Hacker News: shash

New comment by shash in "The RAM shortage could last years"

shash — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 01:38:03 +0000

It’s not merely a “gaming vs data center“. There’s so many other places DRAM and NVM are needed - mobile, automotive, other consumer electronics,… the current situation is that _all_ of that is deprived of the memory that it needs. And much of this is critical to the real economy.

New comment by shash in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

shash — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:10:34 +0000

Yes. It provides a prior for Bayesian analysis if nothing else.

New comment by shash in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

shash — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:10:09 +0000

Yes, actually. This is similar to having a 100 year flood five years in a row. It doesn’t mean that the flood occurs only once in 100 years. _On average_ it’s 1/100 probability of occurring in any given year.

But then, Apollo 1 was after all the first mission on the Saturn V. I think we should assess even its pre-launch risk much higher than the rest of them. Similarly Artemis II has a much higher risk than the subsequent ones will have.

New comment by shash in "Artemis II is competency porn"

shash — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:15:28 +0000

Of course they didn’t. The delta-v needed to land the rockets is better expended in pushing the craft further. Reusable rockets isn’t always the best choice.

New comment by shash in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

shash — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:56:46 +0000

Is 12 enough of a sample size to make a statistical judgement? What if there were 20 more which didn’t have a loss of life? Is it then 1/30? What if there were 20 more?

The risk factor is calculated _per mission_ from what I understand. You can have three accidents in a row and nothing for decades but the risk itself can still be 1 in 30.

New comment by shash in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

shash — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:09:50 +0000

How are you/they instructing those agents? If you are writing detailed spec.md and reviewing those results, you are _still_ programming. Just in pseudocode effectively. I’ve seen enough session transcripts and detailed prompts that would have been easier to just write the code instead!

New comment by shash in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

shash — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:23:16 +0000

Remember that the defender has home team advantage. That’s precisely what you see happening both in Iran and Ukraine. That advantage exists with Taiwan. There’s a reason that China hasn’t made a move in all these years, and the US is only one part of that equation.

New comment by shash in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

shash — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:01:24 +0000

That analysis requires discovering what the US’s objectives were. Not sure we can…

New comment by shash in "NASA Artemis II moon mission live launch broadcast"

shash — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:29:33 +0000

The key here is “could be”. But most four (or in my case, six) year olds can’t really grasp the abstract concepts of what JWST is or the data it’s sending back. For that matter most 40 year olds can’t.

A manned mission on the other hand is tangible in a way a probe isn’t. “See the big round thing in the night sky? There are four people going around it in a spacecraft”.

It isn’t a _complete_ argument in favour of manned missions- that has to account for the risk of the endeavour and reward of the science potential of having people there to react in ways robots can’t. But it’s hard to pretend that the inspiration pretty much everyone feels when they see manned missions is somehow achievable purely by robotic ones.

New comment by shash in "NASA Artemis II moon mission live launch broadcast"

shash — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:23:29 +0000

They’ve changed it so III isn’t landing. That will be IV apparently.

New comment by shash in "Arm wants a bigger slice of the chip business"

shash — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:26:20 +0000

Hi, CEO of Mindgrove here!

Good to see that we're being noticed. But we all still need to deploy (in scale) to make anything worthwhile.

New comment by shash in "RISC-V Vector Primer"

shash — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:52:15 +0000

> The name, yes, but going by name is a bad idea as the V in AVX also stands for Vector.

Now I get your point after reading more of the linked page. Yes. It is very implementation specific.

One of the things about RVV (and in general any vector ISA) is that the data path can be different enough between different implementations such that specific rules of thumb for hand tuning most probably won’t carry over. As you say it is true of even sufficiently advanced SIMD architectures like AVX.

New comment by shash in "RISC-V Vector Primer"

shash — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:45:26 +0000

As sibling said, stripped down in the sense it doesn’t have dedicated registers. In terms of supported functions it’s somewhere close to MMX.

I don’t personally like it because it still ends up with all the headache of building most of a vector subsystem (data path, functional units,…) while _only_ pretty much reducing one special vector file.

New comment by shash in "RISC-V Vector Primer"

shash — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:28:09 +0000

It _is_ RISC-V Vector extensions, so a very specific ISA in mind at the very least. There's another extension (not ratified I think) called Packed SIMD for RISC-V, but this isn't about that.

New comment by shash in "Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines"

shash — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:06:09 +0000

Technically it’s a retroflex approximant [1] and is found in many places (often not as a separate character or phoneme).

But I think we’ve hijacked a cultural thread with enough phonetics for now!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_retroflex_approximant

New comment by shash in "Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines"

shash — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 05:15:41 +0000

I'm coming around to the idea that we _should_ really be using "l" or maybe "r" instead of "zh" for the ழ. At least it's closer in pronunciation and there's a chance someone can work their way to it. Zh is like "we don't have an exact match so we'll repurpose a letter we don't use". It has no phonetic relevance.

New comment by shash in "We mourn our craft"

shash — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:17:53 +0000

I think the decline of manual transmission is different from self-driving. Manuals, you could argue are a technological progression that doesn’t change the fundamental economics or sociology of driving. But self-driving has issues far beyond the technology. Like liability, like ownership of vehicles, availability, traffic rules,…

I’m not even sure if, outside of highly mapped environments it even makes sense.

New comment by shash in "We mourn our craft"

shash — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:13:45 +0000

Or it collapses when the seniors have to retire anyway. Who instructs the LLM when there’s nobody who understands the business?

I’m sure the plan is to create a paperclip maximizing company which is fully AI. And the sea turned salty because nobody remembered how to turn it off.

New comment by shash in "We mourn our craft"

shash — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:10:47 +0000

Either that or the “bespoke hand-crafted artisanal free-range code” will be the only thing still maintainable because vibe coders made such a mess

New comment by shash in "Beyond agentic coding"

shash — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 05:54:33 +0000

In the Before Times we used to do programming interviews with “you can use Google and stack overflow” for precisely this reason. We weren’t testing for encyclopaedic knowledge - we were testing to see if the candidate could solve a problem.

But the hard part is designing the problem so that it exercises skill.