Hacker News: samps

New comment by samps in "CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)"

samps — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:29:25 +0000

Thanks, Ben. I admit I mostly think tracing is just a mind-expanding concept to learn about, even if history has proven it’s not very practical as an organizing principle. But as you say, I’d love to offer more context on “what actually seems to work” industrially.

New comment by samps in "Hotline for modern Apple systems"

samps — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 13:44:24 +0000

I had an identical experience with the REALbasic Cafe as a kid, down to eventually selling a couple of shareware projects. I wonder if we were there at the same time.

New comment by samps in "Flattening ASTs (and Other Compiler Data Structures)"

samps — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 02:59:47 +0000

I think it would be more like RPN if it used a stack, and operands were specified as relative offsets (i.e., stack offsets). In the version I wrote, operands are still represented as absolute offsets in the expression table.

New comment by samps in "Flattening ASTs and other compiler data structures (2023)"

samps — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 22:34:04 +0000

FWIW I did acknowledge this in the article:

> A sufficiently smart memory allocator might achieve the same thing, especially if you allocate the whole AST up front and never add to it

> Again, a really fast malloc might be hard to compete with—but you basically can’t beat bump allocation on sheer simplicity.

Transpiler, a Meaningless Word

samps — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 18:21:20 +0000

Article URL: https://rachit.pl/post/transpiler/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151391

Points: 6

# Comments: 9

A Prototype Original iPod

samps — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 16:07:06 +0000

Article URL: https://panic.com/blog/a-prototype-original-ipod/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28969757

Points: 320

# Comments: 136

New comment by samps in "Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course"

samps — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 19:24:14 +0000

Indeed; I previously had these papers on the list but had to take them out for time this semester:

- Finding and understanding bugs in C compilers. Xuejun Yang, Yang Chen, Eric Eide, and John Regehr. PLDI 2011. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1993532 - Compiler validation via equivalence modulo inputs. Vu Le, Mehrdad Afshari, and Zhendong Su. PLDI 2014. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2594334

New comment by samps in "Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course"

samps — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 19:07:38 +0000

Hi! This course is about the "middle end," FWIW. We do not do parsing or codegen in 6120, and there is no goal (as there is in many undergrad-level compilers courses) of making a complete, end-to-end compiler for a C-like language.

New comment by samps in "AMD to Acquire Xilinx"

samps — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 22:43:49 +0000

To slightly refine this, Intel didn't have many "foundry customers" before Altera. Via Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Opening_up_the_foundries...), the need to fill up the manufacturing lines was engendered by poor x86 CPU sales around ~2013, not poor third-party fab runs. In 2013, Intel was still ahead of TSMC with 22 nm.

New comment by samps in "Apple will host WWDC virtually, beginning June 22"

samps — Tue, 05 May 2020 16:57:44 +0000

From the first sentence of the article:

> for free for all developers.

New comment by samps in "A Look at Celerity’s Second-Gen 496-Core RISC-V Mesh NoC"

samps — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 15:35:06 +0000

> The diagram shows each core has icache and dcache; what they've ditched is cache coherency.

This is not quite true: the local data memories are not caches, i.e., they do not implicitly move memory in from a more distant tier in the memory hierarchy. They are just plain explicitly managed local memories (sometimes called "scratchpads" to distinguish them from caches).

New comment by samps in "JIT-Less V8"

samps — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 13:07:00 +0000

Security bugs in HotSpot happen can and do happen. Check out the CVE list for the JRE: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

New comment by samps in "Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk"

samps — Sun, 24 Jun 2018 18:15:50 +0000

> However, where it starts to get more interesting is the work done by W. Bastiaan Kleijn from Cornell University Library.

The authors are not from Cornell. I think the author made this mistake because the paper is posted on arXiv, and that’s what’s it says at the top of every page?

New comment by samps in "Show HN: Webhook – A lightweight configurable tool written in Go"

samps — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 23:17:05 +0000

Mine's called Hooknook. It takes care of updating the GitHub repository for you on push and then invokes a command inside the repository. https://github.com/sampsyo/hooknook

New comment by samps in "Show HN: A partial HTTP server written in brainfuck extended with syscalls"

samps — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 03:18:02 +0000

import pdb ; pdb.set_trace()

New comment by samps in "Probabilistic Programming"

samps — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 17:52:17 +0000

As it stands, I'd agree with that---but the characterization definitely depends on who you talk to. I might be in the minority among "PP people," since the hype is still going strong and some smart people seem to see more potential than I (and you) do.

New comment by samps in "Probabilistic Programming"

samps — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 15:57:28 +0000

(I'm the author of the lecture notes.) I totally agree, and this is an underappreciated view in the PP community. The hype says "you just write your model; you'll get inference for free," but that obscures that current languages do nothing to help with cooking up an efficient inference algorithm for a particular situation. That's still a hard problem. When the only inference algorithm anyone actually uses is some MCMC variant, I think that's a broken promise.

There's some chance we'll be able to find clever new ways to derive better inference algorithms in specific situations using program analysis, but I wouldn't hold my breath. And it's impossible, of course, for anything like that to work for every possible program in a Turing-complete language.

New comment by samps in "Statistical Mistakes and How to Avoid Them"

samps — Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:57:24 +0000

Needless to say, I disagree. It can be straight-up misleading to report means without including a more nuanced view of the distribution. You don't need to use a bunch of fancy statistics, but you do need to consider whether your results could have arisen by random chance. That's not a distraction; it's accurately reporting what you found.

Here's one frightening example of spurious performance results in CS: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis501/papers/producing-wrong-dat...

Portier – An email-based, passwordless authentication service

samps — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 15:31:39 +0000

Article URL: https://portier.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12837669

Points: 206

# Comments: 85

New comment by samps in "We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS"

samps — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 01:43:46 +0000

Yep! This suggestion comes up shockingly often, and I got tired of re-explaining my reasoning every time.