Hacker News: shash

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.

New comment by shash in "SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation"

shash — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:40:30 +0000

Over the years it’s kind of becoming clear that “running major businesses” is kind of orthogonal to “having emotional integrity”. In larger businesses it’s mediated by layers. But just take a look at some of the deranged tweetstorms we’ve become used to in recent times.

New comment by shash in "Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files"

shash — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:05:47 +0000

If only because of the fact that the start menu (equivalent - the dock and applications view) isn’t an ad filled react app.

New comment by shash in "Of Boot Vectors and Double Glitches: Bypassing RP2350's Secure Boot"

shash — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 17:15:16 +0000

A good scanning electron microscope costs at most a few million? And is pretty common in a decently funded lab pretty much anywhere? Resolutions of 5nm is not uncommon. A scanning tunnelling microscope can go much lower (single atom types) and isn’t all that much more expensive either (comparatively I mean).

I think it’s common knowledge by now that the smallest feature in a 5nm chip isn’t really 5nm. So that’s not (yet?) a viable strategy.

New comment by shash in "Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out"

shash — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 16:52:38 +0000

You mean you’d rather run unverified scripts using a good order of magnitude more resources with a slower experience and have an entire sandboxing contraption to keep said unverified scripts from doing anything to your machine…

I know the browser is convenient, but frankly, its been a horror show of resource usage and vulnerabilities and pathetic performance

New comment by shash in "Engineers who dismiss AI"

shash — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 13:48:24 +0000

As one of those on the skeptical side, one train of thought I have not seen people even mention is, the way we’re using LLMs to code now is largely to use a less precise language (mostly English) to specify what’s often a very precise problem and solution. Why would we think that spoken language is the best interface for doing this?

I’m wondering if we can do something better…

New comment by shash in "An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform"

shash — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 20:29:47 +0000

It’s usually easier to explain the dft. and easier to do a periodic function than a totally arbitrary sequence.

New comment by shash in "Z2 – Lithographically fabricated IC in a garage fab"

shash — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 18:43:53 +0000

They already do offer that - it’s called a multi-project wafer or MPW. But it’s prohibitively expensive on a per-chip basis. It’s mostly used for prototyping or concept proving and not for commercial use.

One problem is, you need to create a photolithography mask set for any volume size of fabrication and those aren’t cheap. But that’s far from the _only_ problem with small volume.