HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

veltas

1,807 karma · joined November 16, 2013

veltas.co.uk
submissionscomments
veltas··on We won't "just hang out"
It’s funny reading takes like this from software engineers that think the only way to meet people is at skateparks, and in… libraries...what?
veltas··on Arena Allocators in C
They wanted shorter aliases for them to make their code clearer, I suppose.
veltas··on The RAM shortage is bringing back DDR4
Fact is that performance intensive code, games or whatever, has always optimised locality and so RAM speed shouldn't usually be a 1:1 impact on performance. Using older generations of slower RAM will be acceptable for many games and workloads.
veltas··on A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU
As a counterpoint, you are lumping a lot and generalising a lot there, if we're specific then you can't really trivially replace e.g. the Linux kernel with an AI project in whatever language you want. An incredible amount of work has gone into the Linux kernel and its design, and the infrastructure under that veneer of a "UNIX kernel" is too significant to hand-wave away. The issues facing Linux are well beyond (but not excluding) those created by using a dangerous language like C, or using hacky/outdated UNIX interfaces and conventions.

Yes you can try and take things in an original direction but we're ignoring the incredible amount of work that's gone into Linux, solving most of the problems you can't imagine and that AI will burn though a lot of time and tokens trying to re-solve (badly, without a ton of intelligent intervention).

I think you're more likely to see more people experimenting with existing open source work, rather than generating new projects. These new projects are easy come, easy go.

veltas··on Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge
Wouldn't they have to fine themselves first?
veltas··on Writing Parquet files using Haskell
That's not what I see reported, they say Haskell tends to have bad memory layout generally and takes a 5x or so hit to performance.
veltas··on I don't want to read what you didn't write
They may have done you a favour if that's what they sack you for, good luck finding another job!
veltas··on A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum
This is the sort of thing I've wanted to write for a long time. Yes it looks like this is vibe coded but I'm glad this was made because it's cool to see what can be done, and it's interesting seeing how AI can be used as a compiler essentially given the output is assembly.

I'd be interested if the author would tell us more about what they did here and what went into the design and evolution, rather than the AI README.

veltas··on All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it
That's how I feel right now talking in my only language of English.
veltas··on All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it
Don't overthink it, I think you are being a bit cynical. If your kid enjoys it then it's worth the money. If you can't afford that then find other things your kid enjoys.

The reward of a game is playing it, not the 'prize', although that can add to the enjoyment too.

veltas··on .name Termination
That's actually the point of the .name TLD is that it's not for businesses, it's for individuals. This whole situation demonstrates ICANN is more for businesses than individuals. It should just be there for everyone and every organisation that's trying to use URI's, shame that it's not worked out that way. This is exactly what the big tech companies want, they might as well hand ICANN over to Facebook or Google, they wouldn't do much worse.
veltas··on Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns
Okay but that's not really relevant as the name changing is not a reason to leave/boycott?
veltas··on Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns
I feel like I'm living under a rock reading this post. What are the problems with Twitter, why does it need boycotting?
veltas··on .name Termination
Yet that is a problem the owner of such a domain has freely entered into by buying that domain, it's their right to keep it despite this apparent problem, if they wish.
veltas··on Gloomberb
In defense given the amount of web content being processed it makes a lot of sense to use JS and related tech. It's put to good use here.
veltas··on England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
And I'll add that whether the style guide or the journalists, BBC articles tend to be like this: constantly saying sentences without giving the full context needed to understand them. This is why as a right wing person I tend to read The Guardian (famously left wing) instead of the BBC, because their articles just read better.
veltas··on England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
This isn't written by AI, this is just how BBC news articles are written. I find it frustrating too.
veltas··on Recursion is lying to you
Here is the conventional use of Big O notation where the input is a number:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Rabin_primality...

As you'll see they are using the number of digits, not the value of the number, because the number of digits is the size of the input.

You can find countless examples of this in literature. So this is not a 'personally-interesting' way as you assert.

veltas··on Don't be a meat proxy
This is the new "Let Me Google This For You".
veltas··on Recursion is lying to you
What do you mean by this? I was interested in article and parent, that's why I responded.
veltas··on Recursion is lying to you
If you want to measure growth based on another variable you are allowed to do so, but for most algorithms I'm more interested in the growth of time according to input size.
veltas··on Recursion is lying to you
Really it's worse than exponential, because the size of the input is not n, it's the number of bits needed to store n i.e. log n. So as the number of bits k grow, it's growing phi^(2^k).
veltas··on Teaching Kids Forth
To be clear, I'm not accusing you of plagiarism at all. I'm just saying this kind of typo unfortunately doesn't prove anything.
veltas··on Teaching Kids Forth
This is exactly the kind of spelling mistake ChatGPT makes if you ask it to make spelling mistakes to make text look more authentic.

What seems to happen is it will get a lot of words like curriculum wrong that people rarely spell incorrectly because they're long enough that if your English isn't confident you would look it up or use a spell checker, or spell words incorrectly that people don't usually spell wrong like 'imediate' or 'puzzel'.

veltas··on Teaching Kids Forth
I really love Forth and spend almost all my free programming time playing with it and I'd never teach it to a class of kids.
veltas··on Don't Take the Black Pill [video]
It's really easy to miss the value in Pointless Rewrite 5 of Core Module 4, but the grad who rewrites it will at least understand it afterwards and can fix the bugs they introduced and add new features to it easier. But the hard pill to swallow is they spent $200K of the engineering budget making the code worse.

The way to understand the value is to see the engineer as an asset. Engineers aren't interchangeable and no codebase can truly be documented and CI'd to the point where expertise doesn't matter.

veltas··on It's a shame what's happened to radio
Also listened in the car but since they've recently shut down the LW tower I can't receive it anymore in the midlands, only occasionally get FM signal.
veltas··on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting
The original joke for anyone who doesn't know or remember, Michael, the manager, asks his accountant to explain what a surplus is like he would to an 8 year old. Michael doesn't understand this and asks for how he would explain it to a 5 year old, which Oscar does a very good job with explaining and Michael finally understands.

Later the security guard is called upstairs to break a tie on votes for what to spend the surplus on, and Michael starts reciting Oscar's 5 year old explanation, and the guard cuts him off saying he knows what a surplus is.

I have to imagine this is sort of a joke about the audience too as inevitably the writers were considering that audience members might not know what a surplus is, and this kind of joke is an opportunity to explain it.

veltas··on Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
Interesting though in retrospect they chose good platforms, Mac and UNIX are still around and flourishing and OS/2 died a death, although would a lot of OS/2 stuff have run on Windows?
veltas··on Show HN: 18 Words
Which would be a problem if it was called "14 words".
Page 1 of 25Next →