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jhgb

3,297 karma · joined August 25, 2017

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jhgb··on Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
People of different ethnicities can differ by something as minor as just language and language-related culture, such as for example Czechs vs. Germans. So surely ethnicity is not the applicable term here.
jhgb··on PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's
I see. I guess that makes sense, popularity-wise. I imagine the results were in the vicinity of PostgreSQL anyway, considering the similarity of approaches.
jhgb··on PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's
I'm surprised that Interbase/Firebird seems to be entirely omitted from this despite pioneering the MVCC approach.
jhgb··on Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7
> As for the bytecode, as far as I recall CMU CL did not have bytecode compiler at all

The byte code compilation option is described in CMUCL documentation, section 5.9 Byte Coded Compilation: https://cmucl.org/docs/cmu-user/html/Byte-Coded-Compilation....

jhgb··on Log is non-monotonic in PHP and Lua
I simply assumed the tables in question were log tables. (No, not that kind of log.)
jhgb··on John C. Dvorak has died
I found very quickly an NYT article from 1993 that listed his date of birth as "April 5, 1952". I don't know if that's the source for the Wikipedia article but that info has been around for a long time, it seems.
jhgb··on Beeg float library, a Rust port of Fabrice Bellard's libbf
You can simply check Wiktionary, like you can with most words.
jhgb··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
No, database servers solve that problem. That the unnecessarily COBOL-like SQL ended up being the primary interface to them is simply an unfortunate accident of history.
jhgb··on Vite 8.0 Is Out
If you want to make ultra-complicated clients, I assume that's what WebAssembly is heading towards. And it doesn't limit you to a poorly evolved language that wasn't intended for ultra-complicated software in the first place, or even force you to use that poorly evolved language on a server if you need to run the same logic in both places.
jhgb··on Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
Jevons' paradox still exists. Making X cheaper (usually by needing fewer people to do one unit of X) can and often does lead to more people being needed for X.
jhgb··on The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory
Merchant shipping contributes around 3% to CO₂ emissions. That is smaller than, e.g., electricity and heat generation, road transportation, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture.
jhgb··on Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C
C is literally a high level language.
jhgb··on Gpg.fail
Nobody decided that it's a crime, and it's unlikely to happen. Question is, what do you do with mandatory snooping of centralized proprietary services that renders them functionally useless aside from "just live with it". I was hoping for actual advice rather than a snarky non-response, yet here we are.
jhgb··on Gpg.fail
> Use Signal. Or Wire, or WhatsApp, or some other Signal-protocol-based secure messenger.

That's a "great" idea considering the recent legal developments in the EU, which OpenPGP, as bad as it is, doesn't suffer from. It would be great if the author updated his advice into something more future-proof.

jhgb··on Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
> yeah it did not follow Algol syntax but Pascal's and Ada's

Now quite sure what you mean by that; all of Lua, Pascal, and Ada follow Algol's syntax much more closely than C does.

jhgb··on Show HN: Tacopy – Tail Call Optimization for Python
...and that costs you code modularity and separate compilation. Why lose them when you don't have to?
jhgb··on Show HN: Tacopy – Tail Call Optimization for Python
Yes, except without all the known disadvantages of goto. That's the whole point.
jhgb··on Show HN: Tacopy – Tail Call Optimization for Python
It gives you arbitrarily complex control flow even in presence of modularity. A tail call is a state transition. Without them, you'd have to resort to a big loop (which breaks modularity), or some sort of trampoline (which works but it's a bit clumsy).
jhgb··on Zigbook Is Plagiarizing the Zigtools Playground
Funny, because it's the exact opposite for me. You sure it's not just your news source preferences?
jhgb··on Datacenters in space aren't going to work
There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-brainer to me if you're trying to optimize bandwidth usage.
jhgb··on Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
You don't HAVE to boot RPi4+ from an SD card. RPi4 and RPi5 can boot from an external SSD just fine. I don't recall the last time I used an SD card in an RPi but it must have been years.
jhgb··on Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
Don't use an SD card, then. It's that simple.
jhgb··on How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
I too need to thank you for the very first C compiler I ever had access to in 1999, after 10 years of having a book on C in my possession that I couldn't use until then.
jhgb··on Why is Zig so cool?
Yes, but compile-time evaluation in Zig doesn't require the "comptime" keyword. Only specific cases such as compile-time type computation do (but these specific cases are not provided by compile-time function evaluation in D anyway, so language choice wouldn't make a difference here).
jhgb··on Why is Zig so cool?
I'm pretty sure the "comptime" keyword only forces you to provide an argument constant at compile time for that particular parameter. It doesn't trigger the compile time evaluation.
jhgb··on Why is Zig so cool?
But Zig doesn't need a keyword to trigger it either? If it's possible at all, it will be done. The keyword should just prevent run-time evaluation. (Unless I grossly misunderstood something.)
jhgb··on Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
USAians are not exactly famous for commonly speaking most European languages at a level that would allow them to resettle to the respective European countries. This makes for a considerable barrier that essentially doesn't exist in the opposite direction.
jhgb··on Tesla is heading into multi-billion-dollar iceberg of its own making
> He bought Tesla after it already put out its fan-favorite car

If you mean Tesla Roadster, that came out in 2008, 4 years after Musk's involvement. Or were you trying to say something else?

jhgb··on Tesla is heading into multi-billion-dollar iceberg of its own making
What do you mean by "without any permission"? Any sort of orbital launch in any country is subject to government permission.
jhgb··on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
Funny thing is, even Starship's failure (to make a reusable upper stage) would be hailed as a spectacular success by any other company (since now that any other company would have at least a cheap, partially reusable superheavy launcher of unprecedented capability).
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