Hacker News: b3morales

New comment by b3morales in "Nim 2.2.6"

b3morales — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 18:15:03 +0000

As one who was interested by Nim and tried it out for some personal projects, I found that this was the biggest problem with the project. There's several options for any given need (including internal tools like LSP or installing the compiler) with very little clear way to choose between them. Each will have different (dis)advantages that you must discover primarily by digging through forum posts or GitHub issues.

In some ways it's the sign of a very strong language, like the curse of Lisp: someone can easily just write their own version of whatever they need. But as a user trying to navigate the ecosystem it is frustrating. I do keep meaning to try it out again though; the language itself is very pleasant to use.

New comment by b3morales in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

b3morales — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 21:09:22 +0000

The stakes of changing the way so many people work can't be seen in a short term. Could be good or bad. Probably it will be both, in different ways. Margarine instead of butter seemed like a good idea until we noticed that hydrogenation was worse (in some ways) than the cholesterol problem we were trying to fight.

AI company execs also pretty clearly have a politico-economic idea that they are advancing. The tools may stand on their own but what is the broader effect of supporting them?

New comment by b3morales in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

b3morales — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 20:50:02 +0000

Because it's rules for us and not for them. If I take Microsoft's code and "transform" it I get sued. If Microsoft takes everyone else's code and "transforms" it (and sells it back to us) well, that's just business, pal. Thomas's argument is completely missing this point.

EDIT to add, I said this more completely a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381996

New comment by b3morales in "An aborted experiment with server Swift"

b3morales — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 17:29:30 +0000

You are probably thinking of this by Chris Lattner: https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr... (on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30416070) Swift has always been developed by a team of course, but he was the lead and probably the most public face.

New comment by b3morales in "Apple's use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17"

b3morales — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 17:58:09 +0000

There can be no clearer example than iTunes's downgrade into the awful Music and somehow even worse Podcasts. On the plus it has invogorated the 3rd party space.

New comment by b3morales in "Apple's use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17"

b3morales — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 17:18:24 +0000

> Perhaps biggest of all Swift doesn’t need a runtime like Obj-C

Swift most certainly has a runtime: https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/main/stdlib/public/runti... And most or all of it is written in C++, not Swift last I checked. Whenever you see a `_swift_fooBarBaz` symbol in a stack trace, that's the runtime.

New comment by b3morales in "What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023"

b3morales — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 23:35:00 +0000

That was almost seven years ago now. It has been the String API twice as long as it has not been the API.

New comment by b3morales in "What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023"

b3morales — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 21:54:19 +0000

> There's no reason to privilege any one of these, and Swift doesn't do this.

Strange thing to say: Swift String count property is the count of extended grapheme clusters. The documentation is explicit:

> A string is a collection of extended grapheme clusters, which approximate human-readable characters. [emphasis in original]

Checked Error types in Swift, preliminary implementation

b3morales — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 17:38:04 +0000

Article URL: https://forums.swift.org/t/status-check-typed-throws/66637

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37587169

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by b3morales in "50+ SwiftUI Components that you can copy paste in your next iOS project"

b3morales — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 20:35:55 +0000

Without a source code license somewhere on site (I don't see any after looking around) you had better not copy-paste these into a next project. The default state if there's no explicit permission granted is that it's not usable: https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/

New comment by b3morales in "macOS 13.5 no longer allows setting system wide ulimits"

b3morales — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 16:05:38 +0000

Also he's got to approaching retirement age at this point, and there is no backbench corps of other DTS who do what he does. Maybe another decade we'll have his help, then what?

New comment by b3morales in "US judge: Art created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted"

b3morales — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 19:48:08 +0000

I'm still not sure how I feel about the actual copyright issue, but this was a bad test case. Thaler is trying to have his cake and eat it too; his position is inconsistent (this similar to a previous comment I've made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783707).

He wants credit for creating the AI, and he wants to that AI to be recognized as autonomous and independent by getting the Copyright Office's imprimatur. But at the same time he wants to treat the art created by the AI as if it were his, or at least to act on behalf of the AI as if it were not autonomous.

New comment by b3morales in "June 2023 Data Dump is missing"

b3morales — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 16:14:15 +0000

Assuming that the linked post is accurate and that the "approval from senior leadership" to turn the dump back on does not come...then yes, I would say so. Actually there is already Codidact, although if I recall correctly they explicitly ruled out importing SE data when they started up. https://codidact.org

New comment by b3morales in "June 2023 Data Dump is missing"

b3morales — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 16:05:54 +0000

This was one of the promises originally of Stack Overflow: all the content is Creative Commons licensed so that if they "turned evil" (I believe it was Joel that put it this way) the community could, in a way, create a fork. https://web.archive.org/web/20230203170609/https://stackover...

Unfortunately the dumps themselves are not a legal requirement, just a gentleman's agreement, so realistically exercising this ability was still at the whim of the company.

New comment by b3morales in "Thoughts on Swift and Objective-C (2022)"

b3morales — Sat, 13 May 2023 17:00:52 +0000

Is it really necessary to defend your language preference by ridiculing the alternative and those who wish to use it?

New comment by b3morales in "Thoughts on Swift and Objective-C (2022)"

b3morales — Sat, 13 May 2023 16:31:59 +0000

A citation is needed for the number of iOS projects that have more than a minuscule amount of code at the application level that risks memory unsafety.¹ The value proposition becomes stronger for the system frameworks that the app consumes, of course. (Although even the stdlib dips more than once into memory-unsafe Swift for performance.) But this brings us to another of the points from the article: is it really best to use one language for both use cases?

¹And additionally for whether those project would eliminate such code if rewritten in Swift.

New comment by b3morales in "A Low Cost Approach to Improving Pedestrian Safety with Deep Learning"

b3morales — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 16:33:30 +0000

GP was most likely thinking not of large roundabouts that take the place of major intersections, but the smaller traffic-calming type where the center can be as minimal as a 3 foot wide concrete block. They can be fit into pretty much any intersection because their purpose is not to change the path so much as to, frankly, eat up whatever extra space is available, which forces cars to slow around them.

New comment by b3morales in "Saying Goodbye to GitHub"

b3morales — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 16:09:35 +0000

This idea ("make a stronger license") has come up in previous discussions of Copilot as well[0].

The problem is that the Copilot project doesn't claim to be abiding by the license(s) of the ingested code. The reply to licensing concerns was that licensing doesn't apply to their use. So unfortunately they would just claim they could ignore your hypothetical Free³ license as well.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277352

New comment by b3morales in "How big should a programming language be?"

b3morales — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 18:19:04 +0000

Some core designers of Swift, at least Doug Gregor, John McCall, Dave Abrahams, were very much part of the C++ world. Abrahams mentions Gregor's proposals for C++ here: https://youtu.be/6JYAXADQmNQ?t=1157

New comment by b3morales in "So you've installed `fzf` – now what?"

b3morales — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 01:20:30 +0000

You do have to remember to use it, but the thing to keep in mind is that you can pipe a list of ANYTHING into it. Any list of text items you can search through with a text query is fair game.

   git log --oneline | fzf

for example is one of my favorite tricks. Instead of scanning by eye or repeatedly grepping to find something, it's a live fuzzy filter. And depending on how deep you want to go you can then add key bindings to check out the selected commit, or preview the full message, or anything really.