Hacker News Reader

whatagreatboyon AMD claims Arm ISA doesn't offer efficiency advantage over x86

Even Jim Keller says that instruction decode is the difference, and that saves a lot of battery for ARM even if it doesn't change the core efficiency at full lot.

whatagreatboyon Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

It's very difficult to determine if the length is due to the font being used or due to actually being hyphen or emdash.

whatagreatboyon Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

Was there any attempt at making rules for experimental features looser than other filesystems? That seems to be the biggest bottleneck here.

whatagreatboyon Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

Em-dashes are very confusing to me, can never figure out if it is a emdash or a hyphen, so I avoid them altogether.

whatagreatboyon Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

Are you worried that ChatGPT will give you wrong words just because they look natural? (And yes it does)

whatagreatboyon Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

Consumer protection can still be separate in this case. That's not a problem at all. The only reason it is not prevalent in these countries yet is because they in general have lax consumer protection laws. But this can easily change. The unified payment interface does nothing to exclude it.

whatagreatboyon Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

India has UPI. China has something. It is only a good thing that this should spread everywhere.

whatagreatboyon Jujutsu for busy devs

How much time do you spend resolving merge conflicts between multiple team members?

whatagreatboyon Yoni Appelbaum on the real villians behind our housing and mobility problems

Poor people will always want to move to richer neighborhoods. The advantage to their kids from this is much higher than the stress and bad effects especially as early in kids life as possible.

So, a lot of people will be looking to move as soon as they can afford it.

whatagreatboyon Linux and Secure Boot certificate expiration

Only legal requirements can change it. Nowadays, the mokutil is good enough that linux users can build a good tool around it to automate registration at boot that should ease some pain. But otherwise, it is a big mess and still needs legal requirement.

whatagreatboyon AI coding tools can reduce productivity

I use it very routinely to generate tikz diagrams. It is obviously wrong and I need to manually tweak a little bit. But the hardest part is often to get something working at first, and in this AI is first class. It gets me 90% there, and rest is me.

whatagreatboyon AI coding tools can reduce productivity

It's kind of true. I only use it for simple stuff that I don't have time for. For example, how to write a simple diagram in tikz. The Ai does the simple and busywork of providing a good enough approximation which I can tweak and get what I want.

For hard questions, I prefer to use my own skills, because AI often regurgitates what I'm already aware. I still ask AI in the off-chance it comes up with something cool, but most often, I have to do it myself.

whatagreatboyon Apptainer: Application Containers for Linux

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3126908.3126925

This paper might help

whatagreatboyon The FPGA turns 40

No. It's not competitive. You'll spend previous time (which should be spent on prototyping an design) on solving bugs and writing infrastructure code. Reverse engineering has not been a viable effort for a long time now.

whatagreatboyon Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper and why they fall short

the real ability of intelligence is to correct mistakes in a gradual and consistent way.

whatagreatboyon Peano arithmetic is enough, because Peano arithmetic encodes computation

I found all the jokes funny as well. Thanks for the blog post. Extremely nice read. I love the approach.

whatagreatboyon Failed Soviet Venus lander Kosmos 482 crashes to Earth after 53 years in orbit

It's very similar to people getting scared about SKylab so, you are not alone.

whatagreatboyon The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)

Not treating math as just another language for expressing your thoughts is a weird position to take. I cannot take this position seriously.

whatagreatboyon Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils

I think this is a good experiment. 25.10 is not an LTS, people who want stability are using LTS anyway.

whatagreatboyon C++26: more constexpr in the core language

That is more on the fact that less investment is made in C++ compilers nowadays. Companies are migrating away from C++ and it shows in compiler development.

whatagreatboyon MacBook Air M4

Then you suddenly want a Nvidia GPU on the side and you need more power.

whatagreatboyon The need for memory safety standards

> Fil-C is currently 1.5x slower than normal C in good cases, and about 4x slower in the worst cases. I'm actively working on performance optimizations for Fil-C, so that 4x number will go down.

I am pretty sure you cannot go much lower than 1.2 here on the best cases. In contrast, CHERI on good hardware will easily be as close to current performance as possible.