Hacker News: tikotus

New comment by tikotus in "Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions"

tikotus — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:24:21 +0000

Apple Maps got really good at some point! I once pick it by accident for navigation, and never went back to Google Maps.

New comment by tikotus in "We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer"

tikotus — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:52:07 +0000

I had the same knee-jerk reaction. "Did I read that correctly?"

But yeah, I guess it can be used to increase certain aspects of quality by letting them go wild. But I think I mostly hear about security or crash issues. In my experience they don't outweigh the number of other issues they cause. Like UI bugs. I've seen more than one service constantly rolling out features that are completely broken, just to have a completely new, still broken, solution available the next day.

New comment by tikotus in "A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review"

tikotus — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:52:22 +0000

Better prompting doesn't improve response time or price!

New comment by tikotus in "Design is compromise"

tikotus — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:54:31 +0000

Compromise is the last tool in the designer's toolbox. Before settling with a compromise, the designer should relentlessly try to narrow down what the problem being solved is, while trying out all possibilities, until it looks like there is no solution that matches exactly the problem (or they run out of time).

More often than not, a compromise means that the problem wasn't scoped out well enough, and it ends up partially solving a problem that didn't need solving.

Edit: I do think it's about trade-offs though. Choosing to solve one problem, acknowledging another problem will be disregarded.

New comment by tikotus in "Lessons from the Vasa Shipwreck"

tikotus — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:07:07 +0000

Finnish technology students played an elaborate prank when the ship was being lifted. Just before the event, a group dived down to the ship and planted a statue of Paavo Nurmi, also known as "The Flying Finn", on the deck. When the ship was finally lifted, the legendary Finnish runner was one of the first things they discovered. This played well with the friendly rivalry between the neighbours, though the Swedes did not appreciate it as much.

https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa-jäynä

New comment by tikotus in "Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine"

tikotus — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 20:46:57 +0000

I don't know enough to give an answer. But I also wonder if Unity, using Box2D to empower games generating billions, paid him anything.

New comment by tikotus in "Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine"

tikotus — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:19:46 +0000

I used to work at Rovio (the creator of Angry Birds). Everyone was telling the story of a talk given by Peter Vesterbacka, the head of marketing. When it was time for questions, a man from the audience asked what physics engine the game uses. Vesterbacka gives the correct answer, Box2D, to which the person replied with another question. "Why isn't it mentioned in the credits? And by the way, I'm Erin Catto, the creator of Box2D." To this Vesterbacka replied "Come talk to me after the show". Maybe that's when Erin was given the hoodie? Also, his name was soon added to the credits.

But one thing amazed us all. It was impressive that the marketing guy knew which physics engine was used!

New comment by tikotus in "Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine"

tikotus — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:03:08 +0000

Ah, found more: https://box2d.org/documentation3d/md_simulation.html#autotoc... "Box3D is designed to be deterministic across thread counts and platforms."

This is absolutely fantastic!

New comment by tikotus in "Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine"

tikotus — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:56:44 +0000

I was looking for the same thing. There is a replay mechanism, so it seems to be deterministic. But with floating point physics, not across platforms. Though -ffast-math is unsupported according to the documentation, so maybe it is intended to be deterministic across platforms? https://box2d.org/documentation3d/recording.html

EDIT: Clarified meaning about ffast-math

New comment by tikotus in "Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine"

tikotus — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:48:00 +0000

Oh, nice! What a wonderful surprise!

Very easy to build, and quite small. A release build of the library is 916K (on macos at least). I have a game engine that compiles to WASM for web, and having 3D physics has been a challenge. 3D physics libraries tend to be large and hard to compile. I didn't try yet, but compiling this into a WASM library with emscripten should be easy, and it's likely small enough to be justifiable for a simple web game.

New comment by tikotus in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

tikotus — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:00:43 +0000

Germany is not EU though. Very different bureaucracy in different EU countries. Up to a point, EU doesn't add a single bit of bureaucracy to the stack. Only once you reach a certain limit you will have to enroll in an international VAT system, which is not too bad.

EDIT: Just re-read your message. I thought it said EU. But the point stands, Germany is not Europe either.

New comment by tikotus in "Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28"

tikotus — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:59:40 +0000

What about the case of just needing one, not a collection? And when a function receives a Point, how does it know if it's a value or a reference?

New comment by tikotus in "Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability"

tikotus — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:19:15 +0000

Indeed. But luckily those who mostly want per commit versioning are coders, and they are technical enough to find a solution for this. Like perforce git interface.

New comment by tikotus in "Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability"

tikotus — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 06:31:25 +0000

I like putting it like this: VCS can be centralized or decentralized, and it can version per file or per commit. For games you want centralized per file versioning, like Perforce. Git is decentralized per commit versioning.

New comment by tikotus in "Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin bypasses, Edge, Opera to follow"

tikotus — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:52:35 +0000

Meta's ad manager breaks maybe once a year on Safari, so I have to boot up Chrome. Also recently there's been an odd bug on more than one sites (at least Zoho mail and, again, Meta) where the top 20 or so pixels are hidden behind the tab bar. Again works in Chrome. But mostly Safari has been fine.

New comment by tikotus in "What color is your function? (2015)"

tikotus — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:36:44 +0000

C# (and F# before it) got it (mostly) right. JS did a shallow copy of it, messing up some details, making it harder to use for certain things.

New comment by tikotus in "PHP's Oddities"

tikotus — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:17:26 +0000

I hadn't done any PHP in almost 20 years, not since my studies when LAMP was still the way to go. But recently I had a reason to create a dynamic web page (not what I usually do) and went with PHP. Haven't regretted it.

I haven't run into any of the quirks. I keep things simple, and it just works. The only problem I ran into was the realization that PHP is the wrong tool for long running tasks. After some rogue requests/users running my whole service to ground, I had to move the long running endpoints to node.

New comment by tikotus in "Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder)"

tikotus — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:31:30 +0000

Async stuff, vector math (vector value type) and special let-style forms for pushing/popping render states. For example, if I want a drop shadow, I can do (vfx/drop-shadow [settings] ...) and a drop shadow effect will be applied to what is rendered within that scope. Also GC that works well with game style allocations where most of the allocations are dropped every frame.

New comment by tikotus in "Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder)"

tikotus — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:59:00 +0000

I've also made my own language for making games. It's a scheme with some tricks to make some gamdev specific aspects much nicer. Making it work was indeed not that hard, but making it good has taken its toll. Really happy with it currently!

New comment by tikotus in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

tikotus — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:02:17 +0000

This does not sound like any of the several vegetarians I know. Is it a cultural difference?