Hacker News: Scaevolus

New comment by Scaevolus in "G# – A modern .NET language with Go, Kotlin, and Swift ergonomics"

Scaevolus — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 06:23:45 +0000

- it's easy to prompt an LLM to do it for you, especially if you're targeting a pre-existing runtime like CLR or transpiling to another language. previously you'd have to grind out the parser and compiler for a new language, but a lot of that work is mechanical

- "I want a language that works a little differently"

- programming language theory (PLT), generally

- languages are tools. the authors should explain what their languages are best suited for

- Obj C and C++ were both developed around the same time as extensions of C. Obj C was focused on message passing and Smalltalk's object system, while C++ was focused on adding as many abstractions as possible to C. Neither language has good support for avoiding null pointer dereferences, one of the primary things Swift addresses with its richer type system and Optionals.

New comment by Scaevolus in "Netstrings (1997)"

Scaevolus — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 06:15:32 +0000

BitTorrent's bencoding format, used in .torrent files, effectively uses netstrings-- but without the trailing commas, so it uses "5:hello" to represent filenames and similar.

New comment by Scaevolus in "Nul Characters in Strings in SQLite"

Scaevolus — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:50:10 +0000

It's not really a big problem. You should be storing arbitrary binary strings as blobs (and length() works properly with them), but the underlying encoding is nearly identical: https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html#record_format

New comment by Scaevolus in "Protobuf-py: Protobuf for Python, without compromises"

Scaevolus — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:46:34 +0000

if you happen to regenerate your protos 5 times in an hour you'll get ratelimited

it's a very frustrating system. you should spend a modicum of effort figuring out how to generate your things locally yourself instead, be that docker, arcane wasm...

New comment by Scaevolus in "WATaBoy: JIT-Ing Game Boy Instructions to WASM Beats a Native Interpreter"

Scaevolus — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:28:39 +0000

The absolutely easiest way to write a JIT is to use Javascript and eval() (or "new Function()", which is just eval in a Java-shaped tuxedo). You can quite easily speed up little matching functions, especially arithmetic heavy ones, by just filling in some templates at runtime!

Here's an example used in PuzzleScript: https://github.com/increpare/PuzzleScript/blob/dc1e0fc979365...

New comment by Scaevolus in "The unbearable cheapness of open weight models"

Scaevolus — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:28:03 +0000

Cloudflare's Deepseek V4 Pro prices are 4x more than Deepseek's for input and output tokens, and 100x more for cached input tokens, which is crucial for the tool uses of agents which cause multi-turn conversations.

New comment by Scaevolus in "Sem: New primitive for code understanding – not LSPs, but entities on top of Git"

Scaevolus — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 01:10:07 +0000

Something like https://www.kythe.io/?

New comment by Scaevolus in "Splash Is a Colour Format"

Scaevolus — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:49:50 +0000

It's rgb with 3.3 bits per channel, basically 10 bit per pixel color (256 colors is 8bpp).

New comment by Scaevolus in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

Scaevolus — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:15:38 +0000

Sqlite can quite easily do 5000+ insert+commits per second on typical NVMe drives.

Speed is rarely the constraint that makes it unsuitable for an application.

New comment by Scaevolus in "A History of IDEs at Google"

Scaevolus — Thu, 14 May 2026 02:13:42 +0000

The main thing holding most people back from web-based IDEs is restricted filesystem and tools integrations, but cloud office suites are extremely popular. Google has excellent infrastructure for distributed build and test cycles built into Cider to go along with the entirely remote version control system.

Best of luck on your web-based demos! Dropping people into a working dummy environment with a few tutorial prompts should really help conversions.

New comment by Scaevolus in "Fc, a lossless compressor for floating-point streams"

Scaevolus — Wed, 13 May 2026 01:07:50 +0000

I see you have ALP, but have you tried Chimp128 or Arrow's byte stream split?

New comment by Scaevolus in "Killed by Apple"

Scaevolus — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:12:00 +0000

Apple could easily support eGPUs if they wanted to, but they choose to have vertical integration over fragmentation or usefulness. It's the same as them not supporting OpenGL or Vulkan: they could if they wanted to be a better gaming/porting target, but compatibility of any sort is not a priority.

New comment by Scaevolus in "Show HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things"

Scaevolus — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:44:32 +0000

Pangram rates it as 100% AI generated.

Heartwarming: even if you die and nobody cares, an AI can write your eulogy!

New comment by Scaevolus in "Intel Arc Pro B70 Review"

Scaevolus — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:35:36 +0000

It's not that it's reserving power, but rather that you hit some bottleneck on a 3070 Ti before running into thermal limits-- it's likely limited by either tensor core saturation or RAM throughput. Running the workload with Nvidia's profiling tools should make the bottleneck obvious.

New comment by Scaevolus in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess"

Scaevolus — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:49:38 +0000

They are bullshit machines because they do not have an internal mental model of truth like a human does. The flagship models bullshit less, but their fundamental architectures prevent having truth interfere with output.

https://philosophersmag.com/large-language-models-and-the-co...

New comment by Scaevolus in "Telnyx package compromised on PyPI"

Scaevolus — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:33:50 +0000

I'm glad there's many teams with automated scans of pypi and npm running. It elevates the challenge of making a backdoor that can survive for any length of time.

New comment by Scaevolus in "An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD"

Scaevolus — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 02:46:40 +0000

That's a narrow fair use exception. Many of these open game engines are effectively 1:1 decompilations of the original games, and it would be shocking if they were not effectively copyrighted the same as the original.

I don't think this has been tested in court, but the recent flood of Nintendo game decompilations is likely to change that.

New comment by Scaevolus in "Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'"

Scaevolus — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:26:50 +0000

Microsoft released a video that covers effectively all of the Xbox One security system, and it's referred to extensively in the talk. The specific methods of glitching don't require any insider knowledge.

New comment by Scaevolus in "The AI Vampire"

Scaevolus — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:10:37 +0000

You're reading more dismissal than I wrote.

Most businesses can and many businesses do run efficiently out of shared spreadsheets. Choosing the processes well is the hard part, but there's just not much computational complexity in the execution, nor more data than can be easily processed by a single machine.

New comment by Scaevolus in "The AI Vampire"

Scaevolus — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:32:17 +0000

Many engineers get paid a lot of money to write low-complexity code gluing things together and tweaking features according to customer requirements.

When the difficulty of a task is neatly encompassed in a 200 word ticket and the implementation lacks much engineering challenge, AI can pretty reliably write the code-- mediocre code for mediocre challenges.

A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some business logic. There just isn't much complexity inherent in any of the feature sets.