yosefk

Too cheap, charge 3x more at least

Certainly puts "good" into perspective

The Ukraine of China is more like it

Flush denormals to zero. Even their inventor had trouble writing correct code in their presence - see the Appendix to that "what every programmer should know..." paper

Indeed you're supposed to, but that way if someone calls exit(0), it looks like the program worked fine, when in fact they committed some debug code and made the program no longer run to completion. "Yay, done" was put in for the scripts to flag this sort of thing, presumably based on experience.

While we're at it, when did central banks start to buy lots of gold and under which POTUS? Could it have something to do with the freezing of hundreds of billions of some sovereign assets?

What produces this Iranian "mercy" at a time when Iran is extensively bombed, if not a combination of defensive and offensive capabilities providing escalation dominance?

The optimal age to have children is way before you need to rely on frozen eggs (one reason among many being that this process doesn't always work)

Coding is a solved problem. Problems with the code - these are far from solved, in fact they're multiplying, but coding is definitely solved

Seems like a case of snobbery on behalf of these people. These are nice images but not "high art" which I guess prompts some people to scoff at them

"Ironically, among the four stages, the compiler (translation to assembly) is the most approachable one for an AI to build. It is mostly about pattern matching and rule application: take C constructs and map them to assembly patterns.

The assembler is harder than it looks. It needs to know the exact binary encoding of every instruction for the target architecture. x86-64 alone has thousands of instruction variants with complex encoding rules (REX prefixes, ModR/M bytes, SIB bytes, displacement sizes). Getting even one bit wrong means the CPU will do something completely unexpected.

The linker is arguably the hardest. It has to handle relocations, symbol resolution across multiple object files, different section types, position-independent code, thread-local storage, dynamic linking and format-specific details of ELF binaries. The Linux kernel linker script alone is hundreds of lines of layout directives that the linker must get exactly right."

I worked on compilers, assemblers and linkers and this is almost exactly backwards

Thank you very much for your work. I think people envious of someone's compensation don't deserve a response

"Also, it [Claude Code] flickers" - it does, doesn't it? Why?.. Did it vibe code itself so badly that this is hopeless to fix?..

The list of the oil producers listed and omitted on a given forum in these contexts is always interesting. On HN it is often SA or Russia, and almost never Qatar or Iran.

How dare you question the rigor of the venerable LLM peer review process! These are some of the most esteemed LLMs we are talking about here.

std::move is definitely for there for optimizing application code and is often used there. another silly thing you often see is people allocating something with a big sizeof on the stack and then std::moving it to the heap, as if it saves the copying

TFA explains how std::move is tricky to use and this is not a feature reserved for library writers

You could say the same things about assemblers, compilers, garbage collection, higher level languages etc. In practice the effect has always been an increase in the height of a mountain of software that can be made before development grinds to a halt due to complexity. LLMs are no different

Rust HashSets are HashMaps with an empty type as the value type, but the compiler actually optimizes away the storage for the keys based on the type being empty. Go doesn't bother to either define a set type like most languages do, or to optimize the map implementation with an empty type as the value type

The Chinese are ahead at too many things at this point to think they're only good at copying

"Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly? One factor may be that the specialists who execute them lack the skill of classical artists, who had many years of training in a great tradition."

Has he ever met people doing this stuff?.. Why write about something you know so little about? Why do people think that they can talk about things without experience, based on abstract reasoning?

I am very impressed with the kind of things people pull out of Claude's жопа but can't see such opportunities in my own work. Is success mostly the result of it being able to test its output reliably, and of how easy it is to set up the environment for this testing?

"AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence."

I still can barely believe a human being could write this, though we have all read this sort of sentence countless times. Which "structure of power and violence" replicated itself into the brains of people, making them think like this? Everything "exists to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence" with these people, and they will not rest until there's anything left to attack and destroy

"Many—especially historically minded—developers complain that modern C++ compilers take longer to compile. But this criticism is short‑sighted. You cannot compare C++ compile times with compilation in other languages, because the compiler is doing something entirely different."

extern "C" functions + ctypes are a personal favorite - it's the least "type-rich" approach by far, and I prefer poverty to this sort of riches

The real problem is that the browser won't let you control the width of a tab without resizing the browser window, which is a bit fiddly, exposes stuff behind the window, and makes you resize the window again and again when moving between tabs.

If you could easily shrink a tab, I would prefer websites to not limit text width. Since you can't, I sorta prefer them to do it, though it's much worse than the user controlling it in a nice per tab way

What's the chemistry of life without water? Do you refer to the promising Russian studies of life sustained by alcohol?

The examples are from the latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Google AI Overview. I did not bother to list the full conversations because (A) LLMs are very verbose and (B) nothing ever reproduces, so in any case any failure is "abnormally bad." I guess dismissing failures and focusing on successes is a natural continuation of our industry's trend to ship software with bugs which allegedly don't matter because they're rare, except with "AI" the MTBF is orders of magnitude shorter

The post or rather the part you refer to is based on a simple experiment which I encourage you to repeat. (It is way likelier to reproduce in the short to medium run than the others.)

From your link: "...The first was gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct's ability to play chess at 1800 Elo"

These things don't play at 1800 ELO, though maybe someone measured this ELO without cheating but rather relying on some artifacts of how an engine told to play at a low rating does against an LLM (engines are weird when you ask them to play badly, as a rule); a good start to a decent measurement would be to try it on chess 960. These things do lose track of the pieces in 10 moves. (As do I absent a board to look at, but I understand enough to say "I can't play blindfold chess, let's set things up so I can look at the current position somehow")

Correct - as long as the tools the LLM uses are non-ML-based algorithms existing today, and it operates on a large code base with no programmers in the loop, I would be wrong. If the LLM uses a chess engine, then it does nothing on top of the engine; similarly if an LLM will use another system adding no value on top, I would not be wrong. If the LLM uses something based on a novel ML approach, I would not be wrong - it would be my "ML breakthrough" scenario. If the LLM uses classical algorithms or an ML algo known today and adds value on top of them and operates autonomously on a large code base - no programmer needed on the team - then I am wrong