Hacker News: vgel

New comment by vgel in "Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?"

vgel — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 06:04:00 +0000

It's less calibrated but still useful, yea

New comment by vgel in "Stalin, Eisenstein, Walt Disney and Ivan the Terrible (1992)"

vgel — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 22:08:50 +0000

Reading the transcript of Stalin, Molotov, etc's conversation with Eisenstein was really interesting. Even if you disagree with their analysis and what they're doing, it's clear they know the period very well--it's hard to imagine modern politicians speaking on history like that.

New comment by vgel in "GoatCounter creator is hoping to raise at least €1k for basic living expense"

vgel — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 22:12:37 +0000

Thank you for making it free! I've used it on my blog (https://vgel.me) forever, since back before I ever would've paid for analytics, and it's been rock-solid the whole time. Some of the most "set it and forget it" software I use. I definitely owe you a donation so I'm glad I saw this!

New comment by vgel in "Polio is on the brink of eradication"

vgel — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 20:53:35 +0000

Oh, we already sequenced it awhile back. As for physical media, that's not exactly what happened... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1?report=fast...

I made a transformer by hand (no training)

vgel — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 16:33:37 +0000

Article URL: https://vgel.me/posts/handmade-transformer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469740

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 17:55:13 +0000

Oh, interesting--I remember messing around with flags on the stack but was having issues with the WASM analyzer (it doesn't like possible inconsistencies with the number of parameters left on the stack between blocks). I think your solution might get around that, though!

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 22:01:12 +0000

Looks like Schism (https://github.com/schism-lang/schism) got part of the way there, but it unfortunately seems to be dead.

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:47:07 +0000

I think because it's ambiguous with unary plus (a = +b), since C isn't supposed to have significant whitespace in most circumstances.

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:35:26 +0000

Oh, that's neat (funny that they skipped out on similar things to me, like GOTO and structs :-)

I didn't see a link to the source in the article, but this seems to be it: https://sourceforge.net/p/tiny-pascal/code/HEAD/tree/NorthSt...

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:28:28 +0000

Maybe not the language choice, but the codegen of this compiler is terrible because of the single-pass shortcuts (for example, it unconditionally loads the result of all assignment operations back to the stack just in case you want to write `a = b = 1`, even though 99% of the time that load is immediately thrown away.)

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:27:06 +0000

Well, I set the 500 line budget up front, and that was really as much as I could fit with reasonable formatting. I'll be excited to see your 500 line C compiler supporting all those features once it's done ;-)

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:24:18 +0000

I actually almost made it a C-- (https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/download/ppdp.pdf) compiler, but IIRC the `goto`s made me go with the regular C subset instead.

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:21:44 +0000

I think the code is fairly readable! It's formatted with Black (and therefore limited to reasonable line lengths) and well-commented.

IMO, being under X lines of code is part of the readability—10,000 lines of code is hard to approach no matter how readable it otherwise is.

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:16:35 +0000

Ooh, this is cool! Using WASM let me avoid writing a register allocator (though I probably would have just used the stack if I had targeted x86/ARM since I wasn't going for speed).

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:15:42 +0000

I'm not sure, haven't looked at the codebases of old compilers in a long time. Definitely a lot of the language is pretty amenable to it, especially if you have unstructured jumps for e.g. the for advancement statement. I had a distinct feeling while writing the compiler every time I added a new feature that "wow, the semantics work exactly how I'd like them to for ease of implementation."

Compare that to, say, Rust, which would be pretty painful to single-pass compile with all the non-local behavior around traits.

New comment by vgel in "Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python"

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:12:33 +0000

Oh, C4 is neat—technically it has me beat since it also implements the VM to run the code—though their formatting definitely takes advantage of long lines :-)

Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python

vgel — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 19:17:37 +0000

Article URL: https://vgel.me/posts/c500/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383913

Points: 510

# Comments: 165

New comment by vgel in "What happened to Wirecutter?"

vgel — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 03:52:32 +0000

A lot of the reasons for decline cited in the article feel fluffy. "The best washer/dryer depends on who you are"? The Wirecutter always gave alternatives and "upgrade picks". "People prefer influencers"? Are there washer/dryer and toaster influencers now?

What killed the Wirecutter for me was the standing desk referral code scandal, full stop. Their whole thing was "one stop for the best thing", and if there's any hint of bias there, it kills that. I believe that was after the NYT acquisition--I think it's very fair to lay the blame at their feet.

New comment by vgel in "Google’s medical AI chatbot is being tested in hospitals"

vgel — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 21:26:13 +0000

We had superhuman diagnosis systems 50 years ago!

> Mycin was never actually used in practice. This wasn't because of any weakness in its performance - in tests it outperformed members of the Stanford medical school. It was as much because of ethical and legal issues related to the use of computers in medicine - if it gives the wrong diagnosis, who do you sue?

https://cinuresearch.tripod.com/ai/www-cee-hw-ac-uk/_alison/...

New comment by vgel in "Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?"

vgel — Tue, 30 May 2023 22:06:05 +0000

> Swing dancing

Swing It Seattle? Me and my wife go to the wednesday dances :-)