Hacker News: theresistor

New comment by theresistor in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

theresistor — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:44:02 +0000

Also also, AMD’s play has always been to produce HW that offers good performance/$, with the downside of having much weaker SW offerings to go with it.

Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.

Message from Pope Leo XIV on the 60th World Day of Social Communications

theresistor — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:30:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/communications/documents/20260124-messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850067

Points: 45

# Comments: 9

New comment by theresistor in "LLVM: The bad parts"

theresistor — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:48:03 +0000

> It might be that regalloc needs to be taught to rematerialize

It knows how to rematerialize, and has for a long time, but the backend is generally more local/has less visibility than the optimizer. This causes it to struggle to consistently undo bad decisions LICM may have made.

New comment by theresistor in "The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void"

theresistor — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:05 +0000

I say and hear it all the time in the US...

New comment by theresistor in "The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void"

theresistor — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 23:57:03 +0000

Really? I read the same sentence (as an American) and immediately thought that they must be referring to British English. Certainly nobody says brilliant as an affirmation here.

And "no problem" and "not bad" are both common colloquial statements in American English.

New comment by theresistor in "Cassette tapes are making a comeback?"

theresistor — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:07:55 +0000

As far as I know Apple will still sell you individual tracks (DRM free, I think?), though it’s a bit hidden.

New comment by theresistor in "Using LLMs at Oxide"

theresistor — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 07:52:25 +0000

A very recent example: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369

New comment by theresistor in "Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025"

theresistor — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:31:06 +0000

This is a pretty standard topic, and not really a compiler optimization. It's usually called a unity build.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_build

AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

theresistor — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 21:03:22 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274

Points: 438

# Comments: 306

The Tree That Owns Itself

theresistor — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:28:27 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882715

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by theresistor in "Starfront Observatories"

theresistor — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 04:29:39 +0000

https://www.itelescope.net/

New comment by theresistor in "An engineering history of the Manhattan Project"

theresistor — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:10:40 +0000

My grandfather also worked on it, as a technician in Los Alamos.

He had previously been working for a scientific supplies company in Chicago that was (unbeknownst to him) providing supplies to the Manhattan Project. Apparently his boss was aware of it, and when my grandfather's draft was called a letter from his boss convinced the draft board to assign him to Los Alamos instead. He was eventually able to get my grandmother, a secretary and typist, a job as a secretary in Los Alamos as well so that she could join him. She teased him the rest of their lives, because as the secretary to someone more important than a lowly technician, she had technically had a higher security clearance than he ever did!

The Atomic Heritage Foundation collects records about people who were affiliated with the Manhattan Project, as well as oral histories. Perhaps they have more information about your grandfather's work? See here: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/bios/

New comment by theresistor in "Mac Themes Garden"

theresistor — Thu, 08 May 2025 01:45:28 +0000

Kid me absolutely ran The Bug on an old PowerMac G3: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8191e1471dc9-the-bug/

New comment by theresistor in "Should managers still code?"

theresistor — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 22:10:05 +0000

> I tend to agree but, playing devil's advocate, is this true for other roles? Does a movie director need to know how to build sets? How to sew costumes? How to use Blender/Maya/Houdini?

I don't know that much about movie making, but my understanding is that there would be managers and/or leads within each specialty, who are (among other things) managing the interaction between their specialty and the director / producers.

That seems pretty comparable to what's being discussed here.

New comment by theresistor in "Affixes: The Building Blocks of English"

theresistor — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 08:48:09 +0000

My father was a Classics professor, and one of the most popular classes he taught was "Latin Terminology for Medicine and Law".

New comment by theresistor in "Common misconceptions about compilers"

theresistor — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 22:22:08 +0000

All of the major C/C++ compilers are deterministic functions of their inputs. This is a pretty major property, and any regression is rapidly detected and fixed.

Optimization "timeouts" aren't done in wall time, but in something that can be deterministically counted: number of instructions, number of recurrences up a call stack or expression tree, etc.

New comment by theresistor in "Why those particular integer multiplies?"

theresistor — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 11:39:52 +0000

> Do they just target the lowest common denominator of operations? Or do they somehow adapt to the operations supported by the user's CPU?

Mostly the former. Some highly optimized bits of software do the latter—they are built with multiple code paths optimized for different hardware capabilities, and select which one to use at runtime.

> Do dynamic languages (Javascript, Python, PHP...) get a speed boost because they can compile just in time and use all the features of the user's CPU?

Hypothetically yes, but in practice no for the languages you mentioned because they don't map well to things like SIMD. Some JIT-based numerical computing systems as well as JIT-based ML compilers do reap those benefits.

New comment by theresistor in "Jank development update – Moving to LLVM IR"

theresistor — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 11:42:34 +0000

The textual IR is not backwards compatible, but the bitcode format has been best-effort auto-upgradeable for as long as I've been involved (2006). The policy is documented here: https://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#ir-backwards-comp...

New comment by theresistor in "AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU"

theresistor — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 01:52:32 +0000

If you know that you need to offload matmuls, then building matmul hardware is more area efficient than adding an entire extra CPU. Various intermediate points exist along that spectrum, e.g. Cell's SPUs.

New comment by theresistor in "AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU"

theresistor — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 23:26:50 +0000

> Also, people often mistake the reason for an NPU is "speed". That's not correct. The whole point of the NPU is rather to focus on low power consumption.

It's also often about offload. Depending on the use case, the CPU and GPU may be busy with other tasks, so the NPU is free bandwidth that can be used without stealing from the others. Consider AI-powered photo filters: the GPU is probably busy rendering the preview, and the CPU is busy drawing UI and handling user inputs.