Hacker News Reader

hcson Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

> But what if you could push?

There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this for software, I don't know how well any of them work.

hcson Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

Or grade accounts by the logarithm of how many accounts were registered before them, like Slashdot. (This is tongue in cheek as I assume yours was.)

hcson IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL

> The "inability to act" which, as Forrester points out, "provided the incentive" to augment or replace the low-internal-speed human organizations with computers, might in some other historical situation have been an incentive for modifying the task to be accomplished, perhaps doing away with it altogether, or for restructuring the human organizations whose inherent limitations were, after all, seen as the root of the trouble. [...]

> Yes, the computer did arrive "just in time." But in time for what? In time to save--and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize--social and political structures that might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them.

- Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) pp 29-30

hcson IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL

I imagine it's a case where you hire a dozen or so test attendants.

hcson A Programmer's Loss of Identity

A Seymour

hcson 7zip.com Is Serving Malware

Maybe this is too obvious to say but it doesn't matter what they're selling the access for, it's the unwanted installation of the proxy that's malware. If you're buying access from a service that gets its residential network access that way you're contributing to the problem.

hcson You can't trust the internet anymore

Seems much more likely it's just going through a list of all games, collated from databases that humans have painstakingly curated.

hcson Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code

Do you need assistance?

hcson The largest number representable in 64 bits

Surely you've been on HN long enough to know people just read the headline. Not that it would stop all sniping, but that headline doesn't even include "program" (or "compute").

hcson Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

On Switch 2 there are also pure license dongles in the form of the Game-Key Card. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Game_Card#Game-Key_Ca...

hcson Efficient String Compression for Modern Database Systems

After decompression, with the performance characteristics you'd expect. If it has to come off disk it's still a win or at least usually breaks even in their measurements. https://cedardb.com/blog/string_compression/#query-runtime

The paper suggests that you could rework string matching to work on the compressed data but they haven't done it.

hcson Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'

Flips switch

How about now?

hcson EmuDevz: A game about developing emulators

Oh this looks right up my alley, I'll check it out on desktop.

Posted a few times previous, without discussion, though I'd missed it:

Show HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45524890

Links on author's site https://r-labs.io/#emudevz

hcson Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

Though it doesn't directly answer your question, isfdb.org is a great reference for publication history of SF: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?55700

hcson There's no single best way to store information

Related seriously: You can make it more likely to have long runs of the same letters, reversibly, with the Burrows-Wheeler Transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transf...

(No magic, though it still feels like it, BWT is most useful when there's repeated substrings.)

hcson AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

If you don't have a good drive and a clean disc you may get skipping/jitter and thus possibly never get a AR or CueTools DB match. (CTDB has parity records that can be used to repair some small errors.) This is the point of the elaborate re-read stuff Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia does. Though even with a good drive you ought to be using a tool that checks for C2 errors, and that won't necessarily catch everything; error correction and detection is always probabilistic.

Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.)

Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.

hcson Max Payne – two decades later – Graphics Critique (2021)

Speaking of Max Payne and graphics, there's an amusing hidden sketch with references to engine development in the game: https://youtu.be/Ca04hCF9FL4

hcson CD Extended Graphics

Thanks! I keep meaning to add a table of players to the page, here's what comes to mind.

Victor/JVC sold a few decoder/karaoke components (VS-G2, VS-G3), as in this '92 catalog: https://extended.graphics/images/Mezzo.1992.2-4.pg10.jpg

There was integrated support in a karaoke machine from Victor (KX-G1-H) and a CD player from Sony (CDP-K2EG, '94 catalog: https://extended.graphics/images/CDP-K2EG-94.2-full.jpg). There were varying levels of support on the NEC PC-FX and some CD-i systems (GoldStar in particular). I've also seen the logo on some LaserDisc players but never tested one.

The Sega Saturn is the best and easiest to find, though! As far as I know there hadn't been a commercial CD+EG disc released since 1992, and the Saturn was out in 1994, but I guess it was just a little extra BIOS code by then.

hcson CD Extended Graphics

A bit buried in this catalog is a link to a recording from a demonstration disc: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uoHQfNd8eb4

Also of hackerly interest, I have modified a CD Graphics decoder to handle CD-EG: https://github.com/hcs64/cdgraphics/tree/cd-eg , example: https://extended.graphics/VINY-1/

hcson Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

Neat idea, but it looks like the math doesn't really work out: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/66295/is-interstel...

Though it looks like these folks are thinking about blocking from near the star, which requires megastructures for anything detectable. I haven't done even back of the envelope calculations but I'd guess the limiting factor is you'd only be causing an eclipse/transit in an unusably narrow angle directly behind the craft. As you get closer the cone expands but the signal weakens.

hcson Why don't people return their shopping carts?

Popup blood donation sites are pretty common in the US, too, though run by orgs like the Red Cross. I've done it a few times, there's no payment involved besides some free snacks + drinks.

hcson A file format uncracked for 20 years

I saw the other when it was first posted so it must have made the front page (or second page)

hcson Why do we need dithering?

You still see dithering from time to time as a cheap transparency, it's been a few years since Mario Odyssey but that's when last I recall it really stood out: https://xcancel.com/chriswade__/status/924071608976924673

hcson Dillo, a multi-platform graphical web browser

I'm imagining a place for boarders to stay confrontationally

hcson Advent of Code 2025 will have 12 problems and no global leaderboard

Christmas comes early this year

hcson New Work by Gary Larson

Oh I get the Larson humor, I mean Physkal's comment and iancollmceachern's implication that a reference was missed by stickfigure

hcson New Work by Gary Larson

For the benefit of me 30 minutes ago baffled by the responses to this down thread, this is perhaps a r/BirdsArentReal thing? e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/BirdsArentReal/comments/1n1yr3d/wha...

hcson After 2 decades of tinkering, MAME cracks the Hyper Neo Geo 64

Not exactly a fork but there was a separate MESS, for a time, expanding the scope to non-arcade systems, until it was reenfolded.

hcson Why is Windows still tinkering with critical sections? – The Old New Thing

> there's two hard problems in computer science: we only have one joke and it's not funny.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42046226

hcson Linux for Nintendo 64 (1997)

I don't know what ever happened to Netscape's version, but various homebrew attempts have been made.

One Linux on N64 project was discussed here a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539319

There was a version of Mosaic in the SharkWire Online device, recently there have been some efforts to make that more usable without the SharkWire, though I don't think much is public yet, some discussion about the ROM here https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1i2odym/update_f...