Hacker News: dfawcus

New comment by dfawcus in "What British people mean when they say 'sorry'"

dfawcus — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:28:13 +0000

The flaw with that article, it being the Beeb showing their bias, is that it mainly applies to the English Home Counties.

So it is a southern English habit, not a British one. The other parts of England are more direct, and will use more obvious phrasing. Similarly the other parts of Britain will be more direct.

New comment by dfawcus in "A simplified model of Fil-C"

dfawcus — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:31:41 +0000

I understand it works _if_ you declare p as being volatile, or explicitly tag it as _Atomic.

i.e., either of these forms:

    foo * volatile p;
    foo * _Atomic p;

Or at least it did when I was performing a similar experiment.

New comment by dfawcus in "Why it’s impossible to measure England’s coastline"

dfawcus — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:18:19 +0000

A section? All of Northumberland, as Wallsend is in Tyne and Wear.

The task of walking (or measuring) the whole of England's coastline is made a bit more difficult by the existence of various islands classed as part of England.

e.g. Isle of Wight, St. Mary's Island, Coquet Island, Lindisfarne, the other Farne islands, etc.

New comment by dfawcus in "Is it a pint?"

dfawcus — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:15:53 +0000

The volume of UK and US fluid ounces being different also doesn't help.

The UK pint is 568ml, apparently a US pint is 473 ml.

New comment by dfawcus in "No Semicolons Needed"

dfawcus — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:55:32 +0000

Attribute (qualifier), or storage class?

https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/428

The use of 'const' in C is very much a mixed blessing; I certainly have experience of the 'const poisoning' issue. Possibly it would have been better as a storage class.

For bool, yes it was a useful addition. Especially for the cases where old code would have something like:

    #define FLAG_A 1u
    #define FLAG_B 2u
    int has_flag_B (something *some) { return some->field & FLAG_B; }

and that was then combined with logic expecting 'true' to be 1; which could sneak in over time.

New comment by dfawcus in "Methods in Languages for Systems Programming (2023)"

dfawcus — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:36:39 +0000

Alef [1], [2], [3] can in part be viewed as C where methods are available.

An 'aggr' is equivalent to C 'struct' combined with 'typedef', and an 'adt' is an 'aggr' having methods.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)

[2] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ref

[3] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ug

New comment by dfawcus in "Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft"

dfawcus — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:21:38 +0000

I had my first go at using it (Github Copilot) last week, for a simple refactoring task. I'd have to say I reasonably specified it, yet it still managed to to fail to delete a closing brace when it removed the opening block as specified.

That was using the Claude Sonnet 4.5 model, I wonder if using the Opus 4.5 model would have managed to avoid that.

New comment by dfawcus in "I mocked the Saudi leader on YouTube then my phone was hacked, I was beaten up"

dfawcus — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:53:32 +0000

Someone being beaten up on the streets is domestic policing issue.

That the perpetrators may turn out to be foreign agents is neither here nor there, only if they were diplomatic staff would it not be a domestic policing issue. However the UK police have largely withdrawn from certain areas, and this would simply be another symptom.

High Court action suggests there was a civil case pursuing the perpetrators (or their principals), rather than a criminal case. With a properly functioning police system, that should not be necessary.

Kahn is the PCC for London, he sets their priorities.

New comment by dfawcus in "I mocked the Saudi leader on YouTube then my phone was hacked, I was beaten up"

dfawcus — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:05:08 +0000

It is London - hardly surprising.

Nothing will improve as long as Khan is Mayor, and may not even if he is replaced.

Anyway, MI6 (SIS) is the overseas spies, MI5 is the domestic spy agency.

New comment by dfawcus in "There's a hidden Android setting that spots fake cell towers"

dfawcus — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 20:19:19 +0000

Lockdown mode allows one to optionally disable 2g, maybe it is also the default there. One can turn 2g back on in said mode if desired.

As to 3g, it is largely switched off here, and I understand most of the rest of the world is also disabling it.

However it does not remove images from messages, it just disables certain automatic helpers - e.g. link previews etc.

One can still send photos, etc without any issue.

New comment by dfawcus in "An Honest Review of Go (2025)"

dfawcus — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 22:30:31 +0000

An interesting theory, however I rather suspect it is basically because Limbo had a similar concept for pseudo-enums.

I allowed (e.g.) a syntax like:

    M0, M1, M2, M3, M4: con (1<


That was taken from one of the Limbo papers.



New comment by dfawcus in "The Cost of a Closure in C: The Rest"
dfawcus — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:10:47 +0000

Ah - thanks.  I'll have a play with some of my systems, and see what it shows.



New comment by dfawcus in "The Cost of a Closure in C: The Rest"
dfawcus — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 19:09:46 +0000

Actually lots is still on C89.
I'm trying to drag one program at $employer up to C99 (plus C11 _Generic), so I can then subsequently drag it to the bits of C23 which GCC 13 supports.
This all takes times, and having to convince colleagues during code reviews.
What C23 has done is authorise some of the extensions which GCC has had for some time as legitimate things (typeof, etc).
However the ability to adopt is also limited by what third party linters in use at $employer may also support.



New comment by dfawcus in "The Cost of a Closure in C: The Rest"
dfawcus — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:56:21 +0000

Nah - more that a lot of commercial code is written in it; and it doesn't make sense to replace (or rewrite) it at this time.
For example, I'm maintaining some 20 year old C code, which the employer adopted around 10 years ago.  It will likely stay in use at least until the current product is replaced, whenever that may be.



New comment by dfawcus in "The Cost of a Closure in C: The Rest"
dfawcus — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:08:14 +0000

Well his "Normal Functions" (benchmarks/closures/source/normal_functions.cpp in his repo) looks quite similar to what I had with my GNU nested functions using a stand in "wide pointer", and hence no generated trampoline.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46243298)
Which rather suggests to me that such a scheme, but generated by the compiler, should have a similar performance to said "Normal Functions" and hence similar to his preferred lambda form.
Since his benchmark environment is so unwieldy, I may have a go at extracting those two code sets to a standalone environment, and measure them so see...



New comment by dfawcus in "Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian"
dfawcus — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 17:01:45 +0000

Remember that English also suffers from digraphs.
e.g. ch, th, sh, wr, oo; etc
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English
That page lists 15 such over and above the doubled letters.



New comment by dfawcus in "Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian"
dfawcus — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 16:54:25 +0000

The Latin alphabet is also a poor match for English.  We make do.



New comment by dfawcus in "Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian"
dfawcus — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 16:32:13 +0000

Yes.
All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16.
It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.



New comment by dfawcus in "Time-Traveling to 1979: Advice for Designing 'C with Classes"
dfawcus — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:50:03 +0000

> In 1979 the “standard practice in C of passing a large struct to a function” wasn’t just not standard practice, it didn’t exist!
Yes it did exist.  It just wasn't mentioned in the original K&R book.
See this page of a memo from November 78, passing and returning structs was supported.  When I learn C on a Unix system, there was a copy of this memo in the printed papers section.
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/cchan...



New comment by dfawcus in "The uncertain origins of aspirin"
dfawcus — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:57:48 +0000

One quibble I have with the piece is the quotes.
        There is a bark of an Englifh tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful aftringent, and very efficacious in curing aguifh [agues] and intermitting diforders.


        My curiofity prompted me to look into the difpenfatories and books of botany, and examine what they faid concerning it; but there it exifted only by name. I could not find, that it hath, or ever had, any place in pharmacy, or any fuch qualities, as I fufpected afcribed to it by the botanifts.

If (as it appears) the author was unable to type in a long-S, he could at least have used a normal one, making the text more readable.i.e. Englifh => English; aftringent => astringent; aguifh => aguish; diforders => disorders; curiofity => curiosity; difpenfatories => dispensatories; faid => said; exifted => existed; fuch => such; fufpected afcribed => suspected ascribed; botanifts => botanists