Hacker News: the_panopticon

New comment by the_panopticon in "First steps in bare-metal programming using UEFI"

the_panopticon — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 18:44:05 +0000

For "Get used to the lack of a C standard library" mentioned in https://kevinboone.me/efitest4.html there's always https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-libc.

And on "Be aware of the Windows-ness of EFI" commentary the resemblance to Windows coding style https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkb... is no accident. We leveraged this coding methodology as we evolved the original Intel Boot Initiative then EFI and then UEFI code and specification https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

New comment by the_panopticon in "Why do we have so many meetings?"

the_panopticon — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:56:00 +0000

WFH and COVID accelerated meeting usage. I had a manager who claimed people also flocked to meetings during COVID and WFH because they were 'lonely.' But that same manager would kick people out of meetings if they weren't actively participating, too, so who knows.

New comment by the_panopticon in "Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals"

the_panopticon — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 22:21:22 +0000

I think the subsequent level is 'Distinguished Engineer.' That's terminal AFAIK. Maybe they'll need a 'Sr DE' someday?

New comment by the_panopticon in "Google Open-Sources NPU IP"

the_panopticon — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 18:13:43 +0000

This is great to see. Google has role-modeled open source hardware/silicon with efforts like https://opentitan.org/ and https://developers.google.com/silicon in the past, too. I wonder how this AI Coral NPU IP will differ from Nvidia's NVDLA https://nvdla.org/ effort with the ecosystem?

New comment by the_panopticon in "Record Everything"

the_panopticon — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:06:56 +0000

"History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes" - Mark Twain https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/mylifebits/

New comment by the_panopticon in "A Gentle Introduction to CUDA PTX"

the_panopticon — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 18:43:02 +0000

Very interesting. It sounds like tuning at the PTX level can increase workload efficiencies, such as quote "Specifically, we employ customized PTX (Parallel Thread Execution) instructions" from the DeepSeek folks https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437.

New comment by the_panopticon in "Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'"

the_panopticon — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 19:41:02 +0000

Intel does have https://www.clearlinux.org/

New comment by the_panopticon in "Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?"

the_panopticon — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 18:25:53 +0000

+1, especially the 'Grand Inquisitor' portion. And a close 2nd would be Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment.'

New comment by the_panopticon in "Deploying Rust in existing firmware codebases"

the_panopticon — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 08:11:50 +0000

This article is a nice addition to the community since rarely is a complete rewrite of a firmware corpus possible. Speaking of Rust and host or boot firmware, the recently published https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s... provides a nice experience report. Other work on moving Rust into EDKII for UEFI style firmware https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-staging/tree/edkii-rust is described in https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/Enabling%20RU... and https://cfp.osfc.io/media/osfc2020/submissions/SLFJTN/resour.... There's also guidance on Rust for firmware in a book chapter https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4_....

New comment by the_panopticon in "In the beginning, there was computation"

the_panopticon — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 18:55:44 +0000

This is a good read. Dr. Blaise Agüera y Arcas was a keynote speaker at https://attend.ieee.org/newera/program/ here in Seattle a week ago but he didn't really get a chance to delve deeply into his position. During his slot there ended up being a lot of back-and-forth about whether AGI truly achieved or just seeing ACI, etc, among the folks from MS, Meta, Google, UW, and even https://www.dia.mil/ rep.

New comment by the_panopticon in "I Hate the Term "Modern""

the_panopticon — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 21:15:35 +0000

"Universal" is also a term that doesn't typically engender happiness in technologists.

New comment by the_panopticon in "Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch"

the_panopticon — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 15:18:20 +0000

In Ocaml, interesting. I was similarly surprised when I learned that the firs Rust compiler was written in Ocaml, too https://users.rust-lang.org/t/understanding-how-the-rust-com...

New comment by the_panopticon in "DevRel at HuggingFace"

the_panopticon — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:47:08 +0000

This reminds me of the saying https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/success_has_many_fathers,_fai... that I’ve seen often played out in big companies, too.

New comment by the_panopticon in "Writing a BIOS bootloader for 64-bit mode from scratch"

the_panopticon — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 14:12:23 +0000

There is still support for CSM in the open source https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/Compat... and even nice projects like https://github.com/coreboot/seabiosto fabricate the CSM16 binary, but many vendors have stopped validating this path, including production of legacy BIOS option roms for adapters (net, gfx, etc) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Legacy-BIOS-EOL-2020. I still believe CSP's maintain some of this support in their hypervisors' guest firmware for legacy OS binaries/ISO boot support? Also since Windows requires UEFI Secure boot enabled by default and CSM has to be disabled for the UEFI secure boot path, this is another reason legacy BIOS boot isn't exercised so much these days. We could have added legacy oroms hashes to UEFI Secure boot implementations https://patents.google.com/patent/US8694761B2/en, too, but again folks pushed back in their zeal to remove legacy BIOS overall. We didn't add the CSM spec https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... to the PI https://uefi.org/specs/PI/1.8A/ since folks were hoping UEFI would remove the need for CSM. I still remember being challenged in the early 2000's by a long-time BIOS mgr at Intel "Is removing legacy a good idea with EFI? You know, we're really at legacy."

New comment by the_panopticon in "Windows NT for Power Macintosh"

the_panopticon — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 14:40:57 +0000

Fascinating work. The ARC std https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(specification) was used to boot the Dec Alpha Windows machines, along w/ MIPS, etc. Anyone know of other open source variants of that in the wild? At intel in 1998 the original efi spec was modeled on & inspired by Arc. The Intel boot initiative (IBI) in fact looked mostly like Arc. EFI (now UEFI) is sort of Arc + installable GUID-based interfaces (aka protocols) a la MS COM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model. Page 8 of https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... recounts some of those travails.

New comment by the_panopticon in "No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead"

the_panopticon — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 19:00:21 +0000

Seems to be a trend including work like https://www.linuxboot.org/.

New comment by the_panopticon in "The weirdest QNX bug I've encountered (2021)"

the_panopticon — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:07:16 +0000

I recall trying to debug a crash in QNX during the mid-90's. I was impressed by the svelte OS that could load from a 3.5" floppy. The failure scenario was coincident with one of my first tasks as a BIOS engineer and it entailed adding some custom error logging in System Management Mode (SMM). Luckily for me it turned out that I had forgotten to save/restore certain general purpose registers around my SMM logic. Fun times. SMM is pretty good at 'breaking' operating systems :)

New comment by the_panopticon in "Costco is building out an ad business using its shoppers' data"

the_panopticon — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 23:47:30 +0000

Weaponizing data for ads and https://nypost.com/2024/06/06/business/costco-to-stop-sellin.... Feels about right for our post modern world.

New comment by the_panopticon in "RISC-V must get its messaging right on open standard vs. open source"

the_panopticon — Wed, 29 May 2024 18:14:15 +0000

Some interesting links on topic at bottom of https://www.rioslab.org/2023/04/14/open-source-hardware-ip-r...

New comment by the_panopticon in "Google now 'third-largest' in datacenter processors"

the_panopticon — Wed, 22 May 2024 15:43:44 +0000

Reminds me of article https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/04/17/what-happens-when-hy...