HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

pdpi

14,749 karma · joined March 3, 2013

submissionscomments
pdpi··on Why open source rocks – a new SM750 (Silicon Motion GPU) HDMI Driver
16 * 1024 * 1024 / 1920 / 1080 = 8.0909, so you have enough VRAM for double-buffered 24-bit 1080p, with a bit to spare. For pure software rendering, that's good enough!
pdpi··on Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)
Does it help to point out that the water path looks suspiciously like the day/night line on a map?

Like this: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5477/

pdpi··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
And the older Anscombe's Quartet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet
pdpi··on Visualizing Binary Files
I've been using ImHex[0] for this purpose, to pretty good effect.

[0]: https://github.com/werwolv/imhex

pdpi··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra for a big leap in performance and AI compute
I built a new PC about two years ago, and I probably got it at the last possible opportunity for a while. CPU and motherboard have come down by maybe £100 in between the two of them, but a 7900 xtx (or any other 24GB GPU) for under £1,000 now seems like a bargain, and £180 for 64GB of DDR5 makes me feel like an old man talking about the halcyon days.
pdpi··on Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions
I'd argue that women can be bros too, especially when using the word in this sense.
pdpi··on WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do
To be clear, they're not literally "charging only", AIUI they're spec-compliant cables with USB2.0 480Mbps and power delivery, and they're allowed to not have the four SuperSpeed wire pairs. They're still useful for low bandwidth devices (like charging my keyboard/mouse).

Incidentally — I spent an inordinate amount of time searching for USB3.2 cables on Amazon, and the vast majority of cables were actually just USB2.0 cables with PD support, and not actual Full-Featured cables.

pdpi··on WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do
I literally spent more than an hour yesterday debugging issues with USB-C cables that I wasn't aware were charging only, and this shows up today... Better late than never, I suppose, and definitely worth my ten quid.
pdpi··on Faster floating point math with Rust's new API
This deserves elaborating on, because it's pretty cool.

Rust has two behaviours around overflow. In debug builds, it panics, in release builds it wraps.

IMO wrapping is a reasonable-enough behaviour to avoid UB in release builds, and panicking in debug is definitely the correct behaviour, because you're only avoiding UB by defaulting to something, but that's not nearly enough. In most applications where overflow is a risk you should make sure to choose what behaviour you consider correct.

Thankfully Rust has a pretty robust story around this:

    fn add_behaviour() {
        let small: i32 = 123;
        let big: i32 = i32::MAX;

        assert_eq!(small.wrapping_add(big), i32::MIN + 122);
        assert_eq!(small.overflowing_add(big), (i32::MIN + 122, true));
        assert_eq!(small.overflowing_add(small), (246, false));
        assert_eq!(small.saturating_add(big), i32::MAX);
        assert_panics!(a.strict_add(b)); // (nb: Not a real assertion)

    }
And you could easily implement the default behaviour yourself with conditional compilation:

    impl Add for u32 {
        type Output = u32;

        fn add(self, rhs: u32) -> u32 {
            #[cfg(debug_assertions)]
            {
                self.strict_add(rhs)
            }
            #[cfg(not(debug_assertions))]
            {
                self.wrapping_add(rhs)
            }
        }
    }
pdpi··on Sonic Pi v5
The SBC in question here is the Raspberry Pi — Sonic Pi was one of the early pieces of educational that made up the RPi ecosystem, and Sam Aaron was sponsored by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write it.
pdpi··on “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
It doesn't have to be Shakespeare, but hopefully everybody agrees that writing at Shakespeare's level is indeed hard. I agree that writing good (but not great) or even just ok literature is still hard, but that invites a bunch of no-true-scotsman arguments that I just can't be bothered dealing with (like "writing Fifty Shades of Grey isn't actually hard" or something similar).
pdpi··on “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
Speaking/writing English is easy. Writing literature at the level of Shakespeare is hard. Writing educational content that makes hard concepts accessible like Grant Sanderson is hard.

Likewise, coding is easy. It's just writing, and any child can learn it. Coding is not programming, and the hard part of the job lives in that distinction.

pdpi··on Reverse Jevons Paradox
No, the concept the author is talking about is the Jevons paradox, just like the title says.

The law of demand frames demand as a function of price and utility — demand is monotonically non-decreasing with utility (the more useful it is, the more people want it), and monotonically non-increasing with price (the pricier it is, the less people want it), but e.g. Giffen goods and Veblen goods break the "monotonically non-increasing with price" assumption of the law of demand.

You can add efficiency to that equation — demand is a function of price, utility and efficiency, and it is also monotonically non-increasing efficiency (The less of it you need, the less people want it). If you could get twice as much saltiness from table salt, you'd cut down demand by 50%.

The Jevons paradox is about the cases where demand isn't non-increasing with efficiency, because utility is itself a function of efficiency. Increased efficiency directly lowers demand, but, because it increases utility, it also increases demand indirectly.

The paradox is usually framed as more efficiency -> more demand (because of the intermediate "more utility" step), but the author is framing it in the opposite direction, as less efficiency -> less demand (because of the intermediate "less utility"). I would argue it's just that the paradox works both ways, rather than calling it a "reverse", but that's me.

pdpi··on Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
Yes, him.
pdpi··on Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice
I had a G502 that lasted years, but the last two I bought lasted me 6 months each (the wheel got completely gummed up somehow). I acknowledge that cat hair and sweaty hands are a bad combination for a mouse wheel, but that's insanely poor durability, and they're annoying enough to disassemble that they're effectively not cleanable.
pdpi··on Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac
This is Laziness in Larry Wall's "Three Virtues" sense. It's exactly the sort of labour-saving automation that belongs in a script/extension.
pdpi··on Log is non-monotonic in PHP and Lua
On the other hand, decimal floating point would fail with 1/3 + 1/3 != 2/3.

The general rule is that, in base b, you have finite positional ("decimal") representations of numbers p/q where q is a divisor of bˆn for some n. So e.g. 1/10 doesn't have a finite binary representation because 10 = 2 * 5, and that factor 5 ensures 10 is never a divisor of a power of 2. Likewise, 3 is coprime with 10, so you can't represent 1/3 in decimal.

pdpi··on Introduction to Data-Oriented Design [pdf]
> Are we just using OOP as a term for anything bad now?

Different paradigms come with different pathological cases. I've had to deal with Scala programmers whose notion of FP is making everything generic on the Monad it abstracts over, even when it'll only ever be instantiated on the one effect system the team uses. Nonsensical levels of generality is one of the classic OOP pathologies, and is the reason why we have aberrations like the AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean[0].

0. https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/javadoc...

pdpi··on Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59
It's not by accident that tabs vs spaces is one of the stereotypical great debates in programming.
pdpi··on Android may soon restrict on-device ADB
No site is important until it is, but by then it's too late to overhaul your security architecture.
pdpi··on How do we stop vibe coding?
There's multiple ways to program using LLMs, so using different words for different styles is a useful distinction.

Of course, you absolutely can build a No True Scotsman argument on top of that distinction, but I don't think that's what GP was doing.

pdpi··on New Framework Desktop Option with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 and 192GB Memory
What do you mean?

The whole point is that these APUs present a pretty unique value proposition (lowish performance GPUs with massive amounts of RAM attached), and framework is afaik the only vendor shipping them on standard mini-ITX boards

pdpi··on Cruller: Bun's Zig Runtime, Continued on Zig 0.16
TigerBeetle is the other canonical example.
pdpi··on Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
"OpenAI's internal team solves famous maths problem" is technically impressive but dispiriting. Non-experts solving a problem by just throwing resources at it is kind of the worst possible optics for knowledge workers. It's just disempowering.

"Famous mathematician uses ChatGPT to solve famous math problem" is equally technically impressive, but now you're telling those very same knowledge workers "that famous mathematician could've been you". It puts you in the driver's seat, and provides a clear path forward — subscribe, use our product, and reap the rewards.

pdpi··on OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
> If CEOs are going to start claiming that a core role of their job is emotional inspiration as a result of all those all hands meetings

Oh hell no. That's not where the value lies.

You can't send an AI CEO as part of a trade delegation. Sending an AI to close the deal doesn't tell the other party that you're there to make sure the deal happens. That's the sort of thing a human CEO does that an AI can't.

pdpi··on OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
AI can’t replace genuine 1:1 human interaction. We’re social animals, and a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human.
pdpi··on Qwen-Image-3.0: Rich Content, Authentic Details, Deep Knowledge
Keyword typosquatting I guess?
pdpi··on LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
Mostly the latter.

There's another aspect to it, though — parent was in a navy ship, surrounded by sailors. That's a very specific population, in a very specific situation, and it's not necessarily true that that's the right crowd or situation to care (though it baffles me how a sailor at sea might look up at the stars without being in awe of the thought "damn, my predecessors navigated based on those")

pdpi··on 85.3 GFlops: Optimizing FP32 Matrix Multiplication on a Single AMD Zen 3 Core
Spelling used to be a big one. E.g. in the opening sentence of the article, the word "otimização" would've been an obvious sign it was Brazilian, because the usual European Portuguese spelling was "optimização" — we had a bunch of silent consonants like that all over the place, but most of those got removed once Portugal started adopting the 1990 orthographic agreement[0]. Speaking of spelling differences, now that I'm re-reading, I could've noticed it was Brazilian from "ingênua" in the first section (would've been "ingénua" in European Portuguese).

A common pattern in the readme is the use of "em um" ("in/on a" in English), which is idiomatic in Brazilian, but not in European Portuguese, where the contraction "num" would be standard. It's one of the cases that could be attributed to overly stiff academic writing, though.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese-Language_Orthograph...

pdpi··on 85.3 GFlops: Optimizing FP32 Matrix Multiplication on a Single AMD Zen 3 Core
Brazilian Portuguese.

Funnily enough, it took me a while to determine it was definitely Brazilian Portuguese, given I'm a native Portuguese speaker, because the whole thing is written in a stiff academic-ish style that hides some the differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese.

← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →