Hacker News: skribanto

New comment by skribanto in "Bringing uv and ty together"

skribanto — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:13:31 +0000

I routinely run into issues, where Claude will try to add functionality to a dict-heavy API and messup the keys, I just do an initial pass converting everything to dataclasses, and it can iterate on it's own with the typechecker to fix everything on it's own, but otherwise I have to do a bunch of manual iterations.

New comment by skribanto in "Bringing uv and ty together"

skribanto — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 22:48:35 +0000

The use case in the article though is type checking standalone scripts with declared dependencies. So it kind of needs some kind of package management + type checking utility at the same time.

New comment by skribanto in "Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating?"

skribanto — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:34:38 +0000

Thats like the same point the article is making

New comment by skribanto in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

skribanto — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:06:47 +0000

From my understanding git reflog works on refs and jj op log works on fhe repo as a whole.

E.g. if I rebase some stacked branches then I want to undo it, with git I would reset each branch separately.

With jj you can timetravel the state of the repo in ine command

New comment by skribanto in "Git Rebase for the Terrified"

skribanto — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:30:31 +0000

rerere can help, but OP probably has their own workflow

New comment by skribanto in "Rust's Block Pattern"

skribanto — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 14:32:35 +0000

Why couldnt you flatten it?

New comment by skribanto in "Performance hacks for faster Python code"

skribanto — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:50:02 +0000

swap with last element then truncate at the end

New comment by skribanto in "Rating 26 years of Java changes"

skribanto — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:49:40 +0000

Well, it can make some chained function composition easier.

  Ick1 result1 = potentiallyNull1();
  Ick2 result2 = (result1 == null) ? null : potentiallyNull2(result1);
  Ick3 result3 = (result2 == null) ? null : potentiallyNull3(result2);

  Ick3 result3 = potentiallyNone1()
    .flatMap(potentiallyNone2)
    .flatMap(potentiallyNone3);

You could maybe move the null check inside the method in the former and it cleans it up a bit, but in the latter you can have methods that are explicitly marked as taking NonNull in their type signature which is nice.

New comment by skribanto in "Open Steno Project"

skribanto — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 23:41:57 +0000

maybe it’s better now, but at last time I checked (~2 years ago) humans are still better in jargon heavy contexts - legal as you mentioned, tech/medical/etc. also accents, muffled audio, noise in general, humans are (were?) much better at accounting for that

New comment by skribanto in "You can choose tools that make you happy"

skribanto — Mon, 26 May 2025 01:37:47 +0000

My interpretation is that as engineers, we attempt to justify all of our choices through purely rational means. However, as humans, we cannot really make said choices without also being at least somewhat influenced by our subjective affections.

Perhaps I'm stretching the author's message, but at least I believe that the argument extends to all engineering conclusions. The author's call is that we acknowledge this subjective side.

Essentially, true engineering is about tradeoffs, there is no X that is objectively better than Y in all circumstances and contexts.

New comment by skribanto in "Programming languages should have a tree traversal primitive"

skribanto — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 22:33:30 +0000

Well, recursion is well-structured and can be reasoned about through induction. Goto is unstructured…

New comment by skribanto in "My Favorite C++ Pattern: X Macros (2023)"

skribanto — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 16:57:12 +0000

I don’t think I follow, do you mind giving a concrete example?

New comment by skribanto in "The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)"

skribanto — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 20:17:52 +0000

Well the main point is that there are changes that for most languages would need a change in the compiler/interpreter itself. However in lisp those kinds of things can be done in userspace

New comment by skribanto in "Lesser known tricks, quirks and features of C"

skribanto — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:49:35 +0000

I believe int[6] can still be passed to static 5 but I would have to double check

New comment by skribanto in "Why is a Guillotine blade diagonal?"

skribanto — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 21:59:50 +0000

Looks fine to me

New comment by skribanto in "Show HN: Vdm, a sane alternative to e.g. Git submodules"

skribanto — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 06:18:47 +0000

I like to wrap it in a venv (pure python project) or nix flake (mixed languages)

New comment by skribanto in "B-Trees Require Fewer Comparisons Than Balanced Binary Search Trees"

skribanto — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 16:29:52 +0000

Left leaning red black trees enforce extra constraints, which remove symmetries. This actually adds an edge case when instead you can just treat left/right rotations and comparisons as symmetric operations.

Left Leaning Red Black Trees Considerer Harmful: https://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/notes/llrb.html

New comment by skribanto in "Discussions: Flat or Threaded? (2006)"

skribanto — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 09:53:34 +0000

A follow up from the same author

https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design...

New comment by skribanto in "Common Lisp Is Not a Single Language, It Is Lots"

skribanto — Fri, 24 May 2024 21:57:56 +0000

Interesting side note: the blog is generated with the C preprocessor

https://aartaka.me/this-post-is-cpp

New comment by skribanto in "Static Chess"

skribanto — Tue, 14 May 2024 00:12:47 +0000

e4 d5 e5 f5 exf6 This simple en passant works