Hacker News: syockit

New comment by syockit in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

syockit — Thu, 28 May 2026 10:35:44 +0000

I think that's because it's easier to package a DOSbox program than a Win16 program (it had Win32 edition, but supposedly the installer itself was Win16). According to pcgamingwiki, there's a patch to convert the GOG DOS edition to the Win32 edition.

New comment by syockit in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

syockit — Thu, 28 May 2026 10:26:30 +0000

I have a very vague memory of being able to name streets, so this might be that.

New comment by syockit in "Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))"

syockit — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:57:40 +0000

I've never seen a CAS that gives two answers for sqrt. Mathematica doesn't, sympy doesn't, and IIRC Maxima also doesn't.

New comment by syockit in "The Cost of Indirection in Rust"

syockit — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:58:47 +0000

It'd be great if IDEs can store a stack of functions currently being explored similar to what you get when debugging. Not breadcrumbs, but plain stack. Bonus points if you can store multiple stacks, and give them names according to the context.

New comment by syockit in "Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems"

syockit — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 03:28:49 +0000

We have OnlyOffice as an alternative today. Personally I find the UI quite pleasing. But lately I haven't had any need to use office suite at home so I don't really use it so I have yet to find anything to complain (meanwhile, LibreOffice was horrible, while Office 365 was bearable until you stuff too many things in the equation editor).

New comment by syockit in "Just the Browser"

syockit — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 02:45:40 +0000

Does seamonkey still work on modern internet? Last time I tried it to open Notion, nothing was displayed. Works great on old world stuff though.

New comment by syockit in "Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice"

syockit — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 08:22:38 +0000

From my understanding, the code is MIT, but the model isn't? What consitutes a "Software" anyway? Aren't resources like images, sounds and the likes exempt from it (hence, covered by usual copyright unless separately licensed)? If so, in the same vein, an ML model is not part of "Software". By the way, the same prohibition is repeated on the huggingface model card.

New comment by syockit in "Show HN: A 45x45 Connections Puzzle To Commemorate 2025=45*45"

syockit — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 01:14:41 +0000

Now I know that grouping J with APL is a mistake.

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

syockit — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 13:38:51 +0000

That's one thing, the other is you find out you were optimizing for the wrong thing, and now it takes more effort and time to reoptimize for the right thing.

New comment by syockit in "Brent's Encapsulated C Programming Rules (2020)"

syockit — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:37:47 +0000

Check against FLT_EPSILON. Oh boy.

The reason is floating point precision errors, sure, but that check is not going to solve the problems.

Took a difference of two numbers with large exponents, where the result should be algebraically zero but isn't quite numerically? Then this check fails to catch it. Took another difference of two numbers with very small exponents, where the result is not actually algebraically zero? This check says it's zero.

New comment by syockit in "Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?"

syockit — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:18:01 +0000

You can add the guideline, but then people would skip the "I asked" part and post the answer straight away. Apart from the obvious LLMesque structure of most of those bot answers, how could you tell if one has crafted the answer so much that it looks like a genuine human answer?

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/810/

New comment by syockit in "Cloudflare outage should not have happened"

syockit — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 03:43:11 +0000

The point still stands. The human body still isn't going change. That's why insulin pump can afford to have all kinds of rigorous engineering, while web-facing infrastructure on the other hand needs to be able to quickly adapt to changes.

New comment by syockit in "GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End"

syockit — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 13:56:53 +0000

The best thing about gccgo is that it is not burdened with the weirdness of golang's calling convention, so the FFI overhead is basically the same as calling an extern function from C/C++. Take a look at [0] and see how bad golang's cgo calling latency compare to C. gccgo is not listed there but from my own testing it's the same as C/C++.

[0]: https://github.com/dyu/ffi-overhead

New comment by syockit in "Nvidia's plenary presentation at BACUS 2025"

syockit — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 10:25:42 +0000

Might as well post it here since it's open access.

Nvidia's plenary presentation at BACUS 2025

syockit — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 10:25:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/13686/1368603/AI-and-AC-for-a-new-computational-age/10.1117/12.3088964.full

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991160

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by syockit in "Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?"

syockit — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:22:56 +0000

LAPACK is still Fortran, even in OpenBLAS where they only have f2c translated codes but hardly any assembly kernels.

New comment by syockit in "Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?"

syockit — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:17:23 +0000

I always install WinCompose specifically for this. Then a Greek letter is as simple as pressing Compose with *, followed by the related Roman letter. Though I still struggle to remember which key maps to which for the letters with no real 1-to-1 mapping (like theta).

New comment by syockit in "FFmpeg 8.0"

syockit — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 09:25:06 +0000

Brings back memories. There was a time when the fork, libav, became the default on Ubuntu, and ffmpeg commands would say "this command is no longer maintained" or so. That was where I learned that there was a fork, and I thought ffmpeg was going to die as a result because there was heavy development activity on libav compared to ffmpeg initially. Surprise, ffmpeg outlived its fork!

This post talks about the situation back then: https://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

New comment by syockit in "What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?"

syockit — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:45:57 +0000

It's really unintuitive how a mere increase in number of dimensions could totally change the scale of things. This is the crux of the curse of dimensionality in machine learning. If you simply stacked it high, it may almost reach the sun (but no quite), but once you lay it into roughly a square (20000 x 50000), it spans only over a mile per side. To lay it roughly into a cube of 100 dollar stacks, you'd have something like 65 x 150 x 1026, which turns out to be about only 12 yards per side.

EDIT: I screwed up in the 1D calculation. A 10 million-height stack of 100 100$ bills only reaches 67 miles.

New comment by syockit in "Tom Lehrer has died"

syockit — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 06:51:24 +0000

Isn't a clock and a gyroscope precisely two things that are needed for the missile to know where it is at all times? Like, it can then know where it isn't by subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is, to get the positional deviation. Combine that with the clock deviation, it can get the velocity and acceleration and then use all three information to generate corrective commands.