Hacker News: pbohun

New comment by pbohun in "Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc"

pbohun — Sat, 09 May 2026 19:39:30 +0000

How many tokens did this port consume?

New comment by pbohun in "Kalshi, the Prediction Market, Is Now Valued at $22B"

pbohun — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:39:57 +0000

There need to be some serious regulations around prediction markets. I'm not sure they should even be legal. These "markets" are encouraging large amounts of fraud and manipulation. As far as I can tell, they offer no positive effect to society.

New comment by pbohun in "Google says 75% of it's new code is AI written"

pbohun — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:58:30 +0000

One possibility is that most of the code that matters is being written by hand, while enormous amounts of code are being generated for other things. People are being evaluated on their AI usage after all.

New comment by pbohun in "Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)"

pbohun — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:00:35 +0000

This makes me think of the color scheme of Plan9. I think they chose that color design for similar reasons.

New comment by pbohun in "Ape Coding [fiction]"

pbohun — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:04:38 +0000

You probably also don't use a calculator because it uses a scary language called arabic numerals. Why write 123,456 when you could write out in english: One Hundred Twenty-Three Thousand Four Hundred Fifty-Six? English is your programming language and also your math language, right?

New comment by pbohun in "Ape Coding [fiction]"

pbohun — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:36:57 +0000

It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them.

The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages.

We could write music using natural language, but no one does because a single page of music would require dozens of pages of natural language to describe the same thing.

New comment by pbohun in "Lilush – LuaJIT static runtime and shell"

pbohun — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:38:07 +0000

Thanks for the update!

New comment by pbohun in "An interactive intro to quadtrees"

pbohun — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 15:12:41 +0000

This page was put together very well. It has interactive illustrations when needed (not excessive), and the explanations were informative yet concise. I also like how it brings up other uses of quadtrees, such as for images. This encouraged me to think about how they might be used elsewhere.

New comment by pbohun in "Lilush – LuaJIT static runtime and shell"

pbohun — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:37:03 +0000

This looks very interesting. It says it has networking, cryptography, etc. Is there any documentation of the APIs? I can't try this out if I don't know what they are.

New comment by pbohun in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"

pbohun — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:43:41 +0000

As far as I know, only Go uses Go's back end because it was specifically designed for Go. But the architecture is such that it makes it trivial for Go to cross compile for any OS and architecture. This is something that LLVM cannot do. You have to compile a new compiler for every OS and arch combo you wish to compile to.

You could imagine creating a modified Go assembler that is more generic and not tied to Go's ABI that could accomplish the same effect as LLVM. However, it'd probably be better to create a project like that from scratch, because most of Go's optimizations happen before reaching the assembler stage.

It would probably be best to have the intermediate language that QBE has and transform that into "intermediate assembly" (IA) very similar to Go's assembly. That way the IL stage could contain nearly all the optimization passes, and the IA stage would focus on code generation that would translate to any OS/arch combo.

New comment by pbohun in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"

pbohun — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:16:15 +0000

QBE is a tiny project, but I think illustrates a better intermediate language design. https://c9x.me/compile/

New comment by pbohun in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"

pbohun — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:13:31 +0000

People are correct I didn't explain my position.

LLVM: Pretty much everyone who has created a programming language with it has complained about its design. gingerbill, Jon Blow, and Andrew Kelley have all complained about it. LLVM is a good idea, but it that idea was executed better by Ken Thompson with his C compiler for Plan 9, and then again with his Go compiler design. Ken decided to create his own "architecture agnostic" assembly, which is very similar to the IR idea with LLVM.

Swift: I was very excited with the first release of Swift. But it ultimately did not have a very focused vision outlined for it. Because of this, it has morphed into a mess. It tries to be everything for everyone, like C++, and winds up being mediocre, and slow to compile to top it off.

Mojo isn't doesn't exist for the public yet. I hope it turns out to be awesome, but I'm just not going to get my hopes up this time.

New comment by pbohun in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"

pbohun — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:39:48 +0000

There's no way to say this without sounding mean: Everything Chris Lattner has done has been a "successful mess". He's obviously smart, but a horrible engineer. No one should allow him to design anything.

Edit: I explained my position better below.

New comment by pbohun in "Microsoft purges Win11 printer drivers, devices on borrowed time"

pbohun — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:13:42 +0000

I have an old printer, maybe 15 years old or so. Linux still prints and Windows doesn't!

New comment by pbohun in "Tiny C Compiler"

pbohun — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 22:46:02 +0000

There also is an unofficial mirror which has updates.

https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc

New comment by pbohun in "Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?"

pbohun — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:50:52 +0000

I'm not. I'm learning a little bit each day, making my brain better and myself more productive as I go.

New comment by pbohun in "Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11"

pbohun — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:49:58 +0000

It feels like everything is falling apart and getting worse. Yet somehow people are racing to produce AI slop faster. If software eventually collapses under its own weight, things might be so borked we have to bootstrap everything from scratch, staring with assembly.

New comment by pbohun in "Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11"

pbohun — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 17:07:34 +0000

It sounds weird to say, but Steve Ballmer was probably the best CEO of Microsoft.

New comment by pbohun in "A million ways to die from a data race in Go"

pbohun — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 21:13:23 +0000

Not quite. Erlang uses the Actor model which delivers messages asynchronously to named processes. In Go, messages are passed between goroutines via channels, which provide a synchronization mechanism (when un-buffered). The ability to synchronize allow one to setup a "rhythm" to computation that the Actor model is explicitly not designed to do. Also, note that a process must know its consumer in the Actor model, but goroutines do not need to know their consumer in the CSP model. Channels can even be passed around to other goroutines!

Each have their own pros and cons. You can see some of the legends who invented different methods of concurrency here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37wFVVVZlVU

There's also a nice talk Rob Pike gave that illustrated some very useful concurrency patterns that can be built using the CSP model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kdp27TYZs

New comment by pbohun in "A million ways to die from a data race in Go"

pbohun — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 20:55:54 +0000

They're not using the dangerous way because of syntax, they're using it because they think they're "optimizing" their code. They should write correct code first, measure, and then optimize if necessary.