Hacker News: mkbosmans

New comment by mkbosmans in "Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers"

mkbosmans — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:38:13 +0000

Nobody says they have no limitations. The question is are those limitation fundamental, i.e. can we expect improvement, say within a year.

New comment by mkbosmans in "Recursive Problems Benefit from Recursive Solutions"

mkbosmans — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:59:25 +0000

No need for radical changes.

  def visit_bf(g):
    n, children = g
    yield n
    if children:
        iterators = [iter(visit_df(c)) for c in children]
        while iterators:
            try:
                yield next(iterators[0])
            except StopIteration:
                iterators.pop(0)
            iterators = iterators[1:] + iterators[:1]

The difference between DFS and BFS is literally just the last line that rotates the list of child trees.

Python is a pretty mainstream language and even though the DFS case can be simplified by using `yield from` and BFS cannot, I consider that just to be syntactic sugar on top of this base implementation.

New comment by mkbosmans in "NASA's DART spacecraft changed an asteroid's orbit around the sun"

mkbosmans — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 07:41:24 +0000

Well, the article says that the effect of the impact was much larger than the scientists expected. That doesn't really give a lot of confidence in how good we are at predicting these things.

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

mkbosmans — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:22:58 +0000

I'm sorry, that second reference was actually for the 3.5ULP variant. The 1 ULP is here: https://github.com/shibatch/sleef/blob/master/src/libm/sleef...

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

mkbosmans — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:14:39 +0000

One of the ways that the classics can be improved is not to take the analytic ideal coefficients and approximate them to the closest floating point number, but rather take those ideal coefficients as a starting point for a search of slightly better ones.

The SLEEF Vectorized Math Library [1] does this and therefore can usually provide accuracy guarantees for the whole floating point range with a polynomial order lower than theory would predict.

Its asinf function [2] is accurate to 1 ULP for all single precision floats, and is similar to the `asin_cg` from the article, with the main difference the sqrt is done on the input of the polynomial instead of the output.

[1] https://sleef.org/ [2] https://github.com/shibatch/sleef/blob/master/src/libm/sleef...

New comment by mkbosmans in "Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)"

mkbosmans — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 07:42:29 +0000

That's not just a good prediction—it is literally already happening right now!

New comment by mkbosmans in "The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers"

mkbosmans — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:09:11 +0000

Nothing on that list has been named that way by Euler himself of course.

New comment by mkbosmans in "My journey to the microwave alternate timeline"

mkbosmans — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 07:03:12 +0000

That seems to be due to he microcontroller using its pins in duplex. There is indeed no radiation being emitted in that case, just the lamp and rotation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46979936

New comment by mkbosmans in "Code golfing a tiny demo using maths and a pinch of insanity"

mkbosmans — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 11:18:13 +0000

I saw that you used `float z;` to later use `z` instead of the constant `0.`. You can also apply that to get a zero vector: `vec3 y;` and use `y` in place of `p-p`.

It seems that leaving the obsession behind some more can save another byte.

New comment by mkbosmans in "Code golfing a tiny demo using maths and a pinch of insanity"

mkbosmans — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 07:12:49 +0000

Another two bytes found (I think)

  (d==0.?K*.01*h:c-c)

could become

  (d>0.?.0:.01)*K*h

New comment by mkbosmans in "%CPU utilization is a lie"

mkbosmans — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 06:25:26 +0000

Especially in HPC there are lots of workloads that do not benefit from SMT. Such workloads are almost always bottlenecked on either memory bandwidth or vector execution ports. These are exactly the resources that are shared between the sibling threads.

So now you have a choice of either disabling SMT in the bios, or make sure the application correctly interprets the CPU topology and only spawns one thread per physical core. The former is often the easier option, both from software development and system administration perspective.

New comment by mkbosmans in "%CPU utilization is a lie"

mkbosmans — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 06:17:17 +0000

Sort of niche indeed.

In addition to needing SMT to get full performance, there were a lot of other small details you needed to get right on Xeon Phi to get close to the advertised performance. Think of AVX512 and the HBM.

For practical applications, it never really delivered.

New comment by mkbosmans in "Linux on the Behringer X32 [video]"

mkbosmans — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:52:49 +0000

I'm not sure what the OS on the X32 (or the Midas M32 sister model for that matter) is from factory. The higher end Midas Pro consoles do definitely run on Linux though.

New comment by mkbosmans in "Frosted Glass from Games to the Web: HTML glass UI inspired by AAA game dev"

mkbosmans — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 14:49:19 +0000

It is the performance win for similar looking results that I find improbable. For a box blur to look like gaussian blur, you would need multiple passes. Even though each pass is now O(1) instead of O(n) (with n the blur radius), due to caching effects I think a gaussian kernel would still be faster, especially for the small blur radius as described in the article.

New comment by mkbosmans in "Frosted Glass from Games to the Web: HTML glass UI inspired by AAA game dev"

mkbosmans — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 14:44:22 +0000

That link is not a box filter, as it still uses weights to approximate a gaussian convolution kernel. It just uses some special hardware to do less texture fetches. But that is a constant 2x improvement over the full 1D convolution, not the box filter O(1) approach that the article suggests that browsers are using.

New comment by mkbosmans in "Frosted glass from games to the web"

mkbosmans — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:02 +0000

Do browsers really use a box filter to approximate a gaussian blur? That seems implausible to me, as they produce pretty different looking blurs.

New comment by mkbosmans in "Frosted glass from games to the web"

mkbosmans — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 08:54:57 +0000

I noticed the blur only "sees" the underlying pixels directly below the glass surface. Any pixels outside that box, but within the blur radius do not get used in the gaussian filter. Probably the edge pixels are just repeated. You can see this when the light of the moon pops in to view when the edge of the rectangle starts to touch the moon. It would look more real if the light pixels from the moon start to through even when the box itself is still just over the dark area.

Would this be possible to achieve in CSS? I presume having a larger box with the blur, but clipping it to a smaller box or something like that.

New comment by mkbosmans in "Tritone Substitutions"

mkbosmans — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 10:39:47 +0000

Why do you say a tritone substitution turns it in a II-bII-I? Can it be as easily said to be II-#I-I? In that case it would be C#.

New comment by mkbosmans in "How to debug your battery design"

mkbosmans — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 09:31:25 +0000

This looks to me like actual correct usage of the term exponential. Surprisingly correct usage of that term is rare, even in technical writing.

Let's say each dimensions added has a finite set of N possible values. Then for k dimensions there are a total N^k possibilities.

Combinatorical growth would actually be faster still, scaling like k!.

New comment by mkbosmans in "How to debug your battery design"

mkbosmans — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 09:26:57 +0000

Yes, I think it is valid usage.

Why do you think usage of the term _curse of dimensionality_ is different in ML?