nickcw
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
4,945
Submissions
592
Member since
Jan 27
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 day ago
Thirded for Anathem. It isn't for everyone, you've got to have a high tolerance for made up words and enjoy puzzling things out but if that is you (likely if you read HN) then it is great. Probably my favourite sci-fi book ever by number of re-reads!
Comment · 4 days ago
You may enjoy ccforth then which is a mostly gforth compatible compiler which compiles to native via C.
https://github.com/ncw/ccforth
I wrote it as an experiment in having both a forth interpreter and compiler running at the same time.
Comment · 9 days ago
I missed that and that is much more pleasing than the LLM reading the SVG source!
Comment · 9 days ago
I thought this was a fun idea and the images are quite pleasing.
I decoded the Morse code image with MkI eyeball. It's quite difficult to read when the trails overlap. I suspect the LLM is reading the SVG source where that doesn't matter so this could do with a little tweak so the dits and dahs don't overlap if it is intended for humans to decode.
If it isn't intended for humans then you might as well use the last 8 bits of your 32 bit float coordinates.
Comment · 11 days ago
From Google's status page https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/Xs2XTHzAVC9YnafnPy...
We are experiencing an issue with multiple services in
europe-west2 beginning on Monday, 2026-10-19 23:08 PDT.
Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within
europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated. Partial
mitigation to infrastructure services will be observed within the
next 30 minutes and the remaining services will be mitigated there
after.
(Also reporting the times in PDT is quite unhelpful for users of this zone who are likely based in the UK or EU)
Comment · 16 days ago
I think about Vinge's treatment of time often. Though I find "see you in a kilosecond" doesn't go down well with the family, so clearly some cultural adjustments needed!
Comment · 27 days ago
Here is the team radio of Lewis Hamilton literally turning his car off and in again on the formation lap!
Comment · 1 month ago
The fixed size int types int32_t and friends weren't introduced until C99. Microsoft held out until 2013 before it put <inttypes.h> into Visual Studio!
So there has been a really long time in C's evolution where we haven't had fixed size types which has been a super annoying mess of #ifdefs in portable code.
The variable size ints have allowed some super weird architectures though. I remember looking at the datasheet for the Motorola 56000 DSP and noting that the C compiler set char = short = int = 24 bits! That was because the hardware could not address anything smaller than 24 bits. I think long could be 48 bits.
Comment · 1 month ago
I know pi to 50 places learned through lots of repetition. I've always been good at remembering numbers though.
I don't find the memory palace tricks helpful at all though. I think that is a consequence of my Aphantasia and something I only realised recently. I can't visualise a memory palace so placing things in it is impossible!
Comment · 1 month ago
I used sdcc for an 8051 based commercial project a while back. I seem to remember spending more time reading the assembly to figure out workarounds for the compiler than actually writing C code!
Whereas sdcc works brilliantly for z80 lineage processors. I wrote quite a lot of C for Gameboy recently and didn't find a single compiler bug in sdcc which revised my opinion of it upwards greatly.
Comment · 1 month ago
Was the performance mentioned anywhere - I couldn't find it on the page?
Comment · 1 month ago
Disappointed to see I already read the Hugo winner for best novel - The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow.
It is a worthy winner in my opinion. Fantasy with a sci-fi element along with a story which takes some untangling. Five stars from me :-)
Comment · 2 months ago
Yes I update the CVE-PENDING once the CVEs are in to keep the record straight.
For more info: