Hacker News: groos

New comment by groos in "A giant star may have destroyed itself in one of the rarest explosions"

groos — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:03:20 +0000

It was a supergiant, hence died at a young age, and unlikely to have evolved life of any kind in its system.

New comment by groos in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

groos — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:25:13 +0000

Again, note that I said "work through" and not "read". Reading code is shallow. Debugging it, modifying it, inserting diagnostic code, etc. is not.

New comment by groos in "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"

groos — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:16:25 +0000

'People' in this case were Don Knuth (TeX) and Leslie Lamport (LaTeX). Both are Turing Award winners.

New comment by groos in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

groos — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:52:40 +0000

You missed the point - understanding comes from working through the code, not just reading it. This is nothing new: nobody has learned or done new mathematics or physics or whatever by just reading a textbook.

New comment by groos in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

groos — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:47:06 +0000

During the last few months when AI usage was mandated in our team and usage exploded, our team's throughput has barely changed. Now, if this was due to people working 2 hours a day and painting, cooking and playing golf the rest of the day, this would be a great result, but I see many people work past 6pm, and yet the output is mostly the same. We are not tackling harder problems or fixing more bugs despite authoring numerous skills for AI. Eventually the reckoning is sure to come, and I think it will not be pretty.

New comment by groos in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

groos — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:42:04 +0000

As I am continually amazed at how well Claude 4.7 deals with highly complicated C++ code, I am also becoming painfully aware of the developing situation mentioned in this article: I no longer completely understand the code it is editing, not because I'm incapable of doing it, but because I have not authored the changes. I am trading throughput for understanding, and, eventually, judgment.

New comment by groos in "Flipdiscs"

groos — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:19:46 +0000

Looks like this would lend itself naturally to sorting algorithm demos.

New comment by groos in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

groos — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:18:16 +0000

A colleague once told me, the difference between software engineering and civil engineering is that they build the same bridge repeatedly while we never build the same thing twice.

New comment by groos in "Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)"

groos — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:27:18 +0000

> How could the first Pascal compiler be compiled if it was written in Pascal, but a Pascal compiler didn't yet exist?

Therein lies the magic of bootstrapping a language compiler written in the same language. Look it up.

New comment by groos in "Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)"

groos — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:25:35 +0000

Pascal, as defined by Wirth, had no "low level" features. E.g., no control over memory allocation other than the language provided new/dispose, no bit operators, clunky strings of fixed size, no access to system calls, no access to assembly, not even any hex or octal constants, all features which a language allowing "low level" access is expected to have (e.g. Ada, Modula-2/3, Oberon, all Pascal-derived languages). Things like conformant array parameters showed up much later in the ISO version but were not widely adopted. No modules either but this is not a low level feature. Turbo Pascal attempted to fix all this on the PC later on and it was deservedly well loved. Still, Wirth successfully wrote Pascal compilers in Pascal without --- obviously -- having a Pascal compiler available. [Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)#...)

New comment by groos in "Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys"

groos — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:52:12 +0000

Yes. The answer is yes.

New comment by groos in "Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)"

groos — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:32:50 +0000

I'm not sure why people seem to be under the impression that writing a compiler means that the language the compiler is implemented in should have "low level" features. A compiler is just a text -> text translation tool if you can leverage other tools such as an assembler and never needs to access machine level instructions. E.g., Pascal compilers have traditionally been written in Pascal, hardly a language which conjures up a "low level" image. Even when an assembler isn't available, all your implementation language needs to support, in terms of "low level" features, is writing of bytes to a file.

But manipulating instruction and file formats and such can be tedious if your language doesn't have the right capabilities but it's not impossible.

New comment by groos in "Ban the sale of precise geolocation"

groos — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:11:27 +0000

Most people don't realize how bad geolocated data is for a free society. I can buy data from a broker, geo-fence your house address, and then I'm able to see all the places where you went, who you associate with, and identify all you associate with by tracking them to addresses. All of this happens with anonymized device identifiers. It is the wet dream of a company such as Palantir and all governments who desire absolute control over their populations.

New comment by groos in "Clean code in the age of coding agents"

groos — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:41:52 +0000

The high level language -> assembly seems like an apt analogy for using LLMs but I would like to argue that it is only a weak one. The reason in that, previously, both the high level language and the assembly language had well defined semantics and the transform was deterministic whereas now you are using English or other human language, with ambiguities and lacking well-defined semantics. The reason math symbolisms were invented in the first place is because human language did not have the required unambiguous precision, and if we encounter hurdles with LLMs, we may need to reinvent this once more.

New comment by groos in "Revealed: Face of 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from cave"

groos — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:09:29 +0000

I wonder have the reconstruction techniques been verified by a double-blind experiment to reconstruct the face of a homo sapiens from a skull with a known photograph. Otherwise, you're just wondering how much of it is just artistry and how much solid, verified technique.

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

groos — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:40:48 +0000

Here's one way to do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORDIC

New comment by groos in "Tony Hoare has died"

groos — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:22:07 +0000

I've had the good fortune to attend two of his lectures in person. Each time, he effortlessly derived provably correct code from the conditions of the problem and made it seem all too easy. 10 minutes after leaving the lecture, my thought was "Wait, how did he do it again?".

RIP Sir Tony.

New comment by groos in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

groos — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:00:29 +0000

I have a strict policy of no Meta glasses for guests in my house. Socially, they're poison.

New comment by groos in "Topological Naming Problem"

groos — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:37:49 +0000

My statement was accurate as of _when_ I moved away from FreeCad. I'm happy they merged the RealThunder work. But they dilly-dallied for a long time while people were demanding a fix and one was available. Doesn't speak well of their org politics.

New comment by groos in "Topological Naming Problem"

groos — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:36:14 +0000

Glad to hear it as I moved away before 1.0 happened. RealThunder had other enhancements as well, if I remember correctly. I wonder if those were taken up as well.