Hacker News: dnautics

New comment by dnautics in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

dnautics — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:41:16 +0000

"flat or falling" let's be honest. The amount of "fall" in that graph is basically in the noise. It's been flat.

New comment by dnautics in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

dnautics — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:36:39 +0000

US population has been basically stable (+10% over the past 10 years), so per capita (in terms of the paris agreement timeframe) is a reasonable proxy.

New comment by dnautics in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

dnautics — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:34:21 +0000

In absolute terms, china's coal footprint is increasing, and will continue to increase in the short term, as of early 2026, they were still opening new coal plants.

New comment by dnautics in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

dnautics — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:32:10 +0000

> US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China

This is not really the case, China is the US' #3 trading partner, and trade-corrected GHGs are also down (see the graph further down the page), actually by an slightly better percentage off-peak.

New comment by dnautics in "Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails"

dnautics — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:19:20 +0000

public safety is downstream of distillation. If you can distill claude, then no amount of guardrails on claude will protect you from what someone can do with it.

New comment by dnautics in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

dnautics — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:12:00 +0000

The US currently is at per capita GHG emissions approximately at the the same level as it was in 1910.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states

Despite not being in the paris treaty, the us needs only a 10-12% reduction to meet the paris accord requirements on schedule (43% decrease by 2030).

New comment by dnautics in "Zig Structs of Arrays (2024)"

dnautics — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:57:25 +0000

one is implementable entirely in the parser. overloading (operator or otherwise) in general is a deeper compiler feature

New comment by dnautics in "Zig Structs of Arrays (2024)"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:06:43 +0000

no, in general overloading is not syntactic sugar, it's a feature of the language (being able to (re-)define a function in place X and have it change the function in unrelated place Y).

New comment by dnautics in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:58:45 +0000

- Otzel, an OT library for elixir that is in some common cases 50x faster than the most widely deployed elixir OT library:

https://github.com/ityonemo/otzel

- Spector, a bare-bones CQRS library for elixir that composes extremely well with Otzel:

https://spector.hexdocs.pm/Spector.html

- nanodrop, an elixir library that interfaces with nanodrop spectrophotometers:

https://nanodrop.hexdocs.pm/Nanodrop.html

- opengenepool, a web-based dna editing tool (technically I started this one 11 years ago):

https://opengenepool.vidalalabs.com/ https://github.com/vidala-labs/opengenepool

- a proprietary camera library that communicates with industrial-grade digital cameras.

- a full on self-hosted lab management system (journal articles, obsidian-like notes, lab notebook, kanban, embedded dna editor, LIMS), obviously this builds on all of the above items

New comment by dnautics in "I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:24:16 +0000

gemini gave it the old college try

New comment by dnautics in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:33:28 +0000

how did they ever survive in the pre-EU/schengen/EEC era?

New comment by dnautics in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:42:24 +0000

you don't think the elixir type system is effective? I've never seen a bolted-on type system get so much acceptance from the hardcore "you can add types into my dead hands" crowd

New comment by dnautics in "Zig Structs of Arrays (2024)"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:23:45 +0000

forced use of parens, or else syntax error.

New comment by dnautics in "Zig Structs of Arrays (2024)"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:42:29 +0000

I have a sibling comment -- having thought about this for a very very long time, zig should really implement binary pseudo-operator syntactic sugar. I don't think this violate zig's spirit of 'no hidden function calls' in that I don't think it takes much of a mental lift to "get" that (_ <+> _) means "heyo this is a function call, not a true operator".

New comment by dnautics in "Zig Structs of Arrays (2024)"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:33:29 +0000

you actually don't want "operator overloading", you want syntactic sugar. I once proposed just a special operator syntax at the parser level, but it got rejected, but if you REALLY wanted it, you could probably do this in about 100-120 lines as a fork of the zig compiler, just hacking (a <_> b) as a special form to be transformed into @"<_>"(a, b). Requiring parentheses elides questions about operator precedence.

    const @"<+>" = @import("operator_module").plus;

    ...

    const x = (a <+> b);

New comment by dnautics in "Zig by Example"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:59:12 +0000

> Linters are not exactly a new idea, and they can be pushed quite far.

That's not an answer. There's a reason why you can't do it in C, and the reason is "the stdlib is poorly designed". No amount of linting can get you around that.

New comment by dnautics in "Zig by Example"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:44:46 +0000

Point being, these two things aren't different (variable assignment and function calls); IIUC they go through the same analysis pathway, result location semantics.

https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Result-Location-Se...

It's a little bit weird, since the types flow in the reverse direction than you would expect.

New comment by dnautics in "Zig by Example"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:41:52 +0000

> Everything you do in Zig can be done almost in the same way in C or C++.

Can you do this in C?

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

New comment by dnautics in "Zig by Example"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:37:34 +0000

that's not quite right.

1) It's var foo = Foo{...}; (no intervening dot)

2) I think parent commenter is referring to function call use case call_my_func(.{...})

New comment by dnautics in "Zig by Example"

dnautics — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:32:59 +0000

> And the compiler should be just a bit smarter to avoid the .{} thing when it is not strictly necessary.

What's your plan for this? Rebuilding the C varargs mess from first principles?