Hacker News: ndesaulniers

New comment by ndesaulniers in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

ndesaulniers — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:08:26 +0000

I encourage folks with a PlayStation 5 (or 4) to participate in the blackout by unplugging their console for the week of August 23 at 7:00 PM your local time and run to August 31 at 7:00 PM your local time. Hopefully that helps send a message. We should irrevocably own our games, not rent a revokable license. And we should have price competition from multiple store fronts.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "We accidentally built an LLVM compiler for Jax"

ndesaulniers — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:07:27 +0000

Ah, I'm behind the times.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "We accidentally built an LLVM compiler for Jax"

ndesaulniers — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:06:35 +0000

Yeah, guess I should have used the past tense there.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "We accidentally built an LLVM compiler for Jax"

ndesaulniers — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:41:13 +0000

Neat. XLA predates MLIR. Interesting stories there. You'd have to stop by the Bay Area LLVM monthly meetup to hear them. :-X

> So if XLA already uses LLVM, why is our approach different?

Uses MLIR, XLA does not.

> So… what is the point?

> Honestly? We aren’t entirely sure yet.

> Let me be perfectly clear: this is not going to beat XLA for standard deep learning workloads. XLA has years of hyper-specific optimizations for linear algebra on GPUs and TPUs. If you are training a massive transformer, stick to standard JAX.

> But what we do think is cool is what happens when you connect JAX directly to the broader LLVM ecosystem and drop the heavy XLA runtime. (Plus, no need to build XLA using Bazel either! You’re welcome.)

New comment by ndesaulniers in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

ndesaulniers — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 17:05:50 +0000

Heh, from the kernel patch: https://lore.kernel.org/all/CALCETrXbj__SFQMzPZhES5y6-sh4np-...

> I saw a fun bug report in ripgrep and a studious but pretty bad AI-generated analysis

Referring to https://github.com/dfoxfranke/ripgrep-3494-analysis which I indeed thought "that's an awful lot written to have been written by a human."

Looks like that thread is from...today!

New comment by ndesaulniers in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

ndesaulniers — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:58:24 +0000

I was able to use Claude to translate a few thousand lines of assembler from one syntax+toolchain to another. Process was definitely iterative; had to keep adding a few rules along the lines of "don't do this...here's the equivalent pattern." But in the end it did a good job and saved me a ton of time. Allowed me to move a ton of unit tests off a hand rolled broken+bad assembler to a modern production toolchain.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

ndesaulniers — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:54:41 +0000

The Linux kernel prefers GAS (or clang) w/ the C preprocessor. Luckily most of clang's assembler unit tests (and LLVM's MC layer unit tests) also use GAS style syntax.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "Fil-C: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out [video]"

ndesaulniers — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 06:35:27 +0000

I like the inline asm sanitizer; probably could be extracted out of Fil-C.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "Neither GCC nor Clang are compliant with standard C++"

ndesaulniers — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:45:59 +0000

Shrug, then write a defect report?

New comment by ndesaulniers in "The lost joy of music piracy"

ndesaulniers — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:24:04 +0000

Just setup lidarr and plex. Not happy about having to re-arrange all my loose files, but claude and beets are helping.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "The lost joy of music piracy"

ndesaulniers — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:23:13 +0000

Final Fantasy FMVs set to edgy nu metal.

Man, I _had_ a limewire shirt (somewhere); they interviewed at my college. Where is that important piece of history?

New comment by ndesaulniers in "Memory Safe Inline Assembly"

ndesaulniers — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:14:08 +0000

> There's no control flow out of the inline assembly.

So no `asm goto` support yet?

Rust Foundation Welcomes OpenAI as Platinum Member, Announces Donation to Rust

ndesaulniers — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:36:17 +0000

Article URL: https://rustfoundation.org/media/rust-foundation-welcomes-openai-as-platinum-member-announces-donation-to-rust-project/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48577938

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The Reason Anthropic's Models Are Offline: A Six-Year-Old Trump Grudge

ndesaulniers — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:00:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/16/apparently-the-real-reason-anthropics-models-are-offline-a-six-year-old-trump-grudge/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48577527

Points: 13

# Comments: 0

New comment by ndesaulniers in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

ndesaulniers — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:37:47 +0000

I find this point to be generally why C can typically beat C++ in terms of code size; generic functions operating on void* are much less type safe, but the tradeoff is code size. Those template instantiations add up.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers"

ndesaulniers — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:08:14 +0000

> it took significant effort to e.g. get clang to compile the Linux kernel (needing patches in both projects).

Tell me about it. :-)

New comment by ndesaulniers in "sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library"

ndesaulniers — Sun, 24 May 2026 01:27:19 +0000

I spent a bit of time implementing parts of a C runtime for the brief tenure I had maintaining LLVM's libc. I quickly came the realization that a lot of the interfaces that made it all the way to standardization were trash. How the language is standardized is still comical to me. I agree with TFA that C style strings are trash.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses"

ndesaulniers — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:43:43 +0000

Good then that Amazon sells it by the 55 gal drum then.

https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Lubes-Natural-Water-Based-Lub...

> This product is out of stock

Ah, shoot, there go my weekend plans. Bummer.

New comment by ndesaulniers in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"

ndesaulniers — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:55:31 +0000

I find it ironic; George Orwell was English!

New comment by ndesaulniers in "No way to parse integers in C (2022)"

ndesaulniers — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:34:09 +0000

It's a shame we never got a package manager for C (or C++).

EDIT: perhaps I should have been clearer; by not having one early on, we now have multiple competing package managers, with no clear winner. Responses prove that point.