knackers | 3 months ago | on: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
knackers's comments
knackers | 3 months ago | on: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
I've been experimenting with running Claude in headless mode + a continuous loop to decompile N64 functions and the results have been pretty incredible. (This is despite already using Claude in my decompilation workflow).
I hope that others find this similarly useful.
knackers | 4 months ago | on: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
Decompiling Snowboard Kids 2 for the Nintendo 64! https://github.com/cdlewis/snowboardkids2-decomp
The work is mysterious but important.
knackers | 2 years ago | on: Your backend should probably be a state machine
I found the contrast with workflow systems such as Cadence/Temporal really interesting. You can tell the author has felt the pain of managing real time distributed state machines.
knackers | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Any front end engineers transition to ML/AI engineering? What's it like?
I recently switched from frontend to a backend/ml role at a large tech company.
At a high level the work is pretty similar. Instead of working with design/product you work with data science/product. The conversations do tend to skew more technical. I remember we talked a lot of about user experience on my old team whereas now it's more about the stability of our services/pipelines and the maths behind the models and features.
One thing I'd call out is that, as an engineer, you're largely responsible for productionising what the data scientists come up with. There can be varying degrees of collaboration on the modelling depending on the team/project but at the end of the day you're there to make the thing work in the real world.
Compared to other engineering jobs, I think the work tends to be more experimental, i.e. can you quickly write code to test an idea.
If you're interested in trying it out, go for it. There's a tendency to silo engineers (backend, web, mobile, etc) but code is code and you can ramp on the concepts in a few months :)
On the other hand, if you're loving frontend there's nothing wrong with staying there. The depth is definitely there but you might need to change teams/companies to keep growing.
knackers | 6 years ago | on: Paul Graham's Keynote at Pycon 2003: The Hundred-Year Language
He mentioned lisp.
knackers | 7 years ago | on: I ported my Gameboy Color emulator to WebAssembly
Very cool. I suspect running on the main thread with requestAnimationFrame for rendering to the canvas would eliminate some of the performance issues without having to rely on postmessage.
knackers | 8 years ago | on: An attempt to upgrade to Webpack 4
Went through this exact process last week. Did they really need to remove CommonsChunkPlugin? Feels like breaking stuff for a slightly nicer API. If this were React we would've had a deprecation warning for a few versions.
knackers | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
Google Wave. RIP T_T
knackers | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Dealing with Failed Interview at Google and AWS?
This is the post I wish I'd made a year ago. Any advice for building back up again for a second attempt?
knackers | 11 years ago | on: HelloJS – Client-side OAuth for JS
Looks great. It's such a pain to write separate authentication / profile retrieval logic for each service.
knackers | 11 years ago | on: Why a Six-Figure Salary No Longer Means You’re Rich
Inflation.
knackers | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: How did you find Hacker News?
I think it was through Slashdot.
knackers | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: I've been making one HTML5 game per week. Here's my 10th game
Loved the 'artwork'. Simple but immediately familiar. Like some other commenters, I felt that sometimes my jumps weren't being registered.
knackers | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: Coderust – Prepare for Programming Interviews
To echo some earlier comments. As someone currently preparing for an interview, I would definitely like to see a web version.
knackers | 12 years ago | on: Firefox now only has one HTML parser
Thanks for the link unwind/paulrouget2.
I think it went a little over my head. What role does about:blank actually play? I'm assuming that the wild behaviour and parsing difficulty is the result of it performing some special function (beyond just returning a blank page).
knackers | 12 years ago | on: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
Yeh it's sandstone. Group of 8 is also sometimes used because ANU and Monash wanted to be included :P
knackers | 13 years ago | on: Software will not be patentable in New Zealand
It will be interesting to see what the practical effect of this is over the long term. The new SOP says that certain processes involving software will still be patentable, which seems remarkably similar to the Supreme Court's finding in Diehr.
knackers | 13 years ago | on: ArchiveTeam + Yahoo Messages Shuttering + EC2 Spot Instances = MegaCrawl
I was thinking the same thing whilst reading the article. There are surely people at Yahoo! who would gladly help if asked.
knackers | 13 years ago | on: Linux 3.8 Released
Agreed. Really looking forward to trying this on my Raspberry Pi.
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A matching decompilation of snowboard kids 2 for the n64. Why this game? Well it's awesome but also I wanted to work on a decomp project from scratch. I've written several blog posts about my experience for those interested. I hope to do more in the future, probably with less of an AI focus.
* Using Coding Agents to Decompile Nintendo 64 Games https://blog.chrislewis.au/using-coding-agents-to-decompile-...
* The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-unexpected-effectiveness-of-o...