Hacker News: Chio

New comment by Chio in "Last fifty years of integer linear programming: Recent practical advances (2024)"

Chio — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 14:38:23 +0000

I can't share pricing details since they are confidential but if you just want to play with MIP you don't need to buy one of the big three (XPRESS, Gurobi, CPLEX) which are all very expensive but usually available for free for students. There are at least two good open source / free for non-commercial use MIP solvers available:

https://highs.dev/ https://www.scipopt.org/

New comment by Chio in "LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning"

Chio — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 17:55:29 +0000

We kind-of have that in DeepSeek-R1-zero [1], but it has problem. From the original authors:

> With RL, DeepSeek-R1-Zero naturally emerged with numerous powerful and interesting reasoning behaviors. However, DeepSeek-R1-Zero encounters challenges such as endless repetition, poor readability, and language mixing.

A lot of these we can probably solve, but as other have pointed out we want a model that humans can converse with, not an AI for the purpose of other AI.

That said, it seems like a promising area of research:

> DeepSeek-R1-Zero demonstrates capabilities such as self-verification, reflection, and generating long CoTs, marking a significant milestone for the research community.

[1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1

New comment by Chio in "Show HN: A fast HNSW implementation in Rust"

Chio — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 19:00:00 +0000

From a quick survey of the implementation probably not very well since, for example, it is using dynamic dispatching for all distance calculations and there are a lot of allocations in the hot-path.

Maybe it would be better to post this repository as a reference / teaching implementation of HNSW.

New comment by Chio in "Solver Performance: 1989 vs. 2024"

Chio — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 20:38:20 +0000

This is true, but there is HiGHS [1] which is "good enough" to use for a lot of real problems (though the commercial solvers are still better).

[1] https://highs.dev/

New comment by Chio in "Happy New Year HN!"

Chio — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 19:34:20 +0000

Happy new year! Committed to making this new year my, and your, best year so far!

Thanks for being a great community.

New comment by Chio in "V 0.3"

Chio — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 12:44:05 +0000

The "autofree" memory management [1] seems quite interesting, and a very cool mixture between garbage collection with static memory management. Has been there been any seminar / conference talk held on this topic related to the pros / cons of this approach vs a pure GC memory management strategy, since it seems like it could be used in _almost_ all modern GC languages.

[1] https://vlang.io/#memory

New comment by Chio in "How Bungie identified a mass sender of fake DMCA notices"

Chio — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 09:56:33 +0000

This is an interesting lawsuit as it is a *company* seeking damages due to DMCA abuse by a third party, and my understanding is that this is very widespread (no source sorry). Is anyone aware of any studies done on the total cost¹ (vs benefit¹) of the DMCA due to malicious actors?

¹ defining what is a cost vs benefit (and how much) is probably the hardest part, maybe after acquiring the necessary data.

New comment by Chio in "We will never have enough software developers (2020)"

Chio — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 16:02:23 +0000

I don't believe this is how it is actually implemented in _most_ companies. Where I work every PR must have a linked story / bug / etc but anyone has the rights to create a story so it acts more as a way to track what changes actually goes into a release for x-teams to review and see if they need to document it, etc.

In regard to refactors, people tend to just squash them into another change they are making. This makes the git log a bit harder to follow at times, but people did this back when we just used to push to trunk too so I don't think the story is the deciding factor.

New comment by Chio in "Ask HN: What are some mentally healthy apps to have?"

Chio — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 12:40:53 +0000

I've taken the opposite approach a lot of times. So instead of asking what you can add you might want to look at what apps / bookmarks that you can remove. Do you need a link to the reddit frontpage, or can you narrow it down to one or two specific subreddits that you want to check, or maybe remove it entirely if it does not add much value to your daily life.

Apps that I would recommend however are many of the apps that tries to gamify physical activity. I use Garmin, but I am not sure if the app works without owning the accompanying smart watches and there are plenty of alternatives, and the gamification and accountability that it offers around physical activity makes it a lot easier to get out of the door (which is always the hard part). Physical activity has long been known to have a huge positive effect on mental capacity and health so well worth spending an hour or so every day on.

New comment by Chio in "The true cost of linked lists"

Chio — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 15:41:48 +0000

This reminds me of an old paper [1] that discuss the performance characteristics of different array layouts for searching in particular. The conclusion is heavily based on the number of cache misses and branch predictor misses that binary search has for different array layouts.

Doesn't have much practical application unfortunately since there is almost zero support for things like eytzinger layout in most standard libraries and sorting an array with a eytzinger layout is a bit harder than a non-decreasing layout.

[1] "ARRAY LAYOUTS FOR COMPARISON-BASED SEARCHING", Paul-Virak Khuong and Pat Morin, https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1509/1509.05053.pdf

New comment by Chio in "Arc and Mutex in Rust"

Chio — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 15:24:17 +0000

I agree wholeheartedly on your points regarding async, which is a topic I've tried to avoid so far in all of my Rust projects because of all the reasons you've already raised above and you really don't need it for most use-cases.

New comment by Chio in "Arc and Mutex in Rust"

Chio — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 14:54:53 +0000

To add my own few cents to this very common discussion Rust is hard is the same way that most programming languages that rely "non-standard" paradigms are hard because they challenge your current mental model of programming. However "different", instead of "hard", would be a better way to describe these sort of languages like Rust, Prolog, and Haskell (as well as a ton of other languages).

If you look at Rust from this perspective then it becomes much more valuable to consider learning because it teach you a different way to modelling your data, and how to break-up your code; and while a language like Java may not force you to consider the borrow checker you will probably be a better overall Engineer knowing how to make it happy even when working in other languages.

On the topic discussed in the actual article: I can't wait for scoped threads to finally go stable since being forced for throw an Arc around almost everything you want to share between threads does not really suit Rust which really emphasise zero-copy in their standard library.