Hacker News: drsopp

New comment by drsopp in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

drsopp — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:00:56 +0000

I didnt inspect the rest of the code but I guess the table is fetched from L2 on every call? I think the L1 data cache is flooded by other stuff going on all the time.

About dropping the interpolation: Yes you are right of course. I was thinking about the speed. No noticable speed improvement by dropping interpolation. The asin calls are only a small fraction of everything.

New comment by drsopp in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

drsopp — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:50:21 +0000

I experimented a bit with the code. Various tables with different datatypes. There is enough noise from the Monte Carlo to not make a difference if you use smaller data types than double or float. Even dropping interpolation worked fine, and got the speed to be on par with the best in the article, but not faster.

New comment by drsopp in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

drsopp — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:10:17 +0000

Did some quick calculations, and at this precision, it seems a table lookup might be able to fit in the L1 cache depending on the CPU model.

New comment by drsopp in "BitNet: Inference framework for 1-bit LLMs"

drsopp — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:10:22 +0000

"1-bit LLMs" is just marketing. The Shannon entropy of one letter with a 3 symbol alphabet (-1, 0, 1) is 1.58.

New comment by drsopp in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

drsopp — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:34:59 +0000

https://trondal.com

New comment by drsopp in "Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator"

drsopp — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:34:32 +0000

It destabilized after a few minutes on my phone.

New comment by drsopp in "The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia"

drsopp — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 16:31:37 +0000

Oo, I'd like to get a roll of these. But I live in Norway.

New comment by drsopp in "Munich's surfers left stunned after famed river wave vanishes"

drsopp — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 05:39:16 +0000

I guess they could model the river mathematically. I would not be surprised if there are two or more "stable" stream patterns. Perhaps it resets naturally after one year.

New comment by drsopp in "Why do Stanford math professors still use chalk? (2021)"

drsopp — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 06:33:20 +0000

One of my math teachers in university always brought with him a dry sponge in a small blue bag. (a lighter sponge that you don't wet before use). Brilliant lecturer.

New comment by drsopp in "Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]"

drsopp — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 06:26:04 +0000

I wonder why the DOI link on the bottom left of the first page does not work:

https://doi.org/10.1145/3719027.3765198

New comment by drsopp in "Show HN: TheAuditor – Offline security scanner for AI-generated code"

drsopp — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:14:39 +0000

How come AST parsing fails? Does that imply syntax errors in the code?

New comment by drsopp in "The cost of interrupted work (2023)"

drsopp — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 04:47:39 +0000

Conversely, I often think about the value I add by being interruptable, by helping my colleague with something that might save him more time than I lose. Good for the company.

New comment by drsopp in "Who Invented Backpropagation?"

drsopp — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 04:11:53 +0000

This I agree with completely.

New comment by drsopp in "Who Invented Backpropagation?"

drsopp — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:42:57 +0000

> The point is that a reader may want to know that the text they're reading is something a human took the time to write themselves.

The reader may also simply want information that helps them.

> They just haven't commented.

Yes, they did.

New comment by drsopp in "Who Invented Backpropagation?"

drsopp — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:19:04 +0000

Who cares if it is low effort? I got lots of upvotes for my link to Claude about this, and pncnmnp seems happy. The downvoted comment from ChatGPT was maybe a bit spammy?

New comment by drsopp in "Who Invented Backpropagation?"

drsopp — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:02:25 +0000

Why?

New comment by drsopp in "Who Invented Backpropagation?"

drsopp — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 16:52:34 +0000

Perhaps this:

Henry J. Kelley (1960). Gradient Theory of Optimal Flight Paths.

[1] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8e1dfe2b-69b0-4f2c-88f5-0...

New comment by drsopp in "Roman dodecahedron: 12-sided object has baffled archaeologists for centuries"

drsopp — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:30:57 +0000

Maybe one shop made these in a big city. Adventurous men bought them, brought them home and gave them to their wife. A great novelty noone has seen at home. So precious they bring them to their grave.

New comment by drsopp in "How to Store Data on Paper?"

drsopp — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 06:05:44 +0000

(2020)

New comment by drsopp in "Estimating Camera Motion from a Single Motion-Blurred Image"

drsopp — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 12:08:23 +0000

I should have read the abstract.