HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

robinei

123 karma · joined May 12, 2015

submissionscomments
robinei··on Don't Paste the AI, please
The article says they could have asked an AI themselves, but that is missing that I may have an agentic context with exactly the right information to answer the question well, which they do not have. For example because I worked on something closely related. Such an agent output is very useful, and taking the time to rewrite that to a short personal answer is not always worth it.
robinei··on Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)
Who cares if a piece of open source has American maintainers? The point is not to avoid touching anything American. It is control and sovereignty.
robinei··on Error payloads in Zig
Do you think it would fundamentally be a mistake to thread data along with error type through the error return path, or is it just that it costs too much say from a calling convention perspective or some other technical reason? Is it related to ownership?
robinei··on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
My feeling is that I consistently find on-point solutions for my Linux problems with a quick search. However if my Windows install gets in trouble my search will yield some DISM.exe invocation which doesn't help at all. A bit anecdotal, but this is my experience. I've always been able to fix my Linux installs.
robinei··on Bag of words, have mercy on us
Let’s not underestimate the scale of the search which led to us though, even though you may be right in principle. In addition to deep time on earth, we may well be just part of a tiny fraction of a universe-wide and mostly fruitless search.
robinei··on Mesa3D Drivers for Windows
XWayland is compartmentalized, and should not make life harder for anyone else in the Wayland world (except the ones spending time maintaining it). And Zink gives us a clean OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan (so not contributing to complexity in the base stack). I'm fine with a long tail of software requiring XWayland+Zink, and I don't think of them as polluting my system.
robinei··on Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview
Since it's trained on a vast a mount of code (probably all publicly accessible Go code and more), it's seen a vast amount of different bespoke APIs for doing all kinds of things. I'm sure some of that will leak into the output from time to time. And to some extent can generalize, so it may just invent APIs.
robinei··on Evolving OpenAI's Structure
If it was first, it could have self-improved more, to the point that it has the capacity to prevent competition, while the competition does not have the capacity to defend itself against superior AGI. This all is so hypothetical and frankly far from what we're seeing in the market now. Funny how we're all discussing dystopian scifi scenarios now.
robinei··on Zig 0.14.0 Release Notes
Cut for the foreseeable future AFAIK. They may return to it when ready
robinei··on Zig 0.14.0 Release Notes
Why would the function's dependencies need recompilation? I guess the dependees may require it, if they inlined it, or if the signature changed.
robinei··on Greg K-H: "Writing new code in Rust is a win for all of us"
That's the theory. However, isn't likely that as things like the new Nova Nvidia driver is written in Rust, the things that depend on Rust are suddenly so important, that shipping with it disabled is unrealistic, even without a policy change. (I don't think this is bad)
robinei··on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE
Calling some of those leftist is quite a condemnation of the right.
robinei··on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE
The question is who is suppressed.
robinei··on The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
And start treating the alliances as vital part of the whole, and stop betraying the fragile trust they are built on. Use Korean industry until the industry at home can catch up.
robinei··on Australia proposes ban on social media for those under 16
Maybe idealism is dead and even the youth have been corrupted these days.
robinei··on Australia proposes ban on social media for those under 16
I’m talking of the typical left/right split. Where leftist policies tend toward redistribution of wealth to the benefit of broader swathes, while right oriented policies tend to at least lead to more concentration of wealth. Maybe it is an outdated bias, but until now at least my impression is that young people have had a greater tendency toward some form of humanistic idealism.
robinei··on Australia proposes ban on social media for those under 16
On the flip side, it seems evident that younger people tend to vote for the betterment of all, while older people tend to shift toward voting for «themselves».
robinei··on Spending too much time optimizing for loops
Ideally arrays of primitive values like `long` to store the bytecode represenation for proper good performance. Then use bitwise manipulation to access "fields"
robinei··on The Making of Dune II: The birth of the real-time strategy game
I actually prefer the Adlib version!
robinei··on Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest
Given the accepted MAD doctrine, which kept the "peace" throughout the cold war, you would think nuclear escalation would be unthinkable as a means to stave off a conventional defeat on foreign soil.
robinei··on A Tunguska size burst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, Bronze Age city in Jordan Valley
Though if the evidence presented for this event is persuasive, then all they achieve by making the connection is to speculate on a natural cause for a biblical "miracle". I mean it can strengthen a view of the Bible as source of historical information, but not as the word of God.

If this event happened, I would expect it to leave long lasting trace in oral tradition.

robinei··on Maintain It with Zig
You can constrain type arguments with a compile-time `if` check, and generate a compile error on violation.
robinei··on Advances of the Hare programming language compared to C
Since then Zig has come quite far in its self-hosted rewrite. So the point of it being Andrew's first compiler is no longer valid.
robinei··on Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work
Zig does it (https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/).

Basically using "await" just means you are declaring opportunity for concurrency at the call site, but it is still valid to await a synchronous function. And it is valid to call a function synchronously, even if it internally supports concurrency via await.

robinei··on Typing Is Hard
Soundness gives an important benefit: Performance, for a compiler capable of utilising the type information properly. It can omit run-time checks, and unbox primitives etc.
robinei··on Threadripper 3990X: The Quest To Compile 1B Lines Of C++ On 64 Cores
This shows that if you are making a not-very-fast compiler (most compilers these days), then the much maligned C compilation model has some serious advantages on modern and future hardware, due to its embarrassingly parallell nature.
robinei··on High Short Interest Stocks
The stocks they are borrowing for their shorts have really high interest now. They are bleeding money just paying interest. And now that goes for a couple of hundred percent of the stock float.
robinei··on Suck It, Wall Street
It seems like shorting alone can create this kind of systemic risk, with its infinite downside. One has to question whether it might be better were it not allowed.
robinei··on Vue Native (2018)
Swift has the slowest compiler I have ever had the misfortune of using. The dev iteration cycle was unbearable for me in a Swift project the I inherited.
robinei··on What Ever Happened to ICQ? (2019)
In Norway MSN Messenger was responsible. I remember all the people who were a couple of years younger than me starting with that, and ICQ never recovered.
Page 1 of 2Next →