Hacker News: nuc1e0n

New comment by nuc1e0n in "TSMC Uses Old Fabs to Make New Chips [video]"

nuc1e0n — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:48:25 +0000

Is fab process re-engineering something an AI could help with?

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Fasttracker II clone in C using SDL 2"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 23:13:54 +0000

Why SDL 2 and not SDL 3? Was the project started before SDL 3 was released?

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

nuc1e0n — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:15:24 +0000

I mean nul terminated strings aren't great, but neither are strings with a defined length Strings generally have poor performance, so making them easy to use isn't necessarily a good thing.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 10:07:09 +0000

That's what pascal did back in the day, but 255 byte strings were all that was needed back then so only a byte was needed to store the length. Does that still sound maintainable? Anyhow, some developers put data into strings when they shouldn't, and require doing that in the APIs they publish. Strings, whether NUL terminated or with stored length, aren't always the best choice architecturally so making them easy to use isn't necessarily a good idea.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:51:24 +0000

I'm of the opinion AI slop code will become untenable way before that.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "A clear fishing wire is tied around the island of Manhattan"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:46:40 +0000

Why bother 'cheating' at all? If you don't want to follow those precepts, then just don't.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Don't trust large context windows"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:24:04 +0000

I doubt the dropoff is as large as 100k tokens. I start a new session and paste the best results from the previous one as soon as as LLM makes more than a couple of missteps. Theres too much focus on fixing what's wrong rather than going back to what worked and amending in a different way.

If you don't point out what's wrong I find the LLM will go into great technical detail which consumes a lot of tokens, but not 'see the wood for the trees'.

It seems to me human beings also have mechanisms to compact context, which may be why we can forget what we came into a room for when going through doorways. I think it would be interesting to research which markers we use to compartmentalize our thinking.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Orthodox C++ (2016)"

nuc1e0n — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:05:43 +0000

c memory allocation functions can be implemented in 1000 lines or so. I've done it myself. Maybe more are needed to handle strange operating systems or architectures, as glib does.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]"

nuc1e0n — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:04:11 +0000

Replying to this comment so I can refer to it later.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "We've made the world too complicated"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 17 May 2026 08:17:41 +0000

I disagree. But maximising the acquisition of bits of paper and numbers on a screen above happiness and day-to-day needs is the American way.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "BLAS, Lapack and OpenMP"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:21:22 +0000

The article claims tensorflow uses eigen. That's not entirely accurate, although the pre-packaged builds of tensorflow are probably configured to use it. Tensorflow can also be configured to use BLAS/LAPACK at build time and not eigen.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

nuc1e0n — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:30:27 +0000

Maybe you can install homebrew and open source apps to make it more Linux like, but you'll still be stuck with Mac OS's shonky window and task management UI unfortunately.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much"

nuc1e0n — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:51:56 +0000

> but it's much closer to an "interesting lab demo" than an "obituary for human programmers."

Was it being sold as the latter? I thought it was strange that a fuss was being made over this tech demo, and that explains why.

Parsing regular languages into other regular languages is exactly what transformer based LLMs should be good at.

A while ago there was an AI system publisized that was trained to generate animations from the game doom that was sold as AI created computer games. But the output made no sense if you watched for more than a few seconds. Isn't this the same kind of scare tactics dressed up as innovation?

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 03:00:34 +0000

Interesting. I'll look into that. The Hippocratic oath says that a physician should do no harm (ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν). It's a personal value judgement as to whether some intervention is providing medical care or causing harm. I consider reckless genetic modification to be causing harm.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:36:51 +0000

I can't see how genetic modification would be the correct way to treat such injuries.

Maybe substances that can trigger epigenetic effects would be more relevant to such things. I understand a Japanese team is working on a means of triggering tooth regrowth by means of an injection. I've got no problem with that. Or something like Skele-Gro from Harry Potter either.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:37:33 +0000

If you think so, what sources would you recommend? According to Wikipedia on medical ethics, "These values include the respect for autonomy". Not expecting any level of self control doesn't show respect for autonomy IMHO.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:10:48 +0000

Medical ethics boards already do such things don't they?

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:03:33 +0000

Some issues could only become evident over a period of hundreds of years with gene editing. That's longer than any medical trial I'm aware of. And mistakes made would be difficult, if not impossible, to undo.

If medications can already do what's required for cholesterol issues, why wouldn't we continue to use them rather than making some change to affect a complex balance that could cause problems over very long timescales?

If we were to be editing a specific gene to match what the wider population has, then I'd be more ok with that.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:52:48 +0000

Genetic treatments have the scope to not only have unintended consequences, but unintended consequences that can last over generations of people. I am in favour of them for some things, but we need to tread very carefully with the technology.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:49:22 +0000

Maybe such a mutation would be a suitable target for a gene editing treatment. I'm not aware of all the issues involved there. I think the linked article doesn't have enough detail to form a fair opinion with.