Hacker News: owlbite

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?

New comment by owlbite in "Matrices can be your friends (2002)"

owlbite — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 23:00:16 +0000

Oh yes, from an actual implementation POV you can just apply some transpose and ordering transforms to convert from row major to column major or vice-versa. cblas is pretty universal though I don't think any LAPACK C API ever gained as wide support for non column-major usage (and actually has some routines where you can't just pull transpose tricks for the transformation).

Certain layouts have performance advantages for certain operations on certain microarchitectures due to data access patterns (especially for level 2 BLAS), but that's largely irrelevant to historical discussion of the API's evolution.

New comment by owlbite in "Matrices can be your friends (2002)"

owlbite — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:59:32 +0000

What I suspect he really means is that FORTRAN lays out its arrays column-major, whilst C choose row-major. Historically most math software was written in the former, including the de facto standard BLAS and LAPACK APIs used for most linear algebra. Mix-and-matching memory layouts is a recipe for confusion and bugs, so "mathematicians" (which I'll read as people writing a lot of non-ML matrix-related code) tend to prefer to stick with column major.

Of course things have moved on since then and a lot of software these days is written in languages that inherited their array ordering from C, leading to much fun and confusion.

The other gotcha with a lot of these APIs is of course 0 vs 1-based array numbering.

New comment by owlbite in "Why we need SIMD"

owlbite — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 19:54:27 +0000

Much better to burn the area for multiple smaller units, its a bit more area for frontend handling, but worth it for the flexibility (see Apple's M-series chips vs intel avx*).

New comment by owlbite in "Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates"

owlbite — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 15:29:38 +0000

In the UK specifically the radical reform (read destruction) of council housing by the Thatcher government had a large impact on the housing market in the 1980s.

New comment by owlbite in "How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me"

owlbite — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 04:21:42 +0000

The main advantage of cmake is it's slightly easier to use than autoconf so long as you stick to the path. Do not attempt to leave the path. Also the path is poorly signposted.