Hacker News: erwincoumans

New comment by erwincoumans in "What Happened to Fry's Electronics"

erwincoumans — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 05:52:41 +0000

CentralComputers is worth visiting, if you were into Frys.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Canvas_ity: A tiny, single-header

erwincoumans — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:36:30 +0000

It is common for header-only libraries: you need to include this header in one c++ using the macro for linking (don't use that macro in other c++ files to avoid duplicate symbols). In C++, you can declare a function as many times as you want, but you can only define it (write the actual body) once in the entire project.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Ask HN: How to get started with robotics as a hobbyist?"

erwincoumans — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:54:24 +0000

I highly recommend starting with the very affordable and well documented Lerobot SO101 arms. You can 3d print or buy parts and actuators, camera. Lots of tutorials and training policies, data collection and simulations. https://huggingface.co/docs/lerobot/en/so101

New comment by erwincoumans in "This game is a single 13 KiB file that runs on Windows, Linux and in the Browser"

erwincoumans — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 06:30:47 +0000

Indeed, magic. How about the Commodore 64, there was a game (Eindeloos, Radarsoft, 1985) within 64kb that has a huge map. Someone recently (after 40 years!) extracted the map (500 screens) and the png alone is 800kb. See the story an zoom in and try finding the little heart in the map! https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2025/03/07/endless.html

New comment by erwincoumans in "Native Amiga Filesystems on macOS / Linux / Windows with FUSE"

erwincoumans — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 23:50:42 +0000

If only exfat had symbolic links.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]"

erwincoumans — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 08:18:21 +0000

Nice shots, would fit well in the Baraka (or Samara) movie.

New comment by erwincoumans in "No Graphics API"

erwincoumans — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:01:49 +0000

Yes, an amazing and detailed post, enjoyed all of it. In AI, it is common to use jit compilers (pytorch, jax, warp, triton, taichi, ...) that compile to cuda (or rocm, cpu, tpu, ...). You could write renderers like that, rasterizers or raytracers.

For example: https://github.com/StafaH/mujoco_warp/blob/render_context/mu...

(A new simple raytracer that compiles to cuda, used for robotics reinforcement learning, renders at up to 1 million fps at low resolution, 64x64, with textures, shadows)

New comment by erwincoumans in "Building a Modern C64 Assembly AI Toolchain"

erwincoumans — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 17:09:09 +0000

Pretty complex project, brings up C64 assembly programming memories (with some freeze cartridge with monitor to enter asm OP codes). It would be interesting to see all the actual LLM queries to get those results.

New comment by erwincoumans in "I made a quieter air purifier"

erwincoumans — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:24:06 +0000

I wonder if they used silent computer fans? I love the quiet Noctua fans, and replace all noisy fans with them: fans in pc, wifi router, playstation 5, mister fpga, robots, jetson orin etc.

New comment by erwincoumans in "We're losing our voice to LLMs"

erwincoumans — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 16:32:53 +0000

I tried Bluesky and wanted to like it. My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why. Ironically it could be another way of loosing ones voice to an LLM :)

New comment by erwincoumans in "Pimped Amiga 500"

erwincoumans — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:16:20 +0000

Yeah the Mister Pi makes more sense, financially. On the C64 side, there is the upcoming C64 Ultimate https://www.commodore.net, that looks almost identical to the original one

New comment by erwincoumans in "Pimped Amiga 500"

erwincoumans — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:06:03 +0000

Thanks, your comment made me buy the icode prebuilt preloaded MiSTer FPGA, 128mb ram, hope that is sufficient for Amiga Vision. I used to own an Amiga 500 with internal HDD, long ago. Guru meditations still exist?

https://www.icode.com/product/mister-fpga-kit-terasic-de10-n...

New comment by erwincoumans in "ZOZO's Contact Solver for physics-based simulations"

erwincoumans — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:36:35 +0000

It is good to point it out it is for offline simulations. There is some related recent work, Offset Geometric Contact that is suitable for interactive use: https://ankachan.github.io/Projects/OGC/index.html

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

erwincoumans — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 13:33:31 +0000

I was assuming the context of robot learning (IsaacLab), where Newton Physics will eventually replace PhysX. Newton Physics doesn't target games or other areas.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

erwincoumans — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 03:33:36 +0000

The primary use case of Newton Physics is reinforcement learning, with 1000s of similar environments. Even if each environment would have sequential actions, you run many envs in parallel.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

erwincoumans — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 01:40:03 +0000

Well, MuJoCo initially used JAX for GPU (MJX) and MuJoCo Warp replaces MJX with better performance.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

erwincoumans — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 01:37:09 +0000

Agreed on most, and naming is terrible. Note that at run-time Python is out-of-the loop, since Newton Physics records a CUDA graph, and executes it, so performance is not impacted (aside from startup JIT time for modified kernels). I'd prefer C/C++ as well, and although you can call Warp-compiled kernels from C++ (without Python, see my https://github.com/erwincoumans/warp_cpp project), it would be better to have native C/C++ support without requiring a Python interpreter. It just happens that almost all Deep Learning/RL for robotics uses Python.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

erwincoumans — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:21:11 +0000

This will eventually replace PhysX, some of its developers are working on Newton Physics. Newton Physics has multiple solvers, including MuJoCo-Warp and is easier to customize and extend.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Fast"

erwincoumans — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 23:52:28 +0000

iOS (iPhone, iPad) UI is typically smooth and fast though. If only car navigation and UI could be as responsive.

New comment by erwincoumans in "The Rise of Whatever"

erwincoumans — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 11:37:57 +0000

Agreed. However, according to the author LLM's mostly produce crap, and he doesn't seem to be able to imagine (or want?) that to improve (beyond crap/hallucination and become very useful to many).

Hacker News: erwincoumans

New comment by erwincoumans in "What Happened to Fry's Electronics"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Canvas_ity: A tiny, single-header -like 2D rasterizer for C++"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Ask HN: How to get started with robotics as a hobbyist?"

New comment by erwincoumans in "This game is a single 13 KiB file that runs on Windows, Linux and in the Browser"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Native Amiga Filesystems on macOS / Linux / Windows with FUSE"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]"

New comment by erwincoumans in "No Graphics API"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Building a Modern C64 Assembly AI Toolchain"

New comment by erwincoumans in "I made a quieter air purifier"

New comment by erwincoumans in "We're losing our voice to LLMs"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Pimped Amiga 500"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Pimped Amiga 500"

New comment by erwincoumans in "ZOZO's Contact Solver for physics-based simulations"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Newton: physics simulation engine built upon NVIDIA Warp"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Fast"

New comment by erwincoumans in "The Rise of Whatever"

New comment by erwincoumans in "Canvas_ity: A tiny, single-header