unity have been wildly successful.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters"

skelpmargyar — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 04:39:33 +0000

If they have a multi million dollar investment at stake and they're not able to pivot to any of the other many SBCs out there then they might just be incompetent. The Pi has nothing particularly special about other than it's well documented and cheap.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?"

skelpmargyar — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 01:07:00 +0000

Wow, your website is excellent and FAST. Good luck to you.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "USPS facility in Utah does nothing but decipher handwriting"

skelpmargyar — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 10:52:56 +0000

As someone who was ridiculed by peers and teachers and having had grades be dropped whole letters for poor legibility, I don't share the feeling. I tried years practicing and I am skilled in other dexterous tasks, but handwriting is not one of them. I still use a fountain pen though.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "TV disappears, but HBO Max removing shows feels different"

skelpmargyar — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 07:17:43 +0000

There isn't an exception that I know of. What I'm saying is if you download a torrent for a movie that you own you can still get a copyright notice. That doesn't really make sense to me.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Was Rocket Lake Power Efficient?"

skelpmargyar — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 04:59:27 +0000

The problem is they haven't added anything significantly new to Windows 11. I don't see any features that requires new processor features.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "What AMC’s streaming troubles say about the greater TV industry"

skelpmargyar — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 23:41:27 +0000

Yep, if I could buy the highest quality in one click without having to search through crap on torrent indexes I would. Then after transcoding if I ever want the highest quality I just go back to the site where I bought it. Nope, they aren't gonna offer that. And I'm not wasting my time storing and ripping Blu-Rays, I'm just gonna acquire it through Sonarr/Radarr. I know it's probably not important to 99% of users, but it would be so convenient to be able to just buy and download the movie/tv at it's highest quality in a few seconds. The closest I have found to that is the *-arr stack I am using with Jellyfin which is super automated and really great.

New comment by skelpmargyar in "Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?"

skelpmargyar — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 22:12:44 +0000

The free tier on Oracle Cloud is nuts. 200GB block storage, 10gb object storage, 24GB RAM 4 core ARM VM, 2 x86 VM's 1GB RAM each. From my experience, it's also really hard to get charged since you have to upgrade your account from a free tier. I haven't been charged one cent in several years.