Hacker News: acmj

New comment by acmj in "Craig Venter has died"

acmj — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:12:12 +0000

I am not sure what is "the draft human genome" you are talking about. Two separate human genomes were published in 2001: the HGP genome and the celera genome. The HGP genome then didn't use Venter DNA. It evolved into the current human reference genome. The celera genome contained Venter DNA but it has been completely forgotten nowadays.

New comment by acmj in "Craig Venter has died"

acmj — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:03:43 +0000

No, at initial release, the human genome from the NIH side was done by bac-to-bac, not by shotgun.

New comment by acmj in "Craig Venter has died"

acmj — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:57:57 +0000

You are confused by the human genome project vs the celera genome project. No, the human genome project didn't include his sample.

New comment by acmj in "Cursor Composer 2 is just Kimi K2.5 with RL"

acmj — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:35:07 +0000

Well, they can keep stealing as long as someone open weight their models.

New comment by acmj in "Golang's big miss on memory arenas"

acmj — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:27:21 +0000

Going from something like "Go lacks a builtin arena allocation" to "Go risks becoming the COBOL" is a long stretch. First, Go is slower than C/C++/rust without complex memory allocation. Introducing an arena allocator won't fix that. Second, arena allocation often doesn't work for a lot of allocation patterns. Third, plain arena allocator is easy to implement when needed. Surely a builtin one would be better but Go won't fall without it.

New comment by acmj in "Amtrak NextGen Acela Debuts on August 28"

acmj — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:01:56 +0000

How is "full booked" a real shame?

New comment by acmj in "Python performance myths and fairy tales"

acmj — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 13:04:58 +0000

Pypy is 10x faster and is compatible with most cpython code. IMHO it was a big mistake not to adopt JIT during the 2-to-3 transition.

New comment by acmj in "Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf"

acmj — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 21:46:58 +0000

Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to openai/claude are more productive?

New comment by acmj in "Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes"

acmj — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 02:18:41 +0000

I wouldn't say this easily if I were the sacrifice, especially as a visa holder.

New comment by acmj in "Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes"

acmj — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:57:11 +0000

I guess Harvard saw the decision at Columbia made the situation worse [1], so they decided to make a different one.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-freezes-all-rese...

New comment by acmj in "Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes"

acmj — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 23:07:20 +0000

People here have little idea about how Harvard works. Harvard is financially vulnerable. It is currently running on a deficiency considering the endowment. And Harvard can't freely use most endowment for personnels anyway. If the government takes away funding, Harvard will have a financial crisis. I guess the leadership made the decision in hope someone could stop the government before bad things happen but when bad things do happen, you will probably see mass layoffs of researchers in particular in life sciences and biomedical research.

New comment by acmj in "Writing C for Curl"

acmj — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 11:47:11 +0000

Some part of this article is opinionated. Curl may be well written but this is more likely to be the result of the overall structure than the number of characters per line. Actually I don't know whether curl is well written. Popularity doesn't always equate to code quality. I have used curl APIs before. I don't like them.

New comment by acmj in "Shift-to-Middle Array: A Faster Alternative to Std:Deque?"

acmj — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 01:21:11 +0000

std::deque typically uses chunked arrays. It is more complex but tends to be faster than a ring buffer based implementation.

New comment by acmj in "argp: GNU-style command line argument parser for Go"

acmj — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 19:48:47 +0000

The most important part is to have a standard, which doesn't need to be perfect. On argument parsing, I actually think the GNU way is the best so far. I have seen various deviations from GNU and I personally regard all of them inferior.

New comment by acmj in "argp: GNU-style command line argument parser for Go"

acmj — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 16:32:29 +0000

> argp parses `foo --bar -1` as `foo --bar=-1` the way you expect when `--bar` takes an value, but Kong treats `-1` as a flag.

This seems a bug in Kong. Has someone reported it?

New comment by acmj in "argp: GNU-style command line argument parser for Go"

acmj — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 15:08:36 +0000

When I use a command-line tool, I don't know and don't care if it is written in Go or not. I just want to use it the same way as most of the other traditional Unix tools. The Go style gets in the way. We would have much more consistent CLI between tools if Go had just followed the GNU style at the beginning. The same can be said to many other languages like Nim that want to reinvent command-line argument parsing with their standard libraries. https://xkcd.com/927/ came to mind.

New comment by acmj in "argp: GNU-style command line argument parser for Go"

acmj — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 14:27:16 +0000

In general, command-line argument parsers should just follow the GNU style. No more, no less. Deviations confuse users as it is not immediately obvious to them what rules a parser is imposing.

> options can have multiple values: -a 1 2 3 means that a is an array/slice/struct of three numbers of value [1,2,3]

Allowing multiple values is inconsistent because you can't tell in "./cmd -a 1 2 3" whether 2 and 3 are positional arguments or arguments for -a. This is not a GNU style. The GNU way is "./cmd -a 1 -a 2 -a 3" (or "./cmd -a 1,2,3"). This package supports that, which is good.

> option values can be separated by a space, equal sign, or nothing: -a1 -a=1 -a 1 are all equal

"--a=1" is a GNU style but "-a=1" is not. This is a minor issue, though.

Also, does this package support "--"? Everything following "--" should be treated as positional arguments.

New comment by acmj in "OpenAI expands Deep Research to all paying ChatGPT users"

acmj — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 02:20:37 +0000

Too little, too late

New comment by acmj in "Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design"

acmj — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 03:29:34 +0000

You need to know what is good code. Opinions may vary a lot between programmers, even senior ones. The Clean Code cult would tell you to find good code there but that is the most poisonous programming book I have read.

New comment by acmj in "New horizons for Julia"

acmj — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 22:00:19 +0000

> The next major Julia release, 1.12, is likely to appear in mid-2025. It will finally include the ability to generate static binaries of a reasonable size, appropriate for distribution.

I would be thrilled if Julia had this in early days, but now it is a little too late. I have jumped the boat.