Hacker News: peterfirefly

New comment by peterfirefly in "DeiMOS – A Superoptimizer for the MOS 6502"

peterfirefly — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:23:15 +0000

e-graphs have been repeatedly reinvented across decades for many purposes. One of them is superoptimization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-graph

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6120/2025sp/blog/supero...

https://github.com/philzook58/awesome-egraphs

New comment by peterfirefly in "Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others"

peterfirefly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:09:20 +0000

We know that emotional intelligence, in the sense of Machiavellian intelligence, is really just completely normal intelligence.

New comment by peterfirefly in "Demonstrating Real Time AV2 Decoding on Consumer Laptops"

peterfirefly — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 20:12:44 +0000

I don't think it actually is. Could you indulge me and quote it here, please?

New comment by peterfirefly in "C++26 is done: ISO C++ standards meeting Trip Report"

peterfirefly — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:26:20 +0000

No. Neither in the language (NULL exists) nor necessarily on real CPUs.

New comment by peterfirefly in "Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars"

peterfirefly — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:31:46 +0000

Just watch it until about half way in.

This is the context:

> and cars aren't mounting pavements to get me...

New comment by peterfirefly in "Xiaomi launches next-gen SU7 with 902 km range and Lidar, still undercuts Tesla"

peterfirefly — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:06:23 +0000

The US car companies have been given decades to catch up. That's the problem: they have been shielded from competition.

New comment by peterfirefly in "Cuba rejects US embassy's 'shameless' request for diesel"

peterfirefly — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:01:17 +0000

> Why has communism not destroyed that country?

It did. The Communist takeover in the North lead to mass starvation deaths and a flood of refugees to the South. The Communist takeover in the South lead to another mass starvation and lots of hunger deaths.

New comment by peterfirefly in "Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure"

peterfirefly — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:33:06 +0000

They are counted by hand in Denmark. We used to post the results on physical paper at the voting site afterwards + have them published for the entire country (including a list of the votes at each voting site) in the national papers.

If the local results anywhere were different from those published in the papers, people would notice. If they were different in different papers, or in different parts of the country, people would notice.

We have, unfortunately, switched to a list on a website instead of in the papers :(

New comment by peterfirefly in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

peterfirefly — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:15:09 +0000

It's not the 5-year plans that are driving China and most of the Chinese economy is untouched by the 5-year plans.

New comment by peterfirefly in "Arm's Cortex X925: Reaching Desktop Performance"

peterfirefly — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:19:13 +0000

Memory models matter.

New comment by peterfirefly in "What's the best way to learn a new language?"

peterfirefly — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:35:21 +0000

Does that work for humans, too?

New comment by peterfirefly in "What's the best way to learn a new language?"

peterfirefly — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:30:58 +0000

That's mostly because it is syllable timed instead of stress timed. And because a lot of people are not as good at Spanish as they think they are, of course.

New comment by peterfirefly in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

peterfirefly — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:27:25 +0000

I would use em-dashes all the time if they were easier to type.

New comment by peterfirefly in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

peterfirefly — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:20:12 +0000

Not the great answer you think it is.

New comment by peterfirefly in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

peterfirefly — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:53:09 +0000

Normally?

All governments are in the egg-breaking business some of the time. Most of them are most of the time. Some of them all of the time.

Very few are good at making omelettes.

New comment by peterfirefly in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

peterfirefly — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:35:08 +0000

Because they don't have superhuman LIDAR. They never did. Nobody ever did. LIDAR input is not completely reliable so what do you do then?

New comment by peterfirefly in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

peterfirefly — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:31:36 +0000

The cars do have at least one microphone.

New comment by peterfirefly in "EU mandates replaceable batteries by 2027 (2023)"

peterfirefly — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 18:16:46 +0000

> Realistically batteries currently made reach end of service life around 3 years, previously it was around 2. People using devices heavily (gaming/videoconferencing) or living in hot climates will have shorter service life.

I was perfectly happy with the battery life of my iPhone SE and my iPad Mini 4 far longer than just three years. Those batteries were not "currently made", were they? And it was not like I was a light user of those two devices...

New comment by peterfirefly in "EU mandates replaceable batteries by 2027 (2023)"

peterfirefly — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 18:12:08 +0000

Somewhere tolerant, I'm sure!

New comment by peterfirefly in "Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation"

peterfirefly — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 21:22:49 +0000

And they are not even supposed to explode anymore!