Hacker News: yosefk

New comment by yosefk in "Floor and Ceil versus Denormals on CPU and GPU"

yosefk — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:07:49 +0000

Flush denormals to zero. Even their inventor had trouble writing correct code in their presence - see the Appendix to that "what every programmer should know..." paper

New comment by yosefk in "All means are fair except solving the problem"

yosefk — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:54:31 +0000

Indeed you're supposed to, but that way if someone calls exit(0), it looks like the program worked fine, when in fact they committed some debug code and made the program no longer run to completion. "Yay, done" was put in for the scripts to flag this sort of thing, presumably based on experience.

New comment by yosefk in "Gold overtakes U.S. Treasuries as the largest foreign reserve asset"

yosefk — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:40:35 +0000

While we're at it, when did central banks start to buy lots of gold and under which POTUS? Could it have something to do with the freezing of hundreds of billions of some sovereign assets?

New comment by yosefk in "Missile defense is NP-complete"

yosefk — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:07:28 +0000

What produces this Iranian "mercy" at a time when Iran is extensively bombed, if not a combination of defensive and offensive capabilities providing escalation dominance?

New comment by yosefk in "The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19"

yosefk — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:01:00 +0000

The optimal age to have children is way before you need to rely on frozen eggs (one reason among many being that this process doesn't always work)

New comment by yosefk in "Claude Code Remote Control"

yosefk — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:49:01 +0000

Coding is a solved problem. Problems with the code - these are far from solved, in fact they're multiplying, but coding is definitely solved

New comment by yosefk in "How to make a living as an artist"

yosefk — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:50:52 +0000

Seems like a case of snobbery on behalf of these people. These are nice images but not "high art" which I guess prompts some people to scoff at them

New comment by yosefk in "Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC"

yosefk — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 06:38:04 +0000

"Ironically, among the four stages, the compiler (translation to assembly) is the most approachable one for an AI to build. It is mostly about pattern matching and rule application: take C constructs and map them to assembly patterns.

The assembler is harder than it looks. It needs to know the exact binary encoding of every instruction for the target architecture. x86-64 alone has thousands of instruction variants with complex encoding rules (REX prefixes, ModR/M bytes, SIB bytes, displacement sizes). Getting even one bit wrong means the CPU will do something completely unexpected.

The linker is arguably the hardest. It has to handle relocations, symbol resolution across multiple object files, different section types, position-independent code, thread-local storage, dynamic linking and format-specific details of ELF binaries. The Linux kernel linker script alone is hundreds of lines of layout directives that the linker must get exactly right."

I worked on compilers, assemblers and linkers and this is almost exactly backwards

New comment by yosefk in "Why I Joined OpenAI"

yosefk — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 08:18:21 +0000

Thank you very much for your work. I think people envious of someone's compensation don't deserve a response

New comment by yosefk in "What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent"

yosefk — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:14:22 +0000

"Also, it [Claude Code] flickers" - it does, doesn't it? Why?.. Did it vibe code itself so badly that this is hopeless to fix?..

New comment by yosefk in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

yosefk — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:16:01 +0000

The list of the oil producers listed and omitted on a given forum in these contexts is always interesting. On HN it is often SA or Russia, and almost never Qatar or Iran.

New comment by yosefk in "Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro"

yosefk — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 07:53:04 +0000

How dare you question the rigor of the venerable LLM peer review process! These are some of the most esteemed LLMs we are talking about here.

New comment by yosefk in "C++ std::move doesn't move anything: A deep dive into Value Categories"

yosefk — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:44:14 +0000

std::move is definitely for there for optimizing application code and is often used there. another silly thing you often see is people allocating something with a big sizeof on the stack and then std::moving it to the heap, as if it saves the copying

New comment by yosefk in "C++ std::move doesn't move anything: A deep dive into Value Categories"

yosefk — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:31:25 +0000

TFA explains how std::move is tricky to use and this is not a feature reserved for library writers

New comment by yosefk in "The rise of industrial software"

yosefk — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 11:05:09 +0000

You could say the same things about assemblers, compilers, garbage collection, higher level languages etc. In practice the effect has always been an increase in the height of a mountain of software that can be made before development grinds to a halt due to complexity. LLMs are no different

What the FTC got wrong in the Google antitrust investigation

yosefk — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 08:41:17 +0000

Article URL: https://danluu.com/ftc-google-antitrust/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383056

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by yosefk in "Hash tables in Go and advantage of self-hosted compilers"

yosefk — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:17:04 +0000

Rust HashSets are HashMaps with an empty type as the value type, but the compiler actually optimizes away the storage for the keys based on the type being empty. Go doesn't bother to either define a set type like most languages do, or to optimize the map implementation with an empty type as the value type

New comment by yosefk in "How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips"

yosefk — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 07:45:00 +0000

The Chinese are ahead at too many things at this point to think they're only good at copying

New comment by yosefk in "Classical statues were not painted horribly"

yosefk — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 17:11:34 +0000

"Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly? One factor may be that the specialists who execute them lack the skill of classical artists, who had many years of training in a great tradition."

Has he ever met people doing this stuff?.. Why write about something you know so little about? Why do people think that they can talk about things without experience, based on abstract reasoning?

New comment by yosefk in "JOPA: Java compiler in C++, Jikes modernized to Java 6 with Claude"

yosefk — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 17:18:00 +0000

I am very impressed with the kind of things people pull out of Claude's жопа but can't see such opportunities in my own work. Is success mostly the result of it being able to test its output reliably, and of how easy it is to set up the environment for this testing?