Hacker News: rbancroft

New comment by rbancroft in "Neoclassical C++: segmented iterators revisited"

rbancroft — Sun, 24 May 2026 11:24:31 +0000

Cppreference.com is my favorite resource for up to date info.

New comment by rbancroft in "The hottest college major [Computer Science] hit a wall. What happened?"

rbancroft — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:04:52 +0000

When I attended back in the late 90’s, there was a view that once y2k was over and that crisis was dealt with the industry would collapse and there wouldn’t be any jobs.

What’s happening now reminds me a lot of that.

New comment by rbancroft in "Ask HN: Burned out from tech, what else is there?"

rbancroft — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:43:56 +0000

Where is the sense of dread coming from?

New comment by rbancroft in "GPT-5.2-Codex"

rbancroft — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:51:48 +0000

Listening to Dario at the NYT DealBook summit, and reading between the lines a bit, it seems like he is basically saying Anthropic is trying to be a reponsible, sustainable business and charging customers accordingly, and insinuating that OpenAI is being much more reckless, financially.

New comment by rbancroft in "New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care"

rbancroft — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:18:54 +0000

Convenience and cost seem like big advantages.

New comment by rbancroft in "Leaving Intel"

rbancroft — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 18:55:48 +0000

If it works, he gets credit. If it fails or never happens, someone else gets the blame. pretty classic.

New comment by rbancroft in "The input stack on Linux: An end-to-end architecture overview"

rbancroft — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 20:33:42 +0000

Very impressive, nice work!

New comment by rbancroft in "Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?"

rbancroft — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 19:57:19 +0000

Interesting, I really like balsamiq and still use it personally, despite work being a figma shop.

New comment by rbancroft in "A Pattern Language"

rbancroft — Tue, 14 May 2024 15:56:37 +0000

I think it's great, nicely done! Tools like this to condense and cross-reference complex information to something you can reference easily is very useful to a human like myself.

New comment by rbancroft in "The Time I Lied to the CTO and Saved the Day"

rbancroft — Thu, 09 May 2024 15:23:58 +0000

There are effective and ineffective MBA's.

New comment by rbancroft in "What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane"

rbancroft — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 23:40:39 +0000

It is cynical and is simplistic but there is an element of truth to it. Maybe is republican ideology, I don’t know about that.

New comment by rbancroft in "What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane"

rbancroft — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 22:49:19 +0000

I think you are right about starting early in education and exposing disadvantaged children to things they wouldn't otherwise have available to them, and supporting them throughout their education. This would benefit organizations that want to achieve good performance and is worth them investing in themselves, although government support is a decent second option that I agree with. However it's important to note that this is primarily an economic differentiation, not a racial one.

Training can help but it is not sufficient for many tasks. You also need aptitude and desire.

Culture is more about what is valued and rewarded in a society, and I think the primary driver of the desire component.

What I meant about framing was that our economies, governments and businesses are framed in a cultural context, anglo-protestant american capitalism in this case. African-american/black communities have a challenging relationship with this for obvious reasons. Certain immigrant populations can integrate or interoperate more effectively than others. I think the key to achieving better results as a society and a planet is to incorporate more cultural diversity, allowing a broader range of desires and outcomes to be seen as valid and worth pursuing. I'm sorry I don't have more time to go into this right now, I hope it gives an idea what I was referring to.

New comment by rbancroft in "What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane"

rbancroft — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 21:53:11 +0000

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

New comment by rbancroft in "What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane"

rbancroft — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 21:36:35 +0000

If you are selecting for anything besides competence, your chances of getting competence is effectively random. It says nothing about one group of people being more or less competent than another.

I have observed that selecting for competence leads to diversity, and I believe that diversity is a strength. But it is best achieved organically.

Personally I think the shortcomings we have with achieving diversity is in the framing stage, not the hiring stage.

New comment by rbancroft in "NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++"

rbancroft — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:47:38 +0000

emacs works great on windows. I'm not sure if there are things notepad++ does that emacs can't but I've never had any windows-specific issues with emacs.

New comment by rbancroft in "OpenAI's chaos does not add up"

rbancroft — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 16:21:38 +0000

I think there is a lesson here, something I have learned once or twice as well. Just because all incentives, reasoning and wisdom align with your position, you need to be prepared that people will take actions against their own interest out of shortsightedness, ignorance or just plain carelessness.

It will be very interesting to learn the real reason why this all went down. The core uncertainty and disagreement around openai's mission must have played a key role.

New comment by rbancroft in "No "malfeasance" behind Sam Altman's firing, OpenAI memo says"

rbancroft — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 19:22:15 +0000

I'm not a lawyer but their original announcement seemed very close to libel and I would think Sam has some legal options should he choose to pursue them.

New comment by rbancroft in "SciPy builds for Python 3.12 on Windows are a minor miracle"

rbancroft — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 22:13:27 +0000

The article is well-written and detailed, however I was taken aback by the claim that meson is 'widely used for C & C++ projects'. I've come across bazel more often than meson. I guess because meson is written in python it seemed like a good choice for SciPy, and it worked out in the end so congratulations.

But yeah, I think CMake is still the gold standard despite all its quirks, complexities and problems.

New comment by rbancroft in "Gitlab.com is down"

rbancroft — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 17:38:42 +0000

That's pretty cool. I notice how MS has become so much more respected as they have embraced open source. Is the next frontier for companies to become open process where the best companies attract the best people because of their open processes?

New comment by rbancroft in "Making C++ safe without borrow checking, reference counting, or tracing GC"

rbancroft — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 18:16:09 +0000

Not necessarily, although it's a bit complicated to understand in C++.

Starting with C++17, there is a feature called guaranteed copy elision that works for many/most scenarios that you would want. You need to read through the following resources to understand it fully:

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/copy_elision https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/value_category