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ridiculous_fish

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2026) on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:45PM (#50340584)
Oklo | Remote (US) or Santa Clara or Brooklyn | Full time | https://oklo.com

Join us in pioneering the next generation of nuclear reactors! You'll leverage your software skills alongside nuclear engineers to model, simulate, design, and deploy advanced fission power technology. You will work at the forefront of the nuclear industry, developing novel techniques to reach new levels of safety, efficiency, and resiliency. Come be a part of powering the future with advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy.

We are hiring for:

- Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/4018702004

- Senior Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/5739483004

See more opportunities here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo

Please mention Hacker News in your cover letter!

Re:I Don't Understand Quantum Physics (2018) on Sunday October 25, 2026 @01:27AM (#50228601)
Link looks to be broken.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026) on Friday October 02, 2026 @01:31PM (#49936182)
Oklo | Remote (US) or Santa Clara or Brooklyn | Full time | https://oklo.com

Join us in pioneering the next generation of nuclear reactors! You'll leverage your software skills alongside nuclear engineers to model, simulate, design, and deploy advanced fission power technology. You will work at the forefront of the nuclear industry, developing novel techniques to reach new levels of safety, efficiency, and resiliency. Come be a part of powering the future with advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy.

We are hiring for:

- Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/4018702004

- Senior Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/5739483004

- Software Engineer (Applied AI/ML): https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/6150355004

See more opportunities here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo

Please mention Hacker News in your cover letter!

Re:Gravity Seems Holographic. What Does That Mean for Reality? on Saturday September 26, 2026 @08:28PM (#49862009)
Say your boundary is a spherical shell, with a radially constant electric field. Based only on those boundary conditions, you cannot know the distribution of charges inside the shell. It could be a point charge, a solid sphere, a smaller shell, etc.

So classically you cannot decipher the entire contents of the box just from its surface!

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026) on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @01:42PM (#49525241)
Oklo | Remote (US) or Santa Clara or Brooklyn | Full time | https://oklo.com

Join us in pioneering the next generation of nuclear reactors! You'll leverage your software skills alongside nuclear engineers to model, simulate, design, and deploy advanced fission power technology. You will work at the forefront of the nuclear industry, developing novel techniques to reach new levels of safety, efficiency, and resiliency. Come be a part of powering the future with advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy.

We are hiring for:

- Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/4018702004

- Senior Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/5739483004

- Software Engineer (Applied AI/ML): https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/6150355004

See more opportunities here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo

Please mention Hacker News in your cover letter!

Seconded - those RealTek dongles are no good.

For my Macs, the IOCrest USB4 adapters with the AQC113 chipset have been rock-solid and can saturate my 10Gbe network. They do run hot but no stability issues. That's what I use and recommend.

The newer RTL8159 based dongles are smaller, cheaper, cooler, and can do 10 Gbe on paper. But they top out at 7 Gbps on Macs, which don't implement the USBx2 spec.

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026) on Thursday July 02, 2026 @11:20AM (#48762979)
Oklo | Remote (US) or Santa Clara or Brooklyn | Full time | https://oklo.com

Join us in pioneering the next generation of nuclear reactors! You'll leverage your software skills alongside nuclear engineers to model, simulate, design, and deploy advanced fission power technology. You will work at the forefront of the nuclear industry, developing novel techniques to reach new levels of safety, efficiency, and resiliency. Come be a part of powering the future with advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy.

We are hiring for:

- Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/4018702004

- Senior Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/5739483004

See more opportunities here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo

Please mention Hacker News in your cover letter!

Re:New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper on Saturday April 25, 2026 @08:24PM (#47906063)
I bought one of these as soon as I heard about it ($74 from eBay) and tested it against my USB-4 AQC113 mainstays ($87, IO CREST brand on Amazon), from my MBP.

The new RTL-based adapter is physically smaller, runs way cooler, but only gets ~6 Gbps from my Mac to my Linux box, with a lot of jitter (iperf3).

The AQC adapter is all metal, gets uncomfortably hot, and sustains 9.3 Gbps, no problem. It's about the same size as the middle adapter in the photo.

The USB-4 AQC adapters are only ~$13 more, and yet are significantly faster with lower jitter. I'm staying with those.

Hope that helps someone!

This paper missed the state of the art!!!

This concerns unsigned division by a 32 bit constant divisor. Compilers routinely optimize this to a high-multiply by a "magic number" but this number may be up to 33 bits (worst-case, divisor dependent, 7 is a problem child). So you may need a 32x33-bit high multiply.

What compilers do today is some bit tricks to perform a 32x33 bit high multiply through a 32x32 multiply and then handling the last bit specially, through additions and bitshifts. That's the "GM Method" in the paper; the juice to be squeezed out is the extra stuff to handle the 33rd bit.

What the paper observes is that 32x33 high multiply can be performed via a 64x64 high multiply and then the extra stuff goes away. Well yes, of course.

But amazingly in ALL of these worst case situations you can compute a different magic number, and perform a (saturating) increment of the dividend at runtime, and ONLY need a 32 bit high multiply.

That is, these are the two algorithms for unsigned division by constants where the magic number overflows:

- This paper: Promote to twice the bit width, followed by high multiply (32x64 => 64) and then bitshift

- SOTA: Saturating increment of the dividend, then high multiply (32x32 => 32) and then bitshift

Probably the paper's approach is a little better on wide multipliers, but they missed this well-known technique published 15 years ago (and before that, I merely rediscovered it):

https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/labor-of-division-epis...

Re:Solod – A Subset of Go That Translates to C on Monday April 06, 2026 @11:35PM (#47670443)
I was curious how defer is implemented. `defer` in Go is famously function-scoped, not lexically-scoped. This means that the number of actively-deferred statements is unbounded, which implies heap allocation.

The answer is that Solod breaks with Go semantics here: it just makes defer block-scoped (and unavailable in for/if blocks, which I don't quite get).

https://github.com/solod-dev/solod/blob/main/doc/spec.md#def...

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2026) on Thursday April 02, 2026 @02:31PM (#47618334)
Thank you for flagging this, that definitely shouldn't be happening. Possibly we have an over-zealous spam filter. If you and your friend are open to it, please email me at pca@[company].com and I will personally look into it.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2026) on Wednesday April 01, 2026 @12:27PM (#47603039)
Oklo | Remote (US) or Santa Clara or Brooklyn | Full time | https://oklo.com

Join us in pioneering the next generation of nuclear reactors! You'll leverage your software skills alongside nuclear engineers to model, simulate, design, and deploy advanced fission power technology. You will work at the forefront of the nuclear industry, developing novel techniques to reach new levels of safety, efficiency, and resiliency. Come be a part of powering the future with advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy.

We are hiring for:

- Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/4018702004

- Senior Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/5739483004

- Software Engineer (Infrastructure): https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/5784826004

- Software Quality Assurance Lead: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/5480416004

See more opportunities here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo

Please mention Hacker News in your cover letter!

Re:Everything old is new again: memory optimization on Friday March 27, 2026 @04:27PM (#47547798)
Why would an allocation require an atomic write for a reference count?

Swift routinely optimizes out reference count traffic.

That's exactly what affine / linear types do.
Re:Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @09:37PM (#47420666)
JS (when using ints, which v8 does) is the same in this respect.
Re:Windows: Microsoft broke the only thing that mattered on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @01:33AM (#47319404)
"and a MacBook Air M4 starts at $1,099 against a capable Windows laptop at around $400"

Pardon?

The “tangle of spheres and circles” is probably a reference to the Hopf fibration.
Re:How to Identify a Prime Number Without a Computer on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @06:56PM (#45986997)
Except 91.
Re:Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @01:38AM (#45743019)
Extraordinary project. I had several questions which I believe I have answered for myself (pizlonator please correct if wrong):

1. How do we prevent loading a bogus lower through misaligned store or load?

Answer: Misaligned pointer load/stores are trapped; this is simply not allowed.

2. How are pointer stores through a pointer implemented (e.g. `*(char **)p = s`) - does the runtime have to check if *p is "flight" or "heap" to know where to store the lower?

Answer: no. Flight (i.e. local) pointers whose address is taken are not literally implemented as two adjacent words; rather the call frame is allocated with the same object layout as a heap object. The flight pointer is its "intval" and its paired "lower" is at the same offset in the "aux" allocation (presumably also allocated as part of the frame?).

3. How are use-after-return errors prevented? Say I store a local pointer in a global variable and then return. Later, I call a new function which overwrites the original frame - can't I get a bogus `lower` this way?

Answer: no. Call frames are allocated by the GC, not the usual C stack. The global reference will keep the call frame alive.

That leads to the following program, which definitely should not work, and yet does. ~Amazing~ Unbelievable:

    #include <stdio.h>
    
    char *bottles[100];
    
    __attribute__((noinline))
    void beer(int count) {
        char buf[64];
        sprintf(buf, "%d bottles of beer on the wall", count);
        bottles[count] = buf;
    }
    
    int main(void) {
        for (int i=0; i < 100; i++) beer(i);
        for (int i=99; i >= 0; i--) puts(bottles[i]);
    }
What's interesting about it is that it supports SPR AVS, which is a new USB power delivery spec. I'm not aware of any other chargers that support this.

https://www.chargerlab.com/complete-pd-3-2-spr-avs-specifica...

Re:WASM 3.0 Completed on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @02:42PM (#45279749)
Doesn't every WASM program have to carry its own malloc/free today?
Re:Float Exposed on Friday September 12, 2025 @12:39AM (#45218680)
You're right, thank you for the correction.
Re:Float Exposed on Thursday September 11, 2025 @11:33PM (#45218419)
My favorite FP Fun Fact is that float comparisons can (almost) use integer comparisons. To determine if a > b, reinterpret a and b as signed ints and just compare those like any old ints. It (almost) works!

The implication is that the next biggest float is (almost) always what you get when you reinterpret its bits as an integer, and add one. For example, start with the zero float: all bits zero. Add one using integer arithmetic. In int-speak it's just one; in float-speak it's a tiny-mantissa denormal. But that's the next float; and `nextafter` is implemented using integer arithmetic.

Learning that floats are ordered according to integer comparisons makes it feel way more natural. But of course there's the usual asterisks: this fails with NaNs, infinities, and negative zero. We get a few nice things, but only a few.

Re:The Core of Rust on Thursday August 21, 2025 @09:52PM (#44980281)
Affine types, variance, higher-rank trait bounds, phantom data, MaybeUninit, and the whole macro and proc-macro systems are some examples of concepts that I found to be challenging when learning Rust.

Dyn-safety is another but I had encountered that previously in Swift.

Re:Modern CMake on Tuesday April 15, 2025 @05:26PM (#43698593)
LLVM's CMake build has had lots of love poured into it.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025) on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @09:02PM (#43563583)
Oklo | Remote (US) or Santa Clara or Brooklyn | Full time | https://oklo.com

Join us in pioneering the next generation of nuclear reactors! You'll leverage your software skills alongside nuclear engineers to model, simulate, design, and deploy advanced fission power technology. You will work at the forefront of the nuclear industry, developing novel techniques to reach new levels of safety, efficiency, and resiliency. Come be a part of powering the future with advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy.

We are hiring for:

- Software Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/4018702004

- Software Quality Assurance Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo/jobs/5480416004

See more opportunities here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/oklo

Please mention Hacker News in your cover letter!

Jekyll and nginx in Docker on Hetzner for €4.49/mo
Re:WASM will replace containers on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @10:22PM (#43021486)
At $WORK we use SQLite in WASM via the official ES module, running read-only in browser.

The performance is very poor, perhaps 100x worse than native. It's bad enough that we only use SQLite for trivial queries. All joins, sorting, etc. are done in JavaScript.

Profiling shows the slowdown is in the JS <-> WASM interop. This is exacerbated by the one-row-at-a-time "cursor" API in SQLite, which means at least one FFI round-trip for each row.

Re:Zig; what I think after months of using it on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @12:17AM (#42944133)
Don't confuse "presence of dynamic types" with "absence of static types."

Think about the web, which is full of dynamicism: install this polyfill if needed, call this function if it exists, all sorts of progressive enhancement. Dynamic types are what make those possible.

Re:Rust's worst feature (available in Rust nightly) on Thursday January 30, 2025 @11:27PM (#42884691)
No, it's not so.

If the allocation is backed by the kernel, then it will be zero-filled for security reasons. If it's backed by user-space malloc then who knows; but there's never a scenario where a mallocated page is quietly replaced by a zero-filled page behind the scenes.

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