Hacker News: adastra22

New comment by adastra22 in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

adastra22 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:51:59 +0000

an X that VERBS in my/our LOCATION at ADJECTIVE CLAUSE

This is a really constipated sentence and there are a dozen better ways to say it. Claude loves this structure though.

New comment by adastra22 in "Stop Turning every purchase into a tip request"

adastra22 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:50:04 +0000

The businesses don't get the money. They must give 100% of it to the staff by law. Management doesn't care and would probably prefer a machine that isn't customer-hostile by asking for a tip in a circumstance where no tip is expected.

New comment by adastra22 in "Stop Turning every purchase into a tip request"

adastra22 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:45:16 +0000

Every time there is an initiative to require paying living wages, food and bar service representatives fight to get it killed because they make _more_ money from tips than they would from regular wages. Tip-earning workers in America are well represented.

New comment by adastra22 in "Stop Turning every purchase into a tip request"

adastra22 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:43:50 +0000

Blame the payment processors. If you are a store and you buy a point of sale machine, it comes preconfigured to 18%/20%/25% or whatever tips, and it is not well documented how to change it. Most small business owners give up and stop bothering.

Why do the payment companies do this? Because they get ~1% of the tip.

New comment by adastra22 in "Protobuf has LSP support"

adastra22 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:48:43 +0000

It is my understanding that basically all LSP implementations use tree-sitter because of its incremental rebuild capability, and this requires re-implementing the parser.

New comment by adastra22 in "Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast"

adastra22 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:43:00 +0000

A $2tn IPO does mean $2tn materialized out of nowhere. What matters is how big the liquid market is, and that is a much smaller number.

New comment by adastra22 in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

adastra22 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:00:36 +0000

Not redacting it would have been better. Either live with it, or you explicitly create a new incompatible ISA. What happened is the worst of both options.

New comment by adastra22 in "CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back"

adastra22 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 05:05:23 +0000

Fair, I think I let that ridiculous movie blur my memory of the events. But yeah, you pretty much got to be a first employee at a company that goes on to have a multi-hundred-billion IPO for the math to work. Not many of those out there.

New comment by adastra22 in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

adastra22 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 02:02:09 +0000

There is a lot to unpack, hence my reaction. Instead of a straight compressed instruction format supported (or not supported) everywhere, we get an alphabet soup of options. C -> "ZcfZcdZca" just by itself is insanity. But the actual technical change is a problem too. Now I can't make vendor-independent RISC-V code, since apparently they all support different compressed instruction sets.

I represented my company as a founding member of the RISC-V foundation. I now shake my head at what it has become and hope I never have to write code for a RISC-V system again. Every time I check in it seems like some new insanity has manifest itself.

New comment by adastra22 in "Show HN: LuaCAD – Parametric CAD Scripted in Lua"

adastra22 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:54:25 +0000

OpenSCAD is garbage and I'm not going to defend it. But I would prefer if a new CAD engine didn't regress.

New comment by adastra22 in "CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back"

adastra22 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:50:41 +0000

Dustin Moskovitz, Tom Mueller. You are right that these are incredibly rare, and pushing the boundary between founder and first employee.

New comment by adastra22 in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

adastra22 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:49:14 +0000

I… you can’t be serious.

New comment by adastra22 in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

adastra22 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:48:56 +0000

It was a joke I think.

New comment by adastra22 in "Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption"

adastra22 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:39:51 +0000

The flip is also true: LLM inference is very nearly maximally optimal for FHE. Thee costly bit, multiplication of a bunch of compressed floating point numbers, translates 1:1. The only bit I’m not sure about is the softmax sampling at the end, but that’s just once per token.

On the other hand, each FHE step is a LOT more costly (e.g. elliptic curve exponentiation) than a vectorized BF8 multiply on GPU.

Unlike the sorting number case, it is probably same complexity. But no hardware support AND a massive slow down constant even if you were comparing apples to apples on hardware.

Disclaimer: I spent a decade working on crypto systems but I am not familiar with TFA’s research.

New comment by adastra22 in "Soup Raiders goes native: What you gain by building your own game engine"

adastra22 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:14:05 +0000

Seems like the industry is redefining terms since I was last involved in the 00's. Game engine used to mean the runtime that manages game state, the framework that you code your game against that handles common things that aren't specific to a single game. Editors used to be surrounding infrastructure.

New comment by adastra22 in "Soup Raiders goes native: What you gain by building your own game engine"

adastra22 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:12:01 +0000

From the source: 'Vast majority of “other” engines are custom game engines'. They don't justify that claim. They just assert other ~= custom.

New comment by adastra22 in "Soup Raiders goes native: What you gain by building your own game engine"

adastra22 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:21:11 +0000

How is MonoGame not a game engine? It handles graphics, input, main loop, etc. You can write simple games in a few hundred lines of code, just loading and game logic. Perhaps we're taking past each other.

New comment by adastra22 in "Show HN: LuaCAD – Parametric CAD Scripted in Lua"

adastra22 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:12:45 +0000

In the pedantic sense, yes. You can use recursive functions with tail-call optimization, or list comprehensions to emulate a universal Turing machine.

But my point is that OpenSCAD's expression purity and one-way compilation model are purposefully limited, and not historical accident: models are a deterministic function of their parameters, subtrees can be cached and reused during preview without invalidation logic, designs diff and merge as text, etc.

Sometimes making things "more programmable" is an anti-feature.

New comment by adastra22 in "Soup Raiders goes native: What you gain by building your own game engine"

adastra22 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:04:24 +0000

There is a valuable point in what you are saying, but I don't think it is as strong as you are making it. Game engines do have a certain 'style' that is recognizable, especially if you use default settings and cookie cutter stuff from the asset store. The most successful indie games often have their own unique aesthetic, and rolling their own game engine, while not strictly necessary, does make that uniqueness the default outcome rather than something you have to strive hard to achieve.

But most indie games do not roll their own engine. Even this widely shared post aiming to show off games with custom engines, ends up listing a ton of games with notes like "OGRE-based" or "MonoGame-based." I'm sorry, but that's not a custom engine. That's an atypical engine choice (OGRE or MonoGame) with tweaks. Maybe I'm being a pedant, but I think the difference matters.

https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0...

Unfortunately I don't think there are good numbers on how many truly original / custom / no-engine games are out there, in absolute or market terms. 13% is the ceiling, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much smaller (e.g. <5%).

New comment by adastra22 in "CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back"

adastra22 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:55:22 +0000

Also selection effects. There have been some great leaders in business with a clear moral code. We lost Tony Hsieh way too young. But by and large those at the top got there for a reason.