Hacker News: eMSF

New comment by eMSF in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

eMSF — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:59:14 +0000

Using a plug-in hybrid as an EV can and will wear out the drive battery over the lifetime of the car. It doesn't even matter if you don't intend to keep the car for very long as a rational market will price this in. The cost ($10k or more) goes a long way at the pump.

New comment by eMSF in "A safe, non-owning C++ pointer class"

eMSF — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 21:31:31 +0000

Related to this, GNU's libstdc++ shared_ptr implementation actually opts not to use atomic arithmetic when it infers that the program is not using threads.

New comment by eMSF in "iPhone Air"

eMSF — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 23:56:21 +0000

Even with a 5" screen, it was bigger than for example iPhone 17 in every single dimension due to its hefty bezels (and not insignificantly so; iPhone 17 is closer in width to iPhone 13 Mini than a Dell Streak).

Screen diameter is in general a bit misleading figure for phones from different generations as "full screen" phones tend to have a taller aspect ratio and hence larger diameter even with same body dimensions.

New comment by eMSF in "A Rust shaped hole"

eMSF — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 09:46:57 +0000

While it is true that only class types have member functions in C++, that does not mean that objects of other types demand the use of macros. C++ also supports non-member functions, and the standard library contains a fair amount of these; including `std::size` that can be used to "get" the length of an array.

(C++ arrays are different from arrays in many other programming languages, though not necessarily Rust, in that their type specifies their length, so in a way this is something you already "have" but certainly there are cases where it is convenient to "get" this information from an object.)

New comment by eMSF in "The C23 edition of Modern C"

eMSF — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 21:40:45 +0000

How could you ever continue after the second statement without checking if you actually read an integer or not? How would you know what you can do with a?

New comment by eMSF in "C++ String Conversion: Exploring std:from_chars in C++17 to C++26"

eMSF — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 08:52:32 +0000

from_chars_result closely matches the strtol line of functions we've had for decades. Not returning the end position would be weird here!

New comment by eMSF in "Lesser known tricks, quirks and features of C"

eMSF — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 09:08:06 +0000

Well, obviously it doesn't have parentheses. It's not like this is the only instance where adding parentheses affects the end result.

You could write even more complex declarators (but don't have to), but that would not prove that some other syntax is inherently intuitive. Case in point, I cannot parse the Go syntax as I do not know Go.

In my experience pointers to arrays are rather uncommon and I'm not sure that I've ever written a function returning one, having even less of a need for a pointer to such. (Thus out of all these, only your first example is somewhat common in practice.)

New comment by eMSF in "Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin"

eMSF — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 07:45:17 +0000

ABP was initially released almost a full decade before UBO was a thing (although I don't know if the Chrome version is related), so I wouldn't judge someone for just using it...

New comment by eMSF in "Is C99 actually Turing-complete? (2016)"

eMSF — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 19:12:39 +0000

It will eventually not matter, but I didn't suggest using a single file.

New comment by eMSF in "Is C99 actually Turing-complete? (2016)"

eMSF — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 18:58:50 +0000

Why does everything have to fit in the memory all of a sudden? Open files, there's your infinite tape.

New comment by eMSF in "DALL-E 3 is now publicly available inside Bing"

eMSF — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 15:44:25 +0000

The Finnish caption is quite a bit worse than "all your base are belong to us" type of invalid grammar. Translating it back, even with best intentions (ignoring the naive attempt of translating "from" in place) it reads "Create images from AI generated words".

New comment by eMSF in "Just how constexpr is C++20’s std:string?"

eMSF — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 00:36:57 +0000

A lot of folks write char const * (and T const& in C++), and the "rule of thumb" is to read the declaration right to left. In this case, pointer (to) const char. Works also with multiple consts or levels of indirection.

New comment by eMSF in "Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints"

eMSF — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 21:20:47 +0000

Block heaters can be used to heat the engine coolant (and afterwards the cabin) with or without running the engine. I doubt any cars have special batteries for these (even a drive battery of a non-plugin hybrid is somewhat small to be useful); block heaters that don't require external electricity simply use the car's fuel in an auxiliary burner.

New comment by eMSF in "The C Standard Library Function Isspace() Depends on Locale"

eMSF — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 21:24:06 +0000

While writing a fancy word counter I learnt that glibc iswspace (or the glibc locale data) actually does not consider non-breaking spaces as, well, spaces even when using a Unicode locale. This apparently conforms to ISO 30112. (For example MSVCRT does do so.)

I happened to notice this via a result mismatch as GNU wc does count NBSPs as word separators. Even though it uses iswspace, it also additionally checks for a hard coded set of Unicode non-breaking spaces.

(I have to say I'm a bit surprised at being at getting voted hidden here. I thought this was mostly related to the topic at hand. I would of course gladly be corrected if mistaken about the details.)

New comment by eMSF in "Bakhmut Is Gone: An Aerial Look at the War’s Destruction"

eMSF — Mon, 22 May 2023 22:42:38 +0000

This thread stinks of cabbage to high heaven. Can you actually fool even yourselves anymore? Russians have lost the war a long time ago, it's barely a nasty procession that's left.

New comment by eMSF in "New C features in GCC 13"

eMSF — Thu, 04 May 2023 15:30:59 +0000

The type of the expression 'x' is int, not char (in C). The type of an expression consisting of a variable name is the type of the variable (as far as sizeof is concerned).

New comment by eMSF in "The Difference Between European and American Butter"

eMSF — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 18:59:40 +0000

The 2000 kcal reference (which I assume you're referring to) isn't for "an average man", but for an average person. For an average man, the reference value would be somewhere between 2.5k to 3k.

New comment by eMSF in "How can we stop the CO2 that plants store from leaking back into the air?"

eMSF — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 18:31:25 +0000

>They are demonstrably and objectively not “fine”

Aka "my opinions are the objective viewpoint".

>They are the primary destructive force in society

Hyperbolic nonsense.

Today's mobile society with cars is better than anything else that has ever existed.

New comment by eMSF in "90k Miles on My Tesla Model 3 – Maintenance Costs Higher Than Expected"

eMSF — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 23:08:15 +0000

That may have been the case sometime between the World Wars, but the only reason you'd do that these days is if you particularly enjoy visiting the shop.

Modern oils can easily last 20000 km (if you'd want, you could only change the oil every other time you change the filter) barring particularly harsh conditions or poor and obsolete engine design. Also, lots of driving (as in typically longer trips) means the oil lasts better.

Oil changes are a common nuisance only if you make them one.

New comment by eMSF in "Finding Nice MD5s Using Rust"

eMSF — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:30:24 +0000

A local community had a rather similar programming challenge years ago (although it was limited to digits-only/letters-only and pi-digits categories).

I revisited the challenge some years later, and managed to achieve a little over 200 MH/s per core on a 2013 CPU. I'd expect (or at least hope) for modern very high-end CPUs to reach somewhere between 5000-10000 MH/s when using all cores, using a similar decently optimized solution. (The thing you want to optimize is the hashing part.) A high-end GPU from 2016 should manage at least 10000 MH/s and more modern ones are likely to be several times faster.