Hacker News: estebank

New comment by estebank in "Measles surge in Utah sparks fears US could undo decades of progress"

estebank — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:15:33 +0000

Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

New comment by estebank in "UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s"

estebank — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:33:49 +0000

Has actual use increased or is it now just more visible to you?

New comment by estebank in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

estebank — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:28:59 +0000

YIMBYism is about relaxed zoning so that commerce and diverse types of housing aren't physically segregated, but even in the most "free" places industry is segregated because the needs of industry are incompatible with human habitation. No one wants to live next to a refinery, nor should they be put in a position where that's their only option.

(I get that you're being ironic.)

New comment by estebank in "French-Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis', dies at 56"

estebank — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:27:23 +0000

Nitpick: it's Colombia, not Columbia. And the last name is Garcia Marquez. Splitting half of the last name is not generally done. It sounds like calling somebody called McDonald just Mac.

New comment by estebank in "Martin Scorsese Is Embracing A.I."

estebank — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:05:56 +0000

I read books and watch movies to engage and be moved by stories I didn't know I wanted, that surprise me and/or leave me thinking for a while.

I loved Annihilation and it's sequels, not knowing what I was getting into. I would never have come up with those stories. And a one to one translation of the text to screen would have left us without an interesting movie on its own right.

New comment by estebank in "Announcing Rust 1.96"

estebank — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:21:27 +0000

Yes, but no, but also yes.

Editions are for language evolution. Evolving the std does fit the bill. Edition aware path resolution isn't a thing. It will likely be a thing starting with Edition 2027. Range is likely to be the first type to use this feature upcoming.

New comment by estebank in "Announcing Rust 1.96"

estebank — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:21:21 +0000

The full transition won't be completed until 2027 edition, when the meaning of the `..` operator is expected to swap to the new type.

New comment by estebank in "you_can::turn_off_the_borrow_checker"

estebank — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:23:12 +0000

I think you meant TokenStream. They are trees, behind the scenes, because matching delimiters happens early on between lexing and parsing. By the time the rustc_proc_macro::TokenStream is exposed, the rustc_ast::tokenstream::TokenTree is hidden to the proc macro API.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/nightly-rustc/rustc_ast/tok...

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/nightly-rustc/rustc_proc_ma...

New comment by estebank in "Migrating from Go to Rust"

estebank — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:57:19 +0000

There's work on edition aware name resolution so that a type with the "nice path" can change over an edition while still accessible through a longer path, but 1) it's not implemented yet, 2) it hasn't been used yet (see 1), 3) if it is ever used it should be done very sparingly (because of the bafflement that can occur if someone follows older docs in the new edition, implementation will come with efforts to mitigate these problems).

New comment by estebank in "you_can::turn_off_the_borrow_checker"

estebank — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:00:54 +0000

Rust macros are Token Trees and provide namespace hygiene, so not quite "text in, text out".

New comment by estebank in "you_can::turn_off_the_borrow_checker"

estebank — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:58:00 +0000

That kind of code doesn't have to hurt performance, as long as monomorphization, inlining or JITting are available to the toolchain. If every single method access is a virtual-table call, then yes, there's an "unnecessary" cost. But you shouldn't be writing high-level looking code in such a language if you care about that level of performance.

New comment by estebank in "Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines"

estebank — Thu, 21 May 2026 23:34:48 +0000

VB had case insensitive name resolution.

New comment by estebank in "Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines"

estebank — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:23:13 +0000

VisualBasic did that. I think it is a mistake. But that doesn't mean that the compiler can't detect that and tell you how to fix it instead.

New comment by estebank in "Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines"

estebank — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:57:03 +0000

If you had a "canonical datastructure database", you could have very short annotations on every standard library for any language that indexes a function to their canonical name. After that you only need to update the database.

New comment by estebank in "Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines"

estebank — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:49:32 +0000

In the Rust toolchain we've done the same. It just so happens that rustdoc already has introduced annotations for "aliases" so that when someone searches for push and it doesn't exist, append would show up. Having those annotations already meant that bootstrapping the feature to check the aliases during name resolution errors in rustc was almost trivial. I love it when improving one thing improves another indirectly too.

I really appreciate them going out of their way to do this, being quite aware of the hidden complexity in doing it.

New comment by estebank in "New features in GCC 16: Improved error messages and SARIF output"

estebank — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:54:17 +0000

Concepts support (like traits I'm Rust) is necessary for good diagnostics, but not sufficient. It gives you the architecture and metadata that you require to infer what the user wants, but a lot of additional analysis on the decision chain that was followed in order to figure out what is relevant and what isn't.

New comment by estebank in "New features in GCC 16: Improved error messages and SARIF output"

estebank — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:49:07 +0000

Even without having concepts, a cpp compiler could conceivably detect at definition time that the template is acting as a generics declaration only, and treat it specially as if it was a "late-bound concept". That would potentially help with codegen, but it would certainly help with making compile errors better. I find it is hard to convince compiler engineers to divorce themselves from what the language semantics are and what the compiler does. As long as the user visible behavior is the same, you can internally handle things differently for conceptually this same feature.

Rust has the same problem as templates with macros. We haven't had a strong need to customize the macrosl evaluation much, but I could very much see us special casing macros that are function like, or have macro arms that can only be a handful of things in order treat them different so diagnostics get better. The only thing that comes to mind thar we do today, is that when a macro call falls through (no macro arm matches), we retry it adding commas in between expressions to see if it was just a typo.

New comment by estebank in "Google changes its search box"

estebank — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:32:58 +0000

> LLMs are 100% better because they'll give me an answer without trying to sell me their thing or pump me with ads.

Yet.

New comment by estebank in "Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features"

estebank — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:05:20 +0000

You can detect with high confidence that a player is aiming at something that shouldn't be visible to them. That goes for both aim bots and wall hacks. The longer they play and the more they do it, the higher the confidence. If you don't want to instaban them because you don't trust the detection enough, use it as a preselection of players to manually review.

New comment by estebank in "USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought"

estebank — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:40:09 +0000

Steak doesn't look like a cow either.