Hacker News: variadix

New comment by variadix in "VHDL's Crown Jewel"

variadix — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:34:31 +0000

I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at, but I think I’ve had a similar question: why don’t HDLs have language elements more representative of what digital circuits are constructed from, namely synchronous and asynchronous circuits, rather than imperative input triggered blocks (processes IIRC, it’s been a while)?

I always thought it was confusing to design a circuit mentally (or on paper) out of things like muxes, encoders, flip flops, etc. and not have language-level elements to represent these things (without defining your own components obviously).

I remember looking this up, and I believe it’s because the languages were originally designed for simulation and verification, and there are things you might want to do in a simulation/verification language for testing that are outside of what the hardware can do. Mixing the two is confusing IMO, but clearly demarcating the hardware-realizable subset of the language would be better than the current state.

New comment by variadix in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

variadix — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:29:31 +0000

Maybe, another possibility is the frontier providers change their pricing terms to try to capture more of the value once a sufficient number of people’s skills have atrophied. For example: 20% of the revenue of all products built with $AI_SERVICE. For someone several years out of practice they may have no other option.

New comment by variadix in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

variadix — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:58:15 +0000

Insiders bring information to a market. Intelligent analysis and prediction also does, but obviously insiders have special information they are incentivized to bring to the market. Most people placing these bets are simply gambling, insiders and analysts at least have rational reasons for placing bets and add information to the market.

New comment by variadix in "Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon"

variadix — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 17:47:27 +0000

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of why index funds are effective. Being over invested into U.S. equities is a risk if you hold outsized U.S. index funds (esp. if you have a large allocation in the S&P500, you do not own the market portfolio), but there are other risks being invested into foreign equities as a U.S. investor.

New comment by variadix in "‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid"

variadix — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 04:59:43 +0000

Where did I say that? It’s ultimately up to a jury to decide whether lethal force was justified. Obstruct and provoke law enforcement at your own peril.

New comment by variadix in "‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid"

variadix — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 20:03:54 +0000

“Not listening” is really an incredible framing for trying to flee being detained for obstruction, and in the process hitting and nearly running over a federal agent in your SUV.

New comment by variadix in "OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026"

variadix — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 01:49:37 +0000

This will remain the case until we have another transformer-level leap in ML technology. I don’t expect such an advancement to be openly published when it is discovered.

New comment by variadix in "All Delisted Steam Games"

variadix — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:20:11 +0000

There is a fan project that has revived the servers. It’s hard to get full matches but can still be played at least. It’s called BLRevive, there’s a Discord for it. IMO the only bad thing is it’s based on the post-PS4 update where the devs console-fied the game.

New comment by variadix in "'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex"

variadix — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 17:47:01 +0000

They make great glassware, very scratch and chip resistant.

New comment by variadix in "Homeschooling hits record numbers"

variadix — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:42:02 +0000

I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.

New comment by variadix in "Gemini 3"

variadix — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 23:59:10 +0000

I doubt they have offline access to the model, i.e. the prompts are sent to the model provider.

New comment by variadix in "Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to"

variadix — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:31:12 +0000

Depends on the distribution of accidents and the distribution of costs. If P(ddos) * Cost(ddos) < P(no ddos) * P(cloudflare outage) * Cost(cloudflare outage) then you would be better off not using Cloudflare.

This is not considering other issues with Cloudflare, like them MITM the entire internet and effectively being an unregulated internet gatekeeper.

New comment by variadix in "How to write generics in C"

variadix — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:10:18 +0000

You can create macro functions per generic function so something like Vector_New(int)(&v) expands to Vector_New_int(&v). It also looks less foreign (more like templates) than the G macro.

New comment by variadix in "California revokes 17,000 expired commercial driver's licenses for immigrants"

variadix — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:14:37 +0000

It’s not intentionally ineffectively enforced to enable big businesses to exploit illegal cheap labor under the threat of deportation. Entrenched interests, lobbyists, and big money have much more influence on immigration policy than who is in power.

New comment by variadix in "Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper"

variadix — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 11:34:50 +0000

This is ridiculous. The real explanation is a level of uncaring incompetence that can only be sustained in large organizations.

New comment by variadix in "How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry"

variadix — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:21:43 +0000

Government backed loans inflate demand. If banks had to consider the risk of repayment prices would come back to reality.

New comment by variadix in "Japanese convenience stores are hiring robots run by workers in the Philippines"

variadix — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 15:17:50 +0000

Automation being more profitable implies it’s more efficient (by the market’s measure of efficiency, which is the best measure anyone has come up with)

New comment by variadix in "America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy"

variadix — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:05:56 +0000

Lowering standards is why a high school diploma is nearly worthless, it wasn’t always the case. If you can graduate with a high school diploma while still being illiterate, innumerate, etc. it is a signal with no entropy.

New comment by variadix in "America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy"

variadix — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 20:26:19 +0000

When graduating is essentially just aging out, it isn’t really graduating

New comment by variadix in "Multi-Core by Default"

variadix — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 18:35:43 +0000

What about pipelining? Something that has clear serial dependencies could still be pipelined to execute separate (but dependent at work boundaries) units of work in parallel.