Hacker News: throwaway81523

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts"

throwaway81523 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:49:33 +0000

Can I redraw the districts to look like a Gerrymandlebrot set?

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability"

throwaway81523 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:59:03 +0000

> Git is fine for text based files like code, but it's really bad at stuff like textures, 3D models, audio files, and other non-text files

Git-annex ?

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole"

throwaway81523 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:57:25 +0000

Thanks, what madness. CPython wasn't abandoned in favor of PyPy at the 2 to 3 transition precisely because they wanted to keep the C extensions working. So what do they do next? Break the C extensions. Genius!

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole"

throwaway81523 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:42:23 +0000

Python's main competition was Perl. Ruby was later, I think.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "USB Power Delivery: Plugging into the Benefits"

throwaway81523 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:35:59 +0000

Madness. USB C doesn't even let you control which way the power goes. Try to charge your phone by plugging in a USBC power bank? Oops, the phone is charging the power bank instead of the other way around. Sometimes you can't even make that stop without a USB-A cable. I can't imagine what kind of fools invented that.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything"

throwaway81523 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:09:09 +0000

Lineage is interesting but doesn't support my phone or others that is want. Same with Graphene.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything"

throwaway81523 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:07:13 +0000

Yeah I use f-droid. I wouldn't want to use Amazon or Samsung etc.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole"

throwaway81523 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:27:24 +0000

Python 3 got very slow update and poor acceptance precisely because it DIDN'T fix major problems, it only tweaked around the edges of minor ones. So people stayed with Python 2 as long as possible. Here's a post from 2014 that I bookmarked and it explains things a decade+ later:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7802575

From the link: "You know why I'm not running python 3? Because it doesn't solve a single problem I have. It doesn't solve anyone's problems. It solves imaginary problems, while creating real problems."

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole"

throwaway81523 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:18:52 +0000

What happened in 3.13? Somehow I missed that. 2->3 was already a jump the shark incident though.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole"

throwaway81523 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:14:51 +0000

Yeah I still use Python. I've been using it for a long time, I can get stuff done quickly with it, but I feel the same way you do to a big extent. Not sure what to use instead. I hate anything having to do with Javascript even though some parts of the JS world beat Python hollow (it's the other parts that are even worse than Python). Golang? Rust? Both too low level. I do use C++ (also low level) when I need something to run fast, but it's not the first stop. Erlang/Elixir? I like Erlang (haven't used Elixir) but it's too small a world and I'd want something with a serious type system if I'm gonna change languages. Haskell? Too much headache to do even simple things, such as logging. Scala? The bureaucracy of Java with the headaches of Haskell. OCaml? Maybe underrated and I should look into it more, but again it seems like Haskell's poorer cousin. I'm sure I'm overlooking some good ones though.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything"

throwaway81523 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 02:38:47 +0000

There's a similar thing with Google accounts and Android, amirite? I've avoided having a Google account but it hasn't always been easy.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Trip report: June 2026 ISO C++ standards meeting (Brno, Czechia)"

throwaway81523 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:23:24 +0000

I believe the aim of this C++ paper is to identify all possible UB in the standard. They mention the possibility of implicit UB but take the view that if that exists, that means the standard didn't sufficiently specify what to do in situation X, i.e. it's a bug in the standard that needs a fix.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Trip report: June 2026 ISO C++ standards meeting (Brno, Czechia)"

throwaway81523 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:17:53 +0000

I'm looking through the UB paper https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2026/p31... and I haven't gotten to the good parts yet (how to handle the UB) but it looks like they're taking what I'd call a better approach. Runtime UB results from violation of an implicit contract (e.g. int arithmetic has an implicit contract that the result should not overflow), so they want to let you specify what should happen in those situations (panic, give some wrong result and keep going, call some kind of exception handler, etc.)

Defining int arithmetic as 2's complement would be a big mistake imho. It's fine if there's additional types for 2's complement, saturation, etc. But the only sane well-defined behaviour for int overflow is trap or panic (like in Ada), so in principle there should always be runtime checks. Otherwise you lose obvious invariants like n+1>n for all integers n. It's unfortunate that today's hardware makes runtime checks a big pain for integers even though it's done with no discernible overhead by the floating point hardware (IEEE-754 overflow trap etc). Oh well.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Treating pancreatic tumours may have revealed cancer's master switch"

throwaway81523 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 02:28:44 +0000

I've heard that some cancers spread by viruses. Viruses do evolve. No idea if that says anything about cancer evolving.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Trip report: June 2026 ISO C++ standards meeting (Brno, Czechia)"

throwaway81523 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 01:09:32 +0000

The very first item listed jumped right out at me. "Complete catalog of all undefined behavior (UB) in C++". And further down, "Telecon line-by-line review of a proposal to systematically address all undefined behavior in C++":

> "This was, pardon my French, a “[metric] ton” of work over the course of several years. Thanks Shafik, Joshua, Timur, Jens, and everyone who helped them compile this detailed catalog so that now we can next systematically do something about these UB cases!"

I wonder if that already been done for C. Many whiners like to shout for a "safe" C or C++ dialect that's free of UB, but then deflect when asked how to specify such a thing. Listing all the ways to get UB is at least a start.

Added: a UB-elimination rampage doesn't sound like a great idea to me, after hearing many calls e.g. to remove the signed-int overflow UB by defining signed arithmetic as 2s complement. That means (in a toy example of 4-bit integers) mandating that 5+5=-6 if I have it right.

It's way preferable to do what Ada does and allow specifying the exact valid range of an integer type and mandating checked arithmetic. A compiler pragma could then allow an unsafe addition (maybe 2's complement) if you wanted to disable the check in in a hot loop or something. That's sort of what C does now, where the compiler can choose to signal an error on every occurrence of an int overflow (since it's UB, the compiler can do whatever it wants).

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Treating pancreatic tumours may have revealed cancer's master switch"

throwaway81523 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:32:25 +0000

Can we end up with a situation like antimicrobial resistance, where cancer itself evolves to resist these new treatments?

Hans Schulz – The father of the VEF Minox lens?

throwaway81523 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:43:06 +0000

Article URL: https://moments-of-now.com/hans-schulz-the-father-of-the-vef-minox-riga-lens/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48522233

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

New comment by throwaway81523 in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

throwaway81523 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:34:21 +0000

That also had "Who is Major Domo?" because they wanted to subpoena him or her, iirc.

New comment by throwaway81523 in "Law Enforcement's "Warrior" Problem (2015)"

throwaway81523 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:16:10 +0000

(2015)

New comment by throwaway81523 in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

throwaway81523 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:53:37 +0000

Here's one that uses exotic materials that the developer got the 2025 Nobel chemistry prize for:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03875-w