Hacker News: turndown

New comment by turndown in "Why don't you use dependent types?"

turndown — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 17:42:43 +0000

I thought that this was a GCC extension(you need to use #define n 10 instead of int n = 10). Is this not the case anymore?

New comment by turndown in "Disposable vapes to be banned in England and Wales"

turndown — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 16:55:05 +0000

On box mods(the big vapes you might recall starting to see 10-15 years ago) there is a chamber up top you have to manually fill with nicotine. This can be a bit annoying to do but the real problem is remembering to bring liquid to refill with.

That’s really the only negative to the large box mods, other than having to recharge 18650 batteries all the time. But disposables are usually much smaller(easier to hide if you’re in school), use nicotine salts(which are much more potent) and they usually last a long time - sometimes 20k hits. So these aren’t “bad” products, they have a lot of selling points.

New comment by turndown in "Giving C++ std:regex a C makeover"

turndown — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 15:44:44 +0000

This is all well and good, but just because something came from before doesn’t mean it was a good idea then, or especially now. You’re basically citing survivorship bias. Of course something still used from the 80s is well made, otherwise it would have been replaced 30 years ago.

New comment by turndown in "Why did Borland ignore the Macintosh market?"

turndown — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 01:17:45 +0000

> 1998 - 2009 was a tough time to be a Windows user

Is that true? I was too young to really have an opinion but to me most people cite XP and especially Windows 7(ignoring Vista which was bad) as the height of Windows. Of course outside of Windows, like mobile, it really was bad but if we’re just talking Windows then I can’t help but disagree.

New comment by turndown in "The Webb Telescope further deepens the Hubble tension controversy in cosmology"

turndown — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 16:07:46 +0000

Just because we are natives of this universe does not mean its behavior or characteristics will be naturally sensible to us. There is no “real” reason it should be something “simple” or reasonable to us. The universe simply is; us as well.

New comment by turndown in "Apple announces new fees for apps in the EU that link to the web for purchases"

turndown — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 17:50:24 +0000

I really cannot until this business model FAANG has come up with in the past 20 years where they are somehow owed money by developers for creating services and products for a platform is completely repudiated. I owe you money because a user clicked a link in my app and then bought something? I am so glad I have never written a line of code for an Apple product.

New comment by turndown in "Panic at the Job Market"

turndown — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 23:55:38 +0000

I imagine you got that code snippet(or a similar example) from somewhere but to me the fairly obvious problem is the chafing between the C and C++ world. %s is for C style strings and I have to imagine that printf function is in the C world. The String(“Hello world…”) is an object in C++ world so expect weird behavior when you try to combine them. As you say in your edit, SSO will make this even weirder.

New comment by turndown in "Crafting Interpreters"

turndown — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 03:25:44 +0000

And that’s just for your first recursive descent compiler. One thing to remember is that you will also one day want extended functionality in your language and either implement C FFI in your language(straightforward or even freely done for you depending on language) and call some C library for the purpose or you have to implement the functionality somehow. So you end up writing a lot of stuff you wouldn’t otherwise.

New comment by turndown in "Crafting Interpreters"

turndown — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 22:31:57 +0000

IMO compilers make you a lot more mature in recursive algorithms and trees, and then after that much more conscious about what exactly the code you write resolves to in terms of that languages semantics. Learning how closures work(variable capture and having to traverse the scope stack to find bound variables) is also a positive.

New comment by turndown in "Things I learned while writing an x86 emulator (2023)"

turndown — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 19:18:06 +0000

Intel is coming out with an improved x86 instruction set that removes a lot of the cruft, called ‘APX’ for advanced performance extensions.

New comment by turndown in "Ed Stone, scientist and salesman for the Voyager mission, has died"

turndown — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 16:16:27 +0000

They have been sending out new rules every few years. You just haven’t paid attention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

New comment by turndown in "Background of Linux's "file-max" and "nr_open" limits on file descriptors (2021)"

turndown — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 03:24:27 +0000

I’m wrong. Fourth paragraph from the bottom, last sentence they say “normal resource limits.” I thought that meant “the limit of something called normal resources” not the normal amount of the resource’s limit. Probably because I was trying to find out the exact same question as OP and thought that was it when I read it. I wish articles explained names more specifically sometimes…

New comment by turndown in "Python with Braces"

turndown — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 01:01:51 +0000

Programs are tightly coupled to textual representations because a compiler is a textual representation transformer. If you deviate from the accepted textual form then the compiler is generally clueless to do anything - that is, it can’t read your intent.

New comment by turndown in "Python Has Too Many Package Managers"

turndown — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 18:41:55 +0000

Is option 3 exactly what you’re supposed to do? Freezing your dependency graph and/or explicitly denoting what version of the dependency you want are your best bets for avoiding problems like this

New comment by turndown in "Background of Linux's "file-max" and "nr_open" limits on file descriptors (2021)"

turndown — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 06:53:02 +0000

Seems to be “normal resources”, where normal probably meant file descriptor based.

New comment by turndown in "A practical introduction to constraint programming using CP-SAT and Python"

turndown — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 15:34:48 +0000

I can guarantee you a blog post detailing how to do this would go triple platinum

New comment by turndown in "Why "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" matters (2011)"

turndown — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 05:32:03 +0000

If you are experienced then I’d say skim whatever sounds interesting from chapters 1-3, then do chapters 4/5 as they contain most of the interesting stuff.

New comment by turndown in "Why I Like Programming in C [video]"

turndown — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 18:02:00 +0000

10 years ago was 2014. What python code are you talking about? Deprecated, sure, and some things have been taken out of the standard distribution because nobody would maintain it(or there were reasons to not maintain it.) 2->3 conversion was 16 years ago.

New comment by turndown in "Address Sanitizer Internals"

turndown — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 22:46:27 +0000

I wouldn’t say they explicitly mention ASan, but in general you will see certain well known C++ developers/community members insist that with a set of sanitizers you won’t have to worry about the kind of things safety focused programmers would like added to C++, all the time never mentioning false positives.

New comment by turndown in "Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'"

turndown — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 05:18:56 +0000

I worded that part poorly, and did not bring up what really bothers me about it, that he tried to deny that there was a genocide in Cambodia. I agree with what you said. The idea that the US is innocent in Cambodia or really anything going on in that part of the world at that time is beyond false.