Hacker News: lisper

New comment by lisper in "I hate compilers"

lisper — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:51:44 +0000

A trivial counterexample to what? The antecedent of "one of the easiest" was "ways to accidentally create nondeterministic output." One even the most charitable reading I can muster that still seems to me to presume some pretty abject stupidity.

New comment by lisper in "I hate compilers"

lisper — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:28:46 +0000

Sure, but that is a completely different issue. People have mutually-conflicting goals on occasion. That is a Thing That Happens, but it is a very different phenomenon than being surprised by the obvious fact that putting a time stamp on your build makes that build non-reproducible.

New comment by lisper in "I hate compilers"

lisper — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:22:27 +0000

> the accidental part is that you suddenly made your build non-reproducible

But that's exactly what I don't get. How can that be considered "accidental"? How can any thinking person not realize that putting the build time into the compiled image will make every build different because, you know, different builds happen at different times? Has software engineering really been dumbed down so much that this is not immediately obvious? It feels like a mechanic doing an oil change and being surprised by having all the oil drain out if they neglect to put the drain plug back in.

New comment by lisper in "I hate compilers"

lisper — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:02:39 +0000

> There are a shocking number of ways to accidentally create nondeterministic output when doing C/C++ development. One of the easiest is to use the builtin __DATE__ and __TIME__ macros to stamp a build with the time the compiler was executed at:

Am I missing something here? Yes, if you use a feature that intentionally inserts the build time and date into the code, the every build is going to be different. That's the whole point of these macros. It's a feature. If you don't want that behavior, don't use that feature.

New comment by lisper in "Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users"

lisper — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:55:18 +0000

That is one of the best, most profound and prescient videos I have ever seen.

New comment by lisper in "US battery manufacturing output continues to break records"

lisper — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:39:02 +0000

I want a robust field of competitors that allows supply to rise to meet demand, and I would like the USA to be one of the competitors. I would like the people who do the work to earn a living wage. I do not want to benefit from overseas slave labor. If that means I have to pay more, so be it.

New comment by lisper in "US battery manufacturing output continues to break records"

lisper — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:26:49 +0000

Now if only we could make RAM chips too.

New comment by lisper in "The computer science degree isn’t dead"

lisper — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:09:44 +0000

> Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences.

It's no great mystery. Social interaction is a skill that requires practice and effort to develop. Interacting with new people is risky and occasionally painful. Back in the day the punishment for not developing that skill and taking those risks was boredom, but nowadays you can just crawl into your cell phone to while away the hours.

New comment by lisper in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

lisper — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:18:09 +0000

What was your friend's name? If they were working on robotics in that time period we probably worked together.

New comment by lisper in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

lisper — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:04:04 +0000

The space program is not about science. It has never been about science. Science is just the excuse, the window-dressing. What it's really about is military power and sending money to the right congressional districts. Source: I worked at JPL from 1988 to 2004.

New comment by lisper in "What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]"

lisper — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:02:26 +0000

What is it like to feel ill? What is it like to eat vanilla ice cream? What is it like to fall in love? What is it like to solve a math problem for the first time? What is it like to wonder what something is like?

Investing Is Compression

lisper — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:38:50 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10758

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48438835

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I Gave ChatGPT a Body [video]

lisper — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:47:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S67z2aekBrI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436524

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The Apple Ad That Broke Microsoft [video]

lisper — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:30:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBof-aNaDa0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48425490

Points: 8

# Comments: 2

Alberta Separatism

lisper — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:14:56 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_separatism

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48288217

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Orania

lisper — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:29:27 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48261657

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

Hitler as a Unit of Measurement

lisper — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:59:02 +0000

Article URL: https://hermitome.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/hitler-as-a-unit-of-measurement/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258977

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by lisper in "A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there"

lisper — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:22:47 +0000

Check your interlocutor's user name and it will make more sense.

New comment by lisper in "Deterministic Fully-Static Whole-Binary Translation Without Heuristics"

lisper — Wed, 13 May 2026 06:16:29 +0000

Good grief, what a useless argument. Isn't it obvious that this could trivially be converted to a non-static array if that's really what was needed?

New comment by lisper in "What's a mathematician to do? (2010)"

lisper — Sun, 10 May 2026 16:11:43 +0000

> One can rewrite their books in modern language and notation or guide others to learn it too but I never believed this was the significant part of a mathematician work

There's yer problem right there. Good pedagogy is hard and highly undervalued. IMHO Grant Sanderson (a.k.a. 3blue1brown) is making some of the most significant contributions to math in all of human history by making very complex topics accessible to ordinary mortals. In so doing he addresses one of the most significant problems facing humankind: the growing gap between the technologically savvy and everyone else. That gap is the underlying cause of some very serious problems.