Hacker News: jhgb

New comment by jhgb in "Vite 8.0 Is Out"

jhgb — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:44:57 +0000

If you want to make ultra-complicated clients, I assume that's what WebAssembly is heading towards. And it doesn't limit you to a poorly evolved language that wasn't intended for ultra-complicated software in the first place, or even force you to use that poorly evolved language on a server if you need to run the same logic in both places.

New comment by jhgb in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

jhgb — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:18:03 +0000

Jevons' paradox still exists. Making X cheaper (usually by needing fewer people to do one unit of X) can and often does lead to more people being needed for X.

New comment by jhgb in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

jhgb — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:13:17 +0000

Merchant shipping contributes around 3% to CO₂ emissions. That is smaller than, e.g., electricity and heat generation, road transportation, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture.

New comment by jhgb in "Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C"

jhgb — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 03:21:26 +0000

C is literally a high level language.

New comment by jhgb in "Gpg.fail"

jhgb — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:32:03 +0000

Nobody decided that it's a crime, and it's unlikely to happen. Question is, what do you do with mandatory snooping of centralized proprietary services that renders them functionally useless aside from "just live with it". I was hoping for actual advice rather than a snarky non-response, yet here we are.

New comment by jhgb in "Gpg.fail"

jhgb — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:30:38 +0000

> Use Signal. Or Wire, or WhatsApp, or some other Signal-protocol-based secure messenger.

That's a "great" idea considering the recent legal developments in the EU, which OpenPGP, as bad as it is, doesn't suffer from. It would be great if the author updated his advice into something more future-proof.

New comment by jhgb in "Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS"

jhgb — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 18:13:06 +0000

> yeah it did not follow Algol syntax but Pascal's and Ada's

Now quite sure what you mean by that; all of Lua, Pascal, and Ada follow Algol's syntax much more closely than C does.

New comment by jhgb in "Show HN: Tacopy – Tail Call Optimization for Python"

jhgb — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:21:58 +0000

...and that costs you code modularity and separate compilation. Why lose them when you don't have to?

New comment by jhgb in "Show HN: Tacopy – Tail Call Optimization for Python"

jhgb — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:55:25 +0000

Yes, except without all the known disadvantages of goto. That's the whole point.

New comment by jhgb in "Show HN: Tacopy – Tail Call Optimization for Python"

jhgb — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:06:56 +0000

It gives you arbitrarily complex control flow even in presence of modularity. A tail call is a state transition. Without them, you'd have to resort to a big loop (which breaks modularity), or some sort of trampoline (which works but it's a bit clumsy).

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

jhgb — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 23:01:25 +0000

Funny, because it's the exact opposite for me. You sure it's not just your news source preferences?

New comment by jhgb in "Datacenters in space aren't going to work"

jhgb — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:45:50 +0000

There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-brainer to me if you're trying to optimize bandwidth usage.

New comment by jhgb in "Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy"

jhgb — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:29:46 +0000

You don't HAVE to boot RPi4+ from an SD card. RPi4 and RPi5 can boot from an external SSD just fine. I don't recall the last time I used an SD card in an RPi but it must have been years.

New comment by jhgb in "Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy"

jhgb — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:03:02 +0000

Don't use an SD card, then. It's that simple.

New comment by jhgb in "How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack"

jhgb — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 21:37:02 +0000

I too need to thank you for the very first C compiler I ever had access to in 1999, after 10 years of having a book on C in my possession that I couldn't use until then.

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

jhgb — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 09:09:25 +0000

Yes, but compile-time evaluation in Zig doesn't require the "comptime" keyword. Only specific cases such as compile-time type computation do (but these specific cases are not provided by compile-time function evaluation in D anyway, so language choice wouldn't make a difference here).

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

jhgb — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 23:53:04 +0000

I'm pretty sure the "comptime" keyword only forces you to provide an argument constant at compile time for that particular parameter. It doesn't trigger the compile time evaluation.

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

jhgb — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 07:33:04 +0000

But Zig doesn't need a keyword to trigger it either? If it's possible at all, it will be done. The keyword should just prevent run-time evaluation. (Unless I grossly misunderstood something.)

New comment by jhgb in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"

jhgb — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:07:54 +0000

USAians are not exactly famous for commonly speaking most European languages at a level that would allow them to resettle to the respective European countries. This makes for a considerable barrier that essentially doesn't exist in the opposite direction.

New comment by jhgb in "Tesla is heading into multi-billion-dollar iceberg of its own making"

jhgb — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 09:05:23 +0000

> He bought Tesla after it already put out its fan-favorite car

If you mean Tesla Roadster, that came out in 2008, 4 years after Musk's involvement. Or were you trying to say something else?