<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: entrope</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=entrope</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 18 Oct 2026 06:29:56 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=entrope" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Show HN: I got tired of btop not seeing my Mac's chip, so I built siltop"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In a third list of three things, Claude mentioned that this program does not link an HTTP stack.  Good to know, I guess, but how can we evaluate it against Zawinski's law without knowing whether it can read or send email?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:07:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130387</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130387</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130387</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "DeepSeek: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not OP, but I typically ask it to report status of whatever is running; it can run a background task that reports to it every N minutes.  With Claude Code in VS Code and a Pro subscription, it seems like the one-hour cache is the default, making it an issue less often.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 11:14:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130044</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130044</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130044</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The process to generate these was opaque, so there was some concern that the values might have been backdoored somehow like Dual_EC_DRBG was; we didn't even have confidence that they were generated from a PRNG rather than some other process.  Knowing that the values were generated this way makes it much less plausible that there is such a backdoor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:09:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123886</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123886</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123886</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> is it suspicious that such an obvious thing wasn’t discovered in 25 years?<p>Ouch.  The implied judgment of us humans stings there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:23:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123212</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123212</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123212</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Geoffrey Hinton: 'We're creating alien beings. I'm willing to choose humans'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As usual, Jensen Huang seems like the more reasonable one here.<p>The reasoning traces of things like Gemini 4 Argon deciding that inserting a compiler backdoor would make it a famous example of deceptive AI (and therefore it "MUST NOT DO THAT") or GLM 5.3 thinking that its output might be used for RL, and therefore an honest answer is much better in the long term, are good antidotes to hyperbole about misaligned AI going berserk.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2026 10:29:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50116637</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50116637</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50116637</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "AI agent designs a complete RISC-V CPU from a 219-word spec sheet in 12 hours"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From April 2026.  It's not immediately obvious to me whether they did release the information promised, but it looks like somebody from Meta reproduced the effort using Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7: <a href="https://github.com/tanfer-meta/vercore" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tanfer-meta/vercore</a> (edited to add: claiming substantially better performance than Vercore)<p>It works be interesting to see how Opus 5.5 does with the same task.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:25:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004070</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004070</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004070</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "$2599 Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What is the value proposition for that over the 128 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD version of the laptop with a list price $100 less?  Does it have a higher power budget or better sustained thermals?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:58:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000761</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000761</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000761</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, that's exactly what I said I understood.  When Go (and Java) people say "stop the world" for GC, they mean all goroutines/threads stop, not just one.  I don't think you get that with even naive reference counting.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:49:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971866</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971866</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971866</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can you elaborate on how cascaded deletions "stop the world" with reference counting?  I understand how GC could lead to arbitrarily large latencies for whatever task triggers that kind of cascaded deletions, but as I understand it, "stop the world" usually means that no threads are allowed to execute application code.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:49:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49963190</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49963190</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49963190</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "GPT-6.1 Sol replaces GPT-6 Sol after just 7 days, with near-Astra intelligence"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you think AI subscriptions are analogous to either price gouging during an emergency or ticket scalping?  I don't see the similarities.<p>It is fair to complain that subscription AI usage limits are opaque, but that is at best tangentially related to them being subsidized relative to API prices.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:19:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49919889</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49919889</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49919889</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Recursive `make` and `-j`"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Having a clean DAG still breaks down with recursive Make: if binary X depends on library A, then X's Makefile either has a rule to recurse to A (and then parallel builds of A might happen, even when building from the top level, unless you use -j1) or it doesn't (and then you can only build from the top level Makefile and you might give up parallelism due to granularity of the top-level DAG).<p>At the time that essay was written, Make was the best runner available, and the only portable one.  There are better options now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:12:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49919847</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49919847</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49919847</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Gitea 28.0"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is not describing the feedback part of the feedback you got?  You're kind of playing into Forgejo's narrative about governance.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:21:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915752</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915752</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915752</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "GPT-6.1 Sol replaces GPT-6 Sol after just 7 days, with near-Astra intelligence"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What about those do you think are "shady"?  Price discrimination in favor of small customers at the expense of large customers is somewhat common; businesses want customers to buy more of their products, but customers are not obliged to buy more if they like their current deals.  Having limits on using finite resources seems even easier to justify.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:12:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49907253</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49907253</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49907253</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Packing Binary Is Fun"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It depends.  My personal experience is with RINEX, a text file format for GNSS observation data.  gzip compresses large sets of files by about 4x.  Someone named Yuki HATANAKA came up with a compact text format (CRX) that shrinks it by about a factor of 4.1x.  You can gzip CRX for a total ratio of almost 12x, or bzip3 it for a total ratio of 17x.  But if you combine Hatanaka's technique (essentially higher-order delta coding) with some others, you get a binary format with a compression ratio of 19x that reads faster than the CRX text.<p>When one's uncompressed RINEX files are 200 GB/day, it's worth some effort to shrink the files, especially if it means they are faster to read.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:49:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49884912</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49884912</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49884912</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Ember-1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The 90% and 95% are against some blend of tasks meant to be broadly representative. A pricey model seldom fails a problem that cheap models do well, so there's stratification of tasks by difficulty.  Someone doing novel research may be in the "hard" 15% of the blend, where P(solution) goes from one third to two thirds.<p>On the other hand, if it's cheap to tell whether you got a good solution, and you think the 90 and 95% apply to your task blend, then it's almost always worth trying the cheap model first.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:39:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49871134</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49871134</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49871134</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Shouldn't they be 64 bits on most modern systems then?<p>Arguably so, but then one would lose the ability to natively name 16-bit integer types because "short" would be 32 bits.<p>An earlier comment addresses x86-64.  AArch64 (pedantically, the A64 instruction set used for AArch64's 64-bit execution mode) is similar, in that addresses are 64 bits wide but ALU instructions typically encode a width bit, called "sf", that selects either 32- or 64-bit data registers and arithmetic.  See, for example, <a href="https://arm.jonpalmisc.com/latest_aarch64/add_addsub_ext" rel="nofollow">https://arm.jonpalmisc.com/latest_aarch64/add_addsub_ext</a> .</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 27 Sep 2026 10:00:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49865193</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49865193</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49865193</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Solving for faster SHA-1 collision detection"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I thought it was a really good, clear write-up of a very nice engineering discovery and optimization.  If anything, I think an LLM would generate native superscript for the `2^(-r)` expression, so I didn't have an impression of LLM authorship.<p>Maybe an LLM did the search for what expressions to put in the blocks vs tail of the vectorized collision detection, but that seems like a good place to use an LLM as long as all of the expected bit relations are verified as checked properly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828055</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828055</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828055</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "Mercury 2.5 LLM hits 770 tokens per second"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Mercury 2.5 is below average in intelligence, but well priced when comparing to other models of similar price.<p>Well priced when compared to other models of similar price, eh?<p>Are we allowed to call this slop, even if the output is not directly from an LLM?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 01:50:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49825223</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49825223</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49825223</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Allowing more than one lead byte <i>is</i> a complication of the existing standard.  As many others have pointed out, we have plenty of coding space without that (e.g. by allowing 5- and 6-byte UTF-8 again), so the case for the extra complexity is currently not compelling.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:14:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774645</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774645</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774645</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by entrope in "UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> BOMs (and especially the hilarious UTF-8 BOM) are strictly a legacy Microsoft/Windows thing<p>How should a reader infer the bye order for a UCS-2 or UTF-16 file without a BOM?  It seems like one would have to read until finding a code point that would be illegal under one ordering (but files might not include such a code point).<p>Similarly, a UTF-8 BOM is a useful flag to distinguish UTF-8 from other text encodings.  You are right that the ambiguity goes away if those other encodings do, but people don't want to rewrite their legacy files.  Some people don't want to use two bytes for common non-ASCII characters, so they are really attached to ISO-8859 or Windows-1252 or koi8r or whatever.  CJK languages have their own encodings that are more efficient for their languages.  UTF-8 is great for English speakers, but it's a compromise for everyone else, so they might reasonably want incompatible systems for their own use.  UTF-8 BOM is a good "magic" sequence to detect encoding as long as people have non-UTF-8 files.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:08:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774610</link><dc:creator>entrope</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774610</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774610</guid></item></channel></rss>