Hacker News: ghusbands

New comment by ghusbands in "Rewriting in Rust"

ghusbands — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:27:40 +0000

You're referring specifically to tracing garbage collection. When a reference count reaches zero, that garbage is collected, often recursively. Among programming language designers, ARC is considered a GC strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_s...

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/reference-counting-garbage-col...

New comment by ghusbands in "Sonic Pi"

ghusbands — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 11:59:47 +0000

It's even more fatiguing to see so many comments about whether something is LLM-written or human-written. I hope we get past this stage, soon.

New comment by ghusbands in "When str.lower() is a security vulnerability in Python"

ghusbands — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:46:15 +0000

So someone used lower() from an unspecified version of Unicode when the standard was very specific about which to use. And they say "There's also a database of Unicode 3.2.0 data available on every version of Python (unicodedata.ucd_3_2_0) specifically for the StringPrep and IDNA algorithms", so the right version is available.

And then the fix is to hardcode a bunch of special cases which again depend on exactly which version of Unicode is in use, and so will break again in the same way in future, rather than just using the right version?

New comment by ghusbands in "Rewriting in Rust"

ghusbands — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 10:51:20 +0000

Refcounting is indeed a form of GC (and the languages that want to handle cycles then need an extra form of GC on top of it).

New comment by ghusbands in "The true power of regular expressions (2012)"

ghusbands — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:12:51 +0000

Regular expressions aren't an algorithm. DFA/NFA-based matching and backtracking are both valid implementation strategies, with different performance characteristics. Backtracking is arguably the most intuitive direct implementation. You and the other poster are confusing the mathematical definition with algorithms used to perform matching.

New comment by ghusbands in "Claude: System Prompts"

ghusbands — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:02:32 +0000

So, on a news discussion site, active discussion gets penalised. There really should be a human in the loop on that one.

New comment by ghusbands in "App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours"

ghusbands — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:42:44 +0000

The article now says "[UPDATE, SATURDAY 8 AUGUST: Consider this entire story retracted for now. Details forthcoming.]"

New comment by ghusbands in "The true power of regular expressions (2012)"

ghusbands — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:30:52 +0000

In common usage, "regex" means patterns accepted by regex engines like PCRE. Police the formal term "regular expression" if you like, but ordinary usage does not honour that distinction.

Also, it's not guaranteed that an engine implementing regular expressions will have O(n) time complexity - a backtracking engine can still have much worse performance on formal regular expressions.

New comment by ghusbands in "The mask that compiles to nothing: how HotSpots JIT learned to reason about bits"

ghusbands — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:34:25 +0000

Every optimisation like this increases the chance of other optimisations/vectorisations being able to usefully fire, and sometimes these very specific cases are themselves from optimisations or type/range restrictions.

New comment by ghusbands in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

ghusbands — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 11:44:36 +0000

Do you posit that there are enough examples of 30x8 ellipses encoded in braille online for ChatGPT to learn from but not 31x7 or 31x9 ellipses? That seems unlikely.

New comment by ghusbands in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

ghusbands — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:22:45 +0000

They lost me a little before then - Claude Code's regressions were so very obvious and there's no sign they've learned their lesson in this article or in the comments of those who work on Claude Code on HN. They'll continue to tweak and generally mess around with a product people are using, altering the behaviour without notice in ways that can severely impact use, for months! GPT5.4 has been remarkably consistent and capable, as a replacement. I've cancelled my max plan.

New comment by ghusbands in "MuJoCo – Advanced Physics Simulation"

ghusbands — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:52:48 +0000

In the video in question, he doesn't seem able to choose a good scoring function for the stochastic solver (even over multiple weeks), seemingly choosing a linear sum of distances (see 8:50) between simulation and reality. That's a mistake that not even an undergraduate should make. He needs some domain experts.

New comment by ghusbands in "A Python Interpreter Written in Python"

ghusbands — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:05:45 +0000

Partly, it's simply that words matter. An interpreter is not a compiler, even if partial evaluators and Futamura transforms are very cool. Posting about them in a context that isn't a confusion about what interpreters are may have been more fruitful.

New comment by ghusbands in "A Python Interpreter Written in Python"

ghusbands — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:28:41 +0000

Yes, that's another great example of the same kind of thing - creating a JIT from an interpreter. It remains true that interpreters do not directly generate machine code.

New comment by ghusbands in "A Python Interpreter Written in Python"

ghusbands — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:44:44 +0000

That's a partial evaluator, not an interpreter, and it converts an interpreter into compiler, which are different things.

New comment by ghusbands in "A Python Interpreter Written in Python"

ghusbands — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:42:09 +0000

This is still incorrect. A bytecode interpreter, as its name indicates, interprets a bytecode. Typically, compiling a bytecode to native machine code is the work of a JIT compiler.

New comment by ghusbands in "Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms – Moncef Abboud"

ghusbands — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:04:52 +0000

It has DEFLATE code, Snappy code, LZ4 code, ZSTD exploration, and describes many involved sub-algorithms, with diagrams - what more were you wanting?

New comment by ghusbands in "Servo is now available on crates.io"

ghusbands — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:38:43 +0000

I wonder why most of the "g" characters are cropped.

New comment by ghusbands in "Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)"

ghusbands — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:04:11 +0000

True, but that’s using “effects” in a broader sense than people seem to mean here. The discussion seems to be about the visible effects the audience experiences as effects, and whether those age well, not invisible digital cleanup, compositing, or set extension.

New comment by ghusbands in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

ghusbands — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:55:27 +0000

Even with high effort, the adaptive thinking can just choose no thinking. See bcherny's post they were replying to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668520