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rustybolt

1,214 karma · joined October 15, 2019

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rustybolt··on Subnormal floating-point numbers are expensive on Intel processors
That seems weird. They did throw extra hardware at it to speed it up for the efficient cores, but not for the performance cores?
rustybolt··on Punk, or why I don't stream anymore
If you ever saw this guy program you know he's very competent so IMHO that reflects badly on twitter, tbh.
rustybolt··on Alice is impatient
This article contains very little substance. Show me the math!
rustybolt··on Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
Thank you for your reply! I did a bit of research and, since I do want to use quite some peripherals, I have gone for the ULX3S. A big factor here was documentation and availability; If I would have been able to find a MiSTer Pi I might have gone for that instead.

I now bought a ULX3S on a whim, and will at least evaluate how usable it is for my purposes. It will take quite some time to familiarize myself with a new toolchain, which kinda sucks. One advantage of these big proprietary IDEs is that they integrate a lot of functionality into one "unit" (as far as the user/programmer is concerned), instead of having to install a lot of separate tools.

For the course, I am now considering to "support" an AMD board, an Intel one, and a Lattice one.

rustybolt··on Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
This sucks. I was working on a video course on building CPUs on an FPGA that uses Vivado (because I am somewhat familiar with the ecosystem and have dev boards with Artix FPGAs).

I am still contemplating my options. I can still use Vivado 2025, I guess, but I am not sure that is the right direction.

What are realistic alternatives for Vivado? (Taking into account the availability of supported affordable entry-level dev boards?)

rustybolt··on My graduation cap runs Rust
> Fun fact #1: you rent your cap and gown in the US. You have to return them. And they’re expensive, too! I paid $94 just for the privilege of renting mine, which is insane because they probably cost way less than that to manufacture.

Ah, yes, of course this is how it works in the US.

rustybolt··on We see something that works, and then we understand it
Nobody said it better than von Neumann: "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them"
rustybolt··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
I don't have a lot to show for it yet, but I'm working on an online video course for software engineers aspiring to build their own CPU on an FPGA dev board.
rustybolt··on Show HN: A game where you build a GPU
This is great!

Some comments:

- I didn't like the "truth tables" one, I got many duplicate questions and for some reason I got only one second for the first question. The rest of the questions I managed to answer correctly but I still got only one start out of three?

- I got very confused by the capacitor. Capacitors do not have an "enable" gate! In fact, in 2.7 (1T1C) you are supposed to build the enable gate -- with a transistor. So currently, you can just simply not build the enable gate and use the one already in the primitive, meaning you don't need the NMOS gate at all.

Was this made using LLM-assistence? (Not judging, I'm just interested!) I'd love to hear more about your workflow and how you managed to produce a good UI as it's something I couldn't do if my life depended on it, and it's a skill I'd like to learn.

rustybolt··on 90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars
Eh yeah, duh? I've been drilled to put every fart on GitHub. 98% of my repositories have 0 stars.
rustybolt··on We should revisit literate programming in the agent era
I have noticed a trend recently that some practices (writing a decent README or architecture, being precise and unambiguous with language, providing context, literate programming) that were meant to help humans were not broadly adopted with the argument that it's too much effort. But when done to help an LLM instead of a human a lot of people suddenly seem to be a lot more motivated to put in the effort.
rustybolt··on LLM=True
Surprisingly often people refuse to document their architecture or workflow for new hires. However, when it's for an LLM some of these same people are suddenly willing to spend a lot of time and effort detailing architecture, process, workflows.

I've seen projects with an empty README and a very extensive CLAUDE.md (or equivalent).

rustybolt··on How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
Note that this doesn't answer the question in the title, it merely asks it.
rustybolt··on What Is OAuth?
> There are very credible arguments that the-set-of-IETF-standards-that-describe-OAuth are less a standard than a framework. I'm not sure that's a bad thing, though.

Spoiler alert: it is.

rustybolt··on Things Unix can do atomically (2010)
I tried using this a while back and found it was not widely available. You need coreutils version 9.1 or later for this, many distros do not ship this.

I made https://github.com/rubenvannieuwpoort/atomic-exchange for my usecase.

rustybolt··on Sometimes your job is to stay the hell out of the way
> Good work very much doesn't speak for itself

Some people are obviously very intelligent and for people with enough technical abilities this can be spotted (e.g. because they churn out a large volume of high-quality code with almost zero defects). I have definitely seen this.

But I have also seen a colleague getting promoted that took thrice the scheduled time to deliver on a low-impact project, planning 2-3 long meetings a week, with about 8 people, discussing details for hours and hours (of course without writing anything down). When he went on leave for a few weeks, leaving a significant backlog of work and noting to our manager that "it's trivial to release", I actually managed to release it. At the end-of-year review he was praised for "deliviring such a complicated project", while the higher impact project I worked on and delivered in 1/3rd of the scheduled time was seen as a "simple project" because it got delivered without any hiccups.

Often it's also just a matter of "this guy states facts with confidence so it seems he knows what he's talking about" (even when he gets the facts wrong). At some point I just stopped correcting him because if we disagreed people would just assume I was wrong. In other words, being good at talking helps your career a lot.

rustybolt··on Many Small Queries Are Efficient in SQLite
This feels like a very elaborate way of saying that doing O(N) work is not a problem, but doing O(N) network calls is.
rustybolt··on Linux from Scratch
Yeah I've gone through Linux from Scratch twice, but at some point I found myself just copy-pasting and to be honest I've never really understood how one would go from here to a modern distro (besides compiling a helluva lot more software).
rustybolt··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
My blog is https://rubenvannieuwpoort.nl

I am also working on a "build your own CPU" series which is still in its infancy but the WIP can be found at https://cpucourse.rubenvannieuwpoort.nl

rustybolt··on Five Years of Tinygrad
I've hear people refer to it as an end-to-end test, where unit tests usually test a single class or function.
rustybolt··on The shadows lurking in the equations
Ouch, this hurts to read. It's not novel and lacks a very basic understanding of math.

The graph of y/(x^2+y^2)=(x+1)/(x^2+y^2) by definition contains the points that satisfy this equation. This is exactly the set of points for which y = x + 1.

The "fuzzy" graph is just coloring the difference between the left hand side and right hand side. This is very basic, not new, and it's definitely not "the graph of y/(x^2+y^2)=(x+1)/(x^2+y^2)".

rustybolt··on KaTeX – The fastest math typesetting library for the web
I use it in my static site generator in Python via https://github.com/rubenvannieuwpoort/PyKaTeX.

Disclaimer: I am the author of PyKaTeX.

rustybolt··on Floss Before Brushing
This is plausible. My dentist says I should use toothpicks, but they are not useful for me as they don't really fit between my teeth. I do the most problematic of my tooth with an "extra small" pick now, and I can usually get those four gaps done before the pick breaks.
rustybolt··on Floss Before Brushing
Yes, that's exactly my reasoning. Even if it doesn't help for anything, it just feels satisfying and more clean. Kind of like picking your nails.
rustybolt··on Floss Before Brushing
I stubbornly floss every day and every yearly checkup my dentist tells me it does not help and recommends me to stop doing it.
rustybolt··on The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review
Agreed, 300 lines will take me a lot more than 10 minutes to review properly!

Depends on the specific changes of course, but generally speaking.

rustybolt··on Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days – part 3
Not sure what's happening but I don't see a single ad and I don't have an ad blocker.
rustybolt··on Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
"Faster than a humans reaction" time is different from "indistinguishable".
rustybolt··on The current state of LLM-driven development
> "There's no learning curve" just means this guy didn't get very far up

Not everyone with a different opinion is dumber than you.

rustybolt··on Fast
Yeah, this was an attempt at humor. But it is quite easy to misunderstand the title.
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