Hacker News: typ

New comment by typ in "Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston"

typ — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:33:09 +0000

6% compared to the post-2000s is mediocre, especially given the low baseline. Not remarkably better than other high-income democratic countries like Japan and West Germany. Even the US can have ~4% growth at the time.

New comment by typ in "Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston"

typ — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:05:20 +0000

American business leaders have (had?) an obsession with gross margin and tech "advancedness." They thought they would be the winner as long as they occupied the high-tech sectors in the supply chain. So they discarded the high-volume, low-margin, low-growth, low-tech businesses like assembly lines and outsourced them. But the reality is that the proximity of the assembly lines creates a cost advantage that attracts more upstream suppliers to surround it. Even Intel was seeking to build more fabs in China before being stopped by the US government.

New comment by typ in "Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston"

typ — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 01:46:15 +0000

If that were the true secret sauce of the economic success in China, why had it not taken off before the 2000s? Like, they have been that "aligned" and "want the same thing" and "run by engineers" since the 50s, no?

New comment by typ in "TSMC to make advanced AI semiconductors in Japan"

typ — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 06:46:15 +0000

The silicon shield became a slogan that has only been popularized in recent years. The potential crisis of war has been there for more than half a century (even before semiconductors became a thing). The real value proposition of the status quo is the freedom of navigation between the northeastern Asian countries and the SEA (the Strait of Malacca, aka the lifeline of energy imports), and the consequential domino effect of the entire western Pacific.

Also, not sure why everyone forgets about it. People should have learned from the experience of the pandemic that the cutting-edge foundry nodes are not really the crucial ones, as being the bottleneck of industrial infrastructure. A delay of the next-gen iPhone or RTX gaming card isn't that catastrophic. But a shortage of embedded MCUs, which are actually fabricated by mature nodes, could stall the entire industrial base of a country.

New comment by typ in "We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler"

typ — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 01:50:58 +0000

I'd bet, on average, the quality of proprietary code is worse than open-source code. There have been decades of accumulated slop generated by human agents with wildly varied skill levels, all vibe-coded by ruthless, incompetent corporate bosses.

New comment by typ in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

typ — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 07:58:44 +0000

> reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times

This is only relevant to the compute productivity (how much useful work it can produce), but it's irrelevant to the heat dissipation problem. The energy income is fundamentally limited by the solar facing area (x 1361 W/m^2). So the energy output cannot exceed it, regardless useful signals or just waste heat. Even if we just put a stone there, the equilibrium temperature wouldn't be any better or worse.

New comment by typ in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

typ — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 05:34:36 +0000

That should be better than a sphere. Though I imagine there could be some fancier 3D geometry designs.

Even for a simple sphere, if we give it different surface roughnesses on the sun-facing side and the "night" side, it can have dramatically different emissivity.

New comment by typ in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

typ — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:25:09 +0000

Assuming that we place an iron ball (ideal sphere-shaped and thermal conductivity) on the SSO (solar synchronous orbit), how hot can the object be?

Given the solar constant 1361 W/m^2, you can calculate the temperature range based on the emissivity and absorptivity. With the right shape and “color”, the equilibrium temperature can be cooler than most people thought.

I suppose that a space data center powered 100% by solar is no different than this iron ball in principle.

New comment by typ in "xAI joins SpaceX"

typ — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 23:14:50 +0000

The radiator area is probably not what they need to worry about that much as we thought. When the energy input comes from solar 100%, they just need to optimize the ratio of the sectional area facing the sun over the total surface area of the satellite. If the ratio is low enough, like a fin or cone shaped object, it will be harder to be hot.

New comment by typ in "xAI joins SpaceX"

typ — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:07:16 +0000

Not sure about the effectiveness of a heat pump in this use case.

>Heat radiation works better the higher the temperature?

The power output is proportional to T^4 according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

New comment by typ in "xAI joins SpaceX"

typ — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:48:37 +0000

It makes sense to target a higher operating temperature, like 375K. At some point, the energy budget would reach an equilibrium. The Earth constantly absorbs solar energy and also dissipates the heat only by radiative cooling. But the equilibrium temperature of the Earth is still kind of cool.

I guess the trick lies in the operating temperature and the geometry of the satellites.

New comment by typ in "Kimi Released Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual SOTA-Agentic Model"

typ — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:45:32 +0000

The label 'open source' has become a reputation reaping and marketing vehicle rather than an informative term since the Hugging Face benchmark race started. With the weights only, we cannot actually audit that if a model is a) contaminated by benchmarks, b) built with deliberate biases, or c) trained on copyrighted/privacy data, let alone allowing other vendors to replicate the results. Anyways, people still love free stuff.

New comment by typ in "Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux"

typ — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 01:19:10 +0000

Rather than API/ABI stability, I think the problem is the lack of coherence and too many fragile dependencies. Like, why should a component as essential as Systemd have to depend on a non-essential service called d-bus? Which in turn depends on an XML parser lib named libexpat. Just d-bus and libexpat combined takes a few megabytes. Last time I checked, the entire NT kernel, and probably the Linux kernel image as well, has no more than single-digit MBs in size. And by the way, Systemd itself doesn’t use XML for configurations. It has an INI style configuration format.

New comment by typ in "DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning"

typ — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:17:31 +0000

The difference is that you can customize/debug it or not. You might say that a .EXE can be modified too. But I don't think that's the conventional definition of open source.

I understand that these days, businesses and hobbyists just want to use free LLMs without paying subscriptions for economic motives, that is, either saving money or making money. They don't really care whether the source is truly available or not. They are just end users of a product, not open-source developers by any means.

Replacing the Type Checker for the Swift Compiler

typ — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 02:26:31 +0000

Article URL: https://forums.swift.org/t/replacing-the-type-checker/79518

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522850

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by typ in "Be careful with Go struct embedding"

typ — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 02:03:34 +0000

It seems to come from a Plan 9 C idiom that GCC even has an extension for it.

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-5.3.0/gcc/Unnamed-Fields....

New comment by typ in "Apple announces American Manufacturing Program"

typ — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 06:00:23 +0000

Downstream assembly factories attract component manufacturers because of lower transport costs and shorter delivery times, which can lead to network effects. (Remember why Intel wanted to build more foundries in China a few years ago?) That's the success formula of Shenzhen, for example.

New comment by typ in "argp: GNU-style command line argument parser for Go"

typ — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 01:54:44 +0000

Maybe the README should mention whether reflection (the part that would disable dead-code elimnation) is used? That was a pain point for me when I had to investigate a binary bloat issue due to reflect.

New comment by typ in "Supply constraints do not explain house price, quantity growth across US cities"

typ — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 05:42:00 +0000

Homes are not a homogeneous commodity. New homes cannot be perfect substitutes due to locations, amenities, access to jobs (commute time), etc. Also, government spending on infrastructure will be capitalized into the neighborhood's land (location) value. You cannot 'undo' this capitalization simply by building more homes.

New comment by typ in "A 10x Faster TypeScript"

typ — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:22:59 +0000

C# is fine. But last I checked, the AOT compilation generates a bunch of .dll files, which are not suitable for a CLI program like Go's zero dependencies binary.