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We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
34•ColinWright•50m ago•6 comments

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
53•thelok•3h ago•6 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
13•surprisetalk•1h ago•5 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
119•AlexeyBrin•7h ago•22 comments

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-sin...
82•alephnerd•1h ago•32 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
820•klaussilveira•21h ago•248 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
53•vinhnx•4h ago•7 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
97•1vuio0pswjnm7•8h ago•113 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
74•onurkanbkrc•6h ago•5 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1057•xnx•1d ago•606 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
474•theblazehen•2d ago•175 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
198•jesperordrup•11h ago•68 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
542•nar001•5h ago•251 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
8•languid-photic•3d ago•1 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
212•alainrk•6h ago•326 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
34•rbanffy•4d ago•6 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
26•marklit•5d ago•1 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
113•videotopia•4d ago•30 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
72•speckx•4d ago•74 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
65•mellosouls•4h ago•72 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
272•isitcontent•21h ago•36 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
199•limoce•4d ago•111 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
285•dmpetrov•22h ago•153 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
21•sandGorgon•2d ago•11 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
155•matheusalmeida•2d ago•48 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
554•todsacerdoti•1d ago•268 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
424•ostacke•1d ago•110 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
42•matt_d•4d ago•17 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
471•lstoll•1d ago•309 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
348•eljojo•1d ago•214 comments
Open in hackernews

C++: Maps on Chains

http://bannalia.blogspot.com/2025/07/maps-on-chains.html
47•signa11•7mo ago

Comments

gsliepen•6mo ago
It's a somewhat interesting article, but it doesn't say much. It starts with:

> Suppose we want to have a C++ map where the keys are disjoint

And then we do something that goes against the whole point of such a map:

> But what happens if we try to insert an interval which is not disjoint with those already in the map?

And the solution is:

> Implementation-wise, we just have to [throw an exception if we are] comparing partially overlapping intervals

Much more interesting would be to show how to implement a proper interval map.

Gupie•6mo ago
Why can't you use this for the comparison operator:

  bool operator<(const interval& x, const interval& y)
  {
     if x.min < y.min return true;
     if x.min > y.min return false;
     return x_max < y.max;
   }
mgaunard•6mo ago
better implemented as

    tie(x.min, x.max) < tie(y.min, y.max)
gsliepen•6mo ago
Or since C++20, just default operator<=>: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/default_compariso...
Sharlin•6mo ago
That’s fine if you just need any well-defined SWO, but I presume the author needs this specific ordering for some algorithmic reason. Still, it’s pretty ugly for a comparator to be throwing.
z_open•6mo ago
Throwing a runtime error seems like an absurd solution compared to changing the comparison operator or using an unordered_map

What's wrong with x.min < y.min || (x. min == y.min && x.max < y. max)

gsliepen•6mo ago
That would indeed satisfy std::map, but then the question is, is that a useful ordering for intervals? To answer that, you need to define what you want to use the interval map for. If you want to be able to lookup in which unique interval a given value is, then you shouldn't have overlapping intervals to begin with. If you do allow overlapping intervals, a query could result in multiple intervals. Are lookups by value (not by interval) still O(log N) with that ordering?
monkeyelite•6mo ago
He’s just asserting he’s using the data structure in the way he wants to.
derriz•6mo ago
I don’t understand the point of this article. There is no requirement stated regarding the properties of the ordering - in fact there is no code at all that depends on the traversing the map elements in a particular order. So you can pick any ordering you want.

If the requirement is “use std::map to store items but prevent adding items to the map if they have a particular relationship to existing map keys”, then this is a terrible solution - std::map like maps and dictionaries in all programming language is not designed for this - it should never be an error to add a value associated with a key to a map instance. Hacking the ordering to implement a requirement like this is brittle, obscure and strange.

If this were proposed as a solution to the problem “design a data structure to store values keyed by intervals that prevents overlapping intervals”, then I would mark it very low.

dm270•6mo ago
I agree. This seems very unintuitive and would be a code smell in a review.
monkeyelite•6mo ago
> then I would mark it very low.

What would you do differently?

I would also assert if any overlapping intervals were inserted - it’s an invariant.

If it was static I would just sort and binary search, but with inserts this seems like a fine way to reuse the std::map.

Std templates are designed for this kind of thing - make a custom comparator, document why it works, wrap it in a typedef.

AlotOfReading•6mo ago
This is one of those cases where being able to name the problem helps. It's a discrete interval problem and is typically solved by a discrete interval tree.

Diets are a particularly clever solution to this:

https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~erwig/diet/

monkeyelite•6mo ago
That’s the same idea as putting intervals in map, an ordered tree.
derriz•6mo ago
Unless you know about the internal implementation of std::map, then abusing the ordering function (which is expected be a total order according to the std::map documentation - i.e. capable of comparing any two elements of the key space) to throw exception when the API for std::map is used in a way you want to block - is not a robust solution. This will probably work but there’s nothing that constrains std::map to be implemented as a RB tree.

Nor is it intuitive - given it relies on understanding how balanced trees are typically implemented.

An “optimized” implementation of std::map should be entitled, for example, to cache results of previous comparisons and exploit the transitive rule for total orders to avoid unnecessarily performing comparisons. Then this solution breaks.

I know whining about downvotes is frowned upon here but I’m surprised to having lost karma here. I’m making what I believe is a good faith argument and am happy to debate my position.

monkeyelite•6mo ago
> internal implementation of std::map > abusing the ordering function

That's the thing about C++. It's not abuse - any strict weak ordering is valid. You are follow the rules and it's guaranteed mathematically to produce correct results.

> capable of comparing any two elements of the key space

You get to define the domain of keys which is almost always a restriction of the possible bits of the key. For example, you can use floats as keys even though nan would break.

> Nor is it intuitive

Intuitive too often means "I haven't seen it before" which is a bias to not learn new approaches of programming. All sufficiently technical knowledge is unintuitive.

- it relies on understanding how balanced trees are typically implemented.

No it doesn't. It's documented API.

> exploit the transitive rule for total orders to avoid unnecessarily performing comparisons

Yes, the comparison must satisfy transitivity. This doesn't violate that.

> I know whining about downvotes is frowned upon here

I downvote low-quality, not to disagree (I did not downvote).

diath•6mo ago
This had bit me in the past with std::sort that made seemingly benign code randomly crash a live service, cppreference has a list of all the standard facilities that need to meet these requirements: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/named_req/Compare.html
monkeyelite•6mo ago
what did you try to use as a comparison function?
diath•6mo ago
This was the original sort function (it was meant to force "last" to be first on the list after the sort which obviously violated the requirement):

  std::sort(entries.begin(), entries.end(), [&last] (const auto &a, const auto &b) {
    if (last && last->getID() == a.id) {
      return true;
    }

    return a.time < b.time;
  });
monkeyelite•6mo ago
Interesting… I’m sure you resolved this. But the textbook solution is:

1. std::find last

2. std::iter_swap(first, found)

3. std::sort(front + 1, back)

delifue•6mo ago
The correct way of storing disjoint intervals is to key by min endpoint of each interval and use ordered querying