Hacker News: alain94040

New comment by alain94040 in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

alain94040 — Tue, 19 May 2026 10:03:27 +0000

We all have had the client from hell: they don't know what they want, they change their requirements all the time. Whenever they have a new half-baked idea, I need to scramble and re-design the architecture. They have no clue that a small change request has a big impact on the code.

Well... Now I can be that client. And let AI deal with my incomplete, always changing requirements. And get it done anyway.

New comment by alain94040 in "Enough with the AI FOMO, go slow-mo, says Domo CDO"

alain94040 — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:35:40 +0000

That matches my experience. At least on the solo front, there were so many topics I wasn't an expert on, that limited what I could build. Now with AI assistance, the sky is the limit. I don't need to be an expert in frontend, backend, I can just build on my personal expertise in a functional domain, and leverage AI to fill in the gaps. I believe many people will benefit from being to build exactly what they want, without gatekeepers or investment.

New comment by alain94040 in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"

alain94040 — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:57:27 +0000

This paragraph from September 2025 didn't age well:

Like you, we have seen numerous reports that more and more firms are capping their total headcount in favor of leaning on more AI tools, leading to downsizing their intern and new-graduate hiring. [...] But we think this misreads the moment completely, so we’re heading in the opposite direction.

New comment by alain94040 in "Visualizing CPU Pipelining (2024)"

alain94040 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:51:10 +0000

Correct (well, maybe not half a century, maybe 30 years or so). I was just about to reply that I'd love a version of this that shows instructions going in and out of a re-order buffer. That would be enlightening.

New comment by alain94040 in "VHDL's Crown Jewel"

alain94040 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:37:40 +0000

You're not wrong, but blocking assignments (and their equivalent in VHDL, variables), are useful as local variables to a process/always block. For instance to factor common sub-expressions and not repeat them. So using only non-blocking assignments everywhere would lead to more ugly code.

New comment by alain94040 in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

alain94040 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:39:51 +0000

Good question. For a long time I think the justification was location: Microsoft is in Seattle, and it’s only the Bay Area that is getting inflated salaries.

New comment by alain94040 in "Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer"

alain94040 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:54:53 +0000

It's not misleading for people in the industry. ARM so far was selling IP (Verilog source code) that other chip makers would include in a full chip design.

Now ARM for the first time (this century) is making its own chip [design], which like most of its customers, is manufactured by a fab like TSMC.

The title is clear.

New comment by alain94040 in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

alain94040 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:03:48 +0000

Agreed, in my experience, rule 5 should be rule 1. I think I also heard it said (paraphrased) as "show we your code and I'll be forever confused, show me your database schema and everything will become obvious".

Having implemented my shared of highly complex high-performance algorithms in the past, the key was always to figure out how to massage the raw data into structures that allow the algorithm to fly. It requires both a decent knowledge of the various algorithm options you have, as well as being flexible to see that the data could be presented a different way to get to the same result orders of magnitude faster.

New comment by alain94040 in "First Website (1992)"

alain94040 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 01:27:22 +0000

In 1993, you could refresh the home page of Netscape (Mosaic) every day and it would mention new sites that had been added. That became unmanageable quickly, which is when two dudes from Stanford started a directory.

New comment by alain94040 in "A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs"

alain94040 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:56:37 +0000

We're in early February 2025 [edit:2026] and the article was written on Dec 23, 2025, which makes it less than two months old. I think it's ok not to include a year in the submission title in that case.

I personally understand a year in the submission as a warning that the article may not be up to date.

New comment by alain94040 in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

alain94040 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:06:04 +0000

When I was reviewing such papers, I didn't bother checking that 30+ citations were correctly indexed. I focused on the article itself, and maybe 1 or 2 citations that are important. That's it. For most citations, they are next to an argument that I know is correct, so why would I bother checking. What else do you expect? My job was to figure out if the article ideas are novel and interesting, not if they got all their citations right.

New comment by alain94040 in "Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time (2024)"

alain94040 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:59:29 +0000

Would those filters be keyword-based only? One benefit of an LLM-based filter I can imagine is that it has a much better understanding of the meaning of text.

New comment by alain94040 in "Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation"

alain94040 — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:12:18 +0000

Really simple fix: social pressure and expectations should be that every company that uses open source pays a fixed amount of their revenue (is 0.1% low enough to be negligible for the companies). Companies that don't should shunned.

New comment by alain94040 in "I canceled my book deal"

alain94040 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 21:16:09 +0000

In my dream world, you take that book plus information about yourself (how good of a programmer you already are), feed that into AI and get a customized version that is much better for you. Possibly shorter. Skips boring stuff you know. And slows down for stuff you have never been exposed to. Everyone wins.

New comment by alain94040 in "Illuminating the processor core with LLVM-mca"

alain94040 — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 17:15:05 +0000

This is interesting if quite incomplete (as noted in the end conclusion). CPU re-order buffers turn what you think as mostly sequential execution into a massively parallel engine. Data memory access, perfecting, speculative execution, etc. But if you are running a micro-bencmark with a tight loop of millions of iterations, then understanding the pipeline dependencies and dispatching can provide good insights.

New comment by alain94040 in "How fast can browsers process base64 data?"

alain94040 — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:59:41 +0000

That blog post left me hungry for more. I was expecting Daniel Lemire to provide a SIMD crazy optimized version that shows the default browser implementations are sub-optimal. But it's not in this article. Anyone knows?

New comment by alain94040 in "Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix"

alain94040 — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:15:54 +0000

To each their own. If you value human interaction, continue to book rides with humans.

New comment by alain94040 in "John Carmack on mutable variables"

alain94040 — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:46:14 +0000

That example is too simple for me to grasp it. How would you code a function that iterates over an array to compute its sum. No cheating with a built-in sum function. If you had to code each addition, how would that work? Curious to learn (I probably could google this or ask Claude to write me the code).

New comment by alain94040 in "The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership"

alain94040 — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:50:20 +0000

> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI?

My definition of AGI is when AI doesn't need humans anymore to create new models (to be specific, models that continue the GPT3 -> GPT4 -> GPT5 trend).

By my definition, once that happens, I don't really see a role for Microsoft to play. So not sure what value their legal deal has.

I don't think we're there at all anyway.

New comment by alain94040 in "TextEdit and the relief of simple software"

alain94040 — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 21:00:21 +0000

Just tried: open TextEdit, new document (creates an empty document). Close it, no save dialog.