Hacker News: Rendello

New comment by Rendello in "Every Byte Matters"

Rendello — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:02:03 +0000

> SoA is not universally better.

This is an important part of Data-oriented Design: the representation of the data should be pragmatically tied to its access patterns, not dogma.

Richard Fabian's DoD book gives the example that (x,y,z) is almost always better as a classic array-of-structs rather than a struct-of-arrays, because if you're accessing one dimension, you probably are want to process the other two dimensions at the same time:

https://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/node9.html#SECTIO...

New comment by Rendello in "Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years"

Rendello — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:20:13 +0000

Which SQL-specific QoL enhancements do you miss? I was really excited to use DuckDB for things like structs and enums, but after a while I just went back to regular SQL and used it for its other features.

New comment by Rendello in "Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years"

Rendello — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:18:02 +0000

I think I had a pretty good understanding of set theory through programming, and although I tried to get into the more mathematical side of it, I found most things to be 1. trivial (because I was used to thinking in lists, sets, hashmaps, etc.), or 2. irrelevant to me. The latter was a shame, because I've always liked the abstraction of math, but I couldn't help but feel I wasn't learning anything actionable when learning more about sets (though maybe I'm wrong).

What had a big impact on me was the relational model, specifically after reading Richard Fabian's Data-oriented Design book [1]. I had watched Mike Acton's famous Data-oriented Design talk [2], then Andrew Kelley's talk [3] where he explains speedups in the Zig compiler using DoD principles (largely using methods from Acton's talk), but Fabian's book tied these concepts to database normalization and the relational model.

Most DoD advice is very "exercise left to the reader", because it's about matching a specific problem, but using the relational model and considering your data's primary and foreign key relations can be really powerful. I just wish more of that power was exposed through regular programming language interfaces, rather than having to pull in and marshal data through a DB. I might have to try C# and Linq.

1. https://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IroPQ150F6c

New comment by Rendello in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

Rendello — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:51:25 +0000

Erlang's Joe Armstrong and Alan Kay did a talk/interview together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOHn9TClXY

New comment by Rendello in "Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel"

Rendello — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:56:35 +0000

I hate any editor changing anything without permission (especially ones that insert the closing paren/bracket).

I used to love Linux's compose keys, though, where I could just press `--.` to get an en dash and `---` to get an em. Most of the compose combinations were guessable, like `a'` for á, `co` for ©.

MacOS has a great keyboard locale switcher, but the lack of real compose keys limits things. Most characters you can press and hold and get some accented versions, but it's very slow if you're typing in French or something in the EN layout. It also has a built-in character picker, which is really nice but even more slow.

New comment by Rendello in "Sysadmining Like It's 2009"

Rendello — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:36:53 +0000

It's fun running into Vista references in contemporary TV shows, which run the gamut from "it's like a good pair of jeans" [1] to "Vista! We're going to die!" [2]. I was too young to form much of an opinion on it, but I remember it feeling quite unstable. I can say I preferred Windows 8 to Windows 7, though.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paw-EKCw_3o&t=86s

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IfnjBHtjHc

New comment by Rendello in "Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel"

Rendello — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:12:58 +0000

I've been getting a lot of job spam in my email the past week or two, not sure if it's from here or Github mostly.

New comment by Rendello in "Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions"

Rendello — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:34:24 +0000

This reminded me of Tom7's video where he made a bunch of ridiculous engines and pitted them against each other (and against "diluted" versions of Stockfish):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpXy041BIlA

https://tom7.org/chess/

New comment by Rendello in "Apple unveils new accessibility features"

Rendello — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:28:12 +0000

I watch most talks at 2x speed or 1.5x if it's a really technical topic. Bryan Cantrill excepted!

New comment by Rendello in "'We mould trees to grow into the shape of chairs'"

Rendello — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:55:38 +0000

One of my favourite examples is bonchi, or bonsai chili. It's exactly what the name implies. Unfortunately I've struggled to keep a regular pepper plant alive, let alone bonsai it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Bonchi/top/

New comment by Rendello in "C++26 Shipped a SIMD Library Nobody Asked For"

Rendello — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:59:14 +0000

This is the first time I've seen a classic for loop called a "boomer loop", but apparently this isn't even the first instance (not the first definition):

http://boomer-loop.urbanup.com/18229646

New comment by Rendello in "Erlang/OTP 29.0"

Rendello — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:31:11 +0000

And then Elixir was born!

I swear there's a video of Joe Armstrong et al. presenting part of this on stage and laughing along with it. I tried to find it last week but couldn't figure out which talk it was. A few years ago I think I watched every Erlang/OTP talk in existence.

New comment by Rendello in "Roman Letters"

Rendello — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:38:31 +0000

What a cool project, I like this one where Pliny the Younger complains about a no-show at his dinner party:

https://romanletters.org/letters/pliny_younger/1015/

New comment by Rendello in ""Will I be OK?" Teen died after ChatGPT pushed deadly mix of drugs, lawsuit says"

Rendello — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:43:55 +0000

A more active thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110689

New comment by Rendello in "The Disappearance of the Public Bench"

Rendello — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:55:36 +0000

> Crack?! I've got company!

> Oh, relax! "Oh, I'm Mark, I'm in the '80s, I'm dying of heroin in a puddle in the corner in an advert!" Drugs are fine, Mark, everyone agrees now. Drugs are what happen to people, and that's fine, so shut up.

https://youtu.be/yoZ1EGxPaOE?t=19

New comment by Rendello in "Getting arrested in Japan"

Rendello — Sun, 10 May 2026 01:51:27 +0000

The Yakuza seems to have a similar story as the American Mafia. Both have long histories, are favourite subjects of films and media, and both had a decline that sharpened in the 90s. A large part of that has been increasingly tight anti-Yakuza laws and ordinances. The whole "Law enforcement and indirect enforcement" section on Wikipedia is an interesting read, I linked part of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza#Current_situation

I do agree with the justice/prison system being incredibly scary, though!

New comment by Rendello in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

Rendello — Sun, 10 May 2026 01:24:01 +0000

I'm really trying to remember the context, I wish I'd written it down somewhere. But now that I'm thinking of it, I'm almost certain it wasn't PDFs, but JSON files that I'd written. For some reason it would allow me to open them in some applications, but in others I'd get a warning and the file would be trashed.

The Docker thing happened as described in my linked post. It happened with something else too, but again I can't remember. I wasn't planning on doing a post mortem so I guess I let the details slip!

In any case, I do like most of the OS' ways of doing things, including security. But it can be overzealous.

P.S. I'm not crazy! I'm not crazy!!!

New comment by Rendello in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

Rendello — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:23:50 +0000

I love when my Mac declares random PDFs malware and deletes them when I try to open them.

On two occasions I've been completely dumbstruck when the software I was using was deleted out from under me. I'm not a fan of the overuse of "gaslight", but it sure felt like that when I had to restart Docker and the OS was like "what do you mean, Docker? You've never had Docker installed! What are you talking about? Are you feeling ok?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42649790

New comment by Rendello in "Inventing Cyrillic (2024)"

Rendello — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:25:58 +0000

You might enjoy Reddit's "constructed orthography" subreddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/conorthography/top/

Or you can take the plunge and make your own complete script:

https://old.reddit.com/r/neography/top/

And if you're still not satisfied and want to spend the rest of your life making a language that no one else will care to learn:

https://old.reddit.com/r/conlangs/

New comment by Rendello in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

Rendello — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:13:28 +0000

There are 12000 in Poland, it was insane when I visited. You'd look down any given street and you were see at least one, sometimes more. Check out the map! [1] They are excellent though, much better than Canadian convenience stores. I wonder if the franchise saturation will lead to a crash à la Subway.

1. https://www.zabka.pl/znajdz-sklep/