HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

discoinverno

130 karma · joined January 29, 2024

Email: inverness[at]duck[dot]com
submissionscomments
discoinverno··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
I keep working on my command line game 'Rebels in the sky' (https://rebels.frittura.org)

The game is about spacepirates playing basketball, it's kinda a basketball manager game. It's played in your terminal and works with no internet.

You can try it via ssh at `ssh frittura.org -p 3788`

discoinverno··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
I love working on the terminal and this looks great, but can I ask why do you require to sign in? To be that's a bit of a downer :(
discoinverno··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
I am working for a while on a command line game about spacepirates playing basketball across the galaxy. The game is a basketball managerial game with some pirate-y stuff. It's a P2P game with no central server, built on top of libp2p.

It runs as a terminal application, meaning that you just need to run it from your terminal, but you can try the game over ssh without installing: `ssh frittura.org -p 3788`

downloads: https://rebels.frittura.org/ repo: https://github.com/ricott1/rebels-in-the-sky

discoinverno··on When 1+1+1 Equals 1
The piece is about something else, cases when 1 + 1 + 1 ≡ 1 but 1 + 1 != 0
discoinverno··on Ratatui – App Showcase
Ja, I know, it's a coin flip, sometimes it works :( I added a youtube link just below it, it's the demo
discoinverno··on Ratatui – App Showcase
Shameless plug of my TUI game, also built with Ratatui

https://github.com/ricott1/rebels-in-the-sky

discoinverno··on The last European train that travels by sea
My family is from Sicily, and I remember taking this train every year when I was a kid. After several years, I took it again last summer and was bufflled at how inefficient the whole ordeal was... Basically you have to wait for the train wagons to be detached and reassembled on the other side, you easily waste a couple hours.

Now, I don't really mind this, it's a bit of a tradition if you want, but I asked a relative of mine who used to work for the Italian national train company, and he told me that this train works like this cause in the past all the Sicilian migrants would travel with a lot of luggage, and it would be very impractical for them to transfer all of that twice. Nowadays this is not really the case anymore.

discoinverno··on Quadratic memory reductions for Zero-knowledge Proofs
The physics paper has been published on a predatory 'open-access' journal, where basically you can pay to publish whatever (ref: https://blog.cabells.com/2021/07/07/no-signs-of-slowing/, look for scirp).

I gave a diagonal reading, it uses the right jargon somehow. They add some new components to the Einstein-Hilbert action they say originate from quantum complexity contributions, to be honest seems completely random, but i'm not an expert. Especially the conclusions look like they have been written with AI.

The 10 citations are almost all self-citing: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2388097775195172652...

discoinverno··on Dead Stars Don’t Radiate
I agree with that comment. Experts can be wrong, of course, but the null hypothesis is that their opinion is 'more correct' than that of a science journalist.

As an aside, nobody really believed the earth was flat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth.

discoinverno··on DOOM CAPTCHA
I couldn't win without cheating ^:) It's crazy how ingrained in my memory is the code tho, could remember it automatically after maybe 25 years
discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
True, I can see your public key, username, and IP I guess. I only log the username and hash of the public key/password that I use for storing save files (the logs are for debugging, but I swear I don't sell them to google). You can see what I do in the source, of course you have to trust me on that :)
discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
I used the pixel planet generator to generate low resolution gifs, which I then combine together to get the galaxy gifs
discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
Thanks a lot, really appreciate it. Have you tried this link: https://streamable.com/huxiwr ?

I know VHS, only problem is that that demo is a bit involved to properly script it..

discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
Love FTL, would be sick to port it to terminal graphics
discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
You mean the song in the trailer? It's the japanese OST for Kenshiro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenshiro

The story is quite simple, I just loved the anime when I was a kid :)

The italian version is also incredible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPIcdhjPG5I

discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
Ahh nice to know! Never managed to test it
discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
My server can't handle all the traffic, guess it's an opportunity to show that the game doesn't need a central authority to keep working.

I created another relayer and ssh node on 85.214.130.204, you can either ssh to this machine `ssh 85.214.130.204 -p 3788` (but the relaying won't work as it tries to connect to the old server), or start your local client with the flag `rebels -i 85.214.130.204` to specify the alternative relayer node ip address.

discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
My server got hug'd to dead, probably the ssh server won't work now either :(

Hopefully this one works: https://streamable.com/huxiwr

discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
Thanks! I agree, I really need to write a wiki or something. The problem is that this game started as a basketball managerial game and then got completely derailed as I kept implementing whatever I thought was cool at the moment.

I think there are mainly 3 themes to play for:

- Basketball: assemble the best possible team. Basically try to acquire as much money as possible to hire the best free agents;

- Money: just try to get as rich as possible, using the market and in the future your asteroids;

- Space adventure: get the best possible spaceship (more options will be available in future releases) and have fun in the spaceshooter game you can access from your team pane (button 'Space adventure').

I tried to combine and summarize these 3 themes by having a reputation score assigned to your team, which can increase based on all 3 conditions. In the Swarm pane there is a Top Ranking window where the best crews are listed.

discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
Proudly built with Ratatui: https://github.com/ratatui/ratatui :)

The graphics themselves are basically handmade pixel-by-pixel, you can take a look in the assets folders to get an idea.

For example, pirate images are generated by combining the different parts and then applying a color mapping for the different skin tones.

Planet gifs are adapted starting from https://deep-fold.itch.io/pixel-planet-generator

discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
Weird, can you see it on the github page tho?
discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
In case the trailer link doesn't work, here's another: https://rebels.frittura.org/demo_v1.0.18.mp4
discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
At the beginning of the match, a match ID is created. Randomness is then seeded from this ID and every random event is determined consistently. If you want, a game could be completely simulated just based on the initial ID.
discoinverno··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
Thanks:)

Basically users can interact by playing basketball games against each other or by trading players. This sort of interactions are handled with something similar to a TCP handshake, since we must ensure that we end up with a consistent state at the end (e.g. players are traded consistently).

Because of this, it is not easy to have 'real-time' interactions: for example, when challenging each other, players only agree on the initial conditions of the game, which then is simulated independently (and deterministically) on both clients.

discoinverno··on Ask HN: Website with 6^16 subpages and 80k+ daily bots
Unrelated, but if I try to send you a message on https://cookie.engineer/contact.html it says "Could not send message, check ad-blocking extension", but I'm pretty sure I turned them off and it still doesn't work

Also, the best starter is charmender

discoinverno··on CRE vet says 30% of office buildings are 'basically worth nothing'
Can you elaborate on this?
discoinverno··on Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
I don't understand your point, I never said that "everything is a discrete multiple of this length, or that space is broken into units of it, or that objects have to be aligned on grid boundaries defined by it", I just wanted to mention that "continuity of spacetime is a convenient approximation" may be a correct sentence in the context of quantum gravity.

Also, for what is worth, in QM the space of wavefunctions can also be finite dimensional (for instance the Hilbert space of a spin 1/2 particle).

discoinverno··on Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
It is true that there is no experimental evidence, but I think there are some convincing arguments that something must happen at the Planck scale (for very short distances) in a full quantum-gravity theory.

Here are some quotes from "Covariant Loop Quantum Gravity", Rovelli and Vidotto (slightly redacted). I suggest the whole chapter 1, in particular 1.2 to get an idea of why fundamentally spacetime may be discrete.

"In general relativity, any form of energy E acts as a gravitational mass and distorts spacetime around itself. The distortion increases when energy is concentrated, to the point that a black hole forms when a mass M is concentrated in a sphere of radius R ∼ GM/c^2, where G is the Newton constant. If we take L arbitrary small, to get a sharper localization, the concentrated energy will grow to the point where R becomes larger than L. But in this case the region of size L that we wanted to mark will be hidden beyond a black hole horizon, and we lose localization. Therefore we can decrease L only up to a minimum value, which clearly is reached when the horizon radius reaches L, that is when R = L. Combining the relations above, [..] we find that it is not possible to localize anything with a precision better than the Planck length (~10^-35 m). Well above this length scale, we can treat spacetime as a smooth space. Below, it makes no sense to talk about distance. What happens at this scale is that the quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field, namely the metric, become wide, and spacetime can no longer be viewed as a smooth manifold: anything smaller than the Planck length is “hidden inside its own mini-black hole”."

"The existence of a minimal length scale gives quantum gravity universal character, analogous to special relativity and quantum mechanics: Special relativity can be seen as the discovery of the existence of a maximal local physical velocity, the speed of light c. Quantum mechanics can be interpreted as the discovery [..] that a compact region of phase space contains only a finite number of distinguishable quantum states, and therefore there is a minimal amount of information in the state of a system. Quantum gravity yields the discovery that there is a minimal length lo at the Planck scale. This leads to a fundamental finiteness and discreteness of the world."