Hacker News: mad

Can LLMs model real-world systems in TLA+?

mad — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:21:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sigops.org/2026/can-llms-model-real-world-systems-in-tla/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065254

Points: 98

# Comments: 26

How LLMs and coding agents change the dynamics of adopting Rust

mad — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:20:16 +0000

Article URL: https://mdwdotla.medium.com/revisiting-rust-in-2026-ae8720cc7f2c

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385652

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mad in "An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters"

mad — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:45:39 +0000

> Most of this list is about how to dress for senpai; figuratively speaking. A pretty depressing take on "how to do important research that matters".

How is that the case? The tips seem to aim for impactful research: picking good ideas and executing well on them. There's a tacit assumption that such impactful research will win best paper awards, but that's actually not substantiated and isn't obviously correct, since best paper selection committees can't see the future. For example, many (maybe most?) winners of retrospective awards (test-of-time / influential paper) aren't papers that won a best paper award when originally published.

Most of the author's papers he cites in the post, including the membership inference paper which is one of the papers the author is "most proud of," didn't win best paper awards.

An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters

mad — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:24:22 +0000

Article URL: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2026/how-to-win-a-best-paper-award.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47311179

Points: 169

# Comments: 42

DoubleAI's WarpSpeed: Surpassing Expert-Written Kernels at Scale

mad — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:59:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.doubleai.com/research/doubleais-warpspeed-surpassing-expert-written-kernels-at-scale

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47233396

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Are large language models worth it?

mad — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 12:43:42 +0000

Article URL: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2025/are-llms-worth-it.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45978931

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

Gate-level emulation of an Intel 4004 in 4004 bytes of C

mad — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:40:42 +0000

Article URL: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2025/ioccc-intel-4004-in-4004-bytes-c.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799452

Points: 56

# Comments: 7

MiniHDL: A Python Hardware Description Language DSL

mad — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 16:50:04 +0000

Article URL: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2025/minihdl-python-hardware-description-dsl.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44759314

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Re-Engineering Peer Review for the Age of AI

mad — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 16:30:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sigarch.org/the-reviewer-is-dead-long-live-the-review-re-engineering-peer-review-for-the-age-of-ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44759097

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The role of LLMs in academic reviewing

mad — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 16:12:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sigarch.org/the-role-of-llms-in-academic-reviewing/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736102

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by mad in "Optimistic Locking in B-Trees"

mad — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 08:02:45 +0000

You should also check out the Maple Tree (https://docs.kernel.org/core-api/maple_tree.html).

It's the data structure used to track non-overlapping intervals in the Linux kernel's virtual memory subsystem.

If you don't mind sharing, what's your use case for such a data structure?

New comment by mad in "Downfall Attacks"

mad — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:05:46 +0000

Company politics? According to this tweet, parts of Intel did know about this attack: https://twitter.com/bsdaemon/status/1688978152201015301

New comment by mad in "Ask HN: What is new in algorithms and data structures these days?"

mad — Wed, 10 May 2023 14:45:46 +0000

The Cuckoo Trie, an ordered index data structure explicitly designed to have memory-level parallelism, which out-of-order processors can exploit to execute DRAM accesses in parallel:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.09331.pdf