Hacker News: _bohm

New comment by _bohm in "Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract"

_bohm — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 06:06:58 +0000

You might be surprised to learn that much of the regulatory quagmire you speak of was devised by supposed proponents of the free market.

New comment by _bohm in "Zig: Pointer Stability for ArrayLists"

_bohm — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:30:43 +0000

Sure, in cases where you need elements to be contiguous in memory then certainly an unrolled linked list is not appropriate. There's usually not a meaningful performance difference between a pointer deref and an indexed array access, however.

New comment by _bohm in "Zig: Pointer Stability for ArrayLists"

_bohm — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 18:45:41 +0000

That's a good point. Using lockPointers would be a good way to enforce at runtime that your ArrayList is truly read-only.

New comment by _bohm in "Zig: Pointer Stability for ArrayLists"

_bohm — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 18:42:43 +0000

Having written a bunch of Zig, I wouldn't say that the language design or culture explicitly encourages the use of pointers over indices in such situations. I would say it's more a language which trusts the programmer to make correct decisions about which constructs are appropriate in any given circumstance.

New comment by _bohm in "Zig: Pointer Stability for ArrayLists"

_bohm — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:41:55 +0000

Aha, gotcha. To tell you the truth, I don't think I ever used it. I have a custom implementation I wrote because I didn't realize at the time that SegmentedList was an unrolled linked list :p

New comment by _bohm in "Zig: Pointer Stability for ArrayLists"

_bohm — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:17:58 +0000

It's a nice feature but I can't help feeling like, if you need a stable pointer to an item in a collection, ArrayList is the wrong data structure to use? Maybe someone can chime in and give me an example of when you'd do this instead of, e.g., just storing an index. Alternatively, you could use an Unrolled Linked List (FKA SegmentedList in Zig before it was removed in 0.16, not sure why).

New comment by _bohm in "Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3"

_bohm — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:09:53 +0000

Ok so why are you still here?

New comment by _bohm in "Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress"

_bohm — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:03:17 +0000

I’m writing a game engine in Zig and after tens of thousands of lines written, I have to say my mind has totally melded to the language. It really hits a sweet spot for me between being expressive enough, and there only being one way to do something most of the time.

New comment by _bohm in "Rent collections are down in New York"

_bohm — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 23:25:33 +0000

I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of low-income people who are delinquent on their rent have no clue who Cea Weaver is. Nor is there any kind of organized rent strike occurring. Do you live in NYC?

New comment by _bohm in "The dangerous delusion of modern warfare"

_bohm — Sun, 31 May 2026 13:35:24 +0000

What do you think Israel’s objective is then? It seems rather clear to me that they have expansionist ambitions which necessitate defeating their neighboring foes, who are backed by Iran. A non-hostile Iran is an Iran that does not back these foes. There has been no attempt to replace Hamas because Israel’s goal is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

New comment by _bohm in "The dangerous delusion of modern warfare"

_bohm — Sun, 31 May 2026 10:59:00 +0000

I think an honest assessment of the history reveals that the Islamic Republic has been far more hostile to Israel and far stabler than the Shah, who oversaw a deeply unpopular monarchy and was deposed by his own people

New comment by _bohm in "The dangerous delusion of modern warfare"

_bohm — Sun, 31 May 2026 10:42:45 +0000

Who do you think the previous regime was? The Shah was installed by the US and was friendly to Israel. Under the Islamic Republic, Iran has been hostile to Israel and funded proxy organizations that have been in conflict with it.

New comment by _bohm in "The dangerous delusion of modern warfare"

_bohm — Sun, 31 May 2026 10:27:52 +0000

Sure, Israel played a hand here, but it’s hard to believe they’re getting exactly what they wanted out of all of this either. Regime change does not seem like it’s coming any time soon. Unless that happens, any reductions in Iran’s capacity will be temporary.

As for the Iraq war, Israel was supportive, but it would be incorrect to say the war was at their behest.

New comment by _bohm in "Zig 2026: No-AI Policy, $670K Foundation, Left GitHub and Why Zig Isn't 1.0 [video]"

_bohm — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:25:02 +0000

Curious what design changes you're referring to specifically. I've been using the language for a couple years now and the language itself has undergone pretty minor changes, perhaps the biggest one being the removal of `usingnamespace`, which I don't think was that big a deal. Or are you referring to changes in the stdlib?

New comment by _bohm in "Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation"

_bohm — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:24:31 +0000

Social pressure from one's peers is not the only form of pressure. I don't think I'm the one who can credibly be accused of not reading the entire comment or not thinking for longer than 10 seconds in this exchange.

New comment by _bohm in "Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation"

_bohm — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:36:43 +0000

“Revealed preferences” are not the same as actual preferences. Treating them the same is what led us to the current situation we have with everyone addicted to social media and miserable. Also, expectations are not the only thing that could pressure someone to use these tools. If all your peers were using these tools and finishing their work in a fraction of the time it takes you, and getting the same or better grades, you would probably use them too.

New comment by _bohm in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

_bohm — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:00:57 +0000

> It's a persistent topic of human interest, across cultures and decades.

Yes, and how did this originally become a topic of interest?

New comment by _bohm in "Supreme Court Limits Voting Rights Act"

_bohm — Fri, 01 May 2026 11:37:41 +0000

I will take you at your word that you genuinely want a politics free of racial discrimination, but all of the points you’re trying to make here are being immediately disproven by the reality on the ground. Florida has already passed a redistricting that massively and transparently disenfranchises black voters as a direct result of this decision. Louisiana is currently trying to postpone their already-underway primaries to push through a redistricting which I expect will do the same.

New comment by _bohm in "I am building a cloud"

_bohm — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:08:57 +0000

A big difference between cost and price is often won at the expense of many years of concerted R&D, though

New comment by _bohm in "Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes"

_bohm — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:57:23 +0000

I've been waiting eagerly for this release ever since the new Io interface was announced. Pumped to start working on some new projects with this!

Love this line from the release notes:

> Lo! Lest one learn a lone release lesson, let proclaim: "cancelation" should seriously only be spelt thusly (single "l"). Let not evil, godless liars lead afoul.