Hacker News: gignico

New comment by gignico in "U.S. science is in chaos"

gignico — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:32:33 +0000

Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.

New comment by gignico in "U.S. science is in chaos"

gignico — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:39:16 +0000

We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order to suppress research on climate change and other controversial topics. If the government can cut your grant at any time without notice or appeal you will think twice before publishing results that go against their ideology, or even before publishing a criticism on Twitter. This is true especially if you are not tenured, which accounts for the majority of the academic world.

New comment by gignico in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

gignico — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:49:49 +0000

Afaik std::span does not need anything that was not in C++98 already, or am I missing something?

New comment by gignico in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

gignico — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:20:56 +0000

> It seems that some people are really losing the taste for good readable code.

It seems that some people never had taste for good reliable code. Use `void ` and now any error whatsoever is a direct undefined behavior. Moreover `std::span` clearly says that you are not* taking ownership of the memory (even though the language does not check it of course), while `void *` does not.

I understand that people can have many things to say about C++, and I do as well, but `std::span` should have been there decades ago and is such a life saver in these situations. A truly zero-cost abstraction which effectively saves you from a lot of troubles.

New comment by gignico in "Garbage Collection Without Unsafe Code"

gignico — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:22:08 +0000

Too bad HN nicknames cannot be put for sale :)

New comment by gignico in "Claude Opus 4.7 Model Card"

gignico — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:55:42 +0000

So LLMs are destroying the economy and the environment but at least “catastrophic risk” is still low. Ok then…

New comment by gignico in "Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness"

gignico — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:45:12 +0000

Off topic, but I sincerely ask: am I the only one that is disturbed by the use of the term "Mac OS X" to refer to modern versions of the OS that is currently called "macOS"? (and not MacOS either)

I mean, the name was changed ten years ago...

New comment by gignico in "Metro stop is Ancient Rome's new attraction"

gignico — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:26:24 +0000

Is it really worth? YMMV, but yes if you ask me.

New comment by gignico in "Metro stop is Ancient Rome's new attraction"

gignico — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:21:12 +0000

For reasons, I used to go to Rome quite frequently in the 2010s, and the construction of Metro C was already a meme. But now some of the stations are quite interesting indeed.

New comment by gignico in "A Canonical Generalization of OBDD"

gignico — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:09:05 +0000

Thanks!

The arXiv submission says the paper is submitted to SAT26, did it get accepted?

New comment by gignico in "A Canonical Generalization of OBDD"

gignico — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:48:43 +0000

Positively surprised to see stuff like these on HN first page!

If any author is around, do you have an implementation that can be compared with CUDD and similar BDD libraries?

New comment by gignico in "Scientists are working on "everything vaccines""

gignico — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:47:24 +0000

I know about reproductive pressure and I’ve read The Selfish Gene. What you say is correct but does not explain that “if evolution did not, better not do it” attitude of the original comment, which I think is wrong for many reasons as I’ve wrote.

New comment by gignico in "Scientists are working on "everything vaccines""

gignico — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:26:13 +0000

The problem is implying that “if evolution did not do it there must be a reason”, because 1) it makes evolution look like an engineer evaluating trade offs, which is not and 2) it considers the current state of affairs the final “product”, which is not. For example, flowers did not exist in the Cretaceous, so somebody looking at what evolution did until then would say “if evolution did not invent flowers, then we’d better not do it”. But of course that’s absurd.

Also as I said evolution is not a process towards a goal. There are 8 billion people around the world which proves Homo sapiens is quite fit for its environment so the pressure to evolve further features is quite low.

New comment by gignico in "Modern Generic SVGA driver for Windows 3.1"

gignico — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:23:59 +0000

> Running Windows 3.1 in True Color Full HD

People from the time would be astonished by the hardware we have now yet bloated software globs up every ounce of performance. What a waste!

New comment by gignico in "Scientists are working on "everything vaccines""

gignico — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 11:30:20 +0000

Evolution is not a process toward better quality of life and life expectancy of individuals. As long as enough individuals can reach the age to procreate in their environment evolution is done. Evolution didn’t train our bodies to reject the diseases we already have the vaccines for neither, so your reasoning would apply to smallpox as well. And what about viruses appeared after Homo sapiens evolved (such as HIV)?

New comment by gignico in "Intuiting Pratt Parsing"

gignico — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 11:23:11 +0000

Until you need to do more than all-or-nothing parsing :) see tree-sitter for example, or any other efficient LSP implementation of incremental parsing.

New comment by gignico in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

gignico — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:52:56 +0000

I don’t know if someone said it already, but when Steve Jobs said this famous quote (“reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”) he then died maybe just a couple of years later.

Hope this does not happen to code :)

New comment by gignico in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

gignico — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:40:54 +0000

Your statement contradicts itself. It was unusable hard before non-lexical lifetimes, but they vastly increased the complexity? Then maybe what’s complex for compiler writers to implement can make the user’s life easier by lowering the complexity of their code?

New comment by gignico in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

gignico — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:02:19 +0000

I'm not sure it shows that. Even basic features of Rust we take from granted come from concepts common users do not need to understand. Borrowing of lifetime draws from affine types, but nobody cares when writing Rust code. If in 2012 you read a similar article explaining borrow checking in academic terms you would have thought Rust would be unusably hard, which is not.

Also I do not think that adding features is always bad to the point of comparing with Scala. Most of the things the article mentions will be almost invisible to users. For example, the `!Forget` thing it mentions will just end up with users getting new errors for things that before would have caused memory leaks. What a disgrace!

Then, pattern types allow you to remove panics from code, which is super helpful in many critical contexts where Rust is used in production, even in the Linux kernel once they will bump the language version so far.

New comment by gignico in "Devirtualization and Static Polymorphism"

gignico — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 08:38:49 +0000

Well, Rust as well has been around for more than 10 years now. I don't imply Rust invented the approach. Surely academia knew about it decades before. I was rather commenting on how one's mental model of things can change by learning new languages.