Hacker News: smallstepforman

New comment by smallstepforman in "Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)"

smallstepforman — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:54:18 +0000

To do something like this, you really need to look at both cache locality and CPU core access patterns:

https://youtu.be/jsdwRf3JvZM?si=0tysoCsvaWl0R_PZ

40’000 NPC in game with collision avoidance, steering, on 8yo hardware.

New comment by smallstepforman in "Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption"

smallstepforman — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:16:18 +0000

In Academia, this is not how to cite references. Date, link, etc. The quality of the reference is also important, not “such and such blogger”, might as well go to local bar and ask the regular drunk for references.

Because in the real world (tm) a diplomat announcing this has consequences. Press can parrot any fantasy they want, gullible may just as well watch Marvel entertainment, same relation to reality.

New comment by smallstepforman in "Show HN: I made a flight simulator, except you're just a passenger"

smallstepforman — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:36:28 +0000

Now if we can watch fresh movies, that would be ideal …

New comment by smallstepforman in "Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption"

smallstepforman — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:01:45 +0000

[quote]Russia declared war on whole west (including this open forum) in 2014[/quote]

I dont remember seeing Lavrov delivering a declaration of war to this “whole west” diplomatic core. Got any real sources to back this absurd claim?

New comment by smallstepforman in "iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27"

smallstepforman — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:35:08 +0000

Hi Pavel. I remember your work on Eddie and Tracker and Queries. Do you still follow the development of Haiku (even if infrequently)?

New comment by smallstepforman in "AirPods 5"

smallstepforman — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:47:37 +0000

You also need microphones to pick up ambient sound and play it back at 180 phase shift ..

There is a reason premium audio car packages cost over 2000$

New comment by smallstepforman in "Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded"

smallstepforman — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:19:36 +0000

Russian are more than happy to sell you NatGas, why do you think they’re weaponising? Watch too much propaganda?

New comment by smallstepforman in "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened"

smallstepforman — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:50:21 +0000

By what metric do you consider them a failed state?

You’re on HackerNews, this website attracts free thinkers, we’re not the group that our influenced easily by propaganda, open your mind, read some data, visit the country and then form an opinion. Dont parrot the propaganda of non-free media.

New comment by smallstepforman in "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened"

smallstepforman — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:43:32 +0000

*It's my current understanding that Ukrainians performed this sabotage.*

If that were vaguely true, Germany which owned 51% of NordStream would have sued UKR immediately and abolished diplomatic relationship. The fact they didn’t tells you everything you need to know about the absurdity of your claim.

New comment by smallstepforman in "Turns are Better than Radians (2022)"

smallstepforman — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:53:12 +0000

For graphics rendering Euler equation doesnt matter. Colours are 0.0-1.0 and have no relation to reality, but it works. Same with rotations (if we’re not using Quaternikns)

New comment by smallstepforman in "Turns are Better than Radians (2022)"

smallstepforman — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:44:39 +0000

Are there any c/c++ libs / headers that use this (without converting to radians in the background). I like this idea.

New comment by smallstepforman in "I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore"

smallstepforman — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:18:14 +0000

Robotics, AI, hypersonic/Ramjets, affordable mobile data, streaming video, lots of innovation in the last 10 years.

New comment by smallstepforman in "Soup Raiders goes native: What you gain by building your own game engine"

smallstepforman — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:53:06 +0000

The thing about game engines is that 80%+ of engine developers time is spent on designing tools and a checkbox/slider for you to click. Another 15% is spent on conflits when combining featured. Less than 5% of the time is invested in actual engine features. In raw homegrown engines, you call a function to enable the feature you want. Your 5% time matches commercial engine 5% time. You dont gain much if you know what you are doing. If you dont know what you are doing, well …

New comment by smallstepforman in "How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood"

smallstepforman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:10:27 +0000

In the next decade, AI will be gutting every industry associated with hollywood other than nvidia and tmsc.

New comment by smallstepforman in "SwiftUI After 7 Years"

smallstepforman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:57:57 +0000

Death by a thousand cuts. First the tech community screamed about memory leaks, so they bolted ARC (automatic resource counting) into Cocoa since unlike C++, Objective-C had no RAII. With swift to be compatible, they forced ARC to all objects. To make RAD (rapid application devolpment), they forced InterfaceBuilder onto the dev community, where artists do layout, but engineers do code. With variable sized screens, RAD tools add constraints to layout, since artists do gui, not engineers. To support Retina displays where GUI is x2, two sets of constraints were added. Spaghetti after twine after hack after crap.

All this goes away if you use a language with RAII, dont treat your devs as morons that cannot manage resources, and allow procedural GUI - let smart dev fix layout and pixels per inch. Artist can create mockup screens in photoshot or after effects, devs do actual procedural coding.

But no, we’ve gone the LEGO assembly way to avoid hiring smart devs.

Disclaimer - I do graphic engines with GUI toolkits for a living.

New comment by smallstepforman in "Building a Fast Lock-Free Queue in Modern C++ from Scratch"

smallstepforman — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:50:04 +0000

The unique_ptr destructor is called on scope exit, and there are times you want this earlier before other critical code.

New comment by smallstepforman in "Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS"

smallstepforman — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:26:49 +0000

X512 is an amazing treasure in the Haiku community. Other than nVidia hardware accelerated drivers, he ported Haiku to RiscV, got sound through HDMI and DisplayPort working, he got AMD Vulkan drivers for Southern Islands chipsets also working, made break throughs in dozens of other porting projects, he’s an amazing Hacker par excellance virtually unknown outside the Haiku community.

New comment by smallstepforman in "The PImpl idiom and the C++26 std:indirect type"

smallstepforman — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:21:29 +0000

Oh god, what monstrocity have we created?!?

All this complexity follows unique_ptr and copy constructor madness.

Anything with pointers with ownership should never be copied - period. Reference pointers - OK if scope/lifetime is known.

Can we have c++11 lite?

New comment by smallstepforman in "Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time"

smallstepforman — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:07:56 +0000

With mmu, every app has its own 32bit address space, and the mmu “maps” the app space to physical space. Legacy apps get shared address space, while newer apps get isolated space. To port apps, its only the messaging system that needs rework, and if the system does its magic with same API, transition is invisible. At the end of the day, only the message address space needs to be shared. Sendmessage() behind the scenes remaps mmu addresses. Not impossible, just requires the will to do it.

New comment by smallstepforman in "Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time"

smallstepforman — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:58:07 +0000

BeOS/Haiku uses datatypes natively