Hacker News: quelsolaar

New comment by quelsolaar in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

quelsolaar — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:06:29 +0000

I was luck to know Josh Nimoy who is responsible for a lot of this in the movie, who has since sadly passed away. Josh took great pride in the fact that he was able to put Emacs and a bunch of Unix commands in a major Hollywood blockbuster.ed

New comment by quelsolaar in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

quelsolaar — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:14:06 +0000

The things you want from C isn't C. Id advice you to use another language.

New comment by quelsolaar in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

quelsolaar — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:17:00 +0000

A lot of the Central UB can not be defined, because they rely on detection. In order to have a well defined behaviour (by the standard or the compiler) the implementation needs to first detect that the behaviour is triggered, this is often very tricky or expensive. Its easy to define that a program should halt, if it writes outside an array, but detecting if it does can be both slow and hard to implement. There are implementations that do, but they are rarely used outside of debugging.

A better way to think about UB is as a contract between developer and implementation, so that the implementations can more easily reason about the code. How would you optimize:

(x * 2) / 2

An optimizer can optimize this out for a signed integer, because it doesn't have to consider overflow, but with a unsigned integer it can not. UB is a big reason why C is the most power efficient high level language.

New comment by quelsolaar in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

quelsolaar — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:36:32 +0000

The 5 stages of learning about UB in C:

-Denial: "I know what signed overflow does on my machine."

-Anger: "This compiler is trash! why doesn't it just do what I say!?"

-Bargaining: "I'm submitting this proposal to wg14 to fix C..."

-Depression: "Can you rely on C code for anything?"

-Acceptance: "Just dont write UB."

New comment by quelsolaar in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

quelsolaar — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:27:11 +0000

Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. The web is full of great content being made hard to access because of poor/inflexible layout choices. Just give me the text and let me choose how to make it readable. The added fact that you can read raw markdown without even parsing it makes it even better. Not having total control over what its going to look like for the reader is a feature not a bug.

New comment by quelsolaar in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

quelsolaar — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:11:16 +0000

Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.

New comment by quelsolaar in "Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds"

quelsolaar — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 10:26:09 +0000

This, "If you have enough, why does it matter if someone else has more" argument doesn't really hold. Yes we can make more TVs and phones so that everyone can get one, but then get to things like centrally located housing, where there is a limited supply. It matters a lot if you want someplace to live, and there are thousands of very rich people trying to out bid one and other for the same space in your city. This is why housing is no longer affordable.

New comment by quelsolaar in "Brent's Encapsulated C Programming Rules (2020)"

quelsolaar — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:01:50 +0000

Thanks for the shout out. I had no idea my 2h video, without a camera 8 years ago would have such legs! I should make a new one and include why zero initialization is bad.

Undefined behaviour spotted in safe Rust code

quelsolaar — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 20:34:35 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/BrianOrwe/status/1996624161209569696

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152664

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by quelsolaar in "Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity"

quelsolaar — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:04:15 +0000

Yeah the idea i that school is somehow a bastion of meritocracy is misguided.

Academia is better at setting clear requirements and measuring those goals, but whether these requirements have anything to do with being successful or useful in the real world is an entirely different matter.

School isn't reality, its mostly not even trying to simulate reality. School breads a lot of "Why was I not rewarded? I did everything they said i should do" disappointment in the real world.

New comment by quelsolaar in "If all the world were a monorepo"

quelsolaar — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 06:36:57 +0000

This is awesome. I run a team that uses software I produce and i have a rule that i can’t deliver breaking changes, and i cant force migrations. I can do the migration myself, or i have to emulate the old behavior next to the new. It makes you think really hard about releasing new APIs. I wish this was standard practice.

New comment by quelsolaar in "Never write your own date parsing library"

quelsolaar — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 07:06:29 +0000

Writing in binary or cranking your own electricity is easy. Anyone can do it.

There is a difference between things that are difficult and things that just take a lot of work.

New comment by quelsolaar in "Never write your own date parsing library"

quelsolaar — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 07:01:19 +0000

Your customers will pay more for things that are hard to do. Ask ASML.

New comment by quelsolaar in "Never write your own date parsing library"

quelsolaar — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 20:59:15 +0000

I exclusively write in C89. I'm a member of the ISO C standard board.

New comment by quelsolaar in "Never write your own date parsing library"

quelsolaar — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 20:38:55 +0000

When ever i see "never implement your own...", i know i want to implement it myself. People say that about hard things, and I only want to do hard things. Nobody wants people who can do easy things, people want people who can do hard things. The only way to learn how to do hard things, is to do hard things, so do the hardest things.

So go ahead, write your own date library, your own Unicode font rendering, compiler, OS, game engine or what ever else people tell you to never do because its hard.

Better Software Conference: Finish Your Software [video]

quelsolaar — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 21:52:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGLoKbBn-VI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44664420

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by quelsolaar in "A new law in Sweden makes it illegal to buy custom adult content"

quelsolaar — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 07:55:32 +0000

Maybe the victims of gunshots wanted to be shot? People shoot themselves all the time.

Should we make convictions of murder, depndent on proving that the victim dint actually want to get shot?

New comment by quelsolaar in "A new law in Sweden makes it illegal to buy custom adult content"

quelsolaar — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 07:50:27 +0000

Yeah thats an old idea, that have proven again and again to cause misery. Its not flimsy at all. Its peer reviewed science.

New comment by quelsolaar in "A new law in Sweden makes it illegal to buy custom adult content"

quelsolaar — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 22:13:13 +0000

Yes, Sex work can be made more safe. However none of these protects against the psychological harm that may sex workers are experiencing. There is plenty of evidence how harmful prostitution can be to mental wealth.

You list things that regulated to protect the user of drugs, tobacco and alcohol, but with prostitution, the product is a human being that needs to be protected too.

The Nordic model, does not outlaw selling sex, but criminalizes buying. In my opinion, selling sex may be harmfull, but i see no ethical reason against it. However there is no ethical way to buy sex, because its impossible for a buyer to be sure that you are not causing serious harm to the person you are buying from.

New comment by quelsolaar in "A new law in Sweden makes it illegal to buy custom adult content"

quelsolaar — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 21:29:00 +0000

We want to protect vulnerable members of society. they come in all sizes and shapes.