Hacker News Reader

throwaway31131on Charting Form Ds to roughly see the state of venture capital “fund” raising

How interesting. I also tried “XML Startup” with and without personalization and got nothing from hacker news on the first three pages of links. I had no idea there was so much variance on returned results.

throwaway31131on Charting Form Ds to roughly see the state of venture capital “fund” raising

That seemed amazing to me because it would’ve meant Google found the comment, integrated it into thier index, and then made that index available, all within three hours. I know Google is good but are they that good?

I googled “xml startup business example” their AI summarized an “xml startup” as “a business using XML as a core technology” and gave the business below as an example startup.

https://databridgesolutions.io/

I didn’t see any reference to the hacker news comment.

Most of the links google provided below the AI summary were about how to configure various XML tools to… startup. Standard link farm stuff. :)

throwaway31131on Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

We probably do need some kind of regulation in this space because for better or worse, and I think it’s worse, it’s hard to be a participant in modern society without a smart phone. (In my mind it would be something more akin to the communications act of 1934, but for apps to mandate a certain amount of “interoperability” across operating systems, whatever that may mean, but I digress)

on the other hand, it wasn’t all that long ago that we had many smart phone markers and operating systems, all with different strategies. It’s possible that the market did decide…

throwaway31131on AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

We would also need a definition of AGI that is provable or disprovable.

We don’t even have a workable definition, never mind a machine.

throwaway31131on Developer's block

“The days are long, but the years are short"

Couldn’t be more true…

throwaway31131on From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

Defect rate is a probability distribution so some people will get 10 heads in a row and others will get 10 tails, and since it’s the internet, and since it’s kinda amazing we hear about both. But most people get a mixture and post nothing.

Every IT survey I’ve ever seen shows Macs as more reliable. On the other hand the repairs are often more expensive. So there’s a trade off.

For me, my M1 16” is a champ. The computer is almost too good. I’d like to upgrade but honestly there’s no reason to so I just can’t get myself to ditch a perfectly good computer.

throwaway31131on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'

I'm not sure those statements are in conflict with each other.

“My view is you absolutely want to keep hiring kids out of college and teaching them the right ways to go build software and decompose problems and think about it, just as much as you ever have.” - Matt Garman

"We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today” - Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

Maybe they differ in degree but not in sentiment.

throwaway31131on I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer

Great post.

What’s Next: Shame Notifications: "You were literally 100 meters from the gym and walked past it"

As much as I hate to admit it, that would probably work on me and I’d probably turn it on.

throwaway31131on Sam Altman is in damage-control mode after latest ChatGPT release

I wonder if GPT-5 benefited from what you learned about how-to-prompt for this problem while prompting Claude for 3 days?

I done a couple of experiments now and I can get an LLM to make not horrible and mostly functional code with effort. (I’ve been trying to create algorithms from CS papers that don’t link to code) I’ve observed once you discover the magic words the LLM wants and give sufficient background in the history, it can do ok.

But, for me anyway, the process of uncovering the magic words is slower than just writing the code myself. Although that could be because I’m targeting toy examples that aren’t very large code bases and aren’t what is in the typical internet coding demo.

throwaway31131on The "high-level CPU" challenge (2008)

> I think this is fundamentally impossible because of dynamic behaviours.

I was thinking that too as it sounds awfully close to a variant of the halting problem.

But since I am not sure that it's actually equivalent, and there might be some heuristic that constrains the problem, in theory, to make it solvable "enough" I went with the softer "I don't know how to do it" rather than "it can't be done"

throwaway31131on Starbucks in Korea asks customers to stop bringing in printers/desktop computers

In my experience most countries put barriers in place to prevent people from moving into the country, from another country, when you don't have enough money to support yourself, but I believe the parent is describing a system that puts barriers in place for internal migration of its citizens.

Russia has a similar system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_in_Russi...

throwaway31131on The "high-level CPU" challenge (2008)

"You don't think about memories when you design hardware"

I found that comment interesting because memory is mostly what I think about when I design hardware. Memory access is by far the slowest thing, so managing memory bandwidth is absolutely critical, and it uses a significant portion of the die area.

Also, a significant portion of the microarchitecture of a modern CPU is all about managing memory accesses.

If there were a hypothetical high-level CPU language that somehow encoded all the information the microarchitecture needs to measure to manage memory access, then it would likely tie in performance, assuming the CPU team did a good job measuring memory. Still, it wouldn't need all the extra stuff that did the measurement. So I see that as a win.

The main problem is, I have absolutely no idea how to do that, and unfortunately, I haven't met anyone else who knows either. Hence, tons of bookkeeping logic in CPUs persists.

throwaway31131on How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development

Hopefully the plane is autonomous

throwaway31131on Claude Code is all you need

> it’s just fun

For some definitions of fun… :)

throwaway31131on Claude Code is all you need

I’m not sure what their simple function was but I tried to use Claude to recreate C++ code to implement the algorithms in this paper as practice for me in LLM use and it didn’t go well. But I’ll be the first to admit that I’m probably holding it wrong.

https://users.cs.duke.edu/~reif/paper/chen/graph/graph.pdf

throwaway31131on Remote hosting for your telescope

I don't really know too much about this but apparently he calls himself an astrophotographer and not an astronomer, so maybe the use of photoshop isn't all that surprising.

https://www.bbcearth.com/news/extreme-night-sky-with-bray-fa...

throwaway31131on Navy demonstrates multi-day solar UAS flight

Mechanical failure is usually a probability distribution and with a large enough population, you get outliers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light

“ The Centennial Light is an incandescent light bulb recognized as the oldest known operating light bulb. It was first illuminated in 1901, and has only been turned off a few brief times since.”

throwaway31131on Study mode

> I’m trying to imagine how you could get a non-deterministic AI

Depends on the machine that implements the algorithm. For example, it’s possible to make ALUs such that 1+1=2 most of the time, but not all the time.

…

Just ask Intel. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist)

throwaway31131on Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly Part 0 – Setup and First Steps

I'm not sure how "useful" or "good" the work is. But some one instruction computers have a considerable amount of tooling already in place.

i.e. https://esolangs.org/wiki/FlipJump

Flip Jump is amazing. I understand the theory and how it works but it still amazes me that it does. Things like this is why I love the science in computer science.

And subleq even has a c-compiler and operating system, just wow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-instruction_set_computer#S...

throwaway31131on Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly (2020)

https://shop.elsevier.com/books/computer-organization-and-de...

It's currently 50% off and not only will you learn ARM, and some history about ISAs in general, but you'll learn more about how the computer itself works.

And if ARM isn't a hard requirement, an older edition that uses RISCV as the core ISA is a free download.

https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ashriram/Courses/CS295/assets/books/H...

Highly recommended.

throwaway31131on Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price

Umm… what’s an evil-maid attack? Sounds like a b-horror film. :)

throwaway31131on Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price

On the one hand, I get you. On the other, I’m just not sure we live in that world anymore for most people.

My daily driver is a base config 16” M1 MacBook Pro from 2021 and I have no inclinations to upgrade at all. Even the battery is still good.

I run CAD, compile and run large C++ projects. Do tons of heavy stuff in matlab. Various visualizations of simulations. My laptop just isn’t the slow thing anymore. I’m sure workloads exists that would push this machine but how many people are actually doing that. (Ok fine, chrome exists)

Even the smaller SSD isn’t an issue for me in practice because iCloud Drive and Box automatically move things I don’t often access off disk freeing local space.

Frankly if smaller memory footprints and smaller SSDs translates to lower base config prices and longer battery life it was the right choice, for me anyway.

throwaway31131on Ask HN: What problem would you solve with unlimited resources?

How to make projectors reliably connect to laptops every time. Although I’m mostly sure unlimited resources won’t be enough.

throwaway31131on Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

And there's also this nuance from the article text,

"The secret here is the kernel will always round 3ms up to at least one whole tick, 10ms."

Interestingly, not covered in the FAQ.

throwaway31131on Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

That's more of a graduate level book. If you would like a book by the same author, that is lighter in content but much more approachable, I recommend this version: https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ashriram/Courses/CS295/assets/books/H...

And don't forget to look at the online appendices on the MK website. They are also all very good.

throwaway31131on Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

What goes around comes around...

From March of this year,

"As we know, big tech companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon have been engaged in a fierce battle for the best tech talent, but OpenAI is now the one to watch. They have been on a poaching spree, attracting top talent from Google and other industry leaders to build their incredible team of employees and leaders."

https://www.leadgenius.com/resources/how-openai-poached-top-...

throwaway31131on CEOs say AI is just a tool to help workers, but our jobs are already on the line

Those regular paycheck jobs exist but they’re never going to be safe and they’ve never been safe. I’ve been in tech for decades and waves of safe jobs disappearing happens regularly as technology improves.

I view these types of articles as 2025’s version of the 2003 article below, which was very big news in its day.

Outsourcing didn’t cause all American programming jobs to go away but it did raise the bar. Expect the bar for “professional programmer” to go higher still. And expect to level up your skills if you haven’t already.

On the flip side, the number of amateur programmers is likely to increase a lot with improved tooling.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/training-your-own-replacement/

throwaway31131on TPU Deep Dive

This also all assumes that there is excess foundry capacity in the world for Google to expand into, which is not obvious. One would need exceptionally good operations to compete here and that has never been Google's forte.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

"Nvidia to consume 77% of wafers used for AI processors in 2025: Report...AWS, AMD, and Google lose wafer share."

throwaway31131on How Are Transistors Assembled Inside a CPU? [video]

In the description they say a video on lithography is on the way. In the mean time maybe this one from the same channel: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9CGRZwD-w

Great channel

throwaway31131on How Are Transistors Assembled Inside a CPU? [video]

As an EE whose made many ASICs, this has to be the best introduction to digital ASIC design for the general public that I've ever seen. Definitely worth watching.