Hacker News: superblas

New comment by superblas in "Embassy: Modern embedded framework, using Rust and async"

superblas — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 02:11:05 +0000

I think you’re aware of this already but for everyone else:

There’s different kinds of embedded. What traditionally was referred to as embedded is microcontrollers (e.g., 32-bit ARM Cortex M devices like the STM32 or an NXP IMX106x chip ). A configuration for a Cortex-M7 chip (that some may consider on the high end of traditional embedded) is a 600MHz clock, 1MB of RAM, and 4MB of flash memory. These run either bare metal or a real time operating system but don’t have an MMU.

These days the definition is sometimes expanded to include devices that run full fledged OSes like Linux (embedded Linux) on devices like the RPI with much more memory than an MCU.

To answer the original posters question a bit: get used to C and C++ and not using malloc() / new(), which includes a lot of the standard library.

New comment by superblas in "Was it a billion dollar mistake?"

superblas — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 17:39:56 +0000

+1 for this. On my system, an ARM cortex-M7, there’s RAM at address 0. In order to catch null pointer dereferences I ended up activating the MPU to make the first couple hundred bytes inaccessible (non-readable, non-writable).

New comment by superblas in "John Carmack on mutable variables"

superblas — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 22:46:04 +0000

Perhaps they’re conflating how you can’t use “const” as a compile time constant (e.g., you can’t declare the size of an array with a “const” variable). If so, C23 solves this by finally getting the constexpr keyword from c++

New comment by superblas in "When Compiler Optimizations Hurt Performance"

superblas — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 13:24:14 +0000

Agreed. As an embedded software engineer new to the field I’ve seen senior engineers with over ten years of experience complain when division by a compile time constant (even by a power of two) is used in code instead of multiplication or bit shifting on our cortex-m7 mcu running at 600MHz

New comment by superblas in "AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile"

superblas — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 19:28:58 +0000

That’s literally how the English language works. It literally evolves

New comment by superblas in "A clickable visual guide to the Rust type system"

superblas — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 16:21:38 +0000

Such needless condescension, jibal.

New comment by superblas in "Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos"

superblas — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 15:26:29 +0000

I was just at one of their offices in San Francisco. They have free breakfast, lunch, and dinner with choices from well over 10 whole restaurants exclusively on their campus. They have (paid) laundry service where they can just drop off their clothes and get them back later. No more Facebook barbers, however. There were people of all different backgrounds: black, white, Hispanic, Indian, etc.

They have all these amenities on top of their huge paychecks (high cost of living in San Francisco notwithstanding). Do you really think they’d give all that up in service of helping their lessers? Maybe some would, but how much of this extravagant lifestyle would they give up? Even those who identify as liberal, how much would they give up?

New comment by superblas in "MI6 appoints first female chief in 116-year history"

superblas — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:20:20 +0000

Excellent rebuttal

New comment by superblas in "1,145 pull requests per day"

superblas — Fri, 23 May 2025 04:51:29 +0000

FWIW you can go to settings on GitHub and select what you get emails about. There may even be a digest option such that you get one email per day with all the stuff you would’ve received individual emails about IIRC.

New comment by superblas in "Tesla Regret Syndrome"

superblas — Tue, 20 May 2025 21:42:48 +0000

Luckily we can protest Tesla and spacex (via not signing up for star link) at the same time.

New comment by superblas in "Grok's white genocide fixation caused by 'unauthorized modification'"

superblas — Fri, 16 May 2025 14:44:53 +0000

Because this follows what the Associated Press style guide suggests and it’s either in enough of the training data to be followed, or, OpenAI purposefully made it follow a style guide that happened to contain this rule after the fact when generating responses? https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...

Why do _you_ think this is the case?

New comment by superblas in "Changes since congestion pricing started in New York"

superblas — Thu, 15 May 2025 08:02:21 +0000

Could you please expand on how that is murder?

New comment by superblas in "Branch Privilege Injection: Exploiting branch predictor race conditions"

superblas — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:07:01 +0000

> If you want a processor that works this way, buy a microcontroller.

The ARM Cortex-R5F and Cortex-M7, to name a few, have branch predictors as well, for what it’s worth ;)

New comment by superblas in "C++ is an absolute blast"

superblas — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 17:36:37 +0000

My understanding is that the cost that is mentioned comes from the branch introduced by checking if the dereference is in-bounds (and the optimizations these checks allegedly prohibit), not from what happens if an OOB access is detected