Hacker News: marhee

New comment by marhee in "Prolog Coding Horror"

marhee — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:24:02 +0000

Prolog is for logic what inverse kinematics is for robotics.

Where in imperative programming languages you supply arguments to a function and get a result in Prolog you can give the result of a function call and get all argument sets that lead to that result.

But you are right that in production systems you would seldom see Prolog, for reason that you can easily LLM.

New comment by marhee in "How Claude Code works in large codebases"

marhee — Fri, 15 May 2026 05:39:05 +0000

The answer is in the introduction:

> Claude Code is running in production across multi-million-line monorepos, decades-old legacy systems, distributed architectures spanning dozens of repositories (…)

So it is optimized for the general case, using robust tooling that works everywhere, especially when large & messy.

That being said, your remark is right and for well organised smaller repo’s there’s better tooing it can and should use. But I think it does, at least Codex does is my case so I guess Claude does it to. For example Codex use ‘go doc’ first before doing greps.

New comment by marhee in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

marhee — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:48:32 +0000

Software engineering is only about 20% writing code (the famous 40-20-40 split). Most people use it only for the first 40%, and very succesfully (im in that camp). If you use it to write your code you can theorettically maybe get 20% time improvement initially, but you loose a lot of time later redoing it or unraveling. Not worth bothering.

New comment by marhee in "In praise of –dry-run"

marhee — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 07:46:23 +0000

Doesn’t this conflate dry-running with integration testing? ASAIK the purpose of a dry-run is to understand what will happen, not to test what will happen. For the latter we have testing.

New comment by marhee in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

marhee — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:19:59 +0000

Yes, but then the GPU needs that amount of ram, so it's fairer to look at the sum of RAM + VRAM requirements. With compressed representations you trade CPU cycles for RAM. To save laptop battery better required copious amounts of RAM (since it's cheap).

New comment by marhee in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

marhee — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:45:45 +0000

> Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past

Just a single retina screen buffer, assuming something like 2500 by 2500 pixels, 4 byte per pixel is already 25MB for a single buffer. Then you want double buffering, but also a per-window buffer since you don't want to force rewrites 60x per second and we want to drag windows around while showing contents not a wireframe. As you can see just that adds up quickly. And that's just the draw buffers. Not mentioning all the different fonts that are simultaneously used, images that are shown, etc.

(Of course, screen bufferes are typically stored in VRAM once drawn. But you need to drawn first, which is at least in part on the CPU)

New comment by marhee in "Quanta to publish popular math and physics books by Terence Tao and David Tong"

marhee — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:32:14 +0000

I will definitely reads these books when they come out.

For a historic overview of mathematics with (accessible) formulas I highly recommend “Journey through genius: The great theorems of mathematics”.

New comment by marhee in "A million ways to die from a data race in Go"

marhee — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 08:28:57 +0000

Concurrent programming is hard and has many pitfalls; people are warned about this from the very, very start. If you then go about it without studying proper usage/common pitfalls and do not use (very) defensive coding practices (violated by all examples) then the main issue is just naivity. No programming language can really defend against that.

New comment by marhee in "How Airbus took off"

marhee — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 08:17:05 +0000

Maybe the real reason is more related to Price’s law/Pareto’s principle, loosely meaning that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. In other words, in large companies most perons do not contribute much, at least not at the same time.

New comment by marhee in "Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version"

marhee — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 06:59:19 +0000

Anyone knows what does "native" means here precisely? Steam Deck has a x86-64 instruction set AFAIK, so it's just same as a the Windows version? Or has it to do with the GPU / OS? Or does it just mean "properly configured"?

New comment by marhee in "iPhone Air"

marhee — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 07:37:58 +0000

If this thinnest iphone air has 27 hours of video playback, why does the regular iphone 17, which looks twice as thick only has 30 hours? At this point, I just want long battery life. Like an "all-week" battery life would be a nice start.

New comment by marhee in "MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today"

marhee — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 14:48:18 +0000

If you enjoy this art-style, definitely check out the game Return to the Obra Dinn.

New comment by marhee in "AI coding tools can reduce productivity"

marhee — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:38:15 +0000

Well, I use it before google, since it in general summarizes webpages and removes the ads. Quite handy. It’s also very useful to check if you understand something correctly. And for programming specifically I found it really useful to help naming stuff (which tends to be hard not in the least place because it’s subjective).

New comment by marhee in "Figma files for proposed IPO"

marhee — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 06:44:47 +0000

It’s a clever trick. But can it render a textured text? Transparent text, gradient fills? Maybe it can, I dont know. But why not just triangulate the glyph shapes, and represent each glyph as a set of triangles. This triangulation can be done offline, making rendering very lightweight.

New comment by marhee in "Compact Representations for Arrays in Lua [pdf]"

marhee — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 07:34:28 +0000

I wonder, in reality, if a Lua program uses large (consecutive) arrays, its values will likely have the same type? At the very least it is a common use-case: large arrays of only strings, numbers etc. Wouldn’t it make sense to (also) optimize just for this case with a flag and a single type tag. Simple and it optimizes memory use for 98% of use cases?

New comment by marhee in "Helion: A modern fast paced Doom FPS engine in C#"

marhee — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 07:14:55 +0000

I suspect it's part of the fun? A way to really learn something?

There's also another hint:

// THIS FILE WAS AUTO-GENERATED. // CHANGES WILL NOT BE PROPAGATED. // ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Of course this could be a result of something having nothing to do with the contents of the file, but maybe the author has to meta library that can generate the types in different languages).

There seems to be fixed-precision variants of the vector types as well which seems to be not available in the .NET framework.

Plus, of course, you can't add your specifics needs to library types (like the fixed precision). They are closed to modification.

I am just guessing, of course.

That being said, it would also make total sense to use the .NET types.

New comment by marhee in "OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive"

marhee — Thu, 22 May 2025 06:32:49 +0000

Would be quite funny if Apple now acquires OpenAI.

New computers don't speed up old code (YouTube)

marhee — Thu, 01 May 2025 08:05:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7PVZixO35c

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43854872

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by marhee in "Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature"

marhee — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 05:16:40 +0000

I don’t find your “seasoned developer” version ugly at all. It just looks more mature and relaxed. It also has the benefits that you can actually do error handling and have space to add comments. Maybe people don’t like it because of the repetition of “data =“ but in fact you could use descriptive new variable names making the code even more readable (auto documenting). I’ve always felt method chaining to look “cramped”, if that’s the right word. Like a person drawing on paper but only using the upper left corner. However, this surely is also a matter of preference or what your used to.

New comment by marhee in "Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water"

marhee — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 16:17:00 +0000

According to that logic, why not distribute fluoride water freely for those who want it? That would serve boths camps, not?