Hacker News: owlbite

New comment by owlbite in "Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists"

owlbite — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:15:10 +0000

Presumably you could just require % amounts to be specified (and make sure to pick volume vs weight in some fashion that avoids gaming).

New comment by owlbite in "MathCode, Mathematical Coding Agent"

owlbite — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:00:09 +0000

Interesting, but I don't see any licensing terms, which means I can't touch it in a commercial setting.

New comment by owlbite in "LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent"

owlbite — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 02:14:41 +0000

At least with LG TVs you can just not give them the internet and nothing of value is lost (at least assuming you have an Apple TV or other trusted smart tv capability). Much more difficult to not give the windows PC internet and have it be useful (at least mine is only used for gaming).

New comment by owlbite in "CarPlay Is Additive"

owlbite — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:53:03 +0000

I'm still astounded my Ford's infotainment system takes 5-10 seconds after opening the radio "app" to present me with the station selection UI. Most of that seems to be some sort of startup delay. The mind boggles.

New comment by owlbite in "Efficient C++ Programming for Modern 64-bit CPUs: Chapter 4/part 2"

owlbite — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:41:45 +0000

I'm somewhat dubious about anything talking about low level performance programming at the instruction level that doesn't distinguish between latency and throughput, never mind mention the incredibly out-of-order nature of modern desktop/server class CPU cores.

New comment by owlbite in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

owlbite — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:21:05 +0000

Or economies of liability and buck passing. I suspect managers and businesses will still want to be in the game of "not my fault, supplier is working on it, we can sue them if they don't meet SLA".

New comment by owlbite in "Efficient sparse computations using linear algebra aware compilers (2025)"

owlbite — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:09:02 +0000

It will be interesting to see if this solves any issues that aren't already addressed by the likes of matlab / SciPy / Julia. Reading the paper it sounds a lot like "SciPy but with MLIR"?

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

owlbite — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:32:09 +0000

Not just for speed, Horner can also be essential for numerical stability.

New comment by owlbite in "LFortran compiles fpm"

owlbite — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 05:07:54 +0000

FORmula TRANslation, the clue is in the name. It's great at math, but yeah, strings and OS stuff is a PITA. The modern vector-based syntax is still really nice and I've yet to come across a C++ library quite as slick.

But I think what it was really missing last time I looked at it was good access to compiler intrinsics (or otherwise) to hit vectorizations and math optimization instructions. The OpenMP simd pragmas weren't really doing a fantastic job. I hope that's better now it's in LLVM.

New comment by owlbite in "Inside the M4 Apple Neural Engine, Part 1: Reverse Engineering"

owlbite — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 04:53:44 +0000

I suspect main benefits are they have no need to maintain the hardware or software for any longer than it makes sense for their own needs, and don't have to handhold users through a constantly evolving minefield of performance and technical capabilities.

New comment by owlbite in "Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems"

owlbite — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:16:50 +0000

I think the current generation of tools have a long way to go before I trust any numerical algorithm they implement, based on our recent experiments trying to make it implement some linear algebra by calling LAPACK. When we asked it to write some sparse linear algebra code based on some more obscure graph algorithms it produced some ugly stepchild of dijkstra's algorithm instead, which needless to say did not achieve the desired aim.

New comment by owlbite in "Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags"

owlbite — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 03:09:51 +0000

Have meetings to figure out how to interact with the other 9990 employees. Then try and make the skeleton app left behind by the team of transient engineers who left after 18 months before moving on to their next gig work, before throwing it out and starting again from scratch.

New comment by owlbite in "Q&A: New UK onshore wind and solar is '50% cheaper' than new gas"

owlbite — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:38:26 +0000

Transmission is pretty expensive, lots of infrastructure and maintenance.

New comment by owlbite in "Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced"

owlbite — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:21:36 +0000

I think calling VLIW "an adandoned design" is somewhat of an exaggeration, such architectures are pretty common for embedded audio processing.

New comment by owlbite in "Algorithms for Optimization [pdf]"

owlbite — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 03:17:36 +0000

This book provides a high level overview of many methods without (on a quick skim) really hinting at the practical usage. Basically this reads as a encyclopedia to me, whereas Nocedal and Wright is more of an introductory graduate course going into significantly more detail on a smaller selection of algorithms (generally those that are more commonly used).

Picking on what I'd consider one of the major workhorse methods of continous constrained optimization, Interior Point Methods get a 2-3 page super high level summary in this book. Nocedal and Wright give an entire chapter on the topic (~25 pages) (which of course still is probably insufficient detail to implement anything like a competitive solver).

New comment by owlbite in "I may have found a way to spot U.S. at-sea strikes before they're announced"

owlbite — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 06:18:22 +0000

But it can be even worse than that. It's "we assassinated the phone", "algorithm says vehicle has suspicious travel history and must die". There's no real thinking human in the loop for some of this stuff, just some model decided the metadata has a high probability of being associate with an opponent of some flavor and then everyone in the vicinity is blown to bits as computer said kill.

New comment by owlbite in "Introducing architecture variants"

owlbite — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:52:37 +0000

Very true, but a lot of stuff builds on a few core optimized libraries like BLAS/LAPACK, and picking up a build of those targeted at a modern microarchitecture can give you 10x or more compared to a non-targeted build.

That said, most of those packages will just read the hardware capability from the OS and dispatch an appropriate codepath anyway. You maybe save some code footprint by restricting the number of codepaths it needs to compile.

New comment by owlbite in "Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)"

owlbite — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 06:15:04 +0000

They just label such people as Applied Mathematicians, or worse: Physicists and Engineers; and then get back to sensible business such as algebraic geometry, complex analysis and group theory.

New comment by owlbite in "Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)"

owlbite — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 06:10:48 +0000

Introduction to PhD study: "How hard can it be, I'm sure I could write that in a week"

New comment by owlbite in "The reason GCC is not a library (2000)"

owlbite — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:10:51 +0000

I thought GPLv3 adoption by GCC was what really lit the flames on moving to llvm by commercial entities?