Hacker News: vnorilo

New comment by vnorilo in "Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++"

vnorilo — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:44:54 +0000

When you need a configuration step, cmake will actually save you a lot of time, especially if you work cross platform or even cross compile. I love to hate cmake as much as the next guy, and it would be hard to design a worse scripting language, but I'll take it any time over autoconf. Some of the newer tools may well be more convenient - I tried Bazel, and it sure wasn't (for me).

If you're happy to bake one config in a makefile, then cmake will do very little for you.

Wamp, WinAmp style native audio player for macOS

vnorilo — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:46:21 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/wishval/wamp

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47692731

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Supply Chain Attack in litellm 1.82.8 on PyPI

vnorilo — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:20:21 +0000

Article URL: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/litellm-pypi-supply-chain-attack/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47508561

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

New comment by vnorilo in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

vnorilo — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:47:31 +0000

The wireless used for pro audio is never bluetooth, however.

New comment by vnorilo in "We should revisit literate programming in the agent era"

vnorilo — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:55:10 +0000

Indeed, which is not all that different from LLM code generation, to be honest.

New comment by vnorilo in "We should revisit literate programming in the agent era"

vnorilo — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 07:01:44 +0000

Yes. LLMs are search engines into the (latent) space or source code. Stuff you put into the context window is the "query". I've had some good results by minimizing the conversational aspect, and thinking in terms of shaping the context: asking the LLM to analyze relevant files, nor because I want the analysis, but because I want a good reading in the context. LLMs will work hard to stay in that "landscape", even with vague prompts. Often better than with weirdly specific or conflicting instructions.

New comment by vnorilo in "Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?"

vnorilo — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:08:13 +0000

When something is hundreds of megabytes, it is very unlikely to be mostly compiled code. A lot of that fits in each megabyte.

New comment by vnorilo in "Maybe the default settings are too high"

vnorilo — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:38:15 +0000

Probably true for many. When thinking about hard problems I'm usually not thinking in language, at least not the kind we speak between us humans, so it can be incredibly distracting if I have to "translate" back and forth while both thinking and communicating.

New comment by vnorilo in "Dependable C"

vnorilo — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:59:02 +0000

>I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...

With genuine respect, I believe this type of insinuation is rarely productive.

Someone might still have silly opinions, even if they have been paid to write assembly for 8-24-64 bit cisc, risc, ordered and out of order ISAs, and maybe compilers too. Peace :)

New comment by vnorilo in "Dependable C"

vnorilo — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:50:08 +0000

sure, I was thinking of large OO cores. "Correspondd to the instructions the cpu runs and their observable order" is how I'd characterize C as well, but to each their own.

New comment by vnorilo in "Dependable C"

vnorilo — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:46:56 +0000

I have empathy for this having written compiler passes for 10ish years of my career. But as I've studied register renaming, speculative branch prediction and trace caches I would no longer agree with your last sentence. It's fine though, totally just an opinion.

New comment by vnorilo in "Dependable C"

vnorilo — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 06:47:47 +0000

And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

Both ISA-level assembly and C are targeting an abstract machine model, even if the former is somewhat further removed from hardware reality.

New comment by vnorilo in "Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI"

vnorilo — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 06:00:44 +0000

When I was in third grade, I decided I want to make computer games to get more of them. Dad got me started with GW-Basic turtle graphics and I made pictures with them - usually non-functional title screens for my games.

At some point I had made a small space ship and was able to make it turn around with the wonderful angle command [1]. However, I could not figure out how to make it move "forward" regardless of the angle.

I was also attending an after hours computer graphics club, mostly about Deluxe Paint, taught by a 20-something student (who much later went on to found a GPU company and got acquihired by ATI/AMD). He would help me occasionally, and in this case he took a tiny slip of paper and wrote down a couple of lines about sin and cos. No questions, no explanations, no gatekeeping.

Just like that I internalized this foundational piece of trig - later when it arrived in school maths it was easy and obvious for me. I had a practical application, but even more I think was because it started as a need I had, and when given to me, felt like a gift and an enabler.

Still much later I studied Seymour Papert's pedagogy and understood I had lived it. I consider myself fortunate.

1: http://www.antonis.de/qbebooks/gwbasman/draw.html

New comment by vnorilo in "You know more Finnish than you think"

vnorilo — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 07:28:18 +0000

Finnish has been very peripheral and isolated due to geography. It is closely related to Estonian, but remains much more similar to their common archaic root, while Estonian has streamlined and developed due to more contact and exchange.

(Disclaimer: Finn)

End times of Intel [video]

vnorilo — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 17:25:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ADwOm7Z3aI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44737021

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by vnorilo in "AI driven drop in human web traffic"

vnorilo — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 06:08:01 +0000

In my experience search engines have rapidly deteriorated - probably because of the SEO arms race - and LLMs often feel like search engines used to feel back when they worked. Who knows what will happen once all the marketing attention shifts towards influencing LLM output.

AI driven drop in human web traffic

vnorilo — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 04:44:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/14/ai-is-killing-the-web-can-anything-save-it

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567895

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by vnorilo in "Ruby 3.4 frozen string literals: What Rails developers need to know"

vnorilo — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 13:46:02 +0000

Not in general. Immutable strings can be deduplicated, leading to a different performance tradeoff that is often quite good. This is mentioned in TFA.

New comment by vnorilo in "Haskell, Reverse Polish Notation, and Parsing"

vnorilo — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 05:46:10 +0000

For sure. Data structures and call graphs like to converge, so when designing a data model, you are actually designing the (most natural) program flow too.

New comment by vnorilo in "The Princeton INTERCAL Compiler's source code"

vnorilo — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 05:00:27 +0000

The recent C# feature called interceptors [1] pretty much looks like comefrom from where I stand. Yet everyone talking about it has either been serious, or very good at trolling.

1: https://khalidabuhakmeh.com/dotnet-8-interceptors