Hacker News: piinbinary

New comment by piinbinary in "A calculator that doesn't round"

piinbinary — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:27:28 +0000

It would also be fun to have a full computer algebra system (like maxima) on a phone

New comment by piinbinary in "CrankGPT"

piinbinary — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:49:46 +0000

I bet if you took one of Taalas' cards which consumes 200 watts for 14,000 tokens/second [0] and slowed it down by a factor of 10, it would actually be quite reasonable to power by bicycle.

[0]: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/chip-designer-taalas-bets-on...

Deep Habits: WorkingMemory.txt

piinbinary — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:02:24 +0000

Article URL: https://calnewport.com/deep-habits-workingmemory-txt-the-most-important-productivity-tool-youve-never-heard-of/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48293640

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by piinbinary in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

piinbinary — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:23:15 +0000

I've been going through Nora Sandler's Writing a C Compiler book and writing a compiler in Python. I'm excited to start the chapters on optimization - those seem like the most fun algorithm problems.

I recommend the book. It certainly isn't easy (maybe 3x harder than Crafting Interpreters), but I've learned a ton (eg how to deal with operations on different sizes of types, or the trick of using pseudoregisters to avoid having to figure out registers up front).

https://github.com/jmikkola/writing-a-c-compiler-python

New comment by piinbinary in "Significant raise of reports"

piinbinary — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:15:43 +0000

I'd be very curious to know what class of vulnerability these tend to be (buffer overrun, use after free, misset execute permissions?), and if, armed with that knowledge, a deterministic tool could reliably find or prevent all such vulnerabilities. Can linters find these? Perhaps fuzzing? If code was written in a more modern language, is it sill likely that these bugs would have happened?

Stripe Projects: Provision and manage services from the CLI

piinbinary — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:00:57 +0000

Article URL: https://projects.dev/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532148

Points: 137

# Comments: 31

New comment by piinbinary in "How many branches can your CPU predict?"

piinbinary — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:51:15 +0000

How does the benchmark tell how many branches were mispredicted? Is that something the processor exposes?

New comment by piinbinary in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

piinbinary — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:37:33 +0000

> a luxury apartment building goes up, surveys the market, and sets its rents 30% higher for the privilege of living in a new building with a gym for dogs or ball pit or whatever. Then the older buildings say, "Well, we can raise our rents 20% and still be the best deal in town," and so on.

I think that might not be the right cause and effect relationship. The actual cause is increased demand. This creates both the increased pricing of existing stock and an incentive to build new stock.

Situational Awareness (2024)

piinbinary — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:19:17 +0000

Article URL: https://situational-awareness.ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47262572

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

AI Thoughts

piinbinary — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:41:30 +0000

Article URL: https://jeremymikkola.com/posts/2026_03_04_ai_thoughts.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256830

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by piinbinary in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

piinbinary — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:11:54 +0000

Back when I lived in SF, there was one bus route (the 6, I believe) that I could use to get to work. The bus was so slow due to frequent, long stops and traffic lights that I could keep up with it on foot by walking briskly. I only bothered taking it when it was raining because it didn't get me to work any faster than walking.

New comment by piinbinary in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

piinbinary — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:07:47 +0000

That's an interesting point.

I'm also curious how bus stops interact with timed lights. Presumably each time the bus stops, it gets kicked back to the next cycle of green lights (which might be a low-single-digit minute delay).

Hopefully there's a traffic engineer in the audience who can give the real answers.

New comment by piinbinary in "Show HN: AI Timeline – 171 LLMs from Transformer (2017) to GPT-5.3 (2026)"

piinbinary — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:15:20 +0000

I think it's missing Google's Bard

New comment by piinbinary in "A terminal weather app with ASCII animations driven by real-time weather data"

piinbinary — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:00:31 +0000

That reminds me of `curl wttr.in/94110`

New comment by piinbinary in "How to choose between Hindley-Milner and bidirectional typing"

piinbinary — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 03:26:14 +0000

> friends don’t just bring up type inference in casual conversation

I wonder if this is a reference to "I need you to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to one another"

But to the actual point of the article: my understanding is that there are areas where you can use bidirectional typing (e.g. languages that have subclasses) where HM style type inference might become undecidable.

New comment by piinbinary in "Understanding the Go Compiler: The Linker"

piinbinary — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 16:53:54 +0000

I'm impressed with how approachable the explanation is!

New comment by piinbinary in "Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC"

piinbinary — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 12:53:53 +0000

That stuck out to me as well.

I wonder if there could be a bug where extra code runs but the result is discarded (and the code that runs happens to have no side effects).

The post also says

> That is roughly 1 billion iterations

but that doesn't sound right because GCC's version runs in only 0.047s, and no CPU can do a billion iterations that quickly.

New comment by piinbinary in "Tiny C Compiler"

piinbinary — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:05:04 +0000

I am currently going through that book. I recommend it with one caveat: you'll need to have written some interpreters before (Crafting Interpreters is a perfect starting point) because it expects you to already know some things like to how write a simple recursive decent parser.

New comment by piinbinary in "Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files"

piinbinary — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:38:51 +0000

https://archive.is/dNffG

New comment by piinbinary in "List animals until failure"

piinbinary — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:48:30 +0000

It didn't know about the Woodboring beetle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodboring_beetle

Doing this felt odd, it was like it wore out something in my brain. After a while I could picture the animals I wanted to enter but I struggled to remember the word for them. Only now, a minute or so after stopping, could I remember 'Dragonfly'

I was also amused by the reaction to "crab":

> (Carcinization makes it hard to define “crab”, so I'm going to pretend you said “brown crab”.)