librasteve
Re:Pico CSS is no longer maintained
on Friday October 30, 2026 @03:37AM (#50300831)
this
Re:We should be more ambitious with the software we build
on Sunday October 25, 2026 @04:39PM (#50235840)
same reason that readable machine code is not on my list
Re:We should be more ambitious with the software we build
on Sunday October 25, 2026 @02:42AM (#50228940)
I made a new spreadsheet https://omasheet.org based on a wish list of the things I wanted:
- ease of use
- markdown friendly
- strongly typed
- exact maths
- columnar data (Apache Arrow)
- fast queries (Polars)
- code oriented
- AI driven
Happy 41st birthday Excel
Re:Claude Now Works with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides
on Friday October 23, 2026 @06:15AM (#50206729)
ah … wondered when that (or Excel) was going to land - about time
Re:In Hilbert space, all things are quantumly possible
on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @02:49AM (#50176963)
Sean Carroll (name checked in the article) has an excellent podcast “Mindscape” (https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/)
I particularly like the one with David Wallace.
Re:The Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction
on Monday October 19, 2026 @03:51AM (#50149568)
I second this. Worked at Weitek in the 80s and my first job was to write a P754 test suite in C. At that time, Sun engineers wrote a test called “paranoia” and would regularly pick holes in our FPU chip designs. Mostly they ended up taking what we had built and we were in notice they weren’t happy. Then then built their own SPARC FPU and we went to the wall.
I spent months in all the corners of P754 and can attest to it being the most carefully thought through and subtly powerful document.
At this time we built custom FPUs for non P754 such as DEC format which iirc was deliberately close to P754 but slightly twisted to maintain code incompatibility.
Anyone who thinks FPU math is deterministic has not got close to circuit design for these beasts. I suppose MAYBE that got fixed in the last 40 years, but the move to GPU leads me to suspect that determinism in all the myriad corner cases is not top of the list.
Re:Open-Source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word Replications
on Sunday October 11, 2026 @05:10PM (#50047839)
Potemkin == Omarchy
Re:Ask HN: Why aren't Americans rising up against tipping?
on Sunday October 11, 2026 @09:46AM (#50043262)
https://cart.tips
This gets my goat.
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @03:24PM (#49997598)
when I worked in Swindon (Intel fwiw), HR told all the Americans “draw a circle 15 miles radius around Swindon station and live outside it”
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:45AM (#49992818)
dang … guess I am stuck in 1961 https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/EW1961PRE/1?utm_so...
fwiw I just threw this in since many on HN probably don’t know much about Reading
red face
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:35AM (#49992676)
I claim 1% commission if anyone on HN buys it
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:33AM (#49992647)
Reading (the largest town in the UK btw) has other tunnels … for example https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/14492484.sneak-a-pea... and there is a rumour of secret escape tunnels from the (medieval) abbey.
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:27AM (#49992539)
oh yeah! tunnel merch
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:24AM (#49992497)
aol wtf
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:24AM (#49992491)
well I (the submitter) messed up and wrote 15M in the submission title (note the cap) in error just to add to the confusion (now fixed, soz.) … I thought “best” just to repeat the article title
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:21AM (#49992446)
sorry for the capital M … I have fixed in the title to 15m as in metres
that’s ~ 45 ft underground, I believe … perhaps not that impressive, but quite funny since I would hesitate to undermine my own house and surely this makes it worth less
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:17AM (#49992386)
oops … sorry … now fixed
Re:House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @08:57AM (#49992126)
sorry for the ads … but this made me smile
House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
Re:Vx – One Language, Every Chip
on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @02:57AM (#49975130)
> Are you not biased having created another PL in a similar fashion?
guilty as charged (but also with experience that I have made something cool that I would not otherwise have had the skills or time to do)
> same fashion as a group project in school
you describe my approach to schoolwork with uncanny accuracy
> that’s the funnest part!
amazingly, finding a name for a new PL is the hardest part and yes I plead guilty to working collaboratively with an LLM for inspiration and for grunt checks (motorbike for the mind)
Re:Why Common Lisp Is Now the Best Programming Language
on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @02:04AM (#49974793)
Soon, hopefully, we will have evidence based analysis of those programming languages best suited for LLM authoring. Fwiw I doubt that CL will make the cut - but happy to be proven wrong. Obviously a large factor remains the facility of the human driver for a particular language.
Until then, I subscribe to the view that strong types fit LLM coding well since LLMs are prone to make silly mistakes when they patch together code examples in dynamic languages.
[Disclosure, my new language https://bil-lang.org aims to add “strong typing” around parallel programming to help weed out deadlock conditions.]
Re:I asked Claude build a physically accurate O'Neill cylinder you can...
on Monday October 05, 2026 @04:41AM (#49962223)
very Rendezvous with Rama
Re:Vx – One Language, Every Chip
on Sunday October 04, 2026 @05:06AM (#49952021)
fwiw I recently tried this with ChatGPT. The result (https://bil-lang.org) came after I dumped the LLM as a name suggester. As a checker and idea source it was fine. The language name space is quite crowded!
Re:Vx – One Language, Every Chip
on Sunday October 04, 2026 @05:04AM (#49952015)
I have come slowly to the view that LLMs are very good at this kind of thing and we can use them very productively. I’m tempted to say that this is optimal human+LLM collaboration.
Re:Vx – One Language, Every Chip
on Sunday October 04, 2026 @05:02AM (#49952003)
TTL4?
Re:Vx – One Language, Every Chip
on Sunday October 04, 2026 @05:02AM (#49952000)
even when the underlying language is widely used (in this case, Rust) I think there is a case to coin a new language when (i) there is a bunch of new stuff, (ii) it ain’t gonna be adopted wholesale by the core team and (iii) it has a coherent toolchain and (iv) it makes promises to coders that are stable over time. Disclosure, I am the author of https://bil-lang.org that pulls the same trick as an extension / transpiler targeting golang
Re:What if we stopped using GPUs? [video]
on Friday October 02, 2026 @03:52PM (#49937820)
As the video points out, there is a hardware/software feedback loop at play here. Since the hardware is deeply pipelined SIMD FPU datapath, the software is hand tuned machine coded transformations. In addition to limiting flexibility (every variation has to be ground out in CUDA), this prevents sparse matrix type optimisations. I predict that a set of general purpose CPUs - non shared memory at this scale - would be a much better use of transistor/power. And you can code that at high level give a CSP style approach such as https://bil-lang.org
Bil Concurrency Distilled
Re:Bil Concurrency Distilled
on Thursday October 01, 2026 @03:59AM (#49918988)
Inspired by the recent post on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49856988#49862080