Hacker News: flafla2

New comment by flafla2 in "Breaking the sorting barrier for directed single-source shortest paths"

flafla2 — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:26:52 +0000

O(m log^2/3 n) !!! What a triumph.

New comment by flafla2 in "On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules (1972)"

flafla2 — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:14:37 +0000

One of my favorite ever papers and very ahead of its time. Thanks for the share :)

New comment by flafla2 in "Designing a Lego orrery"

flafla2 — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 20:19:35 +0000

This is so awesome. There’s a lot to geek out about here, but I was personally enamored with the extra effort to make good renders/visualizations in software. Thanks for the read!

New comment by flafla2 in "Hacking millions of modems and investigating who hacked my modem"

flafla2 — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 07:55:36 +0000

Agreed. Bugs happen, bug fixes don’t always happen (especially quickly)

That being said, we could all do with a bit more input sanitization, and I hope Cox learned their lesson here.

New comment by flafla2 in "My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack"

flafla2 — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 23:57:08 +0000

Cloudflare does a pretty good job of managing it, at the cost of some centralization.

It would be pretty cool if there was a way to DDOS-harden at the protocol layer. Not sure if that’s even possible though

New comment by flafla2 in "Vala Programming Language"

flafla2 — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 15:30:41 +0000

Oh neat I’ve never heard of NativeAOT. I’ve only used Unity’s AOT compiler “Burst” for C# (I assume that is something different?).

Cool stuff.

edit: Actually I meant to say Unity’s IL2CPP, which transpiles IR to C++. Burst is a different tool with similar goals—it compiles IR straight down to native via LLVM.

New comment by flafla2 in "Vala Programming Language"

flafla2 — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 15:10:24 +0000

Oh got it. So like c# but compiles to native a la Swift?

New comment by flafla2 in "Vala Programming Language"

flafla2 — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 15:06:37 +0000

Superficially this language appears to be very similar to Swift. Beyond the syntax, it also has first class refcounting, C language binding, and no external runtime (compiles straight to binary).

I wonder, does Vala have a stable ABI, or native compatibility with other higher-level languages like C++ or ObjC? These are other difficult challenges which Swift attempts to tackle (and depending on who you ask, with varying levels of success).

In any case this is an interesting language. Thanks for sharing

New comment by flafla2 in "How to make smaller C and C++ binaries"

flafla2 — Sun, 07 May 2023 21:24:16 +0000

I agree with the sentiment but in practice I’ve found that most C++ STL exceptions throw in a “fatal error” type of scenario like a bad allocation and generally not an “expected error”. For example, basic_ifstream::open() sets a fail bit on error, and doesn’t throw an exception.

This is in contrast to python or Swift for example, their standard libraries are more “throw-prone”. Building off the previous example Swift’s String.init(contentsOf:encoding:) throws on error on failure.

So in practice, IMO it is usually safe to disable exceptions in C++. Though, I have run into tricky ABI breaks when you link multiple libraries in a chain of exceptions->noexcept->exceptions and so on! You’re of course at the mercy of nonstandard behavior so buyer-beware. I definitely wouldn’t advocate for turning them off -just- for a binary size reduction.

New comment by flafla2 in "Experimental Rust Feature: Safer Interoperable ABI"

flafla2 — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 17:13:14 +0000

Indeed, it’s more accurate to say that C was designed around common asm calling conventions of its day, than the other way around.

New comment by flafla2 in "Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?"

flafla2 — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 22:41:06 +0000

Matlab is awesome. I had to learn it for a class in Computational Photography back in school. The matrix-centric language design is an interesting change from traditional languages and the amazing linear solvers available give you a shocking amount of power sometimes. For example, the language has really good SIMD/parallelism support out of the box, because you are steered towards making all of your variables into vectors and performing batch processing. Backslash is also an incredibly powerful tool in the right hands, and lends itself to some beautiful oneliners (it’s sort of like a shell language in that way).

New comment by flafla2 in "The World Excel Championship is being broadcast on ESPN"

flafla2 — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 03:38:34 +0000

Same. I’m honestly kind of stunned

New comment by flafla2 in "Swallowing the elephant into Blender"

flafla2 — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 02:12:39 +0000

Very happy that Aras is fighting the good fight, doing some great OSS work after his departure from Unity. The speed up numbers are quite impressive!

I remember when I was first getting into shader programming 10+ years ago, I asked a question on the Unity forums and Aras was one of the first to respond. Even then he was a titanic figure behind Unity’s graphics stack. I never forgot how kind he was to help a kid like me out, I’m sure he was quite busy!

New comment by flafla2 in "The math behind mind-reading tricks"

flafla2 — Sat, 28 May 2022 02:43:29 +0000

Complete yet succinct explanation — bravo and i might steal this way of explaining it!

New comment by flafla2 in "An AI system for solving crossword puzzles that outperforms the best humans"

flafla2 — Fri, 20 May 2022 23:53:34 +0000

> this type of AI is not getting us any closer to that.

That is not obvious at all.

From the African 6:8 rhythm to the American shuffle (2017)

flafla2 — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 18:50:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkyOFkBAMDg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31146991

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by flafla2 in "OpenAI has solved the XY problem"

flafla2 — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 06:38:48 +0000

That last example is such a mic drop. I can’t tell if I’m impressed beyond belief or appalled.

New comment by flafla2 in "Ask HN: How do you search large codebases before adding a feature or fixing bug?"

flafla2 — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 23:42:47 +0000

Wow, great work!

New comment by flafla2 in "Winning Wordle"

flafla2 — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 01:33:05 +0000

Well, technically you could have realized the ambiguity in this case, and guessed a word like RAZED to clear it up.

New comment by flafla2 in "Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?"

flafla2 — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 13:05:50 +0000

This is going to sound a bit hyperbolic but I haven’t been truly impressed with any new features in Unity since the introduction of PBR and dynamic indirect lighting in Unity 5.0. If your game doesn’t require cutting-edge technology then you would be hard-pressed to find a significant difference between the latest version and say version 5.4. If your game does require excellent optimization, rendering tech, etc, then Unreal is simply the better option.