Hacker News: jamiejquinn

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again"

jamiejquinn — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:19:23 +0000

Absolutely sublime attention to detail. Reminds me of the series on fonts in Josh Ge's blog on Cogmind (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/09/cogmind-fonts/)

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Show HN: Eyot, A programming language where the GPU is just another thread"

jamiejquinn — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:44:31 +0000

CUDA having had such a wide moat for so long has completely warped the GPU software ecosystem. There just isn't any incentive for Nvidia to meaningfully contribute to any external, standards-driven effort like SYCL or OpenCL. Real shame because it leads to a tonne of duplicated effort as AMD and Intel try to reimplement the exact same libraries as Nvidia (and usually worse because neither seem to prioritise good software for whatever reason).

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig"

jamiejquinn — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:01:04 +0000

Delightful, I'll play about with both, thanks!

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s"

jamiejquinn — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:03:24 +0000

My understanding is all of Google's AI is trained and run on quite old but well designed TPUs. For a while the issue was that developing these AI models still needed flexibility and customised hardware like TPUs couldn't accomodate that.

Now that the model architecture has settled into something a bit more predictable, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a little more specialisation in the hardware.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig"

jamiejquinn — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:12:39 +0000

Can't agree more. I hope someone puts some work into a less painful way to manage strings in std. I would but I don't manipulate strings quite enough to support usecases more than basically concatenation...

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Xfce is great"

jamiejquinn — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 08:19:41 +0000

I ran a pretty vanilla xfce setup from about 2010 until 2024 until I moved to i3. Xfce is great generally, pretty easy to backup and share the whole config, ideal collection of apps. I'm sure gnome and kde have more features but for a good, solid, predictable desktop experience, cannae beat xfce.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Zigbook Is Plagiarizing the Zigtools Playground"

jamiejquinn — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 14:06:28 +0000

Ditto... I love Zig as a language but I worry the high-level community builders (including Andrew) are a little too antagonistic to foster a positive, tolerant, patient community in the long term. In saying that, my infrequent interactions in the reddit and discord are always pleasant.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Open-source Zig book"

jamiejquinn — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 04:43:11 +0000

Snap! I also played around with closures a tonne in Zig. Definitely possible but not... ergonomic. Haven't ended up using them much.

And agree with allocators; in C I always considered using custom allocators but never really needed to. Having them just available in the zig std means I actually use them. The testing allocator is particularly useful IMO.

Never used Go but if it's Zig-like I might give it a shot! Thanks!

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Open-source Zig book"

jamiejquinn — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:50:12 +0000

For many languages I agree, especially languages with steep learning curves (e.g. Rust, Haskell). But zig is dead fast to learn so I'd recommend just nipping through Ziglings and seeing if its a language you want to add to the toolbox. It took me only about 10 hours to pick up and get used to and it has immediately replaced C and C++ in my personal projects. It's really just a safer, more ergonomic C. If you already love C, I maybe wouldn't bother.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Open-source Zig book"

jamiejquinn — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 08:37:28 +0000

Has it changed how you program in other languages? Because that to me is the true mark of a thought-shifting language.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Open-source Zig book"

jamiejquinn — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 07:53:32 +0000

I agree, I love zig but the things that make me program differently are features like excellent enum/union support, defer and comptime, which aren't readily available in the other languages I tend to use (C++, Fortran and Python).

New comment by jamiejquinn in "What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?"

jamiejquinn — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 03:50:59 +0000

One recent HN post I loved recently was on Arthur Whitney's insanely terse C code[0]. I personally find it beautiful, and many others did, but many did not. So it goes.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Why is Zig so cool?"

jamiejquinn — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 08:08:58 +0000

Perl I used in 2008 or so but not since. Haven't come across Perl 6.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Why is Zig so cool?"

jamiejquinn — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 08:07:28 +0000

The article's claim of Zig being a "totally new way to write programs" is quite mad but I'd like to make a different claim: Zig's own development is a totally new way of writing programming languages (or is at least very rare).

While I don't wholly agree with all choices made by Andrew and the Zig team, I greatly appreciate the care with which they develop features. The slow pace of deliberating over features, refining them, and removing unnecessary ones seems in sharp contrast to the development of any other langauge I'm aware of. I'm no language historian though, happy to be challenged.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Why is Zig so cool?"

jamiejquinn — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 07:53:51 +0000

Wow, Raku looks like a really interesting language, I'd never heard of it before!

Have you used it in any large projects?

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Why is Zig so cool?"

jamiejquinn — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 07:48:33 +0000

I completely agree. One of Zig's big competitors, Odin, has a more explicit syntax for this where `0..<5` is an open interval and `0...5` is closed.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste"

jamiejquinn — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 03:11:55 +0000

I don't know if taste is the correct word here but I agree with the spirit of the article, especially the parts on tinkering being a form of practice. Play (in the form of enjoyable tinkering) is such a powerful motivator in learning. In saying that I've found two big limitations with this style of play-based learning:

1. It can easily devolve into meaningless tweaking (see author's point about touching dotfiles) which can still be satisfying but not very impactful. 2. It's hard to maintain motivation when something stops being fun. This is where external motivators like bosses, clients and scoreboards (e.g. Advent of Code) are actually valuable...

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Building a message queue with only two UNIX signals"

jamiejquinn — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:48:19 +0000

Nah, I wouldn't say this is rude or even a ragebait title. It's completely accurate and to the point...

New comment by jamiejquinn in "How can England possibly be running out of water?"

jamiejquinn — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 07:36:17 +0000

Aye, the fact that the WHOLE system would cost trillions to upgrade doesn't stop anyone from upgrading it slowly in this way. The problem will still exist in 50 years, any progress is better than none.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Jeena's Hyprland Demo"

jamiejquinn — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 07:54:49 +0000

If you've tried it and it doesn't fit, that seems fine, it's all just personal workflow.

For me it's pure speed at getting to where I need to go. My notes live on workspace 1, my main workspace on 2 and browser on 3, so I'm just a single key combination away from most of what I need. Can still alt+tab if I like.