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> This has been litigated endlessly with guns. The ceo of Smith & Wesson is not personally responsible for what people do with their guns.

This is a deflection. A human is responsible for the use of a gun. The individual/corporation ought to be responsible for the actions of their agent. If you purchase an agent from someone else it’s your responsibility according to the terms of your agreement. And, as in many other things in life, there ought to be certain rights certain parties cannot legally be allowed to sign away.

Sorry, but the explanation in your README of the example given here is wrong. This is right associative, not left associative as you claim. Looking at your docs, I think you need a %left PLUS; somewhere in there.

At least I think that's the case. Clarification appreciated.

Oh man am I totally going to determine the 10^10^10th digit of π and cement my name in the annals of history.

Usually Doctorow is tedious in his presentation mainly because of how angry he is at what he's reporting on. It's not that it's unwarranted, it just hard to digest because of it. This article, which eventually arrives at Amazon's absolutely unforgivable corrupt implementation of a second-price auction for advertising placement, is worth the read.

I hate what I’m about to write, but alas, here we are.

I respect the work of this developer. However, I cannot view his demo. Too many compromises have to be made to access it, the least egregious of which is that to view video content on this platform it requires an install of an app associated with the platform.

How profoundly disassociated with reality do you have to be to misunderstand the very wealth that you currently possess was predicated on the free and open access to knowledge and information? That precise knowledge that now powers our present AI age.

Shame on you Mr. Hashimoto. Shame on you sir.

This article is really about the inline assembly syntax developed for the author's programming language Odin (and definitely nothing about TALs, typed assembly languages). There are a lot of interesting ideas here.

One of my criticisms, however, is simply pointing to how similar mainstream general purpose CPU architectures have become; they are all C machines. This radically simplifies the complexity on the compiler front where, it seems, the author is targeting amd64 and aarch64. Extending the compiler to rv64 will probably be straightforward.

I don't know anything about Odin, or its compiler implementation, but I imagine the language adheres to a view of the machine that matches the C machine model. Imagine a more esoteric language, the compiler would probably need an intermediate language matching the C machine model and in which the inline assembly would have to have survive some idempotent lowering to the intermediate representation before being further lowered to the object code. These details are what I am really curious about and probably the most intellectually stimulating.

The most interesting possibility is if the Odin compiler is itself written wholly in Odin. If this were the case, it would really show the power of the inline assembly syntax. As far as I am aware no optimizing compiler has really pushed this angle whilst targeting multiple instruction architectures. If I recall correctly, even the Plan9 C compiler moved some basic optimization to their genericized assembler, and I've not kept up with it as it's evolved into the current Go compiler.

Very interesting work as I have often though about inline assembly syntax in a high-level language. Keep it up gingerbill.

For me, the primary issue is as follows. As the audience on HN has grown the rate of submissions has vastly increased. It used to be possible to follow new submissions which meant you could catch those gems of thoughtful submissions that didn’t gain enough traction to appear on the main list. This is totally impossible now.

I now simply follow the main list and hit “hide” on submissions I believe I don’t have interest in. Of those that remain, I read the submitted link and far more often than not they are not submission worthy so I hit “hide” again. Of those that remain, I hope comments arrive and an interesting discussion ensues.

In the past if felt like there was always something worth sifting through the dregs for. I’m unsure of how much longer I can sustain the effort. The technical implementation of the site could make things easier, where you use techniques from sybil-resistance to counter noise, but then if the compute cost on the backend goes up by an order of magnitude and I’m not sure Y Combinator is interested in financing the upkeep of that.

Difficult choices await me in terms of whether I ought to continue investing time in sifting though. It’d save me a lot of time, but then I’d have to find some way of making interesting friends. And if I knew that, I wouldn’t be here to begin with. :)

In the future, which I guess is now, John-types will have to decide between wrangling agents, or being tool calls for things agents can’t themselves do.

I’m not at all against AI, however very intelligent people are empowering corporate masters with very little empathy for humans not fit for this brave new world.

I only participate on this site, for example, because there are rare gems contributed by wonderful people. I have fomo because of that. It’s getting rarer and rarer and I think I’m approaching the limits of what my fomo will tolerate.

Says the man with a professorship in a public university in the most socialist and bureaucratic of Canadian provinces. A man whose "research" is to use public money towards improving performance on proprietary, patented, commercial computer architectures instead of developing general, broadly-applicable ideas. There is definitely merit to reconsidering how science is funded, but the hypocrisy exhibited here is… tabarnak!

I don’t really want to participate in this discussion, however:

As I stand on the flats of Salt Lake, the Earth is definitely flat. Also, I’m sure there are brown cows that produce milk that’s turned to chocolate milk. And since I didn’t directly observe humans landing on the moon, I can’t be certain of it to say.

Am I being facetious, perhaps. But I want to illustrate that people can be broadly split in to two camps. Those that believe individual agency is necessary for all. And those that believe individual agency can only be preserved for all by restricting it to the chosen.

If you’re happy with affairs however whatever camp you’re in differs from whatever camp your society is in, you will turn a blind eye. However, if you’re unhappy then you’ll feel all your problems must stem from your society’s fundamental misconception.

The world has lost, on my opinion, a mass of level-headed people. We don’t need to agree, but we need to talk. Forums like this depend on people taking their time to be nuanced and clear, however there is little reward in this as the quality of the HN audience slowly decays as the attention span of the general populace from which this audience is derived itself decays.

You give me a rational candidate for √2 and by the argument of the submitted article I “construct” another rational candidate with strictly smaller numerator and denominator.

You give me a rational candidate p/q for log 2 and by the argument of the article I “construct” that p = q = 0.

In both instances I create a contradiction thus showing that you could not have provided me such a rational to begin with.

Now let me show you non-constructively that there are irrationals a and b with a^b rational.

To prove this I consider c = √2^√2. I don’t know whether this is rational or irrational so I invoke the law of the excluded middle.

Suppose c is rational. Then take a = b = √2 and we have a^b = c where a and b are irrational and c is rational.

Otherwise suppose c is irrational. Then take a = c and b = √2 and we have a^b = (√2^√2)^√2 = √2^2 = 2 and again we have our result.

What is the difference here? I have no idea whether c is rational or irrational. Either way I can make it work but I can’t tell you which possibility is the genuine one.

You can actually make better choices of a and b and show this result constructively.

This leads to a deeper question. Are there statements with no constructive proof and how do you prove that. This is beyond my expertise, but there are indeed high-powered logical tools that allow you prove such results for certain statements.

The stuff that human beings have done by simply looking at the stars and dreaming really hard is pretty awe-inspiringly incredible.

To be a little more concrete, what it means to prove a negation ¬P (not P) is to assume P and construct an impossibility from it, like 0=1 (assuming those symbols exist in the theory you are working with) or more generally A∧¬A (A and not A) for some A (0=1 being a absurdity, hopefully, because your ambient theory already proves 0≠1).

Now to prove P by contradiction, is to assume, the contrary, ¬P and construct an impossibility. But what you have really done here is prove ¬¬P. Now if you are a normal mathematician, you are classical, and hence you believe every statement A is either true or false, i.e. A∨¬A (A or not A, from any statement A, i.e. the law of the excluded middle). It just so happens that if you accept the law of the excluded middle then from ¬¬P you can deduce P.

An interesting question is why is the meaning of a proof of negation the construction of an absurdity? I guess this is philosophical, but if you accept the point of logic is to only conclude true things, then concluding an absurdity must be impossible, and hence if you assume something that leads to an absurdity, it follows that there must be no proof of the assumption because otherwise you'd have a proof of absurdity, and hence the meaning of a negation is showing that there is no proof of the pre-negated statement. In logic, ⊥ is used as the symbol for absurdity. Hence ¬P is really shorthand for P⇒⊥ (P implies absurdity), which is why earlier I identified A∧¬A with absurdity since when you have A and A implies absurdity, you immediately deduce absurdity.

I don't think this is an IPv6 address literals problem per se, but instead a URL encoding/specification problem. There really is too much historical baggage here to unpack. That's why URL routing is delicate, not to mention canonicalization, fragments, queries, caching, security…

If someone gives you a link-local address, you have to know which interface they want you to use, either implicitly or otherwise.

The interview itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Y2uQn_wvc

The problem with this ambition is that it turns mathematics into software development. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this per se, however what happens is that, as in software, certain ideas get ossified. That’s why, for example, every OS has a POSIX layer even though technically the process/namespace/security model could be radically reimagined possibly to create more easily engineered, correct software.

Mathematics is going through a huge, quiet, upheaval. The litmus test will be when, if ever, someone wins a Fields using a proof-assistant in an essential way.

Please submit this link to Texico. I think it deserves a broader audience.

I agree. It’s the same specious argument that equates a human experiencing a work, be it art or code, with AI training on that work.

I wanted here to write a more detailed rebuttal, but I ended up deleting it all. I don’t think people like antirez can be swayed. They’re committed to the grift, or at the very least are in comfortable enough economic circumstances not to care.

I believe they were attempting to link to https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/454 a paper titled How to Win the Clone Wars: Efficient Periodic n-Times Anonymous Authentication.

Absolutely looking forward to this. The Risks & Challenges section is a bit disheartening but necessary.

The posted link is has had its hash anchor removed by the forum system.

The correct link is: https://theoverspill.blog/#1cf766bc7d58238f348c4a4a2ee9273a

Bad time to be deploying CPEs.

I desperately hope the PLA starts its own Youtube channel in response. :-)

http://ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjs...

For those planning to join Team America.

Thanks for the link to the post. I also watched her talk posted elsewhere in these comments. We’re lucky to have people like her doing the hard work for free software.

> most of the reasons are probably not even technical, but legal/strategic - patents and stuff

I think fighting for specified interoperable interfaces is important and we must be vigilant again forces that undermine this, either knowingly or through ignorance.

I don’t know which of my detractors to respond to, so I’ll respond here.

It should be clear that I’m only interested in compute and not a GPU expert.

GPUs, from my understanding, have lost the majority of fixed-function units as they’ve become more programmable. Furthermore, GPUs clearly have a hidden scheduler and this is not fully exposed by vendors. In other words we have no control over what is being run on a GPU at any given instant, we simply queue work for it.

Given all these contrivances, why should not the interface exposed to the user be absolutely simple. It should then be up to vendors to produce hardware (and co-designed compilers) to run our software as fast as possible.

Graphics developers need to develop a narrow-waist abstraction for wide, latency-hiding, SIMD compute. On top of this Vulkan, or OpenGL, or ML inference, or whatever can be done. The memory space should also be fully unified.

This is what needs to be worked on. If you don’t agree, that’s fine, but don’t pretend that you’re not protecting entrenched interests from the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia, Epic Games, Valve and others.

Telling people to just use Unreal engine, or Unity, or even Godot, it just like telling people to just use Python, or Typescript, or Go to get their sequential compute done.

Expose the compute!

Uuugh, graphics. So many smart people expending great energy to look busy while doing nothing particularly profound.

Graphics people, here is what you need to do.

1) Figure out a machine abstraction.

2) Figure out an abstraction for how these machines communicate with each other and the cpu on a shared memory bus.

3) Write a binary spec for code for this abstract machine.

4) Compilers target this abstract machine.

5) Programs submit code to driver for AoT compilation, and cache results.

6) Driver has some linker and dynamic module loading/unloading capability.

7) Signal the driver to start that code.

AMD64, ARM, and RISC-V are all basically differing binary specs for a C-machine+MMU+MMIO compute abstraction.

Figure out your machine abstraction and let us normies write code that’s accelerated without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater ever few years.

Oh yes, give us timing information so we can adapt workload as necessary to achieve soft real-time scheduling on hardware with differing performance.

I should add some references for ideas:

- https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/LKWQL7-open_source_fi...

- https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/LLKG3M-full_disk_encr...

Security is the big thing for me. Anything non-trivial requires me to trust you are not snooping on any compute I’m performing on your platform. Solving this for your users in a proper way is difficult. Recently 3mbed has developed open source firmware for a Gigabyte server supporting AMD-SEV. If your service can leverage this technology to provide confidential compute in an affordable way then, assuming your network connectivity is good, you’ll have a really compelling offering.

Doing this is not easy and will require excellent technical expertise, but it is doable, and will be a big one up over 2nd tier cloud operators.

Good luck. I look forward to being a future customer of yours.

You and your coauthor need to write up a detailed account of your “Metatron model”. This paper, if it were to count as research, should be how other phenomena can be simulated by choices of parameters for your model.

Otherwise, you’ve just described yet another synthetic model that exhibits criticality (without proof no less). Which is not particularly interesting, unless your model subsumes other phenomena.

The naïveté of workers in tech is astounding. Workers at Google have been complicit in the unravelling of the social fabric of the US since before Eric Schmidt. I only point to the destitution of the fourth estate by search advertising as the most egregious example.

Yes, the technical problems are interesting, the pay is good, but what society are you building?

The fifth estate is now, also, all but extinguished. Machine-driven psyops, in the form of algorithmic engagement, and AI-generated sentiment, mean that social fabric is no longer woven by people, but synthesized by corporations in service of their paperclip-maxxing agendas.

The recent case of Rob Pike, and today’s post by Brenden Gregg, only serve to remind me that the only thing one can depend on is the human mind to delude itself.

What else can explain the flagging of this submission? Google is the tech company of the internet age. That these goings on within it are worthy of being brushed aside by some members of this forum is indicative of a deep malaise in this community, an inability to see reality as it is.

I should end by saying, in my view, the only appropriate employee activism is handing in your resignation. Tech can’t unionize, as the workers don’t see themselves as equals, as disposable cogs in the service of corporations.

Good luck, everyone.

For people who want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9MhqrdpzU4

Sadly is Linux is no longer what is used to be for my generation that cut their teeth having to patch kernels for basic hardware support.

Linux is now effectively systemd/linux, and is attempting to become flatpak/systemd/linux through various corporate sponsored initiatives. The only thing worse, in my eyes, are people who distribute things as docker containers.

The Linux distro as such is becoming an anachronism. There’s no real place to innovate without the inertia of choices made by external projects being enforced on you.

I think it’s a generational change. My generation had Microsoft to contend with, and so sought certain freedoms, but this generation has walled gardens and AI to contend with, so freedom à la Microsoft seems okay and so Linux is being Windows-ified, while Windows itself becomes its own abomination.