Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 246 posts

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#181

Post by layer8 »

vladms wrote: post #124
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without the limitation of your ability to hand code it. Isn't that kind of view pathetic and sad, though? Why would anyone pick up and guitar or play a piano if they could just listen to the same song already made by someone else? I struggle to understand this view of people that pretend to not understand why being an expert of some skill is perceived as valuable by some people. This is also belies next problem wit…

In my experience people that did not hand code enough imagine that the hard part is coding, and not clearly defining all the possible edge cases and use cases. So, in my view, more people will (or should) understand now what is hard when building complex things, if they pass the stage of "I have a nice POC that works for this one case".

I don’t know. The edge cases become very clear when coding, because there are explicit and precise guarantees of how the code will behave that you can reason about (or when there aren’t, you know that you are in trouble and code defensively around it, and you can reason about that defensive code), which isn’t the case when vibe coding. When coding, you can prove the code correct in your head, and the edge cases are revealed by that process. But that process isn’t possible with vibe coding, because what exactly a prompt will produce isn’t predictable, and doesn’t have guarantees attached that you can reason about.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#182

Post by katzito »

renticulous wrote: post #164
katzito wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an artform and a necessity. It's even more of an artform now.

I appreciate the effort. But why not put the skills into something that would be genuinely useful to others or solve a pain point? Open source the results or handover to someone who would like to maintain it.

Asked myself the same question. Just guessing... probably wanted to learn about web servers as well as assembly.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#183

Post by moron4hire »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #71
rdevilla wrote: post #67

Ten years ago, I would have kowtowed to someone elite enough to build something like this. Today, I just think, "how long would LLMs have taken to write this?" I mourn the death of a human artform.

It's far more exciting than sad. Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing it because it would have been impossible for you in any practical way. Look to the positive instead of lamenting something that never would have happened. It's unbelievably exciting that you can now program a computer virtually without the limitation of your ability to hand code it.

This idea that LLMs are going to enable us to do things that we wouldn't have done before, therefore overall productivity and value is going to increase "exponentially" seems naive to basic economics.

If LLMs are good for doing things we aren't already doing, it indicates the overall addressable "value" that LLMs could provide for such things is actually quite low. If the task has necessary prerequisites that you don't currently possess, but you haven't spent the effort to jump that hurdle yet, then it's a good indication the value of completing that task is very low. Even if, maybe especially if, we're talking about personal projects where the value proposition is personal and not momentary, it indicates the person already feels in their bones that the return on doing this thing is not worth the effort.

I'm struggling with this with my leadership at work. We have developed a thing that is going to remove the need to hire temps [0] for data entry when we get clients who send us large amounts of their "data," aka "a thousand 30-slide PowerPoints each with one line graph of interest sitting in the corner of one slide somewhere." It is an ask that comes up a lot, it's always very expensive in both the time and money axes for the client for that task, but overall it's just a small part of the contact budget. I'm all for using what we've built to cut down the time cost for our clients, but my leadership thinking it's going to lead to massive cost savings for our clients seem to forget just how much time we spend in meetings and planning and documentation and testing and reevaluation and more meetings versus actually executing on things.

It's also bad business. To me, giving results faster should be a premium offering. We should be charging more, not less.

[0] We don't actually hire temps, we turn our junior data analyst into temps by burning them out with tons of unpaid overtime. They then leave and we have to back fill them at rather extreme cost of overhead for hiring compared to the direct contract overtime we didn't provide.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#184

Post by renticulous »

beedle_mcdeedle wrote: post #180
renticulous wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the effort. But why not put the skills into something that would be genuinely useful to others or solve a pain point? Open source the results or handover to someone who would like to maintain it.

There’s a lot of things people do for fun that don’t have an obvious purpose. Life isn’t about spending your every waking hour doing something useful in my opinion.

I can dig a ditch and cover it up innumerable times. If you are doing something out of boredom, at least make it useful to someone. Probably would give you a sense of purpose in solving a problem.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#186

Post by OutOfHere »

verandaguy wrote: post #167
OutOfHere wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's absurd for most people to write too much Assembly by hand.

What if the author wants to learn? Is learning just out of style now? I'd be doing the same kind of thing if I had more free time.

So go learn, and stop harassing others who are okay with using an LLM for some tasks.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#187

Post by OutOfHere »

imtomt wrote: post #25
OutOfHere wrote: post #18

An agentic LLM should be pretty good at Arm64 assembly generation, but maintainability of large code could become an issue. Why would it not run on Linux?

I wrote it for MacOS because I don't have a Linux machine right now :( Once I get one up and running again, I'll probably work on porting this. As for why it wouldn't run on Linux, there are some pretty big differences in the actual assembly. One pretty superficial difference is calling conventions -- MacOS uses the x16 register for syscall numbers, Linux uses x8. Calling the kernel in Mac uses "svc #0x80", in Linux…

Is it not possible to maintain a single codebase for both OS with appropriate .ifdef commands?

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#188

Post by [deleted] »

stbev wrote: post #68

I am attempting to write a software renderer in WebAssembly because, for some reason, I feel the need to go against the direction this vibe coded world is going, and I want to feel challenged again. I don't know if I will ever finish it, it is crazy, and by no means useful. But gosh it feels so good. Congratulations to the OP for the accomplishment.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#189

Post by t-3 »

userbinator wrote: post #141
t-3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arm is very nice to write assembly for. Having a proper load/store register-centric architecture rather than a stack-centric like x86 makes the mental load of writing code go waaay down, so the attractiveness of HLLs for ease of writing code is greatly diminished on RISC.

Hell no. Far too many registers, not enough instructions, and (especially with ARM64) weird restrictions that arose from trying to pack things into 32-bit instructions as efficiently as possible. I've been writing x86 Asm for a few decades. RISCs are simpler in all the wrong ways. After all, "just use a (stupid) compiler" was the whole philosophy.

Arm64 has plenty of instructions (although some convenient instructions listed in the ISA manuals seem to be rarely available in consumer hardware), and more registers is always better. I do find the lack of wide immediates annoying, but otherwise the fixed-width instruction set doesn't bother me at all.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#190

Post by entrox »

altmanaltman wrote: post #87
rdevilla wrote: post #67

Ten years ago, I would have kowtowed to someone elite enough to build something like this. Today, I just think, "how long would LLMs have taken to write this?" I mourn the death of a human artform.

I get what you mean but I feel this new profound yearning for "hand-crafted" code is getting a bit out of hand. Software engineers have taken shortcuts whenever possible since software was a thing. Do you also mourn that we don't code airplanes by hand anymore (i.e. the death of the "craft of coding"). We need to stop thinking of software as carpenters where the magic is some physical skill and that is the "CRAFT WE…

In this case you could even replace "LLM" with "C compiler" and it would change nothing.

Look, I still got my physical copy of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book with its genius content about hand-optimizing cycle count on 486 and Pentium processors, beating compilers at that time.

It was an absolute artform, but completely obsolete by today.

Post reply on HN