Hacker News: Snarwin

New comment by Snarwin in "Installing NeoVim caused original Vim undo files to be deleted"

Snarwin — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 15:30:24 +0000

Sure. And likewise, users who care about backwards compatibility have no duty to do anything for the Neovim developers--they can simply use a different editor that suits their preferences.

New comment by Snarwin in "Simple Is Not Small"

Snarwin — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:58:33 +0000

That's not what the linked article is saying. The point made in the article is that the 'uniq' utility couples together two unrelated concepts--sorting and frequency counting--and this coupling forces you to write more complex code, compared to the version where frequency counting is decoupled from sorting.

All of this is completely correct, but it has nothing to do with bash vs. Clojure. The same decoupling can easily be achieved in either language.

New comment by Snarwin in "Simple Is Not Small"

Snarwin — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:46:23 +0000

> There's no native Unix equivalent to frequencies, this sort | uniq -c is the closest we can get. Not only is it less performant (it has to collect the full input into memory before continuing), but it ties aggregation to ordering.

One of the core features of the Unix command-line is that it is user-extensible. If there's no "native" command equivalent to frequencies, you can write your own, and it will be given the same first-class treatment as any other binary in your PATH. This is entirely in keeping with the Unix philosophy of simple implementations.

New comment by Snarwin in "C++ says “We have try... finally at home”"

Snarwin — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 22:51:56 +0000

The oldest defer-like feature I can find reference to is the ON_BLOCK_EXIT macro from this article in the December 2000 issue of the C/C++ Users Journal:

https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/CUJ/2000/cexp1812/a...

A similar macro later (2006) made its way into Boost as BOOST_SCOPE_EXIT:

https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/latest/libs/scope_exit/doc/ht...

I can't say for sure whether Go's creators took inspiration from these, but it wouldn't be surprising if they did.

New comment by Snarwin in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

Snarwin — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 13:07:03 +0000

I thought the "free" in "free web" was supposed to mean "free as in freedom," not "free as in beer." Have we really reached the point where the CEO of Mozilla no longer understands or cares about that distinction?

New comment by Snarwin in "Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)"

Snarwin — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:35:37 +0000

There's plenty of application-level C and C++ code out there that isn't performance-critical, and would benefit from the safety a garbage collector provides.

New comment by Snarwin in "It is worth it to buy the fast CPU"

Snarwin — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 15:03:48 +0000

Several things:

1) Em-dashes

2) "It's not X, it's Y" sentence structure

3) Comma-separated list that's exactly 3 items long

New comment by Snarwin in "ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes"

Snarwin — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 16:05:34 +0000

It's possible that without the medication, you wouldn't have gotten burned out like this. But it's also possible that you'd have missed out on all of the benefits of being medicated and still gotten burned out anyway.

New comment by Snarwin in "Partially Matching Zig Enums"

Snarwin — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 15:59:25 +0000

  import std.meta: AliasSeq;

  enum E { a, b, c }

  void handle(E e)
  {
      // Need label to break out of 'static foreach'
      Lswitch: final switch (e)
      {
          static foreach (ab; AliasSeq!(E.a, E.b))
          {
              case ab:
                  handleAB();
                  // No comptime switch in D
                  static if (ab == E.a)
                      handleA();
                  else static if (ab == E.b)
                      handleB();
                  else
                      static assert(false, "unreachable");
                  break Lswitch;
          }
          case E.c:
              handleC();
              break;
      }
  }

New comment by Snarwin in "The hype is the product"

Snarwin — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 19:32:58 +0000

> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience

Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.

New comment by Snarwin in "Piano Keys"

Snarwin — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 23:34:18 +0000

It's not actually that much to remember. There are 3 shapes that cover most of the major chords, and 3 special cases (F♯, B♭, and B).

New comment by Snarwin in "I write type-safe generic data structures in C"

Snarwin — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:02:19 +0000

You can still write the extension in C++ and expose an extern "C" interface.

New comment by Snarwin in "4B If Statements"

Snarwin — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 12:46:58 +0000

It looks like bans for odd/even license plates were used in Paris in 2014 [1] and 1997 [2], but not before then. However, a similar scheme was used to ration gasoline in the US during the 70s [3].

The only source I can find for the claim about police confusion is the one cited by Wikipedia [4], whose reliability I'm inclined to doubt based on the 1997/1977 discrepancy.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/03/17/290849704...

[2] https://www.wired.com/1997/09/paris-smog/

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2012/11/10/16479229...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd%E2%80%93even_rationing#D...

New comment by Snarwin in "Git Branches: Intuition and Reality"

Snarwin — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 16:08:24 +0000

It looks like this is what git merge-base --fork-point is supposed to do, although according to the docs it is not 100% reliable.

New comment by Snarwin in "C uses "&" for the address-operator because 'ampersand sounds like "address"'"

Snarwin — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 16:49:35 +0000

Interestingly, C already does this for function calls: "fptr()" is considered equivalent to "(*fptr)()".

New comment by Snarwin in "NFS > FUSE: Why We Built Our Own NFS Server in Rust"

Snarwin — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 19:46:52 +0000

Page is completely unreadable in Firefox for Android.

New comment by Snarwin in "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

Snarwin — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 15:01:58 +0000

I'd say C is actually a pretty good choice for an educational project like this. Having to write out all of your data structures by hand and manage your memory manually is a good learning experience, and since you're not writing serious production code, you don't have to worry too much about making mistakes.

New comment by Snarwin in "Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it"

Snarwin — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:42:36 +0000

I don't think these authors intend for you to interpret their criticism of Audible's business practices as a statement about your moral character. One of their central points is that Audible's business practices have severely limited consumer choice in the audiobook market. You can't be held morally responsible for a choice that's been taken out of your hands.

New comment by Snarwin in "Open Letter from Security Researchers in Relation to the Online Safety Bill [pdf]"

Snarwin — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 13:16:05 +0000

Most likely the intended audience is the press. Now that this letter has been published, journalists can write stories like "Online Safety Bill Under Fire From Security Experts", which make the issue digestible to a lay audience.

New comment by Snarwin in "Finding the best sine function for Nintendo 64 [video]"

Snarwin — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 12:16:59 +0000

> Case in point at 9:30[0] he talks about localised memory patterns as though he's the first to come up with it

This seems like an uncharitable interpretation to me. When he says "I'm not sure if anyone else has ever used this approach," it's pretty clear from context that the "approach" he's referring to is interleaving the sine and cosine tables to improve cache usage. And he doesn't even claim to be the first to come up with it, just to have independently discovered it.