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gignico

238 karma · joined March 16, 2025

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gignico··on Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy
They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.
gignico··on Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy
The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.
gignico··on The Millennium Problems for Biology
> 06 - Somatic limb regeneration

At least those things cannot be solved by just burning GPT tokens.

gignico··on Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
This sounded to me like that old “would you steal a car?” anti-piracy campaign until I clicked to read the post :)
gignico··on Visualizing Rust's Vtables: How dyn Trait Works In Memory
In the contrary it’s one of the best design decisions of the language. The rules for object safety are the same C++ applies to virtual functions. On the other hand you don’t have to choose a priori whether you’ll need dynamic or static polymorphism, you can choose at use site, and the size of the objects do not pay for dynamic dispatch because the vtable pointer is kept together with the object pointer, not within the object.
gignico··on Autism mutations drive neurodevelopmental pathology
Indeed, thanks :)
gignico··on Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2016)
Unbelievably I read this news while visiting Cork. Went to Kinsale yesterday. Never been to Ireland before. What a coincidence!
gignico··on Autism mutations drive neurodevelopmental pathology
I thought the US government had just decided that the cause of autism was vaccines </sarcasm>
gignico··on The Two Factions of C++ (2024)
Yes, C++26 reflection is nice, but also extremely complex to understand and use well. The rest of C++26 is the usual series of too-little-too-late additions. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for pattern matching to become a thing (a proposal has been discussed for ages)
gignico··on The Two Factions of C++ (2024)
I understand the issue about the ever-moving target etc., but almost fifteen years later do you really believe C++98 is better than C++11 without move semantics and decent smart pointers? I remember working with Qt5 and C++98 and yes, it was productive, but it was also a mess of intricate object ownership.

I'm critical about some choices made with C++20 and after, like the mess that modules are, and the too-little-too-late ranges library. C++26 is also a joke imho. But on the other hand, working with std::optional and (in C++23) std::expected is so much better than without. The thing is nobody forces you to use every single feature of a new standard, but I would not recommend ignoring very good tools just for the sake of it.

gignico··on What is a product?
What is a product? So you take two natural numbers `a` and `b`, and you want to sum `a` for `b` times, or vice versa. Then things become complicated if you want to do that quickly...
gignico··on Why I Stopped Arguing with People
I was about to start arguing why I don't agree but then I thought it was better not to :P
gignico··on Bipartite Matching Is in NC
Yes, but logic gates with constant fan-in, crucially, otherwise that's called AC.
gignico··on Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
That's true for two `rectangle` paths, but for two nodes that's what I would expect as a user. Anyway, not an easy problem for sure.
gignico··on Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
I've tried it now a little. The UI looks very cool, and generally the project is cool so congrats!

However, the generated TikZ code is not good in my opinion. Everything uses absolute coordinates, which in TikZ is seldom needed.

Just to start, if I place a single node I get absolute coordinates for it. Why? If you just write `\node {Hello};`, TikZ will put that at the center of the bounding box. No need to tell it's at `(0.5,2.91)` like it's happening in my test. Then features such as "align bottom" for a selection of multiple nodes should are manipulating the absolute coordinates instead of using TikZ's alignment features (anchors etc.).

I understand generating such code is more difficult. Maybe it can be something to point at for the next version, who knows...

gignico··on U.S. science is in chaos
Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.
gignico··on U.S. science is in chaos
We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order to suppress research on climate change and other controversial topics. If the government can cut your grant at any time without notice or appeal you will think twice before publishing results that go against their ideology, or even before publishing a criticism on Twitter. This is true especially if you are not tenured, which accounts for the majority of the academic world.
gignico··on The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++
Afaik std::span does not need anything that was not in C++98 already, or am I missing something?
gignico··on The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++
> It seems that some people are really losing the taste for good readable code.

It seems that some people never had taste for good reliable code. Use `void ` and now any error whatsoever is a direct undefined behavior. Moreover `std::span` clearly says that you are not* taking ownership of the memory (even though the language does not check it of course), while `void *` does not.

I understand that people can have many things to say about C++, and I do as well, but `std::span` should have been there decades ago and is such a life saver in these situations. A truly zero-cost abstraction which effectively saves you from a lot of troubles.

gignico··on Garbage Collection Without Unsafe Code
Too bad HN nicknames cannot be put for sale :)
gignico··on Claude Opus 4.7 Model Card
So LLMs are destroying the economy and the environment but at least “catastrophic risk” is still low. Ok then…
gignico··on Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness
Off topic, but I sincerely ask: am I the only one that is disturbed by the use of the term "Mac OS X" to refer to modern versions of the OS that is currently called "macOS"? (and not MacOS either)

I mean, the name was changed ten years ago...

gignico··on Metro stop is Ancient Rome's new attraction
Is it really worth? YMMV, but yes if you ask me.
gignico··on Metro stop is Ancient Rome's new attraction
For reasons, I used to go to Rome quite frequently in the 2010s, and the construction of Metro C was already a meme. But now some of the stations are quite interesting indeed.
gignico··on A Canonical Generalization of OBDD
Thanks!

The arXiv submission says the paper is submitted to SAT26, did it get accepted?

gignico··on A Canonical Generalization of OBDD
Positively surprised to see stuff like these on HN first page!

If any author is around, do you have an implementation that can be compared with CUDD and similar BDD libraries?

gignico··on Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"
I know about reproductive pressure and I’ve read The Selfish Gene. What you say is correct but does not explain that “if evolution did not, better not do it” attitude of the original comment, which I think is wrong for many reasons as I’ve wrote.
gignico··on Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"
The problem is implying that “if evolution did not do it there must be a reason”, because 1) it makes evolution look like an engineer evaluating trade offs, which is not and 2) it considers the current state of affairs the final “product”, which is not. For example, flowers did not exist in the Cretaceous, so somebody looking at what evolution did until then would say “if evolution did not invent flowers, then we’d better not do it”. But of course that’s absurd.

Also as I said evolution is not a process towards a goal. There are 8 billion people around the world which proves Homo sapiens is quite fit for its environment so the pressure to evolve further features is quite low.

gignico··on Modern Generic SVGA driver for Windows 3.1
> Running Windows 3.1 in True Color Full HD

People from the time would be astonished by the hardware we have now yet bloated software globs up every ounce of performance. What a waste! </granny mode=off>

gignico··on Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"
Evolution is not a process toward better quality of life and life expectancy of individuals. As long as enough individuals can reach the age to procreate in their environment evolution is done. Evolution didn’t train our bodies to reject the diseases we already have the vaccines for neither, so your reasoning would apply to smallpox as well. And what about viruses appeared after Homo sapiens evolved (such as HIV)?
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