Hacker News: diffuse_l

New comment by diffuse_l in "Claude Fable 5"

diffuse_l — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:51:01 +0000

Seems like weekly allowance got reset back to 0%, pretty usual when they deploy new models.

New comment by diffuse_l in "sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library"

diffuse_l — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:49:24 +0000

For short strings (probably most of them) - use a byte for the length (at the string/symbol definition site, alongside the offset) (adds 1 byte * symbols, use high bit if necessary to add bytes for longer strings). You need the offset into the table anyway. It isn't strictly better, but it isn't strictly worse, and it gives you the option to reuse sub-strings.

New comment by diffuse_l in "Sp.h is the standard library that C deserves"

diffuse_l — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:05:56 +0000

Nothing prevents you from using a shared pool of strings that don't have null terminator. It can even be more efficient, since you don't have the null byte to handle at string end. Depending on the maximum string length you want to support, it doesn't even have to take more space.

New comment by diffuse_l in "MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble"

diffuse_l — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:57:14 +0000

Complete assembly. Wouldn't call it trivial, but not super hard either. I wouldn't dream of doing this without the complete assembly, not worth the hassle. You run the risk of ruining something, but for me the reasoning was that worst case I'd still have a conputer I can attach to an external monitor. Replacement itself is mostly removing screws and cables carefully - followed the ifixit guide.

New comment by diffuse_l in "MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble"

diffuse_l — Thu, 14 May 2026 11:19:23 +0000

Had a similar issue - some of the display was garbled for more than a year. Had a replacement screen from aliexpress lying around that cost 126$ two and half years ago, got to do the replacement a few weeks ago, as the kid needed a laptop for school. Turns out the replacement screen resolution was not the same as the original, but it still works fine, took ~1 hour for the replacement.

So for me it did make sense to repair - it costs less than a new laptop, at least

New comment by diffuse_l in "XML is a cheap DSL"

diffuse_l — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 13:52:15 +0000

That's if you parse the into a DOM and work on that. If you use SAX parsing, it makes it much better regarding the memory footprint.

But of course, working with SAX parsing is yet another, very different, bag of snakes.

I still hope that json parsing had the same support for stream processing as XML (I know that there are existing solutions for that, but it's much less common than in the XML world)

New comment by diffuse_l in "How many registers does an x86-64 CPU have? (2020)"

diffuse_l — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 16:54:43 +0000

Some minor nitpicks, but hey, we're counting registers, it's already quite nitpicky :)

Add far as I van remember, you can't access the high/low 8 bits of si, di, sp. ip isn't accessible directly at all.

The ancestry of x86 can actually be traced back to 8 bit cpus - the high/low bits of registers are remenants of an even older arch - but I'm not sure about that from the top of my head.

I think most of the "weird" choices mentioned there boil down to limitations that seem absurd right now, but were real constraints - x87 stack can probably traced back to exposing minimal interface to the host processor - 1 register instead of 8 can save quite a few data line - although a multiplexer can probably solve this - so just a wild guess. MMX probably reused the register file of x87 to save die space.

New comment by diffuse_l in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

diffuse_l — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:11:48 +0000

The policy link[0] page still has a link to the bug bounty program[1] which still discuss monetary compensation.

[0] https://curl.se/dev/vuln-disclosure.html

[1] https://curl.se/docs/bugbounty.html

New comment by diffuse_l in "Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video"

diffuse_l — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 20:46:15 +0000

Too bad, but I managed to watch about 30 seconds of the video before getting motion sickness.

Seems like a really cool technology, though.

I wonder if anyone else got the same response, or it's just me.

New comment by diffuse_l in "What an unprocessed photo looks like"

diffuse_l — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 06:47:16 +0000

Really enjoyed the article, thanks! A small nit - I think you have a small mistake in the value range at the start - 136000 should probably be 13600?

New comment by diffuse_l in "The Number That Turned Sideways"

diffuse_l — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:36:36 +0000

It was pretty clear towards the middle of the piece that an ai was involved writing this piece, which was unfortunate, since it distracted me so much from the subject that I couldn't complete reading it...

New comment by diffuse_l in "We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner"

diffuse_l — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 21:02:07 +0000

At least it's ACID compliant

New comment by diffuse_l in "Why JPEG XL ignoring bit depth is genius (and why AVIF can't pull it off)"

diffuse_l — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 13:08:13 +0000

Well, at least the first half was somewhat useful...

New comment by diffuse_l in "Why JPEG XL ignoring bit depth is genius (and why AVIF can't pull it off)"

diffuse_l — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 13:02:15 +0000

It mostly rehashes the point of using float instead of integer representation, and uses different headers (radical solution, why this matters, secret weapon, philosophy, the bottom line) for streching what could be said in a few sentences into a few pages.

New comment by diffuse_l in "Why JPEG XL ignoring bit depth is genius (and why AVIF can't pull it off)"

diffuse_l — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 09:42:33 +0000

I think the article could be better and get the point across with half the length and without the second half of it being full of ai generated list of advantages, or using that space to give some more technical information

New comment by diffuse_l in "First convex polyhedron found that can't pass through itself"

diffuse_l — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 12:16:56 +0000

For some reason, it really bothers me that under one of the images there is a caption that says "the pink cube", but the cube is in a shade of blue...

New comment by diffuse_l in "Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?"

diffuse_l — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:51:16 +0000

It's more than that. They have an unlimited license to arm designs, and can change them as they see fit, since they were an early investors (or something along those lines). Other manufacturers can't get these terms, or if they can, it will be prohibtly expensive

New comment by diffuse_l in "Unity reintroduces the Runtime Fee through its Industry license"

diffuse_l — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:00:35 +0000

I would expect no less from a company that acquired/merged with IronSource...

New comment by diffuse_l in "Website is served from nine Neovim buffers on my old ThinkPad"

diffuse_l — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:45:57 +0000

I'm pretty sure that the website will reside in cache in any case.

New comment by diffuse_l in "I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class"

diffuse_l — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 16:45:00 +0000

I'm wondering if the usage of an em-dash in the article (somewhere towards the middle) is self-aware trolling, or just the result of excessive ai use...

> includes both a human and a computer—and “surprisingly,