Hacker News: z500

New comment by z500 in "Programming language file extensions that match ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes"

z500 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:32:02 +0000

On the flip side, .hpp always makes me chuckle. What is that, Header++?

New comment by z500 in "Why is programming so captivating, yet so agonizing?"

z500 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:52:22 +0000

I've never really been a math person, either, which is why I thought I was going to hate discrete math in college. I mean, it wasn't always the easiest thing ever, but it was a lot more intuitive to me than continuous math. And that's all programming is, materialized discrete math.

New comment by z500 in "Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them"

z500 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:09:19 +0000

And the SD card logo was originally intended for Super Density Disc

New comment by z500 in "Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source"

z500 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:12:58 +0000

I was one of these hapless Comic Chat users. Luckily someone gently nudged me toward a real IRC client lol. I was an absolute IRC fiend for years after that.

New comment by z500 in "Almost all coders at Id Software have been fired, following Xbox reset"

z500 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:12:48 +0000

That's odd, it always worked fine for me. I have had that issue with archive.today, though.

New comment by z500 in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

z500 — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:13:15 +0000

I'm confused. Aren't these supposed to be photos, or are we expected to be agog with 3D renderings?

New comment by z500 in "Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down"

z500 — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:02:28 +0000

Loads for me, but not particularly quickly

New comment by z500 in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

z500 — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:10:45 +0000

That makes sense. The part where my program really benefits is in a bottleneck area that you always have to go through and where you visit every code path in it.

New comment by z500 in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

z500 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:32:37 +0000

It's .NET 10 lol. It's not so slow you can't write stuff for it, I have implementations of Conway's game of life, Huffman compression, and a minimal TUI. The main problem is doing almost anything in it involves a method lookup. And there are almost certainly places I could have done things more smartly.

One thing I do want to try out is publishing it with native AOT. I had a lot of luck with that on one of my other F# projects, I got like a 75% speedup out of it. I understand the JIT is supposed to outperform native AOT in the long term but I haven't seen it reach that speed.

New comment by z500 in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

z500 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:58:41 +0000

That's so cool! I love F#, but I wrote a little Smalltalk interpreter in it and I can confirm it isn't exactly a speed demon for that kind of thing if you use it as intended lol

New comment by z500 in "nowhere: an entire website encoded in a URL"

z500 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:09:31 +0000

Actually they do have one, but it's an older beta format that isn't supported anymore.

New comment by z500 in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

z500 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:03:25 +0000

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

New comment by z500 in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

z500 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:24:07 +0000

That was what I guessed too, but according to the article Intel detected both.

New comment by z500 in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

z500 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:59:51 +0000

Thank you for injecting some perspective into the thread of AI hysteria. I feel like everyone is imagining a bug in a CRUD app.

New comment by z500 in "Fuck the cloud (2009)"

z500 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:44:04 +0000

This is pre-virtualization, so it's not the cloud either

New comment by z500 in "We May Be Living Through the Most Consequential Hundred Days in Cyber History"

z500 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:08:14 +0000

At least we hardly ever have to hear anyone say "cyberspace" anymore

New comment by z500 in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

z500 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:47:01 +0000

This might be controversial, but smelling either in public makes me happy! Now the stale smell of tobacco-infused clothing, that is awful.

New comment by z500 in "Programming Used to Be Free"

z500 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:38:12 +0000

If I remember correctly, it even came with a utility to remove line numbers for you

New comment by z500 in "Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings"

z500 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:44:00 +0000

It doesn't take an AI to demand graph go up

New comment by z500 in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

z500 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:33:42 +0000

Oh I've actually been meaning to get around to reading that first one. I'll have to crack that open.