Hacker News Reader

wheybagson San Francisco Onion Futures Company

Someone at the onion needs to see this.

wheybagson How bicycle coaster brakes work (2018)

They forgot the biggest downside: when you REALLY need to stop RIGHT NOW, you're not thinking about what kind of brakes you have. You're running on instinct, and that instinct probably says "do a grabby motion with your hands", but that doesn't work, and you don't brake on time.

Source: I have a bike with one coaster brake and one normal one. Have never intentionally used the coaster brake, have used it unintentionally many times.

wheybagson Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

I have a post-edit hook that asks the model if this edit introduced any comments, and if it did, remove them. This was the only reliable way to get it to stop that I found.

wheybagson The User Is Visibly Frustrated

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

1000 years red-washing.

wheybagson Microsoft open-sources "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date"

Humbrechthof, Mainz, Germany ofc.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humbrechthof)

wheybagson Claude may require identity verification in some cases

Basically the only relevant question, and it's the one they didn't answer

wheybagson C# in Unity 2026: Writing more modern code

Something I've noticed about software dev vs game design: software is better (easier to read, understand, maintain, etc) when you have clean, separated modules. Game design is better (more fun) when everything is connected (eg in an fps, everything relates to gunplay, damage systems, environmental destruction, in a building game, everything relates to building, the building ui, inventory, resources etc). I think this mismatch shows up in game code.

Combine that with actual hard performance constraints, and if you're a "normal" software dev casually browsing some game code, it can be shocking (eg Celeste movement code: https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste/blob/master/Source/Player/...).

wheybagson Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)

That thing looks like giant pillbox bunker.

wheybagson Git's Magic Files

Yeah, also that's probably not the kind of error a human writing this post would make... I stopped reading at that point

wheybagson It's all a blur

I'm not super familiar with the jpeg format, but iirc h.264 uses 16x16 blocks, so if jpeg is the same then padding of 16px on all sides would presumably block all possible information leakage?

Except the size of the blocked section ofc. E.g If you know it's a person's name, from a fixed list of people, well "Huckleberry" and "Tom" are very different lengths.

wheybagson The Little Bool of Doom (2025)

I know this is likely to be an unpopular take but: I wish it was normal to ship your compiler in your source repo.

Modern compilers are bloated as hell huge things which makes it a bit impractical, but if it was a normal thing to do then we'd probably have optimized the binary sizes somewhat.

I just really like the idea of including _everything_ you need for the project. Also ensures that weird problems like this dont happen. As an extra benefit, if you included the compiler source and a bootstrapping path instead of just the latest binary, then you could easily include project specific compiler / language extensions with no extra effort.

wheybagson A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words

As someone who recently built a daily word game[1], I 100% get it. I can say from first hand experience: there's an awful lot of words that are totally valid but not fun.

I spent approximately as much time on building the word list as I did developing the game. The author's technique of just grabbing a word list and spellchecking it is completely not sufficient, you will get so many weird unfamiliar words in there. In the end I was able to whittle down my list to about 24,000 using various automatic methods, but from that point I just had to do a manual review on the remaining list, which meant I got to see a lot of words, and many of them felt very obscure and/or not fun.

1: shameless plug: https://wheybags.com/turntiles

wheybagson Building Your Own Efficient uint128 in C++

> though he incorrectly states that `uint64_t` is `unsigned long`

It probably is, he's just probably using MacOS, where both long and long long are 64 bit. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

(that's the best linkable reference I could find, unfortunately).

I've run into a similar problem where an overload resolution for uint64_t was not being used when calling with a size_t because one was unsigned long and the other was unsigned long long, which are both 64 bit uints, but according to the compiler, they're different types.

This was a while ago so the details may be off, but the silly shape of the issue is correct.

wheybagson Show HN posts p/month more than doubled in the last year

Would be nice to see some qualitative analyis to know if it's just slop, or actually more interesting projects. Not sure how to do that though. I think just looking at votes wouldn't work. I would guess more posts causes lower average visibility per post which should cause upvotes to slump naturally regardless of quality.

Edit: maybe you could:

- remove outliers (anything that made the front page)

- normalise vote count by expected time in the first 20 posts of shownew, based on the posting rate at the time

wheybagson Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://wheybags.com/blog

Most interesting post is probably https://wheybags.com/blog/emperor.html

wheybagson Turntiles, an NYT style word game I made for my parents

Hello, author here. Can you specify a bit more about what you found confusing? Maybe I can improve the initial instructions.

wheybagson Looking for Decent Conversation?

My first php script was a file upload server for a lan party. Luckily nobody tried to upload a file named ../index.php, because I realized afterwards that it would have worked :p

wheybagson How well do you know C++ auto type deduction?

Romanes eunt domus

wheybagson How well do you know C++ auto type deduction?

And I see this argument often. People make too much fuss about the massive error messages. Just ignore everything but the first 10 lines and 99.9% of the time, the issue is obvious. People really exaggerate the amout of time and effort you spend dealing with these error messages. They look dramatic so they're very memeable, but it's really not a big deal. The percentage of hours I've spent deciphering difficult cpp error messages in my career is a rounding error.

wheybagson How well do you know C++ auto type deduction?

v is double& in your example, not double. But it's not obvious that omitting the & causes a copy. If you see "for (auto v : vec)" looks good right? But if vec contains eg long strings, you've now murdered your perf because you're copying them out of the array instead of grabbing refs. Yes, you could make the same mistake without auto, but it's easier to notice. It's easy to forget (or not notice) that auto will not resolve to a reference in this case, because using a reference is "obviously what I want here", and the name of the feature is "auto" after all - "surely it will figure it out, right?"

wheybagson Cloudflare error page generator

What is this for? I feel like that is missing from the faq. I would say it's a joke, but it looks too serious for that.

wheybagson Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

IMO the biggest barrier is internal mobility. The European silicon valley never happened, because people don't want to move around. The biggest single barrier is language. I'm Irish, and young Irish people often emigrate (way more than in other countries). When I look at where my college classmates ended up, it's mostly America or the UK. We also emigrate a lot to Australia and New Zealand. In other words, we only really emigrate to English speaking countries.

Almost nobody goes to France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc. The mainstays of the European economy. Let alone central or eastern Europe. But if you're a young talented engineer in the middle of nowhere usa, you can just easily move to the bay area without any issue. That cultural unity IMO is America's biggest strength, and the lack of it is Europe's biggest weakness.

Note: I've lived in Ireland, the Czech Republic, and France, so I know first hand how hard it is to move inside Europe, and I understand why people don't do it.

wheybagson Building a Simple Search Engine That Works

I checked the about page on 4get.bloat.cat, and within the first paragraph of the "what is this" section, it used the phrase "globohomo bullshit". I dont think these are people I want to support.

wheybagson Winamp clone in Swift for macOS

Of course they mean OS/X Warp, the Apple x IBM OS collaboration the world forgot.

wheybagson Android developer verification: Early access starts

"We have realised that boiling the frog this fast will result in it jumping out of the water. Therefore we have slowed down, but remain steadfastly devoted to seeing this frog boiled"

wheybagson I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

100% true, I've hit the front page of hn on a server with an old i5 (aka consumer hardware, and not even high end) with no cloudflare or similar caching, and had no problems. Computers are fast, and serving static html over https is a solved problem.

wheybagson I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

https://www.seagate.com/products/enterprise-drives/exos/exos...

wheybagson The government ate my name

There was a hilarious one in Ireland where we were desperatly searching for a prolific polish criminal named "Prawo Jazdy". Which means... driving license.

https://www.joe.ie/news/garda-spent-two-years-searching-for-...

wheybagson IRonCub: A Humanoid Robot Designed to Fly Like Iron Man

https://gravity.co/ is a similar project that seems to be much more advanced, and also attaches to a real human body, rather than a nightmare doll head

wheybagson Show HN: Autism Simulator

Pay attention to people and try to be empathetic. Do this to everyone, not just those you suspect of being autistic. That's all anyone can ask of you, and it works. Autistic people aren't aliens - if you engage empathetically they will respond positively, like any other person.