Hacker News Reader

ajdoingnothingon Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine

I love your articles. Used some techniques almost 10 years ago for hobby projects. Box2D/3D would make physics synchronisation a lot easier.

ajdoingnothingon Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

Agreed. The "Apple Vision Pro" would have (rightfully so) never been released under Steve Jobs.

ajdoingnothingon The Manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra

Astronomy is not named "Telescope Science" though. ;-)

ajdoingnothingon Signal: Online MIDI Editor

Fantastic work!

ajdoingnothingon GPT-4o

If there was any glimmer of hope for "Rabbit M1" or "Humane AI pin", it can be buried to dust.

ajdoingnothingon Space shuttle Endeavour's giant orange external tank begins final journey

Yes! Win-win imho — the orange made it look much better along with the white SRBs, orbiter and a blue sky in the background.

ajdoingnothingon Sorry You Missed It – Inside Rockstar North Blog Shut Down

I recall in some interview that Rockstar never wants to show footage of the development process or have any "behind the scenes". Even video interviews at their office is rare (I know of only one). Their reason for it is that it would ruin the "magic" when you play the game. Especially back in the day, you'd pop in the DVD in the PS2, and you'd get to see Liberty/Vice city or San Andreas quickly (— no install required). You rarely see an interview of a producer/developer as well.

Honestly, for their current "modern" games, it is understandable. But almost 20 year old games? Come on.

ajdoingnothingon Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

GTA IV's tech was quite ahead of its time (2008), with the integration of Euphoria (which had to be integrated in-house by NaturalMotion engineers inside Rockstar's studio @ Edinburgh). The other comment correctly pointed out that NaturalMotion was acquired by Zynga, who in turn got acquired by Take-Two (parent of Rockstar Games).. So who knows, perhaps we'll still see an updated version in the sixth major instalment of the franchise.

ajdoingnothingon Clone-a-Lisa

You're a very creative & talented person!

ajdoingnothingon Java 21: What’s New?

I can't wait until major frameworks (such as Spring in version 6.1) support virtual threads. Reactive programming (e.g., Webflux) would become a niche (unless your use case truly requires streaming with a high number of TPS).

ajdoingnothingon Happy Teacher's Appreciation Week to All the CS Teachers

I have tremendous admiration for all teachers, especially computer science teachers who (presumably) could make more money working as engineers in the industry, but instead choose to educate others and help them chase their dreams. You are an inspiration and thank you!

Nice post – I'd like to echo those words. The (Assistant/Associate) Professors, lecturers and researchers @ research institutes I have seen could easily move to the industry and make plenty of money (whilst facing less politics and get more funding/time for their research), yet their love for teaching and inspiring students is admirably greater.

ajdoingnothingon Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

Completely agree. It reminds me of 'They Write the Right Stuff' (1996) [1], how a group of engineers developed the software for the Space Shuttle.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

ajdoingnothingon Babylon.js 6.0

Havok physics is certainly an interesting addition! Especially since Cannon.js & Oimo.js are not being maintained anymore. Ammo.js (port of Bullet) seems to have some updates here and there (IIRC, it was easier to setup using Babylon considering that it used a wrapper across all physics libraries).

Good to see that Babylon.js is doing well.

ajdoingnothingon Shane Pitman, leader of the warez group Razor 1911: life after prison (2005)

Ah, PARADOX. Nostalgia when hearing the Photoshop CS2 Keygen music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYvjFOKOP7c

ajdoingnothingon Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

Completely agree. Heck, even the current 'waiting list' page (bing.com/new) looks so outdated and a mess. I don't know whether it is the font, the colors, the composition or margins.. Bing itself looks like a mess too. Microsoft truly has no taste.

ajdoingnothingon Path to a free, self-taught education in Computer Science

> The quote 'computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes', comes to mind.

Astronomy isn't called "Telescope Science" though..

ajdoingnothingon Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

Perhaps, Google can finally start focusing again on creating quality products instead of nonsense videos/hypes like "Demonstrating Quantum Supremacy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNEzzDcllU).

However, would people even trust their new products knowing Google's tendency to kill off these products within a short amount of time?

ajdoingnothingon Infosys leaked FullAdminAccess AWS keys on PyPI for over a year

Jack of all trades, master of none. I don't think it's bad at all: at least you can specialise at something (quicker) whenever the need arises.

ajdoingnothingon Ask HN: What do you like to do while you wait?

You mean that I am playing against bots on lichess? Are there less bots on chess.com?

ajdoingnothingon Ask HN: What do you like to do while you wait?

Same here, but on lichess.org ;-)

ajdoingnothingon CD Projekt says Cyberpunk 2077 copy sales reach 20M

CD Projekt was considered a solid developer before Cyberpunk. However, Cyberpunk was (completely) broken during its initial release 2 years ago (and still is on some of the platforms). The industry is in shambles if this is what meets expectations.

ajdoingnothingon Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

I don't understand why Apple didn't build this functionality and enabled it by default. It's much easier dragging a window at any corner or side on a Linux/Windows OS.

ajdoingnothingon Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?

Fortunately, there is a newer edition ;) The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition: https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-journey-mastery-...

+1 on CI & automated tests BTW.

ajdoingnothingon Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

I am truly appalled by a response like this. Is this really the Namecheap CEO? I am sincerely glad I have never made use of your services (as a non-Russian, European citizen). By your logic, YOU should have acted against the (proxy) warfare the US is doing throughout the years.

ajdoingnothingon GTA 6 Confirmed

A major Grand Theft Auto release is these days rare (in fact, a new game from R* is rare). R* truly pushes the boundaries and gets the most out of the generation of console platforms it is running on. The incredible attention to detail is frankly astonishing if you compare it to other games. Each installment brings something new not only to the franchise, but also to gaming in general. E.g., GTA 4 brought Bullet physics with Euphoria's natural motion engine in action in 2008. The latter wasn't just a tool/library they can simply import into the engine: it had to be customized and blended into the game engine itself (engineers from the company behind Euphoria were brought in-house to integrate it). In addition, the amazing dynamic vehicle damage.. It was way ahead of its time [1]. AFAIK, they hire quite a lot of PhDs in comparison to other game companies, likely because they care about research/innovation, and (of course) can afford it too. Whenever you have time, have a look at one of their GDC talks [2] [3]. Even the in-house tooling is quite advanced.

[1] How vehicle damage was implemented (Erwin Coumans, creator of Bullet physics who also helped R* develop the physics of GTA, shared this email from R* North): https://pybullet.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=16852#p16...

[2] "The Sound of Grand Theft Auto V": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4GuM15QOFE&ab_channel=GDC

[3] "Environment Design as Spatial Cinematography: Theory and Practice": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L27Qb20AYmc&ab_channel=GDC

ajdoingnothingon Ask HN: Gmail account security

If there is one Google service I'd happily pay 10 bucks a month for (given that they would then provide proper support), it'd be gmail.... It'd be a nightmare for any gmail user when suddenly their account is blocked for no particular reason. This post is reminding me to look for alternatives.

ajdoingnothingon Prince of Persia in JavaScript

If you haven't seen Jordan Mechner talking about the development of Prince of Persia yet (definitely recommended): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54&ab_channel=ArsTe...

ajdoingnothingon Ask HN: Messed up my education, now 30 and regretting it. What to do?

> but then I look around and see the cool jobs in 3D graphics, in distributed systems, in machine learning, or other "hard computer science" fields, and it feels like I will never be qualified without a graduate degree.

I think you are being too hard on yourself. You can only become a specialist in one of these fields. Even if you were to dedicate your life on doing 3D graphics, you won't easily switch to a distributed systems or machine learning type of focus. Also, working on "hard" problems in these fields primarily happens in an industry/academic research type of job - these are really niche topics you have to throw your soul at to stay up to date/ahead in.

ajdoingnothingon Dataminers are finding developer comments and unlicensed songs in GTA Trilogy

This is really interesting. I remember that the GTA 5 build log file was leaked back in the day. It contained a lot of interesting information too (e.g., something along the lines of an "auto play bot" which failed at a certain mission). I'm looking forward to some summary of this soon in a blog/Youtube video :-). That being said, it's a shame T2/R* is taking down/suing mods for this type of bad port. Despite being way ahead of any other game company in terms of R&D and innovation, they sadly decided to outsource these "definitive"versions and pay little attention to QA. In any case, imho, the best way to play any of these original games is on a PS2 (probably even with a CRT TV) as that is the way the original developers really built it for.

ajdoingnothingon DuckDuckGo’s quest to prove online privacy is possible

I like to search in private windows, and Google harasses you everytime to accept their terms and conditions.

I use incognito too for almost everything. However, I thought that the terms & conditions popup was only a Youtube thing (it drives me insane too)... I guess they haven't rolled it out to everyone yet.