News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

textlapse

Re:Elevated error rates on Opus 4.7 on Thursday May 14, 2026 @10:09PM (#48143720)
Say what you will about Sam Altman, but at least he engages with his user base and acts on user feedback.

Dario and co seem to be on some elevated pedestal - us mere mortals are beneath them - and they have this scattershot devrel where each engineer has their own X way of communicating to the public often at odds with each other.

I loved Sonnet and Opus fwiw but not anymore.

At what stage does a series of floating point numbers output from a GPU become conscious?
Does anyone here know if this would potentially help people with adult SNHL (not genetic)? i.e. for folks who got SNHL when they were >= 25 years old?

Thank you.

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @05:12PM (#47744556)
Working on an RL pixel platformer sandbox to learn RL and explore self-play with a playable RL agent. It’s a cross between JumpMan Jr and Spelunky 2.

Very early demo with a smart dum-dum RL agent here:

https://rlplays.com

Show HN: Try out my pixel platformer demo with an RL agent you can play against

https://rlplays.com/game

I trained a live RL agent inside a pixel platformer you can play against on a desktop browser (needs a keyboard or a controller):https://rlplays.com/gameThis is NOT a quick-one-off vibe/LLM-coded project.I started this project out of curiosity: I wanted to build an RL-based game as there were very few out there (e.g. Sony GT Sophy). And I wanted to learn the core RL foundation in a...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:I'm helping my dog vibe code games on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @09:18PM (#47146470)
If someone could please give an octopus a waterproof keyboard, perhaps we could have a kernel, a compiler and a new internet protocol all in one.
Re:Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview on Thursday February 19, 2026 @12:50PM (#47076698)
To really confuse it, ask it to take that tricycle with the platypus on it to a car wash.
Re:Async/Await on the GPU on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:05PM (#47053335)
It's definitely possible, I am not arguing against that.

I am just saying it's not as flexible/cost-free as you would on a 'normal' von Neumann-style CPU.

I would love to see Rust-based code that obviates the need to write CUDA kernels (including compiling to different architectures). It feels icky to use/introduce things like async/await in the context of a GPU programming model which is very different from a traditional Rust programming model.

You still have to worry about different architectures and the streaming nature at the end of the day.

I am very interested in this topic, so I am curious to learn how the latest GPUs help manage this divergence problem.

Re:Async/Await on the GPU on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @03:38PM (#47052980)
My understanding of warp (https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-programming-guide/01-intro...) is that you are essentially paying the cost of taking both the branches.

I understand with newer GPUs, you have clever partitioning / pipelining in such a way block A takes branch A vs block B that takes branch B with sync/barrier essentially relying on some smart 'oracle' to schedule these in a way that still fits in the SIMT model.

It still doesn't feel Turing complete to me. Is there an nvidia doc you can refer me to?

Re:Async/Await on the GPU on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @01:55PM (#47051457)
warp is expensive - essentially it's running a 'don't run code' to maintain SIMT.

GPUs are still not practically-Turing-complete in the sense that there are strict restrictions on loops/goto/IO/waiting (there are a bunch of band-aids to make it pretend it's not a functional programming model).

So I am not sure retrofitting a Ferrari to cosplay an Amazon delivery van is useful other than for tech showcase?

Good tech showcase though :)

Re:Async/Await on the GPU on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @01:03PM (#47050691)
What's the performance like? What would the benefits be of converting a streaming multiprocessor programming model to this?
Re:GPT-5.3-Codex on Thursday February 05, 2026 @04:39PM (#46905756)
I would love to see a nutritional facts label on how many prompts / % of code / ratio of human involvement needed to use the models to develop their latest models for the various parts of their systems.
Re:Paperbacks and TikTok on Thursday December 25, 2025 @08:48PM (#46388475)
There is a big difference between paperbacks and TikTokification:

Paperbacks required authors to spend the same amount of time/effort to create content with a vastly expanded market and distribution mechanism.

TikTok and Insta created N creators to M consumers where N is nearly the same as M. Making the distribution channels bigger but effortless to create content doesn’t magically equate quality paperbacks with short form hummingbird-attention videos.

Re:Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @02:22PM (#46368429)
His consistency and craftsmanship is amazing.

Being an engineer and coding at this stage/level is just remarkable- sadly this trade craft is missing in most (big?) companies as you get promoted away into oblivion.

On the contrary, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were very customer focused - they listened to customers more so than other big tech companies. You could actually have emailed them and gotten a response (in the case of Bezos a legendary ‘?’ forward to the team).

Not sure how apocryphal a tale this is but it does speak volumes to how customer obsessed these companies were.

This is awesome… but: On the Web, is Avalonia using Skia to render inside a Skia Canvas?

**insert inception meme here**

Joking aside: this points to MSFT moving away from the whole Mono/Maui investments and into Aspire or whatever they call it. Without MSFT backing this I am not sure if there is much more future left for MAUI (or dotnet on mobile in general).

Avalonia is great though.

Re:John Carmack on Mutable Variables on Friday October 31, 2025 @11:14AM (#45772946)
I wish C++ did some sane things like if I have a const member variable, allow me to initialize it as I wish in my constructor - it's a constructor for crying out loud.

Don't be silly and assume if I assign it multiple times in an if condition it's mutable - it's constructing the object as we speak, so it's still const!!!

C# gets this right among many other things (readonly vs const, init properties, records to allow immutability by default).

And the funny thing is the X thread has lots of genuine comments like 'yeah, just wrap a lambda to ensure const correctness' like that's the okay option here? The language is bad to a point it forces good sane people into seeing weird "clever" patterns all the time in some sort of an highest ELO rating for the cleverest evilest C++ "solution".

I was hoping Carbon was the hail mary for saving C++ from itself. But alas, looks like it might be googlified and reorged to oblivion?

Having said that, I still like C++ as a "constrained C++" language (avoid clever stuff) as it's still pretty good and close to metal.

Re:Apple M5 chip on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @02:35PM (#45596702)
It does feel like Apple is firing on all cylinders for their core competencies.

Software (iOS26), services (Music/Tv/Cloud/Apple Intelligence) and marketing (just keep screaming Apple Intelligence for 3 months and then scream Liquid Glass) ---- on the other hand seem like they are losing steam or very reactive.

No wonder John Ternus is the widely anticipated to replace Tim Cook (and not Craig).

Re:Apple M5 chip on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @02:33PM (#45596673)
I wonder how much of the nVidia DGX Spark announcement was meant to precede this M5 announcement by a day or two; M5 MBP has higher performance with a monitor attached and with a (bit) lower price tag.

If you could yank the screen out, it probably evens out :)

I have seen quite a few such announcements from competitors that tend to be so close that I wonder if they have some competitor analysis to precede the Goliath by a few days (like Google vs rest, Apple vs rest etc).

A curious-er question to me would be how did cephalopods (octopuses, cuttlefish) develop sophisticated intelligence a few hundred million years before ‘we’ did separately from us?

And they still are alongside us right now. Which to me is fascinating.

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025) on Monday September 29, 2025 @09:30PM (#45420993)
This looks neat. Great idea!

Perhaps `dot`, `cross` etc might be useful additions.

Re:Google to merge Android and ChromeOS in 2026 on Monday September 29, 2025 @08:34PM (#45420630)
Google Play Store on Windows really.
Re:Google to merge Android and ChromeOS in 2026 on Monday September 29, 2025 @08:07PM (#45420413)
I sense an impending merge conflict.

Seriously though this is inevitable as Fuchsia wound down and Android essentially proved its worth running on Windows (which was a nice experiment I guess).

Re:A WebGL game where you deliver messages on a tiny planet on Sunday September 28, 2025 @01:58PM (#45406409)
If only there was an equivalent of the Arts funding for legit beautiful art via new media…

It may be hard to find an audience (revenue) but these kind of gems should be encouraged similar to traditional art form.

It is somewhat obscene that there is art in galleries out there with far less effort and talent that go for millions in both funding and revenue.

Re:Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel on Thursday September 25, 2025 @03:11PM (#45377474)
I have worked next to an Itanium machine. It sounds like a helicopter - barely able to meet the performance requirements.

We have come a long way from that to arm64 and amd64 as the default.

Re:Public static void main(String[] args) is dead on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @01:22AM (#45258307)
A special static class that cannot be instantiated is not OOP already.

C# does this well by letting you OOPfy your other code but doesn’t require you to use OOP for this monstrosity.

What’s the cost of training vs inference?

If it’s like Marvel sequels every year then there is a significant added training cost as the expectations get higher and higher to churn out better models every year like clockwork.

Re:Closer to the Metal: Leaving Playwright for CDP on Thursday August 21, 2025 @01:45AM (#44969414)
Biggest drawback is the distribution medium: Chrome web store has lots of limitations (manifest v3) so the first point is moot.

Installing untrusted extensions requires a leap of faith that most users won’t and shouldn’t have.

Fortunately or unfortunately.

Re:Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest on Sunday August 03, 2025 @11:00AM (#44777027)
I wonder if there is an LLM competition that can take the obfuscated code and return the unubfuscated/detailed code…
Tangential, but I have a basic question: What makes Aarhus (mainly its university/techhub) a powerhouse for Programming Languages?

C++, C#/Typescript, Dart, etc all have strong roots in that one small area in Denmark.

In general, I am curious what makes some of these places very special (Delft, INRIA, etc)?

They aren't your 'typical' Ivy League/Oxbridge univ+techhubs.

Is it the water? Or something else? :)

Older »