Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | jamra's commentslogin

Very nice. Macs have a new containers program. It’s open source on github but not ready for the current MacOS version. Might be an even better approach as it’s made by Apple.


Yeah, I’ll take a look after I upgrade but I haven’t had to spend time on Podman in years so there’s an upper bound for how much it can improve my life.


I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. His whole point was that Apple has hardware nailed down and it’ll be efficient software that will be the differentiator. The bloat at Meta was the result of empire building.


I remember watching Carmack at a convention 15 years ago. He took a short sabbatical and came back with ID Tech 3 on an iPhone, and it still looks amazing well over a decade later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s

This is a guy who figures that what he wants to do most with his 3 free weekends is to port his latest, greatest engine to a Cortex-A8. Leading corporate strategy? Maybe not. But Carmack on efficiency? Just do it.


Impressive. JC is always one of the engineers I look up to and read up to when depressed.

John Carmack, David Cutler, Tom West, Cameron Zwarich, etc. There are about maybe 50 of them.


Please name them all. Would love to read and watch their content. I usually come across a decade later and like, whaaat.. how did i miss this. Man i could have had better time watching them instead of doom scrolling.


Carmack and Jim Keller for me. Hardware engineering for the latter!


HW is kinda too magical for me at this age :)


Where are the good war stories on Keller?


Computer History Museum interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh8nhK7WS80

Worked on DEC Alpha, AMD K7 & K8, Broadcom, P.A. Semi, was in turn purchased by Apple. Jim spent four years at Apple before first returning to AMD, then on to Tesla, Intel and finally Tenstorrent.

Keller keynoting TSMC's 2022 Open Innovation Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32CRYenTcdw


Tim Sweeney of Epic is up there for me too.


I’d really love to hear his story from the beginning. I believe his first published game was a Blue Disk one, ZZT, in 1991, and he went forward to write the Unreal engine which was released in 1998. People like Tim and John really could bag a huge amount of knowledge in half a decade.


Zachary's Showstopper book is a great account of Dave Cutler and WinNT.


The quality you can achieve with simple painted textures and computed lightmaps never ceases to impress.


At that time, Rage was delayed forever I consider it vaporware, falling the same category was Half-Life 3 or Duke Nukem Forever.

Still, I saw this demo at that time and I felt it was impressive considering the toy level performance of 2010's smartphone.


I followed his posts internally too. It's amazing how many people were arguing against fucking John Carmack. What a waste of talent.


> were arguing against fucking John Carmack

I am sure Carmack himself encourages debates and discussions. Lionizing one person can't be expected of every employee (unless that person is also the founder or the company is tiny).


I don't think you should treat the founder more special than eg John Carmack.

But I agree that civil discussion is good.


I think the implication is that they were arguing poorly and wasting time


Damn, that's medieval. Anyone should be able to challenge anyone regardless of status.


I was one month into my first full-time job, when I've (unknowingly of his rank) challenged the CTO in a technical discussion - in a public email exchange. Regardless of the outcome - I've been treated like an equal. This one short exchange has influenced not only the rest of my career, but my entire worldview.


I mean to some extent sure. But also you need to respect expertise and experience. So much of what we do is subjective, and neither side going to have hard data to support their arguments.

If it comes down to someone saying “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I’ve shipped something very similar 5 times, and we ran into a problem with x each time”. Unless you have similar counter experience, you should probably just listen.

What happens in tech is you get a very specific kind of junior who wants to have HN comment arguments at work constantly and needs you to prove every single thing to them. I don’t know man it’s a style guide. There’s not going to be hard quantitative evidence to support why we said you shouldn’t reach for macros first.


Ugh. Can we as an industry stop blowing people up like this? It’s a clear sign that the community is filled with people with very little experience.

I remember this guy wanted $20 million to build AGI a year ago (did he get that money?), and people here thought he would go into isolation for a few weeks and come out with AGI because he made some games like that. It’s just embarrassing as a community.


Carmack's best work was between Keen and Quake, and it was mostly optimizations that pushed the limit of what PC graphics could do. He's always been too in-the-weeds to have a C-level title.


> $20 million

That’s a pittance for such a project. I wish we could see what he’d have come up with.


He is just a guy who can write game code well and has good PR skills online. I wouldn’t give him a cent if he promised anything in the AI field, no matter how much a bunch of online people gas him up.


He's a guy that knows a lot of math and how to turn that math into code. I don't know if he'd be able to come up with some brand new paradigm for AI but I'd want him on my team and I'd listen to what he has to say.


AI math is not game code math. There are plenty of actual experts in AI who know “how to turn math into code” with years of experience. I would not want this guy, his ego, his lack of social skills, his online fanbase, and his lack of experience in AI to be anywhere near my AI team.


I disagree that you should just defer - but it’s sad that politics was obviously consuming and inhibiting his ability to help the product.


No one should just defer, but you better be right. In the end do they have a better product without him?

Don’t think so.


Can’t really imagine a better person to argue against?


The software for the Quest 3 is unreliable and breaks often. A team that attacks attempts to hold them accountable makes a lot of sense.


In my experience the one big problem on the Quest 3 is the user interface. I am still puzzled why they made a floating taskbar with tiny buttons that you have to hit with VR controllers. I have good eyes, decent hand-eye coordination and don't have shaky hands, yet I manage to hit a button at first try maybe 40% of the time. They made a cut-down 2D desktop interface that makes up a small fraction of the field of view for a VR device and called it a day, and then put the user into some virtual room with zero interactable elements.

Meta Quest 3 feels like sci-fi tech with badly executed UI design from the 90s.


I saw a few of those. He really leaned in on just how much waste was in the UI rendering, with some nasty looking call times to critical components. I think it was close to when he left.

Dude just seemed frustrated with the lack of attention to things that mattered.

But...that honestly tracks with Meta's past and present.


Would love to hear Carmack's thoughts on render cost...


Big fan of her book as well though I don’t know if the recommended tools are still relevant.


Which book are you referring to?


Probably “SVG Animations” available through O’Reilly. It is from 2017. While many of the frameworks used have come and gone; there are a few stable concepts. If you can get it on sale, I’d recommend. Full price is a hard sell.


Appreciate the intro to the book above - two additional useful SVG books. I think O'Reilly has a few more SVG titles

SVG Essentials: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/svg-essentials-2nd/9781...

SVG Text Layout: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/svg-text-layout/9781491...

The fact there’s a book on just text layout helped me learn how much depth there is in SVG.


From the table of contents this looks like a book sponsored by and written to promote GreenSock. Which would be fine if the title was not misleading. Apparently SMIL is mentioned only in one chapter as "not suggested" solution.


GreenSock works and it's fine but I'm always deeply suspicious of any product that tries that hard to promote itself. If the approach is so great, let it speak for itself


An animal crossing built right next to a school. I wonder if the coyotes that will cross will be a threat to the children.


Is this a troll comment I don’t understand?

Do you see coyotes running around hunting children often?


No it’s not. I live there and my kids go to school there. I do see many coyotes in our area. Some tagged. Some not. It’s definitely a worry of mine.

Edit: I have friends whose dogs were torn apart by packs of coyotes. It’s common in our area. I really do fear that this will cause incidents.


California child attack via Coyote 2022.

June 2024 coyote tries to enter a California home and attack a cat.

It happens.


Yeah okay. How many dogs bit children in the same amount of time? How many people did cars kill in that same amount of time? How many fingers pinched by doors?


Opening an animal crossing next to a school in an area where there are many coyotes is a lot different than fingers pinched by doors. But if you’re making the argument that this animal crossing is so important than the occasional child being killed by animals is as trivial as fingers being pinched by doors, I know all I need to know about you.


Only during open season.


Only when there are no roadrunners to be found.


The real fear I have is in plausible deniability for filtering and muting discussion, which they do now. Moving it to a NN can always hand wave away the responsibility.


You’d be calling libraries that are vetted by the security team. Engineering at Meta is a lot like coloring with crayons. It’s very limiting but the infra does a lot for you.


This is true, but like, sometimes you're using them inappropriately. Or you've got a limited exception for performance reasons, and your replacement solution is, uh, unsound.


Do you ever eat the crayons?


Does anyone have a good EBNF notation for Sqlite? I tried to make a tree-sitter grammar, which produces C code and great Rust bindings for it. But they use some lemon parser. Not sure how to read the grammar from that.


The lemon tool that is used by SQLite can output the grammar as SQL database that you can manipulate. There is https://github.com/ricomariani/CG-SQL-author that goes way beyond and you'll need to create the Rust generation, you can play with it here with a Lua backend https://mingodad.github.io/CG-SQL-Lua-playground/ .

Also I'm collecting several LALR(1) grammars here https://mingodad.github.io/parsertl-playground/playground/ that is an Yacc/Lex compatible online editor/interpreter that can generate EBNF for railroad diagram, SQL, C++ from the grammars, select "SQLite3 parser (partially working)" from "Examples" then click "Parse" to see the parse tree for the content in "Input source".

I also created https://mingodad.github.io/plgh/json2ebnf.html to have a unified view of tree-sitter grammars and https://mingodad.github.io/lua-wasm-playground/ where there is an Lua script to generate an alternative EBNF to write tree-sitter grammars that can later be converted to the standard "grammar.js".


Not EBNF or anything standard, but possibly readable enough. It is an LR(1) grammar that has tested on all the test cases in Sqlite's test suite at the time:

https://lrparsing.sourceforge.net/doc/examples/lrparsing-sql...

The grammer contains things you won't have seen before, like Prio(). Think of them as macros. It all gets translated to LR(1) productions which you can ask it to print out. LR(1) productions are simpler than EBNF. They look like:

   symbol1 := symbol2 symbol3
   symbol1 := symbol4 symbol3
   symbol3 := token1 symbol2 token2
   ...
Documentation on what the macros do, and how to get it to spit out the LR1(1) productions is here:

https://lrparsing.sourceforge.net/doc/html/

It was used to do a similar task the OP is attempting.


This is great. Do you have any pointers to where those tests are? It’s hard to test the grammar without those.

Edit: Never mind. I see it right there under the parser. Thanks!


It looks pretty much like BNF. Not too far off, anyway. https://sqlite.org/src/doc/trunk/doc/lemon.html#syntax


Perhaps this ANTLR v4 sqlite grammar? [1]

--

1: https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/tree/master/sql/sqlite


I actually have some experience porting these antlrs over to tree-sitter. I'll give it a shot.


Link us your eBPF disassembler if you can. Sounds cool.


It's not. If you wrote one, it'd be more interesting than mine.


If you use jupyterlite, you're using the same thing. Bento is just the internal Meta version and the only potential benefits is the internal integration.


Meta doesn't use git. It uses mercurial. It does fork it because they have a huge monorepo. They created a concept of stacked commits which is a way of not having branches. Each commit is in a stack and then merged into master. Lots of things built for scaling.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: