Hacker News: jamiejquinn

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Fluid Simulation for Dummies (2006)"

jamiejquinn — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:40:06 +0000

That's typical of models that use the anelastic approximation, where it's useful for a number of reasons to rewrite the equations replacing the true vertical with a vertically stratified variable. I've seen density, pressure and temperature used.

That's less of a different model and more a different way to rewrite the equations to make them easier to analyse or simulate.

We might be talking at slightly different angles here. There's a strong difference in the equations between compressibity of the fluid due to compression and changes in density due to temperature, chemical concentration, etc. The term compressibility usually refers to the first usage, and modelling it leads to sound waves in the system and has major implications for how the system is simulated, I mean it's an entirely different class of algorithms. The second, where density still changes but not due to compression, so no sound waves, that can be easily modelled without including full compressibility. This allows (generally simpler) incompressible models to still incorporate useful thermal physics where important, like in climate and weather. Also, the smaller the scale of the system the more compressibility matters so I wouldn't be surprised if compressibility starts to matter for e.g. Tornados. But I'm not certain on that...

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Fluid Simulation for Dummies (2006)"

jamiejquinn — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:23:42 +0000

Interestingly, most large-scale atmospheric models I know of use a (mostly) incompressble fluid approximation, even though air is obviously compressible at human scales. It just isn't at the flow speeds and length scales of global-scale fluid models. Where compressibility is important for those models is where density changes due to temperature. Look into the Boussinesq and anelastic approximations if you're interested!

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Super ZSNES – GPU Powered SNES Emulator"

jamiejquinn — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:21:08 +0000

Newer emulator or even a recompilation of an old one. I'd bet there are a few modern compiler tricks that would help even on decades old CPUs.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Why I Write (1946)"

jamiejquinn — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 07:56:28 +0000

If he was an entirely rational being I would agree, but he clearly wasn't and he did hold both views that Scottish identity isn't worth anything and Scots are essentially identical to the English.

Let's be serious, I'm not saying Orwell would be out enslaving Scots given the chance, but saying Scottish culture IS English culture is intentionally erasing a culture and is a racist statement, not unlike the common view that all of Africa is culturally homogenous.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Why I Write (1946)"

jamiejquinn — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:24:17 +0000

Disregarding genuine differences between cultures and intentially treating those cultures as identical is racist. Turns out he did come around later in life - https://www.thenational.scot/news/23716840.george-orwells-an...

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Ubuntu 26.04"

jamiejquinn — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:27:06 +0000

I fundamentally agree with you. I don't think responsibility is quite the right word. But if they don't seem to care about a massive portion of their users, why are they building gnome at all?

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Why I Write (1946)"

jamiejquinn — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:15:33 +0000

An important collection of essays but I struggled to get over his racist claim that the English, Irish, Welsh and Scots are essentially all the same. Probably a good thing since I'm now much more inclined to be questioning of other parts of his writing.

New comment by jamiejquinn in "Claude Opus 4.7"

jamiejquinn — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:33:29 +0000

Or that gulf doesn't exist for the problems they are trying to solve?

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