Hacker News: wjakob

New comment by wjakob in "Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS"

wjakob — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:35:32 +0000

Besides boringBar, the following are enabled: Claude, Dropbox, MacWhisper.

New comment by wjakob in "Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS"

wjakob — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:35:10 +0000

I am running the trial and it seems great except for two crucial deviations from Dock behavior. Clicking on a button ("chip") does not bring the associated window to the foreground. It does work when I hover over a chip and then click the preview of a specific window. But nothing happens when I directly click the button in the bar. The issue occurs regardless of whether an app has 1 or >1 windows open. In the latter case, I would prefer if clicking the button brings the most recently used window to the top.

Another observation: many macOS apps (e.g. pages, mail, keynote, etc.) like to stay open even without having any active windows. This is completely hidden by boringBar, which leads to tons of apps being open without the user being aware of it (-> memory waste). Furthermore, actually using such an app then requires me to awkwardly type the name of the app even though it's already open.

I think it would be better if such passive apps without windows still have chips, perhaps smaller ones without a window title.

Regarding the foreground issue, in case it's relevant: The app has all the permissions it requested. This is on a macOS 26.2 on a M4 MBP.

New comment by wjakob in "The hidden compile-time cost of C++26 reflection"

wjakob — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:53:54 +0000

I am very worried by feature creep in libc++ and libstdc++ and the harm that this inflicts on the wider C++ ecosystem. Transitive inclusion of large parts of the STL, and entangling of STL with core language features are both extremely bad. This should IMO be topic #1 of the committee but is barely even noticed. The mantra "It's okay, modules will save us" is naive and will not work.

Nanobind – tiny and efficient C++/Python bindings

wjakob — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 07:10:21 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/wenzeljakob/status/1641025084679766016

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35369146

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Mitsuba 3 Differentiable Renderer

wjakob — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 13:23:14 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/wenzeljakob/status/1549710217616711680

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32165442

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by wjakob in "Cython is 20"

wjakob — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 19:14:13 +0000

> Why would you recommend that? [..] It's a bunch of work for no benefit.

nanobind/pybind11 (co-)author here. The space of python bindings is extremely diverse and on the whole probably looks very different from your use case. nanobind/pybind11 target the 'really fancy' case you mention specifically for codebases that are "at home" in C++, but which want natural Pythonic bindings. There is near-zero overlap with Cython.

Nanobind – Seamless operability between C++17 and Python

wjakob — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 13:31:24 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/wjakob/nanobind

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30698560

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by wjakob in "The team that powers VLC (2019)"

wjakob — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 21:42:23 +0000

There is also IINA that somehow seems more snappy/better-integrated on macOS.

New comment by wjakob in "Python 3.9"

wjakob — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 13:39:26 +0000

Caution: if you rely on pybind11 or a project using pybind11 (many projects do, like NumPy/SciPy/Tensorflow/PyTorch..), hold off on upgrading to Python 3.9.0 for now.

A change in Python 3.9.0 introduces undefined behavior in combination with pybind11 (rarely occurring crashes, but could be arbitrarily bad). We will work around it in an upcoming version of pybind11, and Python will separately also fix this problem in 3.9.1 slated for release in December.

Details available here: https://pybind11.readthedocs.io/en/latest and https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/22670.

Radiative Backpropagation: Lightning-Fast Differentiable Rendering

wjakob — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 18:57:21 +0000

Article URL: http://rgl.epfl.ch/publications/NimierDavid2020Radiative

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716692

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Mitsuba 2: A Retargetable Forward and Inverse Renderer

wjakob — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 14:22:13 +0000

Article URL: http://mitsuba-renderer.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22474620

Points: 38

# Comments: 1

New comment by wjakob in "What I think what we need to do to keep FreeBSD relevant (2019)"

wjakob — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 11:22:39 +0000

What's wrong with red-black trees? :) Since you mention C++: you do realize that std::map will typically be implemented with one?

Mitsuba 2: A Retargetable Forward and Inverse Renderer

wjakob — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 22:27:30 +0000

Article URL: https://rgl.epfl.ch/publications/NimierDavidVicini2019Mitsuba2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21286915

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by wjakob in "Why office workers can't sleep and why that's bad"

wjakob — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 11:50:43 +0000

Here are links to more concrete studies concerning this effect.

Action spectrum for melatonin regulation in humans: evidence for a novel circadian photoreceptor. Brainard et al. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/21/16/6405.full.pdf

Phototransduction by retinal ganglion cells that set the circadian clock. Berson et al. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/295/5557/1070.ful...

New comment by wjakob in "Thoughts on Cocoa"

wjakob — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 15:22:19 +0000

Note that this is only for OpenGL ES!

Show HN: Enoki: autodiff, vectorizer and GPU JIT compiler for simulation code

wjakob — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 12:19:50 +0000

Article URL: http://enoki.readthedocs.io/en/master

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876409

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Enoki: Structured vectorization and differentiation on modern processors

wjakob — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 15:24:34 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/mitsuba-renderer/enoki

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20859645

Points: 44

# Comments: 0

New comment by wjakob in "Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU"

wjakob — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 23:49:28 +0000

The extra-painful part about this whole situation is that it's apparently only due to Apple blocking NVIDIA from signing and publishing their drivers. (for whatever bizarre reason they may have to do that)

New comment by wjakob in "SCons: A Software Construction Tool"

wjakob — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 12:03:57 +0000

The maintainers of SCons have long argued perceived performance and scalability issues do not exist (https://github.com/scons/scons/wiki/WhySconsIsNotSlow).

I've long been really excited about SCons but eventually decided to move away because it became unbearably sluggish for a large-ish codebase with >180K lines of C++ code split into many files. Another issue are cross-platform builds. SCons breaks every time there is a new version of Visual Studio, and it takes many months until an updated version restores compatibility.

New comment by wjakob in "New Mac Pro"

wjakob — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 19:59:23 +0000

Lack of NVIDIA support is a deal-breaker. The AMD ecosystem is just so far behind when it comes to frameworks like CUDA, OptiX, cuDNN, etc.. Why can't Apple open up kernel-level support by cooperating more with NVIDIA? This state of things seems completely bizarre to me.