sestep

há 14 diasdiscuss

> The famous E=mc^2 it's just the first term of a Taylor expansion.

Is this actually true? My understanding was that E=mc^2 is exact for a particle at rest.

sestep

há 26 diasdiscuss

It's slower. Wasm32 can just reserve 8 GiB (32-bit pointer + 32-bit offset) of the virtual address space from the OS for each memory, so checking for out-of-bounds memory accesses imposes no performance penalty. Wasm64 can't do that, so each memory access is a bit slower.

sestep

há 30 diasdiscuss

This is just false. The article links to the 46-page paper [1] which lists full prompts in section E.2.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14740

sestep

mês passadodiscuss

I've seen various posts about Elixir's gradual type system pop up on HN, but haven't been following too closely. Does anyone know whether this particular gradual type system can change the asymptotics of programs vs untyped code? As far as I'm aware, most gradual type systems (e.g. Racket) can make programs run asymptotically slower, although there are some exceptions [1].

[1] https://doi.org/10.1145/3314221.3314627

sestep

há 2 mesesdiscuss

For sure, and in the PR description for the Nixpkgs AI policy, they explicitly mentioned this as a "brown M&M test" [1]. I read the blog post as being against including this information in commit messages at all, not just about tools adding it automatically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen_test

sestep

há 2 mesesdiscuss

I mean, sure, except that many large open-source projects (e.g. Linux [1], Nixpkgs [2], etc) require this as part of their AI policy. Omit attribution in your own projects if you want, but the maintainers of these projects are owed at least that level of transparency for contributions.

[1] https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html

[2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/d18b8f3238abdb2cd878...

sestep

há 2 mesesdiscuss

The triangular table view is fascinating. It looks like the periodic table. I wonder if there are number-theoretic lemmas (or at least conjectures?) about what "family" the optimal packing for a given number falls into (like diamond, diagonal strip, two blobs, etc). I didn't see anything when skimming the survey paper linked at the bottom of the site, but I'm sure there's a lot more literature here.

sestep

há 2 mesesdiscuss

All I see is "Sorry, we've misplaced that URL or it's pointing to something that doesn't exist."

sestep

há 2 mesesdiscuss

Another great tool, built on top of nix-locate, is comma. So for any program foo, if you have foo installed, you can run it like this:

foo

And if you don't have it installed, you can run it (without installing!) like this:

  , foo

And if multiple different packages provide a program named bin/foo then comma lets you interactively choose the one you want, and remembers your choice so you don't have to specify again unless you choose to via the -d flag.

sestep

há 3 mesesdiscuss

I agree with the other replies saying to just run the checks in CI and have the CI error message mention how to install the pre-commit hook.

I'm glad cloning a repo doesn't automatically install hooks since I strongly dislike them: I often use Git commands in the terminal but sometimes I use the VS Code UI to commit, and it's extremely frustrating when simply creating a commit runs for several seconds because of some pre-commit hook.

sestep

há 3 mesesdiscuss

Are you referring to how the nixpkgs-unstable branch hasn't been updated in the past five days? Or do you have some specific software in mind? (not arguing, just curious)

sestep

há 4 mesesdiscuss

This is an issue in Python but less so in languages like JavaScript that support "field name punning", where you pass named arguments via lightweight record construction syntax, and you don't need to duplicate a field name if it's the same as the local variable name you're using for that field's value.

sestep

há 5 mesesdiscuss

One of the other PhD students in my department has an NDSS 2026 paper about combining the strengths of both LLMs and traditional decompilers! https://lukedramko.github.io/files/idioms.pdf

sestep

há 5 mesesdiscuss

Could you clarify what you mean about Nix missing concurrency and parallelism? I often run builds using nix-output-monitor and it definitely looks like things are running in parallel, although I could be mistaken.

sestep

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I think you can do this with Virgil, but I'm having trouble finding the exact doc page at the moment: https://github.com/titzer/virgil

sestep

há 6 mesesdiscuss

https://samestep.com

sestep

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I tried this five years ago back when I was an engineer on the PyTorch project, and it didn't work well enough to be worth it. Has it improved since then?

sestep

há 6 mesesdiscuss

This sounds cool but is extremely uninteresting without performance measurements. Are there any?

sestep

há 6 mesesdiscuss

Same question but for Jai.

sestep

há 6 mesesdiscuss

Noob question: if it just compiles to threads, is there any need for special syntax in the first place? My understanding was that no language support should be required for blocking on a thread.

Submissions

All one-byte program names in Nixpkgs

Newcomb's Paradox Needs a Demon

The Church of Interruption (2011)

Show HN: npc, a CLI to bisect Nixpkgs channel history in flakes

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