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Question marks are becoming more difficult for native speakers to use?

Are you commenting on the title? If yes, I was about to do the same. I've seen this more often lately on HN and don't understand the reason. The actual title doesn't have a question mark, so the poster decided to add one and I have no idea why. Actual title: "Cassette tapes are making a comeback. Yes, really"

A bunch of things are on their way out among native speakers, e.g. singular vs plural (there is / there are), much vs many (how much people / large amount of people), past vs present tense (build / built), ... as a German we have to pass English classes else we get held back a year, what's going on in English schools?

OP modestly claims

> I am the word-best expert in general topology

and many other hilarious things on their GH profile. Judge for yourself :)


At least they didn’t claim to invent AGI this time from prompts only… lol


Post history is exactly what one would expect...

> up to several times larger

Hmm, I'm pretty sure that's not how upper bounds work.


Uhhh no, it's a huge net loss because the cost of sending it to the GPU and back greatly exceeds the cost of just doing it then and there in CPU; even on iGPU the kernel launch latency etc will kill it, and that's assuming the kernel build is free. Not to mention this is doing pow calls (!!), which is so ridiculous it makes me wonder if this was a kneejerk AI prompt.

Another post in this thread mentioned V8 sped this up by removing a buffer copy; this is adding two buffer copies, each about an order of magnitude slower.

Come on guys...


Don't make me upload my web-browser-in-a-GLSL-shader snippet

Uhhh, go for it? You're welcome to link anything you like of course, but do you maybe want to address my actual points if you have any objections? Let's do some measurements, it sounds like you might be surprised by the outcome.

Web browser in a shader also sounds extremely inefficient, for obvious fundamental reasons.


Sorry, I was cracking a joke about the browser in a shader.

The GLSL I originally posted is from the "cursed mode" of my side project, and I use it to produce a data URI of every frame, 15 times per second, as a twisted homage to old hardware. (No, I didn't use AI :P )

https://github.com/Rezmason/excel_97_egg

That said, is `pow(vec4(2),-vec4(2,4,6,0))` really so bad? I figured it'd be replaced with `vec4(0.25, 0.0625, 0.015625, 1.0)`.


I like how one of the reference links betrays how the article itself was researched, possibly written; HN hides the end of the url, which is "utm_source=chatgpt.com":

> https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/19/cracks-are-app...

You have to appreciate the irony :)


Quality of the writing and thought also reveals the construction method.

The real disappointment is none of the sources are linked in the text. Instead, it's just random underlined words, the classic chatgpt over formatting with lots of extra underlining and bolding. I appreciate that a 10-15 minute long article summarizes a 25 minute video, but it's hard to hide the real author.

Quite lazily done and just not pleasant to read.


Would it be as ironic if one wrote an article about Google and used Google search to research their sources?

If the article were about Google ruining everything, yes.

No because google can both ruin things and be a tool that is helpful in certain circumstances

Me and a buddy have bought 3 Framework Desktops between us, they are just otherworldly awesome machines, and a good bit more expensive than the other Strix Halo models. I haven't been this excited about a computer since my i7 920 (Nehalem) in 2008, it's absolute alien technology.

I've also finally made the switch from a lifetime of Windows to Linux, and it just so happened to be CachyOS. The snappiness is just infinitely refreshing, to say nothing of not constantly submitting to Microsoft's dark patterns, so I'm super happy to see this news <3 Go Framework and AMD, go CachyOS and Linux!

Poll: Can Microsoft gargle my whole balls?

[A] Yes.

[B] Maybe later.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have the rest of the month to spend on vacation in my pyjamas coding ultra high precision N-body simulations and rendering them in 8K 60Hz entirely on CPU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz1Od_jkkFg) using my amazing new computer.


I just got the 128 GB model. It is very fast, and sips energy. Such a wonderful machine and naturally CachyOS works like a charm with it.

Obligatory question, how is the battery life, the sleep settings etc ?

I'm pretty sure the Framework Desktop has zero minutes of battery life.

It's a desktop mini PC, there's no battery. There are laptops with the same Ryzen AI 395+ CPU+RAM, but I'm doing heavy rendering / computing (actually I got it for rendering work, not AI stuff) and laptops are a bad form factor for that.

Sleep mode... works? I actually turned it off because I have long-running processes and it only uses 4W at idle with the screens off. It's 8W at idle with a 4K 160Hz monitor and a 1440p 144Hz monitor, which IMO is Alien Fucking Technology, considering there's a > 5GHz 16 core CPU with 128GB RAM (4 channels like Threadrippers, vs 2 for normal desktop CPUs) in there.


Obviously it has no battery, being a desktop. Regarding sleep, under Debian 13 it supports S0 (s2idle) only, which works without issue.

    $ cat /sys/power/state
    freeze mem

I'm surprised how frequently stuff I mention in passing gets turned into separate posts by others :)

Yeah but how is a C++ based project supposed to hit the HN frontpage?

By having a use-after-free bug that caused a noticeable and catastrophic incident.

Like that Cloudflare outage from the other day? In any case, I'm sure there's good reason to believe that, as Rust gains popularity, there totally won't be proportionally more high profile issues in stuff made with it.

You could write a lot of bugs in Rust. Or in any memory-safe language. Just not some bugs. It's just that starting a non-toy project using a non-safe language today is really in the "you could, but didn't stop think if you should" category.

Fair enough, and I do appreciate Rust's contributions to the spectrum of programming language considerations. Personally I'd like to become a Zig guy, though.

There's also Fil-C BTW, and in normal C++ there are GCC or Clang (I forget which) extensions for detecting threading issues, even good old Valgrind is under-appreciated and under-used. In general one wants to adopt best practices and be proactive, rather than relying on the language to solve all problems (of course).


You can even build them with basically one line of code by sorting points using Morton / Z-curve order. It's linear time if you use a counting/radix sort.

Edit: lol, downvoted for this post. Never change, HN.


I'd love to see that. Could you link me to an implementation or explain this in more detail please?

Here's a 3D version used in the creation of sparse voxel octrees:

https://forceflow.be/2013/10/07/morton-encodingdecoding-thro...

Here's an example from AWS, where lat/long pairs are put into a Z-index, which is used as a DynamoDB sort key, letting you efficiently query for items near a point.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/z-order-indexing-for-m...


I would like to know about this more, too. Is there a code anywhere, ideally with comments? But I am fine without comments, too, I would just like to see the code and possibly with an example usage.

Okay, I was intrigued and I did some digging. Morton / Z-order is all about interleaving the individual bits of the x and y coordinates. You end up grouping by quadrants. Python one liner:

    points.sort(key=lambda p: sum(((p[0]>>i&1)<<(2*i))|((p[1]>>i&1)<<(2*i+1)) for i in range(16)))

Yeah good point, they are downsides for sure but it's a simple enough approach and most of all it can be shoved in a database (or b-tree or any 1d-sorted data structure).

And for a z-curve, the order is basically a depth-first traversal of a quadtree.


It’s super easy to click the downvote button by accident on mobile when you meant to upvote. And this UI will never be fixed because this is HN after all.

I just implemented an HN UI. This is good feedback as I'm aiming to have a mobile friendly web version.

https://proc0.github.io/HackerZen (it's also open source)


This is precisely the reason that I do not log in to HN on my phone. My phone is read-only and if I want to upvote or comment then I have to switch to my laptop. Pretty easy with firefox because I can send tabs to other devices.

Zoom in or unvote/revote

This is true, however you can see if you downvoted by the "undown" link displayed instead of "unvote".

That is why I like harmonic app, there is an invite button separating the upvote and downvote. Never going to have this kind of issue

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