Hacker News: wallstop

New comment by wallstop in "Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc"

wallstop — Sun, 10 May 2026 02:44:03 +0000

Ah, yes, the "you're holding it wrong" defense. If one tool has a higher safety rating than another, significantly so, preventing entire classes of mistakes from happening that the other does not, in a kind of superset manner - even the most skilled craftsman will inevitably make mistakes that would have been prevented by the safer tool.

New comment by wallstop in "Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?"

wallstop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:57:02 +0000

Sorry, what I meant by "system error" was more "notification system error". Not error as in "data loss", error as in "reporting".

New comment by wallstop in "Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?"

wallstop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:10:24 +0000

Anecdata, they might have had a system error. My Microsoft account that I use the free tier OneDrive on had the same email sent (you're over x% full, consider upgrading!). I suspected everything you did - eventually I logged in after verifying the email - nope, 5% usage or so.

I then went and deleted more stuff, but my money would be on a reporting glitch than a malicious money campaign.

New comment by wallstop in "Taste in the age of AI and LLMs"

wallstop — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:48:23 +0000

I don't think you really need a tool for that, you can just add something like "after the task is finished, have a subagent review the work in an adversarial fashion. If any defects, no matter how small are found, have another subagent implement the findings. Repeat this in a loop until all subagents achieve consensus that the product is of exceptional quality with no defects" or similar to each prompt. Each subagent gets its own, fresh, context window. No tooling required.

New comment by wallstop in "Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?"

wallstop — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:11:19 +0000

I'm not saying the tech currently exists in a form you can just plop into a project and have it give you the exact CRT look and feel that you want. What I am saying is that you can do that within any modern game engine - you just have to decide what, exactly, the look and feel you want is and how to get there.

As an example, I will quote the article:

> Retro Game Engine owns the full frame lifecycle. I decide what the input signals are, what the display does with it, how time affects it, what gets presented and when.

You can replace "Retro Game Engine" in that sentence with "Unity" or "Godot" and it is just as true.

New comment by wallstop in "Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?"

wallstop — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:19:47 +0000

From my experience with game engines and people that really care about CRTs - I believe the effect (confidence: 95%) can be entirely achieved with rendering glue in any of the modern game engines - Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc. Now, whether or not it is a literal shader, or a shader + custom sauce, not sure.

However, I have not tried, so I cannot verify that claim to 100% accuracy. The author ...might have tried? They definitely surveyed the landscape. My read of the article was that they went down this rabbit hole and back-justified it instead of investing a similar amount of time in a practical solution in a modern engine.

CRT look and feel is a niche full of very passionate and opinionated people.

New comment by wallstop in "Computer run on human brain cells learned to play 'Doom'"

wallstop — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:20:16 +0000

This is cool. I took a look at the public GitHub (not too deep) and this appears to use classical neural network training techniques - there is an exposed API that the author came up with a clever way to encode Doom state and inputs into. Well done!

New comment by wallstop in "What I learned while trying to build a production-ready nearest neighbor system"

wallstop — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:31:44 +0000

Typically my criteria for "production-ready" is "has been battle-tested in production".

Without any production dog fooding, I consider software (that I write) as "alpha", "beta", or "preview".

New comment by wallstop in "Spinning around: Please don’t – Common problems with spin locks"

wallstop — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:04:54 +0000

I wrote my own spin lock library over a decade ago in order to learn about multi threading, concurrency, and how all this stuff works. I learned a lot!

New comment by wallstop in "Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server"

wallstop — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:44:24 +0000

Thanks! My other problem was formatting. Just wanted to share that I see 0 swap usage and nowhere near 100% memory usage as a counterpoint.

New comment by wallstop in "Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server"

wallstop — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 22:56:00 +0000

Edit:

    wallstop@fridge:~$ free -m
                   total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
    Mem:           15838        9627        3939          26        2637        6210
    Swap:           4095           0        4095


    wallstop@fridge:~$ uptime

    00:43:54 up 37 days, 23:24,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

New comment by wallstop in "How do I get into the game industry"

wallstop — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 19:33:26 +0000

> Clean code will slow you down

Hard disagree. In fact, learning how to apply clean code and architectural patterns in game dev has kept projects manageable and on track and done nothing but level up my general software ability.

New comment by wallstop in "That boolean should probably be something else"

wallstop — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 05:10:25 +0000

You can do the above in C#, I haven't written Java in a decade so can't comment on that. I don't really understand your argument though - the options approach is extremely readable. You can also do the options approach in C or C++. The amount of stuff that you can slap into one line is an interesting benchmark to use for languages.

New comment by wallstop in "VC-backed company just killed my EU trademark for a small OSS project"

wallstop — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 01:20:14 +0000

This is a philosophy, or "opinion", and should not be confused with truth. If the world was 100% evil people and beings, across all of history, forever, the present would look very different than it does now. And none of us know what the future holds.

New comment by wallstop in "If you're remote, ramble"

wallstop — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 14:12:37 +0000

Interesting. When I do not feel up to the task of working, whether it is a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or arbitrary cause, I use one of my provided PTO days and email the team a short "I will not be showing up to work today" message, without explaining the cause.

I similarly don't bat an eye when a coworker takes off for whatever reason. We're allotted PTO. Why jump through hoops to convince ourselves that it's ok to use it?

New comment by wallstop in "Filedb: Disk-based key-value store inspired by Bitcask"

wallstop — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 03:48:09 +0000

This looks interesting. Maybe I'm not in-the-know, but why would you offload such important aspects like `sync` to the client instead of building in some protocol to ensure that file integrity is maintained? With this kind of design choice, it seems quite easy to lose data, unless I'm missing something.

New comment by wallstop in "Go 1.21 may have a clear(x) builtin"

wallstop — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 23:10:56 +0000

For a game I'm making, I have a helper function that takes in a specified time (as a float) and returns a (heap based) wait instruction. The times are literals sprinkled throughout the code base of callers of this function, so I maintain a cache of time -> wait instruction to reduce allocations.

New comment by wallstop in "Memory usage of a toy C# server and client with 500K concurrent connections on"

wallstop — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 08:48:47 +0000

Does it? https://blog.stephencleary.com/2013/11/there-is-no-thread.ht...

New comment by wallstop in "Ant Colonies Retain Memories That Outlast the Lifespans of Individuals"

wallstop — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 23:30:30 +0000

Likewise Children of Time (https://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky/dp/1...), another piece of solid sci-fi that explores some ideas about the development of "intelligence".

New comment by wallstop in "The Future of Java SE [video]"

wallstop — Sun, 28 Oct 2018 16:51:21 +0000

Relevant - http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology