Hacker News: swdunlop

New comment by swdunlop in "EVE Online moves to Python 3"

swdunlop — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:30:53 +0000

Oh my yes. EVE Online can experience issues when a conflict in a solar system exceeds a certain number of players. Each system in EVE is a monolithic process, so, if a conflict gets out of hand, things get slow.

This is referred to as Time Dilation (TiDi) in EVE -- https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation -- it's an interesting engineering rathole, Fenris f/k/a CCP has been pretty open about their stack, and the challenges that have built up.

Anything that speeds up EVE lets more players cram in without experiencing TiDi, and this might let the devs escape Stackless Python, which is another interesting engineer rathole. (It's ratholes all the way down, and this is the one that got EVE on my radar, and has kept it there.)

New comment by swdunlop in "I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support"

swdunlop — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:07:26 +0000

Amusingly, when a coworker was looking for this postmortem, they found a different postmortem of three Claude issues that caused decay. This one was in the platform, not in Claude Code:

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

I think there's a certain amount of running with scissors going on here. I appreciate the transparency, but the time to remediation here seems pretty long compared to the rate of new features.

New comment by swdunlop in "GPD Duo"

swdunlop — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 20:51:15 +0000

I was thinking the same thing. There are OLED USB-C monitors on Amazon for dirt cheap that are light if a little fragile.

New comment by swdunlop in "Zed AI"

swdunlop — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 22:47:18 +0000

Add the following to your settings.json:

  "assistant": {
    "version": "2",
    "default_model": {
      "provider": "anthropic",
      "model": "claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620"
    }
  }

Once this is done, you should be able to use Anthropic if you have an API key. (This was available before today's announcement and still works today as of Zed 0.149.3)

New comment by swdunlop in "Initial details about why CrowdStrike's CSAgent.sys crashed"

swdunlop — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 05:59:51 +0000

https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/gdb.html

New comment by swdunlop in "A Few Notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks (1994)"

swdunlop — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 21:23:02 +0000

And that is where the drama is frequently found in the Culture series — when Fluffy the Pet Human meets Spot the Feral Human and disaster ensues.

New comment by swdunlop in "A Few Notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks (1994)"

swdunlop — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 21:20:12 +0000

When Iain (M.) Banks published science fiction (or essays about science fiction), he used “Iain M. Banks.” Other works he used “Iain Banks.”

You can sometimes separate the fans and the topic by how they refer to him.

New comment by swdunlop in "A Few Notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks (1994)"

swdunlop — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 19:03:00 +0000

It's hard for me to read the Culture novels and not hear Porno for Pyros' "Pets" on loop in my head.

It is amusing that this essay starts with "Government" and does not get down to the intelligences until halfway through -- in my mind, it's all just the intelligences watching the funny monkeys play at still having meaningful role in the Culture and the surprising things they do at the edges of its influence.

New comment by swdunlop in "Hired: A Modern Take on 'Ed'"

swdunlop — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 06:25:31 +0000

I was expecting electron in there somewhere.

New comment by swdunlop in "Context Control in Go"

swdunlop — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 16:40:15 +0000

I think of contexts as being Go's answer to dynamic variables in earlier languages, like Lisp, and less like thread local storage (like Pthreads). Much like how Go works with errors, explicit is favored over implicit -- being able to see the context pass through, and whether a function expects a context, tells you a lot about the function you are about to call.

If a function does not take a context, you know it probably cannot be interrupted, just like when a function does not return an error, you know it should not fail. In my work projects, this is also a cue that the function does not do any logging since we always carry a zerolog.Logger in our contexts enriched with trace information about the request and handler.

This also makes life easier for me as a reviewer -- I can see the context passing, I can spot when there is a bad pattern, like retaining a context, or failing to handle an error. It does not require me to maintain a detailed mental map of which functions employ dynamic variables or can throw exceptions.

New comment by swdunlop in "Nushell 0.86"

swdunlop — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 17:17:37 +0000

You can bypass a Nushell command by prepending "^". To use MacOS open, this would be "^open cat.gif"

This tic drives me nuts when I hop between fish (which I use for two features, better tab completion and background jobs) and nu. With 0.86, it might just be for background jobs, which is something Nushell has avoided dealing with entirely. CTRL-Z and "bg" is just muscle memory for me, much like "open."

New comment by swdunlop in "More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck"

swdunlop — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 15:42:25 +0000

Good microsd cards are cheap as dirt and easy to use with a Steam Deck. I do not regret getting the lowest storage model and just using a card.

New comment by swdunlop in "Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)"

swdunlop — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 20:58:08 +0000

You can also get a non-customized version without resorting to dead trees -- the Economist is also published on Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/The-Economist-US-Edition/dp/B0027VSU9...

This trick probably works for other periodicals with a shady-as-hell internet filter bubble "feature."

New comment by swdunlop in "End of Support for Firefox Lockwise"

swdunlop — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 20:08:22 +0000

Ditto. I came to HN after seeing the email, looking for the best way to migrate my passwords out of Lockwise.

Well, still looking. They are outta here.

New comment by swdunlop in "Janet – a Lisp-like functional, imperative programming language"

swdunlop — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 18:05:19 +0000

That is like saying Scheme does not have exceptions, except in C, we have setjmp instead of call/cc. It is technically correct, but there is something more flexible that can be perverted into doing the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setjmp.h#Exception_handling

New comment by swdunlop in "1k hexagons show how global wealth is distributed"

swdunlop — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 16:08:53 +0000

The actual image is linked from https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/nud0y0/if_there_we... if you are frustrated with the tiny images in the Big Think article.

New comment by swdunlop in "Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it"

swdunlop — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 04:56:52 +0000

Same. I cancelled last week for one too many link-bait articles on the front page. After the usual page or two of pleas to stay, they let me go.

Programatically generate gorgeous social media images in Go

swdunlop — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 19:04:54 +0000

Article URL: https://pace.dev/blog/2020/03/02/dynamically-generate-social-images-in-golang-by-mat-ryer.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24812310

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by swdunlop in "If a MacBook Pro runs hot or shows high kernel CPU, try charging it on the right"

swdunlop — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 18:34:03 +0000

Goes further back than that. I used to refer to the Powerbook G4 as a liquid cooled laptop -- where the liquid was the user's circulation.

New comment by swdunlop in "As more of them die, grocery workers increasingly fear showing up at work"

swdunlop — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 18:28:41 +0000

This is also hitting meat processors very hard. Fabrication (the processing of slaughter to produce cuts of meat ready to ship) is human labor intensive and must be done in refrigerated spaces, so the work is elbow to elbow in many places because space is at a premium.