Hacker News: diziet_sma

New comment by diziet_sma in "Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track"

diziet_sma — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:32:49 +0000

> Python essentially bet on UTF-32 (with space-saving optimisations)

How so? Python3 strings are unicode and all the encoding/decoding functions default to utf-8. In practice this means all the python I write is utf-8 compatible unicode and I don't ever have to think about it.

New comment by diziet_sma in "Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]"

diziet_sma — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 23:58:53 +0000

Universal search on Google Pixels has solved a lot of the text selection problems on Android for me, with the exception being selecting text which requires scrolling.

New comment by diziet_sma in "Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO"

diziet_sma — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 10:16:29 +0000

I think self-driving is what makes Waymo premium. A Waymo is a better experience because the Waymo is safer and smoother driver than any human could ever be.

New comment by diziet_sma in "HRT's Python fork: Leveraging PEP 690 for faster imports"

diziet_sma — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 22:54:21 +0000

I took the parent post to mean that a few large firms have emerged as clear winners of the speed game, and most other companies compete on (relatively) longer time scales now.

New comment by diziet_sma in "My Ideal Array Language"

diziet_sma — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 21:23:53 +0000

It's not the same thing as multidimensional arrays though. You can have multidimensional arrays without rank polymorphism. Rank polymorphism makes working with multidimensional arrays much easier because you can write one function which works over input arrays with different shapes.

New comment by diziet_sma in "The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

diziet_sma — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:27:18 +0000

Yes we do. The OP's point is that _if_ there is collusion, building housing will help solve the collusion problem _and_ solve the housing shortage.

Spending effort on theoretical collusion which may or may not be happening is a diversion from the real problem, which is lack of housing supply.

New comment by diziet_sma in "Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers"

diziet_sma — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 02:09:59 +0000

Or perhaps cooking? Cooking can really spike AQI if ventilation is suboptimal.

Another potential explanation is cleaning products.

I think these are both far more likely than perfume, as there is a much stronger link between AQI and lung cancer than perfume and lung cancer (if there is any at all).

New comment by diziet_sma in "The first year of free-threaded Python"

diziet_sma — Sat, 17 May 2025 10:10:50 +0000

There have been many attempts to make a Python JIT that is compatible with CPython to various levels of success. However the larger reason is that the gains from removing the GIL far exceeds the gains from a JIT.

If you're writing performance sensitive python code, the "hot" code is likely already in a C-extension, such as Numpy. So there is negligible benefit to running the code with a JIT.

New comment by diziet_sma in "Show HN: Nix Ninja – open-source Ninja-compatible build system for Nix"

diziet_sma — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 12:34:08 +0000

How long do we expect it to take dynamic derivations to get stabilized?

The GitHub RFC says it's only 80% complete

New comment by diziet_sma in "fd: A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'"

diziet_sma — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 14:39:03 +0000

  fd --help | rg link -C 10

Set -L --follow to descend into symlinked directories. The default is to not.

New comment by diziet_sma in "IO Devices and Latency"

diziet_sma — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 16:08:56 +0000

These aren't financial exchanges, they're a sports betting and an expense management system.

I share OPs skepticism. Market makers invest in microwave towers, FPGAs, etc. I would be surprised if sqlite backed by NVME is on the other end of all that specialized hardware.

Order matching is a single threaded thing though. I would be curious if anyone knows how electronic trading systems are actually implemented.

New comment by diziet_sma in "Jevons paradox"

diziet_sma — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:22:18 +0000

.... I mean in the case of more efficient cars supply of oil explicitly did not change.

There are meaningful differences in terms of pricing strategies, anticipating demand, etc.

New comment by diziet_sma in "Jevons paradox"

diziet_sma — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 15:22:02 +0000

Yes, but for subtly different reasons. In the case of induced demand, the supply curve shifts to the right (eg number of highway lanes increases) so we move to the right on demand curve (or quantity increases, eg more people drive). On the Jevon's paradox case, efficiency increases (eg fuel efficiency increases), so the _demand_ curve shifts (eg more people people drive).

New comment by diziet_sma in "TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday"

diziet_sma — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 18:18:25 +0000

That isn't even a remotely realistic propaganda threat, while tick tock arguably is.

New comment by diziet_sma in "AI founders will learn the bitter lesson"

diziet_sma — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 12:43:10 +0000

> We’ve seen this pattern in speech recognition, computer chess, and computer vision.

I think the bitter lesson is true for AI researchers, but OP overstates it's relevance to actual products. For example the best chess engines are very much still very much specific to chess. They incorporate more neural networks now, but they are still quite specific.

New comment by diziet_sma in "Intel's Death and Potential Revival"

diziet_sma — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 14:05:16 +0000

Intel products have been losing x86 to AMD in servers, desktop, and laptops. x86 itself is losing market share to ARM in the server and laptop space. Intel has no foothold in the fastest growing chip space (GPUs).

Intel foundry has fallen behind TSMC to the point the latest Intel laptop chip (Lunar Lake) was manufactured using TSMC. Recent attempts to attract external client s to fab using Intel Foundry have not met expectations.

Given all this, I think quite a lot of hand-wringing is warranted.

New comment by diziet_sma in "Inside Annapurna Interactive's Mass Walkout"

diziet_sma — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 12:00:27 +0000

If I didn't know the original quote I would have thought the same. It would be clearer to use L̶A̶R̶R̶Y̶ Megan Ellison

New comment by diziet_sma in "What if public housing were for everyone?"

diziet_sma — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 15:14:45 +0000

A significant amount of zoning is about what type of housing you can build where, how much of it you can build, and how you have to build it.

For example, in Berkeley California, which was one of the first cities to implement "exclusionary zoning" has roughly the following zoning restrictions:

* R-1: One home per lot or estate, only. Bans apartments in 49% of the city.

* R-1A: One home per lot or estate, unless the parcel exceeds 2,400 SF which allows for an additional home.

* R-2: Two homes on one parcel, only.

* R-2A: One home per every 1,650 square feet on a parcel. A typical residential parcel in Berkeley is about 5,300 square ft thus commonly three homes maximum.

[source](https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/berkeleys-upzoning-would...)

New comment by diziet_sma in "Memory leak proof every C program"

diziet_sma — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 01:43:48 +0000

This does help, but the hard part of memory leaks is leaks across module/api boundaries. You can write a memory safe module, I can write a memory safe program, but when my program starts calling your program there's nothing validating I'm maintaining the invariants required to avoid memory leaks.

Hopefully the invariants are documented, but relying on documentation to help programmers avoid memory leaks is far from foolproof.

New comment by diziet_sma in "Ask HN: Why do people use password managers?"

diziet_sma — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 19:42:33 +0000

A similar thing happened to me, but one day my keepass file was corrupted instead of 0 bytes. Quickly switched to 1Password after that.