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PetitPrince

Re:Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office on Monday October 26, 2026 @05:39AM (#50241292)
> (unbeknownst to us, he was emptying his bank account for it salaries instead of telling us months prior to start looking elsewhere).

This is sad and kinda foolish but it's refreshing to hear money going in this direction instead of the other. I hope this CEO has a good life at least.

Re:EA is shutting down BioWare on Thursday October 22, 2026 @01:51AM (#50191654)
I'm pouring one out for the developers of Neverwinter Nights, one of the most defining moment of my childhood / teenage years. Its toolset was surprisingly approachable and you could make complex adventures with relative ease (tons of wizards - the assistant kind) ; one of the most acclaimed player created adventure series (The Bustard of Kosigan) was created by a high school history teacher. It had a c inspired scripting language powering it, and player did jerry-rig small MMO ("persistent world" is the correct term) out of it.
Re:Way to Play Super Mario 64: On Apple Vision Pro on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @08:25AM (#50179741)
Diorama-style VR works very well to reduce or even eliminate kinetosis (motion sickness) for games. I've seen this in Moss and Moss 2 and it works very well.

Too bad many blockbuster games nowadays have a camera-over-the-shoulder approach rather and focus on aiming on stuff rather than fixed camera (understandable since so many of them are open world); this would have given a nice accessibility option for fan-made mods. That said, for character action game with melee combat (the likes of Devil May Cry, Elden Ring, etc), maybe a god-game view centered on the character with a limited field of view could work ?

Re:Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:16AM (#50016266)
> Windows still supports Shift+Delete for cut, Ctrl+Insert for copy, and Shift+Insert for paste. I am not sure how many people use these.

Shift inset is handy when ssh-ing intobabtemoyr machine with Python windows.

Developed by Ready at Dawn, who later made the interact movie The Order 1886 (not very well received), then made acclaimed VR games (Lone Echo, Lone Arena) while being acquired by Facebook, and then shut down because there's not enough money to be made in VR.
Re:The art of defusing a second world war bomb on Thursday October 08, 2026 @03:16AM (#50002741)
I wonder how F up Ukraine is going to be in the future. I know that the thousands of kilometers of drone fiber wire is probably going to be a problem, but are there other horrible things to be wary of? (mine I assume?)
Re:Living off-grid: Hundred Rabbits on Thursday October 08, 2026 @02:08AM (#50002297)
Yes: They met in Japan, lived there some year, and they named their boat after an anime character.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer.

Console are also single (or lately dual) target so it's theorically easier to debug and optimize compared to PC.

Re:StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta on Thursday October 01, 2026 @08:30AM (#49920774)
If you go to the OSM website, you can sort of get list of all your modification by date in your profile: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/YOUR_USERNAME
Re:StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta on Thursday October 01, 2026 @07:22AM (#49920275)
StreetComplete is regularly cited whenever OpenStreetMap is mentioned on HN, and with excellent reason (this is a really good introduction to mapping with OSM). Congratulations to the team for the beta!
Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Friday September 25, 2026 @02:32AM (#49840891)
"Stop and go drains the battery faster": my understanding is that it's not the case. You recover a good chunk of the energy with regen braking, and EV motor are more efficient at low speed (hyper miling drivers are driving slow).
Re:Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock on Thursday September 24, 2026 @03:48AM (#49827550)
Article says it's a 1877 building. Maybe at the time they rely more on eyeballing with ample safety margins rather than precise calculation ?
Re:The "Windows XP Box" (2003) on Thursday September 24, 2026 @03:26AM (#49827408)
I wish I could go back in time and tell them what we can do with nowadays tech (well, more like 2020-2022 given the rampocalypse).
Yes, and you typically don't have to charge your battery at 100%. More likely you top up whatever you consume for your daily commute.
Re:Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf] on Monday September 21, 2026 @02:54AM (#49783877)
Looks like Tom Schafer style; I find him whimsical and funny in all of his communication. I don't think it's a stretch that this aspect extends to nom-public communications.
> The Web thing which lets you drag a country or economy over any other and see how Mercator stuffs up their relative sizes is brilliant for getting a sense why people want this.

It's called "The True Size Of..." https://thetruesize.com

And indeed it's a brilliant tool.

My youtube feed gets a decent amount of recommendation from channels such as Mossy Earth, Plant Wild, etc. that showcase some nature restauration project. While I cannot help myself to be a bit skeptical of those efforts (how really sustainable is all of this; isn't that just a tiny drop in the ocean, etc.), I really like to have positive and hopeful news like the one of this article amidst all the ambient negativity and pessimism.
Re:Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets on Thursday September 03, 2026 @07:00AM (#49548450)
It will probably never happen, but maybe it's a way to facilitate the creation of traffic calming infrastructures (chicane, bump)? There's not better way to reduce the average speed than being forced to pay attention to not ruin your car (see the sibling comment with a picture of a narrow Japanese road)
Re:Movie Scene Map – 13,312 films, series, games, anime and manga on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @03:15AM (#49532833)
Neat !

It would be interesting to have some filters; I'm mainly interested in genre (more romance is Paris ? more fantasy in Iceland ?), box office earnings (are all blockbusters in Hollywood / Vancouver ?) and review.

Re:Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card on Friday August 28, 2026 @04:26AM (#49475918)
I don't think it's fair to conflagrate "Europe" as a single entity. From what I'm reading and my distant recollection:

- In London you top up your Oyster card and pay a fare according to the zone your travelling to. Metro is gated.

- In Paris your load up tickets in your Navigo pass and pay a flat rate every time you take the metro or RER. It's also gated.

- In most (all ?) Swiss cities you don't have any card to charge and have to get a ticket for every travel (like in London your fare amount depends is zone dependent); however there's an app that let you get your location at the start of your travel and end of your travel and automatically charges you the correct fare. There are no gates.

Re:Flat Chair by Sara Paculdo on Friday August 21, 2026 @07:27AM (#49386517)
Since they rely on curves for the sitting surface, they should have done a proper saddle chair shape instead. The current design prioritize the manufacturer/corporation over the user/human. This is a failure on my book.
The actual game is playable in uour browser on archive.org https://archive.org/details/TETRIS_201612

It's not an old version of Tetris, so many of the niceties of modern Tetris are absents. Up to rotate irks me (because it's well accepted that being able to rotate a piece both clockwise and counterclockwise is beneficial).

Re:Where Human Sleep Went Wrong on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @08:32AM (#49360690)
I think you're correct, but only if you add "for a given environment". It's good to develop the ability to store super efficiently fat when you're a Pacific Islander and food is scarce, but this advantageous trait becomes a liability with modern and plentiful (junk) food.

see thrify gene hypothesis; I know it's not a good explanatory theory but it's a good illustration of my point

Re:Where Human Sleep Went Wrong on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @08:16AM (#49360502)
Antibiotic resistance happens all the time (at least in our artificial world) and it's a life or death situation for the bacteria.

But you were probably asking for multicellular eukaryote organism; you may be interested in the concept of saltation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltation_(biology) . Behind the concept of the thing itself it's interesting to think about the mechanism behind it. Regular evolution is gradual (point mutation leads to a maybe slightly different protein, which has only a relatively small scale effect but you gain or lose function over many generation), but for a saltatory evolution you most probably need radical changes in the DNA, like duplication (of a single gene, multiple gene or whole chromosome), horizontal exchanges, etc.

It's possible in plant but in animal more often than not it's not beneficial at all to have such event. Famously if you have an extra chromosome nr. 21 you get Down syndrome.

Re:Low-Tech Ceramic Water Filter on Monday August 17, 2026 @02:28AM (#49327144)
Are microplastic produced predominantly by plastic leaching out of objects, or is it coming from garbage that got mechanically pulverized, UVized, and contaminating water sources ?
Re:Why Tiny JPEGs Look Different in Chrome on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @10:46AM (#49273222)
So is Firefox doing a full rendering then scaling, or is it also doing a partial rendering but in another way? You're only telling one side of the story.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a very solid metroidvania that nails the cultural aspect. There's even a well produced farsi dub!
Re:Making difficulty curves in games on Sunday August 09, 2026 @03:13AM (#49229138)
Resident Evil 4 famously had a hidden dynamic difficulty setting that made the game easier if the player struggled. I think it worked because RE4 is a linear / ambiance based game. The game designer wants the player to progress in the story, and getting stuck on an impossible doesn't make sense except if the player chose a challenge mode. Contrast with Morrowing where it makes no sense having common bandit on the road carrying god-like equipment.
Re:Godox Transparent Viewfinder Camera C100 on Thursday August 06, 2026 @03:56AM (#49193811)
Indeed, my autocorrect and lack of rereading is to blame.
Re:Godox Transparent Viewfinder Camera C100 on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @08:11AM (#49181713)
Its cheating because you don't have to think about focusing your lens. At f/8 you have a reasonable hyper-local distance, and so for instance everything from 2m to infinity is sufficiently sharp.

This kind of advice was given before the advent of good enough autofocus where indeed you've rely on the machine to focus your imagine. But at the same time you delegate the choice of the subject to the machine instead of spontaneously capturing "everything".

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