HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Conscat

1,031 karma · joined November 5, 2022

I'm a Silicon Valley girlie into C++ metaprogramming and close-to-metal software. :3 Dabbling in computer graphics and nightly Clang from time to time.
submissionscomments
Conscat··on Ask HN: Why don't we bring back old school OkCupid?
There exist hundreds of fly by night matchmaking apps, but most people can only name about half a dozen off hand.
Conscat··on Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions
I don't remember a map from the movie so I didn't know what to expect. Instantly I love this. I actually wish I could have this rather than street view in Google Maps.
Conscat··on Mojo is now open source
Senior is the last word in use to describe myself as a developer, personally, and I think it's hard to overstate the current economical significance of this software niche. Granted that it IS a niche and nobody would recommend Mojo for, say, kernels in video games or art editors.
Conscat··on Mojo is now open source
In the category of AI/HPC software Mojo aims to displace (which is my industry), I don't know many people who care that much about running Windows. The software I work on may only run as a Docker image or directly in a Linux/WSL. Mojo is hardly the only tool in the space (currently) lacking Windows support.
Conscat··on To save C, we must save ABI (2022)
You can implement it with templates and people do things like this often. In modern C++, it's even pretty easy to make this type of trick support `constexpr`.
Conscat··on Show HN: Git-knife – Edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet
I thought it was a semi-transparent window until I read this. The curvature makes that clear, wow!
Conscat··on Mojo 1.0
It's not true that Nvidia doesn't care about CUDA backwards compatibility. The invention of TileIR was motivated entirely by that problem. GPU architectures are supported by the full tool suites for at least 10 years by CUDA (that's longer than they are for graphics).

Nvidia is also a major contributor to MLIR, which they use for TileIR and ClangIR, so should a compatibility break occur it wouldn't be entirely up to Mojo to fix it.

Conscat··on Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library
I don't think someone mentioned yet, but the (now defunct?) company Outrun Labs built a product Revery which seems almost exactly like what Jane Street has done (to my amateur eyes). OniVim was their only end user product afaik, built on this tech.
Conscat··on Hard Road – A beautiful procedural post-apocalyptic game
I was able to upload hacky unpolished amateur game demos long before LLMs existed.
Conscat··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
Clang pointer authentication makes any type of vtable attack impossible in C++.
Conscat··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
According to Apple, are there any tech companies in the galaxy who haven't stolen their trade secrets?
Conscat··on For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
It would only be effective if the significance of this work is clear. They certainly felt this message needed to reach people, and that it did work makes it self evident they were probably right.
Conscat··on How H-E-B became Texas' most beloved brand (2024)
Personally I hated Publix when I lived in Florida and it made me homesick. I've never had so much food come with mold in the packaging than from Publix.
Conscat··on How H-E-B became Texas' most beloved brand (2024)
As much as I loved growing up with HEB, my fondest memories are of eating Central Market squid salad and brie in its playground/music venue backyard.
Conscat··on I built a GPU back end for Emacs
This seems like the "obvious" solution. Why was the rejected?

EDIT: It appears to be an objection to GPU programming entirely.

Conscat··on FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model
I have been a ClearFlow user for over a year now. Generally I like it, but there absolutely are still common words that are hard to input consistently. The THEA cluster has given me no shortage of problems. Still a fan though.
Conscat··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
A Pascal string has a leading length byte. Because that is one byte, the text can't exceed 255 characters.
Conscat··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
Clang and GCC both let you use Pascal strings in C if you would like (with `\p`). But Pascal strings aren't that useful today because the maximum length is too short.
Conscat··on Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)
I feel like I've never gotten a compelling explanation for why Nastaliq is hard/unavailable. I'm not an expert on abjads, but it doesn't look harder to render then Naskh (and it self-evidently is possible since the fonts exist). Does anyone here know why they make it difficult? Urdu is much less obscure than, say, Sharada or other languages with Unicode support. I think Punjabi is also often written in Nastaliq when it's not in Gurmukhi or Roman.
Conscat··on Amateur may have cracked Linear A, a 120-year-old puzzle
Isn't it customary for the author of a post shared on HN to leave a comment on the thread?
Conscat··on World Capitals Voronoi
I find it very funny to imagine Keralam and Tamil Nadu part of Sri Lanka.
Conscat··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
I've got really comfy `just` scripts for generating Clang "intermediaries" in my CMake project. I can generate `.ii` files which get formatted and edited in a manner making them directly recompilable, along with `.ll`, `.bc`, and `.s` files. All the above are per-translation unit or post-LTO and I can constrain the output to specific functions or files, and the LLVM bitcode can take optimization passes or optimization levels to very easily introspect how my work in this codebase optimizes.

I've also got a clang-repl wrapper for this codebase that is very easy to use and makes interactive programming much easier for me.

Conscat··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Obviously 5 year olds deserve access to safe abortions whether they are trans or cis. It's not safe to carry a pregnancy so young.
Conscat··on Flipper Zero Zig Template
The point here is that these examples need to be updated because @cImport, the syntactic feature of Zig, is being deprecated and removed. That there exists an alternative isn't relevant.
Conscat··on Nvidia Cosmos 3
These demos honestly look pretty good to me. But it is objectively true that this and similar technologies are used at huge scale by every leading autonomous vehicle manufacturer, so we can inductively reason that it _is_ good enough for that use-case. I don't work on Cosmos, but I am currently working on a superficially similar non-open technology at Nvidia used by many of these leaders which, in my opinion, produces similar quality. Some of the open research for it is here:

https://github.com/nv-tlabs/3dgrut/

https://github.com/NVIDIA/harmonizer

https://github.com/NVIDIA/instant-nurec

https://github.com/nvidia/ncore

Nvidia also is integrating Gsplat into at least what I work on and contributing upstream.

https://github.com/nerfstudio-project/gsplat

Conscat··on KDE at 30
Does anyone else miss KWrite? I had it configured as a very slightly more advanced Notepad.exe clone. I really enjoyed opening it for quickly writing out thoughts that crowd my ADHD brain, and I feel like the full Kate takes much longer to open up and looks much much heavier and emotionally oppressive for what I want to do.
Conscat··on Noroboto: Lying Fonts and Mitigation in Rust
These are some very extreme examples of this that push the feature's limits:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256810

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26495059

Conscat··on I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
Fwiw, nobody has ever suggested to me that I employ token compression in my daily workflow. I don't pay full attention in all the AI workflow demos I'm supposed to attend, but I don't recall that even being discussed. Is this an Nvidia blog or tweet you're referencing? I'm actually interested to see what they have to say.
Conscat··on I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
I'm not, I work higher level products. I've talked to a few people who do but I don't recall if they have different standards.
Conscat··on I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
At Nvidia, we have no limit for Anthropic or Open AI models (for now) and are heavily encouraged to use them as much as possible.
← PreviousPage 2 of 16Next →