Hacker News: jhgb

New comment by jhgb in "NetBSD adds a new text editor called atto"

jhgb — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:44:33 +0000

How is Ctrl+S "more traditional" than C-x C-s? C-x C-s is like 50 years old by now. Surely that qualifies as "traditional".

New comment by jhgb in "C for Rust programmers"

jhgb — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:33:01 +0000

> But, in 2026, I don't see why for native code everyone shouldn't be programming in Rust / Swift / other modern memory-safe flavor for any new production use.

The lack of OpenMP for Rust etc. seems like the most obvious reason for "why use C instead of Rust in 2026" to me.

New comment by jhgb in "Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones"

jhgb — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:18:32 +0000

People of different ethnicities can differ by something as minor as just language and language-related culture, such as for example Czechs vs. Germans. So surely ethnicity is not the applicable term here.

New comment by jhgb in "PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's"

jhgb — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:53:05 +0000

I see. I guess that makes sense, popularity-wise. I imagine the results were in the vicinity of PostgreSQL anyway, considering the similarity of approaches.

New comment by jhgb in "PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's"

jhgb — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:41:23 +0000

I'm surprised that Interbase/Firebird seems to be entirely omitted from this despite pioneering the MVCC approach.

New comment by jhgb in "Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7"

jhgb — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:15:21 +0000

> As for the bytecode, as far as I recall CMU CL did not have bytecode compiler at all

The byte code compilation option is described in CMUCL documentation, section 5.9 Byte Coded Compilation: https://cmucl.org/docs/cmu-user/html/Byte-Coded-Compilation....

New comment by jhgb in "Log is non-monotonic in PHP and Lua"

jhgb — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:12:13 +0000

I simply assumed the tables in question were log tables. (No, not that kind of log.)

New comment by jhgb in "John C. Dvorak has died"

jhgb — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:30:52 +0000

I found very quickly an NYT article from 1993 that listed his date of birth as "April 5, 1952". I don't know if that's the source for the Wikipedia article but that info has been around for a long time, it seems.

New comment by jhgb in "Beeg float library, a Rust port of Fabrice Bellard's libbf"

jhgb — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:24:25 +0000

You can simply check Wiktionary, like you can with most words.

New comment by jhgb in "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)"

jhgb — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:57:05 +0000

No, database servers solve that problem. That the unnecessarily COBOL-like SQL ended up being the primary interface to them is simply an unfortunate accident of history.

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).