Hacker News Reader

winocmon How concerned should we be about Astra's recurrent architecture?

I am one of those "humans", allegedly. ;)

winocmon 'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online

That is such a good show.

winocmon Everyone says assembly is untyped—everyone is wrong

Oh man, #pragma aux.

winocmon My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

Same.

winocmon Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

Random inconsistencies such as using push/pop for individual registers instead of pusha/popa for space constrained bits or setting the same register to the same value twice in a row.

Not to even mention that random WORDS are capitalized for some REASON as well.

winocmon Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

The assembly really, really hurts to read.

winocmon 'It's like having a dumb friend': Young San Franciscans hate AI

Honestly, me too.

winocmon Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

Honestly, I agree.

I just can’t bring myself to trust an organization that allows these types of underhanded things to happen in the first place. The fact that this behavior even got to customers raises a lot of red flags for me.

winocmon Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/25/micron-locks-...

winocmon San Francisco Weighs PG&E Takeover Amid Soaring Utility Costs

On the note of PG&E, my electric bill averages to about $750 despite only running an air conditioner, several device chargers, a router, some lights and a fridge...

Thanks PG&E.

winocmon Anthropic's model naming, extrapolated

Don't forget the word "epic" (in terms of the literary definition).

winocmon Local AI needs to be the norm

Perhaps I am the odd one out here, but a small part of me wants to see what happens when you run a proprietary SOTA model on a laptop.

winocmon Show HN: Hallucinopedia

https://halupedia.com/2048-united-states-presidential-electi...

Amazing.

winocmon Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI Overview claimed he was a sex offender

"AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses."

winocmon Networking changes coming in macOS 27

That just ended up inadvertently reminding me, Windows Vista is actually almost old enough to be at the minimum legal drinking age in the US.

Windows 8 is nearly a decade and a half old as well.

Time really does fly.

winocmon An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

This almost sounds like The Monkey's Paw by Jacobs.

winocmon System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

Kinda sorts. The systems that the "MacOS on CHRP" thing ran on had a very strange looking device tree, with some bizarre combination of PC and Mac peripherals.

  Apple Cobra Open Firmware CHRP 1.1 B3 built on 08/18/97 at 13:04:24
  Copyright Apple Computer 1994,1996,1997
  Copyright IBM Corporation 1996
  All rights reserved.
   ok
  0 > dev / ls 
  ff82ec18: /cpus
  ff82ee08:   /PowerPC,604e@0
  ff82f600: /chosen
  ff82f750: /memory@0
  ff82f8d8: /memory-controller@fec00000
  ff82f9d8: /openprom
  ff82fab8: /rom@ff000000
  ff82ff48:   /boot-rom@fff00000
  ff830060: /options
  ff830828: /aliases
  ff830c78: /packages
  ff830d00:   /deblocker
  ff8314c8:   /disk-label
  ff832090:   /obp-tftp
  ff835db8:   /mac-parts
  ff836578:   /mac-files
  ff837de0:   /fat-files
  ff839700:   /iso-9660-files
  ff83a148:   /bootinfo-loader
  ff83b7d0:   /xcoff-loader
  ff83c060:   /pe-loader
  ff83c7d0:   /elf-loader
  ff83da18:   /terminal-emulator
  ff83dab0: /rtas
  ff83dc70: /pci@80000000
  ff83ff38:   /isa@b
  ff8414e0:     /nvram@i74
  ff841ad0:     /rtc@i70
  ff842500:     /parallel@i378
  ff842988:     /serial@i3f8
  ff843020:     /serial@i2f8
  ff8436b8:     /sound@i534
  ff850288:     /8042@i60
  ff8515f8:       /keyboard@0
  ff854b88:       /mouse@1
  ff8554c0:     /fdc@i3f0
  ff858730:       /disk@1
  ff85bac0:     /op-panel@i808
  ff85bba0:     /pwr-mgmt@i82a
  ff85bed8:     /timer@i40
  ff85c070:     /interrupt-controller@i20
  ff85c250:     /dma-controller@i0
  ff85c738:   /pci-ide@b,1
  ff85d028:     /ide@0
  ff85db78:     /ide@1
  ff85e6c8:       /cdrom@0
  ff862e60:   /mac-io@d
  ff863468:     /scsi@10000
  ff865298:       /disk
  ff8660c8:       /tape
  ff8671b8:     /adb@11000
  ff867cb0:       /keyboard@2
  ff8685a0:       /mouse@3
  ff8687c0:     /escc-legacy@12000
  ff8689b8:       /ch-a@12002
  ff868b08:       /ch-b@12000
  ff868c58:     /escc@13000
  ff868e40:       /ch-a@13020
  ff869500:       /ch-b@13000
  ff869bc0:     /via@16000
  ff869cb0:     /interrupt-controller@40000
  ff869e70:   /cirrus@e
  ff86e2c8:   /pci1022,2000@f
   ok
  0 >

Refer to the "Macintosh Technology in the Common Hardware Reference Platform" book for more information, if you're curious about the Mac IO pieces.

The Motorola Yellowknife board seems remarkably similar to this system, as well as the IBM Long Trail system (albeit with Long Trail using a VLSI Golden Gate versus a MPC106 memory controller). Both of them use W83C553 southbridges and PC87307 Super I/O controllers.

The architecture is kind of weird, but the schematics on NXP's website can probably elucidate a bit more on the system's design.

winocmon Recursive macros in C, demystified (once the ugly crying stops)

Mildly related, sort of, one can prevent expansion of variadic macros as follows:

   #define printf(...)

   int (printf)(const char *, ...);

I keep on seeing many random code bases just resort to #undef instead...

winocmon Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

You also get "Program Files (ARM)" (including a complementary "SysArm32") on older arm64 systems too.

winocmon New protein therapy shows promise as antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning

If you want to download SARS-CoV-2, here you go: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_045512.2

winocmon Windows XP Professional

The latter is known as a "twiddle" in BSD land.

(c.f: https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-10/src/sys/...)

winocmon A fast, growable array with stable pointers in C

At least since maybe the DEC Alpha 21264. It could address 48-bits of VA space, but that comes with caveats due to PALcode specific intricacies.

I think VMS (or was it Tru64?) uses this mode, but many other OSes just use 43-bit or 40-bit addressing. Realistically though, I don’t think many users would be using workloads that addressed more than 38-bits worth of contiguous VA space in 1998-1999.

winocmon Rust running on every GPU

LLVM SPIR-V's backend is a bit... questionable when it comes to code generation.

winocmon I write type-safe generic data structures in C

Don't forget the infamous pattern used in some C projects too:

  struct foo decl = {
    .member = /* ... */
    .next = &(struct nested_pointer) {
        .nested_member = /* ... */,
    },
    .array = (struct nested_array[]) {
      [0] = { /* ... */ },
    }
  };

This pattern does not work in C++ as the nested declarations become temporaries.

winocmon Simplest C++ Callback, from SumatraPDF

Consider this implementation:

https://llvm.org/doxygen/STLFunctionalExtras_8h_source.html

winocmon RDNA 4's “Out-of-Order” Memory Accesses

Kind of. NIR is more oriented towards lowering and optimizing code for driver backends, as far as I know. SPIR-V is targeted towards the other end of the spectrum.

winocmon Apple M3 Ultra

Sounds about right.

VMS is the only OS (that I know of) that uses all 4 processor privilege modes.

Side note: The 21064 has such bizarre IPR mappings, the read values have lots of bits scrambled around compared to their write counterparts. This is likely a hardware design decision affecting the programmer's model, if I had to guess.

winocmon Apple M3 Ultra

The Alpha architecture was 64-bit from the very beginning (though the amount of addressable virtual memory and physical memory depends on the processor implementation).

I think it goes something like:

  - 2106x/EV4: 34-bit physical, 43-bit virtual
  - 21164/EV5: 40-bit physical, 43-bit virtual
  - 21264/EV6: 44-bit physical, 48-bit virtual

The EV6 is a bit quirky as it is 43-bit by default, but can use 48-bits when I_CTL<VA_48> or VA_CTL<VA_48> is set. (the distinction of the registers is for each access type, i.e: instruction fetch versus data load/store)

The 21364/EV7 likely has the same characteristics as EV6, but the hardware reference manual seems to have been lost to time...

winocmon LeetCode but You Can Force People to Code in Light Mode

You’re not alone. I do the same, but often I keep the text editor in dark mode but the rest of the system on light mode to help provide contrast.

winocmon Fluoxetine promotes metabolic defenses to protect from sepsis-induced lethality

My condolences.

I had SIRS/sepsis once and it really is a harrowing experience. It really changed me forever and as a bonus, if not to add insult to injury, my hair now falls out and barely grows. Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.