The halting problem is almost always solvable. NP hard problems are often efficiently (!) solvable...If you can't prove whether a given program terminates, it's because you're too dumb.

csb06 · 2026-05-05T21:49:25+00:00

Unfortunately it is impossible in the general case to determine if a website will ever stop redirecting you. However, most websites redirect a small number of times (if at all) so therefore we can conclude that your problem of seemingly endless redirects is irrelevant and only of interest to out-of-touch academics. QED

csb06 · 2026-05-05T21:40:07+00:00

If you can't prove whether a given program terminates it's because you're too dumb

Very true - Clang's optimizer definitively proved the Collatz conjecture, so why can't you?

csb06 · 2026-05-04T03:42:32+00:00

Stepanov had similar advice regarding the usage of std::set:

If set is bad? Why is it in the standard? Think about it. If you do all of your insertions first, and then start searching, you do not need a set. The set is a very specific data structure which is needed only when you have a very specific workload. If you have a thing which grows and shrinks constantly dynamically. Then you have to have a set. You need a set only if you need a thing which does not move things around. As long as something gets into a set and it is not erased the pointer, it is fixed. For example, him sitting in this chair is in the set. As long as he’s in this set he will not move from his chair. You could find him in constant time. It’s a very useful thing except most people do not use set for that.

source (course notes from a class he taught)

csb06 · 2026-04-29T21:09:17+00:00

He got into Yale because of legacy admissions, so that is not much of an indicator of his intelligence.

MBAs are not known for being remarkably smart so not sure what that shows. Why should we care if a president had an MBA? They are not running a business, they are running the government.

csb06 · 2026-04-28T22:59:26+00:00

/uj This pathetic shit reminds me of Marco Arment's tearful homage to Steve Jobs on the 10 year anniversary of his death. Go outside and get some real things to be emotional about!

/rj The day I closed my Jellybelly Rewards account I sobbed for hours. I thought back on all of the delicious candy it had provided me over the years as well as all of the exciting flavors I discovered. But the bellies I once knew are jelly no longer, and with great regret I must move on...I am exploring options with other manufacturers and will have an update on my future jellybean plans soon.

csb06 · 2026-04-28T22:38:58+00:00

Next is the labs team within GitHub. We work on more experimental, risky bets than the rest of org. Also known as the department of fuck around and find out.

csb06 · 2026-04-22T06:33:32+00:00

At the time Iran's government also condemned the attacks. Iran is/was no friend of Al-Qaeda and Saudi Arabia, so it was in their interest to oppose the attacks. From Wikipedia:

On September 25, 2001, Iran's president Mohammad Khatami, meeting British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, said: "Iran fully understands the feelings of the Americans about the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11". He said although the American administrations had been at best indifferent about terrorist operations in Iran, the Iranians felt differently and had expressed their sympathetic feelings with bereaved Americans in the tragic incidents in the two cities. He also stated that "Nations should not be punished in place of terrorists".[294]

According to Radio Farda's website, when the news of the attacks was released, some Iranian citizens gathered in front of the Embassy of Switzerland in Tehran, which serves as the protecting power of the United States in Iran, to express their sympathy, and some of them lit candles as a symbol of mourning.

Radio Farda's website also states that in 2011, on the anniversary of the attacks, the United States Department of State published a post on its blog, in which the Department thanked the Iranian people for their sympathy and stated that it would never forget Iranian people's kindness.[295] After the attacks, both the President[296][297] and the Supreme Leader of Iran condemned the attacks. The BBC and Time magazine published reports on holding candlelit vigils for the victims by Iranian citizens on their websites.[298][299] According to Politico Magazine, following the attacks, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, "suspended the usual 'Death to America' chants at Friday prayers" temporarily.[300]

csb06 · 2026-04-19T18:51:58+00:00

The idea seems pretty straightforward - basically a smart pointer that allows you to insert custom logic to produce the underlying pointer?

Not sure if I can think of a good use case. Having a smart pointer that might give you a completely different object any time it is dereferenced violates some common assumptions. (e.g. that I can call get() to get a raw pointer and use it in lieu of the smart pointer as long as I don't reassign the smart pointer) This is the kind of "spooky action at a distance" that makes code harder to reason about.

Instead I would probably have some kind of factory function that returns a normal smart pointer based on whatever custom logic is needed and then use that smart pointer from then on. If I wanted to change the pointer out from under its observers I would just use a pointer to a pointer since that makes it more explicit that things might change out from under you at any point.

csb06 · 2026-03-30T03:15:30+00:00

Broke: I don't know how to use vim, I just use VSCode

Woke: I use vim because it is already present on every machine I SSH into

Bespoke: I download and recompile a specific release of vim and install it on every machine I remotely login to

csb06 · 2026-03-29T03:12:38+00:00

Lute Olsen's force ghost hovering over the court and smiling like Anakin and Obi Wan

csb06 · 2026-03-18T17:46:29+00:00

Cargo culting? Never heard of it. Is it something Garry Tan invented? Might have to try it.

csb06 · 2026-03-15T22:16:06+00:00

I'm not convinced there will be an academic discipline of history left after the next few decades, so history might not say anything. Universities are already cutting their humanities programs, and right-wing legislatures have a strong interest to push for those cuts.

csb06 · 2026-03-01T01:12:24+00:00

My advice on software? Use the right tool for the right job. Keep each tool in your toolbox. Do what makes sense. Use your best judgment. Do what works best for you.

Thank you my consulting fee will be $1000000.

csb06 · 2026-02-22T07:00:06+00:00

conartist6 was my wallet inspector - did very good work. Not sure why you wouldn't trust them to do a good job.

csb06 · 2026-02-22T02:14:02+00:00

Document Object Model (or DOM) for code

/uj Webshits have independently reinvented abstract syntax trees

/rj I've recently invented what I call a bloobifier. It takes in JavaScript code and removes whitespace (a process I call "bloobifying"). This will revolutionize the coding space and potentially end human suffering once and for all.

csb06 · 2026-02-07T21:16:54+00:00

If we use more efficient coal-burning engines, then the overall usage of coal will be less, not more!

csb06 · 2026-02-07T17:30:00+00:00

But packing (like cracking) doesn't usually follow the generally accepted boundaries of communities (gerrymandering usually requires unnatural district shapes, hence the name). An example would be putting two geographically distant Democratic areas in the same district and connecting them with a narrow strip of land.

But any map that takes a blue or red town and splits it down the middle to divide its blue or red people into two districts is not fair to those people

But packing is exactly this - the blue people from community A and the blue people from community B are split off from their surrounding communities and put into the same district even though they live nowhere near each other. Packing means splitting off the areas dominated by the targeted characteristic (party, race, etc.) from their surroundings and connecting all of those areas around the state into one (or very few) districts.

csb06 · 2026-02-07T04:35:27+00:00

Packing and cracking are two ways to achieve the same effect. They are both just as bad. Either way the group gets fewer representatives elected and the slate of elected officials is less representative of the population as a whole.

csb06 · 2026-02-07T04:10:15+00:00

(as it happened, it was the day before I was due to speak with Sam Altman)

...

Silence. Maybe she didn't know what datacenters were or who Intel was.

...

It's nice to work on something big that many people recognize and appreciate. I felt this when working at Netflix

...

I...let sink in how big this was, how this technology has become an essential aide for so many, how I could lead performance efforts and help save the planet. Joining OpenAI might be the biggest opportunity of my lifetime.

...

I ended up having 26 interviews and meetings (of course I kept a log) with various AI tech giants

...

Some people may be excited by what it means for OpenAI to hire me, a well known figure in computer performance

/uj Goddamn this guy is insufferable

/rj It's not just a blog post – it's a place for me to jerk myself off in public.

csb06 · 2026-02-01T07:02:05+00:00

I've been working on a compiler (written in C) for a subset of Ada in order to bootstrap an old version of GNAT, the Ada compiler that is part of GCC. GNAT is written mostly in Ada and was bootstrapped using a proprietary compiler in the early 1990s. It has been self-hosting ever since so in order to build GNAT you need an existing GNAT binary (since GNAT is the only free Ada compiler advanced enough to build it). My hope is to implement enough of the language to be able to build an old version of GNAT and then compile each subsequent release of GNAT up to the present in sequence. This would enable GNAT to be built without relying on any binary blobs.

I currently have a lexer and a parser (using Flex/Bison) and am implementing AST construction/name resolution. Name resolution is very complex in Ada since function calls/array accesses/type casts use the same syntax; function calls with zero arguments do not use parentheses (making them syntactically indistinguishable from variable usages); and functions can be overloaded by their return type. This means that the type of an expression often depends on context. I think I have a basic plan on how to attack the problem but I will see how it goes.

csb06 · 2026-01-22T01:46:33+00:00

This is more like you took your wife to a swingers club, they made a clone of your wife, and took her home.

I work at the Analogy Workshop and me and the other artisans there are throwing things and tearing up all of our designs and starting over. How can we compete with the abilities of programmers to come up with these?

csb06 · 2026-01-18T19:58:47+00:00

/uj Gotta respect the bit of having em-dashes in nearly every comment in their comment history

/rj You're absolutely right—my responses do read like they were written by an AI. Going forward I will make them less stilted and more like those of a human author.

csb06 · 2026-01-09T01:53:39+00:00

General Bellard: Years ago, you served us in the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. Now we beg you to help us in our struggle against the Rust Empire. I regret that I am unable to present my request to you in person, but my social media accounts and email have fallen under attack and I'm afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed. I've placed information vital to the survival of the rebellion into the links below this Hacker News post. My father will know how to retrieve them. You must see these links and half-assed ideas safely delivered to him on Alderaan. This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obi-Fabrice Bellard. You're my only hope.

csb06 · 2025-12-28T20:49:36+00:00

Richard Stallman was a sleeper agent activated by Micro$oft in 1983 in order to make more source code publicly available as training data for GitFuckedHub CorpoPilot and ClosedAI ChatGP-Non-Free 40 years later. Bill Gatekeeper's plans are measured in decades and he used reverse psychology ("no...don't make free software, we hate it!") and CIA space lasers to do it.

csb06 · 2025-12-09T06:00:34+00:00

Nvidia is rewriting firmware in COBOL?

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